Essay

The Utopian Vortical Web - living on a Borderless Planet with a diminishing Natural World.

Summary.

This essay is underpinned by understandings and hopes which together suggest a contextually relative Utopia of present day relevance.

Predicated on the acceptance that ‘all flesh is grass’, this search for Utopia believes that humans are individual and unique but, identity has relevance only in an interdependent “web of life”. The borderless nature of our LifeSupport of Air, Water and Soil ensures that beggar and superpower are equal in their codependence on the LifeSupport, common to the existence of Plants, Animals and Humans in Utopia.

As we move into a Utopian Age of the Intellect, an androgynous, complex-survival perspective all men, women and children are able to assume, will overcome anarchic collapse of the world’s delicate but reformable social structures and attempt redress of global ecological devastation. To this extent a ‘pre-position’ within the Preamble of the United Nations Charter is suggested as a vital precursor to peace, establishing the complete relevance of this body, to an interconnected web of nations on one Planet. Finding Utopia means using our Intellect to replicate the complex pattern of life’s basic mechanisms of cooperation, feedback, self organisation, and emergence, at human grassroots and institutional levels, to create self sustaining, coevolving behaviour at global levels.

Under an overarching ecological perspective, I have tied concepts from Complexity science to a global “exploration” for a Utopia. By anchoring to the United Nations through a Utopian Vortical Web (UVW) of Global Conversation and Celebration, we continue the search for a Utopian Conscious Civilization to detangle some of the most pressing problems today. One of these is “terrorism” which, in some ways, is driven by a “Frankenstein” search for its own Utopia.

My essay is titled:
The Utopian Vortical Web - Living On A Borderless Planet With A Diminishing Natural World.

It is presented in 5 parts:
Part 1. Introduction, Context and Rationale - for a Utopia of a Conscious Civilization.
Part 2. The Utopian Society of the Mind.
2.1. Search for new understandings in a Utopia of the Mind.
2.2. A 21st century charter acknowledging the centrality of The Natural World.
Part 3. The Utopian Vortical Web.
3.1. A Utopian Conversation
3.2. A Utopian Celebration
3.3. Utopian Consciousness
Part 4. Conclusion, Reference/Short Bibliography, Dedication.
Part 5. Appendix. (1.-3.)

2. Context and Rationale - for the Utopia of A Conscious Civilization.
- Utopian endings and beginnings.
- The age of the intellect.
- Looking through a new lens for today’s Utopia.
- Leadership of ourselves - A new kind of leadership for Utopia.
- The frailty of being human.
- A Utopia for Pre-citizens.

2.1. Search for new understandings in a Utopia of the Mind. 2.2. A 21st century Charter acknowledging the centrality of the Natural World.

3.1. A Utopian Conversation. 3.2. A Utopian Celebration. 3.3. Utopian Consciousness.

There is an inscription on a splendid piece of Islamic architecture ( Muhgal Period ) in Delhi, the capital of India, which reads:

“If ever there is a Paradise on Earth, it is here. It is here. It is here.”

About 400 years later, at the cutting edge of science we are placing bacteria, humans and distant galaxies into a mind based cosmology which confirms that we indeed have a complex and multivariant paradise here and now. It is perhaps the only paradise we will ever have. But as humans destroy this Paradise through war, technology, violence and greed, thoughts of utopia were never more relevant, than they are now. Whilst Utopia is indeed a place hard to define as the word also means ‘no-place’ and to use Rebecca Lettervall’s words, “Utopias may function as critique of the prevailing society, as a literary genre or as a well of future dreams,” [1] - the challenge facing us today is to prove that Utopia can exist concurrent with modern mayhem.

Using the imagery of “rebuilding the ship at sea”, Marius de Geus notes, however, that “The notion of Utopia rarely receives recognition in politics; instead it is more often seen as a daydream - a dangerous, romantic and unfeasible fantasy.” [2] In today’s world teetering on the brink, governments can no longer disregard notions, visions and descriptions of “better worlds” - for what alternatives are there? Is it to be business as usual? More of the same? Or a race toward Anarchy? In attempting answers to these questions, it is more than wise to remind ourselves that all of these options relate - not to nations marked out by lines on maps but, to vast ecological scapes of land and water, on one lonely cosmic orb. Try as we might to describe ourselves as Nigerian, American, German, Iranian, Australian, Indian, Chinese or Japanese, to fit into those lines on maps, we are really simply citizens of a borderless and finite globe.

In his winning entry for the Internet competition Utopian Championship 01, TROY beautifully describes his vision of a journey toward a better world, providing the reader with links and doorways to this world through many grassroots and organisational websites. Chillingly, he sets his entry against a backdrop of “The Great Fall of Capitalism”. As he tells it, “The very market of hyper-capitalism got a global aneurysm and it imploded. When the international economic collapse came in 2007, national governments, bureaucratic armies and state institutions were ill prepared for the chaos that ensued. Their authority suddenly vanished.” And he says, “…is not capitalism itself, with the American Dream as its ultimate promise, also a utopian myth of sorts? For we are told, in a grand quixotic challenge to basic mathematics, that all people have a chance of becoming part of the wealthy minority.”[3]

Today, as minority and majority worlds together move out of the certainty, linearity and predictability of the Newtonian scientific paradigm, insights from the science of complexity are slowly shaping our culture, based on a deeper study of the Natural World. The devastation of the economic imperative, the tunnelvision of specialization, the reductionism of Cartesian thought and the certainty of matter are being slowly superceded - by enchantingly beautiful, yet scientifically proved concepts of butterfly effects, bifurcations, emergence, fractality, feedback, fuzzy logic, non-linearity, selforganized criticality, sensitivity to initial conditions and Vorticity. The principles of all these concepts are fully founded on Nature’s elemental magic. It seems almost certain that not Darwinian competition but Margulis’ cooperation, not genetic mutation but symbiosis, not individuality but structural coupling, not selection but feedback, have been the basis for our earliest primeval survival as “a new kind of cell” some 2.2 million years ago. Utopia must take note of this our earliest fight for survival.

In a 21st century effort to survive, can Utopia exist concurrent with modern mayhem, made achievable in different ways, in an age of deeply interconnected social chaos? I believe it can. The elements are already with us when we hear of The Cordoba Initiative in New York, a multi-faith effort to increase communication and tolerance between Islam and ‘America’; when we read of The Natural Step, which is a sustainability partnership between business and environmental educators in Stockholm; when we hear that the Indian and Pakistani cricket teams are “playing for peace” in celebration of border porosity and when we hear of the vast network of action being performed under the auspices of the United Nations. Children too, are capable of Utopian learning by learning how to debate, discuss and dialogue with great skill - this is visible in schools in Sydney, in Australia and around the world, where intricate topics covering ‘free trade agreements’, genetically modified foods, the relevance of the UN and the urgency of Environment are debated.

Unfortunately, the exposure, publicity and visibility for intelligent debate and the issues it explicates are often lost to sport and the market. Even within the spheres of intelligent debate, while the issues that matter are many and relate among other urgent topics, to growing global refugees numbers and to decreasing ecosystems, the reality is that many in society simply grow fat in courts, debating and interpreting the letter of the law. In closely related schemes for making money under the convoluted and protected aegis of global financial law, dealing rooms of the stockmarket are ‘dynamic and fluid spaces’, in the words of a share dealer, full of opportunity to make and launder easy money; and yet our most creative and unique Universities and their academics struggle to survive and to be heard, without having their intellectual freedom compromised. This too is not unchangeable, though the link between education and the economy is slowly becoming more symbiotic and accepted. While these sick situations are not incurable, it requires a fundamental alteration in attitude to change our current attractors [4] of power, money, identity and arrogance to enable islands of hope to turn into continents of consciousness.

What kind of changes do we need? How long can we leave things the way they are? Will change be possible at all? Our options narrow the longer we take. Awareness amongst ordinary individuals is the key. One simple step to awareness is the installation of a formal process of regulated announcement and recording of “utopian factors” as ecological indicators. Huge capital flows of wealth and the lives of millions hinge upon the economy and the ecology. It would not be wrong to say that mostly, only the market and its indicators are given prominence. If we can announce globally the factors upon which the Ecology depends in the same way as the announcement of international stockmarket indicators currently dictate the Economy and if we could globally give equal and then greater prominence to the Ecology and its indicators - our Utopia may be more easily discovered. The advocacy of law, commerce, sport and consumerism still overshadows the skills of higher order debate, dialogue and discussion. In a Utopia of the mind the skills of the intellect are directed to higher values less concerned with power and wealth. “The Greens are coming!” is a promise for our children, but will they come, with effect, in time? Changing the very culture of today’s integrated world is not easy. Indeed, it is a task for Utopia.

Under an overarching ecological perspective, the desire of this Utopia is to overcome the possibility of anarchic collapse of the world’s delicate but reformable institutional and social structures. More importantly, it is to attempt redress of global devastation of the Natural World. This search is based on the understanding that all humans are individual and unique and that our identity has meaning only in the interdependent web of earthly existence. The borderless nature of our LifeSupport of Air, Water and Soil ensures that, in the trajectory of our future, beggar and superpower are equal in their co-dependence on this LifeSupport, which is common to all Plants, Animals and Humans.

To this extent a pre-position is proposed, within the Preamble to the Charter of the United Nations, as a newly conceived 21st century precursor to peace. Adopting this new benchmark referent in the UN Charter, all institutions are encouraged to think and act contingent upon the urgent needs of the new millennium. This search for Utopia believes our future depends upon how we perceive ourselves as global citizens and thus the question of leadership is thrown into the spotlight. Leadership in the 21st century demands an aware planetary citizen and to create such a Utopian individual the Utopian Vortical Web of Conversation and Celebration is described. Engaging in this vorticity is vital to lifting individuals and institutions into consciousness of interdependency for survival. Utopia is no longer a beautiful city or land located in some future time [5]. Utopia is a cosmos of consciousness in the minds of citizens Today.

The questions which this search tests against are vital to a Utopia today or tomorrow. Are we quickly able to become Aware Planetary Citizens or will we succumb to slow and steady regress, spiralling down to the total equilibrium of the “boiling frog” syndrome? [6] Will we continue to be, by choice and design, “spectators” of mass media, sport and wargames or will we become, at the edge of time, participators in the creation of a better world? Are we committed to worshipping an economy which has become an unstoppable juggernaut in its hungry search for markets or will we subsume the economy to its rightful place beneath the ecological imperative? Will we, in Stuart Hill’s words, continue to “monitor our extinction” by making do with adaptation, efficiency and substitution [7] or will we pull back just in time and make a Utopian effort to take steps for radical change, becoming a Connected Conscious Civilization with time to spare? This Utopian essay would like to suggest that, since the individual is the institution, global survival is only possible on an institutional, and therefore, on a much more widely and individually understood, level.

If our ship is sailing today’s seas, we must set our sights on a not too distant shore. Utopia’s young precitizens cannot wait too long. Hidden by the haze of dust, smoke, chemical and natural cloud, we must navigate with all the skill of our unique Intellects, toward the shore of a contextually relative Utopia of present day relevance. To create a new kind of global citizen, a Planetary Citizen who is aware that we live on a borderless planet with a diminishing Natural World, we must pretend that we are able to start with a clean slate.

Since we know this is not possible, the next best thing we must do is use the tools we already possess. Here You and I are extremely fortunate. We have infrastructure in place, to create great change through the visionary leadership of an organisation which has current capacity for global governance. Such an organisation exists - but people are not aware of this on a large enough scale.

The UNITED NATIONS is indeed such a Utopian organisation today. It is doing remarkable things all around the World and even though many may have heard of it (hearing of and being Aware of something are two different things) most men, women and children really do not know what its diverse goals, capacities and achievements are. This Utopian exercise hopes to create change by bringing the high value of The United Nations to “you and me” and through this Awareness, to create a living, breathing United Nations by means of The Utopian Vortical Web. (UN UVW). The Utopian change will occur, but it must occur first in ‘the dynamic and fluid spaces’ of our minds, as we tack our vessel carefully, out of the age of the machine and into an Age of the Intellect.

“The powers of mind are everywhere ascendant over the brute force of things.”
G. Gilder.

Amongst some thinkers and writers, unlike the beginning of the last millennium, the new millennium has brought no happiness. In a sober assessment of endings and beginnings, in his essay “Apocalypse, Millennium and Utopia Today” Krishen Kumar laments, “There is no millenarian joy…” and he quotes Fukuyama as saying “we…. live in the old age of mankind”. In Kumar’s essay, William Rees-Mogg’s words, “If we are lucky, mankind has about 50 years left. Most of the graphs of human development…shoot off the page somewhere in the middle of the next century”, - are more than simply sober, they are sombre.[8] Indeed it would seem the world of those who would conquer, those who quest religious truth and those who would seek revenge, is quickly cresting into flames of self destruction through acts of war, terrorism and aggression. In some parts of earth, the world of caring, creating, watching and waiting is slowly disintegrating in the face of approaching anarchy. Apocalypse could indeed be with us.

Yet, even in this end of time there could be a Utopian beginning without need for any humans at all. In the midst of chaos, the order of Utopia already exists on earth, at once benevolent and behemoth. It is Earth herself. We do not tame her or use her lightly. We understand, respect and live with her. Presidents, popes and other patriarchs in their mighty arrogance, have not grasped the simplicity of the truth that the health of each nation, government and institution is dependent on the health of every other nation, government and institution. The American Indians in their indigenous wisdom possessed this ancient truth, “If you can listen, you can learn that if one of us suffers, then all of us are suffering.” A new Utopian beginning is heavily dependent on the Ecological Awareness of the interlocking nature of our common existence on Earth.

At the same time as scientists are throwing off the fashions of three centuries of a mechanistic way of thinking, Governments and politicians, Institutions and leaders are being left behind, in their oldfashioned, economy driven, law bound, militarist thinking. Today, powered by minds of award winning scientists, the sophistication of cybernetics and the desire for simplicity, the science of complexity is giving us a new reading of the Natural World. It is saying what Indian, Australian Aboriginal and other ancient wisdom has said in different ways: we share our atoms, or the “divine spark”, with all other beings.

