IN LOCAL NEWS . . .

Today, the local chapter of
the Knights in Shining Harms
gathered at Midtown Harmory
surrounded by harmored vehicles
to discuss the Harm’s Race in general
and the right to bear harms in particular.
The subject of harmistice was never raised.

*

COMING HOME

"Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting."
—William Wordsworth

Here it is, in a nutshell, what all of us are seeking: the bright glowing point of Loving Kindness poised at the center of our being.

That is Home.

That is where we long to be, however we may veer and rove eccentrically off course.

That is the Still Point in our souls from which we’ve strayed in error and misery since birth first sheared us from our womb of Loving Kindness and nurturing sustenance, an image of the spiritual matrix from which we all descend.

To return Home, to reunite with the source of Loving Kindness in all its warm tranquility, and to bask in the sightless light of spiritual illumination, just close your eyes and sit serenely, shutting out the busy, booming world about you till it fades.

Attend then to the subtle nudges of your intuition, leading you to deeper insights from your core, your heart of perfect knowing, still within, the Source of Loving Kindness, your own soul—where Love and Joy and Truth and Beauty live.

Welcome back.

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INSTINCTS AND IDEALS

More than any other animals, we live by ideas and ideals, as well as by instincts.

The conceptualizing power of our brains uniquely allows us to direct our behavior by rational schemes rendered into language that clarifies and communi- cates our motives to ourselves and others.

For us, between the stimulus and response of instinctive reactivity, there’s an intermediate conceptual function of considering possibilities and weighing options before deciding our reaction. And to the extent that we considerately evaluate how we might react, we determine our behavior by our ideals, which represent the values we choose to live by.

Choosing our values well is then a vital task for human beings, since there are foolish values as well as wise values. Which values, we must ask, will guide us best and prove most vital to the world?

That is our quest and task as a species to determine, since our effectual intelligence makes us responsible for sustaining Earth’s viability as a thriving ecosystem—a job we’re badly botching at the present.

Individually and collectively, we’re now challenged by diverse dangers to rectify our values, inculcate them well, and then live by our brightest ideals.

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THE CASE AGAINST HOPE

Regarding the fate of humanity, let me argue the other side, not for hope but for despair, not for comedy but tragedy.

Let me say that the chances seem slim of our waking up and growing up to a sufficient degree of collective sanity to save our race from what in our disposition is inclined to omnicide.

Too much power controlled by too much egomania and too little wisdom will likely end Life’s experiment in advanced intelligence on Earth. Before our intelli- gence can advance to wisdom, grosser human motives, armed by unscrupulous science, are likely to let all hell break loose and havoc reign.

It’s not that there aren’t glints and glimpses of compassion, sanity and wisdom to be seen in our history, in our scriptures, and in many saints and sages living even now. There’s wisdom in our midst, but few to see and follow it.

And wisdom can’t be rushed, it seems. It is a kind of ripening and maturity to be seasoned into by experience, a developmental stage transcending earlier stages, each needing to be lived through, but often not, and thus is wisdom thwarted.

Many, too, are the mad pathologies that plague and stunt us in our wising up, keeping us mean, self-centered, and fatally short sighted.

Is there, though, a way to wise up faster, to waken and ripen multitudes of people to a new level of enlightened consciousness that transcends pathology and nurtures compassion and altruism and harmonious community, where ego previously ruled?

Many religious revival movements in the past have swept societies toward sanctity and sanity, though not for long, once short-winded enthusiasms have puffed away, and the wasteland underneath the glamour reappears.

What then might we barely hope for, in the face of such long odds?

Hope for wising up yourself as well as you can, and helping others to do likewise. Study what it may mean to grow wiser. Study those who appear to have reached higher levels of consciousness and who practice behaviors expressing such enlightenment. Follow their examples and advice. Walk in their ways.

Then hope against hope for the best.

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SAVING THE WORLD FROM US

When it comes to saving the world from human depredations, the bottom-line question is if and how it’s possible to change our minds and behaviors to accomplish that feat.

First, have we identified all of the harms and stresses that our species’ presence inflicts on the Earth, on the well-being of our ecological habitat?

After that, have we developed sufficient ways to lessen our negative impacts? If so, what changes are required, and how will people comply?

