Mass extinctions are paradigm shifts and this is good news when the world is falling apart.

A similar predicament to our own was faced by biological life four hundred million years ago during the Late Devonian Extinction. Although the underlying causes of this extinction are still debated (volcanic activity and/or an extra-terrestrial event are two likely causes), the results are not: ocean anoxia and the disappearance of 75 percent of animal species. Oxygen levels in the ocean plunged and countless marine organisms suffocated.

Keep in mind that for the previous billion years, survival depended on getting oxygen from water. Atmosphere was deadly. Survival strategy for animals during the Late Devonian was based on one assumption: the only source of oxygen is water. However, as oxygen levels in the oceans dropped, this assumption turned deadly. Eventually, it killed three quarters of marine life.

During this same period, one vertebrate, Tiktaalik, developed primitive lungs and the rudiments of feet and left the ocean. All land vertebrates today are believed to have descended from this creature. We owe our existence to this bold innovator whose behavior would have appeared insane to its fellows if they had possessed the awareness to make such judgments.

Think of how hard it is to extract oxygen from water. Think of the percentage of an organism’s resources that must be dedicated to this inefficient and energy-intensive process. Think of the consciousness (or lack thereof) that results. Think of the term “fish-eyed.” Now look at the relative ease with which oxygen can be obtained from atmosphere. Much more efficient that trying to get your O from H20. Although this paradigm shift required the development of additional anatomical features (lungs and legs), it opened up a new world for animal life. Again, this shift was a death sentence for any creature unable to make the necessary changes: three quarters of marine animals.

Humans face a similar dilemma, but we don’t need to acquire anatomical features. We just need to open our hearts. Do we continue to get what we need to survive from the same sources we have relied on for two hundred thousand years or do we take a chance on another source that, to our current level of consciousness, is unreliable at best and likely to kill us at worst? Here, I am not talking about oxygen, but love.

At this moment in history, most human beings believe that true security comes from stuff: money, food, shelter. Love is desired, too, but generally stands at the back of the line. Stuff comes first and, of course, if I don’t have a safe place to live, enough food to eat, adequate shelter, no amount of love will save my life. The first three chakras tell me this and they are correct. The key words are “safe,” “enough,” and “adequate,” and here, the first three chakras are no help at all. All they shout is “More!” There is no off switch. Especially when those chakras are guided by Second Turning consciousness.

Humans, when they can, accumulate wealth regardless of the needs or suffering of others, and even themselves. It is easy to despair when presented with this evidence, when such overconsumption is causing the world’s sixth mass extinction. However, another way to respond to the frightening crises facing us is to recognize what these dismal indicators are saying: time to do things differently. Time for a paradigm shift! The first three chakras, guided by the best thinking of the Second Turning have carried us an extraordinary distance: from preliterate hunter-gatherers to the humans of today. United by the internet and the internal combustion engine, we hold the world in our hands. Never before have humans had so much knowledge and awareness and power at their fingertips. It is time for the next Turning.

00:00 Introduction to the first Three Turnings--paradigm shifts

01:00 Paradigm shift triggered by Late Devonian Extinction

02:05 Warming oceans and rising CO2 led to this extinction

02:30 75% of animal life went extinct

02:50 But Tiktaalik developed lungs and legs and left the ocean

03:28 When things got bad, they were ready

03:39 This bold innovator was the ancestor of All land vertebrates today

03:56 One tiny breakthrough led to ALL land-based animals

04:10 Radical paradigm shift 05:08 So much easier to get oxygen out of atmosphere

05:40 Paradigm shift: Getting what is most precious from a radically different source

