CHAPTER 1
On the Surface: Symptoms ofDeath and Rebirth
This chapter explores the symptoms at the tip of the iceberg of our currentreality. We move from the toppling of tyrants to an exploration of the deeperfault lines that keep generating the disruptive changes of our time. We also lookat these disruptive events from the viewpoint of change-makers: In the faceof disruption, what determines whether we end up in moments of madness ormindfulness?
The Toppling of Tyrants
In the fall of 1989, two weeks before the Berlin Wall crumbled, we tookan international student group to East Berlin, where we met with civilrights activists in the basement of a church. At one point, the professorwho was with us, peace researcher Johan Galtung, put a prediction onthe table: "The Berlin Wall will come down before the end of the year."Everybody doubted that, including the people who were organizing theresistance against the East German regime. And we were all wrong. TheWall came down and the Cold War came to an end just months afterthat meeting.
Nearly two decades later, in the fall of 2008, the bankruptcy ofLehman Brothers, a global financial services firm, sent shock wavesaround the globe and within hours brought the financial systems of theUnited States and Europe to the brink of collapse. Today the remainingWall Street megabanks and their European counterparts have survivedbecause of massive taxpayer-financed bailouts from their governments.On October 11 of that year, the head of the International Monetary Fund(IMF) warned that the world financial system was teetering on the"brink of systemic meltdown."
In December 2010, Mohamed Bouazizi, a young fruit and vegetableseller in Tunisia, set himself on fire in protest of his treatment bypolice, who wanted to extract bribes from him and, when he refused,took away his merchandise and beat him. In January 2011, a twenty-six-year-oldEgyptian activist, Asmaa Mahfouz, posted a video onlineurging people to protest the "corrupt government" of Egypt's president,Hosni Mubarak, by rallying in Cairo's Tahrir Square. With that videoshe sparked and inspired an uprising among the Egyptian population.A week later, on January 25, thousands joined her in Tahrir Square.Within days, the movement counted millions. At first the Egyptianpolice responded with brutality. But less than four weeks after Mahfouzhad posted her initial video, President Mubarak resigned.
A month later, a 9.0 earthquake struck off the coast of Japan, generatinga massive tsunami that killed more than twenty thousand people.The Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant was protected by a seawalldesigned to withstand a tsunami of 19 feet (5.7 meters). Minutes afterthe earthquake struck, a tsunami of 46 feet (14 meters) arrived, easilycrossing the seawall and knocking out the plant's emergency power generators.As a consequence, the radioactive fuel began overheating andput the plant on a path toward catastrophic meltdown.
As the year went on, the Arab Spring spread across the globe. MuammarGaddafi was toppled in Libya. The Occupy Wall Street movement,which took inspiration in part from the Arab Spring, staged actions inmore than a thousand cities across the globe.
The collapse of the Berlin Wall, the demise of the Mubarak and Gaddafiregimes, the meltdown of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear powerplant, and the near-meltdown of the western financial system all sharesome features:
1. the end of an inflexible, centralized control structure, one that previouslyhad been considered indestructible
2. the beginning of a spontaneous, decentralized grassroots movementof people letting go of their fear and waking up to another level ofawareness and interconnectedness
3. the opening of some small cracks in the old system, followed by itscrumbling and eventual collapse
4. the rebound of the old forces as soon as the memory of the collapsebegan to fade away; the old forces tried to obscure the actual rootcauses of the breakdown in order to extend their privileged access topower and influence (an example is Wall Street's financial oligarchy)
We believe that these kinds of events will keep coming our way.These disruptive changes mark the beginning of a new era that we haveentered as a global community, an era of increasing disruption. Sometimessuch movements will give rise to movements that bring aboutprofound change, and sometimes they will falter and fail. In many cases,as we discuss later in the book, these disruptions are already on theirway. It is too late to prevent all of them. So where is our point of control?It is in how we respond to the impact that these disruptions have on howwe work and live.
A disruptive change affects not only our outer world, but also ourinner self. Such moments bring our world to a sudden stop. They maybe terrifying, but they also constitute a great blank space that can befilled in one of two ways: by freezing and reverting to the patterns ofthe past, or by opening us up to the highest future possibilities. The secondresponse—leaning into, sensing, and actualizing one's emergingfuture—is what this book is about.
Presencing
At the moment when we reach the point of meltdown, we have a choice:We can freeze and revert to our deeply ingrained habits of the past, orwe can stop and lean into the space of the unknown, lean into that whichwants to emerge.
