The Great Turning |
Future generations, if there is a livable world for them, will look back at the epochal transition we are making to a life-sustainable society. And they may well call this the time of the Great Turning. Joanna Macy
For so long that it has come to seem natural to us, institutional religion has adopted the mind set that espouses Empire, dominator culture, ambition, competition, and the acquisition of power over others. Such priorities are in direct opposition to truly human values and to genuine spirituality.Notions of transcendence are just one expression of this tendency. Transcendentalist thinking proposes another 'place', another reality, another state, (heaven, paradise, Nirvana as somewhere else) and denies meaning to present reality. Fortunately, there has always been spontaneous resistance to appropriation of this sort, expressed by mystics and renegades in every tradition.
The shift towards the thinking implicit in the Great Turning acknowledges that each person has an innate capacity for creativity, fulfillment, healthy participation in community, and ethical and spiritual integrity. The spirituality expressed through the Great Turning may resemble indigenous earth-based spiritual practices. This doesn't mean that we have to reject the teachings implicit in Christianity, Judaism, Islam, or Buddhism. However, we would do well to examine the many layers of unquestioned Dominator culture thinking that still persists in much religious teaching and within many religious institutions.
We are living at a time when human life has become unsustainable in the manner it is now lived. Dominance by a few 'developed' nations over global resources, markets and labor through economic and military force is unworkable—as demonstrated by events of the last several years. The momentum of perpetual economic growth is unfeasible, if not downright insane, given that we live in a finite world, with finite resources and finite limits to the disposal of staggering amounts of increasingly poisonous waste. Population growth is already straining our ability to produce food and provide clean water. Topsoil from arable land disrupted by ill-conceived development is washed daily into the ocean by the the thousands of tons. The consumption of oil in 'developing' countries like China threatens to match consumption by western countries. Meanwhile, the majority of the world's population live in desperate poverty.
Yet, some of the same technologies which have resulted in the globalization of markets and the destruction of communities and environment, has also let to communication between people worldwide to a degree that was unthinkable even ten years ago. The World Social Forum, collaborations to bring attention to the activities of WTO and the World Bank, as well as global protests against war by the U.S. on Iraq, are just a few of the most obvious results of the way people are beginning to communicate worldwide now that the internet made it possible.
If we are to survive as a species, and if the fabric of complex life on the planet is to even partly recover from the every-accelerating mass extinction of species which began during the past century, then the very structure of how we organize ourselves must change.
It is too late just for bits and pieces of new legislation, strengthening unions, winning an election here and there, or making international environmental agreements. Systemic change is needed. A way for us to collectively shift the way we relate to the world and to each other. Can we move, in the words of Riane Eisler from Dominator culture to Partnership culture? Can we move, in David Kortin's words, from Empire to sustainable World Culture?
A change indicating that a move back to partnership models is already taking place worldwide. There are increasing innovations in strategy and actions towards social justice, sustainable community, sustainable agriculture, and the protection of the environment, Experiments in sustainability; co-housing, urban gardens, community-driven initiatives on the streets of Calcutta, and the reinstitution of democratic process, often brought about by indigenous and working people, in places like Venezuela and Bolivia.
It may be too late. It may be that the best we can do is to preside wisely, in full awareness, and with eyes open, at these end-days of species and planet as we would preside at the death-bed of a lover.
It also may seem utopian to imagine that societies, economies, the way countries interact with each other can be changed. But the values of partnership society are the values that the vast majority of human beings instinctively espouse—if they are nourished by community, if they see freedom from oppression as something more than just the ability to oppress others and gain power over them, By all the evidence, most of our collective history, somewhere in the region of 120,000 years, has been spent in non-competing, collaborative, non-violent community. Surely the digression of the past five thousand years of miniaturization and Empire have not washed away that collective memory?
The World Religions, as we call them (ignoring the one great collective paleolithic religion which has come down to us as a myriad indigenous cultural practices) all arose out of an impetus to restore a human dimension to changing societies. They were a return, away from the Sky Gods of early Empires, back to a life-sustaining world-view. The teachings of Jesus, Mohammed, the Buddha, the Hebrew Prophets, and the Indian rishis and Chinese sages recalled the teachings of indigenous earth-based cultures which took life, the earth, and all beings to be sacred.
Christianity, Islam, and the rest, were re-appropriated to serve the interests, or replicate the mind-set, of Empire. Hierarchical, life-denying teachings have entered all the great world religions.
Central to the Great Turning, our collective journey back to partnership society and Earth community, are spiritual practices that no longer express the whims of a vengeful God, and are no longer based on hierarchical structures of organization. It includes Creation Spirituality, Liberation Theology, Engaged Buddhism, Sufi practice—not as New Age eclecticism that dilutes the integrity of the great traditions—rather, as a way to regenerate and deepen our understanding and experience of life.
Mystical practices have a common root and a common expression. Rooted in love and a sense perfect freedom, they celebrate the interconnected nature of all things—the web of life, the web of intelligence and mind—call it God, or psyche or Dharma. The story they give us about ourselves and the world is a story of the boundless possibility of life. Respect for other is a given, because we all all interwoven in the same fabric, we are all related to each other!
The tap root of the Five Changes Foundation is in Buddhist practice, but not so rigidly so that we cannot question the inappropriate expression of Domination culture behaviors and institutions within Buddhism; and not so exclusively so that we cannot honor and celebrate our Christian, Jewish, Islamic, Shinto, Indigenous and other affiliations and affinities.