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Crisis

type of event that is an unstable and dangerous situation affecting an individual, group, community, or whole society

A crisis is an unstable or crucial time or state of affairs in which a decisive change is impending. Major Crises on the world scale are especially applicable in the study of International Relations.

War-of-the-worlds-tripod
The alien invasion in War of the Worlds was a fictitious crisis.
Man has the "habit of crisis"... They evoke confidence when surmounted, and produce greatly expanded vision.

Quotes

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  • Today's real borders are not between nations, but between powerful and powerless, free and fettered, privileged and humiliated. Today, no walls can separate humanitarian or human rights crises in one part of the world from national security crises in another.
    • Kofi Annan, Nobel lecture, Oslo, Norway, (10 December 2001)
  • Shirk not these crises, hard and difficult though they may appear to be. Difficult they are. Forget not that the habit of confronting crises, is a long-established one within the consciousness of humanity. Man has the "habit of crisis", if I may so call it.
    They are only the points of examination... They evoke confidence when surmounted, and produce greatly expanded vision. They foster compassion and understanding, for the pain and inner conflict they have engendered is never forgotten, for they draw upon the resources of the heart. They release the light of wisdom within the field of knowledge, and the world is thereby enriched.
    • Alice Bailey in A Treatise on the Seven Rays: Volume 3, Lucis Trust Pubishing (1951) p. 477
  • Unless such moments of crisis occur, the life simmers down to a general dead level and (even if useful) offers not the chance for an extreme effort with its consequent need to draw upon the full resources of the soul. (5 – 269).
  • The creative crisis (for Humanity) has been made possible by three major happenings:
  1. The conclusion of a twenty-five thousand year cycle or movement around what is called the lesser zodiac. This connotes a major cycle of experience in the life of our planetary Logos . . .
  2. The end of the Piscean Age. This simply means that the energies coming from Pisces during the last two thousand years, are now being rapidly superseded by energies coming from Aquarius. These result in major changes...
  3. The increasingly dominant activity of the seventh Ray of Order or Ceremonial Magic, as it is somewhat erroneously called. This ray is now coming into manifestation, and is in close co-operation with the two above factors. (18 – 550/1).
  • Our crises show us the ways in which our institutions have betrayed nature. We have equated the good life with material consumption, we have dehumanized work and made it needlessly competitive, we are uneasy about our capacities for learning and teaching. Wildly expensive medical care has made little advance against chronic and catastrophic illness while becoming steadily more impersonal, more intrusive. Our government is complex and unresponsive, our social support system is breaking at every stress point.
    The potential for rescue at this time of crisis is neither luck, coincidence, nor wishful thinking. Armed with a more sophisticated understanding of how change occurs, we know that the very forces that have brought us to planetary brinksmanship carry in them the seeds of renewal. The current disequilibrium— personal and social—foreshadows a new kind of society. Roles, relationships, institutions, and old ideas are being reexamined, reformulated, redesigned.
  • For the first time in history, humankind has come upon the control panel of change—an understanding of how transformation occurs. We are living in the change of change, the time in which we can intentionally align ourselves with nature for rapid remaking of ourselves and our collapsing institutions.
  • We are at a very exciting moment in history, perhaps a turning point, said Ilya Prigogine, who won the 1977 Nobel prize for a theory that describes transformations, not only in the physical sciences but also in society—the role of stress and "perturbations" that can thrust us into a new, higher order. Science, he said, is proving the reality of a deep cultural vision. The poets and philosophers were right in their intimations of an open, creative universe. Transformation, innovation, evolution—these are the natural responses to crisis. The crises of our time, it becomes increasingly clear, are the necessary impetus for the revolution now under way. And once we understand nature's transformative powers, we see that it is our powerful ally, not a force to be feared or subdued. Our pathology is our opportunity.
  • In every age, said scientist-philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, man has proclaimed himself at a turning point in history. " And to a certain extent, as he is advancing on a rising spiral, he has not been wrong. But there are moments when this impression of transformation becomes accentuated and is thus particularly justified." Teilhard prophesied the phenomenon central to this book: a conspiracy of men and women whose new perspective would trigger a critical contagion of change. Throughout history virtually all efforts to remake society began by altering its outward form and organization.
  • Without debate, without criticism, no Administration and no country can succeed — and no republic can survive. [...] And that is why our press was protected by the First Amendment — the only business in America specifically protected by the Constitution — not primarily to amuse and entertain, not to emphasize the trivial and the sentimental, not to simply "give the public what it wants" — but to inform, to arouse, to reflect, to state our dangers and our opportunities, to indicate our crises and our choices, to lead, mold, educate and sometimes even anger public opinion.