06:16 What is most precious to us is free and unlimited

06:53 It all comes back to conscious breath

07:40. Our belief in stuff just like fish

09:10 Capacity for denial one of our greatest super powers

09:28 The heart is the most precious thing I carry

Consciousness awakening. Paradigm shift. Open your heart! What if we recognized the pictures on our altar as the packet picture for the seed we contain—the heart? What if we saw our practice as the spiritual equivalent of gardening? What if we saw that being—Jesus, Mary, Buddha—not just as a helpful guide but as a promise of what we were meant to be? Why were we drawn to that particular holy figure in the first place? What does the resonance we feel with her mean? Coincidence? Wishful thinking? Or a deeper knowing of who we are? These images do not represent unattainable ego ideals. They show us what we will look like when we have cracked open the shells of our egos and nurtured and tended our authentic selves. 00:00 Introduction 01:00 The Third Turning is about opening the heart 01:30 Opening your heart makes you stronger. How to do it. 02:33 The treasure inside the seed—the intelligence to make many more 03:11 Concept of exponential growth/advent of addiction: One is too many and a thousand is not enough 04:04 Imperative to find a new way to fill our hunger: Open the heart 05:05 The heart is a seed: the shell is the ribcage and the ego. Inside is the wisdom and power to transform the world 07:00 What is disaster for the shell is liberation for the germ inside 07:40 Everything falling apart is how it looks to the ego. Things falling apart is how the new paradigm is born 09:15 We have to open our hearts. How do we germinate the "heart seed"? 09:40 Images on your altar are the "seed packet pictures" of what lies in your heart 12:05. The shell is a prison cell. How do we get out?

The Third Turning is the movement from the head to the heart chakra and into higher consciousness, from a shared belief in separateness and duality to a realization of the interconnectedness of all things. This shift is not new. Individuals have achieved it for millennia. 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 transformation of consciousness, this paradigm shift, and, together, changing the world.

00:00 Introduction

00:29 Summary of First and Second Turnings

01:03 First use of fire and language. Arrival of Homo Sapiens aka Shamans

01:52 First agriculture leading quickly to first cities, writing and private property.

02:22 Time for a paradigm shift

02:37 Chakras as blueprint for human evolution

06:20 Fully entering the heart chakra as catalyst for Third Turning

11:13 Learning how to love oneself is the Third Turning

12:44 The Twelve Steps are a beautiful example of the Third Turning 1

3:18 Opening your heart is the Third Turning

The birth of civilization and the seeds of patriarchy: around a large inland sea bordering the northern edge of our home continent, groups of hunting and gathering nomads became larger and more numerous and there was less room for them to hunt and gather successfully. They found once plentiful resources depleted by other groups like themselves and found themselves more often in competition with these groups. Fighting became more frequent as did hunger and disease.

These challenges grew slowly, of course, as did our solution—gardening. With the advent of agriculture, food requirements could be met within a much smaller area and a sequence of events rapidly occurred. Teach humans the power of seed germination, wait a few thousand years, and a number of extraordinary things will happen. First, because of the ability to provide adequate food within a vastly reduced territory, population increased. Groups grew larger and no longer needed to compete to the same degree for food with similar groups. People had more time to specialize in specific crafts and art forms. Because they were no longer constantly on the move, they could begin to acquire more possessions. Social and economic inequality increased.

Within roughly five to ten thousand years, humans, who had for two hundred millennia roamed in small groups, found themselves living in the first cities, ruled by kings, owning property and relying on the written word. This was the Second Turning, the advent of civilization. A little later, first on the great flood plain of eastern Asia and then on the isthmus connecting the American continents, the same thing happened. After several millennia of gardening at increasing scales, former hunter-gatherers became literate urban dwellers with a high degree of social hierarchy.

Take a look around you. Where do you live? In a city? Working in a pyramidally organized organization? Depending on your facility with the written word to determine your place in the existing social hierarchy? Worried about how much you have (or don’t have)? This socio-economic form—so small and rare when it first appeared—now surrounds the world and threatens the planet’s survival with its basic precepts—the unquestioned importance of wealth and social status. Our accelerating advancements of the last two hundred years (fossil fuels, computers, AI) have only made the original pyramidal construct bigger and faster. They have not elevated us to another level of social organization and behavior the way fire and language did, the way agriculture did. Our basic priorities and motivators have not changed.

While we live in a world that looks very different from the one inhabited by the first urban dwellers, if you took people from any social class in that long-ago world and put them in a room of modern people of the same class, they would understand each other perfectly: my boss is a jerk; it’s impossible to find capable subordinates; I will do anything to maintain my grip on power. Although enormous intellectual and technological leaps lay millennia ahead of Sumer and Egypt, the basic paradigm for modern urban-based life was set. The fundamental preoccupation with wealth and status would continue to be the primary drivers of human society for the next five thousand years. It is precisely these ancient and near universal drivers which are making our myriad crises impossible to solve. As the saying attributed to Einstein puts it, “The level of thinking which created a problem (or set of problems) will, by definition, be unable to solve this problem.” A new level of thinking is required. This new level of thinking will drive the Third Turning.

