We are crossing the threshold from our Childhood into the vast and as-yet-uncharted realm of our Youth as Universal Humans. We are undergoing a new rite of passage, yet to be fully acknowledged in this world. To prepare, we first cast our eye backward in time to see the exquisite pattern of our Emergence, guided silently and mysteriously by our Essential Selves.
We remember our conception and gestation, our first awakenings in the womb of self-consciousness, our resonance with spiritual ancestors and guides, our healings of the wounded aspects of the local self, our vocational arousal, our willingness to say yes to the incarnation of our Essential Self, our desire to co-create with others. We honor the definitive moment of recognition that our growth is no longer possible when driven by our egoic local self. We are born, sometimes gracefully, other times painfully, and we enter our Infancy where we contemplate the glory of the Beloved within.
Through our attention, we learn to magnetize the incarnation of the Higher Self; we invite the Essential Self to take dominion within the household of selves and experience the bliss of union with our divine Essence. From there, we enter our Childhood, shifting our identity from ego to Essence, transferring authority to the Beloved within, and beginning the lifelong process of educating our local selves and repatterning our lives.
At last, we arrive in the developmental path at a very early phase of Youth, ready now to come into form in the evolution of our selves and our world. We celebrate within us the shift from the creature human to the co-creator.
The Story…
The transition between Childhood and Youth, similar to the transition between Infancy and Childhood, is not marked by a sudden shift but by a gradual unfolding. Yet one day, I woke up and noticed that a very real phase change had taken place, a shift as definitive as that from prepuberty to puberty, or from menarche to menopause. I felt that I had graduated from Childhood. I now reside as the Essential Self and am ready to commit to action at a larger scale. This is the new hero's journey, and all emerging Universal Humans are on it.
As I enter Youth now, I am securing my identity in Essence rather than ego and am taking full responsibility for the household of my many and wayward local selves. It is clear that my life has been repatterned, as the outward manifestation more and more reflects the inner knowing.
We discover that we are part of a living social organism. All the work is interconnected. We are reaching out, connecting with partners, collaborative initiatives, and enterprises throughout the world.
Everything I have ever thought of is “coming true” in new form. I am constantly stretching, challenged to go beyond my past limits, getting newer every day.
Yet, in the midst of all this activity, I have finally come to realize that my “goal” is not any external activity, important as goals are, but rather myself emerged, stabilized, and whole as a new norm, in loving relationship with and in support of others doing the same.
For all my adult life, I have had a purpose in the world to “go tell the story of the birth of a Universal Humanity.” Although my essential Self had signaled me for years to “create an aura of silence about you until you can hear me at all times…until your self-centered mind is fully incorporated in your God-centered mind,” my local self often ignored the focus on the Beloved and continued to feel compelled to work in the world, overriding the deeper guidance for Essential Self-realization.
Now, in my Youth, having cultivated the Bliss of Union and the process of my own and others' Emergence for many years, I have finally followed this guidance and am experiencing the “rewards.” Deepening and sharing this process of inner union, communion, and co-creating toward the larger planetary shift is the primary purpose of my mission on Earth. While it will take generations for the next phase of social evolution to unfold, it is also true that this experience is available within us now and is the wellspring out of which the new world is coming.
The shift of identity is quantum; that is, it jumps from one orbit to the next with no distance in between, like an electron. I don't have to get here. I am here. Then, once I am aware of that, I can unfold in time/space. And it is from this position, at the other side of the quantum jump, already here as the Universal Human, that we can best guide ourselves through this period of quantum transformation and radical newness.
As long as I was thinking that I had to fulfill some external goal as my primary purpose, I was prevented by that very striving from achieving the goal I was intending. I realize now that this integration of being/doing is vital to my social purpose. For only as this whole being can I fully express and manifest what I am called to do.
If I do what I do as one who is trying to reach a goal, that goal will forever recede from my grasp, and I will forever be grasping. However, if I am the goal, if the Universal Human incarnate is the goal right now, then I am forever liberated from seeking or grasping at anything, and my work will have a quality that truly serves others as it serves myself.
