There are many ways to define sustainability. Let us choose the definition by the World Commission on Environment and Development, which considers sustainability to be "forms of progress that meet the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs."
There is no doubt that our global reality is asking for new forms of benign progress. At the same time, linear thinking proves to be useless in the face of the complexity and unpredictability of our global challenges.
One of the linear patterns of the human mind that is rapidly becoming outdated is the tendency to assign a cause to every effect. Our world is not flat, it is a sphere of inter-connected realities, where every effect has an infinite number of causes and every action has an infinite number of effects. In other words, every action every one of us takes is the cause of everything that happens around us, and everything that happens around us is the cause of what we find ourselves doing. We live in a multidimensional, interconnected world.
This realization which is now dawning on us has initially brought us discouragement and a feeling of powerlessness. What can an individual caught in this web do, what can a group, a nation, or even humanity as a whole do in the face of such overwhelming combined dangers as the ones we face today? Our traditional way to search the database of stored memories for solutions to today’s problems is leading nowhere. We stand before problems never before encountered and we need truly new solutions.
Science- the best of the human mind- is searching high and low for solutions. But I would like to suggest that the real solution will arrive only when human beings collectively discover a missing, crucial dimension of our multidimensional world: the inner universe. We have recently become aware that we are interconnected as individuals and nations, that our economy, ecology, technology, biology and evolution are not separate. But that is not enough.
The next step is to realize that the inner and outer worlds of a human being are also interconnected. Our anger, fear, greed, shame and blame are not separate from the environmental, social or financial cataclysms we experience, just as our love, generosity, creativity and joy are not separate from harmonious societies, economies and environment.
The revolutionary insight we are heading for is that the world is as we are, and the transformation of our own consciousness is the only solution for the problems we face. We have the power to change the world, because we have the power to change our own consciousness. It is up to us to wake up from the illusion of separateness and be the change we want to see in the world.
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This blog is an answer to the question asked by DK Matai on ATCAOpen: "
Is Sustainability the result of Science and Spirituality’s merger if we need new processes + values to go from Linear to Holistic thinking"
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