Chapter 5
The individual has to live in humanity as well as humanity in the individual.
Sri Aurobindo
The accelerating changes referred to in Part One will have no alternative but to force a mind-change on a global and individual level. We are coming together as a global species like never before, despite what we have been shown and told by the mainstream media. We need to view this in both the immediate and the bigger picture. Due to our relatively short human lifespan we rarely reflect beyond a generation or two behind us and in front of us. We have evolved as a species that reacts to immediate concerns; we have an ingrained myopic vision. This served us well in the past when we had survival needs in a restricted world of limited horizons. Yet now we need a perspective that is global at the very least – and even possibly beyond! We are accustomed to perceiving that which we see, touch, hear and feel; yet biologically we are also hard-wired to perceive through senses we may not ordinarily be aware of. In recent years neuroscience has discovered that humans also share sensory impacts with others (human and non-human) through what have been termed ‘mirror neurons’.
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 same brain neurons will fire in the person observing the action as if they themselves were performing the act. In humans such neuron behaviour has been found 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. The subjects’ somatosensory cortex was activated by observing the others being touched. This discovery has led many notable neuroscientists to declare that mirror neurons are important for learning processes (imitation) as well as language acquisition. We might also say that this capacity is what ties a person in sympathy and empathy to another’s situation. It could 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 social networks we can say that people are increasing their ‘empathic entanglement’. Perhaps this goes some way to explaining the features of what has been recently termed the ‘Global Brain’ – a connected planetary nervous system.
If we now look at the bigger picture we will see that a different type of consciousness has been in emergence over the past 150 years, since the dawn of the Second Industrial Revolution. The new technologies of the Second Industrial Revolution – the telephone, radar, cinema, automobile and aircraft – called for a re-orientation of human perspective. A new perception of the dimensions of space and time began to give birth to a psychological consciousness – one 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, esoteric studies and the public emergence of occult movements.
As a brief 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. At the same 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 the search for 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 people who later founded their own individual channels for teaching, most notably Annie Besant, Alice Bailey, Krishnamurti and Rudolf Steiner.
The same period of the late 19th and early 20th centuries also saw the founding of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, and the emergence of esoteric figures such as Aleister Crowley, and G I Gurdjieff. In 1920 Paramahansa Yogananda arrived in the USA and established the Self-Realization Fellowship, and would go on to introduce 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 West at this time include Sri Aurobindo, Hazrat Inayat Khan and Sri Meher Baba, amongst others. Soon a whole range of Asian mystical and occult teachings became better known within Western society, as well as creating bridges to Eastern ashrams and religious centres.
It was not by accident that at this time there also emerged a great wave of influence that turned people’s thinking towards a more interiorized, as well as a more trans cendental, state. This encouraged a shift from the physical realm towards a belief in, and an exposure to, non-physical realms. The shift towards a more intuitive reasoning was also marked by the rise of the American Trans cendentalism movement in New England 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. The trans cendentalists aimed to trust an internal ‘knowing’ and subjective experience of events rather than working through external impacts alone.
These explorations were further advanced by the Canadian psychiatrist Richard Bucke (Cosmic Consciousness: A Study in the Evolution of the Human Mind, 1901); and Harvard psychologist William James (The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature, 1902). 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 recognized part of the collective mind. The theories of Freud, Jung, Reich and other psychoanalysts were changing how people regarded human behaviour and revising the parameters of human thinking. Early childhood impacts, experiences, repressions and sexuality were all now being unearthed as contributing to the contours of the human mind. What happened ‘out there’ was recognized as being a manifestation of what was going on inside a person’s inner realm.
These developments coincided with the rise of the motion pictures – a way of projecting ideas onto an external screen – as a cultural phenomenon. Philosophy too was taking on new ideas that included a creative ‘vitalism’ within the human, Nature’s holism, and the patterns of flow within the universe.1 Yet perhaps the most revolutionary change in 20th-century human thinking came about in the realm of physics, specifically the emergence of quantum mechanics. Quantum physics 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 seems, play dice after all.
