NINE
The Birth of the Future Human
Sessions 22–55
We are now experiencing a moment of significance far beyond what any of us can imagine. . . . The historical mission of our times is to reinvent the human.
THOMAS BERRY, THE GREAT WORK
When the shell of the private mind dissolves in psychedelic practice, experience opens to a landscape so vast it’s hard to find the right words to describe it—the Mind of the Universe, the Cosmic Mind, the Great Expanse. One falls into it, explodes into it, melts into it, sometimes cataclysmically, sometimes so gently it feels like the most natural thing in the world. We are not in control of these expeditions. We show up, do the work, and make our requests, but in this collaboration a larger intelligence sets the course. What we experience seems to be a combination of what the universe wants us to know and what we are capable of knowing. If we drop into this ocean too quickly, we will lose our bearings and won’t be able to bring back much of value. But if we use these hours conscientiously, this intelligence will take us in and teach us. Here all instruction is by initiation. We learn by becoming. The lessons are repeated again and again until our grasp of the material is secure, then new layers are added until the fuller picture emerges.
I review these things to prepare for where we go next. When I began this journey in 1979, I never imagined that what follows here would become part of its story. Now, however, I think this may be the most important chapter of this book, for it speaks of our children and our children’s children as far as we can see. It speaks of a crossroads humanity is coming to and of powerful forces taking us into a future that will change us at the deepest levels of our being.
Public awareness has changed dramatically in the twenty years since I first wrote about these matters in Dark Night, Early Dawn. Denials still abound, but every year more of us are admitting the frightening truth that we have driven our planet into a state of such overload that humanity is now hovering on the edge of an abyss. Everyone knows the list of challenges we are facing: expanding world population, unchecked industrial pollution, escalating climate disruption, rising sea levels, collapsing water tables, increasing drought, soil erosion, species extinction, fished-out oceans, shrinking nonrenewable resources, unstable interlocked national economies, cities and nations going bankrupt, extreme economic inequality, unprecedented refugee migrations, stockpiled weapons we dare not use, and no end in sight. Subtract a few, add a few; cumulatively, the list is overwhelming.
Beginning with The Limits to Growth by Donella Meadows and her team in 1972, a stream of books have analyzed our global trajectory. They’ve crunched the numbers, identified the variables, and projected the outcomes with relentless logic and increasing precision. Since the Union of Concerned Scientists published their “World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity” in 1992, the debate has evolved from whether a global systems crisis will take place, to how soon it will take place, to what can we do to prevent it from taking place, to what we will have to do to recover from it after it has taken place. The growing consensus appears to be that we have postponed taking action too many times on too many fronts to avoid an imminent crash of catastrophic proportions. The discussion is now shifting to the question of adaptation and resilience. How will humanity respond to this global crisis: politically, economically, militarily, technologically, culturally, and existentially?
This brings me to the crux of this chapter. While the threat of a global crisis has grown decade by decade, the vision of our future that has repeatedly come through my sessions is that humanity is rapidly approaching a breakthrough of evolutionary proportions. Despite the fact that we have repeatedly failed to heed the ecological warnings and rein in our rapacious greed and Earth-damaging policies, their message has been one of promise and hope. More than hope, a message of emerging greatness. This is not because I have trapped myself in a New Age “solar spirituality” that refuses to look darkness in the face. I trust it is clear by now that I am no stranger to darkness. Rather, the solution to this paradox lies in penetrating to the essence of this global crisis and understanding what it represents at the deepest level.
The core vision of our future that has emerged in my sessions is that humanity is coming into a time of Great Awakening, a profound shift in the fundamental condition of the human psyche. But for there to be a Great Awakening, there must first take place a Great Death. We must be emptied of the old before the new can emerge. I have come to believe that the twenty-first century will be such a time. It will begin the dark night of our collective soul, a time of emptying, of intense anguish, of loss of control and breakdown. A global purification unto death that will last generations. But through this hard labor, we will give birth to something extraordinary. More than just a new civilization, what is emerging is nothing less than a new order of human being. I believe that through the global systems crisis, our planet is giving birth to the Future Human.
I know it sounds arrogant to speak on such a scale, but I must if I am to describe the visions that repeatedly came through my sessions. Ego-death destroys the existential isolation and constant self-referencing that organizes our ordinary experience of the world. When the partitions of personal consciousness are surrendered, our experience spontaneously opens to the larger rhythms of life that we are part of. One portion of these rhythms is the collective psyche of our species. At the subtle level of consciousness, we can dissolve into the human species-mind so deeply that the beginnings and endings of our personal life become insignificant. When the “small-self” opens to the “species-self” this completely, it is only natural that insights into humanity’s larger developmental trajectory sometimes emerge in our awareness. We would be surprised if this did not happen.
When these visions began in 1991, I knew next to nothing about the emerging global systems crisis and did not spend much time thinking about the future of humanity at all. Nevertheless, the transformation of humanity kept showing up in my sessions, growing deeper over time, with new layers added as I could absorb them. These visions coalesced to form a coherent narrative about our future and the forces shaping this future. It was almost as though the transformation of humanity as a whole was the only thing the Creative Intelligence really cared about. Everything else—my life, our lives, everything we were struggling with in history—was part of this larger project. It was the context that framed all our endeavors. It was the work of the hour. In response to these visions, I began to do my ecological homework.*57
As I turn to share the visions of our collective future that were given to me, my thoughts turn to Black Elk, the Oglala Lakota holy man. Black Elk was just nine years old when he collapsed into the visionary state. As he lay near death for twelve days, the thunder beings of the west took him and gave him a vision that foretold the destiny of his people. At a time when the old ways of life were fragmenting for the Lakota nation and its future was uncertain, the Grandfathers gave this vision to a child. Black Elk was so shaken by the experience that he hid his vision for years. I sometimes feel like that nine-year-old boy must have felt. I am sixty-eight years old as I write this, and I still feel overwhelmed at times by the visions of our future that were poured into me in my sessions. In these matters, the individual is nothing, the vision is everything.
