This essay was a finalist in the How We Saved the World essay contest, where people wrote as if it was 2050 when the world was working, saying how we got there starting with something they did. Here's the intro to this presentation of results, with links to the other finalists and an invitation to make comments about the contest.

The Year 2050: How Our Cooperative Society was Born

The period which was once called the pandemic years, came to be known as the consciousness initiation of humanity.  A critical mass became conscious of the fact that the system and its institutions and long-standing structures served to preserve and enrich themselves at the expense of humanity.

Those who perceived the self-serving and predatory nature of the old system began to replace the consumption of negative social and other media with frequencies that elevated (to be elaborated on later) and simultaneously had born in us a vision of a more beautiful, cooperative society, knowing that cooperation and collaboration benefit the collective. We began to gather together, forming new groups, platforms and networks, drawn by both the need to be in contact with people of like hearts, as well as by some deep interior knowing that focusing our conscious attention, connection and communication on the cooperative society we all wanted to experience would itself be part of its creation.

We recognised that, yes, the old system was destructively competitive and divisive; however, we also recognised that we had a responsibility to be the change we wished to see and to embody the energy of this cooperative society. We had to become aware of our reactions and recognise that the restlessness and unease and the need to compete that we experienced in the old reality was the Soul calling us back to Grace. We developed a practice of constantly bringing awareness, kindness and compassion to the places that were still wounded. We used methods such as journalling and stream of consciousness writing (e.g. Julia Cameron’s powerful Morning Pages) as well as feedback from each other to unearth what needed to be nurtured and healed in order to unlock us from these unconscious patterns of reactivity.

To clear out stuckness in our mental and emotional bodies, to release old patterns that were used as a coping mechanism, and to install new ways of thinking and being, we used strategies such as Emotional Freedom Technique (Tapping on meridian points to release old programmes and integrate new more helpful beliefs); Internal Family Systems (becoming the inner parent to the parts of ourself that have become burdened with past traumas and experiences and communicating with them in a way that is loving and accepting; Family Constellations (transforming relationships with family entanglements through internal work); dance/movement) and prioritised things as simple (but not always easy!) as getting sufficient restful sleep. We noticed our nervous systems calming down and a sense of spaciousness opening up.  As we relaxed, we laughed more and were able to be more present to ourselves, each other and the world around us.

No longer driven by a sense of fear or lack, we set ourselves free from the illusion of separation – recognising that we are individuated but not separated – and began building a foundation rooted in love, grace and a deep reverence for the world around us. This is where we gained the ultimate leverage over the old system.

Rather than running from ourselves or trying to fill a void (which we somatically understood to be distinct from Spaciousness or The Void), with proving, striving or material gain at others‘ expense, we learnt the art of stopping, being, appreciating and listening to our Soul. We made it a regular practice to enter the Theta and Gamma brainwave states, mainly through meditation, where we touched the sacred place at our core that hadn’t been wounded or broken and allowed this place of wholeness to inspire and guide us.

While the journey towards the more cooperative society we now enjoy began with each of us as individuals choosing to act with integrity and engage in the liberating practices outlined earlier, we recognised that the vision of a more cooperative society must also be nurtured and sustained by the collective, that it would literally ‘take a village’ to raise and maintain the consciousness of this new more beautiful world.

We drew on indigenous wisdom traditions and adopted philosophies such as Ubuntu that emphasise the inter-connectedness of all life – that we inter-are. I am because you/we are.  We created Circles in which everyone was recognized as an equal and necessary part of the whole. We exchanged ideas, listened and allowed ourselves to be touched by feelings, fears and perceptions that were given space in the conversations. We set an intention to see each person in each moment without labels, judgements or masks and sought instead to extract the divine from each being we interacted with. We established a practice of fierce friendship where we developed the courage to hand responsibility back to each individual for their own journey, no longer trying to fix or please, but to see their strength and capability and support them by honouring it. Intimacy and trust flourished.

