Today is 11-11-11, which is being talked up as some sort of portal to a new world, so I began assembling this blog at 11 am, just to keep in the spirit of things.

Actually I am asked, quite frequently, about evolution, and how I think it is going to go down. Are moments like 11-11-11 some sort of ‘sign’ of new consciousness that will suddenly envelop us like fairy dust and signal the start of the realm of the good and the true?

To that I have one stock answer. It’s going to start small and grow big, and it’s going to take a lot of conscious hard work.

Today is 11-11-11, which is being talked up as some sort of portal to a new world, so I began assembling this blog at 11 am, just to keep in the spirit of things.

Actually I am asked, quite frequently, about evolution, and how I think it is going to go down. Are moments like 11-11-11 some sort of ‘sign’ of new consciousness that will suddenly envelop us like fairy dust and signal the start of the realm of the good and the true?

To that I have one stock answer. It’s going to start small and grow big, and it’s going to take a lot of conscious hard work.

The reason I say this is that we’re talking here about a major change of mental hardwiring. In order to evolve, we have to move from one particular mindset – I win, you lose, or Us vs Them – to another type of mindset: I win and we all win or Us plus Them.

That is not a small order, because I win, you lose, is deeply embedded in our psyches and in every aspect of our lives. It’s the web of our entire political/financial system. It’s even deeply embedded in much of the consciousness movement.

The reason our evolution/revolution is going to start small is because that’s how all revolutions start – with crisis over the way forward.

On the streets

The place to look for conscious evolution, to my mind, is not from think tanks and collections of luminaries but on the streets of most major cities, where the Occupy Movements are taking place.

Today I made contact with Occupy London Stock Exchange this week and spoke at length to Ian Chamberlain.

Ian comes across as a fairly enlightened guy – wedded to the idea of helping people for a living. He’s the kind of student who happily volunteered for charity work as an undergraduate. Until October of last year, Ian Chamberlain’s life was on a firm trajectory upward.

After graduating with a university degree in theology and religious studies, he chose a career as a community worker in Morecambe in the Northwest of England on a government-funded project to ease community tensions and create greater cohesion between the northern indigenous population and the large influx of Polish immigrants in the area.

It takes a special type of person to find meaning and purpose in essentially convincing the northern working class lads not to bash in the heads of Pollacks whom they believe are stealing their jobs.

Out of a job

When the British government finally got to grips with how broke it was after bailing out the likes of the Royal Bank of Scotland, funding for these kinds of programs was the first to go. Ian lost his job, his flat and any prospects for future work. ‘Basically,’ he says, ‘my quality of life just ended.’

Since that time, he has worked part-time in charity work on the equivalent of half of his last salary and now lives in a rented room in London with a batch of strangers. Recently, he was shortlisted, but didn’t make the final round for a position in international relations, which offered a salary of £19,000 - less than he’d made part time at his old job. The job had 314 applicants, including several PhDs with 20 years of experience in foreign relations.

One possible way forward for the 27 year old was to go back to university for another degree – until the current Coalition government trebled university fees and the Labour Party announced its own alternative, which would be to simply ‘double’ them.

The option available to his father, whose ticket out from loss-leader farming to a long and satisfying career in civil service was a free university education, is no longer available to the son.

‘In a way,’ Ian said, about his desire to join the Occupy London Stock Exchange, ‘it was from a sense of desperation. The alternatives are just not there through a political movement.’

Evolutionary process

Three things are fantastically interesting about this movement as an evolutionary process. The first is the broad spectrum of involvement among all political persuasions. Although the press likes to portray the Occupyees as a load of communists, welfare cheats and general ne’er do wells, a good deal of London’s Occupy movement is largely made up of middle-class or educated people who are out of work.

Nevertheless, this middle-class majority is a rainbow coalition – from hardline conservatives grown disillusioned with Thatcher/Reagan neo-con hands-off economics to hardline members of Labour Party, interested in full-scale wealth re-distribution. One member of the Occupy London movement, a former Conservative member of the City Council in Cambridge, was so pissed off by the decisions made by the current party that he quit the council - and the party.

The common denominator uniting everyone is the realization that the entire current political and economic system is a busted flush.

The second interesting part of this movement is the broad support it has begun to attract from outsiders. The Occupy London movement is only three weeks old, and yet receives, on average, £1000 a day in donations – much of these surreptitious gifts from old guard bankers, who see their own jobs at risk from the ever greater web of credit-default-swap style phony casino instruments of investment banking

In America, a Quinnipiac University poll found that two-thirds of New York voters agreed with the views of the Occupy Wall Street protestors – including 81 per cent of Democrats, 58 per cent of independents and even 35 per cent of Republicans. Nearly three-quarters said that the demonstrators could stay as long as they want.

Virtually no agenda on the planet unites people so well.

Consensus agendas

The final aspect of this movement that signals a big change is the deep desire of the Occupiers to do things differently. The groups are voting on issues by a special consensus method, in which everyone has the chance to have any objections heard and incorporated into the final product. Although laborious, this process thus far has worked, as OLSX feel their way toward a manifesto.

‘It is astonishing that such a diverse group of people can find agreement on issues that are very complicated,’ says Ian. ‘We have a real appetite to find alternative ways of engaging.’

Over dinner, when we were discussing the Occupy Movement, my husband began singing a Leonard Cohen song, Everybody Knows:

You probably know the words:

‘Everybody knows the dice are loaded. . . Everybody knows the deal is rotten. . . from the bloody cross on top of Calvary to the beach in Malibu. . .’

Although they have many placards, one the Occupy Movement needs is ‘Evolution Starts Here.’