THE NEW DIRECTION
In opposition to humanity’s current self-serving and self-destructive dominator scenarios, our involvement with the New Mysteries encourages a return to the nature-revering spirituality of our ancestors, one that will lead us toward a reconnection with the world soul. The shamanist persuasion enables a new level of connection with the great mystery of life because that is where the mystic road begins.
In my own practice, I continue to explore what’s possible through my journeywork. Once in relationship with the hidden worlds, each of us may receive revelations and teachings directly from our inner sources of wisdom and power. These include our helping spirits, our personal oversoul, our Spirit Guide, as well as the world soul herself.
A NEW FOUNDATION
The awareness that we can achieve such connections with the sacred central intelligence agency (SCIA) of the earth, of nature, stands at the epicenter of the New Mysteries. It is an integral part of our re-enchantment, one that may convey to us the knowledge and certainty of our ecological niche, our job description within Sophia’s dream (see chapter 3). Only this, in my humble opinion, will reveal to us the current shape and direction of our destiny as souls traveling across time. And only this may encourage us to behave in ways to soften the environmental catastrophe that now seems to be on final approach.
In thinking about what has been from my perspective as a pre-historian, and in contemplating the various possibilities of what’s coming into being from my perspective as a shamanist, several givens come up for consideration. For example, we are living in a time of great change, with things coming apart. This is also a time in which increasing numbers of spiritual seekers are leaving our mainstream religions. Yet as I have indicated, this is not an atheistic movement.
Given the number of websites and workshops devoted to exploring different aspects of spirituality and the unending avalanches of well-intentioned books written on these and related subjects during the past several decades, an interesting possibility now arises.
Among the shamans of the traditional peoples, it was always understood that each new generation across time had the responsibility to perpetuate and refresh a continuously re-created tradition—even adding to and changing the accumulating horde of spiritual treasures—as they made it their own. For it was always in this way that this ancient visionary road remained both vital and meaningful to those who were walking it.
With the ending of this cycle, we now have the same sacred responsibility that our ancestors carried. To act on this will require courage as well as the willingness to bless and let go of anything—religious or otherwise—that is outdated and no longer serves us. This is about shedding burdens. And at the same time, this is not just about the deconstruction of what was. It is also about the building of what is coming into being. It’s about the creation of a new spiritual foundation, a new worldview, a new cultural mythos, a new story. This deserves our full attention.
MAX ZELLER’S DREAM
Toward the end of the 1940s, the esteemed psychologist Carl Jung had a conversation with his friend Max Zeller who told him about a recurrent dream he had been having.1 In the dream, Zeller saw uncountable numbers of people, and of every race and culture, working on what appeared to be the foundation of an immense temple. As far as he could see, all the way to the horizon and in all directions, swarms of people appeared to be raising an endless number of great stone pillars; in fact, Zeller himself was one of those engaged in this huge task within his dream.
When he asked Jung if he knew the meaning of the dream, Jung responded that he did. When queried further, Jung said the great temple was the new religion coming into being and that vast numbers of people were already actively involved in its construction.
Zeller then asked Jung how he knew this to be so, to which the psychologist responded that many of his clients had reported having the same dream and that he himself had had it. When Zeller then asked Jung how long he thought it would take to create this new religion, Jung told him “six hundred years” with a twinkle.
Six hundred years—it was approximately this span of time required to formalize and codify the new religion of early Christianity that supposedly began within a Judean splinter group called the Zaddikim during the Roman period in Judea and then expanded dramatically in response to the Roman emperor Constantine’s conversion in the fourth century. Backed by the military might of the Roman Empire, Christianity came to dominate our current age for the next seventeen hundred years, and from that time to the present, the popes became (and still are) the emperors of Rome.
THE CYCLE OF AGES AND A NEW RELIGION
In Awakening to the Spirit World, I wrote about the four stages through which we have passed during the great cycle of ages just completed, a cycle that lasted for perhaps twenty-six thousand years. The first stage was the late Stone Age, a period that extended from perhaps 26,000 to 12,000 BCE in which humanity was still engaged in hunting and gathering as a lifeway. The second stage was the Mesolithic-Neolithic period, which extended from 12,000 to 4000 BCE, heralding the beginnings of agriculture and settled communities. The third stage could be called the classical period, which included the rise of civilization states extending from the Sumerians around 5000 BCE to the end of the Roman period. The fourth stage has lasted from the rise of Christianity in the fourth century CE to the present, a span of about seventeen hundred years.
