PART I - The Base
Epoch 5 and its ‘Cultural Creatives’ –
At the beginning of the 21st century the sociologist Paul H. Ray and psychologist Sherry Ruth Anderson, identified a group of people that they coined ‘cultural creatives’. Today these cultural creatives are over 80 million strong in the USA and many times that number worldwide. If you are reading this book there is a strong probability that you are one of them and identify with the values and worldview of this group. The cultural creatives make up a large portion of what we are calling the 5th Epoch of consciousness and culture and are the likely can-didates to make the leap up and create the next Epoch.
Who are We?
According to Ray, Core Cultural Creatives have both person-centered and green values, are seriously concerned with psychology, actualization and self-expression, and like the foreign and exotic. They enjoy mastering new ideas and are socially concerned, advocate women’s issues and are strong advocates of ecological sustainability. Green Cultural Creatives have values centered on the environment and social concerns from a secular view, with average interest in spirituality, psychology or person-centered values.
In addition to having an eco-centric (ECOcentric, as in care for all sentient beings not EGOcentric) perspective and inclusive value system, if you are amongst this group (particularly the core cultural creatives) you are also likely either a practitioner of or recipient of alternative medicine, yoga, meditation, new thought or some type of self-help technique or non-denominational spir-itual practice. And after years of pursuing these approaches I will bet that you are frustrated, because your life is not like you thought it would be. Something is still missing. Many victories have been won by the cultural creatives: equal rights, awareness to environmental issues, honoring of other cultures etc… But something else has happened…the movement has now gone flat. There is no consistent vehicle or effective leadership to carry this movement forward. How can we take the inclusive values of this group (our group) and provide the ‘acti-vation energy’ needed to overcome our inertia? How can we fully align these beautiful values with the evolutionary impulse – the universal principle that has been called “spirit in action” – that drive to create and change and emerge in an upward vertical direction?
How can we simultaneously preserve equality, the environment and at the same time promote growth? How can we honor past traditions but never com-promise our need to evolve and go beyond? Let us reach back down and pull up
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into our being the building blocks of earlier Life Altitudes and take a solid foun-dation forward as we emerge into the radical awakening of Epoch 6. I believe SCM and the 9 Summits of Transformation are a way forward.
I believe we can change, and I believe that ultimately what’s best for the world in the long run is also what’s best for us (our highest selves) as individuals in the short run. We need to align ourselves with our compelling future. That future is at least in part already available within your slumbering higher brain.
The path to a new world need not be perilous and overwhelming, but instead can be rewarding and joy filled. It simply requires that we live from our greatest potential. There is a way.
The pursuit of our own self-actualization must be prioritized and to do so we must engage our higher brain and higher heart. This is how we find meaning.
This pursuit of authentic joy by all of us at the leading edge can be the cata-lyst for widespread social change. Yes, global crisis is a real possibility but so is seismic positive global transformation. We must wake up now, find our essence and commit to a life of excellence. Doing our unique part and giving our special personal gifts creates a life on purpose. Enough lives lived from higher capacities – showing up on purpose – leads to new cultures and large-scale change.
SCM and the 9 Summits help us discover our essence, our Highest Self, as an evolving unitary being – and helps clarify what our purpose in this body, at this time on this planet, actually is. When we are in alignment with our highest potential (and the Higher Brain/Higher Heart is leading the way) we are fulfilled and live a Fearlessly Authentic and Enlightened Life. In this higher way of living and being, what’s best for the personal you, is in perfect alignment with what’s best for everyone else in the world.
In the next chapter we are going to get a feel for the contours of this newly emerging world view, a world view that is not yet fully articulated and not yet fully created. The creators of this next Epoch will be the cultural creatives who are ready to make the leap. Are you one of them? I believe if you have gotten this far into this book you are.
For this aim I am going to consider everything above Epoch 5 as Epoch 6.
Many evolution of consciousness theorists consider what I am calling Life Altitudes 1 and 2 (or Epochs 1 and 2) to really be stratifications within one major epochal shift. Likewise, many consider what we are calling Epochs 4 and 5 to be one major epochal shift and that postmodernity is simply the upper reaches of the modern Epoch. I believe when we are considering what is still an emerging world view or world views we need not create too many demarcations or we run the risk of losing potency in the dissection. So I am going to handle Epoch 6 in
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the same way that many evolution of consciousness theorists refer to Epochs 4 and 5, as one seismic shift.
Truth be told we could probably create sub-stratas and further divide all of our previous epochal shifts but that would minimize the point of stepping back, taking the view from 50,000 feet and seeing where the large seismic shifts in consciousness and culture occurred, and rest assured, there have been times of large seismic shifts in consciousness and culture. The coming Epoch 6 appears to be a seismic shift that is greater than the sum of all previous Epochs combined.
I am not going to make an attempt at articulating an Epoch 7 but I will sub-divide Epoch 6 into a phase one and phase two that I will call ‘emergence’ and
‘ascension’.
