Tuesday, October 26, 2010

The Blind Men & the Elephant

On Fareed Zakaria’s latest show, Kishore Mahbubani (former President of the UN Security Council and current Dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore), when discussing the consequences of America’s decline on the world stage, made the astonishing statement that “...for the first time we are living in a world where the experts don’t know what’s happening...I have never seen this kind of global uncertainty...” and all my antennae went on alert.

Of course the experts don’t know what’s happening—they cannot see beyond their limited area of expertise, and they aren’t looking in the right direction. It’s exactly like the blind men and the elephant: each one feels a particular portion of the elephant—the trunk, tail, leg, ear and flank—and interprets the whole based on the singular part he encounters. This narrow vision cannot even see the problem, much less propose a solution. What is needed is the interpretation of those whose vision is broad enough to encompass the whole, whose concern is neither self-centered nor self-serving.

Our politicians obviously don’t possess this vision. With the recent crisis there was an extraordinary opportunity to create real change, and what happened? Rather than changing our attitude and how we do things, transforming the world for the betterment of all, we have been scrambling to restore the status quo with all our might. It’s not gonna happen. While we are loath to admit it, the old paradigm is in its death throes.

With the world leaders all too invested in their own agendas, refusing to see the writing on the wall, and Big Money focused on grabbing as much as they can as quickly as possible before the whole thing collapses, what will it take to create the transformation the world so desperately needs? Nothing less than a global uprising. An uprising of the people—fed up with the machinations of both governments and corporations interested only in perpetuating their own power and wealth—a rEvolution whose time has come. The Evolution Revolution.

The Evolution Revolution is an expansion of Consciousness quietly taking place on the planet through those whose minds and hearts are open to a new way of being. They have evolved from homo sapien to Jeremy Rifkin’s homo empathicus, and embrace the concept of compassion in business and society. They understand our interconnectedness—and that for the few to profit while the vast majority suffers is obscene and intolerable.

Mr. Rifkin, author of The Empathic Civilization: The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis, asks whether we can “reach biosphere consciousness and global empathy in time to avert planetary collapse.” At the rate we are going, pouring all our energy and resources into a desperate attempt to resurrect an American Dream gasping its last breath, it will never happen. An answer in the affirmative can only be found in the Evolution Revolution.  

www.evolution-revolution-handbook.com