This is the first moment in my whole life in which I have ever felt that my purpose is being fulfilled. By accepting this state of wholeness as my purpose, I have taken a quantum leap.
As Almaas (Essence) says: “A person living in the present can have goals, but the goals are an expression and the result of who the person is at the moment. The person is already fulfilled and that fulfillment can then manifest as certain goals.”
The Guidance…
What are the fruits of this new phase of being? How does it serve others? Being the Essential Self in person is an ultimate service to humanity, because then we transmit that Essence to others spontaneously, helping others to shift from ego to Essence by our presence.
Hold a Mirror for Others to See Who They Truly Are
We become mirrors in which others can see the “glory” of who they truly are. By holding a clear surface for others to see themselves as we see them, we mature ourselves as Universal Humans as we serve others. And as we make the shift from ego to Essence, we can better guide the larger society through its transition from collective egoic behavior, as expressed in vast military spending, nuclear proliferation, environmental destruction, and so on. We cannot transform the world as local selves, no matter how well motivated we are.
Access within Yourself an Expanded Guide, a More Profound Aspect of the Inner Beloved
We deliberately and gently expand the space of the Inner Sanctuary and the Sunlit Garden into our daily lives. We deepen the guidance of the Essential Self by consciously being in that state with others in our work. As we find the way to do more of what we feel called to do, the inner guidance of the Essential Self becomes clearer often in the moment. We may experience “higher mind,” spontaneous knowing what to do, heightened intuition, deeper powers of communication, communion, and love of others.
Call upon this presence to provide the deeper wisdom you need to bring yourself out into the world into form that expresses your Essential Self.
Surrender the Figuring-It-Out Mind
The guidance for newness comes from the profound pattern of evolutionary design embedded in nature and in human nature. In the presence of our deepening wisdom, we surrender the figuring-it-out mind. We bring to waking consciousness the inner intuitive knowing, the gnosis, as a continual wise presence, as we are doing our daily work in the world through the agency of the local selves. We quiet the “waters of the mind” moment by moment, making of life itself an expression of Essence. This is a life art form to be developed by young Universal Humans. The mind remains poised, and the essential love/intelligence emerges in each instant. Life becomes a continual spiritual experience. We carry our Inner Sanctuary or temple with us wherever we go. Life and work become sacred expressions.
Have Compassion upon Yourself
We must have compassion upon ourselves. There is no society on this Earth, as far as we know, that has been through a planetary phase change from the high technology, over-populating, polluting phase to the next phase of universal co-creative evolution, which we are envisioning as our possible future. This macrocosmic “birth transition” is not taught in our great universities. There are no experts in planetary transformation, because no one has lived through it.
While there are many spiritual schools for the evolution of the person toward God realization, there are only a few places, as we have noted, just now emerging, where we learn to be co-creators of the next stage of self and social evolution.
As we learn to mature the inner parents to act as our guiding authority, so now we mature ourselves in our future-oriented knowing. We allow our deepest aspirations, yearnings, and revelations to guide us to create new forms, new social structures, and organizations in the world. We become the “future present,” as is said about Jesus, claiming our inner potential as a reality, and allowing it to attract us forward to manifest in our lives.
Signs and Qualities of Youth
Following are some of the signs and qualities of our early Youth. They can act as guideposts. Add your own signs as you experience yourself entering Youth.
We Are Achieving Continuity of Consciousness as Our Essential Selves
As we enter the phase of Youth, we can remember our identity most of the time. Just as early humans once stabilized self-consciousness in the midst of an animal world, so now young Universal Humans, at the very dawn of Universal Human history, are stabilizing Essential Self awareness. Unitive consciousness is becoming a new norm. The illusion of separation rarely takes us over for long. We find that the various gradients of self-awareness—body, mind, Spirit—are flowing in a spectrum of consciousness so that we can operate fairly well at any level without separating from the other.
We can meditate and lose all personal identity within the infinite, unconditional pure awareness; we can infuse the unique “pearl” of our personal Essence with that divine intelligence, an aspect of the radiant bliss of the infinite self.
