I am excited beyond words about the possibilities that await humanity. Especially the possibility of making a quantum leap from a species prone to war and fighting to a peaceful species.
What if science points to this as a very real possibility—as a likely direction for humanity’s evolution to take? Please bear with me, dear reader, as I let this question wait for the end of this essay. First, more about my excitement and enthusiasm.
In my moments of lucidity about where humanity is on its wonderful journey of evolution and healing, I’m confident that we have arrived at a moment of unprecedented readiness for caring connections.
There’s something in the air, something new in the ethers. Sometimes it feels like a consensus among the tribe of humanity, a basic understanding that going to war is misguided and just plain wrong—not in keeping with the deep roots of integrity that are sometimes visible in the human.
I’ve always considered myself a visionary, so like many other visionaries ( Jean Houston, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, and Hazrat Inayat Khan, to name a few) I tend to be open to intuitive hits and a general sense of buoyancy. Recently, my intuition has been telling me that optimistic visionaries like myself will become more commonplace in the months and years ahead, that there might be a greater openness to sensing that good things may be on their way for humanity as a whole.
Could it be that humanity has not yet realized its full potential? And what if history is not a reliable indicator for what is possible in the future?
What if humanity is more ripe for living from a new set of assumptions about human behavior than ever before?
What if we are poised for living from a new template, one rooted in our heart’s desire for living from compassion?
What if the Me Too movement has provided humanity with a model for a second movement, a Not in My Name movement?
A “Not in my Name” movement? Yes, a movement that can begin today. This movement might include posts on social media that read something like, “The U.S. is launching an attack on [name of country]: Not in My Name.” Plus, general discourse about the wars of governments not representing the general will of the people. (This echoes the sentiment Quakers have voiced for many years when proclaiming, “War is not the answer.”)
Declaring “Not in My Name” invites us to take a stand for integrity and peace rather than against this war or that war. It also holds space for reflecting upon what a world of integrity and peace might look and feel like.
New conversations may abound–dialogues about a new world, a new template, a world sprouting from the soil of integrity and harmony—dialogues that are visionary and guide our ship toward new lands where an evolved humanity can create a new world. (The peace movements in past decades may have been missing this magical ingredient, the ingredient of vision, the ingredient that acts like yeast, that helps lift our dialogue, our mindset, and our understanding to a new sense of possibility.)
And there’s more. A “Not in My Name” movement has is built on an empowering foundation. The declaration “Not in my Name” is rooted in the assumption that we are sovereign adults who think for ourselves and honor our feelings of sadness, anger, etc.—sovereign adults who are willing to let our desire for the nobility of the individual and the collective guide our response to the happenings in the world.
And there’s more: The science.
The late Barbara Marx Hubbard, a visionary who researched the history of the evolution of life on this planet over millions of years, has stated that “Evolution has taught us that crisis always precedes transformation. That’s a big wake-up call for our maturation around the dangers being caused by environmental breakdown.”
She continued in her interview published in Broadview on December 1, 2013:
“The people who are studying this [environmental breakdown] see it as not only the most dangerous movement in human history but also the one most pregnant with opportunity . . . While we’re finding a whole system breakdown, we’re also facing a whole system breakthrough.”
Ilya Prigogine, the late Belgian physical chemist, concluded that nature has gone from entropy to syntropy—from disorder to higher order—for billions of years.
A study published by Nature.com in 2023 provides an example of nature’s propensity toward syntropy in the face of entropy. Researchers concluded that the emergence of multi-cellular life forms on Earth millions of years ago may have been catalyzed by environmental challenges. Challenges to the existence of life on Earth before multi-cellular life forms existed may have created a need for single-cell life forms to become more complex life forms. Some scientists refer to such historical moments as “crossover points” of devolution and destruction or evolution and radical transformation.
Those of us who like to view life through a spiritual lens (or through a lens that combines the languages of science and spirituality) may wish to consider that God’s love fills our human needs, as well as the needs of planets seeking to evolve into a higher order of complexity. The need for peace has never been so acute and so obvious. If the principle embedded in the cosmos is that Source shall supply every need of yours according to Her riches and according to our capacity to receive the answers to our needs, then the enormity of the need of the hour suggests a huge pivot in our direction may be on the way.
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This Post is republished on Medium.
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Photo credit: iStock
