Einstein said that we can’t solve a problem with the same kind of thinking that gave rise to the problem. His insight applies also to the domain of consciousness: we can’t solve the problems of our time with the same kind of consciousness that created them. We live in global times, yet most of us have a tribal kind of consciousness – it’s me or you, my group or yours, and whoever isn’t with us is against us. The continuation of tribal consciousness is nothing less than a recipe for disaster in a world of nuclear weapons, environmental devastation, increasing population and dwindling resources.
There can be no doubt: if we’re going to live sustainably and in peace with each other, we must all shift from a tribal to a planetary consciousness.
But just what is planetary consciousness? Here is how we defined it in the Manifesto on Planetary Consciousness that I drafted with the Dalai Lama and other luminaries of the Club of Budapest in 1996:
“Planetary consciousness is knowing as well as feeling the vital interdependence and essential oneness of humankind, and the conscious adoption of the ethic and the ethos that this entails.”
It was our conclusion at that time that the evolution of planetary consciousness was the foundational imperative for the survival of the human species. I remain more convinced than ever that this is the case.
But what do you think? Assuming you agree that we must evolve beyond tribalism if we are to survive, would you consider yourself to have planetary consciousness? Here are ten questions that I believe, if answered honestly, will tell you whether you do.
Do you –
1. Satisfy your basic needs without diminishing other people’s chances of satisfying theirs?
2. Pursue your own happiness with due regard for the similar pursuit of others?
3. Respect the right to economic development for all people, wherever they live and whatever their ethnic origin or belief system?
4. Live in a way that respects the integrity of nature around you?
5. Work with like-minded people to safeguard and restore your local environment?
6. Require your government to relate to other nations peacefully and in a spirit of cooperation, recognizing the legitimate aspirations of all the members of the international community?
7. Buy from companies that accept responsibility for stakeholders at all levels of the supply chain?
8. Consume media that provides unbiased information relevant to you and your community?
9. Do something to help at least one other person escape the hopeless struggles and abject humiliations of extreme poverty?
10. Believe all young people are entitled to the education they need to be productive members of their community?
Answering these ten questions with an honest yes doesn’t call for money or power. It calls for dedication and solidarity, for the spirit that creates true community, both locally and globally.
The evolution of planetary consciousness is without question an imperative for human survival on our planet. In its absence it’s difficult to see how all seven billion of us will be able to live in peace—or even just survive. To paraphrase Gandhi, “Live consciously, so that all of us may live.”
{ 14 comments… read them below or add one }
Dear Dr. Laszlo,
The ten questions set a high standard to the levels of consciousness dealt in our daily lives, demonstrating the great distance between the transcendent human values and the low level of consciousness that dominates a society based on the ego.
My deepest wishes are to be illuminated by your wisdom.
LGD
Wisdom it´s already inside you.
“A human being is a part of a whole, called by us “the universe”, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest… a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.” — Albert Einstein
We are born so that we can experience.
That is all; whether we choose to be born or someone “else” chooses I know not. I have no clarity in the origin of this mystery, but I know that the purpose of life, as we humans know it, is simply to experience life.
I am a bubble of spirituality enmeshed in physicality.
That is why I exist. This is the reason for my existence;
A huge playground of holograms, illusions, thoughts, time, emotions.
A vast laboratory designed to give us physical experiences and to see what we make of them.
Life is for living, nothing more, and not for thinking and fearing;
certainly not for controlling, neither controlling other humans nor controlling nature.
When we learn this lesson, then we truly start back to be community, to sharing, to caring, to compassion, to communion; then the whole beauty of creation smiles and we finally begin to experience the source we came from, finally the separation ends and the two become one or the parts of spirit re-unite back into the unity they once were. Life is composed of experiences.
Humanity is spirit wilfully enmeshed in physicality so that it may experience.
We have a choice about how we deal with these experiences. We can consciously or unconsciously attempt to control them, to hold our range of experiences within a set of “roped off” safe areas and not risk the ones outside the comfort zones. This way we attempt to stay within the limits of our culture, parental training, personal history and fears etc. We allow ourselves to experience only one illusion (we call it normality) and no more.
