The state of the whole planet is shifting

The “world shift” idea expresses a conviction that the world is undergoing a sea change on multiple levels. This is most obviously framed in terms of the unsustainability of the present system, and the need for a transition to an ecologically balanced and socially just economy.

This framing tends to assume the negative impacts of the economy can be eliminated while maintaining the basic organising pattern and its underlying mentality. However, the whole global system may simply grow to a classic “bifurcation point” at which it spontaneously jumps to a new higher order of organisation (or crashes back to a simpler level). Such a bifurcation would happen due to previously unrecognised adaptive features of the system as a whole, while attempts to force change on the system might fail because they lacked awareness of these features.

A jump to a new pattern of organisation would be equivalent to an evolutionary shift, involving not only material changes but also an evolution in human consciousness, catalysed in part by the experience of global-scale unsustainability. This would appear as a change in worldview which leads to new principles and practices, and a new pattern of organisation for the global system.

The largest context for world shift is the total system of systems, which is far wider and deeper than just social or technological conditions. This is echoed in the idea of an approaching epochal shift, a turning of the ages, which has been long anticipated. Typified by C G Jung’s thinking in Aion (published in 1951), subsequent visionaries and writers such as Fritjof Capra, Hazel Henderson, David Spangler, Willis Harman, Ervin Laszlo, Jean Huston and Barbara Marx Hubbard have all pointed in different ways to an impending grand shift in human experience.

At its most cosmic, world shift is seen as a planetary-level transformation coinciding with the next 2,000 year arc of progression in the 25,000 year precession of the equinoxes – what Jung called the next “Platonic month” – which some believe will usher in a new golden age. This is a way of describing the shift of ‘vibrational’ level that is occurring, that some are describing as ‘ascension’. The vibrationally shifted context will indeed feel golden in comparison with the world we are leaving behind.