Leaving the Forbidden City – by James O’Dea …A systems perspective on Earth’s next major evolutionary phase change … James O’Dea is a Fellow and recent Past President of The Institute of Noetic Sciences (www.jamesodea.com )
Puyi Qing was just two years and ten months old when he was taken from his mother and brought to the Forbidden City with its 35 foot high walls and its nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety nine rooms. There, in the Hall of Supreme Harmony, he was named Xuangton Emperor. Alas, or perhaps fortunately, he was barely six years old when life outside the walls of this most exclusive imperial enclave ended the Qing dynasty in favor of a modern republic. Although he was forced to abdicate in 1912, he was effectively imprisoned in the private quarters of The Forbidden City until 1924 when, at age 18, with the Empress and his favorite concubine, both of whom he had married a few years earlier, he was forced to leave its confines, never to return. He was to be known thereafter as “the last emperor”.
While none of us will have had such a spectacular coming of age story, we all have some version of a time in our lives when, rudely or not, we are forced to shed aspects of a reality which can no longer exist as it once did for us. We discover that other stories exist, beyond the story we found ourselves born into. Inevitably as we grapple with the unstoppable momentum of ideas, technology and the impact of accelerating change and the many other historical and evolutionary forces all around us, we can align only with part of our inherited narrative of the world.
Sometimes the older version of reality just fades away or disintegrates organically like rich compost in the soil of what eventually emerges as new truth. When this happens we find ourselves cooperating with change and even open to quite radical transformations in belief, attitude and behavior. It is often not that easy, it can take a full blown crisis to help us come to grips with the fact that our general worldview no longer adequately defines reality or serves us well. It can take wrestling with unfamiliar ideas, and values which seem alien. Like the emperor, we can find ourselves churned and buffeted by changes beyond our control; and in a world where trade, travel and communication have gone into hyper-acceleration other versions and perspectives of reality intrude upon the walls and boundaries of our current beliefs and demand our attention whether we like it or not.
The question is not just can we learn to recognize our personal ‘forbidden city’ or the ones created by our affinity groups, religions, ethnicities and nations, but how do we engage in larger systems beyond those boundaries in ways that enhance shared meaning and collective understanding about what really matters.
Let’s go back to the last emperor and round out his story before we continue. To his credit, Puyi had tried to explore the world beyond The Forbidden City: at age fifteen he bribed the guards in his attempt to experience the reality that lay outside those gates which were designed to keep the commoners out but which served to keep him in and closeted in a world that was out of touch with the rapidly changing conditions beyond its walls. The guards at the very last moment betrayed him and his disappointment was grievous and soul destroying. It took him a great many years to recover. He admits that he allowed himself, against his own better judgment, to be installed at age 26 as a puppet leader in Manchuria by the invading Japanese. You could call this a major regression on his part: an attempt to recapture a reality he knew to be from a bygone era. But again in 1945 another story caught up with him, this time it was the Soviet army which captured him. After holding him for some years, Stalin handed him over to his new best friend Mao Zedong.
Subjected to ten years of imprisonment by the communists, the man who had grown up as a quasi-deity and, The Lord of Ten Thousand Years, was finally forced to accept his status as a commoner. Having been ‘re-educated’ and, from some accounts, genuinely accepting his fate, he lived in a simple apartment and worked as a gardener. He died shortly after a few precious items were removed from his apartment by zealots of The Cultural Revolution bent on humiliating him ever further.
We see in Puyi’s story dramatic shifts which reflect the collapse of his mythic status, the collapse of his political status; personal humiliation, loss and eventual psychological and intellectual accommodation with the changes he had experienced. It is not a story of good v. evil or a narrative which reveals any kind of simple linear progression of cause and effect. It is a story of multiple non-linear causal dimensions in the form of historical and political storms that flared up into a global conflagration followed by huge ideological rifts, and philosophical differences about the social order, power and privilege. Puyi died in 1967, a year which resonated with the kind of complexity that defined the 20th century and which has only accelerated further in the 21st.
