Looking Back From the Future
A Short Essay on the Internet Global Interchange Project

prepared for the special Tenth Anniversary issue of GreenMoney Journal,
June-July 2002

by Alex Kochkin, John J. Hudy Ph.D., and Tish Van Camp from the Foundation for Global Awakening on behalf of the Global Interchange Project and Decade of the Heart, May 2002

Editor's note: Imagine it is the year 2012 -- A week of special events mark the ten-year anniversary of the founding of the Global Interchange and Decade of the Heart. Thousands of members are in attendance in the auditorium with tens of millions in presence from their home locations through the virtual networks. It is a time of recollection and appreciation as much as exuberance. The following are excerpts of remarks made by members of the global coordinating committee.

Greetings!

Started a decade ago by a small group of visionaries and innovators, The Global Interchange has grown to embrace over 40,000 organizations and enjoys the cooperative and energetic support of more than 350 million members as the most widely used virtual network resource throughout the world. Untold millions of people use it as a vital and welcome part of their daily life, for information, communications, group enterprises, organizing daily activities, financial and credit management, creative sharing, and as an exciting window into new frontiers of consciousness and science.

For those not involved in the years surrounding the turning of the new millennium, (a period referred to as the "great transition"), I would like to take a few moments to share how close we came to devolution instead of conscious evolution.

The mid-1990s through 2005 was a time of incredible breakthroughs in consciousness that were reflected in sciences, economics, philosophy, arts, and other forms. It was a time when more people than ever identified with spiritual-integral values and beliefs, such as interconnectedness of life and consciousness, compassion, and love. It was also a time when there were great numbers of people unable to let go enough of old ways so they could welcome new ways of being with one another and their natural world. Pioneering research conducted at the turn of the millennium by Global Interchange founders demonstrated a growing majority who identified with core values and beliefs that today are widely recognized as self-evident truths of our basic spiritual nature, and that are much a part of our daily life and society. From where we stand today, it may be hard to understand why this transition seemed so difficult for our species.

Over centuries, humanity developed dysfunctional personal and collective processes and structures arising from a way of life filled with fears related to survival and competition. Underlying all this was a basic disconnection between our "personality-selves" and "higher-selves" (i.e., as spiritual beings having a human experience). Even those who seemed to cooperate usually did so to dominate or out-compete. The energetic, social, and economic costs of this became untenable in ways plain to see, but fear, of new and unknown ways of being, overrode the obvious dissatisfaction with the old ways. We so over-identified ourselves with outmoded ways of being and interacting that it seemed impossible for people to surrender to their higher heart wisdom and choose more inspired and enlightened ways of being in a magnificent world.

Everything in the old society was based on competing specialties. Business enterprises that commanded vast resources were considered to be totally separate from social-benefit work. Medical research had nearly nothing to do with wellness, bio-energy, or consciousness. People made a sharp distinction between religious and non-religious beliefs, spirituality was usually equated with religion, which was banned from schools, and young people were taught to take charge of their future based solely on the past!

Even most visionaries of that period, who offered the most enlightened solutions to humanity's eco-spiritual-social crises, over-identified with forms that initially arose from their needs as early innovators to communicate their unique messages. This reinforced a fragmenting and non-cooperating mode of behavior. Each visionary seemed to promote their own version of wisdom over that offered by others. This incongruity made it difficult for most of these early pioneers to ask for (and to receive) the level of support needed to evolve their work to greater levels of manifestation. It also made it nearly impossible for society to recognize and adopt these innovations since the predominant social mode was based on the economic success of individual and family units.

The Global Interchange is one of the most important breakthroughs during humanity's "great transition." It started when a few visionaries agreed to take their common goals further by creating new structures, processes, and resources to encourage cooperation, resource sharing, and communications. The original founders brought together people with experience in finance, technology, and organizational process to craft a plan that would take advantage of the connective capacity of the Internet.

After initial difficulties in getting individuals with financial and technology resources to partner for a such a great purpose as The Global Interchange, funding eventually came from a few bold individuals of high integrity who believed in the vision, and who recognized that humanity simply could not afford not to invest in its own enlightened future.

The early system brought together the best of proven technology with innovative management, commercial, and philanthropic practices. A partner enterprise helped build the first working prototypes and provided access to the system through any digital or telephonic device.

A decade ago there was an overflow of incoherent and unverifiable information moving across what was then called the World Wide Web until the Global Interchange introduced new patterns of reliability and coherency. It was also one of the first to bridge barriers of specialization and language through the use of artificial intelligence.

The Global Interchange brought together inspired projects for a positive future with large-scale financial, technical, and human resources. Together, these early participants helped establish new patterns for cooperation and resource sharing aligned to high purposes.

Through cooperative transnational initiatives, human and material resources once used to dominate people and Nature have been transformed to redress planetary and social ecology in ways formerly thought to be impossible. Many technologies in common use these days were initially supported through the Global Interchange with other advanced cooperators, thus permitting the thoughtful conversion of old, ecologically-destructive processes.

The processes devised to manage and implement the project created a large-scale network that until recent years was a closely held cooperative enterprise. According to its general plan, The Interchange was eventually turned over to its members and is now managed by an amazing network of coordinating bodies.

Today, in the year 2012, as we consciously evolve ourselves, develop a more conscious partnership with our planet, and heal the results of our earlier thoughtlessness as a species, we might ask: "What new higher gifts will we bring to ourselves and to the stars?"