    • John F. Kennedy, in an Address before the American Newspaper Publishers Association. (27 April 1961)
  • Crisis is the mother of history. Beginning with Herodotus the urge to write history has been bound up with the need to explain the seemingly inexplicable reversals of fortune suffered by nations and empires. The best histories satisfy that need while still capturing the openness and unpredictability of human action, though the best histories are not always the most memorable. Historians who offer “multicausal explanations”—and use phrases like that—do not last, while those who discover the hidden wellspring of absolutely everything are imitated and attacked but never forgotten.
    • Mark Lilla, "Mr. Casaubon in America", The New York Review of Books (June 28, 2007)
  • Most of us seldom take the trouble to think. It is a troublesome and fatiguing process and often leads to uncomfortable conclusions. But crises and deadlocks when they occur have at least this advantage, that they force us to think.
    • Jawaharlal Nehru The Unity of India : Collected Writings, 1937-1940, (1942), p. 94
  • Crisis in its simplest terms is defined as an upset in a steady state... the habitual problem-solving activities are not adequate and do not rapidly lead to the previously achieved balance state
    • Lydia Rapoport, "The state of crisis: Some theoretical considerations." The Social Service Review (1962): 211-217.
  • Let them understand in America that the crisis in the country itself is nothing less than a battlefield. There is no better possibility! The Teaching says that while the human spirit is in happy and comfortable harbors it will never awaken. Therefore, only in the days of shocks is it possible to expect spiritual ascent and the realization of true values. The threatening time will compel many to look for a way out and salvation. Try to be at your best, and connect yourselves with the great Focus without delay! Let nobody be deceived by apparent calmness, as it is very deceptive—such calmness may be more dangerous than a storm.
  • Now it is time to encourage the BIS and other regulatory bodies to support studies on stress-test and concentration methodologies. Planning for crises is more important than VAR analysis.
  • The best indicator of your level of consciousness is how you deal with life's challenges when they come. Through those challenges, an already unconscious person tends to become more deeply unconscious, and a conscious person more intensely conscious. You can use a challenge to awaken you, or you can allow it to pull you into even deeper sleep. The dream of ordinary unconsciousness then turns into a nightmare.
    If you cannot be present even in normal circumstances, such as when you are sitting alone in a room, walking in the woods, or listening to someone, then you certainly won't be able to stay conscious when something "goes wrong" or you are faced with difficult people or situations, with loss or the threat of loss. You will be taken over by a reaction, which ultimately is always some form of fear, and pulled into deep unconsciousness. Those challenges are your tests.
  • When such challenges come, as they always do, make it a habit to go within at once and focus as much as you can on the inner energy field of your body. This need not take long, just a few seconds. But you need to do it the moment that the challenge presents itself. Any delay will allow a conditioned mental-emotional reaction to arise and take you over.
  • As the egoic mode of consciousness and all the social, political, and economic structures that it created enter the final stage of collapse, the relationships between men and women reflect the deep state of crisis in which humanity now finds itself. As humans have become increasingly identified with their mind, most relationships are not rooted in Being and so turn into a source of pain and become dominated by problems and conflict.
  • If it was a war that you could not escape, it was nevertheless a war that you had to choose to fight. And it is that which truly warrants describing 2020 as a crisis. In its original sense, crisis or krisis (in Greek) describes a critical turning point in the course of a disease. It is associated with the word krinein, which means to separate, decide, or judge, from which we derive "critic" or "criterion," the standard of judgment. It therefore seems a doubly apt phrase to describe the impact of a virus, which focused on people, on organizations, on governments at every level, all over the world, a series of huge and profoundly difficult choices.
    • Adam Tooze, Shutdown: How Covid Shook the World Economy (2021)
  • These are the visionary, mystical moments, when a man 'completes his partial mind'. His everyday conscious self is only a small part of the mind, like the final crescent of the moon. In moments of crisis, the full moon suddenly appears.
  • Why is it so hard to keep the mind concentrated, and to live up to our good resolutions? The problem is the basically mechanical nature of our left-brain consciousness. We have a kind of robot servant who does things for us: we earn to type or drive a car, painfully and consciously, then our robot takes over, and does it far more quickly and efficiently. Because man is the most complex creature on Earth, he is forced to rely on his robot far more than other animals. The result is that, whenever he gets tired, the robot takes over. For the modern city dweller, most of his everyday living is done by the robot. This is why it takes an emergency to concentrate the mind 'wonderfully', and why we forget so quickly.

See also

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