DESMOND: Hello, I'm Desmond Berghofer from the Visioneers Network welcoming you to Episode 6 on our journey of Extraordinary Wisdom. Today we begin the second half of our journey with a thought leader who gives us the perspective of a futurist in looking at the future prospects for humanity. Dr. William Halal (Bill) is Professor Emeritus at George Washington University in Washington DC, USA, and has been recognized as one of the top 100 futurists in the world today. My partner, Dr. Geraldine Schwartz, will provide further introduction. Here's Gerri.
GERRI: Hello Everyone. Good Morning, Good Afternoon, Good Evening to everyone listening to us around the world.
We have arrived at our second half of presentations of extraordinary wisdom. We are inspired, prepared and poised for change. We've been told the breakdown we observe all around us provides the opportunity for breakthrough, and that we are, according to Jean Houston, “the people of the breakthrough.”
So, with that in mind, we understand the urgency to act, to act on the mega crisis we face everywhere. We understand the need to take responsibility to act for the Earth, for the children, and for the future of humanity, and indeed for our very survival. In the second half of our project, the Visioneers response is a different approach with an extraordinary cohort of wisdom keepers, beginning with Dr. William Halal.
So, people of the breakthrough, here we go.
Have you ever been in a university classroom, you're sitting there listening to a professor, and all of a sudden you say to yourself, Oh my God! This new knowledge is thrilling, exciting, amazing. So, you listen deeply, brimming with hope.
Last year, we had such a moment listening to Dr. Bill Halal, and reading his book, Beyond Knowledge: How Technology is Driving an Age of Consciousness. Bill speaks in a manner we have come to expect of professors, clear, straightforward, informed, a mature thinker. But suddenly we realize, also creative, insightful, and important.
Bill has made a major contribution to the science of human evolution. He describes his discovery of the pattern of increasing human complexity of conscious awareness and our capacity to solve problems creatively. All this, over long periods of time, but accelerating in the age that we now are, as the driving force of evolution. It is a time of the global mind shift that Willis Harman predicted three decades ago, that Ervin Laszlo describes as the bifurcation point, when we need to choose to upshift to a planetary consciousness. Listening to Bill, I saw real hope break through the clouds, not as wishful thinking, but as scientific discovery, that the conditions for a leap were present.
I was reminded of Jane Goodall's Roots and Shoots, and her Tacare programs; and of Anne Baring's powerful rendition of the history and rise again of the contribution of women worldwide with just the skills and the approach needed for the shift: intuition, nurturing compassion, kindness, cooperation and collaboration. I thought of Jean Houston's beautiful metaphor of us emerging from the darkness of the cocoon, just as the caterpillar transforms into the butterfly, bursting into the light.
Then I could understand what Bill was saying, that we have come over an evolutionary period of 3.5 billion years, and many leaps, into the present moment when the Age of Knowledge has given us the digital tools now culminating in Artificial Intelligence to support a new level of human creativity and imagination in the Age of Consciousness, where as a cooperative collective, including all of our global diversity, using widespread communication tools we can act to solve the mega crisis in the most powerful response humanity has ever had, a new spiritual Renaissance-- a Renaissance fueled with creative imagination that will enable us to take great strides forward.
We have many examples already of this happening in our time: the Olympics, the International Space Station, shifts from the profit motive in business towards worker and client concerns, carbon capture, vertical farming, green energy, new solutions of every kind through dialogue and inclusion.
Coming back to Bill Halal, he has degrees from Purdue University and the University of California at Berkeley. He is Professor Emeritus at George Washington University. He's had an illustrious career, has published seven books and hundreds of articles, and he served as a Major in the US Air Force, and he was an aerospace engineer for the Apollo Program. Bill has the credentials of a world class teacher. You are certain to be astonished at what you hear from him.
My partner, Dr. Desmond Berghofer, will put his revelation on the Life Cycle of Evolution into the context of what the other wisdom teachers have said. Here's Des.
DESMOND: Hello again.
With Professor Bill Halal we come to a global thought leader whose work and approach are firmly anchored in the discipline of futurism, which first emerged in the mid 20th century when some scholars began to be concerned that the human race may not be heading into a viable future. Bill 's career goes back to those early days of the discipline, and he was a colleague of Dr. Willis Harman whom we heard from as our first wisdom keeper on our journey.
