Consciousness V Catastrophe

© 2016 by Gillian Ross.

Library of Congress Control Number:   2016904414

ISBN:      Hardcover         978-1-5144-9412-7

                Softcover          978-1-5144-9411-0

                eBook               978-1-5144-9410-3

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Cosmic Density Pyramid (Yale University Press)

Leunig Cartoons (The Age)

Jim Cummings poem (Bright Blue Ball.net)

A Sleep of Prisoners (Tam Fry)

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Rev. date: 06/25/2016

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Contents

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

FOREWORD

INTRODUCTION

Conscious Evolution

The Flintstones Fallacy

The Integral Model

The Inner Quest

A Global Spirituality

The Power Of Story

CHAPTER ONE: The Big Picture

The Three Macrophase Transitions

Macrophase Wisdom

The Transition

CHAPTER TWO: Consciousness And Culture

Three Basic Premises

Pre-Personal Consciousness

Personal Consciousness

Transpersonal Consciousness

The Paradox Of Ego

Victim To Vessel

CHAPTER THREE: Western Aberrations

Death Denial

Disconnection From Nature

Body Mind Split

Denial Of The Inner Realms

Patriarchal Overload

The Seeds Of Western Science

The Universe As A Clock

The Iron Cage Of Materialism

Out Of Step

It’s Ok Or Is It?

Political Fallout

The Return Of The Goddess

Embodying The Transcendent

CHAPTER FOUR: Our New Story

Evolutionary Spirituality

The Challenge

The Starry Heavens

The Anthropic Principle

Quantum Weirdness

Quantum Entanglement

The All-Nourishing Abyss

Dark Energy And Dark Matter

Matter And Consciousness

The New Panentheism

Science And Panentheism

Our New Holy Trinity

CHAPTER FIVE: Our Subtle Anatomy

Life Force

Subtle Bodies

Awakening The Third Eye

The Chakras

The Heart Chakra

Psychic Powers

Kundalini Energy

Kundalini In The Christian Tradition

Welcoming Kundalini

Mystical Illumination Or Madness?

Fact Or Fantasy?

A Science Of Spirituaity

Our Mystical Renaissance

CHAPTER SIX: Transcending Separateness

Culture And Nature

Psyche And Cosmos

Your Transpersonal Self

Transformed Astral Body

Your Unique Gifts

Sacred Activism

Networks Of Grace

Waking Up

The Cosmic Dance

EPILOGUE: The Grail Legend

APPENDICES

I: BIG HISTORY TIMELINE

II: BASIC TENETS OF EVOLUTIONARY SPIRITUALITY

III: WILBER’S FOUR QUADRANTS

IV: THIRD EYE AWAKENING

V: THE NATURE OF KNOWLEDGE

NOTES

GLOSSARY

WORKS CITED

RECOMMENDED WEBSITES

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

First and foremost I must express my deep gratitude to the many spiritual teachers over the years who have helped to stabilise a connection with my Divine Beloved. Without that connection I could not have found the confidence and inspiration to write this book. In particular, to Samuel Sagan and Sally Kempton, whose esoteric teachings and meditation practices have awakened the mystic in me. My thanks also to Sacred Activism mentor Andrew Harvey, whose eloquence, passion and wisdom have become such a powerful source of creative inspiration and spiritual nourishment.

On a more mundane note I am enormously grateful for the loving help given to me in the preparation of the manuscript by my dear friends, Sienna Blake, Fiona Luckhurst, and Leonie Timmerman.

My thanks to Michael Leunig for giving permission to use two of his fabulous cartoons and to Jim Cummings for the gift of one of his beautiful poems.

Last but not least, a thank you to Brian Andrews and Colin Van der Woude for their enthusiastic input into the cover design and to Reg Saunders for his computer skills and willing help with the illustrations.

To all those souls

who are listening to the cry of the Earth and discovering the path of Sacred Activism

We have constructed a system we can’t control. It imposes itself on us and we become its slaves and victims. We have created a society in which the rich become richer and the poor become poorer. And in which we are so caught up in our immediate problems that we can’t afford to be aware of what is going on with the rest of the human family or our planet Earth. To my mind I see a group of chickens in a cage disputing over a few seeds of grain unaware that in a few hours they will all be killed.

