WORLDSHIFT!

The Quantum Leap in Humankind’s Global Brain

by Ervin Laszlo *

To Shift or Not to Shift: THAT IS NOT THE QUESTION

Had he lived today, Hamlet would affirm with more conviction than ever: the question is, to be or not to be. He would be right. But it is not the skull of an individual that Hamlet would ponder, but the living Earth. Will we survive on this planet, or become extinct like the dinosaurs?

The fact is that we are approaching a major watershed; a global tipping point. What will come is not decided yet, but one thing is certain: it will not be the same as that what we have today. We can’t go on as we have been.

We are destroying the fabric of society. There is growing insecurity in countries both rich and poor and greater propensity to resort to terrorism and war. One in three urban dwellers live in slums, shantytowns and urban ghettoes; more than 900 million are classified as slum-dwellers. The gap is widening between the wealthy and powerful and the poor and marginalized. Eighty percent of the world’s domestic product belongs to one billion people, and the remaining twenty percent is shared by five-and-a-half billion. Islamic fundamentalism is spreading throughout the Middle East, religious fanaticism is growing in America and the world over, and neo-Nazi and other extremist movements are surfacing in Europe.

We are also destroying the planet. The production of essential biological and physical resources has already peaked. Forests, species of fish, and coral reefs are damaged and disappearing, soils are impoverished by overcropping and by chemicals; diversity is reduced by genetic manipulation. The reserves of fresh water are diminishing; more than half the world’s population faces water shortages. And climate change threatens to make most of the planet unsuited for food production and habitation.

If we continue in this way, changing weather patterns will create drought, devastating storms, widespread harvest failures, and rising sea levels will flood coastal cities and lands. Millions will flee the worst-hit areas. In the ensuing conflagration no one will be spared.

To shift or not to shift is not the question. If we are to “be” we need to shift, and sooner or later we will shift. The question is, will we shift in time?

WHY We Must Shift

In the late 18th century Thomas Malthus published a treatise that claimed two things. First, that food is necessary to the existence of man, and second that people will continue to reproduce as they always have. “The power of population” said Malthus, “is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man.” Inevitably, the time will come when population-growth outruns food-production. There will be more people on Earth than we can produce food for.

The “Malthusian catastrophe” is a simplified version of the tipping point we are now approaching. In question today is not only the production of food, but the whole basis of life in the biosphere. And the critical trend is not just the growth of population—how many people walk the Earth—but how much each person consumes, and what he and she does to the environment. We have consumed more of the planet’s physical and biological resources in the six decades since World War II than in all of history before then.

Today we consume more than can regenerate or be replaced, and discard more than nature can absorb. This is not sustainable. In regard to food, for example, we know how much is sustainable for each person: it is the produce of 4.2 acres of land. But the average “ecological foot print” is seven acres! And food is but one of the basic resources we need to live and to develop, and we are overusing and depleting most of them.

We way we consume and discard today is as if were on a spaceship destined for a brief voyage. That spaceship uses batteries charged at its homebase to supply its electric power, the fuel loaded at its launch to power its engines, and the air, food, and water taken on board to sustain its crew. Obviously, sooner or later the batteries will go flat, the supply of fuel, air, food and water will be exhausted, and the waste will pile up. The spaceship will then return to its homebase. Man-made spaceships can return to Earth. But where can “spaceship Earth” return to?

What will happen when we reach the limits of Earth’s resources? When in the laboratory bacteria outrun the substances on which they feed, they die off. When mice approach the limit of their food-supply they become infertile; lemmings commit mass suicide. But when a conscious species reaches the limits of its resources it doesn’t need to die off, commit suicide, or turn infertile. It can change its consciousness.

With a changed consciousness we would have different values and different priorities. We could begin to live sustainably. Evolving our consciousness is the best, and perhaps the only, way to launch the shift we need to survive on this planet.

HOW We Could Shift

The world is full of large and seemingly unsolvable problems. If you want to tackle them you must recall Gandhi’s advice: be the change you wish to see in the world. You must join this with Einstein’s insight: you cannot solve a problem with the same kind of thinking that gave rise to that problem. What this tells you is that if you want to change the world, you have to change yourself—change your thinking.

What does it mean, change your thinking? To begin with, it means getting rid of old thinking, including the powerful but often unexamined beliefs that support it. There are many now obsolete beliefs about ourselves, others, and nature. Here is a short checklist.

• Everyone is separate and rightfully pursues his or her own self-interest.
• When one serves one’s own interest he or she benefits also others: after all, the market distributes the benefits.
• Life is a struggle for existence; only the fittest survives.
• In the ruthless competition for “fitness” (meaning power, wealth, and success) the ends justify the means.
• The more money you have, the better you are.
• You owe allegiance to one nation and government, and one business alone.
• If you want peace, prepare for war.
• More technology and more efficiency are the answer, no matter what the question.
• The environment can be engineered like a bridge or a dam to fit our needs.
• For all intents and purposes nature is an inexhaustible source of resources and an infinite sink of wastes.