As a futurist, Bill created a firm specializing in forecasting called Tech Cast. They used the technique of compiling the collective intelligence of a wide range of experts in many fields to make forecasts and to provide commentary on major trends and developments impacting human life on the planet. Bill's major contribution to the exploration of evolutionary thinking that we are considering in this series of episodes is that he has created a conceptual framework for exploring how the system of human development has evolved on the planet, going back to the beginning of biological life on Earth 3.5 billion years ago.
In an extraordinary achievement, he has created a chart which he calls the Life Cycle of Evolution using a logarithmic scale, which allows him to display in one figure human development over vast periods of time in the distant past as well as shorter periods in more recent times.
Here is the chart taken from his recent book Beyond Knowledge. As you can see, he sets out seven stages of social evolution on the vertical axis, and charts their times of development over billions of years on the horizontal axis using a logarithmic scale working backwards from 2500 AD and showing our present time.
Bill is excited that the curve that emerges from this method is an S curve characteristic of all life, showing slow growth to begin, followed by rapid development, then leveling off as that cycle ends and a new one begins. He will explain this in more detail.
The implication is that human development over millions of years has been heading into more complex stages of organization and is culminating in our time as the Age of Consciousness, where we are struggling to give birth to what our other wisdom keepers have referred to as global mind change, planetary consciousness, and breakthrough transition.
Bill shows all of that right here for all to see on his chart of the Life Cycle of Evolution.
Bill's main point is that we are now moving beyond knowledge, which is the title of his book.
Coming back to the Life Cycle of Evolution, you can see towards the top of the curve that what Bill calls the Knowledge Age developed rapidly over two decades beginning in 2000 and reached its saturation point in 2020 with the maturing of digital technology and the early developments in Artificial Intelligence.
Bill's argument is that beyond the Knowledge Age the only place for humanity to go is to the Age of Consciousness.
And this is where his argument becomes critical for our understanding about the future. Consciousness is what comes out of the human mind, and Bill argues that evidence of a new Age of Consciousness is now showing up in the turmoil we are seeing in the proliferation of alternative facts and so called fake news, promulgated by ideologues and social media, and in the clashes between ideologies on the left and the right in politics, particularly in the US, but also showing up in other democracies, and threatening their survival.
We have got to get beyond this kind of. consciousness to a global consciousness of truth and respect that will sustain civilization. This is, of course, exactly the same message as our previous wisdom keepers have proposed, but where Bill is different is that he assigns dates to when things have happened or are likely to happen.
The really exciting message from Bill is that the 2020s is the decade when the future of humanity is being decided. We are being challenged to grow up, to move out of our adolescent preoccupation with conflict and separation, and reach for maturity to take our place as a global species in the continuously evolving universe.
It is the reason why the Visioneers project is coming forward at this time to recognize, celebrate, and promote individuals and organizations who are facilitating the transformation. What a time to be alive, as each of us is being asked to play our role to ensure a successful outcome!
Bill has much more wisdom to share. Listen to him now as he accepts his Visioneers award as a Visionary Leader and talks with David Lorimer to explain his thinking in more detail, then listen to Episodes 11 and 12 of the Visioneers Audio Theatre, also released today, where you will discover amazing synchronicity of message and vision with what you are hearing from Bill Halal and the other wisdom keepers.
Good listening, and good visioneering to all of you.
Here's Bill.
BILL: Hello I'm Bill Halal, a professor at George Washington University in Washington DC and the founder of the Tech Cast project.
I'm happy to receive this award from the Visioneers project. It's such an exemplary award to be in the company of these other distinguished people, so I'm grateful to the people who have made this possible. Let me tell you a little bit about the contribution I can make to this effort. My last book, Beyond Knowledge: How Technology is Driving an Age of Consciousness, does, I think, something that's unusual. It uses historical data to map the rise of civilization through what I call the Life Cycle of Evolution. This is a science-based project. It's a model of social evolution, and we can use it to anticipate what's coming, and what we see is that we're now leaving the Age of Knowledge, the world has been living in an Age of Knowledge for about two decades, and we've become very familiar with that, but we think that's ending now, mainly.
You can see that in the post-factual phenomena, so many ideas that are being floated around have no basis in knowledge, they are simply based on emotions and values and beliefs, like the big lie, and the denial of climate change, and anti-vaccination, and being woke, and all of that sort of thing.
