Here we are, in the early years of the 21^st Century, faced with an unprecedented opportunity – the radical re-invention of our species, its nature, its purpose, its destiny, and its relationship to the rest of existence. For the first time in human history, we have the information we need to take a huge metaphorical step back and to look at the big picture: where did we come from, what we have become, where are we going, and why? If we don’t like what we see, what can we do to change it? Who says the current consensus reality is the only possible option?

What was the greatest scientific discovery of the 20^th Century? Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, you’d most likely say. And you’d be correct. However, Einstein himself could not believe the mind-boggling implications of his discovery. So what did he do? He fudged the equations, adding a term he called the “cosmological constant”. Toward the end of his life, Einstein stated that this act was the greatest mistake of his scientific career. It took the astronomer Edwin Hubble, several decades later, to awaken Einstein to the fact that his original intuition had been correct. We live in an expanding universe!

Now folks, this is not a book about science. It’s a simple book, a practical book, about spirit, about the spiritual nature of the Universe, about the human potential. So why is the above discovery central to our thesis? Firstly, let me say that science and spirit are not separate. That is just another illusion perpetuated by our left-brain worldview. In this particular case, science answers the central question of the spiritual quest. How so? What in Heaven’s name does an expanding universe have to do with God? Let’s approach the question from another angle. There is an old Sufi saying that God is closer to you than your own jugular vein. That’s pretty close, isn’t it?

Now let’s get back to Einstein and Hubble, and see why the fact of an expanding universe has such profound spiritual implications. There’s another facet to the discovery. Careful measurement of the movements of the galaxies reveals that all of them, without exception, are moving AWAY from us. If everything in the universe is moving away from everything else, where does that place us? Aha! You get it! We are at the center. The fifteen billion light-year journey to the center of the universe puts us right here, right now!

The universe is omnicentric, meaning simply, that the center of the universe is everywhere. This makes no sense in a Newtonian cosmology. There is no way to picture such a reality, but that is simply the way it is in the quantum universe. You are at the very center of the Universe. So am I. So is everyone on the planet. So is the moon. So is Mars. So is the Andromeda Galaxy! This has profound implications for our world-view, challenging as it may be to make the shift. Where are we? At the center of the Universe, right here, right now. Where is God, the Creator of all things, whatever you may call it? Same answer. Right here, right now. Closer than our own jugular veins. If you and I and the Creator of all things occupy precisely the same space and time, what does that imply about who I am, about who you are? 

Let's go back in time a few thousand years. Moses had a mission. Jesus had a mission. This book has a mission, so let’s get right to the point. Moses came down from the mountain with the Ten Commandments, a long list of “thou shalt nots” designed to impose control on the people of his time and culture, a semi-wild bunch of shepherds, warriors and artisans with deep and ancient roots in the libertarian goddess-worshiping religions of the region. The only “thou shalts” in the list were the two enjoining the Israelites to love their god and their parents. Both god and parent were stern and forbidding authoritarians, therefore a little difficult to love, so the first two commandments were even more difficult to obey than the other eight. A couple of millennia later, during the Roman hegemony, a latter-day Israelite named Jeshua ben Yussuf, these days known as Jesus of Nazareth, appeared with a new set of commandments, featuring a much greater emphasis on loving, not only god and parent, but also one’s neighbor. And that neighbor was to be loved “as oneself”, perhaps the first time in the world's literature that we find mention of self-esteem, the love of self that we now know to be essential to psychological health.

The messages of both these prophets, along with those of countless others, have had an enormous and positive civilizing influence on human society, no question. And yet the world is still mired in poverty, greed, war and violence. Why did humanity not simply adopt the tenets of its Wise Ones, who to this day maintain that all we have to do is to love, honor and respect one another, and all the bad things will go away?

The answer, we propose, has to do with assumptions, the core beliefs upon which we base our reality, assumptions which we have not questioned for millennia. We propose, furthermore, that by changing a few of these fundamental assumptions, we can individually and collectively change our world, permanently, painlessly, and in a few short years. As we come into alignment with the "true" nature of the Universe, we will be enabled, each of us, to actualize our highest aspirations.

Moses, Jesus and the leaders of 21^st Century Earth, despite their most visionary pronouncements and the millennia that have gone by, share one thing in common – a world where the dominant world-view or cosmology is based on fear. Fear of everything, including scarcity, drought, famine, wild animals, dangerous neighbors, lack of money, illness, old age, disease, storms, other religions, God Itself, computer viruses, communists, cat hair, religious zealots, terrorists, you name it. The list goes on and on and on.

If our dominant world-view is based on fundamental assumptions of scarcity and separation, no wonder we have created the world we see today. What alternative have we had? As unlikely as it may seem, now that we live in a radically inter-connected world where a single idea can spread like wildfire and change everything, we face an unprecedented opportunity: we can change the world simply by changing our assumptions.

In order to change our assumptions, we need to examine our existing ones, and to come up with a set of alternative assumptions to take their place if we find the old ones inadequate or outdated. That is the goal of this book: to discover and define ten basic assumptions to replace the existing ones that have dominated and distorted our world for so long.  Wild, Utopian thinking, you say? Absolutely! It’s the only way. Virtually every society has a myth or folk-story about a long-ago time when we all lived in harmony, in a paradise of balance and abundance. What if that paradise, that Garden of Eden, lies in the future, not the past? What if we’ve had it all backwards? It’s worth a shot, don’t you think?

Unless you’re completely satisfied with the status quo, why not join us in the greatest adventure ever undertaken, a paradigm shift for the whole of humanity? The key to that shift lies here, in the following Ten Assumptions. It’s all in our thoughts, the only things over which we have total control. We may not be able to change our outer circumstances immediately, but our inner landscape is ours to re-decorate as and when we choose. We can co-create a future beyond our wildest dreams. The question is: do we dare?

Speaking of dreams, one morning last summer Andrew woke up from a dream and wrote down these words:“Imaginal transformation: Our task is nothing less than the re-creation of the world, starting with our fundamental assumptions about the nature of the Universe.” This was the first time he had ever encountered the word imaginal. In a dream! He had no idea what it meant. The next book he read just happened to be Barbara Marx Hubbard’s Conscious Evolution, which explains this crucial term in the language of evolutionary biology in the very first chapter!