Reposted from Collapsing Into Consciousness
In Part One of this essay, we looked at defining the terms “paradigm shift” and “tipping point” as they apply to the multiple-systems failure scenario we find ourselves in today. As we and others have pointed out for years, these failures are pandemic. They are everywhere: Education, economy, government, social systems, peak everything, and on and on the list goes. to the point where it’s difficult to find systems that are thriving.
But nowhere are the failure of systems more critical, more in your face, and more threatening than Climate Change and Fukushima. Either one of these has the potential to sound the death knell of the entire human race. But before we move to the possibility of positive paradigm shifts and the tipping points needed to that might mitigate each, let’s touch on both.
Climate Change
As the 5th Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPPC) gets ready to release its damning report on September 27th, the climate deniers are in all-out damage control. Not to the damage the IPCC says is coming, but, typically, to the very report itself. In an earlier article, Collapsing into Consciousness reported that the document “doesn’t hold back. It says, very bluntly, just how bad global warming is going to be. It gives a sense of irreversibility, of scale…and, of direness.” In the process of trying to discount the panel’s findings, the contrarians are exhibiting nearly the full spectrum of the 5 stages of global warming denial, shown here:
Stage 1: Deny the problem exists
Stage 2: Deny we’re the cause and consensus denial
Stage 3: Deny it’s a problem
Stage 4: Deny we can solve it
Stage 5: It’s too late
But as 1,000 year floods and continuing heavy rains inundate parts of Colorado, it is a reminder of much more than awareness that the state has not had a good decade weather-wise: First, a pine bark beetle infestation caused by warmer weather has killed vast swaths of trees, while winter snowpack has been declining, leading to more intense summer drought, which helped fuel the the two most destructive wildfire in stater history within a 15 months span. Many of us will be anxiously waiting to hear if NOAA – The National Center For Atmospheric Research – will point at climate change as cause, but it appears that climate change has already come to Colorado, as it has in more and more places.
The wildfires which swept across 22 regions of Russia in the summer of 2010, are believed to be caused by a warming climate that made that summer the hottest on record up until then. The hotter weather increases the incidence of lightning, the major cause of naturally occurring biomass burning.
“What’s happening with the planet’s climate right now needs to be a wake-up call to all of us, meaning all heads of state, all heads of social organizations, in order to take a more energetic approach to countering the global changes to the climate,” said Russia’s then-President Dimitri Medvedev, in contrast to Russia’s long-standing position that human-induced climate change is not occurring.
We could expand ad infinitum about rising global temperatures, ocean acidification, sea level rise, droughts/floods, fires, dwindling snowpacks, methane releases, summer ice melt in Antarctica, and on and on, but nobody does that better than Guy McPherson, whose article, “19 ways climate changes is now feeding on itself,” says it more eloquently and much better that I can and saves a lot of space in this essay.
In the meantime, arctic drilling was fast-tracked by the Obama administration in the summer of 2012, which clearly tells us that we’re not going to get any help there, despite President Medvedev’s pleas.
The bottom line on climate change? Some scientists are saying that if the mean temperature of the planet rises by 4° Centigrade, we’re pretty much toast, and then go on to say that it could happen as early as 2030…give or take decade. Scientist estimate that we gained .74° degrees and that we’re now doing it 10 times faster than the average rate of ice-age recovery warming.
Will anything meaningful be done to mitigate the near-term extinction possibilities? It doesn’t appear so.
Fukushima
Despite 50% of the comments I received in my article, ‘At The Very Least, Your Days of Eating Pacific Ocean Fish are Over,” being negative and disagreeing about the “science,” claiming it wasn’t reliable because it was coming from alternative sources, just how serious Fukushima is continues to unfold, and the news ain’t pretty.
