No Easy Answers

Traps and fallacies in emergent thought

An Exhange Between Charles Johnston and Robert Theobald

One of the articles in The Next Agenda (IC#19)
Autumn 1988, Page 39
Copyright (c)1988, 1997 by Context Institute | To order this issue ...

In order to "hear the earth" and make the large-scale changes needed to achieve sustainability, we must deepen ourselves. Deepening includes having the maturity to think critically and to make judgements about what activities and thought systems are actually helpful to the process. Paradoxically, it also includes knowing when to be non-judgmental - so that we may include others and hear the truth and merit in their views. The name for this tricky balancing act is wisdom.

Charles Johnston, author of The Creative Imperative, is a psychiatrist and futurist and can be reached at 5721 16th Ave. NE, Seattle, WA 98105. Respondent Robert Theobald, a consultant and futurist whose most recent book is The Rapids of Change, can be contacted at PO Box 2240, Wickenburg, AZ 85358.

We live in a most fascinating and critical time in the evolution of culture. Looking back a hundred years from now, we will likely regard these times of change to be as fully momentous and encompassing as those that took us from the reality of the Middle Ages into the Age of Reason, or those that brought passage from the reality of the hunter-gatherer into agrarian life. In every sphere of our lives, our world is challenging us to qualitatively new kinds of understanding.

Ideas that attempt to bridge into the new and larger kind of understanding being demanded of us get called by a variety of names: new paradigm, sustainable, green, globally responsible, new age. As I see it, we sit presently at a most important developmental point in such thinking. We have had our honeymoon period, our time of first infatuation, the tasks of that stage being first to acknowledge the fact of shifting paradigm, and second to make some initial intuitive hunches about the directions these shifts might be taking us.

Now a second stage stands before us, one that is asking of us somewhat different sensibilities than the first. The tasks are again twofold. The first is to begin to think in more detailed ways about the understandings and actions being asked of us in different spheres, to roll up our sleeves and develop very specific, practical formulations. The second is the important process of beginning to discern wheat from chaff in emergent thinking. We need to give more attention to teasing apart truly substantive thought from notions that are in fact wishful thinking, and to develop tools that will help us in this process.

Purported "new paradigm" ideas include a whole grab bag of perspectives. We find here some of the most significant insights of our time. We find also a lot of ideas that, while they have their hearts in a good place, will need a good deal of maturing before they are of practical use. And we find as well some of the most naive and simplistic thinking around. A lot of new paradigm/new age thought is as much a diversion from the immense challenges that confront us as are fundamentalism or yuppie materialism. It just appeals to people with a different style of personality.

What I'd like to do here is offer a few measures - a few conceptual yardsticks - that I use for doing some of that critical separating of wheat from chaff, both in my own thinking and in my work with others. I spend much of my time working with groups interested in revisioning and reframing their professions in new paradigm terms - educators, physicians, artists, architects. It is nitty-gritty, get-your-hands-dirty work. It asks that one be willing to confront constantly the question of whether particular ideas have something to offer, or whether they in fact lead us away from where we are being challenged to go.

A THIRD PLACE

To set the stage, I would like to share briefly a recent experience that will help put these ideas in some perspective and give a fuller sense of how I make use of them.

A friend who is a political science professor invited me to sit in on one of his classes not long ago. The topic for the afternoon's discussion was written in bold letters on the front of the blackboard: "Peace - Is is possible? How does one achieve it?"

The discussion began richly. One student, a woman in her forties, shared her fears that world peace might be just a utopian dream, that the making of war might be intrinsic to our natures. A young man, leaning forward, said that as he saw it, war on any major scale was simply no longer an option - that changes in the reality of war had made it no longer consistent with survival.

