Resilience From the Heart: Gregg Braden
OMTimes: In our last talk we already spoke about our time of extremes and the so called ‘new normal’. Today I would like to focus more on our perceptions of how traditional science supports our current global challenges and what the role of our heart can play in this story.
What are some of the misconceptions and outdated assumptions of science and how do we know that we can’t apply them anymore in today’s world?
Gregg Braden: I think this is the key to everything. Even the skeptics of a few years ago who were reluctant to really acknowledge that anything different is happening in the world. Recent events have shaken the belief systems of so many people on so many different levels that even the skeptics now acknowledge that something is going on in the world. It happens on many different levels. Whether we talk about social change and conflict that everyone is seeing in the news, economic change, which really got everybody’s attention in the past month as global markets collapsed almost overnight catching many people off guard, climate change, it’s changing the way we live, where we live and it’s changing the industries. How people make a living, how they plan and prepare for their future. All of these things are happening right now. We’ve been experiencing these things in the past but what makes now unique is that we’re living the convergence of multiple cycles of change all in the same window of time. And as the world changes we can no longer separate the big world out there from our everyday lives. People are seeing these changes in the way they plan for their future, how they make their living, the jobs that are available to them, how they safe for their children’s education, health care and their future. All of these things.
People now know something is up and they’re trying to solve their problems through the thinking that led to the problems in the first place. And that thinking that we all have been steeped in in the Western world for the last 150 years is a scientific story that has been shared in the textbooks in public schools, in mainstream media about us – our relationship to the world and our relationship to our bodies, and that story is largely based upon the idea of separation, competition and conflict. A lot of these ideas began with Charles Darwin in 1859. That was the time that the foundation of Western society was being put into place. It’s not surprising that we see those ideas that I just mentioned in things like the economic system that we all rely upon, the corporate systems, how we share our vital resources in our communities, with our neighbors and even between nations. All of these systems that we rely so deeply upon are based in false assumptions of separation, conflict and competition and they are unsustainable.
