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By Root 863 0

I wanted a fresh start. With my family I moved to the San Francisco Bay Area and began to work with a small team of senior researchers in the “futures group” of SRI International, one of the largest think tanks in the world. For the next five years, we studied the long-range future for both government agencies and corporations. During this time I co-authored the book Changing Images of Man with a small team that included the eminent scholar Joseph Campbell. Our research explored archetypal images that serve as beacons to guide the human family into the future. Another project involved a yearlong study of future global problems for the president’s science advisor. Still another project for the Environmental Protection Agency involved looking ahead twenty-five years and projecting an array of alternative scenarios and their implications for U.S. environmental policy. All of this research led me to the stark realization that our world is moving into a time of profound change in the ways we live on the Earth and see the universe, ourselves, and the human journey.

While engaged in researching the long-range future, I was also involved in an intense meditation practice grounded in Tibetan Buddhism. Then, in an unexpected turn of events, I became a subject in the earliest psychic research at SRI on behalf of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. These scientific experiments gave me a way to explore over a period of nearly three years, in my direct experience, the fundamental question raised here: Is the universe a living system? Combining intensive meditation with equally intensive laboratory experimentation gave me an unusual learning opportunity. This book is grounded in the confidence of these years of combined inner and outer inquiry.

The SRI research on the global future made it emphatically clear that the world would soon encounter unyielding limits to current levels and patterns of growth. Seeing this, I wanted to do more than watch from the sidelines of history, so I left SRI in order to meditate and advocate for creative change.

Meditation took the form of a half-year of self-directed reflection and contemplation in my cottage. This culminated in a transformative experience that has reverberated through my life ever since (described in my book Awakening Earth, Appendix II). Insights from this half-year of meditation are reflected throughout this book.

My advocacy for change has included writing three editions of the book Voluntary Simplicity and speaking around the world on themes of building a sustainable future. I’ve also co-founded three non-profit organizations doing non-partisan work for media accountability and citizen empowerment.

Looking back, these diverse life experiences have given me a range of perspectives for looking at the world. So far, I have lived in at least three different perceptual paradigms. I grew up in the mindset of the agrarian era—on a farm where the experience of life was dominated by the seasons and cycles of nature. I then moved into the mindset of the industrial era as I watched our family farm grow into a small agribusiness and we moved from the farm into a nearby town. I then moved into the mindset of the communications era when I began doing research on long-range futures and advocating for a more conscious democracy. I’ve seen how each paradigm develops logically from the last, and each has its unique way of regarding the world and one’s self.

Like myself, I believe many people may be living with a foot in at least two worlds: straddling two or more different paradigms of perception and struggling to make sense of the universe. Perhaps you, like me, feel pulled between opening with vulnerability to the subtle aliveness of the natural world and protecting your experience of aliveness from the deadness of a materially obsessed culture.

Before exploring the idea of a living universe, it is important to acknowledge its antithesis—an extreme view that regards the universe as non-living or dead at its foundations. I believe that seeing the universe as mostly dead matter,