Having received first feedback after the launch of The Mindful Revolution, it became clear that I would translate it and publish a German version, too. Due to many technical terms, most of the neuroscientific area, my thesis becomes easier to transport and understand when delivered in a native language.

For me, personally, it was a highly interesting experience to first of all write The Mindful Revolution in English — and I’m totally aware that I’d never match the style of a native speaker, but it was a nice challenge, anyway — and then to re-translate it into my native language, German. In principle, you could compare this endeavor to the “Whispers” game: one person starts telling something to another person, and so on. The final output always differs greatly from what was originally put in. In my case, I had to re-word much of the original The Mindful Revolution content in order to produce not only a comprehensible but a fluent reading experience in Die Achtsame Revolution.

I hope, my German readers have fun reading Die Achtsame Revolution, and I’d be happy to receive their feedback!

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The issue here is no scaremongering but resolving global challenges that each of us is confronted with, individually. There has been an ongoing migration of poor, desperate people from regions unliveable due to the climate crisis, poverty, and wars. We can watch — live on TV — how people drown in the sea, being prevented from reaching safe land. We also watch live on TV how incompetent, corrupt, but democratically elected heads of states issue rules and guidelines while ignoring domain experts and scientific advice. We, in the first world, discuss, demonstrate, and donate in order to add our fair share to the fight against global threats. But, is that enough?

Many of us share a feeling of an increasing exasperation, the notion that even our aggregated efforts could not suffice to save planet earth as a liveable habitat. Some have started working on escape plans by exploring other planets as potential habitats. But, even the best of these alternative scenarios would most probably translate in very limited living spaces for a fraction of the 1%. So, let’s forget about these, for a moment.

In The Mindful Revolution, I share my thoughts about how human beings must — and can — change in order to save our planet. My perspective is a very individual one: I don’t try to solve global problems by operating giant levers, e.g. by influencing the heads of the United Nations or states to improve their regiments.

The Mindful Revolution — Entering the next evolutionary level.

My perspective is, first and foremost, inward-bound. Based on my layman’s knowledge of neuroscience, combined with my entrepreneurial experience in several technologies, I have developed the thesis of a possible reconnection of our brain with our body (or: intuition) that allows for entering a higher level of understanding and addressing global challenges. As with all technologies, after a certain duration of development, each technology reaches the final stage of its inherent potential. For instance, look at combustion engines. Car manufacturers have fine-tuned car engines to the max — we have now reached the point where each additional incremental improvement would take tremendous efforts that, in turn, would overcompensate the gains. Thus, the advent of the electric vehicle: a completely different technology is needed to move forward and to allow for individual transport in the future.

In the same way, EVs displace the combustion engine, a higher level of awareness attained by leveraged human capabilities through the reconnection of brain and body can take over from our limited, linear, first-order-thinking-based strategies to run the world. There’s no time to discuss and ponder, we have to act. In The Mindful Revolution I propose a peaceful, scientifically-proven, and low-cost way to enter the next level in the evolution of mankind. Looking forward to your feedback!

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Mankind has learned to develop technology that adds convenience to life by instrumentalizing inherent human capabilities, such as language and storytelling — during the phase of the Cognitive Revolution, some 70–30,000 years ago. However, humankind found itself at the top of the food chain of all living beings in a blink of history; whereas other animals used millions of years to develop further, humans succeeded from eating bigger animals’ leftovers to build AI-powered machines within a few thousand years. This evolutionary short track is the main reason for today’s challenges, such as the destruction of our ecosystems and wars. As Yuval Harari puts it: Humans aren’t wolves but rather resemble a sheep flock that — thanks to a freak of nature — have learned to build tanks and nuclear weapons. And sheep armed with weapons are far more dangerous than wolves. Humans have neither learned to cope with these challenges coming with their new abilities nor have we learned to use our brains in an adequate evolutionary way.

Now, being confronted with obvious, imminent challenges, such as climate crisis, migration, and global political tensions, we can’t rely on improving technology further in a linear way. We can’t rely on building slightly better tech when giant challenges are looming. We must initiate a paradigm shift, a change of our own inherent system — we must improve ourselves — since our current human capabilities prove to be insufficient for solving these challenges. We are overwhelmed, and we are only starting to realize this mental overload. Unfortunately, the typical human reaction of being overwhelmed is either to ignore the problem, to run away, or to be panicked. None of which is helpful. Think about it and you will find many practical examples for each of these three coping strategies.

The Mindful Revolution — How To Manage Complexity

The systemic change we have to initiate now is that we enhance ourselves in a way that enables us to solve these challenges, quickly. Obviously, the challenge lies in being unable to solve existing problems with the same level of consciousness that created them. The good news is that there is a way of self-enhancement that can be embarked on by everybody. Each individual can (and should) start working today on her personal improvement. By unleashing our inherent human potential that we have only fractionally materialized by now, we not only improve ourselves, our performance, but we consciously contribute to the next evolutionary step of humankind, the Mindful Revolution. The Mindful Revolution will prove to become a similar quantum leap for humanity as the Cognitive Revolution 30,000 years ago. Historians aren’t completely sure, why Sapiens survived and Homo Florensis, Neanderthals, and others did not. Presumably, Sapiens succeeded because of their greater capabilities, mainly derived from their bigger brains. Now is the time for the next evolutionary step of  Sapiens: we can choose: complete distinction of our species — or The Mindful Revolution.

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This simple statement by a veritable expert in this field (as opposed to my son’s father) had deeply impressed my son. Each time we go skiing and one of our family members is not satisfied with some external conditions, such as the slope or the snow, he quotes his instructor. The statement even turned into an earworm for all of us while going downhill.

As so often, simple, precise statements in a specific field of interest have a broader impact — some of them can be regarded as general wisdom. If we replace ‘slope’ with ‘situation’, we have a good example of a general pearl of wisdom: Not the situation must change — you must!

Most of us experience several situations each day we would like to change or rather not lived through altogether. Typically, we find explanations of why this situation emerged and why other people or circumstances are responsible for a potentially negative perception of this situation. Also typically, it’s not us who are responsible, but someone else. I’m not talking only about real problems happening in real life, I’m talking about our stream of consciousness that produces millions of different thoughts each day and creates this kind of (virtual) situations we then start assessing. Being honest with ourselves, we must admit that in most of these situations we don‘t feel responsible for any negative outcomes, but we blame other people, or the situation itself.

As we know from psychology, philosophy, and neuroscience, everything we experience does not have to happen in real life in the exact way we experience it. Each individual has a slightly different perception of what is going on around her. What we see isn‘t what we get. What we see is a mixture of what we are capable to see, what we remember having seen before and — perhaps most interestingly — what we would like to see. However, a situation per se is a neutral element of life — it is as it is. It totally depends on ourselves how we interpret a situation, how we experience it. In other words: there is a multitude of ways in which we can experience one and the same situation.

Change Yourself Before You Try Changing The World!

Just give it a try: think about a situation you have experienced lately and your original assessment of it. Now, take a different perspective and try to interpret the situation anew. Does it work? I have been using calendar entries to continuously remind myself of the simple truth that it’s me who has to change, not the situation. It works.

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