Our root problem, though, comes from those who live in cultures that promote striving for all we can get, where maximizing our acquisitive consumption is a virtue, rather than a disorder called affluenza.

Thus, our clearer thinking about how we damage our habitat and how we might avoid doing that avails us not unless we can unlearn the self-aggrandizing values that drive our present recklessness, and unless we can learn the values of sustainable frugality grounded in the egalitarian principle that justice requires that all people deserve a fair share of the pie. And that the rights of all species to flourish matter just as well.

Our master meme and dream of Eldorado will die hard, however. Once we’ve seen and lusted after lavish Luxury (or if not that deity, then the lesser gods of Comfort and Convenience), how can we wish for less? Who will opt for Voluntary Simplicity other than an occasional oddball like Thoreau? Robinson Crusoe made do with little, but not voluntarily.

But then, might we be persuaded toward Higher Ways than those of material luxury? Nuns and monks renounce worldly surplus for spiritual sustenance, living not for lusts but for Love, not for abundance but for Beatitude and supernal Bliss.

In this conflict between Greatness and Grace, can we grow disenchanted with the ideal of opulence and settle happily for simplicity—the simple graces of sufficiency and sharing, modesty and the Golden Mean—instead of Eldorado?

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MEMETIC ENGINEERING

The consensus of forward-thinking authors I read is that humanity is overdue for a major upgrade in our collective mindsets, or in our funda-mentality.

Given the perverse pressures on this planet exerted by our teeming population—consuming resources voraciously, fouling the soil, the sea and the atmosphere, and wreaking high-tech havoc on each other—we require more than an attitude adjustment; we need radical reprogramming.

Short of genetic engineering, we need memetic reengineering. But how can that be done?

More simply: we need to change our minds—big time. Continuing business as usual is a lethal option, but how do we break the cycle of our deeply enculturated ways and means so as to imagine healthier, saner, wiser options and then to inculcate them as our new modes of operation? Call this procedure memetic engineering: the changing out of faulty memes for well-functioning memes.

Now that we’ve adoped the concept of memes as the psychic correlate to the genetic element of genes, we have a new way to imagine how our thoughts and attitudes are constituted of idea-units (memes) that enter minds as viruses invade bodies, replicating themselves through a population and altering behaviors accordingly.

But to the larger issue: what new memes does the world now need to be hosted by human psyches? Which are the failed memes to be up-rooted, and which memes are viable and vital for planting a New Humanity? Here are my proposals:


MEMES TO REMOVE

1. rankism
2. empire
3. affluenza
4. a dead universe
5. reckless thrill-seeking
6. raging animosity
7. chronic anxiety
8. depression/hopelessness
9. emptiness/nihilism

TO BE REPLACED BY

1. dignitarianism (Robert W. Fuller)
2. community (David C. Korten)
3. voluntary simplicity (Duane Elgin)
4. a living universe (Duane Elgin)
5. blissful serenity
6. blissful serenity
7. blissful serenity
8. blissful serenity
9. wholeness/holiness/health

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HOMO SAPIENS TO THE THIRD POWER

Ours is a time of crisis, a word that implies both danger and opportunity.

The dangers facing our Earth community—the ecosphere and its inhabitants—are many and urgent, and the list is a familiar litany to anyone who scans the headlines.

Our human population swells toward seven billion and our appetite for resources is ravaging the planet’s lungs (its rain forests), depleting and poisoning its fertile soils, killing its oceans, polluting and draining its fresh waters, carbonizing its over-heated atmosphere, and fomenting violent rivalries planet-wide.

Collectively, we have governed ourselves unwisely and have been bad stewards to the planet that births and nurtures us, our Mother Earth. It’s an easy analogy to liken the rapacious spread of our species around the planet to a consumptive, cancerous growth in its ecosystem.

So much for danger.

As for opportunity, it’s hopeful that we seem to be wising up (if all too slowly) to the danger our depredations pose to Earth’s viability. A major shift in human consciousness appears imminent and has begun to manifest itself in some harbingers of a New Humanity, a generation of people whose prime perspective is global, not provincial, and who see this planet not as a treasure trove to be plundered, but as a living being, the womb and nurse of all Earthlife— Gaia.