These visions were not given to me all at once as they were for Black Elk but came in bits and pieces over many years. I’m going to present this visionary sequence in three parts—two in this chapter and a third in a later chapter. The first part is a series of visions I received between 1991 and 1994 inside the sessions already presented in the three preceding chapters. Rather than present these visions in a piecemeal fashion there, I have lifted them out of their original setting and gathered them here, editing them only as necessary to bring them together. I have grouped these visions into six segments that I am calling the Visions of Awakening. These were the six overlapping themes that emerged over nine sessions during this four-year period. The second part of the story is a single session that took place a year and a half later, in 1995. The Great Awakening session (S 55) carried me deep into the future and plunged me into the heart of the collective death and rebirth humanity is coming into. The third and final part came in 1998, near the end of my journey. I will present it in chapter 11, “Final Vision.”
The Visions of Awakening
The Visions of Awakening are drawn from the following sessions:
S 22 Master Plan #1
S 23 Master Plan #2
S24 Healing the Collective Wound
S 28 Archetypal Meltdown
S 29 Cleansing #1
S 31 Cleansing #3
S 39 Future of Humanity
S 43 Expansions and Elaborations
S 47 Chopped into Light
In creating this compilation, I have trimmed away the intense trials that opened the door to these visions and will simply ask the reader to hold them in the context of the sessions already presented. This visionary sequence began as the ocean of suffering was coming to its conclusion. It was fueled by entering first the fires of hell and then the fires of archetypal initiation. It is difficult to overstate the price one pays for such initiations. My early excursions into personal Deep Time seemed to pave the way for these later excursions into collective Deep Time.
This series of visions began with the vision of the master plan presented in chapter 6. Because this original vision established the context for all the visions that followed, it feels important to include it here, so I have reproduced it below in a shortened form. This vision showed me that everything that lies ahead for humanity is taking place in the context of Divine Love. However difficult things may get in the coming years, we are not being punished nor have we failed in some great undertaking. Rather, each one of us has chosen to participate in this collective transformation in service of Divine Love.
The Visions of Awakening
When I moved beyond the cleansing portion of the session, I was met by a large assembly of beings who appeared to have been called to participate in today’s events. They had the feeling tone of being master shamans. Under their watchful eye, I was escorted to an arena where a day of disclosure had been planned. Eventually, space-time reality was left behind entirely, and I found myself alone in a condition that was seemingly without boundaries of either time or space, soaking in the bliss and clarity of transcendence.
I then learned that I was going to be shown a portion of the master plan for the human species. As preposterous as this suggestion may sound to our ordinary consciousness, in my current state it seemed entirely feasible. I had no time to debate these matters, for suddenly, something opened and I was drawn into a vast, concentrated stream underlying physical reality, and this stream appeared to be the formative intent of the Creative Intelligence itself. I dissolved completely into this stream and became one with it. The following experiences emerged while I was in this condition.
Vision 1—Divine Love
I was taken back to the beginning of creation and there experienced human evolution in the context of a larger cosmic agenda. Suddenly, I was overwhelmed by the most extraordinary LOVE. It was as if a dam had burst and Love was coming at me from every direction, so much Love that I could barely take it in, even in my expanded state. . . . To awaken to this Love was to remember a primordial decision that I had somehow participated in. Remembering choices made before matter and time existed, I reconnected with the Divine Love that had inspired these choices. This experience shattered my heart, and I wept deeply.
I experienced all the suffering that humanity had endured throughout history as taking place inside this Love. I realized that all the suffering inherent in evolution was noble beyond words. It was all part of a cosmic plan that had been entered into freely by all the participants, however unconscious of this fact we have become along the way. The nobility of great suffering voluntarily shouldered in the name of Divine Love, suffering that would stretch across millions of years, suffering that would become so inscrutable that it would be used as evidence that the universe was devoid of compassion, this was the nobility of humanity’s gift to the Creator. All of the suffering that humanity had endured and will endure, especially the suffering of forgetfulness itself, was part of a consciously chosen creative process, a process that had not yet come to full fruition.
Vision 2—All Humanity
The order and design of evolving life is not something that is imposed on it from without; it bubbles and surges up from within life itself. It is something that lives in the fire of the atomic process and surges forward in all the micro and macro-jumps of evolution. It is a restless churning to become more that burns within life. In human beings, the focus of this churning is consciousness, and I was immersed in the forces driving the evolution of human consciousness forward.
Out of the seething desires of history, out of the violent conflicts and the scheming of individuals and nations, there was now driving forward a new awareness in human consciousness. Its birth in us is no less difficult or violent than the birth of a new continent. It drives upward from the floor of our being, requiring a transposition of everything that has gone before to make room for its new organizational patterns.
The great difficulty I have is describing the enormity of what is being birthed. The true focus of this creative process is not individuals but all humanity. It is actually trying to awaken the entire species. What is emerging is a consciousness of unprecedented proportions, the entire human family integrated in a unified field of awareness. The species reconnected with its Fundamental Nature. Our thoughts tuned to Source Consciousness. This unified field did not suffocate our individuality but liberated it into new orders of self-expression. Having moved beyond linear time into Deep Time, I experienced this collective awakening both as a projected destiny and a realized actuality. It was simultaneously something to be accomplished and something already accomplished. The scale of what I was witnessing took my breath away.
