What Happened to the New Age? Sorting Truth from Nonsense

I could simply be jaded. I’ve been going to such gatherings for over thirty years now, and at this point, they hardly impress me with their novelty. But I may not be alone. One has the sense that for many, the energy that gave rise to the New Age has ebbed.

Even the term “New Age” has come to sound stale, harking back to the ’80s and the Harmonic Convergence, and, still further, to the spirituality of the 1960s counterculture. Commercial interests have backed away from the name, preferring the term “mind-body-spirit” or “MBS.” In January 2012, New Age Retailer, the primary trade magazine for this field in the US, changed its name to Retailing Insight.

Was the New Age a fad? Was it a noble but misguided hope that the world was ready for an enlightenment to which it now seems indifferent or hostile? Probably neither. More likely this is the case: much of what the New Age pioneered, including yoga, meditation, and organic foods, has become mainstream. Thus you could say the New Age won out in many ways – but at the cost of seeming fresh.

What about its ideas? Many of them too entered the mainstream and have even become clichés. At this point, it may be useful to step back and look at some of the clichés of the New Age and see how well they stand up.
The New Age

Let’s start with the phrase “New Age” itself. It goes back far beyond the ’60s, even beyond the turn of the twentieth century. It first started being used in 1864, when an American clergyman, Warren Felt Evans, published a book entitled The New Age and Its Messenger.

Evans was propounding the ideas of the great Swedish visionary Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772). In the 1740s Swedenborg underwent a series of spiritual awakenings that, he said, gave him access to the invisible realms and to the hidden meanings of Scripture. One of his most remarkable claims was that the Last Judgment of the Bible had no resemblance to the way it was seen by conventional Christianity. It was never meant to mean Christ’s second coming on the earth. In fact, it took place entirely in the world of spirits, a realm which, in Swedenborg’s theology, occupies a middle place between heaven and hell and serves as a clearinghouse for the newly deceased. This spirit realm had accumulated a great deal of debris, such as base and mean entities, and it needed a housecleaning. The Lord accomplished this in the year 1757.

This Last Judgment, according to Swedenborg, had no immediate consequences for life on earth. Its only effect would be to weaken the power of spiritual tyranny and oppression (notably on the part of the Catholic Church, but also among the Protestants). New horizons on the spiritual world would therefore open. This was the New Age that Evans proclaimed, and Swedenborg was its messenger.

In his way Swedenborg was right. Many of the religious shackles that seemed solid in the eighteenth century have been broken. There is still a great deal of nonsense, deception, and crime in religion, but there is also much more freedom of inquiry – even the freedom not to believe if you don’t want to.

Since the nineteenth century, Swedenborg has faded into comparative obscurity, and Evans, once a best-selling author, has been almost completely forgotten. But the term “New Age” was given new life in the twentieth century by figures such as the British esotericist Alice Bailey, and, as we have seen, the New Age as an ideal reached its own peak in the late twentieth century.

To go back to the initial question: how much truth is there in this idea of a New Age?

In a trivial sense, every age is a new age. Today we face unprecedented dangers and opportunities. So did our fathers; so did our grandfathers. So will our children and grandchildren. Thus it has been since the beginning of history.

But I don’t believe the human condition is going to change in any radical way in the future. Whatever wonders and disasters we may engender, we will still be born, love, experience pleasure and pain, and die as humans have since the beginning of time. As Anton Chekhov said in his play Three Sisters, written in 1900: “When we’re dead people will fly around in balloons, there will be a new style in men’s jackets and a sixth sense may be discovered and developed, but life itself won’t change, it will still be as difficult and full of mystery and happiness as it is now.”





Paradigm Shift

This phrase is often connected to the idea of the New Age. “Paradigm” means a scientific model. The Ptolemaic view of the solar system, which put the earth at the centre, was one such paradigm. It was replaced by another: the Copernican paradigm, which puts the sun at the centre.

How did the new view replace the old one? The historian of science Thomas Kuhn asked this question in his influential book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. His answer goes something like this: A scientific model inevitably has some flaws. It explains the data, but not quite perfectly. There are anomalies. For a long time, these are set aside and either explained away or simply ignored. But after a certain point, too many anomalies accumulate and can no longer be set aside. Science must then find another model – another paradigm.

In the case of astronomy, the Ptolemaic view explained the movements of the planets quite well in light of the observations that could be made at the time (up to the sixteenth century). This even included the retrograde motion of the planets. If the planets moved around the earth, why did they sometimes move backwards in the sky? The Ptolemaic theory replied by posting epicycles – meaning that the planets not only revolved around the earth but moved in small cyclical orbits as they did.

Eventually, the epicycle theory, which still did not match the data entirely, began to break down. Astronomers responded by posting epicycles within epicycles, but there was a point when this model seemed implausible. Another one had to be found. The theory of Copernicus, modified by Kepler, accounted for the planets’ motion much better. This was a scientific revolution, also known as a paradigm shift.

The paradigm shift that the New Age speaks of is vaguer. To some degree, it has to do with another scientific revolution – from Newtonian to quantum physics. Newtonian physics is mechanistic and materialistic: it is a universe of ricocheting billiard balls. The quantum universe is much stranger, and some of its most brilliant theorists have stressed how bizarre and counterintuitive it is. But one idea from quantum theory has captured the public imagination: the observer affects the results of an experiment simply by the process of observation. This theory seems to place consciousness, rather than matter, at the centre of the universe.