The 20th century thus 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? This quest for human meaning in both outer and inner realms permeated the zeitgeist in the second half of the 20th century as the East came to meet the West.
A Western counterculture was now emerging through the new-found popularity of Eastern teachings (Buddhism, Taoism, Sufism and others) and the playfulness of mind-altering processes. Significantly, during this period of experimental cultural expression, a new form of psychological consciousness was being explored. Through psychoanalysis and the theories of Freud, the 1950s and 1960s opened up new areas of self-evaluation. People were increasingly investigating their own feelings through 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’. This search for non-ordinary states of consciousness also led to many Westerners seeking out a shamanic training. The market place was open for experimenting with human potential. Interest in transpersonal issues, interior realms and meta physics opened the door to a dramatic surge in forms of spiritual belief quickly labelled as ‘New Age’. These included studies of life after death, past lives, angels, auras, channelling, divination, crystals, the I-Ching, spiritual healing, prayer circles, holism, spirit guides, and more. There was also a surge of interest in the ancient esoteric interests of alchemy, Hermeticism, the Kabbalah and Gnosticism.
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 best-selling poet in the United States was the Persian Sufi Rumi; holography and the holographic universe was a common new interest; the left–right working of the brain hemi spheres was a popular subject; the Internet was revo lution izing 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 social history!
These changes all correlated with a greater shift toward individual responsibility; a deepened sense of self and psychological reflection; an increased sensitivity to internal and external states; and a heightened recognition and appreciation of human community. They set the stage for long-term growth in the psychological evolution of the human self. These developments also sowed fertile soil for those of the Bridge Generation who will form a core of transformation over the coming years.
The period of psycho-spiritual transformation that will unfold over the coming years will deliver impulses for radical social change and cultural renovation, alongside innovation in science, energy and social technologies. Our human perceptions too are awakening to an understanding that our place within the larger cosmos is anything but inanimate, unconscious and accidental. We are set to witness a generation waking up, with new arrivals being born into change and heralding the later wave of those who will be born as change. Within these years an increased drive for human betterment will manifest that will be marked through intensified activism for social, political and ecological change, and for changes in the balance of global power. The active presence of many inter national socio-cultural-political move ments will also release much concentrated energy for creative transition.
The spectacular rise in global communication technologies reflects a new form of participatory con sciousness, especially among younger people. This new model is a distributed one; in other words, it connects people through networks rather than through hierarchical structures. It also represents a more feminine energy that seeks relationships, to nurture and to collaborate rather than compete and conquer. This emerging feminine energy underlies the rise in global empathy. Also, since people are connecting amongst them selves in multiple relationships it impels them to have an active engagement. For those individuals brought up within the older generation of communi cation technologies (radio, television, fixed phones), the interaction was at most twoway, and for the most part one-way. In that era people were passive receivers, targeted with a limited spectrum of information they could not engage with. This has now shifted so that the receiver of the communication is both the user and the producer. We have learnt to democratize our engagement and to activate choice through online social networks, phone messaging, video channels and various other broadcast mediums. The generation waking up is learning fast how to set up inexpensive, or free, radio sites (podcasts), home websites or newsletters, and they are now orchestrating and managing their own forms of voice and self-expression.
This new model of communication and connection can be said to be rewiring our thinking and behaviour patterns. We are becoming accustomed to dealing with multiple connections rather than single ones, and to becoming immersed in varied and diverse relations and not just one-on-one dialogues. In turn we are being exposed to, and impacted by, a myriad of viewpoints, beliefs, identities and experiences. Within these models of self-expression each person is being called forth to respond and engage with the outside world not in fear or with anxiety but with healthy, creative and positive energies. This exposure to new patterns of information is helping to re-pattern both our social lives as well as our brain neurons.
