For most of my life, I have been on a quest to understand the world I live in and to find a way of life that that helps me and those around me to live a life that feels meaningful and worthwhile. Of course, I have not been alone in this quest—it is what we all seek in one way or another. Yet our world still seems to be filled with conflict, violence, and ways of living and being that cause so much harm. Why is it that after all these years, we often seem no nearer to living peacefully together?

Over the millennia, we have tried to organize societies in so many different forms to create the perfect society, yet we still see conflict and hurt all about us. In my own life, I have been active in a variety of social, political, and spiritual movements. They have all promised me peace—whether it was by getting the right people into government, following a particular religious leader, or through some meditation technique. I was always left feeling disappointed, and my questions remained.

A turning point for me was reading Up from Eden, A Transpersonal View of Human Evolution by Ken Wilber. I gained a whole new viewpoint on our development as human beings. It outlined a different perspective on the underlying forces that made us what we are. Ken Wilber also presented a new future toward which we can evolve. As I read more and more books on related topics, I started writing and found that my book took on a life of its own, developing in directions I had never imagined when I started.

Since I began this immense task, it has taken over my life. I discovered the world of chaos and complexity after viewing a television program about fractals. Writing this book opened a whole new framework through which to view the world that helped me to make sense of the chaotic and increasingly complex dynamics we encounter in our everyday lives. I became aware of underlying patterns in myself, the people around me, and my world that showed an inherent harmony and cohesiveness to life, but it was not an easy peace at all. Chaos, complexity, and understanding the world through the eye of systems shows us a dynamic world, constantly changing and adapting, and a world where parts can suddenly collapse and new structures suddenly appear out of nowhere. If we have the courage to ride this dangerous wave, it takes us to many wonderful and surprising places of learning about ourselves and the world we live in.

While the focus of this book has been on Western civilization, efforts have been made to examine non-European cultures, such as using examples from Russia, Vietnam, and the Maori people of New Zealand. Hopefully, this makes the book meaningful to people outside the European world. While it is Western civilization that has had the greatest effect on the dominant culture of our day and shapes our lives so deeply, we should not lose sight of all the other tremendous contributions that have collectively made humanity what it is today.

In my working life, I have spent the last nine years in the criminal justice area, where I’ve been in daily contact with people whose lives were filled with violence. This made me look at my own violence—subtle and not so subtle—and acknowledge what was similar in me to those we label as criminal.

While the vast majority of us do not punch, kick, or stab people, there are so many other, more subtle forms of violence we perpetrate on each other every day. We must constantly find the balance between meeting our personal needs and helping others to meet their needs. When the balance moves toward meeting our needs at the expense of others, we often perpetrate violence on them. And when the balance is too far toward others, we perpetrate violence on ourselves. We commit violence by what we do and by what we fail to do. It is natural that we want to spend time with people like us and who are familiar, but this can so easily and invisibly turn into isolating and discriminating against those who are different.

Before slavery became a social issue, it was largely invisible—just assumed to be a part of the natural order. In retrospect, it is easy to see the violence. But it was not obvious at the time. We must ask ourselves what invisible violence we perpetrate on each other today will be condemned by future generations.

So many seemly innocuous actions are actually forms of violence. For example, we inflict violence on the people around us when we choose to fail to notice someone in pain, whom we could nevertheless help. us. The closer people are to us, the worse they often seem to fare.

I certainly do not write this book as a paragon of virtue who is beyond violence, but rather as someone caught in the same pain and distress of life as you and all the rest of humanity. Though we try so hard to live a good life, we still find ourselves living in pain and inflicting pain on others.

In order to create a brave new world, we need to understand ourselves as individuals, as members of a society, and as participants in a vibrant living environment. We will then see the dilemmas and contradictions before us. We will see our violence and the harm it causes. With courage, we can take on the lessons we need to trace out a pathway that may take us beyond violence to new, wholesome ways of living together in harmony through the 21st century. I invite you on this journey, so together we can walk on the path of compassion that will eventually lead to our peace.