This idea fascinates people who dislike the meaningless, materialistic Newtonian universe. Some physicists, such as Amit Goswami, author of The Visionary Window and other works, say quantum theory proves that consciousness is the ground of all being. This is a step many other scientists are not willing to take, largely because quantum theory talks about the behaviour of submolecular particles; they are very reluctant to say quantum effects occur on greater scales. Quantum physics is sometimes defined, in fact, as “the science of the very small.”

What does this all amount to? There is certainly a new scientific paradigm (although it is well to remember that much of quantum theory was in place by 1930, making it nearly a hundred years old). But this new paradigm, as understood and applied by physicists themselves, does not prove consciousness is the ground of all existence. Nor is it leading toward a more holistic and satisfying view of the universe. In fact, the trend is going in the opposite direction.

A generation ago there was much excitement, at least in the popular mind, about the connections between quantum physics and mysticism. But the majority of scientists, rightly or wrongly, have never bought it. They remain firmly materialistic in their outlook.

Other disciplines have also moved backward. The psychology of the ’60s and ’70s embraced humanistic and transpersonal perspectives, but to all appearances, this process has been turned around. Neuroscience has had so much luck modifying behaviour through pharmaceuticals that now scientists seem to assume more or less universally that consciousness is a mere side-effect of brain states. (Never mind that this claim has never been proved or even explained in any kind of coherent way.) Computer science, for its part, has made such progress in simulating brain processes that some people now believe it will soon be possible to download your consciousness into a computer, allowing cognition to go on through the operation of a machine rather than a brain. You will no longer need your body to be you. Minds are machines, whether they are made of carbon-based protein or silicon.

In short, the paradigm that was so fondly expected to bring about a new, satisfying, and holistic view of man’s place in the universe failed to arrive. Conventional science, for all its accomplishments, is as drearily materialistic as it was in the days of Queen Victoria.

That is not to say the change will never come. Trends reverse themselves without warning, and fashions in science come and go almost as arbitrarily as the ones in couture. But that is how it looks now.





You Create Your Own Reality

In a trivial sense, this is certainly true. Your senses and nerves and brain filter the data from the outside world (whatever this “outside world” ultimately is) and create a picture of reality that enables you to function.

But some New Agers go further. They say that all you have to do is change your thinking and the world will change automatically.

To some degree, this is true as well. Say you are having money trouble. Try this mental experiment. Believe, as fully as you can, that a cheque for a million dollars is coming to you next week. Suddenly your problems will seem to vanish. You will have no worries.

Your thinking certainly changes the way you feel. But the claim that you create your own reality is a little stronger than this. It is saying that if you believe hard enough that this cheque will be coming, it will come: the universe will manifest it for you. And this idea is harder to swallow. At best, it can motivate you to strive to bring more money into your life; at worst, it is nothing more than daydreaming.

Some people practice creative visualisation. By this method, you formulate a vivid mental picture, and you concentrate on it so that the energy you are directing will make it appear in the physical world. This can and sometimes does work. But it very often brings unwanted consequences in its wake. You can visualise a cheque for a million dollars, and the cheque may appear. But you didn’t count on the fact that you would get into a crippling accident, and the cheque is to compensate you for the fact that you will never walk again. Granted, this is an extreme example. Another more likely outcome is that you will find that you really didn’t want what you were asking for and were disappointed when you got it.

A few weeks ago, for no reason that I can discern, a file suddenly opened up on my computer. It said, “Please, God, protect me from everything I have been praying for.” I wrote it several years earlier and had completely forgotten about it. Evidently, I needed to hear it again.

Another thing is often overlooked: You are not the only one creating your own reality. There are others like you. All of them have the same power over reality that you do. And you are part of their reality as well.

This fact raises a large but unexamined question: if we create our own reality, it must be a collective creation. And what is the effect of all these minds creating and co-creating together? How do the thoughts of your neighbours, your countrymen, your fellow humans as a whole, affect you? How do the minds of many engender a collective reality?

This is, I believe, one of the most important questions facing humanity today. There is a collective imagination – psychologist Charles Tart called it “consensus trance” – that shapes our reality as much as, and probably more than, our own private thoughts do.

As far as I can tell, psychology has not dealt with this question or even acknowledged it. It is true that the psychiatrist C.G. Jung spoke of the collective unconscious. He touched upon collective mentalities in some of his articles, such as “Wotan,” which discussed the resurgence of an old Germanic archetype in the Nazi ideology, and “The Complications of American Psychology,” which related the American psyche to the nature of the land in which it found itself. From another angle, the Russian psychologist V.M. Bekhterev explored mass and mob behaviour in his book Collective Reflexology. Bekhterev, who saw the Russian Revolution firsthand, had plenty of observations to work from. Even so, the science of collective psychology is embryonic.

Thus up to a point, it is true you create your own reality. But so does everyone else, and you are part of that reality too. The question for the twenty-first century is how we create our reality.
Be Here Now

Let’s turn to one of the most famous artefacts of the New Age. A squarish, large-format paperback book, with a purple cover, its contents printed on rough brown paper that looks like wrapping material. Its title:Be Here Now. Its creator: the beloved American guru Richard Alpert, best known as Ram Dass. The words, passed down clumsily with letterpress as if to simulate the visual distortions caused by LSD, urge you to awaken:


What are you doing?

Planning for the future?

Well

IT’s ALL RIGHT NOW

But later?… Forget it baby

That’s later

Now is

NOW

Are you going to

BE HERE or not?

IT’S AS SIMPLE AS THAT!…

If you get so efficient…

If you’ve got to turn off all the vibrations of the scene…
because you’re so busy

about the future

or the past

or time has caught you…

IT COSTS TOO MUCH!

No message from the New Age has burned itself into the collective mind as deeply as this command: Be here now. The past is an artificial construct. The future is an equally artificial construct. There is only the present moment. There is always only the present moment. This is the way to liberation.