As the discussion progressed, my friend said: "Okay, we seem to agree that peace has become an imperative. If that is so, how do we go about achieving it?" As the students struggled with the question, the mood in the room began to change. Voices became more strident. Stances hardened. In the course of five minutes, the feeling changed from one of open inquiry to barely veiled hostility. Our "peaceseekers" had become polarized into warring camps and were exchanging blows with increasingly unfettered and righteous conviction. While at first there was a certain excitement in the intensity of the conflict, soon the students began to realize that something had been lost. For all the sparks, the fire of inquiry had largely disappeared. For all the pushing and shoving, little real headway was being made.

At that point, my friend turned to me and said, "Charley, roll up your sleeves and dive in here. This is your kind of stuff. Play creative consultant for us. Get us past this logjam."

I appreciated my friend's timing. The moment was ripe with possibilities. I got up out of my chair and invited the students to get up as well and join me at the front of the room. I shared with them that while I often enjoyed a good fight, here I agreed that somehow we had lost track of what was important. I asked the students to try something with me. I commented that it wasn't going to be easy to get beyond this impasse, but by using our imaginations we might be able to do it.

"What I'd like," I said, "is for us to pretend that we have been invited to go together to a planet in another galaxy. There is a battle going on there between two groups of beings who experience their world very differently and often end up in conflict. Actually, over the last half hour, we've already begun to make their acquaintance. First there are the 'hawks.' They live on the right side of the room. On the left side live the second group, the 'doves.' We've been asked here as intergalactic anthropologists and ombudsmen. Our task is to find out as much about these beings as we can and help them work toward peace."

I suggested the students begin by going over to the right side of the room, the domain of the hawks, and finding out everything they could about how the hawks experience their reality: to move like hawks, to sense the feelings there, to notice what they most valued, to see how they experienced both themselves and others. After four or five minutes I suggested that as well they might try speaking from that place of "hawkness," to notice what words seemed to want to express themselves.

I then asked people to return to the front of the room and share what they had noticed, what seemed most interesting, what most surprised them. One of the original doves commented that before she had always assumed hawks really wanted war. What most surprised her was that these people, while they had very different ideas about how to achieve peace, seemed in fact to want it as much as herself. A man who had originally expressed strong hawkish sentiments commented that in the past, he'd always associated his stance with simple courage and strength. He shared that in the experience he had felt this strength, but also a lot of fear, even paranoia. He saw that there was clearly much more to understand here than he had assumed.

I then suggested that we all move to the other side of the room and explore being doves. Again our task was to notice all we could - feelings, body posture, values, how others were perceived - and finally to speak.

Doing this, we again returned to the front of the room. Reflecting on the experience, one of the original hawks shared that having now experienced "doveness" from the inside, he had much more respect for it. While he couldn't really agree with this way of seeing things, he saw that there was caring in this place, and that it took guts to speak from it. One of the original doves shared that while he still identified with being a dove, his experience certainly made him step back and reflect. He had to admit that some of his proposals seemed naive when he really listened closely to them.

Turning to the class, I commented, "Well, the fire is back isn't it? Things feel alive again. What happened? How did we do that?" I paused for a moment, then asked: "If the hawks are over there and the doves there, who are we here? What is this place? Again take some time to explore," I suggested. "What are the feelings, values, body qualities here?"

After some time, again people shared. "What most strikes me about this third place," said one student, "is how tricky it is to stay in. I can get it for a moment, then I lose it completely. The only way to hold it was to make my body really big. It sure is easy to get scared and go someplace else." "This place demands a lot of subtle balancing and weighing," said another, "and often between contradictory things, between apples and oranges. Here there are no easy litmus paper tests to fall back on." Commented another, "To be here I have to grow up, be more mature. This place is asking me to be not only knowledgeable and caring, but wise, and to take a larger kind of responsibility than I've really understood before."

There was a pause, and then one student expressed what many were feeling: "I think it is possible to have peace only to the degree we can think and act from this more complete and mature place." I responded that I agreed, and that as I saw it the significance of this place was greater even than this. "It is not just that it is key to realizing peace," I said, "it is key to any practical understanding of the concept of peace. Only from this larger kind of perspective is it possible to discern realistic, workable images for what we might wish to be striving for."

