Photo by Clay Banks on Unsplash
by Volker Brendel and Bill Isaacs
Volker Brendel: Once in a while there are topics that emerge through the mass consciousness and surface in different media, through personal conversations and encounters, and so forth. To me it’s of great value in this setting to occasionally pick up a topic like that and examine that topic with spiritual clarity. There are many reasons to speak and use words. This particular way of using language may be one of the least understood, and yet most important function. Alan Hammond has spoken about this with unparalleled insight, that whatever we can clarify in our consciousness is holographically clarified for mankind. And so that’s my invitation right now to all of you, to help me in that process for our consideration today.
There are many aspects to what I want to discuss, and we will likely not be able to cover all of it. But by examining a few threads, I think we will have a chance to bring clarity. It occurred to me that one of the most important questions anyone can ask themselves is: What do I value? I don’t see this question clearly addressed by many and it is commonly not even heard correctly but understood in a slightly different form. I think mostly that question is phrased by adding the word “most”: What do I value most? To this, some ready-made answers will be given; it may be family, “I put my family first.” Or, health; we value our health and wish to have good health above all. Or some people will list God, or their religion, or their religious community, of being of prime value; or maybe their country, in a patriotic spirit. Now, the critical question is of course what about it—how do you give expression in living to what you value or ostensibly value most? This turns out to be a very difficult question, and one that may quickly lead to contradictions.
For example, you may put much value on the environment. You are pro-environment and are committed to being a non-polluting good planetary citizen. You look at the weather forecast and see today listed as an air-alert day. Loads of pollutants are in the air and you should not use a gasoline-powered car and make things worse. So you commute by bicycle, doing your part. But what if you also value your own health? By bicycling you are exposing your lungs to the high pollution levels.
For another example, you may consider family connections as most highly valued, but if family members live far away, you may find yourself having to use an airplane to visit them—a now widely recognized burden on the planet. So, we recognize that putting value where we think it belongs can be a tricky business in practice.
There is yet another way how people interpret our original question. They will assert that it is they who should be valued, and often the attitude is that they should be valued for what they want—you show me that you value me by giving me what I want. In university settings this attitude has come up in the context of emphasis on inclusion. We should be inclusive and tolerant of seemingly everything! For example, faculty, students, and staff have experienced a lot of stress during the months of pandemic. Now we put a premium on mental health; communication, counselling, breaks, etc. Well, this is wonderful and caring. And, we do have to put down some limits! Do you want to be operated on by a surgeon who needs mental health timeouts during your operation? Do you feel comfortable with the pilot of your passenger airplane or with a captain of a nuclear submarine not being in full health on the job?
There is a fundamental confusion in the way values are being discussed when the conversation stays on a level of self-centered interests, looking for others (society) to honor what I want so that I can feel valued. The question that really should be asked is what is it of value that I am giving? In academic circles it has become popular to add pronouns to one’s address; e.g., “he/him/his,” so that your gender preference can easily be identified. I appreciate the spirit of inclusion in recognition that not everyone fits in binary gender categories, but I also see misplaced emphasis in this. I am not concerned with whether you label yourself male or female or transgender or switch from one to the other. What is it that you express? Maybe in the moment it’s something of a feminine spirit; fine; or something of a masculine spirit; also fine, when it is appropriate.
Once again, this all comes down to identity. I don’t want to identify you with temporary labels. Whether you label yourself as a family person; or a religious person; or a patriot; or of a particular sexual orientation—these are all wrapped-up identities tied to what we call the human nature world. And as long as our values are tied to role playing on that stage, we are missing the point of who we really are. All the attempts of generating value in that way are ultimately doomed to fail. It was said long ago that we should put our treasures in heaven. In other words, put treasure in your true identity; which we may well call angelic identity to indicate a vision well beyond the little worries of our earthly existence. Express that, which is nothing but the expression of the One Life that animates everything. Then lo and behold, something of real value is touched and felt and lived.
Bill Isaacs: For there to be any resolution to the challenges human beings face, human consciousness needs to shift up to a higher level of function. Doing this entails moving out of the perception that what is immediately present in experience is all there is. In this dominant condition for human beings, there is precious little perception of anything of value other than what immediately provides pleasure or comfort. What is needed involves an awakening and movement out of this state to the realization of one that is less tangible, but that is both purposeful, and that carries immense value.
A change of this kind necessarily involves awakening to stature, to the true significance inherent in one’s own Being. Interestingly from a human standpoint, true stature can tend to seem quite insignificant. Human consciousness doesn’t particularly perceive or value the truth.