Humans, plants and animals lie in a continuum with bacteria and distant galaxies. Certainly we all ‘understand’ that humans, plants and animals cannot survive without the LifeSupport of Air, Water and Soil. As we gradually realize the implications of this understanding, we will also see that the age of the industrial revolution is giving way to a revolution of the mind. The mind is an evanescent, evolving, emergent property and its cultural image is the image of the brain. Whatever the reason for the Flynn effect of a generational IQ increase in our children, the nature of this increase lies in our ability to solve problems in our minds.[9]

In their book “The Matter Myth” scientists Paul Davies and John Gribbin declare, “It is fitting that physics - the science that gave rise to materialism - should also signal the demise of materialism. We shall see that matter has been demoted from its central role, to be replaced by concepts such as organisation, complexity and information.” [10] These three concepts lie beneath the delicate substance of The Utopian Vortical Web which is created through the Utopian Conversation and the Utopian Celebration, the aim of which is to raise Awareness of our Planetary interdependency. Without this realization, humans will be as rare as the thylacine.

Thus, for example, the following seemingly isolated situations are deeply ingrained, interlocked planetary concerns. While the leader in critical fields of debate, research and action in conservation, Australia continues to remove the very last of the Planet’s ancient ecosystems. Unbelievably, the giant trees of Tasmania’s beautiful forests in the Styx Valley, the Tarkine and other regions are right now, still being logged for export woodchip, putting into greater jeopardy a plant and animal wildlife some of which is already close to extinction and most of which is unique to Australia [11] - and, while India has legislated to ban the felling of trees in general, the pressures of population, development and technology on its remaining forest cover and vanishing wildlife, far outweigh this end measure. While global dust storms carry away both precious topsoil and toxic dirt from one country and deposit it on many countries, we unknowingly accept that certain fish cannot be placed on our dinnertables because their stocks have simply been ‘fished out’.

Our intelligence has enabled us to explore other planets in our solar system but that same intelligence has created the abstraction of a pervasive, sometimes perverse, system of global justice, the intangible “competence” of which allows larger crime to operate within its legalese, while prisons burgeon with those easily convicted for lesser crimes. While ‘big crime’ thrives, single men die for small misendeavours. Though we declare War on Terror - we forget that Terror’s and War’s various forms of support come from poverty, political oppression, landlessness and environmental degradation on one side, and, from a need to generate wealth by production of weapons, not to mention all technology arising therefrom, on the other side. Rooted in the common element of money - weapons, chemicals and drugs develop deadly, intricate connections with each other. ‘Frankenstein’ searches for Utopia are being made in these places too.

Throw into this mix the age old problems of religion and ethnicity and, we have the basis for the potent phenomenon of ideologically driven terror. The kind which wills itself to commit suicide. To more fully grasp “terrorism” we have to become aware, questioning and willing to listen. In an interview in which he cuts to the core of the Palestine problem, William Dalrymple, historian, commentator and most widely travelled and engaged of individuals, says, “When Britain took over the mandate for Palestine at the end of the Second World War, Palestine was 93 percent Palestine, 7 percent Jewish.” Acting as a ward for Palestinians, the guardianship ended with 75 percent of Palestinians expelled from Palestine. “More Palestinians now live in exile than in Palestine. Those who remain are currently bottled up in their towns, watched over by the Israeli Army, their land encroached on by settlements and settlers, unable to leave the country, unable to do anything without Israeli permission…,” he notes. What he says in this interview is critical to a Utopian understanding of the context and rationale of the Utopian Vortical Web for a Conscious Civilization. Dalrymple comments “if anti-Semitism was the principal blot on the 20th century, in the 21st century there is rampant Islamophobia in almost every European country.” Ignorance, he thinks, is the reason.

Having lived in many countries, he finds that, in the state of Israel and the state-vacuum of Palestine he has “never been any where in the world where two peoples live so closely and yet remain so totally ignorant of each other. Even at the height of Hindu-Muslim rioting in India, or the Indian-Pakistani conflict, there are always marriages across the divide. In any dinner party in India, you will always find Sikh, Hindu and Muslim sitting around a table, although they may disagree. In Israel there is virtually no contact. There are no mixed marriages. There are no mixed dinner parties.” [12] Ignorance and unawareness underlie some of the most burning issues standing in the way of Utopia. Ignorance of facts, ignorance of each other and, above all other issues, ignorance of our complete dependence, not on religion, but, on the LifeSupport of Nature - is Utopia’s greatest and first hurdle.

In the face of such seemingly insurmountable problems and paradoxes, are not visions of better worlds a manner of presenting a new alternative to society, for indeed Thomas Kuhn “found that people continue to believe in the old ‘accepted’ model even if it no longer makes any sense to them”.[13] Is it any more a dangerous, romantic and unfeasible fantasy to search for a contextually relative Utopia of present day relevance than it is to wage war? While once we fought to preserve and extend national borders - now it seems we will fight over nature’s elements, water and soil and air, which indeed respect no borders. Now too, we will have to resolve our differences in dialogue. Muslim with Christian, Muslim with Muslim, Christian with Christian but more importantly human with other human, mind with other mind.

It is not our religion which defines us - it is the weakness of our being human in the face of Nature. It is not our strength which will protect us - it will be the recognition of our complete dependence upon Nature’s elements. The Utopian Vortical Web of cooperation exists both in real space and in cyberspace but most significantly it operates in the space of our minds. It is only by using our intellects that we will become aware enough to be able to overcome the most intractable planetary problems and paradoxes we face today. Crucially, what we first have to realize is that local is global. What happens anywhere happens everywhere. What appears unrelated to and distant from me is indeed very much my responsibility and near to me.

As we make sense of the huge oneness of our ecological predicament - we will become aware of the borderless nature of our planetary interdependence. This Awareness of our minds is the cosmos of a new Utopian beginning - as we connect, cooperate and converse to become a Utopia of a Conscious Civilization - entering a new age where the Mind is, of necessity, all powerful.

As materialism dies a not too early death, we are gradually heading into an Age of the Intellect. From an evolutionary perspective this may be just in time. We know from our bacterial origins that species survival is a creative, cooperative, symbiotic, wholistic venture. It is evolutionary. Primitive connotations in the natural world of animals describe the survival of the species as the primary concern of both males and females. Today, in the 21st century, a complex-survival way of thinking is acknowledged by thinking men and women to be creative, caring, nourishing, nurturing, protective and a sustaining ‘woman’s way of thinking’. Ecofeminist thought is increasingly regarded and supported by males.

A ‘woman’s way of thinking’ no longer stands accused of claiming a special, privileged or disadvantaged stance. It is a perspective which maybe assumed by men, women and children. It simply reflects less of confusion and collapse, less of power and progress, less of war and wounding. A ‘woman’s way of thinking’ is androgynous. It is a utopian gaze. By virtue of its creative, protective, sustaining and complex quality, its gaze must rest on children. These are pre-citizens of Utopia, the inheritors of our world. If we acknowledge children as pre-citizens and inheritors, can we allow anarchy and collapse to be the basis for change?

Catastrophic destruction of the prevailing engine - be it political, social or economic or more likely, all three - may well be imminent. The end of civilization expressed in Eastern or Western terms may indeed occur this century. The “spike” in technological advance occurring together with the “spikes” in population, climate change and human induced catastrophe may act in concert to create a spectacular, self-instigated termination of the ‘intelligent’ species.

But none of us, man, woman or child, wants to destroy Paradise. We destroy Paradise because we are each a thread in this web of nature’s perfection. Since this is not understood, in our struggle to survive, we damage the delicate and beautiful threads of the web. We believe one religion is better than the other. We go to war to protect imaginary lines drawn on paper. We think that being human makes us more special than other coinhabitors of the Natural World. We dream of beautiful futures. From Plato to Bacon, through Morris and Huxley - men have dreamed utopias in memorable words.

The elegant reality is that future utopias may be too late. The marriage of this realization with our entry into the age of the Intellect will enable the use of many perspectives, through which we become capable of seeing our way forward to utopian consciousness. The spiral of evolution needs human awareness to lift itself out of catastrophe, into consciousness. My Utopia seeks to provide the coalescing nascence of this through Utopian Conversation and Celebration.

If we look through an ecological, nurturing, complex-survival, utopian lens, we may preserve the Paradise that is here. The complexity that is India and the simplicity of Australian Aboriginal dreaming may be understood also as the simplicity that is India and the complexity of Australian Aboriginal dreaming. Utopia is both simple and complex. The paradox of survival is that we must accept the challenge that Utopia can exist, concurrent with modern mayhem. To not ground our search for Utopia in the cacophonous reality of today would make us 21st century dreamers, indulging in lavish word art, which the world will not take seriously.

A perspective we learn from complexity science is that the task of social change today is an almost impossible task - for unpredictability, sensitivity to initial conditions and dynamical change around us prevent us from being able to “construct” change. David Levick and Robert Woog do give us this hope, “The best we can do is develop a critical understanding of the world, both as an individual and in company with others, and make choices about how to adjust one’s actions to deal with it.”[14]

If we can lift the level of our global awareness, relative to the many different individual, institutional and geographic situations existing, by developing a critical understanding of the interdependency of the LifeSupport (Air, Water & Soil) of the world, we may be lifted out of the dangerous “basins of attraction” we are caught in today. Broad public understandings create “attractors” of a psycho-social nature, which lift and shift our evolutionary behaviour, to determine the wavering trajectory of social transformation. Fruitless are the efforts to create social change unless humans understand the conceptual basis for change and most successful has ‘the market’ been in detecting and destroying our critical literacy through advertising and brainwash. The message however is clear - if we do not ‘will’ ourselves to change individually and institutionally at the start of this new millennium, the funnel of nature’s vortex will not lift us to a new evolutionary level, it will pull us under. Today’s Utopia is a search for a public awareness, a consciousness and a global citizenship which is appropriate to a world which must evolve out of the matter of an industrial age, into the Mind of a new Age of the Intellect.

The re-examination of our scientific beliefs and laws in the 20th century, accompanied by a gradual acceptance of complexity views of the world, have led to strange discoveries and changes of thought emerging from within the scientific community, which in their turn, have led to further re-examination of scientific laws and beliefs. These paradigmatic shifts have been largely overshadowed by the world’s explosive economic growth, resulting from advances in technology based on the mechanics of matter. Erstwhile derision of the mainstream scientific community, directed at the scientific vanguard, is slowly subsiding as more and more work is done on the fringes of “matter” science. The attention of traditional science is being forced away from analysing parts, hierarchically, towards unconscious inclusion of mutual causality, non linearity, feedback loops, autopoiesis and chaos.

In a fascinating book for the lay person to understand the basis of Complexity science, Briggs & Peat [15] examine the history of the planet’s coevolution in the light of new scientific insights. They say that while coupled together bacteria in our bodies and brains have made us autonomous and self dependent individuals, the “chaotic flux” we have made for ourselves in this process, means that we must couple with each other and the environment to survive the destructive dangers of this flux, in the same way as our earliest cellular ancestors did, in a more primordial soup. The autopoietic paradox “implies that in a sense the individual is an illusion” because the spiralled, feedback understanding of life and evolution shows us that so called freedom and “greater autonomy also means greater and more complex interdependency”. The ‘paradox of today’ is that the more free we become the more dependent we are on the actions of others.

We now see that, one of the areas of greatest exploration in the next decades will be the human brain itself and the most basic understanding of our newly scientifically proved wholism, congruence and contiguity comes from work done on the brain. It is known clearly that while the heart must be regular or we die, in complete opposition the brain has to be irregular and largely chaotic or we suffer epilepsy. The epileptic fit is the brain in a spasm of extreme order. In its natural state the human brain is a chaotic organ. Out of this chaos emerges the process of thought and sense-making. Science has enabled us to see that the brain works not in mechanical parts but as a whole interconnected organ, just like the rest of the chaotic Planet, of which it is a small microcosm.

Humans lie in a continuing spiral of life, from microorganisms through to the furthest reaches of the universe. This simple complexity is visible at different scales of ‘magnification’ through the capacity of the human mind to imagine, invent and interpret intelligently. The most fascinating studies into the “swarm dynamics” of ants, birds, fish and bees show how the group behaves cooperatively as one body, for the end purpose of survival. If we look at a single ant, its behaviour appears random. But if we step back and look at the “whole” group or swarm of ants, an order materializes which shows purpose and direction and meaning. At various scales of our view, disorder is transformed into order, while at other times ordered behaviour looks chaotic. It is hard to draw the line between one and the other, for in Nature fuzziness is the norm. Nothing is black or white, for the closer you look the more intricate and indistinct things become.
Our days for drawing lines on maps and expecting sense from borders is over.

Our minds are an emergent property of our brains and to use our minds effectively we should somewhat understand how our brains function. Work in molecular and cell biology has documented evidence that under conditions stressful to internal and external environments of the brain, a global change takes place in the brain which is followed by a period of “malleability and adaptiveness”. Citing examples of tribal dance ceremonies, evangelical religious conversions, military indoctrination and sexual bonding, Walter Freeman notes, “Nonlinear dynamics and the theory of chaos offer new approaches to understanding these neurobiological mechanisms by which societies are formed and maintained.”[16]

His studies on Chaotic State Transitions in Brains bring to the notice of those leaders and Utopians interested in social change, that there is a form of learning which he believes is applicable to historical periods requiring rapid adaptation to change. In the age of the machine in the last century, this was used by dictators to “brainwash” people into subjection. In the Age of the Intellect we must metaphorically apply these chaotic state transitions in our brains, to understanding how we may learn to live together on a borderless planet, with a diminishing Natural World. Change in group mental attitudes and beliefs can occur through ritual and through “celebration” and are closely linked to neurobiological processes in the brain, which we are learning about more complexly, through current research and study.

As often happens, avant guard science confirms ancient practice. Ritual and “celebration” have always been change agents and tools for learning and reinforcement. The Utopian Celebration will use pleasure as a cementing factor for consciousness raising Conversation. Very recent studies have shown that neuroscientists believe brains are susceptible to a ‘feel good factor’ which could possibly influence every decision we make. These studies show that it may be that “even consciousness itself evolved from the simple sensing of pleasure and displeasure.”[17]. This is an important finding which the corporate market, we can see, has already appropriated in Advertising. Yet other sociobiologists are studying similarities of the workings of the human brain to the cybernetics of the Internet, and they pursue the creation of a virtual Global Brain, through the workings of the world wide web. These and other studies bring us closer to a greater understanding of the human Mind and Consciousness.

