2012: A Positive Message?

We haven’t done anything close to a “scientific” poll (not that I think polls these days are really scientific) but it’s pretty surprising how many people associate 2012 with doomsday scenarios. I’m starting to feel like a skipping CD telling folks that our message along with many other explicators of the Shift is largely a positive one of personal empowerment and co-creation in this unique time in history.

That said, shepherding our own internal resources and state of mind in a positive and mindful direction is one thing. Trying to assess the overall direction of where things are headed as one surreal news item after another jumps across our computer and/or TV screens is another and is a huge challenge to deconstruct, at least from my perspective as a former research analyst. Perhaps that’s why there are so few books available these days attempting to sum up our wandering and attention deficit laden zeitgeist from either a sociological or anthropological perspective. It’s a work in progress -- a moving target -- so who can capture it?

In this context, there seems to be a ying/yang effect going on where things – i.e. all the tangibles and intangibles that make up quality of life -- are simultaneously getting better and worse reminiscent of the classic phrase “the best of times and the worst of times”. Brought down to the personal level, the glass is either half empty or half full of course depending on how someone chooses to add things up: a net positive or net negative.

This theme surfaced at one of the Emergence Project’s recent events in Cambridge during a discussion after the showing of the film 2012 Science or Superstition? In that discussion we looked at some of the positive things that are happening globally right now that resonate with Annette’s wonderful phrase “radical creativity”. But for present purposes I came across a great example recently that I wanted to share with you: nothing less than the reinventing of the state of California.

The New Yorker’s Hendrik Hertzberg wrote about this recently (link below). In the article he says that that state’s political process has become so hopelessly gridlocked that there is a movement afoot to scrap the whole state constitution and, in essence, start over. So California may be at that unique tipping point at which things get so bad that radical creativity is indeed brought to bear and totally new paradigms start to be considered.

Here’s Hertzberg: “California, it turns out, is ungovernable. Its public schools, once the nation’s best, are now among the worst. Its transportation and water systems are deteriorating. Its prisons are so overcrowded that it has to turn tens of thousands of felons loose. And its legislature has spent most of the year in a farcical effort to pass the annual budget, leaving little or no time for other matters, such as—well, schools, transportation, water, and prisons.” Not so good right? But he goes on to say that “Something remarkable is beginning to happen”.

Apparently this all began with an op-ed piece by Jim Wunderman in the San Francisco Chronicle asking (because of the aforementioned mess) “…are we not obligated to nullify our government and institute a new one?” Wunderman called for a “citizens’ constitutional convention” to do just that. This movement is now called Repair California. Herztberg concludes by saying “If California has the courage and imagination to become a true laboratory of democracy, the experiment will be something to see.” Indeed. And this is a great example of what a unique time we’re all living in and what positive developments can arise, Phoenix-like, out of the ashes.

Here's the link to this article:
http://www.newyorker.com/talk/comment/2009/08/24/090824taco_talk_hertzberg

The Web and the Evolution of Mind

I’ll be starting another blog that discusses themes from my book Digital Mythologies. Some of these explore the role of the Web in the evolution of mind. Here’s a passage from the book that I wanted to share here:

In the best case scenario, the Internet could foster a deeper understanding of cross-cultural values which has so far been an elusive goal. With this might come a more nuanced understanding of the more arbitrary qualities of the human condition. In addition, it might reinforce the notion that we create our own individual realities (while society mass produces them) and the notion that separate realities of equal value ands validity can and do coexist. The Net may have at least the potential to become vehicle for reconciling the postmodern Pandora’s box of jarringly subjective truths in so far as they can be reconciled. Or, alternatively, perhaps such an option is a pleasant chimera that lead us towards an impossible to manage cultural entropy.

Demystifying The Shift

The Emergence Project has a number of events planned over the next few months. One of our hopes is to try to demystify 2012 and the Shift and correct some of the many misinterpretations that seem to be out there (although we fully expect that when the mainstream media gets its hooks into this topic, further distortions will inevitably creep in.)

In some of these talks, we’ve been speaking a bit about the concept of world ages, a good starting point for understanding the 2012 phenomenon. World ages and the Zeitgeist are the province of cultural historians and anthropologists who work to discern and preserve human perspective and the complicated advance of cultural change.

In what in my opinion is a stellar work,Transformations of Man, one of our greatest cultural historians Lewis Mumford mapped and correlated the world ages. He also evoked the notion of the Hindu Yugas in reference to some of the strikingly surreal anomalies of the current age and wrote eloquently about the evolution of human thought and consciousness in the progression of world ages.

Getting more comfortable with the Shift and 2012's own complexities does require another leap in thinking beyond the academically sanctioned notion of a world age (if not a leap of faith) since the notion of prophecy and a priori knowledge of the unfolding of the shape of human affairs is introduced. World ages “work” for many people since they are viewed (and developed) in the rear review mirror of historical analysis.

But world ages as recurring cyclical phenomena with spans of time exponentially greater than several centuries are a different animal since to accept this notion tends to bolster the critique of Western knowledge as the pinnacle of human thought and its presumed scientifically sanctioned linear progression towards accuracy and suggests the suppression of indigenous wisdom has been counterproductive to the quest for authentic values, possibly even a wrong turn in history.