Thich Nhat Hanh

A significant portion of the Earth’s population will soon recognize, if they haven’t already done so, that humanity is now faced with a stark choice: evolve or die. A still relatively small but rapidly growing percentage of humanity is already experiencing within themselves the break up of the old egoic mind patterns and the emergence of a new dimension of consciousness.

Eckhart Tolle

There is an old cartoon which depicts an anthroplogist rushing out of his laboratory in a state of great excitement shouting Eureka! I have found the missing link between the apes and humans. It’s us!

FOREWORD

At this time in our history, consciousness finds itself in arace against catastrophe.

Roger Walsh

In November 1992, a few months after the Earth Summit in Rio, a document entitled World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity was released. It was signed by more than sixteen hundred senior scientists from across the globe, including over half of all Nobel Prize winners. They listed the crises in global pollution, deforestation, biodiversity and human overpopulation and warned that:

No more than a few decades remain before the chance to avert the threats we now confront will be lost and the prospects for humanity immeasurably diminished… A great change in our stewardship of the Earth and life on it is required, if vast human misery is to be avoided and our global home on this planet is not to be irretrievably mutilated.

It has taken more than two decades for this message to be seriously addressed by the nations of the world. The recent climate change conference in Paris saw 195 countries pledging to reduce carbon emissions with the goal of keeping the average global temperature rise below a potentially disastrous two degrees centigrade. Understandably the accord sent a wave of optimism across the planet. The targets agreed to however are very far from being realized and leave the systemic issues that we face abysmally unaddressed. The changes in our stewardship of the Earth, which our current torrent of crises demands, call for a great deal more than promises of a long-term phase-out of fossil fuels. The premise of the conference was that all we have to do is shift to clean energy sources and all will be well. The focus of the conference was not on the preservation of the Earth but rather on the preservation of our Western consumerist lifestyle. Governments and politicians across the planet remain resolutely committed to the unsustainable doctrine of economic growth. The forces of greed and exploitation remain in the driving seat, deeply entrenched across the entire planet. Most of us continue our daily pursuit of consumerist-inspired happiness with little or no recognition of the need for restraint in the use of the Earth’s precious resources.

We are like the passengers on the Titanic who were so blissfully confident that the ship was unsinkable that when it hit the iceberg they carried on dressing for dinner.

SS Earth has struck the iceberg of Western civilization. The impact of our Western lifestyle and technology on the delicate balance of the Earth’s ecosystem has been compared to that of a collision with a giant meteor. Life as we know it is under serious threat.

Our denial is assisted by the cleverness of our technology. We can create artificial environments that help to delude us into believing that it’s business as usual. We can tell ourselves that, one way or another, our wondrous technology will avert catastrophe without our having to unduly modify our consumer-driven lifestyles. The military/industrial edifice of Western civililization depends upon our being addicted to consumerism. Its advertising strategies now dominate every continent on the planet, shaping our children from the moment they draw breath, be it on TV, on bill boards, on radio, in magazines or online. Consumerism has become humanity’s new faith. We embrace it with something akin to religious fervor.

Our material comforts and high-tech distractions numb our senses and encourage us to believe that we are indestructible. Nothing could be further from the truth. Many past civilizations lie buried beneath the ravages of time, destroyed by human greed and corruption, and no doubt every one of them succumbed to a chronic denial of what was happening. What is critically different about Western civilization is not its indestructibility but its capacity to destroy. Never before has a civilization dominated the entire planet. Never before has a civilisation caused mass extinctions of species and put our own survival at risk. And, most significantly, never before has a civilization lost touch with a sense of the sacredness of the natural world.

On the positive side, the failure of our Western culture and democracy to meet the challenges arising in our time could well be the catalyst for a dramatic shift in human consciousness, an earthquake of the mental plane.

In the words of poet Christopher Fry:

Thank God our time is now when wrong

Comes up to face us everywhere,

Never to leave us till we take

The largest stride of soul men ever took.

