I’m a big fan of Parker J. Palmer. He writes with humanity in mind, and freedom in our souls, and helps us understand how our disconnections with each other hinder us as we try to build a better world.
In his book, The Courage to Teach, I found this extraordinary section about Václav Havel, poet/playwright, statesman, and the first president of the Czech Republic. And I’m wondering – are we there yet? Read with me and lend your voice:
“[Havel] speaks of the inward seed of human consciousness and how it grew into a flower of reform that cracked and crumbled the granite of totalitarianism [in Czechoslovakia/the Czech Republic from 1968 to 1993], ‘The…experience I’m talking about has given me one certainty:…the salvation of this human world lies nowhere else than in the human heart, in the human power to reflect, in human meekness and in human responsibility. Without a global revolution in…human consciousness, nothing will change for the better, and the catastrophe toward which this world is headed…will be unavoidable.’ ”
Is this what we are intuiting: a global revolution and evolution in human consciousness? It is happening across fields, across generations, across countries, across every which way we choose to define ourselves. But it is happening nonetheless. At some point we must make the determination: are we humans who care about each other and the maturity of our nature? or are we only hapless victims of outward forces beyond our control? What should we choose to believe and why?
[Photo: Mystic Mountain. Region in the Carina Nebula imaged by the Hubble Space Telescope. Elements of this image furnished by NASA. Shutterstock.]