As a psychologist and psychotherapist I have been involved in helping people change since the `60's and as a corporate psychologist helping organizations change since the mid `70's . What became clear to me about 1977 is how all our psychological models endorsed the status quo and ignored systems, blind to the political consequences of theory and practice. My article "Intimacy and Autonomy are Not Enough (Is TA a Middle-Class Tranquilizer?)"^[1], challenged systemic blindness of adherents of the Transactional Analysis Approach. I said that any system that offers itself as a remedy to the human condition without considering social realities is like a life guard standing down river pulling out children and adults who cannot swim, but who never goes or sends anyone upstream to see how it is all those people are getting thrown in.

Many of us now realize that all our systems are dysfunctional, no longer working but also oppressive and addictive. My own Roman Catholic church is one of the worst offenders. Bishops refuse to listen to laity except for right-wing letter writers. My main complaint with the book is that it is not hard enough on our various religious institutions. Few really care about the individual person unless they can exercise some occasional benevolence to reinforce their own "glittering images." Not many teach and respect the primacy of the individual conscience and the importance of each spiritual journey, nor much about prayer. No denomination recognises the power of the unconscious human shadow to sabotage every presumption of righteousness.

Christians kill their wounded and fundamentalist churches eat pastors and keep on splitting, each believing that their "side" has God in its pocket. Nine hundred million Catholics have no biblical theology of sexuality, nor an Incarnational theology of love, and therefore no adequate theology of marriage. All because celibates insist on their own faith-inspired biologically-slanted "natural law" non-biblical view of sexuality and refuse to listen to the experience of laity. Human beings without a penis are second class citizens in church. If one cares about the church, who cannot have some rage about what continues to be done in the name of God but where power, politics and patriarchy prevail?

But a funny thing is happening on the way to Judgment that no one but the Holy Spirit could imagine. Our churches are being ambushed by Spirituality, breaking out in all sorts of forms:^[2] an explosion of books and interest on prayer, meditation and ways of the Spirit, prayer groups, house churches, 12th step groups for the spiritual journey, Christians thinking for themselves. meeting in small groups with every kind of focus. The small group movement (now a long way from its AA origin) is on the verge transforming church life. Those churches that are most successful are noted for having some kind of group for most every interest.

But more than anything else and quicker than we can imagine, the Internet is creating a global village. The WEB is producing a libertarian popularism that is still mostly underground. For many it is hard to understand because it is so different. We cannot have this technological revolution and still maintain our existing power structures. Something will have to give. This technology can not be stopped or managed, co-opted or controlled by the institutions of the past. So either get on board, be left behind or be run over: Hear ye, ye CEO's, presidents, school boards, deans, managers, popes, bishops and powers that be. The organizational pyramid is being turned upside down--everywhere! If executives do not move toward developing teams and respecting the employee, their companies cannot remain competitive. While training managers at IBM in the 1980's, I observed their smugness and sold my IBM stock at 168. It went down to the 30's before coming back now to around 100. It is predicted that at least half of the businesses flourishing or getting by today will not exist in five to ten years.

"If Rip Van Winkle woke up today, he'd find the whole world has changed except the schools," says an acerbic Franklin Schargel, a Long Island quality consultant who retired in 1994 as quality coordinator with George Westinghouse Vocational & Technical High School in Brooklyn, New York. "Schools use a classroom model taken from prior to Gutenberg's printing press." None of our schools teach children how to reason and think for themselves--conformity and regurgitation is still too often the rule. The American Public School system will collapse because they can not adjust and reform themselves.

Charter Schools, vouchers, private public supported education, free schools on the Net will happen. It is only a question of when. All large institutions build up overhead and suffer goal displacement. They are of administration, by administration, and for the benefit of administration. They forget about their clients. The U.S. Congress, the Department of Agriculture, Columbia University, General Motors, IBM, Microsoft, NASA, all age and build deposits in their circulation systems. Top management of both IBM and Xerox had employees with the vision and technical know-how for the PC revolution, but no matter how many times they tried to explain the coming PC evolution to the executives, they simply could not grasp it. Steve Jobs and Bill Gates did. The best argument for free markets is that competition forces organizations to knock off the rust and calcium buildup or get fossilized and die. Business has become the new matrix of creativity.

