As we collectively seek to find hope in a world seemingly falling apart, with band-aid solutions failing us left and right, a deeper conversation needs to be had, held within a larger framework of meaning-making. Let us zoom out for a few minutes and take in the birds-eye view:
First: a meta-view of problems themselves (drawn from the brilliant analysis by Mary Ann Allison): It used to be the challenges we faced as a society were simply horrific and troublesome: world wars, slavery, depressed economy, etc. Then they became wicked problems — climate change, social and economic inequity, terrorism, access to clean drinking water, and so on – in which nobody can agree on solutions because nobody can agree what the real problem or the real question is.
We’ve quickly blazed into the next era in which our horrifically exponential problems are existential: WHO (or WHAT) ARE WE?
- If a teensy little virus threatens to take us all out…
- if we are vulnerable to solar flares destroying our technological infrastructure and with it our entire economy and communication systems… and yet we think that colonizing Mars is the answer…
- if the biggest issue about climate change is not the warming planet but the fact that we are unable to maintain civility in our discourse as we navigate our disagreements …
- if we kill each other over our differing approaches to how we think mass shootings should be handled, or present a future so bleak that suicide rates skyrocket…
- if we perpetuate our addiction to polarizing against one another…
We are confronting new levels of complexity in our evolution, in which the question must be raised: do we know each other to be ONE or do we know each other to be separate, fractured, “others?”
We are slamming into the glass ceiling of what we can do from within the paradigm of duality, in which “good/bad” and “right/wrong” govern our lenses of perception and behaviors. We know that we’re evolving because this dualistic lens is no longer serving us.
Rather than directing our energy into creativity and innovation to formulate solutions to the horrific problems from previous levels of our evolution (they haven’t gone away), we are harnessing all of our energy into blame. Fear. “Othering”. Building walls. Reinforcing righteousness. Building judgment. Defending. Making others wrong.
The problems themselves are no longer the fundamental problem. The problem is now that we don’t know who and what we are, which means we have no idea how to cooperate in service to a solution. We lack the basic skills to meet the problems in a generative way.
We’ve outgrown our cosmologies, so we have no narratives to guide us as we navigate the turbulence of our times.
We’ve outgrown our previous moral compasses, in which “good/bad” and “right/wrong” appeared to provide order. The poles have flipped and those lenses now are creating chaos and conflict, rather than order.
We are a society adrift. And we know it by our collective sense of hopelessness, angst, and despair.
What can we turn to, that becomes a North Star to guide us?
If we zoom out, we might look at how previous iterations of life have handled similar transitions.
Once upon a time, the only life on earth was single-celled organisms, each of them doing their own thing. But somehow, somewhere, in a blinding flash of discovery, they discovered that exchanging resources and cooperating with each other allowed them to create something bigger, more complex, more powerful than what they could do individually.
This cycle repeated over and over – from the time of the single-celled bacteria that occupied the earth three billion years ago, to the development of specialized cells in what we now casually ignore as the miracle that is our body.
A single red blood cell would have a fraction of the intelligence and capacity if going it alone. But let it come into partnership with liver cells, and neurons, and bone cells, and interstitial fluid cells, and we have a most extraordinary development. You and I are not the first of these miracles, nor will we be the last.
But now each of us is a “cell” in a larger organism that is in the early stages of coming to know itself: Humanity as a single species, working in harmony just as the 75 trillion cells of your body work in perfect coordination.
We, of course, are oblivious to this larger perspective – obsessed as we are with the minutia of newsfeed headlines and the busy-ness of our to-do lists. Which is why existence continues to provide louder and louder cymbal crashes in the symphony of our world, so that we look up, wake up, and remember: we’re in this together.
Togetherness, of course, requires a whole new skillset – to evolve our nervous systems to be with conflict and confrontation in new ways (transcending the tendency to take things personally) and to metabolize collective and individual suffering so that the painbody energy can be harnessed and directed into generative solutions. In other words – mastering the emotional reactivity that is our evolutionary baggage.
