The Great Upshift

We need to upshift our world, and for that, we need to upshift our consciousness.

What a privilege it has been to review this book. The 35 authors step us beyond the fear-based and crisis-ridden dialogues that we are being exposed to every day, to instead honour the historic ‘tipping point’ that indigenous cultures have prophesied and increasingly warned us about. This provides humanity with an evolutionary choice-point that is full of possibility and potential, but that requires conscious participation and an upshift in our individual and collective consciousness. It may even be, as Bruce Lipton points out, that ‘from an evolutionary standpoint, we are exactly where we need to be,’ with humanity being given the extraordinary opportunity to co-create the future that we want, with crisis and chaos’a natural step in an unfolding process, rather than a tragic end to a broken planet.’ As Thomas Legrand says, ‘The real question of our times is not about whether or to what extent our societies will collapse. It is whether humanity will finally grow into adulthood. It is the great earth transition whose time has come.’

Many of the authors highlight this need for the human species to realise its unique evolutionary potential and to explore what evolutionary emergence might look like. The cosmologist Jude Currivan asks, ‘What if, instead of human consciousness as something we have and experiencing it at different levels of self-awareness, we come to understand it as an empirical reality that mind and consciousness are what we and the whole world truly are?’ Such understanding calls us to recognise kinship and participation in a world where there is differentiation, complexity and diversity, but which is essentially whole. It calls us to embrace, as Gregg Braden says, the ’dormant abilities and extraordinary potentials far beyond what was believed to be possible in the past.’ Such ‘imaginal potentials’ are something Anneloes Smitsman explores in her own chapter and Pavel Luksha talks of humanity evolving into a ‘planetary species, in alignment with earth and its systems.’

Karan Singh talks of ‘the plurality of human striving for the divine’ or ‘ekam sad viprah bahuda vadanti’ – the truth is one, the wise call it by many names. The striving mentioned is the ‘reaching out into wholeness’ which is something that is discussed throughout the book, with the recognition that life is fundamentally fractal, regenerative and alive with meaning. Increasing complexity over time is the evolutionary pattern of the universe, but as Anneloes Smitsman mentions, coherence is also essential ‘Evolutionary coherence is a dynamic state of harmonic resonance, a spontaneous collaboration between the diverse elements and relationships of complex living systems. A natural state of attunement to the innate wholeness and unity of life.’

The non-local unified reality of our universe, which has now been affirmed through the award of the 2022 Nobel Prize for physics, naturally encompasses multidimensional levels of sentience. As recognised by ancient spiritual and indigenous wisdom teachings over the millennia - we have innate perceptual capacities that are naturally attuned to serve the regenerative emergence of the whole, but that have been profoundly inhibited by the predominant materialistic worldview. Rather than damning the influence of science, however, Robert Atkinson suggests that we instead ‘see science and spirituality as complementary ways of knowing the mysteries of the universe.’ And this accords with Stanislav Grof’s Beyond the Brain statement, ‘Western science is approaching a paradigm shift of unprecedented proportions, one that will change our concepts of reality under human nature, bridge the gap between ancient wisdom and modern science, and reconcile the differences between eastern spirituality and western pragmatism.’

This reconciliation between nature and the divine is something that Swami Vivekananda termed ‘the manifestations of a cosmic intelligence,’ ‘We now see all the various forces of cosmic energy, such as matter, thought, force, intelligence and so forth, are simply the manifestations of that cosmic intelligence, or, as we should call it henceforth, the supreme Lord.’

David Lorimer explores how upshifting the world and upshifting ourselves are two sides of the same coin, and that this unprecedented period of time demands that we each step up to become the best version of who we innately are within our own local contexts and communities. That’s why we need the counsel of contributors such as Elena Mustokova and Alfred de Zayas, who ground us in unitive justice, Lynne McTaggart who reminds us about the toxicity of human isolation and Kingsley Dennis highlights the need for revitalised hope for those who feel themselves abandoned by society. Charles Eisenstein calls for ‘technologies of reunion’ that challenge the story of the separate self and that acknowledge peace as both an inner and outer process that encompasses the rest of nature. And Sunil Mitra reminds us that AI is simply a reflection of our evolution as humanity.

As Ervin Laszlo points out in the final section of the book ‘The suggested roadmaps are bold and daring, yet they are intrinsically feasible.’ They demand of us that we are not constrained by the thinking of the past, but that we instead allow ourselves to become individual fractal expressions of the move towards unity and wholeness that is currently taking place. And this is something that is highlighted by Alexander Laszlo in his own chapter ‘We spend too much time giving all sorts of second and third thoughts to how we should express things rather than just making ourselves available to being expressed.’

Ultimately, as Raymond Bradley highlights through his inclusion of the Pierre Teilhard de Chardin quote, ‘We need to harness the energies of love.’