Affairs are now soul sized.

The problems that beset us are indeed soul sized. They call for a giant evolutionary step into a new way of seeing and feeling and being. It is delusional to believe that the problems besetting us can be solved by the same worldview or model of reality that created them.

This book is about a new model, a new story for humanity–a story that rescues us from the meaningless abyss of scientific materialism and mindless consumerism. The essence of the story is that our universe is a sublime living evolving interconnected whole that is becoming conscious of itself through us. It tells us that it is the evolution of consciousness and not material progress or technological expertise that is needed to rescue us from our current descent into oblivion. Above all our new story transcends the separation of mind and matter, psyche and cosmos, inside and outside. Our current model of reality, and the root cause of all the crises besetting us, rests on a model of separateness–separateness from each other, from nature and from our own inner wisdom and spiritual nourishment.

Waiting to be awakened collectively is a consciousness that transcends the fear driven agendas of our alienated ego, a consciousness that can experience at a deep level the subtle interconnectedness of everything, a consciousness that appreciates the magnificance and sacredness of the universe in which we live and move and have our being. It is a consciousness that will inspire us to serve each other and the earth community with wisdom, compassion and humility. This awakened state is no longer the prerogative of the saint and the shaman. It is the evolutionary birthright of every one of us and the time to claim it is now when wrong comes up to face us everywhere.

Consider the divine spirit in the human soul.

This spirit is not easily satisfied.

It storms the firmament

And scales the heavens

Trying to reach the Spirit that drives the heavens.

Because of this energy

Everything in the world grows green,

Flourishes

And bursts into leaf.

Meister Eckhart

INTRODUCTION

You take hydrogen gas, and you leave it alone, and it turns into rose bushes, giraffes and humans.

Brian Swimme

I have been exploring religious traditions for over thirty years and have found myself to be in tune with the mystical heart of all of them. This has made it hard for me to put any sort of label on my religious affiliations. In recent years however I been more than happy to call myself a spiritual evolutionary in the tradition of Sri Aurobindo in the East and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin² in the West.

Evolutionary spirituality celebrates what has become known as our Big History. It is the epic story of evolution from the formation of galaxies and the origin of life, to the emergence of language and culture. It is a history that is now familiar to most of us but it is not always appreciated just how new it is. A mere two centuries ago Charles Darwin introduced the notion of biological evolution and it was only in the late 1920s, when Edwin Hubble’s telescope found evidence for the expansion of the cosmos, that the idea of an evolving universe was entertained. It was not until the 1970s that sufficient evidence had accrued for cosmologists to embrace what had become known as the Big Bang theory of the origin of the universe. (Significant stages in our now well documented evolutionary journey are summarized in Appendix 1.)

A rapidly growing community of spiritual seekers across the planet are finding inspiration from this new cosmology that tells the astounding story of the evolution of our staggeringly vast universe out of nothing around 14 billion years ago. Science is now telling us that all the riches of planet Earth–elephants, butterflies, Mozart, Shakespeare and you and I and the world wide web have all emerged from that initial flaring forth of energy.

For a spiritual evolutionary this is not a reductionist nothing more than understanding. It is an affirmation of the universe as a biospiritual reality–a living evolving whole. It is hard to comprehend how anyone becoming aware of our evidence-based Big History and contemplating the vastness and sublime beauty of the cosmos is not moved to acknowledge the spiritual mystery at the heart of it all.

Sadly however, we have difficulty in envisaging the universe in this way because "our minds are frozen with images that are dead." (Swimme 1990). Were it otherwise, we would not now be wantonly polluting and depleting the magnificence that is our planetary home. The ancient elements of earth, fire, air and water are no longer seen as being imbued with spirit–alive and sacred. They are perceived as being nothing more than random arrangements of inert particles–dead and unworthy of reverence.

