The Great Shift

For almost its entire history, Canada has been run by the political, media and business elites of Toronto, Ottawa and Montreal. But in the past few years, these groups have lost their power—and most of them still do not realize it’s gone. The Laurentian Consensus, the term John Ibbitson has coined for the dusty liberal elite, has been replaced by a new, powerful coalition based in the West and supported by immigrant voters in Ontario. How did this happen? Most people are unaware that the keystone economic and political drivers of this country are now Western Canada and immigrants from China, India and other Asian countries. Politicians and businesspeople have underestimated how conservative these newcomers are making our country. Canada, with its ever-evolving economy and fluid demographic base, has become divorced from the traditions of its past and is moving in an entirely new direction. In The Big Shift, Darrell Bricker and John Ibbitson argue that one of the world’s most consensual countries is becoming polarized, exhibiting stark differences between East and West, cities and suburbs, Canadianborn citizens and immigrants. The winners—in both politics and business— will be those who can capitalize on the tremendous changes that the Big Shift will bring.

The Great Shift is about the new era of humanity. We have entered the new epoch of humanity's spiritual evolutionary journey into higher consciousness. Our present world is one in which order is arising out of chaos. Everything is changing and seeking equilibrium. The conditions are nothing short of a rebirth. We are quite literally witnesses and participants in the shift from individual to planetary consciousness. We are part of the emerging consciousness, and the signs are everywhere. It is here now, and we all have a part to play in it. This book is a guide to navigating the shift from an old paradigm into a new one. It is deeply rooted in the shamanic and Taoist traditions, which are a fountain of wisdom and knowledge for restoring our relationship with the Earth. Shamanism and Taoism are a way of living in harmony with nature, rather than an adherence to a religious doctrine. By practicing these ways of being, we awaken our soul calling and our connection to nature. They provide a myriad of responses to the spiritual quest of self-discovery. They are ways that embed us in the living web of life, yielding greater awareness and perspective. These practices are easily integrated into contemporary life and provide a means of navigating the turbulent times in which we live.

Most of us think of the 1970s as an "in-between" decade, the uninspiring years that happened to fall between the excitement of the 1960s and the Reagan Revolution. A kitschy period summed up as the "Me Decade," it was the time of Watergate and the end of Vietnam, of malaise and gas lines, but of nothing revolutionary, nothing with long-lasting significance. In the first full history of the period, Bruce Schulman, a rising young cultural and political historian, sweeps away misconception after misconception about the 1970s. In a fast-paced, wide-ranging, and brilliant reexamination of the decade's politics, culture, and social and religious upheaval, he argues that the Seventies were one of the most important of the postwar twentieth-century decades. The Seventies witnessed a profound shift in the balance of power in American politics, economics, and culture, all driven by the vast growth of the Sunbelt. Country music, a southern silent majority, a boom in "enthusiastic" religion, and southern California New Age movements were just a few of the products of the new demographics. Others were even more profound: among them, public life as we knew it died a swift death. The Seventies offers a masterly reconstruction of high and low culture, of public events and private lives, of Jonathan Livingston Seagull, Evel Knievel, est, Nixon, Carter, and Reagan. From The Godfather and Network to the Ramones and Jimmy Buffett; from Billie jean King and Bobby Riggs to Phyllis Schlafly and NOW; from Proposition 13 to the Energy Crisis; here are all the names, faces, and movements that once filled our airwaves, and now live again. The Seventies is powerfully argued, compulsively readable, and deeply provocative.

The Great Shift is a progress report from the field and the messages are positive. You don't have to logically do anything but 'show up' with spiritual intent, and the DNA quantum field is activated in your body, Kryon says. He tells us to expect changes and peace we may have never thought to see in our lifetimes, even in the Middle East. He...

This thought-provoking book offers a new global approach to understand how four social class structures have rocked our political systems, to the extent that no politician or political party can exist today without claiming to be speaking on their behalf, and no politician can hope to win an electoral majority without building a coalition among these classes. Based on a four-fold analysis - Urban and Liberal Creatives, Suburban Middle Class, White Working Class and the Millennials - this book shows that while many have focused on a supply-side vision of politics to explain the upheavals in our political party systems, a vision centred on demand – and the Weberian take on political parties as vehicles for class interests – is more compelling. In 2016, our political world was changed forever by the victories of Brexit in the UK and Donald Trump in the USA. Far from being confined to the Anglosphere however, changes have also rocked the political landscapes in Europe. As the crisis of 2008 has shaken the foundations of Western societies, shrinking the size of the previously all-powerful middle class, new classes have emerged, and with them a new political demand that new (or old) parties have tried to satisfy. This book will be of key interest to political practitioners (politicians, advisors/consultants, journalists, political pundits, party builders, and government officials) and more broadly to academics, students and readers of European and Western politics, political sociology, party politics and political parties, and electoral demographics.

Marc Freedman, hailed by theNew York Timesas "the voice of aging baby boomers [seeking] meaningful and sustaining work later in life," makes an impassioned call to accept the decades opening up between midlife and anything approximating old age for what they really are -- an entirely new stage of life, which he dubs the encore years. In The Big Shift, Freedman bemoans the fact that the discussion about longer lives in America has been entirely about the staggering economic costs of a dramatically aging society when, in reality, most of the nation's 78 million boomers are not getting old -- at least not yet. The whole 60- to 80-year-old period is simply new territory, he writes, and the people in this period constitute a whole new phenomenon in the 21st century. The Big Shiftis animated by a simple premise: that the challenge of transitioning to and making the most of this new stage -- while deeply personal -- is much more than an individual problem; it's an urgent social imperative, one affecting all generations. By embracing this time as a unique period of life -- and providing guidance, training, education and support to the millions who are in it -- Freedman says that we can make a monument out of what so many think of as the leftover years. The result could be a windfall of talent that will carry us toward a new generation of solutions for growing problems in areas like education, the environment, and health care.

Drawing on meticulous research as well as personal shamanic experience, "Year Zero: Time of the Great Shift" clarifies the big picture of planetary evolution from the perspectives of ancient wisdom and modern science, revealing an intricate interplay between phenomena in order to shape a new species of humanity on a rapidly evolving earth.

The renowned author of How to Read the Biblereveals how a pivotal transformation in spiritual experience during the biblical era made us who we are today. A great mystery lies at the heart of the Bible. Early on, people seem to live in a world entirely foreign to our own. God appears to Abraham and Sarah, Jacob and others; God buttonholes Moses and Isaiah and Jeremiah and tells them what to say. Then comes the Great Shift, and Israelites stop seeing God or hearing the divine voice. Instead, later Israelites are “in search of God,” reaching out to a distant, omniscient deity in prayers, as people have done ever since. What brought about this change? The answers come from ancient texts, archaeology and anthropology, and even modern neuroscience. They concern the origins of the modern sense of self and the birth of a worldview that has been ours ever since. James Kugel, whose strong religious faith shines through his scientific reckoning with the Bible and the ancient world, has written a masterwork that will be of interest to believers and nonbelievers alike, a profound meditation on encountering God, then and now. “Fascinating.”—The New York Times Book Review “Biblical exegesis at its best: a brilliant and sensitive reading of ancient texts, all with an eye to making them meaningful to our time by making sense of what they meant in their own.”—Kirkus Reviews(starred review) “A magnificent job of bringing important ideas from the academy to a broad readership . . . Kugel gives readers a sense of history’s convoluted texture, its ironies, and thus its beauty.”—The Jewish Review of Books