We can focus the Essential Self among the bevy of sub-personalities, egoic self-contractions, and addictive patterns that still remain from a lifetime of feeling separate, healing and making whole that which feels broken and in pain.
We can lift those weary selves up unto the peace of union with the Beloved until they forget themselves. Our local selves are our disciples. They are enjoying the pleasure of union and do not want to be separate any more.
We Are Coming into Form through Our Projects, Which Are Our Progeny, Our “Children”
In Youth, we begin to manifest our inner values in new projects, social innovations, books, works of art, organizations, political parties, enterprises, and institutions in every field that can actually assist in transforming our world. Instead of being limited by inappropriate structures, jobs, and relationships, we are actually creating aspects of the new social body. Our vocations bring forth elements of the new culture. Our genius codes, our unique creativity, even in small and almost invisible ways, are early expressions of a new society realizing its own potential for conscious evolution.
In a sense, each of our genius codes is actually a vital element of the emerging social body, just as each cell is vital to the biological body. As we make our planetary transition, each person, each member of the social body, is awakened to new functions required for survival and growth now. We urgently need to develop better social processes to find the partners to complement our own gifts. As we enter Youth, we need “vocationally oriented dating services” to help us discover our unique team.
However, in the puberty of our Youth, even if we are manifesting our creativity in important projects, we are rarely, if ever, actually able to change the larger world en masse, because most people still have not made the transition within themselves. Occasionally, an individual steps forward on the world scene as a great change agent.
Mikhail Gorbachev was such a person, but because he did not have a new culture to advocate, because he could only point to reformation of the failing communist system, or to the more apparently successful laissez-faire capitalism and individualistic democracy that was already showing its flaws and was not appropriate to the Russian culture, he could not complete his mission and was rejected. The former Soviet Union needed examples of cooperative, synergistic, win-win social models—models that have not yet been developed fully enough to serve the countries now in chaos and transition.
Nelson Mandela is perhaps the best of any transitional Universal Human in the great work of overcoming apartheid in South Africa. Yet, as Gorbachev experienced, the lingering problems that must be dealt with are so great that it is difficult for the new to emerge in the midst of life-threatening and collective egoic structures and conflicts that remain unresolved worldwide.
We Experience Vocational Arousal
In our biological phase of puberty, our hormones turn on, our bodies change, we are moved passionately to find sexual partners and reproduce the species. So in our “second puberty” as young Universal Humans, we are just as passionately aroused to find partners and join our genius to evolve ourselves and our work in the world. We move from self-reproduction to self-evolution.
As we shift from maximum procreation to co-creation, we feel the rise of suprasex. This is the awakening of our sexual drive expanding into our creative drive. In sex we yearn to join our genes to conceive a baby, while in suprasex we desire to join our genius to give birth to our greater selves and our work in the world. We may enter wild periods of “suprasexual promiscuity,” where we want to fuse genius with anyone who is willing! We can't live up to our commitments. We suffer from “premature synergy,” attempting to co-create before any of the partners are stable or capable in their efforts. It is difficult to remain in resonance long enough to actually create anything substantial together, very much like teenagers cannot create adult relationships and often destroy their own lives due to premature pregnancies before they are ready to be responsible.
I can remember in the early days of my Youth going to conferences and meeting kindred souls. We would become vocationally aroused and stay up all night talking about how we were going to reform education, build a new political party, create a movie…and then, the next morning, we could hardly remember each others' names!
Vocational arousal is the engine that fuels our natural evolution at this stage. In Youth, it becomes a dominant passion and an evolutionary driver for our own Emergence. For as we attempt to come into form with our initiatives, we hit every possible obstacle within ourselves, as well as in the world. All our weak points show up.
If the desire to express our own creativity, if the passion to join with others to co-create a sustainable viable project in the world is strong enough, we will persistently face every challenge as an opportunity to grow; we will continually transcend our self-imposed comfort limits and find that we are actualizing an immeasurable potential within ourselves and the world. It is exhilarating and joyful. We are like athletes working ourselves to the limit of our possibilities and then finding there is more to be revealed within ourselves.
