Willis Harman on "The Paradigm Shift" (transcript)
SIA: You are about to hear an interview with Willis Harman, who was President of the Institute of Noetic Sciences from 1975-1996. This interview was recorded 20 years ago in 1988. While preparing the CD, we were struck by how remarkable relevant his thoughts and ideas are for today’s world. They serve as a potent reminder of the big picture shifts that are moving us powerfully towards a new era of history. We find Willis Harman’s optimism about the future quite contagious and we hope you also draw inspiration from this quarterly Shift in Action CD from one of IONS most beloved leaders.
Willis Harman: Greetings, I’m Willis Harman and I’m glad you decided to spend some time with me, looking at some very important changes going on, on our planet right now.
You know there was a time when the prevailing notion was that the stationary earth was the center of universe. This idea was fundamental to many people’s view of reality. It was very comforting to know that where you were standing was absolutely stable and central to the rest of existence. Then that Polish fellow Copernicus came along and the world hasn’t looked the same since.
I think that we’re in the midst of another major shift in perspective as profound, or more so, than the changes brought about by the Copernican revolution. I want to talk with you about what I think are some signs of it that are most exciting and hopeful. Let me put it succinctly, there is a world transformation occurring because vast numbers of people are changing, more specifically, their minds are changing and expanding.
We humans have devised many different systems of knowledge for explaining reality. We’ve had great religions, political and moral philosophies that have shaped our history. Right now on planet earth there is one system that has predominance. Most of us aren’t aware of the huge role it plays in our lives and that’s to be expected because this system has been pretty much unquestioned for over 300 years. This prevailing system of knowledge is called science. We have been in an age of science since the 17th century. No other existing system, not Islam or Christianity, not communism or capitalism, holds a comparable position of global authority. We give a tremendous amount of power and prestige to science. I’ll go into more detail of how this came to be and what the implications are, but if you can accept, at least for the moment, that science does hold this unique position. Then you would agree with me, it’s critical for such a pervasive knowledge system to be completely adequate to our needs. It is clearly impossible to create a well working society on a knowledge base which is seriously incomplete, or that has mistakes in its basic assumption. Yet, that is precisely what the modern world has been trying to do.
Let me put into one sentence the critical problem. Current science ignores a fundamental, universal factor, leaves it out almost entirely, that factor is human consciousness. By consciousness I mean our usual awareness of reality together with the unconscious. That’s the vast uncharted realm that harbors intuition, the intellect, instincts, our highest dreams and our spiritual yearnings, our sense of ultimate values and deepest meanings. There have been persistent reports of phenomenon and experiences that don’t fit the basic assumptions and research methods developed during the age of science. Experiences like creative breakthrough, spontaneous remission of disease, the paranormal. All of these reported experiences suggest that we have some source of energy, some hidden level of mental activity that we are generally not aware of, but that profoundly effects us never the less. Let’s call this hidden level our higher consciousness.
This is the central challenge of our times, people today in a variety of fields, psychology, biology, neuroscience, comparative religion and others are beginning to look in their own ways at how to integrate this factor of human consciousness into our basic operating system. We need to develop a system of knowledge that incorporates both the observable measurable parts of the world, with the subjective inner experience of human beings. We need a new age. We have a lot of clues and some very good techniques for helping us all reaching new level of human knowledge, this “new age” of consciousness. We might call it the new Copernican revolution. That’s what this audio program is all about.
I want to give you, early in this audio program, what I feel is a key insight for this territory we’re exploring and calling consciousness. I think that one of the people who can most clearly see it is a scientist and Nobel Laureate named Roger Sperry at Cal Tech. Sperry got the Nobel Prize for his work relating to the difference in functioning the left and right halves of the brain and nowadays it’s become a popular metaphor. You hear people talking about right brain and left brain activities, sometimes making claims about that far beyond what’s been discovered by the research. But Sperry put his thoughts into a lead article for the 1981 annual review of neural science. The article was titled “Changing Priorities.” In essence he said, science has a blind spot, a neglected area, the area of human subjective experience. And it’s a very important area because it relates to values, it relates to meanings, it relates to the things by which societies and individuals guide their lives. And so, it’s not just another area of science. It’s something very fundamental. Sperry spoke about the importance of exploring this area and he characterized it in the following way, he said, ‘We’re leaving behind, determinism, behaviorism, and the materialism of the science of the past.’ We recognize that that has been very useful for exploring a lot of areas. Science has been a powerful tool, but we’re having to recognize, and here I’ll use his phrase: “We’re having to recognize the primacy of inner conscious awareness as a causal reality.” It’s a very sophisticated phrase and it’s important to understand what he’s saying. I’ll come back to it several times in attempt to shed light on its implications. Let me quote the entire sentence from which that phrase was taken. Sperry said, “Instead of renouncing or ignoring consciousness, the new interpretation gives full recognition to the primacy to inner conscious awareness as a causal reality.” Now, that phrase is dynamite, that phrase is revolutionary. It’s really as big as Copernicus’ observation that the earth revolves around the sun. Put simply it means our minds effect reality. Inner decisions we make influence our actions and have an effect on our environment. You will sometimes now-a-days hear a stronger form of the statement, namely, ‘we are creating our own reality.’ That statement bears some serious discussion. Can you imagine the shift that would take place if we move from thinking that we are recipients or victims of what goes on out there, to: we can effect, can materially effect what goes on out there with our minds?