Exactly who defines these boundaries to encapsulate normality varies, but it is becoming the “normal” that we defer even this decision to a non-existent amorphous entity that we call “society” or to the “state”. These so-called safe areas are then forced or coerced into place and policed by the state, society, parental conditioning, teachers, priests, police, lawyers and others, including our peers. It ceases to be our responsibility or our choice, we give our power away again.
This destroys creativity.
If we live in a world that is static and unchanging we cannot be creative. Evolution is creative chaos, so in this version of the world we do not evolve. Creativity demands risk taking, to stay within the rope fence only allows us to copy others. We may make
a new pattern but it is built of other peoples‟ pieces. We have merely re-assembled a jigsaw in a different way. There is nothing new in it,
No creation.
Energy follows Attention,
Power follows Intent
We need to create, not invent, nor manufacture, nor analyse, nor produce; not to design but to create, that is to bring into manifestation in this reality. If we leave our power in another reality and only indulge our nice warm feelings and wonderful dreams, they in themselves will not, cannot manifest in this reality.
Power is the ability to do work
Work is force multiplied by distance moved
So Power is the Ability to use force (Energy) to move something.
Therefore if the power generated doesn‟t get applied to create movement or to move “something” along a distance; unless it manifests as physical reality, then it is just more swirling energy and it hasn‟t made a difference, hasn‟t created anything.
You have to face the grandmothers naked, and they will ask, not
“What did you dream?”
but
“What did you do?
So,
“Are you powerful? Are you full of power?
If so, what are you doing with that power?
Are you creating, something hard and physical in this reality?
Or are you swirling streams of energy around?
Does it matter?
I say it does, for me.
I agree with you Tony, that life is to be experienced. In fact, I believe that the reason we take form in the first place is so that we can experience; but to experience for a reason, and that is, to eventually learn from the consequences of our actions that create our (usually repeated) experiences, to become more aware, more conscious, and more the wise ; and so evolve. Put more simply, the whole purpose of life is to evolve through the experiential learning that a body or form affords an indwelling spirit (life). This applies through all living species and realms. But experiential learning is given no credence or value in our present social paradigm, which forces each individual to be indoctrinated into an abstract, arbitrary belief and value system, with a false sense of identity that conforms us to play gender-based roles that strip us of our true human nature.
The so-called work ethic (an arbitrary abstraction) is causal to the criminal desecration of the planet and human society. The Public Sphere has eliminated the Domestic sphere as a social value, and effectively desensitised human beings to the value of life itself. Living animals are reduced to “units of production” and are treated monstrously, by monsters, in the name of work “efficiency”.
If humans are to survive beyond this current half century, our work ethic must be to work conscionably to restore the desecrated integrity of the Web of Life on Earth that our scientific ignorance of qualitative causal dynamics (evolutionary Laws) is perpetrating. We need to evolve beyond the abstract, arbitrary, rational thinking of our masculine “left-brain” into the concrete, practical, intuitive thinking of our feminine “right-brain”, which visually perceives the qualitative, invisible 90% of reality that, because it doesn’t have to faculty to prove it, quantitative thinking denies any scientific validity. The imminent quantum leap is across the corpus callosum, and it can only be made by the individual who works on themselves.
“Einstein said that we can’t solve a problem with the same kind of thinking that gave rise to the problem.” Tribal consciousness is not the problem; the Patriarchal hierarchical social structure that stems from the masculine L-mode thinking faculty is the problem. We have been evolving the 3-dimensional perception of the L-mode since we emerged as H.sapiens sapiens, and have come to the end of that line of development. It has served its evolutionary purpose. We must shift from 3D perception to 4D perception, and get back on the evolutionary spiral and conscionably take our place within the web of life, under the laws that first created and then maintained the Earth’s evolutionary life.
I think for myself, and am led by my intuition to any information needed for my self-education. I avoid mass media like the plague, as it reinforces the status quo, and threatens my integrity 9) So as to have time to develop my own unique perspective on life, I live in poverty, and I’m in no position to help anyone else. 10) I believe that all young people have the right to be free from compelled education/indoctrination into the patriarchal hierarchical thinking that is robbing them of their uniqueness and human potential, and conforming them for servitude to the criminal work ethic that is destroying human society and ecological integrity. My score was 2-and-a-bit out of 10, because the questions come from the “left-brain” thinking that is causing social and evolutionary meltdown. The evolution of holistic consciousness, by developing the 4D faculty and conscionable thinking of the repressed “right-brain” is without question the new type of thinking that is imperative for human survival on our planet.
