by Bill Isaacs
We are all participating in a vast creative cycle that is the culmination of many centuries of unfoldment, all aimed at the ascension of human consciousness. This goes well beyond the idea of human progress. There have been numerous changes in human experience over the past millennia, which may be viewed as improvements. The primary causes of human difficulty have diminished or turned into manageable challenges, namely famine, war, and disease. Although there are immediate examples of all three, overall these have been demonstrably lessened. However, there are many new problems, some of which carry far more catastrophic implications. We also live in a time that is more interconnected than ever before, where technology is advancing at a pace never before seen, and where we have an unprecedented level of globally shared experience. At the same time, we appear to be at a threshold where the confluence of challenges now arising is more intense than anything we seem to have known before. All these changes are arising together.
This is because the whole is organizing the parts. There is one animating energy moving us and moving every dimension of creation. This vast cosmic machinery dwarfs any picture we might invent. I am a part of that whole. The whole is always thinking, at every level of substance, from the micro to the largest level. It might seem odd to say, but the cosmic whole is sentient, alive. The human view is it is all a collection of star dust and molecules, mass and energy randomly interacting. But that is a limited perspective. There is a larger pattern of mind at work. This emerges through radiation that creates purposeful, accurate and precise movement and form at many different levels. This perspective is useful when it comes to thinking about what is unfolding now, the pressures that are emerging now on earth. One set of pressures is leading to a quest for safety in an increasingly hellish, even barbaric world. This has become a primary focus certainly for some people, in a very immediate and real way. But this same pressure is moving subconsciously for everybody. There is more to this quest than meets the eye.
The most ancient roots of the word safe mean “whole.” The quest for safety is the quest for wholeness. To find and know one’s place in the whole—this is the energy animating human consciousness. We can see this quest intensifying now. It is both liberating energy and making increasing trouble. How we function relative to all of that turns out to be important. We have immense responsibility here. There is a great rift in human consciousness that has induced a large trauma pattern, one that has been felt for generations. One impact of this trauma is that it has become internalized and is now experienced as a lack of trust in the very energy that could heal it. So we have a self-centered pattern of function that has induced trauma, which is leading to greater mistrust, which is increasing the experience of trauma, and therefore the sense of a lack of safety.
It’s a little like a child who injures another, feels themselves traumatized by the injury and the act they committed. They themselves need to be healed, even though they caused the trouble in the first place. Our attitude however cannot be one of condemnation. It doesn’t help. The quest for safety is bringing to focus the opportunity to awaken to wholeness, and it is being met subconsciously with the lack of trust.
This creates a problem. What are people to do? Healing the core rift is the fundamental mission right now in human consciousness. This healing happens within us. I’m sure we could all find parts of ourselves that don’t entirely trust what is unfolding, that do not trust who you are. This, of course, is a tremendous opportunity. If you think, well, there is no such thing in me, I’d say you’ve made yourself almost useless, because you have blocked any connection to what is moving subconsciously in everyone else and in yourself. The offer to return to a pattern of wholeness has never been revoked. It is now being actively offered by me to my consciousness. We could each say this. This awareness can lead us to operate in a more fluid way, where we begin to see what’s occurring as an opportunity. Of course, not all of it is easy to take. Some quite destructive things are occurring, certainly in the Middle East, and in many other places.
I think it’s worth reminding ourselves that what we are seeing now is the confluence of a number of larger cycles that are moving all at once and are appearing all together. However, it is useful to separate them out in consciousness to examine them. One cycle has to do with the oscillations that occur particularly, over the last three or four hundred years, that entail a periodic pattern of unraveling. Human society can seem to be going well, with institutions strengthening. Then gradually individual awakening upends familiar norms and introduces change. Then individualism overtakes institutions, and the wider social pattern begins to unravel. Finally, there is a crisis, where there is substantial and often violent upheaval and change—typically punctuated by war (Strass and Howe, The Fourth Turning). These cycles seem to repeat themselves about every 70 to 80 years through history. We appear to be in a crisis cycle now. The last crisis occurred in the 1930s, and it culminated in World War II. The one before that was in 1860, which in the US produced the Civil War. Before that, in 1790, were the revolutions in France and England. Human beings are not terribly good at navigating these cycles and tend to operate in predictable ways.
Another cycle operating here is the shift in the climate. The planet itself is warming. While there continues to be a debate about whether human beings are really to blame, it seems quite evident that human beings are integrally and unavoidably connected to the planet. However one does the math, the physical condition of the earth is changing exponentially.
There is a yet larger cycle at work, one that has until now permitted human beings to function in a certain kind of homeostasis, even as self-centered function has dominated. This larger cycle has permitted human beings to function with impunity relative to the cycles of life, to operate as if we were somehow disconnected from them. However, the permission to function in this way is being revoked; the evidence is apparent on all hands.
