CHAPTER SEVEN
Birthing the Empathic Mind:
A Revolution Towards Critical Mass
There is nothing in a caterpillar that tells you it’s going to be a butterfly.
R Buckminster Fuller
The past of the human mind is written in every achievement of civilization, from the pyramids through the plays of Shakespeare and the theory of relativity to the ball-point pen and the H-bomb. Its future – if it is to have one – will be written in its ever increasing utilization of its potentialities and in its achievement of control over itself.
George H Estabrooks
An individual person has an integrity, a quality, a being and an existence; two people acting in a harmonious and complementary fashion produce an extra factor and a number of people working and thinking and feeling and offering themselves together, and each consciously involving their essential being, are capable of producing a thing of amazing beauty.
Omar Ali Shah
The previous chapter spent a good deal of time laying out the argument for a cyclic version of history, with a time scale based upon the precession of the equinox, referred to as the Great Year. I discussed how the Great Year plays a significant role in many of our world myths, tales and teachings. Some people might be quick to dismiss this as little more than a long-standing wonder and affiliation for the stars, as is natural for the human gaze. I am more inclined, however, to accept that there is something more than mere stargazing operating here; that myths are the carriers of significant information. I am more disposed to the view that:
It seems that when cultures rise and fall, their arts and their literatures do likewise. But there is something which has a higher factor of survival. Fables outlive fact. Legends penetrate where logic perishes. Folklore, myth, and legend transcend the fluctuations of the historical process. It is as though a myth carries such a penetrating energy that it can leap the gap between cultures – a carrier-wave that unites the ceaseless and separate generations.1
Leaping the generations of our fragmented historical record was very important for many myth-making cultures – why? It may well have been that they had something to tell future generations. To inform those civilizations coming afterwards that nothing lasts forever, and that the cyclic nature of rise and fall was an inevitability one should prepare for rather than dismiss or deny. Major authorities on the Yugas, despite dating contradictions, have placed our present world at the early part of the ascending arc of the Dwapara Yuga – the Bronze Age. Yet if this is the case, then why do things look so bad?
There is no denying that from one perspective the 20th century looked like a veritable Age of Anxiety. Taking only a brief look at some of the events that afflicted life in the last century of the previous millennium we have World War I (1914–18); the Bolshevik Revolution (October Revolution) of 1917; the Great Depression in the US and the infamous 1929 stock market crash that affected financial markets worldwide. Soon after this came the rise of Communism and Fascism across Europe, with Stalin’s ‘Great Purge’ of the 1930s and the eventual beginnings of World War II (1939–45). This horrific war manifested many faces of human terror, including the Nazi concentration camps and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Shortly after this time the Korean War (1950–3) started what was in effect a proxy war between Communist China (with Russian assistance) and the US. This spiralled into the ‘Communist’ threat and the Cold War, including such incidents as the Bay of Pigs, the Cuban missile crisis, McCarthyism and the threat of nuclear annihilation. This ongoing Cold War tension between ‘Democracy vs Communism’ led into the Vietnam War (1955–75) and the proxy wars in Afghanistan during the 1980s. During this time the world also saw the Yom Kippur war (October 1973); the Balkan/Yugoslav wars (1991–5); the Rwandan genocide (1994), as well as the ongoing civil wars in South Africa. There has been ongoing conflict between Israel and Palestine, with tensions also between Lebanon, Hizbullah and various rival factions for Middle East peace and control.
As parts of the world were dealing with the new infection that was labelled AIDS (Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome), the globalization project (sometimes referred to as global imperialism or neo-colonialism) reached across the world through various agencies, notably the WTO (World Trade Organization established in 1995); and the World Bank and the IMF (both established in 1945 as a result of the Bretton Woods agreement). The 1990s witnessed the crash of both the Russian and Asian ‘tiger economies’, as well as the First Gulf War (1990–1).
These incidents are but a few of the many complex, greater or lesser, national or international, events that permeated the 20th century. Even in the first decade of the 21st century the world has seen the 11 September 2001 attacks on US soil, another war in both Iraq and Afghanistan, the subsequent global ‘War on Terror’, and the continuous devastation that nature inflicts upon the planet’s inhabitants. It is thus reasonable to see how the last 100 years have been an Age of Anxiety, resulting in numerous psychological symptoms, including anxiety, apathy, inertia, paranoia, denial, escapism, introversion, violence, addiction, insomnia, fatigue, listlessness, stress, frustration and fear.
