by Bill Isaacs
It really is quite something to just pause and take note of the vast cycles in which we are participating, to note the largeness of what is unfolding. It is some small miracle that we are here now consciously able to perceive and participate in all of this.
I thought for just a minute it would be worth our taking some time to do a little preparation inside ourselves from this vantage point of Being. Let’s take a minute to notice the different patterns that we are encompassing or aware of, or possibly exercised by. Some of these may be personal, and some of them may be factors you are aware of in the wider world. I’ll leave it to you to discern what those are. But I invite us all to take a minute to just put those in a place apart, to separate from our involvement with them, to ask those patterns to step back for a minute. You could even imagine a kind of waiting room that you could put them in if you wish. A pleasant, lovely waiting room. Don’t just shove them to the edges. There are many things that pass through our consciousness, but to make space for deeper work I find takes some deliberate choices. So, let’s take a minute to do that.
The other day a colleague of mine mentioned something that struck me. He said, “This is not a time to do safe things.” He’s one of many I am aware of who see themselves as part of a vanguard of people who are meant to bring something different into the world. He and others see the “meta-crisis” of systemic difficulties emerging in the world. But his awareness of what is meant by the word “different,” is quite refined. To him, it means a fundamental set of root changes. His comment made me think that while there are no doubt many who are disturbed by what’s going on, there are others who are thinking that it is time to get on with it. It has been time to get on with it for a few thousand years, but we are at a time now when there is a specific window of opportunity, not to mention, urgent necessity. His comment represents an awakening to this. We went on to discuss what getting on with it might mean. We often translate these things in terms of what we might do in an external sense, but I don’t think that’s where the action is.
Where are the people who are operationally functioning in such a way that something different could start to happen on the planet, without their being caught up in what’s happening? This is a way of describing the emergence of a spiritual perspective and awareness capable of encompassing and shifting the disturbances all around us. This is something that has been unfolding in my experience, and I’m sure in yours and many others, for decades. But if there were ever a moment to bring all that operational equipment online, this would be it. I think we can see how there is a wider orchestration of factors unfolding that is precisely designed to bring this awareness to the fore, disguised as a series of global crises.
In recent months, as I’m sure everyone’s aware, all around the world, the very atmosphere that we breathe has become increasingly heated and clouded and poisoned. In Denver, in New York, in many places in the Midwest, and throughout the East Coast of the US, an orange haze of toxic smoke descended from Canadian wildfires that have been burning out of control for weeks. Cities in this zone have at different times had the worst air pollution on the planet ever recorded, which is quite impressive. Also in the past few weeks, we’ve seen temperatures rising in such a way that is alarming, even for the alarmists. An intense and record-setting heatwave has settled into the southern and western parts of the United States and persisted for weeks. Europe has also been struck by an unrelenting heatwave. The Acropolis has been closed to tourists because the temperature hit 104ºF. Staff refused to work, and health authorities feared people were going to suffer heat stroke. And it’s not just heat, but a massive buildup of moisture in the atmosphere that suddenly lets loose, that we see developing. The state of Vermont received two months of rain in two days, causing devastating floods and putting the capitol city of Montpelier underwater. While there may have been people, for instance, in America harboring the lingering thought that while climate change might be occurring, it would affect other people in other places, I suspect that bubble has begun to burst.
I was tempted to say something at the beginning about how, like one sometimes hears at the start of movies, “The following program contains material that may be disturbing. Viewer discretion is advised.” Well, I think a little discretion is advised because unfortunately, we really haven’t seen anything yet. This is also dawning on people. The climate cycles we are seeing are part of massive interdependent and reinforcing systems that are escalating in intensity. Each outcome adds to momentum, to the feedback loops that keep moving, leading to further outcomes that carry yet more intensity. People ask when the “new normal” will appear when things will stabilize. They misunderstand the nature of the systems’ effects that are apparently at work.
While speaking with my colleague, he also made a quip that struck me: “The world has caught a fever.” I think it’s evident that we are seeing symptoms of a disease—
Dis ease—moving everywhere. Like any fever, you eventually start to notice—even if you have been in denial that anything was happening. In the Washington Post recently was this comment: “’We’re seeing temperatures exceed those that can support life,’ said Francis, a senior scientist at the Woodwell Climate Research Center. ‘Certain places are becoming uninhabitable…All of these records are being broken left and right, and my hope is people will start to put this together in their heads,’ she continued. ‘These things shouldn’t be happening. It’s all connected to the fact that we’re warming the planet’” (Washington Post, July 14, 2023).
