Barack Obama fought and won the race for President of the United States on the theme of change. And I think this is highly significant.  As Bush embodied the worst of what it meant to be an American, so Obama stands for what is best.   The importance of such figureheads cannot be underestimated.  If a world leader is truly a person of high caliber,  is someone  about whom one could say, 'They have soul and  vision' - and Obama is certainly such a person -  then they can evoke  extraordinary capabilities in  their people. We saw that with Nelson Mandela. The fact that South Africa was able to make the transition out of apartheid without  a single drop of blood being spilt, was truly miraculous, and I believe a lot of this was down to  Mandela's heart being large enough to contain his whole nation inside it. 

And today we need miracles. Our world is in a very precarious state. Not only do we need change in almost every area of life,  but we need very radical change.  And we need it quickly. In the 1970's I read a book called 'Grow or Die' by George Land.  Its theme was that  we are too obsessed with economic and quantative growth, and that unless we focus  on  also 'growing our humanity' and learn to expand our awareness and relate to our fellow human beings and our world, with greater compassion,   we will almost certainly find some way to destroy ourselves. His words have even greater relevance today, and increasing numbers of us are coming to realise  that   the whole way in which we have been accustomed to 'playing the game of life' ,  needs to  shift, needs to be 'upped' to a higher level, and  that we simply cannot continue with our old egotistical agendas , whether acted out in our personal lives or in our national or  our inter-national relationships.

I think the  kind of change being asked for, is not merely a change in the way we live and do things - how we 'do' our work, our politics, our relationships, our health, our education, our economics, etc. It first needs to be a change in the way we are.  For how we are affects how we do and what we do. As Meister Eckhart put it: 'People should think less about what they ought to do and first about  what they ought to be. If only their being were good, their works would shine forth brightly.' 

Our problem is that our being is not always good!  That is our problem. Therefore, for the kinds of shifts to take place where we can have a world that works better, where there is more justice and integrity and less corruption and dishonesty, it follows that we also need to look inside ourselves and perhaps see how and where our own impure attitudes and perceptions have created much of the unworkability of our world. We may need to confront the fact that much of the violence, conflict and evil in the world, relate to the fact that as a species, we have not sufficiently awakened to our deeper human potential. As a character in a Thomas Mann novel once put it: 'If a way to the better there be, it lies in our taking a full look at the worst.'  This means we have to wake up and face ourselves, confront our illusions, look at those motes, not only in our own eyes, but also out in the eyes of our world. 

THE OLD ORDER IS DYING

If the era of George Bush is now, thankfully, coming to an end, we also need to be grateful for the gift it has given us in that, during his years in power, we were able to see many things that were worst about ourselves - least human, most heartless, most stupid - being portrayed on the world stage.  His dreadful presidency and the mainly dreadful people who surrounded and advised him, and their dreadful ideas that lay behind all the dreadful things that took place under his regime, were visible for all to see. Among other things, we saw the evil of trying to police the world using other nations as pawns to serve one's own interest. We were shown the horror of unjust wars fought illegitimately and the insanity of believing that one can kill off the evil of terrorism by throwing more evil at it. Above all, we were confronted yet again with the insanity of trying to achieve financial and territorial security through the selling of ever more destructive weapons to obliterate ourselves with.   And I think if we truly want change, we have to feel indignant and angry about these things, so that in the very core of our being, we can say to ourselves: 

 'No more. I will no longer countenance such injustice and stupidity.  I choose to take a stand for a happier, healthier, more balanced world. I choose to live a life that has love and  integrity and remove my energy  or allegiance from all those systems which support violence, injustice and the continuation of evil in the world in any way,  and instead re-invest it in whatever I feel promotes peace and harmony.'

Please note:  I use the example of  the American leadership, not to single it out especially  - many nations behave  in a much worse fashion,( for example, the leadership in Burma, Mugabe etc) -  but more to suggest that many of 'her behaviours' may be parallel to some of the ways  that some of us also live.  (For example, how much are we 'into control and domination'? How much do we try to use others for our own purposes? Where does our own hate and violence lie? Where are we also destructive?  ( I have to recognise that I sometimes  do not like to look  too closely at Bush. because if I do, I see, mirrored in him, parts of my own heartlessness and stupidity that are painful for me to own. But I know that if I am to pretend to be remotely human, I need to do this. I know that, unless, as a species,  we learn to own and work with, our own dark side, as opposed to  continually projecting it  out onto others and scape-goating them in order to retain the illusion of our own snow-white innocence,   that we are not going to change, and our world is not going to change. 

