Chapter 1 Are We Sinking or Are We Going to Rise?

One moment in the late twentieth century that captured a shift in our collective consciousness was when the astronauts of Apollo 8 were the first to leave the gravitational field of our planet and see it from outer space. The iconic Earth-rise photograph was taken by astronaut William Anders on December 24, 1968. It depicts the rise of our beautiful home planet over the lifeless moonscape, and it altered human consciousness. It changed the trajectory of our gaze: instead of looking for something out there (the surface of the moon), it bent the beam of attention back onto ourselves. Anyone who experiences a similar attentional turn—seeing themselves through the eyes of those who surround them—comes away with a different (and often somewhat altered) state of awareness. Our twenty-first-century world provides us with plenty of possibilities to leave our own “center of gravity” (the ego view) and to look at a situation through the eyes of different stakeholders (the eco view). For example, the climate crisis requires us to look at every action we take, not only from an individual but also from a global perspective, and from the viewpoint of future generations.

This planetary awareness has many historic lineages and origins. These include the liberation movements in the Global South inspired by Mahatma Gandhi and grounded in nonviolence (ahimsa) and truth (satyagraha); the Civil Rights Movement in the United States, which changed the country and inspired the world; the anti-Apartheid movement in South Africa and civil rights movements in other regions; the women’s movements; manifold movements for environmental, social, and racial justice; the various peace movements; the movements for Indigenous people’s rights; and the various movements devoted to inner development and mindfulness.

These movements for transformative change remain inspiring, but they have also generated a backlash against civil society and a resurgence of populist movements or sentiments across many places and regions.

The backlash tends to show up in places of neglect, where people don’t feel seen, respected, valued for who they are, or helped when something is taken from them, whether it has to do with their work, their possessions, or their sense of security—essentially wherever people are not treated with dignity.

The 2023-2024 UN Human Development Report highlights a growing agency gap. Half of the people surveyed worldwide report that they have limited or no control over their lives, and more than two-thirds perceive that they have no agency in the collective decision-making of their countries; they feel that their voice does not count.2

These worrying developments are co-shaped and amplified by a social media machine whose algorithms prioritize hate speech and misinformation over facts and real dialogue. Therefore, three foundations of our societies are being weakened and undermined: democracy (through mass polarization), factual information or truth (through mass misinformation), and human well-being (through mass depression: the pandemic of mental health).

Given this context, the forces of disruption—including climate destabilization, inequality, and artificial intelligence (AI)—and the felt loss of agency, we have found that the concept of islands of coherence can help us to refocus on where the real opportunity is—in our very own agency—that is, in our capacity to act.

“When a system is far from equilibrium, small islands of coherence in a sea of chaos have the capacity to elevate the entire system to a higher order.” Those words, attributed to chemist and Nobel laureate Ilya Prigogine (1917–2003), articulate the idea of bifurcation points. Bifurcation points are critical points in nonlinear systems where small changes in one place (or one variable) can affect how the whole system behaves. Many people sense that we are living in such a moment, that we are at a crossroads, where the future of the planet hangs in the balance.

What is the smallest unit of an island of coherence? It’s you, it’s me, it’s each of us: it’s in our quality of attention, it’s in our quality of relationships.

Islands of coherence redirect our attention back to our own agency, to what we can do. They help us to realign our attention, intention, and agency within the small microcosms of the systems we operate in.

In our current moment, many of us find ourselves pulled forward and backward at the same time: dragged backward toward old structures and ways of operating (“again”) and pulled forward into emerging new opportunities and ways of operating that, in our better moments, we can connect with by leaning in with our minds and hearts wide open. Those places of possibility depend on us to bring them into being. As the tension between being pushed backward and pulled forward begins to intensify, we notice several interesting shifts.

Outside of us, we see increasing levels of breakdown and the increasing collapse of old structures, institutions, and behaviors that have long outlived their usefulness. We see people putting up walls—the rise of divisions, polarization, and echo chambers that throw us into separation and loneliness. But we also see walls coming down—the emergence of deepened connections, of people joining forces to create new ways to live and work together.

