Logic cuts like a switchblade. Love embraces like a mother.
Midwifing The New Era of Human Consciousness
The broken state of the world is evidence that we are at the end of one era of human consciousness and struggling with birth of a new one. A shorthand way to speak about this is to say we are undergoing ‘a transformation of consciousness’ individually, collectively, and Axially. I discussed in last week’s blog that we are at, “The Dawning of Our Divinity.” The shift is from a rationally dominant consciousness that operates through logic to a spiritual consciousness that privileges love as its primary characteristic. Logic cuts like a switchblade. Love embraces like a mother.
Everyone troubled by the appalling state of our world is looking for a way to play our part in midwifing and birthing a new and better era for humanity. In this piece of writing I want to focus on the relationship that exists between the work of transformation at the individual level and the collective. The individual and the collective always mirror each other so, just as each individual human being is called to embrace the new consciousness of love, so too, the collective is being called to the same loving way of living peacefully together on mother earth.
Nothing less than a new way of being human, a new way of being alive, a new way of thinking and being is coming down the track, at breakneck speed. But, in order to engage and support the collective transformation of consciousness being offered by Life we must first experience that transformation in our own selves. This is difficult especially when we don’t properly understand what’s in play. Yet, the thing is for each of us to find what we can contribute to support and help the labour and midwife the transformation of consciousness that some philosophers are calling the Second Axial shift.
Even though we don't properly understand what's happening, we can each take hold of whatever small piece of understanding we have and run with it, in the same way as the birthing mother has to go with the labour pains. The new era isn’t offering us a choice whether to accept it or not — it's already happening. The only choice is whether we cooperate. So, like it or not, we are the midwives. It’s up to us to co-create the new era for humanity. If we resist and cling like drowning people to the old consciousness, we perish with it because no amount of rational, intellectual brilliance will bring about the consciousness of love so desperately needed by humanity. If we truly want to live better we have to allow our consciousness to be transformed individually as well as collectively. So the analogy that I'm calling up for myself and for others at this moment is the birthing mother and her midwives.
The last time a new era of consciousness was born was two and a half thousand years ago during a period of seismic transformation known as the First Axial Shift when rational thinking replaced myth and animism and quickly became the dominant frame for human meaning making. It was mediated by philosophers, spiritual masters, great mathematicians, all men, who produced the foundational philosophy of the west that has informed our culture for good and for ill ever since. Socrates was one of these great minds and he expressly referred to himself as a midwife because he knew he was actively midwifing a new way of thinking and being into existence. For his trouble he was imprisoned and executed by the ruling regime and the political elite.
Philosophers often regard Socrates as a prefiguring of Jesus of Nazareth, who was also executed for his effort to midwife a new type of consciousness for humanity. Jesus modelled the incarnation of love in his entire being. He exemplified the pattern of living from a consciousness of love which prioritises service to our neighbour and love of our enemy. Jesus, a Palestinian Jew, opened the way for the end of the ‘othering’ of people who are not like ‘us.’ When he washed the feet of his disciples Jesus gave an archetypal demonstration of what he meant by ‘service,’ and when he died on the Cross he showed the depth of his commitment to living from love. I’m not offering this as a paean for the Christian church, but as a sorrowful reflection on all that we have failed to learn from Jesus.
Coming back to the idea of our own personal transformation, the hope is that we will let Life shape and transform us into someone who can ‘give up their life’ for the sake of Life itself. It will be, and it is, difficult in a million different ways but Walter Brueggemann spoke of the importance of having ‘the courage that comes from the conviction that you’ve been entrusted with something important.’
I admit it’s been nothing short of a profound personal struggle for me to find the courage of my convictions, to find my voice as a woman and a mystic, and to speak publicly for visionary, mystical consciousness, and for the changing of the eras. I fall into a category of people historically demonised, pathologized, censored, silenced and killed for speaking. In a million years, I never imagined this path as something that I would be called upon to do with my life. I did not want to do it. I resisted, I bargained, I cried tears of despair, but in the end I came to accept this is what’s mine to do to contribute to the changing of the Ages, and so I am doing it.
Ironically, standing in the liminal space between the Ages is actually a place where I’ve come to feel quite comfortable and I realise that my ‘personal myth’, as Carl Jung phrased it, has prepared me for just this time. The most difficult experiences of my life, as for many others, the times of my greatest transformation, have been experiences around birth and death. Having grappled to make sense of my own experiences of breakdown and falling apart in many ways as a result of my own birth, giving birth myself and falling into post-natal depression, experiences of miscarriage, and the line of pain in my ancestral lineages in relation to birth, has all somehow prepared me to have an insight and an understanding when I see the same thing happening at the collective level.
As we know, when we let it, suffering transforms us and delivers unexpected gifts, including some wisdom and a deepening engagement with our own soul and with the soul of the world. Personal pain brought me into the crucible of transformation and what I learned has become medicine I’m offering to support the birthing of the new Age of Love.
A much higher intelligence than ours is orchestrating the Axial Shift to Love. An intelligence that knows what it's trying to achieve, knows what it's trying to deliver, and knows what it's trying to gift to humanity. There is no doubt that as a species we are manifestly in freefall but ironically, that's actually the right way to be when there's a higher order of intelligence and unfolding of evolution trying to reshape and transform us at the level of our consciousness and being. Those of us who have endured freefall in our own personal lives can draw on that experience and rely on it paradoxically to help us stabilise in the current collective freefall.
I would prefer to be living my life privately, but I also want to have the courage of my conviction that each of us must contribute what we can to the collective effort to evolve, transform, and grow into a consciousness of love. Every one of us who is in a position to do something in the face of all of the suffering, needs to do it. It's no longer tenable for people who live privileged lives just to stick our head in the sand and continue living our comfortable lives. It's just not tenable anymore because it perpetuates the brokenness and dysfunction.
For the sake of all who are suffering the most heinous and depraved consequences of a rational consciousness gone rogue and human consciousness turned evil, the rest of us, flawed as we are, must act.
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