CHANGE BEING FORCED UPON US

Sometimes, however, we don't always have the luxury of deciding how, when and where, to change. Sometimes, as many of us are discovering today, change is forced upon us.  And because   this is generally uncomfortable and often painful ( for by our very nature, we tend to get stuck in our 'old ways'), we can  have a tendency to view some of the things happening today - especially in those areas where serious breakdowns are taking place  -  as being 'bad.   Certainly this holds true for the financial crisis, and many hope that very soon, things will be back to the way they were. I hope not. For the well being of life on our planet, I pray not.  My hope is that the more we really go to the root of this crisis and see what it says about us, that something new will emerge out of our current financial chaos - a different kind of  capitalism,  perhaps one with a more human face, perhaps with greater integrity and inclusivity, one which is also able to include the not-Have's of our world, who, we remind ourselves, constitute the vaster portion of people living on the planet, and yet who primarily live outside 'the system' altogether.

One of the problems  that we Westerners , or we 'Have's of this world', have , is that we have grown so accustomed  to life's injustices and inequalities, that we have come to see them as normal. To many people's thinking, it is as normal that their house price should go up each year and that they should grow richer, as it is that most of the world should continue to subsist in conditions of abject poverty, with the continent of Africa riddled with AIDS and starvation. Yes, admitted, most of us may not like the idea of war or genocide,  may think that the trafficking of women and children is odious, but  again we often believe these atrocities to be a normal part of life, like toast and marmalade for breakfast, and that there is nothing we can do about them! We also feel it normal to be primarily concerned with what happens in our lives and with our families, to the exclusion of the rest of the world.  What constitutes a crisis is generally what touches us personally, like if our pension goes down in value! It is not a crisis for us if people in Darfur, the Congo or Zimbabwe live in the most horrific and violent of environments, for it doesn't affect our own cosyness! In a word, we don’t like to look at what is unpleasant. Yes, admittedly, there are exceptions to this rule, for example, when the Tsunami wave came along, and many people did reach generously into their pockets and became, for a short time, aware of belonging to the larger family of humanity. However, this was only temporary and we soon returned to the comfort of our own   narrow little lives again. It is these kinds of attitudes which need changing.

HOTTING UP OF CRISES

However, I am pleased to report that many things are in fact changing and much of this is because the heat is increasing.  We see this particularly with the financial crisis today, which is affecting everybody and in every country. No one is immune, and the more our crises begin to impinge upon our own personal peace of mind (such as it is), the less possible it becomes for us to live in our old ostrich-burying-its-head-in-the-sand kind of ways. In other words, when the flood waters are no longer just impinging on other people out there (in Bongo Bongo land),  but  are now knocking at our own front door, we have to wake up and take a look! And today, increasing numbers of us are doing this, are recognising that much more is required than just talking about what is amiss with our world. Increasing numbers of us are coming to see  that if change is to happen ,  that we have to make it happen and that if we are to do this, then, in Gandhi's words,   'We need to be the change that is wanted in the world'. Thus, we are realising that   we must learn to walk our talk, which means that we must discover how to 'play' life at a higher level, recognise the destructive consequences of living solely out of our egos and learn to give birth to something deeper and truer and more noble inside us. As Lewis Mumford  once put put it: 'Every act that softens the egotistical claims of nations and accentuates the unity of mankind, adds another foundation to the new world that we now must build.'   Nearly fifty years ago, Albert Schweitzer wrote a little classic, entitled Reverence for Life.  In it,  he outlined man's purpose very succinctly. In his words:

'We who are heirs of a complex civilisation, are charged with one major historical task: to aid the world in achieving true culture. It is up to us to make the light of a truly humanitarian culture shine throughout the world.'

And are we all doing this? Are we interested in this? Is what is 'wrong' with our world the fact that many of us have life agendas that could not be further from such an aim? We know the answer.  It is yes. As such,  we have to know that it is we who are the initiators of  whatever kind of culture  we have ( cultures do not emerge from 'them' - whoever 'they' happen to  be - but from us).  And in order for that light to shine,  in order that   true culture  come into expression, we need to discover the light inside ourselves; we need to  discover how to  'come from' our truth,  as opposed to from our false, cover-up  egoic face; we need to realise that what is needed in every sphere of life and in every field of work,  is greater honesty,  compassion, generosity of spirit, wisdom, integrity,  and love . This is the change that is needed, as we increasingly come to see that our systems don't work, because these kinds of qualities have not been sufficiently injected into them and the reason for this is that we have not found them inside ourselves.  (We cannot express what we not yet are.)

Therefore, the main reason why many of us don't help our fellow human beings in crisis and why we tend to be overly obsessed with our own personal agendas, is because we haven't sufficiently 'grown' these capacities inside ourselves.  Yes, we may care a bit.  We may even put on a good show of caring a lot. (Tony Blair was good at feigning compassion). But we don't care enough to realise that putting ourselves out more to help others is actually not putting ourselves out at all. Rather, it is what we naturally and spontaneously feel moved to do as the natural by product of  our connecting more deeply with our own humanity.

