“Great times call for great strength. Great events create great individuals and great relationships. The greatness that you carry will never arise under casual or normal circumstances. It must be called out of you by great events and great needs. It must require you to do things that you would be too lazy or indolent to do previously. It must force you to look at the world objectively. It must force you to prepare for a future that you cannot even see at this moment.” –The Great Waves of Change: Navigating the Difficult Times Ahead

Connecting the Dots

It’s not easy living in an era of great crises and challenges that are wholly unprecedented in human history. Many of us have spent much of our energy in recent years attempting to understand what is happening around us and within us, or to change what we have perceived is most problematic, or to bring about what is most needed and wanted. But when we are deeply honest we can perhaps admit, at least to ourselves, that these efforts often seem to pale in the face of the scale and urgency of humanity’s current evolutionary predicament.

As we reflect on the vast outpouring of communication depicting the great crises of our time—climate change and accompanying environmental destruction; resource depletion, particularly oil (literally the fuel of growth); and the unraveling of the globalized economy of growth—we may sense that we are witnessing the emergence of a kind of collective wisdom among the many authors and activists who are grappling with these issues. Gradually, we are learning to see, to understand, and to rise to the occasion with appropriate action. But it is a daunting task to wade through the millions of words that are being written and spoken these days to find the core thread that illuminates both what is true and what is necessary.

Along the way, we have been informed, inspired and often thoroughly shaken by pioneering thinkers and researchers who have attempted to map the dimensions both of our predicament and our opportunity. For instance, in recent years, William Catton’s Overshoot, Colin Campbell’s The Coming Oil Crisis, James Howard Kunstler’s The Long Emergency, John Michael Greer’s The Long Descent, Jared Diamond’s Collapse, Richard Heinberg’s Peak Everything, Bill McKibben’s Deep Economy, Paul Hawken’s Blessed Unrest, David Holmgren’s Four Scenarios, Rob Hopkins’ Transition Handbook, Lester Brown’s Plan B (in various iterations), Patrick Murphy’s Plan C, Carolyn Baker’s Sacred Demise, Tim Bennett’s What A Way to Go, Chris Martenson’s Crash Course, and Gus Speth’s Bridge at the Edge of the World—along with a host of others—have provided great insight and motivation.

But perhaps most of us engaged in these concerns have understood that no matter who or what we’re studying, we’re only seeing part of the picture. Despite our best efforts to connect the dots, there remain great gaps in our understanding and perspective. We don’t know what we don’t know, and we feel it in our bones. This is unsettling enough, but greatly aggravated by the accompanying realization—however dim it may be—that we might be here on this planet for some singular purpose, that the world is calling something out of us.

There comes a time, it seems, when we reach the point in our lives where we simply need to know, when we need to grasp—as Gus Speth puts it—”the full extent of our predicament,” as well as the full extent of our potential and our destiny. Some of us may feel intuitively that we have already reached that point. We really do need to know who we are, what humanity faces, and what we must do. But how do we truly know?

A Prophetic Message

Here we are eventually brought, often reluctantly, into the realm of the spiritual. But once we enter these waters, we are faced with an overwhelming cacophony of voices and teachings and beliefs that can send us scurrying back into the more familiar (if less than comforting) territory of the rational mind.

Occasionally, though, persistence furthers. Those who are unusually alert may find some of the biggest missing pieces of all in a book that was published last month by New Knowledge Library, The Great Waves of Change: Preparing for the Difficult Times Ahead, attributed to a little-known spiritual teacher, Marshall Vian Summers.

According to Post Carbon Institute’s Richard Heinberg, The Great Waves of Change is, in effect, “a crash course for swimming in turbulent waters,” providing a guide to “profoundly changing the ways we think, relate to one another, and treat our environment.”

Marshall Vian Summers

But this book is not in the same category as those very wonderful and important works mentioned above. The Great Waves of Change is not the result of careful research, long contemplation, laborious crafting, and endless rewriting. Instead, it arrived in a matter of days, whole and entire. Put simply, The Great Waves appears to be prophecy, and Summers its messenger. Generally, we have little understanding of what true prophecy is or where it comes from (it is, after all, mysterious). But prophecy, as demonstrated in this volume, seems to have the power to speak to us on a level that merely human authors can never quite achieve.