So, the Life Cycle of Evolution, I think, is a great breakthrough in our understanding of social change, and we think this model suggests that we're leaving the Knowledge Age now and we're entering an Age of Consciousness. I know that's a very strong claim, but it's almost self evident when you look at all of the things that are going on. The world is not motivated by knowledge or empirical facts. Most decisions are made on the basis of emotions, values, and beliefs, as for instance the propaganda that Russia is using to justify its invasion of Ukraine, the state of political parties in the US, and so forth. So that is a fascinating new development, I think, that I've been lucky to make clear.
We are now living beyond knowledge and entering an Age of Consciousness, and if that is the case, and i think it is, the implications are profound. For one thing, it means that consciousness implies the end or the culmination, I would say, of the Life Cycle of Evolution, that is, life on this planet is reaching some kind of a final stage, a stage of maturity. All life cycles mature, they all come to a conclusion, and we think that's going to happen now within the next few decades.
Secondly, the Age of Consciousness applies the objective of resolving what I call the crisis of global maturity. All of these crises that threaten the world, climate change, more pandemics, inequality, water, and so forth, there are dozens, literally dozens, of horrible trends that are threatening life. The New York Times recently noted that a survey showed that 56 percent of people think humanity is doomed, and the UN recently reported the results of their latest report on climate and said that unless something is done within a decade that we could look forward to a total societal collapse. So, the crisis of global maturity is here now, it's a major threat, it presents itself, it's hard to imagine the world proceeding without resolving the crisis of global maturity. Well, that's exactly what an Age of Consciousness is designed to do.
And so, we think that we're likely to see a revolution in thought, just as every stage of evolution has been driven by a revolution of thought. The industrial age, for instance, was driven by the protestant ethic, the belief in economic man, focus on self interest, money and power. Those values may continue to hold, because they are natural, perhaps, but they have to be supplanted, augmented by a global consciousness, by respect for the planet and cooperation, just to put it very simply, it could be much more complicated than that. We really don't know what a global consciousness will look like, because it's uncharted territory, but it will be something like that.
So we think a global consciousness is likely to occur, and my studies at Tech Cast forecast it is most likely to happen about the year 2030, plus or minus about five years, but there's a low probability attached with that, about a 50 percent probability. In other words, the world is teetering on a knife edge between maturity and disaster, that would be a good way to sum it up, and so what happens in the next few years is pivotal, it's extremely crucial.
So those concepts come out of the work I've done on the Life Cycle of Evolution, on social evolution, and I think it it helps us better understand the situation the world is in now and what we have to do to create a sustainable global order.
I offer that as my contribution to the wonderful work that the Visioneers have been promoting and I thank them again for recognizing this contribution of mine. I'm grateful, thank you so much.
DAVID: My name 's David Lorimer and I'm here with Bill Halal to have a conversation about his work and his vision for the future, and we're going to frame our conversation with a couple of quotations. The first is from E.F. Schumacher, who said humanity is now too clever to survive without wisdom. He's the author of Small is Beautiful and Buddhist Economics. And the second quotation comes from historian Arnold Toynbee from 1975. He said that technology gives us material power, the greater our material power, the greater our need for spiritual insight and virtue to use power for good and not for evil. The morality gap means that since we first became human, we've never been adequate spiritually for handling our material power. Today it is greater than ever, and this was said in 1975, so it's rather a perennial observation. So with that as a frame for our conversation, and we'll come back to some of these themes, I'm going to ask Bill just to introduce himself and his background and say something about Tech Cast, which is his forecasting company, Bill.
BILL: Yes, I'm Bill Halal, George Washington University and the founder of Tech Cast. I fell in love with the technology revolution when I was a grad student at U.C. Berkeley many years ago. I could see the computer was emerging at that time, and it was just so obvious that this was going to change the world. I fell in love with the idea, that I can't think of anything more exciting than to be alive and to witness the world changing in a dramatic way, and so I've been pursuing this for all of these decades, really.
I was impressed by The Coming of Post Industrial Society by Daniel Bell and by Alvin Toffler's book Future Shock. I think they anticipated this very nicely, and so, I’ve done a number of things in that direction.
