OUR COLLECTIVE DECISION WINDOW

Shel and I woke up at five o’clock, as we often do, and fell to talking about the expressions of ‘extremism’ so prevalent in the news right now. Before sleep we had watched a film..Not Without My Daughter…based, I believe, upon a true story, which certainly illustrates several brands of extremism. I guess that film had invaded our dreams even, as we both woke up thinking about news-rants. We needed to look for hopeful intimations.

I said that I do not feel than this trend toward belligerence will gain full ascendancy—that there is a growing core of creative and evolutionary thinkers who will ‘sway’ the tide of emotional energy…energy which is harvested, from that subterranean river in the unconscious, by those who are still holding onto the “dominator” model. Shel reflected again on the critical importance Riane Eisler's partnership concept and her clear presentation of that in The Chalice and the Blade. He said, “Well, you know that in a society where those who have a need to “look down upon others” …when they see those “beneath” begin to climb upward…even to the presidency…they begin to get very nervous indeed and try to put them back “in their place.”

In the moment, as I write here, lines from T.S. Eliot and C.S. Lewis come together in my mind…

“There will be time, there will be time…Before the taking of a “toast and tea…”

and…

“Til we have faces…”

and…then there is…

Ervin Laszlo’s The Chaos Point: The World at the Crossroads...…the "decision window”…

He says that as we now face a choice between “collapsing into chaos and evolving into a sustainable, ethical global community” the voices of the few—even the individual—can have a powerful effect for change.

We need to outgrow our “absolutizing instinct”…as William F. Lynch puts it in his wonderful Images of Hope: Imagination as Healer of the Hopeless.

Ah—Let us listen to the gathering voices of imagination and hope.