Many of us are forming new priorities in our lives as we restructure our social networks to incorporate new modes of interpersonal relations. Social connectivity has developed and matured tremendously over the past decade. As well as online networks, forums and meeting places, there are thousands of inter national non-profit and non-governmental organizations. A form of collective social intelligence is beginning to manifest, but it is not from the centre.
The creative impetus for change will not emerge from any centre, as did the Renaissance that sprang up in northern Italy in the Late Middle Ages. The new ‘renaissance’ is likely to manifest not from one specific geographical location but from distributed networks around the world as conscious individuals and groups connect, network and collaborate. These conscious and creative groups will spread their influence through decentralized connections like ink dots on blotting paper until a time comes when the dots begin to fill the paper and change its colour. Many social changes in the coming years will emerge from the creative engagement and innovation of individuals and collectives worldwide – a shift catalyzed within the hearts, spirit and minds of the people.
Externally we may seem like a vast, distant and separate collection of individuals; yet in truth the human family is an intimate, closely entwined species comprised of various cultures. Many of the younger generation are now waking up to this fact. Youngsters the world over are growing up accustomed to having networks of hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of friends across the planet, sharing intimacy and empathizing easily with an inter national social group of like-minded souls. This younger generation is manifesting, whether conscious of it or not, a nonlocal level of human relationships. This expanded connectivity is bringing about a change in our psychology and consciousness. We are now being impelled to live in ways that enable all other people to live equally well. We are also being compelled to live in ways that respect the lives of others; that respect the right of all people to economic and cultural development; and that pursue personal fulfilment in harmony with the integrity of nature. These traits constitute what I refer to as an integral–ecological consciousness, shown in people acting and behaving as both individuals and as parts of the greater connected whole. Such multiple relations form a more varied, rich and complex life; they provide a more diverse range of activities than before and encourage relationships that stretch the self. As well as providing challenges for developing new skills and learning, our diverse networks can help us form new friendships and add extra meaning to our lives.
As a new global empathic mind emerges, people world wide will grow up with new expressions of mindfulness that are more caring, relational and feminine in energy. The 21st century is likely to be an era that births and nurtures such an evolving consciousness. The 20th century’s exploration of the psyche – as briefly outlined above – is mixing with today’s communication networks to herald a more reflexive mode of self-expression. 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 our own local and restrictive environments helps us to learn tolerance, and to live with experiences that are richer and more complex, full of ambiguities and multiple perspectives. It is a mode of connecting that allows diverse people worldwide to construct a new form of planetary social capital. Just as in our smaller, often ancient communities, where cultural/social capital preceded commercial capital, we have the resources to co-create a planetary human society where once again the focus is on social benefit rather than profit. We can see the emerging models of this in modern variations today, such as in open-source software like Linux, or in collaborative tools such as Wikipedia. The online global commons is a model for the new paradigm that illustrates how sharing can work above the individual thrust for profit and commercial gain. The values and ethics of communal sharing might seem odd or out of place to the old capitalist–consumerist mindset, yet these are the very values that will be on the rise in the coming generations.
During this phase of our socio-cultural and self development we are being challenged to expand and evolve our mental, emotional and perceptual faculties. The psychological interactions available today for the young people growing up with a global/planetary awareness are without precedent. More and more young people are growing up experiencing social relationships that transcend space and time, as well as cultures, national boundaries and local ideologies. This may account for the increasing numbers of young people in developed nations becoming involved in community and social projects and NGOs, such as by taking a year out to help in another culture abroad, to learn, experience and to offer assistance. Volunteering among the young, despite what appears to be the contrary, is on the increase. Young people are even putting themselves into dangerous situations – in conflict zones – to stand up for values of peace, justice, equality and human rights. Across the world young minds are demanding fair and equal access for all peoples to engage in open communication and free speech. This very issue is already a point of contention, with many governments, both Western and non-Western, attempting to curtail, firewall and monitor many of our present communication channels. However, the great advantage of networked communications is that such barriers can be circumvented by creative minds. And it appears that many more creative minds will be joining the global conversation as our current generations increasingly ‘wake up’.
