This post is a follow-up to my last post, “Holding The Whole Truth of Our Times”. Despite our innate and very human resistance to wanting to face the “sober truth” that collapse is underway, it’s hard to avoid it these days. The pandemic brought “life as we knew it” to an end in a New York second and has created untold suffering and loss for so many. This is on top of the climate catastrophes that have come raging through our back doors devastating homes, communities, and livelihoods here and around the world. The loss of democracy and increase in authoritarianism across the globe, rampant social injustice, polarization, etc…
Emergence is also underway. If you’re familiar with Paul Hawkins’s books, Blessed Unrest and Drawdown, you’re aware of the billions of people and organizations worldwide working for a peaceful, just, and sustainable world for all. And, that we already have the solutions to the climate crisis. We’re all aware of the Youth Climate Movements, Black Lives Matter, and Me Too Movements with their global response. And, organizations like Move to Amend, Citizens Climate Lobby and so many more valiantly working for sustainability and justice.
So what does this all mean?
I listened to a talk given by Daniel Schmachtenberger entitled “Our Emerging Universe.” Here’s an overview of some of what he said: He pointed out that if we cherry-pick from the huge data sets about where humanity is going right now, we can see that things are exponentially changing. That means changing in a more and more rapid way and at more and more significant rates. You can cherry-pick metrics where things are getting exponentially better and that’s true and other things are getting exponentially worse and that’s also true.
Therefore, the future you predict, if you just follow any of those curves, is not happening. If things are getting exponentially better and worse at the same time, it doesn’t mean things are getting better or worse. It means the current system is destabilizing – self-terminating.
We will either have a discrete phase shift to a lower-order entropic system or the emergence of a higher-order system that is foundationally different than the current system we have in every way. The things getting bad are the pieces that can be reorganized to create a new civilization with a foundationally new structure. The emergent awareness shift is the awareness that all of us are facets of one integrated, self-evolving reality where the well-being of everyone, the well-being of the commons, is not meaningfully, calculably possible, separate from each other.
It’s easy to think about that and then get caught back up in what you’ve got to do next to win at the current system. That current system is going extinct. Winning at a system that is obsoleting the capacity of life on earth to continue, winning within a collapsing system, is not an interesting win. There is no definition of success for ourselves that is not a definition of success for everything.
When we start really taking that seriously, everything changes. Then you start saying: well, what can I actually do to make my life of greatest use to all life? Your progressively better answer to that question will lead to the emergence of your life’s meaning and path. Concurrently and correspondingly, it leads to the emergence of civilization making it.
When he finished the talk, I took some time to let it sink in… Humanity’s choices will very likely determine which way it goes. As has been said, “We were made for these times” so let’s do it!