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Yoga teacher Paul Wooden put me onto the hilarious YouTube series, Will it Blend?. Beaming smugly, Tom Dickson blends iPads and other semi-precious consumables to dust in a tech-eats-tech world. Besides being excellent advertising, it’s a poignant statement about our obsession with possessions; they’re so very temporary.
Heedless consumption is shoving the globe into a blender and, according to Mother Earth – volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, tsunamis, cyclones, flood and fire – we’re about to achieve our lowest goal yet by pulverising ourselves. It’s a fearsome call to attention, but the upheavals confronting us herald a necessary new world order.
Natural disasters aren’t the only extraordinary weekly news. Headlining events in recent decades represent huge cultural shifts: the first African-American president, so many female presidents, prime ministers and premiers, the crumbling of financial institutions (stockmarket crashes, global financial crisis) and religious order (the flailing of Catholicism, the popularity of spirituality).
Hello New World
For those interested in all things spiritual, the world’s turning point is old news.
We’re heading out of the astrological age of Pisces (humanity directed by leaders great and poor from Jesus Christ to Stalin) and into the age of Aquarius, which urges us to evolve to a new level of enlightened?consciousness.
The challenge is to live more purely, to raise the electromagnetic energy of our bodies and minds to a higher vibration, a lighter energy.
The signs are vibrantly clear: from the yoga pandemic and the rise of professional counselling and energy-based healing modalities to the environmental and personal-development movements that encourage more conscious living.
Some bemoan the rise of individualism as selfish, but at its heart is the Aquarian invocation to spring clean our personal clutter and value systems. Once your house is in order, you have the energy and clarity spare to focus on world service.
Humanity is being asked to awaken collectively, to understand that our task on this planet is to live not only harmoniously as a global entity but with all living beings.
Don’t just save the whales, save the bees that underpin our food supply! Become a Buddhist, one of Australia’s fastest-growing religions, and learn detachment from possessions alongside love of “all sentient beings”. Allow a dud film such as Eat Love Pray to inspire us to take stock of life and how we’re living it.
Time to hook up
As David Suzuki forcefully reiterated during February’s Great Debate, Is Environmentalism Failing?, as part of the Sustainable Living Festival: “We are one species out of 10 to 30 million species on the planet and we think we can take over 88 per cent of the planet and survive. We humans are the centre of the crisis but we need to see ourselves as part of the fabric of a mass of living things. As long as we remain human-centric (we face catastrophe). We need to be biocentric.”
Bruce Lipton, the cellular biologist known for creating a bridge between science and spirituality who featured in What the Bleep Do We Know?, notes in his first e-newsletter for this year that the upheavals around the globe – political, natural, cultural, economical – signal a “state of quickening” in humanity’s evolution. And we can choose to respond in three ways: ignore or deny the collective crises, both of which equal extinction
sooner rather than later, or move towards it, which is the growth response.
Happily, says Lipton, fresh from worldwide speaking engagements on our evolution towards enlightenment, “a massive and ever-growing world population is now responding to the perceived darkness with a life-sustaining, growth-promoting behaviour – the creation of conscious communities”.
In the wake of every natural disaster, the world has joined hands in prayer, funding and resources. But Lipton is also talking about people who volunteer, who dedicate themselves to greater causes, anyone involved in community-service-oriented or personal-growth activities.
People who are lifting themselves out of the mire of consumerism to serve a higher calling – each other.
Keeping it nice and simple
As Australian Conservation Foundation president Professor Ian Lowe, also at The Great Debate, so eloquently noted: “We will have to live more simply in the future so that others may simply live.”
Which leaves the iPad in the blender and humanity hunting for an alternative. How to move forward?
“If we focus our attention on the scary state of civilisation’s erosion, our energy is actually feeding the old paradigm,” says Lipton. “I don’t mean that we should put our heads in the sand … we should … channel the energy into processes designed to create a more harmonious planet. Survival is enhanced by working for something positive rather than working against something negative.”
Professor Lowe agrees. Let’s articulate a new vision for a sustainable world that people can see, hear, smell and taste. This is the advice spiritualists have been handing out for years: “What you see will be.”
To be part of the solution we could spend five minutes before rising visualising a peaceful, harmonious world (thoughts are energy; energy output equals action). Or learn to meditate. Adopt a value system that supports the world, not just the Aussie dream.
Says Lipton: “The world is awakening to the fact that each of us is a powerful co-creator of life, and if we co-operate, like cells in a healthy human body, we can literally create heaven on Earth.”
Ah, that sounds familiar. A little Beatle once told me:
You may say that I’m a dreamer,
But I’m not the only one
I hope someday you’ll join us
And the world will live as one.