We live in a time when change is happening at a perilous pace. What we think we know of the past is being replaced or challenged by an endless flow of new information. Dramatic discoveries revealing hidden mysteries and technological advances enabling instantaneous global communication are increasing every day, forever altering the way we live and carry out our lives. The world is being reformed and transformed before our very eyes.

With this rapid increase of inventions and other advancements of all kinds, it feels like change itself is changing. Each step up the ladder of evolution has quickened the pace of the ascent, making the entire progression seem more and more at risk, and the need for a deep level transformation on both the personal and collective more imminent.

In the words of one current observer, “A relentless and accelerating tide of change has swept across the globe, transforming daily life, throwing together populations who previously cared little about or for each other, altering human and political relationships, and greatly improving material well-being, but at the same time threatening us with the disruption of established social orders and the possibility of cataclysm and extinction.”

We seem to be in the adolescent phase of our collective development, moving toward a more mature outlook when we will consciously live as one human family sharing one planet. Even as we struggle to overcome our child-like tendencies as a species, we know we are headed in that direction.

As the Baha’i writings emphasize, “Far from signalizing the end of civilization, the convulsive changes towards which humanity is being ever more rapidly impelled will serve to release the ‘potentialities inherent in the station of man’ and reveal ‘the full measure of his destiny on earth, the innate excellence of his reality.’” This level of confidence is warranted today because “All the signs indicate that a sea change in human consciousness is under way.” We are clearly in transformational times.