According to Dr. Helen Caldicott, an Australian physician, author, and anti-nuclear advocate who has founded several associations dedicated to opposing the use of nuclear power,
“…It is becoming apparent that the three molten cores, each weighing 120 to 130 tons have not only melted their way through 6 inches of steel in the reactor vessels, but they now either sit on concrete floors of the severely cracked containment buildings or they have melted their way into the earth itself – this, in nuclear parlance, is called ‘A Melt Through to China Syndrome’.”
As I’m writing this, Emergency efforts are underway at the Fukushima plant after a typhoon struck today and more contaminated water is being pumped into the Pacific Ocean. The Japanese government is estimating that as much as 600 tons of groundwater is now entering the Pacific Ocean each day. In addition, an official at the Nuclear Regulation Authority indicated growing alarm about the water leaks, calling them out of control and “creating a state of emergency.”
What’s the bottom line on Fukushima? Three on the four reactors have melted down. The fourth is in imminent danger of melting, a typhoon is flooding it, and it is no exaggeration to say that the fate of the whole world depends on No. 4 reactor. This has been confirmed by most reliable experts like Dr. Arnie Gundersen and Dr. Fumiake Koide. Heaven help us if there’s another earthquake.
Time for a Tipping Point and a Paradigm Shift.
What has become painfully obvious is that humanity is not going to survive unless we experience some kind of a paradigm shift in the ways we think and how we view our world.
In the last sentence of Part 1 of this article I wrote, “but we can work on creating a new paradigm.” But can we really create a new paradigm? Can we design a new way of doing what hasn’t been working for us? I suggest not. We will not find solutions to the overwhelming problems that the we face from the modern and postmodern perspectives we view them from. The tagline in the Collapsing into Conscious banner that says. “because the level of thinking that got us here is not sufficient for the task ahead,” was not chosen lightly.
No, it’s not just about solutions to climate change and Fukushima, although those must be found. It is, quite simply, who we are that is the problem. And until we change who we are, we will continue to have problems that threaten our existence on the planet.
Who are we?
We’re the ones who moved off the land about 6,000 years ago into the cities. We’re the ones who created civilizations. But when we did that, we created what some of us are calling “the Wound of Separation.” We became separate from the land. We became separate from each other. We forgot and we began to dominate the earth, instead of remembering that we are a subset of a larger ecology/system. We forgot that we need each other. We turned religion into power, dogma, and money, separated from God by priests of all kinds. We forgot we’re all ONE, connected, and that what we do to each other and to the planet, we do to ourselves.
We moved from unconscious Unified Consciousness to the Unconscious Separation Consciousness that we now live. It’s time to recognize that separation means holding onto latent psychological wounding – our shadows – and to start healing and releasing The Wounds of Separation and create a new tipping point.
It is the 11th hour and it’s time for humanity to grow up and wake up.
It is only by helping to create this new tipping point of 10% of the population moving into the emergent Unified Field of Consciousness, that we will solve the problems facing us. This is not about “fixing” one or two problems, but about raising the vibrational level of the planet so as to counterbalance the huge power and resistance of separation consciousness that got us into this mess.
We know what needs to be done. We have tools and we have the means. It’s a question now of having enough people who are ready, who have the intention, who are willing to do the necessary work, and who are eager to make the leap through The Wounds of Separation into Conscious Unified Consciousness.
With Conscious Evolution, we can consciously align ourselves with the co-creative evolutionary impulse and take an intentional and active role in helping guide humanity in a direction that resolves the massive resistance and potentially destructive tendencies arising in Separation mode.
Without this conscious shift in awareness of who we are, it is likely this brief experiment called humanity may well disappear.
For more information on Conscious Evolution Coaching, start here
Author Gary Stamper is the founder and manager of Collapsing into Consciousness, a website that is a first-of-its-kind community of like-minded visionaries, problem solvers and early adapters focused on real world transition solutions. Gary is in the process of converting the website membership in to a gifting community.
Visionary Michael Wolff Is the founder of Conscious Evolution Coaching, a social and collaborative as well as an integral evolutionary practice. Conscious Evolution Coaching (CEC) is for Conscious Evolutionaries who wish to Birth the New Era by co-creating the evolution breakthrough of human consciousness.