Yet this is only one part of the great transformation occurring in world affairs. These negative, physical, destructive events are indeed the most visible, the most traumatic, and to which we are unwittingly drawn through the actions of politics and world affairs. At the same time a huge wave of transformative movements has been building over the last few centuries; developments that indeed fall within the scope of an ascending age of consciousness. In the following chapters I wish to focus on these transformative movements and events that mark the potential upward curve, or forward development, of human civilization and, perhaps more importantly, of the growth in human consciousness.
I must stress that in these few pages it is only possible to lightly touch upon the vastness of transformative change that has been moving through our cultures and world consciousness. A whole encyclopaedia would be needed to do justice to these developments, so I apologize in advance for the brevity of the next few pages. Saying this, I will attempt to dip a toe into the great waters of change …2
An Age of Radical Seeking
A new type of consciousness began to emerge after the Industrial Revolution; one that had been affected by the electrical energies that were lighting up an era of rapid growth. Just as the rise of the telegraph gave a metaphoric model of how the human nervous system worked, so too did the new technologies of the Second Industrial Revolution – the telephone, radar, cinema, automobile and aeroplane – create a new foundation for the reorientation of consciousness. A new perception of the dimensions of space and time began to birth a psychological consciousness; a consciousness that wanted to look beyond the borders and horizons of the physical frontier. The end of the 19th century was also a significant period in the rise of spiritualism and mediums, general interest in esoteric matters, and the public emergence of occult movements.
Just to give a broad overview, the 1870s onwards saw a peak in the growth of spiritualism in English-speaking countries. Interest was rife in communicating with the dead, contacting the afterlife, and believing in information from the astral plane. By 1897 it was said that spiritualism had more than eight million followers in the US and Europe, with state and national conventions, lecture tours and summer camps held on a regular basis. By 1880, there were about three dozen monthly spiritualist periodicals published around the world; and in 1882 The Society for Psychical Research (SPR) was established in the UK. A few years later, in 1901, the Spiritualists’ National Union (SNU) was founded in the UK and remains one of the largest spiritualist groups in the world. By 1914 the Society for Psychical Research had 320 registered Spiritualist Societies in Britain.
At the time that interest in spiritualism was peaking, the Theosophical Society was established in New York City by Helena Blavatsky, Henry Olcott and William Judge in 1875. Theosophy heralded a revival in Western occultism and in perennial wisdom. It was also a forerunner to later movements that sought to bring Eastern teachings and traditions to a Western audience. Theosophy has had a large impact upon Western mysticism as it brought forth many personages who later found their own individual channels for teaching, most notably Annie Besant, Alice Bailey, Krishnamurti and Rudolf Steiner (who went on to establish the Anthroposophical Society). By the end of the 19th century, spirits were well and truly out of the closet.3
The same period of the late 19th and early 20th centuries also saw the founding of The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, with its first temple in the UK (London) in 1888. By the mid 1890s the Golden Dawn was gaining popularity both in the UK and later in Germany especially. Well-known members included Irish poet W B Yeats; authors Arthur Machen and Evelyn Underhill; and infamous occultist Aleister Crowley. In a similar vein the spiritual teacher and mystic G I Gurdjieff was spreading his ideas from Moscow to Paris, from New York to London, aided by the teachings of former pupils P D Ouspensky and J G Bennett.
In 1920 Paramahansa Yogananda arrived in the US and established the Self-Realization Fellowship the same year and introduced thousands of Westerners to the art of meditation and yoga. In 1946 Yogananda published the phenomenally successful Autobiography of a Yogi which has sold millions of copies worldwide. Other personages gathering devotees and spreading teachings throughout the western hemisphere at this time include Sri Aurobindo; Hazrat Inayat Khan; and Sri Meher Baba, amongst others. Now the floodgates were open and a whole range of mystical, occult and oriental teachings began to emerge within Western society, as well as creating bridges to Eastern ashrams and religious centres.