The thing about a fever is it’s disorienting. You’re proceeding along and then you don’t feel well and you don’t know why. Now, there’s an additional component occurring here, because when the atmosphere itself becomes toxic, overheated and unbreathable, where there’s no escape for anyone, a claustrophobic condition looms. This is yet another very particular developmental crisis that’s being brought to the consciousness of the entire planet, more or less all at once. There have been some others which I’ll remind us of in a minute. But I think this is a specific and very controlled phenomenon, even though it looks quite out of control. One core element, of course, is that human beings are obviously very dependent on Nature, whether we admit it or not. We look to Nature for everything. When it comes to the point where we can’t trust that nature will right itself, where the self-correcting or governing factors of nature do not seem to not be working well, the rug really is being pulled out from under us. That is a very big change in the underlying condition of experience for human beings, one from which there is apparently no escape.
We’ve used and abused nature and like children, have looked to it to look after us. Yet apparently Nature is under some stress, and it’s not behaving as it once did. It seems to be moving with more and more unstable oscillations that threaten to destroy human beings. In fact, it’s doing the opposite of looking after us. Nature has held us, but its ability to do that, and its manner of doing it, is in question. Now, I think this is a quite profound shift. It certainly is not the first time there have been significant earth changes, cataclysmic and violent shifts on the surface of the planet, but those experiences are buried in the subconscious memory of human beings. This is happening now, to us. And it is sustained and ongoing and intensifying.
With some panic, facing the difficulties ahead, people are now saying things like, “We have already used up half our carbon budget,” meaning half the amount of carbon the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) estimated in 2020 that we could burn before 2030 and still keep the global climate average temperature increase below 1.5º C, considered a critical threshold we don’t want to cross because really catastrophic shifts happen after that. If changes aren’t made before 2030, the science holds that whatever is unfolding now will be completely irrevocable and irreversible. Without reviewing it, I would suggest we’re way past that point anyway. As we have put it in the past, the bus has hit the wall. That likely happened decades ago.
There is a valiant and valid effort by some to try and do something about what seems to be causing the fever, to stop emitting poison into the atmosphere, now framed in extreme ways: all fossil fuels have to go away, today. Despite the impossibility of simply interrupting the momentum of a global economy fully addicted to fossil fuels, the physics of the situation are that even if we did stop releasing CO2 all at once, the bathtub of already emitted CO2 in the atmosphere still has nowhere to go and the planet would continue to heat up for the next 25 years anyway. Longer-term effects might be mitigated, but much of the damage has already been done. Efforts to cut CO2 emissions, however, are at best a matter of treating the symptom. It’s like saying, we’d like to continue in our abusive and childish state, but we’ll make a couple of changes in our habits to do that. Like someone who gets frequent headaches and takes aspirin, letting the underlying cause of the headache go unaddressed.
A much more fundamental change is required, and that is what is gradually being brought to our collective awareness. There have been, over the last relatively few years, a series of unique developments for human beings, where a collective pattern of awareness has been brought more or less to everyone all at once. This kind of thing has never before happened in human history. We did not have the communication technology that would allow for it. Now we do. First there was the novel coronavirus, and the ensuing pandemic. There have been pandemics before, but not one that stopped the world in three days, and where pretty well everyone on the planet was immediately aware of it and shared in a single experience. Initially, some people adapted well while others had much more maladaptive responses. But it was inescapable, unavoidable.
Then Russia invaded Ukraine, and we collectively had to face an old-style world power conflict in Europe for the first time in 75 or 80 years. And again, the world was compelled to pay attention and was intimately involved. In this case, it wasn’t an invisible microorganism orchestrating things but a pattern of conflict right in our midst that could not be avoided. This has had enormous geopolitical, economic, and social knock-on effects. Everyone had to determine where they stood relative to another inescapable collective phenomenon. Some tried to stay out of it, some took sides and became partisan around it; but whatever the response, the situation was and continues a long while later to act like a festering wound in human consciousness. First, we had a world stopping disease. Then a world challenging “family conflict.”