In Utopia we should be aware of the biological mechanisms by which social cohesion may be achieved. As the non-linear behaviour of our human brain is illuminated by today’s sophisticated technology and we push through the borderless nature of matter, the timeless wisdom of the ancients is also confirmed. “Know thyself” are ancient words which surely mean that we must know not only our intellectual strengths, but also our intellectual and physical weaknesses.

This search for Utopia will suggest that in Utopia we will find that leadership is a mental construct which is of critical new importance. This is not the leadership of others to whom we are subject, this is the leadership of ourselves, to enable us to decide the democracy of our self organized existence. Democracy in the 21st century is not the word we hear thrown at us by generals and presidents and dictators. Democracy is the freedom we give ourselves when we learn to lead ourselves. This is more powerful than any other kind of leadership because it shows us that we, not others, are the system, we are the institutions, we are the organisations, we are the government, we are the leaders. As soon as we understand this we are empowered. We want to know more about how we can know more, to empower ourselves to lead ourselves, to make decisions about who we should choose to make other decisions - in order that we may be further freed to lead ourselves in our own sphere of individual self organisation.

The spiral of this kind of leadership is the essence of democracy and true freedom because, it liberates us from contentious matter and takes us into higher regions of the mind - to articulate and address our values, our inspirations and our spiritual (not religious) needs. This is a change which is already with us when we see directions which thinking young Utopians are taking. Individual freedom and knowledge is cherished more than material possession. In broad society, however, blind followership of “cool fashion” leads to dumbing down of awareness and literacy. It is a form of slavery to consumerism which was rife in the 20th century and is still alive at the start of the new millennium.

Nevertheless, governments everywhere, leaders in institutions, dictators in democracies and dictators in dictatorships would do well to observe the Big Change that is emerging out of the chaos of the present. The child of the industrial revolution is dying: Materialism is dying. It is a liberating death. The power of the mind is the new liberator. How important is it that children understand this kind of leadership of self-empowerment? How important is the emancipation that comes from leadership of ourselves? Says George Gilder, “Today the ascendant nations and corporations are not masters of land and material resources but of ideas….Wealth comes not to the conquerors of land but to the emancipators of the mind.”

Wealth is being redefined in Utopian terms as consciousness. There is an identifiable trend indicating that people would rather be poor in money, but wealthy in Awareness. Add to this the ominous findings of studies which suggest that conditions in industrial societies which once led to improved intellectual ability, tend to disappear as affluence increases. Affluence is historically the herald of intellectual decadence and impaired mental acuity. Leaders in Utopia can see that something is to be gained from the death of mechanism and materialism.

The fuzzy nature of our understanding is exploited by people who would seek to influence our minds. In a market integrated world almost every issue is clouded by fuzziness. Even the word ‘sustainability’ is now used more by economists than by ecologists. It is this endemic dependence on coherence, which paradoxically engineers an automatic blindness in people, as they rush to grapple with a faster more complex life. Social Fuzziology is taught just to deal with this complexity.[18] In Fuzziology the “drowning man paradox” is expressed thus: ‘The fuzzier an environment appears, the stronger the attachment to what seems non fuzzy in it.’

What it means is that in nonlinear times we lean heavily toward linearity. Terrorism and the simplistic political reaction to it, has shown that the “free” world has shifted to an awareness of an uncertainty and insecurity which, paradoxically, has caused humans to gravitate toward the certainty and security of what is suddenly a very “unfree” world. Out of habit, our leaders have responded to a 21st century problem, suicide bombing, by using non-complex 20th century, machine age tactics. The complicated problem and its non-complex response have proved very complex in their effects. This has happened in a very short period of time. Longer term consequences have yet to play themselves out on the world stage.

In Utopia, Utopians must consider the question of Leadership because, a new kind of leadership is vital to survival on a borderless planet. It is a kind of leadership which takes its understanding, not from power and wealth, but from ecological complexity, not from linear decision making but from contradiction and paradox. The critical test for leadership in Utopia is for the leader to be able to show others that individuality is achievable only by inclusion, by understanding and tolerating the opposite. In the use of Fuzzy Logic when dealing with social complexity, a tool has been created for consensus, which helps leaders to describe, analyse, understand and eventually work with difficult and chaotic social systems. [19] In this kind of consensus is to be found the “independency paradox” which is critical to ‘tolerating opposites’ and to allowing people ‘to act together’ by dissolving the mental construct of divisive borders. The paradox says, “it is only when social dependencies are established that, the interdependence emerges; and it is this collective interdependence (between people and between people and their environment) that provides the notion of individual independence with meaning.” This kind of complex understanding is born out of the Age of the Intellect and allows for a quality of leadership which Vladimir Dimitrov says has the power to “unite people in a common desire to be different, unique and creative.”

It is a kind of thinking which enables the United Nations, through visionary leadership and by understanding the insights provided by fuzzy logic and by the metaphors of complexity science (when applied to the intricacies of global living), to be transformed from earth’s largest organisation into earth’s largest living, breathing planetary organism - engaging and communicating ‘directly’ with Utopians. Utopians are the United Nations’ planetary citizens. Utopians are global citizens.

The Utopian Conversation enables individuals to see that it is they who are the organisation, it is they who are the system. Unless this awareness and self-empowerment to enable “leadership of oneself” is not understood by “streetleather”, the man, woman and child in the street, there will not be that consciousness which is prerequisite, for social change. In complexity science, “fractals” are capable of creating and making themselves over and over again and the smallest of understandings are capable of repetition and regeneration in this process of fractality. While the nature of the times is such that the global move is toward a state of unconsciousness, the aim of the Utopian Conversation and Celebration is to change this to Planetary Consciousness.

How important is it that we, and our leaders, understand Neitzche’s words, “Follow not me, but you.”? For our children to grow up safely, this is the first lesson they must understand. Philosophy and debate teach children the art of understanding the contradictions of life. Such a paradox and contradiction is the aphorism “The individual is the institution”. The nature of life is that we are the institutions we reside in - be they political parties, homes, schools, organisations, communities. Like the spiral of life there are no borders between workers and their organisations, followers and their leaders, schools and their children/teachers, students and their universities, government and the people, religious groups and their followers. We are each part of the system. Each of us change the system by being part of it - through understanding and acting. What we cannot control is the scale we operate in. Like ants we are random if we do not connect. We are more meaningful if we operate together. What appears chaotic at one scale is meaningful at another.

Among humans, overall meaning is defined and then understood through the medium of language. The visionary leader is one who can make this meaning credible and achievable. Here is where the leaders of the new millennium must be able to say on a global scale “I think, therefore I am - Utopian.” Utopian enough to understand that beggar and superpower are equal on a borderless Planet. Today, a Leader of others is one who can look beyond borders in time and space, to human survival as citizens on a single Planet. Leadership in the new millennium is to be put under the microscope, because our survival as a species on this planet depends on many leaders being able to understand that we are deeply connected with animals and plants - by our common requirement of Air, Water and Soil. These elements are borderless and obey no manmade rules. As a result, the poorest of the poor and the richest of the rich are always equally under a threat which favours neither. The Planet will survive after rich and poor humans are removed, by whatever means. Leaders of the world must understand this as well as you and I do, because they control the means by which we may as a species self-destruct. In survival mode it is to the cooperative mind not the competitive machine, to which we leaders of ourselves must turn.

The response to Terrorism was a War on Terror, which has paradoxically, multiplied our levels of terror by many times. The lesson we have learnt from terrorism is that “leadership” in our times should be examined under the complexity lens if we want to preserve our Paradise in Utopia. The brain in Utopia is our single most important organ for survival. It is the brain which, when exercised, helps us see past contradictions and accept opposites and paradox. Nietzche’s paradoxical words, “Follow not me, but You”, is a classic example of the contradictions of the times. We should follow ourselves through our own understanding, to understand the nature of our complete interdependency in the borderless world of Nature. Through awareness of the natural world and through understanding our technological strengths and ecological weaknesses, we can lead our own thinking to see our real “Ecological Predicament”. To deal with this huge ecological predicament we are going to need all the cooperation we can muster.

Looking at the world as a whole we see that to deal with this Ecological Predicament we should organically see ourselves as part of the earth’s largest organism - the United Nations. To be responsible Planetary Citizens in our interdependent world, each individual should drive the institution, which means we are each the smallest part of the United Nations. If the United Nations is a vital organisation in Utopia, then we are its vital components. The web of You and Me shows the vast work that the United Nations is both doing already and capable of. Participation changes the United Nations from an organisation into an Organism.

With all its weaknesses the United Nations has been a visionary organisation on this Planet. The single most valuable lesson Utopia can teach us is that, in an interdependent world, the governance of an international organisation will create an empowered, conscious citizen for our global times. Through understanding our dependence on the world of Nature we make decisions which reflect our interdependence upon each other. This leadership of Ourselves, will be the essence of true democracy in the 21st century. Empowered by it we will lead our leaders to lead us in our “ecological predicament”.

While scientists study the neurobiology of the brain to see how we may temporarily adapt to new situations, the purpose of an ecological Utopia is deeper and wider. The purpose of this Utopia is to create awareness for Planetary Citizenship. Not law, commerce, sport or war will help us here. Walter Freeman concedes that “the gap between neurobiology and sociology may seem wide and even unbridgeable except by analogy, metonymy and metaphor”. Analogy, metonymy and metaphor are tools in language. Being intelligent humans we look for ways of achieving awareness through language. Neither is a common language always required. Music transcends language barriers. The Utopian Celebration will use the music of the world to connect us. Nevertheless, our unique ability to speak will be our best tool. We need to “couple” with the problems which threaten to efface us from a Planet which will surely survive the ‘blink of time’ humans have been on it. Structural coupling is achieved in society through connection, cooperation and conversation. But, at the edge of human time, a conscious civilization must look not only to its strengths, it must look to its weaknesses, to save itself from terminal chaos.

The quest for Utopia then, leads us to the understanding that what we seek must be sought, not in the trademarks of our civilized “strengths” - religion, sport, technology and art, though we will use these in the service of the Intellect - but in the hidden hallmark of the frailty of being human. This hallmark is humanity’s complete dependence upon a diminishing LifeSupport, the Air, Water and Soil of the Natural World. Only a Conscious civilization can look beyond the arrogant limitations of our “strengths” to see the Paradise we already have on Earth. This is the earth we would like our children to enjoy whether we are Muslim, Christian, Hindu, Buddhist or Bahai. The frailty of our being human is not changed by religion. The frailty of being human means that like animals and plants we are subject to the elements of Nature. The elements of Nature are the very basis of the Paradise we already have on Earth. This is a Utopian essay or attempt, to bring us to ‘realize’ the Paradise that remains, before we accidentally, catastrophically, exercise our right to lose it altogether.

In my mind, including children is a potent step for Utopia. In the blink of an eye children are citizens. They are the future of Utopia. They have human energy which is new, untested and youthful. Above all they must learn to live in a borderless world where if there must be a God, it is Nature. To arrive at this conclusion this story is taken from an essay by William Dalrymple, “A Profound Kinship. (Islam and Christianity)” written in 1998. This story is retold for Utopians, adults and children.

“ ‘The 13th century Sufi Jalal-ud Din Rumi, perhaps the greatest of all the mystical writers of Islam, lived in a town in central Anatolia in which the population was almost equally divided between Muslims, Christians and Jews. When he was asked about the relationship between these three apparently incompatible religions, he replied with the following story: ‘Once upon a time, in a far-distant country somewhere north of Aghanistan, there was a city inhabited entirely by the blind. One day the news came that an elephant was passing outside the walls of the city.

‘The citizens called a meeting and decided to send a delegation of three men outside the gates so that they could report back what an elephant was. In due course the three men left the town and stumbled forwards until they eventually found the elephant. The three reached out, felt the animal with their hands, then they all headed back to town as quickly as they could to report what they had felt. The first man said: “An elephant is a marvellous creature! It is like a vast snake, but it can stand vertically upright in the air!” The second man was indignant at hearing this: “What nonsense!” he said, “I felt the elephant and what it most resembles is a pillar. It is firm and solid and however hard you push against it you could never knock it over.” The third man shook his head and said: “Both these men are liars! I felt the elephant and it resembles a broad fan. It is wide and flat and leathery and when you shake it, it wobbles like the sail of a dhow.”

‘All three men stuck by their stories and for the rest of their lives refused to speak to each other. Each professed that they and only they knew the whole truth.

‘Now of course all three of the blind men had a measure of insight. The first man felt the trunk of the elephant, the second the leg, the third the ear. All had been granted part of the truth, but not one of them had begun to grasp the totality or the greatness of the beast they had encountered. If only they had listened to one another and mediated on the different facets of the elephant, they may have grasped the true nature of the beast. But they were too proud and instead preferred to keep to their own half truths.

‘So it is with us. We see Allah one way, the Jews have a slightly different conception and the Christians have a third. To us all our different versions are irreconcilable. But what we forget is that before God we are like blind men stumbling around in total darkness…’ ” [20] Today, I feel the wise Sufi would also agree that before Nature we are like fully sighted, completely dependent, frail beings - without clean air, water and soil we die. Years ago I heard this story with a different twist, not making a religious point but making an environmental point - in looking at the enormity of our environmental problem we are like those blind men. We each see only part of the huge problem. Academics, scientists and mathematicians have only grasped a small section each of the total ecological predicament we are faced with. We must converse, connect and cooperate to remove our ignorance, our unconsciousness, to see the totality of our plight or suffer the fate of fools and mindless matter.

With this in mind the Society of the Mind is asked to make everything as simple as possible but not any simpler, as Albert Einstein said we should. With this in mind Appendix 3 challenges Utopians to create a game for a schoolchild’s Utopia - with an emphasis on paperless activity. With this in mind this essay suggests that the Utopia of a Conscious Civilization should look at a very small book to make a small start. This book measures just 5 inches by 5 inches and is just 141 small pages long. It is called “The Little Earth Book”.

