Living in a Chaotic World
What do theories that deal with relativity, space and time curvature, the speed of light, big bangs, “cats in boxes” and particles have to do with how you and I live our lives?
I think that they are beginning to affect many of us and I would like to tell you a bit about how I see their impact on us as individuals. I see some new patterns, or beacons, emerging which have helped me explain to myself the previously un-explainable. I have also found a number of activities and a way of looking at the world which have helped me become better reconnected to the universe. So if you don’t mind, here is how Rob is affected by the new story and here are some of the pointers that he uses to find his way around in the new world.
Normal Reality
Most days I experience the world quite conventionally. After all, like you, I was brought up in the old story. I know that I am separate from you. I know that things are real, I can’t walk through walls. I know that big boys can beat up smaller ones. I know that if I don’t control everything and everyone around me there will be chaos. I know that should be a rational answer for everything. I know that I will have to struggle for everything that I want. I know that I am responsible for all my family and even for some of my friends. I know that my father has been dead for 18 years. I can no longer hold his hand or hear his voice. My slipped chest, my graying hair and my need to wear glasses tell me how real time is. I fear the day of my own death, the day that I will be separated from all that I “know”.
New Reality
But on other days, on my good days, I experience the world quite differently. I know that work will arrive when I need it. I know that as I help a young girl with her heavy luggage, a stranger will do the same for my daughter. I know that my “rival” at the bank has helped me more than most “friends”. I can hold my glass of wine and feel the sun on the vines. I can have “bad” things happen to me and know that I am fine. I can find the most difficult work easy. I can meet a stranger and find a soul mate. I can hug my son and hug my father. I can look into the mirror and see the boy that I still am. I can look up at the night sky and know that I am at the very centre of all time and all existence.
Sometime during this decade I crossed a line and a “New Reality” burst into my life. Now I spend more and more of my time consciously in the “New”. The New, for me, is a reality informed by the rules of connection, relationships and is nourished by an eternal source of energy.
Does the idea of a “Line” make sense to you? Can you recall when you lived only in the old? Can you now, in the first seconds of meeting another know if the new person has crossed the Line as well? How many people in the new do you meet now? Is this number growing and how fast? Do you feel sad that many of your long standing friends and members of your immediate family, maybe even your spouse, are on the other side? Do you know enough now to be careful about who you open up to in conversation.? Does it surprise you that you can be completely open to a stranger who has crossed the line?
Did you have a guide who put out their hand to you when you were standing in fear on the far side of the Line? How did they help you find the courage to take that first step? Who was this person? Was she or he a stranger or someone close to you? What role do you play when you meet others who are trembling alone at the edge?
Did you discover that you had new and powerful powers of discernment about people and events? What kind of trouble did you get yourself into with these new powers? How much do you trust these powers now? Have you found that if you channel these new powers into an intention that you, without any effort, can do great things?
Intention
Have you discovered the power of Intention? I suspect that Intention is the process that enables us to co-create a new world. I have found that if my intention is pure that I can become part of a new evolution of reality. I have found that a pure Intention has some rules. If I include the how, it does not work. If I include just me, it does not work. If I exclude others, it does not work.
Intention seems to drive another key process “Synchronicity”. I experience Synchronicity when things and people turn up in the right way and the right time. Synchronicity makes all work seem easy. I have found that a key rule for supporting Synchronicity is to keep my need to control people and events to the minimum. Synchronicity seems to drive wonderful accidents.
How big is Synchronicity in your life right now?
Synchronicity is mainly about Connections. Hope, our daughter, can be eating a meal in a small village in Turkey be told that she must come outside and meet a man who looks exactly like her brother James. The young man standing outside is identical to our son James and has the same name, James. Known as Jamie, he is the son of a friend of mine at University whom I last saw 27 years ago in England. How does the universe set these meetings up? What do they mean? Do they happen to you and how often?
Better Connections seems to improve our health and our peace of mind. In the new reality, it seems that a clear objective in life, an aim in itself, is to improve the number and quality of our connections. This appears to be a rule. As the internet expands, it becomes more robust. We are disabled by strokes because they reduce the number and the quality of connections in our brain. Have you noticed how much better you feel as your family of soul mates expands? Have you noticed how every aspect of your life improves? I am going as far as to say that my network of connections is the source of what I might broadly define as my Wealth.