What we have here is a message for humanity that stands apart from nearly everything else being said or communicated today. Yes, there are plenty of “messages” being offered in these times, but nothing in this category, not even close.

The message of The Great Waves of Change is challenging and often uncomfortable to receive, something like “tough love.” We need it, but we may not appreciate it much at first. We may not like much of what it has to say, for it calls to account our attempts to avoid what is central to our life as individuals, as communities, and as a species.

“You cannot avoid this. You cannot run away and hide somewhere, pack your bags and move to the country, or move to another country. Wherever you go, wherever you are, the Great Waves will be there, and the impacts will grow over time and in many places will be catastrophic.”

As we might expect, The Great Waves confirms what many have suspected: Humanity is entering into a prolonged period of great confusion and difficulty, for we have so irreversibly overused and abused the world that we have now unleashed a series of awesome consequences—the Great Waves of change themselves—that will fundamentally alter life on this planet. We are told that even in the best case scenario we must now prepare for a world of greatly diminished resources and a massive reduction in human population. From here, whether humanity will even have a future and whether human civilization can survive will depend on a tremendous outpouring of human ingenuity and cooperation.

Resource depletion, especially of fossil fuels, will be a prominent feature of the Great Waves of change:

“Without sufficient petroleum, how will you run your cars, your farm machinery, your transportation system and your governments? Many people have faith that there is unlimited petroleum in the world. It is just faith. It is a hope. It is a wish. It is an expectation. They have no certainty. They have never studied the problem. They do not realize that humanity will be facing declining resources. They have faith that all of these resources are there, and you just spend more money, and the resources are there. You spend more money, you get more resources—endless resources. It is never a problem, really. That is a foolish faith.”

Meanwhile, travel will become extremely difficult, if not mostly impossible. In order to survive, people will be forced to live and work locally. Local food production and local manufacturing will become increasingly essential. Eventually, nearly everything will function only on a small scale. The world itself will be able to support only a much smaller population, perhaps no more than two billion people.

“It is certain that many things will fail. Communities and even certain nations may collapse. It is certain that many people will have to migrate, and there will be a great shift in the order and function of civilization.”

An Evolutionary Threshold

The Great Waves of Change clarifies that our collective predicament is an evolutionary threshold for humanity—a threshold that is practical and physical, as well as moral and ethical. Therefore this is “a time when a great decision must be made as to whether humanity will unite and cooperate to share and manage the resources of the world or whether it will fight and compete, propelling humanity into a state of constant conflict and permanent decline.”

The way all this sobering news is delivered packs a wallop that statistics and analysis could never produce. “Humanity is at a great turning point,” The Great Waves says, “that will lead either to its permanent decline or to its future ascension as a united and powerful race.”

The Great Waves says that while humanity may seem to have already sown the seeds of its own demise, we can yet mitigate some of the impacts and successfully adapt to the changes that are coming. But in order to do this, we must cease our endless conflicts and unite together to prepare.

Such unprecedented unity and preparation could also be crucial in facing an even greater challenge in the future. In an unexpected turn, The Great Waves declares that humanity’s evolutionary shift includes our planetary emergence into the “Greater Community”—the larger Universe, replete with intelligent life.

We are pointedly warned that while we are distracted and struggling with the Great Waves—including the greatly increased risk of conflict and war among our divided nations and people—unwelcome intruders could already be clandestinely exploiting these situations for their own advantage, preying upon human weakness and superstition, secretly exacerbating conflict, seeking to benefit from the decline of human civilization.

That’s a chilling thought, one that inevitably leads to a reconsideration of troubling phenomena that have been reported around the world for the last 60 years or so. It’s bad enough that we humans have been practicing “extraction economics” to the point of damaging the very biosphere itself. But to also have extraplanetary “visitors” following the same compulsions of greed and survival in our midst—if true—would greatly complicate the dangers of our situation and raise the stakes by orders of magnitude. At the very least, this warrants serious investigation.

