There is a growing number of thinker / practitioners who are working at the intersection of science, spirituality and social change. Just a sampling of these remarkable individuals include: Otto Scharmer, Ken Wilber, William Ury, Joseph Jaworski, Peter Senge, Betty Sue Flowers and Adam Kahane. In addition, there are two spiritual teachers whose efforts are inviting our “attention,” to the present moment: Thich Nhat Hanh, and Eckhart Tolle. At the center of this intersection is the present moment. The present moment is where we all really live - in that moment also lives what will be: the future. How we act in this moment will determine what will be.
Vaclav Havel stated in 1994: “I think there are good reasons for suggesting that the modern age has ended. Today, many things indicate that we are going through a transitional period, when it seems that something is on the way out and something else is painfully being born. It is as if something were crumbling, decaying, and exhausting itself – while something else, still indistinct, were rising from the rubble.”
Since 1994, so many things have fallen apart, and continue to do so daily. As I write the world economy is in shambles, as well as other micro and marco social systems and institutions. Transition is the keyword: changing from one way of being to something different.
Adam Kahane, in his book “Power and Love: A Theory and Practice of Social Change,” brings us the wisdom of Martin Luther King and 20th Century theologian and philosopher Paul Tillich to our contemporary attention. For instance, Tillich defines power “as the drive of everything living to realize itself, with increasing intensity and extensity.” Tillich defines love “as the drive toward unity of the separated.”
For millennia we have been in relationship with the Divine, or Great Mystery of the origin of life in a mostly a passive way. Now it appears we are shifting from passive to active, or even “interactive.”