Moreover, we can notice a new awareness of ourselves and our own levels of agency. How we pay attention matters. The intentions we hold make a profound difference. The aligning of attention, intention, and agency is perhaps the most powerful force for transformation present on this planet now. The quality of our presence makes all the difference to us, to others, and to our planet.

Finally, there is only one pathway for truly connecting with our highest future potential: the journey of the heart. The journey of the heart is the gateway to presencing. The heart becomes an organ of perception that enables the innate human ability to sense and actualize our highest future potential—a future that is looking at us because it cannot manifest without us. Presencing can be thought of as a blend of words: presence (embodying and acting from the presence of the future now) and sensing (feeling a future potential). It is the practice of meeting the emerging future in the present moment.

Two profound developments set the stage for the decades ahead. The first is a massive intensification of disruption, distraction, and disorientation that has led to the polycrisis facing civilization and our planet. These disruptions feed the well-known divides of our time:

the ecological divide: a disconnect between Self and Nature that manifests in climate destabilization and massive biodiversity loss

the social divide: a disconnect between Self and Other that manifests in inequality, hyperpolarization, violence, and war

the spiritual divide: a disconnect between self and Self, between who I am now and who I could be. This divide manifests as a pandemic of mental health issues including anxiety, hopelessness, loneliness, and depression.

The distraction and disorientation are amplified by a social media–based industry that thrives on diverting and hijacking our attention. In the context of our twenty-first-century attention economy, our ability to pay attention, to focus, is the ultimate scarce resource. The business model of social media runs on amplifying the noise (the more extreme your viewpoint, the more amplification you get through algorithms—i.e., the louder your megaphone is), to distract our attention (toward paid content), and to manipulate our behavior (which is the basis for a trillion-dollar industry that keeps pumping noise into our systems).

We collectively create results that no one wants. Almost no one gets up in the morning, looks in the mirror, and says, “All right, I’m looking forward to spending another day inflicting harm and violence on nature, on others, and on myself.” Yet collectively, that’s exactly what we keep doing. Generally, we know what the problems are. We also often know what the solutions are. But we are not implementing these solutions collectively in ways that will transcend our collective knowing-doing gap.

Recognizing that gap adds to a felt sense for many that perhaps it’s already too late to have any meaningful influence on how the future evolves. According to the 2023–2024 UN Human Development Report, 50 percent of us believe that we have lost agency in our personal lives, and 68 percent of us believe we have no voice in collective decision-making.3

Even though the felt sense of hopelessness and the collective condition of depression are widespread, our moment of agency has not passed by any stretch of the imagination.

Recently, Otto worked with a group of UN leaders from various agencies. While preparing to launch a workshop series on a future UN (UN 2.0) that better meets the moment we are living in, the group was feeling weighed down by the recent turn of events in the Middle East and other crises around the globe. At that moment our Zambian Presencing Institute colleague Martin Kalungu-Banda shared his own motivation for joining our effort and asked: “What if everything we are experiencing now is exactly the moment the UN was created for?”

Stillness. As this question landed on each of us, I felt a new energy begin to emerge in the room. “What if,” someone else asked shortly after, “everything that we are experiencing right now is exactly the moment that we—as a community of leaders and changemakers—were born for?” Suddenly the blanket of collective depression that had been weighing on us was lifted. The challenges had not gone away, but we now saw our current reality from a different vantage point: a place of possibility connected with our own path of agency—regardless how small that agency may be. That shift changes everything. It focuses our attention on what is ours to do.

In many ways that story is prototypical of our current moment. If you take in all the data and trends, you tend to get depressed. But how can we stay informed and avoid depression and a sense of futility? That’s why Martin’s question is so helpful. What if everything that we are experiencing right now is exactly the moment that we were born for? What if everything that I am experiencing right now is exactly the moment that I was born for? What if now is exactly the moment for us to wake up—to bend the beam of attention back onto ourselves and to see our current situation from a viewpoint of possibility and emerging potential? This perspective relocates the source of our attention in an awareness of a deepened relationship with our planet, with each other, and with ourselves.