This second possibility—to lean into and connect to our highestfuture potential—we refer to as presencing. As noted in the introduction,the word presencing merges the terms presence and sensing. It meansto sense and operate from the presence of an emerging future field.As we connect with this field of heightened awareness, our attentionmorphs from slowing down, opening up, redirecting, and letting go to lettingcome, crystallizing, and embodying the new. Figure 4 (see the introduction)summarizes this process.
The process of connecting to our Self, our highest future possibility,and moving toward action can be a sequence that we go through in aninstant or over a period of many years. It is an archetype of the humanjourney. It is a process of opening up, of allowing something new toland, to emerge, and to come into reality through us.
A real-life example of this process was sparked by the video thatAsmaa Mahfouz posted on January 18, 2011, which inspired peoplearound the world. In it, she speaks from a place that transcends thethree primary obstacles—doubt, cynicism, and fear—that prevent usfrom connecting to our source of deep presence and authenticity.
Instead of expressing doubt, which government propaganda triedto perpetuate, she speaks with great clarity. Instead of expressing cynicism,she speaks from a state of deep connection and empathy. Andinstead of expressing fear, which would isolate her, she speaks from aplace of vulnerability, commitment, and courage:
Four Egyptians have set themselves on fire to protest humiliationand hunger and poverty and degradation they had to live with for 30years. Four Egyptians have set themselves on fire thinking maybewe can have a revolution like Tunisia; maybe we can have freedom,justice, honor, and human dignity. Today, one of these four has died,and I saw people commenting and saying, "May God forgive him. Hecommitted a sin and killed himself for nothing."
People, have some shame.
I posted that I, a girl, am going down to Tahrir Square, and Iwill stand alone. And I'll hold up a banner. Perhaps people willshow some honor. I even wrote my number so maybe people willcome down with me. No one came except three guys—three guysand three armored cars of riot police. And tens of hired thugs andofficers came to terrorize us. They shoved us roughly away from thepeople. But as soon as we were alone with them, they started to talkto us. They said, "Enough! These guys who burned themselves werepsychopaths." Of course, on all national media, whoever dies in protestis a psychopath. If they were psychopaths, why did they burnthemselves at the parliament building?
I'm making this video to give you one simple message: We wantto go down to Tahrir Square on January 25th. If we still have honorand want to live in dignity on this land, we have to go down on January25th. We'll go down and demand our rights, our fundamentalhuman rights.
The first time Mahfouz went to Tahrir Square, she was, as she says,joined by three young men. The next time, a week after posting thevideo blog, she was joined by over fifty thousand protesters, and a weeklater, on February 1, over one million people protested peacefully. OnFebruary 11, the supposedly "unsinkable" regime was finished andMubarak resigned.
This process of co-creating disruptive change is not a singular, isolatedcase. It is part of a much bigger picture that is starting to becomevisible now. We have seen similar efforts in several other sectors, systems,and cultures. The change-makers embarking on these journeysventure away from well-known paths and put themselves at the edges ofthe unknown. They are connecting to deep sources of knowing, sensingthe future that wants to emerge. But more often than not, change leadersdon't talk about this deep personal zone of change because there isno widely understood or accepted language for doing so.
Mahfouz is a very visible figure at the tip of an iceberg that may represent,in the words of the author and activist Paul Hawken, "the largestmovement in all of social history." It includes grassroots civil societymovements that have brought down the tyrant-led regimes in Egypt andTunisia, the Communist-led regimes in Eastern Europe, and the apartheidregime in South Africa. The movement also includes a new breedof business entrepreneurs who create "hybrid" business enterprises thataim for a triple bottom line, combining profitability with a social missionand environmental objectives.
This new global movement has no name, no leader, no ideology, nosingle program, no single center. Instead people are sharing a new interiorfield, an emerging field of connection and consciousness, a collectiveconcern about the well-being of all living beings, including our planet.
Absencing
Of course, presencing doesn't happen if we are on autopilot. When confrontinga moment of meltdown, instead of leaning into the future, wecan also choose to revert to habitual patterns of the past. Mubarak didthat on February 10, 2011, when he initially refused to step down. ErichHonecker and the East German Politburo did it in the early fall of 1989,trying to hold on to their crumbling system. The Wall Street banks didit on the brink of collapse, when they still couldn't resist further expandingtheir power through, in the words of former IMF Chief EconomistSimon Johnson, "a quiet coup." The Catholic Church does it when, evenin the face of the most heart-wrenching cases of child abuse, it holds onto its old institutional routines. But it's not just them. We all do this whenwe refuse to let go of what worked in the past but no longer does.
