Our sense of space and time has changed radically within the last few decades. New technology has invited us to become globally connected - to increase our sense of space from local communities, to nations across the world and to the cosmos. Far from fulfilling the dream of world unity and solidarity, we find ourselves connected from without, but alienated from within. As our space has increased we discover clashing values and different worldviews threatening to divide the world into the elite and the impoverished at a time when global problems require cooperation and alliances to deal with terrorism and international crime. We are faced with the complexity of multiperspectives in diverse cultures in a newly globalized world. We must now enfold egocentric and ethnocentric attitudes into a worldcentric consciousness that aligns with the widening global living space we now inhabit. But how?
Time has speeded up. Adaptation will require flexibility in letting go, coming apart, and coming together again more rapidly. There is something different about today's changes. The pace of change is somehow faster, the frequency, and amplitiude of restructuring and reforming are significantly greater, and the pathways of emerging futures seem to be less predictable than they were in earlier times, says Ray Kurzweil, author of The Age of Spiritual Machines. Where is this leading us
New understanding of Reality as a living, evolving system and advances in evolutionary biology and in nanotechnology give rise to the question of what it means to be human. Solutions that worked in the past under different space/time conditions and different views of Reality no longer suffice. History reveals that when humanity is faced with new challenges that cannot be solved with old thinking, new capacities at mental and biological levels will evolve. We are now living at a point in history when changing life conditions are of such a magnitude that a new worldview with a transformative vision is beginning to emerge. We call that Integral.
