You know what it's like when you are gnawing on a particular
interest or concern that will not let you go. Have you ever
brooded on something [it can be a positive or creative idea, too]
to the point that you had the uncanny feeling it was brooding
you,
almost as if it had acquired a presence of its own?
Many of us take such things into our prayers and other
spiritual practices, into some form of reflection or creative
expression. Also, whether by intent or not, if we feel it strongly
enough, we "sleep on it," and many times we are
pleasantly surprised after a night's sleep to waken to the
awareness that things seem to have sorted themselves out or that the
needed healing or answer has been drawn to us or will soon be. One way we intuitively know this
even before the facts catch up with us is, we wake up with a clear
difference in feeling about the issue. The gnawing is gone!
And then there are those middle-of-the-night adventures. You're cozy,
cuddled up, warm, it's cold on the other side of the covers, and
suddenly you're aware you are awake, and THERE'S THE ANSWER, pristine
and ready to dance! You're still past the point of being able to
move, but there it is, like a glorious light-catching ornament hanging
in a window. To move or not to move. (Smile.)
It's your, um, move!
Although with rare exception we have not yet collectively acknowledged
we do this, as our global communication effectiveness grows to
provide nearly every person in the world access to the same information,
greater numbers of people
are simultaneously reading or hearing/seeing the same [for
example, news] interests or issues
in-common. We can FEEL this collective awareness, and on some level we know-that-we-know
this is a mutual feeling or understanding. For no small
number, this may also play out, without such exposure, as precognition, pre-knowing, which
also factors into a "global brooding" that becomes for
us a presence. Examples: the 9/11 episode; the death of Princess
Dianna, the assassinations of Mahatma Gandhi, the Kennedy brothers and
Martin Luther King, Jr.; the successful first landing of the
[Apollo 11] astronauts on the moon -- a rare celebratory moment
felt all over the world; another was when the Berlin Wall came
down. Holy days celebrated by millions-to-billions can
also be palpable as world-sized events.
Another type of occurrence experienced by many people is when there is
a conscious group intention that results in the sought change and
for which there is just no physical explanation. One famous example
is the Woodstock Festival in the 1960s during which everyone was asked to
concentrate or pray on stopping the rain. It had
been a relentless downpour up to the moment when the crowd of roughly 100,000
people together asked or intended that the rain stop, and within
about ten minutes, it did and ceased to be a problem during the
remainder of the event.
You may remember the published experiment that
was done by the Maharishi Institute. A group of research
subjects meditated on peace specifically directed at -- and from
within -- Washington, DC, as well as other places. During the times this was performed, the crime rates
went down significantly, and when they were not meditating for
this purpose, the crime rates climbed back up to their more "normal"
rates.
Rudolf Steiner and David Spangler come to mind, but there are
others, too, who suggest when we create a sustained group
intention, this becomes a vessel within which to hold an idea or
challenge or question, providing a collective space within which
to manifest or resolve itself in some way. Again, we
naturally [mostly not with any mutually recognized awareness of
its efficacy and power] do this all the time, such as when we
create a purposeful organization, discover an answer to a
difficult challenge, or plan or initiate an
activity together -- a game or ritual or a business; prayer groups certainly
work on this principle. We add to the caldron or vessel our
thoughts and feelings, our collective desire and assumptions ..
and doubts, etc. We can image this as a chemical or
alchemical activity.
You know we are fast becoming seven billion people on the planet
[2009]. In the USA, there are computers full of data
reporting that anywhere from 5% [NDEs] to 25% [OBEs] to let's say
>50% [after-death communications with a loved one / ADCs] have
said they have had exceptional experiences of some stripe.
Roughly comparable statistics have been collected over the past
quarter century in many countries around the world. Depending on the data of which study or country or
year you may refer to [e.g. (and unfortunately, that's not i.e.), see Statistics],
it is reasonable to suggest that probably anywhere from
one fourth-to-one half of the world population have had such
experiences. That's ..
|
1.75 to 3.5
BILLION of us who have had direct encounters
|
..
with -- whatever you
prefer to call it -- the spiritual world, God, Goddess, All That
Is ..., the paranormal, the Ineffable, the Ultimate Mystery --
that which cannot be explained in physical terms as such.
These might have been transcendent experiences [e.g., out-of-body
or near-death experiences]; immanent experiences of a sense of
Presence within the very ordinariness of embodied life; sensory abilities may be temporarily extended
beyond the range of what materialistic science would be able to
acknowledge, an anomaly ... Go look at Rhea White's
list of over 500
types of potential EHEs.
Bottom line is, you know-that-you-know this is
meta- [or greater-than-] physical. Or other than, if you
prefer. It leaves its mark on
you. For some it's merely a seed planted. For others,
it's an inner tectonic shift of instant and permanently
transformative proportions. But there is always that
feeling: you know-that-you-know Something extraordinary happened.
I daresay, the more fully you know-that-you-know, the more your
life exemplifies the recognized aftereffects
associated with exceptional human
experiences / EHEs. My belief is we are in the midst of
a [r]evolutionary shift
in the consciousness of our species that is expanding our
sensory capacities as well as certain other aspects of the
operative consciousness we possess. Probably a close if
inexact match in terms of agenda and number is what Paul
H. Ray and Sherry Ruth Anderson call the "Cultural
Creatives," a largely hidden [read that as not yet fully
mutually recognized in a manifest way], though quite coherent
subculture with certain values / worldviews in common that sound
like simply another rendition of the EHE
aftereffects. Here are
the Cultural Creatives' values / traits in Ray's and Anderson's words:
-
Personal
Authenticity ["...
means that your actions are consistent with what you
believe and what you say. ... (relying) on two
apparently contradictory ways of perceiving. On the
one hand, ... personal experience: 'Tell me what
it was like for you.' ... telling each other
their experiences ... whole life stories. On the
other hand, they take a wide synoptic view of 'the big
picture,' often extending to the whole planet."