So, at this time there emerged a great wave of influence that turned people’s thinking towards a more interiorized, as well as a more transcendental, state. It was a shift from the physical towards a belief in, and an exposure to, non-physical realms. Coming as it did at a time of on-going industrialization and material expansion, one must wonder if the timing is pure accident. Yet the ‘inward turn’ was not only happening in the occult sphere. The shift towards a more intuitive reasoning was marked by the rise of the American Transcendentalism movement in New England (US) in the first half of the 19th century, with notable figures such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman and Margaret Fuller. This movement reacted against religious dogma and over-intellectualism and sought to find truths through direct inner experience; that is, the transcendentalists aimed for trusting an internal ‘knowing’ and experience of events rather than through the medium of external manifestations.
This line of enquiry was further enhanced when in 1901 Canadian psychiatrist Richard Bucke published his now famous work Cosmic Consciousness: A Study in the Evolution of the Human Mind. A year later in 1902 Harvard psychologist William James published his series of lectures in the book The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature. These ideas were beginning to circulate amongst an educated public at the same time that psychoanalysis, developed in Vienna in the 1890s by Sigmund Freud, was also percolating into mainstream circles. The early part of the 20th century was a period when the ‘collective unconscious’ was becoming a conscious part of the collective mind. The theories of Freud, Jung, Reich and other psychoanalysts were changing how people regarded human behaviour and parameters of human thinking. Early childhood impacts, experiences, repressions and sexuality were all now being unearthed as contributing to contours of the human mind. What happened ‘out there’ was recognized as being a manifestation of what was going on inside a person’s mind.
These developments coincided with the rise of the motion pictures as a cultural phenomenon; a way of projecting ideas onto the external screen. Philosophy too was taking on new ideas about the creative vitality within the human, nature’s forming of wholes greater than the sum of their parts, and the nature of flow within the universe: Henri Bergson’s Creative Evolution was published in 1907 (in English 1911); Jan Smuts’s book Holism and Evolution in 1926; and Alfred North Whitehead’s Process and Reality in 1929. Yet perhaps the most revolutionary change in human thinking came about in the realm of physics; specifically the emergence of quantum mechanics.
The early decades of the 20th century saw a revolution in physics, from Einstein’s publication of his general theory of relativity in 1915, providing the standard theory on our laws of gravity, to the dual state of particles (photons) in 1926, and Heisenberg’s ‘Uncertainty Principle’ in 1927. The people behind these new discoveries are now almost household names: Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Max Planck, Erwin Schrödinger, John von Neumann, Paul Dirac, Wolfgang Pauli and others. By 1927 the field of quantum physics was reaching a wider acceptance amongst the scientific establishment. And in 1957 physicist Hugh Everett presented his ‘Many Worlds Theory’ that postulated an infinity of parallel universes whereby the universe splits every time a quantum system makes a choice, and there are billions of quantum events taking place within each ounce of matter every second. In this model there could be another universe where the dinosaurs continued to evolve – perhaps they evolved high intelligence and now write books on evolution! Quantum physics then finally presented to the world the concepts of particle–wave duality, nonlocality, observer interference and wave collapse. Suddenly, the world was not as fixed, durable, or mechanical as previously thought. It was now seen as an unpredictable, uncertain, energetic sea of chance: God did, it seem, play dice after all.
Information became the keyword for the middle of the 20th century, with cybernetics (Wiener), Communication Theory (Shannon) and early computing (von Neumann and Turing) all emerging with rapidity. This new information revolution was capped by the eventual breakthrough discovery, in 1953, of the molecular double helix structure of DNA (Crick and Watson). The human mind was now processing information at a faster speed than at any time in known history; and most of these new developments concerned the interior gaze. The 20th century became a time for asking and answering such questions as: What lies beyond life? What is behind matter? What lies behind our conscious thoughts? What lies behind all biological life? The thrust for human meaning, the age of a radical seeking had been born, and it manifested most clearly through the revolutionary second-half of the 20th century.
The half a century from the 1950s to the end of the millennium began with a human howl for substance and inner searching. The poet Allen Ginsberg portrayed this inner rage with his famous poem ‘Howl’:
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed
by madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at
dawn looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient
heavenly connection
to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night.
The search for the heavenly connection came through a sporadic surge for experimentalism, for opening new horizons, sometimes creatively, other times throwing caution to the wind. In some instances it manifested as a hedonistic mix of intoxication, exuberance and illumination, as in the Beat Generation and the creative expressions of Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs. Other times it was channelled through the new growth of interest in Buddhism and ecology as through the work of Alan Watts, D T Suzuki and Gary Snyder. A Western counterculture was now emerging through the newfound popularity of Eastern teachings (Buddhism, Taoism, Sufism, etc.) and the experimental playfulness of mind-altering processes. The zeitgeist of the age can be seen through the psychologist and counterculture guru Timothy Leary’s famous dictum: Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out.
