Global Thinking is a qualitative change in consciousness to comprehend the big picture, such as the first photo of the Earth from outer space.

Humanity achieved a mutation a hundred thousand years ago -- it registered in the human body as a qualitatively different structure, a millimeter-thin neocortical layer covering the human brain. This mutation began the process of learning how to use our human brain over these hundred millennia and what we learned, as it passed from generation to generation, became culture. Culture gave rise to agriculture and settlements with division of labor and new skills. Then culture escaped the limitation of word-of-mouth through the invention of writing and a rapid evolution began during our five millennia of recorded history.

This evolution is bringing about an energetic level of consciousness, which neuroscientist Gerald Edelman calls a "qualium," a qualitative leap to truly human consciousness as a new stage in evolution. A species evolves quickly during the period it acquires a new mutation, until it leaps as a whole into the new level and then continues to evolve slowly at the new homeostasis.

Civilization after civilization has come up to this energetic level of consciousness and chosen the genetic programming that got us through four million years of 'survival of the fittest,' instead of the consciousness belonging to the 100,000-year mutation of the neocortex. This mutation of human consciousness gave us the capacity to perceive what other individuals are experiencing -- something anthropologists identify as a cognition specific to humanity, which they are investigating in other primates, as well as in large-brained animals, such as elephants and whales.

What gave our species a survival advantage through this mutation of qualitative consciousness was a reciprocal bond of loyalty to our social grouping. When a society offers the opportunity to achieve as part of a reciprocal obligation for the contribution and achievement by individuals, the bond of loyalty is called patriotism. When it is broken, either by the society or the individual, it is betrayal.

In Ancient Greece, this reciprocal loyalty was made a virtue of character defined "Sophrosyne" by the Greeks. It is that measure of excellence which comes from the wisdom of being in individuals and proportion and harmony in social order, that is, justice.

Civilizations fall when the reciprocal bond of loyalty is corrupted by power and hierarchical privileges that power maintains for itself -- a two-class plutocracy of rich over poor, who produce and serve their luxuries.

The World Wars of the last century were a mass rehearsal for the kind of social order in which every human being's contribution is needed for survival and from private to general, the highest compensation for work is no more than a double-digit multiple of the lowest. Only with single-minded commitment can we answer the crisis we face of our own mass extinction by changing our social order to be in proportion and harmony with our natural environment.

Michelle Christides

Turn to the Jungian Archetypes page to take a test in your own symbolic language.