Below, Mike Seymour writes on the measure of our work with the Awakening the Dreamer Symposium. Mike, a Facilitator, Youth initiator, founder of Youth For a New World, and over all impassioned being, has authentic insight and his writing is a great offering to the global community. Enjoy!
Note [from Mike]: This article is written for and from the perspective of those some 2000+ people around the world who have embraced Awakening the Dreamer, Changing the Dreamsymposium as part of their contribution to mid-wife the global shift in consciousness.
What Are We Really Doing with the Symposium?
Has the time come to address more directly what I have sensed we are doing with the symposium? Namely, if we are about waking up, then we are talking about a change in consciousness—our own and humanity in general, and perhaps the entire Earth community is also engaged in some evolutionary shift in tandem with the human. After all, if everything is connected then surely, as the Apostle Paul says in Romans “…the whole of creation is in labor until the sons of God may be revealed.”
If this is the true bottom line and measure of our work, then should we not bring forth this narrative of consciousness change more explicitly and not leave it as an assumed background thread in a presentation where the impact it could make is diminished?
After all, we and the people we are serving have a spiritual thirst. When we give out less than what the emerging being really needs, the spiritual power in what we do is not fully released.
Two books I’ve read recently shine their own particular light on our identities as facilitators, awakening Earth citizens and cosmological beings. One is Andrew Harvey’s The Hope: A Guide to Sacred Activism and the other is The Translucent Revolution by Arjuna Ardagh. Both cite prophecies of the religions and wisdom traditi0ns of many cultures as well as formal and informal research on consciousness trends across many populations globally. They conclude that humanity has reached the borders of the long foretold millennium, that period in human history when significant numbers of us are breaching a threshold into integral consciousness, precipitating a “tipping point,” (to use a term popularized by Malcolm Gladwell) that ushers in a new epoch in human being and human knowing.
This new narrative, or way of experiencing ourselves and our beingness in the universe, is unfolding throughout the human community. It is not the province or privelege of a special few enlightened people. In fact, I have met many people of differing political, cultural and religious backgrounds that all share come kind of awareness that “something’s up” in the world, that we are in trouble; that things must change, and that the very nature of their lives has and is changing. Whether or not that change is interpreted as positive or negative depends on where one is standing.
We focalize the tremendous energy inherent in this shift toward unitary consciousness first in ourselves before we can really embody it for others to perceive and resonate with. A transformation of human consciousness is a process of awakening to a new identity, softening the small sense of self bounded by our own wants, beliefs, prejudices into a sense of participation with something far larger. From the perspective of the old human, the new identity is really no-thing. It is unrecognizable as self as we now understand self, because this new being is clothed in none of the family, cultural or even species-made garments we are accustomed to.
Simply asking yourself “What Am I?” and then sitting with a quieting mind to contemplate the response, one might feel oneself peering into a void, listening for a sound that does not come—as we sort through the usual mental chatter that has little substance or staying power. Do that kind of enquiry enough and you come to both the frightening and glorious epiphany that “I am nothing.” Our existence as separate selves—with all our pains, demands and stories—is a fiction. The flip side is that we also are everything, and in that moment feel at the cellular level a divine oneness with all things and a fulfillment, if only for a moment, of a God-type of love and the “peace that passes all understanding.”
An incredible freedom awaits us in this initiating point in human evolution. We’re going through a painful birthing, where the small me and all the things we grasp out of fear or greed are being loosened as we emerge into this much vaster cosmos. Here the work of living is not done by “me” but in flow with the greater energies of the universe that have always born the trajectory of our lives.
The question we face as symposium facilitators is how do we bring this story forward within a mixed group of people, many of whom may be at very different points in their personal evolution. There is no one simple answer as to how, since this depends on who you are in the moment and the people you are with.
A for myself, I am striving to find a common language that would bridge all differences, a deep well of compassion in myself in which I can embrace the whole room, and a weaving together of various cultural narratives about this transformative time which greatly amplifies the feeling of importance held in the Eagle & Condor Story. In addition, I also believe there are exercises we can offer to participants which help to bring home this consciousness shift more directly, and assist people in discovering how “the great turning” is already manifesting in their lives.
-Natalie
