We are on the verge of the new age, a whole new world. Human consciousness, our mutual awareness, is going to make a quantum leap. Everything will change. You will never be the same.
Imagine a yogi, a teacher, a physicist, a social visionary, a physician, a parapsychologist, a theologian, a feminist, a psychotherapist, and an ecologist engaged in dialogue. Boundaries between their disciplines are suspended as they explore remarkable parallels and unsuspected connections that link fast-breaking developments on the frontiers of research. Some connections invite comparison with an ancient wisdom. Others seem to form a basis for a major evolutionary change comparable to the emergence of the Enlightenment from the Middle Ages.
Under discussion are topics relating to the "meeting of science and consciousness," the "decline of patriarchy," the importance of "living as if the Earth really mattered," and even the "end of Western civilization as we know it." Ideas that used to be considered false or even crazy are now explored as vital ingredients in our survival! Beginning in the sixties and exploding into the nineties, thousands of such dialogues have been undertaken on local, national, and international levels. They cover a dizzying spectrum of topics.
Here are a few examples: science and ancient wisdom, creativity, expanded human potential, varieties of meditation, healing, near-death experience, holistic health, noncompetitive models of education, altered states of consciousness, subtle energies, peace, world hunger, therapeutic touch, ecological consciousness, vegetarianism, extraterrestrial encounters, the women's movement, channeling, globally sustainable culture, psychotronics, the hospice movement, dream symbols, yoga, free energy devices, Tibetan medicine, spiritual arts, applied kinesiology, East-West interfaces, New Physics, mobilizing intuitive faculties, recovering Native American traditions, the end of the Cold War, Green politics, letting go of fear, New Biology, earth changes, learning through both sides of the brain, "shadow" sides and encounters with darkness, decentralist social agendas, steady-state economics, intimacy versus security in relationships, etc.
These far-ranging dialogues and agendas are nurtured by hundreds of institutes, organizations, journals, newsletters, and countless pioneering authors who are creating new genres for libraries and bookstores to contemplate. A massive grass roots movement is evident if we include both issue-oriented groups, such as Greenpeace or the National Organization for Women, and those whose personal lives have been transformed positively through an encounter with, say, meditation, political action, or a healing crisis.
A dramatic ripple effect is not only changing beliefs but also changing lives. We increasingly hear or read of individuals: seeking to get in touch with their latent feminine or masculine aspects; fighting cancer through nutrition and visualization, rather than chemotherapy; becoming more present-centered after a near-death experience; leaving the corporate world to adopt a life-style of voluntary simplicity; working out a painful divorce cooperatively; developing creative intuition in order to render better business decisions; or seeing a psychic to explore personal growth issues.
Marilyn Ferguson, whose Aquarian Conspiracy is mandatory reading for anyone concerned with social and personal change, describes this grass roots movement as a powerful fifth column in-the-making:
Other writers have expressed a similar sense of powerful cultural realignment, among them Patricia Aburdene and John Naisbitt, authors of Megatrends 2000, and historian Theodore White. In White's view, a new culture is struggling to be born. It is only in retrospect that historians "may be able to sum up all these stirrings and their effects in an epigraphic zeitgeist, or spirit of the times."
Mark Satin, author of New Options for America, not only has seen the road ahead but also has helped get us moving in that direction. For him, a "Second American Experiment" already is underway. We are beginning to move beyond assumptions that have limited our conception of what is possible. Instead of seeking new answers for old questions, we are asking new questions.
And the answers often have a more spiritually based ring to them. In Spiritual Politics, which Patricia Aburdene describes as "the first articulate, in-depth application of ancient spiritual wisdom to today's political events," Corinne McLaughlin and Gordon Davidson seek to transform the world from the inside out:
James Redfield, author of The Celestine Prophecy, views these shifting visions not as hype or fad, but as a "positive psychological contagion" expressing a global spiritual realignment:
With these and other writers I concur that a new worldview and, indeed, a new world are in the making. That is the thesis of this book. But what is this emerging perspective indigenous to Satin's "Second American Experiment" or Ferguson's "Aquarian Conspiracy" --this spiritual unfolding that, according to Redfield, "no philosophy or religion has yet full clarified?" Where did it come from and where might it take us? What is causing the shift? Does the need for change automatically mean there will be change? Are we wishfully projecting more than is really there?
To claim that an old worldview is dying and a new one is emerging requires, first of all, that we clarify what we mean by "worldview" and "paradigm shift." Only then will we be in a position to identify the old worldview, the causes of its decay, and the kind of vision that promises to replace it. A considerable amount of information will have to be organized along the way. But taken a step at a time, the journey will prove less formidable and the destination will become progressively more clear.
Broader than reform, deeper than revolution, this benign conspiracy for new human agenda has triggered the most rapid cultural realignment in history...It is a new mind-- the ascendance of a startling worldview that gathers into its framework breakthrough science and insights from earliest recorded thought. The Aquarian Conspirators...are school teachers and office workers, famous scientists, government officials and lawmakers, artists and millionaires, taxi drivers and celebrities, leaders in medicine, education, law, psychology.
Our aim is to shift the focus of political dialogue from the outer level of physical forms and activities to the inner, causal realm of consciousness. "Consciousness precedes being--not the other way around," noted former Czech President Vaclav Havel in his 1990 address to the U.S. Congress. The human mind is not simply a reflection of prevailing social structures-- it creates form. The interplay of human and Divine thought creates all personal and social reality.
For half a century now, a new consciousness has been entering the human world, a new awareness that can only be called transcendent, spiritual...We know that life is really about a spiritual unfolding that is personal and enchanting and magical--an unfolding that no philosophy or religion has yet fully clarified...We know, [too,] that once we do understand what is happening, how to turn on this growth and keep it on, the human world will take a quantum leap into a whole new way of life, one that all of history has been struggling to achieve.
(Exerpted from Paradigm Wars , pp. 1-4)