THE NEED FOR HEART

At one level, I see the problem of our world as being one of insufficient heart.  Our hearts are too closed. And what this means is that we cannot deal with evil properly; we cannot love deeply enough or see deeply enough. We don't have the vision properly to move forward without glancing in the rear-view mirror all the time, or to deal wisely with all the many conflicts that confront us in our lives. Because our hearts  are too closed down, we also cannot allow ourselves to  feel the pain of the world  , to sense into the suffering of those who are starving or being tortured,  or experience the agony of  those  who have no hope.  And because of this, we are insufficiently moved to do anything to make a difference.

The shift needed,   then, is a shift of consciousness. An awakening of heart, a resurrection of our ability to feel deeply. What is 'wrong' with our world is our human incompleteness. We behave greedily, violently, destructively, stupidly, selfishly, because, as a species,  we have not yet opened the door (which lies inside our hearts)  leading us into our deeper humanity.  And without an open, giving heart, we just carry on in our own merry (or not so merry) ways, feeling separate from the world around us, trying to advance our own causes, all too often at the expense of what serves the whole. Often, there is little joy about us, for  it is our  open heart that enables us to feel full and confident. It is our open heart  that enables us to need less and celebrate more, to  take pleasure from the little things of life  and to want  to be a force for wholeness and goodness in the world  and to share whatever we have an abundance of - be it intelligence, inspiration, money, love, etc -  with those who are  less wealthy in these arenas. Not only are the most wonderful spiritual treasures stored in our hearts, but they also help us reconcile conflicts and metabolize our pain in much the same way that our stomachs digest our food. Also, if we have an open heart, it is so much easier to face and work through our difficulties and tragedies, not least because we possess a far greater capacity both to understand and to assimilate them. 

 

 If we are to have change, then, one of the key things that is needed is a change of heart, or, more accurately, an opening of heart. (We cannot change what has not yet emerged), and a change of mind never takes us deep enough. For deep shifts to occur, then, our hearts need to be sufficiently touched, either with the pain of some existing situation, or with the joy born out of a new vision of what might be. When that happens, we may be capable of extraordinary things. Indeed,   one of my favourite ways of describing our hearts is to refer to them  as our greatest weapon of self construction.

THE POWER OF THE PEOPLE TO EFFECT CHANGE

So thank goodness for Obama and the new vision which he represents.  But that said, let us   not just leave things up to 'him' - or to our other world leaders' - to change things, to solve our problems. Rather let us allow ourselves to be inspired by what Obama stands for, so we can ourselves take responsibility to make the changes we feel are needed and to take our stands for those values we believe in.   The movement for change must also be a grass roots one, growing from the bottom up. It needs to start with each of us individually, and in this context, some  very basic questions  that we might ask ourselves, could include:

·         What needs changing in my personal life? What am I dissatisfied with?  How genuine is my life? How much of it is lived for show, that is, to impress others, and how much is it lived for real? And if I do sometimes play a 'show game', what kind of image of myself do I wish to project out to others?  What would it mean to have more genuineness and less show?How open and loving and compassionate and generous and tender and wise do I believe myself to be?

·         Do I live within my means, have a lifestyle with enough balance ? Do I treat others the way I'd like them to treat me, share my resources sufficiently  with those in need, have a work that supports the emergence of a healthier, 'better' world?

·         Am I willing  to work at addressing some of the things in my personal life that are not working, so I can  move towards 'being the change that is needed out in the world?

·         If so,  what would I need to do and how might my  'new life' look? What might be different about it? 

·         How might I concretely make a difference? What area or areas of what is not working out in the world, do I feel moved to address and in what way?

 I will  say a few words about the financial crisis.

UNDERSTANDING THE FINANCIAL CRISIS

 

Perhaps the main thing to understand about our current financial crisis that is hitting many of us strongly at this moment, is that a large part of it is not about money. It is about what we associate with money; it is about what money represents. It is about our image in relation to money. For example, someone used to the identity that having fifty million pounds gives them, will feel  impoverished if 'reduced' to a mere five million, whereas someone who has never had much money, will feel immensely wealthy if they had a thousand pounds in their pocket. 

As such, the problem many of us face today, if our own credit happens to be crunching, is not simply that we may have to struggle to pay the mortgage or go to ingenious lengths to find another job to support our families, and perhaps confront the fear that we may become bankrupt!  The added difficulty  is the loss of our accustomed image, of how we like to present ourselves in the eyes of others, as money plays a big part in this process.   Our problem is that today, many of us have made money into a god. (Interestingly, in the past, the cathedral used to be the central feature of the big towns. Now it is the big banks!)Therefore, because we rate ourselves (and others) so much in terms of a perceived economic well being, where, if we have money, we feel we are an 'important somebody', and if we don't, we don't, its loss can make us feel very insecure . The same criteria also applies to the things money can buy. Let me give you an example .  I have an old banger of a car. I like it. It works and I look after it, but I do not go loopy if someone scrapes into it as I am not especially 'identified' with it.  A few months ago, my banger  lightly brushed against someone's Rolls Royce.  I could not see a mark. But the owner could, and ranted and raved at me. Why this drama?  It was because they were very identified with their car - one might say that a large part of who they considered they were, was bound up with that rolls rocyean identity, and so my tiny, weeny scrape felt like a mortal wound to their heart!  I had diminished them!

