The following article is based on responses to a series of questions posed by the Foundation For the Future.
Elisabet Sahtouris, Ph.D.
What are the factors that are most critical to the long term survival of humanity?
Let me preface the listing of factors with my conviction that the long term survival of humanity is so much in question at this critical time that everything depends on what we do in the next few years, the next decade, and in the rest of the first century of the millennium. Our current projections of information speedup, population increase, species extinction, etc. reach crazy impossible figures in very near years, showing the utter impossibility of continuing on present trajectories. As Jonas Salk said:
I now see that the major shift in human evolution is from behaving like an animal struggling to survive to behaving like an animal choosing to evolve. In fact, in order to survive, man HAS to evolve. And to evolve, we need a new kind of thinking and a new kind of behavior, a new ethic and a new morality. It will be that of the evolution of everyone rather than the survival of the fittest. . . . If we can be courageous one more time than we are fearful, trusting one more time than we are anxious, cooperative one more time than we are competitive, forgiving one more time than we are vindictive, loving one more time than we are hateful, we will have moved closer to the next breakthrough in our evolution.
With that in mind, I will discuss, from the perspective of an evolution biologist, critical factors in survival that we need to implement immediately if we are to have a long term future. I hope my biologically oriented view will mesh harmoniously with those of others looking at the situation from different vantage points.
Understanding Cosmic Creativity:
We must collectively recognize what western science is only now discovering: that humanity and the rest of our living world are embedded within a far greater and fundamentally different reality than is encompassed by our current scientific worldview or paradigm. We are replacing the view of a non-living material/ electromagnetic universe with a greater non-physical reality of conscious intelligence as the never-ending source of scientifically known energy and matter—a cosmic source that has been known in many human cultures from ancient times. It is fundamentally conscious and creative, transforming or transmuting into material universes and other creative ventures. As Nobel laureate biologist George Wald of Harvard put it, “The stuff of the universe is mind stuff.” Once this greater, consciously intelligent reality is acknowledged as existing both within and around us, we will recognize that we collectively co-create our experienced daily reality from our individual consciousness fields, from our collective beliefs about reality, including the belief that what we see or measure with instruments is all there is.
Understanding Living Systems:
Biologically, we must recognize humanity as a living system embedded within larger natural living systems and reorganize our human systems—economics, politics, etc.—accordingly; that is, with adherence to identifiable principles of healthy living systems. Because no living system can remain healthy if any part of it is ill, this implies a) the redesign of technology and technological processes to eliminate pollution, waste and environmental destruction, and b) the empowerment of all humans to meet their own needs, participate in collective governing and otherwise contribute creatively to the whole human family. Because no living system can remain healthy if any part of it is at war with any other part, it also implies the need for eliminating warfare and oppressive inequities.
Making the Shift to Caring and Sharing:
Recognizing that humanity has operated on needlessly fear-based principles of scarcity that have produced unsustainable patterns of greed and want, we will be able to shift our beliefs to love-based principles of caring and sharing, which will raise even our physical bodies to higher energy frequency levels. We can then produce peacefully sustainable populations living in sustainable abundance, with material and spiritual fulfillment for all. Critical to this change, we must ensure that all the world’s people, regardless of current status or condition, have access to the knowledge/understanding that this shift can be made and are empowered with the basic material resources to take part in this transformation in their unique creative ways.
What are the current map and trajectory of these factors?
Understanding Cosmic Creativity:
The recognition of cosmic consciousness as the source of creation, with human belief systems as the source of our daily reality, is coming into popular culture faster than science can corroborate it, especially in Europe and the Americas. Science—the dominant human institution “officially” empowered to define reality and describe how it works—is still trailing, but rapidly revising its cosmology/worldview from one based in Newtonian mechanics to one reflecting a self-organizing living systems reality. The concept of creating physical reality from consciousness actually came into western science with quantum physics more than half a century ago, but has been very slow to percolate into science outside of physics. Recently, an energy pervasive in the universe and fundamental to all creation has been acknowledged, but referred to as a “kooky,” “weird,” or “bizarre” form of energy not yet understood (Scientific American, January 1999). NASA physicist Bernard Haisch has shown that material reality is an illusory perception of the zero-point energy field, bringing classical western physics full circle to eastern cosmology. Meanwhile, in biology, the intelligent molecular reorganization of DNA, the language of life, was also demonstrated half a century ago, but is only now given official recognition after much corroborative research. It will take some time to complete this paradigm shift from nature as accidental mechanics to nature as conscious, intelligent co-creation, but it is well under way. Once intelligent consciousness is accepted as the creative force of nature, the whole idea of creating our own reality, which arose in so-called New Age literature as a reflection of ancient cultural knowledge, will enter the worldview of science. One welcome effect of this will be to eliminate the artificial barriers we raised historically between spirituality and science.
