Awakening to Heart and Soul and gaining Wisdom

Sustaining Hope in the Transition to a world of limited resources
* Post Petroleum Stress Disorder * Despair to Empowerment*
  * Global Citizenship * Apocalyptic Vision *

Many are aware of deep spiritual dimensions to the current planetary challenge. Yet the challenge affects different people very differently, and only some want to know about the deep spiritual dimensions. These pages are for such people. Others may even think that spiritual dimensions are nonsense. However, we regard that as bad science in the true meaning of science as rigorous, impartial openness to evidence, not driven by prejudicial emotions either for or against. There is plenty of scientifically valid evidence for miracles. And every near-death-experience is a testimony to realities beyond the physical world. Some people don't want to look, CSICOP being leaders in wilful blindness... but it is essential in the present crisis that we can collaborate, all who have goodwill and care about humankind and the precious earth on which we live.

From the Sixties on, many saw writing on the wall. Overpopulation, exhaustion of resources, pollution, nuclear issues, social issues... But in the Seventies, the small resources of the environmentalists were heavily opposed by oil-funded "Global Spin". And very few wanted to think about population. Now Climate Change and Peak Oil are pressing on us so hard that anyone who looks knows we must act fast and deeply change our habits, expectations and lifestyles, if we are not to endanger life on Earth altogether. A sense of urgency is growing, to educate governments and ordinary people to see the profound crisis we face, and to use our imagination to plan a wholesome, realistic change, build resilience, re-localize, and help each other. We cannot live in hope unless we pay attention to all levels of Reality, even if the inner realities seem hard, elusive, full of fear... But the magical/spiritual/ intuitive connectedness, that was known at the great awakening in the Sixties, and often comes at moments of crisis, has another chance now. Dumbledore's Army. Spiritual warfare. The Second Coming. Apocalypse. Much in permaculture, psychology, UFO awareness, has been developing quietly in response to apocalyptic awareness. Lucy Skywalker wrote Apocalyptic Vision in 1981 and it is still a good overview. Transition Towns may seem to be an eleventh-hour response, but perhaps it's only possible to build community resilience and solidarity now that the writing is so clearly on the wall. Perhaps, as with Moses' forty years in the wilderness, the waiting period was necessary training for the "forty years in the wilderness" that lies ahead. Joanna Macy sums up what we are facing today. Here she calls it "The Great Turning" but she has also used the titles "Despair and Empowerment" and "The Work that Reconnects", to describe her work.

Lucy Skywalker has also done research on the "Great Change of Ages", the "Great Transition". She believes her research is both unique and important. She can talk about it to interested groups.

Joanna Macy - Introducing 'The Great Turning'

"I consider it an enormous privilege to be alive now, in this Turning, when all the wisdom and courage we ever harvested can be put to use, and matters supremely. It is the epochal shift from an industrial growth society, dependent on accelerating consumption of resources, to a sustainable or life-sustaining society. There is no guarantee that we will make it in time for civilization, or even complex life forms, to survive; but it is clear that there's no alternative, because now we are, in systems terms, "on runway", consuming our own life support system.

"Lester Brown of the World Watch Institute says that, while the agricultural revolution took centuries and the industrial revolution took decades, the ecological revolution must happen within a few years. At the same time, it will be, of necessity, more thorough-going - involving not only our political economy, but the attitudes and habits that sustain it.

"Scientists - at least those who are not in the pay of the corporations - see more quickly than the politicians that there is no technological fix. No magic bullet, not even the internet, can save us from population explosion, deforestation, climate disruption,poison by pollution, and wholesale extinctions of plants and animal species. We are going to have to want different things, seek different pleasures, pursue different goals, than those that have been driving us and our global economy.

"...The Great Turning is occurring on three simultaneous levels...Recognise how they are gaining momentum in your own life. On the most visible level are holding actions in defense of Earth, including all the political, legislative and legal work to slow down the destruction as well as direct action - blockades, boycotts, civil disobedience and other forms of refusal. Work of this kind buys time...

"The second level of the Great Turning addresses structural causes of the global crisis and creates sustainable alternatives..new social and economic arrangements are mushrooming from local currencies to local marketing and consumer cooperatives, from eco-villages to renewable, off the grid energy generation. They may look fringe but they hold the seeds of the future.

"These nascent institutions cannot take root and survive, however without values to sustain them. They must mirror what we want, and think we are. The paradigmatic shift - at the third, most basic level of the Great Turning - is happening all around us. Some choose to see it as an influx of spirit from above, others as "hitting bottom" in our doomed and addictive society. Either way we are opening our senses to the web of relationships, the deep ecology, in which we have our being. Like our primordial ancestors, we begin again to see the world as our body and (whether we say the word or not) as sacred....we hardly have words for the cognitive, spiritual and perceptual revolution that is occurring now at a stunning rate of speed. ...We can't tell which will happen first, the final unravelling of life on Earth, or the moment when the elements of a sustainable world cohere and catch hold. But even if this Great Turning fails to carry this planetary experiment onward through linear time, it is still worth it. It is our homecoming to our true nature"

Watch Joanna on a very short video putting the Great Turning in historical context

Hear Joanna telling us about the prophecy of the Shambhalla Warriors that she learned from her Buddhist teachers.

Read The Great Turning as it appeared in Resurgence (very similar to the above).

Ten Keys to Planetary Citizenship (developed by us in Green World Trust)

This was fun for us to brainstorm. Perhaps you can improve it.

key page - last updated 1st October 2008

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