In his 1990 book of essays The Practice of the Wild, Gary Snyder says, "Creatures who have traveled with us through the ages are now apparently doomed, as their habitat--and the old, old habitat of humans--falls before the slow-motion explosion of expanding world economies. If the lad or lass is among us who knows where the secret heart of this Growth-Monster is hidden, let them please tell us where to shoot the arrow that will slow it down."
I so wanted to be that lad! Every time I have read that line over the years I took it as a personal challenge.
Now over twenty years later I am six months into a project of trying to answer almost the same question, restated now as, "What is the shift of consciousness needed to support the Great Turning from our industrial growth society to a sustainable civilization?"
The quote below from David Korten comes pretty close to serving as a summary of my findings to date. He has been working for years to articulate the over-arching "Story" that is struggling to emerge to replace the belief system that has gotten us into this mess. On page 28 of the .pdf of his latest iteration he pauses to summarize what he has been saying:
I now see a world gripped in a values struggle between money and life. Global corporate power aligns with the interests of money. An expanding global people-power movement aligns with the interests of life. Corporate power mobilizes around a well-defined Sacred Money and Markets story with a pervasive public presence in corporate media and a corporate dominated educational system. The people-power movement is far less visible and mobilizes around a wide variety of peace, justice, and sustainability initiatives that lack a recognized and accepted framing story.
Based on the lessons of my life experience I have no doubt that the choice between the well-established Sacred Money and Markets story and some version of the Sacred Life and Earth Community story will determine the human fate. If the Sacred Life and Earth Community story is to prevail, it must gain clear articulation and public presence.
Is it possible that this Sacred Life and Earth Community story might take hold on a mass scale? In my opinion it is possible, but it will be a real stretch, challenging the current mass mind's capacity for complexity. It will require a larger view on at least three levels.
1. Space - It requires people to see beyond their current personal horizon, to see the whole earth as an interactive system. This is a great leap of complexity, but the number of people who have made the leap is growing, if not exponentially, at an accelerating rate.
2. Time - It requires seeing the period of the Industrial Revolution as a recent brief, and uniquely destructive, moment in human and earth history. This awareness is also growing.
3. Depth - It requires seeing the foundational beliefs and ideas of our culture as a "story" that can be examined alongside other stories. This is maybe the most difficult leap to make, because we so totally "identify" with the culture that shapes us. But as our cultural stories disintegrate, and options appear on the horizon, it gets easier to entertain the idea that we have an "operating system" that may need a major upgrade.
It seems to me that each of these levels is attainable for most people, at least momentarily. Putting the 3 together requires additional effort. The resulting view is something like the "shift of consciousness" needed to change our course. It needs to be digested and integrated so it becomes a pervasively assumed mental baseline. This is a very tall order to pull off globally, is theoretically doable, but will probably require an intense mobilization of symbolic resources. And...I see increasing signs that it is happening.
And... after writing all the above I was drawn back to an Internet posting called "The New Myth For Our Species: The Creation of Consciousness", based on the book The Creation of Consciousness, Jung's Myth for Modern Man, by Edward Edinger. It's basically about the unification of opposites, so maybe this whole "Sighting of the Ox", based on a clash of worldviews, is just a transitional precursor, in which the New Story makes healthy contact with the archetypes of the Collective Unconscious, and the life-affirming myth for our time emerges for all to see. One can hope.
Meanwhile, the research project continues.
Sources
1. Gary Snyder. The Practice of the Wild, p. 5
2. David Korten."A New Story for a New Economy”, p. 28
3. David Ratcliff. "The New Myth For Our Species: The Creation of Consciousness"