Significantly, during this period of experimental cultural expression a new form of psychological consciousness was being explored. Through psychoanalysis and the theories of Freud, who had exposed sexuality and notions of self-esteem and the inferiority complex to the public stage, the 1950s and 1960s opened up new areas of self-evaluation. People were increasingly exploring their own feelings, self-reflection and the interior gaze. Timothy Leary was right to suggest that the new era had shifted to ‘the politics of the nervous system’. Likewise, Theodore Roszak, in The Making of a Counter Culture (1968), noted that sociology had given way to psychology and that the trip was now inward, making everything open to question.
The inward trip during the 1960s and 1970s was popularized by the experimentation with psychoactive fungi, largely given exposure in the US by the ethnobotany of Robert Gordon Wasson. This later materialized into experimentation with the once-legal drug LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide) that was initially synthesized by Albert Hofmann and popularized by the antics of Timothy Leary, Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, amongst many others. In the 1970s the anthropological research and writings of Terence and Dennis McKenna were gaining a wider readership in their sober assessment of the role of psychedelic drugs in society. This search for non-ordinary states of consciousness also led to many Westerners seeking out a shamanic training. Perhaps most popular during the late 1960s and through the 1970s were the various books of Carlos Castaneda, which described the author’s apprenticeship with the shaman known as Don Juan.
The market place was open for experimenting with human potential, as was evidenced by the popularity of the Esalen Institute, founded in California in 1962, that offered workshops on such subjects as meditation, Gestalt, yoga, ecology, psychology, spirituality and holotropic breath work. Transpersonal psychology became a defined field with the publication of the Journal of Transpersonal Psychology; notable names in this field included Abraham Maslow and Stanislav Grof; and later Ken Wilber, Charles Tart, Stanley Krippner, Claudio Naranjo and Oscar Ichazo.
Interest in transpersonal issues, of interior realms and metaphysics opened the door to a dramatic surge in forms of spiritual belief quickly labelled as ‘New Age’. These included life after death, past lives, angels, auras, channelling, divination, crystals, I-Ching, spiritual healing, prayer circles, holism, organic foods, spirit guides, etc. Sacred sexuality too became a focus with people connecting with Tantric sex, Taoist sexual practices and Native American sacred sex traditions. There was also a surge of interest in the ancient esoteric areas of alchemy, Hermeticism, the Kabbalah and Gnosticism. On 16–17 August 1987, the Harmonic Convergence gathering took place which brought many people together to celebrate the planetary alignment occurring and to facilitate the shift towards a new era.
Planet Earth was now in full focus, especially after the Apollo 11 Moon landing on 20 July 1969. The first photos of Earth taken from space seemed to galvanize people’s ecological awareness, alongside Rachel Carson’s 1962 environmental classic Silent Spring. The ecology movement was spurred by other such notables as Gregory Bateson, E F Schumacher, Arne Naess and Thomas Berry. In 1970 the US Environmental Protection Agency was established and the world held its first Earth Day. In 1971 Greenpeace was founded; and in 1972 the UN Environment Program was set up. The 1960s and 1970s represented a period of tremendous change in thinking and attitudes, with the support of feminism, sexual liberation, civil rights, CND and freedom of expression. Despite the atrocities of the Vietnam War and the assassination of John F Kennedy, people were still turning on and tuning in to a new energy of change. Large-scale gatherings, such as the music festivals of Woodstock and the Isle of Wight, offered a place for community that celebrated a form of neo-tribalism and self-expression. These events later influenced Burning Man, Glastonbury and other large-scale gatherings now worldwide. The power of change brought about the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989/90.
By the 1990s the most popular poet in the US was the Persian Sufi Jalalludin Rumi; holography and the holographic universe was a new popular paradigm; the left-right working of the brain hemispheres was a popular subject; the Internet was revolutionizing communications; and notions such as the noosphere, Global Brain and collective consciousness were almost commonplace. What a revolution of human thought in such a short span of human history! In between we saw a flurry of artistic and literary movements including, in no particular order: Cubism, Expressionism, Surrealism, Dada, Modernism, the Frankfurt School, stream of consciousness, and many more that would require several books to recount. A phase of immense cultural, mental and psychological growth has occurred in the last 150 years.