The idea still reverberates. Just as its effect was starting to fade, Eckhart Tolle came out with a booster shot: the best-selling Power of Now, published in 2004.

No one could possibly refute this idea. It is always now, and, it would seem, the atomic moments felt through meditative awareness – an endless chain of nows, each one inexorably strung upon its predecessor – bring us as close to ultimate reality as we are likely to come in this world.

As a mental discipline, what has sometimes been called “the doctrine of the present” has no peer. Every moment – or, rather, every moment you are aware of it – you bring your attention to the present; you sense your feet on the floor and feel the breath go in and out. The welterings of your mind subside. You are centred and at peace.

How could anyone question this?

In essence, I could not hope to. But in practice, another view arises.

There is the sensation of my foot on the floor. This is direct, immediate, real. There are, on the other hand, the thoughts and fantasies and daydreams in my head, flowing before my mesmerised eyes like the scenes of a thriller. By contrast, they seem unreal.

But maybe this is not the whole picture. Am I not, after all, experiencing all these supposedly delusory thoughts in the present as well? Why should one experience be held up as real and genuine, while the other is despised as false?

Someone who goes to a few of the innumerable talks given by Tibetan lamas in the West will sometimes hear them denigrate the conceptual mind – the ‘monkey mind’ that must be suppressed, or even killed if enlightenment is to occur. But I once heard the Dalai Lama speak, and he criticised this point of view. Although I don’t remember his exact words, I do remember that he said this contempt for the conceptual mind was unjustified, that this part of the mind too has its place, and one must not try to uproot or kill it.

And sometimes this conceptual mind will take you out of the present.

The present, then, that magic moment that discloses God, is only one of innumerable types of experience. It is well, of course, to be able to recognise and rest in it. But it may not be wise, and it certainly seems impossible, to stay there all the time.

R.H. Blyth, in his celebrated collection of essays Zen and Zen Classics, writes: “Where Buddhism makes its great mistake is in asking for eternity without time. As Blake said, ‘Eternity is in love with the productions of time’.”
Peace

Peace. If there is one word that encapsulates the New Age, it is this one. In its day, it was more than a word. It was a gesture (the fingers forming a V, the palm facing out in an exact reversal of Churchill’s ‘V for victory’ gesture). It was an ideograph, the circle bisected vertically, with two other lines extended down from the centre – a combination of two letters in semaphore code standing for ND or “nuclear disarmament.”

But peace – a cliché? That is a harsh verdict. And if it is, you will say, we need more of such clichés. And badly.

In the ’60s the peace movement was the result of a genuine collective impulse. It was not only the recent memory of the horrors of the Second World War. It was also an aftershock from the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 when the world came the closest it has ever come to nuclear war. In the US, the peace movement was also a response to the Vietnam conflict and to the real likelihood that, like the states in Orwell’s 1984, the superpowers would maintain a permanent state of war.

Events turned out differently from the expectations, as events always do. The threats to world peace that seemed so menacing during the Cold War are gone, but they have been replaced by others, and when these are gone, there will be others still.

Do we need a peace movement to turn ourselves around? I think we do, but I also think we have never had a genuine peace movement. What we have had are antiwar movements. And to be against war is not the same thing as to be for peace.

Earlier in this article, I talked about the possibility that thoughts play a part – a major part – in shaping reality. And I think this is the case. In this light what are we to make of today’s mentality, which projects so much hatred toward its leaders? Do they deserve it? Maybe – but you are not making them any better or their work any easier by directing hatred and vituperation at them. Not if there is the dimmest bit of truth to the idea that your thoughts create reality. And of course, this goes double for any collective feelings of hatred.

In this light I find myself thinking about the possibility of a peace march – a genuine peace march. Such an event would be aimed not at stopping the latest war but at offering peace and blessings to the leadership of the nation, of any and all ideologies, without any agenda whatsoever. This would be a real peace march because it would be offering peace rather than opposition, blessings rather than grievances. I wonder what effect it would have.

A cliché, of course, could never become a cliché unless it is widely disseminated. And it would never become widely disseminated if it did not have much truth, and even wisdom, in it. So it is with the clichés of the New Age. Many of them are rooted in ancient and indeed perennial truths. That these truths need to be recast and restated in the language of a particular time and place is hardly a flaw; it is a way of adapting them to the needs of a generation. They will be restated and recast in many ways in the generations to come.

The Hour is Getting Late

There is a very real drama unfolding all around us, and also within each one of us. The intensity of this drama is without recent precedent and is now being realized on a stage spanning the length and breadth of the planet and beyond.

It’s a race against time, played-out within a gathering storm of conflicting energies. Human aspiration and inspiration clashing head-on with inhuman domination and destruction. And we are all caught in the gathering turbulence, witnessing the rapid dissolution of props and pillars we once took to be secure and dependable fixtures of our daily lives.

Our home, this planet, is in deep crisis, raped, polluted and torn by war, she is on the edge of collapse. While human society carries on as though there was no crisis at all; just a number of disturbances, inconveniences and maybe a slight feeling of insecurity creeping in at the edges.

So long as the great majority experience life this way, the nonhuman forces of repression and destruction are winning the race. But so long as this predatory majority is shrinking and the forces of aspiration and inspiration are advancing, the race is shifting in favour of victory for a great transformation in human awareness; accompanied by a healing of the third-degree wounds suffered by this planet.

Where are you within this unfolding drama? Are you consciously channeling your energies in support of life? Or are you still caught in the cul-de-sac of a stagnating status quo?