In the first stage, the dominant spiritual practice was shamanism—nature-focused spirituality. In the second, it was shamanism plus the awareness of nature as personified as the great goddess, perhaps; we don’t really know, but we begin to find small portable images of women rendered in stone and ivory and ceramic with increasing frequency. In the third stage, polytheism appears in association with the first state-level societies accompanied by the belief in many high gods and goddesses above nature. And in the fourth stage, monotheism emerges, a form of polytheism with many deified saints and sages but with a supernatural emperor, father-god, or CEO on top. In other words, with each stage a new religion came into being, and as our perceptions of ourselves and our societies became more complex, more stratified, and more centralized, so did our collective mythos about the supernatural realms. The same thing is happening now.
We are now at the beginning of the next cycle of ages, and the attentions of a substantial portion of our population have turned toward spirituality as reflected in the plethora of books and workshops on mysticism, shamanism, Buddhism, mindfulness meditation, Zen, Taoism, Kabbala, Sufism, and Gnosticism. Then there is the avalanche of books and workshops on self-awareness, personal development, and finding our soul’s purpose, which reveal that more and more of us are growing beyond our old belief systems and the religions in which we were raised and are embracing a more expanded version of ourselves, as well as who and what we are becoming in a new way. In drawing upon all these resources, it does seem that a new kind of religion or spiritual complex is quietly taking form.
Increasing numbers of us are searching for enhanced self-awareness on the one hand and reconnection with the archetypes that our visionary ancestors sought out across time on the other—with those authentic transpersonal beings who are poised and willing to help us and who always seem to want the best for us. This impulse seems to be part of a progression forward and upward toward the new spiritual complex. This may be the new religion described by Jung at whose center can be found that cluster of core beliefs held by the transformational community. I have written about these in my other books and will add a few more points here.
The mysteries in every age have always begun with the adventure of self-discovery—with the quest to find out who and what we really are, where we came from, and what our purpose for being here is. It has always been through this quest that we have acquired an enhanced awareness of what our life lessons are, the ones on which we are currently working and the ones that reveal our path through this life.
As we progress in our quest, the process is much like peeling an onion, whereby we remove those outer layers that we took on unconsciously from our families and friends and from society at large—those social values and beliefs and morals about who we think we are (or should be), as well as who we are afraid we are (or not). As we peel them away, we find within our essential self the lost light of our true spiritual nature, which usually has nothing whatsoever to do with the script that most of us were handed at birth by our parents and by the culture or the religion in which we were raised.
Connection with our authentic inner oversoul seed of light provides us with a greater understanding of who and what we really are, and yet as we discover this, we learn that we must also practice discernment as to how much of our new awareness can interface with that of our families and friends, as well as with society at large. For it is not in alignment with the visionary path to create disharmony or discord, although this does sometimes happen.
The kahuna Hale Makua observed often that the first question we must address is, who are we? This brings us to return to the discussion in chapter 6 on the three souls that come together to create the self. It is of interest that in Buddhism’s central doctrines, now very popular in the West, the self is often proclaimed to be an illusion. From the perspective of the Polynesian kahuna mystics and many other indigenous peoples, this proclamation is in deep error. There is indeed a self that we develop in each life. In fact, there are two selves, our higher spiritual “overself” that resides forever in the dreaming, and our physically manifested earthly self here. And it is through this dual vehicle of the two selves that we as immortals travel across time.
And why is this correction so important? Because in order to experience authentic initiation, to become who and what you are to become as an authentic being in life, you have to know who you are. And your dual-natured self is most definitely not an illusion.
THE PATH THAT ONLY WE WALK ON
When we step onto our path—the path that only we walk on—the New Mysteries beckon, inviting us into the deeper levels of wisdom where we may learn much about the nature of reality and how this interfaces with the nature of ourselves.
In my experience as a scientist and a shamanist, this wisdom cannot be acquired from belief systems or scripture, nor can it be gleaned from faith alone. It must be derived from the direct connection with the transpersonal worlds that are all around us as well as within us. For as Saint Symeon and Hale Makua knew, this experience alone conveys upon us the mantle of authentic initiation. As we receive this mantle, everything changes. Through meditative shamanist journeywork, the spiritual seeker may experience the great field of power that underlies and infuses everything everywhere with life force, a field of which your own soul complex is an expression. As I have mentioned, the life force is continually emanated by the Originator, whose profound accomplishment at the universal level is the transformation of inorganic energy and matter into organic life, ultimately leading to the evolution of sentient (self-aware) life forms that eventually transmute themselves to become godlike beings who step up and into the spiritual hierarchy.
