What have you been thinking about recently?

I've been in a deep inquiry about the Global Consciousness Shift. I just found out about a new transformational film that is being created, called "The SHIFT Movie". As the producers of this film explain,

"A massive worldwide phenomenon is in progress, sowing seeds of great hope for our collective future. Millions of individuals and hundreds of organizations are waking up and embracing a new outlook with an emphasis on their personal responsibility to contribute positively to our collective future. We are in the midst of the biggest social transformation in human history, The SHIFT.

"At this critical point in our evolution, it is imperative that the masses quickly become aware of this global movement. The most visible face of The SHIFT is the global environmental movement. However, this evolutionary phenomenon is broader and deeper. It involves our very understanding of who we are as human beings, and our responsibility to the world and to life itself. 

"The SHIFT is the first feature film to reveal the proactive role we are now playing in the evolutionary shift of our collective consciousness. As it chronicles the faces, the stories, and the leaders assisting in this social transformation, the film reveals the phenomenon's emergence and profound meaning."

I recently read a new book by visionary futurist Ervin Laszlo, The Chaos Point. In it, he postulates that the present world situation is leading us toward a critical tipping point, which he calls the Chaos Point. When we reach that point in time, world civilization will either go into Breakthrough, evolving to a safer, more sustainable world - or a Breakdown of the social, economic, and ecological systems that frame our life will occur. Laszlo claims that this critical Chaos Point corresponds to the Mayan calendar's 2012 date we are all so familiar with.

What I think about constantly and deeply is, how can we insure that when we reach the Chaos Point, we will tip the balance toward Breakthrough?

This is on the hearts and minds of many of us on Earth today. While as stated above "Millions of individuals and hundreds of organizations are waking up and embracing a new outlook", in large part the controls and levers of "Spaceship Earth"-- a term coined by Buckminster Fuller--are still being manned by those who are firmly entrenched in old-paradigm ways of thinking.

In his book Theory U: Leading From the Future as it Emerges, Otto Scharmer explains that "The crisis of our time isn't just a crisis of a single leader, organization, country or conflict. The crisis of our time reveals the dying of an old social structure and way of thinking, an old way of institutionalizing and enacting collective social forms."

The world's current social structures, the infrastructure of civilization and society, are built on what Scharmer terms "the premodern traditional and the modern industrial structures or forms of thinking and operating". These traditional and modern forms, or paradigms, were successful in the past, but are no longer a valid working model. As our world has moved from the old nation-state model to an integrated global model, the old infrastructure is crumbling under the weight of the new system that the old forms can't support.

The Global Consciousness Shift that is needed involves more than simply millions of people on Spaceship Earth having a mind/consciousness Shift. Just as importantly, the result we need is to have people at the helm of the Ship who have themselves undergone the Shift.

My main inquiry, that which I think about all the time, is the following:

How will we steer Spaceship Earth to the point where the people at the helm -- those who are enacting legislation, determining environmental sustainability standards, collecting and spending tax dollars, dictating the content of our media, formulating international law, running countries, directing global financial markets, responding (or not) to global crises - are people who have undergone the Shift?

There is a conversation about organically finding our way to that point as more and more people wake up and experience the Shift individually. This is the "hundredth monkey" concept, the idea expressed in Malcolm Gladwell's books The Tipping Point and Blink. Marianne Williamson also spoke to this recently in her "One-Minute Shift" video, in which she said that the tipping point will be reached when 11% of the population experience the Shift.

I am energized by that conversation and agree with its basic thesis. I also feel called to the inquiry of how the people at the helm will either experience the shift themselves or be replaced by those who have. I believe this is a key component of the equation of Breakthrough to a New Earth.