We are on a long journey together, yet this is just the beginning of our new lives and of our work in co-creating new worlds. We are a growing band of pioneering souls scattered in every culture, field, discipline, age, and background. We can have compassion for all others and ourselves. We are very young and still fragile in our ability to stabilize our identity as Essential Selves, as young Universal Humans. What is new in us is so original and imperceptible that it is often difficult to recognize what is emerging.
Since Emergence was first written in 1999, it is obvious that the process of change has accelerated. The global set of crises has intensified so rapidly that some observers believe we have reached a point of irreversible breakdown of our own and other species' life-support systems, through climate change, global warming, resource and water shortages, and devastation of the soil, the seas, and the very air we breathe.
It could be that our collective shifting from ego to Essence, one by one, is a decisive factor in determining which way the system goes: breakdown or breakthrough. I would not underestimate the significance of any one of us making this inner shift of identity. It is said that small islands of coherence in a sea of social chaos can tip the system toward a more synergistic order. This is the tendency in nature. This is the Implicate Order unfolding and becoming explicate. Crises precede transformation. Nature takes jumps through greater synergy, the coming together of separate parts to make a whole greater than and different from the sum of its parts. Is it possible that as countless ones of us make the inner shift from ego to Essence and reach out to others to “join our genius,” to express our creativity, we are the tipping point in person. Each of us!
I believe this is so. Everyone counts. Each person is a living member of the living planetary body. This whole planetary organism is itself under the stress of its emergence toward a new phase. Mother Earth gave birth to bacteria, to single cells, to animals and humans. Now she is giving birth to us, to co-creative, co-evolving humans, very young and immature, not fully knowing how to participate in a planetary shift. Yet this is the tendency of evolution. When we say yes to the evolutionary impulse within, when our own egoic, local selves become transparent to our Essential Selves, this impulse is rapidly coming into new form through us. As I have said, we are not doing this alone. It is not a neutral universe. It is a universe informed by exquisite universal intelligence. It is this universal intelligence that breaks through when we are sensitive to the true nature of our Essential Selves.
This is a mighty adventure, and we are the ones crossing the great divide from unconscious to conscious evolution. Our joining together in mutual support, as a global communion of pioneering souls, may indeed be a most critical factor in making the Shift in time.
Visions of the Future
To make this great journey, we need some positive visions of our own future to allure us, energize us, empower us. Where there is no vision, the people perish. Where there is vision, we flourish, we are attracted, we have something toward which to move. Visions of the future equal to our spiritual, social, and scientific/technological potential are necessary now to guide us to “cross the gap” from here (breakdowns) to there (a co-creative, sustainable, and compassionate planetary culture).
None of us can evolve fully into the stage of Universal Human Adulthood until the collective culture is transformed by us. It is our work to help create the culture that can call forth Universal Humans in the future. The challenge is huge and faces us on the personal, social, and planetary scale. It is vital for us to envision what it may be like when everything works for the evolution of life. These kinds of visions become, as I have said, magnetic attractors to guide us in the use of our rapidly expanding capacities.
What could a positive vision of our future be? There is no one answer. Here are some of the visions I see.
When and if we get through this very dangerous crisis of birth on the social scale, I envision that we will be moving toward a more “co-creative society,” one in which all people will be free to be and do their best. We will have developed new kinds of social systems in every field—mind/body/ spirit education, sustainable environment, clean energy, new approaches to health and healing, new forms of currency, ethical business and sustainable economics, self-organizing, nonhierarchical structures for our institutions, to name a few.
On the macrocosmic, global scale, we will have learned planetary ecological management and sustainable, regenerative economic development. In an Earth/space expanded environment, we will have access to nonpolluting, miniaturized technologies. These powers could transform the entire physical complex in which we live to one of sustainability, abundance, and unimaginable new powers, provided, of course, that we move beyond our egoic, collective misuse of these capacities.
On the individual or microcosmic scale, these new capacities, it is now being said, could evolve the very life cycle of the Universal Human beyond the familiar mammalian sequence of conception, gestation, birth, puberty, reproduction, aging, and dying. We will reach a critical phase change in the animal life cycle when we creature humans will have learned to regenerate, to live in outer space, to transform our bodies to reflect our expanded consciousness and our new environments beyond our mother planet, to increase our intelligence to an exponential degree. At this next stage, we can imagine that the higher ranges of unitive consciousness, experienced even now by a growing number, will become a new norm. At this stage of consciousness, we experience the nature of reality as divine love/intelligence and will live out our identity as that in person, in touch with many dimensions of reality.