There’s a saying that problems can’t be fixed at the level at which they were created. They can’t even be perceived accurately at the level at which they were created. This lack of perception gets translated into actions that attempt to fix problems, that are themselves counterproductive. The very effort to correct the gaps and distortions in human experience, to fill the voids people feel, ironically enough does nothing but intensify destructiveness because the actions are taken from a consciousness that is locked into a partial perspective. There does now seem to be coming a culmination of all these impacts of human action, something that can be sensed that is coming, a shadow cast across human experience.
When I was about thirteen years old, I read a book that really impressed me: The Earth Abides by George Stewart. The book tells the story of a man who goes on a camping trip in the mountains, and is soon bitten by a rattlesnake. He suffers through this experience but survives the poisonous effects of the snake’s bite. When he comes back down from the mountains he discovers a remarkable change. Somehow almost everyone in the world has disappeared. During the time he was away, humanity was devastated by a mysterious virus that wiped out most of the population. He speculates that his struggle with the snake poisoning somehow enabled him to defeat the disease that struck down almost everyone else.
The rest of the story describes how this man endeavors to survive and make his way in a fundamentally transformed world. This book was written in 1949 but certainly has an obvious contemporaneous relevance. I remember at the time reading it and thinking something like this could happen. I had a perception, maybe not very easily articulable at the time, of a coming profound shift, a step change of some kind that would require an awakening, and that would require courage, among other things, from me.
The title of this book comes from a passage in Ecclesiastes (1:4): “Men come and go, but the earth abides.” The King James translation is more poetic: “One generation passes away and another generation cometh, but the earth abides forever.” The earth itself persists, beyond the antics and machinations of human beings, and even beyond the possible destruction of mankind itself.
It doesn’t take much to recognize that in the last six months, all over the planet, something is going on, an apparent acceleration of climate events in particular. There has been a confluence of factors that seem odd, and troubling: extreme drought, extreme hailstorms, floods, intense record-setting heat waves, out of control wildfires. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) recently published its latest report, which says essentially the same thing it has over the last 20 or so years, namely that things are looking rather dire (https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/). The report is quite unequivocal, making clear that there are changes in the climate that are now irreversible “for centuries or millennia.” The report makes clear we have crossed a threshold that will lead to a sustained step change in experience on a global scale. We are at a moment of disjunction where what has seemed quite stable and predictable is having the rug pulled out from under it. However one can never underestimate the human capacity for self-deception and denial. Even when things are shifting right before one’s eyes, the impact is often still not perceived. But now the preponderance of factors is gathering momentum.
Peter Wadhams is a scientist from Cambridge University in England. He is the head of the Polar Ocean Physics Group in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics. His specialty is the study of sea ice. He’s made dozens of trips to Greenland and has charted the melting of sea ice. He recently gave an interview where he outlined more precisely his experience and observations about the changing conditions on the planet (https://youtu.be/-48Fjl2NOJ4).
There is a concept in the scientific community called a “tipping point” that is relevant here. A tipping point is a condition when a system that has moved along at a certain pace and in a certain way suddenly shifts to an irreversible and fundamentally different state, seemingly just like that. These are referred to as non-linear dynamics—a situation where everything seems to be going in a straight line, and then suddenly, boom, it changes. Well, it isn’t really changing suddenly. Tipping points are instances of what’s called exponential change. This is a change which is as Hemingway once put it, moves slowly, slowly, then all at once. An incrementally small set of changes can suddenly appear to move very quickly. To take one example: Imagine a pond where you can gradually add lily pads to it. Every day you double the number of lily pads you add to the pond. So on Day 1 you place 1, then 2, then 4, then 16, then 256, and so on. Ask yourself, how many lily pads would there be after a month? The early numbers seem quite small; it stays small for quite a while; but then it suddenly, and quickly grows to an enormous number (by the 29th day the pond would be half covered with lily pads). The melting of sea ice appears to be an exponential phenomenon. As Wadhams puts it:
“We’re getting 8, 9, 10, 12 billion tons, of ice disappearing from the Greenland ice sheet every day … it melts away, goes out to sea. So, we’re contributing to global sea level rise. Greenland has become the largest single contributor to global sea level rise. And it seems to be something that’s, that’s steadily increasing. It’s not something where we are going to be able to fix.”
