A living system continually re-creates itself. But how this occurs in social systems such as global institutions depends on our level of awareness, both individually and collectively... As long as our thinking is governed by industrial, "machine age" metaphors such as control, predicatbility, and "faster is better", we will continue to re-create institutions as we have, despite their increasing disharmony with the larger world.

When you see what you're here for, the world begins to mirror your purpose in a magical way. It's almost as if you suddenly find yourself on a stage in a play that was written expressly for you.

When your practice has led you to experiences that you can't understand, you need a better theory. Otherwise, if you try to understand these transcendent experiences with 'profane' or, we might say, 'materialistic' ways of thinking, your cultivation will be set back.

The basic problem with the new species of global institutions is that they have not yet become aware of themselves as living. Once they do, they can become a place for the presencing of the whole as it might be, not just as it has been.

What we're calling 'presencing' is possible because of this womb, where the absolute and the manifest interact. I think a buddhist would say that presencing can arise to the extent that we develop the capacity, individually and collectively, to extend our conscious awareness in both domains.

Serving the emerging whole means paying attention to what's right here within my awareness, what's completely local, and surrendering to what's being asked of me now.

If science is an unfinished project, the next stage will be about reconnecting and integrating the rigor of scientific method with the richness of direct experience to produce a science that will serve to connect us to one another, ourselves and the world.