Vision 3—Guiding Intelligence
I saw humanity climbing out of a steep valley, and just ahead on the other side of the mountain was a brilliant, sun-drenched world that was about to break over us. The time frame was enormous. After millions of years of struggle and ascent, we were poised on the brink of a sunrise that would forever change the conditions of life on this planet. All current structures would quickly become irrelevant. All truths would quickly be rendered passé. Truly, a new epoch was dawning. The lives of everyone living in this pivotal time in history were helping to bring this global shift about.
As I witnessed this scene, I saw that though we did not know the deep future at a personal level, there was a more encompassing level of consciousness that could see it very clearly. This was a deeply moving and clarifying experience for me. Just as we ask our children to do all sorts of difficult tasks that they do not understand but we know will be important to their future, there was likewise a “parental intelligence” that had set a task for humanity knowing what was just around the corner for it. Individually, we humans could not see what was coming and so did not understand why things were the way they were. Yet isolated from the future, the present makes absolutely no sense. To be ignorant of what is being built would be to be functionally blind, and our species is not blind. There is an intelligence within it, guiding it, an intelligence that knows the future and is preparing us for it as systematically as we prepare our homes for the change of seasons.
From this perspective, I saw that our culture’s scientific knowledge about the origin of life was deeply incomplete in two respects. First, our understanding of the mechanisms of evolution is still rudimentary, and second, we have been basing our interpretations on what has emerged just up to this point in time, ignoring the fact that we have seen only the early acts of a much longer play. Imagine someone from antiquity who is completely ignorant of cars observing the early stations of an automobile assembly line and trying to comprehend what is being built. We simply see too little to guess what is coming and therefore do not properly understand what has gone before. The depth of our ignorance is shown in our conviction that the universe is assembling itself by accident. In being given glimpses of our future, in touching the edges of the Creator’s intent, I saw that evolution was indeed no accident but a creative act of supreme brilliance and that humanity is being taken across a threshold that will change it forever.
At this point, I could not see the specifics of what the future held for us. What I experienced instead was overwhelming Light and Bliss. Though these may sound disappointingly vague, they revealed more to me than details ever could. I knew that the brilliant Light was the radiance of enlightenment and the Bliss was the joy of liberation. The human species was poised on the brink of a profound spiritual awakening.
Vision 4—Our Species as a Single Being
I was taken deeper into the unified field of existence and experienced the dynamics of humanity’s awakening as movements being initiated and orchestrated by a single, integrating intelligence. Previously, my frame of reference for understanding these processes had been individual human beings, and the theme of individual evolution is the skillful exercise of free will over many lifetimes. Now I was being drawn into a superordinate level of reality that exposed a deeper organizational pattern.
From this perspective, I experienced the evolution of our species as the systematic growth of a single organism, a unified being that all of us were part of. The subtlety of the cooperation of the parts with the whole was extraordinary. Nothing in our theological or philosophical systems does justice to the facts. To experience the incredible diversity of our species as a single unified field made many events clearer. New patterns sprang into view, and the patterns made transparent sense.
At one point, my vision zeroed in on this process so deeply that the “units” of individual lives disappeared completely. At this level, human lives were simply crystallizations of patterns of a fluid energy that made up our species being. Individuals were “forms” that drew together portions of this energy into somewhat fixed and firm configurations. In themselves these forms were not solid. They simply drew to a head energy existing in the species field.
What I then saw was that the unified field of humanity was moving decisively and precipitously to become more aware of itself. Whereas previously it had existed as an extended fabric largely unconscious of itself, now it was waking itself up. Visually, this took the form of energy coming together in swift, contractive spasms that created bright flashes of awareness. I repeatedly saw extended webs of energy suddenly contract and explode in brilliant flashes. In the past, these flashes had been swallowed by the inertia of the collective psyche and not endured long. Now, however, the flashes were beginning to hold their own and to connect with other flashes occurring around the planet.
Vision 5—Collective Purification
When an organism is called on from within to become more conscious, it must first cleanse itself of the psychological by-products of living at its lower level of awareness. It must bring forward the residue of its past and purge that residue from its system in order to lay the foundation for a more refined level of operation. Our species was doing this in a wholesale manner and with great determination by crystallizing within itself generations that embodied its toxic legacy.
What I had previously seen as individuals reincarnating in order to clear their individual karma, I now experienced as a highly centralized decision made by the Human Mind-Field to cleanse itself of its karmic legacy in order to prepare humanity for what is coming. It was the coordinated exercise of the self-evolution of the species as a whole. At a deeper level, it was the deliberate movement of the Divine evolving itself through the experience of our species. All our individual histories were expressions of this Being’s larger history; our individual struggles were aspects of its larger struggle. The process was so beautiful and elegant that it swept me into deep ecstasy, taking me almost beyond my ability to maintain coherent awareness. It was not a vision but an experience of the reality itself.
One of the things that stood out for me in these experiences was the sense that the present form of humanity is transitional. Like transitional forms that a species moves through in an evolutionary pivot, we are a transitional form. We are cells in a superorganism intent on rapid change. Our very constitution, the form of our species, is a stage in a longer evolutionary journey.
I saw that the generations born in our period of history had been deliberately configured to precipitate an intense cycle of collective purification. The poisons of humanity’s past were being brought to the surface in us, and by transforming these poisons in our individual lives, we were making it possible for divine awareness to enter more deeply into future generations. We had volunteered for this role for both our personal good and the collective good. I saw that this century formed a watershed into which the karmic streams of history were flowing and that as this process came to fruition, the future condition of our species would be beyond anything we might project from our current state of fragmentation. The future would not look like the present. Our future form would not look like our present form.