Here is another data point worth considering. According to a 2021 poll, three out of four people in the G20 countries support the transformation of our economic systems to better address climate change and social inequality (G20 countries represent 60 percent of the world’s population and 80 percent of global GDP).4 Three-quarters of those surveyed support transformative change, and, as noted above, two out of three people are willing to sacrifice some part of their income to address the climate challenge. Yet, most of us also underestimate how many others share these views.

Over the years, we have learned that experiencing oneself as part of a community of inspired changemakers can profoundly deepen and activate one’s personal intention and agency.

Every year since 2015 we have organized a yearlong free program called u-lab: Leading from the Emerging Future. The u-lab is an online–offline course that gives changemakers free access to tools and methods for bringing about transformative change.6 Since 2015, over 260,000 u-lab participants from 194 countries have created thousands of local in-person “hubs” to help each other devise solutions to their local challenges. Many of these hubs generate ideas and initiatives year after year. It’s like a different kind of Pando in the making: a planetary field of connections that keep co-generating countless shoots across the entire eco-system.

In an environment saturated with online offerings, why does a course like u-lab continue to activate the powerful experiences of deep, lasting relationships and an ongoing stream of initiatives? Much of it has to do with the Pando-like structure of the roots and the soil that the u-lab generates. The u-lab “live sessions” are broadcast from a small classroom at MIT to the entire community as a way of “holding” a shared space for all the participants. In these sessions we invite participants into moments of intentional stillness, of sensing what emerges from the felt presence of the global community.

We have learned from many participants that being a part of a planetary social field has a significant empowering impact on their local initiatives. They tell us that these are the moments when they feel a part of a global field of connection, being part of a bigger story that deeply resonates with their own deepest intention, a story of pioneering pathways for co-shaping the future through shifting the social fields in their own local contexts wherever they are.

These repeated patterns—with roughly one-third of u-lab participants reporting about life-changing experiences—makes us ask the following questions: How might we further democratize access to such spaces, methods, and tools? What would it take for everyone who has an interest to explore and experience the Pando-style root connections that we all share across sectors, systems, and cultural boundaries? What would it take to bring this hybrid of capacity building, eco-system activation, and planetary movement building to the next level?

We know that to change systems we need to create spaces that allow everyone involved to sense and see themselves as part of the larger whole. In other words, to transform a system we must transform the consciousness (the mindsets) of those who co-enact that system moment to moment. And to do that we need to create new forms and qualities of holding spaces that allow the system to see and sense itself.

Recent large historic transformations, such as decolonization, the collapse of the Berlin Wall, or the end of Apartheid in South Africa, are not the result of sudden changes or decisions. They require intentional support structures and hard work over many years, decades, and often generations.

But all historic shifts begin with individuals who take the first steps—steps that at first seem very small. These shifts begin when small groups, small islands of coherence with the right support structure, grow over time to become eco-systems of coherence. Building islands of coherence begins when we bend the beam of attention back onto its source, when we become aware of our relationships with others, with our planet, and with our Selves.

If a shift toward forming islands of coherence and from there to an awareness of the larger system is part of the journey of change, where do we start? We believe that the most practical and powerful starting point is realigning attention and intention—in other words, bringing intention into our social interactions and relationships. The journey through this book and the tools at the end of each chapter are designed to help you in that process.

Traditional mindfulness and awareness practices use breathing, sensations in the body, or perhaps a mantra (a word, sound, or phrase) to focus our attention. Every practitioner develops the practice that works best for them. You may already have yours.

In this book we suggest practices that ofer related but different ways to contemplate the current moment. By holding our gaze steady on this object of contemplation and inquiry we engage in a structured process of bending our beam of attention back onto its source—ourselves—and onto what emerges through it.