DREAMS OF AN INTEGRAL CONSCIOUSNESS

Sometimes during Melbourne’s Summer, it doesn’t rain for weeks. That’s why after a thunderstorm you notice things like the lovely way raindrops on a spider web scintillate in the emerging sunlight. The picture weaves into your dreams, like the night I dreamt I was in my garden peering into one watery orb to see what was reflected there.

Suddenly I noticed that it was night. The raindrop became like those photos of earth taken from space, with the darkness of the globe’s surface scattered with the lights of a host of cities, dense in patches, less so in areas with few inhabitants. I leaned even closer and could see now spaces between even the densest clusters. Then something beautiful happened. The lights became miniature dewdrops with fine threads spun out like spider-silk clothing the planet in an exquisite fractal-like garment. And along all these delicate threads I saw human souls moving in each direction as if along highways. Somehow, I knew they were living souls ( no, not the internet ). And as I woke I understood that I needed to be there with them.

It was a haunting dream that stayed with me. And in the way of dreams I understood that it linked up with other thoughts of the day. I had been looking at changes in consciousness from the far distant past to now, how once we lived immersed in the world around, but over countless millennia as we sought to understand the secrets of existence, our consciousness shifted along with our explanations.

The world is divided into separate parts 

A radical shift took place a little more than 300 years ago, during the Enlightenment or Age of Reason when a different mentality burst apart older unified views of existence. It was closely connected with the scientific revolution and with concepts of a universe consisting of nothing more than physical matter. Thinking became rational, evidence-based and requiring everything to be separated into its parts. This scientific modality is dynamic and technological invention has flourished since, but a negative outcome is a utilitarian materialism. And, some say, a loss of values due to self-centred disconnection from the deeper mysteries about who we are in the world. In the early 21^st century this is where we dwell.

But tumultuous change is happening. And faced with enormous upheavals we cope in many ways, looking backward, sideways, outward, even inward and most of us have a finger somewhere in this mix. Meanwhile there is a deep and widespread longing for renewal. I feel it and I’m convinced it heralds the emergence of another shift.

Those souls I saw in my dream are moving towards a new enlarged, inclusive consciousness, a world view that is being called post-secular, holistic, integral. It’s about convergence, a reuniting of separate parts involving every aspect of existence.

True individuality and deep inter-relationship are not contradictions

James Lovelock’s Gaia theory of the earth as a single interacting, living system has had a profound influence on the environmental movement. Carl Jung, Abraham Maslow and others reveal how healing the soul is essential to the healing of the whole. Rudolf Steiner draws our attention to the unfolding spiritual ‘I’. This is not ego, needing approval or recognition. It’s a truly free individuality, able to lovingly embrace all that is ‘other’.

I’m excited by the possibility of restoring our old feeling of unity without losing the individuality that has taken so many aeons to evolve. We are the real agents of change and if we strive to follow this path to the ‘I’, inter-relationship on a profound level is already being restored. It happens when we ‘walk the talk’ through deeds born of love. Such threads of connection, once we make them, are as strong and enduring as spider-silk. I believe my dream was, and is, telling the same story.