Every day, it seems, I’m being asked to be part of something evolutionary.  Evolutionary groups and committees. Evolutionary teleseminars and meetings.  Evolutionary leaps. New paradigm this, new paradigm that. Co-creation. Emergent. 2012. End of the world. Beginning of the world.  

I’m more than happy to join in the fray largely because I live in hope that we’ll eventually fumble our way through to something new.  But what has saddened me about most things evolutionary is that, in the main, much of what passes for efforts to create supposedly new prescriptions for living are being unconsciously assembled with a very old set of tools. 

The people of America, at long last, have had enough of unfairness. From Wall Street to Main Street, they have taken to the streets. Teachers, soldiers, postal workers – all those in the core traditional jobs of American public sector – are suffering huge layoffs and now ready to join the millions of people now out of work and living without health insurance or the likely prospect of another job.

I have sad personal news to report – the death of our family’s beloved pet, Ollie.  In early September, Ollie suffered from congestive heart failure.  After a week spent in doggie intensive care and then several weeks more back and forth from our vet, he finally lost the fight a week ago and passed on.  

Ollie’s extremely non-competitive behaviour in part, inspired me to write The Bond. I thought of him in relation to some new evidence I just discovered about why we are kind to each other.

Ollie was a small, tri-colored Cavalier King Charles spaniel and, characteristic of the breed which was bred by royal decree, he was born with a peculiar sense of regal entitlement and a permanent look of disdain. Ollie belonged in a Peanuts cartoon, the curmudgeonly dog whose thought balloon, like Snoopy’s, continuously registered his exasperation at his clueless owners.

I’m back from holiday and with fabulous news.  The 9/11 Global Peace Intention Experiment has mushroomed into an extraordinary and enormous event. Every day, more organizations are offering to work together to make the anniversary of 9/11 into a day of unity, evolution and peace. 

Tens of thousands of Arabs and Americans are joining together for the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 terror attack on New York’s Twin Towers for a remarkable experiment: to discover whether their collective intention can bring greater peace to an area of conflict.

As you’ve probably heard, my adopted country, Great Britain, is on fire.  From Manchester to London entire communities have been set alight, stores and houses vandalized, people beaten up, and five murdered as of this writing. Last Wednesday, my sleepy suburban corner of London was crawling with policemen, acting on inside information that our area was targeted next. 

Commentators have been busy, trying to work out the collective significance of the anarchy on the streets.  Who is doing this?  Are they provocateurs, bussed in from the outside?  Or well organized protests against globalization?  Or perhaps the criminal underbelly of society?  

For most of the last 10 days, I’ve been on the phone.  On the other end of the line has been virtually every important thought leader in the human potential movement: Jack Canfield, Marianne Williamson, Michael Beckwith, Marci Shimoff, Steven Covey, Howard Martin, Barbara Marx Hubbard, Jean Houston, Lisa Nichols, Bobbi DePorter, Eric Pearl, Arjuna Ardagh, Gay and Katie Hendricks, Don Beck, James O’Dea, Arielle Ford, Janet Attwood, Bryan Hubbard, Katherine Woodward Thomas. 

You name them, I spoke to them this week.  And I’m carrying on next week, too.

Recently, I came across an article in the New York Times about our inherent ‘thirst’ for fairness.  The story provided evidence for the fact that human beings, even in primitive hunter-gatherer societies, have an enormous distaste for hierarchical extremes and a deeply and finely honed sense of fairness.  

Recently I was in Vermont, speaking at the annual American Society of Dowsers annual conference — a delightful experience – where I learned of the burgeoning Transition Town of Montpelier, one of 90 official Transition Town initiatives in the US. 

As you may know, the Transition Town movement, which has now captured the imagination of citizens in 34 countries and half of the US’s fifty states, started life in an unlikely spot — the tiny town of Totnes in southwest corner of the UK.  It is the brainchild of Rob Hopkins, a builder and teacher of permaculture — sustainable land use design, based on natural patterns in nature.  

The brain stubbornly refuses to operate according to our current notions of reality. Not only does it have difficulty working out the difference between a thought and an action, it also appears to be an organ without an understanding of time as a forward progression. 

Extraordinary new evidence shows that the brain cannot distinguish between the recall of our own past (called ‘episodic memory’) and imagination of our future events. Indeed, the same areas of the brain are activated for both activities.