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MARGARET MEAD TOLD US “never to doubt the power of a small group of people to change the world. Nothing else ever has.” Mahatma Gandhi was even more insistent: “Be the change you want to see in the world.” They were right. When you change yourself, you change the world around you—and ultimately you change the world.

In a macroshift, this insight is crucial. It bears repeating that if the critical chaos phase of this shift is to be brought to a humane and sustainable conclusion, our values, worldviews, ethics, and ambitions must change in line with our changing conditions. We must forget obsolete beliefs, learn to live with and make productive use of the world’s persistent diversity, embrace a planetary ethic capable of guiding behavior that can enable all people to live on this Earth, and meet the responsibilities that fall to every one of us in the personal, business, and political spheres of our lives. Understanding these imperatives is essential, but if it remains on the level of the intellect, it is insufficient. A global survey of young people has shown that intellectual understanding produces better ideas, but not necessarily better behaviors.

Designed and implemented by UNESCO and the U.N. Environment Programme, the “Survey on Youth and Sustainable Consumption” interviewed young people in 24 countries on five continents. It found that the vast majority of young people rank the reduction of pollution in air, water, and soil as the most important challenge for their future—more important even than issues of health, human rights, population increase, and the disparity between rich and poor. Yet the survey also found that there is a serious disjunction between the ideals and hopes of youth and their everyday life. Young people in both industralized and developing countries recognize the environmental and social impact of the way they consume and discard the products available to them, yet they do not link this intellectual recognition to the way they shop. Especially when it comes to everyday items such as food and clothing, considerations of price and quality continue to outweigh the environmental friendliness of the products and the social implications of their production and use.

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Young people, and people of all ages and all walks of life, can change the world, but only if they go beyond mere understanding and evolve their consciousness. They will then not only think better but will also act on their thinking—as the U.S. “cultural creatives” already do.

Harry Truman once remarked, “the buck stops here,” meaning the desk of the president of the United States. Today the buck has become more democratic: it stops with every one of us, whether rich or poor, developed or developing. It comes in the form of a challenge: Reexamine your values, evolve your consciousness. If you do, the movement toward a more adapted and sustainable civilization will deepen and spread.

Why is your consciousness so crucial? The explanation is common sense, and it makes uncommon good sense. We know that when a living species is threatened with extinction it faces a stark choice: it either produces a viable mutation or becomes extinct. For the species to survive, the way its members maintain themselves and the environment and the way they reproduce have to change. In nonhuman species most behavior directly concerned with survival is genetically coded, and this kind of change calls for a coinciding adaptive mutation of the gene pool.

The situation is not quite the same when it comes to humans. When the survival of a human population is threatened, it too must produce a viable change in the way it lives and reproduces if it is not to face the specter of extinction. But this does not require a mutation of the genetic pool of our species. Although it is true that some aspects of human behavior are genetically coded, the values and beliefs that threaten human survival today are under conscious, not genetic, control. We can discard obsolete beliefs and outdated behaviors and adopt new beliefs and behaviors. This process of “cultural mutation” is far more rapid and efficient than a mutation of the gene pool, which is a protracted process involving repeated trial and error, with the successive mutants exposed to the ultimate test of fitness to the environment—the test of natural selection. The mutation of the cultural information pool does not require the chance serendipity of success: it can be consciously planned and purposively promoted. Its conscious planning and purposive promotion have become a precondition of human survival in the twenty-first century.

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A general definition of culture is the ensemble of values, world-views, aspirations, and customs that characterize a people and distinguish it from others. In this sense there are thousands of cultures in today’s world. Yet, with the exception of the few remaining traditional cultures, they all share a common trait: they give rise to behaviors that are socially and ecologically unsustainable. This trait must now disappear—and its disappearance, like any other specific of human culture, hinges crucially on people’s consciousness. If the consciousness of mainstream culture does not change, the threat to human survival will persist. Obsolete values and outdated beliefs will widen the gap between rich and poor and degrade the viability of nature. This will lead to deepening social, economic, and political crises, spreading destitution, increasing violence, and ultimately a collapse of the weakest populations.

The threat to human survival has its ultimate roots in the outdated consciousness of a critical mass in today’s world. If the obsolescence of today’s dominant consciousness is the root cause of the survival threat, evolution of this consciousness is the way to overcome that threat. You, as everyone around you, can do your part by evolving your own consciousness.

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To live with and not against each other, to live in a way that does not rob the chances of others to live as well, to care what is happening to the poor and the powerless as well as to nature calls for feeling and intuition; for sensing the situation in which we find ourselves, apprehending its manifold aspects and creatively responding to it.

But just how can you evolve your consciousness? First of all, you should know what is a more evolved consciousness. The simplest way to grasp it is in reference to the two frontal hemispheres of your brain, the narrowly rational one-thing-at-a-time rationality of the left hemisphere, and the intuitive, Gestalt-perceiving right hemisphere. The mythical rationality of ages past was right-brain dominated, while the rationality of the modern age is left-brain dominated—it is the rationality of Logos. A more evolved consciousness combines the clear-cut if simplifying linear reasoning of the left-brain with the spontaneous, deep intuitions of the right. It is whole-brain consciousness: the consciousness of Holos.