Wealth
I always used to think of Wealth as having a lot of money. My purpose for the first part of my life was to increase the amount of money I had. I still think that money is important but I am now seeing that my Wealth is much broader than just money. I now see it as a function of the number and quality of my Connections. My connections bring me work and hence indirectly they bring me money. Much of what I bring to my work are my connections. I am able to bring other people’s skills which balance out mine. But this new kind of wealth is much more powerful than money. These connections bring me peace of mind and comfort. They therefore also bring me something that money cannot buy, they create the larger me. I have started to think of myself as a painting. Each person who sees a painting sees something different from other people. So each new connection exposes a new part of me to myself and to the universe. This is why I think that I am created by my interaction with others. I think that this is an important insight. It explains why those people who are not well connected seem to shrink. Does this make sense to you? Think of a time when you were so busy that you drifted away from others. How did you feel? More human or less? Think of a time when you were strongly linked to others. How did you feel then? The paradox is that when we have a difficult challenge in front of us, we often default in the doing and lose the connections and hence our power. Maybe a better way is to begin by reinforcing the connections?
As I have found the benefit of improving the number and quality of my human connections, so I have begun to notice an improvement in my life as I increase and improve the number and quality of my connections with the natural world. If you want to become better reconnected to the rhythms of the universe, think of living in a place where you are connected to the change of the seasons and have access to the night sky. Seasons and the moon have a huge impact on us: if we let them into our lives. When I lived in the big city, my life was full speed ahead no matter what the season and of course I could not see the night sky and therefore lost touch with the moon. There was no rhythm to my life. Now I live on Prince Edward Island where these forces are quite manifest. Do you feel the pull of the moon and do you change your life significantly with the change of the seasons?
Robin and I garden. She gardens and I putter really. Beyond being more closely connected to plant life (no small thing!), gardening has enabled me to connect to many species of animal and insect. It has also reconnected me to the soil itself. Soil has shifted from being “Dirt” to being a valuable living organism. Other than earwigs, we try not to kill any living thing. Sharing my dinner in the summer in the garden with the wasps has become an interesting interaction. Do you garden? Even having a window box is a good start. Do you have the time to garden?
Time and being busy were the critical barriers to my own ability to reconnect to the most important connection, to myself. The paradox of being reconnected to the universe, which seems all out there, was becoming reconnected to myself. I have come to believe that any relationship that I have with an outer being depends essentially on the quality of the relationship that I have with myself. So long as I was all over the place in myself, how could I be in a quality relationship with anyone or anything else. So long as I was so busy, I did not know who I was. Do you feel satisfied with the relationship that you have with yourself? Do you know the lies that you tell yourself?
Connected to Myself
The most important revelation that has opened up for me, is that being connected to myself, going in rather than going out, means that I am never alone anymore. The universe is not just out there, it is also in here. As this belief seeps into my being, I am beginning to realize that I will never be alone again.
This is not new wisdom. It is the oldest wisdom of our species. The difference is, I suspect, that this wisdom is becoming immanently known to an ever widening group of people. There is something about our time that is awakening many people. Its not just the baby boom and midlife crisis. Have you noticed that this process of crossing the Line is happening to people of all ages. I see it happening to younger friends in their thirties. I see it happening to people in my parent’s generation and, most wonderful of all, I see that my children, in their early twenties and late teens, are already there. I see that nearly all young children are there anyway.
Maybe all young children have always been there. Something, maybe school, happened which caused us to forget and to go back to a world of burdens and loneliness. Maybe we listened too carefully to Paul who told us to put away childish things and we forgot the teachings of Jesus who told us that heaven was only available to those that had become like children again. So we forgot what it is like to trust, to be filled with wonder, to know that to play is to learn, to use our bodies as well as our minds.
Eyes of a Child
I am now convinced that a good way for us to our lives consciously in the universe is to look at children with fresh eyes. To see our children as our teachers. To live our lives more like them than like us.
I don’t mean that adults should aim to be more childish. I suspect that this is the one unpleasant aspect of childhood that we have not given up. I am talking about being more childlike. Can you remember how you felt to see snow for the first time? To walk up to a stranger and say “Can I be your friend?. To know that what you really need right now is a big hug? To be so sad one moment and so happy the next? To be told that grandpa has gone to heaven and to know that he is safe and OK? To have to get off your bottom right now and run around the garden? To hear a story and know that it is real? To know that the next meal will be on the table?
My intention is to bring back the boy Robert into my daily life. He was, and is, the finest part of me. I have a photo of him by my desk. He is about 6, wearing shorts and a sweater, on the beach in Cornwall, England. He holds an anchor and is calling to his sister Diana.
He is saying something like, “Come here and play with me, it is such fun!”
To live like this is truly to be alive.
