You Are a Miracle

"Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The soul that arises with us, our life's Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar. . . ."

Billions of years ago, before the sun ignited, before the earth was formed, all the elements that have come together to manifest as your body, that have allowed your consciousness to come forth, were spread out across thousands of light years of space. From this perspective, you are a miracle.

Billions of years from now, the sun will run out of fuel and implode. Earth's atmosphere will be blown off the planet like the flame off a candle. Meanwhile, other stars are forming. Other suns are igniting. Other intelligences are no doubt birthing into consciousness. But as far as we know, we are alone.

The short-sighted and personal perspective that we bring into our lives everyday is what limits us. Moreover, it threatens us. We live in a time of man-made climate change, overpopulation, massive species extinctions, and seemingly constant war, poverty and famine. The very air we breathe is compromised and the oceans are full of plastic but stripped of fish. On multiple fronts we are destroying the ecosystem that has allowed mankind and civilization - as it is - to arise.

Millions of years from now, our survivors (if there are any) will look back at this time in Earth's history and will ask how we could have done this to ourselves and to the Earth. How could we have played Nero as the Earth itself burned?

You are a miracle. Are you the miracle that we need at this moment?

Carl Sagan: "Let Us Find a Worthy Goal"

"The trap door beneath our feet swings open. We find ourselves in bottomless free fall. If it takes a little myth and ritual to get us through a night that seems endless, who among us cannot sympathize and understand?"

"We long to be here for a purpose even though - despite much self-deception - none is evident. The significance of our lives and our fragile planet is determined only by our own wisdom and courage. We are the custodians of life's meaning. We long for a parent to care for us, to forgive us our errors, to save us from our childish mistakes. But knowledge is better than ignorance. Better by far to embrace the hard truth than a reassuring faith."

"Modern science has been a voyage into the unknown with a lesson in humility waiting at every stop. Our commonsense intuitions can be mistaken, our preferences do not count. We do not live in a privileged reference frame. If we crave some cosmic purpose, then let us find a worthy goal."

-- Carl Sagan --
(1934-1996)

Eckhart Tolle: On Attachment and Our Real Needs

It is hard to even begin to gauge how much a complication of possessions, the notions of "my and mine," stand between a true, clear, liberated way of seeing the world. To live lightly on the earth, to be aware and alive, to be free of egotism, to be in contact with plants and animals, starts with simple concrete acts.

The inner principle is the insight that we are interdependent energy-fields of great potential wisdom and compassion - expressed in each person as a superb mind, a handsome and complex body, and the almost magical capacity of language. To these potentials and capacities, "owning things" can add nothing of authenticity. "Clad in the sky, with the earth for a pillow."

-- Gary Snyder --
(Excerpt from "Essential Zen," page 32.)

Humanity's "physical needs" are relatively few - clean air and water, heat, food, clothing and shelter - but our "psychological needs" are nearly infinite - we all, or so it seems, want more and more to gain some sense of fulfillment or completeness. Tragically, in seeking to fill this vacuous need for more "things" to meet our "psychological needs," we preclude millions of others from attaining the most basic physical necessities of life.

The whole structure of the world's interrelated economy is thus premised on an unachievable aspiration. We all want "more" than we possibly need, both for seeming "comfort" and to give a twisted sense of "meaning" to the mad rush for material "well-being" rather than true psychological and spiritual fulfillment.

This unending drive to fulfill faux psychological "necessities" becomes, as spiritual teacher Eckhart Tolle points out in his best-selling book, "A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose" (below), a self-perpetuating cycle of dysfunction.

"The physical needs for food, water, shelter, clothing, and basic comforts could be easily met for all humans on the planet, were it not for the imbalance of resources created by the insane and rapacious need for more, the greed of the ego. It finds collective expression in the economic structures of this world, such as the huge corporations, which are egoic entities that compete with each other for more. Their only blind aim is profit. They pursue that aim with absolute ruthlessness. Nature, animals, people, even their own employees, are no more than digits on a balance sheet, lifeless objects to be used and then discarded."

Nevertheless, Tolle places the blame exactly where it originates - within the smaller "self" or "ego" by which the overwhelming majority of us blindly run our lives.

"The thought forms of "me" and "mine," of "more than" of "I want," "I need," "I must have," and of "not enough," pertain not to content but to the structure of the ego. The content is interchangeable," Tolle notes.

"As long as you don't recognize those thought forms within yourself," he points out, "as long as they remain unconscious, you will believe in what they say; you will be condemned to acting out those unconscious thoughts, condemned to seeking and not finding - because when those thought forms operate, no possession, place, person or condition will ever satisfy you."

It is time that we recognize this, individually and collectively, in order to live softly upon the face of the earth.  "Clad in the sky, with the earth for a pillow," as Gary Snider so poetically put it.

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

A New, Kosmocentric Paradigm

In a New-Age Emersonian rant, the narrator of "Cosmopolitical Thoughts on Leaving for Black Rock City, Nevada" (attached) raises recurrent questions about the survivability of humankind as a species (along with the survival of all other species) under our current socio-political paradigms. An advocate of a new "kosmocentric" understanding of life, the narrator of this great video clip offers a glimpse of an alternative to the industrial-productive, money-centered way we live now.