I started out by trying to redefine business and economics. One of my papers, "Beyond the Profit Motive" won the 1977 Mitchell Award which carried a $10,000 prize, and $10,000 was a lot of money in 1977. And that idea is now coming to the fore with the Business Round Table's decision to end what they call shareholder supremacy. They now recognize the legitimate goals of all stakeholders: employees, customers, and the public as legitimate goals of the enterprise. That's revolutionary, so I am happy to say that I think I anticipated that development many years ago,
And then I turned my attention to the technology side of this, and I founded Tech Cast, and we focused on pooling the knowledge of about two hundred international experts to develop the best forecast possible, I think, using collective intelligence I called it, and I think collective intelligence is a very powerful methodology, and I think we did an admirable job forecasting breakthroughs in all fields. We had a hundred different forecasts covering different fields, and that was wonderful. We received lots of attention for that, for instance, I had a full page in The Washington Post, and we won awards, and the project was cited by the National Academies of Science.
But I began to see that this was really just the beginning of the journey, because about that time the post factual stuff started appearing, and I could see this was different, the denial of climate change, for instance, really caught my attention. It was so bizarre, to ignore the reality here, and to engage in wishful thinking, that it's not important, it would go away. It just… Madness.
And that has blossomed now, that is a full-blown phenomena. It's happening around the world, and we have to see it as the beginning of an Age of Consciousness. It's not good consciousness, that's true, but consciousness is an entire domain. It encompasses everything, good consciousness, bad consciousness, everything, and this is just an unfortunate form of consciousness that we have today, and the challenge the world faces is to change this consciousness into a consciousness that is able to create a sustainable world.
So that's how I got into this, and I'm just committed to pursuing the need for a shift to global consciousness. That is really the focus of my work these days.
DAVID: Thanks very much, Bill. We'll go into more detail about the shift and global consciousness and maturity later in our conversation, but I wonder if you could recall at this point your meeting with Willis Harman who was the President of the Institute of Noetic Sciences, first president, and wrote a book I think about 1988 which I also read, called Global Mind Change.
BILL: Yes, I was very inspired by Willis 's book. I read it, I absorbed that, I loved it, but I didn't really grasp the full meaning of the book until I started writing my own book on Beyond Knowledge. I knew Willis 's work, and I loved it, as I say, but I have to say that the inability to fully grasp it makes me realize how difficult consciousness is. It's hard to grasp.
When i started writing my book about five years ago, I made a point of including my experience with Willis and I remembered once when I met Willis at a conference and I was telling him about this marvelous idea I had that the corporation would become a democratic system that was governed by its employees and customers and the public as well as its shareholders. And Willis said to me, "Bill, that's a lovely idea, but it won't mean a thing unless you can also create a change in consciousness."
That idea just really caught my attention. I recalled that moment very very explicitly and I noted it in the Introduction in the Preface to my new book. Willis really inspired all of this work many years ago. He was 50 years ahead of his time, and he deserves to be recognized for the insights he had well before anybody else did.
DAVID Well, I believe he's one of the Heroes of Humanity on this website. Quite rightly. Because his work spanned, you know, business, economics, society, and crucially consciousness, and the assumptions of the mechanistic worldview, and how we needed to move beyond those assumptions. He worked a lot on the metaphysical foundations of modern science, which we are continuing, some of that work.
So, Bill now let's come to the background to your current book Beyond Knowledge: How Technology is Driving an Age of Consciousness.
So tell us a little bit more about the book and its structure and message, and then we'll go into further detail in our conversation.
BILL: Well, I really anticipated the broad outlines of this book decades ago when I was fascinated with social evolution and I started playing with the data, and I gathered the historic data, defining when the very stages of evolution were introduced, and I began plotting it, and it was very hard to plot it, because the time spans are so enormously different. I mean you have billions of years on one end of the scale and you have decades on the other end of the scale. So, I decided that a logarithmic scale would do the trick, and it does.
On a logarithmic scale these data plot a very precise pattern, and most people probably know that an S curve is the hallmark of all forms of life of culture of bacteria or the growth of a human being. They follow an S curve, very precisely, so the fact that civilization is following an S curve is very revealing, I think. It tells us that life on the planet is not simply random. There was a lot of random behavior, of course, I mean, we've had the rise and fall of many empires, wars and famines, and plagues, and so forth, but above all of the clutter there is a very precise long-term trend.
In system science they call that organized complexity. There's lots of random behavior, but the overall pattern is very precise, and it's the S curve showing the rise of civilization through the agrarian stage of development, the industrial stage, services, knowledge, and now by definition, consciousness, because by definition everything beyond knowledge is consciousness, and that's what we're seeing arise all around us, consciousness.