It is difficult to describe the jarring combination of emotions these insights stirred in me. On the one hand, I was deeply disturbed by the decisive and almost impersonal manner in which this transition was being enacted. To experience multiple generations of human beings as expressions of a larger evolutionary pivot was devastating. The entire process had the ruthlessness of Kali the destroyer, mercilessly cutting away the old to make way for the new. On the other hand, I also felt an exquisite tenderness coming from the Creator, who experienced with us every pain we had taken upon ourselves. Humans were so precious to the Creator that not a single ounce of pain, not a single tear was wasted. The depth of that divine care so moved me that no sacrifice seemed too large or unreasonable.
Vision 6—The Future Human
At one point, I was given a brief experience of the Future Human we are becoming. It was as though I had been carried into the distant future and allowed to try on for size what will be the abiding state of humanity at that time. What a magnificent being! Just touching it filled me with rapture, calm, and sheer delight. It felt clear, warm, and whole. There was an abiding sense of Oneness that went deeper than just the feeling of being interconnected. It was a feeling of being truly One underneath the diversity of life. Such expansiveness, such breadth of being! It was fully embodied spiritual realization, the tantric awakening of our entire species, Spirit and Matter in perfect balance. This penetrating glimpse transfixed me. Its beauty, grandeur, and simplicity pierced my heart. This awakening poured a delicious and healing nectar into me, a balm for all my kind.
There is a social awakening coming, a time when we will have dropped our attempt to live in the closed cells of our past and will actualize the truth of our inclusive nature. Everything we are currently undergoing both privately and collectively is paving the way for this future. Though we may not personally live to see this awakening realized, I saw that we would participate in it through our future incarnations. We were doing this for God, for others, and for ourselves. On a longer time horizon, the awareness that was emerging on our planet seemed destined to eventually extend beyond our solar system. Earth seemed to be a hothouse, growing a capacity for conscious creation that would in time be exported to other systems in the galaxy.
The net result of all these experiences was to focus me on the question, “How can the entire species be awakened? What will it actually take for the whole of humanity to make this quantum jump in awareness?” Though I had seen that this awakening was our immediate task, I had not been shown how it would be accomplished.
Taken together, these six visions gave me the basic framework of the deep transition taking place beneath the surface of history. They helped me understand the scale of the enterprise that humanity has undertaken and what the goal truly is. Experiencing the Creative Intelligence operating inside this transition made me feel grounded in the genius of our universe. Experiencing the complex reincarnational dynamics surrounding this pivot both inspired and humbled me. And yet, nowhere in these visions had I been shown how this collective transformation would actually take place. This critical piece of the puzzle was missing, and I had no idea how Nature was going to pull this off.
The Great Awakening
Then in December of 1995, as my family and I were preparing for the Christmas holidays, a particularly powerful session carried me into the heart of our coming transformation. To present this session, I have to jump ahead in the timeline of my journey because the Great Awakening session took place in the middle of the Diamond Luminosity sessions, which I haven’t described yet. I had entered the Diamond Luminosity twice already, in sessions 45 and 50, and would enter it twice more in sessions 60 and 66. Then, in the middle of this sequence, just when I was expecting to be taken back into the Diamond Luminosity, session 55 took me instead into the global death and rebirth of humanity. This striking placement underscores the significance of this encounter.
Session 55 built on the collective and transtemporal experiences of earlier sessions, as though these had been training exercises preparing me for this seminal visionary download. The collective convulsions I entered in this session appeared to be driven by a global ecological crisis, but I was not given any details about how or when this crisis would take place. Instead, this session showed me the fact of a global crisis, it took me inside the collective psyche’s experience of this crisis, and it showed me some of the mechanisms of collective awakening that will be activated by this crisis.
Session 55—The Great Awakening
I spent the first portion of the session working on a very painful relationship in my childhood. It seemed like the work was endless, that I would never get to the bottom of the disturbance. Then after two very difficult hours, what I had been processing suddenly broke apart. Something that had been experientially real suddenly became as brittle as painted glass and shattered. It was as if the issue I had been processing reached its perfect pitch, then shattered into hundreds of shards of glass. A voice said, “Enough of that,” and it was finished. There was no gradual transition, just a sudden, abrupt shift from something artificial to something profoundly real.
I entered this reality exhausted from the healing work, but my fatigue quickly disappeared as the shattered glass fell away. Now I was suddenly awake within a different reality, operational within a different sphere altogether. As I try to describe what happened next, I flounder for words. Something unprecedented took place today. Whole new categories of experience opened, new modalities of awareness. It will take me years to fully assimilate this experience.
There was nothing personal about the state I was in, not even the residual personal of individual ecstatic awakening. Instead, there was a wholeness about it that was specieswide; its movement was the movement of my species. This movement was itself part of the movement of the Divine-in-time, so from another perspective the experience was of being drawn into the inner workings of the Divine’s-experience-as-this-species in the larger sweep of its evolution. As often happens, experience preceded understanding. I simply began to experience new things, and only slowly did I get my bearings on what it was I was experiencing.
I began to experience states of arousal, anxiety, crisis, breakthrough, and new beginning—but as a species, not as an individual person. I began to realize that “in me” were the experiences of countless human beings. The levels of arousal I was experiencing were ascending waves within the collective unconscious, and these waves were building up and breaking within me! It was like being able to experience a thunderstorm in its totality, with every drop registering individually and the patterns of the storm as a whole simultaneously.
