What is a Great Transition Story?


A story of great transition has a number of attributes: It is universal, simple, emotionally powerful, evocative of our higher potentials, and more.

Key Characteristics

A story of ‘great transition’ recognizes that the human community is challenged to step up to a new level of responsibility for the world we are creating. These stories are:

  1. Universal and concern the whole human community,
  2. Simple and relatively easy to understand or grasp,
  3. Emotionally powerful,
  4. Able to call forth our higher potentials,
  5. Dynamic and unfolding or “evolutionary,”
  6. Culturally powerful with a shadow side if their potentials are not fulfilled, and
  7. Involve a time of profound initiation and deep transformation.

A number of narratives are not ‘transition’ stories for humanity and so are not included; for example:

  1. Catastrophic scenarios where, for example, nuclear war or a global disease wipes out most of humanity within a matter of months,
  2. The rise of a centralized, authoritarian, and paraylzing government with rigid controls to halt the seemingly unstoppable collapse of civilizations,
  3. Intervention by an alien civilization to ‘save us,’
  4. Intervention by other dimensional, spiritual beings to ‘save us’

Importantly, these are viewed as examples of interrupted, incomplete, or failed transitions. In addition, they are stories being developed by many others. Narratives of incomplete and failed transitions are not the focus of this project; instead, we are exploring narrative pathways that lead through our time of transition and into a promising future.