The Living Universe (22 page)

Learning to see ourselves in the collective mirror of the mass media is as important as learning to see ourselves in the mirror of our personal consciousness. Once there is inclusive and sustained social reflection, we can build a working consensus regarding appropriate actions for a promising future. We are a visual species; we cannot consciously build a positive future that we have not first
collectively
imagined. When we can see a sustainable and promising future, we can build it. Actions can then come quickly and voluntarily. Voluntary or self-organized action will be vital to success because hundreds of millions of people will be required to act in cooperation with one another. With local to global communication, we can mobilize ourselves purposefully, and each can contribute their unique talents to the creation of a life-affirming future.

At the very time that humanity requires a dramatic new level of human communications, the converging media of television and the Internet are making the world transparent to itself. Our world is bursting with conversation from the grassroots, and bringing an entirely new layer of conversation and connection into global culture. We now can see climate disruption producing crop failures and famine in Africa, destruction of rain forests in Brazil, coastlines eroding from hurricanes in the United States, violent conflict fueled
by religious differences in the Middle East, and the impact of skyrocketing energy prices around the world. Television and the Internet make every person a global witness—a knowing and feeling participant in world affairs. We have access to a world of vastly greater diversity and depth than ever before.

There is a weakness in the very strength of the Internet. The vast outpouring of views and voices from the grassroots is flooding us with a confusing avalanche of messages. Without a way to discover a working consensus, we are paralyzed. To coalesce our collective sentiments, we require regular opportunities for millions, and even billions, of persons to gather and explore our common future. We have all the technology needed to hold interactive electronic town meetings (via television and the Internet) that dramatically advance the conversation of democracy and provide us with a powerful voice in choosing our future. We need only the social will to claim that potential.

The scope and quality of our collective attention is the most precious resource we have as a human community. If we don't pay attention while decisions of monumental importance are being made, then we effectively forfeit our future. The bottom line is this: If we are to take practical steps to awaken our society, then citizens must make their voices heard in creating a more reflective and responsive media environment. I recognize many people feel profoundly disempowered when it comes to media change. Nonetheless, it is essential to leave that disempowerment in the past. The media are the most visible representation of our collective mind. As the media goes, so goes the future. Currently, our collective mind is being programmed for commercial success and evolutionary failure.

Building a culture of sustainability will require as much creativity, energy, and enthusiasm as we have invested in building
cultures of consumption. It is vital we begin conversations about sustainability at a scale that matches the actual scope of the challenges we face—and often these are of regional, national, and global scale. The world has become intensely interdependent. Our consciousness and conversations need to match the scale of the world in which we live. This is a time for rapid learning and experimentation locally, all the while being mindful of how we connect globally.

At this pivotal moment in our history, a citizen's movement for a more conscious democracy could turn humanity's primary attention machine—television—from the distractions of adolescent entertainment towards a mature reflection on matters of momentous concern. As the world's systems problems converge into the singularity of a global systems crisis, we could pause in our normal affairs and finally tell ourselves the truth. The business-as-usual focus of global media on commerce and entertainment could be replaced by a critical period of planetary truth telling in which we humans work to heal the wounds of history and then, together, forge a vision of a sustainable and meaningful future.

It was communication that enabled humans to evolve from early hunter-gatherers to the verge of planetary civilization, and it will be communication that enables us to become a bonded human family committed to the well-being of all. At the very time that we need an unprecedented capacity for local-to-global communication, we find we have the necessary tools in abundance. Electronic gatherings will blossom from the local to national to global scale and make the sentiments of the body politic highly visible. When everyone knows the “whole world is watching”—when economic, ethnic, ideological, and religious violence is brought before the court of world public opinion through the Internet and the other
media—it will bring a powerful corrective influence into human relations. As groups and nations see their actions scrutinized and judged by the rest of the world community, we will become more inclined to search for ethical and nonviolent approaches.

Because communication is fundamental to our common future, it is critical that the human community work consciously to bridge the digital divide, extend the communications culture to all corners of the globe, and build an effective “social mirror” for the human family—one that authentically reflects both the adversities and the opportunities of our times. All cultures will be naked—their history forever exposed in a world made transparent by the electronic media—and confronted with the need to make amends for wrongs committed in the past if there is to be release into a promising future. A supreme challenge will be to hold a steady and undistorted social mirror as we struggle for collective understanding, respect, and reconciliation. Societies without a tradition of freedom of speech will find this both liberating and extremely demanding as new skills of inclusion and reconciliation are required to participate effectively.

One of the most helpful and powerful actions we can take as we move through this transition as a species is to increase opportunities for conscious reflection from the personal to the planetary scale. Personal reflection refers to seeing ourselves in the mirror of consciousness as individuals and to observe the unfolding of our lives. By analogy, social reflection refers to seeing ourselves in the mirror of collective consciousness by using tools such as the mass media.

The more widely and accurately our time of initiation is witnessed by the people of the Earth through the global media, the more strongly the lessons of this time will be grounded in our collective lives and memory; in turn, the less likely it is that we will
have to relearn these lessons in the future. If we can see disasters in our social imagination, we may not need to manifest them in our actual experience. As societies, we can collectively imagine futures that we do not want to enact in experience—futures marked by profound climate change, resource shortages, famine, and conflict. If we use our collective imagination to see that perpetuating the status quo produces a future that few would want, then we can consciously turn in a more promising direction.

