The world is ready for the advent of a new stage of human consciousness and action. It is time for a “planetary birth experience,” a collective awakening, an experience of shared empathy, love, and creativity. Just as we once evolved from Neanderthal to Homo sapiens through a mysterious set of circumstances, not fully understood, so now we are emerging as Homo universalis, a species capable of conscious evolution on Earth and beyond.
What are signs of the emergence of a new era of evolution? Ken Carey wrote in The Third Millennium:
A mother never knows exactly what hour she will give birth to her child, but she has a “due date,” an approximate time when the baby is expected and will most likely be born. For millennia now there have been those in various traditions of both East and West who have known that the earth has a due date sometime during the second decade of the 21st century. Though there will be much awakening of individuals prior to the first unified movement of the awakened planetary organism, this movement, like a first breath, will occur in but a single moment.1
Such a planetary awakening is happening now because the timing is right in relationship to our planetary life cycle. Let’s continue with our biological analogy. A newborn baby awakens at a specific time in its life cycle, just after it has made its journey from the comfort of the womb into the harsh and strange world. The child finally rests at peace. At one delightful moment, which cannot be predicted yet is expected, the infant awakens, relaxes, opens eyes that have never seen — eyes that were created in the darkness of the womb. For the first time the womb-veil thins, light floods in, and the infant focuses and sees its mother. A radiant glow of recognition and joy crosses its face and animates its body. It has come home to the new world, never to go back again.
Let’s compare ourselves as a planetary organism to a biological organism just after birth. We are facing a trauma that could be compared to the trauma a baby faces after birth. We are Generation One, the first generation on this Earth to consciously be aware that we can destroy ourselves by our own actions or evolve ourselves by our own choices. We are struggling to coordinate ourselves as one global system, feeling the panic of running out of Mother Earth’s resources. We are learning to change our energy consumption, to grow our food in healthier ways, to handle our own waste, to stop overpopulating and polluting, and far more. As we do so, we are beginning to recognize we are all members of one planetary body.
For the first time, in the 1960s during the Apollo program we opened our Earth-bound eyes, saw ourselves from outer space, and were amazed at the beauty of our Earth as a whole. For one brief moment we saw no boundaries, no nations, and no walls to divide us.
Now, millions of us are awakening to our participation in the whole, as our planetary body integrates and links up throughout the world. The internet, mobile phones, social media, and many other elements of our rapidly growing planetary nervous system are connecting us as individuals and groups, beyond the confines of time and space.
The process is unfolding. Let’s imagine that the internet is informing us of what is now working to evolve our world. Let’s assume that the NewNews in all its forms is communicating to us the news of who we are becoming. But we are still in a postnatal torpor, traumatized and confused by the abruptness of the changes we are undergoing. Many of us are without hope, without the sense that our future is desirable and attractive, forgetting that each of us has a part to play. Yet, as Teilhard de Chardin writes in The Future of Man, “The whole future of the Earth, as of religion, seems to me to depend on the awakening of our faith in the future.”2 At times, we live with an ominous sense of impending doom, which is realistic. We have never seen another planet go through a transition period wherein its inhabitants were able to create so many offspring, so much technology, and such high levels of pollution and waste. If we do not quickly adjust to our new condition, we may die. Our birth could be a death. The dangers we face are life threatening, just as the newborn infant faces critical problems that must be quickly handled or it will die.
Something more is needed to awaken us as a whole — an infusion of life, love, appreciation, and security to comfort us in our time of trial. Remember, everything that rises converges. The planetary dissipative structure is reaching maximum instability. Everything we do counts, especially in this critical time. Will the impulses of health and creativity prevail soon enough to counter the acceleration toward environmental and social breakdown?
Among the many things that are needed to facilitate the positive shift is a catalytic series of events to connect us spiritually, emotionally, and practically — events with such powerful impacts that the global state of mind will be changed, events so inspiring that the world will never again doubt that we have the capacity and the will to make it, that everyone on Earth has a chance to survive and grow, that each of us is needed, and that all of us are part of the universal creative process.
Originally, I envisioned a single Planetary Birth Day celebration. We had had two great Earth Days to awaken us to our environmental crisis. This, however, was to be the first Planetary Birth Day. It would awaken us to our creativity, our love, and our potential for life ever evolving.
The vision for this Planetary Birth Day first came to me on an afternoon walk in Connecticut in February of 1966. The trees stood black and brittle against the winter sky. I wrapped my scarf around my face and set out walking. I had been reading Reinhold Niebuhr on the subject of community, and he quoted St. Paul’s famous statement: “For as the body is one, and hath many members, and all the members of that one body, being many are one body, so also is Christ.”
