by Duane Elgin
Once there is integration, once the loop is closed and a system is functioning as an integrated entity, it can move freely—there can be “liftoff.” To illustrate, a tornado is a dynamic torus—a powerful self-organizing system with the ability to move while continuously holding itself together. Analogously, when we become fully self-remembering and self-possessing, we acquire a new level of soulful mobility and freedom. The physical structures of body and world that enabled our invisible consciousness to know itself will have then fulfilled their aligning function. As we acquire the ability to recognize ourselves in the mirror of our own consciousness, it opens the door to an infinite journey. With the ability to be self-reflective, the physical body that oriented our existence can ultimately fall away and the life stream of consciousness will continue to be self-knowing.
A grand adventure welcomes an awakening soul—a path of great compassion and great discovery. The natural companion of awakening is the compassionate understanding that we are intimately connected with all of existence and from this insight, a natural inclination grows to serve the awakening of all beings. Awakening also brings growing freedom as we see that our physical body does not bound the totality of who we are. As noted earlier, there is a growing consensus among cosmologists who think we live in a universe with many more dimensions than are visible to us. Are realms with breathtaking degrees of creative freedom beckoning us if we fulfill ourselves here? Because we have experienced the richness and complexity of life in the third dimension, what must it be like to have the spaciousness and freedom of, say, the thirtieth dimension? Just as few would want to stay in the third grade forever, I believe few would want to stay in the third dimension forever. If we become fully self-referencing beings and can experience “liftoff,” would we choose to stay grounded? Analogously, if we build an airplane, would we be content to forever taxi down the runway or might we want someday to lift off and soar into the spacious sky?
A Garden for Growing Life
Two remarkable dynamics are at work. The first dynamic is often called the “universe story,” and is the grand narrative of the universe evolving through time. The universe story portrays humanity as descendants of a vast creative lineage stretching over the past 14 billion years. The second dynamic is what I call the “great awakening,” and it is the account of humanity progressively awakening to the miracle of the universe arising as a fresh creation at every moment. Where the universe story provides a stunning narrative of the “horizontal” unfolding across time, awakening to a living universe adds a further dimension: the “vertical” creation of the cosmos in time. The universe story focuses on the evolution of the universe through time and the living universe focuses on the universe being created in time. The vertical dynamic of continuous creation slices through all that exists and reveals everything as a single orchestration happening all at once. We are, at every moment, a part of this grand unity of creation. The first miracle—the flow of continuous creation of the cosmos—is so subtle and occurs at such a high rate of speed that it is easy to overlook. As we have seen, it is those who invest long periods in quiet contemplation and meditation—participants in the world’s wisdom traditions—who have perceived this flow most clearly and described it most pointedly.
Our awakening to a new understanding of the universe in both its horizontal and its vertical aspect represents a stunning and extraordinary re-imagining of where we are as a species. Our awakening to the living universe goes beyond the history of any particular nation, region, or ethnic group. This vision of the human journey is big enough to honor the diversity of our past and to act as a beacon for our collective future. This is a story of such immensity and immediacy that it completely transforms the shallow story of materialism and consumerism. The emerging narrative tears back the veil of smallness and reveals humanity as creatures of cosmic dimension and participation. We are bio-cosmic beings who are waking up to find ourselves in a living universe and our evolutionary task is to grow into the bigness of who we are, both personally and collectively. Although the idea of a living universe has ancient roots in human experience, it is radically new and fresh as the frontiers of modern science begin to recognize how mysterious and magnificent the universe truly is. Humanity and universe are becoming connected once again, this time with the aid of science to cut away superstition and reveal the authentic mystery and subtlety of our cosmic home.
The evolutionary direction of the larger universe and that of humanity are aligned. We are not off course or on an evolutionary detour. Although we are largely on track in fulfilling our evolutionary potential, we now confront a supreme test of our collective intelligence and species maturity. Let’s look at the challenging journey ahead.
Chapter 7
Humanity Is Halfway Home
. . . we are pilgrims together, wending through unknown country, home.
—FATHER GIOVANNI, 1513
Where are we on our journey of collective awakening? As beings with an evolving reflective consciousness, how fully have we realized who we are? To answer that question let’s move from the scale of an individual to that of an entire society.
Our journey of awakening into our living universe is not exclusively the journey of the individual; inescapably, it occurs within the context of society. With rare exceptions, our personal awakening does not happen in isolation, but is strongly influenced by the larger culture in which we live. Culture and consciousness co-evolve. It is difficult to step outside the perceptual paradigm of a culture and beyond the prevailing norms. Soul and society tend to grow together.
To explore our collective journey of awakening we can use the simple but powerful lens of one of the world’s fundamental archetypes—the hero’s journey.
Humanity’s Heroic Journey
Because we are all living and growing in the same universe, it is understandable that we would awaken and develop in a roughly similar manner. We are all climbing a common mountain of consciousness, seeking higher ground. Although there are many paths to the summit, familiar routes and approaches emerge.