It’s no coincidence that so many people are searching for a larger context in which to operate. Humanity now faces a web of global dilemmas that call for an expanded intelligence. I want to show you in the course of this program not only how to develop your own powers of consciousness, but how collectively we can use the power of consciousness for the benefit of humanity. Today, the people who are studying consciousness and those who are participating in a tremendous variety of consciousness experiments, are looking for solutions to the problems that faces us all. I think this exploration of consciousness will turn up new solutions. I’ll even go farther out on a limb; I think the solution to our problem lies in the recognition that consciousness is a primary cause of reality.
Imagine being told the earth is not the center of the universe, when you thought it was. The German philosopher Goethe wrote this about the Copernican revolution, “Perhaps a greater demand has never been laid upon mankind.” This event, which took place around 1600, is an excellent example of paradigm shift. This is a term you’ll hear me use often in these tapes because I think we’re experiencing one right now. In fact, the current change is of much vaster scope and will take place in a much shorter interval than the change from an earth centered to a sun centered universe
Thomas Coon wrote a very important book, which came out in 1962 called The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. In that book he introduced the word paradigm to refer to the basic pattern of perceiving reality. He was concerned with how science views reality. A paradigm shift occurred when we moved from a Newtonian view of the universe to the one described by quantum physics in this century. The view that came to be associated with Newton was that the universe was much like a large machine, it had lots of movable parts and was governed by laws like momentum and gravity and could become quite predictable once we figured out all the laws. The proponents of quantum physics came along and said, that when things got very small at the atomic and subatomic level, all those laws broke down, they didn’t apply any more, nothing was certain. In fact, Heisenberg, one of the founders of quantum physics, called his insight the uncertainty principle. Now Coon only applied this term paradigm to scientific concepts, but the term has been applied now to society as a whole. Each society has a basic way of thinking and valuing and acting, that’s in keeping with a particular vision of reality. I’m suggesting that these shared assumptions are an integral part of the age of science.
Let me provide a framework for all the basic assumptions of the age of science, so that you might recognize them for yourself. In the early years of science there was a tacit agreement with the church that the upstart scientific enterprise would not stray too far into the territory of the soul and spirit, since those were the province of ecclesiastical authority. So for practical reasons, that were all quite valid at the time, the scientific enterprise, early on became characterized by three assumptions: the objectivist assumption, the positivistic one, and the reductionistic assumption. Once those ideas caught on they sounded about right to nearly everyone. As time went on the confidence in the reality of these assumptions grew so that nobody thought of them as assumptions anymore. They had become basic to Western thinking. After all, they had an astounding power to predict and control the physical world and they led to an amazing array of technological advances.
By the latter half of the 20th Century it was becoming apparent that however useful science might be for some purposes, it had a serious negative effect on our understanding of values. Its effect was to undermine the common religious base of values and to replace it with a kind of pseudo value system. There were economic and technical values such as material progress, efficiency and productivity. Decisions that would affect the lives of people around the globe and of generations to come were decided on the basis of short term, economic considerations. There emerged a technological imperative to develop and apply any technology that could turn a profit or destroy an enemy. This has endangered both the life support systems of the planet, the oceans, the forests and all the various species of living things, as well as human civilization itself. Spirituality and religions did not disappear, of course, the churches still played a role in people’s lives, privately many a scientist guided his or her life by deep spiritual beliefs, but modern man was attempting the impossible. That was to operate a society successfully on the basis of two conflicting and mutually contradictory pictures of reality.
You and I are in the middle of a huge shift of perspective. When you’re in the middle of something, like leaving a big football event or like a gigantic snow storm, it’s very difficult to get the whole picture. Things are happening so quickly and so chaotically that you’re lucky to catch a part of what’s going on. Well, the story of science is like that, ever since the scientific revolution hit it’s been taking off in so many different directions - to the stars, to the insides of atoms, and everywhere in between - that hardly anyone has the big picture.
What I’d like to do now is share with you a few of the exciting insights about consciousness emerging from what’s called the hard sciences like physics and biology. Later we’ll move into the soft science of psychology where we’ll encounter the unconscious. At least some hard scientists are beginning to understand that matter and mind are not separate. It’s important to note that [Fritjof] Capra and others did not arrive at this view by immersing themselves in mystical tradition. They came to this understanding by exploring the atom, the basic building blocks of matter, and discovering that the interconnectedness of all matter is what is real. That protons and electrons are and all the subatomic particles are participating in a web of relationships. Let’s say for now that that web of relationships is one aspect of consciousness, it’s one piece of the picture. I want to mention the work of another outstanding scientist, Ilya Prigogine. Prigogine is a Belgian physical chemist who won the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1977, for what he called the theory of dissipative structures. I’ll explain what that term means in a minute. But let me first tell you the implications of the theory.