Of course, Black Rock City is the home of the Burning Man Festival, an annual art event and temporary community based on radical self-expression and self-reliance, and leaving for such a destination is bound to focus one's mind on what can be done to advance through change our increasingly sclerotic and seemingly moribund post-modern society. This is accomplished in spades in the attached clip.

"Isn't apocalypse," our narrator asks, "the best-selling plot in today's mass media market?  Everybody knows the old world is coming to an end," he notes, "but because the horror of this reality is too much to take responsibility for the majority of us sit on the couch and pretend it is all just another form of entertainment. Fantasy has replaced forthrightness," he observes, "and imagination has withered to make way for shallow ideological affiliation with merely symbolic causes."

"Of course, symbolism is no mere trifle, and our sense of meaning is precisely what is at stake," he notes. And, thus, he asks:

"How are we to conceive of the human presence on the planet? Are we a cancerous growth or the incarnation of God on Earth? Are we to become once again a spiritual instead of a consumptive and pleasure-driven species? Are we to replace industrial with initiatory cosmology? Is our goal to worship, celebrate, and create, or to use, abuse, and destroy?"

"These are questions of the ultimate meaning of the universe," according to this New-Age Emerson, "and their answers," he points out, "determine how we inhabit the Earth."

A Need for Spiritual Awakening

Rather than calling it the Self, the Atman, or any other descriptive noun, physicist-turned-philosopher Peter Russell talks of "the aware-ing" that allows one to observe the process of the ego from the perspective of an omnipresent higher state of consciousness and being that is always available, although it is most often obscured by the thoughts of the smaller self.

Steeped in Transcendental Meditation, Advaita Vedanta, Buddhist meditation and various other wisdom teachings (including "A Course in Miracles"), Russell is the author of a number of books that explore the interrelationship of science and spirituality, an interface he (like many others) sees as increasingly important given the collective crises humanity faces and the widespread spiritual awakening that seems to be arising in response to such crises.

"I see this as a huge, unprecedented moment in human history," Russell observes. "We have scientific developments like never before, but we also live in a state of real vulnerability on the planet. Environmentally, we could really screw things up. And, at the same time, there is this search for spirituality. "

"It is becoming widespread across the planet," he notes, "that the old way, the material way that is actually leading to so many problems, leading to environmental issues, isn't actually working. It doesn't work for the planet - we are destroying the planet - but it is (also) not working for us as individuals."

"We just keep on going on down the same road and never ever getting anywhere much," he points out. "So," he notes, "I see that there is a widespread search for spiritual awakening that is happening across society."

"This is the time in history where we need that spiritual awakening," Russell notes. "Because it is the fact that we haven't got it - that we are coming out of this materialist, self-centered consciousness - that is leading us to destruction."

Tolle and Jung: Collective Insanity, Ego and the Human Psyche

In his insightful and liberating best-seller, "A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose," author, Eckhart Tolle, the recipient of a sudden, profound and lasting enlightenment experience, examines the nature of the human ego and, in the following passages, warns us of the dangerous realities it poses, individually and collectively, to our very survival.

"The achievements of humanity are impressive and undeniable. We have created sublime works of music, literature, painting, architecture and sculpture. More recently, science and technology have brought about radical changes in the way we live and have enabled us to do and create things that would have been considered miraculous even two hundred years ago. No doubt: the human mind is highly intelligent. Yet its very intelligence is tainted by madness. Science and technology have magnified the destructive impact that the dysfunction of the human mind has upon the planet, other lifeforms, and upon humans themselves. That is why the history of the twentieth century is where that dysfunction, that collective insanity, can be most clearly recognized. A further factor is that this dysfunction is actually intensifying and accelerating."

"The First World War broke out in 1914. Destructive and cruel wars, motivated by fear, greed, and the desire for power, had been common occurrences throughout human history, as had slavery, torture and widespread violence inflicted for religious and ideological reasons. Humans suffered more at the hands of each other than through natural disasters. By the year 1914, however, the highly intelligent human mind had invented not only the internal combustion engine, but also bombs, machine guns, submarines, flame throwers, and poison gas. Intelligence in the service of madness! In static trench warfare in France and Belgium, millions of men perished to gain a few miles of mud. When the war was over in 1918, the survivors looked with horror and incomprehension upon the devastation left behind: ten million human beings killed and many more maimed and disfigured. Never before had human madness been so destructive in its effect, so clearly visible. Little did they know that this was only the beginning."

"By the end of the century, the number of people who died a violent death at the hand of their fellow humans would rise to more than one hundred million. They died not only through wars between nations, but also through mass exterminations and genocide, such as the murder of twenty million "class enemies, spies, and traitors" in the Soviet Union under Stalin or the unspeakable horrors of the Holocaust in Nazi Germany. They also died in countless smaller inner conflicts, such as the Spanish civil war or during the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia when a quarter of the country's population was murdered."

