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Leah Russell4 min

Our Moment Of Choice

Thought leaders including Dr Bruce Lipton, the Editor's Pick in the Kindred Spirit Awards 2020, share a call to humanity and urge us to realise our potential for co-creating a unified, thriving world.
 

Between climate change, globalisation, economic inequality and social tensions, our moment of choice is now. This interconnected series of worldwide issues is impacting the current survival of humanity. Today’s global culture is changing, and it’s up to us to make the conscious choices to restore hope and peace back into the world.

That's what 42 of today's evolutionary leaders have come together to tell us in Our Moment of Choice, a new collection of messages from some of the West's most influential thinkers and speakers including Deepak Chopra, Lynne McTaggart, Gregg Braden and Jean Houston. With each chapter reflecting on and offering creative solutions to humanity's problems, this collection is a real call to action offering a framework of how we can ensure ourselves a better future and a transformed global consciousness. Read on for extracts from chapters by author James O'Dea and epigeneticist Dr Bruce Lipton.  

Practicing Peace

by James O’Dea

  The accelerating contribution of two previously distinct areas – neuroscience and mindfulness practices – has strengthened an integral approach to building a global culture of peace. Neuroscience has revealed, through neuroplasticity and other concepts, that we are designed for adaptability and fresh insight. Even long-established neural pathways that convey reactivity and prejudice can be rewired to become more open to empathy, connection, and commitment to others. This creates new opportunities that help us integrate new meaning, by softening fight-flight-freeze triggers and allowing us to relate more deeply to others. Research on meditation and mindfulness suggests regular meditative practices, including loving-kindness meditations, significantly reduce anxiety, stress, and emotional reactivity. In addition, a variety of breathwork and heart-centering techniques help support peaceful communication, peaceful heart resonance, and compassionate listening. New, more intentional, nonviolent communication approaches that are more skilled in diplomacy and conflict resolution are also propelling the evolution of a culture of peace. Effective heart-centered communication builds environments where people listen deeply and feel seen and heard while expressing their truth. Dialogue of this type can be profoundly healing when it allows us to experience a deep sense of unity in diversity. These skills are especially needed culture-wide—in the home, at school, at work, in our communities, and in our political discourse—as they create fields where people feel nourished and even loved despite their differences. This heart-centered communication leads us to the door of spiritual growth where we can explore the terrain of inner peace. As we evolve in the outer world, we also ascend an inner pathway to unconditional and lasting peace. Meditation and mindfulness are one facet of creating inner peace, but as progress on the path is made, a self-reflective consciousness emerges that helps surface blind spots and conditioning. This spiritual work has a transformative effect on how we view and do peace work. More people now, especially activists, are seeing how ego, personal agendas, and the projection of unresolved issues sustain polarities and breed a sense of superiority and self-righteousness. We realise that we ourselves must be the change we seek in the world. We know we can no longer channel our own unresolved hostility, anger, and frustration in the name of peace. We know that being against is not the same as cultivating an openness to working together. In the last decade, this integrated form of activism embodied by the great peacemakers Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. has started to be known as sacred activism, mystical activism, conscious activism, evolutionary activism, and visionary activism. This type of activism calls for cultivation of wisdom and passion for engaging the whole person and the whole truth; it is deeply dialogic and informed by the integration of new science and spirituality. It expresses deep ecological and environmental awareness, mobilised by new forms of conscious organising. It envisions the birth of a new humanity. Our vision of a culture of peace includes the following:
  • School classrooms where teachers know how to set the field of heart coherence so emotional intelligence can flourish and support optimal learning
  • Whole educational systems committed to teaching and practicing nonviolent communication
  • Communities where restorative justice gathers momentum
  • More governments framing policies that honor multicultural values and appreciate that ecology and economy can be designed to sustain the interconnection and interdependence of all life
  • Spiritual movements taking people beyond dogmatism and competing religious claims to affirming universal oneness and infinite diversity
  • Societies healing the multiple traumas of the past and ending the intergenerational transmission of wounds
  • A new generation of mindful, compassionate, and ethically evolved political and social leaders who are integrated visionaries
  • An awakening of collective responsibility transforming gross destructive materialism into whole-Earth planetary service
  • The emergence of a cosmology of consciousness evolving and blossoming into sustainable and lasting peace
  How will you participate in creating this evolutionary culture of peace?    

Conscious Evolution: A Theory We Can Thrive With

by Bruce H. Lipton, PhD

  We can get to a higher level of evolution, but only if we change our rapacious ways. The potential positive future our species can be likened to is the metamorphosis of a butterfly. A caterpillar’s body comprises several billion cells. In the body of the growing caterpillar, the economy is booming and the cellular community is actively employed. This organism’s voracious appetite leads to it devouring the leaves of the plant on which they are living. Caterpillar growth slows and eventually comes to an end as the available resources are consumed. Within the pupa, the cells are out of work and their highly structured community begins to fall apart. Specialised imaginal cells within the ensuing chaos provide organising information and direction to create a different, more sustainable future. Metamorphosis is complete when the unsustainable caterpillar civilisation transforms into the ecologically sensitive butterfly civilisation. The parallels are clear. By behaving as a caterpillar, human civilisation’s voracious appetite to grow and consume has undermined the environment. The global crises we face today are Nature’s wake-up call for humans to realise that civilisation itself needs to undergo a metamorphosis, so our current incarnation as the environmentally destructive “caterpillar” must transform into a new, sustainable organism: humanity. The looming fall of civilisation as we know it is a necessity; we simply cannot build a future for humans to thrive on the unsustainable foundation supporting today’s world. Will human civilisation survive its metamorphosis? We’re balanced on the knife-edge of extinction or conscious evolution. Our uncertain future is dependent on the actions we engage in today.  

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Parts of this feature have been extracted from Our Moment of Choice is Now: Evolutionary Visions and Hope for the Future, ed. Robert Atkinson, Kurt Johnson and Deborah Moldow. Our Moment of Choice is Now is available from 1 September, 2020 (Beyond Words Publishing and Atria Books, RRP £20)
 

www.evolutionaryleaders.net www.jamesodea.com www.brucelipton.com