We know from physics that all of physical reality is really made up of systems. Systems of molecules, four more complex systems of interacting components and so on, until we arrive at very complex systems like Human Beings. According to Prigogine, some systems are open, that is, they are involved in a continuous exchange of energy with their environment. These systems are in constant motion. Prigogine uses the example of a town. It takes in energy from the surrounding area, for instance the electricity and transforms it into heat and light for its citizens. Closed systems on the other hand, don’t have a constant exchange of energy with the environment; a rock and a cold cup of coffee are examples of closed systems. Prigogine’s term for open systems is dissipated structures. Our society is a dissipative structure and it’s being perturbed by a number of forces. This theory offers us a scientific model for how the age of consciousness might come about. Perhaps the fluctuations caused by a relatively small number of people, the people who are expanding their consciousness in ways we’ve been discussing, could provide the necessary perturbation for the society as a whole. Perhaps, I’d say, with discussions like this we’re hoping that individuals who listen will join in the expansion of consciousness that is going on all over the planet right now. And the more of us who gain this perspective, this planetary consciousness, the sooner we’ll be able to address the problems facing all of us. If you can see your role in how reality gets shaped and perpetuated, you might hopefully take more active responsibility for how you do it. When a growing network of people shares the discovery of consciousness, it will change history.
The Unconscious: This area of research in psychology has been exploding with information and suggestions of new human possibilities for almost a century now. Sigmund Freud is considered to be one of the great geniuses of the 20th century. His contributions to mapping the unconscious formed the basis for his process of psychotherapy, which he called psychoanalysis. It’s from Freud that we’ve inherited the concepts of id and super-ego. He also discovered how traumatic incidences in childhood, like sexual abuse could be repressed in the unconscious and yet dramatically effect the behavior of the person as an adult. Freud wrote volumes on the nature of anxiety, the structure of the mind and the theory of instincts. His emphasis on dreams and their symbolic significance opened up a whole new set of concepts for therapists.
William James was considered a towering figure in psychology. In fact, the large lecture hall for Psychology at Harvard University is named after him. He was actually a professor of philosophy at Harvard. But his many books include The Principles of Psychology volumes 1 & 2. He was also deeply interested in the notion of the unconscious and took a tack different from Freud. That revolution in our generation of human beings changing inner attitudes is still going on today. It’s very much a part of what we’re calling an expansion of consciousness; William James labeled it almost a century ago.
Now, Frederick W.H. Meyers is the least well know and possibly the most controversial of the three. His book, Human Personality and the Survival of Bodily Death, came out in 1903. It laid out a daring map of a vast terrain at that time little explored by science. It included such areas as the study of unconscious processes, sleep and dreams, hypnosis, creativity, psychic phenomenon and as the title implies evidences of the survival of the personality after physical death. William James had high regard for Meyers’ work, but psychologists were very concerned about gaining scientific legitimacy for their field, so they tended to ignore Meyers’ insights, since his work took him into areas where science could not make measurable observations. It often happens that the early investigators in a field will get a hold of different aspects of the same problem and argue over who has the right approach.
We’re indebted to people like Freud, James, Meyers and many others who have been willing to explore unknown territory. Remember, I defined consciousness as the conscious and unconscious parts of ourselves and there are many indications that the conscious self is but a sliver of the whole person. In fact, Carl Jung, who was a student and colleague of Sigmund Freud’s, began his autobiography with the line, “My life is a story of the self realization of the unconscious.” He felt that the purpose of life was for the personality to evolve out of the unconscious condition and to experience itself as a whole. The unconscious figures in much of what I mean when I say we are witnessing the emergence of the age of consciousness. In a way, you could say it’s emerging from our unconscious.
One of the great discoveries of physics was that the array of different colors we see are but a narrow portion of a vast electromagnetic spectrum of colors. A similar discovery has been emerging over the last century with regard to the human mind. Through the ages there have been instances of genius or inspiration in which superior capabilities of the mind became manifest. Through the scholarship of such men as Sigmund Freud, F.W.H. Meyers and Carl Jung, it became apparent that these recognized instances of creativity are in a sense, the visible spectrum of a far vaster range of manifestations of the creative unconscious. This spectrum ranges from mundane acts of habit to miraculous instances of prophecy. Between the mundane and the divine lies an immense spectrum of creativity. We have names for some of the more familiar creative hues: intuition, inspiration, imagination, insight, vision, talent, foresight. But just as outside the color spectrum there are broader regions of electromagnetic radiation, ultraviolets and infrareds, there are also extraordinary levels of insight and creative capability. In fact, we know something about how to access those levels. And as you will soon see, this broader spectrum is more accessible than you might currently believe.
