Cosmopathy #10: The Stand, Chaos, IONS, Center for Whole Communities

My View of the World

Blogger, Editor, or Worldview Ranter?
For the past two months, worldview change items have been plentiful: new subscribers, IONS conference, retreat with the Center for Whole Communities, books read, articles published, and someone (I believe me) accused this publication of being, rather than a newsletter, a hybrid between a newsletter and blog. Whatever its species, it will continue to offer a wide range of items for people deeply interested in changing worldviews for a sustainable world.

The Institute of Noetic Sciences has been studying the role of consciousness in healing since 1971 when Astronaut Edgar Mitchell was returning on Apollo 14 and beheld the planet as a universal whole: “The presence of divinity became almost palpable, and I knew that life in the universe was not just an accident based on random processes... The knowledge came to me directly.” He went on to found the organization.

I attended a day of conference in Arlington, VA. I was struck how in such a short time I encountered a wide variety of new ideas. Consider a few:

Don Beck, promoter of Spiral Dynamics theory and a plenary speaker observed that genes, memes, and viruses all go through non-linear jumps. The shift in the world that needs to happen is not more of the same. It has to be a vertical jump, so 30 years he has mapped how this happens and what the change processes are. This concept has been tested during tear gas days in South Africa and the most anticipated civil war (that didn’t happen). Beck worked more than a decade with Mandela and de Klerk to transition South Africa from Apartheid. See his seminal book, Spiral Dynamics.

Marylin Shlitz, director of research for IONS, argued that there exists a greater connection between people than most currently believe. Consider the case of the Achuar Indians of the Amazon. Unlike modern civilization where we tend to regard dreams as amusing but insigificant events, the Achuar believe they dream collectively. When they wake up each morning, their social responsibility is to share their dreams because each person has some of the information needed to navigate their people. Together they must piece their dreams together to reveal deep social meaning. See her landmark book, Consciousness and Healing.

Dean Radin, a senior scientist with IONS and leading psi researcher, discussed how the Theory of Entanglement might explain psi effects. The theory actually is basic to Quantum Mechanics that says when any two particles interact they become entangled foreverafter, creating a single quantum state outside time and space. Thus, when one particle is affected in certain ways, the other particle is also affected similarly, without sharing any information between them, regardless of how far apart they are. Radin says that physicists have shown experimentally not only entangled photons, but atoms (thus, the basis of atomic computers), and a cubic centimeter salt crystal. Theoretically, there is no limit to what can be entangled, possibly the entire universe. He noted that there is so much evidence for the existence of psi effects — and he reviewed experiments for how distant people can place images in others’ dreams and their minds, how distant people can affect skin conductance of others (basis for spiritual healing), etc.

Most fascinating are Princeton’s Global Consciousness Project’s 65 random number generators located around the world. Since noise behaves in statistically recognizable ways, anything that would alter those generators in a systematic way could be measured as deviation from the norm. Based on the evidence that psi exists between individuals, the project hypothesizes that collectively human consciousness could have global effects. Every time they knew of a big event, they would search the pooled data for a drop in randomness. Every time large-scale events where worldwide human attention was focused, they found such drops (Radin explained how collective human attention affects the generators): OJ Simpson’s trial, funeral of Pope John Paul II, Y2K, September 11 which exhibited a 6.5-standard deviation drop in randomness. The results were published in a physics journal. Even more startling, they found the effect began 2-3 hours BEFORE the actual attack occurred. Once they stumbled across this phenomenon, they went to their 200-event database and picked 55 unexpected events to see if there was a pre-cursor effect.

They found the effect in all events including before the Tsunami, which corresponded with the time period that indigenous people and animals began to flee the coastline. The obvious questions are if indigenous people can detect something before it happens, can we all with training? Also what theory would explain this? Radin discusses all the evidence and entanglement as the explanatory theory in his book to be published next year, Entangled Minds (Simon & Schuster).

Daniel Zylstra found me on the Internet, and we subsequently discussed worldviews as cultural and individual phenomena. Can each person have his or her own worldview and mold it? Or are even unique individual worldviews really interacting with a sub-cultural worldview? In either case, if we work at the individual scale, which tools do we use? We discussed among behavior models, designing experiences which interests Daniel, but at the same time makes him wonder if that is too manipulative. I felt that every relationship is about influencing others (“manipulate“ is a charged word) and influence itself isn’t bad, but we must consider the influencer’s motives. Daniel is a Christian Seminarian who is working on a seminar currently entitled, “Hermeneutics and the Post Modern Reaction Against Truth.” Let us know how that comes out, Daniel. (He has a Canadian email domain name, so I assume he is in Canada.)

Jan-Willem F. Knegt is a Senior Advisor with the SNV-Netherlands Development Organisation stationed in Ghana. He discovered Cosmopathy through an opinion piece I wrote for The Systems Thinker (see below). Jan writes, “Here in Ghana I’m banging my head against a massive wall of ignorance and financial interests in getting sustainability (‘ecologically sound utilisation of our biosphere’) mainstreamed into development and development thinking. I’ve just started here a few months ago, and feel I need to avoid getting frustrated or angry. Anyway, your writing was very encouraging and I’m curious to read Cosmopathy.”

