The state of the whole planet is shifting

The ‘world shift’ idea expresses a conviction that the world is undergoing a sea change on multiple levels. This is usually seen in terms of the unsustainability of the present system, and the need for a transition to an ecologically balanced and socially just economy.

This framing tends to assume that the negative impacts of the economy can be eliminated while maintaining the basic organising pattern and its underlying mentality. However, if the whole global system remains aimed at accelerating material growth it will reach a systemic ‘bifurcation point’ at which it either jumps to a new higher order of organisation or collapses. Such a spontaneous jump would be possible due to previously unrecognised adaptive features of the system as a whole, while attempts to force change on the system would fail because they lacked awareness of these features.

A jump to a new pattern of organisation would be equivalent to an evolutionary shift, involving not only material changes but also an evolution in human consciousness, catalysed in part by the experience of global-scale unsustainability and by the deficit of meaning in modernity. This shift would appear as a change in worldview which leads to new principles and practices, and a new more advanced pattern of organisation for the global system.

The largest context for world shift is the total system of systems, which is far wider and deeper than just social or technological conditions. This is echoed in the idea of an approaching epochal shift, a turning of the ages, which has long been anticipated. Typified by C G Jung’s thinking in Aion (published in 1951), subsequent visionaries and writers such as Fritjof Capra, Hazel Henderson, David Spangler, Willis Harman, Ervin Laszlo, Jean Huston and Barbara Marx Hubbard have all pointed in different ways to an impending grand shift in human experience.

At its most cosmic, world shift is seen as a planetary-level transformation coinciding with the next 2,000 year arc of progression in the 26,000 year long cycle or precession of the equinoxes – what Jung called the next ‘Platonic month’. This is thought to mark a shift of consciousness or spiritual level that will usher in a new golden age. All these symbolic references can be interpreted as the experience of living through a rapid evolutionary shift – one that will involve not a step up in physical embodiment but in consciousness.