Given the advantages we can experience through reconciliation with our intuitive self, it is surprising to consider that the vast majority of society goes through life without ever consciously taking the time to develop a relationship with this aspect of human experience. Preoccupied by the details of daily life, the demands of job, family, and existence in a material world, we have collectively relegated our inner world of soul, spirit, and being to a place of minor importance. We have lost our true identity. Tragically, we are no longer aware that something precious, an essential quality, has been lost to us.
Too often searching for security through material gain and worldly recognition, we have allowed our sense of values to become distorted. Our concepts of quality have been confused with those of quantity. Image has become more important than authenticity. We have become a people without purpose, without origins, and, therefore, without traditions to guide us on our way. The spiritual path, once recognized as a vocation which added value to the collective well-being of society, has been reduced, at the end of our 20th century, to an indulgence for the privileged few who can afford it, or else viewed as an escape for the marginal misfits who cannot find their way in a hard and competitive world. We have separated ourselves from nature, from the rhythm of the seasons, and from the very movement of the life-flow within our own bellies. We live our lives cut off from others, cut off even from ourselves, and we have lost an awareness of the mysteries that once belonged to us as a heritage of our incarnation.
Living, as we do, in a world full of fear, suffering, and sadness, we think it can be no other way. We cannot imagine a world united, a world at peace, a world in harmony with itself. We have, as a people, fallen far from a state of grace. The fall is reflected all around us, every day, in ways both large and small. We have lost our sense of community and fraternity. Others have become threats to us and we feel we must protect ourselves from their violence, separating ourselves, withdrawing. We have lost our sense of communion. We belong now only to ourselves and we are far from the God and nature to which we owe our origins.
We have lost our capacity to communicate and to offer with our words the gift of who we are. We can no longer share our hearts with others. So much has been lost, so much has been forsaken. In our urge to gain independence and express our individuality, we have made the collective mistake of cutting ourselves off from our roots, from our original source of nourishment. We have separated ourselves from our own hearts, from our own true being. Yet we wonder why we find the world so cruel, so hard, so lacking in heart and soul.
As a people, we face a collective crisis and we can only survive if we join together in integrity, fraternity, and authenticity. We must now come back to ourselves. We must reexamine our identities, our origins, and our destinies. We must contemplate why we have become so separated from ourselves, so cut off from others, so alienated from nature, from God, and from the Source. We must heal ourselves of our past traumas and create the possibility within ourselves for reconciliation—a reconciliation, above all, with our own being.
When we consider intuition as a nonfunctional capacity, we face the image of a human being advancing through life without reference to depth or essential being. Given a restricted access to inner resources and qualities fundamental to well-being, as well as a lack of an essential inner integrity, it is no wonder that so many people suffer from chronic depression, sadness, and despair. The roots of human alienation, of separation from original nature and essential being, can perhaps be traced back to the mythological fall from the grace of God and the misadventures in the Garden of Eden. The well-intentioned but badly executed search for self-knowledge has led us farther and farther from the essential truth of ourselves. At the same time, since we have answered many questions about the structure and nature of the physical universe, there are evident advantages to the search for understanding embarked upon so long ago. We need not go back so far in time, however, to explore what caused us to become so alienated from our intuitive selves. We need only look at life and the traditions by which we live it in today's world to find an explanation for the terrible fragmentation of our inner potential and integrity.
For the majority of infants born into the modern world, birth is a violent experience.
The process of labor and childbirth has always been something of a physical trauma for both mother and child, but, in natural circumstances, a few days of rest and recuperation restore both mother and infant to normal physical, emotional, and psychological good health.
The natural stress of labor and childbirth is a stress that babies are equipped to manage. The atmosphere into which newborns are delivered, however, is all too often cold, clinical, and noisy. Babies, taken from their mothers, umbilical cords swiftly cut and tied, are obliged to breathe instantly, with no transition time to adapt their lungs to the cold air by which they are suddenly surrounded. Whisked away, they are suctioned, injected, washed, tagged, measured, and weighed. The lucky ones are then returned to their mothers for contact and a cuddle. For others, it may be hours before they find themselves returned to the safety and security of maternal arms.
The hospital is cold and noisy. The lights are bright. Babies are handled by people they don't yet know. They are sensitive, vulnerable, innocent, fresh, and new to this world. They cannot speak, but that does not mean they are not aware. They are helpless, but that does not mean they cannot feel.
In fact, babies feel everything that is happening to them. They hear every noise, every word that is spoken. They may not understand, but that does not mean they do not experience. Too often they are born, in all their precious beauty and sensitivity to this world, only to be treated on arrival as insensitive objects, unaware of the environment. Newborns are not recognized as the beings that they are. They are not acknowledged as beings with sensitivity and intelligence, as souls with stories. They are not recognized for who they are beyond their newborn bodies. For this reason, the suffering in their beings will be terrible.