A good example is the world's response to the war in Ukraine. I was amazed that more than half of the world, maybe two thirds of the world, rose up in outrage at the attack on Ukraine, and they started supporting Ukrainians, and that's why the Ukrainians, one of the reasons, Ukrainians are doing such a fine job of resisting the Russian invasion, because they have the world support. They're getting armaments and they have the moral support of the world. So that was, I think, a wonderful prelude to global consciousness that showed us what global consciousness would look like, what it would feel like, it was the entire world thinking and working together in a noble cause.
And it's worth noting that this was, I think, made possible by social media, which is very ironic, because social media is getting a bad play these days. It's the source of so much disinformation and conflict, it's really the source of the post-factual phenomena that has us all worried. But the fact that it also permitted the world's response to the Ukrainian crisis shows us that the technology is impartial, it doesn't care, it's ready to do good as well as evil, and here it was an example of the social media being used for a good cause.
DAVID: So the social media takes us right back to Toynbee, doesn't it.
BILL: Exactly. Everything has an upside and a downside, it can be used for good purposes or not so good purposes, the social media is neutral, it's there and we can use it for good or for evil depending upon us, and so it really hinges on the will of ordinary people. The greatest challenge the world faces is to educate a large number of people that we face a different era of development, that we need a global consciousness.
DAVID: And another person who I think prefigured some of your vision was Teilhard de Chardin, and maybe just say a little bit about him.
BILL: Oh, Teilhard de Chardin was a genius, what brilliance. In fact, my book starts, it reads this way: “The great Jesuit anthropologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin has long fascinated us with his vision that the world would evolve into a Nooshere, a great web of consciousness enveloping the Earth. It seemed a lovely but distant ideal, yet the digital revolution is making that dream a reality. The Nooshere, as this book will show, the Noosphere is here today, and it's transforming our lives, our work, our social institutions, and our very minds and souls.”
That's the way my book starts, that's the first paragraph.
DAVID: Wonderful, and of course the irony is that Teilhard de Chardin was pretty much censored in his lifetime, very little of what he wrote came out before he died in 1955.
BILL: Exactly, he was like Galileo, you know, he couldn't publish his work during his lifetime. It was all, I think, published posthumously. An interesting thing is that it didn't threaten Catholicism at all, it showed the glory of Christianity, of spirituality, that the entire world would become spiritual in time, so it's hard to see why the Catholic church felt so threatened by this idea.
DAVID: Well, one of the other people I'm going to be interviewing is Jean Houston who, of course, met Teilhard in New York when she was young. I get to ask her about that. Now let's go on, Bill to a little more explanation about the Life Cycle of Evolution, and how you see this Knowledge Age, of knowledge or information, in a sense moving into an Age of Consciousness, because I think we need to drill down on this Age of Consciousness, and how we're going to be able to bring it about.
BILL: Right, the best way to see this is by looking at the structure of consciousness itself. Scientists agree that there are two fundamentally different aspects of human consciousness. There's objective consciousness, which consists of perception, gathering data, storing it in memory, acquiring knowledge to solve problems, and making decisions, that's objective. That's what computers are good at, the objective factors, and now, right now the digital revolution is automating all of that, and this poses the great question on most people's minds. If AI and a digital revolution automate knowledge, then what will people do, because that's what people are doing now, they're working with knowledge.
Well, the answer is that there's a a great domain beyond knowledge, subjective consciousness, and that consists, I defined it very very simply, I tried to be very objective and more orderly about it. I think of it in terms of factors like emotion, values and beliefs, and vision, and that sort of thing. You could probably identify a dozen different qualities that would fit into the subjective realm, like wisdom and imagination and things like that, but there is definitely a subjective realm that transcends knowledge, and it dominates knowledge.
The subjective beliefs will exclude certain knowledge and gravitate towards other forms of knowledge, so the subjective realm dominates knowledge and that's what we're seeing now, people are choosing to believe wild ideas, just because they prefer to, so that's the way I think this is working. The digital revolution is automating the objective functions of knowledge, of consciousness, which are knowledge, that is driving attention into the subjective realm and that process is going to continue, and so that's what's driving the Age of Consciousness, the digital revolution.
DAVID: Well, one of the interesting points you make in your book is you would define this subjective realm as the human spirit. And I just want to make one observation here, because I think it’s an interesting one historically, and that is that Galileo and Descarte and Locke distinguished between what they call primary qualities and secondary qualities.
