The
New Story
Part 1. In
Search of a Universally Recognizable Global Myth
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This 'new story' aspect of Ahhh-TheLight has become an unexpected and
provocative challenge that induced me to put on the brakes a
number of times before it started coming together (which is another
story). Suffice
it to say, I don't believe anyone in an authoritative sense
can presume to announce THE New Story or mythos for others, much less for whole populations of people!
But there will always be some individuals who
will call attention to patterns and propensities earlier than
most everyone else and who may even clearly identify in this
case such guiding stories that spark a flash of recognition
in other people. These pathfinders
suffer the awe[ful]some privilege of being among the first or
very few to stand with
toes hanging over the edge of a yet-to-be bridged abyss, of the
unknown to the taken-for-granted known, to observe the emergence of something
transformingly new.
An archetypal story wells up out of our collective depths
through lived experience. At first, one by one, we may go
through something so novel, we don't have words to express
it. Imagine, for example, being among the very first to be struck by a
thrilling insight, such as how to make fire or to conceive of
the notion of the wheel and its potential. Or as a far
traveler of ancient times, like Marco Polo, to encounter very
novel creatures, cultures, and geographies far removed from the
imaginations of the community in which we have grown up; or
imagine -- or if you are so fortunate, remember -- the
experience of the birth of your first or only child ...
And finally, imagine or remember, again, if you are fortunate, an extraordinary nonphysical /
otherworldly experience in timeless detail! In each case, imagine
having no preconceived notion of this possibility the instant
before it becomes your lived experience.
Eventually,
some dare to try to communicate their singular
experience/s, if not through story, through some other art, and
in this way we as experiencers, or even as nonexperiencers whose
curiosity or empathy are aroused, discover first one, then another .. who
have undergone similar events. As we come to realize this
truth in many, it eventually may become the lived truth of The
Many, the universally felt "truer than true" that is the sublime stuff
of metaStories and mythos.
A mythic cultural story may celebrate special characteristics native
to a specific group, such as the First People of Australia or
Generation X or a business ethic. But some particularly
natural / spontaneous types of experience spring from something
even deeper and more pervasive. We aren't accustomed to
looking at ourselves in these terms, but even today we are
capable of discovering new budding qualities abilities,
attributes, for humanity, too, is an evolving
species.
Once upon a time, as a species, we developed the capacity for
self-awareness, that set us apart from all other creatures on
this planet, the ability to know I am I.
They touch major nerve plexuses within a
society. These are the life-shaping mythic
adventures we come to take for granted as the heart of who
we are. Such stories /
experiences can move us forward as a society in the evolutionary
spiral of the discovery, perhaps, of what William James
projected as the
MORE that it means to be Human,
Jean Houston
has called the Possible Human, John White has named Homo
Noeticus, Paul Ray and Sherry
Anderson infer in their Core Cultural Creatives, Russell Targ
implies in the idea of Limitless Mind, Rudolf Steiner -- the
"True Human Being," Rhea White [no relation to John]
and others have referred to as "the Self we all are," David
Spangler shifts into an active verb, "selfing."
As we have learned from countless misadventures they can also
damage, destabilize, and destroy all that we cherish.
Supposedly prophetic apocalyptic stories have caused so much
misery and havoc the world over. We have quite a
collection of such cases just from within the last 40 years,
including the Jonesboro group of [300 or so?] who succeeded in
committing suicide together, drinking poison-laced Kool-Ade.
We
must be mindful of their power and help each other to choose
wisely.
In the last one-to-two centuries, and perhaps much, much longer,
depending on your point of view, there have been certain
reiterated themes and relational possibilities that have been
repeated [Goethe ; Steiner ; Aurobindo and the Mother
; Teilhard de Chardin ; Spangler ...
Some say a recognition of this era we are moving into, along the
lines cited above, were foreseen by the early Gnostics ; are
implicit in the ancient Mayan Calendar that appears to end
abruptly in the year 2012 ; and also in some Eastern traditions
as well ... |
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The author Ceci Miller describes a
gradual process over the years of seeking out the company of other “ordinary people like me” who
together felt a desire or need to share their exceptional experiences and related insights and together to explore the fundamental questions about life, such as Who am
I?, and Why am I here? Observing this development over time, she said,
“I began to notice that as we shared these stories and our contemplation of them, step-by-step we were creating an even greater collective story – one that points the way toward humanity’s highest expression.”