"We only need to watch the daily news on television to realize that the madness has not abated, that it is continuing into the twenty-first century. Another aspect of the collective dysfunction of the human mind is the unprecedented violence that humans are inflicting on other lifeforms and the planet itself - the destruction of oxygen producing forests and other plant and animal life; ill-treatment of animals in factory farms; and poisoning of rivers, oceans, and air. Driven by greed, ignorant of their connectedness to the whole, humans persist in behavior that if continued unchecked, can only result in their own destruction."

"The collective manifestations of the insanity that lies at the heart of the human condition constitute the greater part of human history. It is to a large extent a history of madness. If the history of humanity were the clinical case history of a single human being, the diagnosis would have to be: chronic paranoid delusions, a pathological propensity to commit murder and acts of extreme violence and cruelty against his perceived "enemies" (his own unconsciousness projected outward), criminally insane, with a few brief lucid intervals."

"Fear, greed and the desire for power are the psychological motivating forces not only behind warfare and violence between nations, tribes, religions, and ideologies," Tolle notes, "but also the cause of incessant conflict in personal relationships. They bring about a distortion in your perception of other people and yourself. Through them, you misinterpret every situation, leading to misguided action designed to rid you of fear and satisfy your need for more, a bottomless hole that can never be filled."

This is not new information, our collective insanity has been brought to our attention over and over again for millennia by sages and enlightened teachers. It is just the acceleration of destructive intensity and deadly methodologies that increasingly threaten us today. Jiddu Krishnamurti, one of the great enlightened teachers of the twentieth century who influenced Tolle's work, clearly pointed out that what we collectively face is "a crisis in consciousness." Meanwhile, the great Swiss psychologist, Carl Jung, clearly warned us that the only danger we are facing is that which comes from ourselves and our unexamined human psyche.

"We are the origin of all coming evil," Jung presciently observed, in the following interview conducted shortly before his death, fifty years ago, in 1961.

Living Sustainably with the Earth, Compassionately with Each Other & Creatively with the Universe Itself

Social scientist and author, Duane Elgin, is an activist who advocates for our establishing a "more sustainable and spiritual culture." Winner of Japan's Goi International Peace Award for his global vision of sustainability, Elgin envisions a renewed culture in which humanity will build upon the fundamental unity that we have with the Earth, each other, and with the universe itself.

"As a species for the last 35,000 years we have been pulling back from nature," he observes, "we've been differentiating ourselves, we have been cultivating our ability to stand apart from nature (and) to know our own power and uniqueness. And we've been doing that as hunter-gatherers, as farmers and then as industrialists for 35,000 years. But now," he points out, "our power is so great that we are on the verge of undermining the ecological foundations (of civilization) for the foreseeable future. "

"So we have to turn then from separation to communion, to connection, to union, to Oneness with the Earth and with the universe. . . .There is," Elgin posits, "only one time in the life of a planet that a species comes to full wakefulness and dominates the life of the entire planet, and begins then to create climate change, species extinction and all the rest, that will forever change the evolutionary direction of the planet. And that," he points out, "is what is happening in our lifetimes, right now."

"We are beginning to see that the world is an integrated living system," says Elgin (in the video below), "not just the human system, but the Earth system of water, air, and earth. So we have to learn how to live sustainably within the Earth system, and we need to learn to live compassionately within the human system, and then . . . we have to learn to live at home within the cosmic system, the universal system - because that's where we come from, and when we die, that's where we go."

. . . . . . . . . . . .

Elgin's viewpoint of seeing and developing our universal sustainability, while utterly necessary, is not in and of itself unique, either to this culture or to this time. The seeming separation from the beauty of all that is has been apparent to mystics and sages for thousands of years.

Says Jalalludin Rumi, the great 13th-century Sufi poet, jurist and teacher:

The universe is a form of divine law,
your reasonable father.

When you feel ungrateful to him,
the shapes of the world seem mean and ugly.

Make peace with that father, the elegant patterning,
and every experience will fill with immediacy.

Because I love this, I am never bored.
Beauty constantly wells up, a noise of springwater
in my ear and in my inner being.

Tree limbs rise and fall like the ecstatic arms
of those who have submitted to the mystical life.

Leaf sounds talk together
like poets making fresh metaphors.
The green felt cover slips,
and we get a flash of the mirror underneath.

Think how it will be when the whole thing
is pulled away! I tell only one one-thousandth
of what I see, because there is doubt everywhere.

The conventional opinion of this poetry is,
it shows great optimism for the future.

But Father Reason says,
No need to announce the future!
This now is it. This. Your deepest need and desire
is satisfied by this moment's energy
here in your hand.

"It may be," says Rumi's masterful translator, Coleman Barks, "that the clarity Rumi calls "reason" is a brilliant lawfulness that ecologists and astronomers examine as the coherence in any system, and that the mystic and the scientist both attend the same layered intelligence: the grand and precise artistry of existence."

[Coleman Barks, "The Essential Rumi," pp. 145-146.]

. . . . . . . . . . . . .

The Language and Context of a New Pespective

Do we have a choice in the worldview we adopt, or is it culturally determined? If it is the former, what choices should we be making? If it is the latter, what can we do to influence our cultural environment, so that collectively we can deal with the many existential challenges we face?