A New Incentive to Free Ourselves from Ego-Driven Behavior Arises
To actually join our genius, we must be relatively free of the illusion of separation. This illusion prevents the full fusion required for the next stage of liberation of untapped potentials. Co-creation requires that we complete the Emergence Process far enough to be aware when the ego enters. For when it does, it destroys resonance and creates separation. Then, the old power struggle of dominance and submission takes hold, and judgment and fear arise.
In Youth, we are freeing ourselves from the ego's usurpation of our creativity for its own insatiable needs. Let's be humble here. The ego does not immediately disappear. It is a lifelong process of self-education and the release of self-contractions.
As we mature, our creativity begins to flow more easily, less by competition and comparisons. Our acts are increasingly self-rewarding. They express us. We feel rewarded in the doing and the being; therefore the impulse to feel driven and self-judgmental diminishes. We are transcending the dichotomy between selfish and selfless as we become self-evolving. Our greatest pleasure is our Essential Self expression and the giving of our gifts to others in the world. Our most cherished reward is the freedom to be and do our best with others.
Our work is our life's expression unfolding in tangible form through us. If we have found a way to express our life purpose, our callings in specific forms, we find that our work is the process of accessing our deeper genius and of joining our genius with others in the dance of co-creation, an extension of the lovers' dance of procreation. Our work becomes co-creation, suprasex in action. As nature put joy into sexuality to attract us to have so many babies, it is now putting joy into suprasex to motivate us to evolve ourselves and our world through connecting to create. The drives of self-preservation and self-reproduction expand into the drive for self-evolution. This drive is even now becoming, I believe, a primary force to evolve our world. In our Youth as young Universal Humans, we become world-evolvers. We are attracted and invigorated, energized and rejuvenated by our “work.” In fact, our work is our cosmic connection with universal creativity.
At this stage of social life, we are rarely “hired” to perform our life purpose and must become co-creative entrepreneurs, often investing or paying our own money to do our work. We find this effort well worth it, because our life purpose expressed in chosen work is our passport to joy, companionship, fulfillment, and participation in the larger community of co-creative humans.
We Embark upon Co-creative Community
In our Youth as young Universal Humans, we move beyond occasional meetings, at conferences, churches, and events, to the formation of extended chosen families and communities of shared purpose. We begin to participate in a continuous process of co-creation through specific projects and enterprises that provide opportunity for further unfolding. Co-creative, sacred, human-scale communities begin to form. We need safe arenas to test out and experience the validity of our ideas and to stabilize our consciousness with others doing the same.
In biological evolution, mutations often occur among “isolates” that are separated from the mass of a given species. In social evolution, we need many “muddy pools,” social laboratories that allow us to experiment and learn in a relatively harm-free and resonant field. Then as we mature, and as the social environment evolves sufficiently, incorporating innovations, solutions, and breakthroughs in every field, we test out our projects in the larger world. If they grow and attract resources, they are naturally selected by the process of evolution that indeed has been selecting what works best for billions of years.
We Experience Optimum Health and Regeneration
We begin to experience a sense of optimum well-being and increased energy that is a positive blessing. The alchemical process of inner union, combined with the stimulus of vocational arousal and co-creative work with others, activates the cells and infuses them with new life. Whatever age we are chronologically, as we enter Youth, we're flooded with energy that springs from the excitement of union and the passion to create. We see that our health is enhanced as the sexual drive is raised and extended into the suprasexual drive to move from maximum procreation to co-creation.
Now, in my eighth decade, I am amazed at the amount of energy that floods me every day. My strength is greater than when I was thirty, for at that time I was a seeker, I had not found my vocation or my community. I suffered from depression and feelings of failure. My local selves were signaling discontent and frustration, but the guidance had not yet emerged. I was not “plugged in” to the larger design that now floods me with vitality moment by moment.
Now this creative energy heals me of most illnesses. I find I rarely get sick. I feel as though I am almost crossing over to a new life cycle.
