“War is Peace. Slavery is Freedom. Ignorance is Strength.”

I first read George Orwell’s 1984 during my early college years, while pursuing a degree in Peace Studies. Wars of imperialism were being fought worldwide in the name of peace, living ecosystems were being plundered in the name of progress, and endless lies were being peddled in the name of truth, all justified in the name of freedom. Nation-states vied with each other for dominance, each claiming to be somehow ‘chosen’, with all others being expendable, wrong or downright ‘evil’.

The end always justified the means, or rather, a secret elitist agenda always justified the lies. Truth became collateral damage in the great task of empire building. So what a few acts of genocide to found a great nation?  So what a wee bit of deception to create a dominant religion? So what a few more forest species extinguished in order to build a profitable economy?

After all, we must fulfil our manifest destiny, and the strong shall inherit the earth. Didn’t Darwin prove that we are at the top of the evolutionary ladder, and that evolution supports only the survival of the fittest?

If anything has changed in the thirty years since those early college days, the mainstream lies have just become more blatant, our ability to discern has become increasingly eroded, and we have learned to unquestioningly swallow the blue pill in allegiance to outright slavery of mind, body and soul. We would rather plunge into extinction than face our own truth. We would rather die in arrogance and illusion than take down the mask of our own collective dissonance.

On a personal level, however, many are waking up. Most people in the world today are not heartless tyrants and mindless consumers. We have learned to perceive ourselves as isolated and weak, but we are not soulless. We may be ignorant and misinformed but we are not evil. Many are increasingly looking to give back to the earth, to make amends for past wrongs, and build a new world based on respect, sovereignty, justice and peace. We are looking to seek our truth, find our power, claim our freedom.

To the extent we are conditioned by Orwellian ‘doublespeak’, however, we cannot see clearly enough to distinguish truth from falsehood. As long as we accept our current world system as benign, we will continue to become a cancer on this earth. Having given up our sovereignty as divinely inspired and powerfully compassionate guardians of creation, the only choice left is to play out our pitiful roles as serfs and victims.

The Andean Inkas talk about pachakuti, a time of turning around. When things have been topsy turvy for a long time, it means turning the world right side up. They say that we have been living in a bad dream, and NOW is the time to wake up. They say that we must choose this ourselves, that WE are the ones we have been waiting for. The entire cosmos is lining up with our little blue planet in order to make this happen.

It begins with seeing clearly, seeing from a big picture perspective, seeing through the eyes of the heart, which is connected with the soul of creation. In the following series of essays I would like to investigate this further, examining political realities, scientific paradigms, evolutionary cycles, cosmic intelligences, climate changes, the psychology of awakening, and depth spirituality. I would like to explore the shadows that have glazed our vision, light as well as dark, personal as well as collective, and discover ultimately the undying light of our own existence, a radiant Self-awareness bright enough to evolve consciously and powerfully towards the next World Age.

“Lead us from the unreal to the real,” said the ancient seers of India. “Lead us from darkness to light, from death to immortality!”

 

Shadows of a Dying Age - 2

By Kiara Windrider
October 12, 2019

“What is truth?”

It’s the question that drives us. Or rather, it’s the answers we seek to that question which drives us. It’s the question asked by a man named Pontius Pilate, governor of a little province called Judea, to a man named Jesus, who has sparked more change and controversy than the world will ever know. It’s a question you keep asking yourself until the answers emerge unasked and the question itself disappears.

As a wise man said once, it is only when the answers dissolve into silence that the purpose of a question has been served. A true question is not meant to seek for an answer but to refine the question itself. Not just the question, but the questioner. A true question demands a change in perception, it pushes you to a place where you are no longer waiting for an answer, but rather where you turn your gaze around to look into yourself.

What is Truth? Who are we, why are we here on this tiny little planet in a great big universe, why all these dramas being played out across our experience of time? Are we who they say we are, the universe reflecting itself, unveiling itself, a singularity of consciousness revealed in a quadrillion tiny sparks of light in a constantly changing dance of life?  Or are we insignificant little specks of dust blowing in the wind of our own self-importance? Are the answers limited to a single question, a single perspective?

Shadows of a Dying Age. The title came unasked as I felt an urge to begin this blog. I found myself writing about our place in the world, where we come from, and what we are moving towards. I found myself writing from a place of concern for the state of the planet, the madness of these times, for the survival of our species. But also from a place where I understood that the planet is not separate from me, and that in truly understanding myself I can begin to understand this bitter-sweet shadow dance of humanity. The answers are not fixed out there. They are a fluid response to my own deep engagement of life. The answers become the mirror of my own self-awareness.