It has never been more crucial to know the answer to this question. It has never been more important to know what you’re doing with your life and to take action in making the shift so as to align with an emotional and actual commitment to building towards victory over the forces of death and destruction.

Time is running out for anyone still sitting on the fence. I’ll restate that slightly differently: time has run out for those still sitting on the fence.

Yes, every day that passes without one putting one’s energy firmly behind the push for deep and lasting change for the better is now going the other way: a contribution to that which is aligned with decline and death. Every day.

The hour is getting late. There is no ‘middle ground’ left. The four horses of the apocalypse can be heard making their long approach – do not allow yourself to be mesmerized by the sound of their hooves. Turn instead to face their advance. Stand as strong as a pillar of oak in your resistance.

Let all fear be banished from your veins. Find in yourself that total resolution you know you have.

It was at this time that you have gifted this power. Divine power.

Use it. It’s the last chance. Abuse it – and that chance is blown. The Universe is awaiting your move. And time itself has come to a halt. Your response is attended upon by all the forces of creation. Yes, I’m talking to you.

Drop the old baggage right where you stand. There’s nowhere left to go except where you have to go. If you try to stay in some in-between space, you’re lost, because it doesn’t exist. There is no space in between, except a virtual reality one. The world of lost souls, millions of them, clinging to that which is unreal; figments of an abstracted grasping mind, divorced from the true soul that would guide it on its way. The way.

Why cling to the illusory? It has nothing to offer you and you have nothing to offer it… it’s a place of ghosts.

There is a great danger on this planet, but it’s not the kind of danger you’re thinking about. It’s the danger that you won’t act when all that is energetic is calling upon you to act. Calling you to join the resistance against the forces of destruction. That is the greatest danger any individual can face; not acting when everything which actually matters is screaming for one to act.

I don’t want to overdo the words, time is precious. I want to inspire your inner sun, not your powers of reasoning, however, useful they may be. I want to feel you come alive with the power you are presently sitting on; sitting stewing on the reasons why you can’t make the changes you know you have to make.

Everything else is moving on. This Universe is expanding, still hungry, still exploring, still adventuring. Have you lost your appetite?

The dark-side strategists feed on those who are not in movement. They proclaim the benefits and convenience of stagnation. They need their slaves. They maintain their energies by feeding on yours! And until you act, you are prostituting yourself to them.

Every time you go to their phony kingdoms to buy your depleted food or to get your essentially valueless money, you prostitute yourself to the world of destruction. The sterile, denatured world of the soulless automaton that’s killing off our living planet. Yet you think it’s just normal! Or, you don’t think at all.

Now you’re getting a kick to wake-up to the reality and to act on it. It’s a rather bigger kick than usual because now you’re in the last chance saloon – and you’ve got no time left to sit around wondering what to do about it.

The hour is getting late, my friend.

The Illuminati controlled trading blocks of the world are tightening the noose. They are aiming for absolute control over all the resources of the planet; to own them. This means that even the vegetable seeds you might want to plant in your garden will be illegal unless you buy them from the trading block approved corporation. Genetically modified, for your convenient consumption.

Governments won’t step in to save them because governments are in the employ of corporations and not the other way around. They’ll go to war and rip the skin right off the face of the planet, to get what they want.

Your reaction to this should be “Not while I’m alive on this planet, they won’t!” But instead it’s more like “Oh God, what will stop them?” Or “Is it really that bad?”

You see, you’re not being primed by outrage. ‘Outrage’ is the fire that drives one to take action, and if instead of outrage there’s just a weak little flame flickering dimly in the dark, then you’re going to get swept away, like the rest of them.

Prime your lamp right now, turn up the wick, feel the absurdity of a world where nobody bothers to do anything that matters, but instead devote themselves to everything that doesn’t matter one iota! Get outraged by the sheer lunacy of this situation.

You are a child of creation – and yet you seem paralyzed to create.

Are you aware of mind control? Have you ever considered that you might be living someone else’s life? That the person you see in the mirror is not actually you at all? No, it’s the person you have tried to be, all this time – and that person is a mind controlled being. A being who has been fed the pap propaganda of the status quo: the Illuminati agenda.

That reflection in the mirror is an indoctrinated being who has suffered the fate of all those who fail to question the endless stream of lies which pour our of the control system that runs this planet.

When I warn you that you are walking blindly down a road to hell, you are more concerned about what the temperature will be when you get there than on getting off that road, whatever the cost.

The hour is getting late. Most of your friends have no conception of this fact. They continually try to talk you out of having any such notions. They are cannon fodder for the apocalypse; sacrificial units for the sustenance of Baphomet, secretly worshiped by the Masonic Illuminati bloodlines. The vampires of human creativity.

But I’ve said enough. Time to find the answers in yourself. Activate your survival mechanism; call forth the godly powers that will transport you to where you need to be. Do it: here and now. Find your courage and never let go.

I’ll meet you again on that road – or not at all.

Sucked Into Horror

Everything we see, touch, hear, smell, taste, feel… is on the record. It’s all in our personal databank – either in the conscious mind, with us experiencing it, thinking about it or recalling it… or in the vast subconscious mind.

It’s easy to bring back an event in life that has had a big emotional or feeling impact, such as the feeling of a blissful embrace or the emotion of fear experienced when viewing something that horrifies us. These large impact experiences, when recalled to mind, do have the ability to change our energy.

Wherever our energy/feeling is, that’s what we’re aligned to… celestial… demonic… feeling translates into alignment. So it follows that disciplining the mind and emotions is a very beneficial practice.

