The Living Universe - Duane Elgin [62]
—PYTHAGORAS
The human family faces a demanding journey. Because we are experiencing a systems crisis, everything is happening at once. How do we sort out what is most important for making our way into a promising future? Having pondered this question for more than thirty years, I suggest that the following six tasks are vital for making this unprecedented evolutionary turn to begin our homeward journey.
1. Co-creating our story of awakening
2. Cultivating reflection and reconciliation
3. Living simply and sustainably
4. Creating new kinds of community
5. Becoming media-conscious citizens of the Earth
6. Bringing our true gifts into the world
Co-Creating Our Story of Awakening
If we are separated from the universe, we are literally lost. When we don’t know where we are, we cannot understand who we are or the nature of the evolutionary journey ahead. This journey is not a return to the past. We cannot go back to some nostalgic golden age of a previous era; instead, home lies ahead in a new relationship with ourselves and the universe. Chapter 6 described a great transition for the Earth that is already underway. On the other side of our growing systems crisis, the world will be a decidedly different place depending on our actions now. We will have either an Earth ruined through conflict or an Earth restored through cooperation.
At this pregnant time in human history we are each called to help birth a larger vision of the human journey. To respond successfully to climate disruption and the dwindling supply of cheap oil requires more than programs for energy efficiency. More fundamentally, we need a compelling story about the human journey that enables us to look beyond looming conflicts over scarce resources. As a citizen of the Earth, every person has the right and responsibility to contribute to the collective visioning of our journey.
The “great awakening” to a living universe is truly great. It is not a marginal or incremental expansion of the human journey; instead, it is a radical, deep, and powerful transformation. In our encounter with limits to physical growth, we are discovering the unlimited aliveness of our universe and the enormity of our growth potentials within it. Material limitation awakens us to non-material freedom. As one door of opportunity closes, another opens to reveal an immensely larger realm of possibility.
To establish a guiding vision for humanity based on the foundation of materialism—when science has demonstrated that 96 percent of the known universe is invisible—is to choose a paradigm suitable for only 4 percent of existence. The “4 percent solution” of materialism is profoundly deficient. The magnitude of the challenges we face calls for a “100 percent solution” that includes the invisible aspect of the universe as revealed by both exterior and interior sciences.
It is important for us to not get ahead of ourselves, but to recognize where we are on the journey of awakening. We are in a dangerous time of transition from separation to communion. We are between two major stages and moving rapidly into a time of planetary initiation. We are entering a world systems crisis and we must choose whether we will pull together in creative cooperation or pull apart in profound conflict. The coming decades will reveal the soul of our species and provide the opportunity for a rite of passage from one great trajectory of learning and development to another.
In this supercharged setting, a critical step in building a promising future is to visualize it together. Although many people can visualize a future of catastrophe and ruin, far fewer can imagine a future of opportunity and renewal. A future of conflict and suffering is easy to imagine, while a future of harmony and health is still a vague and unformed possibility in our collective imagination. We face big challenges, and it will take an equally big vision to transform conflict into cooperation and draw us into a promising future. To create this vision, here are four empowering archetypes that provide us with