Here, The Great Waves unveils a core principle that demands our attention:

“Should you exhaust your natural inheritance, you will need to seek what you need from other powers in the Universe. If this occurs, you will lose much of your freedom and self-determination, becoming only a client state to foreign powers, who will not hesitate to take advantage of your weakened, dependent position.”

Fortunately, many of the preparations for the Great Waves of change—especially the rebuilding of community resilience and self-reliance—are also high among the strategic priorities for preparing for our encounter with forces from a Greater Community. In a nod to the fundamental wisdom of relocalization, we are admonished to “Learn what the resources of your community are. What can they provide? What assets do they really have that can support you and your community?”

Inner Preparation

Nevertheless, The Great Waves of Change affirms that inner preparation is far more significant than anything external we can do. All physical preparations—e.g., storing food, stockpiling resources, protecting our communities—may be necessary, but are only temporary expedients. We will also need to consciously cultivate our inner resources and internal resilience.

The good news of this sobering message is that we humans have within us untapped capacities which—if we learn to cultivate them in time—will ensure that at least some significant remnant of humanity can remain free and thriving in the Universe. The principal of these is “Knowledge,” the deeper mind (as yet largely unawakened) that is said to be the natural inheritance of our species. The Great Waves advises, “Clear your mind. Set aside your assumptions. Set aside your beliefs and your preferences so that you may see, so that you may know, so that you may respond to the signs of the world and to the signs of Knowledge within you.” (Good advice, too, for reading this highly unusual book.)

In exploring The Great Waves of Change, readers may be challenged in unexpected ways. The message often seems to be speaking directly to you, as if it had been written for you alone. You may at first be outraged by what will seem outlandish claims. You may be annoyed by what feel like persistent probings into the depths of your memories. You may want to stop reading, to simply forget about all of this. You may sometimes stumble over words and phrases that seem to conjure up earlier experiences of religion. But if you persist, you will discover that something entirely different is actually being transmitted, something very rare in modern human experience.

A Life of Meaningful Engagement

According to The Great Waves, the times ahead will not be easy, but they could be redemptive. For in meeting these challenges, we’re told, “your real gifts to the world have an opportunity to emerge where they could never emerge before. Here you will be living not a life of comfort and preference, but a life of clarity and meaningful engagement with others and with the world.” Importantly, this will also be “a time of great compassion, a time of great giving… and a time of redemption in the face of immense and seemingly overwhelming difficulties.”

But, as the great quantum physicist Niels Bohr famously said, “Prediction is difficult–especially about the future.” We do not know how the future is going to turn out. Here, The Great Waves provides an almost comforting sendoff to those of us who are called to meet the growing challenges of this world:

“How it is going to turn out really does not matter because you are here to serve the world, and you serve the world without requiring a result. If your service is pure, if it comes from love and compassion, you give because you must give, not because you are assured of an outcome. You do it anyway. You try to bring about a good result, but in the end, you cannot control it. Then if your service to others seems to fail, you will not feel devastated. You did what you could. Like the physician in the field of battle taking care of the wounded soldiers, you do what you can with what you have.”

In the end, perhaps it doesn’t matter where this extraordinary message originates from, for it seems to stand on its own. For starters, we might just take it at face value. For myself, I consider The Great Waves of Change a gift from the heart of the Universe itself.

“This is the time for humanity to unite and to become strong. The incentive for this is immense. The possibility for failure is great. This is your chance to rise or to fall, to become great, united and free in the Universe or to diminish yourselves here on Earth and fall under subjugation to foreign powers. This represents the great threshold for humanity, the great opportunity for humanity, and the great challenge for humanity.”

More information is available at www.GreatWavesOfChange.org.

MICHAEL BROWNLEE is co-founder of Transition Colorado (formerly Transition Boulder County), and a long-time catalyst for relocalization. A founding member of the Boulder County Food and Agriculture Policy Council, he is also a board member of Transition U.S. and a certified Transition Trainer. His organization has helped birth more than 20 Transition Initiatives in Colorado. Michael is also editor and publisher of Transition Times, a newly-launched online publication providing information, insight and inspiration for The Long Emergency.