This new breed of Harmonious Humanity, instead of wreaking mindless havoc, like an autistic teenager, has grown mindful of the intricate and delicate interconnections among all Earth’s beings, comparable to those among all the cells in one’s body, woven in synchrony by a network, a mind-web of collective interconnections.

Our technological World Wide Web of electronic communications offers a metaphor for the psychic mind-field now manifesting in our consciousness as we mature into Homo sapiens sapiens sapiens (humanity to the third power)—our third power being not merely consciousness and self-consciousness, but wisdom.

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LIVING ON PURPOSE

A Brief Self-Inquiry

What do I want to endeavor, accomplish, achieve, become, realize—before I die?

Or, what, at the end, will I most regret having left undone?

• having amiable relationships with all
• expressing and putting my innate gifts and potentials to best use
• being deeply fascinated by the wonder of being, the marvel of the immense journey of the universe

Who am I mainly?

• a seeker/learner
• a thinker/writer
• a teacher/sharer
• an inventor/improver
• a reconciler/harmonizer

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CONVERSING WITH THE UNIVERSE

Let’s just assume that the Cosmos is alive and unfathomably intelligent, without necessarily personifying the universe as “God.”

Why not, then, converse with the universe to seek guidance on issues you face and decisions to make?

Get comfortable, but stay alert and receptive in mood, relaxed and undistracted, then bring to mind your query or concern.

Assume that just as a laptop computer connects with the Worldwide Web to feed its own small hard drive with a vast influx of information, so can your brain tap into the subtle flow of cosmic intelligence, what some call the Akashic field, a psychospiritual repository infinitely resourceful.

Make your request, assume that what you’re seeking will in due time arrive, and then again relax. Keep your doors of perception open, and trust your intuition to come up with what you need—Ah, ha!

It often works for me, so why not you?

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TRANSCENDENTAL INTELLIGENCE

Intelligence or aptitude in human beings manifests in many modes: verbal, mathematical, musical, athletic, social, and emotional, among others that researchers have recognized, including some more arcane, such as telepathic, telekinetic, and transcendental intelligence.

Telepathy and telekinesis—the abilities to sense information remotely or to exert physical force at a distance by thought alone—I leave to scientists to verify (as they have indeed, or so I read). What, though, would constitute transcendental intelligence or aptitude? Let me suppose.

I’ll say that some people experience what they would call a kind of knowing that stands beyond our ordinary knowing which can be confirmed communally (“Did you see that, too?”) or scientifically, by controlled observations.

Such extraordinary knowing or awareness is subjective rather than objective, personal rather than communal, numinous rather than phenomenal—and yet, to the perceiver, real: palpable, impressive and persuasive—not delusional, not hallucinatory.

Such was the experience of lunar astronaut Edgar Mitchell, a left-brained aeronautical engineer and rocket jockey, as he peered out of his spaceship window in 1971 while flying from the Moon to Earth: “On the return trip home, gazing through 240,000 miles of space toward the stars and the planet from which I had come, I suddenly experienced the Universe as intelligent, loving, harmonious.”

So blown away by that impression was Mitchell that he later founded IONS, the Institute of Noetic Sciences (“noetic,” like gnosis, implying ways of knowing beyond the narrowly empirical kinds that science validates). IONS investigates such “noetic” intelligence as was expressed in Edgar Mitchell (and several other lunar astronauts), which, in traditional language might be called spiritual intelligence.

What more can we know than our conventional definition of knowledge and methods of verification permit? What wider or deeper intelligence does human consciousness harbor than convention sanctions? What latencies of transcendental knowing have yet to awaken in more than those few luminaries who light our dim way to insights yet unseen?

Inquiring minds want to know.

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS

“Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” are the prime values America stands for—“happiness,” not “property,” as John Locke originally phrased his triad of paramount human values.

What, then, is this elusive “happiness” that needs to be pursued? Is it one condition befitting all human beings alike, or many individual kinds of good fortune or private bliss?

Our Founders have left us to determine the nature of happiness, an enduring question that human beings the Earth over continue to debate, proposing sundry answers.