In the consciousness movement we have learned to monitor not only where we allow our minds and emotions to go, but also what we allow as incoming. We know that conditioning and programming are incoming, and these prolonged experiences serve to control our opinions and behaviors without us knowing.

Traumatic experiences are different in that we take them in as direct hits to our energy, and they can linger as stress and anxiety: dark thoughts, bad dreams, hyper-alertness, control trips and so on. Folks who have taken too many hits may look for means to escape the stress through drugs or distractions. It’s just the sad truth.

So… since we know these things about our consciousness, it begs the question of why we would believe it harmless to give our attention to images, videos and audios of another’s personal horror. Yes, this society dines on the pain of people’s private lives, but we if we’re not interested in that dinner, why EAT there?

What I’m talking about is photos, videos and audios of another person experiencing horror, or shame, or disgrace or even death… videos that mirror the most horrific mainstream entertainment, but are in fact not fictional. They are real people experiencing real pain.

An example would be an audio of a horrifying 911 emergency phone call, a video of someone being shot and killed, watching people jump out of the twin towers, and recently online, a video of a young woman minutes before her death wherein she was in terror of something that seemed other-worldly.

This video originated on a site I visit occasionally… I received an email, so clicked on it for a look. So sorry I did that… so sorry for her to be photographed and have her terror amplified in the collective mind thousands of times over.

Fear porn is not news and it’s not information: it’s something malicious. The audio and video offerings of human beings experiencing horror are vampiristic; quite capable of sucking the unaware listener/viewer into the pain that other human beings are experiencing.

With awareness of the power of incoming energy and its relationship to our alignment, we are wise to avoid exposure to these images and sounds as we would avoid exposure to a virus, and by all means keep our children away. The instinctive response is our best response: out of respect for human dignity, and the eternity of energy, we refuse to be sucked in.

Deeply personal embarrassments also have a tendency to show up on the Internet as well, and this, too, doesn’t speak well of the collective tendency to vampirism. The ‘fat girl’ doesn’t need her photo tagged with a comment and spread around to the derision of millions, nor does the man who stripped off his clothes and ran around while suffering from a mental breakdown. We might cringe when we see it, but the embarrassment or degradation still becomes part of us… and by our viewing it, we amplify the suffering. By re-posting it, we endorse it.

Detaching from any association with these things can be done fairly easily… if you have a clue what it’s going to be, just don’t click. Click on something that embodies more light and liberates you… no trauma, no high impact low vibe energy hit!

When we look at life as sacred, and many of us do, we have possibilities that are the polar opposite of being sucked into horror. With protection from unwanted incoming and reverence for the divine energies, we can put a little more light in our personal data-bank. And we want this, if we are ever to experience our unfettered true selves.

The light seems a perfect image to leave with you as we approach Halloween… an event that, in truth, is celebrated as a holy day for the demonic. The cultural programming we are inundated with would have us believe that imitating what we fear is harmless fun… unfortunately, it just isn’t so.

Doesn’t the horror story tell us that a vampire is unable to step across a threshold unless or until it is invited in? Don’t invite… don’t align… this too shall pass.

The Challenge of Eternal Life

Eternal Life: a promise which has always seemed, well... let’s say... somewhat out of reach...

But then, whoever was it who told us that such a state might be attainable to Earth-bound mortals?

I’m not sure – was it Jesus? And then, would any of us actually consider this sort of eternal life a blessing? I doubt it... Maybe more the opposite, especially if this life was viewed as the template for all lives to come!

But what if it wasn’t – and some bolder vision was able to take center stage in our lives – what then?

What if talk of ‘eternal life’ was never supposed to be about human life alone, but to go much further and address the infinite power of the spirit which simply finds a passing home in our human bodies, on planet Earth. Seen in this light, our human bodies are the vehicles that both carry and are born along by the Great Spirit; and like all vehicles, they eventually wear out and are recycled. Yet the spirit carries on – eternally.

But when I refer to ‘we’ who or what exactly do I mean? Who are ‘we’? Could it be that ‘we’ are in fact as much spirit as we are third density corporeal beings? If so, well... maybe we could have some serious role in the drama called eternal life after all! Soaring upwards on our mission like Buzz Lightyear winging his way “To infinity ... and beyond”

Maybe up until now, we have been misled by the fact that the inquiry has centered around whether or not it is possible ‘to have eternal life’. For in the possessive verb ‘have’ we find a lack of movement – a lack of dynamic. Life is not, after all, a possession. And lest we forget, the movement is the one constant of universal physics... we cannot actually stand still... although by not intentionally grasping the joy of movement, we can stagnate; which is probably the closest one can come to ‘no movement’ and in that sense – death.

Yet as we know, the physical body has a limited life, breaking down into various forms of biological matter after completing its role in this life. In fact, in its state of decomposition – it still goes on – and also never stops moving. However, like all physical forms within third density existence, the process can be measured by time and is subject to the laws of gravity.

But then take a good look at these physical forms under a powerful microscope – and lo and behold they lose their three-dimensional fixedness – and start swirling around – in a wild dance of atoms. That’s us!

No need to head out for the party – it’s here and now! And the passage of time never diminishes this great dance – only transforms it.

So here we can see that ‘eternal life’ most probably really does exist and a snapshot of that eternal life is also observable at the subatomic quantum level. At this level, the process of transformation of even the minutest visible particles can be observed – as was the case of quantum physicist Neils Bohr – to shift enigmatically between a speck, a wave and a dance; while simultaneously, the absolute objectivity of perception of the viewer was called into question – because the viewer and what he/she views are not so distinct – but both part of one collective expression: Life.