And now we have emerging even more abruptly what has been brewing for a long time, a fever, an intensifying fever that may well make many places periodically if not permanently uninhabitable. But more than that, it has no sign of letting up anytime soon, and no easy fix. This is the underlying anxiety that is lurking here. Some might think, “Well, maybe next week it’ll cool off.” Probably not. This is a third and yet further intensification being brought to the awareness of more or less everyone on the planet. Now, if that’s not the orchestration of life functioning precisely to bring about changes in collective awareness, I don’t know what is. Unprecedented shifts, unprecedented grand cycles, with unprecedented collective awareness, all with the purpose of making it inescapable that we recognize the necessity of finding a different way of functioning and a different orientation. In this case, the shift is from the childish expectation that Nature will look after us, to the recognition that somehow, we must look after Nature, not merely to stop poisoning it.
The orchestration of the whole is bringing awareness of a collective and shared experience, and shared responsibility, to the fore. But what is to be done? We are not going to think our way out of this. There is no single technology that’s going to fix it. The difficulties here are embedded in human consciousness, in the ways we think and act and understand ourselves. For people like the colleague I mentioned earlier, someone who is moving in an awakening pattern, this is very obvious. What to do isn’t necessarily obvious, but the need to rise to a new level of understanding certainly is.
That brings us back to the question, What is the missing ingredient? One way to think about the underlying causes of the fever is to recognize that there are many burdens held in the consciousness of human beings. These burdens lead to all kinds of distorted and destructive behavior, individually and collectively. We have whatever awareness or understanding we have about what to do about this. Some people’s playbook tells them to just override and ignore them. Some seek to expunge them. Others try to rise above or transcend them. That may buy some space. But ultimately what is needed is to heal those factors from a place in oneSelf that is capable of doing that, with the quality of awareness and energy that is in position to offer healing.
But what’s needed goes beyond anything personal. There are also collective burdens, legacy patterns that have persisted for millennia that just sit on the heads of human beings, passed from one tribe to the next, from one community to the next, through the generations. For example, there is research now showing that the children of Holocaust survivors inherited genetic changes that had been produced by the trauma inflicted on their parents. The burdens even extend beyond the personal and beyond communities. There are factors in the collective unconscious, not attached to any particular human community, that are part of what got introduced into human consciousness as human beings diverged from participation in the whole. Some of these have been floating around for millennia, seeking residence in human beings. And they are mean. That’s an understatement. A better word: violent.
How are these factors going to be healed at a collective level? It’s one thing to provide a point of orientation, but I don’t think that’s enough. Nor, however, is there the need to do battle with these factors. It all needs healing, allowing it all to find release, to go wherever they wish, into the earth or into the atmosphere and disappear. These burdens have no place at the level of function where We Are, where I Am. And from that place, we can see and allow changes to transpire, healing to move.
There hasn’t been a collective vehicle to do this kind of work. That collective effort does not so require outer coordination so much as participation in the inner design that is being made evident anyway. We’re all being pointed, oriented towards seeing and acting on what is needed now. We have an unprecedented opportunity to do something that’s not safe, something that can offer healing at a level that has never been possible before. There are baseline requirements for this, and in some ways it does all boil down to the simplicity of expressing oneself and the Tone of that. The world has caught a fever. It can certainly be helpful to treat the symptoms as it is in any situation of illness to bring some relief, to buy some time for deeper healing. As I said, the source of the disease isn’t so evident as yet to people. It isn’t really the pumping of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. There’s something behind that.
Part of the value of a good healer is that they bring confidence. They give people the sense that “This can be handled,” something that evokes a response in the direction of wholeness. Of course, the outcome is never assured, and that’s certainly the case here. But to the degree that there’s interest, the attitude can be, we can get through this, but not by doing the same things we did to get here. That would be crazy, and I think it’s going to be increasingly obvious how crazy that really is. Human beings don’t handle disturbance terribly well. There is, therefore, the need to allow a release of the anxiety that arises as a result of intensifying symptoms as quickly as possible, with those who are willing.
The message to bring is, “We can do this, you can do this, and while it’s going to look worse for sure, there is a safe place to stand.” I think the level of how much worse things may get has not quite dawned on people. But it is starting to, and I think that presents an opportunity. It is also making more evident hidden collective factors that need to be released. There aren’t many people in position to do much about that, but I would suggest that we could, if we so choose. We are not here to be looked after by the earth, but here to look after the earth, to look after the whole, from a position that has been absent for a very long time. We have perhaps a glimpse. anyway, of what that might mean. Something is clearly working out. The orchestration of it is breathtaking. In that, we can have complete confidence, and can convey that in our every action.