Moral : the more we place our sense of who we think we are with outer things,  and  the less connected we are to who we really are, the more insecure we will feel when our outer things get threatened , damaged  or diminished in some way.

The roots of this insecurity, leading us to over egg our outer lives , has  to do with an insufficiently lived inner life.  As such, instead of defining ourselves by who we are (which we cannot , as we have so little connection to this part of ourselves), we say to ourselves 'I am what I have'. In other words, the less 'inner gold' we have, the more we feel we need to make  it up with outer gold. And many of us feel we  can never have enough really to feel secure,  which  is why so many people in this world are, financially speaking, continually on a financial  treadmill of constant anxiety.

The point to get is that an unlived or a dis-owned inner life makes us feel empty, numb and, at times, not quite real. We always feel something is lacking. Which it is....So, if we have money,  we use money and the things it can buy -  prestige, fame, sex, power, ritzy holidays, social status, etc - as'plugs'  to fill up or muffle  or distract us from our emptiness. This is  the added reason why, on top of our needing money to survive and eat,  we  feel we need it for so many other things which  in fact have nothing to do with  anything remotely genuine, or, if the truth be known,  with the quality of life, although we think it does. Many people whom I know who think they live the 'high life', actually live rather a low life and I often think to myself, 'My goodness, all that money spent on those  activities, when there are so many important causes that could really have benefited!' I truly understand why Jesus talked about it being harder for a rich person to  discover their true self, than for a camel to go through the eye of a needle! Money can cover over so many holes and give us such illusions about ourselves. This is why so many of us are so greedy and want far more than we need and  why   at times,  we will do anything to get it ( often engaging in  activities which destabilize the world even more and in the process, disconnecting us even more from ourselves). What  basically happens is that much of our life force, which  we ought to be investing  in deepening our inner life, instead get   'divested' into deifying things that, in the  greater scheme of things, are utterly unimportant, such as who wins quiz shows,  fawning over celebrities, pop stars and  status cars .These energy divestments  take us  further away from our humanity as not only do they not feed the real us at all ( thus giving it less and less chance of  it ever revealing itself to us) but  our false self gets overfed.

Money  can become extra important  because without the connection with our hearts, which constitutes the very core of our inner life, it is hard to experience real joy or to derive true meaning from the little things of life.  If we cannot delight in simple food,  then we need the expensive meal at the status restaurant. In the same way, if it is hard to feel gratitude for the many blessings we have, such as our health, our friends, our family, or whatever, we will always feel 'This isn't it; this is not enough'. And even if we have tons of money (and I know this, as over the years I have worked with  many such people), if there is no attempt to engage with our inner life, our feelings of insufficiency will still pop out! Interestingly, many of those who jumped out of the top-floor windows in the 1929 crash had not lost all their money. They had lost their particular identity that went with the amount of money they had, and could not contemplate life without it. Thomas Merton put this existential dilemma   of ours very well.' We have lost', he said, 'Dante's vision of that Love which moves and sun and all the stars and in so doing, we have lost the power to find meaning in the world'.

This statement underlies the essence of much of what is 'wrong' with the world. We are overly concerned with ersatz significances, and as a result, too much energy  gets pushed into activities that not only make no  difference to life, but which also  distract our attention away from those activities that do.  Do you see? If there is to be change in the world and if we are to be that change, our relationship with money needs to alter.

ASKING THE RIGHT QUESTIONS

So what  makes this financial crisis so big  for  so many of us - one that  cannot  be ignored or run away from -  is  that having less money means we can no longer hide from ourselves in the same way. In other words, if we have less in the bank, our loss may not only be financial; it may also be the absence of what we would use  to distract us from the  pain of confronting our own soullessness. In this context, the following basic questions may be useful ones to ask ourselves:

·         How important is money to me?

·         What is my identity around money?

·         Do I feel I have too much or too little?

·         Do I spend an overlong time thinking about money?

·         Am I  greedy?

·         Are the means I use to earn money, always ethical?

·         Are the ways I spend it wise?

·         Who am I if I have less money?

·         What are my challenges around money?

·         Where is change needed?

·         Am I prepared to work on my money issues? 

·         At a more concrete level, the following questions are also important:

·         Can I survive on the money I have?

