We have to have a vision. I don’t mean a plan. I don’t mean an agenda. I mean a vision and you don’t – the vision comes from above. It comes from – call it the unconscious, call it the Gaian mind, call it the Great Spirit.

It doesn’t come out of committee meetings and the data gathered by statistical analysis. We lack, at the highest level, not you and not me, but at the controlling level, we lack a vision.

The best leaders among us are no more than crisis managers attempting to manage us past an apocalypse that they are coming to believe is inevitable. That isn’t good enough.

That’s not what my Daddy raised me for and it’s not what your Daddy raised you for. We represent the cutting edge of novelty in the biological World.

Our self-reflective Consciousness is our great glory. It also opens for us a dimension of moral responsibility unknown to the rest of the denizens of nature.

Part of our Promethean and god-like aspiration to the control of nature is the concomitant obligation to care for nature and to feel nature.

So really, my message here is a message of feeling. The ideas will come. The ratiocination will come. But what we have to do is feel our dilemma.

If we could feel our dilemma and make other people feel our dilemma we would move rapidly toward real solutions.

We are anesthetized. We are a World dying under anesthesia for lack of authentic experience, authentic connection with the living World out of which we came.

If we can do this, by whatever techniques are available, if we can create a sense of community, globally, then attending that sense of community will be a sense of caring and responsibility.
 
It cannot happen unless we change our minds. We have the technologies, the money, the logistical ability to do almost anything in the Human world.

But we don’t know how to change our minds. We are angels with a Siamese twin who is a monkey growing out of our chest.

And this was all very fine when there were endless environments to despoil and vast herds of game, that curious amalgam of the animal and the angelic that is our humanness could exist in that kind of an environment, but no more.

And for the past thousand years the moral bankruptcy of western civilization has become more and more apparent.

The chickens are coming home to roost.

We must build community and we must do it in a short time. We’ve lost our compass. We don’t know who we are. We don’t know where we want to go.

Our own lives are an experience of inadequacy and tension. We have lost our compass. But it’s there.