This is the purpose of the universes, and we are all going in this direction. At the end of our evolution as souls, we will merge once again with the Source, which will incorporate into itself the gifts of everything that we have done and become during our long journey across time. It is in this manner that the Originator grows, increases, and becomes more as it travels across eternity. And eternity is a long time.
This is a central theme in this book, and it is my hope that my field reports will enhance your own visionary investigations, encouraging you to go where few embodied souls have gone before.
Another central theme reveals that the visionaries of the old mystery schools knew that the great field of living light—the great central sun, which is the Source, the Originator—is impersonal and remote, and yet their experience has shown that when conditions are favorable, this field can and does respond in subtle ways, giving us that “one taste” that the philosopher Ken Wilber has described in his book One Taste: Daily Reflections on Integral Spirituality.2 Insights such as these can completely change the one who receives them, and as we are transformed, so is the world. This gives us something to look forward to, wouldn’t you agree? And if personal transformation is what you are searching for, sooner or later it will catch up with you and find you.
Through the consciousness of the millions of spiritual seekers at large in our time, the new religious complex that Max Zeller and Carl Jung talked about more than sixty years ago is quietly taking form, one that will likely replace or at the least considerably change our current mainstream religious traditions. And given our sophisticated and global systems of communication, this may happen in considerably less than six hundred years.
The New Mysteries now ask us an all-important question: How is each of us to define our own personal standard of humanity? In searching for answers, we have the potential to achieve a higher value. The word value in this sense refers to our attitudes that inform and mold our behaviors. And it is precisely here that our behaviors may embrace the foundation stone of Indigenous Mind—respect—rather than the foundation stone of the Western world—domination—and this is worth considering.
Within the transformational community, increasing numbers of people seem to be concerned with the quality of life at all levels of society, and human relationships are perceived as more important than personal gain. This awareness reveals that the new spiritual complex coming into being has a deeply humanistic focus at its center, one that is giving rise in our time to a new form of mystical humanism, one in which the old divisions between liberal and conservative, between Jew and Christian and Muslim, between Buddhist and Hindu, or between conservative patriot and progressive liberal become transparent.
I personally find this perspective to be deeply reassuring, as being a humanist has everything to do with being a progressive in the evolved sense of those words. Although the Western world continues to be driven by greed and fueled by denial, motivated by fear, and dominated by competition, members of the transformational community are oriented toward democratic, humanistic ideals, and we tend to favor cooperative endeavors that benefit the many.
The importance of balance and harmony lies right at the core of our values, and in this respect, we, like the indigenous peoples, have grasped that humans must strive to live their lives in ways that contribute to the greater good of all rather than following lifestyles and pursuing goals that create its opposite.
The time has come for all of us, including our leadership, to turn toward our higher nature, to bring out the best in ourselves in order to lift our anchor out of the negative polarity and re-sink it into the positive so that we may work together to create connection and community with an enhanced sense of purpose and mutual cooperation.
To quote a Hawaiian saying, “We are all in the canoe together, and if we keep paddling in the right direction and we keep bailing, we’ll reach the island.”
A HUMANIST PERSPECTIVE
At the moment that we achieve this level of awareness, we step up to be in service to our colleagues, friends, and family members, and even humanity at large, all those who are still entrapped in samsara—the world of illusion—assisting them so that they may ascend to the next level in their own personal evolution as souls traveling across eternity. However, this is not about missionizing the unready and the unwilling. It is not our job to inflict self-realization upon others, because it simply doesn’t work that way. The experience unfolds in layers for those who are prepared, for those heroes who are ready, willing, and able to assume the chase.
Hale Makua was fond of observing that in the positive polarity, the practice of the priest, the shaman, the mystic, or the healer is and forever will be about compassionate action, thought, feeling, speech, and relationship with the other, whoever and whatever the other might be. No judgment. It is only in the positive polarity, not the negative, that the spiritual teacher or practitioner can be a healer or a teacher by example, and thus a world redeemer. This is the bodhisattva path on which exalted souls walk—those who have completed their evolutionary cycle of embodiments and who are ready to step up and into the spiritual hierarchy but who choose to postpone their own “nirvana” so that they may return again and again, coming back into this world of pain and suffering to be of service to all those still stuck in their stuff. In addition, Makua said often that it is only when we are in the positive polarity that it becomes possible to connect with our helping spirits, our spirit teachers, our Guide, and our ancestors.
Makua also gently observed that the negative polarity of the priest or priestess, the missionary or healer, is zeal. The negative polarity is not necessarily bad, although it certainly can be. When we are in the negative polarity, we discover that nothing can be accomplished on behalf of others or ourselves. Yet this is where we often learn our lessons.