A CULTURAL MIDLIFE TRANSITION

Passage into the next stage of culture challenges us to expand our understanding in qualitative ways. When I or the people I'm working with come up with notions that may be significant to new understanding, I look very closely to see if the ideas are really big enough. One thing I do is look to see whether the ideas fall subtly (or not so subtly) into one of a number of common new paradigm "traps and fallacies."

First, I listen carefully to sense if in any way the new notion is offering the seduction of an easy answer. As I see it, a shift in paradigm never offers easy answers. What we get is a frame large enough to address the emergent questions, something the old paradigm has ceased to be able to do. But ultimately a shift in paradigm is saying: "Life is bigger than you ever imagined. Can you handle it?"

This need to step beyond easy answers is, I think, particularly pertinent with our present shift in paradigm. I see important parallels between this time in the story of the lifetime of culture and a critical time of passage in our individual lives - the time of midlife transition. The midlife transition is unique in that it demands not only that we give up old answers, as with earlier lifetime passages, but also that we come to understand a whole new definition of what it means to have an answer. In the first half of life, one kind of simple, form-defined truth replaces another - parents, teachers, peer rules, personal beliefs. At midlife, as with earlier passages, the old truth ceases to work; but now no analogous truth emerges to replace it. Here life challenges us to understand in profoundly more mature, relativistic terms: to see our beliefs in larger, living contexts; to find the courage to take responsibility in a reality with very real uncertainty; and to understand not just from a place of knowledge, but increasingly from one of wisdom.

In an analogous cultural way, we are being challenged by our world to step beyond familiar truths: the world of experts; "my country right or wrong"; parental images of the divine. And similarly, we are being given no simple, form-defined, one-line answers to replace them. We are being challenged to embrace and embody a profoundly more dynamic, relativistic reality - a reality that demands of us a maturity beyond anything before known or needed in the human experience.

When I hear a new idea, one of the first things I listen for is whether it really addresses the immensity of what is being asked of us. Does it face squarely the needed maturity? Or does it somehow slide away from it, seducing us subtly (or not so subtly) with some new way to remain planetary children?

A second place I look in evaluating a new concept is how it goes about holding the major polarities that, in the past, have always ordered our thinking. Successful challenges to the prevailing Newtonian/Cartesian paradigm offer ways to embrace in a single brushstroke concepts that before have seemed polar absolutes - matter and energy in physics; mind and body in medicine; masculine and feminine in our understanding of gender. They offer ways to understand in terms of wholes, where before we could see only the either/or of parts.

WHOLENESS VS. ONENESS

When a purported new paradigm notion is in fact too easy an answer, it has more often than not fallen prey to what I call a unity fallacy. A unity fallacy is a confusion of the needed wholeness with oneness. The position of the doves in the political science class is a good illustration of falling for a unity fallacy. The feeling state was one of openness and caring for others and the planet. It felt like wholeness. But seen in the big picture, the doves were quite specifically taking sides. They were projecting parts of themselves that they didn't want to deal with onto others, and in the process coming to well-intentioned but ultimately partial and ineffective conclusions.

Catching unity fallacies isn't easy. To see past them requires that we think in larger than three-dimensional terms; an integral reality - a reality of living wholeness - can't be captured in a simple picture. The language of symbol and metaphor offers perhaps the easiest way to understand unity fallacies. All polarities somehow juxtapose a quality that is more archetypically masculine (pointed, form-defined, concerned with parts) with one that is more archetypically feminine (softer, connected to mystery, concerned with oneness). When we fall for a unity fallacy, we confuse the oneness of the archetypically feminine with the more challenging reality of the living whole.