Having whole-brain Holos consciousness is not a matter of adding more facts and figures to the storehouse of facts and figures already in your head. Relevant facts and figures are important, but alone they do not fill the bill. To live with and not against each other, to live in a way that does not rob the chances of others to live as well, to care what is happening to the poor and the powerless as well as to nature calls for more than reading up on the statistics. It also calls for feeling and intuition, for sensing the situation in which we find ourselves, and for apprehending its manifold aspects and creatively responding to it. It means raising the full scope of our attention, empathy, and concern from today’s ego-, business-, and nation-centered dimension to a broader human-, nature-, and planet-centered one.

A more evolved consciousness is achievable; many people are achieving it already. The principal avenues that lead to it are open to everyone.

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People who meditate or pray, who have had near-death experiences, and who have traveled in space have a fresh appreciation of existence and reverence for nature. . . . They possess an integrated, holistic vision of themselves, of nature, and of the universe.

Psychiatrists and consciousness researchers know that a more balanced consciousness arises in those who have had direct inner experience of oneness with other people, and with nature. Individuals practicing a deep meditative or prayerful state intuit oneness with other persons or with a higher presence, and those who have come close to death in an accident or illness experience life in a new light. Common characteristics of this inner peace include no fear of death, empathy with other people, and taking pleasure in simple living and sharing. Astronauts who have had the privilege of traveling in space and viewing the Earth in all its living splendor feel an intense tie to their home planet for the rest of their days.

People who meditate or pray, those who have had near-death experiences, and those who have traveled in space have a fresh appreciation of existence and a reverence for nature. They evolve deep humanitarian and ecological concerns and find differences among people, whether in the area of sex, race, color, language, political conviction, or religious belief, interesting and enriching rather than threatening. They realize that they cannot do anything to nature without simultaneously doing it to themselves and that other people—whether next door, in distant parts of the world or of generations yet to come—are not separate from them and that their fate is not a matter of indifference. These people possess an integrated, holistic vision of themselves, of nature, and of the universe.

Not everyone can be expected to engage in deep prayer or meditation, have near-death experiences, or be shot into space—yet a more evolved consciousness is needed in all people. Psychiatrist Stanislav Grof believes that this can be achieved: the states of consciousness required for it were common in times past, and can become common again in the future. In ancient and traditional cultures people regularly experienced nonordinary states of consciousness fostered by their socially sanctioned rituals. “Primitive” and traditional people could and very likely did have firsthand experience of deep connections to each other and to all of nature. Shamans and medicine men seem also to have had encounters with archetypal beings and to have entered mythological realms. Not surprisingly, these cultures integrated people’s altered-state experiences into their overall worldview.

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According to Grof, the same thing is happening to contemporary people who have the opportunity to enter nonordinary states of consciousness. He has yet to meet a single person from our culture, he said, no matter what his or her educational background, IQ, and specific training, who had powerful transpersonal experiences yet continued to subscribe to the materialistic concepts that dominated the mindset of the twentieth century. Even highly trained psychologists, when they have experiences of nonordinary states or study them in others, shift to a vision of the world that integrates the dominant view of modern-age Logos with deeper cultural and historical perspectives. It is likely that if nonordinary states were to become generally accessible, today’s dominant consciousness would shift to a new and more adapted modality.

Genuine works of art and literature socialize people into their community and give insight into the relations that bind them to each other and to the cosmos. They give perceptible form to humankind’s perennial intuitions of the oneness of life and nature.

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Nonordinary states attained through meditation, spirituality, or psychotherapy are not the only avenue leading to an evolution of consciousness. This evolution is a cultural process, and art and artists have an important role in it. Art and literature in their many forms are vital resources for the evolution of new values and perceptions. Despite their specific modes of expression and criteria of excellence, art and literature are nourished by the same basic source as science, philosophy, and spirituality: insight into the nature of human experience. Rather than penetrating the microcosmos of the atom or the macrocosmos of interstellar space, the artist and the writer penetrate the deepest regions of their own psyche to find communal links with their fellow women and men, with their suffering and joy, ambitions and yearnings.

Art is not limited to museums, galleries, and concert halls but is present throughout society. It shapes cities through architecture and urban design, enters people’s feelings through music, entertains, challenges, and informs through film, radio and television, and catalyzes comprehension through literature and drama. It is cultural creativity in its finest form.

Genuine works of art and literature socialize people into their community and give insight into the relations that bind them to each other and to the cosmos. They give perceptible form to humankind’s perennial intuitions of the oneness of life and nature. They are a vital source of inspiration for living, loving, and harmony with all of creation.

Art is more relevant to the outcome of today’s macroshift than most artists and art lovers realize. It is all the more regrettable that artists are often reluctant to go beyond their coterie of experts and followers to address everyone in society—they fear that by so doing they will become propagandizers of preconceived ideologies. Yet by turning to all people with art that expresses their own experience they become propagators of their own consciousness. Great art is not any the less great for addressing the bulk of humankind; it is only more effective in promoting the common good.

