Ervin László: The Upshift

All things that consciousness that I want to say, but the way human consciousness is articulate, and can express itself, is able to perceive and respond to perception. That’s more developed than any consciousness on this planet. So perhaps whales and dolphins together to come closer to it. We don’t know exactly, but their environment is a different environment.

Our terrestrial environment calls for highly articulate consciousness and manipulative consciousness, and we have that. We can consciously choose to upshift to nature. And ants can’t do that, even in a colony, unless it has a joint consciousness, a collective consciousness. I don’t think so. But it’s not impossible.

But they can’t do that. Our consciousness is here for a purpose. It’s to help us come back to living the life that we are meant to live A life of striving, a life of togetherness, a life of oneness. So, again, child’s poetry, but it is the bottom line. That’s the way to upshift. If you don’t do that, we’ll pay by running into more crises and difficulties. We can’t block the evolutionary trend. It’s there, and we are a part of it. So let’s study the consciousness that allows us to become conscious of people and nature.

Sandie Sedgbeer: Ervin László, you drafted, in collaboration with the Dalai Lama, a Manifesto on the spirit of Planetary Consciousness. Tell us about that manifesto.

Ervin László: It was a very interesting experience. It was quite an experience, and we are now interested enough. There’s a project now to revive that dialogue, to make it an internet-based dialogue. This is Holiness. And today, I’ve been working on my input into that and quoting the Manifesto Planetary Consciousness. Interesting that you mentioned that because there’s no way you could have known that this something came up yesterday. This morning I decided to open up the manifesto and call the last part of the manifesto, called the Call for Planetary Consciousness.

And I’m suggesting we should revive the dialogue with his Holiness, the Dalai Lama, and talk about the need for this kind of consciousness. Let me just say why it was such an interesting experience. At the time, I was staying in Auroville. Auroville is an international settlement in India but not formally part of India.

It’s an international city in India with its own governing board. But, based on the ideas of Sri Aurobindo.

And at that time, I served as chairman of the Auroville board, looking at what Auroville was doing and trying to communicate it with the rest of the world so that there is support; and then spread the idea of Sri Aurobindo which is the more spiritual, high and uplifting ideas that you could imagine. Part of the great imaginings of independence for India, and the new thinking, the New India. So I was in Auroville, and his Holiness the Dalai Lama came to visit, and we sat down to talk. They allowed me to go to meet him. His secretary said he has a few minutes, is very busy, and has planned his whole day out, but let’s start talking.

And he asked me, what are you working on these days? And I said I have a sketch. I have a project I would like to say, a manifesto on a new kind of consciousness. And he said: ” Can I read something?”.Can you have something of it? I had it with me because that’s what I was always thinking about those days. So I started reading his Holiness, then suddenly everyone surrounding me said this, and that’s how about that, and so on. And he ended up the rest of the day. His secretary was sitting there and noting it all down. He canceled all his other appointments. That day the evening came, and we had a few pages, which became the plan, the manifesto, or the Spirit of planetary Consciousness. And it was signed by, later on, a few months later, a year later, at the meeting that I organized at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.

I’m a member of that academy. I was born in Budapest. And that at that meeting, his Holiness came to that meeting in the fall of 1996. We, besides the manifesto, are the spirit of planetary consciousness. So this was an experience, a spontaneous experience. Then we adopted this manifesto, and it’s part of the work of the Club of Budapest with its 24 member clubs worldwide, and it is a set of distinguished individuals.

We are developing a new set because life doesn’t go on forever. And there’s a certain change, our attrition, and you’d have to want to bring in new members, especially young members. But we are trying to work on the consciousness, on the potentials of the human spirit, and bring that to people’s attention. So that’s one thing. Another project that is so relevant to what we are discussing is something I’m working on these days, just for the last two weeks.

Very recent, but very intensely good. I decided, and I’m joined by my good friend David Lauermann, the head of the Scientific Analytic Network. I decided we should ask thought leaders, deeply insightful scientists, and spiritual people. What do they think of the path that we need to take? In my book, The Upshift, I say, yes, the path to healing and the Evolution of Planet Earth. How do you look at this path without trying to suggest it to people? What should you look at? What do you think of it? Asking for insights from people, articulated people to write this out. I don’t know what will come out of it. I’ve asked more than two thousand outstanding individuals in the past few days. I don’t want to name any names, but they are people you would know. Ask them to write the path in five or six pages.