In time I began to realize that I was experiencing what the human species will experience as historical events unfold over the next several decades, perhaps the next hundred years. In earlier sessions, I had glimpsed the historic transition humanity is making. Today I was taken inside this transition and given the experience of it from deep within the collective psyche of our species, framed within the surrounding consciousness of the Creative Intelligence. When these developments take place, people will think they are being overtaken by events outside themselves, but in fact these events are being driven by the Creative Intelligence drawing forth from within itself new capacities that will be specieswide. I came away from the session exhausted from the knowledge of what lies ahead, exhausted from having experienced the fear that humanity will feel as our world crumbles around us, and exhilarated by the new forms that are emerging.
The Core Scenario
In a field of relative calm, a small anxiety began to grow. Slowly, people were looking up and becoming alarmed. Like people living on an island who gradually become aware that a hurricane is overtaking them, humanity was gradually waking up in alarm to events that had overtaken them. Conditions got worse and worse. People became more and more frightened as the danger increased, forcing them to let go of their assumptions at deeper levels. There was less and less for people to hold on to, fewer givens that they could assume—how they would live, where they would live, what they would do for a living, how society was organized, what could be possessed. The world as they knew it was falling apart.
Decades were compressed into minutes, and I felt the people’s fear deepen as they lost more and more of what they considered the normal and necessary structures of their world. Step-by-step, events were forcing a rapid reassessment of everything in their lives. The events that had overtaken Earth were of such scope that no one could insulate themselves from them. The level of alarm grew in the species field until eventually everyone was forced into the melting pot of mere survival. We were all in this together. Families were torn apart—parents from their children and children from each other. Life as we had known it was shattered at the core. We were reduced to simply trying to survive.
For a time, it looked as though we would all be killed, but just when the storm was at its peak, the worst of it passed and the danger slowly subsided. Though many had died, many were still alive. As the survivors began to find each other, new social units began to form. Parents and children from different families joined to form new types of families. Everywhere new social institutions sprang into being that reflected our new reality—new ways of thinking, new values that we had discovered within ourselves during the crisis. Every aspect of our lives was marked by new priorities, new perceptions of the good, new truths. These new social forms reflected new states of awareness that seemed to spread through the survivors like a positive contagion. These new social forms then fed back into the system to elicit still newer states of awareness in people, and the cycle of creativity between the individual and the group spiraled.
The whole system was becoming alive at new levels, and this aliveness was expressing itself in previously impossible ways. It was as if the eco-crisis had triggered the myelination of nerve cells in our species-brain, allowing new and deeper levels of self-awareness to spring into being. Repeatedly, there was the message: “These things will happen faster than anyone can anticipate because of the hyper-arousal of the species-mind.” Thousands of fractal images drove this lesson home again and again. “Faster than anyone can anticipate.” The pace of the past was irrelevant to the pace of the future.
The Mechanism of Our Collective Awakening
There was an important aspect of this sequence that focused on the actual mechanisms that lay behind this transition. The key was understanding that this global crisis will be so severe that it will impact not only individuals but also the collective unconscious of humanity itself. The suffering generated by the eco-crisis was so widespread, so deep, and so sustained that the field of the species-mind was being driven into higher and higher levels of arousal. Eventually, the species mind moved into such a highly energized state that it began to function differently. I experienced these changes in terms of the concepts of superconductivity and nonlinear systems. I have only a limited understanding of these scientific concepts, but they seemed to apply both literally and metaphorically to the workings of the collective psyche. I experienced them more deeply than I was able to fully grasp cognitively, but the intuitive taking in was exceptionally clear and well defined.
What was emphasized was: (1) the hyperconnectivity of the species field and (2) the unprecedented speed with which changes can take place in this field under nonlinear conditions. Over and over again, I saw these features operating in our future. When fields are put under extreme pressure, small changes can produce disproportionately large effects. Systems that were previously isolated can suddenly begin interacting with each other, activating a latent connectivity in the field. I saw that what was true for physical fields was also true for psychological fields.
The speed with which new formations were emerging in the collective psyche reflected the superconductivity of nonlinear systems. These new forms were not just temporary fluctuations but became permanent psychological structures marking the next stage in humanity’s long journey of self-activated awareness.
The entire process seemed to be driven by strange attractors that were rapidly drawing the system into new patterns of self-configuration. The time of rebuilding was suffused with an inner luminosity that signaled a profound awakening within the human heart. It was not the overwhelming brilliance of Diamond Luminosity that shines forth in individual awakening, but a softer luminosity that reflected the same reality more gently present and more evenly distributed throughout the entire species. The whole of humanity was going to go through a death-rebirth process, and the substance of awakening for the group was the same as for the individual, though realized more slowly and in smaller increments. The core of this awakening was the experience of Oneness.
One scenario put the matter in theological terms. We are entering a period of grace in which the sins of the past can be set aside en masse. We do not have to expiate them linearly but can surrender them whole if we will but open ourselves to the forces that are moving powerfully in the present to re-create our lives. In a blend of Western and Eastern mythologies, I saw present generations carrying the full karmic burden of our prior evolutionary limits. I saw that the entire system was poised for a profound revision of those limits and that we who are part of this transition can actually free humanity from its past by responding to the challenges of this radical transition. Collective karma is being cleared exponentially. The time of great purification is a time of great grace.
