Recently I had a long conversation with a very spiritual friend who is very concerned about world events.
Pointing to some pre-teen boys and girls at our table, he said, “Those children will be drafted into the military, unless something happens soon to change the course of history. This war will go on for decades. Our environment is being destroyed, our health care system is in shambles, our political leaders are rapacious dupes of the corporations who are ripping us off. It makes me mad, but when I try to tell people what's really going on, they act like I'm some kind of conspiracy nut. I work hard at my spiritual practice, but I keep getting discouraged about all this stuff. Why does the world situation seem so bleak? Why is it so hard to educate people about these problems and why do they seem to resist the truth so much? What can I do? I have the feeling I'm witnessing a cycle, a cycle that has probably repeated itself many times in the past.”
Here's my response to my friend.
I think that events in the world reflect this world's status as a midway point between spirit and matter. There are other worlds with more evolved civilizations, more spiritually evolved populations, and other worlds with less evolved and more “barbaric” or more “evil” or more “matter-entrapped” civilizations. Earth is a magnificent place to work out an understanding of the dualities inherent in material creation for this reason alone.
At this time in Earth's history, the human population is reaching the end of a long period of evolutionary history which highlighted the advances of the individuated consciousness, the rational mind, and the scientific model of reality as applied to the material world, considered as separate from the observer and separate from the world of “energy”, ie spiritual worlds.
Thus we find ourselves trapped in a materialistic culture that worships material success and power over nature, power over other sentient beings, and for this reason is self-destructive in the extreme.
The social structure of this society is a reflection of this moment in evolutionary consciousness, highly structured, hierarchical, and driven by mental considerations of perceived self-interest on the part of small elites who govern on the principles of fear, greed and obfuscation.
However, the next evolutionary step for human beings is to re-establish conscious ancient connections with the web of life, with the extended consciousness of the human over-soul, and with the multitude of spiritual beings in higher worlds, to offer in self-sacrifice their highly developed individuated consciousness to the Higher Self, and to establish the Kingdom of Heaven here on Earth.
This is the task of the next Cosmic Day, the Age of Aquarius, as we progress from the depths of the Kali Yuga, and the Piscean crucifixion on the cross of matter into the Dawn of the Aquarian moment of stellar synchronicities, which are the material manifestation of spiritual energies accessible to the human mind, and of the dawning of scientific spirituality -- all symbolized by the seven pointed star.
The Piscean moment, which combined blind faith in hierarchical quasi-tribal religious organizations with a primitive kind of scientific rationalism, can be symbolized by the image of the Pieta, the dying god cradled in the arms of the World Mother, and represents a moment of evolution in which the lesson presented was all about the limits of male deification, left-brain rationalism and hierarchical priestly, kingly, judicial, scientific and economic elites organized on the basis of self-interest.
In many ways the Piscean age was the flip side of the late Neolithic moment presenting the myth of the dying and reborn god, consort of the Great Mother, because the Neolithic moment was about the limits of the female dominant, right brain dominant, Taurean, tribal, agricultural elites dependent upon blood line and blood sacrifice.
Now the new Age of Aquarius represents the moment of the balance of male and female, the image is of the Divine Lovers in an embrace of eternal love, and their Union is the union of matter and spirit, mind and Higher Self, humanity and the web of life.
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Drawing by Jane Sherry |
The Piscean age mental & social forms and structures and those people that inhabit them, particularly the elites and the true believers, work to use force and mind controls of various kinds to damage the emerging new world moment so that they can continue their social institutions and individual privileges.
They seek to consolidate their waning power through a series of wars, through increasingly autocratic governmental structures, and through religious fundamentalism that will unite social structures in hierarchical domains fighting for dominance, resource control and ideological and religious supremacy.
There are two ways we can enter this new age as a group, as humanity.
We are currently addicted to oil and to industrialization, to power games and greedy consumption of the Earth's resources without concern for future generations, the web of life called the environment, or the web of life we know as higher worlds, the world of energy forms and signatures.
We can choose to utilize our remaining oil and the rest of our lives to the peaceful replacement of our current deluded lifestyle, consciousness and social structures, as individuals and as groups, or we can choose to squander those resources and our remaining time on earth in fear-based reactive actions which will result in a war of all against all.
Those spiritual forces that feed upon the negative emotions and deluded thought forms of unenlightened humanity may be conscious or merely parasitic in nature, but they work toward the fostering of the war of all against all, and they foster the perception that they and those deluded humans who serve Mammon and material creation at the expense of spiritual worlds are all-powerful and that we who oppose their design must struggle against them by mental and material means in a “war” of good versus evil. This is part of their plan, to suck us into squandering our energy.
My spiritual guides and my research into consciousness have convinced me that there will be a time of reckoning in our lifetimes, in the next fifteen years or so, when humanity will be offered a much more conscious version of this choice than we have now at hand.
Those among our friends and acquaintances who have yet to confront the responsibility of this conscious choice will be offered that choice in greater clarity as time advances.
It is important to have total faith in the workings of the Divine Plan for human evolution, to perform our spiritual practices more and more and with greater and greater single-minded devotion, to advance the cause of scientific spirituality that respects all paths to the Divine, and to quietly work within groups dedicated to humanity's spiritual, environmental, political and social advancement into greater light and greater love, in greater service to the Divine.