The story of cosmic evolution is a story of creative abundance. Evolutionary spirituality sees that creativity manifesting as a never ending quest for greater consciousness and complexity. What is more, it is propelled by an evolutionary force that manifests in each and every one of us: "The force that through the green fuse drives the flower, drives my blood.’ (Dylan Thomas). The love that moves the sun and other stars moves us." (Dante). It is a force that is purposeful. It is taking us somewhere. It seems ludicrous to believe, as the Neo Darwinian scientific materialists do, that an organism as complex as a human being, for example, could have evolved through mere random fluctuations in the arrangement of inert matter. It has been said to be about as likely as a wind sweeping through a junkyard and assembling by chance a Boeing 747.

A Darwinian perspective on the nature of evolution, no matter how elegantly refined to suit contemporary knowledge, could well be in its death throes. It is certainly the case that mainstream science is finding it increasingly problematic to dismiss consciousness as a mere chance epiphenomenon of matter and it is becoming increasingly problematic for orthodox science to sustain the belief that the engine of evolution is driven by random mutations of genes, in other words, by natural selection. Physicist and popular science writer Paul Davies has no further illusions on this matter. He asserts that from a classical Neo Darwinian perspective:

…it would probably have taken longer than the entire age of the universe (about 13 billion years) for even a single protein to have formed by chance (2004:76)

Recent advances in quantum computing and quantum physics in general are opening up more nuanced and less materialistic avenues of thought on the mechanisms behind the emergence of life. The notion of some attribute of mind underpinning the process of evolution is gaining respectability.

The metaphysical implications of quantum revelations are discussed in chapter four. It is worth remembering however that in these matters we continue to play on the surface of reality. Non of the revelations from the new physics, no matter how mind boggling, can do justice to the depth of the mystery that is evolution.

Big History is the first origin story in human history that we can all share and which is based on evidence not faith. Seen from the perspective of evolutionary spirituality, it holds the promise of transcending cultural and religious differences and healing the decades-long conflict between religion and science. Evolutionary spirituality injects meaning and purpose into our destiny, uniting humanity in an inspiring perception of what it means to be human.

CONSCIOUS EVOLUTION

Man is evolution becoming conscious of itself.

Julian Huxley

One of the core tenets of evolutionary spirituality is the understanding that the mechanism of evolution has now shifted from any notion of natural selection toward conscious choice on the part of humans. (The core concepts of evolutionary spirituality can be found in appendix II) In coming to understand this we are witnessing a revolution in consciousness that promises to be as radical a transformation of our worldview as the Copernican revolution.³ In the form of the human, evolution has become internalized. Where we go from here depends not on any further material or technological progress but on a shift in human consciousness. In other words, a shift in how we perceive reality and our relationship with it.

The consciousness revolution is engaging many great minds from different disciplines across the planet.⁴ All of them agree that the consciousness of Homo sapiens is now the driving force of evolution on planet Earth. There is not a single atom or species on the planet that is not now in some way impacted upon by human behaviour. Even if we accept a Darwinian process of natural selection as being an adequate explanation for the evolution of life, it can only be applied up until the early 20th century.

A whole new and revolutionary dynamic to the process of evolution emerges as the universe becomes conscious of itself in each one of us. The future of our planet is now in human hands. The responsibility of that is awesome. It requires us to raise our level of awareness around our actions and consciously create the future of our planet in a spirit of co-operation and with compassion for all sentient beings. In other words, our consciousness must evolve to meet current challenges.

THE FLINTSTONES FALLACY

Understanding the consciousness of yesteryear is essential not only for appreciating the fact that consciousness has evolved but also for enabling it to evolve.

Carter Phipps

Chapter one offers an overview of our cosmic story and looks at its implications for the future of consciousness. The one abiding principle of the mystery that is evolution is impermanence. As modern humans, with our skills in reasoning we have tended to believe ourselves to be the pinnacle of the evolutionary adventure. As far as consciousness is concerned, accidental or otherwise, nothing could be further from the truth. In the words of the renowned astronomer Carl Sagan:

There is no reason to think that the evolutionary process has stopped. Man is a transitional animal. He is not the climax of creation.

