Macy is one of a growing number of visionaries who are recognizing our pain for the world as relating to the very evolution of our species, a shift toward a new level of social consciousness. Through our pain we can open to the power that is not just our own, but belongs to others, too. She calls this movement a "holonic shift" because it can be understood in terms of our nature as holons - meaning that each is both a whole, containing subsystems, and at the same time part of a larger system. For us those larger systems include our families, communities, societies, and our planet itself. Like cells in a larger body, we participate in them and co-create them. These social systems have not yet developed intelligence, as our brains have, because their parts have not yet integrated and differentiated enough for the self-reflexivity - the capacity to make conscious choices of all the information it processes - which is necessary for the survival of a system when it evolves to great complexity.

Today our interactions are becoming so complex and interdependent that they require a self-monitoring capacity. If we are not to commit suicide as a species, a real measure of self-reflexivity must arise on the next systemic - or holonic - level. Present modes of decision-making are too crude and too fallible for the alert and responsible self-governance we need if we are to survive.

A New Social Awareness

The next level of self-reflexivity seems to be appearing. A new social awareness is emerging. Evidence comes from many sources verifying the increase in incidence of so-called parapsychological phenomena, which Macy sees as the gradual emergence of a new holonic level of consciousness. We are like neurons in a larger brain and that brain is starting to think.

Evidence for the shift appears in social developments - the burgeoning of cooperative grassroots enterprises, the spread of consensus decision making, the networking of neighborhood initiatives - all happening from the bottom up, as it always does in the self-organization of life processes.

Macy sees our planetary crises as driving us toward this shift. Our mortality confronts us with our as a species, goads us to wake to our inter-existence. This and the recognition of the fragility and limited resources of our planet are leading us to think in integrated and synergistic, rather than the old fragmented and competitive, ways.

She believes that our feelings of social and planetary distress serve as a doorway to systemic social consciousness. Just like the "phantom limb" in which an amputee feels itches and twinges, we feel pain in those extensions of ourselves - of our larger body - of which we are yet to become fully conscious. "These sensations do not belong to our past, like the severed leg or amputee, but to our future."

We hear that we are living in times of crisis, facing apocalypse. Remember that crisis in Chinese is composed of two symbols, one meaning "danger" and the other "opportunity." Similarly, the original Greek meaning for apocalypse denotes closure, uncovering. The literal meaning of apocalypse is not disaster but revelation. Our times are calling us to look very deeply into the meaning and purpose of our lives and our relationships with one another and with the earth. The time is ripe for revelation.

---