“Will anything meaningful be done to mitigate the near-term extinction possibilities? It doesn’t appear so.”
“We know what needs to be done. We have tools and we have the means.”
These statements appear to be in conflict. Without any intention to be snarky or hostilely provocative, I have to ask if you can elaborate a little here. I’m getting pretty old now, and I’ve spent a good deal of my adult life doing inner work, coming to terms with myself and my mortality, building a deep-seated understanding of our interconnectedness, etc., and yet the big picture here on Planet Earth just seems to keep getting worse. For a long time I held onto some hope for the quantum leap in the larger body of humanity that you are apparently alluding to, but it always remains a wishful potential just out of reach. Do you really believe a “change in consciousness”, as my late friend Michael Toms used to say, is the answer or even realistically possible? Maybe I’m just worn out and my own day in the sun is over, but more workshops and counseling are starting to seem inadequate for the task. What exactly is the plan?
Good questions Izzy. I’m tempted to offer my own feedback, but I’d like to let Gary go first.
Hi Izzy,
Thanks for your comment. What I mean by the first statement is that we’re not going to be able to rely on TPTB to mitigate the damage that’s being done. Too many vested interests.
We – you and I – and other conscious people are going to have to do it ourselves, and I believe th only way we’ll accomplish it – if it can be done at all – is to have a tipping point in consciousness that literally “makes them do it” to paraphrase FDR.
I’m not talking about workshops – although I do them – I’m talking about serious movement by into unified fields of consciousness. We know it’s there, and we know how to do it. Find someone to help you and others to shift into that consciousness. I think it’s our only hope.
Hi, Izzy,
I also sense deeply and clearly a growing hopelessness. The unstated and stated promise of workshops and theories and philosophies and healing, that they would lead to a quantum leap of consciousness and thus a rejuvenation on this planet, simply has not occurred on a large enough game-changing scale.
While one’s inner work can have an impact beyond oneself and ripple beyond oneself, I wonder how much these transformational impact can percolate from the multi-dimensional and unseen fields into this 3D world.
My experience is that such perlocating impact is quite slow, compared to the impact of the massive and well-organized corporate campaign, e.g., of Apple 5s.
Nevertheless, I take comfort that the energy generated by my inner-work will continue to the far ends of the universe, even though the world may end and my body will pass away one day.
And not only the energy generated by my inner-work, but also the energy generated by my heartful interaction with this very messy world (regardless of its visible results), will have the same effect.
I will become just a star dust in the future, but these energies will continue to be used and enjoyed by the cosmos, in whatever forms and ways it thinks fit.
I cannot figure it out with my ego, but I can trust.
Or more accurately, I am learning to trust.
Thus, Izzy, you and I are doing invaluable work.
I want to acknowledge the comments of both of you—Izzy and Daniel. I also want to acknowledge the inner work you are both doing on yourselves. Yes indeed it matters in the macrocosm, and the truth is, none of us really knows how MUCH it matters or where it is making a difference. People in the world who are conscious enough to know the insanity of an attack on Syria may have just averted World War III. That is one “small” victory that is making a world of difference, literally. The inner work is 1/2 of the work you came here to do. So please keep doing it—for yourselves and for all of us.
“‘A Melt Through to China Syndrome’.”
That can’t be good! But what would likely happen if that were underway? What is implied by this, were it to be the case?
Y’know, I don’t pay a great deal of attention to popular/corporate media. I know these sources are misleading, at best — on most things. And the edge/fringe media isn’t much better, since any nutball with a keyboard can generate it, without any regard for journalistic methods or standards. But I have noticed Fukushima ranks very low down on the list of “urgent” topics and issues these days, insofar as media is concerned.
A “paradigm shift” of any sigificance sure will have to address this fundamental communications problem.