There has existed, and probably still does, a negative attitude about what these extra ordinary mental events might be like. People used to ascribe them to witchcraft or hallucination or the result of starvation or drugs. Now, some creative people have had their peculiarities but let me say this most clearly, whoever examines personal accounts of great creative breakthroughs is sure to find a pattern of elements and, here is the part that is most important to us at this moment, this pattern of creative breakthrough is something that anyone can apply to his or her own goals and achievements.
In our exploration of consciousness in this program we are now moving toward direct application to ourselves. I’m going to suggest a number of ways in which you, the listener, can shift your consciousness from ordinarily awareness to the less accessible levels of the unconscious, where your own creative breakthroughs reside. Once you learn that you have a creative problem solving intuitive mind and that when you call upon it, it has its own ways of coming up with solutions, and that the more you deal with it, the more you trust you put into it, the better it seems to work, then you will finally develop quite a respect for your own powers of creativity.
Imagine being able to hear an entire Mozart symphony all at once in your head. The feat seems impossible. Yet hearing the entire piece at once is exactly how Mozart described the experience of his major creative breakthroughs. We hear these kinds of explanations echoed from the writings of great scientists, artists, inventors and authors. In their autobiographies, many artists and creative geniuses describe singular moments of breakthrough.
Now let’s take a look at that pattern of creativity I mentioned. I’m going to borrow this idea from a British writer, Graham Wallace, from his 1926 book The Art of Thought. Wallace proposed that the creative process consists of four components: Preparation, Incubation, Illumination and Verification. Again, preparing for the creative insight, allowing time for it to incubate, having it happen and then verifying its authenticity.
An aspect of the preparation phase is the strength of your intention. If you make a casual request, you’re unconscious may decide the whole thing’s not that important. The more important we make a question seem, the higher priority it gets in the unconscious. Intense emotional concentration leads to major creative breakthroughs. Deeply desiring and intending to solve a problem is part of the preparation.
Then let the problem incubate. The illumination often happens when you’re not sitting there waiting for it, it happens when you relax your mind. The verification phase is where we sift the wheat from the chaff, the gold from the mine tailings. The illumination has occurred and it is given, in Freud’s words, a reality check. Does the solution work? Does the melody please? Does the insight hold up in the practical light of day? Sometimes the insight is so strong, the creative impulse is so overwhelming that its rightness is not doubted. Verification is almost after the fact but for lesser insights, the kinds we need on a day to day basis, verification is the way we can tell if we are really using our unconscious creative, intuitive mind.
I hope that what you’re getting from all of this discussion is that gaining access to your inner creativity is a learnable thing. It’s not something that just happens to people. You can cultivate your own creativity. It may require quite a shift in mindset for you. So often people think creativity belongs to the known artists and inventors, they think it’s a special talent. Creativity belongs to everyone, it’s natural, it’s our birthright, we are each unique, each of us can be creative, if by creativity we mean getting in touch with the creative center and through that making a unique contribution. Creativity doesn’t have to be spectacular. We’re all presented with opportunities to come up with unique ideas everyday, a new game for the children, a new sales approach, a new sauce for the chicken. And the important point in the previous discussion is that there is a process we can follow that can be of great benefit.
I’m not promising you’ll get a dazzling creative breakthrough every time you try, nobody does. But the process is tried and true. As a reminder of this process, keep in mind the two words: genius and genie. They’re related. The older word, genie is a magic spirit, now considered to be mythical. A genie is able to grant miraculous favors to mortals on special occasions. In a sense, that myth has lived in our language for generations, people have believed that certain, talented individual - that is, geniuses - must possess the aid of a genie.
I want to mention a wonderful metaphor for cultivating creativity that I came across in an essay by John C. Gowon in the Journal of Creative behavior it was titled “Some Thoughts on the Development of Creativity.” In it he makes what amounts to a call for a paradigm shift. Gowon’s notion is that we have been harvesting creativity wild, like the nomadic tribes search for food. Why not cultivate creativity? Why not find the conditions under which it flourishes and then we can have an ample supply? Suppose that the tools of western science and the wisdom of the east could be applied to this goal of a worldwide creativity harvest. When we all learn the trick of opening our conscious mind to the vast terrain of the unconscious, the masterpiece of our endeavors may not be a painting or a theorem, but a new way of life.
We’ve been discussing all along the fact that there is a shift in consciousness going on in the society around us. We’re calling it the dawning of the age of consciousness. We can already see signs of it in health care, in sports, in personal growth activities, and really, if you look closely enough in most of our institutions. What we’re seeing is the recognition that the human mind plays a major role in shaping reality. If that is so, and I think you’ll come to recognize that it is, then tools that access the vast potentials of the mind are very valuable. These tools of affirmation and imagery have been known the world over for many centuries sometimes they get buried for awhile, but they always seem to get rediscovered. Today we have increasing scientific validation for these techniques plus a growing interest in the general public.
