Great changes are blowing through the world: it is, as the ancients understood, “all things change.” Yet even the Greek philosophers would have been more than a little startled to witness our current planetary hyper-acceleration. Five thousand years ago humans were carving their best wisdom in words and symbols into rocks, today we can take their words and symbols and transmit them instantaneously around the globe. We 21st century folk excel in high-tech, high-speed change: we can remove a cataract and restore sight in a few minutes to a person blind for most of their adult life, we can traverse continents in hours and we can evaporate billions upon billions of dollars in a day’s trading. From war to commerce, from medicine to media communications we can change the landscape of experience for the people of planet Earth literally overnight.
But the companion maxim to “all things change” is “the more things change, the more they stay the same.” Witness the behavior of the marketplace these days, and it doesn’t take long to see that the contortions of the materialist dream represent a chronic attachment to the same old ‘make a buck at any cost’ modus operandi. Even when confronted with nightmare scenarios of catastrophic economic ruin involving hundreds of millions of people across the globe, international bankers and corporate executives are positioning themselves for the next ‘killing.’ Bouncing right back with more of the same old materialist fixations, which have persistently disconnected profit from an encompassing moral vision, is obviously not to be understood as anything close to transformation. Now is the time to be particularly watchful for the newest guises of the same old same old.
So we don’t necessarily focus on changing conditions to find our way into the heart of something as profound as transformation. And since our subject is global transformation, let’s draw our attention away from the frenzy of world changes for the moment and see if we can find a deeper understanding of the nature of transformation.
The Heart of Transformation
As if to warn us away from superficial change as any kind of guide to transformation the old Zen adage reminds us “Before enlightenment: chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment: chop wood, carry water.” Transformation can, of course, bring radical changes but radical changes can also serve the status quo. So we are looking for something which changes the whole axis of meaning rather than preserving the old in a different form. It is worth a moment’s meditation on this question: what is it that can transform meaning itself? Lest we get too abstract and philosophical, here is a real life example:
During what the Irish call the recent Troubles, Frances is walking down a street in London Derry, Northern Ireland, and talking to a member of The Royal Ulster Constabulary when a gunman shoots to kill the officer. He misses, and Frances receives the bullet which gets lodged an inch from her heart. The doctors cannot remove the bullet and she is expected to die. But she lives, only to be greeted by a co-worker on her first day back at work with the hateful wish that she hadn’t survived. Today, if you visit Derry, you will find Frances alive and actively engaged in peace and reconciliation. The bullet is still there lodged close to her heart, but all the velocity of hostility with which it entered her body has been transformed into a powerful force for healing the sectarian divide.
So what is it that can transform meaning itself? It is nothing less than contact with a more vivid and accurate picture of reality. The bullet that almost took her life served to waken Frances to the deeper reality of human oneness: the truth that she now lives is an expression of that reality. Whenever we align with a greater reality we shift the axis of meaning in our lives from the artificial constructions of psyche and society to more faithful representations of a morally coherent and deeply inclusive universe, which seeks to be known through our awareness. In other words, transformation involves a movement from unconscious, fragmented and conditioned responses to consciousness, greater wholeness and presence. Transformation is not concerned with a sudden conversion moment but with the process of immersion in a wider, more inclusive reality. What we want to keep our attention on is the process of awakening.
It takes a commitment to life-long learning to stand evermore deeply in the presence of a universe which invites us to experience greater wholeness in ourselves, in our relationships, in our communities and nations, and with all sentient life.
Transformation, in the sense used here, is always a coming home to what is after we have sojourned in worlds of contrivance, illusion and projection. The spiritual heart of transformation is a rich appreciation of the truth that we are: we come home to our own larger story. As we experience genuine transformation, the universe becomes less alien, and alienating, more kindred and mysteriously familiar…or another way to put it, we come to experience consciousness itself as our greatest resource and as we do so, it draws us upwards into more expansive states of lucidity, insight and peace.
Within this general framework we can now explore what global transformation might be about. First, although hardly needed, a quick reminder of our current predicament.
Global Tower of Babel
Let us face it: human civilization has been careening out of balance for some time now. It is impossible to catalog the damage we are doing to our earth home: what other species willfully destroys its own habitat? Even when the evidence demands a complete change of direction, our leaders have lived in denial. Since the first Earth Day in 1970 one third of the planet’s species have become extinct. This year, 2009, we are beginning to see catastrophic global crop failures and unprecedented levels of severe drought throughout the world which stem from the myopic policies and planning of the world’s largest economies, or those, like Zimbabwe, caught in political turmoil and the last remnants of despotic rule. At the same time the credit that is needed for community-based economic/ecological renewal, in a time of equally catastrophic financial collapse and globally depressed economies, is largely being directed towards the paradigm which gave birth to these problems in the first place.
This represents not only a collective learning disability, and attention deficit of epic proportions, it suggests we are collectively further adrift from reality than we care to admit. We have created a Matrix of media distraction, and materialist fetishism, and relied on extravagant military expenditures to secure ‘the dream of peace’ and ward off threats. Adding to this contemporary Tower of Babel are the maniacal voices of assorted fundamentalisms trying to set themselves apart from the blatant hypocrisies and values erosion of ‘western’ mores and ideology. Some are so inflamed by perceived injustice and ‘moral decay’ that they are willing to slaughter civilians in the name of God and enforce their strict orthodoxies through fear and hatred. It seems as if we are surrounded by multiple distortions, unable to find any sound basis for dialogue or a path which could lead us resolutely out of cultural wars, sectarianism, economic disaster, carbon addiction and assaults on the ecosphere.
