Returning to the Great Stillness

My new dachshund puppy is teaching me a lot about silence. Not that she's silent. Anything but. But I live in a rural area about an hour from Boston. There are at least six horse farms in the area, and a quintessential new England common with three white steepled churches that was once filmed in a movie to provide the backdrop for....well, a quintessential New England common. By most standards it would qualify as rural or quasi-rural. But as it turns out little black and tan Maggie is super-sensitive to noises and if she's out in the yard and hears a plane or a leaf blower, she freaks. This has in turn made me more sensitive to the noises she hears and has been a bit of a revelation. What surprises me is how much of it I hear in this supposedly rural realm. I call this ambient background noise that we are all immersed in The Great Noise. Some may want to include the ever present media barrage as a part of this as well.

I'm not sure exactly why there is so much noise in our lives these days. When did this happen? It seems to be a product of the hyper-accelerated times we're now living in and the tendency in our culture to engage in the business of busyness. Certainly fostering a 24/7 world has fostered the elimination of many sacred spaces in our lives or even just time to pause, reflect, or appreciate. But as the Shift progresses, the transparency of all this busyness which has become the ambient white noise of our lives becomes more obvious. We may be called to find what poet T.S. Eliot called the "still center of the turning world" and one of my own teachers, Taoist master Bruce Frantzis, calls the "great stillness". This is not just a personal endeavor however. Our society and culture also needs to return to the special places and spaces that marked a time for spirit to renew and soul to reconnect. In time I believe this will happen but in a pluralistic society such as ours, it becomes a more complicated process. In finding that sweet spot of stillness, we can remember who we are and what we are called to do in this special time.

Deep Cultural Transformation: Education

In the last few blogs I talked a little bit about the need for sacred activism in a 2012 context and how that practice might lend itself to many areas of life including education, health care, technology, and environmental development. In terms of education, the chaos currently pervading our institutions all the way from K-12 to the university level is well known and documented.

No amount of top down “programs”and testing approaches are going to provide some sort of quick fix for this. As in health care and other areas, a deep cultural transformation is needed. A precursor to this is a forthright admission of failure and recognition that the way we are doing things now is unbalanced and not a path that resonates with the spirit of New Earth. And after this, there is process of discovery that needs to take place to identify more specifically what needs to change.

In this context, I ran across an excellent article called Seven Sins of Our System of Forced Education written by Peter Gray, a Research Professor of Psychology at Boston College, published in his blog on the Psychology Today web site. It’s a great list of things that have not worked in our educational system. Here are the main points:

1. Denial of liberty on the basis of age.
2. Fostering of shame, on the one hand, and hubris, on the other.
3. Interference with the development of cooperation and nurturance.
4. Interference with the development of personal responsibility and self-direction.
5. Linking of learning with fear, loathing, and drudgery.
6. Inhibition of critical thinking.
7. Reduction in diversity of skills, knowledge, and ways of thinking.

Deep Cultural Transformation: Getting There from Here

Our educational institutions seem to be putting less emphasis these days on right brain activity. Art and music are getting sidelined and math and science elevated. But as we head into the new paradigm, creativity and imagination will become increasingly important. If there is a "New Earth" to be built, as Eckhart Tolle describes it, positive intent will be extremely important. But so will digging in and doing the work. Every area of life will beckon us towards a new way of thinking and being. As eco-poet Gary Snyder puts it: "Find your place on the planet, dig in and, take responsibility from there."

This is where sacred activism as described by teachers such as Andrew Harvey come into play. It could involve helping those caught in the dire exigencies of transition and economic dislocation. It could involve discernment, interpretation, teaching or truthtelling. It could also center on helping to create the new social and cultural modalities needed to support the New Earth paradigm. There are many other areas needing our collective and individual attention. Everyone has a role to play and something to contribute.

Cultural Transformation: Health Care

I’m old enough to remember when going to see a doctor was a simple person to person transaction. After a visit you would get a bill in the mail and pay it. Health care is a deeply personal issue and when I look at the heath care mess today it seems that we’ve moved from the notion of a simple person to person human transaction to a complex, technocratically constituted system. What’s wrong with this picture? An array of “middle men” now have assumed as much importance in this scheme (or in some cases more) than that of healer and patient.

Intervening between you and your doctor is a whole infobureaucracy of insurers, pharmaceutical industry minions, paper-pushers, and second guessers. In my book Digital Mythologies, I wrote about this larger social and cultural phenomenon a bit in an essay that described the rise of technologically-fostered mediated relationships. Author James O’Dea who spoke at our conference last year describes this state of affairs as “the mechanization of culture”. Its mind-bending complexity is not only rendering the very process of getting care dysfunctional, it makes the ability to establish holistic and healing relationships difficult. As the Shift dissolves energies that support it, there will be great opportunities for alternative and holistic practitioners to step in and help restore balance of human dignity and direct, caring relationships in health care settings. Cutting edge technology will still be an important capability but will need to assume a much less obtrusive role in the healing process.