·         Do I need to explore new ways of making money? 

·         Do I need to 'downsize', consume less, only buy necessities, i.e., not get anything new unless absolutely necessary?

  Here, we may need to bear in mind that often, underlying our desire to have new things - the latest fashion or the newest mobile phone - may not be because we really need them, but because we  grow tired of things very quickly, which in turn  is because we do not know how to view old things through new eyes, that is, see our world freshly all the time. Very much the same thing applies, of course, in our relationships and I believe a major reason they break up and  why we  feel we want a new   partner, is that , like the new car, we hold them imprisoned within a ' fixed concept' of how they used to be, and so do not know how to elicit what is best out of them. The excitement is gone! Again all these issues relate back to an insufficient ly lived inner life. One of the  big paradoxes   for us to  confront  here, is that, in order for the old financial system to survive, it needs quanttive growth, that is, it needs  us to be discontent  with our lot and to wish to try to compensate by continually buying new things.  As such, it must continue to pander to our false identity bound up with consuming,  and be continually re-inforcing the notion about  how great our new self image will be and  how good we'll   feel,  if   we  could have that new car or T.V and therefore how important it is we have it!

 

It is interesting to observe  how  ordinary people in countries like India,  behave - and  here I am not including those who are starving, who clearly exist in another category altogether, but those ordinary people  who  know they will never be able to derive satisfaction from  having the  expensive  holiday or the fancy house . From my observations,  they tend to appreciate and take much greater care of as well as derive greater usage from, what they already have. Thus, there is greater gratitude for what is. This makes the family life much stronger. There is  also very little wastage. More is obtained out of less. The reason for this is that  much more effort is devoted towards the earning of an inner living, the cultivation of an inner life, so that unlike us in the West, people's well being or happiness tends not to be nearly  as dependant upon what is occurring in their outer world. 

 

 

REVELATIONS OF A HEDGE FUND MANAGER

I will leave the last word here with an outwardly successful, middle-aged ’city’ man I have been working with for about a year -  before this financial crisis erupted . He came to me because he felt there was something stale about his life. I always took notes of our sessions and the following two paragraphs are a summary of some of his reactions to the credit crunch. (He was happy for me to share his thoughts so long as I did not reveal his name.) I think his words reveal a few important truths.

'This financial crisis has truly opened my eyes in ways I never would have believed and though it is painful for me to be losing  money and  to be about to be made redundant ( I don't quite know who I am  if  I am not working , as that is all I ever seem to do!), I see that from another perspective, that this is the best thing that could be happening to me. This crisis (which by the way in Chinese, means a 'dangerous opportunity')  has made me see things that I have long suspected but  have hidden away from myself, pretended were not so, namely, that the financial system is riddled with greed all down the line, and that I  too, have been part of this system.. I've never let myself see this until now and nor have many of us brokers, as  a) our society legitimises what we do and rewards ( or used to reward) us handsomely and call it 'making a good profit' and 'being successful', and b) calls it a failure if profits  do not occur.

 

Now we are seeing the downside of this obsession with growth and profit all the time. I feel so sad and so ashamed that in living this so called 'abundant life of mine', that I have so neglected my soul and have 'sold it to the company store’, as I think that song goes. I see how attached I have been to always having to win, which has meant to try to get others to loose. I am still wealthy outwardly but this crisis is letting me see how I have always used it to cover up my inner impoverishment, the vacuum inside my heart. Is this, I wonder, a main reason why I have never used my money to help people in real need and who are really poor, i.e., because internally, I feel poor like them? I am answering my question and it is yes. And I feel ashamed.  I see I have been a slave of  a dysfunctional system that I have apprenticed myself to all my life, thinking it was giving me something, but now I realise it was also taking from me, sucking out my humanity. I realised this when I came to one of your Majorca retreats. I saw that I have never really let myself enjoy life or let go and that I have always been a doer, never a be-er and so all the really wonderful things of life, my nice homes, my beautiful family, I have never fully appreciated or let in.

While I am sad that this crisis will also affect  poor people who are not like me, but who will struggle even more to survive ( perhaps some will bump into me so I can help them), I do think at one level it is a blessing as I see the connection between money and war and corruption and perhaps if this old system collapses, something new and better will emerge in its place.  I hope so. I certainly want to play a part in helping it emerge. I want to learn to enjoy work, or, better, to do a work that truly has meaning for me.

In the past, I used to look down at people who did what I call 'lowly work', people who were cobblers or carpenters or who built stone walls. Now I see that their work is 'true work', it has love in it and integrity ,and it is not right that  I can make one little phone call  from my office and in two minutes make more  money than they could ever make in ten years.  

I deeply, deeply want to change my life and be a real person who does real work.....Perhaps I will radically shift my priorities and become a stone waller, and I mean that. It would feel much more honest and have more meaning.....'