Looking back at history, philosopher and spiritual seeker, Aldous Huxley observed that the motivations and conceptions which humanity has turned its faculties to have been largely a matter of choice - and that choice, in turn, has dictated the language and direction of further inquiry.

"Certain thoughts," he wrote, "are practically unthinkable except in terms of an appropriate language and within the framework of an appropriate system of classification. Where these necessary instruments do not exist, the thoughts in question are not expressed and not even conceived. Nor is this all: the incentive to develop the instruments of certain kinds of thinking is not always present."

For millennia on the India sub-continent, on the Himalayan plateaus, and in South-East Asia, China and Japan, the great thinkers turned inward studying the subtle levels of consciousness and charting paths to the attainment of enlightenment. Meanwhile, in Europe (and then in the 'New World') the direction of enquiry turned outward to the 'material' world, and so birthed the study of the natural sciences.

Thus, Huxley pointed out, "(o)ur perceptions and understandings are directed in large measure, by our will. We are aware of and we think about, the things which, for one reason or another, we want to see and understand. When there's a will there is always an intellectual way. The capacities of the human mind are almost indefinitely great. Whatever we will to do, whether it be to come ot the unitive knowledge of the Godhead, or to manufacture self-propelled flame-throwers - that we are able to do, provided always that the willing be sufficiently intense and sustained."

Huxley made these observations in his classic work, "The Perennial Philosophy," which was first published in 1945, immediately in the wake of the devastations wrought by world war. Since the passage of what now seems to be an almost historic gulf, has mankind substantially changed the language and direction of his enquiry? Certainly, the West has become more acquainted with Eastern modes of thought as our own religious and wisdom traditions have begun falling away. Yet, for all the evident interest in exploring the inner path to consciousness and enlightenment, it seems that the principal impetus in the direction of our language and thinking - East and West - is towards the further development (and many would say exploitation) of our outer world and "reality."

[Aldous Huxley, "The Perennial Philosophy," p. 17.]

"A hundred years ago," wrote Thomas Merton (one of the great contemplatives in the next generation of spiritual seekers), "America began to discover the Orient and its philosophical tradition. The discovery was valid, it reached toward the inner truth of Oriental thought. " However, he observed, "(t)he intuitions of Emerson and Thoreau were rich in promises that were not afterward fulfilled by successors. America did not have the patience to continue what was so happily begun. The door that had opened for an instant, closed again for a century."

In his 1961 book, "Mystics and Zen Masters," Merton speculated as to whether an impulse to turn once more to the teachings of the East was once again arising.

"Now," he writes, "that the door seems to be opening again (and sometimes one wonders if it is the door of the same house), we have another chance. It is imperative for us to find out what is inside this fabulous edifice. From where we stand," he observes, "we can descry the residents dressed in our kind of clothing and engaged in our kind of frantic gesturing. They are tearing the place apart and rebuilding it in the likeness of our own utilitarian dwellings, department stores, and factories."

"Not that there is anything wrong with industrial production, with its higher standard of living," he points out. "Yet," he cautions, "we know, or should know, by this time, that our material riches unfortunately imply a spiritual, cultural, and moral poverty that are perhaps far greater than we see."

[Thomas Merton, "Mystics and Zen Masters," pp. 69-70.]

Merton's warning, written at the beginning of the 1960's when there seemed to be a brief flaring of the potential for a new western culture - albeit, one that quickly gave way to the materialism and consumerism of the last several generations - seem all the more apt today. Cultural awareness of our existential problems - an unchecked population explosion, global warming, mass environmental degradation and species extinction, to name but a few - should prompt our looking for a new cultural paradigm that is inwardly focused, rather than being focused more and more wholly on materialism and consumerism.

But, with a somewhat jaded eye, can we say that an apparently renewed interest in spirituality and Eastern insights that may help us address some of these imposing problems we face will be any less impervious to a flickering out than it was with the great Transcendentalists, or with Huxley, Merton or the radicals and gurus of the 1960s? One can hope that it will not be so, for it seems imperative (as Huxley noted) that we develop a new language and framework that will allow us to address our problems.

With an ever more widespread awareness of the perils that we collectively face, the possibilities of such a new language and framework for seeing both ourselves, our world and our place in the grander scheme of things seems more likely and more important now than it has ever been. "Where there's a will there is always an intellectual way," as Huxley observed.

The Cosmos and Consciousness: A Spiritual Awakening

In discussing Emerson's views on 'religion' in his classic work, "The Varieties of Religious Experience," the great psychologist, William James observed: "The universe has a divine soul of order, which soul is moral, being also the soul within the soul of man. But whether this soul of the universe be a mere quality like the eye's brilliancy or the skin's softness, or whether it be a self-conscious life like the eye's seeing or the skin's feeling, is a decision that never unmistakably appears in Emerson's pages. It quivers on the boundary of these things, sometimes leaning one way, sometimes the other, to suit the literary rather than the philosophic need. Whatever it is, though, it is active. As much as if it were a God, we can trust it to protect all ideal interests and keep the world's balance straight."

[Wm. James, "The Varieties of Religious Experience," p. 33.]

