The Great Turning

“We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.” Albert Einstein

To effect change, you must look at the pattern, not just the details. Coaching, therapy, spiritual work are all, in essence, ways to look at the pattern, ways to look at the bigger picture.

“I have tried to do something which Korzybski was very much concerned with doing, and with which the whole semantic movement has been concerned, namely, I have studied the area of impact between very abstract and formal philosophic thought on the one hand and the natural history of man and other creatures on the other. This overlap between formal premises and actual behavior is, I assert, of quite dreadful importance today. We face a world which is threatened not only with disorganization of many kinds, but also with the destruction of its environment, and we, today, are still unable to think clearly about the relations between an organism and its environment. What sort of a thing is this, which we call “organism plus environment?”

“Let us go back to the original statement for which Korzybski is most famous—the statement that the map is not the territory, This statement came out of a very wide range of philosophic thinking, going back to Greece, and wriggling through the history of European thought over the last 2,000 years. In this history, there has been a sort of rough dichotomy and often deep controversy. There has been a violent enmity and bloodshed. It all starts, I suppose, with the Pythagoreans versus their predecessors, and the argument took the shape of, “Do you ask what it’s made of—earth. fire, water, etc.?” Or do you ask, “What is its pattern?” Pythagoras stood for inquiry into pattern rather than inquiry into substance. That controversy has gone through the ages, and the Pythagorean half of it has, until recently, been on the whole the submerged half. The Gnostics followed the Pythagoreans, and the alchemists follow the Gnostics, and so on. The argument reached a sort of climax at the end of the eighteenth century when a Pythagorean evolutionary theory was built and then discarded—a theory which involved Mind.” Gregory Bateson

There is a quantum leap that occurs when you learn to look also beyond the bounds of your own narrow interest – not in the name of ‘sacrifice’, not ‘for the sake of others’, rather to change altogether the distinctions you make between ‘self’ and ‘other’.

“If you put God aside and set him vis-à-vis his creation and if you have the idea that you are created in his image, you will logically and naturally see yourself as outside and against the things around you. And as you arrogate all mind to yourself, you will see the world around you as mindless and therefore not entitled to moral or ethical consideration. The environment will seem to be yours to exploit. Your survival unit will be you and your folks or conspecifics against the environment of other social units, other races and the brutes and vegetables.

“If this is your estimate of your relation to nature and you have an advanced technology, your likelihood of survival will be that of a snowball in hell. You will die either of the toxic by-products of your own hate, or, simply, of over-population and over-grazing. “Gregory Bateson

In the same essay as is quoted above (Form Substance and Difference) Bateson goes on to say that resources are actually infinite, as resourcefulness is infinite, when we think and act from appropriate understanding. Writing in the 1960s he said that he could not estimate how much time we have left in which to implement that thinking.
Whatever time we had them is less now.
What was urgent then is critical now.

“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

Five Changes works from a global, interpersonal and individual perspective. These apparently different fields of experience are interconnected in apparently limitless variations. We understand the exploration and expression of this to be at the heart of The Great Turning.

An appreciation of The Great Turning informs our work
as coaches, teachers, and facilitators.

Form Substance and Difference by Gregory Bateson Click Here