Unity fallacies can take a variety of forms, but two are most common. We see the first when traditionally liberal, humanistic, or philosophically romantic notions masquerade as new paradigm. While such notions often provide a valuable counterbalance to predominant sentiments, it is important to recognize that they are not in fact new; they are simply the other side of the coin of the established perspective. (While we popularly depict the prevailing paradigm of the Age of Reason as mechanism, more accurately it is a dialectic composed of mechanism as one pole counterbalanced with a less powerful, but decidedly present, liberal/romantic voice.) Making this mistake, one again ends up quite specifically taking sides in the name of wholeness: with feelings in the battle of mind and emotions; with esthetics in the battle of art and science. The important recognition here is that either side of the coin of traditional paradigm is easy; we can express it well in one-liners and fervent dogma. The challenge is to think in ways that embrace the larger reality of the whole coin.

We see the second kind of unity fallacy in ideas that tend to equate the emergent paradigm with the thinking of earlier times in the evolution of culture - for example, with Western mysticism, classical Eastern philosophy, or native American thought. Such notions contain an important kernel of truth. An inherent dynamic in emergent reality is a critical kind of remembering, a reconnecting into kinds of understanding that once were central parts of us, but which through time have been forgotten.

The analogy to midlife is again helpful in understanding the partiality of this kind of thinking. As I frame things, creative/formative process is what fundamentally organizes reality - lifetime and culture are simply two examples. Inherent to the first half of any formative process is an amnesia for the formative stages that we have progressed beyond. Thus adolescents have a hard time making sense of the reality of children even though they were themselves children but a few years before; and young adults find adolescence baffling even though logically it is they who should be our greatest experts on it. In the second half of life, form is sufficiently established that these protective amnesias are no longer needed, and they gradually dissolve. Much of what we call wisdom is simply this remembering. It offers in maturity a growing ability to see the larger process of one's life.

The partiality of this second type of unity fallacy can be seen by an obvious analogy: while the elder re-embodies much of the reality of the child, its world and that of the child are far from the same. Culturally we are gaining the ability to appreciate and utilize the sensibilities of earlier times in rich new ways. And it is essential that we not confuse these earlier sensibilities with the much more challenging kinds of discernments that our times demand of us. In what the elder is, more than what the child is, lies much of what will be most critical if we are to survive and creatively thrive in times ahead.

Unity fallacies can be found in any sphere of understanding. In organizational development circles we see them in the thinking of people who, after appropriately questioning traditional hierarchical management, make consensus decision-making the new ideal. In medicine we see them in views that rightly criticize the traditional disease model, but then go no further than to side with non-traditional, supposedly "natural" methods. In environmental questions they manifest in a replacing of the mythos of man over nature with an equally unworkable view than treats nature as pure and humanity as the enemy - a perspective that, if carried to its logical conclusion, would have to regard the entire rise of civilization as a mistake. We see them commonly in popular new age concepts that purport to bridge the sacred and the scientific, but in fact are simply reducing everything to spirit.

A last measure I'll touch on briefly has to do with how the time frame of paradigmatic changes is depicted. Easy-answer views commonly depict change happening very quickly (an Aquarian second-coming by the good graces of the hundredth monkey?). In fact paradigm shifts have never happened this way, and there is no reason to suspect this one will be different.

The timing of paradigmatic changes has a bifocal nature. One part is quite rapid: in a rather short time, a significant mass of people recognize that major change is indeed in progress. But counterpoised with this is the actual embodiment of change, which takes place only over quite a long time - decades, centuries.

The issue of world peace makes a good example. My hunch is it will not be long before a critical mass recognizes that projecting our devils onto others in order to both feel virtuous and have a sense of identity is simply no longer an option. Yet it will be quite some time before complementarities between peoples become sufficiently second nature that war can take its place as a vestigial human institution, like sacrifice or slavery.

As a therapist I work frequently with couples on issues of shifting paradigms in relationship - what it means to move from loving as two people who together make a whole, to loving as whole people. Acknowledging this bifocal relationship to time can be most helpful here in freeing up the compassion these kinds of changes require. I often comment on the fact that while the concept of loving as whole people is not difficult, the reality of doing it can be quite another thing. I share with these couples that it's important to be able to accept that in the changes we are trying to effect, we are in our bare infancy; and that at the time of our death, it's likely we will still be but young children.