The dancing wave under the microscope could equally be, in part, the vibrational input of the viewer and not simply the way a distant object behaves. Thus, the quantum experiment greatly expanded our awareness of the interactivity of what was previously considered ‘subject’ and ‘object’.

Eternal Life then is something we do access after all – so long as we get to realize who that ‘we’ is!

Hmm... did I say that already? Are we going around in a circle? No, not quite, because the Universe is actually not circular but an ellipse. . and the distinction is important. It is due to the ellipse that the power of magnetism gains enough strength to bend the light around stars on its way to Earth. A ‘bending’ which was brought to our attention by Albert Einstein.

Thus, life is not circular, we never return to exactly where we started on our great voyage but move up a notch on the completion of each revolution or cycle of life – often measured in periods such as seven, ten or fourteen years etc..

Observed from the outside, this could look like moving along one coil of a multi-coiled spiral. In moving onto the next loop of the coil we pass over the place where we were (so to speak) say seven years back; possibly even picking up some peripheral resonance – and memory – from the energy manifestation of that time. This, due to the fact that the ellipse creates points at which our journey moves closer to or further away from certain key transforming points. Just as, for example, Earth experiences more intense manifestations of (climatic) energy at winter and summer solstices – and when passing closer to or further from our sun and various planetary forces.

That our lives move in this spiral formation is due to a mix of forward propulsion and gravity – particularly the ellipse inspired gravity that is particular to this Universe.

Given the universality of spirit energy – with which our spirit is inseparable – it does become possible to speak about ‘living forever’ and being ‘infinite spirit’.

Although initially balking at the notion, it no longer seems quite so implausible... that in some way we really do live forever – forming endless links in an ongoing and inseparable chain of wave-like movements. These words come to you from a window that has just opened in the vast flowing current of this endless river.

At the point of transformation called death, the corporeal responds to gravity and goes downwards while the spirit defies gravity and is drawn upwards. At this point ‘we’ – provided we have embraced life with a certain fullness – are expressed as Spirit, and go with the uplift.

Once we allow ourselves to be subsumed into our universal origins – and destinies – we cannot separate our life span from that of this Universe which is our eternal home. A home which itself will eventually experience its own death and rebirth on the vast macrocosmic scale of the greater cosmos.

So we should rejoice in that which gives momentum to this ever expanding Creation. A Creation in which each of our lives plays their part, as a guiding force, and in which our memories form a collective well which can only be described as bottomless.

8 Steps to Towards Non-Attachment

During our lives, we tend to form many attachments to various types of things. Many of us are so attached to the physical world that we become enslaved and possessed by the very things we adore.

Detachment is when someone has complete freedom from all that is seen or heard and doesn’t let any possessions take control of them. Practicing non-attachment gives us power over our emotions and feelings in relation to the attachments in our life.

Many people wonder, why does detachment matter? Why does it matter whether or not we’re attached to something? The answer is simple, if we’re not careful our attachment can lead to tragedy and heartbreak when change takes its unstoppable course. Attachment is the root cause of our suffering. Non-attachment is the ultimate form of self-mastery.

The first and most important concept when trying to incorporate non-attachment into your life is consciously acknowledging that everything that’s manifested in our physical world is temporary, not forever.

When you notice your attachment to anyone or to anything, ask yourself the following questions: “Why do I really desire this? What permanent advantage would I gain by possessing this? How would this possession help me towards greater knowledge and freedom?” Over and over again, the answers to these questions show us that the desired thing is useless in the long term and also may be potentially harmful by driving us into ignorance and bondage. Sometimes we may become aware that the things we desire, is something simply to fulfill a mere restlessness in the mind.

The mental state of non-attachment may come slowly, but even during the earliest stages of practice are rewarded by a sense of peace and freedom. Guaranteed success will come from being consistent with this spiritual discipline.

Practice Non-Attachment in 8 Steps

1. Ask yourself what realistic permanent advantage you should gain if you possessed your desire.

2. Let go of your attachment to money by making a donation or helping out someone in need.

3. Befriend yourself- your self-worth should come from within you, not from other peoples approvals.

4. Don’t seek security in people or things.

5. Overcome your attachment to entertainment

6. Let go of the need to be dominate or influential over others.

7. Stop living in an illusion- don’t overly attach yourself to your possessions or even your hopes and dreams.

8. Understand that all things naturally come and go. It’s unavoidable.

Non-attachment is easily misunderstood by many people as they might interrupt it as having to give up their possessions to feel “free”. This is far from the truth. Detachment is simply not feeling owned by the things you possess or desire.

There will be moments when impatience of frustration arises. But that’s alright as long as you allow the emotions to rise and dissolve. Do not feed or fuel the negative emotions.

The Benefits of Non-Attachment

· Expectations no longer rule your life.

· You see things for the way they are.

· You’re not bothered much by the physical world (but you don’t tolerate harmful behavior).

· Your heart grows even bigger and you love more because you don’t feel the need to control everything.

· You’re not attached to outcomes.

· Detachment is releasing vibrational resistance, allowing the law of attraction to work effectively for you.

· Be attached to nothing but be open to everything. Non-attachment is a freeing practice which will help you a lot when it comes to adjusting to change that takes place in the future.

The Division of Humanity by Humanity

The strategy of Divide and Conquer has been used throughout history almost every time there is one group that wants to dominate or defeat another group. It has been a tried and true strategy for generals on the battlefield to assist in winning wars. The same strategy has been used against humanity by those that desire to control us through various forms of manipulation. In fact, it is so engrained in our way of being that we almost relish in dividing ourselves which allows them to better conquer humanity.