The new scientific paradigm has come a long way since Newton’s clockwork universe. Consider that the scientific contributions to human knowledge include: quantum physics, quantum biology/biophysics, holography (holographic universe and holographic brain), string theory (multiverses and extra-dimensions), systems theory, systems philosophy, self-organization, non-equilibrium systems, chaos and complexity theory, implicate order, morphic resonance and many more. Science established the Genome Project, nanotechnology engineering and quantum computing. It even produced the first successful genetic cloning, of Dolly the sheep, in Scotland in 1997. Cyberspace is the new shared domain that exists beyond conventional notions of time and space, and virtual communities play around with digital identities. Despite the dangers of these new technologies,4 an acceleration of possibilities marked the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the new millennium.
The Great Acceleration
The second half of the 20th century saw a rapid acceleration in almost all spheres of life. Some of this ‘acceleration’ has occurred in our environmental systems, and to detrimental effect. We only have to look at biodiversity loss, deforestation, the chemicals we are throwing into the ground and the atmosphere, ocean acidification, global freshwater decline and topsoil depletion to see some of the effects of recent human enterprise. With the simultaneous growth in human populations and erratic geological conditions this could lead us to change from using the term ‘The Age of Anxiety’ (as the 20th century has been called) to ‘The Age of Disequilibrium’. However, an acceleration of chaotic energies also has no alternative but to force a species mind-change on a global and perhaps interior level. The changes I have only touched upon briefly suggest a greater shift towards individual autonomy; a deepened sense of self and psychological reflection; an increased perception of inner and outer realities; and a heightened recognition of the sensory nature of human experience. In other words, there has been an astounding growth in the psychological evolution of the human self.
The manner in which we communicate reflects our own internal processes. It may be that the rise in global communication technologies (Internet and mobile phones) reflects a new form of participatory consciousness amongst people. This new model is a distributed one; in other words, it connects people horizontally in a more egalitarian way rather than through hierarchical structures. It also catalyses people into being more active through their participation. No longer are we the passive audience, as in earlier electrical revolutions of radio, then television: the new model is YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, blogging and text messaging. The dialogue is now more active; people are onstage and orchestrating their own connections; managing their own forms of voice and self-expression. At the turn of the century, as the 1990s tipped into the third millennium, the social-civil body of the planet began to stretch its tentacles.
Social networks have matured tremendously over the past decade; the list of global Non-Profit Organizations (NPOs) grows longer with each passing year. These innovative networks are the forums for visionary thinkers; concepts spread virally through the electronic nervous system of the planet as once-fringe ideas go global. A new civil body is being constructed by the distributed contributions of individuals in every conceivable physical location. Talks are broadcast regularly – such as in the TEDTalks series of innovative lectures – and social collectives form, activate, influence and stimulate alternative thinking and ideas. A more mature form of collective social intelligence is beginning to manifest in various parts of the globe, as the key element of the Internet ‘isn’t the consumption of information or interactive services but participation in a social process of collective intelligence …’5
This new networked model of civil society represents a burgeoning collective intelligence. It is an intelligence that is arising out of our increasing interrelatedness, and one that is being exposed to a global world of contradictory realities and multicultural perspectives. As Pierre Teilhard de Chardin correctly stated:
The Age of Nations is past. The task before us now, if we would not perish, is to shake off our ancient prejudices, and to build the Earth.6
This non-hierarchical bottom-up format may be the working model for the future and, like the Internet, can be built to withstand shocks, attacks and breakages: we re-route, disperse and re-join at a later point in the network. This is the peer-to-peer collaborative model – a way of greater individualization within a shared, complex, diverse yet unified field of interactions. This networked unity may be a new model to make the old one obsolete. Buckminster Fuller nailed the point exactly when he said:
You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.
Externally we seem to be a vast, distant and separated collection of people, yet the reality may be the opposite: a dense, intimate, closely entwined species of various races, individual yet sharing a nonlocal sense of being. And with the rapid rise of physical global travel and tourism to complement our virtual global communications, the world has extended its nervous system to expose millions of people to each other, different cultures and circumstances. Younger generations of people worldwide are growing up with a new expression of consciousness; the 20th century’s exploration of the psyche, mixed with technologies of communication and connection, herald a more reflexive mode of thought. People today are comfortable in expressing themselves with strangers; they explore and express their inner thoughts, feelings, emotions and ideas with hundreds of unknown persons online, from various cultural backgrounds. More and more daily interactions are empathic as we react and share news, stories and emotional impacts from sources around the world.
