The Way Ahead Newsletter: No. 1
Dear Friends,
Welcome to the first ‘Way Ahead’ newsletter. To tell the truth, it has been a long time coming! Before this time I have not been able to focus my time and attention onto a full and regular Newsletter. However, now that my website has had a facelift I have decided to place my efforts into a monthly newsletter, to be sent out on the last day of each month. There may also be brief 'News Updates' sent out between newsletters - yet I will remain mindful not to overload your inboxes! The ‘Way Ahead Newsletter’ each month will have some ‘reflections’ from me; some recent & varied news links of interest, a 'saying' to share; a tale to finish; a list of recommended books in the right-side column; and a list of recommended web links & videos in the boxes at the end. I hope it will provide enough ‘food for thought’ – an interlude of reflection – as we move through these formative years. Also, please feel free to pass this newsletter on to anyone who you think would like to receive it, and ask them to sign up from my homepage. As ever, all feedback, thoughts, and enquiries are most welcome – just drop me a line!
REFLECTIONS
As a civilization we are in the throes of living out an ‘endgame’. No, it is not the endgame of our species, or any similar dire situation, for the human evolutionary project will continue. Yet it is the endgame of an era. For many of us living in the developed nations, we are witnessing the endgame of the Second Industrial Revolution. Yet overall, this endgame concerns a way of living, a social-political model that has now come to the end of its life. Simply put, we cannot go on living as we have been doing for the past 150 years. Why 150 years? Well, this is roughly the time since oil was first discovered and utilized for fuelling our rapid social expansion. All life is a living system; as such it requires the continual inflow of energy in order not to atrophy (the law of entropy). At regular stages of growth new energy sources are required in order to ‘boost’ the growth and expansion of any system. And for millennia the human species has been evolving towards a planetary civilization. We are now on the cusp of this, and the reason we managed to arrive at this point so rapidly is due, as I have said, to the finding of oil as the most recent energy boost. In just 150 years many societies have gone through the most incredible development, to the point where we have sophisticated technological infrastructures that enable us to circumnavigate the globe like ‘
Phileas Fogg’ both physically and virtually. On top of this we have oil-fertilized our agriculture into mass food production to sustain the vastly expanding human population. Our light switches illuminate our rooms instantly; we fly to other countries as if taking a taxi; and we have access to a kaleidoscope of goods and services one could only have dreamed of previously. All this because we have had a tap onto the most precious energy source so far discovered on our planet. This has been our rocket fuel. Our current 150 years of rapid industrial acceleration has been built upon the notion of a perpetual-growth machine. This extraordinary period in our cultural evolution has now been accepted, and taught, as the norm. Yet back in the early 1970s the now infamous ‘Limits to Growth’ report concluded that the end of growth would probably arrive between 2010 and 2050.
Let’s be realistic - from now on only relative growth is possible. Some aspects of the global economy may continue to grow, ‘relative’ to others, yet the overall trend is one of contraction. Those who support continued growth often forget that there are factors external to the economic system that make ‘business as usual’ near impossible - and that this situation is not temporary but permanent. These factors include: the depletion of important resources; the proliferation of disruptive environmental impacts; and a financial system that is no longer suited to the current crisis. However, there is another significant factor which most commentators leave out completely, perhaps because it cannot be ‘physically verified’ – this is the presence of human consciousness.
The modern world has witnessed a different type of consciousness emerging over the past 150 years, a post-Industrial Revolution cognitive mind. New technological innovations that helped to alter our perceptions of the dimensions of space and time in the world began to birth a psychological consciousness; a consciousness that wanted to look beyond the borders and horizons of the physical frontier. For any great epochal shift to be successful it requires a change in the parameters of human consciousness; this has always been the case. We are slowly beginning to recognize this fact and to notice a change in our psychology and consciousness. Life on planet Earth is undergoing three types of revolutions: physical, psychic and cosmological.
Our human socio-cultural cycles are very much a part of our evolutionary history, with marked eras between hunter-gatherer, agrarian, city-state, industrial and planetary. Cultural historian William Irwin Thompson has marked these cultural ecologies or cycles as:
1 Hominization: 4000000–200000bc
2 Symbolization: 200000–10000bc
3 Agriculturalization: 10000–3500bc
4 Civilization: 3500bc–ad1500
5 Industrialization: ad1500–1945
6 Planetization: 1945–present
Currently, our struggles are between a system marked by the inequalities of a dysfunctional global system (marked by the ‘old consciousness’) and that of an integral-ecology era (represented by the ‘new consciousness’). This is a transition period which is manifesting through resource wars and the ongoing struggle for control and management. At the same time there are many forecasts trying to predict the future of life on planet Earth without a comprehension of the ‘bigger picture’. We are often unable to discern the uncertain, the unpredictable and the unexpected. The Western mindset has a preoccupation, or even obsession, with a linear view of history and progress. Yet the concept of a linear development of human civilizations is erroneous and misleading. Linear development does not take into account living in ways that enable all other people to live as well; living in ways that respect the lives of others and that respect the right to the economic and cultural development of all people; to pursue personal fulfillment in harmony with the integrity of nature; and working with like-minded people to preserve or restore the essential balances of the environment.
Yet in the months and years ahead we are going to witness some sharp degrees of change as we realize that our 'accepted norms' of linearity are breaking down. This year especially will see much change occuring in our lives as we see dysfunctional systems falling apart. Yet it is not a time to be worried, negative, or stressed; rather, it is an opportunity to re-align ourselves with the way forward. We now need to make decisions over our life priorities. We need to educate ourselves, and to gain balanced and helpful information. It is time to make these steps as our old world transforms herself...
Until next month.... please visit
my webpage for more news...and stay informed.
PS. New Essay now available online on my website:
BEYOND THE FUTURE: FACING A PERCEPTION SINGULARITY
Some News of Interest
A 'Saying' to Share
‘Seek wisdom while you have the strength, or you may lose strength without gaining wisdom.’
A Tale to Finish
'Friends'
An Arabian legend tells of two friends who were travelling through the desert and at one point they fell into disagreement about the trip whereby one of the friends slaps the other across the face.
The friend who had been slapped said nothing, only wrote in the sand: ‘Today my best friend slapped me in the face.’
Both friends continued on their journey and eventually arrived at an oasis where there were baths to refresh themselves. The friend who had bee slapped jumped into the large baths yet soon found himself starting to drown. The other friend immediately jumped in after him and saved him. After recovering the first man took a pen and wrote on a stone: ‘Today my best friend saved my life.’
Intrigued, the friend asked: ‘Why is it that after I hurt you, you wrote in the sand and now after saving you, you write on a stone?
Smiling, the other friend replied: ‘When a good friend offends us, we write in the sand where the wind of forgetfulness and forgiveness will be responsible for clearing it off; on the other hand, when something great happens to us, we burn it into stone in memory of the heart where no wind in the world can erase it.’