James' famous work can undoubtedly be traced to the influence which the American Transcendentalists had on his view of man, the world, the universe and God. Further on in his introduction into the subject, he observes: "At bottom, the whole concern of both morality and religion is with the manner of our acceptance of the universe. Do we accept it only in part and grudgingly, or heartily and altogether?"

"If we accept the whole," he asks, "shall we do so as if stunned into submission?"

James goes on to examine at great length the "religious experience" of a wide variety of individuals who had been "stunned into submission" by their realization of a greater spiritual reality than they had previously known to exist. For my part, however, I can find no such experience greater - although there are many others that vary solely in the details and circumstances - than that described by Edgar Mitchell, founder of The Institute of Noetic Sciences ("IONS"), and more famously, an astronaut on Apollo 14 who had the rarely privileged experience of walking on the moon.

In a recent article in the IONS newsletter, Mitchell describes the nature and import of the profound spiritual awakening he underwent on viewing the Earth as a distant orb in the vastness of space.

"The first thing that came to mind as I looked at Earth," Mitchell recalls, "was its incredible beauty. Even the spectacular photographs do not do it justice. It was a majestic sight, a splendid blue and white jewel suspended against a velvet black sky. How peacefully, how harmoniously, how marvelously it seemed to fit into the evolutionary pattern by which the universe is maintained. In a peak experience, the presence of divinity became almost palpable, and I knew that life in the universe was not just an accident based on random processes. This knowledge came to me directly – noetically. It was not a matter of discursive reasoning or logical abstraction. It was an experiential cognition. It was knowledge gained through private subjective awareness, but it was – and still is – every bit as real as the objective data upon which, say, the navigational program or the communications system was based. Clearly, the universe had meaning and direction. It was not perceptible by the sensory organs, but it was there nevertheless – an unseen dimension behind the visible creation that gives it an intelligent design and that gives life purpose."

"Next," he recalls, "I thought of our planet’s life-supporting character. That little globe of water, clouds, and land no bigger than my thumb was home, the haven our spacecraft would seek at the end of our voyage. Buckminster Fuller’s description of the planet as “Spaceship Earth” seemed eminently fitting."

"Then my thoughts turned to daily life on the planet," he remembers. "With that, my sense of wonderment gradually turned into something close to anguish because I realized that at the very moment when I was so privileged to view the planet from 240,000 miles in space, people of Earth were fighting wars; committing murder and other crimes; lying, cheating, and struggling for power and status; abusing the environment by polluting the water and air; wasting natural resources and ravaging the land; acting out of lust and greed; and hurting others through intolerance, bigotry, prejudice, and all the things that add up to man’s inhumanity to man. It seemed as though man were totally unconscious of his individual role in – and individual responsibility for – the future of life on the planet."

"It was also painfully apparent," he recalls, "that the millions of people suffering in conditions of poverty, ill health, misery, fear, and near slavery were in that condition from economic exploitation, political domination, religious and ethnic persecution, and a hundred other demons that spring from the human ego. Science, for all its technological feats, had not – more likely could not – deal with these problems stemming from man’s self-centeredness."

"The magnitude of the overall problem seemed staggering," he recalls. "Our condition seemed to be one of deepening crises on an unprecedented scale, crises that were mounting faster than we could solve them. There appeared to be the immediate possibility that warfare might destroy vast segments of civilization with one searing burst of atomic fury. Only a little further off appeared the possibility of intolerable levels of polluted air and of undrinkable water. A more remote but no less real likelihood was the death of large portions of the population from starvation, abetted by improper resources management by an exploding population."

"How had the world," he wondered, "come to such a critical situation – and why? Even more important, what could be done to correct it? How could we restore the necessary harmonious relationship between the environment and ourselves? How could a nuclear Armageddon be avoided? How could life be made livable? How could our potential for a peaceful, creative, fulfilling society be realized? How could the highest development of our objective rationality, epitomized by science, be wedded to the highest development of our subjective intuition, epitomized by religion?"

"These thoughts and questions stayed with me through the mission, splashdown, and parades," he recounts. "They stayed long afterward to the point of haunting me with an overwhelming awareness of how limited a view man has of his own life and the planet’s. Sometimes at night I would lie awake for hours struggling with this enigma, trying to understand it and see it in a sensible perspective. How could human beings, the most intelligent creature on earth, be so utterly stupid and shortsighted as to put themselves in a position of possible global extinction? How had insight become divorced from instinct? Was it possible to find a workable solution?"

"Only when man sees his fundamental unity with the processes of nature and the functioning of the universe," Mitchell observes, "will the old ways of thinking and behaving disappear. Only when man moves from his ego-centered self-image to a new image of universal human will the perennial problems that plague us be susceptible of resolution."

"Humanity must rise from man to mankind," he notes,"from the personal to the transpersonal, from self-consciousness to cosmic consciousness."

"Humanity’s multiple problems," he concludes, "resolve themselves into one fundamental problem: how to change consciousness. How," he asks, "can we raise our awareness to a higher level – a level that will restore the unity of human, the planet, and the universe?"

This, to me, is the existential question of our time. Mitchell's experience, and the view of our place in the cosmos which it stamped upon him, suggests the answer.

