Facing the Future

[John G]

A friend directed me to this article and given that it was "New Age" I wasn't expecting a lot even though I have a lot in common with this friend. The article is actually quite good in areas like don't focus on particular dates/events; that the spirit world won't and can't do the work for us; and that elements of the apocalypse happen around us all the time:

_http://www.lorian.org/davidspage.html#gpm1_2

One of the perks of having a modest amount of fame in certain areas is that I occasionally am asked by publishers to review and write blurbs for forthcoming books. In this way I have met authors whose writing I have not only been happy to support but whom I’ve been privileged to learn to know as people. One example is Catherine MacCoun, who is not only a skilled writer—her book On Becoming an Alchemist is simply one of the best books on spirituality and the metaphysical discipline of working with subtle energies that I have ever read—but for some years now a most wonderful friend and colleague.

Another such opportunity arose this summer when I was sent a manuscript for Unfinished Evolution, a book on the New Age. I was so impressed with it that I wrote the author, Teena Booth, and offered to write a foreword for it if she would like. This was in spite of the fact that I needed another writing project the way a drowning man needs rain. Teena agreed, and the result was that I gained a small part in an excellent book and a new and equally excellent friend and colleague.

We do not hear much about the New Age as an image of the future anymore. The phrase is usually used these days to mean a kind of lifestyle, a marketing brand, or even (to my distress, I admit), a quasi-religion. None of these were what the New Age meant to me in the years that I was one of its leading spokespersons. In fact, for me it was less an image of the future than it was an image of how we create the future. It was a call to look beyond habits and trends and the pull of the past and broaden our imaginations to be creative in shaping the future we want. For me the idea of the New Age was (and is) an affirmation of our collective creative potential as human beings.

Back in the Sixties and Seventies, the New Age swept into prominence on a wave of apocalyptic prophecies. None of them ever came to pass (though we came very close to fulfilling some of those predictions a couple of times, most notably during the Cuban Missile Crisis), but this has not discouraged purveyors of catastrophe from continuing to sell their wares. Visions of apocalypse are still with us as strongly as ever these days, with the immediate candidate for our culture’s fascination for end-of-civilization (and even end of the world) scenarios being the year 2012. Many of the lurid claims for what will happen on December of that date have little to back them up, but this is not preventing a whole industry of movies, books, websites, and workshops dedicated to the apocalyptic possibilities from springing up to separate you from your money.

In the interests of full disclosure, I’ve never had much patience with apocalyptic thinking, particularly when it is tied to some specific date. It is far too fear-based (and fear-producing) for my tastes. Nor have I ever found much collaboration for such events among my non-physical colleagues in the spiritual worlds. Their perspective is that in the majority of cases, focusing a person’s attention on a single event or a single date diminishes that person’s capacity to perceive the elements of “apocalypse” occurring all the time all around them in the world and thus diminishes both their compassion and their capacity to serve. With their attention focused on a speculative future, the needs of the present go unheeded and untended.

One doesn’t have to look far to see mini-apocalypses and catastrophes occurring all around us, from the starvation, disease, and poverty rampant in third and fourth world countries to people in our own country unable to meet medical expenses, losing their jobs and homes, or finding their life savings disappearing as some corporate executive decides to play fast and loose with both the law and ethical business practice to increase his or her own financial hoard.

But is a larger catastrophe possible? Absolutely. We live in a very vulnerable civilization. With climate change, environmental pollution, diminishing petroleum reserves (and consequent rising prices across the board), economic meltdown, and rising population, it takes little imagination to see apocalypse—or at least drastic change--prowling in the woods nearby. If you want some truly sobering reading, pick up a copy of The Long Descent: A User’s Guide to the End of the Industrial Age by a good friend of mine, John Michael Greer; it gives a clear-eyed view of a future in which cheap energy is no longer available and the consequences this can bring to a civilization like ours based on splurging huge amounts of energy all the time. Or read Sacred Demise: Walking the Spiritual Path of Industrial Civilization’s Collapse, by Dr. Carolyn Baker, an equally sobering look at the spiritual and psychological impacts and implications of a meltdown of industrial civilization. It’s hardly the New Age many people have been envisioning or hoping for.

Does this mean that the idea of a New Age is dead or irrelevant?