Ozymandias

I met a traveller from an antique land

Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed.

And on the pedestal these words appear:

“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:

Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1818

Since the dawn of time, we have built great civilizations that were intended to endure forever. Time and time again, we have reached great heights of technological and cultural development, only to have these mighty empires turn to dust, just as the glory of the achievements of Ozymandias[1] sank beneath the sands of ancient Egypt. Today, we seem to be heading toward a similar disaster, but this time the consequences could be far more destructive. If we are to avoid this fate and build a new and brighter future for ourselves and our children, we must understand the unfolding patterns that have made us what we are so we can make better decisions about our future together.

This is the challenge that this book takes on. Of course, it is only a small part of the whole jigsaw puzzle that will lead us to a better future. This book uses Complexity Theory as an underlying framework to give shape to our journey. Complexity Theory can be applied to so many aspects of human existence that the task of bringing it all together feels enormous. We need to look at our physical structure as human beings, including our brain, which controls so much of our functioning. Then, there is our emotional side and the psychology of coping with past traumas in our lives. We also need to see how and why we behave as we do when we come together in groups or as a society and explore the structures we have formed in order to create a shared sense of meaning in our lives. Reflecting on our human history opens further doors of understanding. All this needs to be pulled together to make sense of our present-day situation and the many challenges we face. We seek ways to turn from our use of violence, however subtle, and become more compassionate toward each other. We need all this as we face an uncertain and perilous future, but also one that could see us open new levels of consciousness to become all that we might be. Writing this book has been a major undertaking covering the past fifteen years of my life, during which time the book seems to have charted its own path as discovery after discovery is revealed.

Section 1 introduces the theme of the book and explores some aspects of human nature, particularly using an evolutionary approach to gain an understanding of how and why we have become what we have. Competition and cooperation are presented as two powerful forces that have enabled us to not only survive, but to thrive in a precarious world that could see our end at any moment. For almost all of the time that there has been life on Earth, violence has been the way that dominance has been maintained. So often, the survival of the fittest has meant the survival of the strongest.

Political stability is often gained through violence. Rebellion and the threat of invasion are quelled by force to enable peace to reign. The Elizabethan golden age of English history was founded on political intrigue and the ruthless use of military and economic power. There was a large population living in abject poverty in London in the late 16th century and early 17th century, which generated the surpluses for the society that allowed William Shakespeare to make his enormous contribution to our literary heritage. Graeme Taylor in his book Evolution’s Edge states that, even today, it has been estimated that sixty people must live in poverty around the world to sustain each person living in a developed nation.

The tragic truth about all our achievements and the relative peace in which we live today is that it has only ever been gained through unimaginable violence perpetrated on each other and our environment. We cannot begin to measure the blood that has been spilled over the millennia to enable you to read the words on this page. Human society and all our wondrous achievements lie like a thin veneer on a foundation of many thousands of years of violence and oppression.

While violence has been effective for most of our evolutionary history, we now need to develop other strategies to cope better in our world. We now live in a global economy and can only survive by working more effectively together.

We move on to explore the way our brain developed and how that has fashioned our journey of evolution. It has enabled the most amazing development of our consciousness, but it has also brought with it some weaknesses with which we must always work.

Section 2 looks at the concepts that have been developed in Complexity Theory, which actually form the basis of a new paradigm through which to see the world. Reductionist science has enabled so many achievements over the last three hundred years or more, but it has also become a hindrance, as it tries to squash our non-linear world into a linear box. If we have the courage to face the world as a sometimes chaotic and unpredictable one, where change and even catastrophe are just normal parts, we are able to also feel the magic of how complexity is able to work for us to bring new, unimagined forms of consciousness into our world.

Complexity is rapidly becoming more mainstream, and this is certainly so when I look over the years of writing this book. Some of the concepts of complexity have already become a part of our everyday language. The average person on the street has generally at least heard of tipping points, six degrees of separation, and the butterfly effect.

