2012 – Waking Up from the Dream of Separation

We are standing on the threshold of this most momentous year – 2012 – the year that in the Mayan calendar is the end of a 5,125-year cycle.  There are predictions of this being the “end of the world” and some are calling it the time of the Apocalypse.

Does that bring fear up inside of you? Those sorts of beliefs do that. But what would it be like if you understood that any belief that brings up fear comes from a mind that believes itself to be separate from life – a mind that has forgotten how to trust life. How different would your experiences of life be if you could trust that life knows what it is doing?

How can we trust this time of turmoil?  The world is poised on the brink of financial chaos, the polar ices caps are melting, our oceans are polluted and there is always the fear of terrorists getting their hands on a nuclear weapon.

In order to move from fear to trust, come sit on the moon with me and look across at this beautiful blue-green jewel that is our home. Understand that it is a living being that has gone through many stages in its unfolding.  At every major shift of evolution there has been chaos as the old order is fading away and a new order is being born.  We are in that time of a major evolutionary shift and it is chaotic.  This shift is happening inside of human beings, growing beyond of the fear-based world to one of connection, trust in the intelligent creativity of life and a willingness to recognize that we are not alone.  We are all in this together, floating through vast oceans of space on an exquisitely beautiful little planet.

Elisabet Sahtouris, the evolutionary biologist, uses the story of the caterpillar to help us to see what is going on here.  Within its cocoon, the caterpillar turns to goo, and out of this goo comes the first cells of the butterfly, called imaginal cells. The interesting thing is that the goo kills them off.   The old resists the new!   When the imaginal cells rise to the occasion and the urge for the new becomes stronger than the urge of the old to kill it, the butterfly is born!

There is no accident that the first cells are called imaginal cells. They are the vision of what is asking to be born.  Each one of you reading this newsletter is an imaginal cell, a human being that is being moved out of fear and into trust.

To get a sense of this, look again at the Earth from our seat on the moon. See it completely dark. Then see a flicker of light here and there, representing beings who, over the past few thousand years, have woken up from the dream of separation and struggle and have fully embraced life. Now see more and more flickers of light appearing across the dark planet, especially over the last 60 years, and see these lights connecting with other lights until there is a web of light all over our planet.

This is what is happening.  More and more of us are waking up from the dream of separation and into the awareness of the heart. So we can see this as a time of overwhelming problems, or we can see this as a time of possibility.  We can buy into the old world of fear, or we can open into the new world of connection and trust which is emerging.  This is at the heart of everything I offer to the world. In fact, the title of my new book (coming out next summer) is What’s in the Way IS the Way.  And its subtitle (at this point) is The Alchemy of Trust.

I leave you with one of my favorite poems which reminds us that we have a choice as to whether we see this as a time of problems or possibility.

In the dark of the moon, in flying snow, in the dead of winter,
war spreading, families dying, the world in danger,
I walk the rocky hillside, sowing clover.

–Wendell Berry, 1968