Give us an indication of what you think is the right thing. Is it right to shift forward, the right way to go? And the answers are coming in. Just today. I got two very important answers. Again, no names, but I’m very delighted to have them. And I think by the end of this year, end of December, we will probably have two dozen or more contributions to what we then jointly call the imperatives, the upshift imperatives. And so it’s another six months or so, and we’ll publish that too. It follows the book the Upshift, but this time it goes and taps into mind the inside, the consciousness of 2000 or more thought leaders.

Sandie Sedgbeer: Just to go back to the manifesto. There were three clarion calls in that manifesto. Can you describe those to us?

Ervin László: Well, now you expect me to remember what I’ve written all this time, exactly?

Sandie Sedgbeer: I can tell you. Well, the first is the core of creativity and diversity, right?

Ervin László: Yes. Diversity is absolutely necessary. As I mentioned, even the atom has diverse elements if you want to join that whole. This idea is that somehow things are just by things coming together into contact. And that’s what makes a larger hole, just more of the same. The larger whole is not more of the same. Even quantitatively, a whole is never the sum of the parts, and it is always something else. Wholeness is another factor. Diversity is to make wholes. Nature makes wholes, creates wholes, creates molecules, cells, macromolecules, crystals or single-cell organisms, multi-cell organisms, ecology of organisms, and the planetary ecology. These are all whole systems made of diverse plant parts.

Oneness is not created by just adding one thing together or multiplying things. It is opening up to everything else but opening and embracing diversity and working with diversity. So that’s something we already recognized in the late 20th century in the manifesto, which is becoming increasingly evident. The need for it becomes more evident as we want it today.

Sandie Sedgbeer: The second one is the call for responsibility.

Ervin László: It’s an awful word, actually very often said. I’m just responsible when something goes wrong. And then people feel you are being accused of being responsible. So many things have gone wrong, and now the whole planetary system you’re living in has gone off track. And so, my goodness, that means that we are responsible, but there is a call to assume responsibility for what we can do, for what we truly are, and do it to the best of our ability. What we can do is try to live together so all can live. And it’s one of the things I’m saying in this book, that’s ethics; living in a way that other people can also live. I don’t necessarily mean they have to live the same way, but it can also exist. They have often lived in a way that used up too many resources and too much energy, attention, and insight and Information, so many people were locked out of it. It’s not ethical to do anything that others cannot share.

Today, this is close to 8 billion people. So at least in principle, you must be able to live in a way that enables or allows at least other people to live. As I said, not necessarily the same way we live their own way, live the way we can. We are also diverse, but to live, strive and become more of what we are, whole systems working together is all the life on the planet.

Sandie Sedgbeer: And, of course, the third is the core of planetary consciousness.

Ervin László: I said it in the beginning, my goodness. Planetary consciousness, do you mean the consciousness of the planet? In the beginning, this was a relatively new term. This was not much used. Now people talk about planetary consciousness. They don’t misunderstand it. Usually, they know it’s a new human consciousness that embraces the planet. It’s not the consciousness of the planet. Even though I should add as a philosopher, I’ve convinced that all large bodies in the universe have their own consciousness—all complex bodies, including the planet.

Sandie Sedgbeer: I recently interviewed Dr. Jude Currivan, who I know is a good friend of yours and sometimes a collaborator as well. And I loved what Jude says in her new book, that we need to start seeing ourselves as Gaians, not Americans or Britain or whatever, but as Gaians, and then we will begin to understand that we are one.

Ervin László: Yeah. So I said multiple identities. We have the largest identity, which means we are living beings in this universe, and that’s already an identity. Not everything is a living being. The living beings that emerged are a particular articulate expression of the evolutionary drive toward creating complex and coherent systems.

Here I’m using one term, coherence. Coherence is so important because now we recognize that nature is coherent. And Einstein said. Also, it’s almost a miracle that in this, all this wealth of chaos, the wealth of interactions that are happening in space and time, there’s something coherent that is emerging, as coherent is a system of life. And even the universe, the planets, the system of planets, and the galaxies are themselves coherent systems from the initial chaos after the big bank; ever more coherence is emerging in space and time.

That’s a great forward trend. That’s the upshift trend. It’s an attractor. I call it the holotropic attractor in my current work, whole, you know, toward wholeness. Tropic means trophism or something pulling you toward something that is an attraction toward the universe that appears to be attracted toward wholeness.

Wholeness means the joining together of those different diverse elements into wholeness. You know, and so recognizing or being part of that is our largest identity. Within that, multiple identities are part of life on Earth, a Gaian, and identity is certainly a very important element.

