"A caterpillar eats up to three hundred times it's own weight in a day, devastating many plants in the process, continuing to eat until it's so bloated that it hangs itself upside down and goes to sleep, it's skin hardening into a chrysalis.  Then, within the chrysalis, a new and very different kind of creature, the butterfly, starts to form....... 

Cells within the butterfly genome were held as disclike aggregates of stem cells that biologists call 'imaginal cells' hidden away inside the caterpillar all it's life, until the crisis of overeating, fatigue and breakdown allows them to develop, gradually replacing the caterpillar with a butterfly.

 Such metamorphosis makes a good metaphor for the great changes globalisation, in the sense of world transformation, is bringing about....  Our bloated old system is rapidly becoming defunct while the vision of a new and very different society, long held by many 'imaginal cell' humans, who dreamt of a better world, is now emerging like a butterfly, representing our solutions to the crisis of predation, overconsumtion and breakdown in a new way of living lightly on the Earth, and of seeing our Human society not in the metaphors and models of mechanism as well-oiled social machinery, but in those of evolving, self organizing and intelligent living organisms.

 If you want a butterfly world, don't step on the caterpillar, but join forces with other 'imaginal cells' to build a better future for all".

   ~ Elisabet Sahtouris, Ph.D.

      Evolution Biologist