Awakening

to the New Story:

The Evolutionary

Imperative of Our

Time

opening slide

We are faced with four major threats:

Climate Change

Nuclear war

Population increase

Technological Insanity

Will we survive these or will we perish

through our inability to awaken?

“As at the beginning of the Christian Era, so again today we

are faced with the problem of the general moral backwardness

of our species which has failed to keep pace with our

scientific, technical and social progress.” CW10, par 585

“God’s powers have passed into our hands. The powers

themselves are not evil, but in the hands of man they are an

appalling danger — in evil hands.” CW 10, par 879

Jung’s warning

Jung’s warning to us:

Nuclear Explosion

Splitting matter led us to create demonic weapons with

which to destroy our enemies.

How have we come to believe that it doesn’t

matter what we do to matter? How have we come

to believe that Nature and Matter are not part of

Spirit? That we are not part of Spirit?

Why are we not aware that the Earth is part of a

Sacred Cosmic Order?

There are two stories, deeply imprinted on us,

that answer these questions. We need to

relinquish them before we can move into the

New Story:

1. The Myth of the Fall of Man and our

Expulsion from the Garden of Eden.

2. The Myth of a lifeless, meaningless universe

promoted by Materialist or Reductionist

Science (Scientism).

1. Religion

The patriarchal image of God or Spirit

separated the Creator from Creation

opening an abyss between them and between

the masculine and feminine archetypes.

The masculine archetype was associated with Spirit;

the feminine archetype was associated with Nature.

Nature was no longer experienced as sacred as it had been

in the shamanic cultures which preceded patriarchy.

Kabbalah was the only tradition in the West that held the

image of the indissoluble union between the masculine

and feminine aspects of the god-head and between

Creator and Creation.

The New Story 2

The New Story: Web of Life underlies all life

God or Spirit was defined as wholly

transcendent,

not transcendent and immanent

within and as all Creation.

Nature and the life of all species on this

planet were not recognised as Sacred

as the manifestation or epiphany

of Spirit, as essentially Divine.

The priesthoods of the principal world religions promoted

a world-negating,

not a world-embracing cosmology.

The religions of the East emphasized release from the spell

of Maya and from the Wheel of Rebirth.

Christianity emphasized the sinfulness and helplessness

of man in a fallen world.

Both of these beliefs led to a de-souling of the world and

the value of human existence.

The Myth of the Fall

The Image of Deity changed from

Great Mother to Great Father:

Divine Immanence was lost.

The emphasis was on the

transcendence of God or Spirit.

Earth became a place of exile and

punishment for primordial sin.

Man was given dominion over the Earth

but he was no longer part of the divine order.

He lived in a world

contaminated by the Fall and subject to

sin, suffering and death.

– Phase of Separation

Michelangelo Expulsion

of Adam and Eve

This World was presented as a Fallen World

The spiritual path was a world-renouncing one,

where the body was seen as the main

impediment to the spiritual life:

this led to asceticism… to the demonization and fear of

sexuality… and to guilt and shame

the appetites of the body must be overcome

Matter is not part of Spirit

Body is inferior to Mind and Soul

Women are inferior to and subject to men

In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries in Europe the

Feminine Archetype was restored in

the image of the Holy Grail

which was a pseudonym or cover for the Holy Spirit

The main features of the Feminine

Archetype are relationship and compassion.

When the Feminine Archetype is unconscious,

degraded or absent in a culture as it is in our

world culture today it manifests as the will to

power and the need to conquer and control others

as well as to control Nature.

2. Science

The Separation between Spirit and Nature, deeply

embedded in the patriarchal religions, was transmitted to

Science from the sixteenth to the twentieth century when

the influence of Christianity was beginning to wane.

Science came to reject God and the soul as illusory

creations of the religious and superstitious mind. It also

excluded whatever it designated as non-rational.

The result today is that ‘scientific rational man’ rules

supreme: a hubristic one-eyed consciousness that is split

off from Nature and from Soul.

Redon Cyclops

Scientism

From the late eighteenth century, materialist

or reductionist science (scientism) has told us

that we are the only sentient beings in an

inanimate universe that is without meaning,

purpose, direction or intelligence.

“Life has no script, no playwright, no producer

– and no meaning.” (Yuval Harari, Homo Deus)

The Feminine Principle has no place in this

belief system.

The four main tenets of scientific materialism or

scientism are these:

1. The physical, material universe is the only

one that exists.

2. Consciousness begins and ends with the

physical brain. When the brain dies,

consciousness ceases to exist.

3. The whole universe is basically a mechanism.

It has no conscious beings in it apart from

ourselves.