The strategy in war makes perfect sense. If you divide the opposition into smaller groups, especially if your army is larger in numbers or fighting the power, then you are able to quickly defeat the smaller groups of fighters versus a larger mass or better-equipped group that can help defend themselves and attack offensively. Communication would play a vital role in this aspect as well. If a larger group is working together towards a goal with clear communication, then they have a higher probability of achieving the goal versus many units with possible communication barriers working on an assumed strategy versus constantly morphing strategies to react to the opposition.

Well, the same is applied to us, humanity, in our lives for as long as history has been recorded. There has always been a “Them vs. Us” mentality prevalent. It is evidenced in the ideas of nationalities, race, religion, political stance, economic status, education level, etc. Sadly, it appears that we, as humanity, have been manipulated in performing this task in the present day for those that wish to control us. In the last couple of generations in the western cultures if not further, it has been carried into fashion, physical appearance, volunteer status, material status, sports teams, type of beer you drink, music genres, and on and on.

Many people are quick to label themselves and join certain groups and allow those labels and groups to become their identity. Many constantly allow this to be something of debate more so than the logical truthful facts. They are quick to judge someone based upon a label they have given another person or the group of which that person affiliates. The debate over which label or group is better becomes the debate not the facts of the argument. In fact, if more people would stop with the stereotypes and focusing on which group they think someone belongs to, we may actually awaken as humanity to the nonsense that we are being manipulated into believing is our way of life.

Think about it. A Republican and a Democrat will argue over which group is better than the other for hours at a time. Yet, if they could put those “differences” aside (many of us know there really is no difference between the parties – they all serve the same corporations and “owners”), then they begin to awaken to the fact that most of what either party is doing are unacceptable. Yet, they continue to argue over points that do not serve any real value to humanity as a whole.

It is sad to say that this is an experience to those of us that are awake and try to avoid labels and stereotypes. In the community of awakened souls, you will find those that think they are more awakened than another. They will argue this fact versus spreading the truth that they both may be aware of and others need to hear to begin their awakening or even further their awakening. We focus too much on the absolute truth that we often loose others that are awakening to the bickering over the details.

I am not saying the details do not matter. I am saying that we are all on the same journey. Perhaps someone else is not taking the same size steps as you, but at least, they are stepping. Some may not realize all the truth, but at least, they are awakening and searching for more truth. Just as a young child is beginning to explore their world and think for themselves, we should never tell the child to quit asking questions or formulating their own thoughts even if they are not entirely accurate. We would eventually squash the child’s desire to learn more. The same thing is happening to awaken souls.

If we can stop doing the work of those that want to control us by stopping the labeling, grouping, and division of ourselves, we will move mountains. We have to remember that we are all souls in this journey of life and treat each other accordingly. It is fine to be aware of where someone else is in their journey of discovery of themselves and Truth, but do not judge them. Yes, some are imposters and are usually obvious of what their purpose and presence serve. I suspect those are weeded out quickly. However, they are still a soul that we have an opportunity to touch.

I do not advise kid’s gloves for everyone all the time. It has taken some pretty hard messages to keep me moving forward. It was the judging of me and the blatant “You are so wrong and doomed” that discouraged me from the search. We all have to toughen up on the road to discovering the truth of ourselves and Truth, but sometimes compassion can carry someone a lot further than tough cold love. Both have a purpose, but try to recognize when they should be applied.

Always remember, you are interacting with another soul. Our goal is to raise awareness and vibration. It should not be to shame others back into the dark and make them feel inferior. Just some food for thought for the next time you interact with a “sheeple” or not as “enlightened” soul as yourself. They are still a soul. We are all a part of humanity. We need each other in this battle. Division will not serve us well. We have to stand together. We have to help each other stand up to our potential.

The Illusion of Time and Space

Like a lot of things about this reality we experience, linear time is simply a very convincing illusion. It is an illusion created by consciousness, in fact so, is “space”. Closely related to the idea of “time” is the notion of “linear causality” — A causes B causes C. This notion is also just a very convincing illusion. The reality that we are experiencing is by no means an “objective reality” as most people presume. In fact, it is more like what we would conceive of as a virtual reality, but one with some very interesting rules.

Let’s briefly review the basics about what you and the universe really are and then we’ll dive into how and why time and space are illusions.
Cosmic Consciousness

The very fabric of the Universe is conscious, and your consciousness is a thread of this universal consciousness with its own focal point of awareness. We are apertures that universe is perceiving and experiencing through.

Mainstream science, with its rigid materialistic view of the universe, believes that consciousness arises from the operation of the brain. The operation of the brain does, in fact, give rise to some LIMITED cognitive and analytical abilities and local memory but our higher consciousness exists in the field, and our brain functions as a receiver.

In fact, consciousness is all the Universe is. Everything is seen and unseen, large and small, are just thought forms inside of the cosmic mind. And because we are threads of this cosmic consciousness, we are creating our reality with our thoughts and beliefs — this is how the universe works, this is what it is, we are part of a great cosmic mind, and all realities are constructs.


The Infinite Information Matrix

The information that represents every aspect of every moment of the past, present, and future all exists simultaneously, eternally, and NOW. And not just all the information for the timeline that we are experiencing, but all possible timelines — literally an infinite matrix containing everything possible, everything imaginable. Of course, this is not apparent from within the space-time construct because we are only seeing and experiencing the part that is needed to create the experience of our reality. You can think of a timeline as the path that our consciousness takes through the information, and hence experiences.

In an unbounded (unconstrained) state of consciousness, the state that our higher-self is in, we can move our point of awareness anywhere in the infinite matrix of information that represents all that is, navigating through it by either the “temporal” dimension or the “spatial” dimension. More about this later in the article when we look at the remote viewing and past life regression.

