Happy Easter! Whether or not you are celebrating Easter or Passover, this time of year always reminds us about the miracle of death and rebirth. It is a time of renewal and possibility: the welcoming of another chance.
And that’s particularly timely right now because many of us feel we are going through a death of sorts. We sense that we have reached the end of something: the end of peace, the end of global liberalism, the end of NATO and the West, the end of cheap energy, the end of democracy. The beginning of the end of the world.
But the crises we face on many fronts are symptomatic of a deeper problem, with more potential repercussions than those of any single cataclysmic event. They are simply a measure of the vast disparity between our definition of ourselves and our truest essence. We’ve reached the point where we can no longer live according to this false view of who we really are.
What’s ending the story we’ve been told up until now about who we are and how we’re supposed to live — and in this ending lies the only path to a better future.
Undoubtedly, the scientific discovery with the most pervasive hand in our current worldview is Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution through natural selection and his friend British philosopher Herbert Spencer’s coining of the term “survival of the fittest.”
As an inadvertent consequence (and even though he amended some of his ideas later), Darwin unleashed upon the world a metaphor that came to represent the human experience: Life as war. An individual or population thrives only at another one’s expense.
For many decades, since writing The Field and my other books, and researching so many scientific disciplines it has become clear to me that the eat or be eaten lives we’ve chosen to lead are not consistent with who we really are.
In my research, I discovered other societies who live very differently from us, with a world view more in keeping with the findings of the new science. These cultures conceive of the universe as an indivisible whole, and this central belief has bred an extraordinarily different way of seeing and interacting with the world. They believe that they are in relationship with all of life – even with the earth itself.
They’ve understood the essential nature of humanity as a coming together—a communion—and as a consequence, they live happier lives, with lower divorce statistics, fewer troubled children, less crime and violence, and a stronger community.
They have chosen a better way to live, a more authentic way to be—the way, I believe, that you and I were meant to live. And they do so because they’ve bought into another narrative—another world view of who we are and why we’re here than that espoused by our current Western culture, most particularly by our current science.
Science is a relentless process of discovery. No one scientist writes the final story for all time. As new findings come to light, new chapters constantly revise and even supplant earlier versions. Currently, we are undergoing a radical revision of our understanding of ourselves and our world.
Many of the theories we have held sacred, including the original theory of evolution or the notion of us as isolated survival machines largely powered by our inflexible genes, are being refined as more information about the nature of our world unfolds.
The scientific story of who you are has drastically changed, and we must change with it in order to survive. The competitive impulse that is now a major part of our self-definition and that forms the undercurrent of all our lives is the same mindset that has created every one of the large global crises now threatening to destroy us.
Every day in their laboratories, these frontier scientists have caught a tiny glimmer of new possibility. They’d found that we are something far more impressive than evolutionary happenstance. Their work suggests a decentralized but unified intelligence that is far grander and more exquisite than Darwin or Newton have imagined, a process that is not random or chaotic, but intelligent and purposeful.
The vast complexity of life is not one giant accident—or struggle for dominion. They are beginning to offer us nothing less than a new science of unity, delivering back to us a hopeful view of our universe in an age defined by competitive singularity. Nothing stood alone. Everything was a symphony, not a batch of single notes.
Their work hints at human abilities beyond what we’d ever dreamed possible and fully acknowledging them will help us take a final evolutionary step in our own history by at last understanding ourselves in all of our potential. Living consciousness is not an isolated entity but increases order in the rest of the world.
We have incredible powers, to heal ourselves, to heal the world—in a sense, to make it as we wish it to be.
This revolution in scientific thinking also promises to give us back a sense of optimism, something that has been stripped out of our sense of ourselves with the arid vision of twentieth-century science and philosophy. We are not isolated beings living our desperate lives on a lonely planet in an indifferent universe.
We never were alone. We were always part of a larger whole.
During this Easter weekend, hold onto the following thought: we have far more power than we realize, to heal ourselves, our loved ones, even our communities. Each of us has the ability—and together a great collective power—to improve our lot in life.
Our life, in every sense, is in our hands.