Empathy is one of the core values by which we create and sustain social life. Exposure to impacts outside of our own local and narrow environments helps us to learn tolerance, and to live with experiences that are richer and more complex, full of ambiguities, multiple realities and shared perceptions. It is a way of constructing more social capital in our world. It is a model that was used in ancient communities where cultural capital preceded commercial capital; when cultural relations were primary and came before commercial relations and focused on the social benefit rather than the profit. We see this happening in modern variations today such as open source software (e.g. Linux), or in collaborative tools such as Wikipedia, when a global commons for sharing can work above the individual thrust for profit and commercial gain. And we have also seen it in active operation in the form of ‘smart mobs’.
The term ‘smart mobs’ was coined by cultural critic Howard Rheingold to refer to mobile social networks that organize their activities via mobile phones, usually through text messaging. According to Rheingold, these mobile networks are the new ‘social revolution’ in that they are shifting social practices through connecting like-minded people together into collective action at short notice. Such networks are constantly on the move, constantly communicating, and forever able to ‘swarm’ within a matter of minutes if physically able. As a case in point, mobile text messaging in Manila, the Philippines, was a major contributor in ending the presidency of incumbent Joseph Estrada. A text message of ‘Go 2EDSA, Wear blck’ was sent around and, within the first hour, tens of thousands of Filipinos descended upon Epifanio de los Santos Avenue (known as Edsa). Over a four-day period more than a million people showed up in an effort to oust Estrada.7
The well-known anti-WTO protests in Seattle in 1999 – often referred to as ‘The Battle of Seattle’ – coordinated crowds of protestors through phones, laptop emails and texting. These anti-WTO protest movements were modelling themselves in the nature of distributed, self-organizing networks. Although their interests varied within the overall movement, they came together in their protests to create an action greater than the sum of their parts.
A more recent example is that of the ‘Occupy Wall Street’ movement in New York City (based in Zuccotti Park on Wall Street) that began on 17 September 2011 and within a few weeks spread to over 70 major cities and over 600 communities in the US. October 15th 2011 also saw an international ‘Occupy’ day that involved similar protests in over 900 cities worldwide. All of these protests used the new forms of social media – the Internet, mobile phones, online social networks, etc. – to organize their ‘smart mob’ gatherings. Now in the age of Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, people-centred content is more than ever active in promoting people-power dissent and action across the globe, from the ‘Arab Spring’ of the Middle East to the angst of Middle England. We are no longer joined by blood ties alone but by larger, sometimes global, affinities.
We sometimes forget that humans cannot live by food alone; we are in need of nurture, affection and shared interests. This fact has now been clearly established by psychologists who have worked on maternal-separation and social-isolation experiments. They clearly demonstrate the importance of care-giving and companionship in social and cognitive development. A growing number of psychologists have argued that a child depends on deepening relationships with other people in order to develop a sense of selfhood and self-awareness.8 This corroborates what neuroscience has discovered with ‘mirror neurons’ about how we also share sensory impacts. A ‘mirror neuron’ is a brain neuron that is activated (‘fires’) when a living being (such as humans, primates and other mammals) observes the action of another. In other words, if an individual watches another person eat an apple, then the exact same brain neurons will fire in the person observing the action as if they themselves were performing the act. Such neuron behaviour has been found in humans to operate in the premotor cortex and inferior parietal cortex. In a series of experiments a group of people were hooked up for brain scans (fMRI) and watched other people; their somatosensory cortex was activated by observing the others being touched at that moment.