If you hold such beliefs, you are part of the problem. But how can you become part of the solution? The answer is: adopt new thinking—new values, new priorities, a new view of the world. New thinking is not utopian and it is not unprecedented. There are a growing number of people who strive for them: they are a great and growing wave, the wave of the emerging cultures.

Some of the cultures that emerge harbor great promise. Those who belong to them rethink their preferences, their priorities, their values, and their behaviors. They shift from a narrow egoism to commitment to peace and sustainability around them, and around the world.

Two things hallmark the new thinking. One is the realization that the ancient saying “we are all one” is not mere fiction. As William James has said, we are like islands in the sea--separate on the surface but connected in the deep.

The second distinguishing feature is a wide sense of responsibility. This follows from the sense of oneness. If we are one with nature and with other people our responsibilities don’t end with ourselves, with our family, with our country and with our company; they encompass the whole human family and the whole Earth. Living up to our responsibilities is not charity. We are part of humanity, and humanity is part of life on the planet, so what we do to others and to nature we also do to ourselves.

When you shed obsolete beliefs and adopt new thinking, you change yourself. In these chaotic times that change can be the “butterfly” that triggers a storm. It can spread far and wide, and in the end it can change the world.

WHEN We Should Shift

When you exclaim, “that’s the last straw!” you express a fundamental yet often disregarded insight. This is “nonlinearity.” If we load the back of a camel, we can add load after load and the camel will adjust and cope—until the load reaches the limit of the camel’s carrying capacity. Then, as the expression has it, just one more straw will break its back. A stepwise process that proceeded smoothly, “linearly” becomes suddenly abrupt, “nonlinear.”

This is what happens throughout nature. A living species can cope with changes in its environment—up to a point. When those changes accumulate, the stress reaches a critical point and the species dies out. Unless, of course, it mutates. In relatively simple systems critical points lead to breakdown. In more complex systems these critical points are tipping points: they can go one way or another. They do not lead inevitably to breakdown but can also lead to breakthrough.

When you reach a tipping point, the rule is evolve or exit. This rule holds also in society. In 1989 it was enough that a group of East German refugees received permission to cross the iron curtain to Austria to create a small but critical shock to the system—the shock that broke its back. It was “the last straw.” In a matter of weeks the Communist-dominated East European states seceded from the Soviet Union, and less than a year later the Soviet Union ceased to exist. The Soviet Communist Party, the most powerful political party in the world, not just lost power, it was actually outlawed.

In the last ten thousand years many societies, entire civilizations, reached critical tipping points. Once flowering cultures vanished: the Babylonians, the Sumerians, the Mayans, the Easter Islanders… But others met the challenge: they transformed and survived. History testifies that the transformations were profound.

Stone Age tribes lived in a mythological world: they communed with the trees, the animals, and the spirits of ancestors. People saw themselves as part of a mysterious but meaningful living cosmos. Ten thousand years ago this “Mythos” civilization transformed into a “Theos” civilization: into the theocratic civilizations of ancient Egypt, Babylonia, China, and India. Here the unchanging laws of Sky-Gods governed human existence: as Hermes Trismegistos declared, “as above, so below.” Then, two and a half thousand years ago on the northern shores of the Mediterranean still another civilization arose: the human reasoning-based “Logos” civilization pioneered by the classical Greeks.

At the dawn of the modern age Western civilization combined elements from all of these, but it was shaped above all by the belief in the power of reason inherited from the Greeks. It developed a materialistic and mechanistic view of the world inspired by the pioneers of modern science: Galileo, Newton, and Copernicus. This allowed classical physics to join hands with handicrafts and produced enormous technological breakthroughs.

But today, in an age of global information, communication, interdependence and environmental degradation, the mechanistic-materialistic worldview doesn’t work any more. The technologies and behaviors it generates produce more heat than light—more negative side-effects than real benefits.

Modern civilization is no longer sustainable: it either breaks down, or it transforms. The challenge is to transform it into a civilization where six-and-a-half billion or more people can live with dignity, and in harmony with each other and with nature. This civilization must be diverse yet unified. It must be an organic whole, the same as nature and the universe.

The civilization we need must be a whole, and its worldview and its values must be holistic. This must be a civilization of Holos.

The leap from Logos to Holos is the epochal Worldshift we must launch, and launch now. We don’t have time to prevaricate, for the global tipping point is approaching. The trends and processes that lead to it may become irreversible as early as the end of the year 2012, after which it will be too late to create a sustainable and peaceful world. It is in our own best interest to make this much-prophesied watershed in human affairs not a prelude to breakdown, but the springboard to an age of peace and sustainability.