That said, it is also true that depending upon the choices humanity makes as a whole, there could be vast differences in the scale of suffering inflicted on the world population in the physical realm in the near future.
Our well-intentioned attempts to educate those around us about world conditions and the current dangerous crossroads of history we inhabit can only be a positive force, if they are carried out without taint of fear, emotional reaction, judgment or desire for revenge against those who would thwart the Divine Plan for human evolution.
You said, "I am beginning to suspect that I'm witnessing a cycle, a cycle that has probably repeated itself many times in the past." Karmically, we all bear memories of past Aeons in which reactionary spiritual forces delayed and perverted the evolutionary current to the detriment of collective human evolution. This trauma created the samskaras (the subconscious imprints created by an individual's past actions) that create fear, emotional reactions, critical judgmental attitudes, cynicism, and the desire for revenge against these reactionary forces today in people like you and I who participated in these earlier cycles of human development. Unfortunately, these negative emotions cause our friends and neighbors to tune us out when we attempt to educate them. It is part of our job to ask for help from God and Guru (our spiritual guides and teachers) to remove these particular samskaras from within us in whatever way is most expeditious so we can be more effective servants of the Divine Light by being more articulate, less aggressive, and less emotionally reactive, as we explain these emotionally charged matters to others around us, and in that way their minds can hear the information more easily.
For instance, the Piscean Age was hampered by the remnants of the Age of Aries. These remnants of tribal warrior elites instilled tribal warfare patterns into the religious, sacrificial initiatory moment embodied by the life of Jesus the Christ, which was intended to unite all tribes and nations in an Empire of Light based upon principles of non-violence, and adherence to the path of Self-realization.
Nevertheless, Jesus the Christ did inject his etheric body into the etheric body of the planetary consciousness at his Death, and this opened a spiritual doorway for all humanity. Today, if you seek him out in Nature, you will find the living Christ available to you, because of this sacrifice and this successful fusion of the Christ within the Natural world. Call to him in the mountains, in your garden, or in the woods and he will speak to you.
Those of us who are old souls are always concerned, sometimes even fearful, that the adherents of past initiations and past social structures flowering from those initiations will hamper the human over-soul's development.
Nowhere is this fear more acute among highly sensitive spiritual souls than in America. America has gone in a few short decades from a shining city on a hill to a dark and dreary society, exemplifying all that is reactionary and backward-thinking in today's world.
Once the model for political and financial democracy, social justice and fair play, America has become a land of increasingly rigid hierarchies, with remote elite politicians and corporate chieftains purveying a bifurcated global culture composed of the super-rich and the disenfranchised masses.
Once a land defined by moral values and spiritual aspirations, America has become the global purveyor of a rancid culture characterized by rampant consumerism, myopic materialism and me-first egotism.
Once a land aligned with the world's freedom-loving and peace-loving peoples, America has become the global bully-boy, intent upon maintaining its privileges, such as control of the world's oil supply, at the expense of the rest of the world.
So it's a difficult time for Americans right now, and I suspect that times will get more difficult over the next couple of decades.
Americans have set themselves up as political and economic role models, cultural leaders and imperial masters of the world, and the world is now rejecting our leadership.
Unfortunately, America's leaders are locked into a herd mentality with little or no room for new thinking.
Their interests are best served by a continuation of the status quo trends of American dominance, less democracy, mindless consumption, environmental degradation and increasingly hierarchical society.
In all these areas, America is now the country whose leaders, values, lifestyles, political system, economy, and foreign policy interests, backed by the world's largest military force, are most at odds with the legitimate aspirations of the rest of the world.
American policies currently stand in opposition to the rest of the world's legitimate aspirations for environmental protection, social justice, worker's rights, abundant social safety nets, financial democracy and international co-operation in the interests of peace among equals.
This is a recipe for disaster.
However, if the citizens of the Soviet bloc could peacefully change the system in a military dictatorship, I think that Americans certainly have it within their power to do the same.
Right now a majority of Americans realize the Iraq war was a mistake, and I believe that within a few years, a majority of Americans will fervently desire to join the rest of the world in pursuing a more democratic, environmentally sound, economically just, thoughtful and spiritual way of living.
Keep the faith and keep your fervent desire alive.
This is the moment of worldwide labor, just prior to the birth of a planetary human consciousness. This is the moment known to mystics as The Dark Night of the Soul.
Will humanity birth a planetary consciousness based on scientific rationalism placed in the service of elite social structures and hierarchical dominance, resulting in environmental destruction and continuous warfare or a consciousness of love and spiritual science, bringing about environmental balance and peace, bringing us untold breakthroughs in every realm of earthly existence?
That is the question, that is the transition we face, that is the opportunity, and that is the clue to the nature of our role, as midwives to the embryonic new World Consciousness.
Let us approach that birth with reverence, with confidence, with bravery, with a clear mind and a heart singing with faith, devotion and yes, surrender, to the New. In this way, we join our life force, our soul force and our mental energies to the Divine Plan and to the legions of lightworkers and spiritual beings who prepare the way, even now, for the coming victory of the forces of Light.
July 19, 2004