Were we to understand “human nature” thoroughly, might we find fundamental, species-wide criteria for happiness, the knowledge of which would prove illuminating and instructive in the shaping of our communal institutions of education, governance, and economy?

If we clearly knew the essential criteria of human happiness and pursued no spurious surrogates, would not this sorry world be better off?

Should we not then turn to the best of our psychospiritual scholars, those who have studied most revealingly the nature of human minds, from the most basic to the most elevated and subtle?

What do ancient Wisdom Traditions (such as Taoism and Buddhism) tell us about human happiness, and what do the academic disciplines (such as Integral Psychology and Positive Psychology) say to confirm or modify that ancient lore?

Before pursuing happiness per se, it seems, we must first pursue the idea of happiness and learn the end of all our questing. True happiness can’t be the will-o-the-wisp so many have futilely chased before, or merely good hap. It must be what we need above all else.

Now what is that?

* * *

MAKING THE MYTH THAT I LIVE BY

If it’s true that we live by stories, by fictions or myths that offer us meaning and purpose which we crave but cannot prove, then why not assume authorship of our myth-making process?

Why not spin the yarns of our own lives and weave the patterned fabrications of our own philosophies?

Though others may be well enough satisfied by modeling their life stories to imitate what’s familiar and fashionable, customary and conventional, I prefer to make own myth independently and inventively.

Changing my metaphor from weaving to house building, I’d proceed in this myth-making process by supposing the foundation I’d want to build on, the fundamental cosmological ideas I wish to assume.

In my case, I’ll assume that the universe is alive with infinitely interconnected consciousness, directed by principles of harmony and love.

Furthermore, I’ll assume (as many throughout history have declared) that my present earthly personage expresses in this physical, temporal world a spiritual, eternal essence.

Who I am essentially survives my bodily demise, has previously chosen to incarnate as me in order to evolve through this temporal experience, and will carry lessons learned here back to eternity.

That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.

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HOW TO GROW WISE

To pose this topic assumes

• that we are not born wise yet may become wise
• that wisdom is a kind of maturation, a ripening arrived at through development over time and through experience
• that before one arrives at wisdom or grows wiser, one lacks wisdom and acts contrarily, which would be: foolishly, stupidly, ineptly, or in other ways that lead to unwanted ends.

Thus to act wisely or prudently entails foreseeing desirable ends and managing to achieve them as happily as possible for all concerned.

Thus wisdom, rather than implying the serene sagacity of passive contemplation, implies making decisions and taking actions that lead to good ends.

Serene contemplation of a problem may well bring insights that guide wise actions, but wisdom is finally practical, entails right choices, and produces valuable effects.

Which is why we hope and work to grow wiser.

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THE MOST ENDURING QUESTION

What could be a more enduring and essential question for a member of the species Homo sapiens sapiens to ask than how to grow wise?

Having already dubbed ourselves “doubly wise” (or conscious of our consciousness), we owe it to our self-esteem to develop that wisdom of which we assume we are capable, to investigate what we have meant and now mean by being wise or acting wisely, and to learn how to grow into the highest consciousness we can.

From The Wisdom of Solomon and Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave” to Dante’s Divine Comedy to Shakespeare’s King Lear and Herman Hesse’s Glass Bead Game, the minds of Westerners have canvassed this question of our potential for wisdom and our penchant for folly, of our seeking for the light of higher awareness and our stumbling blindly in the dark woods of error.

Furthermore, the esoteric insights of seers and sages in more ancient and exotic cultures around the globe are now more accessible to our examination than ever before. What, then, do shamans from Central Africa, South America, or Indonesia, as well as the wisdom traditions of India, Persia, China, and Japan have to show us to enhance our sagacity today?

We are “the people of the parenthesis,” says Jean Houston, author of The Possible Human, poised, she hopes, for a major breakthrough to a higher level of collective consciousness before the impending breakdown of our endangered ecosystems collapses our hopes of advancement into a wisdom culture capable of securing and sustaining the matrix of our civilization.

What is that Wisdom Culture we might inhabit that will allow illuminated intelligence to flourish on this planet, prevailing over the dim stupidities of unenlightened minds, too sleepy to see what it means to be awake?

That is the most important question I can think to ask.

