For over a decade now I have been saying that we are creating a new civilization as we enter the Information Age. I was wrong. My thinking has been incomplete. We are in fact moving beyond civilization. Real knowledge comes to us from the unseen world. All we have to do is listen and the infinite wisdom of the universe is available to everyone. The ancestors have revealed to me, a little at a time, the great change that humanity is presently going through. This has been a life long process. It has been an evolution. It is not that the ideas I was espousing when I was 22 are wrong, they are just more complete now. For example when I was 22 my plan was to retire from my public job after five years, and move to the mountains and create a self-sustainable life style with my nuclear family. At the time I never thought about community, but over time the idea of my individual family living sustainably grew to community idea and the networks of communities.

From 1984 to 1990 I saw the change within companies as just improvements to make bureaucracy work better. Then I grew by 1992 to see that these changes in companies were actually the creation of a new wealth creation system that would replace companies and bureaucracy. As I wrote my first book, from 1992 to 1996, this idea grew to the notion that creating a new wealth creation system is actually part of the current evolution towards a new civilization. When the book was published in 1999 I had not connected the changes in society to the Indigenous world. In the early 2000’s I began to understand that the civilization shift was a shift to a more natural Indigenous way of living. By 2006 this was solidified in the Indigenous Way.

Virtually all of the wisdom that comes to me from the ancestors come when I am not trying to figure out anything. Usually they are stimulated by unrelated events and observations in the external world which meander their way together in my mind and hook themselves together with tiny fishing hooks. For example the recent message from the ancestors regarding moving beyond civilization has been incubating in my mind for the past months. In the past few months ideas have been rolling around in my head regarding the white ways brought from Europe being really about domestication, control, manipulation, dominion over, reprocessing and refining of the Indigenous world to suit individual humans perceptions of their needs, regardless of the consequences to others and Mother Earth. One of the message that I was given over time was that it was impossible to live the Indigenous Way in a city.

For example a city by definition mandates pollution where the outputs of systems always are greater than the inputs to the next system. And the result is pollution. For example the mere act of going to the bathroom in a city becomes toxic waste, pollution and desecration. And one cannot live in reverence when one in desecrating Mother Earth. And this is just one example. Over time the ancestors showed me that the domestication process of the authoritarian system includes fakeness, surface politeness and phoniness. When driving yesterday, October 19, 2008, it dawned on me that creating a substantive, sustainable civilization may actually be a contradiction in terms. I began to wonder about the definition and roots of the word civilization. When I got home I checked the definition: Civilization from Latin civilis meaning that it refers to "civilized city dwelling" as opposed to the rural ways of the countryside.” and "behaving in a reasonable or polite manner." It was very civil of him to stop the argument. Wow!! Bullseye I thought. The ancestors are right again.

Many people falsely believe that indigenous people lived in mass in civilizations. The term indigenous means native to a natural ecosystem. Thus we see that indigenous and civilization are in fact opposites. Once humans begin moving away from living in harmony with Mother earth they are no longer indigenous. This is why in the vast majority of America once Indigenous people move away from their tribe they are no longer considered Indian.
Hence what we see happening with the vast change in the world today is not the creation of a new civilization but the evolution beyond civilization.

Barry Carter