Deep Time Philanthropy and the Evolution of Consciousness

Path Notes # 14

I wrote this after an inspiring meeting with a small group of philanthropists and systems practitioners from around the world. I’ve edited the original post for clarity.

In a nutshell

· Across history, tiny groups of individuals (5-50) have consistently been able to shift collective consciousness and catalyze civilizational transformation.

· There is a pattern language describing how such movements emerge, grow and reshape culture. Emerging during periods of instability, they form around a transformative idea or revelatory insight and involve recombination of existing traditions. They require practical translation and patronage, and they succeed through network effects rather than force.

· Transformative patronage operates differently than conventional philanthropy: it requires a kind of visionary pragmatism alongside deep alignment and a willingness to fund invisible, early-stage work that seems counter-intuitive to mainstream thinking.

· Transformative movements develop through distinct phases over centuries - from hidden emergence to protected coalescence to gradual maturation to broad cultural integration. Patrons and investors have to match their support strategies to each stage.

Here’s a thought experiment.

Let's say you have $50 million and you want to invest it towards a flourishing planetary future.

You sense that the socio-ecological challenges facing humanity require the awakening of a new level of collective adaptive capability. To think and act not as a group of competitive belligerents but as a wise caretaker species. To cultivate a more ecological worldview.

Something needs to change at a more fundamental inner level.

You want to support the emergence of mature patterns of consciousness and culture. To help the human family evolve and live together more peacefully and sustainably.

$50 million represents a personal fortune, but it's a tiny drop in a global bucket. It would pay for a rural bypass around a small US town, or the costs of sustaining one or two battalions of UN peacekeepers in the Congo for a year. If you want to have a significant impact, you'll have to be as precise as an acupuncturist in your allocation.

So where would you invest?

There are many obvious domains that are worthy of consideration. In no particular order, these might include:

Regenerative agriculture, circular/regenerative economies, biomimetic technologies, Indigenous community/cultural/territorial renewal, decentralized governance experiments, community resilience networks, watershed/bioregional/trans-boundary management, ecosystem preservation, clean energy development, nature connection, earth-based spirituality, consciousness research, reimagining schools, climate psychology or AI tools and guardrails for enhancing human collective intelligence.

All are important and inter-connected.

But for this particular thought experiment, I want to look back and learn from our ancestors.

Because we've done this before people!

Humanity has been through major worldview transformations many times throughout history. Some of the movements that I believe offer critical lessons for those of us trying to support the emergence of new patterns of consciousness and culture include:

Religious movements such as: the emergence of Daoism, Buddhism and other Axial Age traditions (Zoroastrian, Hebrew, Greek), early Christian monasticism, the coming of the Peacemaker and the Great Law of Peace, the Neoplatonic Schools, Islamic Golden Age institutions, medieval Islamic mystical & scientific salons (such as the Brethren of Purity), the Ismaili tradition, Sufi Orders, Japanese Shugendō, Protestant dissenting movements such as the Levellers and Diggers, Quakerism, the Bahá'í Faith, liberation theology and various emergent forms of creation spirituality and contemporary ecological renewal within existing faith traditions (such as the Al-Mizan and Francis’s Laudato Si’).

Socio-technical-artistic movements such as: the Renaissance, the Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment, the Haitian Revolution, the Romantic Movement, the American Transcendentalist movement, the Scandinavian Folk Schools movement, the Sarvodaya Movement in Sri Lanka, Gandhi's Satyagraha movement, the Quantum Revolution, the psychedelic renaissance, the cooperative and syndicalist movements, various adult educational movements (hedge schools, civil rights Freedom Schools, the Zapatista's autonomous education systems and liberatory participatory action research initiatives), cybernetics and the emergence of the complexity sciences and systems thinking, the Integral movement, the deep ecology/ecopsychology/nature connection/permaculture movements, feminist consciousness-raising circles, Afrofuturism & black speculative thought, the human potential movement, the global Indigenous resistance, healing and cultural renewal movements, the regenerative design/culture/economics movements, and meta-modernism.

Each offers important lessons, and I describe six of them in greater detail at the end (Daoism, Buddhism, Great Law of Peace, Quakers, the quantum revolution & cybernetics.)

I'm generally describing these examples as net 'positives' when it comes to the evolution of human consciousness. We could however make the case that a number of these movements also led to significant harm. And I think it's just as important to learn from historical examples of morally ambiguous or definitively harmful ideological movements that were also framed as consciousness-shifting. Examples might include Theosophy and the New Age movement, the intelligentsia/architects of the Russian Revolution, the Khmer Rouge, Sendero Luminoso and ISIS.

