PART IV
The Great Turning

There can be no respect for our place in the environment and the environment’s place in us without a spirituality that teaches us reverence for the cosmos in which we find ourselves.¹

Matthew Fox

We humans live by stories that embody the shared wisdom of our cultures about our possibilities, values, and the nature of the cosmos. Through these stories, most particularly the stories of our origin, we define ourselves, the meaning of our lives, and our relationship to the sacred. When the stories a society shares are out of tune with its circumstances, they can become self-limiting, even a threat to survival. That is our current situation.

It is now within our means to make an epic choice to put the sorrows of Empire behind us in favor of the joys of Earth Community. We have the knowledge and the technology. The remaining barriers are primarily self-limiting beliefs that have no reality beyond the human mind.

The explosive advance of human knowledge in the past hundred years greatly expands not only our understanding of our nature and possibilities but also the capacity for cooperative self-organization and mutual service inherent in the very nature of life itself. To navigate successfully the turbulent waters of the Great Turning, we must revisit and update the stories by which we communicate our common understanding of our human origin, purpose, and possibility.