I want to consider both phases as Epoch 6 because my intuition is once we emerge into the new atmosphere of Epoch 6 a sort of scaffolding in conscious-ness is created that allows for our very rapid ascent and the way we see future Epochs changes radically.
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Epoch 6 –
The Rise of the New Human
A Science Fiction Story?
Z
eina swooned towards the upward pull of a universal energy. A trans-per-sonal, trans-biological energy had engaged her, entered her, elevated her mind and swept across her body. Her body and mind felt fluid and filled with light. The energy soon began its synchronizing effect with the rhythms of her heart. Her heart thrust open as energy poured into it and coupled itself to her own life energy.This coupling effect created a reverberating circuit between her heart’s energy and the universal energy. With each cycle of this circuit, energy was thrust forward from her heart emanating back out to again combine with the source energy. She was synchronizing with, while adding her unique energy sig-nature to, the collective dynamic of the energetic field produced by thousands of new beings co-creating the new way.
She stood transfixed, feet firmly planted on the ground, eyes to the heavens, chest opened upwards. Her heart was filling with love, her mind with light, and her soul with truth. She was stunned by the realization that she was entangled with every being on her planet and could never again be alone, although she was, in that moment in space and time, alone. Minutes passed that felt like lifetimes and yet part of her was plunged into a timeless eternal NOW that contained no date or duration and was witnessing, but not entering, the passage of time.
The grip of synchronized energy fields slowly dissipated. She was released, but she was changed. Zeina had done her work and she had just experienced a punctuated shift into the pure ‘ground of being’, a ground of being that was the source of all matter and manifestation, energy and information in the world.
She recognized that absolute ground of being as her very own consciousness, which was not only the passive observer of all that was, but her consciousness was simultaneously set ‘in motion’ in the relative world that was being observed.
She was not only in a state of pure ‘being’ but also radical ‘becoming’. She was part of a new movement in the symphony of human history and there was no going back for Zeina, ever.
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The year was 2121 and a new day was dawning. A new era was rapidly approaching as the collective consciousness of the leading edge of humanity was bursting free of the restraints of pure reason into an expansive new meta-mind.
Humanity was ascending to a new summit of awareness; a unitary, evolutionary, enlightened new culture was being birthed. Revolution was in the air. A ground-swell was occurring as vast waves of people were going through the change and seeing a new world through new eyes. They were awake, aware and thriving in all aspects of their lives. This new shift in consciousness brought with it a beautiful new meaningful world.
In some strange way even the paradoxes, inconsistencies and apparent randomness of life now made sense. On a deeper level, beyond reason, above the intellect and out past the ordinary conditioned mind was a new understanding.
This new awareness revealed through the new human, a direct unshakeable knowledge that everything was just as it should be and heading towards greater and greater perfection.
The material world of buildings and bridges, flowers and trees, of inorganic matter and evolving species were all so brilliant and beautiful now. All of manifestation was rife with color, brilliant color everywhere. Everything that this new human observed seemed to ‘turn to gold’. Sights, scents, sounds, touches and tastes were more vivid than imaginable, and yet the world was also bestowed with meaning beyond and above what the senses could by themselves affirm. This evolving new human experienced an affirmation of truth in their consciousness that was direct and immediate. The new human had become a conduit for the source of ‘all that is’ to express itself through. Universal energy and information flowed through this new being as if she were an open circuit.
This flow of energy and information provided the fuel that was taken into oneself and used to purposefully drive evolutionary change.
Zeina was born while this new age of transformation was just getting started.
She had grown up in the new paradigm, she knew, as her leading edge com-munity knew, that evolution was the driving impulse of her own consciousness.
She understood evolution to be a cosmic and deeply spiritual process that was shot through the world of form at every scale and it was felt deeply in her very being. To Zeina and her people, evolution had become synonymous with ‘spirit in action’ and this world-creating process was emanating from her own depths.
She was infinitely powerful and she knew this came with a huge responsibility.
She, and those like her, who were awake enough to know, charged themselves with the uncompromising responsibility of creating a new future, a heaven on earth.
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Zeina’s people knew their very own consciousness as the ground of all being that the universe first burst from 13.8 billion years ago and through cosmic evolution has been churning out miracles ever since. The new evolving human’s life was intimately informed by this primal ‘ground of all being’, the pure consciousness that is simultaneously still, serene, peaceful and perfect.
And yet this new human was, paradoxically to the old conditioned mind – but clear to the new meta-mind – also in an ever-changing constant motion of upward striving, as each tomorrow is replaced with a new today through a relentless unfolding of evolutionary emergence, producing ever-greater depth and meaning in the world.