I’m also interested in paradoxical reactions – consciousness shifting initiatives that had precisely the opposite effect over time of what they originally intended. The Reformation for example that was intended as a form of spiritual purification but set in motion forces (e.g. individualism & anti-authoritarianism) that also laid the foundations for secularism! Environmental education intended to mobilize people that inadvertently leads to apathy and doomerism. The unifying promise of the internet fuelling polarization. The complexity hacker of me is curious about how to leverage this phenomenon…the homeopathy of cultural metamorphosis!

An Emerging Pattern Language

I am aware that my perspective here is quite limited^[i]…you’ll likely see movements and moments across the arc of history that I’m not even aware of.

But here’s the key takeaway:

When you look at these examples, it's clear that collective shifts in consciousness aren't random: they follow patterns.

Time and time again, relatively small groups of individuals are able to catalyze fundamental shifts in collective consciousness that reshape entire civilizations. These shifts emerge during periods of instability, they often form around a new revelatory insight, they recombine existing elements in novel ways, they require practical translation and support, and they succeed through network effects rather than force.

A pattern language of collective consciousness shift begins to emerge.

Like all pattern languages, it’s fractal. That means the pattern is consistent at every scale from a single community to an entire civilization or culture. This is very much a working model, but the elements seem to include:

1. Liminal Disruption and Catalytic Crisis: Historical moments of collapse generally create the most fertile conditions for consciousness shifts - such patterns emerge during periods of breakdown, transition, exponential change, paradigm exhaustion, significant migration or civilizational stress.

2. Core Group Genesis: Civilizational shifts are invariably initiated by small, intimate communities…5-50 people….who form around a transformative insight/practice/individual. These small, highly relational groups then create institutional forms and protective containers (monasteries, universities, salons, conferences) that enable certain ideas to germinate and ensure their transmission across cultures and generations.

3. Invisibility During Genesis: It's very hard to predict that this particular 5 - 50 people are laying the foundations for a world-shifting initiative! The future is always hiding out in plain sight. But it's very hard to perceive with the eyes and mindset of the present. (In some cases – such as early Christian monasteries or the preservation of sacred texts in Mali – traditions of learning and insight are deliberately hidden away during times of civilizational collapse).

4. Recombination and Synthesis: The shift often involves a novel recombination of existing forms and elements, often animated by a revelatory insight of some kind. Both Buddhism and Christianity began with visionary insights. They then built on existing forms – Vedic tradition and Judaism – retaining some elements, dropping others, and creating more open-source patterns that could spread rapidly beyond specific ethnic and geographical communities.

5. Transformative learning: it’s a modern term for a perennial truth. Transformative learning – the rituals, ceremonial forms, experiential practices, transmission mechanisms and methods of inquiry held by a particular tradition – is the way that people directly participate in their own liberation, awakening and development. Transformative learning is how people discover and integrate what lies beyond the familiar boundaries of convention, consciousness and culture. And it’s what keeps an emancipatory social movement vital and regenerative over time.

6. Embodied Integration: There is a combination of transformative learning practices with social innovation and systems engagement. Not one or the other. Both at the same time! And these two domains – the inner and outer – are woven together by webs of story that gives them a kind of narrative coherence and mythic potency.

7. Institutional/Educational Innovation: New transformative learning practices and organizational forms begin to emerge for transmission (schools, orders, communities, societies etc.). The most effective tend to mimic ecological patterns – embodying principles like decentralization, distributed intelligence, fractal scalability, feedback loops, cycles of adaptation, co-evolution and self-organization.

8. Cultural Bridging: These transmission mechanisms are able to bridge core insights and practices across different socio-cultural contexts. The most contagious produce mimetic bridges – ideas, metaphors and practices that are able to leap between paradigms (e.g. terms like 'Tao', 'quantum leap', 'systems thinking', 'ecosystem', 'witnessing' or 'awakening'). They adapt to local contexts.

9. Re-sourcing Authority: Nearly all these movements challenge existing power structures by offering compelling and useful alternatives to—rather than simply tearing down—imposed external structures of authority. This can be through direct spiritual experience, re-alignment with ecological principles, processes of collective discernment and decision-making or just a more accurate map of reality. They begin to form increasingly stable basins of attraction. At the same time, as their influence grows, they must work with existing patterns of economic, imperial and political power.

