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5. Initiation: The Coming Evolutionary Inflection
While recognizing that sincere disagreements exist, the conclusion reached in this report is that beneath the complexity of different trends and forces, a simple reality is at work: humanity is on a collision course with nature and our own human nature. The exact timing of the full encounter is unclear. Some would say that our time of collective initiation has already begun, and they could point to monumental ecosystem problems such as climate change and the mass extinction of plant and animal species. Others suggest that we have yet to pass the threshold into our time of initiation, but may do so around the turn of the millennium, through a combination of factors: a worsening, global economic crisis (amplified by disruptions caused by the year 2000 computer problem); greater climate instability than expected, resulting in crop failures and regional food shortages; and massive social disruptions caused by terrorism. While these are powerful forces, they still do not seem strong enough to present us with a clear evolutionary wall-a situation so powerful that it provides an unwavering opportunity to confront our collective character and future intentions as a human family.
Many of the adversity trends and transformational forces considered in this report seem to reach critical thresholds in the decade of the 2020s. Difficulties that may seem relatively isolated (such as climate change, poverty, water shortages, species extinction, and the depletion of cheap oil) seem likely to coalesce into a tight and unyielding web. The result would be a whole-system crisis. Like a rubber band stretched to its limits, our planetary system will likely be stretched to its limits, becoming inflexible and brittle, losing its elasticity and ability to cope with more disruptions. This is a condition ripe for breakthrough and transformation. If this assessment is accurate, then the decade of the 2020s will mark humanity's entry into an inescapable initiation -- a rite of passage that could lead to a new relationship with one another and with the Earth.
The irony is profound -- we are initiating ourselves. Our own actions are rebounding back upon us and are creating the circumstances that will initiate us into planetary consciousness and responsibility. Our historic behaviors are now the catalyst for global changes that are, in turn, spurring us on to new heights of evolution.
What is the purpose of this time of initiation? The commonly recognized purpose of an initiation is to enable a person or community to cross a threshold from one life into another, to discover a new and larger possibility. Regarding humanity, a shared rite of passage could give us the opportunity to move beyond our former life of separation and division into a new life of connection and cooperation.
Another purpose of our initiation seems to be the further awakening of the potentials described by our scientific designation as a species -- homo sapiens sapiens. Technically, we are more than sapient or "wise," we are sapient sapient or "doubly wise." 103 Where animals "know," humans "know that we know." In that subtle but profound extension of consciousness, a revolution has occurred that is transforming the Earth. Teilhard de Chardin describes this in his book The Phenomenon of Man. He says that, when the first living creature consciously "perceived itself in its own mirror, the whole world took a pace forward." 104 The capacity for self-observation or double wisdom is not a trivial enhancement of evolutionary potential. It is an explosively powerful capacity that has given a supercharged boost to the evolutionary process. "The being who is the object of his own reflection, in consequence of that very doubling back upon himself, becomes in a flash able to raise himself into a new sphere." ." 105
Turning from the personal to the collective, when a group "knows that it knows," it has the ability to be self-observing and to take responsibility for its actions. The ability to observe or witness our knowing collectively -- as a tribe, nation, or entire species -- represents a powerful evolutionary advance because it enables us to take charge of our behavior with greater clarity and intentionality. When a nation, for example, can see itself in the mirror of reflective knowing, it becomes more accountable to itself and can take charge of its future. To illustrate, when the mass media awakened Americans to the civil rights movement, the women's movement, and the environmental movement, it made the reality of these movements undeniably apparent to the larger society. Once these powerful movements had been brought into public consciousness, the American people began to learn together about issues of racial injustice, gender discrimination, and environmental destruction. In a similar way, when the human family consciously recognizes the damage we are doing to our biosphere and our future -- when we "know that we know" unambiguously -- we will then cross the threshold into our time of initiation and the quest for a new adulthood.
Figure 5 presents a highly simplified view of the dynamics likely to be involved if humanity is to successfully move through the evolutionary initiation and turning of the coming decades.