The "good" news in the dynamics of shifting paradigm is that we get to be pioneers. The "bad" news is that being a pioneer isn't always easy. And many of the rewards do not come until well after one's passing.

- Charles Johnston

Robert Theobald responds:

Charles Johnston's piece reminds us of the most critical danger of our time: underestimating the magnitude of the change from the industrial era to the new world that I now call the "compassionate era." Failure to recognize that magnitude causes us to short-circuit the massive personal and cultural processes through which we must move if we are to have any chance of creating the profoundly new conditions that our times require.

I find Charles' techniques fascinating, and I appreciate his description of the difficulty and stress of the balance position he describes.

I believe, however, that this balance point, which I tried to develop in a paper called The Art of Dynamic Balance, is not new. I would suggest that this type of struggle for balance is at the heart of both our theory of democracy and our real understanding of religion. Winston Churchill argued that democracy was the worst form of government - except all the others. He was arguing that the constant pull of committed individuals and groups was the way to keep culture evolving. The practice of democracy, however, requires passion and commitment, and we have lost these qualities in recent years.

The core of all religions also stresses the need for balance. I am aware that all too often this core has been ignored. Yet there are many [religious people] who are ready to wake up and struggle with the implications of a world which needs to be based on the values of honesty, responsibility, humility, love and a respect for mystery.

If these arguments are correct, we often ignore a large part of the public which might cope best with the challenges Charles raises. It has been my experience that it is often the less advanced and sophisticated people who understand the true complexity and meaning of the "balance" issue.

All too often we have downgraded those who remain attached to the age-old values. I recognize that those in the main-line religions also have very difficult issues with which they must struggle, but I am convinced that they are at least as likely to be resolved as the dilemmas which emerge from our sophisticated and fragmented intellectual dialogue.

I have come to recognize that we exclude many potential participants from involvement because we insist that they use our language rather than theirs to discuss the issues. When I work in their terms, I often find their reactions very similar to my own. Indeed, the more excluded and disempowered they are, the more resonance there is to the need for truly fundamental change.

The issue as both Charles and I see it is, therefore, how do we help people to attain and maintain their balance position? One implication of this question is that we must re-examine who can tolerate a balance position most easily.

In closing, let me take up the one point where I disagree with Charles: that of timing. He argues that we are too impatient and that we must not expect the revolution to be completed in our lifetimes. At one level I agree, for the turbulence from our extraordinary shift will continue for decades.

On the other hand, I believe that our world culture will either set new directions for itself before the year 2000 or we shall be moving toward destruction. People cannot function unless their model of the world conforms to reality - if it does not they will become more and more baffled, frustrated and angry. This is the current mood not only in America but throughout the world.

This, in turn, leads to a search for simplistic, traditional answers. The dynamics of the 1988 election in the United States and the 1987 election in Great Britain prove how far we are along this path. We shall either learn to live at the balance point or we shall destroy ourselves. This is the reason for the now common statement that the human race will either grow up or blow itself up.

In the 1960s, the dynamics of the industrial world and our realities started to diverge. Most of us have tried to keep one foot in the industrial era and the other in our new world. The stretch is now becoming intolerable: we shall either connect to the new world or snap back to the old.

For me, much of the change in thought and behavior has already taken place - a point well made by Yankelovich in his book New Rules. The issue now is whether we shall recognize the extent and depth of the change or deny it.

How shall we live as we accept these new understandings? I would suggest we shall need to adopt a pattern of "realistic hope" or "hopeful realism." We must accept where we actually are, rather than operating on wishful thinking. And then we must commit to the belief that our activities do make a difference if we are prepared to commit to them.

