Our present state of global crisis has been called a liminal time, an initiation, a rite of passage—a time of limbo between two worlds, one dying and one being born.

Like any rite of initiation, this is a time of great unknowns—we don’t know what is on the other side, and we don’t know if we will get there. We don’t know if it’s the end of the line, or a dark night of the soul. We are called on a collective hero’s journey, but we don’t know if we will emerge triumphant, or even if we are the heroes, the culprits or victims.

Classically, in a rite of passage, there is a deep descent into the darkness, the heart of the unknown, and a return home, bearing its light and its gifts, healing and transformation. Today we are being called to make this passage, each in our own way, personally and collectively. To enter into the heart of our being is to find our way back to our true Wholeness, and then to bring that Wholeness home to the whole sacred family of life with whom we share this precious, irreplaceable planet.

The shorthand for this is conscious co-creation.^[1] When we access the universal consciousness at our core, we can begin to co-create with the very Source of the universe that created us. When we access the fulcrum of our being, we ignite a multi-dimensional revolution—the awakening of our own consciousness, and, at the same time, the co-creative power to help transform our world, sourced from the inside out.

Relating to Others and Nature from Essence, Heart or Ego

There are three basic dimensions to our being: ego, heart and essence. The egoic dimension, where we experience separation from each other and nature; the heartful or soulful dimension, where we experience interconnection with each other and nature; and essence, or the eternal dimension, the unified, universal field where all is already one, undivided, always has been and will be, prior to any sense of separation or even connection, the indestructible, all-pervading basis of our being.^[2]

In our evolution, personally and collectively, we move from the eternal dimension to the egoic dimension and back again. Collectively, we have reached the peak of the egoic dimension today—hence our explosive crises—and are being called back home. Yet this isn’t simply a return to an undifferentiated, uniform state, or a void or emptiness, an annihilation—for in our return to the eternal dimension, we enter into new ground—conscious co-creation, the expression of the eternal through the infinite forms of this world, the spirit of the sacred infusing the healing and transmutation of ourselves and our planet.

The West has developed highly egoic societies and spread these out to the world. And so this rite of passage is taking place not only in the West right now—though perhaps most strongly there because the contrast is starkest—but globally. We are all in this together, and now with the pandemic, even more so.

Yes, we need to come together, but the power we are gathering must be sourced from within (perhaps the reason this crisis has forced us first to self-isolate.) And here is a crucial point. It is easier to accelerate this process in our own self than it is in the collective, because of the weight of collective gravity and inertia, so the impetus must initially come from inside us. Yet, in an amazing grace, when we do so, we accelerate that process in the collective. This is because, as we have seen, they are never in fact separate—everything we do has a ripple effect through the Whole, the quantum field in which we are connected.

And—an even more amazing grace—that effect is exponential. It starts with us, and it ripples out and touches others, our human and natural systems, growing exponentially greater. This is an unexpected law of grace we usually do not recognize, because the ripple effects are often hidden, at least in the initial stages, but if we can keep the faith through dark days, they will one day surface and triumph.

It is well within the realm of possibilities that everything we do, in the name of the Whole, has an infinite reach, reverberations far beyond what we can see, hidden to our visible sight but no less powerful for that…likely far, far more so. There are intimations of this in the poetry of the saints and mystics, the still open-ended mysteries of quantum physics, and deep within the inner sanctum of our own hearts, if we can, with reverence and openness, slip in—enter that still center, listen to its whispers and intuit its deepest, innermost secrets.

We’ve tried to divorce ourselves from the natural world and our own true essence, replace them with our man-made world, a projection of our ego, minds, concepts, constructs, technologies. But they are all collapsing now, because they were never real—they were just artifacts, artificial abstractions, straying ever-further from essential goodness, truth and beauty. All along, underneath them, lay the true basis of our existence, our foundations, which are rising up now, reasserting themselves, through nature, through our crises, toppling our upside-down world, the fantasy world of our projected, artificially-inflated desires that have now become a nightmare.

It is well and good that we are now waking up from them, startled, shaken, jolted. It is actually a gift to us that that fantasy-world is now crumbling, revealing its insubstantiality, its precariousness, unsustainability. The truth is surfacing now, and with it its perennial companions—love, goodness, justice, beauty. The truth itself is erupting now from the core of our being to overtake and save us, from our own greed and ignorance, to subvert our corrupted hierarchy of power, and give us back our true power. It is knocking us over the heads to bring us back home to our senses, and our deepest invincible essence, from which we can defend and uphold the sacredness of all of its expressions in, as, and beyond this world.

It is in that inner connection, the connection with the true Source inside us, that our greatest power lies. By tapping into that deepest Source of our being, and of all creation, we tap into what is best and highest within us, and bring it into the world. There is no separation. We breach the imagined boundaries between inner and outer, break free and bring that breakthrough into the world—true freedom to be both the whole of creation and an active force within it, serving its highest evolution and expression.

We have allowed our outer systems, and the worst in us that they represent at this historical juncture—the peak of individualism and greed—to dominate us and control us. We have to turn this around, and change them from the inside, from our direct connection with the Source of Creation within us, and its love, its justice, its beauty. That is where our true power lies, in our unity with the Whole of Creation, with each other and all of nature. This is both the Source of Creation and the wellspring of inspiration we need to tap into in order to turn our current breakdowns into breakthrough.