"Now," he unequivocally notes, "is the time for us to begin building a single whole of humanity. Now is the time to develop our nonrational abilities into a “subjective technology,” which will begin the wedding of science and religion, reason and intuition, the physical and the spiritual. This union of head and heart, insight and instinct, will ensure that as science comes to comprehend the nonmaterial aspect of reality as well as it knows the material – that is, as science approaches omniscience – our knowledge will become wisdom, our love of power will become the power of love, and the universal human of cosmic consciousness can then emerge."

A Sacred Earth: The Vision of Thomas Berry

"Not till we are lost, in other words, not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations."

-- Henry David Thoreau --

The Earth is a sacred space within the cosmos . . . and we are violating its sanctity, losing touch with its sacredness - irrevoccably  and permanently -  day by day, month by month, year after relentless year.

Thomas Berry, C.P. (November 9, 1914 – June 1, 2009) was a Catholic priest of the Passionist order, cultural historian and ecotheologian (although cosmologist and geologian — or “Earth scholar” — were his preferred descriptors). Among advocates of deep ecology and "ecospirituality" he is famous for proposing that a deep understanding of the history and functioning of the evolving universe is a necessary inspiration and guide for our own effective functioning as individuals and as a species. He is considered a leader of progressive eco-theology and a wider, expansive collective consciousness within the Catholic Church, in the tradition of the Jesuit paleontologist, Teilhard de Chardin.

[Source: Wikipedia]

The video below, an excerpt from Berry's writings ("The Dream of the Earth"), illustrates the depth of Berry's vision of the Earth as a sacred space in peril.

A Second 'Axial Age'

Are we entering a second "axial age" similar in breadth, yet different in content than the first "axial age" (a term coined by German philosopher, Karl Jaspers, to depict the fruition of Hindu, Buddhist, Taoist, Confucian, Zoroastrian, Judean and Greek religious and wisdom traditions between approximately 900 BCE and 200 B.C.E.)?

Certainly, with the existential problems we collectively face, and our technologically advanced potential for communicating ideas in a truly global culture, the ground is ripe for an emerging consensus of spiritual insight based upon the latent similarities in all the world's great wisdom traditions. And, perhaps, what we are seeing in the radicalization of fundamentalists across existing religious traditions is indicative of a reaction against a newly emerging "axial age" that embraces the core non-dual teachings of all the world's great wisdom traditions and the emerging consensus about global bio-genesis, global interdependency, and the key role that consciousness plays in shaping our world.

In an insightful Huffington Post article, author Duanne Elgin makes the case that we may, in fact, be on the cusp of just such a second axial age. Noting that the first axial age was very much a reaction to the emergence of city states and the use of new iron age weaponry in savage, widespread warfare, Elgin suggests that the time is now ripe (culturally and technologically) for a new spiritual paradigm to emerge.

"In a world of growing individualism and differentiation," Elgin notes, "the religious emphasis on compassion served as a vital bridge between people. Now, a second major axis with a very different orientation is opening in the world. Religions of separation are becoming religions of communion as we realize there is no place to go where we are separate from the ever-generative womb of the living universe. The second axial age begins with a recognition emerging from the combined wisdom of both science and spirituality; namely, that we are already home -- that the living universe already exists within us as much as we live within it."

"The universe is a communion and a community," says Elgin, quoting theologian Thomas Berry, and, "(w)e ourselves are that communion become conscious of itself."

"Compassion remains a vital element of spirituality," Elgin notes, "but it is now being held increasingly within a context of communion rather than separation."

"As people around the world move into spiritual communion and empathic connection with the living universe," Elgin suggests, "we see the role of religion differently: Less often do people look for a bridge to the divine. Increasingly, people seek guidance and community in the journey of awakening within the living universe. People want to know there are others on the journey of soul-making and seek guideposts along the way to support the awakening of their experience of unity and intimacy within the universe. Less and less are people seeking only religions of belief. Carried along in this great cultural project of awakening, we are increasingly seeking religions of direct experience -- religions of communion with a living universe."

"The 'Great Work" of our time," says Thomas Berry (in the attached video), "is
moving the human community from its present situation as a destructive presence on the planet, to a benign or mutually enhancing presence. It's that simple."

"When our aliveness consciously connects with the aliveness of the universe," Elgin observes, "a current of aliveness flows through us. At that moment -- when life meets life -- a direct connection between the living universe and ourselves is realized and we have an awakening experience. We no longer see ourselves in the universe, we experience that we are the universe."

"We do not need to manufacture or imagine awakening experiences," Elgin suggests. "Instead, we only need to experience directly what is already true about the fundamental nature of ourselves as beings who live within a living universe. When the conscious knowing of ourselves becomes transparent to the reality of our participation in an ever-emerging universe, we recognize there was no separation to begin with -- we all emerge in communion at every moment within the unity of a continuously regenerating universe."

That recognition is already becoming apparent - irrespective of the religious tradition from which it emerges - as a quick search of the Internet will reveal to those who make the inquiry.

Consciousness vs. Military-Industrial Complex

In barely 200 years, Western culture morphed from one shaped by religious organizations to one shaped by the state. Then, in a matter of decades, we became a culture shaped by corporations - most notoriously, a culture shaped by the multinational oil companies and the defense and armaments firms that President Dwight D. Eisenhower targeted in his January 17, 1961 Farewell Speech, when he warned us of the the rise of the 'military-industrial complex.'