It was a year when the man who was to become the last Shah of Iran was crowned, only later to be overthrown by Islamic fundamentalists. It was the year of the Summer of Love in San Francisco, while, at the same time, the US intensified its high-tech war against communist forces in Vietnam and Israel defeated the combined Arab armies of the region in six days, annexing the West Bank and Gaza with devastating consequences for the Palestinian people. It was a year in which Martin Luther King was at the height of his influence and The Beatles released Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. As pictures of Earth, taken from outer space, began to circulate around the world conveying graphically that all nations belonged to the whole, physicists were exploring with equal reverence and awe the mysterious and even boggling ‘entangled’ reality of sub-atomic particles and the quantum foam.
It was also in 1967 that Arthur Koestler coined the term holon to represent a systems perspective that could more accurately describe reality than the concept of hierarchies: A holon being something that is whole in itself but part of a larger more inclusive whole. Holarchy—the descriptor for interconnected and interdependent nested realities was felt to be a more accurate description of systems at all scales, from the minute to the cosmic, than the rigid top down world of hierarchy. But in human affairs hierarchies are tenacious and tend to morph into other guises….as Puyi discovered early in life.
Hierarchies exist, but increasingly we are compelled, for our own survival, to learn how complex, non-linear, adaptive systems work and what they tell us about how we might catalyze healthy whole system transition. It has been pointed out that if you remove the head of a spider it will die, if you cut off the arm of a starfish, because it has a decentralized nervous system, it can grow back the arm, while some types of starfish can even regenerate from a single dismembered ray. Obviously you shouldn’t try this experiment on a human since mammals do not have this regenerative ability, but as Brafman and Beckstrom point out, hierarchies dependent on top-down leadership tend to stifle and even kill the generative creativity of ‘leaderless’ teams.
We know that massive collective creativity is now required if we are to avert volatile climate change, ecological devastation, loss of species, toxic pollution and immeasurable human suffering: consumption patterns and lifestyles must change, and corporate and financial structures need massive transformation from unconscious levels of acquisition and unsustainable modes of operation. But these are only elements of a much larger web of systems reverberating and reacting to each other: ultimately human civilization must undergo a whole system evolutionary phase change. Religion, education, science, politics, economics, healthcare and ecology can no longer sustain privileged autonomy within the whole system of planetary existence. When it comes to addressing and securing the survival of our species and our relationship to all life on Earth or to securing universal adherence to human rights, fundamental social justice and the elimination of violence as a means to intimidate and punish others, these major arteries of civil society must weave a tapestry which coherently depicts a new vision of wholeness and interdependence in contrast to fragmentation, polarization and domination.
The nature of our current ecological and economic crises is multiple and interrelated: but more people—from activists to policy makers– know that we can’t fix our environmental problems without transforming our economies, and that the health and well-being of communities all over the world is tied to successfully integrating economic systems with the primary systems which keep Earth’s life and climate in balance.. And we can’t integrate them into a sustainable design if we believe the highest goal of life is to acquire stuff, and that it doesn’t matter what we do with the planet’s resources because the End is coming and the destination is Heaven. Only a shift in consciousness that expresses itself in real behavioral, cognitive, and attitudinal changes and which creates a solid foundation for shared values can act as the driver of whole system evolutionary phase change.
Whole system evolutionary phase change is the antithesis of cosmetic tinkering with dying and outmoded structures: a contrived patchwork of accommodations and compromises won’t work—we are beyond that. You maybe able to deceive and distract people but you cannot lie to the wind or the oceans; you cannot bring back the one-third of Earth’s species lost since 1970. Nor can you deceive the larger system which you are embedded in, but you can reach upwards to gain a higher and more inclusive perspective: Fortunately we can expand awareness and grow in consciousness in ways that reach far beyond the cleverest of manipulations. An evolutionary phase change is dramatic: dinosaurs become extinct; needs, feelings and ideas get expressed into language; language is symbolized in written form; codes for the instantaneous transmission of the written word are created and shared across the world.
So what will be the dramatic nature of this next evolutionary phase change? It will be as bold in contrast as the shift from Ape to Homo Sapiens. It has the potential to stir the emergence of a collectively awakened higher consciousness in sufficiently large numbers as to tip the balance away from the violent and punitive underpinnings of contemporary civilizations. It will be a phase change that moves the human species from fragmentation, division, exploitation and distraction to integration, conciliation and service. In moving us towards this dramatic change it seems inevitable that the pathologies of our most egregiously destructive behavior will need to be fully understood and so graphically exposed as to consolidate evolutionary learning. Yes, that is bleak news! At the same time, the emergence of greater numbers of more consciously awakened people in all cultures will act as a positive evolutionary lure or attractor—they will exude more peace, friendship, compassion and they will be healthier and live longer. They will be more subtle, dialogic and generally more loving, forgiving and appreciative than their forbears.
