The year 2012 has come and gone, along with it the build-up to the “end of the world as we know it.” So what happened? Did we “shift?” And what happens now? If you’re thinking nothing seems so different, just look around. Humanity has changed dramatically over the last decade and that change has everything to do with a heightened connectivity and discovering power in that connectivity. This has been the decade of smart mobs, flash mobs, crowd-funding sites, Twitter, Facebook, You Tube, text messaging, Skype, Wikipedia…and on and on.
Careers are being made as people bypass the once-essential intermediaries of established industries and meet the public directly, one by one, through social media channels. Resource-sharing, where people share instead of own, has become a hot new business model. Time Magazine jumped on the power-of-the-collective bandwagon, naming “the Protestor” their person of the year, citing the 2011 phenomenon of grassroots movements rising up all over the world — some overturning governments — surprisingly, without any top-down instigation.
Technology has evolved to a place where it now seems to be evolving us. The internet is enabling the emergence of a sort of human hive mind that’s more intelligent than any individuals, groups or computers have ever been before. MIT in recent years has opened a Center for Collective Intelligence to study this phenomenon and to perhaps find ways to harness this new form of intelligence for the common good.
Act as a collective
Not only are we starting to act as a collective, the collective is becoming increasingly personal. At the same time that world population is growing, giving us more and more reason to feel invisible and alienated, we now have an extremely personal technology enabling us to reach beyond the chasm of our distance and numbers to touch individuals we’ll never meet. Facebook, Twitter and You Tube are putting a personal face to the vast abstraction of “humanity.”
Look at what happened with the viral video, “Kony 2012,” the documentary portraying atrocities being committed by Ugandan war lord Joseph Kony. It’s not that mainstream media didn’t cover this story. It did; it just wasn’t able to get people to care. It took the more personal, one-by-one dissemination of You Tube for people to pay attention in the tens of millions and to experience something heartfelt.
Our technology has primed us for global caring. As human beings, perhaps we’re learning how to love in a whole new way, reaching beyond the tribe mentality of local community to break faceless “humanity” down into people, and care deeply.
A new metaphysics
For those of us committed to personal growth and spiritual seeking, this shift can’t help but change how we go about it. I foresee the emergence of a new metaphysics that takes technology out of the mix and replaces the connectivity we have via the internet with connection through intention and pure consciousness alone.
This new metaphysics holds at its core the tenants that we are exponentially more powerful together than separately — and that love is the most potent change agent there is. It gives practical applications to what science is showing to be the extraordinary power of consciousness to affect physical reality, even including the transcendence of time and space as we think of them. This opens vast new possibilities for tapping the power of “mind over matter,” which science has already shown to be significant.
In the same way people are gathering in grassroots movements, we can also come together through conscious intention alone. Because consciousness can bypass the presumed boundaries of time (boundaries that science is showing to be far more permeable than they seem) we can even join with people from the past and future simply by all holding the intention to do so. Imagine a crowd-funding site fueled by focused intention alone.
The real difference in this emerging metaphysics, however, is how it ends the duality of giving and receiving. The old axiom, “It’s better to give than receive,” always lies in polarity, and consequently in close relationship to “There’s not enough to go around so I’d better grab mine first.” In this duality, where we can either attend to our own needs or care for others, being a “good” person involves sacrifice and forces our energy to be divided between self and others.
A Course in Miracles beautifully evolves this duality of giving and receiving into the singular “giving and receiving are the same,” but this abstraction can feel so removed from day-to-day experience. The New Metaphysics is all about the practical applications so we see, through the immediate demonstrations of our own results, that we can have more for ourselves as we give to one another. We understand through practice that giving is the most efficient path to receiving.
An imagining experiment
How does it work? Try this: Bring to mind your highest heart’s desire, just like The Secret teaches us to do. Imagine it until you feel all warm and fuzzy inside…and then let it go. This is where popular practices end and new metaphysics begins.
Now, imagine yourself able to reach out, beyond time and space to every other person who has, is and will read these words (you don’t have to believe this to be possible, just imagine what it would feel like if you did). Imagine that we’re all joining minds, bringing only our highest and best to the party, forming a pool of consciousness (biochemist Rupert Sheldrake might call this a morphic field).
To activate this field of consciousness, for a moment, let yourself love all of these unseen, unknown, fellow readers. Not for any reason, just because you can. Love them with all your heart as you would your nearest and dearest. Let their hearts’ desires matter to you as much as your own and, with the biggest wave of love you can muster, send (in your imagination) the heartfelt wish that miracles now happen for each and every one of them. Imagine you’re a parent delivering the most beautifully wrapped birthday gift to your beloved child (times many), with your heart overflowing from the sheer joy of giving the perfect gift. You don’t need to believe this is really doing anything. Just imagine how it would feel if you did believe that your loving intention is quietly making life better for people you’ll never know.
There. You’ve done it. And now countless people you’ll never meet have just done the same for you, like massively focused prayer offered on your behalf. Studies have shown the power of anonymous prayer, and you’ve just received it in a big way. Didn’t it feel pretty good to want the best for all those unknown people? And doesn’t it feel good knowing they’re all on board, making miracles happen in your life?
Unconditional love and service
If given full attention, that exercise could be an effective practice for calling forth YOUR heart’s desire…yet most of it is spent being in service to countless others, people you’ll never meet. When unconditional love and service is what generates the energy that takes each of us where we want to go, giving and receiving have truly merged.
I call this exercise a miracle experiment, and I put forth a lot of them in my book Making Miracles to see what might happen. Many readers have shared stories of miraculous healings and manifestations related to reading the book. But what I find even more significant is how many speak of feeling less alone, more loved, more compassionate and more “connected.” What can’t be gauged is the effect that coming together in this way is having on the world. It may be greater than we’ll ever know.
Perhaps this is how we’ll bring an end to the world as we’ve known it.
I LOVED this article – especially the group activity that you have people do in here 🙂