With social reflection from the local to global scale, we can explore the core questions raised here: Is the universe dead or alive? Who are we as a species? What kind of journey are we on? As our capacity for social reflection grows, we can choose social conversations more wisely and look for promising pathways more effectively. Actions can come quickly and voluntarily as we develop a capacity for building consensus for a promising future. With a shared vision, each person can contribute unique talents in creating that future. Voluntary, self-organizing action will be vital to our success. Our swiftly developing world situation is far too complex for any one individual, group, or nation to design remedies that will work for everyone. While being mindful of the conditions and needs at the global scale, we can work creatively at the local scale to adapt to changing conditions. This is a time for diverse local experimentation undertaken in a context of rich communication from the local to the global levels.

At this time of supreme testing, we are being challenged to give nothing less than our highest and best gifts to the world. The Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh describes how we each have what can be
called “near gifts” and “true gifts.” Near gifts, he says, are those things that we are pretty good at doing. Often we make our living and have our lives absorbed in our near gifts. He also said that we each have true gifts. True gifts are those things in which we are soulfully gifted—activities in which we feel at ease, where we naturally excel, and that bring us happiness in our personal lives and the lives of others. I believe the times ahead will be so demanding that our near gifts will not be sufficient to get us through. At this rare moment in history when our human capacities are being tested to their utmost, we are each challenged to bring our true gifts into the world. The window of opportunity is brief. Don't hold back. Give your gifts to the world at this pivotal moment in the human journey.

We have come full circle in the great story of our journey of return to our cosmic home. Now we can look again at the three questions that have oriented this inquiry.

Where are we?
The combined wisdom of science and spirituality speak with stunning clarity. We live, not in a dead universe, but in a living universe that is almost entirely invisible, flowing with an immensity of energy, continuously emerging anew, and brimming with sentience. We live in a universe that is vastly larger, more alive, subtle, intelligent, purposeful, and free than many of us have begun to imagine. With humility, we can turn back to the cosmos and freshly rediscover our home.

Who are we?
Life exists within life. Our life is inseparable from the aliveness of the living universe. Our aliveness and consciousness
extends beyond our biological bodies and into the further reaches and depths of the living universe. Our physical bodies comprise only the smallest fraction of the full scope of our being. Our bodies are biodegradable vehicles for learning that we are subtle beings of light, love, music, and knowing. We may have thought we were physical beings in a material universe, but now we are discovering that we are beings who are an integral part of the life stream of a living universe. With renewed feelings of wonder, we can open to a larger sense of self that connects into the subtle aliveness of a living universe.

Where are we going?
Humanity is growing up and growing into the reality that we are beings of both biological and cosmic dimension. We are on a heroic journey of awakening—learning how to live within the deep ecology of the Mother Universe. Our journey of awakening and discovery has reached a critical stage. We now confront the supreme test of living sustainably on the Earth, in harmony with one another, and in communion with the living universe. If we can make the great turn toward home—if we can move from a path of separation to a path of communion and connection with our home, the universe, then humanity's journey can continue to unfold. We can move into an era of reflection and reconciliation as a human family, then beyond into an era of deep bonding and restoration, and then into an era of flowing creativity. We have far to go and much to learn to complete our magnificent journey of awakening.

We live in momentous times and the choices we make now will powerfully influence the future course of evolution on the Earth. In these historic times, a paramount task for the human community
is to discover a larger sense of identity and vision for the human journey, one that can bring us together in a common enterprise. The doorway into a larger understanding of who we are and where we are going can be found by becoming more conscious of where we already are—living within a living universe. In discovering we live within a living universe, we open to the heartening knowledge we are one of her precious offspring, seeking communion with her depths. We celebrate that the living universe has a central project—growing self-referencing streams of life at every scale—and that we are one flowering of an evolutionary dynamic at work throughout the cosmos. In seeing the universe around us as alive, we consciously seek to grow that aliveness within ourselves. What a wonderful paradox: We get our bearings for the journey ahead by recognizing that we are already home.

Reading about the living universe and what it means for our lives offers one level of learning. A deeper and more powerful level of learning unfolds when we bring these insights into our lives through direct experience and shared conversations. To suggest a few possibilities, I've drawn themes from the book and placed them in two sections—meditations and dialogues. I encourage you to explore and expand upon these as a way to deepen your engagement with our living universe. For additional resources, see my website at
www.awakeningearth.org
.

Ultimately, the goal of meditation is simply to relax into “ordinary reality” which, as we have seen, is quite extraordinary. Because the
universe is alive, when we slow down, calm down, and come into the moment, we are opening into a subtle field of conscious alive-ness. Instead of striving to reach some imagined state of awakening, in meditation we relax the thinking mind, rest in the simplicity of the moment, and allow the miracle of a living universe to present itself in our direct experience. We don't have to
do
anything. We are only required to be open in our experience—to be curious and awake to everyday life—and the first miracle of a living universe will become self-evident in our awareness. In that spirit, here are a few meditations drawn from this book that can support our awakening to a living universe.