Format: Audio (mp3 and m4b audiobook included)
Running time: 1 hour 52 minutes

All it takes is a cursory scan through the 24-hour news cycle to feel like the world is going to hell in a hand basket. Our economy is failing, our environment is suffering, all while our ideological differences become more intractable every day and our political system comes to a virtual standstill. Anxiety rules the day—a tightly wound collective anxiety that has in turn produced a staggering amount of cultural cynicism.

But is this cynicism really the most appropriate response to our current condition? At a time when it can feel like the average person has even less control over their fate then ever before—subject to unprecedented economic pressures, caught in the crossfire of one of the greatest culture wars we've seen in decades, and conditioned by a sensationalist media to believe that our world is somehow more precarious and more violent than ever before—it can be all too easy to lose hope. However, despite the "if it bleeds, it leads" mentality of the media, it remains true that, for example, the past decade has seen fewer wartime casualties than any other decade in the past 100 years. The world really is becoming a more peaceful place, largely due to the obsolescence of standing armies and the rapidly growing connectivity between individuals and nations—that is, because we are evolving.

If the world really is getting better, then why does cynicism seem to prevail? The simple answer: because we do not currently possess a shared vision of the future. We no longer have the modern space-age visions of humanity colonizing the solar system in giant wheel-shaped space stations, as we did in the 60's and 70's. We no longer have the idyllic flower-power visions of Haight-Ashbury, where "All You Need Is Love" was felt to be so much more than mere lyrical expressions of sentiment or affection—it was an idealistic roadmap for the future. A tad naive, perhaps, but powerful nonetheless.

Without a cohesive shared vision, without a sort of mutually-felt Omega Point calling us into our future, it can feel like the world is moving in a million directions at once—drawing and quartering our hopes, our optimism, and our overall sense that we are actually going somewhere.

Without such a vision, cynicism and dystopia quickly fill the cultural vacuum.

Creating and nurturing this sort of vision is exactly what pioneers like Barbara Marx Hubbard and Ken Wilber have devoted their entire careers to. Bringing them both together in dialogue, we can feel a supernova of warmth, clarity, brilliance, and sober optimism exploding in our hearts, grounding our cynicism and reminding us that we really are on the right track. When we look at the world from the wide-open vista of this big, beautiful evolutionary vision, we can see that our various problems and crises are not obstacles to reaching the next phase of human existence, but rather the indicators that we are already on our way. Our emergencies are symptoms of our emergence, and could not possibly unfold any differently.

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