Review
Our world is in a Macroshift: today's reality is a substantially new reality of climate change, global corporations and industrialized agriculture. Here Ervin Laszlo presents a new 'reality map' to guide us through this time of great transition. Science's cutting edge now views reality as broader, as multiple universes arising in a possibly infinite meta-universe, as well as deeper, extending into dimensions at the subatomic level. Laszlo shows that aspects of human experience previously consigned to intuition and speculation are now being explored with scientific rigour and urgency. There has been a shift in the materialistic scientific view of reality toward the multidimensional worldview of multiple interconnected realities long known by the world's great spiritual traditions. By understanding the interconnectedness of our changing world as well as our changing 'map' of the world, we can navigate with insight, wisdom, and confidence.
192pp, 152mm x 228mm, softback, 2008

Extract
The Reality Revolution
In the first decade of the twenty-first century we face a new reality, individually as well as collectively. Our reality is shifting because the human world has become unstable and is no longer sustainable. But the reality revolution harbors a unique opportunity. This decade is the first in history that offers the choice between being the last decade of a fading, obsolete world or the first of a new and viable one.

The emerging reality is radically new. We are experiencing ever more frequent and ever greater shocks and surprises, and these are not due simply to blindness and ignorance. It is our reality that is shifting. As the economist Kenneth Boulding remarked, the only thing we should not be surprised at is being surprised.

The new reality is an intrinsically surprising reality. Nothing continues in the same way as it did before; everything 'bifurcates.' This expression, coming originally from mathematics and chaos theory, indicates that the path of development of a system encounters a rapid, previously unforeseen change. We live in an age of bifurcation in the midst of a fundamental transformation of our world: in a Macroshift.

The reality shift we experience regards the way we relate to each other, to nature, and to the cosmos. Previously some of us had suspected that this reality might soon shift, but the great bulk of humanity proceeded on the assumption that things would remain pretty much the same as they were: business as usual. But in the year 2007, it is daily becoming more evident that business is definitely not as usual. The Earth is literally transforming under our feet. On New Year's eve the Russians celebrated in the former Red Square without a trace of ice and snow; in January New Yorkers walked in Central Park in shirtsleeves; the center of Greenland is taken up by an unfrozen lake the size of Lake Michigan, Lake Superior, and Lake Erie combined; and there is hardly any of the legendary snow left on top of Kilimanjaro. Anyone who still doubts that the world we live in is changing must be blind, obstinate, or just plain stupid.

Of course, the climate is just one of many changes under way, though it is the most visible. Connected with climate change are a host of other factors that are just as prone to change as the ecology, in the economic, social, political, and cultural arenas. The bottom line is that, in more respects than one, proceeding further as we have up till now takes us to a catastrophic bifurcation: to a fateful tipping point.

Change is no longer mere theory, and it is no longer merely an option: it is a reality, an imperative of our survival. Proceeding on the assumption of business as usual (BAU) is suicidal.

Interestingly and importantly, our map of the world is also changing: science itself is in the midst of a paradigm shift. The new paradigm gives us a deeper understanding of the nature of quantum shifts in complex systems in nature as well as in society. Complex systems do not evolve smoothly, step by step: they are highly nonlinear. They evolve step by ste only up to a point, then they reach a threshold of stability and either break down or bifurcate. This is true of the evolution of stars (at a given point they either explode as a supernova and spew forth the matter that will become the stuff of the next generation of stars or they collapse into a black hole); it is true of living species (sooner or later in their lifespan most species are threatened with extinction - and then they either mutate into a more viable species or become extinct); and it is also true of entire civilizations (they too evolve or go under, as the experience of the communist world demonstrated in the winter of 1989/90).

Does this mean that human society may be doomed, and we may become extinct even as a species? The currently dominant form of civilization does seem to have reached its limits and is bound to change. But out demise as a species, while it cannot be excluded, is by no means decided. We have enormous and as yet unexploited resources for coping with the challenges that face us. We have a whole range of new and sophisticated technologies at our disposal, and radically new insights are emerging at the cutting edge of the sciences.

However, the key insight coming from the new paradigm in the sciences is not technological. It is the confirmation of something people have always felt but could not give a rational explanation for: our close connection to each other and to the cosmos. Traditional people have known of it and have lived it, but modern civilization has first neglected and then denied it. Yet genuine spiritual experience offers direct evidence of our links to each other and to all of creation, and now science confirms the validity of such intuitions.

Until the last decade or two, scientists and science-minded people considered the feeling of human and human-nature interconnection a mere delusion. Then the evidence started to come in. A fresh look at our connections in the framework of the new sciences - quantum physics above all - began to indicate that the 'oneness' people sometimes experience is not delusory and that the explanation of it is not beyond the ken of the sciences. As quanta, and entire atoms and molecules, can be instantly connected across space and time, so living organisms, especially the complex and supersensitive brain and nervous system of evolved organisms, can be instantly connected with other organisms, with nature, and with the cosmos as a whole. This is vitally important, for admitting the intuition of connections to our everyday consciousness can inspire the solidarity we so urgently need to live on this planet - to live in harmony with each other and with nature.

This knowledge and the practical wisdom that follows from it have become the precondition of the persistance of human civilization and even the survival of the human species.

From Quantum Shift in the Global Brain, ?2008 by Ervin Laszlo, published by Inner Traditions.