Why does it take a disaster to bring us together? Recent tragedies like 911, Hurricane Katrina, and the Tsunami remind us of who we are deep inside – a spiritually connected part of a large extended family, a web of living beings, sharing a tiny biosphere, on a small planet. As Albert Einstein reminded us, “our separation from each other is an optical illusion of consciousness.” Disasters jolt us out of the sleepwalking that can happen as we focus on the daily business of life and survival with our self focused agendas, even our higher spiritual ones. Disasters also can open our hearts, as spiritual energy comes through us and is released in the form of compassion to others. Collectively, a chain reaction of goodness can come as a flood, but then, after the crisis, a “spiritual dam” may form once again within us and we go back to the sleep of our busy lives.

Happiness is declining in the most powerful country in the world. As Robert E. Lane, Yale professor emeritus, puts it in his book, The Loss of Happiness in Market Democracies: “Amidst the satisfaction people feel with their material progress, there is a spirit of unhappiness and depression haunting advanced market democracies throughout the world, a spirit that mocks the idea that markets maximize well-being and the eighteenth-century promise of a right to the pursuit of happiness under benign governments of people’s own choosing.

The haunting spirit is manifold: a postwar decline in the United States in people who report themselves as happy, a rising tide in all advanced societies of clinical depression and dysphoria…increasing distrust of each other and of political and other institutions, declining belief that the lot of the average man is getting better…a tragic erosion of family solidarity and community integration together with an apparent decline in warm, intimate relations among friends.”

Eight o’ clock in the morning on September 26, 1993. I stood in my prickly blue jumpsuit with the other seven inmates of the Bubble, as some of us liked to call it. We waited for the radio announcement that it was time to walk through the double-doored airlock, that the mission was finally over. I would like to say that I was pondering heady thoughts about the future of mankind, but all I could think of was how much I wished that dear Jane Goodall would shut up.

The world needs new ideas. We have reached a global milestone where each country is facing the same challenges. We almost have a “butterfly” effect through our interconnectedness, because now local changes have global effects. When we look into the collective, it seems almost as if we are stuck in the past.

It is Time for New Visions
Global MindShift’s mission is to help bring about a new era of cooperation and creativity on the planet.

It is a new way of thinking that can help us find solutions to world problems. It features an expanded perspective about the world we live in and how we can learn to cooperate more successfully. It offers 24/7 worldwide connectivity with others, 13.7 billion years of memory, and the power to improve the future.