You know, every time we come to the
beginning of a new century, we humans expect great or terrible things to
happen. All sorts of prophets arise with
all sorts of predictions. The world is
going to end, there will be cataclysms, the rapture is coming when some will be
lifted to heaven with Jesus and the rest of us will suffer eternal damnation, a
new wave of consciousness will transform us all, and on and on and on. And those expectations come true, although
not always as we imagined. Just looking
at the last few hundred years, we find a new wave of spirituality sweeping the
world at the beginning of the last century, not the least of which was
introduction of the Hindu tradition of meditation to the western world. The one before it was the industrial
revolution and the beginning of modern science.
The one before that was political revolution, carrying a wave of
democracy. The one before that was a
wave of exploration and settling the earth.
Now here we are approaching December 21,
2012 and those expectations are wilder than ever. And I like what I’m hearing. Some of it is incredibly exciting, and it is
you and I, ordinary people living ordinary lives, that are going to bring it
about. We are going to do it by changing
our minds about our beliefs, and once our minds are changed, our actions and our
lives will change.
The following is from futurist John L
Peterson. It is from a presentation made
to the Unity Worldwide Ministries board of trustees in 2009. “I believe we are entering one of those
punctuation points in the evolution of our species that will rapidly propel us
into an unimaginable new era. This new
world won’t work at all like what we currently find familiar. Because this shift is so fundamental and
acute, the most positive option will not make sense at all from this vantage so
early in the transition. In the face of
almost certain uncertainty, our job is to rise to the occasion, to evolve – in
our thinking, our perspectives and in our commitment to make this transition as
positive as possible. We will probably
become some new kind of human at the end of it all – it is that big and
important.”
This was followed by a list of possible
breakdowns and breakthroughs over the next 20 years, and the breakthroughs are
so astounding and positive it almost makes the breakdowns seem piddly. Of course, each of us has a hand in
this. It does depend on us. The critical question we have to ask
ourselves is have we each attained enough ethical and spiritual evolution to
handle these startling new changes in a way that is moral and just? They are going to effect our lives. Can we deal with it?
