Summary

A unitive narrative has been drafted by members of the SDG Thought Leaders Circle, one of the Synergy Circles of the Evolutionary Leaders Circle – a project of the Source of Synergy Foundation.

The purpose of the narrative is to provide an emergent cosmological, planetary, interspiritual and societal foundation to serve and support the conscious evolution of humanity and heal our collective worldview from separation to a perspective of unity in diversity.

It is founded on the convergence of scientific breakthroughs with universal wisdom and spiritually-based teachings. A unitive narrative invites us to inwardly hear the wisdom of our hearts and respect the complementarity of feminine and masculine attributes. And thus, its unity expressed in diversity guides us to a wholeness of both the inner being and outer doing in our lives and supports us in integrating our innate health and wholeness, both individually and communally and as a planetary species.

In realizing the unified nature of reality, it calls for a collective celebration of our inner lives as a doorway that opens us to an evolutionary shift of consciousness and the emergence of an inclusive interspirituality which provides essential practices for awakening to this unitive consciousness. Vitally, it recognizes our fundamental interbeing; our interconnectedness, interdependence and belonging with the whole community of our planetary home, Gaia, and with the entire Universe.

It empowers us to envision and gives us hope to co-create a love-based rather than separation-based future and where the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals and Agenda 2030 resolutions are a natural outcome of a world that works for all people and our planetary home.

Context

From the earliest times, human beings have shared narratives and told stories to try to understand the nature of the world and our place in it. We have sought to embrace and reconcile our inner and outer experiences of life and to imbue them with meaning and purpose; over time evolving our narratives as we’ve discovered more of the nature of reality.

Earlier narratives that were based on faith and metaphysical traditions, mythology and psychology, have increasingly been peripheralized and superseded, by a paradigm based on a secular science of solely materialistic reality and a worldview of apparent separation. This paradigm co-evolved with economic and political power systems, creating and justifying unprecedented levels of conflict and inequity.  In considering evolution to be driven by random occurrences and mutations, secular science also views immaterial mind and consciousness, without explanation, as somehow and solely arising from material brains.

Whilst such a perception has enabled us to achieve significant technological innovation, including planetary communications as a species, its cosmology describes a Universe devoid of life-affirming meaning and bereft of purpose. Despite their benefits, its technologies also suffer in their outward applications from the same deficit – a dissociation from our innate humanity and kinship with all life and cultures on Earth.

In only describing the outer appearance of the world, its paradigm can preclude probing more fundamental truths of universal relationships and the nature of consciousness, and in not acknowledging such deeper wisdom it has been unable to provide an authentic and wholistic worldview. This has progressively driven a schism in our collective psyche and motivated duality-based and unsustainable behaviors that have come to existentially threaten our collective future as a species as well as our planetary home.

Now, however, the presumptions of the secular science of separation are being found to be fundamentally flawed and instead, scientific breakthroughs are enabling an understanding of the unified nature of reality and a unitive narrative to emerge.

To paraphrase the great narrator of human experience, Joseph Campbell: The only narrative that is going to be worth thinking about in the immediate future is one that is talking about the planet and all beings on it. This new narrative will need to be grounded in widespread unitive consciousness, which includes a felt sense of unity with all life, unity with the ineffable source of all being, and unity with the evolutionary flow.

Unitive Narrative

A new paradigm, based on scientific breakthroughs, with evidence at all scales of existence and across numerous fields of research, is revealing a radically expanded perception of the world. It is converging with universal wisdom and spiritually-based teachings, and in realizing the unified nature of reality, calls for a collective evolutionary shift of consciousness and the emergence of an inclusive interspirituality which provides essential practices for awakening to this unitive consciousness. Central to its unitive narrative is the recognition of our interbeing; our interconnectedness, interdependence and belonging with the whole community of our planetary home, Gaia, and with the entire Universe.

Revolutionary insights are discovering a Universe whose appearance emerges from deeper levels of causation. A Universe that not only exists and evolves as an entirely unified and innately sentient entity, but that, meaningfully and purposefully, exists TO evolve; from simplicity to complexity and diversity, toward ever greater levels of individuated and collective self-expression, self-awareness and conscious interdependence.

Above all, multiple scientific disciplines are concluding that mind and consciousness are not something we have but rather, what we and the whole world fundamentally are.

