“Seek wisdom while you have the strength, or you may lose strength without gaining wisdom.”

Ancient saying

There is a story that is told about a wandering stranger who once stopped a king in the street. Furious, the king shouted, “How dare you, a man of little worth, interrupt the progress of your sovereign?”

The stranger answered: Can you truly be a sovereign if you cannot even fill my begging bowl? And he held out his bowl to the king. In wishing to show his generosity to the crowd that had now assembled, the king ordered that the stranger’s begging bowl be filled with gold. But no sooner did the bowl appear to be full of gold coins than they disappeared and the bowl seemed empty once again. Sack after sack of gold coins was brought, and still the begging bowl devoured them all. “Stop,” screamed the king, “This trick of yours is emptying my treasury!” “Perhaps to you I am emptying your treasury,” said the stranger, “but to others I am merely illustrating a truth.” “And what truth is this?” asked the king.

“The truth is that the bowl is the desires of humankind, and the gold is what humanity is given. There is no end to humanity’s capacity to devour, without being in any way changed. See, the bowl has eaten nearly all your wealth, but it is still an empty piece of carved old wood, which has not partaken of the nature of gold in any respect.”

What this tale illustrates is that many of our old ways of doing things are devouring both the world and our own sense of worth, without producing real change within us. Observing our current epoch, with its varied ideological and political conflict, mental conditioning and strife among peoples and nations, it appears that our collective body is in a state of global psychosis. Nothing short of a global revelatory experience, or epiphany, is required.

For the past several thousand years at least the human race has defined itself through crisis and calamity, struggle and greed. We have recently crammed ourselves into conurbations – densely-packed city spaces where daily we pass thousands of people, with tens of thousands more living within a few minutes’ travel of where we are, and yet we each act independently, unaware of our intrinsic interdependence. Psychologically we are separated, feeling alone, whilst our inherent connectedness lies under our skin and all around us.

In a play by Luigi Pirandello – The Man with a Flower in his Mouth – a man emerges from a doctor’s surgery with a fatal diagnosis; with this knowledge of impending death the man’s world suddenly changes and every small thing has significance. He undergoes a conversion of consciousness: the bleak diagnosis and shock are followed by a courageous renewal.

Perhaps ours is a world with a flower in its mouth… as we move through the transition and its associated initiatory impacts. Maybe we are facing an historic episode of rebalancing on an epic scale, signaled by spiraling unrest in the collective consciousness of humanity. That we have no cultural memory of having encountered such an epochal transition before, places us in frightening new territory.

As Richard Tarnas says: “Perhaps we, as a civilization and a species, are undergoing a rite of passage of the most epochal and profound kind, acted out on the stage of history with, as it were, the cosmos itself as the tribal matrix of the initiatory drama.”

Any society or civilization which makes the material world its sole pursuit and object of concern cannot but decline in the long run. That is why the game play needs to change, and why the current generations have a responsibility to be a part of this constructive change. For us to evolve as a species and as a planetary civilization we need to co-exist with the Earth’s systems and to understand those laws that are in harmony with a long-term future. This may be the only way toward advancing the evolution of the human being; and it is common sense too. The famous British historian Arnold Toynbee claimed that civilizations emerge and evolve when they are governed by a creative minority that inspires the people. In turn, civilizations enter decline when the dominant minority fails to inspire the rest of its people and prefers to follow a status quo of power rule. This begs the question – are we being inspired?

Or rather, can we be inspired to become the very social agents of change?

Social agents of change are those people in every society who are not afraid to break away from the norms of social conditioning and to think for themselves. The awakened individual is now required more than ever, so that conscious thinking and conscious behavior can co-create a way forward, through the morass that surrounds us. The rising change has already begun – and we need to take notice of this shifting ground.

The bottom line is that we need to accept that there is the possibility for self-development – work on ourselves – that in turn has an impact upon the grander developmental cycle of civilization. We need to recognize that we often live our lives within a distracting social milieu, and how it is crucial we align ourselves with those positive ideas that reflect our capacities and strengths. In other words, to feel empowered and not powerless, to possess an inner confidence that allows us to work in our external environments in the ways most appropriate. It is time to stop playing their funny games, and to begin taking responsibility for our own minds and actions. It is time to become the new wave of change agents upon the planet.

Excerpted with permission from The Phoenix Generation, ©2014 Watkins Publishing.

Kingsley L. Dennis, PhD, is a sociologist, researcher, and writer. He is the author of several critically acclaimed books including New Consciousness for a New World; New Revolutions for a Small Planet; After the Car; and the celebrated Dawn of the Akashic Age (with Ervin Laszlo). He previously worked in the Sociology Department at Lancaster University, UK. Kingsley is the author of numerous articles on social futures, technology and new media communications, global affairs, and conscious evolution.