The First Turning of human consciousness occurred around two hundred thousand years ago with the mastery of fire and language and the emergence of homo sapiens. The Second Turning of human consciousness began ten thousand years ago with the discovery of seed germination and fully appeared five thousand years ago with the advent of cities, armies, private property and writing. The Third Turning is the movement from the head to the heart and into unity consciousness, from a shared belief in separateness and duality to a realization of the interconnectedness of all things.
The shift in consciousness of the Third Turning is not new. Individuals have achieved it for centuries. The Lakota prophet, White Buffalo Calf Woman, announced the Third Turning with her refrain, mitakuye oyasin, “All my relations!”—We are all related: All humans, all animals, all plants and rocks. Jesus said the same thing: “Love thy neighbor as thyself.” Einstein spoke of the ending of the “optical delusion” that all things, all beings, are disconnected and alone. What will be new about the Third Turning is groups of individuals achieving this shift in consciousness in ever increasing numbers.
As with any leap in consciousness, this new awareness can be terrifying. Look at the widespread fear about climate change. After decades of denial, vast numbers of us are waking up to the fact that each of our actions has a cumulative impact on all life. What one does happens to all. For the first time in history, the world really is One. This profound awareness, spoken of quietly by the wise for millennia, comes to us now in the form of panic and pain. That’s the way things work on this planet. First God whispers. Then She hits us across the head with a two-by-four.
Buddha, known to friends and family as Siddhartha Gautama, is the first person known to achieve the Third Turning in human consciousness, often referred to as “enlightenment.” Although we are conditioned to regard this accomplishment as superhuman and unlikely to happen to us, what if this step is next step of homo sapiens as well? What if enlightenment represents homo sapiens’ (‘wise person’ or ‘one who knows’) true potential?
The first words of Buddha’s first sermon were “I teach one thing: suffering and the end of suffering.” What is this one thing? Impermanence. If you fight it, you suffer. If you dance with it, suffering ends. Simple as this may sound, he lectured constantly for thirteen years and nobody got it. It wasn’t until he stopped talking and held up a flower instead that one of his monks, Mahkasyapa, finally woke up.
What makes a flower so beautiful? Not just its physical appearance. If this were true, no one would be disappointed by plastic flowers. Its fleetingness, its fragility in the face of time, its impermanence, is what catches and holds our attention. Now imagine that unspeakably beautiful life form in the hands of the first enlightened being you have ever met….
This is the message of climate change. The unspeakably fragile and beautiful flower is the entire planet and the being holding this fragility in her hands is each one of us. And we are each Mahakasyapa, witnessing this disturbing revelation. It is said that when the Buddha did not give his usual lecture, but sat there for an hour holding a flower, many of his followers had heart attacks. This is what the world is doing right now. She isn’t saying anything. No clear instructions are coming from on high. We are left to witness how fleeting and fragile She is, we all are.
“Rescuers never run” was the first thing I learned in wilderness first responder training. Panic never leads to good outcomes. We are all wilderness first responders now. There is no 911 we can call, no hospital to go to. There are no professionals trained and licensed to mitigate this emergency. Keep in mind that the Buddha was responding to what he felt in his bones was an emergency—the universal human suffering resulting from sickness, old age and death— and what is climate change, really? So perhaps there is an expert available. What did Buddha do in the face of what he knew to be a crisis of precisely the same magnitude as the one we are facing now?
He sat. Quietly. Under a tree. For as long as it took.
We must quiet our minds and sit alone in nature until clarity appears. This is how all the world’s religions originated—courageous individuals on mountains, in the forest, the desert, a cave—waiting silently and alone for revelation. There is no other way. The mind will not help us now. Look at the chaos and panic and squabbling and ineffectual outrage of human thinking at this time. We all want to blame someone. We want someone to fix it.
This is not any one person’s or corporation’s or nation’s fault. Each one of us contributes to this crisis every time we get in a car, every time we spend money. Name one thing you purchase that does not require fossil fuel. This problem is us. It is the fruit of our consciousness— our awareness, our priorities, our actions. Until we change our consciousness, we will keep reproducing the same results. The Third Turning is this change in consciousness.