In time, fears such as not being heard, not being enough, being wrong or being excluded lessened because, as we witnessed each other without judgment, we each found our place with our uniqueness and with it a capacity to recognize our own potential. We began to see that what we had thought was our weakness was in fact our greatest strength and that our messy vulnerable human nature was, in part, what connected us to each other.

In Circle, we sat, we breathed, and we bathed in the Spaciousness which allowed answers to questions, messages, intuitions and solutions to be perceived and to be acted upon. We paid each other warm attention and made peace with our imperfections.

We began to witness the healing and enlivening effect these Circles were having as community came to be understood as inter-being.  A new culture developed in which we reestablished our connection to the natural world and began a practise of reverent listening, where we could tap into the Earth‘s wisdom, learn about strength and presence from the mountains, harmony and cooperation from the forests, and rootedness and sustainability from the life-sustaining altruism of the mother tree which, through the vast underground mycelium network, shares nutrients, information and energy to surrounding trees who don’t have the same strength or access to sunlight.

We learnt that the true value of the Earth wasn’t in stripping her of resources for commodities but in being sustained by the richness of her beauty, balance, serenity, wisdom, intrinsic inter-being and life-giving energy. Awe, wonder and gratitude became an instinctive repsonse – gratitude for the abundance we enjoy: the wealth of nature and its biodiversity; being able to plant a garden and harvest the seeds; the body’s drive towards balance and health; and by no means least, our ability to relate both to each other and to the Spaciousness.

Each of us also learned to consciously attend to our own physical body and its sensations and perceptions. We began to use practices such as Earthing (Grounding) which, whilst ancient and completely natural, had been lost from the Western lifestyle. Through dance and other physical practices we directed our attention to gravity which we came to see as the mechanism Mother Earth uses to pull us towards herself and connect. This magnetic connection, aided by the clearing and cleansing of old patterns we were engaged in as individuals, created an expanded energy field which not only raised the Earth to a new level of consciousness but activated new abilities and additional senses within the human.

Fortified by the gifts and contributions of each individual, the whole became self-sustaining and resilient with a great vibrancy and capacity for regeneration until we found ourselves increasingly incapable of relating to each other and the planet in ways that were antithetical to cooperative and harmonious flourishing. We noticed that we were no longer reliant on what once controlled us and the old system had become completely obsolete.

In summary, these are some of the qualities of our cooperative society:

• creative abilities are now used for the benefit of the collective rather than for the accumulation of individual wealth

 

• we recognise that we are individuated but not separated and that our actions create ripples in the Field of infinite potential so becoming conscious of our thoughts, actions, reactions  and intentions have become a practice

 

• we learned, and continue to learn, from the interconnectedness of life/ nature

 

• we nurture the sense of belonging each individual craves and practice self-compassion

 

• we cleared out old programmes of lack and scarcity and felt indescribable gratitude for the abundance we already enjoy

 

• we laugh more;

 

• we experience awe, wonder and gratitude;

 

• we have come to experience ourselves as ‘More’ through connecting with an expanded Awareness/Spaciousness/Consciousness

 

• we have replaced the consumption of negative media with frequencies that elevate

 

• we spend more time in and with nature and each other

 

we feed our spirit and nourish ourselves so that our cups overflow and giving, receiving and sharing feel natural and joyful

The new culture generated an energetic Field in which the impulse towards cooperation and the collective good became the dominant vibration, an unstoppable drive, and the beautiful cooperative society we now enjoy, and continue to nurture, was born.

 

Appendix

The Year 2050: How we birthed the more beautiful world

Before explaining what we did to birth this more co-operative society, this  more beautiful world we now enjoy and continue to nurture, we need to explain what we understand the nature of the world to be and how we understand it to be constructed.

Our understanding is that we live in an ocean of energy, what some have called a quantum soup, and what each of us does causes an effect, a ripple in the Higgs Field , also known as the Unified Field.  As we make choices and resonate with those who make choices on a similar frequency, we attract each other and clump together like atoms,  just as we are doing now,  drawn together in the common pursuit of reverse-engineering our cooperative society. We learned from experiments such as the famous double-slit experiment that attention and focus collapse potentialities into probabilities. Biological discoveries found that the reticular activation system, found at the base of the brain, filters out almost 98% of the input swirling around us, knowing what to filter out depending on what we expose it to i.e. what we focus on most.  Combining understandings physics and biological science, we could say that potentialities become stronger or weaker probabilities through strength and repetition of focus and what then manifests in our 3^rd dimensional reality is reflective of our focus.