10. Generative Persistence: Many of these examples contain recursive renewal mechanisms such as the ability to reinterpret canonical teachings for a new context (e.g. Ismailis) or the ability to integrate visionary new insights (e.g. quantum physics). There is often a direct initiatory and inter-generational transmission process (transformative learning) that prevents them from becoming too dogmatic or ossified. Above all they maintain their capacity to reconfigure relationships and connection – to ourselves, to each other and to the natural world.

The Role of Transformative Patronage

Returning to the original thought experiment – how to spend your $50 million - every one of these examples has been definitively shaped by the relational networks from which they drew the energy needed to emerge and sustain themselves. And that nearly always included some form of patronage.

The term – which shares etymological ancestry with patriarchy – is not unproblematic!

But whether it's King Ashoka promoting Buddhism across his empire, the Medici family supporting Renaissance artists, scientists and philosophers, Clare of Assisi helping to establish and protect the legacy of St Francis, Möngke Khan hosting inter-faith debates between Christians, Muslims, Buddhists and Daoists at Karakorum, or the family inheritance that enabled the establishment of Esalen as an experimental centre for the human potential movement, there is invariably a significant patron quietly helping to nurture consciousness shifting initiatives.

But such transformative patronage operates differently from conventional philanthropy. It requires what we might call developmental fit along with a deep sense of visionary/spiritual/energetic/soulful alignment. Clare of Assisi supported Francis because she understood at a profound level what he was up to…and could see things that were invisible to others. When the deep future is manifesting in the present in a small handful of individuals, if it isn't invisible to the mainstream, it will often seem counter-intuitive, ridiculous, threatening, dangerous or a complete waste of time and resources.

Because the present is usually very allergic to the emerging future!

There are several paradoxes here. Conventional philanthropic organizations and social investors have worked hard in recent years to be more mindful of the power they wield and to become much more representative of – and accountable to - the communities they serve. There are many upsides of this. But future generations and the more-than-human intelligences generally don’t sit on the resource allocation committees leading to an almost inevitable bias towards present-centred, socialized priorities and speculative risk aversion. Right now, foundations who have been at the forefront of supporting systems transformation are experiencing great pressure to refocus on more locally tangible impacts - it’s a kind of system ‘snapback’ or order response.

At the same time, there is a remarkable new constellation of transformative patrons and investors emerging who are are attuned to the dynamics of civilizational transition and explicitly committed to supporting patterns of ecological consciousness and culture at scale. They have the freedom to move swiftly and creatively, and are able to fund and protect experimental spaces and early-stage work in a very different way. And, like all resource holders, their work invariably reflects the state of consciousness of their founders/principals.

Transformative Potential?

So how do you decide whether a particular individual or community has genuine transformative potential - especially given pattern # 3 (Invisibility During Genesis)? From a complexity lens we might ask ‘how do you spot and track emergence?’ I’m definitely not the only one curious about this. I’m coming late to the party but I’m quickly learning that I’m in the company of some very skilful pattern trackers and transformative philanthropists for whom this is a vital thread of inquiry. Check out, for example, this conversation about ‘glimmers of the future’ between three such trackers, Gemma Mortensen, Graham Leicester and Cassie Robinson, and the brilliant checklist they developed. Some of the core questions we’re all asking revolve around:

1. Is there a clear model that addresses a critical systems contradiction?

Is the initiative responding to a deeper systemic tension rather than just a surface problem or symptom? Is it attempting to cultivate genuinely enhanced human capabilities rather than just offering another critique or program? Is there genuine intellectual humility, accountability and openness to being wrong? Do they hold their model lightly enough to let reality reshape it? Historically transformative movements arise when existing systems are unable to resolve their own internal contradictions or develop the new ways of being/knowing/acting required transcend the original problem.

2. Does this work actually create genuine consciousness shifts or result in new capabilities?

Is there evidence of people actually shifting or becoming different – embodying new ways of knowing, being, belonging, acting or relating – rather than just feeling better or being more informed? Do the practices generate practitioners who can then generate better practices or adapt them to different contexts and communities. Is it generating a more complex transformative learning ecosystem rather than a giant pyramid scheme? Many people have visions. But peace activists are still sourcing from Quaker founder George Fox’s vision in tangible ways 300 year later.

3. Is there a sense of fractal coherence across scales?

Are the principles that guide individual practice reflected in the relational patterns that form around practitioners and the way they engage with broader systems? Many initiatives fail because they have beautiful individual practices but dysfunctional group dynamics, or inspiring group processes that don't translate to practical systemic influence. Are the shifts people experience personally reflected in their wider relational/cultural/institutional networks? Is this work rippling outwards or does it tend to stop or get stuck somewhere? What are the patterns that consistently emerge from this relational field?

