We sense that this is important work that we are doing. One that is challenging us to think anew. Perhaps work that might have implications beyond us.
As we do so, we are drawn to three quotes from Einstein: * “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used to create them.” * “Imagination is everything." * “The only source of knowledge is the experience.”
We are facing the challenge of understanding systems we can no longer fully comprehend, to hold in our mind. The thinking, and the language of our thinking, does not allow us to make the patterns that create meaning.
So we stumble into the darkness, looking for new thinking, new language, and new patterns that will illuminate new meaning.
We do this as Homo sapiens, the wise ones. The ones gifted with an imagination that allows us to abstract new meaning that binds ourselves together into a shared, collective consciousness. Our source of strength. And survival.
The challenge we face is not a new one.
We look back and begin to notice patterns, epochs of consciousness, when we have evolved into new thinking. New understanding. New wisdom. With a regularity that is remarkable, approximately every 500 years of our historical journey.
The time of the ancients is vague, but around 1000 BCE we see the emergence of the metaphysical models of truth, spirit, good and evil with Zoroaster and its Abrahamic interpretation.
Then around 500 BCE we see the three great minds of Socrates, Buddha and Confucius separately reimagine new models of being. Then, about 500 years later, we have the reimagined consciousness of Jesus, at the center point of what became known as the common era.
About 500 years into this common era, we see another profound reimagining, with Bodhidharma planting the seeds of Zen in China at that time when the Western Roman Empire collapsed into the Dark Ages.
An age that lasted about 500 years, before we were led into the High Middle ages by the rediscovery of the potential for civil society in the _Corpus Juris Civilis_ and the revealed passion of the heart and spirit, found in _Le Roman de la Rose,_ a tale that rooted Romanticism.
Which led us to the Age of Reason, the onset of our modern era, that time around 1500, when we began to embrace a new intellectual mind of scientific rationalism, one which fueled the growth of civilization but is also leading to the destruction of our biosphere. What we have called, the Cartesian Mindset.
And now, here we are, remarkably, about 500 years later. A time when we are struggling to understand complex systems with thinking of an age that may no longer be sufficient for us to understand.
A struggle that brings us back to Einstein's words: _We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used to create them._
We are challenged now to use our imagination, for _imagination is everything._
To discover new thinking, new language and new patterns of meaning. One that is shaped by our new experiences for _the only source of knowledge is the experience._ A Paradigm Shift.
We continue to seek these new experiences, ones that might emerge into a new epochal wisdom. For ourselves and others. A wisdom, we sense, that has something to do with a better understanding of the nature of autopoietic systems.
Like a tree, the more deeply we root our work, the higher we can reach. A journey that leads us Into the Forest.
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