Ceci Miller's insight summarizes my feelings and thoughts as well about
how a New Story of this age [post-WWII]* is coming into being. for
these reasons below, I believe this is a new and crucially important
global story:
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Our
current abilities to communicate person-to-person, such as via
travel and the internet, and to learn about and from each other
has given us an unprecedented opportunity to realize and
appreciate our common humanity. In the process we are also
discovering and enjoying the wonder of our truly glorious
diversity and how it can inspire and deepen us and galvanize
whole new dimensions of co-creativity and collaboration.
We are connecting and building relationships and forging new
bonds of relationship and social collaborations based on mutual
regard, concern, and love all over the world together.
[Friendship, social activism, collaboration, creativity] |
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We
are discovering similar insights about our relationship to our
fragile, living Earth with all its diversity and our concerns
love and need to protect our Home, realizing its value beyond
price and that we only have o-n-e. [environmental
activism, a personal bonding with the Earth and her creatures] |
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We
are together and openly learning many people all over the world
have had and are having such experiences that take us through a
fairly universal process to the same qualitatively transformed
outcomes in terms of a Shift in lifeview, values, |
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We
are also becoming more aware that many cultures have long
observed, studied, and cultivated a multiplicity of exceptional
experiences, sometimes for thousands of years |
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Because
of I believe this New Story is a global story. Also because
of It appears to be evolving one genuinely transformative experience
[EHE] and one person at a time. Rhea White has emphasized
"it must be lived to be known." The vast majority of the
Experiencers themselves in essence convey the same or highly congruent
outcomes [see Aftereffects], no matter
how personally unique the details of unfolding events of their
experiential stories. So it appears we are each** When enough of
us have
=-
One of several pivotal depth charges set off for me by Paul
H. Ray and Sherry Ruth Anderson in their book, The
Cultural Creatives: How 50 Million People Are Changing the World,
and perhaps not widely known, concerns the significance of cultural myths or
guiding stories and the fact that our postmodern Western society does not have one.
In
an eye-opening conversation the authors had with mythologist Joseph
Campbell, he explained how myths are necessary to the stabilizing unity
of a culture. Such mythologies serve two purposes, he says. First,
they bring us to the appreciation of our sacred place or participation
within the world and within the Great Mystery of Life. Second,
they give us a referent for expectations and behavior that carry us
through all stages of life, from birth to death. Bottom line
according to Campbell and the author he quotes [William MacNeill in the
journal, Foreign Affairs]: "A
society without a shared myth can't function coherently."
[Who, us??!]
Campbell made it quite clear: American society is bereft of such a unifying
mythos.
It seems to me we could say the same thing about ourselves as a rapidly
evolving, coalescing planetary culture. In any case,
naturally, Ray and Anderson asked, "Well, where do we get
one?" -- to which the renowned professor replied,
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"The
panorama of possibilities has made it impossible to
mythologize. The individual is just going in raw. All you can do is follow your own inward life and try to stay
true to that." |
Similarly, the Cultural Creatives authors invoked an often quoted
comment from priest and ecologist Thomas Berry,
who sees our lack of a universal story or myth as the cause of our
overwhelming challenges of the times, although he is more
positive. He sees us as "between stories," and along
with Brian Swimme, offers a rich, living account
of how we may begin to find our bearings again through their instantly
classic book, The Universe Story: A
Celebration of the Unfolding of the Cosmos.
A new story of this significance
must come to be the prevalent lived story in order to become such a
universally compelling light. Just like a young plant grown from a seed, such a
universal understanding must develop day by day out of the nascent chaos
of our collective unconsciousness until we together can recognize and
name it, such that the nebulous chaos eventually surfaces into the
splendor of our collective conscious cosmology. At first, assuming you can't see the seed itself -- have
you noticed?.. the great majority of sprouting seedlings, from ruby-red
tomatoes to giant redwoods, look pretty much alike. So it may take
a while for us to form a natural and mutually recognized consensus of what this might come to be.
But what an intensely creative and inspired time this is, from our
fractious and deeply felt sense of chaotic life in a chaotic
world. Rudolf Steiner has said, "Only
what is chaotic can be made beautiful. When we transform the chaos
into the cosmos, beauty arises. [Cosmos ... means the beautiful world.] Chaos and cosmos are thus
interchangeable concepts."
