We are participants in evolution, but not yet fully conscious of how we participate

The outer predicament: We have built extraordinary capacities to shape the world. We can communicate across continents in seconds, generate more information than any person could absorb, develop technologies that would have seemed miraculous a generation ago, and organise people and resources on a vast scale. Yet we still struggle to resolve conflicts without violence, work across differences without turning them into divisions, or bring our collective resources to bear on problems we know how to describe but find difficult to solve. In organisations, communities and nations, people with knowledge and good intentions can remain caught in rivalry, mistrust and competing interests. We can become ever more capable of changing our circumstances while struggling to agree on what is worth changing, how to act together, and what kind of future we wish to create.

The inner predicament: We work to improve our lives. We learn, grow in experience, build careers, pursue relationships and achieve things that once seemed beyond our reach. Yet we sometimes find ourselves repeating patterns we thought we had outgrown, reacting in ways we later regret, or discovering that achievements we worked so hard for have not brought the fulfilment we expected. We may understand ourselves better than we once did and still struggle to change how we respond to life. At other times, life may be going well, yet we sense that there is more to discover, more to develop, more that we might become. Our circumstances can change, our knowledge can grow and our capabilities can expand,  yet we may still find ourselves responding to life in ways we had hoped to outgrow.

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