IF NOT US, WHO? IF NOT NOW, WHEN?
Our economy is in crisis, wars are continuing to add to their deadly toll, and the balance of world power is shifting dramatically. Meanwhile, trust in government is at a historic low. Are we entering an era of chaos and decline, or are we poised to jump to a higher order?
TODAY’S MOUNTING WORLD PROBLEMS ARE MERELY SYMPTOMS
of a fractured, dualistic way of thinking (us vs. them, human vs. nature, win/lose) that is dangerously out of touch with the acute interdependence, wholeness, and unity in diversity of all that lives. Looking outward but not inward, reacting to external symptoms but not the root cause, we can’t see why our world is out of balance. No wonder! As Einstein famously said, “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”
“Throughout history, the really fundamental changes in societies have come about not from dictates of governments and the results of battles but through vast numbers of people changing their minds. By deliberately changing the internal image of reality, people can change the world.”(Willis Harman, Global Mind Change: The Promise of the 21st Century)
Only such a shift in our shared field of consciousness, a collective waking up to our real human potential, will put us on the path to a life-enhancing future. But how can such a shift occur? Will it happen only after a fatal tipping point has been reached, with nothing to break our fall, or can we now intentionally choose to wake up to our shared responsibility for our future?
Signing the Call to Conscious Evolution: Our Moment of Choice may seem to you like a small, merely symbolic action. Yet even a single butterfly moving its wings can, according to Chaos Theory, cause a ripple effect large enough to change global weather patterns forever. Consciousness, similarly, is a unified field that can shift dramatically when the spontaneous emergence of new possibility captures increasing attention. Witness the sudden, over-night collapse of the Soviet system of communism when the real possibility of freedom took hold in people’s minds.
As you join in signing this historic document, and as you go on to initiate conversations about our collective future as this document invites, you can be confident that your voice will be heard and your profound influence powerfully felt
This Call to Conscious Evolution: Our Moment of Choice was jointly issued by thirty-eight thought leaders and change agents whose names you will find listed below. They share a global, long-range perspective and a deep faith in our combined creative capacities to shape our own destiny. The future, in their view, is not what “happens to us” but rather what we can NOW imagine - actually see, taste, and feel - as possible and then go forward to create through our actions. This group of individuals who met to address the global prospects for evolutionary leadership on July 26 of this year at the Chopra Center in Carlsbad, CA were invited by the Chopra Foundation, Source of Synergy Foundation, and Association for Global New Thought. Their legitimacy however comes from a universal mandate that empowers us all: If not us, who? If not now, when?
These collective thought leaders know that the way we create meaning and purpose in our lives is through the narratives we tell about ourselves, where we’ve come from, what we aim for and why - and if we don’t like the way it’s reading now, we can change our story. This is a radical view of human freedom at a time that many fear our fate has already been sealed.
The butterfly, for which the global ripple effect is named, is a potent symbol of transformation. While mere change can mean becoming an ever bigger caterpillar, transformation is fundamentally different. The caterpillar inside its cocoon dissolves into a liquid carrying imaginal cells that construct an entirely new kind of creature with great beauty and the power of flight. The human imagination has a similar power - to perceive entirely new possibilities in our present conditions and to bring those possibilities into being. That is why Einstein also reasoned, “Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.”
Signing the Call to Conscious Evolution: Our Moment of Choice signifies that you are ready to begin encircling our world, as its old forms are dissolving, with fresh imagining of what is possible, to share this sense of possibility with as many others as you can, and to work with them to consciously create with guided action a peaceful, just, harmonious and vibrantly beautiful world that reflects in every way the true nobility of our common humanity. The time has come.
Sign the Call to Conscious Evolution: Our Moment of Choice
Read more about The Call to Conscious Evolution: Our Moment of Choice
FOUNDING SIGNATORIES
Chopra Center, Carlsbad, California, July 26, 2008
Michael Beckwith, Joan Borysenko, Gregg Braden, Rinaldo Brutoco, Thomas Callanan, Deepak Chopra, Mallika Chopra, Dale Colton, Gordon Dveirin, Duane Elgin, Leslie Elkus, Barbara Fields, Debbie Ford, Ashok Gangadean, Kathleen Gardarian, Tom Gegax, Charles Gibbs, Kathy Hearn, Jean Houston, Barbara Marx Hubbard, Bruce Lipton, Judy Martin, Rod McGrew, Steve McIntosh, Lynne McTaggart, Deborah Moldow, James O’Dea, Carter Phipps, Wendy Craig-Purcell,Carolyn Rangel, Rustum Roy, Peter Russell, Gerard Senehi, Emily Squires, Brian Swimme, Diane Williams, Marianne Williamson, Tom Zender.