In 2012 the population was around 7 billion and the proportion of registered Internet users was 33%, five times more than a decade before. By 2020 world population is set to be 7.8 billion and Internet usage worldwide is predicted to reach 66% – that’s a little under 3 billion new people plugging in to the global conversation. In other words, nearly 3 billion new minds will be tapping in to the information flows; and that’s many millions of new creative problem solvers, innovators and visionaries. What is more, the majority of these new minds will be coming online from Asia, the Middle East and what have often been referred to as the developing countries. These will be mostly young minds, and minds with the urge for social betterment. Can we imagine the collective potential of these creative new minds, many of them thinking outside of the box, and outside of the old patterns?
The capacity for new minds to grasp, explore and develop from information was stunningly shown by the work of scientist and educationalist Sugata Mitra. Dr Mitra discovered that illiterate, uneducated and unsupervised children were able to teach themselves when provided with Internet access. As early as 1999 Mitra and his team carved a ‘hole in the wall’ that separated his research premises from the adjoining slum in Kalkaji, New Delhi. They installed a freely accessible computer in the hole for the slum dwellers to access on the other side, and the responses were videoed. It proved to be an instant hit especially among the young street children. With no prior experience, the children learnt to use the computer on their own. This prompted Mitra to believe that any group of children could learn through a process of ‘incidental learning’, as long as there was content, motivation and at times some minimal guidance.2 In order to test his ideas further Mitra set up freely accessible computers in Shivpuri (a town in Madhya Pradesh) and in Madantusi (a village in Uttar Pradesh). These experiments came to be known as the ‘Hole-in-the-Wall’ experiments. The findings from Shivpuri and Madantusi confirmed the results of the Kalkaji trial. It appeared that the children in these two places picked up computer skills on their own. Dr Mitra has defined this as a new way of learning – Minimally Invasive Education. Mitra has subsequently established ‘Learning Stations’ throughout India and also outside India in other deprived areas. After many more years of vigorous research Mitra’s results all show that children learn to operate as well as play with the computer with minimum intervention. They are also able to pick up new skills quickly and accomplish tasks by constructing their own learning environment. Imagine what many of these bright young minds will bring to the global conversation in the years to come?
As some measure of what to expect we can see now how young minds the world over are already participating in creating innovative change. For example, 12-year-old Steven Gonzalez Jr., who was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukaemia, a rare form of cancer, credits video games for helping him survive the experience. In wishing to help other cancer patients his age he then created a video game, Play Against Cancer, in which players destroy cancer cells illustrated as green ghosts. Gonzalez has also developed The Survivor Games, a social network and online community for teen cancer patients. Similarly, a group of four 14-year-old girls – who named themselves ‘Team 2-the-Res-Q’ developed CyberMentors, which is an anti-bullying Android app for young people that focuses on building self-esteem and increasing safety. The app also includes a messaging feature through which users can talk to a CyberMentor directly about experiences with bullying. Perhaps the youngest person to have been certified as developing a software gaming program is Zora Ball. At only seven years of age Zora not only created a mobile game app using the Bootstrap programming language, but was able to reconfigure her program on request to prove it was her own work. Although these are examples of technology-driven youngsters, it does show that there is a wave of young, creative minds waiting to arrive upon the planetary stage.3 Furthermore, such young minds and hearts are demonstrating a strong desire to help and assist others, and are largely driven by altruistic urges. How technology is used in our hands will be crucial for the changes to come.