Understanding Living Systems:
Because Nature itself is not widely seen as alive and sacred, it seems easier for people to perceive humanity as spirit in human form than to perceive this human form as a biological species—as an embedded self-organizing system now pressed to evolve into a mature species, one that cooperates within and across species, as all do in mature ecosystems. Our failure to understand our creative role within Nature, and Nature’s creative role in Cosmic Consciousness, has resulted in our needlessly causing the ongoing sixth great biological extinction in the history of our planet, as documented in a poll of biologists conducted by the American Museum of Natural History in 1998. Human wellbeing depends on cooperation with other species, on healthy ecosystems. It is important to see the current globalization process as an inevitable and evolutionarily healthy process for reorganizing our species. It is working by cooperative (living systems) principles in some ways: communications, travel and transport, technology and knowledge exchange, human rights concerns, mutual assistance, etc. Its economics are still struggling with dangerous imbalance—the sacrifice of local economies to the global economy, for example, is a biological error akin to sacrificing cells to organs, or organs to the body. Thus it is imperative for humanity’s survival that we see all humans as a single system, a huge family amidst an even larger family of other species that sustain us if we keep them healthy. People everywhere must be helped to produce sustainable livelihoods and to develop their positive potential in all ways.
Making the Shift to Caring and Sharing:
Recognizing our responsibility and opportunity for creating our reality is the only way I see for making the shift from fear to love—from a world of scarcity and greed to one of abundance in which all people are empowered to fulfill their needs in sustainable ways. To achieve this, we must break through long cultural conditioning on our lack of power, our willingness to accept, and thus co-create, economic and political inequities that disempower people, currency systems that promote these inequities and anything else preventing the full expression of human potential in sustainable ways. Rather than attack what does not work, we must shift our focus to what does—to all the healthy practices based on caring and sharing now springing into business, education, religion, community organizations, media, etc. The vast majority of people, who feel helpless to alter this situation, must be helped by those who have seen the way forward. The liberation of human creativity will be enormous and exciting.
What are the problems and opportunities with the factors identified?
Understanding Cosmic Creativity:
Although more and more people are waking to the understanding of beliefs (consciousness) as the source of our reality, the problem is how to spread that understanding to all people quickly. Scientific validation of consciousness as the greater reality of a “mind stuff” universe, in Wald’s terms would speed the process enormously. The opportunity is thus for a collective shift to seeing that our material, economic, political, ethnic, spiritual, cultural, social and personal realities are not inevitable, but freely created by our collective consciousness in an abundant and loving universe. People achieve success because they take charge of their own beliefs to create their success; we can do it as a species.
Understanding Living Systems:
The problem is speeding the scientific and cultural paradigm shift to match the need for making serious changes in the design of human systems. As Dee Hock, the founder of VISA, has said, we continue to maintain educational institutions that do not educate, justice systems that do not dispense justice, health systems that do not give us health, etc. The opportunity is for redesign according to principles of living systems, such as diversity, cooperation, mutual enhancement, self-government in the interest of all parts and the whole. Certainly we can see signs that the recognition of human organizations as living systems is running ahead of science in many business establishments, which are working to reorganize themselves accordingly.
Making the Shift to Caring and Sharing:
The problem is too much focus on scarcity and greed, too much belief that what we have is all we get. Focusing on obsolete systems, on realities that do not meet our fulfillment needs, only empowers them further. Most mass media remain devoted to fear-based, negative or distracting and soulless entertainment, with notable exceptions such as Oprah Winfrey (viewed internationally), with her very substantial positive impact on conscious self-empowerment and on caring and sharing. The opportunity is for personal and collective visioning, with belief shifts to caring and sharing at all levels of human society. This is a spiritual revolution that will quickly lead to a human evolutionary leap.
What do you envision as the greatest potential/future in your field in the 1000 year future?
To have a 1000 year future we will have to make a collective decision to continue creating a linear-time universe after we see how illusory it is. Let’s say we do because we love this material world and enjoy playing out new creative possibilities within it. I have envisioned the very near future of science (particularly evolution biology) as a shift to understanding that the universe is fundamentally alive, conscious and self-creative; that humans, like other species, are self-creating fields of consciousness, electromagnetic energy and matter. The brain will be understood as a self-created instrument for interfacing between cosmic consciousness and material reality. I doubt that science as we now know it will continue to be a self-contained branch of human endeavor a thousand years from now, since everyone will have direct mental access to knowledge as desired and most research of the present kind will thus be obsolete. Technology will also be inconceivably different. Health care, for example, will likely be preventive or conducted through self-healing; energy sources will be non-exhaustible and clean (as in zero-point energy); housing may be made of easily changeable, movable force fields that do not harm other life, communications will make it possible for all humans to participate freely in local and global self-government and the collective redesign of all human organizations and activities as needed or desired. Science fiction is wide open to imagination—so is our scientific future.
What are two or three topics/questions critical to the long term future ?
1) Conscious creation of reality from a scientific perspective,
2) Reintegrating science and spirituality, and
3) Spiritual self-development and world change.
Please articulate your vision of the 1000 year future in a 3-5 line statement.
Humanity understands itself as spirit having human experience and is having a wonderful time on this beautifully restored and abundant planet, as well as on others we share. We know ourselves as conscious creators of our realities and have long since solved ancient social and environmental problems stemming from ignorance of cosmic process. Our focus is on helping each other, as well as beings of other worlds in continuing spiritual evolution.
Visit Elisabet Sahtouris’ Website
Also see Timothy Wilken’s vision of A Synergic Future