The path toward a brighter future
Ervin Laszlo (Nobel Peace Prize nominee, science philosopher and founder of the Laszlo Institute of New Paradigm Research) and David Lorimer (chair of the Galileo Commission and editor of Paradigm Explorer) are the authors of the anthology “The Great Upshift” (Light On Light Press, 2023, 384 pages), a book that author Gregg Braden says “… reveals practical steps to awaken a heartfelt world based in love rather than a bleak future born of fear.”
This book sports the subtitle “Humanity’s Coming Advance Toward Peace and Harmony on the Planet” and is a compendium of 35 world-renowned scientists and visionaries focusing on the question of “how we can upshift ourselves — our ways of healing, of thinking and feeling, and even of intuiting — to respond to the pressing requirements of our world troubled by climate change, conflict, and unsustainable conditions.”
The best way to talk about this book is just to dive in and choose essays that strike your fancy. In my deep dive, I was drawn to essays like: “On the Cusp of a New Era,” “Awakening the Power of the New Human Story,” “Ascending to the Age of Planetary Consciousness,” “Transforming a Death Economy to a Life Economy,” “Healing the Wounds of Separation: Soil, Soul, and Society,” “Intuition and the Great Evolutionary Upshift.” “Upshifted Relationship to Beauty,” “Love, the Force of All Creation.”
All these and many others create a platform of forward and positive thinking from the various authors in this collection that will separate the human future from its past. Or as Laszlo and Lorimer say in the Introduction:
“Today’s world is neither a happy nor a peaceful or even a sustainable place. We have entered a path of development replete with conflict and prone to multiple crises. Continuing on this path would lead to the sixth global extinction on the planet — one that is triggered by, and includes, the human species. We must adopt better ways of conducting ourselves on the planet. We need to upshift our world, and for that, we need to upshift our consciousness. To create an upshift to a better world, in the end it depends only on us, but it calls for conscious participation by a critical mass of dedicated people.”
From the introduction, we move into the nuts and bolts of the various conscious activities that will hopefully pave the way for not only our survival but also for our upshifted evolution as a species here on planet Earth. In her essay “Intuition and the Great Evolutionary Upshift,” Anna Bacchia, who is the winner of the Luxembourg World Peace Prize and founder and director of the Consciousness Institute in Lugano, Switzerland, asks: “What if we sparked the Upshift through Art — the Art of the Life which we are, through intuitive actions that do not ask us for energy, but offer us energy? Such experiences open us to an expanded intuitive mode of knowing, thinking, and conceiving ordinarily unexplored in western culture, a wisdom that is generated from being and which, from direct experience, grasps in an illuminating flash that we are 100% diversity and 100% oneness.”
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As a word artist, this line of thought — of intuitive awareness — rings true to me and always has. Now, scientists are saying from their knowledge and studies that intuition may be a more all-consuming way of “thinking” and understanding life in this world and at this critical time. Or, as an educator on cosmology and consciousness, Arabella Thais adds in her essay on beauty: “Beauty is the truth and the reason, and it is pulling us forward like a magnet towards a perfect and complete aesthetic masterpiece.”
And apparently, this more intuitive upshift in thinking and being also applies to the practical side of our lives, as in business. In his essay “Upshifting the Business Mindset,” Steve Rogers, a business consultant, executive coach, board advisor, speaker and author says: “I suggest that the concept of business is not just about making money or conducting transactions, but about a way of being in the world. It can be understood as a way of fulfilling our purpose and mission and of making a positive impact on the world.” Similarly, David Talmor, a management consultant for major business firms, says: “The Upshift Movement advocates that people relate to the world with a vision of ‘wiser living,’ and Upshift for Business advocates that business owners relate to the world with a vision of ‘wiser working.’”
In “The Great Upshift,” we are given synchronous ways of thinking in all the areas of human life —social, spiritual, ecological and environmental, political, psychological, medical, technological and artistic — that represent aspects of our being and our lives and which have been collected and represented in this book from the various agencies of our lives as humans living together on this planet. There is a lot to take in here in “The Great Upshift,” but it is all relevant and insightful and is summed up by Erwin Laszlo in the book’s Afterword: “The outlook for the future is not entirely dark. There are signs that we are waking up. A spirit of cooperation and solidarity often arises in the midst of chaos. The great upshift is before us. It is up to us to enter on the path that leads to it. The vision and the courage to do so could be, and will be, our salvation.”
(Thomas Crowe is a regular contributor to The Smoky Mountain News and author of the multi-award-winning non-fiction nature memoir “Zoro’s Field: My Life in the Appalachian Woods.”)