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ENDURING QUESTIONS

Why are some questions “enduring” questions, while others are “settled” questions?

Is it that enduring questions can never be settled, or just haven’t yet been settled?

Are there some questions we can raise that are impossible to answer, yet we persist in trying, however futilely?

Are some questions durable because they are very hard, and no one has yet succeeded in cracking them to everyone’s satisfaction?

Or do enduring questions endure because, over time, their answers change? If this is so then perhaps enduring questions are questions to live with and grow into, as Rilke advised: “Live the questions.”

Or are they abiding and perennial questions that all inquisitive people encounter in due time and wrestle with, perhaps for all their lives, which makes their course of life not merely a course but a quest?

This last perspective is, I think, the most useful—that of abiding, perennial, recurrent questions fundamental to our concerns as human beings, concerns of various kinds: personal, societal, cultural, natural (scientific), cosmological, philosophical, spiritual, and sapiental (we being, after all, Homo sapiens sapiens).

Each person, each generation, gets to grow up to and into these kinds of questions, asked afresh and maybe answered anew, since each generation, standing on the shoulders of their fathers and mothers, sees from a different vantage and sees some things, perhaps, more clearly.

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THE TRANSCENDENT GENERATION

I grew up in a generation of Americans seeking ways to expand their consciousness beyond the constricting conventions of the materialistic, upwardly-mobile economic culture of the Post-Depression, Post-War era. We were seeking transcendence.

We were seeking something spiritually liberating: ways to get directly, transcendentally to a Higher Consciousness of holiness, wholeness, health and well-being. We aimed to be authentically High, even though we fell for sordid surrogates and just got loaded and blasted instead.

But some of our gurus proved genuine and inducted some of us to commune with our Higher Selves and to find spiritual salvation through techniques of meditation and mind control, opening us to wider realms of consciousness, grander vistas of awareness, awakenings to the numinous.

Now that the gates of Heaven stand ajar, more souls can take the way to the Eternal Now of mystical bliss and to direct knowledge of the spirit of wholeness, the Holy Spirit.

Transcendence beckons.

*

THE JOURNEY HOME

Over and again, even though we catch repeated glimpses of the light that points our way to go, we lose the way, we miss the path, we wander into the ferocious forests, we fall asleep, and we forget our mission to come home. We are lost souls.

Where then is home? And what is there?

Home is joy and bliss and love and care.

Home is warmth and comfort, rest and respite, Heaven on Earth. It’s where we deeply yearn to be—
a place, a state, a way of being, in and beyond the world of turmoil and confusion, strife and contention, anger and frustration—a place of harmony and peace.

That’s the home we all long for, deep in our hearts and souls, even if we’ve never been there. That’s the habitat we’re made to inhabit, the condition we’re conditioned to, the life we’re meant to live—a life of blessed bliss.

See you there.

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THE FRONTIERS OF CONSCIOUSNESS

Breaking through barriers and exploring new territories is a motive inherent to human beings above all other species, since we can be pioneers in so many different ways, given the multiplicity of our potentials, the foremost of which is thought.

Human mentality, flawed and limited though it is, still shines beyond our co-inhabitants on Earth in ways that let us change and develop self-consciously and intentionally as no other species can.

Possessing languages as the building blocks of our elaborate and variegated cultures, we have diversified the kinds of thought processes we can explore to explain ever more widely the Earth, the Cosmos, and even our own consciousness—which earns us our title as Homo sapiens sapiens, the introspective human, conscious of our own consciousness.

And human consciousness itself is our ultimate frontier, for after all our sophisticated technologies have probed the depths and intricacies of Earth and outer space, we still have inner space to voyage through. We still have the elusive mysteries of consciousness to unlock, perhaps to find (as some have long declared) that consciousness pervades and constitutes the Cosmos.

*

THE BEST COSMOLOGY EVER

Somewhere out there is the best-ever story to tell us what’s really going on in the cosmos—The Story of Everything.

But since I don’t know where that story is out there, I’ll just look in here, in my mind, in my imagination, in some inner sanctum of my consciousness where just that story is hidden—hidden in plain sight, should I look aright to find it.

Though I have no text to investigate, I have a heart and soul to intimate.

So let my intimations begin . . .