Our physical reality is a construct that our souls are using as a learning experience. In a certain sense, our whole reality is an illusion, but the experiences it provides are very much real and leaves an indelible mark on the consciousness that is our souls. It serves as a most excellent training system for our souls and drives our soul's spiritual evolution/growth.
The Cosmic Film Projector

From the context of the eternal NOW and the infinite information matrix, a linear experience is created by sequentially stepping your consciousness’s focal point of perception/awareness through the information matrix. This process creates the experience of time and space, motion, evolution, and causality.

It’s like a movie produced by a film projector.

In a film projector, the illusion of motion and time is created when the projector displays the still frames of the film, one frame at a time, in a rapid steady sequence. Yet, ALL the frames exist simultaneously. In fact, the projectionist can take out the film, spread it out on the floor, and view all the frames at the same time.

In a similar manner, our consciousness “projects” individual “still frames of reality” in a steady and extremely rapid sequence, BILLIONS of times per second, creating the ILLUSION of the flow of TIME. Each “frame of reality” contains absolutely NO MOTION whatsoever — it is a perfectly STILL image. And yet, by rapidly sequencing these still frames, we create the illusion motion and time.

Sets of information in the infinite matrix function much like the still frames of the film strip. Our earthly consciousness functions much like the film projector, viewing still frames in a rapid steady sequence. Our higher-self exists in the timeless realm and functions like the film projectionist, who can take out the film and view ALL the frames simultaneously.

“It is you who are moving, not time. Time has no movement. There is only One Moment.” – Bashar
The Illusion of Continuity

Normally, the “reality-frames” that we view in a rapid sequence are related and similar creating the ILLUSION of continuity. Continuity is required to make the game of life a convincing experience. If we experienced obvious discontinuities, we would realize we were players in a game, and that would diminish the effectiveness and purpose of the game of life.

How continuity is enforced is not entirely clear but one explanation is that we simply don’t BELIEVE jumping around time-lines is possible. Because we steadfastly BELIEVE in the idea of time and its continuity, discontinuities don’t normally happen. We EXPECT continuity, so that’s what we get. We are creating all of our reality with our thoughts and beliefs — this is how the universe works, this is what it is, we are part of a great cosmic mind.

But continuity is not an absolute requirement. It is possible to “jump” to a completely different frame in the infinite matrix. Jumping around the timelines would normally be considered “Time Travel”, and this has traditionally been considered impossible. One argument that is often put forward why time travel isn’t possible is the classic “grandfather paradox” that states:

If you time-travel to the time of your grandfather and kill him before he has any children, then your father would not have been born, and then you would not have been born. And if you were never born, you could not go back to kill your grandfather.

Of course, the paradox dissolves when you realize that there are an infinite number of time-lines — all simultaneously co-existing (parallel but distinct paths thru the infinite matrix, or “flows” of events). When you “Time Travel” you are jumping to a DIFFERENT time-line. There is no change whatsoever in your originating time-line. The time-line you switched to may appear to be almost identical to the one you were on, but it is a totally DIFFERENT time-line.
Paranormal Phenomena and the Illusion of Time and Space

The paranormal/psychic phenomena of remote viewing and past life regression shed light onto to the underlying nature of our reality and are consistent with the illusory nature of time and space that I am presenting here.

Remote viewing is the term that the military intelligence community coined as an alternative to other metaphysical terms. Remote viewing is the ability to view any location, no matter how distant, in one’s mind simply by conscious intent. According to the book Limitless Mind: A Guide to Remote Viewing anyone can develop this ability with training.

The ability for the mind to “see” any location in space strongly suggests that consciousness exists outside the brain in the fabric of the universe as many ancient schools of thought believed and that many leading-edge contemporary scientists are starting to understand and prove (check out the book The Immortal Mind: Science and the Continuity of Consciousness beyond the Brain to dive deeper into this subject).

Our conscious awareness is indeed a part of something akin to a universal mind and in its unbounded (unconstrained) state, we can move our point of awareness anywhere in the infinite matrix of information that represents all that is, navigating through it by “spatial” or “temporal” dimensions. In the case of remote viewing, we are accessing our unbounded (universal) mind and moving our focal point of awareness thru the “spatial” dimension the universal information matrix to a specific “spatial” location.

Past life regression is a technique that uses hypnosis to put a subject into a state of consciousness that allows them to access unbounded consciousness of their higher-self to explore, what we traditionally think of as the past and future lives. Our higher-self creates many souls that are aspects of itself and projects them into the lower frequency planes of existence. During past life regression, we are able to access some of our unbounded consciousness and move our point of awareness through the “temporal” dimension of the infinite information matrix along paths and to locations that correspond to segments and points on time-lines that other aspects of our higher-self (other souls) are stepping through (experiencing).

Our higher-self creates many souls and puts them in many life forms, on many worlds, in many different situations to accelerate its spiritual evolution. It is experiencing everything that all its souls are experiencing and growing because of it. It is having a massively parallel experience thru all of its souls! If you want to learn more about reincarnation and past life regression and I recommend the books Journey of Souls and Past Life Regression: Discover Your Hidden Past Life Memories.
The Mechanics of Reality Creation

The reality that we are experiencing is by no means an “objective reality” as most people presume. In fact, it is more like what we would conceive of as a virtual reality, but one with some very interesting rules, some of which I’ve discussed here. Deeply understanding and mastering the laws and mechanics of reality creation will make you a very powerful being who can tailor make your personal reality to whatever you desire. And if we ALL mastered this, and focused our thoughts and intentions on the same vision of a better world, we could drastically alter our collective reality too! And quick!