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A better grasp of the worldview suggested by the latest scientific theories would give a positive impetus to the evolution of people’s consciousness and would move us nearer to a more adapted path for our collective evolution.

Science is changing. This change, much like the emerging cultures’ change of consciousness, is important, yet it is not widely known. Innovations in science—insofar as they do not have immediate technological and economic implications—are poorly communicated to society at large. Scientists use esoteric language and complex mathematics; their reports are neither accessible nor understandable beyond their narrow specialties. The result is that the general public is poorly informed about advances at the cutting edge of scientific thought.

A few scientists have formulated scientific findings in narrative form, using everyday language. Stephen Hawking, Paul Davies, and other scientists produced writings of this sort, and they met with success. Some of their books have become bestsellers. Indeed, the emerging insights are fascinating and can be effectively communicated in many venues—for example, as illustrated accounts of the evolution of the cosmos, life, and consciousness for children; as textbooks on the scientific worldview for students in elementary and middle schools; as reference works on the new sciences in colleges and universities; and as information briefs on the nature and dynamics of social and ecological developments for business leaders and politicians. Television documentaries and the Internet could bring the new scientific worldview to the general public.

The remarkable but as yet little known fact—outlined here in the Postscript—is that science is evolving a holistic way of thinking about the world. This is of direct relevance to navigating the macroshift. A better grasp of the worldview suggested by the latest scientific theories would give a positive impetus to the evolution of people’s consciousness and would move us nearer to a more adapted path for our collective evolution. The popular ideas of Newton, Darwin, and Freud have been overtaken by new discoveries. In light of these emerging scientific insights, the universe is no longer seen as a lifeless, soulless aggregate of inert chunks of matter. Rather, it resembles a living organism. Life is not a random accident, and the basic drives of the human psyche include far more than the drive for sex and self-gratification.

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In the emerging vision of science, matter, life, and mind are consistent elements within an overall process of great complexity yet coherent and harmonious design. Space and time are united as the dynamic background of the observable universe. Matter is vanishing as a fundamental feature of reality, retreating before energy; and continuous fields are replacing discrete particles as the basic elements of an energy-bathed universe. The universe is a seamless whole, evolving over eons of cosmic time and producing conditions where life, and then mind, can emerge.

Life is an intimate web of relations that evolves in its own right, interfacing and integrating its myriad diverse elements. The biosphere is born within the womb of the universe, and mind and consciousness are born in the womb of the biosphere. Nothing is independent of any other thing. Our body is part of the biosphere, and it resonates with the web of life on this planet. Our mind is part of our body, and it is in touch with other minds as well as with the biosphere.

Inner experience, art and literature, as well as acquaintance with the current discoveries of science are among the many ways that today’s cultural mutation could be fostered. Education, both formal and informal, offers additional ways. School and family could encourage children to treasure feelings and empathies that link them to other people, to humanity and to nature. In young people, as well as throughout life, intuitions that give credence and substance to links and bonds with people and nature could be brought to the level of consciousness instead of being suppressed by a modern rationality that ascribes such notions to childish fantasy, if not to an unhinged mind.

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Addressing a joint session of Congress in Washington in February of 1991, Czech writer-president Václav Havel said, “Without a global revolution in the sphere of human consciousness, nothing will change for the better . . . and the catastrophe towards which this world is headed—the ecological, social, demographic, or general breakdown of civilization—will be unavoidable.” Havel’s point was well taken, but it is not a reason for pessimism. The breakdown of civilization can be avoided. Human consciousness can evolve. In a significant number of people it is evolving already. Today’s stream of Holos consciousness can swell into a mighty tide that will change the world.

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You have whole-brain Holos consciousness when you:

1. Live in ways that enable all other people to live as well, satisfying your needs without detracting from the chances of other people to satisfy theirs.
2. Live in ways that respect the right to life and to economic and cultural development of all people, wherever they live and whatever their ethnic origin, sex, citizenship, station in life, and belief system.
3. Live in ways that safeguard the intrinsic right to life and to a life-supportive environment of all the things that live and grow on Earth.
4. Pursue happiness, freedom, and personal fulfillment in harmony with the integrity of nature and with consideration for the similar pursuits of others in society.
5. Require that your government relate to other nations and peoples peacefully and in a spirit of cooperation, recognizing the legitimate aspirations for a better life and a healthy environment of all the people in the human family.
6. Require business enterprises to accept responsibility for all their stakeholders as well as for the sustainability of their environment, demanding that they produce goods and offer services that satisfy legitimate demand without impairing nature and reducing the opportunities of local enterprises and developing economies to compete in the marketplace.
7. Require public media to provide a constant stream of reliable information on basic trends and crucial processes to enable citizens and consumers to reach informed decisions on issues that affect their health, prosperity, and future.
8. Make room in your life to help those less privileged than yourself to live a life of dignity, free from the struggles and humiliations of abject poverty.
9. Work with like-minded people to preserve or restore the essential balance of the environment, whether in your neighborhood, your country or region, or throughout the world.
10. Encourage young people, and open-minded people of all ages, to evolve the spirit that could empower them to make ethical decisions of their own on issues that decide their future and the future of their children.