Darwinian evolution, ‘survival of the fittest’, had long ago given way to a more integral understanding of evolution. Darwinian evolution was fragmented, partial and most relevant only to a now bygone era. To this new human, evolu-tion was known to be bigger, deeper, purposeful, a cosmic process emanating from eternal consciousness and being, the ground. This ground of being, thrust its energy forward as evolution and started the universe from what was once considered by scientists to be ‘no-thing’.
A creative act of blaze and glory (once known as the ‘big bang’) was thrust forward and started winding up. The original soup of fiery matter and energy was repurposed through billions of years of purposeful experimentation until in miracle fashion, it created a shimmering planet in a far-off galaxy. This new planet was perfectly positioned with a set of highly improbable initial conditions that set the stage for life and sentience to emerge in the great cosmic scheme of becoming.
These precisely tuned initial conditions on and around this little blue planet Earth, allowed for the next ‘big bang’ as LIFE burst free from insentient matter and started winding itself up into ever-greater wholeness. This new emergence of ‘life’ in the cosmos relied heavily upon co-operation to ensure its survival long enough that it could again thrust itself forward into the unknown, in its relentless drive to adapt and grow. The new human identified herself directly with the 13.8 billion-year process that had created her. Her new consciousness could peer all the way back to her origins as the ground of all being, and know that she was indeed the leading edge of an unbroken multi-billion-year stream of upward momentum.
The staggering understanding that changed the evolutionary ‘rules of the game’ was that she now could consciously promote evolution by energizing and reorganizing the once listless higher structures of grey matter behind her forehead and waking up higher consciousness. She could self-generate higher
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new patterns of increasing brain complexity that were associated with an enlightened mind.
These new potentials needed only to be nudged into existence. The architec-ture for radical change was already seated in her brain, although its potential and the new level of consciousness it brought with it were only now being cultivated.
It had been known that the human brain’s most recent evolutionary advance-ment had been stifled for generations.
Long ago there had occurred an evolutionary leap in new brain form, which until recently had not yet turned into new brain function. The architecture and raw material of the higher brain had been laid down long ago through evolu-tion, and the potential for massive transformation currently boiled beneath the surface.
Her higher brain and its correlating higher consciousness allowed her to make choices as an agent of cosmic evolution. She knew she was not other to the process that had created her and this elevated awareness came with a moral imperative. She must promote and accelerate the very evolutionary process that she was. Therefore, ‘evolutionarily directed conscious choice’, which had become a new mechanism of evolution, was born in her, through her and as her.
These new people being in possession of the knowledge that the highest aspects of the human brain were dormant and associated with higher conscious-ness, performed decades of experimentation that led to an organic technological breakthrough that accelerated the remodeling of the brain and elevated con-sciousness. In the latter part of the 21st century it had become known that the energization and reorganization of certain higher brain structures could be accomplished through a new technique that promoted the mobilization of a once secret energy source in the human body. An energy source that, through this new technique, found its way to the higher brain, providing the energy needed for the new brain to wake up and remodel itself and its world into some-thing ever greater. This new human had ‘hacked’ evolution and was consciously evolving himself towards ever-greater perfection. The delivery system, the new technique and technology that promoted this new ‘energy to the higher brain’
had become a movement that was sweeping the world.
Through this new technique, information and energy was self-introduced, via a specific new code, into the latent subtle energy pathways of the human body. When this new code was precisely introduced with touch, breath, and intention, waves of sacred subtle energy were released, coursing through the recipient and finding the way to the dormant, latent evolutionary potential of the higher brain. Practitioners of the new discipline were rapidly being trained
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as this new movement grew. The influence of the new discipline was gaining momentum at quantum speed, spreading its influence throughout the world.
Gatherings were organized to amplify the effects, not only for oneself but for the benefit of humankind.
At these gatherings stories of a new world were shared and group practice of the new system that had led to the large-scale awakening of the higher brain and higher consciousness in humanity was experienced. These gatherings of the new Avant-garde were catalytic hubs spurring on the new movement; it was a time of epochal change, humanity had found a way to rapidly accelerate their own evolution.
Over time, the practitioners of this new discipline had developed permanent access to the higher brain and could instantaneously engage it and promote an accompanying sense of empowerment and enlightened consciousness. Having permanent access to the liberating potential of the new brain they re-charted the contours of reality. What they discovered led to a new meaning-making map, a map that when navigated from the higher brain perspective accelerated growth and evolution. Through the conscious navigation of the new map of the new territory this new map eventually became a permanent installation into the architecture of the higher brain and became downloaded into the interior labyrinth of the mind. The new map and its new contours of reality became the default pathways that reduced life’s complexity and accelerated the journey towards one’s highest truth.
With the continued navigation of this new map via new brain/mind strate-gies, the new human’s genetic expression was changing. The new human’s DNA was being driven to upgrade and it was reflectively emerging new outputs based
With the continued navigation of this new map via new brain/mind strate-gies, the new human’s genetic expression was changing. The new human’s DNA was being driven to upgrade and it was reflectively emerging new outputs based