A Column Performed at the Dutch Bilderberg Conference 04.02.2011 by Peter Merry

“For each age is a dream that is dying or one that is coming to birth” – O’Shaughnessy quoted in the conference papers. I would change one word in that quote: “For each age is a dream that is dying and one that is coming to birth”. Our future holds both death and birth.

The dream that is dying can be seen in a downward spiral of interlocking crises such as climate-fuelled extreme weather, food and water shortage, health pandemics, social insurrection, and economic instability signals the end of an era. Solutions once full of promise give way to the challenges that were seeded in them from the start. Evolution runs its ruthless course as paradigms and understandings we were brought up on are shattered on the rocks of reality.

Yet in the warm depths of the compost heap of our old systems, new life is forming. Under our very noses the human species is involved in a spontaneous process of radical R&D, a hot-bed of experimentation and exploration. Most of it is taking place outside the walls of our established institutions, in small cells of social entrepreneurs, rapidly iterating the forms and practices that hold the DNA of a new civilisation.

This change moment we are in is non-linear in its nature. What that means is that there is no way we can see fully the next stage of our evolution from where we are now. It would be like trying to explain the internet to a monk hand-copying transcripts of the bible in the 17th century.

We cannot predict what our future will look like, and therefore we cannot plan our way to it. What we can do is to humbly and passionately participate in this Great Experiment, letting go of everything we thought we knew while opening our minds and hearts to possibilities outside of any frame of reference we currently hold. As humanity we have been through these non-linear times of emergence before, the last being the transition out of a faith-dominated system into the scientific rational worldview. In our DNA we know how to do this, we just have to remember. And maybe we can manage it without burning so many at the stake this time round.

In the conference papers, Jan-Willem van den Braak points to a consciousness revolution. This may give us some early signals of what lies before us. Many disciplines are starting to converge – quantum physicists, biologists, consciousness researchers, social anthropologists, engineers – around a picture of reality that looks something like this: a world essentially composed of energy, which interacts with human consciousness, in which nothing is static, where time is no longer linear, in which everything is connected, where energy generation will be distributed, in which dynamic technology is turned on and off by human intention, in which the energetic frequency of morality determines the level of information we are given access to, and in which science and spirituality, ancient wisdom and modern knowledge, inner experience and outer worlds combine to create a holistic worldview of what it means to be a human being on the planet earth in an evolving universe here and now…

Feel strange? Or familiar?

Either way, I take solace in the words of this poem that my brother Tim wrote:

Feeling Strange

I fear not this feeling strange
it is the future being born
taking new form
the freshness of air after the storm

a slow rising
sense of arriving
letting go of striving
to get it all done
stopping now to enjoy the sun
feeling it has begun
when I slow
feel the speed trees grow
the way the rivers flow
there is an easier way
that feels like play
moulds me like clay
into what I am to become
bring on the rising of the sun
over the dark mountain range

I fear not this feeling strange
it is the future being born
taking new form
the freshness of air after the storm

the watered ground
the sound
of my heart explodin’
of the birds chirpin’
I want to ride the roads of this land like Dick Turpin
whoopin and hollerin’
into the unknown of tomorrow
into nameless joy and sorrow
and deeper learning
sitting in the churning
of our future unfolding all around
on watered ground

I fear not this feeling strange
it is the future being born
taking new form
the freshness of the air after the storm

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