I felt it very brave of this man to have been so open, and because of this, he is changing.  His soul is returning. (Actually, we never lose our souls; we just lose touch with them.)And he is changing because he is not just seeing his predicament intellectually, but he is letting it touch his heart. And in being touched, his heart is beginning to open more and more, which I see is an important key for change. I will leave the last word with the Dalai Lama.'

'We should try to strike a balance between material and spiritual growth. I see nothing wrong with material growth per se.Although it has contributed enormously to human welfare, it is not capable of creating lasting happiness..the happiness that springs from inner development independant of external factors.'

KEY QUALITIES NEEDED FOR CHANGE

My sense is that if we are truly to respond to the challenge of change, that we will need all or at least some, of the following qualities that exist in our human armoury. We will need wisdom, equanimity, gratitude, love, detachment, creativity, courage and flexibility. And to develop them takes work   on our part. (We don't evolve them just by sitting there with our mouths open!)

 I think we need wisdom so we can always be aware of the 'bigger picture', that is, see into the deeper meaning behind the many breakdowns occurring in our society. The advantage of this is that instead of our being anxious and thinking that something is always going wrong, we can instead give more consideration to the new breakthroughs or opportunities that particular collapses may be heralding. In addition, we can see if there is any way that we can contribute.  I   think  why we need greater detachment  is firstly, to be better able to dis-identify from the various images of ourselves that  we are in thrall to, and secondly, to avoid being tangled up in the many  paranoid and fear-based currents of thought  that are prominent in our culture. If we give in to this negativity, it can greatly disempower us. We must remember that the media loves hyping up disasters - this sells newspapers - and of course our governments play along with this, since the more disequilibriated we become, the easier it is for us to be controlled.

I personally think that the whole Terrorist threat is somewhat over-amped by the same kind of mindset which, in the fifties, saw 'A Red under every bed'. (Look at that absurd hype surrounding those imaginary ‘weapons of mass destruction'!) If the truth be known, the real weapons of destruction lay inside the mindset of certain people in our financial institutions! These destructive elements have costs our governments even more money than their wars have cost. OK. Terrorism is a fact of life, a very unpleasant one, and of course it needs dealing with very seriously, addressing its causes as well as its symptoms. But do not let us forget that far more people die in traffic accidents. 

The reason  why we need greater  gratitude and acceptance of 'what is', is because it  allows us to move beyond the kind of thinking that goes  'Oh how terrible, my pension or my house  is down 20% in value',  what can I do, boo hoo', to instead being grateful we still have a house and it still has value and we are still alive!' Most people in the world, we must remember, are so poor that they have no roof over their head and are not even in the financial system.  I   think we need creativity, courage and flexibility so we can make the necessary adjustments in our personal lives and if necessary, engage in new activities and learn to see the world in a new way.  Lastly, we need equanimity,  for the calmer we are, of course, the more effective we will be in all of the above.

UNDERSTANDING THE SECOND COMING

In W.B. Yates' great prophetic poem 'The Second Coming’, the poet suggested that

'Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world'.

And later he went on to say 'Surely some Revelation is at hand...'And he was right.  In actuality, revelation is always at hand if we can open to it, and there are certain times when it is even more at  hand  -  even more available - and has a particularly important message. And one of those times is right now. And one of the best ways  for us to hear what revelation, which is the wisdom of life itself communicating  to us, is trying to say to us, is through listening to our  hearts. Indeed, if we can really do this, we will learn to understand our current predicament from a wholly new perspective .

Sadly, however, the whole idea of a Second Coming has been hugely distorted by a lot of fascistically inclined, Fundamentalist zealots,   who exist in all the great world religions*.  They all view the Second Coming through excessively literalist eyes. For them, it is about  a particular  'Great One'  who will return in person ( perhaps, for UFO fanciers, descending in a space ship a la Close Encounters),and who will  'save' them, that is,  'lift up to Heaven'  the  'special ones',  who are especially chosen for saving by God because they, and only they, 'know the true way' to worship him! Meanwhile the other 99.99% of humanity, us non-special ones, who are miserable sinners,  and don't know the true way - we can go rot in hell!  Many Fundamentalist Christians, for example, believe that Jesus will come back exactly the way he was, probably walking on the water, replete with hippy beard and flowing white robes!