Planetary consciousness is the 7 Dimensional awareness of our Planetary Mother. We cannot go from 3D to 7D consciousness; we must evolve there. What we need to do is evolve into the next dimension of perception, from 3D rational consciousness to the 4D R-mode intuitive faculty of mind. The above definition illustrates L-mode thinking in that it is only concerned with the falsely conformed human state: human beings conditioned by law to be an abstraction with arbitrary values and value. We must individually overcome the socially conformed self to claim our divine heritage as creative conscionable human beings.
My answers are more like comments. As a consciously evolving individual,
1) I have learned to separate needs from wants; to know what is ‘enough’; to live conscionably, creatively, frugally; and with resourcefulness. 2) I devote myself to the daily pursuit of truth by following my intuition, and experience joy on the odd occasions when a truth is found.
3) I respect the rights of all living beings to their life and place in the web of life. Economic development is anti-evolution and anti-life. Humans do not have the right to destroy this planet’s billions of years of evolution in the name of “economic Development”.
4) In every way I can, I live in a way that respects the integrity of nature. 5) Try as I may, I have yet to find like minded people who are addressing CAUSE rather than effect. 6) I believe that Governments and other institutions are part of the thinking that is causing the problems. As long as patriarchal hierarchical structures exist, nothing is going to change. 7) Under the rule of corporate empire, we are consuming the planet and its web of life for the sake of the corporate bottom line; the only thing that benefits from the economic appropriation and exploitation of life is the corporation and its shareholders.
You can’t get there with thinking. Thought leads you to the rabbit hole.
The truth that can be told is not the eternal truth.
The name that can be named is not the eternal name.
The eye cannot see itself.
The beauty of thinking positive thoughts.
Even the reply is modified
Thank you, Honour leigh. Comment to # 9 ” I live n poverty.” I guess you are referring to financial poverty because your richness of spirit and soul and treasury of deep knowledge is immense
I am just flabbergasted that economy is even mentioned in this article, in the way of “Respect the right to economic development for all people”. With a monetary system there can be no happiness for all, no sharing, only climbing over each others dead bodies to reach higher on the monetary status ladder. Therefore those who have will strive for more, as will those who don’t have. And if money should miraculously one day be evenly distributed, there would be no market, because you wouldn’t need money any more. Money needs to go. We have plenty of resources to provide for every person on earth, so it’s the distribution of those resources that are important, not how much they “cost”. The cost is a fiction, an agreement of inflation on the “market”, which is also a figment of imagination. Money needs to go.
If you haven’t realized this truth before, I suggest you watch the three films in the Zeitgeist series. zeitgeistmovie.com
I don’t think the question concerning economic development was referring specifically to a monetary system. To me, it is the opposite. It is saying every culture should have the right to develop its economy–whether that be monetary or any other system–in alignment with that culture and its needs and not based on some superpower’s economic needs. A sustainable economy takes into consideration the needs and culture of the people, not the wealth of a few. It looks to the people for their talents and resources. It makes them the proprietors of their future.
IF I could say that unless the number 10. tell me as a boy 20 years consciousness evolves in a way accelerate other 9 based on the maximum, with a natural touch and spiritual educational progress but could not come sircustancias of this system that is established today. Given that we have to live so that too can do it like I can survive without money, no education, i almost nothing but that if i ever require vasandome as to understand the spirituality i Quantica I theoretically explains all my thoughts i my path in life simplemnte Based on the evolution of my consciousness I come to understand the spirituality i understand the Quantico, so if you live i feel. and had the good fortune to read a book of yours, Quantico Change is not by chance that I get to my hands like your name, and also have read a lot about you online mencanta Akasiko field theory. I would love to continue reading his books one day get them because you are an inspiration to my life theoretical. Thank you very much Dr. Lazlo. I’m not productive?
It’s not just tribal consciousness that is the trouble. We must all realize we are one tribe; the tribe of life! We are all one family! Every living being is a member of the tribe of life! We must first must allow ourselves to wake up to the fact that we are loved. Each one of us is treasure of unique gifts and insights. Until we treasure our inner nature and ourselves to just be the trouble will remain as it is.
It all starts at home, with you, in your heart! Can you accept who you are as loved and treasured no matter what!
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