In a world immersed in urgency, with alarm bells ringing left and right and dire predictions for our future, how dare I come up with a banner marked, “Yes, so many good things are happening”? Simply because how we look upon the world is a purely subjective vision emanating from our view of existence, our sense of trust in the universe and life, our ability to impact what is happening both locally and globally.

Yes, powerful positive trends are emerging or have been active already for years. Here are a few:

1. The current global pandemic – something which has never happened to us before – is creating a totally new awareness of our oneness as a race. We will make it together or sink together – no more private paradises, an illusion so many of my Swiss compatriots held till the nineties.

2. A growing sense that everything is linked. The rising sea levels could displace not millions but certainly tens of millions living in low coastal areas and they could end up on our doorsteps as climate refugees unless we in the West start changing our profligate consumption patterns which are a major cause of rising world temperatures.

3. The vision of the New Physics which is radically changing our vision of the world and, amongst many, many changes, enabling us to see that energy is behind everything – including the energy of my positive or negative thoughts. Each one of my significant thoughts about the world raises or depresses world mental energy levels – how extraordinary! I can help model the future of the world just by my thinking. (Think of spiritual healers healing people thousands of miles away on another continent. This happened to me once in a highly critical situation.)

4. The growing worldwide movement of personal development, illustrated by tens of thousands of workshops, not to mention books, touching tens of millions over the past thirty years.

5. The amazing development of alternative medical and health approaches, also a very recent development in the past twenty years or so, enabling each of us to know there are always positive alternatives to a medical system so heavily dependent on Big Pharma.

6. The growing awareness of the environmental crisis with both citizens and innumerable NGOs and governments starting to act to avoid the major crisis ahead.

7. The growing awareness that all forms of life are related (of which the amazing growth of the vegetarian movement is a very concrete sign) and the growing trend to recognizing animals as creatures with real consciousness, not an automatic bundle of reactions to outside stimuli. In recent years some countries have even recognized that rivers have all  the  rights of a legal person, as related in this article https://gentleartofblessing.org/meet-the-river-people-who-speaks-for-the-rivers/

8. Technological innovations such as portables and especially internet. We are all aware of the drawbacks of portables, especially in the field of raising children and interpersonal communication, but they have so many positive dimensions. As for internet, it has changed world culture and living in so many amazing and positive ways it seems we simply could not survive without it. For the first time in history, the humblest streetsweeper or porter has access to exactly the same information as top scientists. This has dealt a very strong blow we all benefit from to the monopoly of information, hence of authority, in so many fields.

This list could continue page after page. Why not make it a family game one drizzly afternoon to make the longest list of positive trends you can come up with? It could even be more exciting than switching on the TV for some major sports event.

Pierre Pradervand