I think the worst thing about these  literal interpretations  is not only that they reduce what is, I believe, something immensely extraordinary that is happening at this time, but that they also take responsibility entirely out of our hands, thus infantalising us. Their message is that 'Someone or something from above will come along and fixit.  Without us doing anything.' A kind of supernatural Jimmy Saville with wings!  But of course, this only applies to the 'special ones'. Only they will be 'taken up’ to Heaven and live on milk and honey for evermore or enjoy  some virgins or whatever.  No hope for the rest of us, us non-specials; we're excluded; we'll all perish. A bigger Tsunami perhaps! Or a plague of giant locusts will come and  gobble us  all up. Underlying this weird thinking is the idea that there is no point in trying to do anything to heal the planet or   create a better environment, address the issue of Global Warming, etc, because the planet won't be around for much longer. However, this doesn't matter because the 'good people' will all have been 'raised up' to Heaven anyway! (It was this kind of thinking, for example,  that lay behind why Bush never signed the Kyoto treaty and why the fanatical Iranian President tells us that he has no qualms about nuke-ing Israel, even through he knows that three-quarters of his people will perish in retaliation.) Because of these extreme interpretations, many people discount   the idea of revelation altogether.

And this is sad, for I believe there is a 'second coming' and that it is very concrete and practical and not at all exclusive.  It is all about  it now being the time for us human beings to accelerate our evolution and move to a higher state of consciousness, and where we are challenged to give birth  to  a higher wisdom and higher love,  where we choose to reveal our true or our deeper humanity, as it has been revealed for us via the lives of the great saints, adepts and sages of the past,   whose message has always been that divine possibilities exist within all of us and that we too, if we choose, can be like them.  As such, the second coming is not something going on outside of us, but a transformation occurring inside of us. Anyone who chooses to commit to work at awakening their heart   and is willing to 'out' their potential to be a 'raised' human being, that is, who wishes to evolve beyond being identified only with their ego self,  can become a conscious  part of this process. In addition,  it is possible to receive extra help in one's mission, since the next step of our human and planetary evolution, is, as it were, 'hovering right above us,' or standing right in front of us' , waiting to be anchored or brought down into concrete reality. To be  such an anchorer, to be part of the Second Coming or Second wave, what  is required , on our part, is a heartfelt desire to align ourselves with the new flow of life,  to desire, in how we lead our lives, to be part of the solution to the world's problems as opposed to continue being part of them.

 

And of course there is a connection between the challenging times we are living in right now, and this new revelation. Indeed,  the collapsing of many of our old structures is happening alongside, or more accurately, is being  propelled into being, by  this spiritual awakening or spiritual renaissance   which is essentially global in nature and affects all beings on Earth.. And one of its  characteristics is that it is  making it much easier  and quicker for us to evolve spiritually !

We can say that there is a new spiritual presence in the world, a powerful new zeitgeist or 'spirit of the times’  and that  it is affecting all of us, whether or not we are aware of it. Its aim, we could say, is to ’quicken our spirit', to escalate our evolution, to move us all in the direction of greater wholeness. If we are someone who chooses to listen and to feel inspired, this new zeitgeist can help us  not only be more aware of the next step of our human and planetary evolution but also reveal to us what our precise role might be in helping it incarnate into being.  Most importantly, this new availability of spiritual light in the world, is also having the effect of illuminating for us what it is about ourselves and our world that obscures or resists this and which therefore needs transforming, in the interest of  a   'true culture' coming into being. Today, all the things that are 'wrong' or amiss with our world are becoming increasingly clear to us.  Never has there been a time where more skeletons are being uncovered  more quickly in  more closets. If you will permit me to change the metaphor,  it is only when we become  aware what our dragons are,  what shape they take and how they operate,  that we  are capable, if we  so wish, to do something about them. So long as they remain in their lair, unseen, they can control us. I hope this is all clear.

 

The point is that no one is going to 'save' us or 'raise' us or do it for us, other than ourselves.  It is we who are challenged to connect to the 'higher' or more 'heavenly' capabilities inside ourselves which the new spiritual revelation is highlighting for us.  However, it  is entirely our choice as to whether we choose  to connect with ourselves in this way, or not, whether  we move forward as part of the forces of evolution and innovation, or whether we remain cocooned in the old dysfunctional patterns of our past.  Inside our hearts exists not only the blueprint for our evolution, but also the instruction manual for putting it into practice and we can either elect to listen to the messages from our heart and say yes to a new and better and more ethical world,   the information, or whether we close off to it and continue our 'business as usual'.  The Second Coming, I must stress is not about persons but patterns, new patterns. It is also  not about a war against the old - against ego and separation and greed and evil; rather, it is an acknowledgement that  there  is a 'higher way' to be, a more 'resurrected way', and that the choice to be increasingly heart centred as opposed to ego focused, will help align us in this new higher way and that the more we 'go for' it, the less energy we give to our 'old ways' and so the more they begin to die off. Also, it is important that we realise that being part of this spiritual renaissance has nothing to do with race or religion or anything like that. As I said, it is all about our attitudes and our willingness to give birth to our deeper humanity, to refuse to remain ensconced in our old destructive identities. 

