We are living at a time where many are reviewing their lives and place in the world.
Although sometimes very challenging, this also brings with it an opportunity to explore a number of narratives that are currently shaping the world as we know it
Business as Usual
One narrative is that of ‘Business as Usual’ which is enthusiastically supported by governments and public media, and which promotes global corporate capitalism and the industrial growth economy, both of which underpin much of the challenges facing us today.
The Great Unravelling
Another narrative is that of ’The Great Unraveling’, the natural result of ‘Business as Usual’ when it reaches beyond what is sustainable or can be propped up. Ecological, biological and societal systems cease to be able to maintain the ever increasing demands upon them and begin to falter and crumble.
The Great Transition
The next, and newest, narrative is that of transition, moving away from limitless growth and the subsequent collapse of living systems, and instead moving towards a regenerative, and actually life sustaining, culture.
Great transitions are not new to us as a species and have spanned all of our history. Where once our ancestors lived underwater we made the massive transformation to walking on land and breathing air. More recently we have been through immense societal transitions including the agricultural revolution around 10,000 years ago and the industrial revolution a few hundred years ago.
In all cases a radical transformation took place in how we lived as well as our relationship with the planet. Today our challenge is to survive the first two narratives in order to bring in the third narrative, a truly humane world for all.
Looking Deeply
To do this demands something special from us if we don’t want to revert to more of the same.
We are going to need to get to the underlying roots of what made the first two narratives even possible.
This is not an either/or position. We will need to do work to change the external world - after all as who wouldn’t want to help make sure that everyone has clean water to drink, that thousands of animal species are not driven to extinction, that food is uncontaminated by toxins and that climate disruption is reigned in, but to stop there, at merely the visible and surface level, means that the underlying causes can still remain.
People who tend gardens know that the health of a plant depends on the health of its roots since it is these that nourish the plant’s life.
For our successful transition into a new future not only do we need to address what is happening on the surface, but also to look deeper into the roots of this because, like a plant unfurls from it’s roots, the society we are living emerges from the root of how we see ourselves, each other and the planet.
Separation
What we find when we look into the roots of our being are still predominantly based in an underlying sense of separation, separation from each other, and separation from all life. It is this sense of separation that brings with it a yearning for completion through more goods, more production, more shoes, more Facebook likes, anything to fill the internal sense of incompletion.
The sense of separation and wanting more also allows for the treatment of people and the planet as ‘other’ and therefore more easily ripe for plundering to try and fill the void.
Integration
However the narrative of separation is not the only one and for thousands of years there have been teachers around the world who have consistently pointed out that rather than this sense of separation being the full picture, our fundamental nature is actually a unified wholeness.
In addition to describing that this consciousness exists, many also share how it is possible to discover our divine nature directly for ourselves, sometimes called awakening into spiritual enlightenment or nondual awareness.
However this profound wisdom has been, until recently, marginalized as something interesting but somehow other worldly and therefore not much to do with real life or the healing of ourselves or the planet.
This is a really common mis-interpretation, and deep misunderstanding, of the nature of awakening fully into the transcendent.
Awakening
Awakening into our underlying and unified true nature is to at last open into our wholeness.
This escalates the healing of our sense of separation and transforms our inner being from rooted in the sense of separation to rooted in divine unity - from which the blossoming of ourselves and a healing and regeneration of our world finally becomes actually possible.
More than ever we now need to reclaim our divine nature, not through scriptures, dogma, belief, concepts or wishful thinking, but rather through the authentic experience of the consciousness that is beyond everything that we have previously known ourselves to be.
Want to know more?
What I am describing is entirely experiential so what you can do is to make time and energy to either start, or deepen, your exploration of your own spiritual awakening.
Nowadays new, and very direct, ways of awakening are coming online and this could be as a response to the environmental and humanitarian crises we are now facing, but it might equally be that it is simply emerging from the shadows more clearly and coming to the forefront of our awareness as part of our human evolution.
Either way, spiritual enlightenment is now becoming more accessible for everyone, and YouTube and Podcasts have free teachings available, and there are numerous books and courses.
Whatever way you choose to approach what is beyond the surface appearances, a useful stance is one of radical openness to the unknown