Consider also how a slum-dweller in Africa with a mobile phone now has potential access to better communications than did President Reagan 25 years ago. With a smart phone with Internet access and the use of search engines then the slum-dweller is likely to have better communications diversity than President Clinton 15 years ago. This is the power of exponential change. What is more, it is the young minds behind these technologies of communication that are the true power source. Imagine living in a world where a few humans can touch the lives of millions – it’s already arrived! Our external connectivity is the exoskeleton mirroring the collective field of human consciousness (see next chapter). As more and more inspiring individuals add their ideas to the global conversation and envision the unexpected, this will undoubtedly inspire others to envision the previously thought impossible. These are signs of a strengthening empathic consciousness: a service-to-others as opposed to service-to-self. Such thinking and behaviour has the power to create great change as we are at a point in history when even small catalysts can produce monumental shifts.
It is significant that in times of relative social stability, human consciousness plays a lesser role in the behaviour of society. However, when societies reach the limits of their stability then they are sensitive and responsive to even the smallest fluctuations in the consciousness of their citizens. In such times, changes in values, belief sets, perceptions and so on hold great sway over the future direction of the social milieu. Human consciousness becomes a significant stimulus and catalyst for change during these times of social instability. That is why it is imperative that humanity be collectively focused upon develop ment and betterment rather than coerced into a fear-based status quo. We should not underestimate the capacity for the human mind to adapt and evolve according to social and environmental impacts and influences. That is why our psycho-spiritual evolution is an unfinished project, and relies on people ‘waking up’ to stimulate new neuronal pathways.
How we communicate as social beings wires the neurons in our brains and in-forms our psyche. Thus, the shift to a networked exchange of information and human relationships has helped to usher in not only new forms of social organization but has also influenced how we have ‘wired’ our brains. When our mind and attention are focused in specific ways we create neural firing patterns that link and integrate with previously unconnected areas of the brain. In this way synaptic linkages are strengthened, the brain becomes more interconnected, and the human mind becomes more adaptive.
Child development author Joseph Chilton Pearce has written about how several times during an infant/child’s develop ment the brain does a ‘clean-up’ by releasing a chemical that dissolves all unproductive, unused or redundant axon–dendrite connections. The result is that the productive and well-used neural fields are left intact.4 In other words, if we don’t use them we lose them! Further, he explains that a child of six years is provided by nature with a new spurt in brain growth, effectively boosting the neural connections by four to five times.
Yet such neural updates do not only occur during our childhood. According to psychologist Daniel Siegel the adult brain undergoes genetically programmed ‘neural pruning sprees’, which he says involve removing various neural connections to better organize brain circuitry. Again, this suggests that the neural connections that are no longer used become disconnected (deactivated), thus strengthening those regularly used synaptic connections, which helps the brain to operate more efficiently. As the phrase goes, neurons that fire together, wire together. By adapting to new social interactions and cross-cultural impacts we are sending signals to our brain to rewire itself according to new behavioural and thinking patterns.
Our modern sense of self-awareness has clearly evolved to root us in our social world, a world of extended relation ships and social networks. Humanity, it can be said, has been biologically hard-wired to tap into extended social connections and communication networks. Our small tribal communities were only an earlier stage along this evolutionary path. We are also hard-wired to adapt physically in response to experience – new neural processes in our brains can come into being with intentional effort, awareness and different patterns of concentration. This capacity to create new neural connections, and thus new mental skill sets through experience, has been termed neuroplasticity. The human brain of today has to respond to the incredible amount of energy and information that is flowing through our environments and embedded in our cultural experiences. By being aware of our experiences and environ mental impacts and influences we can gain a better understanding of how our brain and thinking becomes re-patterned. This awareness is what Siegel calls ‘mindsight’:
In sum, experience creates the repeated neural firing that can lead to gene expression, protein pro duction, and changes in both the genetic regulation of neurons and the structural connections in the brain. By harnessing the power of aware ness to strategically stimulate the brain’s firing, mindsight enables us to voluntarily change a firing pattern that was laid down involuntarily.5
Thus, how we focus our attention and awareness greatly shapes the structure of our brains. Further, the ability to grow new neural connections is available throughout our lives and not only in our young formative years. This knowledge encourages us to nurture our mindfulness, our self-awareness and our empathic relations with others. Neuroplasticity also encourages us to pay more attention to our human networks, and to develop those social skills that underlie empathy and compassion. These new ‘wired connections’ are exactly what are becoming activated as individuals increasingly ‘wake up’ to what is happening within our communities and societies and upon the planet. Such distributed connections breach cultural and national borders and force us to self-reflect on our identity, values and ethics. The exoskeleton of our global communications is in turn catalyzing new patterns and organization within the human psyche. These emerging energy patterns are likely to have traits of a feminine consciousness, using energies that work through relationships rather than one-on-one; that seek to nurture co-operation; and that are nourished themselves through compassion and loving connections.