In a contemporary warning delivered at the Omega Institute, controversial author, John Perkins ("Confessions of an Economic Hitman"), a one-time economist for the strategic-consulting company Chas. T. Main, a firm with alleged ties to the U.S. National Security Agency, warns that "these are deeply revolutionary times," when all of us will have to play a part in reclaiming our lost culture.




"This is a time that requires incredible courage on our part," Perkins notes.  Are we willing, he asks with all the fervor of a convert, to take courage and "stand up to a system that we know we can deeply improve upon?"

"Being fearless, at this point," he observes, "requires tremendous courage and the recognition that there is something much greater than 'my' immediate needs and 'my' immediate life, and that looks at the whole integrated planet and its future."




Perkins' "Dream Change" organization is dedicated to shifting consciousness and promoting sustainable lifestyles for the individual and global community. He has deep roots in Ecuador, having served in the Amazon with the Peace Corps. before entering upon a truncated career as a consultant to U.S.-based multinational corporations.

Below, Perkins talks about the holistic worldview of native Ecuadoran tribal life, and the Amer-Indian "Prophecy of the Eagle and the Condor."

Towards a New Cultural Paradigm: 'Developing Sustainability' rather than 'Sustainable Development'

In his now-classic treatise, "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions," Thomas Kuhn points out that new scientific paradigms emerge when there is an anomaly that the existing paradigm cannot account for, when a new theory that can account for the anomaly is put forth, and when a small but growing number of adherents coalesce around that new way of interpreting reality.

Could a new cultural paradigm be emerging in a similar fashion? Instead of mouthing platitudes about "sustainable development," is there a growing number of people "developing sustainability" at an individual level, beginning with a shift in their own consciousness? Could a paradigmatic shift in our collective consciousness emerge as a result of, and to tackle, the existential challenges that we know we face - an energy crisis, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, global warming, deforestation and mass species extinction etc.? Perhaps.

In the attached video, spiritual teacher, Adyashanti, points out that a change in our cultural paradigm is rapidly becoming "a biological necessity."

"I think we are actually at a point in time that is very unique," he notes. "Here we are, and it is very possible that in your and my lifespan we will actually experience the fulfillment of literally not being able to sustain certain things. We will run out of energy, we will run out of environment. We have weapons of  destruction that are so extreme that we can wipe ourselves out. It is very possible in the lifetime that we are living in, that we could actually come (to) see a conclusion, that non-sustainability will actually happen and we will have to deal with that. And I think we have been evolving towards that for a very, very, very long time. And, here we are."

"It is no wonder," Adyashanti observes, "that there is fanaticism breaking out in all sorts of religions and fundamentalists in all points-of-view, whether it is religions or philosophical (viewpoints). People are just dividing themselves. There are people that want to save the world, and people that want to destroy each other. They are all there. And it will be very interesting to see what happens. Because there is often at the points-of-no-return - at the point of the most dramatic tensions in life and extremes -  (that) is the very place that dramatic change and transformation can happen."

"I don't think that it's anywhere guaranteed that the change and transformation will happen," he notes. "We don't know. But it is going to go one way or another, and it's not going to be very long from right now before it goes one way or another."

"We are running out of options other than to wake up," he warns. "It is starting to become, possibly, a biological necessity of survival. And when it gets to that point, it really starts to get people's attention."

"We may destroy ourselves if we cannot actually wake up to the fact, to the living experience, that we are really the same," he notes. "It is not good enough to have the philosophy that we are really the same, because that philosophy breaks down when push comes to shove."

Clearly, it seems, we are overdue for a new cultural paradigm that is sustainable in the long-term. And such a shift in paradigms - which may already be occurring - will require the consensus of a great and growing number of individuals who see and experience themselves as being a part of something much greater than their individual selves. The crucial question, for each of us now, thus becomes: "Are we in or are we out?"

Old Thinking and a 'Crisis in Consciousness'

In a fractured world that is divided and then divided again by ideologies, class culture, religions and race - rich vs. poor, capitalist vs. socialist, 'free world' vs. autocracy and theocracy, religion versus science, believer vs. non-believer etc. - do we have have the wherewithal to face the many existential crises we do?

If we do, will that spark the global cohesiveness necessary to face and overcome the global threats - from global warming to overpopulation, and from dire poverty and widespread hunger to massive species extinction - that we face?

If so, one can be certain that it will require a deeper understanding of our collective well-being and an awakening of our collective conscience and consciousness. Thankfully, there are signs that, at least for some small portion of humanity, such an awakening - an awakening of consciousness itself - is already underway.

"We as human beings are at a transitional stage," observes spiritual teacher and best-selling author, Eckhart Tolle, "where we are becoming strongly aware of the pull back to the source."

Yet while one part of humanity realizes that we face what another enlightened spiritual teacher identified as a "crisis in consciousness" - and that being (for the main part) restricted to a small portion of the most highly privileged, best educated and materially wealthy generations the world has ever produced - the large remainder of humanity, or at least its leadership, seems to remain committed to yet more of the thought structures, discussions, politicking and committee meetings that have marked our 'progress' towards the numerous conflicts and crises we now face.