Remember earlier that we talked about how important the preparation phase of the creative process was. When you use affirmation and imagery as part of the preparation, you’ll increase the clarity and the strength of your request to the unconscious. Let’s take a closer look at affirmation. The concept is very simple, an affirmation is a positive statement about something you want to create for yourself and you repeat this statement over and over to yourself as a kind of reprogramming. Many of us have heard the affirmation from Emile Coue, “Every day in every way I’m getting better and better.” Let’s use this affirmation as an example and look at its components. First, it contains the word “I.” Second, it’s a positive statement, there are no negative words or images and third, it is couched in the present. It’s very important in this type of personal affirmation to use the word “I.” Using the word “I,” or a variation like “my,” puts you in the picture. What would happen if you repeated the statement, “The situation at the office is improving?” Perhaps a little might change but not much. The statement is vague and there is no ‘doer.’
When you say a statement like one of those that affirms what you want, you are putting yourself in the picture, you are doing it, you are responsible, you have the power. Now the second aspect is a positive tone. In constructing affirmations for yourself watch for negatives like “not,” “can’t,” “never.” Instead, find a way to say what you want as a positive outcome. The third aspect of creating an affirmation is putting it in the present. This is sometimes the hardest part for people to do. It feels like a lie. It feels silly to say something that’s obviously not true. Yet, we know that it’s essential to create what you want in the present. Remember Coue, “Every day in every way I am getting better and better.” Now that is probably easier to say because it has an on-going sense of improvement to it. But what about my skin is clear and healthy when you’re covered with a rash? What we’re suggesting is that it is important to create the image of what you want and you want to have it now. It has much more power when you say it in the present. Even if it takes you nine minutes to run the mile, saying the affirmation, “I am running the mile in five minutes” will help program your body-mind to get to that speed.
One of the people who has studied the power of affirmation is Dr. Maxwell Maltz, who wrote a book in 1960 titled Psycho-Cybernetics. Maltz was a plastic surgeon who noticed that many of his patients got a new lease on life after a successful plastic surgery. He saw people who were burdened with unattractive features or accident scars. These people carried around with them not only the physical problem, but a psychological problem as well. A boy with two big ears had been ridiculed all his life. He avoided social contacts, he was afraid to express himself and so he was considered a moron. When his ears were corrected the cause of his embarrassment was gone and he went on to a successful, normal life. Even more interesting to Maltz were the people whose lives didn’t change after plastic surgery. Maltz says every plastic surgeon is baffled by the people who insist, even after drastic surgery has made a major improvement, that nothing had changed. People actual said, “I look the same; you didn’t do a thing.” Showing these people before and after pictures didn’t do any good, and these people insisted on holding onto their old personalities. Maltz came to an insightful conclusion. As a plastic surgeon Maltz knew it was possible to change the physical features of people. And because of his careful observation, he concluded that the psychological self image could be changed as well. Put yourself in a picture of success, whatever picture you desire, make it a positive picture, capture the feeling of having accomplished your goal, that is, make it in present time. Now you’re ready to use your affirmation. Simply repeat your affirmation, imagining the full meaning of the statement, a number of times a day, day after day. Know that this powerful tool is working with the other personal growth techniques you might be using, like mediation for instance, to bring the external world you experience, closer to the inner world you are consciously creating. Along with affirmation comes imagery. When you affirm a result you can often see it in your minds eye as well. The power of mental imagery has been well established. In fact it seems to be true in some sense that the unconscious does not distinguish between an actual event and one that was strongly visualized. Many athletes find that they can dramatically improve sports performance by visualizing the accomplishment they want to achieve.
Imagery has been used in medicine since ancient times. Shamans and folk healers consider the use of image as essential in awakening the self healing powers of their patients. In the work of Dr. Karen Olness of Case Western Reserve University, children who have leukemia are taught to use imagery as a powerful tool in their recovery program. Interestingly, they seem to be more successful when they come up with their own creative way to image the immune system battling with cancer cells, than when they are directed to use what works best by some external authority. The technique of imagery is turning up in a lot of other places these days as well. Olympian Marilyn King, is teaching it to children in physical education classes, business executives are being taught imagery techniques to improve their professional skills. What all of this amounts to is reprogramming old unconscious beliefs about limitations and potentials. We can also program in new beliefs in the form of affirmations. We need to vividly verbalize them and visualize them. If this is done persistently over a period of time, the new system will replace the old and become an instinctual part of our lives.
When we sleep, we’re in the realms of the unconscious, it can speak to us directly without interference from the analytical or rational parts of our mind. It’s no wonder that so many inspirations and illuminations come to us through our dreams. The process of interpreting the content of dreams is a major part of both Freudian and Jungian therapies, they both agree that the symbols and events in dreams are very personal. There is no way to write a dictionary of dream meanings because every symbol has a unique meaning for the person who dreams it. It is possible though, to give you a set of guidelines so that you can begin to use your dreams as a way to access your unconsciousness. Dream work is a little harder to get started on than meditation. In fact, meditation will help make it easier. Sometimes dream work can take weeks, and even months before you feel you’re making progress. But sometimes it works the first night, your dream messengers are anxious to get your attention.