The idea that we had to ‘make’ things happen became replaced by an understanding that physical reality is an out-picturing (a projection) of our attention and that therefore our work was to align our actions with our intentions, listen for guidance, feel the impulses and allow our intuition to direct our actions.  We came to understand that we live in a participatory universe and if the very act of focusing attention affects how particles (quanta) assemble /show up, then we needed to be very intentional about what we give our attention to (in the domain of our personal ‘reality tunnel’, not suggesting any individual has dominion over how the whole world shows up!)

As a result, we began to hold a vision of a more co-operative society and to speak and act as if it was already so, encouraged by research in 2023 that suggested it only takes 25% of a population, far fewer than at one time thought, to create a tipping point and create social change.  Some researchers spoke of a multiverse in which the more cooperative society already existed in a parallel dimension, and that it’s not so much that we created it as that we shifted into it (tipped into it?) through our collective thoughts, intentions and actions.

Jennifer’s story

Prompted by the symptoms of distress and lack of hope so many youngsters were exhibiting especially since the pivotal year of 2020, my attention turned to the things I could do to soothe and empower them, to create a ripple in the Higgs Field that would connect with other similar frequencies and create a stem change.

• I pursued a long-time fascination with quantum physics and took a deep dive into what in 2024 was an emerging field – Quantum Social Change. I immersed myself in learning about the quantum world and principles of quantum mechanics such as entanglement and the observer effect.
• Using the principle, ‘tend to the part of the garden only you can reach’, with a background in education, training, research and coaching, these are some of the real world actions I took:
• I created programs to train the trainers – adults who worked in organisations whose mission it was to educate (in the truest sense of the word) and empower young people – young people who had either already been excluded from school or who were at risk of being so. These programs alerted young people and their teachers and parents/care givers to the reality that being human is a magnificent thing; that we live in a magical world if only we realize it and use the inner resources (e.g. intention, focus, imagination, intuition) we innately possess to bring our dreams into this 3^rd dimension of material reality.
• I also designed courses for organisations who worked with parents whose children refused to go to school and who were therefore home-schooled (e.g. SquarePeg)
• I facilitated these programs both online and in real life.
• I created relational learning spaces on Sutra’s Transformational Learning Platform
• I wrote blogs and created a podcast called ‘Unshackled’ to spread the word – that we are powerful beings; that division and amplification of differences, rather than a focus on the ways in which we are more similar than different, was a tool to keep us distracted and fighting amongst ourselves.
• I joined Charles Eisenstein’s NAAS and Sanity Project and pooled energies with other like-minded visionaries I encountered there.
• I co-founded an intentions group called Pioneers in Possibility which has been meeting every 3-4 weeks since 2019 and which continues to support intentions for individual thriving as well as for the world at large.
• I co-founded the Contemplative Pedagogy Network which operates within the university sector to advance the use of contemplative/reflective methods in learning – contemplative methods themselves allowing space for a more relational and cooperative philosophy

Geraldine’s story:

• Inspired by Permacultures’ Whole System Design’ which uses deep looking and listening to see the ‘Whole’ and then come up with Systems which support and sustain this ‘Whole’, I noticed that this concept was applicable not just to the Garden and the Planet but also to the individual’s life and the Community.
• I designed my life in such a way that I gave priority to tuning into the Field and allowing myself to be guided. I spent the first 2 hours of my day meditating, doing Tai Chi and journaling. This practice had a profound effect on how I interacted with the World, and I was often blown away by the ripple effect this peace and presence had on the people I encountered.
• I taught adult classes in Creative Journaling and print making and used these classes as a gateway to self-exploration and accessing and expressing the core being that lies beneath all the programming and patterning. The fun and colourful nature of the classes made this work accessible to all.
• I hosted events based on the philosophy of Inter-being, coming together and experiencing what it is to work together, to inspire each other, know each other and help each other. Letting go of competition or comparing, honouring each individual unconditionally and without judgement, we worked as a whole to create a complete piece of art, acknowledging that a true Whole System Design is made up of many unique beings each with their individual contribution which makes the whole stronger and more adaptable, resourceful and creative – and in the process we deepened our experience of what cooperation and community can mean.
• I hosted a number of events called ‘Sacred Circles’ which brought people together to explore what could be created when we pool our energy, gifts and resources.  We drew a circle around ourselves and everything that comes within that circle is sacred because it teaches and evolves us.  In the drawing of the circle we became more conscious of what we were creating, and within the greater circle of the group we were witnessed, acknowledged and supported. We explored together in the forest where we created eco art and circle dances and expressed our journey through art journaling and a finished work of art.
• I taught Botanical Print courses in the National Park and local forests where we took inspiration from the forest system to explore the concept of interconnectedness. Each person printed an individual canvas that became a co-created collective artwork. The events concluded with a final exhibition where each person’s journey was expressed and seen within the collective.
• As part of a permaculture tree planting group, each Sunday I joined with others to plant trees on neighbours’ land. Planting trees gave us a sense of coming together for the greater good and I found the most important part of our Sundays was the pleasure of eating lunch together outdoors, usually made up of food grown organically on our land. Each person was enriched, not only by good food but by the conversation, laughter and inspiration of each individual who had chosen to spend their day in this deeply creative way.
• I created a Permaculture food forest and ran courses on Permaculture and Whole System Design – how this design concept can create systems which are generative and sustainable not only for a garden and the Planet but also for our life and health.
• We set up a small farm shop with a pay what you can ‘gifting’ system so that everyone had access to good health-giving organic food.
• We also instituted seed saving and sharing days and large-scale harvest banquets where we shared with the community the sense of abundance and generosity that can be created in a system that is sustainable and kind to the earth.

 

The story of the mycelium network

Barbara, Geraldine and Jennifer and others like them who met as members of Charles Eisenstein’s New and Ancient Story (NAAS) community and Sanity Project, and who strengthened their connection and contribution to this more beautiful world through the SUE Speaks Network, leveraged the reach of these online communities by tapping into their wisdom and existing networks to gain inspiration and sustenance, using those networks as the mother tree (which,through the vast underground mycelium network, shares nutrients, information and energy to surrounding trees who don’t have the same strength or access to sunlight).

As part of a cohort of committed humans who decided to exercise our agency and choose which reality we wished to inhabit, we chose to speak and act from that vision, taking action each day in service to the more beautiful world.  Some of those actions included taking full responsibility for clearing out our old programming (using a variety of methods such as EFT; journaling; dance; somatic awareness practices) and, as mentioned in the essay, supporting each other, both within Circle and outside, to do the same in order to make us more resonant with the world we were intent on bringing into physical reality.

Each of us committed to share the vision of the more beautiful world with three people; those three then did the same and so on until inter-connections, mutual support and the reality of inter-being took on the form of a sprawling mycelium network.  Together with  fellow visionaries, we sat in Circle, in silence, feeling and envisioning how this cooperative society, this more beautiful world, would look and intuiting how it would feel. Qualities such as love, integrity, empathy, loyalty, being of service, compassion, kindness, care, gratitude, connection, creativity, presence filled our being and sent signals out into the Unified Field which via a feedback loop returned, amplified, and created waves of resonant energy until we began to see and experience the new more beautiful world in our 3D physical reality.

Larger-scale actions played their part as well; however, in order for these to have fertile ground on which to land, take root and spread we needed the combined and cumulative actions of committed humans tilling the energetic soil, sowing energetic seeds and creating ripples in the energetic field.

Sending out waves of the more beautiful world in England, Germany and Ireland, as well as in(to) the Unified Field –  Jennifer Bright, Barbara Stahlberger, Geraldine Woessner