It’s all connected. Nothing is loose or isolated. All of Being (and All is Being) is one endless web of intelligent energy, energy informed with consciousness, the Ultimate Brain of Infinite and Eternal Being.

We are not separate, we are not distinct, we exist in perfect communication with the entire cosmic Metaverse, even though, for purposes we’ve hidden from ourselves, we pretend that we're discrete particles, mere perceptual illusions.

We’re playing Hide-and-Seek with our True Selves, or Self itself, until the All-y-All-y-In-Come-Free when we take a time-out from Time to rejoin eternity, right here, right now.

. . . So much for now, and here.

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HIGHER CONSCIOUSNESS

What behavioral indictors reveal that a person has attained what the ancient wisdom tradition calls “higher consciousness”?

When imbued with such an exalted state of consciousness (for few persist there permanently, and most attain such a condition only transiently) people in higher consciousness appear serene and blissful in affect.

They seem to radiate loving kindness to all about them. They are gentle and tolerant and appear to understand the vexations afflicting those around them, which their tranquility pacifies.

Whereas other people’s minds seem like interstate highways slashing through big cities at rush hour, their minds are kayaks slipping fluidly downstream through the rising mists toward dawn’s aurora.

In flow with the energies of the universe, in sync with the harmonies of the stars, these higher beings warmly glow, calming all in their presence.

They do not need to teach their secret since they live it. The example of their evident transcendence is all we need to lead us in their way, like a lodestar drawing us magnetically, in our own good time.

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“O BRAVE NEW WORLD”:
THE WHOLE-WORLD RENAISSANCE OF NOW

”The New Philosophy casts all in doubt”—John Donne

Just as the Renaissance of 1400-1700 was an era of revolutionary thought, so is ours today, yet even more radically so.

Just as the former Renaissance rebirthed ancient ideas from a previous Golden Age (“the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome”), so does our current renaissance revive insights, even more ancient, from primordial shamanic cultures: not from the agrarian warrior epoch of the blade (to borrow imagery from Riane Eisler), but from the matrilineal epoch of the chalice. . . .


(A brave beginning, to be continued after further reading, beginning with Duane Elgin’s new book: The Living Universe, 2009, as well as many books by Erwin Laszlo, and L. Robert Keck’s Sacred Quest: The Evolution and Future of the Human Soul, 2000)

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2012 C.E. AND BEYOND

Suppose that what is often suggested these days—that humanity is entering a new age, a new era, a new epoch—is true.

Set aside your doubts and derisions for a moment (since it may seem that we’re going to hell in a handbasket), and imagine the opposite.

Imagine that instead of a worldwide breakdown, we’re now in the throes of a global breakthrough, the birthing of a new civilization that expresses the saner values of a Wisdom Culture.

Imagine what that Wise Culture would be like: its tenets, its principles, its fundamental assumptions about humanity’s role on Earth and in the Cosmos.

In such a world, how would people behave differently than we do now, according to what norms, and guided by what instructions?

See what kind of picture you can envision, not of a nowhere utopia, but of a possible planet sanctified by sanity.

Go on—imagine!

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WE ARE HOMO MYTHICUS

We human beings are the sole species on Earth who can tell stories about ourselves and who possess a powerful drive to “figure” out answers, by means of metaphor and myth, to essential questions such as Who we are, Why we’re here, and What it’s all about.

We are Homo sapiens to the extent that we are wisely conscious in our quest for knowledge to answer our essential questions (sapience meaning wisdom). But we are more exactly Homo mythicus in that we settle for approximate but consoling fictions (i.e., good stories) about our place in the cosmos, rather than for absolute knowledge—which, so far, eludes us. “Give me a good myth!” we cry out.

Thus human intellectual history comprises an anthology of inventive fictions depicting our best guesses about the nature of the cosmos and our place in it.

Granted, our ever-refining and revealing sciences do now yield us vast information and powerful conceptions we call “objective knowledge” about the universe. But when it comes to the Big Picture and the Ultimate Questions, we still turn to myth and story to satisfy our cosmic longings for a Theory of Everything and for answers to our deepest human questions.

“What then are the myths you live by?” is a fundamental question to ask of yourself, your culture, and your era.