So the primary qualities were what you could weigh, measure, touch, the visible world, if you like, which corresponds to the lower end of your spectrum, as it were, the objective functions, and then the subjective functions were defined as secondary, including the sense of beauty, qualia, sensations, feelings, and so what you're doing in reconciling the two, is really saying, well you can't say it's primary and secondary, and there are these different aspects and dimensions of the human being and they both need to be recognized.
BILL: Well, that's exactly right, in fact the subjective realm has been a thorn in the side of social scientists for hundreds of years, people were troubled by the animal spirits that some people called that domain, the subjective domain, it was in fact considered the source of sin, in many religious perspectives, so it's never been really understood, but now it's coming into its own.
And it is spiritual in fact, but I like to, as I use all of these terms, I like to use this in an operational sense. I like definitions that we can identify with as the way we live. And I like to define spirituality, not in terms of supernatural powers, but as human spirit, the sense of mood or awareness or consciousness that human beings hold during the day. And it changes constantly throughout the day, and we manage our consciousness, we may not be aware of it, but we're constantly really managing our consciousness. That's why we wake up in the morning, we drink coffee to make us alert, and at night might have a beer or a glass of wine to calm down a little bit, so we use what I call technologies of consciousness to manage our awareness, to manage ourselves.
So, this is a very profound thing that's happening now. Now we are beginning to see the subjective realm of consciousness in all its glory, and it is enormous. It is everything that the religious people have fantasized about for millennia, and it's opening up before us, but it seems incoherent right now, it's the early stages of an Age of Consciousness, it's raw, it's untapped.
DAVID: Yes, I think there are more or less mature expressions of it. And as we'll see before we come onto saying more about or looking more at the technologies of consciousness I'd like you to tell us about, which I think is a key question, you know, what you call the crisis of global maturity, and of course this is I think the sort of $64,000 one.
BILL: Yes. Many years ago a fellow futurist Michael Marien and I started tracking what we called the global mega crisis, and we saw this as the confluence of various threats to civilization, climate being the most prominent one, of course, but there are a dozen at least others: the pandemics now look like a major threat, we're likely to see more pandemics because the conditions that cause pandemics mainly air travel are here and they're going to get more intense; and then of course inequality; the threat of a global instability, a great recession or depression; water availability; and so forth. There are at least a dozen major threats, and they are of such a magnitude that they can't, I don't think, be resolved with the existing frame of mind, because they are global in nature, and you can't solve problems…
DAVID: They're also systemic.
BILL: Yes, that's what I mean by systemic, they involve the world as a whole and you can't solve global problems with local solutions. So, the very nature of these global threats makes them a crisis of global maturity. This is what the challenge that an Age of Consciousness has to address and resolve if we are to continue civilization; otherwise it's hard to know what would happen, but it wouldn't be good, it could be disastrous, we could see the loss of civilization, or at least severely downgraded.
So, the crisis of global maturity is the crisis that the world has to face to become a mature global civilization. It's very much like the crisis of maturity that a young person faces. Teenagers struggle to become adults because they don't understand adulthood and they don't have the understanding, the wherewithal, they can't control themselves, their own emotions, and they get into a lot of trouble. They suffer great pain until the pain becomes so severe that they finally yield and they recognize that they have to grow up, have to accept responsibility for their behavior. And then they set realistic goals for themselves and they become responsible adults.
That's roughly the situation the world is in. We have to accept our responsibility for these crises, grow up, become a mature global society, and address these problems, and become a mature civilization. That doesn't mean it'll be Utopian, there will still be normal problems of any functioning society, but it will be a functioning global system, we think, that's right.
In the last two years, the last two decades, rather, of the Knowledge Age we became accustomed to using information technologies to change knowledge. Various platforms, applications, we stare at screens half of the day, so we're familiar with that. Well, if we're in an Age of Consciousness, that changes everything, now we need the equivalent to change consciousness of what I call technologies of consciousness, the things that we really use everyday or perhaps unwittingly to keep ourselves under control, to manage our state of mind, like drinking coffee in the morning to become alert and having an alcoholic drink in the evening to calm down.
There are literally infinite tools or technologies that could be used to alter your consciousness and we have to learn how to use those things in order to gain control over ourselves and of the world as a whole.
DAVID: And I think you in your book, you talk also about the importance of spiritual practice meditation, prayer, as, if you like, spiritual technologies, I think they also play a role.
