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Awakening
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The Sun interviews David Korten September 2007

"Living Wealth"
YES! Fall 2007

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In Loving Memory
Donella H. Meadows (1941-2001)
The Global Citizen

Educator Parker Palmer provides a simple map of the process by which the seemingly soft path of a cultural awakening translates into a hard path of political and institutional transformation. The process begins with the awakening of the individual consciousness to the ways in which perceptions and behaviors are shaped by the unexamined assumptions and values of the prevailing culture. It is rather like awakening from a cultural trace. Once the trance is broken the individual experiences an increasingly painful disconnect between the more examined or authentic values of their awakened consciousness and the realities of family, work, and community life grounded in the values of the old culture.

Eventually the individual decides, in Parker's words, "to live divided no more." He or she finds that the sense of isolation that results from attempting to live by authentic values in an inauthentic culture can be broken only by joining with like-minded persons to form communities of congruence. Initially small and isolated, these communities eventually meld into larger alliances as the individual's sphere of identification with the larger community of life grows. Step by step, authentic cultural spaces are created and expanded. As alliances grow they gradually achieve the power to transform the logic and reward systems of society's political and economic institutions.

Paul Ray and Sherry Anderson present a similar analysis, tracing the dynamic growth in the population of Cultural Creatives in the United States to the civil rights movement. They note that before the civil rights movement both blacks and whites tended to accept the prevailing cultural code defining the relations among the races as the natural order of things. The civil rights movement raised the consciousness of peoples of all races that this code was simply a belief system that served certain interests, but had nothing to do with any natural order. Having learned to recognize the difference between the natural order and an unexamined belief system in reference to race relations, it became easier to see how similar cultural codes artificially defined the relations between men and women, people and the environment, straights and gays, people and corporations, and people and the economy.

As each successive cultural trance is broken, the individual is able to live more freely and consciously in coherent relationship with the life of community and planet. In turn the alliances that form around the new cultural awareness grow more holistic in their defining story and their vision of the society that might be. Gradually they take on more significant challenges. Previously modest experiments with new ways of addressing social and environmental needs move to scale. Step by step the way is prepared to create the public culture and institutions of a truly civil society.