In 1980 Stephen LaBerge began research on lucid dreaming at the Sleep Research Center at the Stanford University School of Medicine. LaBerge taught people to have lucid dreams at will and to communicate with outside observers from within their dreams. These dreamers were then used to carry out rigorously controlled experiments that explored the nature of the dream state. These were experiments that were never before deemed possible. LaBerge’s work suggests that what the sages say might be true, there might exist a state of consciousness, that is to normal waking consciousness what lucid dreaming is to dreaming. A state in which one consciously wields the power to act with intention in the creation of ones own reality. Being able to direct your dreams demonstrates to all parts of the unconsciousness that there is a richer, fuller dimension of consciousness.
The central theme of this program has been that we are entering a new age, what I’m calling the “Age of Consciousness.” We’re coming out of an era in which there has been a very strongly shared consensus about what reality is all about. Basic to this shared consensus, is the notion that there is a material universe, it has laws governing its operation and that it comprises the outer world. This outer world is the place we operate in every day. Now, we all know that we also inhabit an inner world. A world that sometimes feels like it exists inside our heads. And it is generally thought that these two worlds, the inner and the outer, are very separate, never the twain shall meet, to borrow a phrase. The hallmark of this new age is the recognition that the twain are meeting. They’re meeting because they never were separate. The vast world of stars and galaxies and the vast interior of our minds are all involved in the same reality. We’re calling this reality, consciousness.
I think one way of describing what’s happening is that people are really waking up. They’re waking up not just to an awareness of the problems that we have around the world, but also to our potential for handling any problem if we just get our heads straight. In other words, we’re getting an appreciation that problems are in the mindset. They certainly manifest in the world out there, but the basic change that has to take place is in our consciousness. That has been the central message of this program. We’re recognizing that the external world we perceive with our senses and the inner world we experience in our psyche are one and the same reality. The age of consciousness is the bringing of those two seemingly separate realities into one.
Now what does this all mean to the world of our every day living? That’s what this segment of the program will continue to explore. We’ve already spent some time looking into the ways that we can cultivate that inner world and bring its fruits into our personal lives; the spectrum of creativity we each possess is without boundaries. There are no limits to our creativity, only ones we impose upon ourselves by believing in them. We’ve explored techniques like affirmation and imagery and lucid dreaming and I think you’re probably seeing how practicing those activities can enrich your life. How does this all spill over into the collective consciousness?
In one of the earliest of the modern era’s books on transformation, social critic Lewis Mumford observed that there have only been four or five periods of change in the whole history of western civilization, where the term ‘transformation’ is really justified. Another scholar who identified a pattern in the changing course of civilizations was British historian, Arnold Toynbee, who introduced the once startling idea that like human beings, all societies and indeed, all civilizations tend to go through stages of growth, maturity and decline. He wrote specifically about the apparent present decline of western civilization. This was not meant to be only a doom and gloom prediction; to the contrary, Toynbee foresaw the possibility of the transfiguration of industrial society to one which would display more of a balance between utilitarian and spiritual values.
More than half a century ago, Pitirim Sorokin, who was founder of the Department of Sociology at Harvard University and one of the most impressive scholars of basic social change, Sorokin forecast that industrial society would decline. He predicted that the emphasis on materialistic, rational positivistic goals would shift and like Toynbee, Sorokin felt that there would be a transformation toward, what he called an integral culture characterized by a balance between the material and spiritual, the rational and the intuitive. Sorokin didn’t put any precise time line on his forecast but his descriptions fit well with the cultural changes we have seen over the past two decades. When he first wrote about this transformation in the 1940s, he clearly felt it was not far off. As we said, Lewis Mumford demonstrated that every major transformation of society is accompanied by a changing metaphysical base of assumptions, a shifting picture of reality. This is essentially the same as what we referred to earlier as a paradigm shift.
Now let’s move on to get an even better idea of how this shift, this transformation, is manifesting in the world. My guess is that since you decided to invest your time and money in this program, you are part of the manifestation. By that, I mean, one of the hallmarks of the new age is what has been called the self realization ethic. This ethic affirms that the proper end of all individual experience is further growth and individual awareness and the evolutionary development of the human species. So, again, one of the signs of the new age is people exploring all of the myriad ways that they can expand their knowledge and bring more of the gold mine of the unconscious into conscious awareness. I hope this program has value to you in both those respects. And I suspect that you are also investigating mental disciplines and spiritual paths. You’re not alone. This is going on world wide.
