Abstract
We ended the previous chapter recognizing the creative challenge before us: in the words of Lewis Mumford, to develop a self that can take as a province the entire world, and work collectively to bring about organic unity in all our diversity, using the fullest resources of modern civilization. This chapter focuses on individual and collective consciousness as a complex dynamic system that can only be understood in its dynamic transformations as it interacts with concrete socio-historical contexts. We examine emergent new collective consciousness as a new level of integration of the human faculties of knowledge, love, and will; and we describe underlying cross-cultural motivational processes and developmental pathways.
We humans walk on a high wire. At one end the wire is secured to the misty foundations of our evolutionary past, the nature of which we are just beginning to understand. The other is tied to an equally obscure foundation of sentience and choice…. We are balanced… halfway between evolutionary constraint and rough freedom… [A]s we walk the wire, we are shaping ourselves in ways yet unanticipated.
Robert Weber (2000)
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- 1.
See HYPERLINK “http://www.theshiftnetwork.com”.
- 2.
See Huxley’s discussion of the relationship between knowledge, love, and will in his Perennial Philosophy (1946/1974).
- 3.
In the first half of the nineteenth century, the Founder of the Bahá’í spiritual paradigm explicitly articulated the historical dialectic in the evolution of collective consciousness. See Bahá’u’lláh’s Kitab-I-Iqan, (Book of Certitude) written in 1861, and first published in English in 1904. This recognition is important to our discussion throughout this volume of the need to begin to integrate the quest for truth and meaning of both science and religion. It is also important to recognize that earlier wisdom traditions contained an implicit understanding of the dialectic between individual and collective development.
- 4.
For a more detailed discussion of the concept of non-violence, see Chap. 7.
- 5.
For an extensive and comprehensive discussion of the many forms that service can take, see McIntosh’s discussion of the practice of beauty, truth, and goodness on pp. 137–141 (2007).
- 6.
In the spirit of honoring equally social science sources and spiritual sources, it is important to note that the Bahá’í spiritual paradigm offered a prescient articulation of the notion of integral spirituality at the core of world wisdom traditions in the early part of the nineteenth century. Long before global thinking emerged in the social sciences, it underscored the oneness of humanity’s pursuit of its higher nature in the quest for truth, beauty, and goodness, framed through the different historical religious revelations; as well as the shared challenge to overcome the polarizing divisions of race, ethnicity, religion, wealth, and social status in the direction of developing human capabilities that will progressively enable the establishing of unity while nurturing and respecting diversity. Further research is needed to illuminate more fully the roots of these ideas.
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Mustakova-Possardt, E., Oxenberg, J. (2014). Toward Cultivating Socially Responsible Global Consciousness. In: Mustakova-Possardt, E., Lyubansky, M., Basseches, M., Oxenberg, J. (eds) Toward a Socially Responsible Psychology for a Global Era. International and Cultural Psychology. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-7391-6_6
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