From my work in many countries and across a wide variety of peoples and cultures I find that many, worldwide, are making a fundamental shift to values of ecological sustainability, personal development, and hope for change. Many say they see themselves as citizens of the planet, as well as of their own country. What is extraordinary is that it is not just a single country or region that is shifting its values but our whole planet is developing a capability to take up a larger view of what we can do. This shift in deep priorities and goals is a wave of change that can carry all of us into a wiser future and come together to build a global civilization.

At the same time, all of us – from ordinary people to international institutions – are hurting. This is because we have put off dealing with critical challenges that now are undermining the world we grew up with. The most serious challenge to our civilization is that generated from the entanglement of energy, environment and the economy. The most urgent of our challenges are the current financial meltdown and the escalating effects of climate change. We are no longer experiencing occasional crises in an otherwise healthy system. We are now in the midst of a series of cascading crises of the system itself.

Communism collapsed because it was not economically realistic. Now unregulated free market capitalism is collapsing because it is not being ecologically realistic. Business as usual, founded on a mantra of unrestricted growth and development, is no longer sustainable. As we look ahead, we can expect an accelerating stream of crises, emanating seemingly out of nowhere, like last year’s financial meltdown, and reverberating around the world with unpredictable, destabilizing and cascading effects. Crises will only hit harder and be tougher to overcome until human civilization either declines into ruin or human ingenuity creates a higher level vision of the future that will usher in a new era in human affairs. It is this challenge, this complexity, that frames the sense of the need for PanGaia, a planetary civilization that cares for the well being of all peoples and the planet.

What Needs to be Done?

We urgently need to come together to make sense of our time in history. We need to inquire as deeply as we can, not only to see what the facts are, but what principles and design criteria we need to apply to understand our challenges and frame our decisions. We need to build whole-system solutions that take all aspects of our humanity into account. What is at stake is nothing less than the shape of human existence on planet earth. What is required is nothing more than a shift in human consciousness. As Einstein observed, only with a different consciousness can old problems be solved. All of us must work together to create the future we seek, combining facts and values in a new way for a new time. This is the time to envision a new story, perhaps even a planetary civilization with high individuation of cultures.

I am dedicated to bringing together people in many fields and cultures to envision what PanGaia, a “world that works” would actually look like. I am inspired to do this because of what happened to me when I was a young teenager and met an elderly man with whom I would take walks in New York’s Central Park. I called him Mr. Tayer because his long French name was too hard to pronounce.

He told me that the people of my time would be “taking the tiller of the world”. But, he warned, they cannot go directly but must go in spirals, touching upon every people, every culture, every kind of consciousness. It is then, he said, that the noosphere, the field of mind, will awaken, and we will rebuild the Earth.” He took my hands and looked at me intently. “Jeanne, remain always true to yourself, but move ever upwards towards greater consciousness and greater love! At the summit you will find yourself united with all those who, from every direction, every culture, have made the same ascent. For everything that rises must converge. Ah, so much I wish I could live to see it.”

“See what, Mr. Tayer?”

It seemed that he didn’t hear my question. Instead, he seemed to already be seeing something else. He seemed to be in ecstasy. He began to talk, in faltering but eloquent spasms of speech. “All around us, to the right and left, in front and behind, above and below, we have only to go a little beyond the frontier of sensible appearances in order to see the divine welling up and showing through. See, over there, in that cherry tree, in that rock, in that child. By means of all created things, without exception, the divine assails us, penetrates us, and molds us. We imagined it as distant and inaccessible, whereas in fact we live steeped in its burning layers.”

Mr. Tayer continued to speak about everything – war, pain, beauty, death, rebirth. He told me the present chaos was not the end of the world but the labor pains of a new Earth and a new humanity coming into finished form. At the end, his voice dropped, and he whispered, almost in prayer, “Omega . . . omega . . . omega . . .” Finally, he looked up and said to me quietly, “Au revoir, Jeanne.”

“Au revoir, Mr. Tayer,” I replied, “I’ll meet you at the same time next Tuesday.” For some reason, Champ, my fox terrier who always went on our walks together, didn’t want to budge, and when I pulled him along, he whimpered, tail down between his legs, looking back at Mr. Tayer.

The following Tuesday I was waiting where we always met at the corner of Park Avenue and 84th Street, but he didn’t come. The following Thursday I waited again. Still he didn’t come. The dog looked up at me sadly. For the next eight weeks I continued to wait, but he never came again. It turned out that he had died suddenly that Easter Sunday, but I didn’t find that out for a long time.

But his visionary words stayed etched in my memory. Years later I read his ideas about the noosphere in his book The Phenomenon of Man. For Mr. Tayer was the great priest-scientist- visionary, Teilhard de Chardin who had lived across the street from me at the Jesuit Rectory of St Ignatius.

A glow ripples outward from the first spark of conscious reflection. The point of ignition grows larger. The fires spreads in ever widening circles till finally the whole planet is covered in incandescence. Only one interpretation, only one name can be found worthy of this grand phenomenon. Much more coherent and just as extensive as any preceding layer, it is really a new layer, the “thinking layer,” which since its germination . . . has spread over and above the world of plants and animals. In other words, outside and above the biosphere is the noosphere. (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1959, p. 182)

Tags: different consciousness, Dr. Jean Houston, ecological sustainability, Einstein, fundamental shift, Jesuit Rectory of St Ignatius, noosphere, omega, PanGaia, personal development, Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man

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