A view from the United Nations
May-June 2004
Happening now: A global revolution of consciousness
By Vicente García-Delgado, CIVICUS UN Representative (New York)
Prof Ervin Laszlo, former Rector of the Vienna International Academy and Founder and President of the Club of Budapest www.club-of-budapest.com spoke recently at a gathering of The Values Caucus at the UN, sponsored by The Loretto Community.
Prof Laszlo is one of the foremost systems and general evolution theorists, and the author of numerous books, many of them relating to evolutionary processes in all fields of science, systems theory, and the relation between the behavior of closed systems far from equilibrium when they reach a point of “bifurcation”.
I was fortunate to meet Prof Laszlo ten years ago, and to attend some of his lectures at The Assisi Conference. His watershed book The Age of Bifurcation—Understanding the Changing World, (1991, with a foreword by Nobel Laureate Ilya Prigogine) in particular, had a tremendous impact on me and changed for the better the way I look at the current human predicament.
Dr Laszlo asserts that humanity is at a critical juncture, a point of “bifurcation”, as this term is used in systems theory. This is nothing earth shattering, in the sense that it happens all the time in the systems of the natural world: all systems are subject to periodic “fluctuations” due to new tensions or outside pressures.
When the fluctuations get to be large enough so that the system can no longer cope with them, the system then enters a period where “everything is possible except the status quo”. Prof Laszlo thus reminds us that evolutionary changes are not always gradual or linear. Indeed a system may encounter a point of bifurcation and quite suddenly jump to a higher level of evolution.
According to Prof Laszlo, humanity, as a system, has now entered this critical period. A period of chaos, as the term is used in chaos theory, with infinite potentialities. At some point one of these potentialities may “nucleate” (the other potentialities “aligning” themselves with the nucleating potentiality); or, alternatively, no “nucleation” takes place, the result then being fatal to the system. Evolution is not keen on giving out second chances.
Thus, once a system enters this critical period, two different results may obtain: either the system experiences a sudden transformation into a more complex, more evolved system; or, no such transformation occurs, and the system fails, its various components falling down the ladder of evolution.
In the case of humanity as a system, however, we humans have a saving advantage that no other system is known to have: Consciousness. Humanity is the only system in this planet where its elements can influence, through developing a global awareness, the outcome of our critical period.
Every one of us can influence the outcome, and together we humans can imagine and create the common, planetary future we want. By becoming aware of our own global consciousness, we humans (each in his or her own environment, together in groups or in intimate reflection) can help bring about a conscious revolution. In meditation or engaged in social activism for a just, equitable future, or both, we can help the right “nucleization” to gather momentum until it becomes unstoppable.
A “Revolution of Consciousness” as Prof Laszlo has put it, could be already happening.
In solidarity, CIVICUS UN Representative (New York)
Vicente García-Delgado
Please send your comments to CIVICUSUN@aol.com
