Today, we celebrate crossing a line in air. This doesn't diminish the importance of marking the new year and new decade. It imbues it with creative magic. It reminds me that each gesture taken and each object shaped is made of formlessness playing hide-and-seek as form. Ten years ago, I might have described dwelling on Earth using the same words, but deep in my bones and deeper in my mind I only had a faint idea of what they meant.The core change I've traveled in the last ten years is the passage from experiencing the world and myself as solid, measurable objects to experiencing them as spacious flowing consciousness. This shift happened abruptly before Y2K, but its taken this decade to integrate the mysterious, weird, delightful wisdom and humor of this reality into daily life.
When the solid ground beneath my feet dissolved, I was plunged into watery darkness. My studies of mythic journeys through the underworld hadn't prepared me for I encountered. My hands found nothing to grasp, my feet nowhere to stand. Worst of all, my mind, after a lifetime of spiritual practice and learning, couldn't make sense of what was happening. None of the old tricks I had used for navigating the solid world worked in this realm of bottomless, ever-shifting liquid.
It was either sink or swim, breakdown or breakthrough. To navigate this watery world I had to abandon my beliefs about right versus wrong, friend versus foe, spiritual versus material. Every idea that divided the world was useless in this ocean of unmoving currents and wordless wisdom. While everyone around me enacted their lives in the same old ways of self and other, spirit and matter, I moved about as a wave of energy wearing the disguise of a human being doing what a human being does to get by. Words had meaning while pointing beyond meaning. Faces had character while revealing what was beyond character. Places had design while framing what was beyond design.
It would take a decade to recount all the wise guides and miraculous synchronicities that nurtured and challenged the way to today. In essence, life shattered the illusion that I was a separate self and opened my mind to what lives beyond the personal viewpoint. It revealed that through me, you and the rest of us a new networked global mind is emerging. This global mind is transforming the old solid world of divisions through an information world into a consciousness world. The line in air that we are crossing is the threshold to the mind re-membering its original oneness as an "unbounded ocean of consciousness in motion." The implications of this are immeasurable and we will see them unfolding in the years to come.
As we make the cross-less crossing into the timeless New Year, the news reports describe the old divided mind that is savagely clinging to its delusions of isolation, control, dear, numbness and death. It's thrashing about, crying to be heard as it sinks into the waters of consciousness. It has forgotten its true identity as a wave in the ocean of energy and wisdom, rising and falling, emerging and submerging like all the other waves. Rather than despairing at this, I'm celebrating the dissolving of the old and the emergence of the new. This is Earth's natural way of rebirthing itself, including us. On the other hand, I'm thrilled by the tides of connection, communication and creation flowing in every direction. New insights about re-integrating life on Earth and ways of sharing them are shimmering every second. The currents of change are surging. SURF'S UP is the planetary call and billions are riding the waves of transformation. What appears through this watery mystery will be amazing to see. I'm glad we are swimming these waters together. Enjoy where life is taking "you" and "us" in the coming year.
HAPPY NEW YEAR