What characteristics would identify such a world story?
The multi-genius Rudolf Steiner virtually demanded, from the early 20th century, it must
contain an element that demonstrates the redemption of the feminine that
in turn will revitalize, protect, and transform the world. Joseph Campbell
and Thomas Berry have reminded us it must, foremost, reveal our transcendent nature within the
world and the cosmos, as well as provide guidance for what is expected
of us throughout all stages of human life, from before birth to after
death. It must model a superlative archetype, toward which we may
aspire, of what it means to be Human, Rhea White and
William James would suggest.
David Spangler states, as do Steiner, Pierre
Teilhard de Chardin, Sri Aurobindo, and now Rasha
and also Ester Hicks/Abraham, it must be NEW to represent this unprecedented new round of
human consciousness evolution, not just a rehash of an old story.
In each of these cases, their lifework is based on "The New"
as they have themselves been gifted to foresee or see its unfolding. It
is up to each of us to discover it and nurture it from within ourselves: Steiner
carefully explained the final story must come out of
its own time, sourced in the inspiration, imagination, and intuition of
those who are discovering it from their own lived experience.
During his lifetime [1861-1924], this great Emphasis on lived,
which ties in with what comes next: I believe the most important criterion
is expressed by Rhea White, who tells us from her decades of studying
and collecting thousands of people's EHE stories and the stories behind
the stories and from also being an Experiencer, that for any "new story" to take root within us
as a deeply felt guiding story, for it even to be recognized in the
first place, it must be experienced. It must be lived in other words, for it to
have that much precedence in our lives, it must be experienced.
Finally, to be that ultimate guiding story it
must unquestionably, powerfully, passionately speak to and for each
and all human beings.
Let's explore this together as a direct and on-going question. Send in those mythic stories along these lines that speak to
you. Frankly, I do not feel any one learned person or authority
can speak for all of us. Many fascinating "new" stories
are surfacing -- some are makeovers and some are purely out of our own
time and very creative. The REAL "New Story" will emerge
out of our own collective attractions for what most resonates with our
feelings. We together will *recognize* such a story .. there's
this little nudge to keep our options open by saying, maybe there will
be more than one! Who knows! But at least this will be one
place where we can openly explore this together, which is important --
we need to do a bit of consciousness-raising together, pay attention to
this in a deeply thoughtful way, Listennn for that resonance within
ourselves and with each other.
We are not going to be responsible for any "final vote,"
and yet one way that can help us begin to understand how we all do see this is
through what will probably be blog and survey options, which will eventually be added to this part of
the website. My feeling is, having looked at at least several
Great Stories in the offing, that what grows organically out of this
inner searching may be a kind of multi-faceted amalgam. .... =- Ain't
Got No Satisfaxion ...
Today, more and more people who for a whole list of reasons are no
longer moored to or attracted to not-to-be questioned religious beliefs say
that faith for them is not enough. Of course this context has been
applied to the [not-to-be-questioned] materialistic Western science
perspective, our latest dominant theoretical or belief system as
well. This hunger for direct knowing started with the baby-boomer
generation, interestingly, the first generation living from birth
without a myth, according to Campbell; he says we lost our guiding myth
after WWII.
With Experiencers, there is an added and most compelling push toward the
demand or need to know firsthand what the big picture of Life is all
about:
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Rhea
White was all set to pursue a golfing career as a college
student. When an extraordinary near-death experience
intervened, and she found herself being cradled in the
"everlasting arms of Eternity" and she heard a Voice [PMH
Atwater says "The Voice like no other"] say
to her, "Nothing that has ever lived can possibly
die," from that moment her whole life was oriented to
understanding this realer-than-real moment. Everything
else paled by comparison to this 'need to know', and she spent
the rest of her several decades immersed in the Great Pursuit. |
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Hans
Stolp [see Margarete van den Brink and..],
as a seminary student had accepted as a given something he had
been taught, that the Western science held precedence even in
such a hallowed domain, that the idea of a 'soul' as being
something separate from the body was "outdated," and
he fully believed this until the moment he found himself fully
aware and all that he ever felt himself to be as a conscious
being, out-of-body, floating near the ceiling of his room,
looking down on his body. As a result of that and similar
experiences, his entire life has become a quest to comprehend
what happened to him and its implications about who and what he
is and we all are. He has since learned of numerous people
who have had such experiences OBEs], which he sees as quite
"ordinary," and whose lives have been similarly
reprioritized as a result. |
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Dr.