As a species we are being prepared for connectivity within a shared global empathic mind in order to evolve parallel with an emerging new evolutionary era upon this planet.
New Minds Want Peace
A new narrative is emerging, one in which each person is integral to the larger picture; the journey of each one of us is a part of the journey as a whole. This new story informs us that the possibilities are open for humanity to engage in consciously creating its way forward – with harmony, balance and respect to all. This new narrative is part of humanity’s evolving empathic mind and should compel us to seek greater connectivity and meaning in our lives. Many younger minds the world over are resonating and embracing a new consciousness of connection and compassion. The younger minds do not wish to be rote-fed the anger, fear and insecurity of their past generations. They want to reach out for change and betterment.
Around the world there are examples of young people rejecting the conflict mentality of their elder generations. In conflict zones especially, where young minds are conditioned into hatred of fixed enemies, there is a backlash against this old programming. Younger people are reaching out across artificial borders to engage with the so-called ‘enemy’ and to start a new dialogue of peace and reconciliation. Such minds realize that the conflict mentality has no future, and will be left behind if it cannot accept change. Whereas many of the old programmed minds thought that the future meant putting up borders, and viewing the ‘others’ with suspicious eyes, many of the young minds see differently. We can see this in youth move ments worldwide as there is change emerging in the mindset of young people every where. This is especially so in Middle Eastern territories where restrictive regimes are now encountering rising youthful demographics who are not accepting the old mentalities and old ways. The young people want what almost everybody wants – peace, justice, equality, freedom. There is a new spring in the step of young, tech-savvy, energetic minds that are bypassing the old models (see Chapter 7). In the years ahead – at least for the next two decades – we will increasingly see the signs of the changing of the old guard. And this time they will not be replaced by those with the same consciousness. With generational change we will see the gradual transition to an era of individuals who think differently, feel differently, connect differently, and who will want to work toward a different world. This forms part of the psycho-spiritual evolution that will accompany the generational shift toward what I have called the Phoenix Generation.
One example of this generational change is the youth movement Generation Waking Up, which calls itself a ‘global campaign to ignite a generation of young people to bring forth a thriving, just, sustainable world’. They announce that, ‘A new generation of young people is waking up. We are the middle children of History, coming of age at the crossroads of civilization, a generation rising between an old world dying and a new world being born.’6 Through their open-source, multimedia workshops, training and leadership academies Generation Waking Up (which refers to itself as ‘GenUp’) is mobilizing young people both locally and globally.7 GenUp is part of a whole array of meetings, gatherings and workshops that are popping up all over the world and engaging young minds in new thinking and new futures. Such people are living as far into the future as they can in order to transform the present. As the visionary Buckminster Fuller once said:
The youth of humanity all around our planet are intuitively revolting from all sovereignties and political ideologies. The youth of Earth are moving intuitively toward an utterly classless, race less, omnicooperative, omniworld humanity.8
The opportunity for change and betterment exists like never before in our recent history. This means that there is also responsibility; 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 is the rise of intuition, empathy, greater connectivity to the world and to people and a sense of ‘knowing’ what changes need to be made. Furthermore, within each person is a growing sense of the greater cosmic whole: the realization that humanity exists and evolves within a universe of great intelligence and meaning. This serves to impart to humanity a more profound spiritual impulse. We are on the evolutionary road to coming together as one.