I published an opinion piece in The Systems Thinker entitled, “Systems Thinkers Must Go Down the Rabbit Hole.” A call-out: “In a time when the global system is spiraling toward unprecedented change, those of us who want to make a difference must jump into the rabbit’s hole in order to understand and change our reality.” The rabbit’s hole refers to worldviews.

Glimpse Abroad. As many of you know, I have been writing fiction as of late as an additional tool for communicating issues of worldview change. Since starting with a fiction writer’s group last year, I have had my first creative non-fiction publication, “Don’t Travel by Night.” The e-zine writes, “The road that Jon Kohl and his friend embark upon is supposed to lead them from the Costa Rican border to Nicaraguan customs. But will they end up in jail instead?” The piece also earned “Special Mention” in the literary magazine, Toasted Cheese’s Midsummer Tale Contest.

While sitting atop Costa Rica’s highest peak, Patrick and I got the bright idea to travel through Nicaragua.

This from Global Vision’s web site (edited for length here):

“In scientific terms, the urban/industrial world view is still largely based on the mechanistic model of the universe developed by Isaac Newton and René Descartes during the 17th Century. According to the Second Law of Thermodynamics and the concept of ‘entropy,’ closed inanimate systems devolve from order to disorder and disintegration. This has been popularly misinterpreted to imply that the universe itself is inexorably headed for chaos. The idea of an entropic universe has since been refuted by the new ‘self-organising systems’ paradigm emerging from quantum physics, chaos theory, systems theory, ecology, biology, and cybernetics. And Ilya Prigogine won a Nobel Prize in Chemistry for showing how inanimate molecules in a test tube can spontaneously organise themselves from randomness to order! Nevertheless, the assumption of an entropic universe continues to be widely disseminated in schools and universities, and still informs the way most Westerners and many other people now perceive the world. In this view, human efforts to restore order to the planet are doomed from the onset.”

Mathis Wackernagel is executive director of the Global Footprint Network. Susan Burns is the managing director. Marisol (my wife) and I had breakfast with Mathis, Susan, and their son, Andre, while we visited San Francisco for a wedding. We discussed ways in which I might apply creative writing to bring the concept of ecological footprint closer to the organization’s different audiences.

Worldview Change Project inspiration, Peter Forbes is co-director along with his wife Helen Whybrow of the Center for Whole Communities. I attended the Whole Thinking Leadership Retreat that invites land movement leaders (and me) to experience and discuss, albeit briefly, what it feels like to live and work holistically. For six days on the 400-acre Knoll Farm in Fayston, Vermont, Peter cut us off from civilization. We ate organic food, gardened in the organic farm, slept in tents on the edge of the woods, meditated, enjoyed silence, carved wooden spoons from a local tree, and discussed how in order for conservation ultimately to work, people must have positive and deep relationships to land. To have a holistic relationship to land also demands (if not requires) that people live a less fragmented life themselves. We discussed how the story is the vehicle by which people live and relate to land. I came away with many ideas on how to improve discourse in the heritage interpretation field, one area in which I write a great deal and also an area that I feel has its true calling in the promotion of sustainability based on land or more generally, places. Thank you, Peter!

Orion Kriegman works for the Tellus Institute’s Great Transition Initiative in Boston. “GTI is an expanding international effort to help crystallize a global citizen movement by advancing an inspiring and coherent vision.” We discussed intentional communities and ways that my writing might be of service to this project with similar bent as the Worldview Change Project. Cosmopathy subscriber, Brendan Miller, was also in attendance.

What I’m Reading: The Stand

Recently I chose to read Stephen King’s The Stand for its obvious connection to Worldview Change literature. In it, a flu-like disease wipes out most of the world’s population and the few remaining Americans join one of two bands to see who survives the final stand. Of course, everyone died so suddenly the survivors had plenty of food and gas left over. This is not the normal collapse scenario one reads about where a world full of people grinds to a halt, consuming all the stored food in the process.

That’s what I thought until I read an article by nutrition/health expert Jon Barron on Avian Flu. He writes that the Type A Avian Flu virus H5N1 currently can only be transmitted from animals to humans, not humans to humans. Nevertheless, it’s mortality rate is 20-36%. Because this is a new and easily mutated strain, vaccines will be of little value and even healthy immune systems won’t help. The virus turns the body’s own defense against itself, causing it to flood the lungs with fluids, resulting in suffocation. The virus is mutating in ways never seen before and has been crossing species. Right now it can’t jump human-to-human, but if it ever does, we’re in for a pandemic, potentially of historic proportions. Given its properties, human population density, and our general lack of readiness, we could easily see a die-off greater than that of the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic that killed 50-100 million. Estimated death tolls today would run 300-350 million, 2 million in the US. Consider SARS in Canada where there were 440 cases and 43 deaths. It cost the country about $2.5 million/case. Multiply that by 2.5 billion (number of people estimated to be infected in the next pandemic) and that’s a lot of money — if the pandemic comes in our lifetime under current conditions. There’s a little gloom for Cosmopathy readers.

I also finished Threshold 2000: Critical Issues and Spiritual Values for a Global Age, a book published by the Millennium Institute. It discusses how the traditional world religions cannot move the world to sustainability. It goes on to discuss how to build a new global ethic, a sustainable faith. Gerald Barney, a Cosmopathy reader, prepared the book for the 1999 Parliament of the World’s Religions in South Africa. For anyone interested in the interaction of religion and sustainability, this book is a great place to start.