September 2007 | From the Editor
Transformation
My friend Devin, whose photos you have seen grace the pages of this magazine over the last year, and who, for the time being, languishes in a corporate job, recently hosted a book discussion night for some of his co-workers. The book he chose to share was Thom Hartmann’s The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight, an impeccably written and researched work that charts man’s discovery of the “ancient sunlight” locked inside oil that allowed humanity’s ranks to swell to more than three times what the planet can reasonably sustain, and outlines the consequences for us when that ancient sunlight runs out. Hartmann, who appears in the new film 11th Hour, invites us to “discover how spiritual renewal can transform our ecological crisis” by discovering “that you, personally, hold the power of personal and planetary transformation.”
This is not an unfamiliar concept to those of us engaged in the work of personal and cultural transformation. But for the people gathered that night to discuss the book, Hartmann, who is known for his down-to-earth, populist writings, was summarily dismissed as a kook for offering a spiritual message. The oft-repeated criticism of the book was that it did not present “practical solutions” for saving the planet. As if there is anything “practical” to the mess we are in now.
Last month while at the annual conference for the Institute for Noetic Sciences, I had the opportunity to meet author, mystic and “sacred activist” Andrew Harvey, whose Seven Laws of Sacred Activism, much like Hartmann’s book, offers a solution to the planetary crisis via personal transformation. And it is anything but “practical.” It is a gut-wrenching, soul-shaking, totalistic inner transformation that, in the end, produces a being that is a fusion of the mystic and the activist, forgiveness and compassion fused with righteousness and action, a selfless, egoless, collaborative being of pure intention. That ain’t no joke.
If I could be so bold as to paraphrase Andrew, my guess is that he’d most likely say that if you are looking for a “practical solution” you are a fool who should just go and sit at the base of the volcano and wait for it to erupt all over you, because you are not helping, and in fact, may actually be making it worse. If you look at it closely, you’ll see that most of the biggest crises facing humanity were cause by “practical solutions” to preceding problems. How many problems did oil solve before it became the problem?
How could trying a “practical solution” make things worse, you say? Well, consider this: the rational-mental man, the Modern Man, will hop up on that treadmill and expend tremendous energy trying to solve these problems “practically,” which is another way of saying, with a conventional approach dictated by the parameters of the dominant paradigm. But he gets nowhere with it because he fails to recognize that it is the paradigm itself that is defective. You can’t use science and technology to solve a psycho-spiritual crisis on a planetary scale. You can’t remain the person you are and expect everything to change around you. The Postmodern Human, the one capable of surviving in the 21st Century and navigating us through the Great Turning, will be the one who has recognized this, and gone through the fires of transformation.
Check out IONS at noetic.org, and Andrew Harvey at andrewharvey.net. It’s well worth the time.
And speaking of transformation, I guess now is as good a time as any to tell you that in August, Conscious Enlightenment received investment from Gaiam, Inc, a publicly-traded LOHAS products company. At the same time, Gaiam purchased the green living site Lime.com and the conscious living network site, Zaadz.com, creating a “unified LOHAS platform of like-minded companies, products, services and media — both online and off.” What this will mean in the way of changes remains to be seen, but whatever they will be, I’m sure they will prove interesting.
It was a beautiful summer.
— Charles Shaw
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