And this leads us to a second ethic, a second manifestation of the new age. It could be called the ecological ethic. It assumes that we identify with the whole of nature. We perceive all of humanity as one vast community, part of the larger community that includes the planet and all of its life forms. The manifestation of this is the identification of individual self interest with the interests of all of our fellow human beings and with the creatures of the earth and all future generations. Then we come to recognize that there are limitations on all physical resources, including top soil, fresh water, the waste absorbing capacity of the natural environment, spirit renewing wilderness, this all calls for us to become active partners with nature, to protect the complex life support systems of the planet. We begin to make clearer and clearer, which kinds of growth are wholesome and which are cancerous. I suspect that many of you are involved in recycling natural resources, in water and clean air conservation; perhaps you belong to one of the environmental groups. These kinds of values are becoming increasingly common, again, not only in the United States, but in almost all parts of the world.
A crucial choice point, perhaps the most crucial in terms of our history, certainly the most crucial in terms of our future, we have at least two things going for us in the positive direction; we have a growing self awareness and a growing scientific comprehension of the world. We have progressed from the elementary awareness of the amoeba, through the vastly increased awareness of the vertebrates, to the uniquely self aware consciousness of the human. This evolutionary path has been characterized by a trend toward higher and higher levels of increasing awareness. The same is true for social evolution, from the near submergence in the collective unconscious of the earliest human societies, through varying degrees of awareness of the self and of the total environment, to the most highly informed and self aware society of individuals in history. The esoteric core of every religion, the purpose of each of the varieties of psychotherapy, the quest of science in its very best sense, have always been based on becoming aware of our higher potential; our higher potential for love, for knowledge, for happiness. We can count on that evolutionary thrust to continue. The second thing we can count on is that we’re coming to recognize the limitations of the classic form of the classic form of the scientific revolution; the objectionist, positivist, reductionist version. We’re moving toward a science that allows for the full range of human experiences to be examined, a science that explores and respects the physical world as well as the psychological and spiritual aspects of life. Let me remind you one more time of Nobel Laureate Roger Sperry’s insights. That science should, in his words, give full recognition to the primacy of inner conscious awareness as a causal reality. I think we’re going to find that insight to be a major one of the 20th century.
I want to take all of the wonderful ideas, all of the positive techniques we’ve discussed and focus our attention now on applying them to something I know we can all agree on: global peace. Essentially what I’d like you to think about is the possibility that it’s really true what Jonathan Shell said in his book The Fate of the Earth. He said, “There is no solution to the nuclear dilemma - no solution other than to reinvent the world.” That was the phrase he used - “to reinvent the world,” a peaceful world. People use this word peace is a kind of bucket-shaped word. It carries a lot of meanings and connotations and you fill it more full of meaning as life provides a range of experiences. Peace is not very precisely defined. I think there are two main meanings in which people using it these days and I want to distinguish those. One is real peace; real peace in the sense of allowing the unconscious programming to change, to develop in such a way that we have and experience inner peace. We experience real peace in our relationships with one another, let’s extend that to real peace with the planet and our relationship to the life processes on the planet. That’s a sense in which peace is an evolutionary goal. We’ll get there, we have to get there. But I want right now to talk about a different, more near term peace, in a sense a more practical goal. I’ll call it practical peace. I want to suggest why that kind of peace is much more feasible than we have thought is was and what we need to do about it.
Peace is, I think, perhaps more possible today than at any time in history. For several reasons, one is that we do have more than ever before a growing sense, a wide spread sense, of the intolerability of going on the way we have been. The total intolerability of the nuclear impasse is becoming worse and worse, year after year. And when we have Star Wars we may think temporarily that we’re going to be more secure but the more deeply we pursue that, the more we’re simply seeing there’s going to be more technology in the sky, more missiles and more insecurity. We sense that and we know that something has to change.
But besides that we have an assortment of new tools, new ways of looking at things that can be of assistance in this. For one thing, we have grown out of, by and large, the religious and racial issues that were the cause of many of the wars in the past. A lot of the wars in the past were religious wars. Much more than ever before, people recognize that reality is too rich to be incorporated in any conceptual framework, any sort of ideology. We really don’t believe our ideologies anymore. We believe our experience more. And that’s something that’s been happening during the last quarter of a century, so we’ve made a lot of progress with regard to racial issues and religious issues. They’re not gone yet, there’s still conflict around them, but if you look at the long sweep of history, we’ve made a lot of progress. Secondly, there has been a slow delegitmating of war. Wars of naked aggression are really not legitimate the way they were even a couple of generations ago. Everyone has to label their preparation of war ‘defense.’ That was not true before WWII. We in the United States relabeled our department of war, the Department of Defense, because there was a felt illegitimacy to having a Department of War. So there’s progress along these lines, you can’t just go out and stamp out somebody else the way you could quite legitimately, say, a century ago. Then, there’s a great deal of growth with regard to realizing that we have common values, we really are one world in a sense that we weren’t even, again, just a couple of generations ago, just a half century or so ago. It wasn’t so in the same way one little indication of that is the United Nations’ universal declaration of human rights. Now, it’s pretty hard to imagine before 1948, getting this kind of agreement around the world with diverse cultures, diverse religious traditions, and yet everyone agreeing on a set of values that goes far beyond the basic Bill of Rights in our own constitution. But now we have a large percentage of the human family around the globe agreeing on the right of people to have security, the right of people to have their own identity, to have community, the right to live in environments that allow them to be human beings in every sense. It’s a magnificent document. I don’t know that it’s taught very much in our schools, but it should be. In a much more fundamental sense, there is a universal set of values being recognized by a larger and larger group. They may come from traditions of Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, Christianity, Judaism, from Native American traditions. They each honor the sacredness of the individual, and the sacredness of our relationship to the planet. That’s what’s emerging and that’s why there’s reason for hope.
