Fortunately, there are signs that we are not doomed to repeat these troubling patterns. There is abundant evidence that humanity is several steps into a perceptual framework that will help us resolve many of these System Overloads.

There are also signs that this new framework holds more than meets the eye. Journalists and business pundits have been quick to pronounce the death of the Industrial Era. But there has been no such consensus on what has replaced it. Contenders have included The Computer Age, The Information Age, The Internet Era, The Knowledge Age, The Network Age, the New Economy, and the obvious, though less original “Post-Industrial Era.”

The reason that each of these monikers fails to stick – or to inspire -- is that each is incomplete. The origins of this dramatically new worldview stem from more than new technologies or even new strategies for survival. The emerging perceptual framework is based on much broader -- and more exciting -- developments in human civilization. Indeed, the new era is an indication of profound changes in the way that we see and explain life.

In the final scenes of the movie Matrix, the main character, Neo, can finally see the software code in the walls around him. At this moment, he understands that this code creates the surrounding virtual reality, and he recognizes his own power to change the code. Our own scene is not so different from his. In the case of Western civilization, the four “walls” that shape our understanding of reality are:

1. Science’s explanation of life.

2. Our social context.

3. The way our brains operate.

4. Individual consciousness, or interpretations of reality.

The first two of these “walls” represent the external and internal determinants of our collective reality. Science tells us about life and reality “out there.” And each of us then constructs our personal reality in our patterns of interactions with the world.

The second two walls shape the external and internal versions of our individual reality. Though the brain is located inside our bodies, its functioning can be observed and studied empirically, while consciousness exists only internally; my thoughts and feelings cannot be observed or studied without my sharing them.

Like Neo, humanity is getting better at seeing and interpreting the four walls that shape our reality – and even at reprogramming their coding. As the following pages will show, inspection of each of these four walls reveals distinct and recognizable signposts, pointing the way toward a very different way of operating. Each reveals life as not solely mechanistic and separate but also inherently adaptive, interrelated and generative.