I started contemplating what story we had that was equivalent to the birth of Christ — what story would change everything? My thoughts quieted. I was poised from within to catch the slightest hint of revelation. Suddenly, my mind’s eye penetrated beyond the blue cocoon of Earth, lifting me up into the utter blackness of outer space. From there I witnessed the entire sweep of Earth’s history, as though I were seeing a Technicolor movie.
I saw Earth as a living body, just as the astronauts did. It was alive.
I experienced a kinesthetic imprint of the planetary organism. I felt myself to be a cell in that body. Earth was gasping for breath, struggling to coordinate itself as a whole. I felt hunger, war, torture, disease, and species extinction. The pain was so great that we all literally stopped and paid attention to the suffering at the same moment. This shared pain was the trigger for the planetary birth experience.
Then I witnessed a flash of light, more radiant than the sun, surround the planet. Empathy began to course through our planetary body and through all people. The walls that separated us spiritually dissolved. Each of us began to hear in our own inner voices and see in our own images the experience of Spirit. I felt the various organs in the social body — innovations in health, education, energy, justice, and spirituality — begin to coordinate into a whole system. I felt an uprising of light. We were becoming a glowing Earth. I heard a tone, a vibration of resonance, connecting all of us in a moment of global coherence.
Then I heard these inner words clearly: “Our story is a birth. It is the birth of humankind as one body. What Christ and all great beings came to Earth to reveal is true. We are one body, born into this universe. Go tell the story of our birth.”
I saw billions of us open our collective eyes and smile. It was a planetary smile, like the first smile of a newborn baby: When seeing her mother, her tiny face relaxes into an amazing radiant smile. She knows her mother, even though she has never seen a human being. Just so, each of us has a deep place within our heart that experiences some aspect of the Light of Life itself.
This expanded vision deeply imprinted itself in my consciousness. Every time I shared the experience, it was almost like “remembering” something that had actually happened to me personally. Since I had intuited a new vocation — as a storyteller of the birth experience to help others feel it — I was always looking for opportunities to manifest the vision in real terms. I made a beautiful film called Visions of a Universal Humanity, which describes the actual planetary birth experience and calls us all to manifest it in action. Visit Evolve.org to rent the film on demand or buy the DVD.
When I first wrote this book in 1998, I envisioned an event something like the first Earth Day for our Birth Day, in the model of the great Live Aid global satellite broadcast in 1985, which linked more than two billion people for eighteen hours on the theme of hunger. Our Planetary Birth Day would link as many, if not more, for a twenty-four-hour celebration of the creative potential of humanity in the third millennium.
As I developed the idea, I asked myself, What elements would be key to such an event? What ingredients could contribute to our ongoing planetary birth experience?
The first element is spiritual. Everyone who prays, meditates, or contemplates does so during such events. We have prepared for this element during many world healing and world peace days. Countless people are already linking up in meditations across the planet. For events related to our planetary birth experience, everyone is asked to participate at the same time. This is possible in today’s globally connected world. During these kinds of experiences, people from every religion, culture, and tradition are aligning their thoughts and prayers on humanity’s potential for goodness and creativity.
Prayers and meditations are communicated via all media from all regions of the world. Poems of praise for the potential of humanity are heard around the world. Forgiveness is offered and received as groups everywhere pray that the illusion of separation be dissolved and ask for forgiveness for the pain we have inflicted upon one another, upon other species, and upon Earth herself.
The second element is emotional; it touches the heart. Musicians perform live in all parts of the world, playing their indigenous music in celebration of humanity’s potential. The music arouses our love and compassion. We feel empathy toward one another, expanding beyond family, tribe, and nation to embrace the world. We feel the excitement and expansion that often bursts forth in large parades and celebrations and during great sports events.
Imagine planetary concerts. All kinds of music interweave until we hear one planetary beat, one musical heartbeat pulsating rhythmically throughout Earth. It entrances and aligns our hearts and minds. One sound that can be hummed and sung in every tongue emerges from the planetary symphony. It is said that the note may be D-flat, known as the tone of Earth. It is the vibration that has been measured coming forth from healers in the act of healing. People attune to the tone. Brain waves and heartbeats synchronize. Tensions ease, intuitions rise, and love is felt as a palpable opening of the heart.