4. We, as observers, are separate from what we

observe.

Seeing all aspects of the world and the

universe as separate from ourselves has led to

a catastrophic loss of soul and a loss of

relationship with the planetary environment.

The ‘rational mind’ has replaced God.

This dehumanising materialist ‘philosophy’

provides no foundation for moral values.

Science and technology are dreaming of

unimaginable power over life but they have no

moral boundaries to restrain them.

Christ Before the Judge

The Religions of the world have taught us to

believe, but they have not taught us

how to discover the marvel and treasure

of our essential being and our profound

relationship with the universe.

Science has taught us that our potential and

destiny are limited to the material universe

and our present state of consciousness.

Both have created a kind of prison in which we

live unconsciously, believing what we are told.

“Why do you stay in prison

when the doors are open?” Rumi

Our Separation from the Web of Life

Because of the pervasive influence of the Myth of the

Fall as well as materialist science we have come to see

ourselves as separate from the life that surrounds us.

This mind-set has been mainly the creation of Western

science, whose methodology is based on the objective

analysis which separates the observer from the observed.

This scientific separation of the ‘knower from the known’

has become deeply embedded in the ruthless politics

and economics of the industrialised nations.

We see governments pursuing their own paranoid

power-driven agendas, competing against each other

instead of serving their people and the planet.

Iain McGilchrist:

The Master and His Emissary: The Divided

Brain and the Making of the Western Mind

Anxiety

and

Depression

We are on the wrong path and have been on it

for centuries. We have forgotten our

relationship with the inner life of the Cosmos.

We have lost our relationship with the planet

that, millennia ago, we once had.

Only the Indigenous Peoples with shamanic

traditions have maintained a relationship with

both, particularly with the Earth as Mother.

For decades they have been calling out to us

to look at what we are doing to the Earth, to

leave the dangerous and unconscious path

we are on.

Thomas Berry

The Dream of the Earth

“Suddenly we awaken to the devastation that

has resulted from the entire modern process…

In relation to the earth,

we have been autistic for centuries.

Only now have we begun to respond to the

earth’s demands that we cease our industrial

assault, that we abandon our inner rage

against the conditions of our earthly existence,

that we renew our human participation in the

grand liturgy of the universe.”

The New Story

The New Story

The New Story 2

The New Story: Web of Life underlies all life

The New Story comes from Science

Quantum Physics tells us that the whole universe

is a Unified Field, a Cosmic Web of Life

which connects all life forms

in our universe

Every atom of life interacts

with every other atom

None of us is truly separate from others or from

other species of life on the planet

or from the life of the 2000 billion galaxies of the

universe, each of which has

100 billion stars

The New Story is a revolutionary shift in

collective thinking — the same kind of shift

as when Copernicus and Galileo displaced

the geocentric model of the sun and the

moon revolving around Earth.

Just as our sun does not revolve around the

Earth, neither does the life of the Earth

revolve around our species. We are

dependent on the environment that sustains

us. If we destroy the environment, we

destroy ourselves. It’s as simple as that.

Universe is a web of energy patterns

The Universe is not a collection of objects, but is an

inseparable web of vibrating energy patterns in

which no one component has reality independently

from the entirety. Included in the entirety is the

observer.

Paul Davies, physicist

The entire universe is an interdependent system

that is co-arising with everything else at each moment.

In this co-arising process, we participate directly

with the world beyond our physical body.

Duane Elgin

The electro-magnetic quantum vacuum is a form of

light. It is an underlying sea of energy, that permeates

every tiny volume of space, from the emptiest

intergalactic void to the depths of the Earth, the Sun

and our own bodies. Our world of matter is like the

visible foam atop a very deep ocean of light.

Bernard Haisch, Astro-physicist

Scientists now know... that particles are nonlocally

connected with each other throughout space:

Living things of all kinds are non-locally connected

throughout a subtle field that scientists know exists

although they don’t yet understand what it is or how it

works.

Ervin Laszlo

“The Universe is an

undivided wholeness

in flowing movement”

David Bohm, physicist

“Consciousness is ultimate Reality; physical universes

and their components, including the brain, emerge

from Consciousness; all beings in the manifest

universe are related to each other, never separate from

God, Nature or any other being for an instant.”

Paul Hague, The Theory of Everything

Consciousness is fundamental in the universe, not

derivative from physical matter.

All of the apparent physical world exists within

consciousness.

We are all manifestations of the one mind,

the primordial consciousness in which all the events

of the universe occur.

