IS CALAMITY TO BE OUR
ONLY PATH TO CIVILITY?

My Dear and Wonderful Companions on the Journey…

As the world reflects on the events of these most recent days — from the bloodshed in Syria to the killing in Afghanistan to the bombing in Boston — and on all the terror and all the savagery and all the violence that has emerged from and through people of every race and creed during the course of its long history upon the Earth, the heart of humanity breaks, and the collective mind of humanity cries out…

“What will it take for us to stop ourselves from doing this? Are we truly primitives still, who have found no way to control our most barbaric impulses? Does our desperation remain so acute that we feel lashing out in murderous rage is justified, and is the only announcement of it we feel will be heard? Is there no way to ever, ever put an end to our species’ bestial behaviors?”

In fact, however, the question is larger than that. It is more pointed than that. The question of the day is: Even if there was a way, can we ever gather ourselves together in sufficient numbers to actually employ it? What, if anything, could cause us to unite at last in Singular Purpose?

So far, it has only been calamity.

News reports out of Boston have told of a whole city joining to bring comfort, aid, and succor to bombing victims and their families, and to heal the city itself from its shock and dismay. And so it is, everywhere on the planet where disaster strikes any community. Suddenly, our sense of community is given re-birth. Our humanity is reawakened.

Yet why must it take cataclysm and catastrophe to arouse our awareness of community? Is there nothing else that could cause us to relinquish our “story” of “separation” and embrace the truth of our oneness?

There is.

We could abandon our Story of Separation finally and forever. We could embrace the Story of Oneness at last and always.

All it would take would be numbers. Large numbers of people. All it would take would be a revolution on our planet. It would be the last revolution we would ever need. It would be the Evolution Revolution, and when it was complete, we would have civilized civilization.

I realize this is a big order. There have been massive social revolutions before. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. led one for blacks. Gloria Steinem led one for women. Harvey Milk led one for gays. Mahatma Gandhi led one for an entire nation. Nelson Mandela did the same. And others have done so as well.

Yet now the time of individual revolutionaries has passed. It is the Moment of Movements, and movements are ignited by cohorts, cadres, corps. If a corps can be formed — a global cadre of inspired, motivated, engaged but gentle activists — humanity’s final great revolution, the Evolution Revolution, can and will sweep the planet.

How does such a revolution begin? By people sitting down together and talking about what it is they wish to change, and how they wish to change it. That is what The Conversation of the Century is all about.

Once again I should like to share something from Margaret J. Wheatley, author of Turning to One Another: Simple Conversations to Restore Hope to the Future (2002).

This is a globally known consultant on organizational behavior. She received her doctorate from Harvard University, holds an M.A. in systems thinking from New York University, and has worked on every inhabited continent in virtually every type of organization.

In other words, Meg Wheatley knows her way around. Here’s what she says:

“There is no more powerful way to initiate significant social change than to start a conversation…We can take courage from the fact that this is a process we all know how to do. We can also take courage in the fact that many people are longing to converse again…Change doesn’t happen from someone announcing the plan. Change begins from deep inside a system, when a few people notice something they will no longer tolerate, or when they respond to someone’s dream of what’s possible.”

That is precisely, to the letter, what The Conversation of the Century is all about. And here is the Dream of What’s Possible: A new way of being human, arising from a New Cultural Story for Humanity: A Story of Oneness.

What is now being proposed is a global cohort — small groups of people meeting in their homes twice a month to, first, talk about, discuss, analyze and deeply explore the elements of Humanity’s New Cultural Story, and then, to place that story on the ground in cities, towns, and villages around the world, partly through a gentle but persistent brand of civic-social-spiritual activism that epitomizes the spirit of Victor Hugo’s immortal observation: All the armies of the world cannot stop an idea whose time has come.

Thus will be born the Evolution Revolution.

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The Evolution Revolution is a spiritual activism outreach of Humanity’s Team, a global organization founded by Neale Donald Walsch, the author of the Conversations with God series of books and the creator of The Global Conversation internet newspaper. Information on joining the Evolution Revolution by initiating a Conversation of the Century action group may be had by writing to neale.donald.walsch@HumanitysTeam.org