For Tolle, and other progressive voices, it is clear that it is the fabric of our collective consciousness that must be challenged if we are to move forward and address the existential problems that are the results of our old thought structures and paradigmatic thinking.

Are they optimistic and realistic in predicting a widespread awakening of collective consciousness that will lead us back from the brink? Or, is this merely an updated brand of naive millenial faux spirituality? One hopes for the former and dares not look too hard at the latter.

As Einstein once famously remarked, "We can't solve problems by using the same level of thinking we used when we created them."

Krishnamurti: On a World Crisis of Consciousness

In 1966, Jiddu Krishnamurti, either a man before his time or, perhaps, a timeless man, observed: "The crisis . . . in the world is a crisis in consciousness, a crisis that cannot anymore accept the old norms, the old patterns, the ancient traditions, a particular way of life - whether it is the American way, or the European way, or the Asiatic way."

"And, considering what the world is now, with all the misery, conflict, destructive brutality, aggression, tremendous advances in technology and so on . . . though man has cultivated the external world and has more or less mastered it, inwardly he is still as he was. The great deal of animal still in him is still brutal, violent, aggressive, acquisitive (and) competitive. And he has built a society along these lines."

Listening to this enlightened teacher almost fifty years later, one has to ask: 'Have we changed, or have we just become more so?'

"Question:   Of what significance is hope and faith to living?"

Jiddu Krishnamurti
(1895-1986)

"Krishnamurti:   I hope you won't think me harsh if I say there is no significance at all. We have had hope. We have had faith - faith in church, faith in politics, faith in leaders, faith in gurus - because we have wanted to achieve a state of bliss, of happiness and so on, and hope has managed this faith. And, when one observes through history - through our life - all that faith and hope has no meaning at all because what is important is what we are. What we actually are, not what we think we are, or what we think we should be, but actually what is. If we know how to look at what is, that would bring about a tremendous transformation."

. . . . . . . . . . . . .

"We are the product of the society in which we live," Krishnamurti observes, "(of) the experience, the knowledge and all the rest of it. And there is nothing original. We repeat, repeat, repeat. To find out anything new requires tremendous inquiry and meditation."

"You don't just get it by just coming to a meeting for an hour and thinking about meaning," Krishnamurti warns, "one has to work tremendously hard."

"This requires much more alert, much more careful examination," he notes. "And one does not have the energy, the patience or the interest, because this is non-profitable. It does not bring you profit, financially or any other way."

"When you are really faced with a problem of war, of famine, of death, of poverty and so on," says Krishnamurti, "you can't argumentatively discuss about it. One has to deal with it. One has to put one's teeth into it. And you cannot artificially (and) intellectually have teeth to put to problems that are vital."

. . . . . . . . . . . . .

A half century after Krishnamurti's talk, and in a world evermore rife with existential problems - global warming, climate change, species extinction, over-population, hunger, intolerance, war, pollution and poverty - are we, or are the  leaders we allow to govern us, any more willing to put "teeth into" the problems that so manifestly cry out for our attention?

It seems not. Therefore, more so than ever it is apparent that we still face a crisis -  a crisis of both consciousness and conscience.

Adyashanti: "Time Is Running Out"

In researching the convergence of spirituality and science, I was struck, firstly, by the enormous amount of material available on a sense of "oneness" - what Vedantists and other Eastern wisdom traditions have long viewed as "non-duality" - and, secondly, I could not help but be impressed by the sense of urgency that both scientists and spiritual teachers have as to whether collectively we will wake-up to the nature of our interconnectedness, our "oneness," in time to avert the many life-threatening problems which we face on a global scale.

"Nobody can avoid the truth forever," says spiritual teacher, Adyashanti. "If the human species doesn't survive - (and) as far as I've seen in the history of the world there is almost no species that survives forever - if we don't do the job, if our consciousness doesn't evolve, 'Life' or 'Existence will just go, " Well, that didn't work out so well . . . phht! . . . You're out!" Not that he means this to be as casual as it might sound. He notes that "there will be a lot of blood, of suffering and difficulty in that process."

"It just seems that we keep getting to these crises," Adyanshanti observes." Not that this is necessarily bad, it just seems in his view, as in the view of so many others, that with mass extinctions, global warming, an energy crisis and ever advancing technology we are now facing our inevitable existential challenge.



"Crises are often the catalysts for change," he observes, "(and) I hope we are starting to agree that we are coming to a place of crisis; that we are coming into a contact, not with our own personal mortality, but with our mortality as a species."

"Just like individual mortality can lead to a change of consciousness because we realize time's run out that, there is no more time," he notes, "in that 'no-more-time' sometimes consciousness can shift. And, as humanity, I think we are rapidly approaching that same kind of imperative. Time is running out."

"So quite naturally," he concludes, " there is tremendous pressure on humanity, on humanity's consciousness. We all feel  it, right? This tremendous pressure to evolve, to awaken, because somehow intuitively everyone knows that if there is not some rather dramatic shift of consciousness then this tremendous opportunity will be missed."