If by “New Age” we mean a happy, rosy, untroubled future that will drop into our laps as a gift from God, Space Beings, or as a result of some planetary catastrophe that will get rid of all the undesirable people from the earth, that is most certainly dead. It was a zombie idea in the first place, lacking any real life except in our desire to have something for nothing. It never was anything other than a fantasy, as is the idea that we will all suddenly undergo a planetary shift of consciousness and spirit that will transform everything for the better. It doesn’t work that way. We experience transformation, whether of ourselves or of the earth, the old-fashioned way: we earn it.

This earning is not necessarily through the “sweat of our brows;” rather it is through the sweat of our efforts to understand and embody the changes and the sweat of our intent to make change happen. In other words, it can’t happen unconsciously in spite of us; we can’t just wake up one morning with everything new and shiny. True, integrated and lasting transformation—the only kind that will bring about a New Age—is a conscious, deliberate process that we embody through mindful intent and choice.

The New Age, let me repeat, is not an image of the future; it is an image of ourselves capable of co-creating a new and better future. The idea of consciousness shift is really the idea of ourselves shifting our consciousness through understanding, intent, and practice—and through compassionate and transformative action in the world. Not that we don’t have immense resources of help in doing this from allies in the spiritual and subtle worlds—we do. But they won’t, and can’t, do the work for us.

So, from my point of view, the New Age is as alive as ever as a potential in us. But with all the problems currently facing humanity in the world—and the scale of many of those problems—we can feel overwhelmed and frightened and out of touch with that potential. This is a something Lorian seeks to address through Incarnational Spirituality which is all about that potential, what we can do with it, and what we need to do to awaken and use it. And this is also why I was so impressed with Teena Booth’s Unfinished Evolution and why I wanted to write the foreword for this new book on reclaiming the New Age as a motivating, inspiring symbol for our time. (It’s also the message behind her excellent website, _www.newagepride.org.)

As a spiritual teacher, I feel keenly the need both to face the future myself and to help others do the same as well. We cannot even begin to exercise our creative potentials if we don’t look at the world as it is and see both the challenges and the opportunities we’re facing. But which future should I face? The future of unending progress and rosy tomorrows created by continually unfolding technology? The future of civilizational collapse brought about by devastating body blows from overpopulation, environmental disruption due to pollution and climate change, and the loss of cheap energy due to the increasing expense of finding and producing fossil fuels (the Peak Oil phenomenon)? A New Age future of transformed human consciousness and ecological wholeness? A future with bits and pieces of all of the above?

My answer actually is to look at ourselves as builders of the future as well as receivers of it (or more precisely, as receivers of the consequences of past decisions and actions).

With this in mind, I was delighted to receive and write a blurb for another book that complements Teena’s and one that I would like to recommend: Odyssey of a Practical Visionary by Dr. Belden Paulson (available from Thistlefield Books at _http://thistlefieldbooks.com/). I have had the privilege of knowing Belden and his equally accomplished and talented wife Lisa for many years and worked with them in the late Seventies and early Eighties, helping to create an ecological and spiritual center in Wisconsin. A political scientist, community activist, scholar, and spiritual philosopher, Belden is one of the most remarkable people I’ve met. His book is an exciting testament to the difference one person can make in the world if he or she is willing and simply steps forward to do what he or she can one small step at a time. From his work with refugees in Italy immediately after the Second World War to his seminal efforts to help think through and forge a transformative politics in the Eighties and Nineties to his work in pioneering the implementation of sustainable, ecological technologies, Belden is in many ways the epitome of what it means to be “New Age.” He’s not someone given to exploring past lives, investigating psychic powers or engaging in trendy lifestyles; he is a practical mystic who has always taken on and done the hard, in-the-trenches innovative work to create a different and better future for all of us.

Don’t be put off by the length of his book (well over 700 pages in length). He has, after all, led a full life, and this is his memoir. It’s an exciting read—what Peter Caddy, a similar kind of man and one of the founders of the Findhorn Foundation community in Scotland, would have called a “ripping good yarn”—and the third part gives as insightful and deep a history of the New Age as a political, ecological, and social movement as I have read anywhere. It’s a glimpse of where the New Age idea was headed and what it could have become before it became sidetracked into personal spiritual development and, in the worst cases, narcissistic pursuits. But mostly it is the story of what it means to embody the power to create futures.