Whenever we respond to the inner space of emptiness by downloadingthe old rather than by leaning into the new, we are embarking onand co-enacting a journey of social pathology that looks roughly likethis: downloading, denying, de-sensing, absencing, deluding, destroying,and (eventually) self-destroying.
As shown in figure 5 in the introduction, the absencing journey isthe inversion of the presencing journey. Instead of opening the mind,heart, and will, the absencing cycle holds on tightly to the past. It doesnot dare to lean into the unknown, the emerging future. As a consequence,the space of absencing throws us into a trajectory of denial (notseeing what is going on), de-sensing (lacking empathy with the other),absencing (losing the connection to one's higher Self), delusion (beingguided by illusions), and destruction (destroying others and ourselves).
A good illustration of absencing is what Hitler and the Nazis didto Central Europe and the rest of the world. Today, look at what we aredoing collectively to our own planet. The fundamental pattern is thesame.
Thus, being thrown into the space of absencing means getting stuckin the tyrannies of
1. One Truth (ideology)
2. One "Us" versus "Them" (rigid collectivism)
3. One Will (fanaticism)
The triple tyranny of "One Truth, One Us, One Will" is also referredto as fundamentalism. It's the structure that people rose up against inWorld War II. Whether we talk about the struggle for decolonization andindependence in the global South, the struggles against the apartheidsystem in South Africa, or the struggle against tyrannical regimes inEastern Europe, Latin America, and North Africa, the deeper struggle inall these places has always been the same: People keep rising and fightingagainst the same tyranny that emerges from the fundamentalismof One Truth (a closed mind), One Us (a closed heart), and One Will (aclosed will). That rigid worldview has led to social structures defined bythree key features:
1. unilateral, linear communication
2. low, exclusion-based transparency
3. an intention to serve the well-being of the few
The alternative is not well defined, but could be sketched as follows:
1. multilateral, cyclical communication
2. high, inclusion-based transparency
3. an intention to serve the well-being of all
How to achieve the second model is a central topic of this book. Andwhat is striking today is that most people on the planet would probablyreject the first model, which merely reproduces widespread structuraland cultural violence.
The battle over the fundamentalism we are referring to here will notbe won by defeating Al Qaeda. It's a battle for the future of our planet. Itwill not be won by dropping bombs on other people. The primary battlefieldof this century is with our Selves. It is a battle between the self and theSelf: between our existing, habituated self and our emerging future Self,both individually and collectively. It is a battle between absencing andpresencing that plays out across all sectors and systems of society today.
Moments of Madness and Mindfulness
What determines whether we as individuals, teams, institutions, andsystems operate from the state of absencing or the state of presencing?What is the lever that allows us to shift from one state to the other? Whatcan we do to move from madness to mindfulness?
Let us look at a concrete example. On April 26, 1986, an accidenthappened at reactor number four of the Chernobyl nuclear power plantin Ukraine. As the worst-case scenario started to unfold, the childrenand citizens of the city next door, Pripyat, received no warnings. Citizensof the region, Russian and European, were exposed to a cloud ofnuclear radiation that first traveled north to Scandinavia and then coveredalmost all of Europe and its 500 million inhabitants.
Not only were Europe's citizens not warned about the potentialthreat, even the top Soviet leaders in the Kremlin were in the dark.Mikhail Gorbachev, who at the time was general secretary of the CommunistParty, recounts: "I got a call around 5 a.m. I was told there wassome accident at the Chernobyl nuclear plant. The first information consistedof 'accident' and 'fire.' The information report was that everythingwas sound including the reactor.... At first, I have been told there wasno explosion. The consequences of this information were particularlydramatic.... What had happened? A nuclear explosion, a cloud, seriouscontamination? It was Sweden that alerted us!"
Gorbachev was told that the accident posed no threat to the surroundingenvironment and was under control. No one, according toGorbachev, told him in these early days that a series of explosions hadoccurred in the core of the reactor and had blown the twelve-thousand-toncover of the reactor into the air, releasing a highly radioactive vaporinto the environment. Later, high radiation levels set off alarms at theForsmakr Nuclear Power Plant in Sweden, over a thousand kilometersaway. The Swedish government alerted its population about radioactivedust.
Although radiation was still emanating unchecked from the Chernobylplant, the evacuation of citizens living next to the plant did notbegin until more than twenty-four hours after the accident. Only afterGorbachev formed a commission of nuclear experts and gave themaccess to unlimited resources, people, and technology did a full-blowncrisis response begin.
