Ervin Laszlo at the Parliament of the World's Religions

one of the things in your uh presentation today that struck me was you spoke about about us being in what you call an age of discontinuity of transformation and you spoke about how PC reasonable approaches are in a sense impotent in the face of the challenges we're confronting and uh about the need for more radical approaches so first if I could just ask you briefly to speak a little bit about what you mean by us being in an age of dis continuity well discontinuity is well-known Concept in science in the complex systems it expressed in a nonlinearity of its development in words a trend that up till now moved fairly smoothly forward can suddenly break down when it breaks down it's because it reaches the limits of its stability of the system's limits of stability and at that point is what in science is called the bifurcation in the popular parland now this is called The Tipping Point right you know then something happens all kinds of things are possible except the status quo I mean you can do all kinds of other things but you can't maintain the system the way it was system either breaks down or breaks through with another state it's a discontinuous development that doesn't mean development doesn't keep going it keeps going unless the system becomes extinct which is also possible but it become it goes in another way it finds it has has to find different way of operating okay so Society is in a period of a macro shift a shift of simultaneously economic social political and ecological all its elements together are undergoing a shift which means we need new thinking and here I think is the relevance of Einstein's quote you know the quote from Einstein he says you can't solve a problem is the same kind of thinking in which the problem arose right so you need new thinking new Consciousness to like a new spirit or new spirituality so can you speak some about the kind of radical approach you feel is required to confront the challenges that we're facing now well it's radical in this sense that it uh it recognizes a peac mill approach and an old rationality doesn't work you can patch up the system but if you patch it up you just prolong the current situation where the crisis will deepen and all the indicators all the linear indicators are negative which you look at the combination of poverty of ecological degradation of uh the distribution of wealth in the world and Power in the world concentration of of one one of the elements and the growth of the other element uh together with the increasing pollution of air water and land uh all of this is untable any linear projection that goes more than 10 years and attempts to project the current trends into the future and the understanding that the same thing will happen in the future as happened in the past it just continues the same way anything like this reaches a point where human life becomes untenable for an increasing proportion of the human population now when you think one3 of population already doesn't have access to clean water half of the population or almost half about three billion people live on the equivalent of $5 a day or less and if you and and almost a third of the population lives in big cities and it's going to move to 2/3 probably in 25 years or so put all of these things together you say there's just no way that increasingly number hundreds if not tons of millions of people can survive what happens then what happens to his HIV AIDS what happens to all the other major epidemics what happens to migrations you know what happens to the entire system that's so delicately balanced right now that you can shake up in a in a country like Afghanistan that most people didn't know it existed I so they didn't know where it was and there something is happening then and the whole world is shaken up you know what happens the people didn't know very much I suppose where where Iraq was and what the difference between Iraq and Iran before September 11 you and Sadam and so on um you can't have a world running smoothly and surviving when an increasing portion of it is is faced with B Survival problems so that's why we need to think in terms that adequate to this change situation so we're here at the parliament of world religions where we've got all the traditions of the ages gathered together in their current forms uh theoretically to look at you know the world we're in and how we're going to move forward how do you feel that the religious Traditions are responding to the crisis you just laid out are they are they going to be a source of the kind of thinking that you just expressed do they need to change to meet the demand and if so how well it's really a two-part question will they or do they need to yeah I don't know whether they will because even if religious leaders who are represented here have the will to dialogue and have the will perhaps to come into a common denominator find a common spirituality that doesn't mean that the large masses of followers of given religions will go in that direction they could see but it calls for a major change in Consciousness and religions is one part of that certainly the roots of religion have a common spirituality every religion is founded in the idea of being part of a community now this community got in the in the in the period of of centuries and the in the space and time of development got delimited to us and them and that's a tragic mistake because you can say yes we all can we all searching for a common road to understanding to for enlightenment but we may be searching in different ways our paths could converge but in the meanwhile to say that only my past is valid and you are making rful mistakes and you are Heathen or pagans or or whatever you know it's divisive and this is part of the divisions that we have in the world so certainly the need is there to change whether the change will occur in time that only time will tell but certainly we must uh try we must try and the and the effort here the attempt to bring together representatives of different religions to a dialogue is a well worthwhile attempt do you feel that uh the Traditions they're equipped in in their current forms to meet in a sense the the radical evolutionary demands of our time or do we need a a new religion of some sort a new spirituality for the future religion have a problem in the sense that there is a spirit of the religions and then there is the word or the doctrine of the religions now the spirit has originally inspired the doctrines but often in the in the hundreds and thousands of years that have elapsed the spirit has vanished or has been put in the background and the doctrine lives you know and they can become dry and so we need in a way to go back to the roots go back to the origins the spirit that inspired the different religions is a spirit of belonging expressed so love expressed to being part of a cosmos different from the Eastern religions different in the mon monotheistic Western religions but it's basically it's always there a sense of belonging to a large po you know and that I think is is an important Insight um which is contrary to modern science only in a sense that modern science is Antiquated to the latest development in contemporary science it's no longer contrary I tried in my latest writings to show that there is very many there are many commonalities between the ancient insights and the latest development in The Sciences in the sense that all emerge together all are coherent with one all things are coherent with one another all have a join Destiny basically of course many things can disappear that doesn't mean every species survives 99% of the multicellular complex species since the Cambrian Revolution 600 million years ago are extinct doesn't mean that Humanity will will not become extinct but we have a conscious mind therefore we can perhaps direct our own destiny make use of our conscious mind um but coherence is there you know the Oneness of the universe is there and the latest developments which to my mind are particular very important and it has been me my main work in in and research work on the past 15 years or so as to look into the fact that coherence is actually through a kind of an internet if you like it's communicated it's communicated in nature in other words what is happening in one part influences instantly what is happening in other parts this is known as non-locality in physics but we find that it's in the body not only by biochemical information moves you know when you do something with the body in one part it's not just biochemistry that affects the other part instantly all other cells are affected by whatever happens to one cell or one group of cells and same thing with Minds what happens to one mind or one set of Minds affects others as well so that there is a kind of a cosmic internet if you like which was probably the source of the religious prophetic insights the great prophets have been able to communicate with this information field so you were just bringing up that we live at a time we live in a time when uh spirituality and science are more and more again starting to find Common Ground the leading the Leading Edge of spirituality is the Leading Edge of science yeah good how do you think the uh the Traditions uh do do you feel they have something to learn from science do you feel they need to accommodate a more scientific worldview and how might that change them that's maybe my bias but the my answer certainly yes I think I as a scientist I believe in science but I've written recently a little a little article which will be published in zyon which which is entitled why I believe in science and believe in God you know I don't think it's it's mutually exclusive what science tells us is what what I believe but what science tells us is such a remarkable universe that could not have been Arison purely by chance it's not an accidental Universe it's an evolving coherence evolving Universe where Consciousness is an integral part and all this recalls the insights of religion