4. Does this work have the capacity for broader cultural or systemic influence?

Does the group/initiative seem to have the potential for cultural permeability and impact beyond their core community? Is there potential for adaptive scaling? Are there viable transmission mechanisms beyond their core practices? Are there multiple pathways for influence - intellectual, artistic, practical, spiritual, political - rather just one way of engaging broader culture? Transformative movements tend to either stay pure but marginal, or gain influence but get co-opted. Does this work hold possibility for navigating the transition from insider transformation to broader cultural influence without losing their transformative essence?

5. Is there a palpable aliveness or generative energy around this work?

Does being around this initiative or its practitioners feel enlivening, expansive, or somehow more possible? Is there a quality of creative tension, fertile uncertainty, or emergent potential that draws people in? Does the work seem to generate more energy than it consumes - not just in individuals but in the field around it?

Transformative movements carry a distinctive energetic signature - a sense that something genuinely new is wanting to emerge through this particular configuration of people and practices.

This isn't about charismatic leadership or inspirational rhetoric, but rather an almost magnetic quality where the work itself seems to be alive and attracting the resources, people, and opportunities it needs to unfold. When this animating potency is absent, even technically sophisticated initiatives tend to feel effortful, contrived, or somehow flat - they may be doing good work but lack the generative field that allows transformation to propagate organically. This quality is often what people sense first - before they can articulate why an initiative matters, they feel pulled toward its energy. The X-factor!

As we hold these questions, it’s also important to remember - as any seasoned venture capital team will tell you:

There are no perfect 10x opportunities that only require capital to unlock their potential!

What we're looking for are the initiatives that are trending in the right direction with enough genuine momentum that strategic relationship, investment and mutual commitment can grow them into something extraordinary. My hunch is that the most powerful transformative initiatives across history emerged through this kind of developmental relationship - where patrons and practitioners co-evolved the work together, each bringing capacities that help the other realize potentials that neither could achieve alone.

Putting it Together

Looking at the various examples of historical consciousness change, I’ve pulled out some of the lessons I’m learning and clustered them in a way that mirrors the pattern of their unfolding. This is a pretty rough list….I’m trying to sense and synthesize what the patrons of transformative and consciousness-shifting movements across the ages might whisper to us here in the present. This is what I hear them say…

Emergence: Start with vital individuals & small communities

Look for the people doing the kind of work and generating the kind of subtle or visible results - at any scale - that most closely mirrors what the future is quietly asking for.

• Invest in key individuals and tight communities: prioritize coherence of concern and relationship over scale or visibility. Deep cultural shifts often begin in obscure places.

• Support the social mycelium: fund the livelihoods, places, and subtle networks that make deep work possible long before it's legible or fundable by conventional standards.

• Uplift embodied integration: prioritize initiatives that combine genuinely developmental inner work and transformative learning with practically grounded outer application.

• Take risks on the invisible: the most transformative work is often happening in places that don't yet have the language or platforms to articulate what they're doing. The most culturally significant long-term patterns of emergence invariably begin in the imaginal, visionary, revelatory, mythopoetic or dreaming layers of consciousness.

• Look beyond the familiar: Our particular cultural myopia can over-ascribe transformative significance to initiatives that feel familiar or exciting, while remaining unaware of developments in distant or mainstream contexts. This means significant patterns of emergence in 'unexpected' places can go unrecognized and unfunded, while culturally resonant but limited experiments receive disproportionate attention and resources - often amplified by platform algorithms.

Coalescence: Protect the translators and bridge builders

Some people and places hold the edge between worlds. They need shielding, not scaling.

• Protect and connect threshold-dwellers: those bridging dominant paradigms and emerging ones—whether mystics, mediators, or system thinkers—require both legitimacy and sanctuary. This might be particularly important at times of peril and systems collapse.

• Attend to traditions and marginalized lineages: deep knowledge is often held in places long ignored or suppressed. Consider supporting – on their own terms - those who are reweaving ancient wisdom into contemporary life. Many of the most significant consciousness shifts in history have emerged not from the centres of power but from the margins - often from communities that weren't trying to "shift consciousness" but to protect and revitalize existing wisdom traditions. Indigenous sovereignty movements, for example, aren't seeking to evolve human consciousness so much as to maintain relationships with land and cosmos that industrialized cultures have forgotten or traded away.