A third great element is the practical. From every region and culture social innovators and creators link up via the internet and phones, communicating the NewNews from all over the world, as imagined by Neale Donald Walsch in his biography of me entitled The Mother of Invention.3 Pragmatic and caring voices say to the planetary child, “We can feed, we can house, we can educate, we can restore, we can explore, we can cooperate, we can cocreate.” For we are already doing it when we are in coherence, resonance, and connection with what’s working. Vignettes of successful projects are communicated via global satellite, just as instances of overcoming hunger were communicated during Live Aid, interspersed at that time with the song “We Are the World.” The combination of prayers, music, and demonstrations causes a new awareness to course through the minds of billions of people simultaneously. Such events reveal the trends that these innovations can lead to, inviting artists, poets, and dancers to celebrate their visions of what humanity can become when we grow up.
Let your imagination soar now and see that people begin to gather in the streets, malls, churches, temples, mosques, in the bush and fields, in cities, towns, and villages. When the Berlin Wall came down people joined in joyful celebration of their liberation. Now thousands of Berlin Walls begin to come down — the walls within our hearts that hold back the pent-up love dammed by our illusion of separation and our fear of one another. Not only do we remember that Earth has no physical boundaries or borders, but we now feel in our hearts that false stereotypes, labels, and customs do not divide us against one another. We feel an uprising of love and forgiveness.
We have had many intimations of this type of experience: We felt it during VJ Day when the war with Japan was over. I was in an apartment in New York City when the announcement came. I heard a roar from the city as people opened their windows and cried out with joy. People flooded into the streets. An irresistible tide of relief and celebration brought people into each other’s arms. Strangers were hugging and kissing with abandon. I went into the street and was carried away by the enthusiasm of the crowd.
We felt it again when Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon. Bells rang throughout the world. We identified ourselves as the people of Earth on a new world. We saw glimpses of such outpouring in the “Reach Out and Touch” ceremonies at the 1984 Olympics, when people in the stadium were asked to reach out and touch people from all nations and backgrounds. As I watched the feelings mount, I knew that a sense of joining wanted to spill out of the stadium, that the millions watching on television wanted to reach out also. But we were isolated in our separate homes.
It happened again during Live Aid. It happens during worldwide meditations; it happens whenever two or more of us are joined together in our love for Earth, for one another, and for Spirit. Now it’s beginning to happen more consciously, in real time, to celebrate and affirm what is being born now.
On December 22, 2012, fourteen years after this book was first published in 1998, I coproduced (with Stephen Dinan, CEO at The Shift Network) an actual live planetary birth experience called Birth 2012. December 21, 2012, marked the end of a phase of the Mayan calendar, and many people mistakenly interpreted that event as marking the “end of the world.” Mass media told stories of apocalypse; people were selling their homes and running away to hide. It was obvious to most of us that the world was not going to end on that day. But it was true that something was ending: the form of consciousness marked by the illusion that we are separate from nature, from Spirit, and from one another.
In response to this transition, my Foundation for Conscious Evolution came together with Dinan’s Shift Network — a teleseminar company that communicates the messages of hundreds of transformational, spiritual, and evolutionary teachers — to cocreate a global event called Birth 2012 to celebrate the birth of a new era of evolution. A remarkable gathering of people at hubs, in circles, and at celebrations occurred all over the world.
We had 537 registered hubs in countries including Australia, Brazil, Canada, Egypt, England, Scotland, Guatemala, Mexico, India, Thailand, Japan, Kenya, and the United States. The event was broadcast on PeaceDay TV online through several hundred sites. A portion was broadcast on Peace of Mind TV, which may have reached as many as ten million viewers on TV and the web in India.
All of us who participated experienced a sense of awakening to immeasurable potential. Dinan had set up a broadcasting studio at the Agape International Spiritual Center in Culver City, California. Reports were coming in live from around the world. For example, one event, in Boulder, Colorado, assembled hundreds of people for a daylong festival of cocreation, celebration, dancing, good food, and connecting. There was also a vibrant show on the Agape stage, with dancing and musical presentations. A highlight for me was when Sister Judy Cauley of the Sisters of St. Joseph arose and read with a passionate heart this new prayer, which was written for the occasion:
PRAYER TO CELEBRATE OUR PLANETARY PENTECOST
Spirit of the living God,
life of all life,
light of all light,
fertile Dark Mystery,
God-Becoming in the sacred adventure of evolution,
we are grateful to be your chosen ones,
planetary pilgrims,
cocreators with you on the edge of evolution.
This is our moment.
We are the ones
flaring forth as a flame of love
in Holy Communion with all creatures, continents,
planets, galaxies in time and space.
Great Mystery, One Spirit,
Birther of the Cosmos,
God in evolution,
We place our faith and trust in you
birthing within creation
a Planetary Pentecost.
