Gregg Braden: The Turning Point

Gregg Braden: I begin with that statement: “We solve our problems and deal with the events of our lives based upon the way we think of our relationship to ourselves, to the people around us, to the world around us, to our past and to our future”. This is important because in the Western world, for 300 hundred years, science has led us to embrace a story based upon separation – We are separate from ourselves, separate from our own bodies, separate from one another, separate from the world and we are essentially powerless victims when it comes to the things that happen in the world. All that we can do is respond and react to what happens rather than to participate in the events as they unfold.

This is very important because we are living, what the experts are calling, in a time of extremes. That doesn’t mean necessarily that all bad things are happening, or even good things, but big changes in the world are creating big changes in our lives and we are doing the very best we can to embrace those changes based upon the way we think of ourselves. So we are trying to deal with the change through the story of separation.

The best science of the late 20th and now the early 21st century have changed the way that we think about ourselves. New discoveries in peer reviewed science have now overturned 300 years of the story of separation and the new story is now a story of connection. This story is telling us that we are deeply connected to our bodies, we are deeply connected to the world beyond our bodies and that we solves our problems based in nature’s model of cooperation and what biologists call “mutual aide”, not the competition and the conflict based upon survival of the strongest that was introduced in 1859 by Charles Darwin.

So as we embrace the new discoveries of science it gives us a new lens through which to think of ourselves and to see ourselves in our relationship to the world. This gives us also new reasons to go about solving our problems differently. Whether it’s the big problems in the world, when we talk about the economy that is based upon a model of competition and conflict. When we talk about the big problems in like The Middle East, whether it’s Israel and Iran or Syria and what’s happening in Iraq or whether we’re talking about China or Russia and the Ukraine, it’s affecting all of our lives. We’re attempting to solve these big social and economic issues based upon this model of survival of the strongest, it’s not working, it’s not sustainable in its present form and that’s okay because now the new discoveries give us new models of cooperation that we can utilize to solve these big problems.