This phenomenon of ‘mirror neurons’ was first discovered by a research team in Italy in the 1990s when studying the neuronal activity of macaque monkeys. This discovery has led many notable neuro-scientists to declare that mirror neurons are important for learning processes (imitation) as well as language acquisition. In more modern general terms we might also say that this capacity is what ties a person in sympathy and empathy to another’s situation. It may also explain why people become so emotionally attached to events on television, and even cry in response to watching someone crying on the screen. In this way we are emotionally entangled through a mirroring of neuronal firing in the brain. If we expand this understanding to take in worldwide events through global communications and networks of connection we can say that people are increasing not only their empathic relationships with each other but also their entanglement at a distance. New developments in psychology, cognitive science and neuroscience are laying the groundwork for a wholesale reappraisal of human consciousness. This is what I mean about the ‘great acceleration’. The human race is not only accelerating in terms of its information retrieval/storage and its science/knowledge base, but also in its empathic entanglement: the rising web of a planetary nervous system. Or, as writer Doris Lessing liked to refer to it, the rising of the Substance-Of-We-Feeling (SOWF).
During this accelerating phase of our socio-cultural and inner evolution we are asked to expand and develop our cognitive, emotional and perceptual faculties. Harvard professor of psychology Howard Gardner has outlined in his book Five Minds for the Future what he considers to be the five separate but related combinations of cognitive abilities that are needed to ‘thrive in the world during eras to come’ and which we should develop for the future. Gardner’s five minds, or rather mindsets, are paraphrased here as:
1 To master important subjects rather than simply knowing about them. To stay up to date with the subject and to know how to work steadily over time to improve skill and understanding.
2 To be able to integrate large quantities of multidisciplinary facts and apply them to one’s work.
3 To pose new questions, developing new solutions to existing questions, stretching disciplines and genres in new directions, or building new disciplines.
4 To be open to understanding and appreciating the perspectives and experiences of those who are different from the individual.
5 To do one’s work in an ethical way that reflects responsibilities to others and society; to reflect on the nature of one’s work and the needs and desires of the society in which one lives.9
Gardner also refers to a type of ‘existential intelligence’, what he calls a ‘heightened capacity of appreciation and attention to the cosmological enigmas that define the human condition – an exceptional awareness of the metaphysical, ontological and epistemological mysteries that have been a perennial concern for people of all cultures’.10 The psychological impacts we experience will be primary in developing the perceptions necessary for the future. We are today exposed to each other in ways without precedent. The children being born as part of the new millennium (sometimes referred to as the ‘Millennials’) are growing up embedded within virtual social networks that transcend space and time, as well as cultures, national boundaries and local ideologies. The younger generations are accustomed to send and receive information in a way that may also help to nourish local networks – and not, importantly, to replace them.
This may account for the increasing numbers of young people in developed nations becoming involved in community and social projects and NGOs; taking a year out to help in another culture abroad, to learn and experience, and to offer assistance. Volunteering amongst the young, despite what appears to be the contrary, is on the increase. Young people are even sacrificing their lives for peace and justice, as evidenced by the actions and subsequent death of Rachel Corrie in occupied Palestine. It is not only a call for equality – it is a loud call for tolerance and justice. These are signs of an emerging relational consciousness, a service-to-others (STO) as opposed to service-to-self (STS).
Another growing movement is the ‘Roots of Empathy’ programme – educating young schoolchildren about emotional needs and relations. Founder Mary Gordon writes:
The Roots of Empathy classroom is creating citizens of the world – children who are developing empathic ethics and a sense of social responsibility that takes the position that we all share the same lifeboat. These are the children who will build a more caring, peaceful and civil society, child by child.11
The great acceleration (or New Planetary Era?) is moving further towards a planetary consciousness that is collective and shared: a model of greater connectivity and global communication (horizontal), with closer intimacy, with Earth customs and cosmic perspective (vertical).
It is my firm understanding that humanity is currently passing through times that will catalyse both psychological and physical changes. As the earlier chapters discussed, we are on the cusp of many older energy systems breaking down. Yet many people have been sensing this for some time now, as events in the second half of the 20th century have indicated. Also, within developed nations there has, over the past few decades, been a significant shift of values in that more and more people are seeking a quality of life that has moved away from materialism and towards meaning and happiness; towards simplifying their lifestyles (even before the recent economic crashes). So far, a good quality of life for too many people has been provided by raiding the world’s finite energy sources and co-opting other nations’ resources. However, being forced to downsize can be a good thing, turning people’s emphasis away from external status and material possessions to a focus on what is local and meaningful – relations, local resources, working with one’s self and the needs of others. Any form of inconvenience, or even hardship, needs to be taken as a beneficial interiorizing process; a way to develop self-reflexive consciousness. Sometimes in order to gain we must first experience what it is to lose something. Troubled times can lead to an extension and/or manifestation of empathic consciousness, as we realize the interconnectedness of our worsening situation – just like the war ‘bunker’ mentality during World War II, a coming together of the people in times of need.