The themes found in the hero’s journey are universal throughout the world and throughout history. Popularized by the renowned scholar Joseph Campbell, the hero’s journey describes a path of separation and return whose general outlines are as follows.1 An adventurer hears a call and separates from the everyday world to set out on a path of discovery. Along the way, the hero experiences many tests and trials, each rich with learning. Eventually, the hero confronts a seemingly insurmountable challenge that cannot be overcome with the capacities of the ego. The hero then successfully confronts a supreme test and awakens to a new and more soulful relationship with the Earth, the rest of life, and the universe. Upon completing this rite of passage, the hero vows to bring these gifts of insight back to the larger community and turns toward home. The ensuing journey is rich with additional discovery and learning.
Although modern media often portray the hero’s journey as a quest for adventure, this is a shallow rendering of this archetype. Throughout history and across cultures, the hero’s journey has been viewed primarily as a process of inner discovery and personal transformation. In going through a supreme test, the hero does not slay demons and dragons; instead, the hero surrenders a limited sense of self and awakens to a subtle connection with the living universe and the community of life. The hero’s greatest challenge, then, is to slay the dragon of ego and the small sense of self. A supreme test devastates the ego and reveals the soul, enabling the hero to recognize his communion with a living universe. We can apply these insights to our “social ego” and see that, as an entire species, we are being called to a much larger sense of who we are and where we are going.
Looking at the broad sweep of our history, where is the human species on the hero’s journey? The accompanying figure illustrates the evolutionary dynamic of which we are a part.
According to archeological evidence, we humans awakened to ourselves roughly 35,000 years ago. At that time, we had a weak
and shallow sense of self and a strong experience of connection with nature.2 Over thousands of years, we became increasingly conscious of ourselves as distinct beings, but at the cost of separating from communion with nature and the field of life. As we move into our time of initiation as a species, we are challenged to reconnect consciously with nature as a living field while growing an even bigger sense of ourselves as both biological and cosmological beings.
HUMANITY’S HEROIC JOURNEY FROM SEPARATION TO INITIATION TO COMMUNION
This picture of humanity’s journey tells us several important things. First, instead of a linear, one-way ascent of an evolutionary mountain, the figure portrays human evolution as pulling back from the universe in order to strengthen its sense of self. At a crucial point, the entire process begins to bend back and consciously reflect upon itself, which leads to our eventual return and communion with the universe at an entirely new level of understanding.
Second, when we look at the seemingly insurmountable problems facing humanity, we see the human species now entering a time of supreme testing. We are now in a pivotal transition zone; our challenge is to reorient ourselves toward communion with the cosmos and cooperation with one another.
Third, making the turn toward reunion with the living universe does not end our journey of learning and discovery. There will be as much to learn on our journey of return as there has been on our long journey of separation. This is humbling news. Instead of the modern era representing the culmination of human evolution, I believe that it represents only a mid-way point on the journey of realizing our potentials as doubly-knowing humans. We are halfway home.
A fourth important insight is also evident in this picture: From a big picture perspective, the path of separation is the only path that we have known as a species. Our history is a story of progressive separation from nature and one another coupled with the development of a strong sense of biological identity and ego-self. We have pulled ourselves out of our immersion within nature and grown into richly differentiated individuals and complex societies. As we make the pivot from separation to connection, it is important to regard the journey ahead with humility, and to recognize that we are all in new and unfamiliar territory.
Because the hero’s journey so powerfully describes a widely recognized path of development, we can use this archetype to get a sense of where we are on our collective journey. Let’s look more carefully at our long journey of separation, the supreme test of our species, and our journey of reunion.
Humanity’s Journey of Separation
Humans physically like ourselves have existed for at least 150,000 years. However, our lineage almost died out about 70,000 years ago, when a period of abrupt climate change produced extreme hardship for our species. A massive volcanic eruption in Indonesia appears to have been the precipitating event. Sometimes called the “Toba catastrophe,” this mega-colossal eruption—the largest in the past 2 million years—produced 3,000 times more ash and smoke than the 1980 eruption of the Mount St. Helens volcano. To indicate the magnitude of the Toba eruption, thousands of miles away much of India was covered with nearly six inches (fifteen centimeters) of volcanic ash. The resulting haze blocked the Sun, cooled the atmosphere, and triggered a severe ice age that lasted a thousand years or more and may have produced the bottleneck in human evolution.3 Geneticists now estimate that between 1,000 and 10,000 humans in southern Africa survived this catastrophe. A few thousand humans who survived (perhaps from a single village or locale) provided the gene pool from which the entirety of modern humanity derives. These ancestors went their separate ways out of Africa to populate the planet. Now, 70,000 years later, their descendants are encountering one another once again—but this time as a family approaching 7 billion! What a remarkable story of survival and success.