Sandie Sedgbeer: I find it really interesting; you were a concert pianist. You are still a pianist. What do you think about music, all of the things that make music so wonderful and connect us to our souls? The same things you’re talking about now, coherence, harmony, all of these qualities. Do you notice, do you regard yourself as some kind of musician in the sense of what you are preaching about the planet?

Ervin László: I don’t know how I regard myself. I mean, I’m a seeker. I try to find things, particularly that wholeness and harmony that you find in music, not in every kind of music. I don’t relate to music that is violent with the percussions and whatnot. But it doesn’t have to be sentimental songs but music, which is at a higher level, is a unit of perfection. Every element of it is perfect. When Mozart was asked by the Duke or Emperor at the time in Austria about actually writing too many notes, this was in the film. Amadeus, I think, he said: No, no, your highness, there are just as many notes as need to be. These are more, no less. Every note counts in a masterpiece; you can’t remove any note without destroying wholeness, unity, and coherence.

You can’t even also just arbitrarily add on at anything. So this is what I’m seeking. I’m seeking the perfection where all things operate to maintain, to be the whole, the expression of art, the experience of art, the aesthetic experience is precisely that. So when we talked earlier about the ways that we can approach this higher level of upshifted consciousness, now talking about the nature experience, I would like to add the aesthetic experience of human artifacts, music, painting, and even dance in a way that we dance. You know, it’s all human artifacts. And that the express wholeness and oneness and that experience, which is a high level of, a deep experience, a highly satisfactory experience of Oneness That I think is again, one of the ways that we can evolve our consciousness so that we move toward this higher level of Upshift that is so badly needed into work and that we can contribute to. And these are our pathways to move towards.

Sandie Sedgbeer: You created the upshift movement, which you are inviting everybody to join. What is its subjective and its mission?

Ervin László: Okay, I can share with you, as I’ve written out the mission statement. I can make it available. And when the time comes from to if you present that. Next week, we will have a meeting in Rome, Italy, of the members of what we now call the WUM, the world Upshift movement, which has its own board. It’s registered formally as a movement at the so-called company’s House in London, England. But it would be an international registration, and it’ll have its own website developing the current websites, which remains, but it’ll be developed as such. We have to emphasize the term world, which we added to it because it’s not a local initiative in any sense. I would like it to be an initiative of the US Yes, certainly of Europe, but also the east, around the south.

So, and I’m going to ask organizations, I said, I’ll ask, ask the or radio on TV as well to see which way we could adhere to this Movement. So it becomes an international, a world movement. I, myself, I may add, dislike and somewhat the mistrusted term international. We are not talking about Nexus nations being connected in some way. We’re talking about transcending the level of nations so that we become global, which is what the spread needs to be. So world, a world movement. That is our goal. And I hope to involve people at all levels of insight, education, and different interests to come together because it’s our world and one world, and we are one with it. And so let’s see how each of us can contribute to it. We all care. Let’s be articulate. Let’s talk to each other about that.

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Sandie Sedgbeer: Can children become part of this Movement?

Ervin László: Children are part of this Movement.

Sandie Sedgbeer: They are part of the Movement.

Ervin László: I think they only get corrupt when they go to school.

Sandie Sedgbeer: Yes, they do. They do. Yeah. Okay. I mean, certainly, your book, “the Upshift, should be part of the school curriculum.

Ervin László: They’re wonderful schools as well. I don’t disregard that. But then we are told that we are only concerned with human affairs as though they will be separate. The only concern is our national interest as though it will be separate; then those are corrupting influences. I’ve been talking to people trying to develop an upshift in business. And I say that there are two terms that I found very dangerous.

One is in the business world, particularly, and one is private. It’s a term. And the other is national. A private business. It’s the private sector. We used to say that in Europe, when we had communism, we were looking for a private sector, a small sector, and more freedom. And I was happy with my parents belonging to the private sector. But now it’s not a question of the private sector; it’s all businesses practically private except for a very small part of enterprises.

But the question is, how did the private sector become public? Becomes part of the human enterprise. Not by taking it out of hand and time to organize it, to direct it by a group of people, managers or politicians, or whatnot. But part, becoming by spirit, becoming a public enterprise, having the public, the human spirit as its guiding principles, profit, yes, it needs to be to run the organization but not as an end and in itself and by itself, profit to become one, and part of a wholly diverse system, which you can call the Gaian system, which is the planetary system, which is a planetary consciousness. That is the great chance and the great challenge that we face.

Continue to Page 3 of the Interview with Ervin László

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