Waking the Global Heart

Humanity's Rite of Passage from the Love of Power to the Power of Love

 

Overview

Waking the Global  Heart  articulates a guiding vision for the transformational passage of our time.  Positing that we are an adolescent culture in search of our future humanity, our maturation into the next era of human civilization will occur through an initiatory process that is at once both personal and collective. The agents of our initiation are the very by-products of our culture––from population expansion and environmental degradation to scientific breakthroughs and the blossoming of the World Wide Web. Such rites of passage force a shift in identity and awaken a fundamental change in values. A new identity must emerge that is based on planetary stewardship and global community, rather than ego-based individualism.

This requires the enchantment of a new myth––a fundamental awakening to an inspirational vision.  Lasting transformation cannot be generated by fear, guilt, or control, but must be motivated from the heart.  This comprises a shift from our current values based on the love of power to those motivated by the power of love. What awakens the heart is the soul of the world itself and the very real possibility of a wondrous future.

The primary focus of the current era, oriented to power, aggression, and personal ego must change. The old story of warring empires struggling for power must give way to a new myth of interdependent reciprocity.  An era of the heart, based on values of integration, compassion, human rights, and environmental sustainability, is essential if we are to survive into the future. This shift takes us from opposition to synthesis, competition to cooperation, separation to integration, markets to networks, and most importantly: from power to love.  

Waking the Global Heart chronicles the story of this passage. It takes the reader through an examination of three basic questions:  Who are we?  Where did we come from? Where are we going?  The answers take us on a tour through 30,000 years of the human story, examining the mythic themes that guided past eras. Each era is compared to stages of individual psychological development from birth to adolescence, and correlates these stages of collective evolution to the levels of consciousness related to the chakra system and to masculine and feminine archetypal dynamics. 

The book then describes the elements of a new organizing principle based on self-organizing networks, values of compassion and cooperation, synthesis of divorced polarities, and the awakening of both transcendent and immanent forms of spirituality.  Through a fundamental shift from seeing our world as an object to embracing it as a complex and divine subject, we can fall back in love with the world once again, and join together in balance and respect with the original partner in our evolutionary journey.  By this act we can send the message through the global brain that it is time to awaken the global heart.