Understanding the Earth Changes

Here’s a posting from Annette about that appeared in our recent newsletter:

“I remember my mother exclaiming that she could feel the weather in her bones whenever a storm was coming our way. She would shiver and sigh and sure enough like a living barometer and without listening to any weather forecast, the rains would start shortly after. I reflect on this as the earth changes seem to be escalating and notice how I seem to have become a walking breathing monitor and barometer for each impending earth change, storm or affliction upon the earth, sensing each shift, turn, bump and sway as if I have taken on the consciousness and the body of the earth during her transition. This experience brings to mind the spiritual truth "As above so below." Indigenous elder and 2012 interpreter Barbara Hand Clow suggests that this is a time to deepen our soul connections: "These great earth changes are awakening our connections to divine levels because our highest levels of emotions are spiritual; we need to be in touch with our souls during these challenging times." As we accelerate towards the 2012 window, earth energetic activity seems to have gone into overdrive ranging from devastating earthquakes in Haiti and Chile to landslides and cyclones in Europe, to odd weather patterns here in the US. It seems that not a day goes by when we don't hear about some violent earth happening. Are we awakening to our intuitive connection just as the earth is making this huge
change into the new earth energy?

No one is immune to what is going on. Everyone is feeling this shift on some level. But what is all this activity pointing to and what can we do individually and collectively to lessen the suffering and effects that these changes bring about? Haiti is a powerful example of ways in which to respond proactively with compassion and concrete help. But what is our energetic response? Are we acting as transducers and transformers for these changes and can we use our collective intent of love and peace to help the earth manage these pangs as she births a new earth? The challenge is to hold the space of intent for the highest possible outcome in our hearts and minds as the earth changes and the Shift continues. - Annette Farrington

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Is 2012 Moving into the Mainstream?

A lot has happened in a year. When the Emergence Project first started out working on our Boston conference and a number of special events, 2012 seemed to still be considered exotic territory, even in many groups involved in alternative spirituality . We found much unwarranted skepticism as many (thanks in part to media sensationalism) more or less automatically associated anything to do with 2012 with a kind of apocalyptic extremism. Fortunately, over time, it seems that understandings about the Shift have both accelerated and moderated a bit. Many are now curious and reasonably open to finding out more and good information is getting out there even if there’s a flood of disinformation that inevitably attaches to it.

Evidence of the Shift moving into the mainstream can be seen on a number of fronts. No less august an institution as National Geographic ran a televised special on 2012 some months ago (sorry NG, we were not impressed). In addition, a professional organization for archaeologists, the Archaeological Institute of America, ran an article on 2012 in their house publication, Archaeology called Apocalypse Soon? (although the piece offered a decidedly skeptical perspective ). More recently, Scientific-American took on the complexities of the Shift with an article enitled End of Days Danger (March 2010) which weaves together the Copenhagen Summit, 2012, and a controversial tweet from Sarah Palin. All in all, we’re encouraged by the fact that mainstream publications and organizations are beginning to think about a megatrend that will affect us all, profoundly, and soon.

Are We in the Age of the Kali Yuga?

In Vedic science, there are four world ages or Yugas: the Satya Yuga, the Treta Yuga, the Dwapara Yuga and the Kali Yuga. Each of the four Yugas is characterized by the state of what might be called the quality of human knowledge. During the Kali Yuga, which is the darkest period, knowledge is occluded, muddied. Everything seems haywire, topsy turvy, like bizarro world in the old Superman comic books.

There is considerable debate about whether we are living in the age of the Kali Yuga currently. John Major Jenkins and Jay Weidner believe that this is the case. Sri Yukteswar, Yogananda’s teacher and guru, has been one of the more visible dissenters as outlined in his book the Holy Science. Yukteswar believes that the current age is the Dwapara Yuga also known as the Bronze age, a time characterized by mixed bag of positives and negatives.

While sometimes I tend to view these debates as “2012 theology”, it seems clear that, Kali Yuga or not, the current time – especially the last ten years – has been characterized by elements associated with this Yuga: surreal inversions of good and evil and the need to legislate morality and even at times basic human decency. The Vedic texts themselves say things like: “Rulers will no longer see it as their duty… to protect their subjects.. men will openly display animosity towards each other…cowards will have a reputation for bravery, and the brave will be enervated cowards.” This last item is reminiscent of a line in the Yeats poem “The Second Coming”: “the best lack all conviction and the worst are full of passionate intensity”

Whether or not what’s happening now is related to the Kali Yuga, at times of transition things can seem dire indeed. The old energies are manifesting still in powerful ways, a last final burst of expression, but the new energies have not fully manifested. The saying that “it’s always darkest before the dawn” springs to mind. In my own experience I find that thinking about this is one helpful way to stay out of fear during the chaos of transition.