By getting a solid grounding in complexity concepts, we are then able to use them to better understand ourselves and the world we live in. We see the way we have evolved not only physically, but how we have developed emotionally, cognitively and spiritually over time. We have become increasingly effective at meeting our needs. Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs shows how we grow to meet higher-level needs. These concepts are then applied, first to the functioning of individual human beings and then to societies. Cooperation and living in groups has greatly increased our abilities. Language, writing, money, and so much more have helped us develop our potential, so we achieve far more than we could have by ourselves.

Section 3 then looks more closely at our emotional lives, how the concepts of complexity can help us understand how trauma and emotional wounds affect our lives, and how we can heal those wounds so as to function more effectively in our lives. We come to realize that much of the violence we perpetrate on each other is not physical, but is subtle and often hidden even from ourselves. Much of the content of this section is developed from my previous book, When the Dragon Stirs.

Section 4 moves on to look at some models that have been developed by various researchers and authors that again give more depth to our search for understanding. Some of the models spring explicitly from Systems Theory and Complexity Theory. Other models discussed have been developed outside the framework of complexity, but are nevertheless consistent with a complexity approach. The integral approach links our internal and external world and presents a holistic vision of the development of consciousness. Spiral Dynamics shows us the stages we have evolved through as societies, but those stages turn out to be the same stages that we progress through as individuals.

The Adaptive Cycle concisely describes the flow of time and the stages that are evident at the individual level and the societal level. It also strongly emphasises our links with nature and the interlocking cycles that exist between us and our environment.

Section 5 takes the concepts covered and uses them as a means of shedding light on human history. Various epochs are discussed, so the underlying dynamics that moved our ancestors become apparent and give us clues as to how we might grapple with some of the challenges of the future.

Section 6 looks at our present situation in our world and particularly at how we have treated our environment. It looks at some of the underlying dynamics and the challenges that we face.

Section 7 pulls all the strands together and attempts to look at what we need to do to create the type of future we want for ourselves and our descendants. It looks at the values and practices that will help us as individuals to live full, wholesome lives that will hopefully see us not needing to use violence in our interactions with others and turning to use compassion as a guiding principle in our lives.

Chaos Theory and Complexity Theory are sciences that have really developed only over the last thirty years or so, but they herald a whole new way of making sense of the world we live in. A complexity viewpoint tells us that life is interconnected. We are not separate agents doing what we want without affecting or being affected by others. It says we must expect the unpredicted and come to see it as normal. The unpredicted may bring problems we had not foreseen, but it also brings pleasant surprises and “miracles.” Complexity emphasizes the importance of the individual, but balances against the needs of the many. Complexity sees us as dancing partners with creation rather than enemies trying to defeat it. This is a fundamentally different way of seeing life that may be able to bring about fundamental changes in how we live in our world.

Rather than being a simple, linear process, life is more often complex and unpredictable. Simple linear views of life are not sufficient. Particularly in our modern world, we need an approach to life that acknowledges the chaos we increasingly experience. Chaos and complexity look for useful patterns within the complexity of life. We can use it to understand our world and cope better with the challenges of the 21st century.

We cannot continue to live as we have. Our very survival as a human race could hang in the balance unless we find new ways of being. Reductionist perspectives that fail to see the “big picture” are part of the reason that we have so many problems today. An understanding of chaos and complexity and the various models of consciousness discussed in this book provide a useful framework for understanding the dynamics that rule our lives in a new way. While gaining an understanding of complex systems is not the magic solution to all our problems, it can nevertheless play a crucial role. Chaos and complexity form important pieces of the jigsaw that makes us who we are.

In order to find ways of living that do not require such violence and chaos, we need to understand how and why we have created our present maps of reality, from which we form our identities, both individually and as societies. We must acknowledge our violence and understand our place in the complex web of life. This book is a humble attempt to map out some of that framework to help us as we journey into the 21st century.



[1] Greek form of the name Ramses II, the Egyptian pharaoh who had the largest number of monuments erected in his honor.