Eben Alexander, neurosurgeon

Living in a Mindful Universe

New concept of God or Spirit

The New Story

gives us a New Image of God or Spirit

There is no Creator beyond Creation

God or Spirit or Divine Mind is the invisible

Ground of the entire manifest universe and the

Ground of our own consciousness

It is not something separate from us

We are within it, co-existing

and co-creating with it

This is one of the great revelations of our time

The New Story

“The innermost self of every human

and animal, of plants and crystals

is God.”

C. G. Jung, Letters

We are here on this planet to

discover and express our divinity

This will be reflected in some kind

of creative activity in service of life,

something that engages the heart

and does no harm.

Divine light within man

“Hidden within man there exists a

heavenly and divine light

which cannot be placed in man

from without

but must emerge from within.”

(from the Vision of Zosimus, 3rd Century AD)

The New Story

Tells us that in our essence we carry divinity – the

pearl of great price that Jesus spoke of – at the core

of our being.

How do we open our awareness to the existence of

that pearl or that indwelling divine light? How do we

expand our consciousness, living in awareness of it?

These are the great questions that confront us now.

Divine Spirit is the core of our being

The soul is intermediary

between spirit and body

The body is the temple of the soul and the

means of our being able to incarnate on

this planet. At the same time it is a portal

that can offer access to the many

dimensions of the inner universe

and the experience of

the Divine Ground.

The Soul of the Cosmos

is the Cosmic Sea of Being or shimmering Web of

Light underlying physical reality through which all

things are connected to each other.

Cosmic Soul

is the forgotten Great Mother once named

Anima-Mundi, Sophia, Shekinah,

Divine Wisdom and the Holy Spirit.

The soul is not in us, we are in the Soul.

Our physical body is

the precious vehicle of the Soul

in this material dimension of reality.

The New Story

tells us that Light and Love are the

foundation of our being,

our consciousness, our intelligence,

and our capacity for love.

The New Story

is about relinquishing the fear of death;

knowing that we survive death;

that we are, in our essence,

immortal beings.

Kubler Ross quote

Kubler Ross quote

“Nothing is more important for our wellbeing than to

know that when we die we move into another reality

that is as real and vitally alive as this one.

Consciousness does not die with the death of the body:

consciousness is eternal.”

Three Orders or Planes of Reality

Three Orders or Planes of Reality

Three orders of Reality

spirit

Three planes of

reality

The Divine Realm

The plane of Pure Light

beyond form:

The angelic intelligences

and the great Avatars

The Intermediary

plane of subtle forms:

the “soul” world of

multiple dimensions;

higher vibrational rate

The plane of Earth: a

denser, material reality;

lower vibrational rate

The Three Orders or Planes of Reality

soul

body

spirit

Each of us has 3 Bodies

Each of us has three bodies Each of us has at least three bodies

for these three Orders of Reality:

1. A physical body for living in this world of material reality.

2. A soul body, called by some the subtle or etheric body, but also

called the radiant, luminous or starry body, composed of much

finer particles than our physical body and attached to it by a

silver cord. This body is weightless and can move freely; it can

create through the heart and the imagination and communicates

telepathically.

3. A spirit body or bodies – called radiant or shining – composed

of ever finer light particles that we enter as we move ever deeper

into the Light of the divine ground, ultimately merging with it.

The New Story tells us that

We are everywhere surrounded by

Orders of Reality

beyond reckoning

We are immortal

We are immortal

The Immortality of the Soul

We are immortal beings and we retain our

individuality after we die.

There are literally millions of unseen worlds,

planets and dimensions in the universe inhabited

by countless billions of souls.

It is not what we believe but how we live our lives

here that draws us to the plane or place we will

inhabit there. We

We are eternally in the Divine Ground.

We save, redeem and heal ourselves by becoming

aware of this and living in that awareness.

The New Story

Tells us that we have a purpose and an agenda to

accomplish and that is to carry out the will of the

Cosmos for this planet;

to safeguard and help it retain its wonderful life;

to cherish every aspect of

its divinity.

Buddha and Christ

“I am the Light which is above everything. I am

the All… Cleave a piece of wood, I am there; lift

up the stone and you will find Me there.”

Jesus in the Gospel of Thomas

Gospel of Eve

I am thou and thou art I and wheresoever thou art, there I am;

In all things I am scattered, and from wherever thou willest,

thou gatherest Me, and in gathering Me

thou gatherest thyself.

The Gnostic Gospel of Eve

Krishna quote

Only through constant love can I be known and seen as I really am, and entered into.

Fix your mind on Me, give your heart's love to Me,

consecrate all your actions to My service, hold your own self as nothing before Me.

To Me you will come; truly I promise for you are dear to Me.

Krishna to Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita

Dark heart

–Holy Spirit