Human consciousness is evolving. Our minds are shaped not just by our biology but, very powerfully, by language and culture. We share the same brain capacity and DNA as our stone age ancestors but it is absurd to imagine that we think and perceive the world in much the same way as they did. To believe this is to fall prey to what has been called the Flintstones fallacy. Historical dramas and science fiction fantasies as well as cartoon shows, invariably assume that human consciousness remains the same regardless of dramatic changes in our outer world. The reality is that our ways of thinking are in a constant state of flux impacted upon by cultural and environmental changes. In particular a sense of being a self, or ego, separate from other selves and from the natural world has evolved, reaching an unprecedented peak in our current epidemic of narcissism–our look after number one philosophy. The latter has become a pervasive imperative that has captured even our spiritual practices. In the words of evolutionary spirituality guru Andrew Cohen:

It is time to move beyond an approach to spiritual practice that too often has become reduced to just another form of narcissistic self-absorption. In a culture so infatuated with extreme individualism, it is time to get over ourselves, once and for all, for the biggest reason that there is: to awaken wholeheartedly to the evolutionary impulse, so that we can create the world anew. (2011)

Evolutionary spirituality sees our Western cult of individualism as merely a stage in the evolution of consciousness. Mystics, shamans and sages throughout history have experienced states of consciousness where there is no separation and all is unity. These higher states of consciousness, where the alienation of separation does not exist, beckon us at this critical time in our evolution. The connection between states of consciousness and stages in our cultural evolution is the main theme of chapter two. With the help of genius Ken Wilber’s Integral Model (detailed in Appendix III) we explore in chapter two the evolution of mind and culture that has taken us from flintstones to iphones.

THE INTEGRAL MODEL

I sought an integral philosophy; one that would believably weave together the many pluralistic contexts of science, morals, aesthetics, Eastern as well as Western philosophy, and the world’s great wisdom traditions… A holistic philosophy for a holistic Kosmos:a world philosophy, and integral philosophy.

Ken Wilber

Wilber’s Integral Model is beginning to be applied in many different fields of human endeavor. One of its basic premises is that there is an evolutionary blueprint that ensures a natural progression through certain levels of consciousness for both the individual and for culture. From that perspective we are currently where we are meant to be on the evolutionary ladder. Our present crises are a necessary catalyst for progression onto the next rung. After all, science tells us that evolution is not a gradual process but punctuated by periods of chaos. It is arguable however that just as the evolution of individuals can be pathological, the evolution of Western culture has a pathology that has brought us close to the brink of catastrophe.

There is disagreement among the ranks of the evolutionary spirituality movement on this issue. In chapter three I endorse the pathology perspective and look at what can be perceived as unfortunate aberrations in the evolution of our Western worldview. The chapter offers a brief history of Western thought and argues that our masculine bias has led to a damaging repression of our innate affinity with the natural world and a pathological avoidance of our inner depths.

THE INNER QUEST

We are at this moment participating in one of the very greatest leaps of the human spirit to a knowledge not only of outside nature but also of our own deep inward mystery that has ever been taken, or that ever will or ever can be taken.

Joseph Campbell

Our Western heritage has unfortunately bequeathed us a culture in which "interiors are out and exteriors are in."(Wilber 2001:286) We lack the skills needed to explore consciousness having applied ourselves to external rather than internal technologies. Western religion discouraged direct encounters with the Infinite. We have no yoga, no tradition of meditation, no maps of the inner realm. The spiritual energy housed there is closely allied to sexual energy and is immensely powerful. Our race against catastrophe requires those energies to be awakened and harnessed wisely.

We cannot hope to solve our current problems purely from the level of ego and the rational mind. Our survival depends upon a collective awakening of heart consciousness and this requires inner work. In the words of the poet Rainer Maria Rilke: "Work of the eyes is done, now go and do heart work".

If we are to move beyond the current insanity of the human condition, an essential ingredient of our new story has to be the recognition of ourselves as being a great deal more than mere flesh and blood and bone. Human beings are reminiscent of Dr Who’s Tardis: we are so much more than we appear to be on the outside.

Fortunately we are now discovering techniques for entering our Tardis with the help of ancient spiritual wisdom from the East and from many indigenous cultures.

For over 2,500 years, Eastern yogis, masters