The current global crisis is confronting humanity with an unprecedented challenge to fi nd sustainable ways of living. There is a need for cooperative action to fi nd alternatives to the reductionist and materialist mind-sets that have contributed to the current global crisis. This state of affairs calls for a political transformation, which is founded upon a renewed vision that recognizes and values the interdependence of all forms of life. This proposition is underscored by the importance of a shift in consciousness that leads to a greater depth of engagement in life; however, there is no precedent set for how such a change at a collective level could occur. In this article we discuss how the transformational phenomena known as spiritual emergencies may be revealing spontaneous changes in consciousness that could be leading people to experience greater depths in the way that they live. This shift in consciousness can be viewed as an enantiodromia, which is a naturally occurring process that precipitates a reaction or fl ow to an opposite position when a situation becomes unbalanced or too one-sided. We are suggesting that the enantiodromias of spiritual emergencies are heralding a wake-up call for the collective, which could be initiating a renewed vision for a deeper relationship to consciousness and life as a whole. We conclude by outlining six propositions for initiating a political transformation.It is hard to ignore the effects of consumerism and the separation that has emerged between people and the natural world, which is believed to be a contributing factor to an escalating sense of disenchantment (Reason, 2002). However, other factors such as global economics and political ideologies have also made a profound contribution to the current global crisis, which has been steadily gathering pace, decade on decade, since the mid part of the 164 Collins et al.A vision of human transformation has to include the possibility that human beings have a 'pull towards self-transcendence' (Walsh and Vaughan, 1983, 412), which is based on the recognition that such a development involves consciousness, as indicated by Walsh and 168 Collins et al. If Laszlo, Grof, and Russell (1999) have asserted correctly that within the modern world we are going through a collective spiritual emergency, we have to consider how the fl ow 170 Collins et al.
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