We Are Now Awakening
A mere 2.6 million years ago, quite near the end of this 13.8-billion-year story, came the creation of a being with the capacity to reflect on its own consciousness; to experience with awe the beauty and mystery of creation; to articulate, communicate, and share learning; to reshape the material world to its own ends; and to anticipate and intentionally choose it own future.
We call ourselves humans. We are the living spirit's most daring experiment: a species possessed of the capacity to shape is own destiny as a conscious collective choice.
We each express as a living body composed of some 30 to 70 trillion individual living, self-regulating, self-reproducing cells. More than half of our individual dry weight consists of the individual micro-organisms we need to metabolize our food and create the vitamins essential to our health and survival.
Think of this body, your body, as a community of tiny living organisms continuously self-organizing in exquisitely balanced union to continually renew and heal the physical body within which our consciousness resides. It is a stunning cooperative achievement that even our most brilliant scientists have barely begun to understand.
We humans are remarkably fast learners in the cosmic scheme of things. During our two and a half million yeas we developed the capacity for speech, mastered the use of fire, learned to make and use sophisticated tools, express ourselves through are and music, cultivate our food, communicate in written form, live as highly complex societies, and create organized systems of knowledge in botany, zoology, astronomy, and cosmology.
Then, only a few hundred years ago, we began to embrace a scientific paradigm that largely dismissed consciousness and the spiritual aspect of our nature. We focused our life energies on the task of mastering the physical world and building our technical capabilities. These capabilities now open vast opportunities to build healthier societies devoted to advancing our social, intellectual, and spiritual growth.
Our increasing alienation from nature and spirit, however, has led us to use our ever more powerful technologies and institutions not to serve life but to dominate it, even destroy it. In so doing we put our future at risk. Alienation from our spiritual nature has left us exposed to manipulation by advertisers who turn our longing for spiritual connection into an insatiable quest for money to consume that for which we have no need and by political demagogues who align this quest with corporate interests. Tragically misguided, in little more than our most recent hundred years we have destroyed much of the living biosystem capital it took Earth's evolving community of life billions of years to create.
We are now awakening to the beauty, joy, and meaning of life and embarking on the most profound and exciting course change in human history. The Copernican Revolution divided science and religion and initiated an awakening to the potentials of the material side of our existence.
The Ecological Revolution now invites us to experience ourselves as spiritually alive and politically active participants in the unfolding exploration of the potentials of a living universe. It is a challenge that calls us to draw on the full potential of our species and engage in a collective enterprise the requires the creative contribution of every individual.
As the old assumption crumble, so too will the old political alignments. Traditional distinctions between Left and Right, liberal and conservative, have lost their meaning. Appeals to a political center are futile posturing by those who fail to recognize the significance of the challenges we face. The political future belongs to those who have the courage and vision to form new alliances based on ways of thinking that cannot be defined by the old categories.
We must approach this giant step into the unknown with the mutual caring and tolerance for diversity foundational to the healthy societies we hope to create. Even as we align ourselves with our core values and build alliances with those who share them, we must be constantly aware that we have embarked on a journey for which we have a compass but no map. We are all learners in an unfolding process that requires us to look with a critical eye and an open mind for the spark of goodness in each person and the kernel of truth in each idea.
- David Korten,
excerpted from When Corporations Rule the World
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