Gregory Bateson has taught us that change is not always gradual. It is my deep belief that the shift away from the industrial era will take place very rapidly - if it takes place at all. I realize that this statement is highly controversial. Because of its importance I would suggest that it is one of the areas where we should be spending significant amounts of time and effort.

- Robert Theobald

Dear Robert,

A delight to get your note and hear your thoughts on my article. I think we do differ on when the shift to the emergent world view began (though I don't think that difference has major implications for what is now critical to do). I see the shift beginning around the turn of the century with the thinking of people like Einstein, Freud (the concept of the unconscious is a radical challenge to the Age of Reason's core tenet that with time all could be brought into the light), and Darwin (his brazen claim of our relatedness to the most hairy of apes was a first important reassertion of our inextricable relatedness in nature). I see us now in the middle stages of these changes.

Traditional democracy and standard religion are both Age of Reason structures, as I see things. Democracy has its basis in the concept of individuality. While balance has an important role, it is defined not in terms of integration - recognizing the larger contextual process - but in terms of compromise. Traditional religion, while often a voice of moderation, paradigmatically is a polar institution; it is the voice of spirit in the fundamental duality of sacred and secular. The emergent world view is quite specifically integral - this, as I see it, being something very different from simple compromise or identification with the more unitary side of things. For example, e=mc2 is qualitatively more than a simple averaging of the concepts of matter and energy: it is a statement of dynamic four-dimensional relationship. Emerging ideas about gender are much more than concepts of compromise (in becoming whole women and whole men, the ideal is not some unisex middle ground, but the courage to be whole as uniquely who we are). New mind/body concepts in medicine are asking not simply how to balance mind and body, but what mind and body are together as a living, creative dynamic.

So, if I understand you correctly, there may be some differences in both how we see the history of these processes and to some degree in how we frame the dynamics of what you call "balance" in"the compassionate era" and I called (in The Creative Imperative) "third-space" dynamics in "integral culture." But I think our visions of the tasks ahead are extremely kindred.

I agree completely that many of the people with the greatest potential for engaging emergent reality would not identify themselves with any of our popular categories: holistic, green, new paradigm, globally responsible, new age, etc. Indeed, in my experience, often those who hold most tightly to such labels are some of the people with the least tolerance for how large our emergent challenges in fact are. Yes, it is most important that our language and our vision be kept broad.

In terms of the question of "timing," I'm not sure in fact we see things that differently. I completely agree with you that "our world culture will either set new directions for itself by the year 2000 or we shall be moving toward destruction."

I spoke in my article of the timing of these changes being a "bifocal" dynamic. As I see it, there are aspects which will and must happen quickly, others which will take much time for tempering and maturing. An image that works for me in thinking about paradigmatic change is that of a snake shedding its skin in order to grow. It seems clearly the case that we are in the midst of a time of major "skin shedding" (and one that must be completed in pretty short order or the old skin will strangulate us). But as well it is the case that it will likely be decades, indeed centuries, before we realize the full potential and significance of our "new skin."

I often emphasize the long term part of this bifocal dynamic, but not out of any belief there is time to spare (the title of my book is The Creative Imperative). I do it because so often the concept of paradigm shift is framed popularly in magical terms, as a sudden, "second coming"-like new age that will effortlesly bring solutions to all our problems. I do it to emphasize, as you do so well in your work, the immensity of what is being asked of us in the challenges we face.

- Charles Johnston

Dear Charles,

I feel that we are closing the gap in a number of the apparent disagreements between us. I agree that the dynamic of change goes back a long way - indeed we can argue that the patterns we, and many others, are attempting to surface have been hidden within Western culture for centuries. (St. Francis of Assissi, Blake, Goethe, etc.)

I also agree that there is a profound difference between compromise and the resolution of paradox, about which I hear you talking. The latter can only be resolved by finding the common ground which rises above the paradox. The problem, of course, is that English is a bad language for the discussion of all the issues which are now most crucial. And even more seriously, the structures of knowledge we are using are obsolete. Hence our outrageous goal to write a "new encyclopedia."