To anyone who grasps the potentiality of global peace, one question comes to mind: What can I do?
I believe there are four kinds of things an individual can do, and they all must be done to make a balanced contribution. They are: say no, say yes, do your inner work, do your outer work. This means, say no to the prospect that our children and our children’s children must grow up in fear that the world will destroy itself before they have a chance to live their lives. Say no to the continued legitimacy and glorification of war as an instrument of national policy, for any nation. The really fundamental changes in history, of society, such as the fall of the Roman Empire or the decline of the Middle Ages, have come about, not through the arbitrary decisions of a few leaders, but because vast numbers of people changed their minds, a little bit.
People give legitimacy to all social institutions and on occasion have asserted their power to withdraw legitimacy. In the past, legitimacy has been withdrawn from slavery, from cruel and tortuous punishment, female infanticide, to name a few. Capital punishment is an example of an institution whose legitimacy is waning around the globe. The legitimacy can be removed from war when people’s consciousness changes and their will to act, particularly women’s, is awakened. Feminine consciousness tends to be life revering and nurturing. War has practically always been a man’s game. Since WWII, war is no longer a contest between trained armies, it is the decimation of civilian populations. Its legitimacy must be removed, there is no other way.
Recognize and affirm the proposition that war can be outlawed only though a total change of beliefs that separate nation from nation, persons from nature and each of us from our own deeper selves. Affirm that this total change in the global mindset can be accomplished. The change will spread mainly from person to person and every individual’s effort counts. Now, we’re not talking about a simplistic power of positive thinking. To hold and affirm the positive image of a world that works for everyone in which there is harmony between people and the earth, that is not simplistic. Because interconnectedness of all minds, affirming a positive vision, may be about the most sophisticated action anyone can take.
Your inner work consists of at least three aspects. One: discover the potentiality of the deep intuition as a guide and resource, this means exploring your own spectrum of creativity. Using relaxation exercises, meditation, maybe even your dreams as resources. The second aspect of inner work is changing your beliefs about the limitations of your capacities. The limits you believe you have are the limits you have. You’ll be amazed at what you can do when you allow yourself to explore the notion of there being no limits to your potential. And the third aspect of inner work is changing your beliefs that collectively held shape the national and global institutions that perpetuate conditions of non-peace in the world.
You probably have little difficulty understanding how your individual beliefs have created problems for you, it’s a bit more difficult to understand how collectively held beliefs create global problems. The fundamental breeding ground of non-peace is the unconscious beliefs that create barriers, separations and tensions. Remember that there can be strong resistance to challenging collectively held beliefs. The church fathers refused to look through Galileo’s telescope because the moons he claimed were traveling around Jupiter, couldn’t possibly be there. We are in a similar position when we seek to unveil collective beliefs that don’t serve us. So the inner work may be unsettling at first; both the work involving self image and the work involving life inhibiting collective beliefs. Yet, as you progress, you’ll find it getting easier and more joyous. As the negative separating beliefs are brought to light, there is a strengthening of the positive vision of a world that could be and an increasing sure footedness with which one undertakes action to bring it about.
It is important to be involved with some work in the world. It will keep the inner work from becoming too introspective and the outer work will be increasingly effective as it is informed by the progress of the inner work. Each one of us has his, or her, own unique outer role to be discovered and played. It may be a significant public role or it may be a small quiet one. It may be the role of social activism or of patient healing, of lecturing to crowds or of taking care of children at home. Whatever it is, do it as well as possible; it’s important. We started off this segment with the question of how we can focus the insights of this program on global peace. I’m afraid the answer I’ve given you is no different than the insight I’ve been trying to communicate all along. The change in the outer world will come as a result of work done in the inner world of our psyches. And since there is no separation, your inner world will benefit as a result of the conscious action choices you make every day.
I see a world, a world that is a global commonwealth, a world in which every planetary citizen has a reasonable chance to create a decent life for self and family, a world in which men and women live in harmony with one another and with the earth and its creatures, a world where people cooperate to create and maintain a healthy environment. A world in which there’s a great diversity of cultures, and the different cultures honor and take joy in one another because of that diversity. I see a world in which there’s a deep and shared sense of meaning in life itself. This world exists because it exists in our minds. Welcome to the age of consciousness.