In it is truly everything a child and a conscious citizen in a busy world need to know to become leaders of themselves and begin to act and know with the intellect appropriate to the new millennium. In this book is sufficient substance to generate a vortex of knowledge and action if we could all know it. This book was sent to me in Australia as a gift from a friend in England but it gave also the gift of Mohandas Gandhi’s words, which I did not know until I read them in this book, “Freedom is to be attained by educating the people to a sense of their capacity to regulate and control authority.” This is indeed the ‘leadership of oneself’ in other words - because it objectifies ‘a sense of capacity’ which implies the authority of Awareness to regulate and control our other leaders. Until we have this sense of capacity and authority of awareness, we will remain John Ralston Saul’s “Unconscious Civilization”.[21] In the final chapter of “The Little Earth Book”, publisher Alistair Sawday says,

“In his book ‘The Seventh Enemy’, Ronald Higgins outlined the 6 major threats facing us back in the 1970s. The seventh, and deadliest, was the one we are now staring in the face: our own inability to get off our backsides. He was describing apathy, and as I look back on the last 25 years a chill runs down my spine. He was right. Do we now know enough to tackle our apathy, or - more kindly - our institutional inertia?”[22]

His question is: do we now know enough to tackle our apathy, or more kindly, our institutional inertia? This is a question which lies at the heart of having ‘a sense of capacity’ and at the centre of the conundrum of Awareness. Is it that we don’t care to know more about our planetary future or is it that we are not Aware enough to care enough? I believe the latter to be true.

If we were more Aware we would act and participate more. This essay is an attempt to present a Utopian pathway to Awareness through individual empowerment; and through individual empowerment the ‘engenesis’ of an existing institution, the United Nations. The United Nations is an institution with an enormous membership of global citizens. The Utopian Conversation and Celebration will create the ether of awareness and the threadlike substance of a Utopian Vortical Web, to show that this citizenry is both you and me.

It is not that we don’t care. It is that we are not aware enough to care more. This essay provides the start for a new millennium, global Utopian Conversation and the start of an ancient, global ritual of Utopian Celebration, to generate Awareness to create the substance most needed in the new millennium - Consciousness.

“None are so helplessly enslaved than those who falsely believe that they are free.” Goethe.

A sense of apocalypse and the start of the new millennium are experiences driving a doomsday force of gathering intensity, as fundamental religious hopes, perceptions of environmental degradation and human desperation converge. Utopists are important people indeed. Like beacons on a nearly visible shore, signifying that through the dust, smoke, chemical haze and natural cloud, a paradise is possible, Utopists may also show that a Paradise is probably already there, waiting in the simple complexity of its potential existence. To bring this ship to shore the Utopian Society of our Mind seeks to dissipate the dust, smoke, haze and cloud. It believes that: by detangling the current “attractors” of war, sport and terror it is possible to dredge and shift the depth of their lodgement in valleys and basins of current attraction; and by celebrating the creative forces of the Natural World, it is possible to allow the utopian gaze to fall on peaks of peace and survival.

But what are the attractors which are engaging us so thoroughly as to prevent the existence of a society where “mind” is ascendant? How may we identify these forces of entropy? Making distinction between massive, money-driven, institutionalized, commercial sport and healthy, participant sport played by You and Me, it is possible to draw a parallel between spectator sport and war, to demonstrate their current ascendency. Both either neglect or deny the true needs of humanity in the 21st century and both excite and are excited by emotion and instinct. Both satisfy the need for power, identity and money. Both see conflict as a spark to be ignited, to be lived for a short while, ending it is always hoped, in one side’s victory and glory and defeat of the opponent, putting an end to the spark of hope which ignited the act. Both are bodily engagements, temporarily attracting intellectual engagement. Both are apocalyptic (victory and defeat) and millennial (engendering and ending hope).

They are together reflective of pulling back the crossbow, flexing muscle, total engagement in the frenzy of the fight, decimation of the opposite, the triumph of the glorious, the self flagellation of the defeated and the uncertain calm of the aftermath of the battle. In society today the human body is esteemed beyond the Intellect, through media glorified sport and war. Driven by esteem and elevated by exclusiveness, the Olympics are both an inspiration and an extraordinary expenditure of emotion and money, rivalled only by ‘son of star wars’ and other exercises in shock and awe. While the Olympics have served the purpose of bringing Nations together for competition, we must now go beyond. We must look to the Utopian sport of Cooperation to celebrate the Intellect.

Bringing the ship to our Utopian shore, in a Society of the Mind, is a fully satisfying mental exercise, capable of resolution beyond physicality. This is the purpose of the Utopian Conversation and Celebration. When you and I connect in intellectual sport, the potentiality of anticipated emergence and the actuality of creative discussion, satisfy the need for engagement with other beings in far more complex terms. Debate and discussion, discourse and dialogue obviate the necessity for physical war in Utopia. Conversation, conceptualization, connection and complex “coherent communication” are the sport of Utopia. These skills of the intellect are played without injury to limb. This is the sport of winning and losing without loss of life or wounding.

If, instead of waging ‘war on terrorism’ we ask John Burton’s question, “Why does it occur?” [23] then an instinctive response becomes an intellectual response. We seek not to crush an emergent phenomenon but, instead, search for wider and deeper understanding and insight into it. The War on Terror has shown that Jerome B. Wiesner, Science Advisor to Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, should also have advised our leaders today. He said then, “Some problems are just too complicated for rational, logical solutions. They admit insights, not answers.”[24]

In a Society of the Mind, terrorism is not a problem for the “rational” solution of war. War is a physical, instinctive response. Terrorism demands an intellectual awareness and insights much deeper than the “information” conveyed by electronic surveillance, by human spying or by the gimmick of fridge magnets. Terrorism demands 21st century insight into human complexity and an understanding of the supremacy of nature’s laws. Once this is understood, then cooperation is possible between opposite cultures, different religions and unequal wealth to find and deter terrorists of any persuasion.

One kind of terrorism comes from the fundamental belief in the power of religion. Another kind of terrorism germinates from greed and ignorance about the squalid and endemic nature of poverty. It needs Awareness not ‘information’, insight not ‘intelligence’, to understand that the other kind of terrorism’s cultural support comes from the absence of twin necessities to remove poverty - ecological security and social justice. But, if we were to ask which of these necessities ranks first, then only a Utopian perspective would be able to give us the correct answer. There can be no society without ecological awareness of our common ecological predicament. There can be no humans in Utopia without the acknowledgement of the LifeSupport of nature’s elements.

Terrorists in corporate boardrooms and terrorists in planes, need to remember that neither technology nor religion rank before the LifeSupport of Nature.

When educated terrorists set out to make spectacular statements against “democracy” - what is it they are trying to say? Could it be that they are trying to tell us that today’s democracy is not what it seems to be made out to be? In their paper “Globalisation - Democracy in Decline” Robert Woog & Vladimir Dimitrov observe that “the decline in democracy and the desire to maintain it appear to be serving the same ends. There is a tension between individual democracy and the democracy of individuality.”[25] While the number of democracies in the world has risen, it is almost impossible to say that we are truly more free. There is no freedom and independence of the individual without acceptance of the responsibility and dependence of the individual. Unless we learn to lead ourselves to the understanding that in a world of interconnectedness and interdependency, the LifeSupport is first in importance, we are subjects of Dangerous Democracies, where false human superiority, misunderstood power and indulgent individualism abound.

In danger of being swallowed up by the ‘democracy of globalisation’, Australian Aboriginals and other disappearing indigenous people of the world have lived life for centuries, without the need to conquer and annex territory or to dominate and manipulate nature. The essence of this indigenous ability to be close to and at the same time distant from nature, comes from a union of the human spirit with nature which we are only now beginning to understand is a complex consciousness, rising far above our modern or even post modern awareness. It is a consciousness that signifies ritual rather than religion; and relates to living rather than expressing belief.

Religion and technology give us the illusion of invincibility, the false assurance of sovereignty and the strength of sacrifice for martyrdom, but they do not give us the elements of Nature, without which we die. Using our species-unique ability to communicate, in churches and mosques, in schools and universities, in government and industry - through the Utopian Society of the Mind - we must use the ritual of connection, conversation and cooperation to create an Awareness of the extreme fragility of our being ‘human’, interlocked, as we are, with our LifeSupport of Nature.

Reflecting our movement from the machine metaphor of the industrial age, to the living, evolving, self organized criticality of an Age of the Intellect, we will move towards becoming a Utopian society engaged in a revolution of the mind. In Utopia the mind matters more. And so, appropriate to the Age of the Intellect, the emerging constellation of new cultural images of the civilized times are not the gun, the football and the religious book - but the Web, the Butterfly, nature’s Vortex and the Brain. None of these images is manmade. These are the products of Nature’s elements which today must form the symbols of Cooperation, Connection and Conversation for survival - on a borderless Planet with a diminishing Natural World.

The concept of borders in nature is virtually nonexistent. Borders as in lines on maps or concrete walls, do nothing to contain nature’s elements. In perversely opposite fashion, border porosity is nature’s way. It is an evolutionary tactic. The elements of Nature recognize no borders, obey no manmade rules. The emergent phenomenon of “terror” - as also the phenomena of finance, the market, drugs and disease - are not contained by borders. Peace therefore does not depend on borders for its existence.

Indeed, borders destroy Peace by creating conditions for the conception of war. As a conscious civilization we must look away from borders for our security. If, by using our capacity for understanding we look instead to ‘the basis for human existence’ for our common security, we establish our right of entry into the Age of the Intellect. We make the LifeSupport the prime requisite for Peace. We cannot find Utopia in the 21st century without the primary accession that Air, Water and Soil are the basis for Peace.

That “borders give us false security” is an understanding born of a primordial complexity which predates by millions of years, the 20th century’s search for Peace which eventually gave birth to the United Nations. It is never too timely to remind ourselves of the horrors of the sSecond World War, which brought about formation of the United Nations. The very first of four purposes listed in the charter of the UN is that of preserving peace and security. The United Nations has served the Utopian purpose of providing a global forum in the search for peace for the past half century.

It is an unrecognized fact today, that being able to keep nations seated around a table with the express purpose of dialogue, even during war, is itself an Utopian achievement of “civilization” in our times. It is a mark of our species that we are able to talk and today the need to talk is ever more important. The Preamble to the Charter of the UN clearly describes why we need to communicate. The Preamble begins: “We the people of the United Nations determined - to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war…..”.

The truth is that today, we know much more. Half a century after the formation of the United Nations, we recognize that attempts to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war are doomed, if we have destroyed The Natural World. We know that Peace is meaningless without the LifeSupport because Life without Air, Water and Soil is nonexistent. Life is an intricate web in space and time and to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war we must first save the web of Life. The scourge of war is perpetuated by our inability to acknowledge that all beings are interdependent threads in a very delicate global web. “The atoms we take in from the air to become part of our bodies were once parts of other people, of trees, of worms, of snakes and spiders The water we drink in Australia was once a part of the Amazon jungle, the forests of Canada and the oceans of the world. We have forgotten that…..if we put poison into the air, water and soil we just as surely put poison into our children.” So said David Suzuki, speaking at the Australian Museum, in Sydney, in 1989. In the age of the Intellect our conscious minds must also tell us that this is so.

For fifty years the olive branches of the UN have been the one symbol of unity and peaceful communication between nations. To sit at the International Round Table of dialogue without acknowledging the centrality of The Natural World in the Charter of the United Nations, is to fail at the very start, to deflect the focus off war and on to the prime precondition for peace, the LifeSupport of the Natural World. To not shift the focus off the instinctive response of war is to not change the adversarial ethic that pervades the present culture of an industrial age.

Conversely, to recognize in the Charter that the LifeSupport of the Natural World is central to “nature dependent” humans and other interdependent beings, is to establish a new point of reference for Peace. To recognize that the LifeSupport is a PRECURSOR to peace is to establish a new international, institutional benchmark, which is the basis for human existence and which precedes and presupposes peace. To acknowledge this, signifies that we have entered a new age of the Intellect, appropriate to the 21st century.

A 21st Century Update, for Individuals and Institutions in the Age of the Intellect.

Central to today’s Utopia is the need for all individuals and every international and national institution to acknowledge the fact of interlocking Interdependence, which prevails upon all beings. In an interdependent world the actions of one government, rich or poor, can endanger the safety of the borderless LifeSupport, which is shared by the peoples of the world, be they Muslim or Christian, Hindu or Jewish, Shiite or Sunni, Buddhist or Bahai, rich or poor, good or bad. There can be no peace, no national security, no religious freedom and no Utopia without this single precondition.

Today we understand that peace is “a nonsense” without the security of Air, Water and Soil. Neither religion nor technology, both drivers of fundamental human beliefs and behaviour, can substitute the elements of Air, Water and Soil. Peaceful human existence is impossible without their LifeSupport. The interconnected web making up the LifeSupport is the prime requisite for peace - for beggar and superpower alike. With this understanding pervading the global psyche, the international forum can legitimately shift the global focus from arms, technology, war and wealth - to the basic elemental Web of Life on earth.

Those who sit around the United Nations International Round Table of dialogue, be it in the Security Council or in the General Assembly, or indeed in any of the United Nations many organs and specialized agencies, must be able to declare as the benchmark referent of the United Nations Charter, what physicist Fritjof Capra has called the “web of life”,[26] - that which is understood to be the fundamental global commons and which this essay calls: The LifeSupport.

To this extent, this essay suggests that the LifeSupport is a precursor to peace. It is essential to the Age of the Intellect and Utopia, to incorporate this basic fact, into the Preamble to the United Nations Charter, as follows:

“We the peoples of the planet,
Acknowledging that the borderless Natural World of Air, Water and Soil is the LifeSupport of the planet,
Agreeing that the security of this LifeSupport is the forerunner of Peace and Progress on the planet,
Understanding that Humans, Animals and Plants are completely inter-dependent upon each other and upon the elements of Air, Water and Soil, and
Perceiving that all inter-dependent beings and elements are linked together in an inter-connected and unbreakable chain - which is the web of life:

Accept that the LifeSupport of the planet is common to all nations and thereby

State that the LifeSupport of the planet is the key to saving global citizens and succeeding generations from the scourge of war.”

“And that inverted bowl we call The Sky, Whereunder crawling coop’t we live and die, Lift not thy hands to It for help - for It Rolls impotently on as Thou or I.”

The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (ca 1048 - 1122).

In the Utopian Vortical Web, the centrality of the Natural World and its survival is embodied by the life and death of You and Me. We are at the very centre of the vortex and the web. The challenge is to prove that we are not impotent to change the way things are for a better future. We are capable of creating global ecological awareness and Utopian Consciousness.

Once the United Nations is able to pursue peace on the basis that the LifeSupport is essential for human existence, by making this fundamental fact a benchmark referent in the Charter, it will be morally braced by this essential reform to pursue Peace on a new platform. It will be able to remind the rulers of the world of their inherent vulnerability to the weakest form of life, in a world of total complex interdependence.

