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At the threshold of global transformation by Micheal Meyer.
We stand at the threshold of a new World Order. The next step in human evolution lies before us. It leads humanity out of an era dominated by egoism, individualism and hedonism on the individual level and by cultural pride, nationalism and imperialism on the collective level. If all goes well, it will eventually lead humanity to a planetary society, an age of global harmony and plentitude.
It is a most difficult step. And all might not go well. In the darkness of pride, ignorance and fear we might stumble and fall half-conscious across the threshold, only to find ourselves in an oppresssive, totalitarian new World Order - a society of imposed unanimity of the sort many envisioned upon hearing the leader of a vast and powerful warrior nation pronounce the words 'new World Order' in the same breath as a declaration of war. Or we might simply go on as usual - hesitating at the threshold, searching for a comfortable escape and hoping that the myriad of truly global problems facing us will somehow magically disappear whenever the twin gods of our modern era (empirical Science and high technology) are invoked as their high priests.
We have already hesitated long at the treshold, clinging desparately to our prized sense of separateness, relying too much on atomistic and classical mind-sets we should have by now outgrown, and resorting to comfortable and profitable ways and means. But if we hesitate too long, forces greater than the puny egos of men, higher than the obsolete sovereigny of nations, and more powerful than the socio-economic influence of multi-national corporations will act. Wholeness will act-assuming a destructive or regenerative aspect.
Now is the time for individuals, groups and nations to take a hard look at themselves. We need to ask ourselves some difficult questions. We may talk glibly of a 'new age' and avidly consume 'new age' products, but are we actually making ourselves fit to live in the global society of truly new age? Are we ready and willing to participate in the transformation of our chaotic world situation into a planetary society whre plenitude will replace hunger in the face of conspicuous consumption, where cooperation will supersede competition and where harmony will supplant conflict and war. Or are we avoiding the challenge by holding tight to our sense of seperate egohood and national sovereignty, and by attempting to force-fit the needs of a new, global humanity into the inadequate mind-sets and patterns of behaviour that are responsible for our current social, econmic and ecological crises.
To those ready and willing to participate in building a Planetary Society of Harmony and Fullness, the study of cycles provides an abundance of symbols which can contribute to one's understanding of both where one stands as an individual and what is at stake for humanity as a whole during this crucial last year of the 20th century. In their efforts to provide the public with symbols of transformation, astrologers focussed on the series of conjucntions of Uranus and Neptune in 1992.
At any time, the vast majority of human beings are unable or unwilling to respond to the call to transformation sounded by the outpouring of a new evolutionary impulse. And today most, whether they realize it or not, want to be and can only imagine themselves as members or specimen of a particular culture. They have not yet emerged as true individuals out of the cultural matrix that encloses them like a mother's womb. Their emotions and feeling-responses, personal attitudes and thoughts, behavior and preferences, belief-systems and political-religious affiliations are. though most would certainly deny it almost certainly conditioned by their particular social-economic class, nation and culture (or sub-culture or counter-culture) and its surface currents of fashion. Included in this majority, though gradually emerging out of it, are 'individuals in the making' reacting or rebelling against the values and institutions of their culture.
During certain phases of a culture's life-cycle, one may (though few earnestly and consistently choose to) act as a creative participant in the flowering of a still vital culture. One may choose the way of the seed. Seed groups, composed of true individuals who, having more or less seperated themselves (in mind and spirit if not in body) from their declining, disintegrating or dying natal or adopted culture, represent a culture's seed harvest. Such seed groups work-make it and its members fit to act as a translucent lens bringing into sharp concrete and existential focus a new variation on the theme of the archetype Anthropos(the total pattern of humanity) and a new, more inclusive aspect of the divine Wisdom of the Universal Mind.
Humanity is an advance through a long series of cultures. Each culture provides the matrix within which a new quality of personhood and new more inclusive embodiment of archetype Anthropos and divine Wisdom may safely gestate, and each contributes at its 'autumnal' phase a transferable seed harvest which will eventually participate in the birth to a new more inclusive culture.
The fundamental transformation that represents the next step ahead in human evolution should not be confused with the sort of fashionable, surface change of personal attitudes and behaviour masquerading under the labels 'transformation' and 'transformative'. The type of authentic tranformation constituting the next evolutionary step ahead is along and difficult process of repolarization or modulation of one's sense of will and identity, and of one's centre of consciousness and psyhomental desires, reactions and complexes to the spiritual-mental level of all-inclusive compassion where individual selfhood and group unanimity interpenetrate.
Such a process does not necessarily involve techniques developed in the past to meet the unique needs of a particular type of personhood engendered by a particular culture at a particular phase of its development. This does not mean that ancient techniques of meditation, shamanic rituals and so on do not have thier place and purpose. But the many ancient techniques and practices were developed in the past-they are based largely on biopsychic foundations and developed to meet the needs of members of pre-individual cultures. Humanity now needs to take the next step ahead, which is not a return to a pre-individual, tribal past or to a paradise lost. The next step ahead for humanity is transpersonal and transindividual-it features the development of humanity's still largely latent spiritual-mental faculties and a mind of wholeness.
A mind of wholeness understands the place, purpose and function of humanity as a whole, as well as the relationship of everything within Earth's biosphere, and within the solar system and the galaxy, to everything else. In its fullness a mind of wholeness is an eonic mind encompassing the entire cycle; it holistically understands the meaning, purpose and interrelatedness of everything that is, was, and will be during the human planetary cycle of evolution.
Ancient pre-individual, biopsychic practices and rituals, so called 'new age' products, training seminars and lifestyles, and the self-indulgent and self-involved types of pop psychology and psychotherapy practised today will not much help humanity meet the crises and the challenges of 1999 and beyond. They can do little to either promote an authentic repolarization of mind and sense of indentity or to provide the clear and meaningful sense of direction and purpose humanity needs now. Nor will endless debates, demonstrations and social-political-ecological 'activism' really solve the issues they address. Something more is need to 'defuse the time-bombs at the end of the century'. What is needed is not a new suit of clothes tailored in a new style from natural textiles in a fresh and fashionable hue. Surface change, which comes and goes as swiftly as fashion, is not enough. What is needed is a transmutation into a new 'species', a metamorphisis characterized by the development of a mind of wholeness and a radically different sense and quality of will, identity and being.