It is only because of the environment they are born into, because of the quality of welcome the babies receive, that birth is experienced as something violent. If, in the first precious hours of life, the being of each newborn is not recognized, acknowledged, and nourished, how can we expect the child to harbor this aspect of self intact? If we do not recognize the being in children and help them to maintain this essential and integral reference to themselves, they will surely forget who they are, as we have forgotten and as our parents have forgotten before us.
The way we come into this world is indelibly marked on us and within us. Many human beings never fully recover from the original trauma of their birth experience. Birth by violence, with instrumental intervention, into an environment that seems hostile and full of overwhelmingly new sensations, creates fear and even terror in the newborn. Infants breathe, but they breathe in fear. They breathe instinctively, for life, but they feel threatened and in a state of panic. They are frightened and overwhelmed and do not easily find the reassurance needed to calm them. Their sole point of reference, in the beginning, is the mother. If they can bond with the mother, if the mother can hold and nurse them, they will become secure and begin to recover from the birth trauma. If the mother is not available and cannot provide the comfort and security needed to relax and breathe naturally, the child will retreat into the trauma, which will remain on an unconscious level throughout life.
This trauma will influence babies' respiration, their emotional nature, and their psychological structure. The fear experienced in the first few hours of life will determine the future relationships they establish with their bodies, their breath, and their external environment. If the fear is not resolved and integrated, they will establish an instinctive fear-reflex toward life. Their breathing will be too shallow and too hurried—a stressed breath. They will become nervous, hypersensitive, and tense. Due to this state of inner tension, the circulatory systems of the body will have difficulty functioning efficiently, and they will not receive the physical and energetic nourishment they need to develop fundamental physical health and psychological well-being.
Lacking a basis of psychological security, it will be difficult for individuals to develop trust in themselves, in others, in life, and in existence. It will be difficult to relax, to let go. It will be almost impossible to imagine life as a process of gentle unfolding, as a journey of evolution. The external world will not seem friendly and welcoming. It will seem, rather, something to protect oneself against. A protective, defensive posture will be established in the physical body which will result in further physical and energetic blockages. A full and flowing respiration will be difficult to attain, thus causing a sense of alienation and separation from the physical body. Robbed of a sense of physical well-being, these individuals will find it virtually impossible to establish a sense of spiritual harmony and equilibrium.
We are subjected from birth to a whole host of parental expectations, projections, and behavioral programmings that influence both our social development and our fundamental sense of ourselves. We are molded by the ideas of our parents; we unconsciously conform to their expectations of us, behaving as they wish and accepting the limits they impose upon us. We are raised to perceive the world through their eyes and in relation to their personal experience. Very often, during adolescence in particular, we feel we must fight against the family to gain the right to discover, explore, and assume our proper originality. We are obliged to reject the traditional male/female stereotypes imposed by social conditionings in order to discover who we really are, to move beyond the definition given to us by the sex of the body into which we are born.
Regardless of their good intentions, our parents often make us feel imprisoned within their value system. Regardless of their love for us, they limit us by their conceptions of who we are and what we are capable of. If we stay within the confines of family traditions, we have a tendency to unconsciously reproduce the lives of our parents. Adhering to the standards expected of us, we maintain a certain security. By making this choice, however, we do not give ourselves the opportunity to discover our true potential and then develop it.
We are not taught to give importance to our spiritual well-being. Nor are we taught how to nourish our relationship with nature and light. From a very early age, we are conditioned to search outside ourselves for nourishment, entertainment, attention, and exchange. We are not taught to reflect, contemplate, and meditate. We are not told that we can find the answers to our questions within ourselves, in the stillness of our deeper being.
Our lives are organized in such a way that we do not find the time to take care of ourselves. We take care of the family, of work, of the house. Afterward, too often, there is no time left for other things. At the end of the day, we fall to sleep exhausted and the next morning, we begin again. We do not find the time to prepare nourishment that is balanced and wholesome and so we become tired, drained, and discouraged. We are stressed. There are too many details to attend to, too much noise, too much violence and abuse. We cannot breathe. We need to renew ourselves in nature, but we do not have the time, because there are too many other important and pressing things we must take care of first. We are caught in the trap of “doing” and “having”—and we are all caught in it together. We do not give ourselves the right to experience being and so the circle of stress continues to turn and we turn with it, trapped and going nowhere.
We do not find the answers we seek by thinking. Thinking is another series of circles bringing us back to our point of departure. Because of our dependence on the rational, logical mind and our belief that it is the only mind in which we can have confidence for solving problems and arriving at solutions, we propel ourselves deeper and deeper into despair. We have been collectively conditioned to give priority to the logical mind in all matters. We were trained for hours and hours at school to be rational and logical. We were taught to use our rational minds and to believe in logic, evidence, and scientific reasoning. We were conditioned to neglect the creative hemisphere of our brain. We were punished for “daydreaming,” for relaxing our concentration and allowing our imaginations to function. We were taught to believe that our personal value to society was largely determined by our scholastic capacity.