But being with conflict and relational discord is so profoundly uncomfortable, most of us won’t do it. Unless there is a Big Why that is big enough to inspire one to eat shadow for breakfast, day after day after day.
The vision of humanity living and breathing as One collides with too many entrenched belief systems: it’s not possible, it’ll never happen, no way.
But if, for just a single moment, each of us dares to place our attention on a vision of what might be possible – perhaps a thousand years from now – if we evolve ourselves to become a single species, working in cooperation with all the other cells in the body of humanity, to create a masterpiece … something we are willing to be ALL IN on participating in … maybe, just maybe, we can access a fleeting glimpse of what’s possible for our children’s children – IF we show up as the most mature beings we can muster today, take ownership of our reactive emotions, to uplevel our capacity to cooperate with others by sharing resources and communicating effectively.
Is there a future worth fighting for? Of course. But the fight is not against other people or even against the doom and gloom of the wicked problems we’re mired in. The fight happens within ourselves as we battle pessimism, hijacking of our limbic system, distraction, and the apparent weight of the world – made heavier by how we are holding it.
We are a single species, ever-so-gradually evolving our capacity to see and know one another as ourselves. Every one of us that recognizes ourselves as a “cell” carrying that intelligence gets to join Team Oneness and BE that consciousness in our everyday lives, one by one passing along newfangled “intercellular communication” skills to other cells, until one day we reach the tipping point and quantum leap into a new way of functioning.
The ”intercellular communication” skills, of course, arise from presence. Deep listening. Empathy. Openness. Wonder. Non-reactive, non-judgmental presence that can lean in, stay curious, listen through the noise and perceive deeper openings.
And to become masterful at these capacities is to become masterful at working with the energies of emotion (not ordinary Emotional IQ, but a deeper attunement to how energy wants to flow as each emotion arises and is suppressed or expressed) and to become masterful at thinking evolutionarily – understanding how the paired forces of chaos and coherence work together to generate new possibilities, so that you can perceive the opportunity within the conflict, sense the emergent current within the catastrophe.
These capacities happen within the context of the body and one’s somatic experience – perceiving the subtleties of creation within one’s lived experience and present moment awareness of the felt-sense.
Which means that in order to develop into the sophisticated, multicellular organism that we are becoming aware that we are, we must remember how to feel – not just “feel the feels” as we metabolize individual and collective trauma, but experience the body as a receiver, antenna, and transmitter of higher-frequency energies.
We can’t yet know how we will create solutions to the horrors of war, appalling inequity, or a planet in crisis — because we are trying to go about “solution”-thinking from the perspective of “us and them,” fix and control, manipulate and figure out, judge and react.
The paradoxical path requires us to go deeper within ourselves – to slow down and perceive the intelligence latent within the invisible realm – and develop our relationship with the place inside us that knows, experientially, that we are all one.
“You can’t solve a problem from the same level of consciousness that created it,” said Einstein.
And what science is trying to define as “consciousness” cannot be understood objectively – it can only be experienced subjectively.
And so to bring sacredness back to the subjective, to honor our interior, to create the conditions in which we go deep beneath the layer of “separate selves manipulating reality to get results” and gasp in awe as at last, we find ourselves being breathed by the one breath that breathes us all … this is our work.
In a world seemingly fractured beyond repair, the “world” reflects only that which we perceive ourselves to be. Separate. Fragmented. At war with ourselves.
Existence has been evolving for fourteen billion years (as far as we know, at least within this universe that we think is The Universe). Evolutionary problems have always been setups for growth and expansion into a greater form of intelligence, complexity, and cooperation. The shitstorms we are wading through today are no different. The question is – will we place our attention on what divides us or will we divert our attention into that which unifies? Will we bombard our own nervous systems with the nuclear fallout that is our addiction to fear and despair, or will we breathe enough each day with presence to flood our systems with the felt-sense of peace?
Oh, the irony – that something as seemingly massive as “the future of humanity” should come down to something so simple: that “the future” is created one breath at a time, and is shaped by the quality of presence we bring to that one breath.
We are in this together.
May we breathe together as One.