Approaches that used to work at all kinds of levels—in institutions, in governments, in religious contexts, and personally—no longer do. Human institutions are failing. But more than that, fragmentation and polarization are also intensifying. The central narratives that have guided human experience seem to be falling apart. It’s quite perplexing to people. The squeeze is on. When the squeeze comes on, this creates disturbance and confusion. But the opportunity to find greater connection to an experience of wholeness is also intensifying. Even in the current challenges in the Middle East, windows of opportunity may be opening that have been closed shut for decades if not longer. This is a very delicate topic, so those seeking to bring greater wisdom to it have their work cut out for them. All of this intensifies the experience of the lack of safety and the quest to address it.
What can become apparent is that there is in fact only one safe place to be. There is an energy present now that is inviting an ascension of understanding in people. This is an internal compulsion, orchestrated by the whole, intended to reconstitute things in a new way. This compulsion is moving through people in different ways. For instance, an initial level of safety is physical; finding some place where one is physically safe. Now, the effort to achieve this has been pursued in several slightly odd ways. For instance, there are billionaires who have purchased land in New Zealand and have built bunkers to protect themselves from what they anticipate will be societal calamity. The government there has now severely limited nonresidents’ ability to do this. Elon Musk’s vision is that humanity is no longer safe on the planet at all, and that the only route out is to colonize space. This is the vision behind his company, SpaceX. We have to get off the planet. Safety is out there somewhere. This is a physical vision. Another popular version of this same instinct is to find so-called “blue zones.” These are the few places on earth where people routinely live to one hundred years or longer. These are all physically oriented framings of safety.
Others seek safety mentally, in the tradition and mindsets that have been held for long periods of time. People double down on their deeply held beliefs, whether nationalistic, or religious, or tribal. Of course, this is where we see some trouble. One person’s mental definition of safety is another’s definition of danger. We see conflicts arising on all hands because of this where mentally held views are clung to intensely. Safety, people say, is in the belief that I have and that my family has had and my tribe has had for centuries. These legacy patterns of mental orthodoxy and rigidity have persisted and been imprinted in people. The roots of the word orthodox are interesting in this light. “Ortho” means straight or correct, and “doxy” means opinion. Orthodoxy: correct opinion. That sums it up!
So the pressure is on and people are clinging to their orthodoxy, to their beliefs. We might say we are past that. Are we? There are always parts of us that cling to beliefs we have formed, with which we have tended to be identified. These influence how we experience the world. For instance, whenever something doesn’t work out in your life the way you expected it to, and you feel some inkling of frustration, this is always because there is a mindset or belief that it should have worked some other way than the way it’s actually working. While this may not seem to equate with historic patterns of fundamentalist or extremist beliefs, the two are not that different. Both find orientation and seek security mentally.
Another level in the quest for safety for many people is through various forms of spiritual exploration. People go on meditation retreats, find a shaman, practice yoga, or experiment with psychedelics. There is now a growing wave of interest in and exploration with consciousness altering “medicines” as people seek to find ways to liberate themselves from the constraints and lack of wholeness that they experience. Seeking to make space for the unresolved factors in one’s past through stillness and consciousness change is a worthwhile endeavor. Often spiritual quests of this kind have a hidden downside,however, in that they lead people to attempt to bypass the unresolved emotional factors they carry. So while they are pursuing an inner sense of calm, they are suppressing underlying emotional distortions that sooner or later always emerge. This is another attempt to free oneself from the pain and lack of safety that people feel.
But safety emerges only as the energy of Being is brought to bear on all these factors to all these internal factors. Then we are not seeking a spiritual experience, we are providing one for our own mind and heart and consciousness, and incidentally for others who reside in our consciousness. The direct experience of Being, of Self, transcends belief, and instead of suppression it brings compassion. As this is known more fully, we experience fluidity. We are participating in the one whole movement of Life and we know it. As I have said, this ascending pattern has been working itself out for centuries. However, my sense is that we are at another crossroads, as this quest for safety breaks surface, and as more people begin to be aware of themSelves.
When people are no longer looking to discover what leadership is, but providing leadership, new possibilities emerge. We are participating in a coordinated transformational flow and we know it. I think this experience is relatively unexplored. What would it mean to operate with these wider forces in conscious and coordinated manner, to operationalize divine technology, if you will, to participate in it? This is a remarkable, even breathtaking notion.
The emergence of stature of being collectively begins to bring to bear an opportunity for healing that hasn’t been available, however inconsistent the journey to this point has been. I am here and not just individually. From this stance we know what it means to provide safety, to provide an opening in which the healing of the rift can occur. This requires more than expressing the right thing in the moment. It also takes being in the right place and allowing the right thought to emerge. It takes maintaining the right proximity to all the factors in one’s world. It does not require strategic calculation, but it does require the willingness to generate finer levels of perception, which always have to do with healing the factors immediately in front of me and around me and within me.We also each need a continuous engine for the generation of awareness and substance. The gravity pull of subconscious factors can be intense. We need a counter pressure, a means of achieving lift. These multiple conflating and intensifying cycles are bringing many things to the surface. But there is no forging of a new world without creative pressure and creative fire. This fire is being unleashed as stuck structures are dissolved. Because of this we will see more hell, not less. Safety is every person’s birthright; everyone is already part of the whole. It was never otherwise. We know there is just one safe place to be as we function from this place. Whoever steps up to trust this will discover rich reward.