When Hazel Henderson informed me that the manuscript of The Power of Yin would be published, I could only laugh. For laughter is largely what I remember from those golden autumn days of 1977 when Barbara Marx Hubbard and I sat together with Hazel in her lovely Princeton home and spoke together of our hopes and dreams of making a better world through the power of yin. I thought that a transcription of the tapes of a similar meeting in April 1978 would yield page after page of “Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!”
Viewing this material now from the vista of thirty years later, I am stunned at how prescient were our conversations of so long ago. And also, how much of our current lives are fractals of what we envisioned then. Here I am, still teaching a school of spiritual and psychological studies, but now amplified into many programs in social artistry for leaders the world over. Hazel’s and Barbara’s work has reached so many people and arenas worldwide that truly they can be said to be among those who have profoundly made a difference to this world and time. And strangely (or foolishly), age does not seem to wither nor custom stale our continued efforts to improve the planetary and human condition. The power of yin moves among us, between us, within us, as well it should, for without it, the human experiment could well come to an ending in the next hundred years or so. Where is this yin power leading us?
I sometimes attend conferences of high-minded folk from many disciplines who address the problems of an old world passing into a new. The millennium has brought many to the table. Some are radical visionaries proposing utopian global housecleanings. Others are reformers devoted to redressing old wrongs. Each attempts to push the membrane that wraps us in unknowing. With all their practical skill and accomplishments, they are humble before the mystery of a world in transition.
“It is as if we are in a giant womb, trying to figure out what happens next,” a United Nations official said to me recently at the State of the World Forum.
I was startled by her remark, for earlier that day, I had been chatting about international politics with a Bulgarian cab driver in San Francisco. “I have just been present at the birth of my daughter,” he told me. “I was very afraid, for I had never seen such a thing. It was very messy and very beautiful. And after all the hours of my wife’s labor and the painful contractions, a new life! Maybe that is what is trying to happen in our world.”
Like Hazel and Barbara, I sometimes think of my work as a kind of midwifery.
Organizations and cultures, businesses, as well as individuals, sometimes need a steadying hand as they birth themselves into a world as strange and unexpected as the one babies face when they emerge from the womb.
But how do we do it? How do we grow to become stewards of the extraordinary time that is upon us, and it so doing nurture ourselves, our clients, even our various cultures? One way is realizing the extent of the whole-system transition of which we are a part—a condition of interactive change that affects every aspect of life as we know it. I call it Jump Time. It is related to what in evolutionary biology is called punctuated equilibrium.
Change, evolutionary theorists tell us, doesn’t happen gradually. Rather, things go along as they were for a long while—in a state of equilibrium—until a species, living at the edge of its tolerance, experiences enough ferment and stress to punctuate the equilibrium with a sudden jump to a whole new order of being.
It is the changing of the guard on every level, in which every given is quite literally up for grabs. It is the momentum behind the drama of the world, the breakdown and breakthrough of every old way of being, knowing, relating, governing, and believing. It shakes the foundations of all and everything. And sometimes, it even allows for another order of reality to come into time. Throughout history there have been many cultural jumps, but what is looming before us now is a collective jump—faster and more complex than any the world has known. We find ourselves at present in the midst of the most massive shift of perspective humankind has ever known. Other times thought they were it. They were wrong. This is it.
In a Jump Time, with everything in transition, we can no longer afford to live as remedial members of the human race. A new set of values—holistic, syncretic, relationship- and process-oriented, organic, spiritual—is rising within us and around us. These, of course, are women’s values, women’s genius, women’s gift. These are the powers of yin!
Though old forces and traditions and fears seek to restrain us, we know there is no going back. Our complex time requires a wiser use of our capacities, a richer music from the instrument we have been given. The world will thrive only if we can grow. The possible society will become a reality only if we learn to be the possible humans we are capable of being. As women, we are the pilgrims and the parents of this new emerging world, and no old formulas and stopgap solutions will do. In the past, men in governments and the private sector have been partners in determining how the world works. It is time now to focus on the role that women—who are the majority of the people on the Earth, a majority that has been largely excluded in the past—should play in the development process. This is indispensable if we seek a future that is different from the past.
Women are critical to the great forces of change: the repatterning of human nature, the regenesis of human society, the breakdown of the membrane between cultures and peoples, the breakthrough of the depths, both psychological and spiritual. And so the rise of women in our time and in the century before us may be one of the most important happenings in human history.