We can envision, based on the nature of the quantum transformations that preceded us, from prelife to life, from animal life to human life, that the Adult Universal Human will emerge as something radically new yet inclusive of all that came before—an ever-evolving, co-creating, self-transforming cosmic human.
A profound question arises from an evolutionary perspective as to whether Homo universalis is the maturation of our own species, Homo sapiens, or the early stages of a new species. Here is my evolutionary intuition: We, Homo sapiens, are a crossover generation out of which many mutations or various speciations will appear. We will self-evolve into a diversity of species. Some will continue to live on Earth and mature the lineage of Homo sapiens. Others will choose to live in space, change their bodies, and build many small worlds, traveling throughout the cosmos. Some of our new capacities, like nanotechnology, biotechnology, and supercomputing, may not be appropriate in the Earth's biosphere but may be vital for a universal species in outer space. Our metaphysical preferences will become evolutionary choices. As diversity decreases on Earth, we will gain diversity in the universe. The universe is the vast “wilderness,” not the Earth. Mother Earth is giving birth to seeds of life that will flourish beyond the Earth. When Father Sun expands and destroys all the planets in our solar system, as suns always do, billions of years hence, Earths children will be galactic beings.
The third stage on our developmental path, Adulthood, leads not to old age and death, but rather to a transition to what might be called “universal life.” This is an unknown. I envision that we will become cosmic beings, spanning the galaxies in cosmic consciousness, in touch with whatever other forms of life exist in the universe, as far beyond our current stage of Homo sapiens sapiens as we are from Australopithecus africanus millions of years ago. Project us forward even a few thousand years, let's say to the fourth millennium, a blink of the cosmic eye, and we can imagine the dim outlines of Homo universalis, a co-creator on a universal scale.
This is one person's vision. What is yours? As we are co-creators, it is very important what we envision, because, as I have said so often, our images of the future affect reality. As we see ourselves, so we act; and as we act, so we tend to become. It is a participatory universe. There is freedom at the very core of reality. To be a conscious co-creator is not a metaphor; it is the power of metamorphosis. We are designed to know the design and to participate within it, as aspects of it, ourselves.
We are facing the unknown. Many great modern psychologists have prepared the way for our emergence as individual humans, but it hasn't been possible for anyone or any approach to fully chart this new path into the mature phases of Adulthood and beyond, because our expanded technological power of destruction and co-creation is radically new. The Universal Human we are becoming has not yet fully appeared, and so we can only point in the direction we are headed now.
To help us on our way, however, it is vital now that we develop self-images commensurate with the glorious possibilities of who we really can be. The shining beauty of the young Universal Human potentiality is hardly ever seen in the arts, films, television, and the “news.” Classic science fiction writers like Gene Roddenberry, Ray Bradbury, Arthur C. Clarke, and others have at least tried to give us some visions of ourselves in the future, but rarely are they attractive enough to motivate us to realize them. The media for the most part portrays images of our failures, our weaknesses, our violent and tragic local selves. The daily “news” headlines are stories of our contending and anguished local selves. They are what Rev. Dr. Michael Beckwith calls “prayer requests.”
We have not yet had our new portrait done. The Greek sculptors portrayed the beauty of young athletes and warriors, gods and goddesses, and a new image of humans was born. The medieval artists portrayed the Christ, the Virgin Mary, the saints, giving us images of divinity yet still seeing it as outside ourselves. Michelangelo sculpted the magnificent David, fully human and fully divine, yet he was unique, a hero beyond the so-called ordinary person. Modern art disintegrated this great self-image that came forth in the Renaissance. We see ourselves broken up into points of light, new forms, streams of energy, the Void. The works of Monet, Manet, Pissarro, Picasso, Jackson Pollock, and the later large blank canvases of White on White and current minimalists have revolutionized art in the modern period to portray dissolution.
We enter the post-postmodern period. I believe the most important artistic question now is, What are new images of humans commensurate with our powers to shape the future? How can art, music, literature reveal us to ourselves, alive with love and intelligence as a new norm, the next stage of human evolution? We call upon our artists to provide for us images, sounds, lights, words, poetry that evoke from us what we are becoming, that dramatize for us the Whole Story of Creation—so we can see ourselves being born as Universal Humans and a Universal Humanity. We need courage and encouragement to make the great transition.
All of us now attracted to the path of our own emergence should realize that we do not do this for ourselves alone, nor do we do it as ourselves alone. We are actually an expression of the Great Creating Process itself. The Essential Self is the personal expression of that Process incarnating in each of us, as us. We fulfill the promise given to us by great avatars, seers, and visionaries, as we embody the Emergence Process, as we mature as Universal Humans, and become conscious co-creative participants in the very process of evolution.