What Future May Come

We are the first species in 4 1/2 million years  that can choose not to go extinct     "Before we can arrive at solutions to the planet's problems, we will have to arrive at solutions for our own internal problems. We're a troubled mix of fear and anxiety, and we escape through endless distractions. - Zhiwa Woodbury   We are becoming aware that much of what we have been doing is not working, and that fundamental changes are now required if we are to be able to create a sustainable future as a species.   Life conditions have totally shifted our context from historic local and tribal values to a new global scale. To deal with the problems we are facing, human beings will need to evolve to a higher lever of consciousness and a deeper level of maturity, because what is happening today has never had to be faced before.   If we can find a way to mobilize the spiritual community within this new frame work of global values, it can be very powerful, for this group holds the keys to immense innate knowledge from long ago about accessing and cultivating changes.   These religions span large boundaries around the planet and provide important, expert and crucial understanding of the processes of transforming transitional values. What is called for is a kind of master intelligence that transcends but includes the marvelous, deep rooted religious traditions and indigenous spirituality and that grew out of local and tribal values.    The idea of religion is to bring about a higher standard of morality. But the problem is that it often becomes a contest to see who can be the most pious (holier than thou). When compassion gives way to obedience or compliance, it can become just another "ism." Joseph Campbell cited the Star Wars character of Darth Vader as someone who becomes lost by giving up his individuality to "the system," where there are only rules and no heart. Institutions are very much bound up in their OLD STORY (history), and are products of their roots, with strong tribal and ethnic identities. God spoke to humans in the language of their cultures. The gentle beatitudes of Christ evolved out of an older, more stern and punitive system. Jesus came after Moses, not after Abraham, and this can be seen as a kind of evidence of an evolutionary flow. The Age of Patriarchs was followed by Moses (the law), then by Christ. So the old “eye for an eye and tooth for tooth” of the Old Testament began to gave way to the beatitudes.  Mohammad began teaching in Mecca about 610. Very conservative, closed systems that seek to discredit new ideas and institutions may not be able to change. They are products of strong and ethnic identities, and their message is their history. De-institutionalization of some of the most inflexible and primitive cultural systems may take place as THE NEW STORY begins to emerge, which is globalization.   So far, there is no spirituality for the modern context. But people everywhere are having transcendent, deep connections with life, with one another and with the world, similar to a religious experience, in a non-religious context.  In some ways science may be considered to have served as the religion of this epoch, in that science has been asked to explain how reality works, in much the same way as religion was in the past. But science has been trapped in a kind of fragmentation between the inner world and the outer world. This grew out of an early deal with the church. The agreement was that science would limit itself to material concerns, and the church would deal with all spiritual matters. So, from its beginnings, science had an experiential core, couched in skepticism about the transcendent. Descartes addressed the inner vs. outer world as being quite separate. This great rift or separation in which science was limited to only empirical considerations of the physical world, turned science  into a sort of orphan, barred from the spiritual banquet table. Biblical references to mans’ dominion over the world has turned into exploitation of the planet. The framework we are left with is empty consumerism. Breaking out of this illusion is what is needed. By the time of Goethe, we find references to a spiritual paradigm of science.As western science which has developed over the last few hundred years we have increasingly looked to science to explain how reality works. Interestingly, we are seeing recent references in scientific terms to the evidence of the evolutionary flow of spirit.     The contemporary paradigm is one of a kind of serpentine path between being isolated and alone in our individuation (discontinuity), and being somehow connected to the whole of the race, the planet and the continuous universe. The feeling is one of reaching toward the future, yet being trapped in the past. It seems almost like a strange dream of being stuck or abandoned and unable to move forward or back.   But a NEW STORY is beginning to be told, a story of a new world view, and a new science as well. This new story describes a kind of seamlessness quantum inseparability, which may become the basis for new theology or expression of religion about what life itself is. Some physicists and philosophers are even beginning to talk about religion again because of recent discoveries about how life itself is expressed, and evolving. Some even speak of a redefinition of spirit with more of a cosmic respect for the force of life itself.     We have come to understand that humans could not have evolved into their present biological complexity with only 35,000 genes in the human body, because there would not be time for the random choice process to work, unless some other kind of intelligence is behind it.  Also, we know that bacteria, viruses, genes and now memes, respond together in response to non-linear dynamics. When their external worlds threaten their internal capacities they re-calibrate their codes. In fact, there is, in all life forms a genius and adaptive intelligence. There is a new respect for and a redefinition of the cosmic force of life itself, which may imply a whole new concept of what is spirituality.     The new story is that there is only ONE and we are all THAT ONE, as an inherent part, that there is one world, one civilization.  The above is based on a telephone conference between Peter Singe, Don Beck, Brian Swimme, moderated by Andrew Cohen, Part 2.  Matthew Fox - Recovering the Sacredness of the Earth Quintessential Michio Kaku Anne Tucker