We are ripe for more than ceasefires, detente, re-vamped economies, techno-fixes and New Age spiritual placebos: we are ripe for global transformation.
Big Shift In How We Identify
The poet Carl Sandburg noted that one of the most unpleasant words in the English language, which has nothing to do with profanity, is the word ‘exclusive.’ The truly big news in this global era is that we live in an age of dying exclusions, when race, ethnicity, class, religion, or gender can be used as impenetrable walls of exclusion. I say ‘dying’ advisedly: there is much exclusion in all these and many other categories, that still persists, and which maintains the harsh and even violent exclusion of those deemed to be ‘other,’ ‘lesser,’ ‘inferior,’ ‘infidel,’ ‘impure’ or simply too poor. But the death-knell of these exclusions has been sounded ever since the signing of The Universal Declaration Of Human Rights sixty years ago—with its compelling vision of inclusion and protection for all human beings. Despite many blatant examples that could be cited which represent egregious human rights violations based upon exclusion, the world is increasingly adapting towards a normative stance of greater and greater inclusion which has expanded the rights of women, children, and provided other protections relating to sexual orientation, disability etc.
We are in the midst of a huge planetary shift in how people identify with ‘otherness.’ We live in increasingly media porous and information saturated environments where people are constantly exposed to a reality which challenges narrow sectarian belief, caste superiority, and the unsupportable claims of narrow and exclusionary beliefs. Increasingly we come to see each other in the common mirror of the human condition…in spite of the media distortion referred to above, humanity increasingly witnesses its relatedness and interdependence in a complicated global mosaic. Falteringly, and with great cost for the sluggish pace of our learning, the average person sees themselves in the context of a world story. Paul Ray’s breakthrough sociological research conducted in 2008 confirms this idea: people have a growing sense of connection to the planet as a whole.
Shifts in how humanity in general identifies with other humans has great significance in relation to the concept of transformation: slowly but inexorably the axis of meaning is shifting away from petty and tyrannical isolation and exclusion to accommodate a planetary reality, a multicultural reality, an-interfaith reality and the reality of a shared ecosphere. Our attention is often riveted by the painful, threatening, violent and vocal resistance to this reality, or by the manipulations and distortions of global powerbrokers and financiers whose consciousness too often mirrors stages of uninitiated adolescent development. Yet despite a deficit in both corporate and political leadership, which often seem pulled down by the structural entropy of outmoded institutions, there is a tidal shift towards a common humanity, greater tolerance and a willingness to address our ecological crisis.
When a space emerges where even a little more of your truth and a little bit more of my truth can both be heard, what opens is the possibility for more authentic dialogue and communication. Here then, quietly, in the hearts of average citizens the world over a sea-change has begun; it has begun as people loosen the tightened and clenched fist of their particular nationalist, religious and cultural identities and recognize that some part of them is reflected in what they had been told to think of as the ‘other,’ as the one to be kept at bay, the one they were told was a threat, the one who would ‘pollute’ their race or caste or creed.
One by one, not trumpeted by philosophers or claimed by politicians, and surely not glitzy enough for sensational media treatment, the common folk of planet Earth are opening up a space for the universal human to emerge. Despite all the odds, they are transforming the bedrock of our shared meaning from exclusion to inclusion.
Yet the human enterprise is currently like an express train heading for a cliff with no single lever to divert it or hit the brakes. It is a nightmare scenario.
Waking Up In Time
The only way out of a nightmare is to wake up. What is needed now is for a new generation of leaders to both experience and represent the full potential of the emergent shifts in consciousness now underway in the general population and apply the levers at their disposal to help catalyze whole system transition. A new covenant in governance is called for: one in which servant leadership engages in distributive power sharing. As Paul Hawken and others have noted there is an extraordinary potential in the hundreds of thousands of social profit and civil society organizations around the world to constellate a global bridging force between governmental, financial, and corporate institutions and the power they have to effectuate transformative change. For too long, prophetic voices like David Korten have been crying out in a policy wilderness: his work, and many others across the planet has been detailing templates for a global economy based on sustainable communities, humanistic values and ecological principles.
There are also a host of other templates for the complete transformation of those outmoded meanings, which collectively no longer serve human progress. These templates, which are emerging from the creative interplay of science and spirituality, psychology and the social sciences, systems theory and public policy, offer us pathways to a radically changed world. They include the education of the whole person: emotionally expressive, psychologically nuanced and intellectually creative. They include new templates for health, healing, inner renewal and even spiritual enlightenment; templates for peace building, social healing, conflict resolution and restorative justice; and templates for systems thinkers to demonstrate how an interdependent world consummates the marriage of economy and ecology, peace and prosperity and communal values with global governance.
Every minor shift in mass consciousness is an invitation to leaders, social entrepreneurs and change agents to take these templates and offer them as the source code for the evolution of peaceful and sustainable planetary civilization. One thing is certain; the time for global transformation is now to be counted in years rather than in centuries or even decades. But we know deep in our hearts, this time, we are beyond cosmetic change and that, however painfully, we have never been more ready to give birth to a new humanity.
William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)
THE SECOND COMING
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