Necessity being the mother of invention, the extreme hardship of this time led to an evolutionary leap in human reflection and creative action. It was in the years following this catastrophe that physically modern humans made their first great migrations out of Africa—first to the Middle East and around the coastline of India, across Indonesia, and on to Australia. Fifty thousand years ago, another wave of humans made the journey to the north and settled in what is now Europe. These two streams of migration eventually brought humans into North America roughly 15,000 years ago, and then on into Central and South America.
Stepping back, we can summarize our evolutionary journey in a single sentence: We awoke as hunter-gatherers with a revolution in self-perception 35,000 years ago, a revolution in farming and village life blossomed 10,000 years ago, the urban-industrial revolution began approximately three hundred years ago, and the communications revolution that is now enveloping the Earth began about fifty years ago. Let’s review these major blocks of human experience so we can get our bearings for the journey ahead.
Roughly 35,000 years ago, we became consciously aware of our bodily existence and, with a sensing consciousness, we made a dramatic leap forward in our ability to develop tools, personal ornaments, and trading networks. It appears that we awoke from the numbing sameness of life to pursue a higher calling—a greater possibility in living that expressed itself in cave art, flutes made from bone, necklaces made from teeth and shells, burial of the dead, and more. In this call to adventure, the tests and learning were very close because life was experienced with such immediacy. Social organization was on a tribal scale, and our sense of identity came from affiliation with the tribe and our connection with nature.
Approximately 10,000 years ago, the last great Ice Age came to a close and we made a gradual transition into the agrarian era with its settled existence and small village way of life. A farming-based society with a food surplus and a feeling consciousness established the foundations for the rise of city-state civilizations. In this era we developed astronomy, writing, the priesthood, kings, warfare, and mathematics. It was also a time of widespread illiteracy, superstition, and the oppression of women. Most individuals were impoverished peasants who had no hope of material progress.
Then, approximately three hundred years ago, advances in science and a thinking consciousness enabled humans to achieve unprecedented control of nature, and to bring unprecedented dynamism into the world. In this stage, people strongly identify with their intellect and grow in their uniqueness. A new sense of personal autonomy and freedom fosters greater citizenship in government, entrepreneurship in economics, and self-authority in spiritual matters. Empowered humans have been so successful in this stage that we are now devastating the biosphere and undermining our future. This is producing a planetary-scale, whole-systems crisis as the entire human family is pressed to come to terms with a new condition of the Earth.
The agricultural and industrial revolutions have produced the most differentiated, individuated, and separated beings that the world has ever known. While our journey has taken us as far from the Mother Universe as we will ever go, it has also taken us to the greatest degree of ego development—empowering us with strong identities as sensing, feeling, and thinking individuals. Because we are still far from completing the evolutionary project of soulful self-possession, the industrial era mindset can leave us feeling disconnected from the living universe (thinking of it as non-living), disconnected from one another (thinking we are existentially separate), and disconnected from our soulful vitality (thinking the soul does not exist). Our imagined separation is a source of profound suffering—and a powerful motivation to continue our journey of awakening to become whole with ourselves and the universe.
Because the culture and consciousness of the industrial era are so far removed from intimate connection with nature and the subtle life force, it may seem that this stage of development has been an evolutionary detour instead of actual progress. Despite the alienation and anxiety of journeying so far from the nurturing life force of a living universe, I believe we have been on a highly purposeful path of development. In the industrial era, we acquired our most distinct and empowered sense of self as materia
l beings. Feelings of existential separation from nature and the universe were essential for us to realize our current degree of differentiation and development. Instead of an evolutionary detour, our progressive separation from nature has been integral to our learning and maturation as a species. However, our learning is only half complete. We are moving into our supreme test, which challenges us to change direction and reconnect with the living universe and the enduring aliveness within ourselves.
Our Supreme Test and Time of Initiation
Evolution moves forward on a bending curve and there is no going back. The starting gun of history has gone off, and humanity is moving rapidly into a new world. We humans have always been tested by adversity. However, our current times are unique in one crucial respect—and this makes all the difference. The circle has closed and there is no escape. Now the entire Earth and whole human community is at risk. Now the entire human species must deal with the reality of climate disruption (with resulting crop failures and famine), the dwindling supply of cheap energy, an enormous global population with most people living on the edge of subsistence, a massive wave of extinction of plants and animals, the spread of weapons of mass destruction in an ever more interdependent world, and much more. All of these are occurring at the same time the global communications revolution is making the world transparent to itself. Our supreme test is to grow consciously into this new world and learn to live in balance with the Earth, in peace with one another, and in gratitude with the living universe.
My estimate is that, by the 2020s, “adversity trends” will coalesce into an unyielding, world-scale systems crisis. Every major system in our lives—ecological, economic, political, cultural, psychological, and spiritual—will be in crisis as it is challenged to adapt to a dramatically changing world. This time of supreme testing will occur in a wired world that is transparent to an immensity of suffering.4 This is a recipe for anarchy and chaos as millions (perhaps billions) of people will be on the move in search of a sustainable existence. With the largest migrations of humans in history underway, the likelihood of widespread civic collapse and tremendous violence will be extremely high.
