A continuation of a fictional reflection by a hundred-year-old Espe from 2112 about the start and on-going movement of transformation to Sustainable Living. I add clarification links and quotes as needed.
After so many decades it is not always easy to explain to the young ones just how fractured humanity was before the great change – it is beyond their comprehension to imagine humanity being a mass of squabbling peoples and squabbling nations. The great change came in so many ways, and one of them was the need to stop tribalism of all kinds. We talk today of a ‘New Tribalism’ that encompasses all of global humanity, but the old tribalism had its good points but also some bad ones we had to overcome. I remember reading about a president of the United States from the early twentieth century that saw how tribalistic thinking would ruin that young country: “There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism, …The one absolutely certain way of brining this nation to ruin, of preventing all possibility of its continuing to be a nation at all, would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities” Theodore Roosevelt.
That was the problem we faced during the 2030s. We created alliances all around the world but still identified ourselves by our previous national associations, e.g., American-Gaian, German-Gaian, Chinese-Gaian, Moroccan-Gaian, etc. This had the problem of making us think from a self-serving perspective rather than a new kind of human collective of sovereign individuals with unique and beneficial multicultural heritages. I mentioned in my last post how by 2042 we began recognizing how old-tribalism, curiously more with the people in developed countries than the less-developed ones, was a hinderance to our new way of thinking.
Materialist Consumerism was not an easy thing to eliminate. Going from a mindset of scarcity to abundance meant eliminating centuries of conditioning about there not enough for everyone. Even with the population drawdown, ‘fear of lack’ was ever prevalent in many peoples’ minds. The late 2020s, especially after the corporate supply chains became increasingly fragile, was a time of fear for many who could not get past the beliefs of scarcity. The fact that our parallel societies were producing more than enough of everything we needed for day-day living (e.g., food and energy) didn’t stop many worrying that for some reason, things must get bad eventually. Change is hard for many people, especially older people who had grown up in the pre-Covid era. It was our younger people (like myself and my generation) who led the way.
It was the people of my generation that began the transformation by living a life of hope! We weren’t captured by old ways of thinking. And with my background of pre-covid sustainability, I, along with many others, was able to be a teacher that talked about and encompassed what a new and better world could be. We had hope and believed that a more spiritual path was the one to follow. Even as religions became more and more redundant, our spiritual beliefs about life and the world grew. One of my father’s favorite spiritual teachers from that time, Michael Roads, had a lot to say on the transformation. Roads said, that we were very much living in a time of self-transformation. And it was down to us if we wanted this new world, because it is not random chance that transforms us but our own individuated free will. We can conform to the beliefs of ages but that merely opposes the newness of transformation.
Clinging to old beliefs was the security of the rut we understood. Transforming required us to make conscious decisions to change. For too long, humanity clung to conditioning that promoted old hates and grudges like a dog chewing on an old and long rotten bone. We had to accept that we were all uniquely different, and that was no real wrong or right, good or bad. Just choices, some foolish, some wise. By 2030, those ready to self-transform during the Great Change and were ready to ‘Let Go’ of old grudges, old anger, old hopes, old dreams, and all the old emotional baggage and emotional attachments to an old way of living. The New path was about embracing a New consciousness by becoming more open, less judgmental, more accepting, less critical, more Loving, and less aggressive. It was, as Roads said, about the magic of self-transformation, which is based in Love, “consciously choosing Love in thoughts, words and actions . . . divine magic indeed!”
It was no longer just Earth. To transform we had to leave the old behind so we started referring to Earth as Gaia to differentiate our new thinking form the old conditioned mindset. We started to think more like Gaians with all our unique global cultural heritages. While some struggled with the Great Change – after all change on the scale we were living was quite overwhelming – most saw the wonder of the changes as something they had dreamed about but could never have actually hoped would occur. For the most part we started living in Peace. Harmony? Well, that was a few more years away. Criminals and people focused on money for security had a hard time letting go of the victimhood so prevalent in the pre-Covid era.
For the rest of us, we let go the notion of just romantic love and opened up to unconditional Love that brought Compassion, Joy and Humor into our lives. As Roads emphasized: “Wisdom without Love is nothing – just words. Wisdom without Compassion is nothing. Wisdom is Love and Compassion working intelligently together to examine everything from a complete perspective, not just intellect. Intellect is just smarts, not intelligence. The ego-brain gives you high thinking but only an illusion of wisdom contained within a coral of restrictive beliefs. A fool doesn’t know that they are a fool. Beating their heads against a solid wall thinking it will create a door. It’s what they were taught by others who also believed they knew the way to create a door the same way. Storming a barricade instead of just walking round it.”
Before the Great Change, we were so convinced that all our problems were technologically and financially based that we could not see the solutions before us. The catastrophe narrative didn’t help much as the hierarchy bamboozled people globally with their ‘give us the power and we can resolve all the ecological problems. As that twentieth century genius, Albert Einstein stated, the solutions could not be enacted with the same mindset that created them. The profit driven bottom line was an illusion of what was important. It was the rapid decline of the old global economic system and hastened the change. Without the perceived hardships, most would not have had the courage to do something different. With the economic failures, political systems around the world started failing as well and corruption lost its footing as a means of controlling humanity. We now have politics that is only for those with integrity and the people do not accept unethical behaviors of any kind. We finally recognized the ways of the natural world as the model to follow – the connection of all things working in harmony. Once we changed our worldviews, the solutions to all our societal and ecological problems became self-ev
The following was from an Australian friend back then who explained how the change was already working for her way back in 2023: “I’m in a small rural town in NSW, Australia, and there is a definite split in people, those who are oblivious and those who are pulling away from this catastrophe narrative. We are building communities and making connections with farmers in the region, making connections and doing things an older simpler way. More people are home schooling, myself included. More people here are putting up greenhouses and growing their own food. There’s even a network of frontline workers in Australia working to set up alternative medical-care system all across Australia. The last year and a half, land and rural property in this area is selling incredibly fast, for way more than ever before, people becoming more self-sufficient.” TBC ……..
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