For me, my truth (not “the truth”) about these times is that there are two truths at work. There is the “sober truth” of our times which is that we’re well into the sixth mass extinction event on the planet. We are facing multiple system collapses, including ecological (with its climate disruption), economic, political, energy, social, and moral collapses. We’re on a destructive path and will be living with the ramifications of it for decades to come even with a change of course. Without that, much more extinction and suffering is not just a possibility but a probability.
Having said that, there is another truth that allows for a different possibility. We are part of an amazing evolutionary process that goes back to the “Big Bang” when the creative intelligence of the Cosmos, the Quantum Field, erupted into space, became embodied in the universe as stars and ignited the miraculous 14 billion year evolutionary journey of planet earth and all life. As cosmologist Brian Swimm has said, “four billion years ago our planet was molten rock and now it sings opera”. The quantum field is a field of unlimited possibilities and as the embodiment of that, we humans have access to those possibilities and the potential to change our course.
Modern civilization, with its industrial/corporate/military complex, and our human seducement by power, greed, and self-interest, have led to a devolutionary process taking over our planet. At the same time, there is a growing momentum of people, groups, organizations, and movements, reclaiming our creative, evolutionary potential and our humanity to take the next evolutionary step to bring forth a life-sustaining world that works for all… It seems we are on the razor’s edge of an ultimatum: evolve or die.
In my exploration of the “whole truth”, I became fascinated by the principle of syntropy in Systems Theory. I was aware of Classical Science’s principle of entropy – the tendency toward chaos, disorder, diffusion, and disintegration. We see this process in the destructive phases of the cycles (disintegration and decay). With entropy, time moves in one direction, past to present, with the past causing the present as in the law of cause and effect.
What was newer to me was that living systems operate according to the principle of syntropy as well – the tendency toward greater complexity, higher-order, differentiation, and integration. It brings things together through the law of attraction. With syntropy, there is retrocausality in which the future causes the present. This represents the creative phases of the cycles (life and regeneration). Syntropy propels emergent behavior – how elements self-organize to create some new and imagined structure. An example from nature is the chrysalis – the caterpillar cells disintegrate then self-organize to become the butterfly that emerges. What’s noteworthy is that it’s not disintegrate or evolve/emerge, the chrysalis process holds both. The caterpillar must disintegrate for the imaginal cells of the butterfly to coalesce, evolve and emerge.
I sense the truth in both of these possibilities. I believe that we are in a state of collapse and that much of modern civilization does need to “disintegrate” so the imaginal cells of a new worldview can coalesce and the possibility of a new human, civilization, and earth can emerge. The kicker is not knowing which way it will go. Despite where we’re at in our understanding of all this, I think we sense there is a better way to live on this amazing blue orb that is spinning through space and wanting us to participate with it in this amazing evolutionary experiment. I choose to work for synergy and emergence with positive expectancy and hope while I prepare for the daunting challenges that lie ahead.