The nuclear accident at Chernobyl has proved that national borders mean nothing to Air. Similarly contaminated Water and Soil obey no manmade laws. Humans and their technological strength have no absolute power over earth’s elements. Religion cannot give us clean Air, Water and Soil for food. Protecting the LifeSupport now becomes the first responsibility of Governments, heading each country’s National List. In the web of life beggar and superpower are codependent on nature’s elements and the United Nations is strengthened by this common understanding.

We have much to be grateful for what is happening in thousands of ways around the world to protect the Natural World. But this is woefully slow compared to the speed of destruction and exploitation of the Natural World. The impact of the global corporate market is far more powerful in creating cultural memes which negate the work of environmental non governmental organisations (ENGOs) protecting the Natural World. The market and its attendant forces of money and media have presided over the destruction of critical civic literacy and this destruction is proceeding faster than the ecoliteracy so urgently needed for Edmund O’Sullivan’s “period of decline” [27]. In his essay “Utopia of a Global Market” Pierre Bourdieu has given us a chilling picture of what is still to come, as public and civil commons vanish as a result of corporate advertising and brainwash, in the “utopia of endless exploitation.”[28]

Academics call for critical literacy, conceptual clarification, sustainable learning and ecoliteracy. The Union of Concerned Scientists called for greater action to be taken. At great advertising, paper and emotional cost, Environmental and Non Governmental Organisations struggle through paid and unpaid volunteers to repair and restore, to protect and conserve. Research on best methods is examined, government policy direction is revamped, books, magazines and papers are written, audiovisual documentaries of great beauty and pathos are screened, radio and television journalism passionately explicates current problems in all countries. But still the Natural World shrinks. The work done by various UN organs and bodies is today truly utopian in its performance and achievement. But still the LifeSupport of You and Me is disappearing. After all the effort by global individuals and organisations, the UN Report Global Environmental Outlook declared that the present approach was “not sustainable” and doing nothing was no longer an option.[29]

What shall we do? Inter-nationally? Nationally? Locally?
From a complexity point of view we have two options open to us: “Cooperate or Perish”. But this exercise in Utopian thinking believes that we may have one more option. Ecological awareness of our planet’s ecological predicament may be summed up through “Celebration”.

But before we do anything to protect us from ourselves by establishing global citizenry, one understanding must occur. Evolution occurs within a medium. Striving to survive needs the assistance of tools. Technology helped in the age of the machine. In the age of the Intellect we need something more sensitive, subtle and sophisticated. Among humans this is our species-unique ability to speak in languages. Distinguishing between manipulative, meandering, maundering “legal” language and true communication, if we are to understand the implications of living on a borderless planet with a diminishing Natural World - it is in Conversation - that we bring our ship to the Utopian shore.

The Utopia of survival means we must Converse, Connect, Cooperate and Celebrate, to evolve into Planetary Citizens.

The language of War perpetuates War. If we speak of crusades and war on terror the adversarial ethic of the age of technology answers with the language of war - bombs, terror, violence, destruction, arms and weapons. The language of the new millennium must be the language of the intellect, of nature and complexity, to produce the language of Peace.

Using our new reference point in the Preamble to the United Nations Charter, the LifeSupport becomes the acknowleged precursor to peace, in an altered space of organic and intellectual relevance. It will be the responsibility of the UN to shift its “language” from the machine metaphor appropriate for an industrial age, to the metaphor of an evolving, cooperating, interconnected living organisation. All institutions and organisations, nationally and internationally, are asked to follow the lead of the UN, empowering a global behaviour which matches the survival strategies employed by our earliest cellular ancestors.

Appropriating principles and perspectives provided by a ‘complexity’ understanding of life’ will push the understanding for common survival even further. Foremost among these principles are, the dynamics of cooperation instead of competition, feedback and networking, butterfly effects and sensitivity to initial conditions, self organized criticality for emergence, intellectual turbulence and Vorticity. Though each of these concepts has a classic fit with Utopia and Nature, it is beyond the scope of this essay to explain these principles but learning about them may be easily accessed on the world wide web. The language of complexity moves our psychosocial evolution into an age of the Intellect. The cultural language informing all cultures becomes as we shall see, not the simple-minded language of the machinery of War, but the processes of the complex, higher global brain for Peace.

“Butterfly effects” have been mathematically proven but their public understanding comes through the delicate imagery of the words. A “butterfly effect” is metaphorically explained as the tornado caused in Texas, by the whisper effect of the breeze from a butterfly flapping its wings in Bejing. “Butterfly effects” are scientific proof of the complexity principle that great change may result from extremely sensitive initial conditions. “Attractors” are states that emerge as they come into our understanding. “Attractors” are powerful agents of change because they alter our conceptual understandings and insights.

As the Utopian Conversation generates the “butterfly effect” of awareness and action, the changes in understood social behaviour produce new “attractors” born of our understanding, which then create understood behavioural change. The “attractors” of money, power, status and material possessions are slowly changed by the currency of language. They are superceded by “attractors” of relationships, values, sharing and caring - all abstract concepts which are appropriate to the age of the intellect, quite opposite to material attractions which are appropriate to an industrial age. “Attractors” however will dissipate if they are not sustained by the “integrated self-propelling, self sustaining and self centered whole” of the “Vortex” [30]

Global consciousness for Planetary citizenship is sustained and propelled by the vortex of energy produced by a Utopian Conversation and the subsequent Celebration. The Utopian Vortical Web is a dynamic, emergent and self generating global force, transforming awareness into action and Gandhi’s ‘sense of capacity’ into conscious change. Understood change is both a product of and a precondition for, social evolution. If Terrorism’s cultural support is born of social and environmental poverty compared with social and environmental plenty, then we must understand that Complex-survival sharing should be employed by those who have enough to give. Why? Because the new level playing field is a borderless planet - borderless for Air, Water and Soil and borderless for disease, drugs, finance, poverty, goodwill and “terror”.

The Planet is borderless for Nature’s elements and borderless for terrorism. The cost of not understanding this simple complexity and resolving the root cause of terrorism, is indeed more terrorism. A war on terrorism is a mechanical response. A Utopian response is intellectual explication of the word “terror” and its diverse origins, as well its ramifications upon the Paradise, which the inscription on the piece of Islamic architecture in India says is here, with us, Now. The language and metaphors we use in this conversation must not be those of war - war destroys Paradise. The language and metaphors we use must be those of Nature - which feeds and waters us.

Never was a language for complex global change more needed to support and sustain the global brain we now need to ensure the survival of the species. Never was a Utopian Conversation more necessary.

But - why must we converse? And - why look to a conversation on “terror”? The answer to the first question comes from academic and futurist Richard Eckersley. In an essay titled “The end of the world - as we know it”, written in January 2001, he writes about fundamentalism and issues which prevail almost prophetically. His words underpin this essay and suggest my contextually relative Utopia of present day relevance.

“ In ordinary times it is perhaps normal for different planes of perception and understanding of the human condition to remain relatively separate and distinct, with little friction or influence occurring between them. In transitional epochs, when what it is to be human is undergoing profound evaluation and radical alteration, these planes of perception need to come together in a single, interwoven public conversation.

Ours is such a time.” [31]

Within the context of many realities of vastly differing global situations, of social and environmental degradation, we turn to Karl Popper’s conclusion that “social midwifery is the only perfectly reasonable activity open to us.”[32] Marius de Geus’ “rebuilding the ship at sea” is the same as Karl Popper’s “social midwifery” but described by another name. If we add to these Eckersley’s “public conversation” then what we see is three of many thinking people, suggesting a Utopia in action.

Participatory Action Research (PAR) is a good example of public conversation, social midwifery and rebuilding the ship while it is at sea, for we are in a situation today where everyone together must bring forth and give birth to, social change in the world. In a paper “Some thoughts on Social Change”, [33] biologist, sociologist, author and distinguished professor Mary E. Clark, lists the Parameters of Change and in doing so she asks, “How aware is the society of a “need” to change?”. In her opinion, a society’s psychic dependence on its worldview (which includes whether that society believes itself to be “ahead” and “superior” - in which case it is less likely to entertain change than if it believes the world and itself to be “imperfect”) and the extent to which that society includes change as an integral component of its worldview (where the West believes in linear progress and accepts change, while the East experiences change passively at one end and at the other end it fundamentally tends to exclude change) are two critical parameters of change.

Speaking from a rich lifetime of experience, Mary Clark’s Prerequisites for non-destructive change, then, are first that “a ‘critical mass’ of people must accept the need for change” and second “a requisite amount of social energy must be available.” In keeping with the global citizen/ global brain perspective brought to this exercise, Mary Clark has extended the point of the question: “Why must we converse?” and given weight to my own conclusion that a Utopian understanding for living on a borderless planet with a diminishing Natural World needs globally coherent Conversation.

Through the cooperation, participation and action of The Utopian Vortical Web (UVW) we enable the creation of a critical mass of social energy, which is required for ecological security and change.
This Utopian public conversation then aims to connect earth’s largest existing international organisation with the individual at the local level to generate a Vortex of Awareness and change. Everywhere on earth, in particular in places where humans have no access to internet and other technology, the Utopian Vortical Web and the UN will seek to create a public conversation for simple survival. The aim of this Public Conversation is Utopian.

It is a strategy for 21st century survival conducted by a global intellect through the global citizenship of behaviour. I ask other individuals to add to this suggestion, to increase its sophistication but, at this moment, this is a simple start. Using the survival of its children and citizens as its basis and charged by the Preamble of the UN Charter to protect the common LifeSupport, the Utopian Conversation aims to permeate our social mental constructs, to alter our social behaviour, to temper the justice, political and health systems, to advocate a spirit of global citizenship and to redefine our perceptions of governance at all levels. The Conversation aims to create a conscious global citizen through the United Nations.

To bring global problems to an optimal dealing point, three urgent themes each year are selected and the conversation proceeds along those lines. All information relating to those topics is disseminated to saturation point, to raise awareness and clarify conceptual understanding of action needed globally and locally. For instance: How many people understand the ramifications and implications of the Kyoto Agreement? How widespread is the understanding of the need to say “I have enough” in the West? How soon may we expect all our energy needs to come from solar heat? Will “sustainability” be subsumed by an elite few, thus excluding the many who cannot afford its advantages?

The complexity of thousands of issues at once includes and excludes each one of us. The leadership of ourselves empowers us. Through coordinated research, media focus, public debate and discussion at school, university, industry and community levels these topics will be linked by Utopian Conversation and Celebration to recognition and award, publicity and visibility to raise their popularity and cultural attractiveness. Through a new legitimacy provided by the primary recognition of the Natural World in the preamble of the UN Charter, the relevance and importance of the LifeSupport is enforceable and enshrined in global institutions and a Utopian Conversation for Awareness under the auspices of the United Nations is enabled everywhere, in cyberspace and in real space. We are lifted by Awareness into a global intellectual conversation.

In Australia, the UN has been called “the lynchpin of collective security”, by a unique voice of civil society, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. These words are more than just fine words. They are a description of society’s mental construct of the organisation called the United Nations. This is a construct needing expansive dissemination. The public media, free speech, the voice of civil society, itself globally under threat, is critical to the formation of our social mental constructs. It is part of the social “commons” which like world heritage sites should belong to the world and its people but which, along with many other publicly owned commons, is slowly being lost to rich private ownership. Once these tracts of publicly owned commons are sold off, civil society will not own them again without another ‘French Revolution’- for that persuasive legal system will competently incorporate these once publicly owned “commongrounds” into stocks and shares of the economy, belonging then to invisible people. This is the nature of the beast of privatisation - to want more.

In Australia we fight to keep this vital voice of civil society free and the ABC in Australia serves as a model for free speech in every country. That it is free, is evidenced by the fact that it is often the object of criticism by both sides of politics, when in government. Free media is the critical instrument in creating the medium of the language of the Utopian Conversation. Through the United Nations and the voice of civil society, one of the first topics of our Conversation would be to explore the root cause of terror and the closely allied mother topic of Ecology.

In his essay “Ecotopia, Sustainability and Vision” de Geus makes an important critique of the Dutch debate on ecology and economy and he lists comprehensive points of issue and strategy for a sustainable future both in the context of this debate and otherwise. Exactly these points of discussion are the vectors in the Vortex of Awareness which is generated by the proposed Utopian Conversation.

Since each country is an interlocking thread in the web of life, each point needing global discussion will result very soon in the formation of a metaphorical ‘global brain’, to detangle these borderless problems. Answers arrived at in one country will be shared and applied in other countries, contextually adapted to the state of the nation. Much of this is happening now but without broad institutional recognition and without the legitimacy of internationally directed and coordinated authority. In the wake of increased “terror” flowing from the war on terror, a revamped Preamble to the UN Charter which recognizes that the precursor to peace is the LifeSupport of human existence, will be an acknowledged and common starting point to the Utopian Conversation, now so desperately needed in the furthest reaches of our lonely planet.

One of the first conversations the global brain will need to have will probably centre around John Burton’s question, “Why does terrorism occur?” If we want to produce more lateral thinking, an additional question may be, “Will renewable energy stop terrorism?” More provocatively and radically we might include discussion on, “Can terrorism push us to find solutions to surviving in a finite world?” No matter what the topic, the intent is to stimulate an intellectual vortex of debate in small cornershops at street level and in public debates via media. The Conversation will create a global awareness of conditions necessary for human existence in every borderless country. The Conversation will remove “old men’s solutions” of building 40 ft. concrete barriers and walls to keep out borderless terrorism and to keep in borderless peace. The Utopian Conversation will bring the Palestinian and Israeli conflict off the war table and on to the table of dialogue, not simply in the region, but across the borderless world.

The Utopian Conversation will constructively search for complex/simple answers from the world of Nature, to which elements we are ultimately subject. This Utopian Conversation is always moderated and guided by the Utopian organisation - the United Nations - which is a living organism because it is made up of you and me. This is a conversation made legitimate by the United Nations Charter to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war - having conceded in the Preamble that we are all Interdependent beings, subject equally to the LifeSupport of Nature.

Individuals in Institutions - The Web of You and Me and the United Nations.