If I am only questing for answers, I find myself defining and interpreting external realities to reflect certain positions, and then getting attached to that position. But if I am questing for truth, I simply enter into a wideness where answers come into the sky of mind like morning mist rising up from valleys below. They are not so much answers as perspectives, multi-dimensional layers of understanding where the winds of truth can blow.

Truth cannot be compartmentalized. There is no such thing as a spiritual truth or a scientific truth or a political truth separate and independent from each other. Why get caught up in ‘politics’ if my quest is for enlightenment? Or why bother with esoteric mumbo jumbo when it’s ‘science’ that has all the answers? If I define myself as spiritual, and if spirituality is about experiencing myself as a creator, can anything be outside of this truth? If I define myself as a caring, compassionate human, can I disengage from the crucibles of life around me? Is it possible to be fully human and fully divine in the same eternal moment? Isn’t this what all great masters across the ages were trying to demonstrate?

An alchemist is one who is willing to enter the flaming crucible, and become that flame. We must enter into the madness of these times, fully understanding it, yet holding the awareness of a greater truth, in order to transform it. For it is within this flame that we open our hearts to compassion. And any truth, no matter how sublime, is meaningless without this flame of compassion.

“This is fullness, and THAT is fullness,” said the ancient Vedic seers. “Fullness always flows from fullness, and though this fullness comes from THAT fullness, THAT fullness remains forever full.”

Shadows of a Dying Age - 3

By Kiara Windrider
October 12, 2019

“i HAVE met THE ENEMY… AND he IS us”

This confession from a comic strip character, Pogo, reveals an extraordinary moment of insight, an insight rarely displayed in our long history of endless war, political intrigue, and societal mind control.

When we are unable to perceive our light, we learn to play a game of shadows. We make others wrong to make ourselves right. We make others guilty to absolve our own shame. We pull each other down to distract from our own inadequacies and guilt. We attack those who are most dear to us to mask our own unmet needs. We do unto others what we most judge about ourselves.

And we whitewash everything with fictitious justifications of righteousness and superiority.

These mind games tend to be for the most part unconscious, meaning we are not generally aware of them. We are genuinely convinced we are right, and genuinely believe that our adversary is at fault. We are genuinely convinced that we are more worthy, more deserving, more righteous than the other players in the game. Once so convinced, it is but a small step from interpersonal conflicts to global wars, whether fought for land, power, prestige, control, or ideological advancement.

The need for an enemy is hardwired into the human psyche. On a personal level we are much too familiar with the silly dramas being constantly played out in daily life, providing our fragile egos with a sense of specialness we cannot otherwise experience. When these same fragile egos are placed in positions of political influence, we have war. There is nothing more heroic than the act of uniting against a common enemy, chanting our litanies of self-righteous outrage while flocking to defend a precious national identity. We demonise the other side to justify wholesale slaughter, silence any voices of dissension that call for diplomacy or sanity, and quietly cover up the lies, corruption, and crimes we may ourselves be committing. 

We are all familiar with psychological defence mechanisms such as projection, repression and denial. These are for the most part unconscious, meaning we may not be consciously aware of our underlying motivations as we wander through the daze of interpersonal conflicts and war games. We justify the need for an enemy because we don’t trust the right use of power. When power games are used to deliberately manipulate an unconscious population we become truly dangerous and diabolical. The need for an enemy has brought our species to the edge of extinction.

Pogo’s revolutionary insight is the first step in the road to recovery.  The darkness we project on our created enemies conceals our most brilliant light. The shadows we deny reveal our greatest gifts. The pain we have repressed is the mask of our most profound love.  When we see this clearly we will not need to manipulate someone else in order to experience who we already are. We will not allow someone else to manipulate our own choices and emotional responses. We will drop the masks of pretence that keeps us veiled from our own unique radiance. We will gaze into the mirror of our deepest truth and walk this earth as gods.

What if they gave a war… and nobody came?

Shadows of a Dying Age - 4

By Kiara Windrider
October 14, 2019

“And he gave man dominion over all things…”

There are two opposing paradigms shaping the world today. The shamanic paradigm perceives the inter-dependency of all things. It points to an enormous web of creation that contains all of life. We have an important place in this web, but no more than a bumblebee, a cauliflower, or a giant squid. We are not separate from this web, and can therefore enter into communication with all things, and with the spirit that moves through all things.

And then there is the hierarchical paradigm, which places a Creator God above his creation. Nature is no longer a web but a ladder, with our human species occupying the top rung of this ladder. There is an enormous gulf between man and the rest of creation, and an even bigger gulf between ourselves and our Creator God.

In the shamanic paradigm the Earth is our Mother, whom we learn to love and respect. The Earth does not belong to us; rather, we belong to the Earth. We are placed on this earth as guardians and caretakers for life. Incarnating here is a privilege, and requires an attitude of responsibility and maturity. We recognise that if we fail in our task, we could easily be replaced, and that none of us is greater than the balance of life itself.