• Fund cultural translation: support artists, storytellers, and cultural workers who can make new paradigms accessible to mainstream audiences.

• Create sanctuary spaces: provide protected environments where experimental work can learn, fail, iterate and mature without premature exposure to market forces or public scrutiny.

Maturation: Build containers for transmission

Practice must be carried across generations and geographies to shift culture—not just outcomes.

• Support long-term transmission infrastructure: fund schools, retreat centres, mentorship lineages, and transformative learning ecosystems that carry wisdom forward in ways that evolve over time.

• Don’t skimp on the transformative learning! I’ve been looking at the difference between patterns of success and failure in large scale systems transformation efforts. I’ll likely write more on this later but my working hunch is that in ‘successful’ efforts (Scandinavian folk schools, Costa Rica’s biodiversity protection movement, post WW II reconstruction in Japan, Finland’s transformation of its education system) somewhere between 60% - 80% of the total spend goes towards intentional transformative learning.

• Structure funding around long arcs: design philanthropic rhythms that support slow cultivation over years or decades. At the risk of being cliched, don't simply seed ideas - nurture forests.

• Avoid premature scaling: let new paradigms deepen and cohere in small, protected spaces before expanding. Scaling too soon often dilutes or distorts the work. Don’t be one of those patrons who just makes the horse run faster and further until it drops!

• Invest in learning ecosystems: consider supporting the emergence of entire ecosystems that can cross-pollinate and evolve together. The interstitial and mycelial matter.

• Beware the purity trap: history reminds us that radical cultural innovations and revolutions in consciousness often ride into town on stolen horses and imperial trade routes. Eros, paradox, power and conflict are always present….as they should be! There’s something critical about being able to work with the way the world actually is rather than a sanitized image of how we want it to be.

Integration: Tend to cultural transformation

Insight takes moments. Integration takes generations.

• Take the long view: the quantum revolution happened a century ago, and its implications have yet to sink in! Cultural transformation is a generational process, not a communications strategy.

• Be wary of flash over fundamentals: be cautious of viral movements promising rapid, large-scale change without demonstrable capacity for sustained practice and institutional innovation. Look at the climate, not just the weather!

• Support work rooted in inquiry: fund initiatives grounded in ethical humility, transformative learning, deep listening, and self-reflexive awareness—work that knows it doesn't have all the answers.

• Don’t get derailed by urgency/depth tensions: there are significant pressures to speed up. To focus on urgent mitigation strategies in the face of climate change, conflict escalation and systems collapse. To get dazzled by the promise of digital ecosystems. To mistake urgent activity for change, noise for signal. It’s hard to focus on deep time evolutionary change…the heart and soul are likely more reliable guides than the amygdala!

As always, these ‘phases’ are not linear; they tend to overlap and cycle recursively. Emergence continues even during integration phases. Coalescence happens repeatedly at different scales. (It’s helpful to map them using the adaptive cycle framework.) And they are shaped by external pressures; persecution, oppression, co-option, technology, institutionalization and various types of civilizational and socio-ecological dynamics can all accelerate or distort this rhythm.

The stakes couldn't be higher. We're living through what may be the most significant liminal moment in human history—a period of breakdown and breakthrough that could determine whether our species develops the collective wisdom necessary to navigate the challenges ahead.

The question isn't whether transformation is possible - history shows us it is!

There is so much we can learn from our ancestors to support the emergence of whatever forms of consciousness our planetary moment is calling forth.

To support the cultivation, transmission and integration of wisdom.

So if you have a spare $50 million and you’re wondering what to do with it….or you are interested in bringing resources to an emerging collective table….let me know! There are some inspiring fellow travellers out there and the doors are wide open!

With curiosity and a growing sense of wonder

Julian

p.s. big thank you to Cheryl Rose and Cassie Robinson for their feedback and thought partnership!

Endnotes: Six consciousness-shifting movements

The global Buddhist Sangha (6^th century BCE onwards)

Historian of civilizational collapse, Arnold Toynbee, was famously asked in the 1970’s what he thought the most significant event of the 20^th century would turn out to be. “Possibly the coming of Buddhism to America” he replied. It’s a stunning response for many reasons and worthy of deep consideration. In many ways, Buddhism demonstrates a complete arc from an individual awakening experience to ongoing global cultural adaptation. Siddhartha’s insights, and the small group that initially formed around them, catalyzed institutional innovations (monasteries, universities) that enabled the transmission of core contemplative practices across radically different cultures—Indian, Chinese, Tibetan, Southeast Asian, Japanese, American, European etc. From 9^th century Japanese tantrism to the mindfulness-based stress reduction available in contemporary healthcare settings, there’s a thread of adaptive creativity that has woven cultural flexibility, intellectual and psychological inquiry, deep consciousness-shifting practice and practical organizational forms across a 2,500-year timespan.