Between the pressures of school and the conditioning of the family, by the time we reach puberty, we have been programmed to accept belief systems about ourselves from which we will probably never escape as long as we live. Educated, socialized, and then integrated into the system of modern daily life, we live our lives the best that we can, using whatever resources we can find within us to help us through the difficult periods of questions, doubts, and mental depression.
Many of us are without religion, not because we were not born to it, but because the religion we were born to has not satisfied our criteria for what we feel religious experience should or could be. The Christian God, whether Catholic or Protestant, Anglican or Methodist, can hardly be considered a readily accessible God. If we follow the teachings of our churches, we must submit to the mediation of priests in order to have access to His presence, guidance, and wisdom.
The interpretations given to the teachings of Christ by the church have taught that we, as a people, are impure, tarnished, sinners by our very human nature. They teach that the physical body and our desire for pleasure are devilish temptations, taking us away from God and leading our souls to certain peril. If we believe what we have been taught by religion, there is little, if any, hope for us at all. The belief that we are imperfect and damned to exile from God's love because of our imperfection is deeply ingrained in those who have been touched by the Christian religion. Regardless of all that we may do or try to be, we will probably never arrive at the perfect purity demanded of us by our stern and judgmental Father.
In our churches, we are encouraged to pray and taught to trust in a higher good, in justice, and in mercy. We are guided to develop faith in the love of God. We are given values that help us to live in harmony, respect, and cooperation with our fellow human beings. We are taught about the importance of community spirit. We are reminded that God exists regardless of how far from Him we may have strayed.
But we are no longer taught that God and the Divine Spirit also exist within us. We are not encouraged to search for our God in nature. We are not encouraged to believe that, from a place of inner silence, in the deepness of our heart, we can speak with God and receive His love and healing for ourselves whenever we may need it. So, disappointed, we have turned away from religion. We do not close our eyes to pray; we do not meditate in the presence of our God.
We cannot say that any one person in particular is responsible for the state of neglect into which our spiritual well-being has fallen. It is difficult to debate with any certainty that the level of spiritual consciousness of our society is worse now than it was one, or two hundred, or even two thousand years ago. Certainly, we cannot reasonably hold our parents, our teachers, or our obstetricians responsible for the fact that we cannot organize our lives in a manner that will ensure our ongoing personal and spiritual evolution. At the same time, accepting all the responsibility on our own shoulders seems equally unreasonable and unnecessarily guilt-provoking.
It is as though we have all fallen into a long and deep sleep of collective forgetfulness. From this sleepy fog, it is extremely difficult to regain consciousness. The neglectful habits we have developed belong to all of us and so they do not seem to be habits at all, but rather the normal way of life of our day and age.
For all its tragedy and woe, our world remains a place full of hope and possibility. We have the mixed fortune of living in an epoch that is particularly fraught with mortal danger and, at the same time, bursting with evolutionary breakthroughs on the levels of human consciousness, scientific revelation, and global political negotiation and reconciliation.
The turn of a millennium is a time of endings, of completion. It is also a time of new beginnings. Collectively, humanity is facing a symbolic death, a death that will be followed naturally by rebirth. Individually, we are experiencing a process of alchemical transformation in our inner worlds of thought and feeling. As our century draws to a close, we are faced with the possibility of accelerated personal evolution. There is a “quickening” occurring in the global consciousness of humanity that signifies the long-awaited arrival of the Age of Aquarius, the New Age. Perhaps it is not arriving as we might have imagined it, but it is arriving nonetheless. We are all present and being whisked along by its coming. The effects of the acceleration are felt most strongly in our inner world, in the world of our consciousness. It is an epoch for insights, for revelations, and for breakthroughs. We are being offered the possibility of liberating ourselves from illusion, limitation, and unnecessary suffering. We find ourselves faced with the choice of greater individual freedom.
Reconciliation within ourselves and with our loved ones becomes an imperative rather than a preference. Internally we are transforming. We are becoming more sensitive, more perceptive. Our scale of values is shifting. We are searching for the meaning of quality and trying to rediscover our lost integrity. There is hope for our humanity. We are beginning to understand the meaning of responsibility, of fraternity, and of integrity.
Thanks to the epoch of which we are all a part, humanity will eventually give birth to a new philosophy of life. Within that philosophical framework, intuition will have a place of importance, a place of value, and a place of respect. Individuals will be encouraged to develop their intuition, to listen to their feelings, to follow their inner guidance. The capacity of each person to access and trust their inner truth will be integrated into the developmental programs of education from the earliest age. The being, with all its qualities and inner resources, will again find its place in the world.