Religion and borders divide us. Our speech and intellect unite us. The complexity of nature, knowledge and process has progressed exponentially while humans have been on earth but, the organisation of how to share this knowledge, has not changed with effect. In his book

“The 20th century witnessed the greatest flowering of knowledge in humanity’s million year story. But at its end there were more poor, more hungry, more wretched, excluded and dispossessed than ever…This I believe is because the driving engine of the 20th century innovation wasn’t science, it was war……Somehow we value the act of creating knowledge a thousand times or more above the act of sharing the knowledge so that it becomes useful.” [34]

Once the United Nations sees the value of furthering individual ecological awareness to further its own aims, the Utopian Conversation becomes a powerful tool for sharing knowledge and raising broad awareness globally. At any level the model for Utopian Conversation and Celebration presented here, deliberately encourages a multispecialty web of communication, which provides the stimulus to link up with an agency at the United Nations. If we wish to be ecologically aware Utopians, all we need to do is find and fill in the names of individuals with whom, or based on whose example, we may wish to form a specific or non-specific functional web, to enable action and shared knowledge.

The web-of You and Me is a Utopian Vortical Web (UVW). The Utopian Vortical Web links individuals in institutions with leaders of science and technology, media and civil society, ecology and science, sustainable industry with publications, events and debates - thus persuading the web to diversify solutions and seek help outside like-boundaries. The UVW seeks to breakdown borders, to overcome the secrecy of specialization, to revel in multidiscipline, to connect with confidence and to cross cultural barriers. Including children in these webs, will bring Utopian citizens and pre citizens into their future. Diversity is a catalysing force. By using the resources of global NGOs and ENGOs, the many existing Centres for Action, ecological Thinktanks and the local and international resources of the United Nations - we become empowered to protect our own piece of paradise.

By acknowledging the interdependence of all beings in the Natural World in the preamble to the Charter of the UN, ordinary people will be given visibility, legitimacy and the relevance of national importance, to enable them to share consciousness with the world’s largest organisation, the United Nations. The www.web-of-unme.com presented in Appendix 2 initiates the move to create a requisite amount of social energy emanating from critical masses of people, who have accepted the need to change. The model presented is open to change, development and improvement. Crucially, it denotes first the “self leadership” required to change oneself to reflect Mohandas Gandhi’s famous saying, “Be the change you want to see.”

The model presented here is apolitical, nonreligious and primarily adopts an ecological perspective. It ‘emerges’ from an amalgam of complexity concepts and describes the principles of living organisms by connection, networking, feedback, the emergence of sustaining attractors and the intellectual turbulence of vorticity. Its primary aim and use is to raise ecological awareness for survival. It therefore has the image of the spider’s Web [See Appendix 1] but takes its spirit from Nature’s Vortex. [See Appendix 2]

Most importantly the model links spatially, by its ability to join the action occurring anywhere at local or root level, to the action occurring at an International level because, each of the areas webbed is represented by a body of the UN. The United Nations University (UNU), the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) are organs geared up to coordinate their existing resources with those of specialized agencies such as the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), and other organs such as the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM) and the United Nations Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR). By including children in our Utopia, we will infuse with even more energy, the excellent enthusiasm of the United Nations Youth Association (UNYA).

Is it possible to mix urbane consciousness and simple naivety in such a vortex of communication?
I feel so. Right now, the 14th general election is being held in the world’s largest logistical democratic exercise, in the form of the world’s most technically advanced election ever held. In India, 5 million election officers will assist by taking voting power to some of the most remote and some of the most populous places, some places only accessible by elephant back and helicopter, in an election where voting electronically will save the equivalent of a few national parks of trees in paper.

When individuals and institutions connect for any specific purpose through the Utopian Conversation they involuntarily have volunteered to connect to create global consciousness - through a suggested United Nations Utopian Vortical Web (UNUVW). These organisations represent current and existing energies which, when connected in conversation with individuals, awaken a Vortex of intellectual turbulence from its state of potential existence, to a state of actuality as a global brain. In cyberspace or in realspace, a global brain exists through connection (synapses in the human brain), coherent communication (neurotransmitters and electrical charge in the human brain) and conversation (conceptual processes in the human brain). Using the principles of Reduce, Recycle and Reuse, www.web-of-unme.com and the UVW will help the United Nations to produce results through networking and feedback “on the ground”. Current energies and existing resources are used to assist ecological awareness for global repair and protection.

Today, in regions of “ecological awareness” most people do not know what actions are possible, what actions are taking place, what actions have happened. It is not that people do not care - it is that people do not have ‘a sense of capacity’ to care enough with consciousness, for the very system which nurtures them and keeps them alive. It is important to flood into global intellectual awareness, knowledge of all activities and intended activities emanating from the UN, forming a powerful picture of what is happening now for the Planet. This awareness will awaken further action. Further action is simply waiting - in a state of “potential existence”. The model presented here provides a format and a formula for acting more deeply and widely on any ecological topic of personal or group interest, through the UN. It is a grassroots way of Uniting Nations. But one may ask: What is so different with the Utopian Vortical Web?
The difference is PLANETARY AWARENESS. In a web, vibration of one thread signals presence, energy, vitality and life. Awareness indicates that intellect and emotion have transcended the bias of political or religious belief. Awareness indicates engagement with another being. It is the mark of being human. It indicates “complexity”. Awareness signals consciousness, but “involvement” signals action, change, learning and value-shift.

It is at this point that one is introduced to the deepest, most ephemeral and exquisite concepts of the new science of complexity - the awakening of new forces from their nonexistent waiting. These are the “swirling dynamics” of the Vortex. [35] Out of nothing new forces of change emerge, “involvement” is embodied in the dynamics of connection, conversation and communication and a complex system is created by the very sensitivities it responded to in its spiralling and swirling dynamics. “The vortex concept teaches us something fundamental about the world…The Western scientific tradition has always strived towards a set of fundamental laws of nature. Complexity has crushed this dream. In a world with a single set of physical laws there will always arise complex systems… And when this happens, fundamentally new forces wake up from their non existence.” Onar Am .[36]

Our “global consciousness”, arising from our global brain, is created by the awareness and involvement we generate through the Vortex of communication - The Utopian Vortical Web. “Awareness and involvement” turns the whole United Nations into a living, breathing organisation of which each one of us is a part, cooperating for global survival in a joint Utopian venture. As energies begin to swirl, as language creates consciousness, as awareness creates action and involvement, a vortical flow is created and - “Once a system enters a vortex, it will be trapped in its pattern.” Onar Am. The Utopian Vortical Web engages, creates, takes up and awakens a new dynamic through a new use of, and involvement with, the various bodies and organs of the United Nations which are already in existence.

Today we recognize that both self interest and the greater good are drivers of human nature. The vectors of the vortex will paradoxically contain particles of both good energies and destructive energies. Distinguishing one from the other is an inevitable part of the contradictions in life. True democracy enables self leadership to distinguish one from the other, for Paradox is part of the complexity of a contextually relative Utopia of present day relevance. Complexity science is a powerful tool for understanding the ecological imperative to which as frail humans, we are fully subject as an interdependent, interconnected whole. Ancient wisdom and new science have reinforced each other. Subatomic particles, humans and universes which are only now being “found”- are all part of the same whole. If we don’t change by acting to survive, humans will cease to be, the rest will remain.

But the change must start with You and Me. This smallest dynamic gives strength and legitimacy to Earth’s largest International Organisation. The United Nations turns, through you and me, into a living organism and this change has the capacity to flow into all institutions on earth. The individual is the institution. “It is the individual who is custodian of the self-organizing drive of the universe…The individual has the heart, will and intelligence….” saysVladimir Dimitrov.[37]

Individuals who are aware and individuals capable of leading themselves into involvement, are individuals who are capable of driving the Utopian Vortical Web. These are also the human vectors which are the embodiment of the energies of the Vortex. These are the new leaders of the 21st century. Self leadership is the new meaning of democracy. It is the freedom we give ourselves - to create the opportunity to survive. Not through the wealth of money, but through the wealth of consciousness and involvement with the United Nations.

What are the swirling dynamics of the human Vortex of Awareness? What will create the interest to generate involvement in this Conversation? What will provoke the forces to maintain the dynamic? What are the various vectors of the Vortex? Where will we find the energies sustaining this ecoliterate social evolution?

The answer to all these questions may be found in the ancient wisdom of our ancestors. Awakening the forces from their nonexistent waiting is the primal function of ritual, which our ancestors engaged in. In India and Australia, as in other parts of the world, the elements of Nature still play a central part in ritual - for example, fire is a common element of ritual. Religion is the belief that sustains many humans. Ritual is used to assist this belief. If we believe that the LifeSupport of the Natural World is essential to survival on one Planet, then ritual is needed to fuel the action to raise ecological awareness of our global ecological predicament.

Today, the scarcity of clean water across manmade borders, could suggest the germ of an intellectual vortical solution to the problem - emanating from the connected understanding and relevant coherence in the mind of the public - and a Utopian Conversation and Celebration has the power to generate this. In each country the tools of “celebrated” public debate, discussion and workshopping, engaged by the voice of civil society, through public media, through the resources of global commons, through sustainable industry and through the suggestions of our intelligent children who are the pre citizens of Utopia - these would all be brought together as a global brain to storm the problem of Water. Or should we celebrate the Air or the Soil? Down the ages, inventions and discoveries are emergent factors, born out of natural processes of turbulence and bifurcation. Inventions, findings, discoveries and solutions are the “emergence and bifurcations” of the creative intellectual turbulence produced by vortices of collaboration, participation action research and cooperation.

While the Olympics of Sport celebrate competition and the human body, the Utopian Celebration through the UN brings the Intellect and Cooperation to the fore. By looking beyond borders and war, at the basis of life, it is concerned with interdependent human security. In the face of huge competition for public attention from Sport, gambling and consumerist lifestyle advertisement, a Utopian Celebration will be conducted with the intellectual intent of raising ecological awareness.

Cooperation of the mind is as much to be celebrated as the competition of sport. Competitive sport is adversarial, often violent and exclusive. The Mind functions cooperatively, holistically, creatively and inclusively. The mind goes beyond competition, beyond hate and beyond fear. Even “terrorism” has its value - if we look at finding positive solutions for our common ecological predicament. Regardless of the stand one may take on it, if looked at beyond the sensationalized horror of the act, one sees a global need to understand it. An examination of it and an explication of its root cause may well uncover an ecological deficit. This is an intellectual response, a sane examination of terror, which needs to have “take up” into a vortex of communication.

To this extent “terror” has had a unifying, clarifying and consciousness raising effect on the Planet. The need is now to look with seeing eyes, not to respond in mechanical, patriarchal and unintelligent ways. Here the Utopian Conversation and Celebration would take the emergent unity, clarity and awareness from the examination into “terror” into new and creative directions. Solutions to seemingly intractable problems, such as the perception that all Muslims are either extreme fundamentalists or terrorists, and the perception that Western law has all the answers, would be examined under the new light of an ecological imperative - the health and viability of the LifeSupport of the world. The security of the bordered “homeland”, the driving forces of crusades and jihads, would be seen as less important than the security of the Planet and its LifeSupport which are borderless and needed by all races and faiths.

The ecological imperative would involve radical redesign and not simple adaptation, as Stuart Hill proclaims. It would celebrate sustainable industry and create new jobs, provide clean food and drink in all parts of the world. Religion would be seen as less important than the Air, Water and Soil needed to keep Plants, Animals and Humans alive. Most importantly, it would generate awareness of a new kind of ethic, not domination through the machines of war and religious fervour through faith based ideology, but behaviour commensurate with that of thinking living organisms.

Celebration then is yet another way of Uniting Nations. It is the Olympics of Intelligent Cooperation for Survival on a single lonely planet.

The simple assertion put forward here is that global Utopian Celebration to raise ecological awareness of the relevance and importance of the Natural World to You and Me - is an essential agent of paradigmatic change and tool of cultural shift. This is because of several reasons, but three will suffice here, for the purposes of this Utopian exercise.

Firstly, celebration is practiced with great effect, as a matter of course by the pervasive informational footsoldiers of the market machine: “Advertising, marketing and promotion”. If there is to be any success with ecoliteracy for complex ecological sustainability then equally strenuous and continuous effort must be invested in counter-celebration, the Utopian celebration described here, by those wishing to effect change, not for private profit and individual gain but for the social good and for future generations. Once we see how successful advertisement has been for corporate globalisation, the challenge is to see how we may, ethically, use measures to counterbalance the effort for sustainability.

Secondly, the domain within which different interests must compete for public attention is not a level playing field. At present citizens movements, environmental movements and NGOs attempt to sell their message through charities, fundraising and volunteer support - with scant ‘aid’ given by governments, whose interests are often supported conflictingly by the same corporate globalisation most responsible for environmental and social justice erosion. It is clear that with issues of concern multiplying every day, the charity ‘dollar’is both harder to obtain and wastefully obtained, for most of the charity ‘dollar’ is expended in trying to earn more charity ‘dollars’.

Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, conceptual understanding of the complex issues which plague the borderless planet and its diminishing Natural World, are hardly understood by even the most ecoliterate and engaged practitioners let alone the disenfranchised, exhausted, excluded and least able among us. This is because of the amorphous and evanescent nature of the problems themselves and because the ripple effect of the very nature of change constantly alters and impacts the structure and infrastructure of the Natural World (which is our LifeSupport) and the Manmade World (which is now so deeply embedded in the interdependent whole of it).

The central point of the Utopian Celebration and this essay is to demonstrate that ecological critical literacy and Gandhi’s ‘sense of capacity’ is desperately needed at all levels of society - at school, at university, at work, at home at play and most importantly at the ballot box. This critical literacy or ‘the language for a complex world’ if you wish, is not simply information and a collection of facts - but the “wholistic vortical sense- making” of selected, relevant and vital ecological knowing, of that which has significant urgent influence on our LifeSupport - the Natural World of Air, Water and Soil upon which all plants, animals and humans depend.

I believe that in critical areas relating to our planetary survival, this eco-literacy needs “advertising” and “marketing” and “promotion” in almost exactly the same way as the economy and the market supervise the deconstruction and destruction of that critical literacy, for monetary gain. However, the élan vital of “CELEBRATION” is missing in the message of ecoliteracy, globally. To reinforce, reiterate and revitalize this critical learning, we need that magical extra ingredient, the ritualizing, the happymaking, the visibility, the profile and the “celebration” of the LifeSupport of the Natural World. This is the reverse side of the same coin, of the same ritualizing, which is so successfully propagated after being carefully dumbed down by the marketing of consumerism, through crass but increasingly sophisticated advertising, put forth by the Market Machine.

