“Our future is shaped from the story we host in the present … When the mind of humanity changes, everything changes.” This is from the Editor’s Note below, the must-read lead piece in the latest issue of Turning Point, the Journal of the Conscious Elders Network. It’s about the need for a new story that moves us into “the beautiful world our hearts know is possible.” We work on problems piecemeal, with very little attention on the worldview that keeps them all in place. We need to tell a story about who we are and what we are doing here that underlies and impels the kinder, gentler world we must move into.
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
the falcon cannot hear the falconer;
things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
the blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
the ceremony of innocence is drowned;
the best lack all conviction, while the worst
are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand…
William Butler Yeats penned these lines in his poem, The Second Coming, nearly 100 hundred years ago in the aftermath of the First World War. His words resurface today as a disquieting commentary on our times, yet also as a reminder that every historical age faces what it experiences as unprecedented threats to its welfare and existence. The broad view of history suggests that each generation must claim the revelation at hand—even as we remember that we’re certainly not the first, nor will be the last, to be challenged by this calling.