BILL: Yes, absolutely, but I think the most powerful things that will alter opinion are our institutions, for instance, the corporation. I alluded earlier I think to the revolution in thought going on in business right now, the realization that profit can't be the only goal of business. That is commonly accepted among business people now, they're doing a very mild form of that, they call it ESG,
Environmental, social, and governance, and so they're just dipping a toe into those waters, but if they really do this well, if they really get into it and understand it, they will come to see that this will inevitably lead to collaborating with the various stakeholders, employees, customers, the public, their suppliers, distributors to solve strategic problems and thereby create value, because the corporation has to create value, it has to compete in a competitive marketplace, so it can't be simply philanthropic, it has to be productive, and I think business people will come to see that it can be very productive to work with all of these stakeholders to create an entire system that is far more productive, by integrating all of the stakeholders into a corporate community that is a synchronized.
DAVID: Collaborative community I think you also say, don't you?
BILL: Yes, there are lots of different terms one could use for this. I like the term democratic enterprise. I think that's what this really is leading to, and if business could do this, and I think there's a strong likelihood this could happen, they could lead the world out of this mess, because corporations are the most powerful institutions in the world, and if they exemplify a model of cooperation, then the rest of society will follow, because business sets the tone for culture. I think in many ways business people could become heroes, servant leaders, who are solving social problems as well as making more money for their investors. In fact, they could make more money with less risk, because the sources of risk, that is employees and customers, now become part of the enterprise.
DAVID: I think the most difficult thing, and I listened in on a podcast with John Perkins not so long ago, is the fact that many business people are caught within the existing short term profit system, and he said that in conversations with CEOs they had said to him, we need shareholders or stakeholders to exert pressure from below, so that we can give a rationale to what we actually want to do anyway, which is, you know, move beyond the existing system.
BILL: Yes and really what this would lead to in time, I think, is that companies could encourage their various stakeholders, their employees and their customers, and the public really to buy shares in the company so that it's not at the mercy of Wall Street. As well, one of the interesting things about this is if the corporation were to do this well, it would become a more self regulating system because the parties whom it affects, its employees and customers and the public, are now part of the corporation, so that would diminish the need for government regulation and oversight, and that would serve the interests of Conservatives, who don't like big government, and that's why these solutions are really, they're solutions at both ends of the political spectrum, both the right and the left end, and that's what makes this very feasible and attractive, both ends of the spectrum could benefit from solutions like this. And I might mention a global carbon tax, that would also alleviate the climate change problem and it would satisfy in principle both the right and left ends of the political spectrum.
So, there are solutions to all of these problems. They simply have not been taken up because of faulty consciousness, because we're trapped in distrust and hatred for one another and self interest and so forth.
DAVID: Yes, I'd just like to drill down into this a little bit because I think, and this is my own view, that when people come to realize that there is really only one life and one consciousness and we're all expressions of this same life and consciousness, then I think you shift to what Ervin Laszlo calls a planetary ethic, and because you realize this oneness of life means that you serve life you promote life as your part of or your contribution, if you like. Does that resonate with you?
BILL: Exactly. I'd like to bring into this conversation the wisdom of our former colleague, Hazel Henderson, who passed away two weeks ago.
DAVID: Sorry to hear that.
BILL: Yes, it was a…We all loved Hazel, what's a great loss. Hazel 's great wisdom was to see that there was an economic system beyond the present one, and she called it “love economics.” She didn't mean romantic love, she meant the love that we entertain when we just become friends with somebody, that we form working relationships, and she's exactly right. That's what's needed an economy based upon trust and affection and respect for one another, that's the only way the world can become a functioning whole.
I know there is this force that animates the universe. I see it in my garden. I see it all around me, and if we could recognize that great force that keeps us all alive as love, and if we could find our way to participate in that…Oh a lot of these divisions would just dissolve.
DAVID: Well, we were talking earlier about a quotation from Arnold Toynbee, and that's exactly his view. He talked about there being love as a spiritual presence behind the universe and that our job as humans was to align our wills with this universal principle.
BILL: I think that's exactly right. That's amazing that he saw that so long ago.
DAVID: Yes, well I think the sages see these things perennially, if you like.
BILL: Well, that's right.
DAVID: Now then, Bill to education, because there are enormous changes going on in education, so how do you see that from the shift from teaching to learning and how, what effect do you see that having on institutions?