NEW-SCIENCE INSIGHTS FOR SHIFTING

Everything Is Connected with Everything Else

One of the most promising factors in our quest for a timely shift is known only to a handful of people, and they seldom make conscious use of it. This factor is another shift: a paradigm-shift, and it takes place in the sciences. The fact is that not only is the ground shifting under our feet, also the way we perceive that ground is shifting. If this shift were to become known beyond the small coterie of front-line scientists and the still small if rapidly growing circle of science-savvy people, a critical mass would begin to see the world differently. And that critical mass would begin to question its dominant values and priorities and search for better and more responsible ways of living.

First, consider the dominant view of the world. Most people, at least in the Western world, believe that the world is made up of matter moving mechanistically in empty space. The matter that makes up the galaxies, the same as the matter in our bodies, is the ultimate reality; space and time are merely the framework within which they play out their destinies, following the laws of cause and effect.

But this concept is not correct. Already a hundred years ago Einstein showed that space and time are dynamic and integral elements of the universe—the basic reality is a four-dimensional continuum within which all things are relative and all things interact. Twenty years later, the “quantum revolution” removed science’s remaining materialistic-mechanistic assumptions. The ultimate elements of reality are swirls of energy, known as quanta. They have no simple location in space, and they are instantly and non-mechanistically connected throughout space and time.

The quantum world is said to be “weird,” but, as it turned out, this weirdness is not confined to the microscopic dimension. Also the living world has quantum-like properties, for here, too, things are quasi-instantly interconnected. This is what comes to light in the new fields of quantum biology and quantum brain research. It appears that humans, as all living things, are not just biochemical systems but, remarkably, they are also “macroscopic quantum systems.” The universe in its totality is a super-macroscopic quantum system. Its basic parameters are staggeringly coherent, and its fundamental constants are finely tuned together so as to permit the evolution of ever more structure and ever greater complexity.

Leading-edge science rediscovers and reaffirms a perennial insight that occurs and recurs in the world’s spiritual and cultural traditions. Everything is connected with everything else, including humans and the whole web of life. This science-insight changes everything. This is a different world, and it calls for a different way of viewing it and acting in it.

We Are an Integral Part of an Integral Cosmos

The instant, space and time-bridging interconnection among all things—physicists call it “entanglement”—goes even beyond Einstein’s concept of a relativistic universe. This aspect of the new paradigm in the sciences conjures up another vision: the vision of an organically whole cosmos. In this interconnected cosmos matter is not the primary reality. The basic reality is energy, dynamically and coherently integrated with space and time.

And there is more. As if this matter-to-energy shift was not profound enough, in the last decade or two front-line scientists discovered another factor that is fundamental in nature. This is information.

We used to think that information is something produced by humans when they think and communicate. But as we now realize, it is more fundamental than that. Information exists in nature; indeed, the world as we know it could not exist without information—certainly not as it does.

Our universe is a very remarkable place. It is one among trillions of possible universes among which only a handful could harbor life--all the others would be physically incapable of bringing forth the kind of complex systems we call living. But what is it that makes the difference between our remarkable universe and the myriad others that could, and perhaps do, exist? The answer is, information. Space, time, and energy are the hardware of the universe; information is the software. Hardware alone is inert, it is “dumb”—a computer without software cannot do anything. It is information that sets the laws of nature, decides the size and interaction of elementary particles and the values of universal fields and forces. It specifies the way the universe “works.”

The universe works in remarkably consistent and coherent ways. It evolves particles into atoms, atoms into stars and stellar systems, and within stars it evolves simple atoms—like hydrogen—into progressively more complex ones such as helium, beryllium, carbon, and others. They are the building-blocks of all life. Life evolved on Earth from basic molecular compounds into unicellular organisms, and then into complex and integrated multicellular species. We are the most complex multicellular species yet to have evolved.

Evolution from hydrogen to homo is not the result of inert matter moving mechanistically in empty space. Evolution is of infinite complexity, staggeringly fine-tuned. It results from a constant and effective transfer of information among all the things that evolve.

This science-insight is critically important for our life and our future. If the entire world is integral and interconnected, we humans are an integral and interconnected part of it. We are, as novelist-philosopher Arthur Koestler has said, “holons”: organic wholes that are organic parts of other wholes. This means that everything we do on Earth affects the whole human family and the web of life of which it is a part. Conversely, everything that happens to the human family and to the biosphere affects you and me, and each person on the planet.

We are not separate, and the world is not an aggregate of inert matter moving mechanistically in passive space. We are an organic part of each other, of nature and of the cosmos. We had better learn to be a responsible part, because lest we do, we could destroy the integral wholes on which our life depends. For a conscious species living in an organically interconnected universe, evolving the consciousness that makes it a responsible part is not just an option: it’s a fundamental condition of survival.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

* Founder of The Club of Budapest and Chancellor-Designate of GLOBALSHIFT University, and author of over eighty books including SCIENCE AND THE AKASHIC FIELD and the forthcoming QUANTUM SHIFT IN THE GLOBAL BRAIN (Inner Traditions, 2007 and 2008).