On the Threshold of a Great Transformation

"(C)onsciousness is not a late emergent product of a material evolution, but the exact opposite: the source of all material evolution," observes biologist Dr. Elisabet Sahtouris. "Spirituality and science were separated only for historic reasons. It is time now to reunite them in a single worldview that can encompass the best of our spiritual traditions and the best of our scientific traditions."

"When you do that," she points out, "you come to a view of a living universe, rather than this strange concept amongst human cultures that Western science came to, that we are in a non-living universe . . . that is running down by entropy, and in which by some miracle life emerged from non-life, consciousness from non-consciousness, intelligence from non-intelligence. Those have been the stickiest problems for Western science."

"The really exciting thing about being alive today," Dr. Sahtouris notes, " is that we are all here for a great transformation. It is clear that we are unsustainable, we have to change things, and we are figuring out how. In a sense the old system is getting more entrenched, more violent, more powerful. It's trying to deep itself alive. While we know that we need a new system."

Utilizing the metaphor of a caterpillar dissolving into a chrysallis within its cocoon before it metamorphizes as a butterfly, Dr. Sahtouris points out that we can not save today's societal paradigms as they are unsustainable, but that rather we must evolve new ways of living. This, she notes, is of course no mean feat, and its inevitability is by no means assured.

"If we put our energy into building all the alternative ways of doing things, we can learn from nature how to go about this process of evolution that is called for today. We can build alternatives to the old models of education, of law, of health care. All this we are doing. And we know we can function as a global family because we have communication systems that are global."

"Above all," Dr. Sahtoris points out, we need a very powerful vision. (We need) to know where we want to go, because the old system is very clear about what it wants. And we really do create our realities out of our beliefs. If we don't believe in a positive world in which all humans are liberated to express their creativity, we cannot build it. We must hold the vision very clearly and then go about doing whatever each of us loves doing most, knowing that others will do the other parts. None of us has to do the whole thing, (and) together we can make it happen."