New Realities (1) - Quareness Series 136th "Lecture".
Over the past year we have witnessed what many of us would have regarded as reality become somewhat intangible and fluid...an apparently ongoing scenario of losing our bearings/moorings and likely further anxiety as most(?) people try to cling on to their invested beliefs. It looks like many of our older established social norms have dissolved faster than new ones could replace them...shades of a kind of rootless frantic uncertainty mixed with a sort of desperate tech-salvation. Of course fluidity and changeability have always been integral to our reality but this has been massively more sudden with the onset of covid-19...a bit like a bursting of the dam rather than a trickle.
The late Elias Canetti (20th century Bulgarian-English author) once wrote of - "A tormenting thought: as of a certain point, history was no longer 'real'. Without noticing it, all mankind suddenly left reality; everything happening since then was supposedly not true, but we supposedly didn't notice." His words have a certain resonance today in that there's an evident rising confusion entering into our world-wide "reality bubble" with our social and political systems seemingly full of abstract madness partly because of their disconnect from truth.
With the brakes radically applied to our normal human living, we have been kinda compelled to view ourselves in a "never seen before" way. And before we take our further steps into what will likely become of immense significance for all of humanity - a phase of rapid evolutionary acceleration - we need to pause and carefully examine our situation. As we emerge from our "quarantined cocoons" we must face the question of how we allow our collective future to unfold. In this regard our "covid consciousness" can have the effect of awakening us into a stimulated frame of mind triggering new perceptions or it can force us into accepting a new consensus reality (aka "the new normal"). Fortunately we still seem to have time for a consideration of where we are, what we are doing and where we wish to go from here.
Every student needs a necessary moment for unhindered self-observation. Indeed any society may also need such, given that people tend to be culturally bound to particular "postures" of thought and feeling (aka social conditioning) and maybe the external impact of the 2020 pandemic has provided a timely "stop" point for those automatic/programmed attitudes of ours.
It's an opportunity to ponder what we may find in this moment of "frozen" introspection and what are the implications of pressing the reset button. We may consider whether humanity is now being freed from its prior commitments to a previous way of life as we face into a possible new trajectory for our human-planetary future. For most of our evolution we've existed as localised aspects of consciousness participating in the "mental life" of our more immediate communities. A global perspective on our part has only existed for a relatively short span of time and even then any collective species mind has been largely outside the awareness of most people...until now when so many people have become conscious of psychological fluctuations across our world during this current pandemic. And the "seemingly intangible" effects of consciousness are just as important as those tangible physical effects we're more generally aware of.
Consciousness is just as (if not more) contagious as any biological virus. It's an open arena spreading like ripples across fluid/intangible/interconnected fields. We each create these ripples which are then strengthened by the larger community consciousness fields forming collectives of human thought. And such powerful collectives of thought are easy to be caught up in...it's why they are contagious. As persons become "socially programmed" by layers of conditioning, they are absorbed into the "national psyche" of their respective countries. However, in learning to grow beyond these layers of psychological conditioning, we create more expansive states of awareness through our access to a broader range of consciousness fields. And since such consciousness is an interconnected ecology, this expansion of awareness does not just remain at the individual level. What we feed into localised fields of consciousness goes on to form part of larger resonating collective fields at the community, national and global levels. What and how each of us thinks is an integral part of this ecology.
What we're currently experiencing is not only a biological pandemic but also a psychological one feeding the tone of an overall psychic resonance ranging all across the spectrum from coherent to dissonant. With a psychological environment of fear, panic and anxiety embedded in so many individualised fields of consciousness, the resonance of disturbance has to be on a scale far exceeding the individual level. Similarly where localised ripples of coherence, hope, trust and empowerment are transmitted, these will impact the larger community and global psyche. Psychologically we are not alone...each of us lives as part of the world (not apart from it) and has a responsibility to manage the thoughts we receive/process/transmit. It may be crucial for the future of humanity that people do not now fall back into a heightened state of cultural programming swayed by agents/systems competing for increased control and social management. This "covid consciousness" may either be an opportunity for a contagion of awakening or (ab)used as a strategy for managing a controlled consensus reality. What's at stake here is our human freedom.
When communities and individuals lack psychological insight, they are vulnerable to the impulses of the unconscious from within and without i.e. manifestations of the unconscious don't just occur within an individual's mind but also within the mass psyche of the collective. It's a human psychological trait that when our minds recognise a repressed force within ourselves, a corresponding expression manifests in our outer physical world...thus does the source for so many ills reside within us. The images we hold within can be just as powerful as those without. Accordingly it's vital for our wellbeing that human civilisation returns to fundamental recognition of the person as a human being with psychical force...sorta getting back to ourselves.
“If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.”- Jesus Christ. Using the resources within, each person can bring insight, conscious awareness and experiential knowing onto contemporary issues and their distress. In order to achieve genuine solutions, each of us must be prepared to change and transform from within, and to bring our inner world to bear on the outer material sphere. In short we each have a responsibility not only to the outer world but also to our individual inner life.
We humans have an inbuilt need for sustenance from a source beyond all social institutions and the influences of everyday life. It's important for us to create some distance from the upsets that life inevitably brings...perhaps triggering an awareness of unhealthy energetic attachment and identification as an antidote to the general state of social unconsciousness. It's increasingly important too to resist the conditioned conventions of the mass mind by cultivating new faculties of perception. This is really a matter of personal freedom of thought and perspective in recognising the unconscious forces of the mass mind and aiming for the personal development of our awareness in order to truly act as individuals.
Human history suggests that moral uncertainty tends to precede new understanding as the old morality enters its death phase. It also suggests that so long as the majority of people expect all problems to be solved outside of themselves, our societies tend to continue to be dominated by unruly forces and that freedom from these forces depends on people willing to assume the responsibility of conscious awareness. Only when we're finally able to heal ourselves from within, can we heal others and the world without. The power for change begins and ends with each individual...it's always been thus. And human responsibility is now calling us to resist the encroaching forces of dehumanising social-technological control.
Sean.
Dean of Quareness.
March, 2021.