Excerpt from thee final chapter of my new book: Consciousness v Catastrophe: Reflections on the Next Stage of Human Evolution:
WAKING UP
“Are you God?”
“No, I am not God.”
“Are you an angel?”
“No I am not”
“What are you then?”
“I am awake!”
Gautama Buddha (500BC)
The price of separateness has become intolerable. We are entering a phase of melt down. Old structures within our psyche and in the world at large have to be dismantled in a process of spiritual awakening. And it is a process. It will not happen overnight or even in one generation.
In the foreword I quoted a segment of the poet and playwright Christopher Fry’s poem from his play The Sleep of Prisoners written in the early fifties. In this final chapter I feel moved to quote it in full. It is so relevant to the themes we have touched upon:
Dark and cold we may be, but this
Is no winter now. The frozen misery
Of centuries breaks, cracks, begins to move;
The thunder is the thunder of the floes,
The thaw, the flood, the upstart Spring.
Thank God our time is now when wrong
Comes up to face us everywhere,
Never to leave us till we take
The longest stride of soul we ever took.
Affairs are now soul size.
The enterprise
Is exploration into God.
Where are you making for? It takes
So many thousand years to wake,
But will you wake for pity’s sake!
The “exploration into God” that he speaks of is I believe the inner quest that I have been championing throughout the book. It is the mystic’s journey. Our consciousness revolution is “the upstart spring” . We are being called to awaken. “The frozen misery of centuries” wonderfully conveys the solidification of our perception. And the image of the thaw speaks to our gradual awakening to subtle energy and a melting of the egoic contractions we hold in our bodies. American poet Ann Sexton described art as “ the axe for the frozen sea within us” But heartbreak can also be the axe when wrong “comes up to face us everywhere”.
It may seem strange to some to see our 21st century world as a prison in which human consciousness sleeps. After all our technological revolution as brought us greater material comfort, more freedom of expression, more entertainment, more choice and opportunity in life than ever before in our entire history.
All the glamour and glitter and high tech stimulation of our modern world gives the illusion of wakefulness but what we are seeling in its midst is a veritable tsunami of personal and global crises that are telling us that we are not only imprisoned in a state of sleep but experiencing a nightmare. We urgently need to wake up and embrace a whole new story around what it means to be human. The industrial/military/corporate complex has become a giant mechanistic monster. It has been slowly devouring our souls since the industrial revolution. Our Western conditioning, whose robotic tentacles now reach out into the four corners of the globe, has given us an illusory sense of self that knows no better than to align the pursuit of happiness with the pursuit of wealth and power.
Sacred activist, scholar and mystic, Andrew Harvey speaks of this deadening of our souls as our coca coma:
“ At a time when the world needs to be informed about the true dimensions of the crisis we are living through and requires every available form of encouragement and inspiration, it is kept instead in what I call our “coca-coma”, stupefied be celebrity trivia, half-baked news, and a 24 hour diet of inane comedy shows, advertisements, pornography and violence that keep us docile and infantile, addicted to consumerism that is killing us even as it feeds our already dangerous levels of alienation and fear. We have become so used to this incessant, systematic psychic rape that we hardly notice it anymore; the anomie of the abused has become a normal state of mind. (2009:104)
THE COSMIC DANCE
Dance dervish dance…
Write a thousand luminous secrets
Upon the wall of existence.
So the even a blind man will know
where we are
And join us in this love!
Hafiz
What we find within ourselves moulds our reality. We birth the universe and the universe births us. Outside and inside engage in a dance of mutual awakening. It is a dance that we are being called to participate in with greater awareness and joy. A re-connection with cosmic energies and with the ineffable beauty of the natural world, together with a deepening of our capacity for intimate relationships and shared creativity are all emerging as our new story finds acceptance and begins to fire our imagination.
The prevailing scientific worldview tells us that we are isolated specks of accidental consciousness that have evolved out of an inanimate purposeless universe of matter. It is a story that tragically diminishes both ourselves and the cosmic mystery in which we live and move and have our being. In chapter four I suggested that in the light of current scientific knowledge we could instead, honor the infinite creativity and essential unknowability of the universe and understand that each one of us is a unique expression of its sublime intelligence. Indeed through the evolution of consciousness it may well be that our human mind is destined to become a universal cosmic mind. There are intimations of this in mystical experiences of the “we” space. .
And the wondrous thing is that we do indeed embody all the powers of this living, evolving universe. The energies that brought forth the stars and galaxies and the exquisite beauty and wondrous creatures of our planet-ants and elephants, whales and butterflies-are present in us and can be consciously activated in us. When this new story is truly felt, it is an awesome insight but not a frightening one. On the contrary, it brings a lightness of heart because it awakens a sense of belonging. The pain of separation is transcended, not in a fleeting mystical moment but permanently.
The news that the universe is a living Numinous reality is the most liberating and illuminating message imaginable for a consciousness caught up in the straightjacket of materialism and locked into the prison of the ego. It is to be hoped that our mechanistic sleep will prove to be a chrysalis for human transformation. In learning to live our new story we will be emerging into the glorious Light of the Transpersonal, fully aware of our origins in the primordial fireball and free to take wing and explore, individually and collectively, unchartered realms of mystical experience and cultural creativity.
I believe it is no exaggeration to say that the race against catastrophe cannot be won unless our global culture comes to embody the new evolutionary panentheism. It holds the key to our manifestation of the macrophase wisdom reflected upon in chapter one. It is a cosmology which reunites matter and spirit, body and mind, nature and culture, psyche and cosmos. It celebrates our transition from the Age of Separation into the Age of Reunion. Above all, it rescues us from our incessant preoccupation with the soul shrinking trivialities of our consumer dominated ‘local mind’. The imperatives of evolution triumph over egocentrism.
When we can actually experience ourselves to be a dance of energy, immersed in the music of an infinitely creative nurturing universe, we begin to resonate with the beauty of the universe, we begin to flow in the current of the Eternal Tao and tap into an ocean of psychic energy:
Cosmology, when it is alive and healthy in a culture evokes in the human a deep zest for life, a zest that is satisfying and revivifying, for it provides the psychic energy necessary to begin each day with joy. Swimme ( 1996:36)
. And this entry into the empowerment of our new story cannot be a purely solitary exercise. All to0 often spiritual work is seen as an individual activity, set apart from the ‘real’ world. Our new evolutionary panentheism ushers in a global worldview that encompasses every aspect of human endeavour and transforms our capacity to love and to co create . It is a call to fellowship, a call to celebrate the wondrous understanding that we all live in the same Divine womb:
Come to me all you who are burdened by lack of praise, lack of beauty., lack of vision in your lives. Look about you at the starry heavens and the deep, deep sea; at the amazing history that has birthed a home for you on this planet; at the surprise and joy of your existence. Gather together-you and your communities- in the context of this great, cosmic community to rejoice and give thanks. To heal and let go. To enter the dark and deep mysteries, to share the news, to break the bread of the universe and drink the blood of the cosmos itself in all its Divinity. Be brave Let your worship make you strong and great again. Never be bored again. Create yourselves, recreate your worlds, by the news you share and the visions you celebrate. Bring your sense of being microcosm in a vast macrocosm; bring your bodies; bring your play; bring your darkness and your pain. Gather and do not scatter. Learn not to take for granted and learn this together. Become a people. Worship together.
Matthew Fox (1988:228)
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sending...