The essence of Belden’s story is that the visionary, the mystical, the spiritual, and the engagement with subtle worlds can work hand in glove with the practical, the down-to-earth, the innovative, the political, the economic, and the social. These are not opposing sides of our nature. They are complementary. We need both. A New Age future unfolds out of the double helix of the DNA they form together. And this DNA, this innate power to blend spirit and earth in an incarnational wholeness, is where I feel we must look for our future.

When people say, “Oh, technology will solve our problems, it always has,” they are making an incomplete and misleading statement. It is not technology but human beings thinking through, creating and using technology that have done so. When people say, “Civilization will collapse because we are running out of the easily accessible resources needed to keep our industrial way of life going at its present scale of energy use,” they are only partly right. What I feel they overlook is a resource that gets undervalued these days: the power of our imagination and creativity born of our wholeness and collaborative connectedness with the subtle and spiritual worlds.

This is not a magical power. It’s not a wand to wave that makes everything bad go away and everything good come to us. It is a resource that we will need to mine and refine from within ourselves and our incarnational connections to the spiritual worlds, as well as to the physical one. The tools we use to do this lie in our imagination, our attunement, our intent, and our willingness to be “New Age,” that is, to go beyond the habits, inertias, fears, and assumptions we inherit from our past in order to be open to possibilities, change, and creative collaboration in a spirit of wholeness with the world.

There are many people working in a variety of ways these days to access this resource. One is a good friend of mine, Ron Rabin, who has been head of a foundation that supports research, programs and initiatives in early childhood development and education, with a primary focus on social emotional learning. This foundation (Kirlin Charitable Foundation) under his leadership was the instigator and primary supporter of a major conference in Seattle last year called “Seeds of Compassion.” This event brought together leading educators and scientists from around the world as well as spiritual leaders such as the Dalai Lama and Archbishop Desmond Tutu to discuss how to foster early care environments and nurturing education programs for children that would produce truly compassionate individuals to bless and heal the world.

Ron will be leaving the foundation this year, and these days he is focusing on his own consulting practice working with foundations, universities and corporations to support “mindful parenting.” This is the kind of parenting that can foster not only emotionally healthy, compassionate and creative people but imaginative ones as well, for the future depends not just on technology and not just on survival strategies but on the powers of imagination and collaboration. In my words, we’ve had the Industrial Age, the Space Age, the Technological Age, and the Information Age. Now, for all our sakes, we stand on the brink of the Human Age, a time when we can understand and access the human capacities found in our wholeness, our imaginations and in our collaborative alignment with the vertical worlds of spirit and the horizontal worlds of nature and humanity.

Belden’s book is an example of this. When as a young man he found hundreds of refugees living in caves overlook Naples after the Second World War, he imagined a way to resettle them and enable them to be productive; as a professor at the University of Wisconsin, he imagined ways of engaging with African-American colleagues to empowering and transform life in the slums and ghettos of Milwaukee, creating pilot programs later copied by other cities; as someone interested in the New Age, he imagined ways of transforming its spiritual values into practical politics and into the creation of an eco-community. He drew on his imagination and knowledge and then took small steps that ultimately led to big results.
Through her book, Teena Booth is imagining the power inherent in the idea of the New Age to mobilize and empower change and is taking her small steps to encourage others to find that power, too.

My friend Ron imagines ways of empowering parents and teachers of young children that can open the resources of imagination, compassion, and collaborative social skills that are absolutely critical to our future. And he is taking his small steps to make that empowerment possible.

Here at Lorian, we imagine the capacities and powers that lie in the individual, incarnate person working in collaboration with spiritual and subtle worlds and are taking our small steps to explore and open the doors to those capacities.

Every one of these people is facing the future, but not the future of either progress or collapse but the future that lies in our capacities of imagination, will, and collaboration. Everyone one of these people—and increasingly hundreds of thousands of others all over the world—are feeling the birth of a “Human Age” when we understand that to be human does not mean to be separate, to be dominant, or to be afraid but rather to be loving and understanding partners with life. That is a future worth building with whatever resources we have. That is a future worth facing.