History is intensifying. Feedback loops are accelerating. Time is becoming concentrated. Developments are unfolding exponentially. The past is rapidly catching up with us; debts put off for generations are coming due; a new beginning approaches. The ecological crisis will precipitate a death-rebirth confrontation that will shatter our psycho-spiritual isolation, both individually and societally, and bring forward an awakening of common ground within us. I saw that once we made this painful transition, we would discover that all was gain. Nothing essential had been lost. We will look with amazement at the depth of ignorance that had set us on this course of self-decimation, and we will not long for that past at all. All is gain, all is gain.
I am exhausted from this experience. I feel like I carry humanity’s future inside me as a public secret. I look on my people and am filled with compassion at the fate that awaits them and respect for their courage. I want so deeply to help them through what approaches. I am exploded by time and have nowhere to stand but where I am.
It took me more than a year to recover from this session. For months I walked around the city where I live feeling like someone walking around Hiroshima a week before the bomb was dropped, with unbidden knowledge of what lies ahead and profound respect for all the participants. It was terrible to experience humanity’s coming collapse but redemptive to experience the rebirth that followed. Since that session, I have never doubted the larger arc of our evolutionary journey, even as I mourn its casualties.
This vision showed me what the previous visions had not shown me—that humanity’s transformation will come about through terrible suffering. This suffering will be driven by a global systems crisis triggered by a global ecological crisis. Our species will change when our collective pain simply becomes unbearable any longer. In this, session 55 echoes the conclusion reached by Duane Elgin in Awakening Earth, where he wrote:
It is the immense suffering of millions—even billions—of precious human beings coupled with the widespread destruction of many other life-forms that will burn through our complacency and isolation. Needless suffering is the psychological and psychic fire that can awaken our compassion and fuse individuals, communities, and nations into a cohesive and consciously organized global civilization. (Elgin 1993, 121)
While the suffering that is coming will be terrible to endure, this session showed me that humanity will come through this crisis, not intact but changed for the better. In the context of the earlier visions of awakening, it affirmed that through this ordeal we are giving birth not just to a new period of history but to a new form of human being. As the years have passed and I have watched the shadows of history deepen, I find that this promise means more and more to me. Without a vision of where nature is taking us, without understanding the higher good that our collective suffering is bringing forward in history, we might drown in the sorrow that lies ahead. And we must not drown.
The Nonlinear Dynamics of Awakening
For psychedelics to have their deepest impact on our culture, it is not sufficient for us to simply record the powerful experiences they unleash. We must also ground these experiences in critical discourse and place them in dialogue with other fields of learning where possible. For this reason, when I presented this session in Dark Night, Early Dawn, I unpacked its assertions about the role the collective psyche will play in humanity’s awakening as carefully and systematically as I could. These assertions are:
- That the species-mind is a unified psychic field,
- That this field will be driven into a nonlinear or “far-fromequilibrium” state by the extreme suffering generated by the global ecological crisis, and
- That in this hyperaroused state, the species-mind will exhibit some of the same nonlinear capacities that scientists have observed in physical systems when they are driven into the nonlinear state, namely, the capacity for rapidly accelerated change, heightened creativity, and higher self-organization.
I created an interpretive framework that wove together Donella Meadows’s research on global trends, Rupert Sheldrake’s morphic field theory, chaos theory, Peter Russell’s global brain theory, Ilya Prigogine’s Nobel Prize–winning research on dissipative structures, Kenneth Ring’s observations from near-death studies, and Richard Tarnas’s analysis of the intellectual and cultural crises building in the twentieth century. I used this framework to ground the core assertions of this vision: that under the pressure of the extreme conditions of our future, the human psyche will come alive at new levels, that something like psychological phase-locking will take place, that the interconnections between people previously too subtle to be detected will become obvious, and that all of this will take place much faster than anyone could have predicted.*58
I continue to believe that in order to understand how we will make this historic transition in as little time as we have, it is vital to understand the structural role that the collective psyche will play in it, but I will not reproduce these arguments here. Instead, I simply point to them for those who may wish to explore these issues further.
I do, however, want to underscore again the deep correspondence between the vision of humanity’s awakening presented here and Richard Tarnas’s powerful analysis of the trajectory of Western intellectual history in The Passion of the Western Mind. In the epilogue of that book, Tarnas presents the bold thesis that the human species as a whole is undergoing the same death-rebirth process that individuals undergo in Grof’s psychedelic therapy, but on a much larger scale. Drawing on his deep knowledge of Grof’s work and his comprehensive grasp of Western history, Tarnas illumines the archetypal sequence that he believes underlies the intellectual and cultural crises building in the modern era. The basic arc of this trajectory is one in which consciousness emerges within a primal, undifferentiated unity, undergoes a process of self-empowering individuation, and then undergoes a death of identity that leads to a reawakening to the original cosmic matrix, but now experienced on a new level that preserves the achievement of the entire trajectory. He demonstrates that when the history of Western thought is viewed in its entirety, one begins to see that the West has been on this journey of transformation for thousands of years and that it is presently entering the critical death-rebirth phase of this transition on all levels—intellectual, social, political, economic, spiritual, and ecological. The power of Tarnas’s argument lies in the compelling way he integrates so many aspects of our history around this thesis. For this, one must turn to the epilogue itself and to the subsequent analysis he presents in Cosmos and Psyche.
More than twenty years have passed since I had this vision of humanity’s collective awakening. During these years, the unraveling of our planet has continued to accelerate. Global climate disruption has moved from being a scientific hypothesis to a Pentagon planning priority. The ice caps are melting faster than anyone predicted, and we continue to register one hottest year on record after another. Record-breaking hurricanes continue to savage our southern and eastern coasts, while in the West an unprecedented number of forest fires tear through the drought-parched hillsides. Meanwhile, our reefs continue to die, species perish, commodities shrink, and twenty-six people own as much of the planet’s wealth as half of the world’s population combined.*59 The 2018 report from the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change made it brutally clear that these trends are rapidly taking us into an agonizing future, a future previewed with devastating honesty in David Wallace-Wells’s The Uninhabitable Earth (2019).