It is also important to remember that for the new energies manifesting in our times, the old model of technology will not work. As I described in Chapter Two, the old technological mind of control, bureaucracy and organization, which has led to our present surveillance world (Chapter Five), will no longer serve us. Our technologies not only need to be more fluid, as in emerging social media that is free to access (e.g. YouTube) and social networks free of censorship, but also more egalitarian and democratic. Technology that aims to dominate will not be able to work with the new energies of consciousness that will manifest over the coming years.
These conscious energies will include a rising protest from people for more transparency and justice in our national and international systems. There will be many more social protests and strikes on the horizon if these systems do not begin to better serve egalitarian and ethical human interests. Further, as the social transition goes through many years of change (remember that these cycles are long, and are not offering immediate relief) the world may first have to pass through a period of fragmentation due to energy depletion in the future and/or technological infrastructure problems. A new form of integral consciousness is less likely to embrace a corporate global techno-industrial future, despite what some thinkers argue. However, even though there may be initial periods of fragmentation this will not diminish a collectively evolving empathic mind that will inform a greater awareness for working together; community-building; shared values and ethics; and working towards remodelling how the world operates.
It will not be ‘business as usual’ as most future forecasters seem to predict; many forecasters simply offer a linear view that is just a more ‘planetary’ version of today’s world. This view does not take into account ‘system jumps’; the tipping points, or rather phase transitions, that characterize the fluctuations of growth. The future may well be a more mindful, spiritually aware and ecologically-integral period, yet it may first also be a more chaotic, fragmented and disturbed global picture as the people of the world – and the world’s systems – learn to reassemble themselves into a radical new form of existence in line with the resources available to us.
This period of transformation of life on Earth is likely to include heightened impulses for radical social change and cultural renovation; alongside new discoveries in science, energy and our knowledge of the cosmos. There will manifest an increased drive for human betterment that will be marked through intensified activism for social, political and ecological change; and for changes in the balance of global power. Large demographic shifts and the active presence of many cross-cultural movements will release much concentrated energy for psychological and physical change. Planet Earth is entering a sustained period for monumental change, requiring humanity not only to draw on all its physical and psychic resources of creativity and vision, but also to shift into capacities that could ultimately serve to be extremely liberating for the self.
Reaching Critical Mass
It is certainly no small claim to say that the 3rd millennium will stimulate and nurture a new form of human consciousness. To paraphrase the famous saying of J B S Haldane, the future of humanity may not be only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose. And as Terence McKenna once said, we need to take out our conclusions from being central to our culture and replace them by a sense of the mysterious. The future may open up a greater sense of the mysterious than we have anticipated. Some of this mystery may surround the greater capacities inherent within the human, as I shall discuss in the following chapters. To help us arrive where we are already heading we will have to question, and perhaps discard, many of our belief systems. Rather, we should put the role of direct experience in place of enforced belief systems that are self-limiting functions. It limits our vision to have beliefs when the universe is stranger than we can suppose and is thus continually overriding our beliefs, making them limiting factors if we cling to them.
Experience must be made primary; therefore the language of the self must be primary. We need a new language, and in order to have a new language we need a new sense of reality. Rather than consuming ideological visions we need to be the creators of them – to send them out. Let our visions and creativity breed and mutate like viruses in proactive and beneficial ways. Terence McKenna used to urge his listeners to ‘Live as far into the future as you can live’; reminding them also that energy is now rushing into our reality like into ‘the realm of the densely packed’.
The opportunity is here for change and betterment like never before in our recent history. This means that the responsibility is also here; and these two factors may never be present again at exactly the right moment when they are so badly needed. What the human species may now be witnessing, on the cusp of this critical mass, is the rise of intuition, empathy, greater connectivity to the world and to people, and a sense of ‘knowing’ about what each given situation demands. Being nurtured within each person is a growing sense of the greater cosmic whole: the realization that humanity exists and evolves within a universe of intelligence and meaning. This can serve to impart within humanity a more profound, and acknowledged, spiritual impulse.
After all, we are already on the way to where we are heading. One can see clearly that Bob Dylan was right when he sang ‘There’s something happening … but you don’t know what it is. Do you, Mr Jones?’12