Conundrum

I have a daily paradox. There are nearly 8 billion people, how does any one of us matter? v’s Massive positive change is always from the actions of individuals.

As I’m thinking about this conundrum I feel that our world is immense. What one person can do to make a difference is surely inadequate. What can I do, one person do, measured against our world’s population and global issues such as injustice and climate crises?

On the other hand, I’m viscerally aware that the world is changing all the time. It is always individuals, our individual action that creates change. Be that small shifts or completely transformative worldwide action.

Being confronted with this sort of paradox makes me think about bigger problems. If a problem cannot be solved, enlarge it, as Eisenhower put it.

Paradoxes like this, when we are looking, we encounter them on a daily basis. That suggests how we think the world works is too simplistic. The old ways—e.g. if there’s a problem come up with a plan and get a solution—are not serving us very well for today’s complexity.

A quantum leap

That’s where quantum social change comes in—it’s time for a ‘quantum’ leap. We need significant shifts to thrive through our climate crisis.

The question that looms over us is can we consciously change and is it possible to create a world where everyone can thrive and, if so, what’s our role in making this happen?
Karen O’Brien

Karen is speaking in the latest You Matter More Than You Think webinar. It’s a series based on her draft book by the same title. In “this decade because we are living in a time when the existential threats associated with climate change are … challenging us to transform ourselves our systems and our society” she says.

Connected

We can see the evidence of climate change all around us. We know we have all been part of creating it. Yet “many understandings of social change are still based on this paradigm that sees us as inherently separate from each other and from the environment” as Karen puts it. There’s a very different way of understanding this, it draws on the radically different way quantum physics tells us the world and ourselves in it are. While there “is no consensus on what reality is at that quantum level it’s also very clear that we are one entangled quantum system.”

For example, “looking at politics in the world today you see how beliefs matter… not always in a positive way. …

“If we are deliberately trying to transform society at the rate scale speed and depth that is called for we probably need to actually think about okay what role is consciousness, social consciousness, the expansion of social consciousness.”

You matter more than you think

Listen to the whole of Karen’s talk here> and the connections from this. It provides a reality base for the idea that we, as individuals are more than just ourselves. We are part of a resonant, larger whole and also a quantum consciousness—a coherent connection between us.

In the same webinar Christina Bethel, Professor at the Bloomsburg School of Public Health at John Hopkins University and founding Director of the Child and Adolescent Health, Indra Adnan, British community organizer, political theorist, social psychotherapist and co-initiator of The Alternative UK plus Jaime Bristow Director of The Mindfulness Initiative add depth to the importance of this.