What On Earth is Going On?

In our journey through the ages from being particles of stardust to our current selves, we have come to a place now where we are being pushed to take a leap into a new and different way of being human. Through many past generations we have developed the incredible gift of intellect and have begun to understand and control the world within us and around us. We have learned to express our intellectual power, building a world that would have been completely unimaginable only one thousand years ago. Yet we cannot rest comfortably here, for the world we have built now presents us with challenges which cannot be solved at the level we utilized to build it. We are pressed to evolve again in order to survive this new situation.

In the process of developing this capacity, our intellect has overshadowed any sense of who we are beyond itself. Intellect frames who we are in terms of ideas, temporarily blinding us to the reality behind those ideas. We have been caught in a golden trap where our lives are for the most part confined within a web of thinking, unable to escape from relating to everyone and everything through our ideas about them.

Yet in each generation, some small percentage of our ancestors have pursued various contemplative traditions, building an ongoing connection with what lies beyond intellect, a golden thread if you will — a human capacity which portends our possible escape from the trap our minds have us caught in, shining a light on our collective passageway ahead. We have planted for ourselves the seed of our next stage of development and it is growing. It is the capacity to open up to what is, to experience the fullness of life without filtering and limiting everything through our preconceived ideas about it. Because of the nature of the challenges we are presented with at this time in history, it is time now for this seed to grow from isolation into the mainstream of human life – from the cloister into the marketplace.

All around the world, the fruits of this seed are beginning to develop and ripen. People are beginning to wake up as if from a long sleep. Contact with those pioneers stimulates the same capacities in others and a new and wonderful contagion spreads. New possibilities become visible that could not be seen before. The felt-sense is that of having a new door of perception has opened. Life is radiant with vitality, people are seen as unique expressions of divine grace, the answers to the previously intractable world issues are already in the room.

Intellect is no longer is in charge of having to figure everything out and can assume a new, more do-able role as servant of something beyond itself and is less subject to initiating self-defense type activities and more prone to just exploring what is possible. The thought-based operational self which the intellect created to try to run everything and survive, is no longer in change. We find ourselves a part of something larger and much more stable and secure. Intellect becomes the most amazing tool.

To be alive now, at this critical juncture between the potential for humans to meet the challenges of our time or self-destruct is both a privilege and an opportunity. Many people are thriving as pioneers here in the midst of the pain of the dying of the old order. This is truly a renaissance of human nature arising at a time when the old world’s forms, organizations and thought processes are beginning to fail us. Many people are already beginning to build on the new possibilities, even as they are dwarfed by the weight of what is failing all around them. New structures spring up like weeds.

Because this is just beginning, these pioneers often can feel isolated and overwhelmed. Yet I would argue that these far-flung pioneers of a new humanity are in fact already all parts of one movement stretching across the globe. I would also argue that it is the work of this time to begin to make connections between ourselves, forming a network which transcends all the differences once separating us from each other and solidifies our true unity in the oneness of all life in a way that we can palpably feel and be supported by. We have the technology to form this network, and all around us humanity is beginning to awaken.

Establishing a New Base of Operations (part 1)

As we meditate and otherwise explore our inner dimensions, we become increasingly familiar with the contours of that inner territory.  We feel into who we are on so many different levels.  We get to know the feel of our bones, our muscles, our emotions, our conceptual capabilities, our ideas about ourselves, our noisy monkey-mind, our direct knowing and we stretch into what higher realms are also within our reach.

We  may explore the downward stretch into connection with Earth and with the whole human experience we are at one with in our roots.  Our ancestors and our relatives the plants and animals and all of life meet us there in Oneness, giving us a base, an unshakable foundation on which to build a life for ourselves that is a natural outgrowth of that natural line of development, of evolutionary progress and of belonging to something quite beyond the self of our past.

The old isolated self, the old base of operations (the one that was built from our thinking) is no longer capable of leading us forward.

We find we can begin to reach upwards into a newly opening dimension of human consciousness right now.  Something new is seeming to be available to us here, something almost like another dimension, an internal one.  We are able to make an upward stretch into territory that was not there before. A new capability is coming alive in us.    It seems to hold all of our future possibilities and call us forward individually and collectively – to enter into our evolutionary next step. and to invite the future possibilities that wish to unfold within it.