QUANTUM SHIFT IN THE GLOBAL BRAIN

HOW THE NEW SCIENTIFIC REALITY CAN CHANGE US AND OUR WORLD

ERVIN LASZLO

INNER TRADITIONS                    2008

www.InnerTraditions.com

PART VI

Chapter 4: A Better Way to Grow

 

Our societies and our economic and financial systems have become unsustainable themselves, and the way they function creates unsustainability in the global ecology. In the course of the past decades, we have been growing the wrong way.

There is a better way to grow. In itself growth is not necessarily bad or even limited: its desirability and future depend on the kind of growth we embark upon. Unrestrained, purely quantitative growth in energy and materials production and consumption is not possible on a finite planet with finite resources and a delicately balanced biosphere: ultimately it is bound to deflect and then turn into growth of a cancerous kind. But there are other forms of growth available to us.

The current modality: extensive growth

Extensive growth moves along a horizontal plane on the surface of the planet: it conquers ever more territories, colonizes ever more people, and imposes the will of the dominant layers on ever more layers of the population.

The basic end of extensive growth is the extension of human power over larger and larger areas. Traditionally, the means to achieve this end has been conquest: the conquest of nature and the conquest of other, weaker or less power- and domination-oriented peoples. Successful conquest led to the colonization of other tribes, nations, cities, and empires, subjugating them to the ambitions and interests of the conquerors. For most of recorded history this was accomplished by force of arms. Since the second half of the 20^th century it has also been attempted by economic means: wealthy states and global companies using their power to impose their will and values on wide layers of the population.

For states the goal of extensive growth is territorial sovereignty, including sovereignty over the human and natural resources of the territories. The corresponding goal for global companies is to generate demand for consumption, often without regard for the social and environmental consequences.

The ends of growth can be encapsulated in three “Cs”: conquest, colonization, and consumption. These ends are served by corresponding varieties of means. First, the technologies that use and transform matter, the technologies of production; second, the technologies that generate the power to operate matter-transforming technologies, energy-generating technologies; and third, the technologies that whet people’s appetites, create artificial demand, and shift patterns of consumption, the technologies of Propaganda, PR, and advertising. The first of these kinds of technologies built habitations with networks of transportation and communication and increasingly powerful production structures for a growing variety of products. The second harnessed the forces of nature to drive these technologies. The third produced the demand-provoking images and the subtle or not-so-subtle means by which the manufacturers of products and the suppliers of services impose their will on their clients and customers.

A better modality: intensive growth  

The ends of intensive growth are very different from those of extensive growth. Intensive growth centers on the development of individuals and communities. Its principal ends can be grasped under three other “Cs”: connection, communication, and consciousness.

• Like the mass points of Newton, humans appear to be self-contained, mutually independent chunks of organized matter only externally related to each other and to their environment.
• As we shall see in part 2, the contemporary sciences no longer support such a view.
• Now every quantum is known to be intrinsically connected with every other quantum, and every organism with other organisms in the biosphere.
• In turn, economists know that there is a direct connection between the interests of individuals, individual states, and individual enterprises and the workings of the globalized international system.
• The second and third ends of intensive growth are directly linked with the first. These ends are to deepen the level of communication and raise the level of consciousness of the communicators.

Communication unfolds on multiple levels. First of all, we need to communicate with ourselves, caring for and developing our consciousness and personality. People who are “in touch with themselves” are better balanced and more able to communicate with the world around them. We also need to be in communication with those who make up the immediate context of our lives – family, community, and work or profession. Still wider levels of communication are equally necessary: communication with other people, whether near of far, in our own community and in other communities, countries, and cultures.

Communication calls for connection, but on the human plane more enters into play than connection: communication also involves consciousness. The full potentials of human communication unfold when the communicators apprehend the strands of connection through which they communicate. A high level of communication calls for a high level of consciousness that enables people to make use of the many, sometimes extremely subtle, strands of connection that bind them to each other and to their environment. Consciousness of these connections could enable us to shift from today’s power- and conquest-hungry Logos-civilization to a Holos-civilization centered on the growth of individuals and the sustainability of human communities and the biosphere.

Chapter 5: A New Vision

It seems to me that a totally different kind of morality and conduct, and an action that springs from the understanding of the whole process of living, have become an urgent necessity in our world of mounting crises and problems. We try to deal with these issues through political and organizational methods, through economic readjustment and various reforms; but none of these things will ever resolve the complex difficulties of human existence, though they may offer temporary relief.

But there is a revolution which is entirely different and which must take place if we are to emerge from the endless series of anxieties, conflicts, frustrations in which we are caught. This revolution has to begin, not with theory and ideation, which eventually prove worthless, but with a radical transformation in the mind itself.

J. Krishnamurti, “On Learning”