The Awakening of Humanity

Occasionally in the course of human events, a new worldview emerges that transforms society. It happened when Jesus' disciples were inspired by his life to believe in radical transformation of the person and the world through love. It occurred in the Renaissance when the idea of progress through knowledge was born. It took place in the United States when the ideas of freedom and democracy became institutions through the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. It happened with the advent of the British Royal Society and the dawn of science through Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton, and again among the transcendentalists, such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman, who believed that each individual is an expression of the divine, a free and sovereign person. Now, once again a new worldview is arising. This idea is the culmination of all human history. It holds the promise of fulfilling the great aspirations of the past and heralds the advent of the next phase of our evolution. It is the idea of conscious evolution.

Conscious evolution is occurring now because we are gaining an understanding of the processes of nature: the gene, the atom, the brain, the origin of the universe, and the whole story of creation from the big bang to us. We are now changing our understanding of how nature evolves; we are moving from unconscious evolution through natural selection to conscious evolution by choice. With this increased knowledge and the power that it gives us, we can destroy the world or we can participate in a future of immeasurable dimensions. Into our hands has been given the power of codestruction or cocreation.

As Jonas Salk stated in Anatomy of Reality:

The most meaningful activity in which a human being can be engaged is one that is directly related to human evolution. This is true because human beings now play an active and critical role not only in the process of their own evolution but in the survival and evolution of all living beings. Awareness of this places upon human beings a responsibility for their participation in and contribution to the process of evolution. If humankind would accept and acknowledge this responsibility and become creatively engaged in the process of metabiological evolution consciously, as well as unconsciously, a new reality would emerge, and a new age would be born.

Consciousness has evolved for billions of years, from single cells to animals to humans, but conscious evolution is radically new. In The Life Era, Professor Eric Chaisson of the Wright Center for Scientific Education suggested that the second great event in the history of the universe is happening now. The first event was when matter gained charge of radiative energy, which organized the explosive energy of supernovas into metals and materials that formed the material world more than 10 billion years ago. The second is when technologically competent human life gains an understanding of matter. As we learn how nature's invisible processes work, we can restore the environment of our Earth and free ourselves from poverty and disease; we can design new life-forms, bring life to other planets, and eventually explore and bring Earth life into the universe. Chaisson wrote in ZYGON: "The change from matter-dominance to life-dominance is the second of two preeminent events in the history of the universe.... If our species is to survive and enjoy a future, then we must make synonymous the words future and ethical, thus terming our next grand evolutionary epoch, ethical evolution."

Evolution or Extinction

An irreversible shift toward conscious evolution began in 1945 when the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. With this dreadful release of power we penetrated one of the invisible technologies of nature — the atom — and gained the power that we once attributed to the gods. This capability, combined with other rapidly developing technologies such as biotechnology, nanotechnology (the ability to build atom by atom), and artificial intelligence, if used in our current state of self-centered consciousness could lead to the destruction of the human race. We must learn "ethical evolution," as Chaisson said. And we do not have hundreds of years in which to learn.

The response to this crisis has been an uprising of a new consciousness — almost a new kind of humanity. Since the 1960s, the metamorphosis has accelerated as millions of people have become aware of environmental degradation, social injustice, and the need for radical change.

In Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming, Paul Hawken, a leading environmentalist and social change activist, examined the worldwide movement for social and environmental change. He discovered that groups working in these causes comprise the largest movement on Earth, a movement that has no name, leaders, or location and that has gone largely ignored by politicians and the media. Like nature itself, it is organizing from the bottom up. Fundamentally, it is an expression of humanity's collective genius.

As Hawken suggests, in the 1960s through the 1980s networks of people in every field and sector of society formed to respond to crises as well as to realize new opportunities. But we had no social map of our collective potential. Although there were many positive social innovations, we didn't have a way to connect the dots.

We entered a period of confusion — a loss of vision and direction. We continued to destroy our rain forests, pollute our soil and water, and increase our rate of population growth. Our global population is still rising. We cannot continue to increase our population at the current rate and survive. If we continue with our current practices, we may destroy ourselves. Many of us have seen looming catastrophe, but few of us have realized that this crisis is...