The social political impact of the WEB is the creation of virtual communities giving support to alternative viewpoints and personalities without the approval of higher authority. The dominant social system does not and can not understand the "freedom" of this diversity and will be taken by surprise in a major social revolution. The traditions of conformity and the chain of command are increasingly obsolete. People are finding ways to be connected that are new every day and simply exploding. One reference is to request free weekly copies of the Synergy Journal from Pflaump@sprynet.com.^[3]

Connectedness is much larger than the Net. Many are talking about or aware of connectedness today, both scientists and philosophers: from structural anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss to new interest in philosopher G. W. Leibnitz. Our true nature is interdependent. I.e., "We are cosmic connectivity focused in an individual way." The religious view would say that we are brothers and sisters of one human family.

Connectedness is the word we hear today from diverse sources, from environmentalists, quality control experts and family systems counselors to physicists, philosophers, Native Peoples and mystics. Connectedness means that we can do harm we never meant to do, but it also means that our capacity to create, spur changes, and cooperate is far greater than we imagine. This book is about system filters, connectedness, dialogue and shifts in consciousness. It does not catch the Net, the Net catches it. And this is fascinating and symbolic about the increasing rate of change.

Dialogue is uniquely suited to exploring connectedness, since dialogue is the act of connecting. Through dialogue we open the thought paths between us and investigate shared concerns. Before we know it, we are exploring the interwoven character of our lives, as our awareness of connectedness dissolves the hard and fast walls between us. The WEB produces opportunities for dialogue that is just beginning to explode exponentially.

Chapter titles reveal the scope of this book: Recovery, the art of paradigm shifts; Pain and power of shifting assumptions; Power in whole-minded shifts; Power in shifting the context; Self knowledge: knowing our paradigm filters; Self-disclosure: breaking through paradigm filters; Self-acceptance: building systems on Who We Are; Dialoguing our way to social order; Dialoguing with our connectedness; Connected action; Conspiring ongoing paradigm evolution; Walking or Sleepwalking; Changing the consciousness grid. The authors suggest the way forward to system change or the good old religious word "metanoia." The Net is connectedness, immediate, and far reaching.

We are in the midst of tremendous shifts in our consciousness, on the verge, I believe, of a great leap forward unlike the world has ever seen. Evolution is not linear. Even the physical fossil record does not support a slow steady progress, but sudden extinctions and bursts of creativity that also happen. The complexity of the human brain could not have evolved incrementally by chance: that is statistically impossible even in 15 billion years. The mystery at the root of everything in quantum physics and astronomy is sending many scientists back to philosophy and theology.

Nature was never as calm and stable as we thought. Evolution according to Stephen Jay Gould is not always a orderly, steady, slow process but can be sudden, dynamic and chaotic, times of sudden change, exterminations, chaos, high levels of uncertainty, where discontinuous forces, sudden bursts of creativity and leaps in human consciousness that swiftly transfigure the familiar and fault all expectations. The Internet revolution is about a social, educational, political and business environment of rapid evolution.

Only 11% of the colonists brought about the American revolution; the great majority of colonists preferred to remain with England. A small number of people can change the world. This was true with both the rise and the fall of communism, and the collapse of the Berlin Wall. Bernard Shaw observed that the Reasonable person adapts to reality, but the Unreasonable person expects Reality to adapt to his/her ideas. Therefore all progress is made by the Unreasonable Person: Jesus, Francis of Assisi, Joan of Arc, H.G. Wells, Shaw, Galileo, Lincoln, Gandhi, Anwar Sadat, John XXIII--add your favorite for people of new vision who moved beyond the conventions of their time. I believe we will reach critical mass within the next 3 to 5 years for a major social transformation.