But keep asking, because the answers are changing: our myths are shifting.

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OUR IMPERATIVE REVOLUTION

To my colleagues in a new programmatic venture in general education at Rollins College, the “Rollins Plan.” The theme of our RP group is “Revolutions.”


What I aim to bring to our table as a member of the Revolutions Rollins Plan team is my perspective on “Human Frontiers.”

A frontier, from an American viewpoint, implies not a barrier (as in Europe) but a gateway, an invitation to a fresh start, new beginnings, new opportunities—and that suggests revolutions.

Thus the revolutions I’m particularly interested in exploring with my students are today’s and tomorrow’s revolutions, the ongoing and upcoming upheavals of the status quo and settled ways of what we know and do.

There’s no question but these are revolutionary times in the global human community, with momentous discoveries, breakthroughs, and alterations impending on every side—in science, technology, economy, ecosystems, governance, cultures, arts, and individual development, among others.

But these are also critical times in which large and difficult decisions must be made collectively so as to keep dangerous trends from wreaking havoc on our planetary ecosystems, on the well-being of Earthlife. Powerful as human motives have become in affecting planetary conditions, they must now be reconciled with what is best for the thriving of Earthlife as a whole—decisions that demand wisdom as well as knowledge, that demand a level of collective human maturity greater than we have yet attained.

Thus the revolution most necessary for a viable future on Earth is a fundamental revolution of human consciousness leading to the establishment of a Wisdom Culture capable of guiding our burgeoning intelligence toward the enhancement of life on this precious planet and beyond.

To ponder such a “Wisdom Culture” and to help invent it is the human frontier I aim to explore, and the most important calling I can imagine pursuing.

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PROLUSIONS,
OR FOREPLAY IN THE FIELDS OF THE LORD

We need a new word to stand as the opposite of delusion or illusion, a word with positive, not negative, connotations. I suggest prolusion.

If a delusion or an illusion signifies the play of our minds (from ludere in Latin = to play) in the direction of misleading fantasy and groundless imagination, then a prolusion would signify some shaping fantasy, some intuitive insight into a deeper and subtler Reality than our ordinary minds have yet grasped, such as, in earlier eras, the heliocentric paradigm or the concept of the Big Bang or the realm of quantum physics.

A prolusion, then, is a fresh leap of intellect that carries the human mind closer to what, eventually, we will come to understand as Reality.

Much of what now passes as “metaphysical,” “mystical,” or “spiritual” speculation may in time prove prolusive.

While presently the Guardians of Knowing (i.e., scientists) consign Reality only to what submits to their scientistic methodologies of demonstration and calculation, in the fullness of time a larger noetic science may arise to embrace a wider Reality, one comprehending such phenomena as reincarnation, the Akashic field, and Source—in the dimensions of spiritual intelligence.

The Age of Prolusion will then have begun.

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PROGRESS TOWARD WHAT?

A perennially fascinating theme for me to ponder is progress, human progress, especially the idea that, given time enough, our intelligent species will make its erratic way toward a state of flourishing which in earlier years could only have been dreamt of as “god-like” or “utopian.”

Quite obviously, however, looking about at the world today, we remain far off from that wished-for state of being. Conflicts abound, from interpersonal to international, at ever more lethal levels.

Our explosively populous species devours the world’s resources and despoils its earthly habitat with abandon. Our inventive technologies, admirable artifacts of our intellect though they be, are often used with wanton disregard for the health of Earth’s ecosystems or the well-being of humanity in the long run.

How oh how, then, might the wisdom emerge and prevail that can guide us to a higher state of collective consciousness and persuade sufficient numbers of human beings to behave sanely?

In so many ways, so many of us behave insanely—unhealthily in body, mind and spirit. How can that change? How can we learn that “evil” is an illness that can and must be cured, and soon, before our infected world succumbs and perishes?

Health, healing, wholeness, wellness (all words from one root) constitute the wisdom we are seeking, both individually and worldwide. What wiser calling could there be than to commit oneself to the quest for sanitas?

What then is progress for us except the pursuit of sanity: physical, mental, moral, and spiritual? We profess no higher wisdom and proclaim no greater goal.

If this be true, let us progress whole-heartedly.

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