SPIRITUAL FIRE

Another way of looking at the second coming is to see it as a great Spiritual Fire working on the world psyche, both lifting up the vibrations in the world and at the same time gradually burning up all our negative patterns, all our impurities, be they at personal, social, national, financial, political, global levels, to the end that something more refined and elevated may emerge. Anything and everything that is not 'raised' will succumb to this transmuting flame, which is why it  is so important that those of us who  see ourselves as Change Agents,  learn to co-operate with this fire,   allow it burn away all those parts of ourselves that still have attachments to the old order. And how we do this is  by having the courage to recognise our old attachments, acknowledge those parts of ourselves that are  still  ego fixated, image conscious, self aggrandising, self seeking - and allow ourselves to experience how much  pain they give us.  This has the effect, as it were, of offering them up to the flames. The more we  consciously can allow our old separative self to burn, the lighter and brighter we become. the less we are held back by our past and the freer we are to move forward and embrace our future.

The second coming, then, is all about the birth of a new vision for humanity, one  requiring manifestation in every single sphere of life. The visionary politicians like Obama are working to incarnate it through Politics, the visionary Scientists through Science, Artists through Art, Ecologists through Ecology, Educators through Education, lovers through discovering deeper octaves of what it means to love, etc.  It is all about sacralising our world, bringing spirit  and meaning back to those many areas of life that have become denuded of it. And, as I said, each of us have a different role to play in helping the Second Coming, come more fully into expression. Some of us just 'serve' by radiating beautiful loving heart energy into the world. Others of us are the movers  and shakers; some have a role as being scholars, others design systems to irrigate deserts or new technologies that don't pollute our planet, some, the spiritual warriors, are out there on the front line doing  dangerous conflict resolution work between Palestiniansd and Israelis. What particularly excites me   and gives me so much hope, is the realisation of  just  how many people throughout the world are being touched by this new zeitgeist, how many fine, wise  'Second Come-ers'/ Change Agents   there are in every country in the world, and in every single field of human Endeavour,  all of whom,  in their own way, are celebrating the fact that the 'old centres' are 'no longer holding'' and that as they dissolve, space  is emerging for new structures, new forms, new ways of doing things, to emerge from the peripheries of our culture and  to begin moving towards a new centre stage. 

 

APPROACHING THE TURNING POINT

  My sense is that  slowly a critical mass  of heart energy is  powerfully building up, and that we are  approaching a turning point where  enough of this 'new energy' will have been built up and enough of the old energy will have  been dissolved, to bring about a sudden, huge  acceleration of consciousness. And we need to be ready for this. At present, the old system is badly leaking , but it is still holding on; it has not yet collapsed, which is a good thing as most of us would probably not be ready if it had. However,  I believe that there will come a time in the not too distant future, perhaps within  as little as three years, where suddenly the old dam will burst and the flood waters of the new revelation will stream with vast power into every single area of our society. And we need to be ready for this. The upside is that a huge empowerment will be experienced on the part of  all those who have been engaged in their own 'raising' process and whose lives are about designing the new forms for the new world ('the new bottles for the new wine'.) The downside is that those of us  who resist new life and who are afraid of the new and who  prefer to look back to their past, will find life increasingly difficult as 'the force' will no longer be with them. Just as there is nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come, so there is nothing weaker than one whose time has past. 

Intimations of what is to come, are currently in the air. We are currently witnessing a gradual collapse of our financial system. And this will spread to other systems. I stress again: this will only be painful  if we refuse to make the transition and refuse to unhook ourselves from ways of being and behaving that no longer serve where the new revelation wishes to take us and why I stress the need for us to develop our powers of flexibility and fluidity now  and  not wait until it is too late. Yes, this will be challenging for those of us who earned our living via the rules of the old system; we may , for a time, feel at a loss about what to do or where to go,  and in such instances, it is important that we focus our attention upon  our hearts, we meditate on positive qualities  and not be sentimental about what is dying  but rather think about how a better, more just world can come into being, and how we can help mid-wife it.  (I am reminded about the story in the Bible about Lot's wife who was asked to move forward and not look back. She did not do as instructed and was turned into a pillar of salt. Although, I know I will be affected as much as anyone by the great changes  currently taking place,  I view the collapse   of  the old order as  a  symptom of health, for I know that it will be out of the  old ashes that the phoenix will gradually arise. And I believe in the awesome power of prayer.

So yes, as the great Bob Dylan put it, 'The times they are a-changin'.  And very rapidly. And our responsibility is to see that they change for the better and to allow ourselves to go along with the new flow, even if we cannot always understand it or where it might be taking us, even if there are periods where we may have to experience suffering .The more we choose to accept our many challenges in good faith, with humility and equanimity, not only will our humanity be expanded in the process, but we will all be given new strength, guidance and inspiration.

*See my article on 'Why the world needs Spirituality and not Religion',