This emergent understanding is revealing a cosmology of evolutionary consciousness. By recognizing unity with the ultimate Great Mystery or Source of all being and inherent integration with universal sentience, a unitive narrative also contextualizes biological emergence as the expression of an inherently living and dynamically evolving Universe.

The unfolding evolutionary story describes how cosmic mind, articulated in a universal ‘language’ based on digitized and vitally, meaningful, in-formation and pixelated at the most minute scale of existence, literally and actively in-forms the entire appearance and manifest forms of our Universe. The holographic principle, so named by extending research from black holes to a universal scale, is also providing compelling cosmological evidence that the Universe’s in-formed reality manifests holographically; with its innate wholeness expressed in nested and relational complexity of its differentiated and diverse parts.

The mathematical signatures and dynamic patterns and processes of wholeness are being found at all scales of existence and through numerous fields of study ranging from cosmology, physics and chemistry, to biology, complex systems and collective human behaviors.

Beginning, 13.8 billion years ago, not in the old paradigm story of the implied chaos of a big bang, but as a beautifully ordered and incredibly fine-tuned first moment of an ongoing ‘big breath’, a sentient Universe emerged. As space expands from its miniscule birth and time flows from past to present to future, life embodies a profound evolutionary impulse driven, not by random occurrences and mutations, but through resonant and harmonic interplays of forces and influences that are meaningfully and coherently in-formed and guided.

Gaia’s continuing emergence is embodied in collaborative and synergistic relationships and dynamic coevolutionary partnerships on a planetary scale, where, now, the conscious evolution of humanity may be realized as an integral part of our planet’s own evolutionary progress and purpose.

On planetary and human levels, the universal and archetypal relationships now being evidentially revealed are also reflected in spirituality-based and wisdom traditions and in psychologist C.G. Jung’s concept of the collective unconscious and representative archetypes: containing the whole spiritual heritage of humanity’s evolution born anew in the mind of every individual.

Instead of the apparent separation of our inner and outer awareness, and devaluation of our inner perception, a unitive narrative values our inner cognition and invites us to inwardly hear the wisdom of our hearts. In doing so, it also honors and respects the complementarity of feminine and masculine attributes, relatedness and balanced perspectives and empowers the co-creativity of their synergies within and between us. And thus, its unity expressed in diversity guides us to a wholeness of both the inner being and outer doing in our lives and supports us in integrating our innate health and wholeness, both individually and communally.

Unitive Narrative | UN SDGs and Agenda 2030

Our hitherto fragmented worldview, with its flawed paradigm of materialist separation, has engendered dysfunctional and unsustainable behaviors and social structures. Because the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs) are global responses to these symptoms of our collective dis-ease and distress, approaches to their implementation are often founded on, structured and compartmentalized by, the same fragmented narrative and so, in and of themselves, are inherently limited.

The emergent unitive narrative heals our individual and collective psyches from the illusion of separation to a communally lived wholeness. In expanding a circle of empathy from me, to inclusion of the shared we and the universal all, our focus transcends from an ego- to an eco- and evolutionary perspective. In revealing the innate meaning and purpose of our existence and our evolutionary potential, it naturally embodies universal principles of unity in diversity; empowering us to envision and offering guidance on action steps toward a regenerated, compassionate, peaceful and just world.

This wholistic perspective approaches the 17 SDGs as an interconnected whole, each one interdependent with each other; an interwoven and interdisciplinary framework with each and every one essential to achieving an inclusive, prosperous and thriving global society and living in planetary harmony with Gaia.

Instead of solely quantitative goals based on economic growth, in recognizing and including qualitative goals of development based on increasing and co-creative learning and competent growth towards wholeness, its unitive approach also resolves their apparent contradiction in advancing the commitments of the SDGs

Regarding the UN’s Agenda 2030 particularly, such unitive consciousness can radically reframe and empower our collective approach and actions, by emphasizing calls to be in service for the good of the whole and guiding us to what to wholeheartedly say yes to.

Instead of choices founded in fears and scarcity engendered by the illusion of separation, we can co-create a future affirming shared life, love and hope in action, where the SDGs and Agenda 2030 resolutions are natural outcomes of a world that works for all people and our planetary home.

Unitive Narrative | Here and Now

To paraphrase philosopher Teilhard de Chardin: Someday, we shall harness the energies of love, and then, for a second time in the history of the world, humanity will have discovered fire.

That someday is here and now. As we wake up to the radical reality of a unitive narrative, we will also discover as a species and perhaps for the first time, who we really and truly are and who we can evolve to become.