Hey, James…
A paradigm shift of just 10% of the planet’s population into the Unified Field of Consciousness – not just awareness, but being able to embody it – IS very significant. theWill we get there? I have no idea. Do we have to try? Absolutely! Join us!
One hour ago (news):
Magnitude-5.3 earthquake hits Japan’s Fukushima
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2013/09/19/japan-fukushima-nuclear-plant/2835493/
That can’t be good, either.
“What has become painfully obvious is that humanity is not going to survive unless we experience some kind of a paradigm shift in the ways we think and how we view our world.”
And it would have to happen at breakneck speed, in any historically grounded sense of time and duration. Historically, paradigm shifts have been rather glacial by comparison to what we’re needing now.
What we require, it seems to me, is a very rapidly mounting and planet-scaled (though also locally oriented) peace-loving social movement which almost instantaniously replaces most of the modern technological economy/lifeway with vastly less energy intensive ways, e.g. bicycles and shovels and hoes rather than automobiles and industrial agriculture (etc.).
This obviously means putting all ideas about “the odds” out of the picture, as “the odds” are overwhelmingly against such an occurrence happening in timely fashion and without bloodspilling.
It can’t hurt to try. But “trying” can’t look like we tend to think of it. A little magic fairy dust and a heap of wu wei (google it) might do it. But this would amount to a global awakening!
“What we require, it seems to me, is a very rapidly mounting and planet-scaled (though also locally oriented) peace-loving social movement which almost instantaniously replaces most of the modern technological economy/lifeway with vastly less energy intensive ways, e.g. bicycles and shovels and hoes rather than automobiles and industrial agriculture (etc.).”
Yes…that’s a paradigm shift. Good luck to us all.
As you already know yourself, Gary, luck will offer us no help or aide. What we seem to require is a naturalistic miracle, a movement of the heart into the hands and feet — an embodiment of integrity which begins with a leaping into motion with a felt trust/faith in the rightness of emergent integrity (a.k.a., healing).
Gary Stamper:
“A paradigm shift of just 10% of the planet’s population into the Unified Field of Consciousness – not just awareness, but being able to embody it – IS very significant. the Will we get there? I have no idea. Do we have to try? Absolutely! Join us!”
Yes, the embodiment of the emergent “dynamic wholeness-awareness”, which is my preferred way to say “Unified Field of Consciousness,” is key. Such embodiment is necessarily both personal and transpersonal, ordinary and extraordinary, knowable and mysterious…. It’s paradoxical. We can live it. Embody it. But to do so requires a radical (utter) commitment to integrity, which is both wholeness and honesty/truthfulness.
I love that you said “embody”. That’s the absolute key! Our culture has long divided spirit and matter into fictions of separation which have wounded the individual and collective soul. The body is thought of as material, and spirit (along with mind/consciousness) is imagined as immaterial. It almost doesn’t matter than one of these two is typically conceived of as more essential or valuable than the other, because the wound of separation is born/e here in the original split and chasm.
The result is a fragmentation of body and mind, intuition and intelligence/thought, psyche and soma, value and meaning, sensual and spiritual, and on and on and on…. And the path to integrity begins with a motion, a movement, an action — a setting into motion of authenticity as integrity. A living and embodiment of wholeness. Wholeness is fully present always, but we have to live it for it to unfold into our lives as embodiment. We have to embody our integrity.
In this context, this means (in very large part) quitting the destructive culture of dis-integrity / disintegration (which is a mode of embodiment). Culture needs to be understood as a mode or expression of embodiment. One has to look carefully to see this, but it is. Cultural revolution (“paradigm shifting”) has to be enacted to be meaningful and real. The conversations, visions, insights, knowledges…, need to be enacted and embodied — lived. So far we’re not doing this part so well. Our dreams are too much in our minds and hearts without having made their way into our feet and hands. And when the feet and hands enter more fully into the dreams and visions … each will unfold their emergent wisdom into our lived experience and world. And not before.