It is in this way that we will wake up, will turn around and heal the systems that are now destroying us, from the inside outwards, from the depths of our hearts out into the world. It is crying out now for that love and connection—it is up to us to hear it, and to answer its call.

This journey, outwards, inwards and out again—outwards (to materialism, separation), inwards (to heart and essence), and out again to its expressions in the world—now experienced as inseparable from our own being—are our evolutionary journey. Yet this cycle is also happening in every moment, because these levels are not in fact sequential but simultaneous, co-existent, a seamless continuum that is in truth always one. When we align ourselves in co-creation with the Source of Creation, evolution and the eternal converge.

What is happening now is mythic—if we can’t see the beauty, the supreme intelligence, the justice and rightness in it, the blessing in disguise—we need to open our eyes. We need to turn around the way we understand things, and look much, much deeper. There are treasures to be mined, not from hacking and fracking our precious Mother Earth, but deep within our own essential wisdom. These are the treasures we need to cherish, the wisdom that can save us, that can turn our descent into darkness around, and light our way to a new life on this Earth.

We are running out of energy and of time. Counter-intuitive as it may sound, both are to be found in the dimension of the timeless. It is there that we can transmute these end-times on Earth into a new beginning, a birth, an endlessness of potential.

Matter, energy and consciousness are one. We are in a meltdown now, returning to our Source – pure consciousness at our core. From there a whole new way on Earth can spring into being. Our crises themselves are bringing us home to our true eternal nature, who we really are. It is up to us to humble ourselves to this tremendous power, and bridge the gap we have created between Heaven and Earth.

I would like to offer a model, the Spheres of Co-Creation, that brings together the dimensions, inner and outer, of our being, and those who would like to co-create from them, coming together in an active movement of inner and outer awakening. It is designed to function as both an ontological illustration of the different spheres of our being, and an online platform bringing together those who are working for transformation at all these levels: spiritual, energetic, psychological, ecological, economic, socio-political and planetary.

Once we have connected the dots between the inner causes of the crises—our divisive consciousness – with the outer symptoms—climate crisis, pandemic, racial crisis and gender divides, political, economic and ecological collapses—we can also connect the dots that lead to the solutions, that galvanize the unity at our core for our healing and renewal. Within this greater context, we can come together, from all walks of life, and connect to uproot the causes, and bring in the true unity that is our common source and birthright, at every level of our being, our lives and our global society, personal and collective, across all divides and sectors.

With the Spheres of Co-Creation, we can create a broad-based movement, drawing on our deepest and widest powers, the deepest power of the unity at the core of our being, and expressing it at all levels. This overarching movement of movements would be both deep and wide, profound and inclusive, drawing on the power of the unity at our hidden core, and reflecting it in our world in every dimension, from consciousness and subtle-energy fields to individual and cultural psyche, to social, ecological, economic, political and planetary systems. (If you would like to know more, see the link below.)^[3]

We live in an infinite, multi-dimensional, ever-flowing context, that cuts across time and space and beyond, in ways we cannot comprehend. But when we can give ourselves over to it, open up to that infinite power—when we allow ourselves to be moved by it, we can move things in the world.

When we reclaim our true power from within, the power relations at the outer levels, all the way up the line, also re-align. When the psychological, cultural, ecological, economic and socio-political dimensions are informed and guided from the deepest Source of Creation, new potentials for our evolution, a whole new story, can flow.

A new story is emerging, but we need to hear and align with it to accelerate that movement. That movement is in the air, the Zeitgeist (some would call it the noosphere); we need to lean into it, listen deeply, give ourselves to it and ride its movement, bring it forward into the light of day. We need to do this individually, each at our own edge, and we need to do this collectively, together; diving deep within to discover, and to bring forth, our gifts.

This is the sacred opening that can help us go forward, to which our crises themselves are calling us today. If we enter into the sacred heart of creation, we will find the power to redeem, resurrect, our precious life on this planet, to rise again from the ashes—the evolution, and revolution from the ground of our being, that can turn our crises around.

Abridged from Medium.com, May 28, 2020: https://link.medium.com/kzn7b4noR6

References

1. The term “conscious co-creation”, and whole wider vision of evolutionary spirituality behind it, comes from the great evolutionary visionaries Barbara Marx Hubbard, Sri Aurobindo and Teilhard de Chardin. Some teachers in non-dual circles today have incorporated these perspectives, in a new, emerging field that could be called non-dual evolutionary spirituality. This in turn can be expanded into direct, multi-dimensional action — a new sacred activist approach to meet today’s global crises.

2. The idea of these three levels to our being – ego, heart and essence — has been developed and expounded at great length by John Prendergast, Adyashanti, and other contemporary non-dual spiritual teachers. (Adyashanti often refers to the heartful level as the “soulful level”, using the terms interchangeably, while Prendergast often calls Essence “Deep Heart”, but basically these three levels are the same.)

If you would like to know more about the Spheres of Co-Creation, please contact me at kavitabyrd@gmail.com or see my website www.shakticentre.blogpsot.com.

3. This is an abridged and edited version of “Turning Our Crises Around from the Inside Out; Inner Pathways to Global Transformation” by Kavita Byrd, originally published by Medium.com on May 28, 2020.  https://link.medium.com/kzn7b4noR6