Figure 5: Stages in the Evolutionary Initiation and Transition
Let us look more closely at the major stages through which we seem likely pass in our evolutionary transition (and portrayed in Figure 5):
Denial -- Many will insist this is not a time of fundamental change and that things will soon settle down and return to normal. Others will insist that great changes have happened through history, so there is nothing unique about this time. Others will insist that the whole situation is far too complex to understand and so feel powerless to get involved. Still others may recognize the urgency of change but may procrastinate anyway, not wanting to upset a comfortable (or at least predictable) way of life.
Innovation -- Without public fanfare, a critical mass of citizens (perhaps 20 percent) will cross a threshold of concern and will launch innumerable social and technological innovations. While the larger society may be relatively unaware of what is occurring, there will be intense grass-roots activity to design ourselves into a workable and meaningful future. Diverse networks of communication will be vital to this burst of innovation. These will extend from small groups at the local level to mass dialogues via the Internet at the global level.
Initiation -- Because of the blossoming of innovations and pilot projects in sustainability at the grass roots level, when the whole-systems crisis actually emerges, people around the Earth can turn to realistic alternatives with a sense of hope that they can meet, and move beyond, these difficulties. In meeting the tests and trials of this time of initiation, the human family overcomes the historical sense of separation and, together, envisions a sustainable and soulful future for the Earth's community of life.
Bounce -- Assuming that the fabric of the Earth's ecosystems and human society have not been stretched beyond the tearing point, our species could conserve our evolutionary momentum and coalesce onto a path of mutually supportive development and make an exhilarating leap forward.
What might it feel like to live through this time of initiation. Here is one plausible scenario that is based on the trends and forces discussed earlier (because such a scenario is written in the past tense, it is often called a "future history").
Two decades into the 21st Century, individual adversity trends coalesced into a global, systems crisis and the world moved into a time of intense, planetary compression. The Earth became a superheated pressure cooker in which the human family was gripped by the combined and unrelenting forces of an expanding world population, a dramatically destabilized climate, water shortages, dwindling supplies of cheap oil, extensive poverty, and terrorism involving weapons of mass destruction. A circle had closed. All frontiers were gone. There was nowhere to escape. These forces became so unyielding, and the stresses they placed on the world were so extreme, that human civilization was pushed to the brink of either descending into chaos or ascending in a spiraling process of profound transformation. A new human alloy emerged from the furnace of these superheated decades -- finally bringing the human family together with a shared sense of identity and direction for building a sustainable and meaningful global civilization. Looking back, no single moment or crisis gave birth to this fledgling planetary civilization. Instead, humanity moved through numerous cycles of contraction and relaxation before exhausting ourselves, and finally breaking through the barriers that separated us from our wholeness with one another and with the Earth. What a remarkable project it became when, instead of mobilizing around enemies, we came together in the common work of building a sustainable, sociable, and soulful planetary civilization.
If humanity misses this chance for an evolutionary leap forward, we hopefully will have other opportunities to mature as a species. What we will miss is an opportunity that seems uniquely favorable to our evolution. If we do not rise to this challenging task, we may so devastate the biosphere and so burden ourselves with hatreds and resentments that it could require infinitely more effort to realize our evolutionary potential in the future. We may have to pay a heavy opportunity cost if we forego this evolutionary opportunity.
Although one aspect of humanity's initiation will involve confronting our destruction of the biosphere, this does not mean that further environmental devastation is needed for us to come to sanity. What is needed is more awareness not more suffering. There is already sufficient suffering to motivate change. What is needed is the wakefulness -- the unflinching double wisdom of knowing that we know -- to see what we are creating and then to respond appropriately.
There is no one to blame for this predicament. Humans learn through experience, and we have never encountered this situation before. We should not be surprised if a powerful rite of passage is necessary to awaken our evolutionary intelligence.
Looking ahead, we cannot predict the outcome of our evolutionary initiation. We will therefore consider in Part 6 two scenarios of what could happen -- two polar opposite possibilities -- an evolutionary crash and an evolutionary bounce. Of course, our actual future is likely to occur somewhere between these two extremes, depending on the choices we make in this generation.
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© Copyright 1999, Duane Elgin
duane@awakeningearth.org
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