In the hierarchical paradigm the Earth is perceived as a resource that belongs to us by right. Even though we barely understand the nature of our Creator God, we have taken upon ourselves to become His sole representative upon Earth. We claim ‘dominion over all things’, or in other words the right to use and plunder resources at will. We give ourselves license to do what we want when we want to anyone we want and get away with it.

From this paradigm of course emerges the idea of ‘survival of the fittest’. Rather than harmony and inter-dependence being the guiding principles in an immense circle of life, we find ourselves selfishly pitted against nature, against each other, and against the very forces of life, weakening and destroying the delicate balance that nature has accomplished over long eons of evolution. Survival has become a struggle, and we justify this struggle by claiming we are the ‘fittest’ and ‘strongest’, and therefore have more of a right to be here than the millions of species we have driven to extinction.

Additionally, we have created a false dichotomy between creation by divine design and evolution by natural selection. While rightly questioning whether there is a transcendental force separate from the laws of nature, our current understanding of evolution ignores the divinely creative intelligence that pervades the entire web of life. Dismissing the vast creative fields of conscious intelligence that weave together an entire cosmos, we justify the tyranny of one ‘divinely ordained’ species dominating the earth.

To be fair to Charles Darwin, father of modern evolutionary theory, it was never his intention to glorify ‘survival of the fittest’ as a model for evolution. How many people are aware that this particular term was used only twice in his entire 800 page thesis, On The Origin of Species, the second time being an apology for ever having used that term before?

He himself understood that it was not selfish competition but rather instinctive co-operation that sustains the web of life, and had been attempting to highlight our human capacity to step out of pure animal instinct to consciously enter a higher evolutionary realm operating from love. It was the robber barons of that age who took over his message and warped it to justify their self-serving agendas. Unfortunately, this deliberately distorted version has become the cornerstone of evolutionary theory today.

We are facing a clash of paradigms between a life-enhancing, sustainable world view which indigenous people around the world seem to still adhere to, and the self-destructive agendas of our current globalist age. One leads to renewal and life, the other to extinction and death. Which do we choose?

Shadows of a Dying Age - 5

By Kiara Windrider
October 15, 2019

“man is an unfinished species…”

This higher aspects of Darwin’s evolutionary theory were echoed more than a hundred years ago in the the visionary theories of an Indian yogi and mystic known as Sri Aurobindo.

There is an intelligence within the field of matter that drives evolution, he stated. In other words, evolution does not require a Creator God outside of Creation, since matter itself is also divine. Operating through an intelligent force within our DNA, the process of evolution has unfolded through vast eons of time.

Meanwhile, there is a process of involution also happening simultaneously. Whereas evolution has to do with an intelligence within the density of matter rising up towards creative expression, involution has to do with an infinite potential within the unmanifest aspects of divine consciousness, which is continually seeking to embody itself down into matter.

Involution and evolution are not separate from each other, since the unmanifest aspect of Existence is always present within the manifested worlds. The entire potential of Creator God is present within Creation, although veiled in expression. Every living creature, including our own species, is born to express this divinity.

We imagine that consciousness emerges from the mind, which is an evolutionary byproduct of the creation of life. Although this is true of human consciousness as experienced through our brain and nervous system, it is also true that Life is a product of Mind, and Mind is a product of a single primordial Consciousness, a Consciousness that moves through all things, while also Self-existing beyond all things.

When human consciousness becomes aware of itself as primordial Consciousness, a new stage of evolution becomes possible.

Sri Aurobindo refers to four stages of human evolution. The animal human was the first stage. We were unconsciously aware of forces beyond our personal self, but had not become self-reflective. We were driven by instinct to survive and to thrive, in harmony with the web of creation. We lived in a state of natural grace.

Then came the human human stage, coinciding with the development of the rational mind. This is symbolised in Christian theology as the Tree of Knowledge, due to which we experienced a ‘fall’ from the state of grace. It is meant to be a transitional stage, however. The rational mind must be integrated within other layers of consciousness, symbolised by the Tree of Life.

It is a journey from unconscious unity to conscious separation to conscious unity. The divine human stage is where the mind, heart and soul begin to integrate, where the Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge are both experienced together. We haven’t collectively entered into this stage of our development yet, although many of us have been exploring this individually as we open our minds to higher levels of awareness.

Ultimately, says Sri Aurobindo, there is a fourth stage, the supramental human, where the fulness of Consciousness will be able to incarnate without being held back by unconscious veils. It is a stage of divine mastery and creativity. We will continue this theme in future chapters of this blog.

Shadows of a Dying Age Part 6-10