They have exceptional authenticity radar!]
-
Engaged
Action and Whole-Process Learning ["where
they can be part of creating something from the
beginning, middle, end, and through to the new
beginning"]
-
Idealism
and Activism [living their talk, being
personally engaged in causes and in work that makes a
contribution to society.]
-
Globalism
and Ecology [very attuned to a
whole-systems, big-picture approach; "they want
to see all the parts spread out side by side and trace
the interconnections"; they are "very or
extremely concerned about 'problems of the global
environment...'"]
-
The
Importance of Women [What politicians often
refer to as "women's issues" are a key to
understanding Cultural Creatives. They see
women's ways of knowing as valid: feeling
empathy and sympathy for others, taking the viewpoint
of the one who speaks, seeing personal experiences and
first-person stories as important ways of learning,
and embracing an ethic of caring ... distressed about
violence and abuse" and not to mention
-
Social
Activism -- advocacy for the equal rights
of all people, unconditionally.]
-
Green
["Commitment to a
sustainable future."]
-
Altruism,
Self-Actualization, Spirituality [Although
all Cultural Creatives "have a well-developed
social conscience and a sturdy but guarded optimism
about the future," only about half of them are
committed to the cultivation of a spiritual life.
And by the way, by the numbers and as a trait, this
appears to be loosely definitive of what they call the
"core" Cultural Creatives, as distinct from
the "green" Cultural Creatives, who are
otherwise largely similar. In Contradistinction,
the "greens" are more comfortable with
traditional religions or they have no religious
interest.]
-
Rejection
of: "'owning more stuff,'
materialism, greed, me-firstism, status display,
glaring social inequalities of race and class,
society's failure to care adequately for elders,
women, and children, and the hedonism and
cynicism that pass for realism in modern
society"; "the intolerance and narrowness of
social conservatives and the Religious Right";
"almost every big institution in modern
society"; "narrow analyses and are sick of
fragmentary and superficial glosses in the media that
don't depict what they see,
or explain what they know from their own direct
experience.*"
|
Given
the enormous potential and beauty of what the Cultural
Creatives and EHEers and EHE Empaths share in
common in regards to concerns, values, and worldview,
here is the Big Question in question:
|
|
What
could the unified consciousness, astounding creativity
and brilliance, and purposeful commitment of these
hundreds of millions of compassionately motivated, aware
people
from
all over the world, who have these
characteristics
in
common, do together with well-organized, inwardly-derived
or intuitive or Spirit-led
intentionality?
|
|
That is the paramount question, held in the sacred vessel of Ahhh-TheLight,
that I hope these many millions -- or billions -- of us will come
together with heart-sourced intention and readiness to bring to
pass. Rhea White speaks for numberless EHEers who have
realized intuitively or perhaps through premonition or a direct-knowing
experience that it is this unified quality and strength of intention
that can make all the difference for our world and each other -- "if
enough of us do it."
Iron filings are in total disorganization unless a magnetic field points
them to true north, and then they are capable of phenomenal works
together that form the basis of many of our technologies today that we
can't imagine being without. I believe, the 'true north' for
our humanity is exceptional
human experiences.
They generate a certain intuitive if not actual knowing sense of a
deeper reality that cradles us, if we but knew -- and from these direct
experiences, many, many millions now do! And that number grows
daily. I believe we can come together and organize and do an
incalculably powerful, wondrous work together, unified and fortified
with this common experience and knowledge and the kinds of values that
come with that type of experience.
What
will it take to get enough of us mutually engaged with this shared
understanding and intention to achieve that tipping point?
As many know from experience and observation, when we consciously
choose to do something as a sacred act or activity, we bring into the
now sacralized vessel of our intention or question the
element of an immeasurable SOMETHING MORE ... to use a phrase from
Rilke, "to meet and be met" as co-creators. And we
almost inevitably get feedback or a clear sense from that SOMETHING MORE
that IT is fully engaged with us. What can we not do together with
this kind of unified consciousness and intentionality?
An
afterthought:
One day I overheard -- I must have been working in an office -- these
two guys about college age comparing how fast their computers could do
some task where they could watch the numbers go from 0 to heaven-knows
tetrabytes or something. They were lit up like Roman candles about
to go off. I feel that way -- giddy! -- when I think of how many
of us [billions!] have these types of experience in common.
I'm willing to bet a decided majority at least think, even if they are
not willing to say this out loud to someone [yet], that their
Exceptional [Human] Experiences are without question "the most
important thing" that ever happened to them.
Don't you wonder what it could mean if we together fully understood and
acknowledged the significance of this in some way that could have a
positive, transformative, tipping-point impact on the plight of our
world [see New
Consensus Reality article]? That's the secret behind
why I do what I do. I know one day that's going to happen, if we
manage to survive long enough. As the author Satprem
says, "When we take a good look around, there isn't much to
lose."
_____________
*My
emphasis on 'direct experience': This can also be
paranormal knowing as well as other kinds of knowing of
hidden facts.
_____________
See
Such
As ..?? for
more about our evident engagement with this SOMETHING MORE.
Also
see Lynne
McTaggart, who
is giving us a whole new confirmation of this very fact with her Peace
Intentional Experiment, by the way!
