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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