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Evolutionary Crash or Planetary Renaissance: You Get to Choose
by Ted P. Attreides

This article simply gives an overview of leading edge thinkers and scientists who warn that our immediate future holds unprecedented changes for all humanity. For a more complete perspective however, please read through the ATP lessons (especially month 7) which presents our discovery of a rare text containing specific predictions for our immediate future. These vital prophecies give a very accurate picture of the 40 year period 2001-2041, along with a cosmic perspective of why this 40 year cycle is foreseen to be a time of dramatic changes affecting all of us.

From many quarters we hear that we're at a unique and perilous time in history; that we have entered the leading edge of a gathering world storm which threatens our planet and our species.

Scientists and futurists like John Peterson of the Arlington Institute, Jeremy Rifkin, Duane Elgin, Elisabet Sahtouris, Ray Kurzweil, Barbara Marx Hubbard and many more, warn us that we are now living in a period of significant transition that is reflected in unprecedented change at almost every level of existence -- technological, social, political and ecological -- and it is happening on a global scale.

What is under threat today is not one belief system, or one nation; what is under threat today is life as we know it on the planet.

Therefore almost all of these leading edge thinkers insist that the awakening of a reflective consciousness at the scale of the entire species is fast becoming an evolutionary necessity if we are to avoid an evolutionary crash and a new dark age for humanity.

This urgency of our awakening as a species was made clear in a chilling 'Warning to Humanity' in 1992, when a majority of the world's living Nobel laureates in the sciences -- as well as 1,600 other senior scientists signed a historic cautionary statement declaring that soon the earth might be wounded beyond repair, and therefore the human family is being challenged to realize a new level of identity, responsibility and reflective consciousness.

A very similar conclusion was reached by Unicef, namely that unless we put as much attention on the development of consciousness as on the development of material technology we will simply hit an ecological and evolutionary wall as a species. In other words, without interior development, healthy exterior development cannot be sustained.

There are many dire scenarios of what would happen past this point of no return, but lets for a moment explore what the likely response of most governments would be as the earth's biosphere is crippled and devastated, precipitating global instability and a whole- system crisis.

Joe Firmage (co founder of USWEB/CKS, Intend Change and Project Voyager) points out that there are two ways this can play out from a governance point of view: 'coercive' or 'non-coercive'.

Coercive stands for external legal control backed by force; non-coercive stands for personal internal development and moral wisdom providing self-guidance.

To avoid the 'coercive' scenario he believes that "nothing less than an integral spiritual revolution will suffice, since no form of exterior control mechanism could completely work, and any that would come close, would make life unlivable."

Article 3 continued