I'm glad we do agree that the critical element in being able to deal with these issues is to look at the incredible scope of the current challenges, while agreeing that current labels leave little of the complex reality in place. But we obviously need to give people a sense that they are not all alone as they struggle with these issues.

Finally, on timing. Once again I am delighted to find that we agree on most of the elements. Let me challenge you at one level, however. I agree with you that the current predominant image in the culture is that the new age will inevitably and happily arrive, and we both disagree with this assertion. But we apparently see different critical points. You want to emphasize the immensity and do so by stressing how long the end results of the change will take.

I want to alert us to the incredible implications of shedding the skin of the snake in the next few years and to challenge people to get involved. I therefore stress how much must happen before the end of the century if we are to survive while being aware that the consequences will take decades to work out. Obviously the visions are complementary and convergent.

- Robert Theobald

Sacred Stewardship

by Jean Houston

Let us look again at what is stewing in the closing years of the Twentieth Century. Not only must we contend with factors unique in human experience, but there are many factors thrust upon us by present history for which we are untrained, unprepared, and often unwilling.

Erik Erikson sees modern maturity as the age of the struggle between what he refers to as generativity and stagnation. By generativity Erikson means the responsible guiding of the growth of others, the caring and concern for social organization, and other activities critical to the maintenance of community. In the past this period of responsible guidance didn't last very long, because one's life didn't last very long. Most people could expect to be dead by their mid-forties, after their grandchildren had been born. This fact of thousands of generations of early mortality casts a long shadow, so that many people now, somewhere between roughly the ages of 35 and 55, become unpleasantly aware that half a million years of human experience tells them it is time to die.

Part of this finds its reaction in the so-called "mid-life crisis." One day they wake up and discover that in some sense they have "died" in the middle of all their responsible activities, and they feel neither commitment nor responsibility to "take care" of things anymore. And yet one knows that one is going to live maybe 20 to 50 years longer than all those ancestors who had so brief of a period of "being responsible". The prospect of many decades of doing more of the same provokes a calendrical nausea that causes many people to leave spouse, home, friends, job, and even life itself.

We are still shaped and manipulated by educations, social plans, jobs and therapies that are geared to this limited life span. As a species we have not yet woken up to the thrilling realization that for the first time in human history many of us will have "enough time" to discover and use those latent capacities that could not be tapped when we were prisoners of time, having just enough years to grow up, reproduce, and take care of the basic necessities for ourselves and our children. Suddenly we are sprung from the limitations of merely "biological" time, and we are presented with a vista of possibilities that remains shadowy because we have not yet learned to turn on the light.

In earlier epochs we were often left benumbed when faced with the prospect of cataclysm and profound social change. Now, like Job, the full Individual rails against absurdity and demands that the breakdown of meaning be the occasion for deepening.

Years ago Julian Huxley prophetically spoke of the opportunity and necessity for deepening: "It is as if man had been suddenly appointed managing director of the biggest business of all, the business of evolution - appointed without being asked if he wanted it, and without proper warning and preparation. What is more, he can't refuse the job. Whether he wants it or not, whether he is conscious of what he is doing or not, he is in point of fact determining the future direction of evolution on this earth. That is his inescapable destiny, and the sooner he realizes it and starts believing in it, the better for all concerned."

As custodians of all life forms and shapers of the planetary future, we have no choice but to accept the challenge. Never before have we had so great an inherent purpose; never before so thrilling and adventurous an opportunity. That is why perhaps we have recently been gifted with such long lives. Sacred stewardship demands that we live long enough and deep enough to learn the ways of evolutionary governance and to nurture the course of changes which can occur now, not in millennia, but in the duration of an 80-year-plus lifespan. Sacred stewardship demands that we educate ourselves by acquiring the inner capacities to match our outer powers, seeking and finding those physical, mental, and spiritual resources that enable us to partner the planet.

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