The emergence of Daoism (Zhou Dynasty, 1000-200 BCE)

Following the collapse of the Shang Dynasty with its centralized authority and supreme deity, and as the subsequent Zhou dynasty fragmented, Daoist philosophy emerged as a conscious alternative to hierarchical governance models. Legendary/historical figures like Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu drew from indigenous Chinese animistic tradition to articulate a sophisticated political and ecological philosophy that offered alternatives to failed hierarchical systems at a time of political crisis and collapse. The consciousness shift from imposed authority to a deep harmony with natural patterns helped to articulate a set of principles (wu wei) that continue to offer profound personal, organizational and governance relevance. (If you don’t know this story, I highly recommend David Hinton’s excellent book Wild Mind, Wild Earth)

The Great Law of Peace (12^th Century)

The spiritual teachings of Iroquois prophet Deganawida – known to this day as the Great Peacemaker - led to the establishment of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy and what might be one of history’s most dramatic and significant single generation consciousness shifts. The Peacemaker catalyzed a transformation of five warring nations into a sophisticated confederacy that endures to this day with democratic and sustainable governance structures that have both a deep time perspective and profoundly ‘ecological’ decision-making processes incorporating the more-than-human worlds. I’m horribly over-simplifying it, but it’s fair to say that this indigenous innovation influenced American democratic thought through the architects of the US Constitution, it continues to shape contemporary environmental and political movements and has played a potent role in uplifting indigenous sovereignty movements around the world.

The Quakers (17^th Century - Present)

In 1652, George Fox climbed Pendle Hill in Lancashire, England, where he experienced a profound vision that would catalyze one of history's most enduring spiritual-social movements. Fox's mystical experience revealed the possibility (to him) of direct divine connection without intermediary institutions, leading to the formation of the Religious Society of Friends. What began as a small group of radical Christians would grow into a global community whose principles such as the equality of women in ministry, rejection of slavery, truthfulness in business dealings, principled non-violence and a shift from hierarchical obedience to collective spiritual discernment have quietly influenced social justice movements for over three centuries. Contemporary organizations like Greenpeace and Amnesty International trace direct lineages to the Quakers, and they invite important questions about how a very small community's commitment to lived spiritual practice can continue to support the emergence of new movements for justice across centuries.

The Quantum Revolution (1900-1930)

At the beginning of the 20th century, the work of a small handful of physicists - including Planck, Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg, and Schrödinger - fundamentally shattered the classical worldview in ways that continue to reverberate. It might be the most profound historical shift in human understanding of reality's fundamental nature, and it was catalyzed by fewer than a dozen people in three decades. Quantum mechanics overturned classical assumptions about objectivity, causation, and the nature of matter itself, revealing reality as relational and interconnected rather than composed of separate, independent objects. While the technological applications that flowed from this discovery have transformed global civilization – think computers, mobile phones, lasers and nuclear weapons - its deeper philosophical implications remain largely unintegrated into mainstream cultural consciousness.

Cybernetics (1940s-present)

Following World War Two, a tiny group that included Norbert Wiener, Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead, helped to establish frameworks for understanding feedback, self-organization, and information flow that transcended traditional disciplinary boundaries. They held a series of conferences (1946-1953), supported by etc Macy Foundation, that brought together mathematicians, biologists, anthropologists, and engineers to explore common patterns across different systems. This small community and their gatherings helped to catalyze several inter-connected movements including the fields of ecology, systems theory and the complexity sciences. The shift from reductionist to systems thinking is starting to impact virtually every field or human endeavour. At the same time, it is facing significant resistance: it challenges fundamental aspects of the modernist paradigm; it is less ‘mobilizing’ than more simplistic linear stories; and it is a great example of how you cannot ‘think’ your way into a new state or stage of consciousness.

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^[i] Specific areas where this post is ‘thin’ or where I cut it back to avoid it being too long include: a discussion of what I and others mean by consciousness and its ‘shift’ or ‘evolution’; a look at the different levels or domains of intervention; persistent patterns of failure; shadow dynamics…especially when it comes to transformative movements, concentrations of wealth and patterns of harm.