The Challenges of Becoming a Sustainable Heart-Centered Civilization

If anything is true, it is that deep down in our heart of hearts we yearn to believe in the dream of evolving human civilization to be more caring and more loving. The reality of our world often seems to stand in cruel contrast. What we feel should be possible is not written in many examples throughout history. 

The need for deep change is a tall order, but hopelessness and inertia seems almost endemic. There is a slim path to a sustainable future, and for that to happen a new kind of humanity may need to evolve—one that is more heart-centered than mind-centered. A new kind of planetary consciousness, a new kind of cooperation, a new baseline of experiential connection needs to spread.

Let the Heart Lead the Way

I long for humanity as a whole to step into a new phenomenon of heartful connectedness that revolutionizes how we experience, appreciate, innovate and find working solutions. So many of the difficult problems and challenges I have faced in my life were not solved by working it through the mind, no matter how hard I tried.

My ability to discover how to fix a show-stopping bug in a software program remained obfuscated until my heart had a chance to intervene. This often occurs during the night in our dream world, in the shower, or in my case, while pulling weeds and watering the garden. The only way some things can be solved is for the mind to relinquish its iron grip. And when it does, answers and elegant solutions are free to emerge intuitively and unexpectedly.

The needed changes in humanity sometimes seem impossible if not improbable. Will it take hitting the rock bottom severity of human and environmental adversity to awaken and discover new ways to change? And what is this change in its deeper essence? What is the new soulful shift that guides us to a beautiful future? How does it effectively express itself into legal, sociological, ethnic, political, and economic mental dimensions of systemic change? How does a heart-centered civilization come alive in a practical way? 

From Disconnection to Unity

In my experience everything starts within the individual and the ability to dream that the impossible is possible. Everything starts with honestly and openly feeling what is going on. It is time for humanity to evolve, more than ever, to usher forth a great balancing between mind and heart, to discover how our way forward critically depends on us becoming more heart-centered in all that we do.

Only through deepening and elevating our ability to feel, have empathy, and experience the non-dual substrate to life, can we grow our capacity for direct knowing outside our more limiting mind-centered sense of self. We have the innate capacity to experience a true connectedness, a singular unity, with all that exists. I have experienced this with loved ones, with animals, and in the presence of nature. I have experienced this not through my thinking mind but through empathically feeling others as being part of my larger sense of self.

If we can invest enough loving attention, mutual caring, responsive action, wise discernment, thoughtful determination, and creative vision, there really is a path forward to becoming a sustainable heart-centered civilization.Yes there will always be setbacks, but we can find our way.

Scaling Up Heart-Centered Awareness

We can see things for what they really are through the lens of our open hearts. And in that wider and deeper truth, discover a largely missing natural ethical grounding necessary to emerge for humanity to change its course. We can change course from habitual systemic corruption to coordinated, practical civil action that pierces the false and dismissive narratives in the global conversation.

We can scale up a revolution of becoming a heart-centered world that works for everyone. But how do we scale up in the face of so much vested interest in might-equals-right and predatory practices? Evolving a caring, loving planetary consciousness is no small thing, but it starts with small things—in each person, each soul, and each heart. 

Our greatest truth conferring system that can provide us balanced awareness and perspective for all challenges—is our hearts. It is our ability to feel not only what we ourselves feel, but what others feel, and to directly feel what is going in the entire energy field of our immediate and extended environment. Science only barely recognizes this to be possible, if at all. Science still largely denies the existence of the soul, the capacity for feeling subtle energy fields, and the idea there is a non-dual baseline that unifies all things.

But we are running out of time, and cannot wait for scientific materialism to catch up. There are simply too many tipping points near the threshold of crashing. Scientifically agreed or not, only when we grow our ability to sense and feel from our hearts can we ever really tell fact from fiction and know the true bigger picture by feeling what the big picture is. 

A True Partnership Between Mind and Heart

The heart is not interested in control, it is interested in connection. The heart is not interested in toppling or shunning science or technology, just guiding it towards more beneficial ends. The heart is our best natural navigator, our best intuitive assessor, our best authentic truth teller. The mind beautifully discriminates, understands, analyzes, synthesizes, and comprehends but it does not itself have the capacity to directly experience. It is in simplistic tech terms a comparator, not a sensor. It can understand the idea of the non-dual field, but it cannot directly know it.

The heart can sense the energy of love and division, of vitality and alienation, of pleasure and pain, of caring and abandonment, of reality and fiction – it can know through direct experience.

We are at the precipice of a massive moment in the punctuated evolution of human consciousness. It is only a painful and tenuous emergence because we are facing such frightening present and potential disasters. If successful, this evolutionary leap, and revolution of the capacity of our heart, can rapidly transform our civilization.

We can naturally and sensitively move away from the presumption of unlimited material growth,  alienated relationship with the Earth, and conspicuous consumption. We can make changes to responsibly thrive within Earth’s carrying capacity. If we do this, as the fires under our feet are urging us to do, we can create and scale up powerful momentum to coordinate and implement a sustainable Civilization 2.0—a truly heart-centered civilization.

Heart-Centered Revolutions was created to lead humanity into an age of empathy and unconditional love. You’re invited to participate in the revolution through joining our mailing list for the newsletter  and enrolling in events or courses.

The best way to join this revolution, though, is to practice opening your heart with empathy and truly coming from unconditional love for yourself and everyone around you. For more on how to bring heart-centered principles into your everyday life, we have a collection of books to help guide you. You can also continue your exploration of heart-centered principles by reading the articles on our blog. We offer business consulting and personal and parenting coaching, as well as workshops and courses

If these words and ideas truly resonate with you and make your heart and soul sing, visit us online and join the revolution!

Heart-Centered Revolutions is a 501c3 non-profit organization dedicated to making a world that works for everyone. 

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