Kenneth Ring tells the tale of a 14 year-old boy he
interviewed who had a near-death experience [he drowned and was
brought back]. In this youngster's words, "…
(S)omething happened. It was so immense, so powerful that I gave
up on my life to see what it was. I wanted to venture into this
experience which started as a drifting into what I could only
describe as a long tunnel of light…which I wanted to look
into, to touch. There were no sounds of any earthly thing. Only
the sounds of serenity, of a strange music like I had never
heard. A soothing symphony of indescribable beauty blended with
the light I was approaching. I gave up on life. I left it behind
for this new wonderful thing..." |
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MAKE
THIS FIRST SENTENCE BELOW BETTER. REST OF PARA. IS ON TARGET! People I want something more than
faith; I want to know for myself, and to know-that-I-know, that
Spirit/God is real, that there is more to life than merely the physical
aspect, if that is indeed the case. I confess to be one of the latter, but I also have reason to believe I
speak for at least one generation [baby boomers] and probably even more
for the more recent generations. It seems to me, given that
criteria, to know firsthand, such a mythic great star to guide us must first be
lived to be recognized. =- The
Assumed Normalcy of our Schizophrenic Society: Why Have We Not
Questioned This More Rigorously?
I don't know about you, but I grew up feeling pretty schizophrenic about
this split between science [our way is the only way] and religions [each
one saying, our way is the only way]. We just took that in
stride with a nod and continued trying to make ends meet and honoring
our religions [those that had them] at least one day a week, and science
and technology, pretty much the rest of the time.
Ever so slowly, begrudgingly or unobservingly, as an old couple will
that's put up with each other for a few hundred years, they have started
to look remarkably alike, don't you think? Western science reigns
as our most dominant 'religion' of the moment, if for no other reason
than it's [please excuse my over-simplification] ONE 'religion', in
contrast to the MANY 'other'/actual religions, a number of which have
become more humanistic and secular [we believe in the worthiness of all
humankind ...]. I leave this to your own imaginations and
interpretations before I get into any more trouble here! But you
get my point.
Is this just me? ... I feel we are about to shake ourselves loose
from the clutches of the materialistic scientific model that alas has
not developed an equally useful ethics ... because it left religion
behind. And in the process, for all it's stupendous gifts [and
with all due respect], it has nearly wrecked our world and humanity
beyond repair. And we are similarly shaking ourselves loose, many of us,
from traditional religions, because of their lack of an open-minded
methodology and discipline that seeks first and last to know Truth
directly [and not merely believe, and with all due respect, via
interpretations of interpretations of interpretations, whatever has been
handed down for hundreds or thousands of years]. In both cases there is a peer pressure to toe the
party line of the currently preferred rhetoric, and there's universal
agreement, although the terminology used may vary, about where you end
up if you don't!
It says 'this is the latest truth' and we mostly just nod in
unquestioning wonder and say 'amen'. And religions have often
taken to their bosoms much that science and technology bless us with
with gratitude and sometimes to the max. Look at some of their
edifices of the last 30 years or so with all the modern
conveniences. has
become more scientific I
don't know that this began with the Baby Boomers, but more so than with
past generations, we
As more of us attune ourselves to this need for a global
myth, this Great Potential,
we can together hold this crucial and compelling question until it takes
on a life of its own within us. Until the question lives fully within our
collective consciousness. It's like birth -- living with a
question to the point that it lives us. When the answer in the
fullness of time begins to live in enough people, a wave of recognition
will grow to be so clear, we will know; there will eventually
be a felt consensus.
--
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Post-WWII, when, according
to Joseph Campbell
and Thomas Berry,
we last had and moved beyond a unifying cultural story.
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Theoretically and ultimately, all of us will 'arrive' at the same lived
knowing, so say persistent EHEers with almost one voice.
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In
the meantime, we may already have the New Story fully in hand and just
not yet be aware of it. See Part 2:
"The
Bedrock of
the New Dispensation: EHE" ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
* * *
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ The
New Story
Part
2: "The
Bedrock of
the New Dispensation: EHE"
Part
3. The New-Story Hologram: Our
Collective EHE Stories
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