Process Check

I’m taking a short break from my 4-part series “Navigating the Storm of Global Change” to offer some reflections on my process that I hope may be relevant for you in dealing with whatever challenges you may be facing during these initiatory times. (For those new to this series, here are the links to the first two essays: Birth of the Aquarian Age and Changes in Technology and Spirituality.)

I’ve been working on the third essay in the series since mid-November. It’s been an unusual struggle. In this essay, I’m aspiring to name the dynamics of the ‘dark’ or ‘anti-evolutionary’ forces as I see them playing out in our world today. Ultimately, I’m attempting to provide a context in which we can understand the hidden evolutionary role these destructive forces are playing to prepare the ground for our transition into the coming Aquarian era. But first these forces need to be recognized and ‘unmasked’ for the genuine threat they pose to us all.

Naming these dynamics is proving to be challenging.

For the past several years, in both my personal life and public work with EarthRising, my focus has been on opening deeper channels of connection with the natural, regenerative energies of the Earth and Cosmos as a source of creative inspiration and personal and collective healing. Five years ago, Kate and I moved to Mendocino, a small romantic town on the Pacific Ocean in North California. Our house is next to a large state-protected redwood forest. I’ve lived in cities my whole life, but since we moved I’ve been able to consistently immerse myself in the beauty of the forest and be fed more and more by its natural wisdom. I’ve sat under redwood trees, bathed in natural freshwater pools, and communed with wild animals. These energies have flowed delightfully into our work at EarthRising, where our emphasis has been on strengthening our connections on the subtle realms to each other and to the natural energies of the Earth. Emerging from this matrix to look squarely at the destructive elements running amok in the world today, I feel at times like a small furry forest creature wandering onto a 6-lane interstate highway. The traffic is pretty intense.

At the same time, there is a seriousness to our situation that cannot be avoided. I feel called to name what I’m seeing to the best of my ability, even if it’s difficult or contentious. And I have something very particular to say.

Yet it’s been interesting that just as I’ve been ready to describe these dynamics, I’ve faced all manner of inner and outer obstacles to actually get the ideas down in writing. Apart from various external dramas and commitments that have kept me away from the writing desk, it’s as if my decision to write about the dark has drawn its attention to me. For the past couple of months I’ve been taken on a highlights tour of the most vulnerable places of my own psyche. All of the places where I could be derailed from my purpose have been activated and magnified. It’s like I’m being shown up close and personal precisely how the dark functions, as well as what it calls forth from us to grapple with it. In this sense, writing this piece has felt like it’s serving as a personal initiation.

One of the main ideas of this forthcoming essay is that we are involved together in a crucial collective initiation that entails our waking up to the operation of certain ‘anti-evolutionary’ forces in the world that would direct us toward a dark and dystopian future. Humanity is being initiated into a new level of power. And simultaneous to this collective initiation, we are all facing an individual power test as part of our personal initiation into the new era. This will likely involve a process for each of us of examining our personal history in relation to power, thereby becoming more conscious of the ways we’ve given our power away or had it taken from us.

It is also calling for each of us to stand resolutely in our truth in relation to the dynamics unfolding in our world.

In the last few years, my assumptions about the world have gone through many revisions. As I pointed out in part 2 of my essay series, the digital media revolution has fundamentally altered our process of making sense of the world. Rather than the top-down, expert-driven, one-to-many structure of broadcast media, the Internet has given us an essentially horizontal, peer-to-peer landscape allowing the rapid flow of information between many more voices.

We are facing serious sense-making problems as a result of this shift, including the manipulation and weaponization of information for political ends, the questionable reliability and trustworthiness of information generally, the weakening of rigor and accepted standards, and the breakdown in our capacity to develop shared meaning about anything. But it has of course also led to an explosion of information and a radical expansion in conceptual possibilities in every sphere of human knowledge. In this environment, it is inevitable that the foundational assumptions of our worldview are up for almost constant revision.

The truth is, it’s been troubling to my heart to find myself in recent years moving out of resonance with the perspectives of many of my friends, colleagues, and family members with whom I used to feel broadly united. I know I’m not alone in this experience. Conversations are raging all over the Internet in which people recount similar tales of unexpected paradigm shifts, their seeing through narratives they used to feel aligned with, and their struggle to come to terms with the sudden divergence in outlook they now experience with friends and colleagues.

The situation is complicated by the systematic way we are being directed into information silos by social media algorithms, and the increasingly rigid boundaries being placed around our public discourse. The general response of the broadcast media establishment to the rapidly growing influence of decentralized digital media has been to double-down on its efforts to achieve narrative control through extremely unnuanced attempts to vilify all alternate perspectives — no matter how rational or empirical — as ‘dangerous’ or ‘misinformation’. This approach has made it virtually taboo for those within the mainstream paradigm to question an increasingly dogmatic orthodoxy. I think this strategy is destined to fail, but it speaks to the heart of the dynamic I want to name, and helps explain why it is currently so challenging to do so.

In the next two essays, I will present my views as honestly as I can on how I see the ‘dark’ or destructive forces operating systemically in contemporary world events. While some of these views will no doubt be contentious, I feel passionately that I have a perspective to contribute that can be helpfuI. I look forward to sharing it with you.