BILL: This is going to be difficult, because it's not happening to a serious degree, I think, yet, but we have to move from teaching to learning, to putting the focus on the student, because only the student can learn, the student cannot be taught in a strict sense, the student will only learn what he or she is prepared to learn, so it's an enormous challenge.
It's not entirely certain this will happen, of course. We have to start with that, but I think it is likely. I think it's probably the normal progress of civilization. If we were to by some miracle find other intelligent forms of life in the universe, I think we would probably find that they went through roughly the same stages of development, agriculture, industry, services, knowledge, and intelligence, and I think we'll probably find that most succeeded. I don't think…Life is tenacious. It rarely fails, and I think it probably succeeds in most cases, so I think it's likely to succeed on our planet. But it's an enormous undertaking.
We've studied this at Tech Cast, that's how we estimated the 50 percent probability that we will see a global consciousness in about 2030. You better also understand, we've studied various scenarios, and I've come to see that the most likely way this will emerge is not through one big fell swoop where the leaders of the world get together and say we need a global consciousness. That's not likely to happen. It's likely to evolve incrementally. If we can maintain an awareness of the need for sustainability and consciousness, and if we can do that and if we meet crises as they come up with the appropriate understanding with global consciousness, then we will incrementally master this skill, that we will develop a trust in that way of thinking, and then it will evolve by its own accord in time and at some point it will become the dominant worldview, i think.
DAVID: I believe you have a project which is working on this very notion. Let's finish by telling us about that.
BILL: About half a dozen of us are convinced that this is the greatest challenge facing the world, the need for a global consciousness, and we're doing everything we can imagine to make that real. We start by, we're getting funds now to build a very extensive website that will bring together all of the people who participate in global consciousness, like David Lorimer, and collectively we will learn a great deal more I think. But more to the point, we also intend to create a portal to global consciousness, which will be an audio-visual process using sophisticated technologies that will help individuals change their mindset from their present thinking to global consciousness itself, and hopefully they will emerge from this process and say, Ah, so that's global consciousness. I love it.
DAVID: So that's your goal, a new operating system, a new and necessary operating system. Well, Bill, thank you very much indeed for sharing your wisdom and insight and I'm sure the Visioneers community will be on board for your project and indeed many of the partners and other institutions involved with the movement, as it were, and so I look forward to being able to continue our conversation on other occasions. Thank you very much,
BILL: David, you have been a marvelous host, you asked just the right questions, and you have all this wonderful wisdom yourself, thank you so much.
DAVID: Thank you so much.
BILL: OK, bye bye.
GERRI: That was magnificent, clear, and important. Thank you, Bill for this new understanding of what global consciousness truly is.
And now we conclude with poetry, a powerful and memorable way to confirm and consolidate this message. Here is Des Berghofer's poem from the book Prayers for a Thousand Years, recited for you by Shakespearean actor,Christopher Gaze. The poem is called “At Last We Have Come to It.” Here's Christopher.
CHRISTOPHER: At last we have come to it. One small and fragile speck of interstellar dust, one infinitely tiny cell of cosmic life, a single jot of total potential, waiting to be released.
Like the first bacterium leaping into life, the Earth stands poised to exhale the breath of human consciousness into the dark and lonely void of space. A second genesis in this other Eden.
After four billion years of evolutionary struggle, a new synthesis of human and universal consciousness. At last we have come to it.
This is untraveled ground. Four billion years for consciousness to emerge, then in only forty thousand more to move from cave to high rise tower, from stone tools to robots on the assembly line. All this, but still stuck in territorial grief, remaining deaf to love beyond the tribe and soaking the ground with blood in every land.
Now, the higher calling struggles to be heard. For the most part, the din and dance of boom and bust still drowns it out while the very Earth trembles more than a little under the burden.
No flash of transformation is pending. The way of evolution was never thus, but always in the sheltered margins of the main event the questing mutant messengers have formed, secured their strength, and waited for their moment in the light.
So will it be again, as the pressure builds for consciousness to hear the higher call, then reach, transform, and finally transcend.
Unless, unless the sweep of chance wipes all that out, because we did not learn to play the part our consciousness created for us, and like a curious willful child without a parent's guiding hand we fall into the shimmering pond and drown.
So, at last we have come to it. Whether to fashion a value shift among all cultures, replacing sense of separation with understanding of the All, or lose our gains against a higher hand.
At last we have come to it.