00:00 Summary of First Turning-Origins of fire and language

01:24 Motivators for Second Turning/agricultural revolution

01:45 Learning to germinate sees the next major paradigm shift after fire and language

02:18 Neolithic revolution, Larger sedentary groups living in smaller areas

02:45 Ancient writing, cuneiform--increased grain supplies and population catalysts for new form of communication

03:18 Ancient writing first used to keep track of grain supplies

03:25 First cities in Mesopotamia and Egypt; first pyramids, kings, armies, slaves, writing; template for how we live today; at first only 3 or 4, each with a population of a few thousand

04:20 Today, there are more than 10,000 cities with a combined population of over four billion; appetites and waste products leading to 6th Mass Extinction

04:50 Humans have capacity for making paradigm shifts in face of serious threats. We have been here before.

06:47 Wealth and status primary motivators of our current paradigm. Accumulation did become a goal until humans became sedentary.

07:22 Second Turning ending; time for a paradigm shift

Humanity's three turnings began with fire and language and shamanism. The first repeated and controlled use of fire is fairly easy to date using the radiocarbon method—around 200,000 years ago. Although it is impossible to find equivalent evidence for the first use of language, it is not hard to see how the two go hand in hand. Not only is the creation and use of fire complex, hard to convey with grunts and gestures, but the nuances of fire are subtle and subject to change. If people were not able to communicate in precise and abstract ways about this new power, it was going to become another predator. No other animal uses fire. Fire is the most terrifying force any animal has ever encountered. When it showed up in the wild, as out of control savannah or forest fires caused by lightning strikes, everyone ran. What caused our ancestors to think they were different? The things that make us human: intelligence, imagination, curiosity, playfulness, fascination with risk, love, terror. Before we domesticated fire, a leading cause of death among hominids was “big cat related.” Lions and leopards ruled the night and although they eventually inspired spears, they still had the edge. Fire leveled the playing field. With fire at your command, you could keep any predator off. If you could control fire, you controlled the greatest power on earth. And before you could control it, you had to be able to imagine controlling it. You had to see something in your mind that did not exist. This took time, of course, probably many thousands of years. But, when they were done, our ancestors had mastered two of humanity’s greatest powers—fire and language—and were no longer Homo erectus. Homo sapiens had emerged, another word for "shaman." For 200,000 years they wandered, eventually out of Africa, in small groups—as small as five, as large as thirty or forty—overcoming all other predators and multiplying. There were significant developments during this time. A cognitive revolution around 70,000 years ago may have led to increasingly complex forms of belief; sculpture, painting, along with our ancestors’ first departure from Africa, all occurred during this period. But our form of social organization—small cooperative, egalitarian kin groups—remained the same until our success threatened to undo us.

00:00 Intro

00:16 Good news About the World Falling Apart

0:27 First Turning

00:34 First appearance of homo sapiens

00:45 Fire and language

01:43 Bi-polar nature of fire

02:33 Origins of language

03:05 fire and language

04:30 Danger of big cats-- lions and leopards

05:00 Fear as motivator to work with fire

05:25 Danger of fire inspired language

06:25 Fire extended our days; laboratory for developing language

07:00 Fire and language as "super powers;" Huichol word for fire, 'tatewari," means "oldest grandfather and "first shaman"; shamanism explained; what is shamanism?

07:40 Imagination, intuition, inspiration are essence of shamanism

08:00. "shaman: is another word for human being

08:49 Our current crises are a failure of imagination

We are witnessing the birth pangs of a new paradigm, a mass shift in consciousness, a shift from power to compassion, from the third chakra to the fourth : the awakening of the Heart. In these episodes, I will share how to recognize and nurture this awakening, around you and within you. As this 5000 year old paradigm falls apart, many are confused, angry, in despair. As the title of this channel promises, there is good news to be found! Like the accelerating contractions in the transition phase of the birth process, the pain of these times doesn't just herald the ending of patriarchal civilization; they tell of an impending birth. I will be drawing on a lifetime's experience : --over 20 years as a college instructor of anthropology and history; --almost thirty years as a member of 12 step groups and a water pourer; --over 30 years on a spiritual path; --over 30 years as a dad to three remarkable children.

00:00 Good News About the World Falling Apart; paradigm shift

00:26 Consciousness

00:45 Mayan Calendar

04:50 Maitreya

04:52 End of Days

05:56 End Times

06:12 12th Imam

07:15 Age of Aquarius

08:16 Mass consciousness shift