The Greenland ice shelf has passed a tipping point, meaning that a significant increase in sea level rise is now baked in. Wadham goes on:
“Stopping sea level rise due to melting of the ice sheet is just something that’s inexorable and is getting more and more rapid all the time. So it’s going to be the source of a great deal of discomfort for human beings in the years to come as the coastal cities and coastal regions experience an acceleration in the rate of rise of sea level…People think, especially people my age, they think, oh, well, no, if disaster is coming it’s in 2059, I’ll be in my nineties. So I won’t care. But it’s going to happen before that, and it could easily in a very short time. You can conceive of the kind of scenarios, like for instance, in California. You didn’t use to get brush fires or not very many brush fires. And now every year there’s, there’s more and more brush fires, which amalgamate to produce a kind of burning out of the whole state…It could become something where the whole state becomes uninhabitable because of the destruction of towns, the destruction of crops, the destruction of farmland. You end up, with a place where you can’t live and that could happen.”
He goes on to outline how the melting of Arctic ice and exposing and melting of the permafrost releases methane to the atmosphere, which is a significant accelerator of warming. In other words there are many other factors which are seemingly coming together, not slowly, but all at once. Wadhams suggests there could be catastrophic climate events within five years, not thirty.
Finally, Wadhams says this:
“There was this very famous American scientist who said that all the problems of the world stem from mankind’s failure to understand the exponential, or to assume that everything is going to carry on in a nice, steady way. The way that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change always showed a steadily increasing sea level, was completely wrong. But the exponential is something we appreciate. We’re adding CO2 to the atmosphere in an exponential way, but we don’t seem to bother with that. And yet that goes on and is getting worse rapidly. So coupled with an exponential [change]…you’re, you’re climbing, you’re climbing a hill and behind you, everything’s flat and you think, oh, that’s nice. And then in front of you, everything’s getting vertical and that’s what’s happening in the world in so many different aspects of the climate. So,any of these exponential changes could be the source of a major, a major catastrophe.”
The famous American scientist he is referring to was one of my mentors. I was introduced to this way of thinking many years ago. Climate and systems scientists have been saying these things privately for years, but they’re now saying them out loud and publicly.
There is an exponential tipping point coming in form, no doubt about it.
But this is not the only tipping point that’s underway. Human consciousness can’t perceive of problems from the level at which it lives. The fundamental tipping point underway now revolves around a shift in identity, from one where the preponderance of experience is caught in the external patterns of the earth, to an awareness of the wholeness and oneness of Being. What percentage of human consciousness will rise to participate in the full stature that is in fact already present? This is a shift that has also been going on below the level of conventional human perception for a very long time—one could argue over thousands of years. And while not much has seemingly happened, the process is in fact underway. That is the nature of exponential cycles. Nothing seems to be happening, and then, suddenly everything changes.
A tipping change at the level of human identity is indeed underway. The factors that allow the intensification of movement, and ascension in experience, continue as long as there is an active conscious focus through these currents can move. This puts very direct responsibility onto those of us who have some understanding of what we’re here to do.
The intensification that is coming certainly cannot be handled in any way other than through the presence of true Being, where there arises a clear understanding that things are unfolding as they should. The point here however is not merely to survive these changes or to be in position to tolerate them, but to be part of the cause of the tipping point action in a heavenly sense.
The invisible changes tend to come before the visible ones. What we may experience now however is the clear realization that we are here to encompass both the heaven and earth tipping points. We do this by operating from the stature of Being that is natural to us. No tipping point shift is possible until conscious understanding of this kind breaks surface. That itself may be many years in the making. Even now, what is present consciously could seem to be quite small. As I mentioned, one of the striking things about the human perception of true identity and true stature is that it perceives it as nothing much. And yet nothing could be further from the truth.
This summer my family and I have been on an island 30 miles out to sea. The light from the cities is somewhat less intense here. We can walk outside and easily see the stars. We can see the Milky Way with the naked eye—a billowing of clouds of billions of stars, a vastness, which impresses and overwhelms human consciousness. This is an intimation of the stature of Being, our home among the stars, beginning with people who know this, expresses value inherent in it. It is that expression, at the level of human consciousness that catalyzes the tipping point of identity—an identity which is the birthright of every human being on the planet.
As the intensification of changes in form transpires, possibly sooner than later (if you believe Professor Wadhams) within a very few years there will be more awareness of change and more pressure to rise up. We have ringside seats in this juncture of history to an enormous and significant unfolding experience, and we are, as we know this, also at the center of these changes. These moments have been looked to for millennia and it’s quite evident that we are approaching tipping points, both in form but also in the presence of identity itself. And all through this, we stay true to the truth.