At grassroots level this eco-celebration is happening in festival form, in Woodstock and Woodford style and in similar celebrations. Now however, ‘making relevant and important’ ie. “celebrating” our critical civic literacy should enter the institutional domain. But the type of “celebration” which is the crux of this theorizing is not the light hearted, light headed and mindless noise which essentially composes commercial advertising. It is not exclusive by its appeal to money. Ecological awareness is freely available for You and Me - it is the advertising of EcoLiteracy for our mutual survival. Here is meant a complex cultural co-joining of emotion, intellect and critical enjoyment, to produce what I call: “Celebration - with serious intent.”

The cascading effect of institutional change for “ecological awareness of our common ecological predicament” will emanate from the leadership of the United Nations, by specifically acknowledging the centrality of the Natural World and its LifeSupport, in the preamble of the United Nations Charter.
One of Complexity’s principles is that great change is sometimes produced by the smallest whisper. Perhaps, in “celebration” of the new science of complexity, which is based on nature’s principles, we should call this United Nations Utopian Celebration: “The Butterfly Effect”.

“The Butterfly Effect” - Celebrating the New Global Citizen. The culmination of the great Utopian Conversation is a United Nations Celebration - A Utopian Celebration. This is an Event spread over three weeks each year (nationally) and every three years (internationally) in June (including World Environment Day), premiering perhaps in Sydney, Australia, but moving around the globe thereafter.

The Three urgent themes, selected and coordinated by existing United Nations bodies, would be given special celebration. In areas needing urgent redress, such as these perhaps:
GlobalWater, Renewable Energy and Wildlife Preservation or
GlobalAir, Old Growth Forests and Waste or
GlobalSoil, Crop Diversity and Sustainable Industry -

community action, individual contributions and industry’s achievements are given recognition, profile, relevance, visibility and award. Special research done on these topics and innovations made are given prizes and world visibility, changes produced are applauded globally and children’s projects and ideas are seriously discussed, advertised and celebrated in ways which the vortex of conversation will further suggest. Applying the principles of reduce, recycle and reuse, this intellectual Olympics would generate fractal effects, deliberately rotating into wider regions and become the voice of civil society to raise the consciousness of Utopia’s citizens and precitizens..

Using existing cultural resources from civilization’s repertoire of arts, sport and religion in service of the Intellect and to attract citizen’s attention, this intellectual celebration would take its guidance from the United Nations for awarding, rewarding and celebrating the achievements of those individuals, groups and organisations involved in change through the UVW conversation. To some extent this is already happening in the world. The difference in this instance is the “big picture” awareness of ecological interdependency of humans in the context of the Natural World. In this Utopia, a real life global brain will fashion a 21st century planetary citizenship, and this Utopian Celebration will applaud planetary custodianship of the LifeSupport.

The Utopian Society of the Mind would use many different forums for keynote speakers, debates and workshops, in a Celebration awarding and persuading the attention of global citizens. It would bring achievement from one country to visibility in all countries. It would bring individuals doing work for plants, animals and humans in India, Australia, Sweden, Turkey, Greece, Iraq, Palestine, Spain, America, Egypt, the United Kingdom, Japan, China and New Zealand to mention a few, together and make them into heroes to be listened to and remembered in the same way we applaud our political and sports heroes and heroines. This celebration would take brave journalists and activists and set them alongside if not above, our sporting heroes who are so well celebrated today. It would use nature, science, analysis and awareness documentaries from National Geographic, The Australian Broadcasting Corporation, BBC, Canadian TV and other responsible sources, to be shown on movable big screens under the auspices of the UN.

This would engage our eyes and ears and hearts within the context of the LifeSupport. It would popularize content relevant to our future survival from alternative, popular, science and ecology publications. Attention attracting series such as NewScientist’s “Time to rethink everything” would be given detailed exposure all around the globe to all people. There would be critical and extensive exposure for environmental non governmental organisations and social justice organisations and all individuals engaged in protecting and repairing the Natural World. World music, the language which overcomes all barriers, would glue it all together, reaching into the human brain and coopting those processes of the brain which science is only now discovering, are involved in detecting pleasurable sensations and directing the diverse decisions we make. The object of this Utopian Celebration would be both serious and happy. It is a celebration with serious intent.
This is, after all, a Utopian Celebration in the new Age of the Intellect.

Tacking our vessel carefully through the smoke, fog and haze, before casting anchor we mentally prepare ourselves for what lies ahead, by seeking a new way of thinking. We know that Utopia is an uncertain place of many different realities - many people, many languages, many cultures and many ways of understanding. To deal with this diversity we must abandon any self-conscious and fearful clutching-on to notions of post-modernism. The simple reality of our enormous ecological predicament defies historical, intellectual and philosophic categorisation. Abstract discourses about truth and knowledge are often incomprehensible to many and they sometimes delay and obfuscate the reality of the necessity for action.

In the age of the machine the language of mechanics and technology was the product and tool of industry. It was open to manipulation by media and industry. Today’s Utopia is a world of teeming billions, diverse realities and a diminishing Natural World. Utopia is no longer some beautiful distant land. Utopia is the ether of a New Consciousness - to help us to engage with the psycho-social evolution of ourselves into new beings, now. The intellect should be used in service of survival, not in service of the intellect.

If this is today's Utopia we seek to cast anchor in, a new language of Nature and Peace is needed for securing our survival into the future. The primary power of complexity as a metaphor, is that it allows us to understand our potentiality through Nature. Complexity pulls science into "life", through a language which draws inspiration from Nature's Laws, by giving us insight into the way things happened before the Industrial Revolution and the way they will continue to happen, if we don’t act now. It shatters the contained and constraining linearity of rule-bound learning which emanates from matter science, religion, economics and law. It frees us to develop and apply a non-linear intuition to the chaotic dynamics existing in a diverse, unpredictable, man-made and natural environment. It permits us to appreciate and grasp the creativity which emerges at "the edge of chaos" - which is a point at which dynamic solutions merge with new insights and situations are transformed into opportunities.

Complexity, used with metaphorical power, shows us that the vortex of this diversity produces highly sensitive, sudden, dramatic and productive changes over which we have no control, but which we may prepare ourselves for and harness, as best we can. It also shows us that dynamic interactions within the system produce emergent, sometimes thoroughly unexpected behaviours and properties from within the system, which may be destructive but which again we may harness and use to our benefit, by working with them.

It also implies that the same Humanism, which brought us out of the darkness of the Middle Ages, is once more called upon in the 21st Century, but with an Ecocentric perspective. As Utopians seek to apply the elegance of complexity’s insights to survival, they must also apply complexity concepts to deeply understanding and resolving the root causes of the barbarian tactics employed by terrorists in corporate boardrooms and terrorists in planes and pickup trucks. The task ahead will not be easy. “Cooperate or perish” suggests symbiosis. The model in this essay: “Cooperate and celebrate or perish”, suggests creativity and critical thinking, through Awareness. Utopian consciousness implies activating an ingenuity which we will sorely need - after we have cast anchor in Utopia.

As we attempt to anchor our ship to Utopia in the contextual reality of today we look around at the confusing multitude of “jobs” to be done on a strange new shore. Like Crusoe of old , bodily needs must be satisfied and secured before the mind may deal with the contradictions and paradoxes of the new millennium. The frailty of being human and our complete dependence on Nature, ensures that this must be so. Jumping off ship promises to be an adventure. Will anything be different? Will Richard Eckersley’s sense of connectedness with the world and universe, which he feels is crucial to meeting “the challenge of the spikes” - pervade the Utopian ether? Or will we still be under the spell of a Promethean predisposition for progress, which, in his book "The Passion of the Western Mind", Richard Tarnas says has caused the masculine mind to repress the feminine, through “a progressive denial of the soul of the world, of the community of being, of the all pervading, of the mystery and ambiguity, of imagination, emotion, instinct, body, nature, woman.”? [38]

It would not be wrong to say that such a repression of the mind has happened in the East, no less. As may be expected in pluralistic times, opinions are varied. There are linear optimists, linear pessimists, systemic revisionists, anarchists and solid as a rock positivists - among a host of others. Many have faith in technological solutions. Many are so fascinated with the human aspect of our civilization they delimit examination at this point. Culture is crammed with the examination of ourselves, our self expression, psychology, the distinction between feelings and beliefs, our public engagement and disengagement and, post September 2001, our newly energised ideological, philosophical and political discourse. Some like Eckersley think “government and business are dominated by linear optimists: those who believe that by continuing on our path, human life will continue to get better.” Many have no opinion at all.

So, in the landscape of the contextual reality of today, managers are still busy managing the remnants of our mania with the economy. Despite popular protest and media revelations, diehards of managerialism are still acquiring, merging and rationalizing in the world of corporations and institutions. This has even affected health and wellbeing, where technology merges with bioethics, which merges with the market, to produce a system where health is not a natural part of life, it is a commodity, a luxury and a complex foray into finance and law!

In direct opposition to this trend, bright spots in Utopia's landscape may be seen in the acceptance and inclusion of East / West medicine and herbal remedy. Here 'border porosity' has allowed a new breed of professionals to shine, for their knowledge bridges Oriental and Occidental treatment of underlying causes and overlying symptoms. Well acknowledged, highly affable and happily open, writer, naturopath and public lecturer on health, Phillip Alexander, is quick to remind his listeners and readers that Louis Pasteur's famous warning cry was always, "Le Terrain! Le Terrian!" and, these were among the last words Pasteur uttered. The external and internal Environment of humans, is fully significant when dealing with a health problem created by offending bacteria.[39]

In the world of politics, while the language is changing ever so slowly in response to fall in participation and the lack of depth in interest, there is little change in the mechanics. Diplomacy, dialogue and critical thinking are paths seldom taken. The quick fix, which must naturally be resorted to in election driven politics, means the underlying causes of problems are not addressed. In an era of globalisation in money and the market, drugs and disease, Utopian International processes available at the Round Table of Dialogue and Diplomacy, are often left unused. Instead dictatorships must be toppled for dubious democracy and, following the chaos ensuing from the scourge of war, “the fallen” are either avenged or sadly remembered.[40] And always quietly in the background, the old “legal” system remains unchanged, colonizing and colonized by new global issues - silky, smooth and ready to read and interpret a complicated law, at great, and mounting, cost.

As we cast about, there are one or two safe havens in the Age of the Intellect. A University is increasingly an island of hope, a source of higher learning, an institute of the mind. It is a place for rethinking things, for research, teaching and learning, for changing the way we do things. It is a place for finding alternatives to Mrs. Thatcher’s way, a place where intellectual passions may be excited by ideas of an order higher than idols, icons, IT and indicators of share markets. A University is a place where we may examine our human frailty in terms of our universe. It is a place where we may debate, discuss and disseminate the interlocking relationships between our personal (spiritual, mental and psychological), our social (religious, cultural, economic and political) and our natural (“all flesh is grass”/environmental, plant and animal) selves.

This interdependence is indeed, the ecology of being human. It is in great need of exposure, publicity and visibility. It is in need of being brought to schools, to places of worship, to shopping malls, to industry, to government and to all institutions and communities. A University is a place where we may re-form our institutions through re-awakening individuals. It is a place where we may revitalize our Intellects, through new insights and lifelong learning.

Yet here too our Utopian shore is revealing remnants of rationalization and reductionism. Small brilliant pockets of experimental and experiential learning in matters of environment, financially strong through new and increasing participation rates and greater curiousity in the ecology of being human, are blindly being made "lost to visibility". Small, valuable areas of learning, acting as precious points of dissemination for ecological awareness and Utopian Consciousness, are being managed, merged, amalgamated and incorporated into cumbersome, bland, hungry, debt ridden, money making courses of study. The ubiquitous study of accounting, business, commerce and marketing is still considered more valuable than study in ecology, ecoliteracy and environment.

Is it any wonder that ‘humans as plague’ scenarios, create a sense of despair at one end and scoffing at the other? The depth of interest and awareness is too shallow to be able to dialogue and deal with “the whole elephant”. Vanishing wildlife and extinctions in plant species (which increasingly are accepted to provide more and more remedies for our natural health) are evidence of a globally diminishing Natural World. If plotted as a graph, this diminishment (a sign of deep unawarenes) is rising in tandem with the interest in accounting, business, commerce and marketing courses of study in our Universities. In countries of the Eastern and Southern World, newly acquired technology and newly generated wealth, is making for a new “unconsciousness” of massive proportions.

Zooming down from the global into the personal, this exploration into my consciousness, has been for me - a Utopian study journey. This essay, born of life experience, was also an amalgam and an application of the reading undertaken to develop and extend my own awareness of the chaotic complexity of our existence on Earth. Written and researched alongside, and extra to, normal academic submissions, it was created especially as a Utopian exercise. It was the celebration of a new kind of teaching and learning. Sadly this learning journey too, could be a microcosm of our current global state. It too could have a doubtful conclusion, because a unique combination of complexity science and ecology could easily become invisible. A rare and precious window of visibility for Ecology, Environment and Ecoliteracy could slowly be closed. By the ravages of managerialism, Ecology could be in danger of being subsumed by the Economy, yet again. Truly, even in stations of higher learning, it would seem our ecological predicament is born of our unconscious civilization. This is our reality today.

Will the Utopia of a conscious civilization ever find its Vortical Web of Awareness?

Towering above the morass of today’s reality, yet having its feet firmly grounded in grassroots, through its many land level organs and agencies, the United Nations is a Utopian Institution peopled by Utopian citizens. Criticized, dismissed and written off by many, it has withstood the political change of half a century. Scorned sometimes by superpowers, its strength is in the number of its participants. By the increasing number of nations clinging to its sanity, the reach and spread of its global citizenship has risen to remarkable proportions. But do we all realize that involuntarily we are all part of the largest organization on earth? Do we realize that we are global citizens of a United Nation? Bringing the UN to life, revitalizing it and making it relevant in an Age of the Intellect is possible, by changing the organisation into to a living, breathing organism.

BY changing the Preamble to the United Nations Charter to reflect the reality of the LifeSupport as the true precursor to peace, a cascading flowon effect to all institutions and organisations is able to be established. A new benchmark referent for peace is created in Utopia, to take the focus off war and to place it on to the prime condition for peace - the LifeSupport of the Natural World. A new global citizenship arises and a Vortex of Utopian Consciousness is generated through Conversation and Celebration, where conversation means communication, cooperation and connection and celebration means making relevant, publicising and making visible.

