The wonder is that by bringing all that you are to what you do, you will undoubtedly create a unique meaning and purpose and vision to pursue, and find ways to do so. The emerging paradigm is already coalescing around principles that are human scale, biocentric, evolution-friendly, and circular (as in circular economies). They are multiplying at the grassroots and in some instances lead professional emergence, as in architecture’s seven-petal paradigm; agriculture’s agroforestry, permaculture, and other innovations; and archaeology’s unique bifurcation into research that crosses many fields to reconstruct the past, which is coupled with an industrial approach that provides large-scale assessments and targeted data collection prior to construction.

Successful communities have mores that enable congregal living, usually derived from spiritual or religious traditions that “pray together” and “stay together.” This can reflect as open a construction as those devised by non-programmed Quakers, which include brief silent meetings at the beginning of the day, when people enter a lovely state of being that is perfect for care and cure as well as for cooperation. Quakers have also recognized that some members of a community tend to be more equal than others, and use methods like passing the talking stick to make sure that everyone has a chance to step up and to speak up, regardless of temperament or habit of leading or following. Spiritual lives that leave plenty of room for individual belief and creativity are emerging from some clergy, as with—Arthur Greene’s Judaism for the World and David Seidenberg’s Kabbalah and Ecology. Others are emerging with interfaith or multi faith networks, as with Earth Ministries, which grew out of the idea of Care of Creation and supports congregations of all kinds to become engaged in grass roots change. Other groups arise as bioscience activism, as with the Beaver Believers you can see on Vimeo.

However emergence develops, expect this profound change to take half a millennium, or it may continue—hopefully—as a built-in continuing adaptation in the course of which evolution may happen. Whatever emerges will hopefully avoid the “civilization” pattern in which one top-down enforced paradigm that does not allow change gives way to another of the same ilk.

You may end up retiring modern science—or at least avoiding scientism and virtual reality (such as the fantasy of top-down control)—and replacing it with whole-body processes of discovery that gradually transforms the unknown into actionable problems that a next generation can define and solve. More, you might just reach escape velocity from the destructive habits of your species and become a maverick who helps to co-create a part of the living future.