In a time of such growing instability, when the old certainties are beginning to fall away, it is understandable that people would be drawn to political leaders who promise to take us back to a more familiar and stable time. In 2016, the United States elected a president who denies the scientific consensus on global climate change, reasserts the old divisions of religion and race, and seeks to wall out the world. But denial will not hold back the oceans, and religious and racial stereotypes lead to Auschwitz and Dachau. In the end, this path will only accelerate our collective unraveling.
Despite the continuing deterioration of our ecological and social fabric, we have not yet come to the tipping point that Paul Gilding forecasts in The Great Disturbance.
Then there will be a tipping point when denial ends and the reality that we face a global, civilization-threatening risk will become accepted wisdom, virtually overnight. At that point, we will respond dramatically and with extraordinary speed and focus.
We may not have reached this threshold, but we soon will. Gilding continues:
It is not hard to imagine what a serious collapse inducing global crisis would look like if you put together the trends we’ve been discussing. A global famine that sees a billion people or more starving to death; a series of wars raging in the Middle East and elsewhere over water; armed conflict between China, India, and Pakistan over millions of refugees from political breakdown and food shortages; the drowning of people and nations in low-lying islands in storm surges; the global insurance industry going into insolvency in the face of a series of climate disasters and the run-on effects in the banking industry with uninsured assets being used as debt collateral; the collapse of global share markets when the risks of all these things are priced into share portfolios. (Gilding 2011, 106, 108)
It is when these events or events like them dismantle our world that the vision of the Great Awakening in session 55 will be put to the test. It is then that we will learn whether the field of the species-mind will become so hyperaroused by our collective suffering that it will begin to function in a nonlinear manner. If this happens, it will mark a new dawn for humanity. From Dark Night, Early Dawn:
As the inherent wholeness of existence becomes a living experience for more and more persons, individuals will find themselves empowered by new orders of creativity that could not have been anticipated as long as we were trapped within the narrow confines of an atomistic, self-referential mode of consciousness. As the encompassing fields of mind become stronger, synergy and synchronicity will increase. The Sacred Mind will spring alive inside the human family in ways that seem impossible from our current fragmented condition. However difficult the journey, who could not feel uplifted by the privilege of being part of such an undertaking? The pain of this labor should not be feared but used creatively. We are building a new world for our grandchildren, indeed, a new species. (Bache 2000, 254–56)
What Form Will the Future Human Take?
If history or nature or the Creative Intelligence of the universe is giving birth to a new form of human consciousness on this planet, the next question becomes, What form will this Future Human take? What will our evolutionary future self look like? To address this question, I want to connect the vision of the Great Awakening presented here with the vision of the birth of the Diamond Soul presented in the previous chapter. There is such a striking convergence of themes in these two visions that the longer I have held them both in my awareness, the more I have come to see them as deeply intertwined. I offer the following thoughts as a brief explanation for why I believe the form that the Future Human will take will be the Diamond Soul.
The vision of the Diamond Soul is a vision that sees the cycle of reincarnation coming to a crescendo that lifts the human experience to a higher register. Just as “young souls” become “old souls,” old souls will become “complete souls.” When our former lives are integrated and fused into a single consciousness, an explosion in our self-awareness takes place. The shell of the ego pops, and we no longer experience ourselves as being simply hundred-year-old beings but as hundred-thousand-year-old beings. When we look out on the world, we feel our connection with countless people formed over countless lifetimes. We see the Earth as our home for a thousand incarnations. In short, we know ourselves to be incarnating Souls.
In the Great Awakening narrative, we see a parallel story unfolding. In this narrative, the intelligence of the universe is working systematically to bring our entire species into a new chapter of its life: “The entire human family integrated in a unified field of awareness. The species reconnected with its Fundamental Nature. Our thoughts tuned to Source Consciousness.” After an arduous process of shedding our past, a quickening of the human spirit takes place, marked by “new ways of thinking, new values . . . new priorities, new perceptions of the good, new truths.”
The parallels between these narratives are so numerous that I have come to view them as being synergistically linked. That is, I believe that the global systems crisis taking place in the world outside us is deeply connected to the evolutionary metamorphosis taking place inside us. As our planet struggles to become more integrated geopolitically, we are struggling to become more integrated psycho-spiritually. As our nations confront the consequences of our political and cultural divisions, we are confronting these same divisions carried in the memory of our former lives. As Earth struggles to become one planet, we are struggling to become one Soul. I believe that these processes are deeply intertwined and mutually reinforcing. Several observations point in this direction.
First, as we think about the challenges we will be facing in years ahead, we should remember that the global systems crisis will not be happening to human beings as we traditionally think of them but to Souls. That is, from a reincarnational perspective, human beings are not simply hundred-year-old beings; they are Souls who carry potentially thousands of years of experience inside themselves. From this perspective, each of us is carrying many lifetimes of learning wrapped around our core. As the great unraveling hits, therefore, it will be Souls who will be experiencing it and choosing how to respond to it. When this long and sustained crisis puts enormous pressure on our social institutions to change and adapt, it will also put pressure on our individual psyches to change and adapt. Could this unprecedented pressure trigger a shedding of our psychological past and the emergence of Soul awareness faster than history alone might lead us to expect?