This may strike you as wild conjecture but while it is true that no one knows what the future will bring, there is now a considerable body of scientific evidence which confirms the extensive psychological, emotional and physiological benefits of such things as meditation and as a result large numbers of people are taking up meditative and yogic practices. In fact in crude ‘survival of the fittest” terms those who are loving, relational, forgiving and altruistic are simply going to outlive the angry, hostile and vengeful. An inability to forgive, for example, has negative cardiovascular effects and can lead to psychological fixation and stuckness. People who learn to release hostile feelings are able to move on and adapt more quickly—and the ability to adapt to changing conditions is, as we know, high up there on evolution’s short-list of essential skills. Because people who have been learning and sharing these insights at the interface of science and spirituality eat more consciously, they also stay in better shape and have a further advantage in terms of social capital, and other wellness and longevity indicators. Together, these and other dramatic changes in perceptions, attitudes and beliefs are marking the emergence of a growing segment of the population who are more subtle, tolerant, adaptable, dialogic, eco-conscious, as well as being more peaceful and spiritually open than their predecessors.
It is as if evolution has been honing the design of loving, creative, healthy and adaptive beings who would live responsibly and have the wisdom to care not only for their own species but for other species and life forms. To have these beings emerge into full consciousness they had to go through countless evolutionary stages and transitions. This social and psychological evolution of our species is well argued and cogently framed in spiral dynamics theories: it is not that the various stages of our development were negative, it is that to evolve from the safety of closed kinship groups to the ultimate safety of global community we constantly needed to transcend the limitations and include for the journey ahead the very best insight and wisdom of each phase of our development.
What lies ahead is an integral map of reality where inner and outer worlds are brought into alignment and harmony: as we begin to master the translation of the idea of the good, the beautiful and the true from the imaginal and intellectual spheres to the manifest world of everyday reality to address our very concrete challenges. As we begin to leave behind the punitive, distracted and disconnected aspects of contemporary civilization what we see greeting us beyond the walls of this more limited consciousness is our evolutionary emergence into societal forms informed by scientific and interdisciplinary insight and deeper psychological and spiritual consciousness. The tremendously positive insights of the last century now begin to evolve to new levels of systemic integration:
The mind, body health movement will move from all of its accomplishments at the personal level to integral medicine which looks at the whole system context of healthcare, to include social healing and eco-healthy environments and even a healing and restorative approach to the criminal justice system. Our schools will finally be free to educate the whole person—liberating deeper emotional and social intelligence, honoring multiple ways of knowing and exploring the great questions about the nature and purpose of existence. And politics will no longer the haven of overburdened egos but the organizational hub of a new humanity where local community is revitalized as global community is consolidated. As utopian as this may sound, any whole system which attains a greater degree of resonance and coherence and which involves the human quest for meaning and purpose, will involve constant re-visioning and change. Without fresh insight and new inputs any system will be overwhelmed by entropy. Each phase transition of human development will continue to involve creative conflict and will always require the capacity to transcend its own limitations while harvesting the continuity of its best learning.
From a systems perspective we always must ask the question what is the environment that any given system is embedded in? What is the nature of the larger system beyond the obvious one? If it is hidden from view or not understood, how can we see it, know it or understand it? One could say we are always looking not just for the story but the meta story. To find the next dimension of a story, and appreciate the container it is held in, we invariably have to leave many a “forbidden city”, break taboos, leave some in-grown circles of colleagues and open doors to others, fearlessly and with a good heart. We have no other option. And, maybe as Einstein suggested, more than all the knowledge we can gain, what will seed the future will be a luminous imagination. Certainly, as scientists keep helping us to appreciate just how much more expansive and teeming with hitherto unknown galaxies our universe is, it becomes easier and easier to imagine that the story of life is so much vaster than the one we have been telling ourselves.
Published 1-16-09 by Global Systems Initiatives