2008 Woodie Awards
On the Transformation and Evolution of Human Consciousness: A Meditation, on 11 September 2006
Alan Nordstrom
Issue date: 9/18/06 Section: Opinions
A premise underlying what I have been reading in recent years regarding the possibility of humankind's faring more kindly in the future is that our "consciousness can evolve." What might that mean? And is that so?
Like a chambered nautilus outgrowing one compartment of its shell and then building a more capacious space or, more dramatically, like a caterpillar metamorphosing into a butterfly (two commonplace images these days), so can the cultural constructs - the memes, the myths, the stories - in which we live shift from model to model, paradigm to paradigm.
For example, within my lifetime in the U.S., I have seen the disappearance of "Whites Only" signs, of publicly sanctioned racial segregation. I have seen two women serve as U.S Secretary of State (one of them African American) and seen many women CEOs. After Rachel Carson's Silent Spring (1962), I have seen our altered consciousness about all things "green" and about our collective responsibility to Earth's biosphere. I have seen the model of medicine morph beyond illness to wellness and seen psychology evolve through several schools or "forces" toward psycho-pharmacology and psycho-spirituality. Now, of course, we are all entangled in a world-wide web of instantaneous communications and of access to information of all kinds-which cannot fail to transform how we think, feel and behave.
Yes, human consciousness evolves, as do the cultures in which we collectively express it. Therefore I am hopeful that our urgent sense of danger, our sense that how we now live on Earth is toxic and unsustainable, will compel a seismic shift of global consciousness - what Willis Harman called in his 1988 book a Global Mind Change. Once we became able to view enchanting photographs of Earth's blue marble taken from the moon, that graphic shift of perspective began to give new mythic meaning to the word "global." We could see vividly our interdependency aboard Spaceship Earth or on the planetary organism some call Gaia. We grasp now that we are all citizens of the world before we are citizens of cities or of nations. Conscious now as never before of our interconnectivity with and dependence upon the whole web of Earthly life, we can see better our prime directive of sustaining the planetary matrix that sustains us all.
On this day as I write - a few minutes before the first 9/11 attack five years ago - I recognize also how that event profoundly altered human consciousness around the world, almost instantaneously. We now urgently apprehend that we humans possess horrific power to wreak harm. We are the first generation on Earth who can choose to be the last. I think we hear quite clearly now the wake-up call of history urging us toward a higher collective consciousness that leads us to realize the further reaches of our potential humanity. Let's go there. Let's make that shift.
Like a chambered nautilus outgrowing one compartment of its shell and then building a more capacious space or, more dramatically, like a caterpillar metamorphosing into a butterfly (two commonplace images these days), so can the cultural constructs - the memes, the myths, the stories - in which we live shift from model to model, paradigm to paradigm.
For example, within my lifetime in the U.S., I have seen the disappearance of "Whites Only" signs, of publicly sanctioned racial segregation. I have seen two women serve as U.S Secretary of State (one of them African American) and seen many women CEOs. After Rachel Carson's Silent Spring (1962), I have seen our altered consciousness about all things "green" and about our collective responsibility to Earth's biosphere. I have seen the model of medicine morph beyond illness to wellness and seen psychology evolve through several schools or "forces" toward psycho-pharmacology and psycho-spirituality. Now, of course, we are all entangled in a world-wide web of instantaneous communications and of access to information of all kinds-which cannot fail to transform how we think, feel and behave.
Yes, human consciousness evolves, as do the cultures in which we collectively express it. Therefore I am hopeful that our urgent sense of danger, our sense that how we now live on Earth is toxic and unsustainable, will compel a seismic shift of global consciousness - what Willis Harman called in his 1988 book a Global Mind Change. Once we became able to view enchanting photographs of Earth's blue marble taken from the moon, that graphic shift of perspective began to give new mythic meaning to the word "global." We could see vividly our interdependency aboard Spaceship Earth or on the planetary organism some call Gaia. We grasp now that we are all citizens of the world before we are citizens of cities or of nations. Conscious now as never before of our interconnectivity with and dependence upon the whole web of Earthly life, we can see better our prime directive of sustaining the planetary matrix that sustains us all.
On this day as I write - a few minutes before the first 9/11 attack five years ago - I recognize also how that event profoundly altered human consciousness around the world, almost instantaneously. We now urgently apprehend that we humans possess horrific power to wreak harm. We are the first generation on Earth who can choose to be the last. I think we hear quite clearly now the wake-up call of history urging us toward a higher collective consciousness that leads us to realize the further reaches of our potential humanity. Let's go there. Let's make that shift.
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