I am not getting older, or younger, but rather newer every day. In fact, all of us over fifty are members of the newest generation on Earth. In the past we would have been dead! Now we are living from fifty to sixty, seventy, eighty, as a new norm, feeling well, vigorous, and healthy. This is vital for the Emergence of the Universal Human. It takes a long while to grow up.
Many postmenopausal women over fifty are entering almost a new life cycle. When we say “yes” to our deeper life purpose, we actually are giving birth to the authentic feminine self. We become feminine co-creators. That is, the impulse of creativity once dedicated to reproducing the species is now available to evolve our selves and give our gift of creativity and love to the world. I have coined the word regenopause to describe this experience. I feel as though there is a “pause” in the life cycle. While the body is aging, the Spirit and vitality is rising. In my case I feel my very cells have been signaled that there is more for me to do. Far from sensing that my life is over, it feels as if it is emerging, that it is expressing newness again. Many women sense a greater energy and clarity than ever before. Also we often suffer from loneliness, lack of community, uncertainty as we seek our next expression in the world at a stage when we are supposed to be retiring!
The fact is we are vocationally aroused, suprasexually charged, seeking deeper partnerships. As men step outside of the structures of the patriarchy and begin to express their own essential selves, we are exploring the next level of relationship, family, partnering. If life extension is, as many biologists say, possibly offering us far longer life spans, the reproductive years will be a small percentage of our life span. Yet women's bodies are designed for the miracle of reproduction. We have hormones that turn on with pregnancy, stimulating unconditional love of the unknown child. In our postmenopausal years, when we desire to express our own creativity, we find ourselves falling in love with the unknown future, the unknown world, within ourselves and in society. It's a hormonal reserve!
Of course young women and men know that they are moving into a world filled with new crises and new opportunities. As they enter the period of Youth as Universal Humans, their creativity will be unleashed in unprecedented ways. We are all actually members of one planetary generation. No one has been through this planetary shift before. We are in it together now.
We Surrender Our Separated Intentions
In our Youth, we cease seeking status or external rewards, even the achievement of specific goals. Yes, we have intentions, but these intentions seem to be part of a larger design of which we are intrinsic participants, rather than feeling that our own separate purposes must be achieved.
We find that as we surrender and let go of our egoic notion of the way things should be, we gain a far greater freedom, released from struggling and striving to win, maturing to enjoy the process as well as the product, just as the rest of nature does. Is a tree “achieving” something as it bursts into bloom in spring? Is a baby accomplishing a goal when it opens its eyes and smiles its first smile of recognition of its mother?
In fact, the ideas of achievement and success fade because we are self-rewarded. Abraham H. Maslow called this the “Eupsychian Society,” the society of self-actualizing and self-transcending people, where the greatest reward is the freedom to express what we are born to do. At this stage we are communing with other pioneering souls. We feel the union not only with those we know but also with all those souls who are now drawn by their Essence to emerge as Universal Humans, creating a vast planetary congregation from all faiths and cultures. We sense our common roots, which go back to the beginning of time and then beneath time itself into the Void, Emptiness, the Source, the Ground of Being—God.
The garden of our Youth, the Sunlit Garden of Co-creation, is really the heart of God in the temporal world, the place where people “make love” manifest in form. Through procreative love, we make babies. Through co-creative love, we make new worlds.
Journal
We have come to a shift in the Emergence Process. If you have come this far, you are at an ever-expanding threshold. Your life purpose and genius code is turning on, you are seeking your partners, your process of co-creating. You are learning how to contribute to a new planetary culture.
As you enter Youth, in what ways do you experience this phase change? What are the fruits of this new way of being and perceiving?
As your Essential Self, write your highest purpose. State your current intention. Describe your vocational arousal. Explore the part of society toward which you would most like to contribute your genius. Ask yourself these questions:
What do I most want to create?
What do I need to create it?
What do I want to freely give?
What gifts do I have that the world most needs right now?
What gifts am I inspired to give to the Shift?
Share these questions with your friends and colleagues, reach out to people that attract you, and continue to work with the Emergence Process through all the offerings you will find on our website at www.evolve.org.
Welcome to the global communion of pioneering souls!