Next point: Our divided and damaged world was created by a species operating out of the egoic level of awareness. For all its many virtues and strengths, the ego is a fragmented consciousness isolated from the underlying fabric of life that binds us together. Albert Einstein famously said, “We cannot solve our problems with the same level of thinking that created them.” I personally believe that the problems coming at us are too large to be solved by egoic awareness, even well-intentioned, collectively organized egoic awareness. There is a structural relationship between the self-interest and shortsightedness that has created this crisis and the nature of the ego itself. I do not believe that we can grow the planet into a greater whole as long as we remain psychologically fragmented ourselves. If the private ego remains in control of our lives, we will remain a divided people, and if that happens we will likely perish. The ego of the private self built our divided world and is being consumed by the fires that are consuming this world.
In order to solve this impending crisis, we desperately need to grow up as a species, to shift from what Duane Elgin calls our adolescent self to our adult self. From a reincarnational perspective, “growing up” means owning and integrating the larger consciousness that has been gestating within us for thousands of years. Owning it, seeing the world through its eyes, and letting its accumulated wisdom shape our choices. The Soul lives in history differently than the ego. In order to solve this crisis, we need to adopt the long-term perspective that is natural to the Soul. The Soul knows that its relationship with this planet extends beyond the limits of its present life. It knows that the Earth we leave behind is the Earth we will inherit in our next incarnation. It knows this and it acts accordingly.
Next point: Because of reincarnation, each of us carries the world’s diversity inside ourselves. This simple fact may help us when we have to make the hard choices that will determine the future of this planet. In a world of shrinking resources, the argument to narrow our loyalties to “us and ours” is already being pressed. This has always been the ego’s strategy, to divide the world between the deserving and the undeserving based on some measure, be it nation, religion, race, or class. But inside our lived experience as reincarnating beings, each of us carries memories of having been these “others.” At some point in our long history, we have probably been every race, every religion, every nationality and class. We have been rich and poor, male and female, immigrant and native. This residual memory works to expand our feelings of empathy and responsibility to others. When push comes to shove, this inner history may help us make the courageous choices of inclusion that will save humanity and the other species that share this planet with us. Or looking at it the other way around, as we rise above our narrow self-interests and make the political and moral choices that will create a world that works for all, it may draw the awareness of our incarnational history forward in our awareness. We may literally enact the Soul into our conscious awareness through the political and social decisions we make in the years ahead.
And finally, one last point. When we come through this collective labor, we will discover that 95 percent of the work of creating this Future Human was already accomplished before our labor began. The birth of the Future Human is the culmination of a gestational process that has been underway for hundreds of thousands of years. Through the systematic expansion and integration of our human capacity lifetime after lifetime, we have been growing toward this historic breakthrough. Gestation is long and slow, but birth is sudden and quick. Our planet is going into labor and will soon give us no choice but to deliver our deeper self into history. The form of our future is implicit in our past. The Future Human is the Diamond Soul.
Another Voice: Bede Griffiths
There is nothing about the vision of history presented in this chapter that is unique to psychedelics. It has been surfacing among indigenous peoples and contemplatives for many years. Let me bring this chapter to a close by sharing a poignant exchange between Bede Griffiths and Andrew Harvey about our moment in history. Bede Griffiths was the deeply loved and respected Benedictine monk who spent much of his life living in ashrams in southern India, cultivating a deep integration of Christian and Hindu spirituality. Harvey was visiting him in 1992 in connection with a documentary that was being made about his life. This exchange took place a year before Griffiths died. He was eighty-six years old.
Bede paused suddenly . . . and then said, quietly and intensely, “You know, of course, Andrew, that we are now in the hour of God.”
Although it was a warm, fragrant morning, I shivered.
“When you say ‘hour of God,’ what do you mean?”
“I mean that the whole human race has now come to the moment when everything is at stake, when a vast shift of consciousness will have to take place on a massive scale in all societies and religions for the world to survive. Unless human life becomes centered on the awareness of a transcendent reality that embraces all humanity and the whole universe and at the same time transcends our present level of life and consciousness, there is little hope for us.”
His calm, measured, aristocratic voice made his words all the more arresting. Bede coughed and gazed at his fine, strong, bony hands.
“Very few people dare to face how extreme and decisive the situation has now become Very few people are prepared to look without illusion at our time and see it for what it is—a crucifixion on a worldwide scale of everything humanity has expected or trusted or believed in every level and in every arena ”
I had never, in all the many hours we had spent together, heard him speak so nakedly and darkly about the future of the world, and I knew him well enough already to know that he never said anything without deep purpose.
We sat together in silence, absorbing the pain and challenge of his words. Then I asked, “Do you think humanity can get through?”
“Of course,” he said immediately, his voice strong, “but it will cost everything. Just as Jesus had to go through death into the new world of the Resurrection, so millions of us will have to go through a death to the past and to all old ways of being and doing if we are going to be brought by the grace of God into the truth of a real new age ”
Bede paused again, turning his head to look at me directly.
“I know for certain only two things about the time we are about to enter. The first is that it will see on every level a ruthless battle between those forces that want to keep humanity enslaved to the past—and these include religious fundamentalism, nationalism, materialism, and corporate greed—and those forces that will awaken in response to a hunger for a new way of living and of doing everything. The second thing I know—and I know this from my own inmost experience—is that God will shower help, grace, and protection on all those who sincerely want to change and are brave enough to risk the great adventure of transformation.”
Very softly, Bede added, “God, I believe, wants a new world and a new humanity to be born from what is about to unfold.” (Harvey 2005)