May this be the ground from which
all our acts of love grow.
Amen. Amen. Amen.
Dinan and I had invited an illustrious group of colleagues to serve as the “Welcoming Committee” throughout the whole year of 2012. Their role was to welcome in the new era of our conscious evolution. Together they represented hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people whose lives were touched by their work, and by the Birth 2012 celebration. Several of them were there that evening, including Rev. Michael Bernard Beckwith, Jack Canfield, James O’Dea, and Neale Donald Walsch. For various reasons the many women on the Welcoming Committee could not come. I stood there on the Agape stage surrounded by these loving men, as though they were holding the bassinet for the newborn planetary child.
Each member of the Welcoming Committee wrote an excellent essay for the book I was putting together called Birth 2012 and Beyond: Humanity’s Great Shift to the Age of Conscious Evolution. The very titles of their essays tell the new story:
Rev. Michael Bernard Beckwith: “The Birth of a Global Citizenry”
Rinaldo Brutoco: “Ascent of the Phoenix: Global Reconstruction”
Jack Canfield: “Self-Actualization, Life Purpose, and the Evolutionary Shift”
Ashok K. Gangadean: “Dear Planetary Family”
Jean Houston: “Living on the Eve of the New Story”
Ervin Laszlo: “Global Bifurcation: The 2012 Decision Window”
Dot Maver: “Coming Together to Coauthor a New Story”
Lynne McTaggart: “Our New Story: Recognizing the Bond”
Oscar Miro-Quesada: “A Shamanic Re-Membering of Universal Humanity”
James O’Dea: “The Birth of the Peace Child”
Lynne Twist: “The Ancient Prophecy of the Eagle and the Condor”
Neale Donald Walsch: “The Overhaul of Humanity”
These thinkers and their insights represent the new mainstream, setting a new norm of the shared vision of our future. Together their networks reach millions of people.
After Birth 2012, I felt depressed, not unlike a mother experiencing postpartum depression after a child is born. I couldn’t find the baby. What really had happened?
Then I realized that that first celebration had merely been an announcement of the birth. It was like the story told of Jesus’ birth in a manger. Only the wise ones knew that something new had happened. Yet it really had happened.
Something new has happened within us. We are the baby! A new consciousness, a new love, a greater awareness of pain throughout the whole is manifesting. I felt it within myself, as did many others, as though I were shifting from a self-conscious, separated human to a “universal” human, connected through the heart to the whole of life and awakened from within to a deeper soul’s purpose, aware of higher frequencies of Spirit within myself incarnating the greater light.
Although Birth 2012 was a vital contribution to our birthing process, I no longer sense that the birth will happen in a single moment, on that long-awaited “due date.” It’s a process. An accumulative series of experiences is birthing this new stage of our evolution — in-person as well as virtual gatherings, on the individual, local, and global scale. Many hubs, circles, and gatherings formed to celebrate Birth 2012, and they are continuing and spreading. One valuable revelation that came from Birth 2012 is that we really can create global events celebrating the next era of evolution. The time is right: the media are available, our planetary nervous system is ready to link up, the internet is already connecting the new capacities of the social body, our prayers are aligning our thoughts, and the music is opening our hearts.
I sense that our planetary birth experience is happening across time and space now in a series of events great and small as we allow the love we feel for one another, for nature, and for Spirit to overtake us and unite us. As we place our conscious attention on doing this, I sense we are just beginning to open our eyes together. I sense that a joy and newness of hope are coursing through those of us who are participating.
Many of us sense that we are a united humanity awakening to the fact that we have always been one planetary body. We are beginning to open our eyes together and see the light of who we are becoming — all parts of one global family with the capacity to care for all its members. We are ready to discover the vast and unknown potential of an awakened humanity in a universe of immeasurable dimensions and life-forms.
We can imagine that social innovators will continue coming together in processes of cocreation. New social architecture for cocreation is becoming visible, such as the Wheel of Cocreation, which I and many others have used in our work, and which I describe in detail in chapter 11. We are discovering ways of experiencing both the alignment of loving consciousness and the increased interaction among innovating elements, all of which can be communicated worldwide. I feel strongly that the patterns connecting us will continue to be strengthened, and that millions more are being aroused to join in the effort to grow and nurture a new world.
Let’s dedicate the third millennium to the evolution of our species. Let’s each declare that we are to become a universal humanity, coevolutionary with nature and cocreative with Spirit. We are at a new beginning. The great awakening is happening. The twenty-first century is in full stride. We can move through the crisis of our birth without devastating all life on Earth. Let’s continue creating events and celebrations that help usher in this new era.