Interdependence

Human Consciousness

“We are at the dawn of a new consciousness, a radically fresh approach to our life as the human family in a fragile world. This birth into a new awareness, into a new set of historical circumstances, appears in a number of shifts in our understanding.”

                                 Wayne Teasdale (The Mystic Heart)

There are several ways in which we have an emerging new consciousness. One is our growing ecological awareness. We are coming to realize that our planet, and every species on it, including ourselves, are connected in a web of life. If we poison the planet, we will suffer the consequences. We have grown to understand that other species have rights and need protection in terms of habitat and hunting. We have painfully learned the cost of nationalistic militarism and extreme religiosity. As social media has spread across the planet, we now acknowledge our connection to all of humankind. Our economic well-being is tied to that of the rest of the world. As we have stretched our reach into the cosmos, we know that our small planet is but one tiny dot in a vast expanse of time and space. Interdependence is an inescapable fact of modern life.

At the same time that we are becoming conscious of the interdependence of all things, there is a backward pull in every area of life. An undertow that would have us not make the leap. It is the pull of the opposite—the determination that things not change, that power not be shared, that individual singularity not acknowledge the needs of others, whether nations or species or the planet. We fear that if we give ground, all will be swept away, and we will come out on bottom. It is the fear that shared power is the same as no power at all. It is fear itself.

Sometimes I have the feeling that all the thousands of generations of souls who came before us are watching, waiting to see whether we will make the leap into this new universal consciousness. The backward pull is strong. The growing wave is fragile. The change comes only as one human at a time wakes up. Where do you stand?

                                                 In the spirit,

                                                   Jane