I would like to emphasize that much is happening now. But a Utopian effort is needed today.
To truly create global ecological awareness of our global ecological predicament, the public’s engagement and understanding is taken to the point where we are not just school children, university students, workers, volunteers, parents and citizens but - Planetary Citizens. It means this planetary awareness must enter churches, mosques, temples, factories, sports stadiums, shopping centres, places of learning and homes - to rise above the borders and biases of religion, nationalism, sport and technology. In Utopia we are a society of the mind, not a collection of machines. Utopia is a matter of uniting nations and individuals.

In keeping with the ecology of Utopia, I suggest we start with the step of Conversing - with Earth’s largest organism - to change the Preamble of its Charter to reflect the evolved reality of today’s search for Peace, through the centrality of the LifeSupport of Nature. Half a century after the formation of the United Nations, is an appropriate time to consider the complex simplicity of a nuanced alteration to its guiding document. This will reflect the global sophistication, the ecological awareness and the conceptual understanding of self-leadership encapsulated in the words "Follow not me but you!" residing in those participants who sit at the International Round Table of Dialogue. This will also be the basis for an historic start to the understanding of the nested concept of "the individual is the institution" within the whole concept of "global citizenship", leading to a deeper and wider understanding that, the United Nations is a living breathing organism composed of "You and Me".

Then a Conversation with all of the individuals mentioned in this essay. They are the ‘first vectors’ of the vortex suggested, the already existing embodiment of the threads of the Utopian Vortical Web, by virtue of the work being performed by them. From the initial sensitivities of this Butterfly Effect will arise a turbulence which will create human dynamic interactions and the self- propelling energy of the Vortex of Awareness - enabling participation by an ever increasing global citizenship.

From this Conversation will arise a Celebration and from the reinforcement and recognition of the Celebration, a wider Conversation will ensue. Like the ripple effect in water, the ether of consciousness and eco-literacy in the Utopian Vortical Web, will get wider and deeper in space and time. The time for simple efficiency, substitution, adaptation and making do, has passed into a time for what Stuart Hill calls, “radical, root-level, redesign”. [41]

I believe the combined synergy of social midwifery, rebuilding the ship already at sea and a public conversation - if used together with effect through the Utopian Vortical Web (UVW) - will bring forth and to give birth to, an individual and an institutional awareness - a 21st century Planetary Consciousness, which is Utopian.

Such a Utopian Consciousness is needed to secure the only Paradise we will ever have - and to survive the spectacle of our unfolding future.

“So if the millennium supplies the element of hope, utopia supplies the element of desire.” Krishen Kumar.

Our world is a singular paradise some call Gaia. Gaia is the Greek goddess, Earth. She will remain after humans are gone. In the meantime, for children who will inherit the earth, life will not be easy. For them, “everything should be made as simple as possible” and as safe as possible. How shall we do this?

The UN is already working on doing this. The more we understand that this is so, the better we can help it to do its work. The sooner then,we will create Utopia within today. Complexity concepts are emergent understandings of our world, made more powerful by the language and metaphors by which they are conveyed. We humans alone are capable of understanding these insights and concepts. This is because of our intellect and because Utopia is a Society of the Mind.

But Beware! It could be that our very difference, the consciousness that sets us apart from animals, might be our downfall. The technology that our intelligence has created might destroy us. We now have nuclear weapons and power stations to accidentally destroy ourselves. Many times. The same penchant for technology may save us if, given the legitimacy of the Preamble to the United Nations Charter and through Utopian Conversation and Celebration, we act quickly. Colin Mason writes, “Every day, solar energy amounting to around 200,000 times the present global electricity capacity falls on the planet……Solar towers are proposed for Rajasthan, in India, and rural Victoria, in Australia.” [39]

How quickly can we change things? How much do we know? How much do we not know? Our knowing, our conceptual awareness, our consciousness, creates the cosmos of a Utopia today. Our survival depends on knowing and acting. If we can realize that all living creatures are dependent on Air, Water and Soil, and that human dependence on this LifeSupport makes us dependent upon the ecology of plants and animals, then our Intellect might be our saviour.

When in a speech in 2001, Mr. Clinton, former president of the world’s only superpower invoked, “a truly global consciousness” for our survival in the new millennium, he concluded his speech with the words, “The question is whether we have the will.”
Only a conscious civilization has the will to make choices appropriate to survival at the edge of today’s time. Utopian thinking is the vital instrument to secure this Paradise - before we humans accidentally, catastrophically, exercise our right to lose it altogether. The Utopian understanding for living on a Borderless Planet with a Diminishing Natural World would be a continuous, multiple looped United Nations Utopian Conversation and Celebration, deriving the germ of its inception from a revamped preamble to the UN Charter, which would acknowledge that the precursor to Peace is the LifeSupport of the planet.

This essay provides within the Preamble of the United Nations Charter, the premise and the understanding for the will to create the cascading “fractality” of individual and institutional change at International, National, Local and Individual levels. At the International level the infrastructure of global utopian governance already exists in the form of the United Nations (UN).

The Utopian Vortical Web provides the threads for You and Me (leaders of self and others) to initiate the steps by which we may, through Awareness and in conjunction with Earth’s largest organisation, the UN, act out an aphorism for our complex and dangerous times: “Cooperate and Celebrate or Perish.”

Reference/Short Bibliography.
1. Lettervall, R. (2001) Member of Jury, Utopian Championship 01. www.soc.nu/utopian

2. de Geus, Marius (2002) Ecotopia, Sustainability and Vision, Organisation & Environment Vol 15 No: 2. June 2002, 187-201.

4. Woog, R. Lecture. Leadership and Change. February. 2004. School of Social Ecology, Hawkesbury Campus. University of Western Sydney, Australia.

5. Hutchinson, F. (1996) Utopia and Dystopia. University of Western Sydney, Hawkesbury Campus.

6. “boiling frog syndrome”- analogy to describe the manner by which humans may slowly succumb to insentient termination through environmental pollution.

7. Hill, Stuart B. (2004) Social Ecology as a Framework for Understanding and Working with Social Capital and Sustainability within Rural Communities. Foundation Chair, School of Social Ecology and Lifelong Learning, University of Western Sydney, Hawkesbury Campus.

8. Kumar, K (1995) Apocalypse, Millennium and Utopia Today. In Apocalypse Theory and the Ends of the World. Ed. Malcolm Bull. Blackwell Publishers UK.

10. Davies,P. & Gribbin,J. ( 1991) The Matter Myth-Towards 21st Century Science
Viking, London.

12. Dalrymple, W. (2002) Visions of Palestine, Interview with the writer and historian

13. Gowar, S.,Lackey,G.,Moyer,W., Taylor,R. (1976) Moving toward a new Society. New Society Press, Philadelphia.

14. Levick, D. & Woog, R. (2000) From Systems Boundaries to Fractality, Broadening the Practitioner’s Paradigm. Paper for International Conference on Systems thinking in Management, Deakin University, Geelong. From Complexity, Organisations, Fuzziness. School of Social Ecology, University of Western Sydney, Australia.

16. Freeman, W.J. (1995) Chaotic State Transitions in Brains as a Basis for the Formation of Social Groups. In Chaos & Society Ed. A.Albert. IOS Press. Quebec.

18. Dimitrov, V. (2002) Use of Fuzzy Logic when Dealing with Social Complexity. Chaos and Complexity. School of Social Ecology, University of Western Sydney, Australia.

19. Dimitrov,V. & Hodge,B. (2003) Corruption and Abuse of the Fuzziness of Human Understanding. http://vlad-home-page.fcpages.com/internet-papers

20. Dalrymple, W. (1998) A Profound Kinship (Islam and Christianity), New Statesmen Aug 14th

21. Saul, J.R, (1997) The Unconscious Civilization, Penguin, New York and London

22. Bruges, J. (2000) The Little Earth Book. Alistair Sawday Publishing Special. Bristol.

23. Burton, J. (2004) From “Democracy” to Consensus. Paper from SELL Residential, February 04.

24. Cambel, A.B. (1993) Applied Chaos Theory, A Paradigm for Complexity. Academic Press, New York.

25. Woog, R. & Dimitrov (2003) Globalization - Democracy in Decline. Http://www.zulenet.com/Vladimir Dimitrov/pages/Global

27. O’Sullivan, E. (1999) Education in a Period of Historical Decline- Transformative Learning. Zed Books, London.

28. Bourdieu, P. (1998) The Essence of NeoLiberalism, Utopia of Endless Exploitation. Translated by Jeremy Shapiro.

29. Lowe, I. (2003) Correspondence Quarterly Essay. Issue #9 2003. Schwartz Publishing.

30. Internet Bulletin Board discussions: Leadership and Change, 6th April 2004

31. Eckersley, R. (2001) The End of the World - as we know it. Sydney Morning Herald, 20th Jan. 2001.

33. Clark, Mary E. (2004) Some thoughts on Social Chang, Paper from SELL Residential, Feb. 2004.

34. Cribb, J. (2003) Sharing Knowledge ABC Radio National hosted by Robyn Williams.

35. Hodge. R & Dimitrov. V (2003) Language and Theory of everything, Managing Organisational Change at the Edge of Chaos, Complexity and Creativity, School of Social Ecology and Lifelong Learning, University of Western Sydney

36. Am Onar, (2002) Back to Basics - Working with Chaos and Complexity. www.uws.edu.au

37. Dimitrov, V.(2003) A New Kind of Social Science: Study of Self-Organisation of Human Dynamics, Morrisville:Lulu Press.

38. Hill, S. (2004) Lecture, “Qualitative Research and Design” (April 2004,) Foundation Chair of School of Social Ecology, University of Western Sydney, Australia.

40. Bell. M (1998) Quote in Appendix #1. from Towards an Ecology of Spirit; A new paradigm for Organisational Development, Paper from Social Ecology residential 2002.

I dedicate this essay to Sergio Vieira de Mello, United Nations envoy for peace and Utopian citizen, who died at the International Round Table of dialogue.

The ecology of Planetary Citizenship: “The World’s largest Organisation - the United Nations - becomes, through You and Me, a living Organism.” “The word ‘ecology’ comes from the Greek “oikos” which means “household”. Ecology is the study of the earth household. More specifically, it is the study of the relationships that interlink all members of the earth household.” Fritjof Capra from Mike Bell. Inukshuk Management Consultants. Canada [40].

“Both the vortex and chaotic attractors are emergent phenomena which manifest the self-organizing capacity of dynamic interactions. A Vortex is a dynamic attractor able to generate its own centripetal (implosive, ‘sucking’) force…” Bulletin Board. 6th April 2004.

The object of this Vortex of Awareness is to remove the current “attractors” of power, money, identity and arrogance, manifested in war, violence and greed - by attempting to turn islands of hope into continents of consciousness and ecological awareness, through exposure, engagement and enablement.

Islands of Hope which may be used in ‘social engineering’ and ‘rebuilding the ship at sea’ through the Utopian Conversation and Celebration. All individuals and Institutions mentioned in this Essay.
All ENGO’s
Eminent Conservationists from all countries on earth.
Sustainable Industry Chief Executive Officers.
Politicians with a clear track record of Ecological Awareness.
Ecological Thinktanks.
Centres of Conservation and Sustainability.
Children capable of critical, eco-literate debate and dialogue.
Publications dealing with renewable resources.
Audio-Visual Media dedicated to the voice of free civil society.
Universities and Schools engaged in Participatory Action Research.
All Animal Conservatories, Zoos and Principals thereof.
Botanic Gardens and National Parks and Principals thereof.
Individuals engaged in research appropriate to the Vortex.
Any other Individuals and Institutions similarly engaged.
World Music

Major Tools to be Used in the Utopian Vortex. The effort is to keep this as far as possible a paperless activity, such as was possible in the largest logistical exercise ever held - The Indian Election ’04.
The major tools to be used are linked, organized Debate, Discussion, Dialogue concentrated on selected urgent topics essential to Planetary Citizenship and Survival. The WWW, audio-visual technology, Art, Science and mass-communication devices, will be used in conversational service to the Human Intellect. Reinforcement, Recognition and Reward will be essential to encourage feedback, social change and idiosyncratic ways of dealing with the need to Reuse, Reduce and Recycle. In celebratory service to the Human Intellect, the emotion of pleasure directing our deepest desires, will be engaged through music (world and all other genres), the pathos and beauty of nature documentaries and appropriate Art of Nature. Complexity science will also provide computer generated art, springing from new science’s rereading of matter-science eg. Pietgen exhibit, “Frontiers of Chaos”.

The Model below describes the flow of the Vortex of Awareness in The Utopian Vortical Web.

Appendix 3.UTOPIA is a game we must play for our Survival.
(A Challenge to Children - Forming “A Utopia in Threes” into a practical working Game.)

Utopia means a Dream, a Vision, a Wish. Utopia is like a Nest made of Plants where Animals and Humans must shelter. Animals, Plants and Humans all need each other to survive. They also need clean Air Water and Soil. We have One Nest where Plants, Animals and Humans must co-exist to keep the balance of Air,Water and Soil clean or the balance will be destroyed and one or all three will die out.In One Nest we remember Past history, learn from the Present and provide for the Future. Three is a useful number in Utopia. Children can remember everything in threes. Utopia can even be a game. It is a game Adults must learn to play or One Nest will not survive.
Rules:

Headings: Conversation in Utopia:
1.The Leaders of Utopia - Structure.
2. The Work to be done in Utopia - Setting Goals.
3. The Politics of Utopia - Acting the Goals.

Celebration of Utopia:
1. Publicity, Relevance and Visibility of Utopia.
2. Continuing Utopia.
3. “Dialogue/Debate/Discussion” - A No-Waste Celebration.
Will Wishing Work? Maybe it will - if we Connect, Cooperate and Celebrate!

Celebration.

This essay is born of life experience, yet it is mostly an amalgam of, an application of and emergent from, the reading done in the last few years in the course of a study journey to develop and extend my awareness of the complexity of our existence on Earth.

I would therefore like to use it to CELEBRATE the teaching of a unique combination of Social Ecology with Complexity, Chaos & Creativity, at the School of Social Ecology, at the University of Western Sydney, in Australia.