All posts tagged: #collective

Chapter 1, Part 2:

April 19, 2020

She imagined herself and her co-creators as archetypal characters, like she was dreaming a play without yet knowing who would play the parts, or how the story would weave together. She imagined:

Noel: a property owner with a modest yard, with a full-time job outside of the collective, who has dedicated (and continues to dedicate) a significant amount of time to her emotional and spiritual development. Noel was a truth-seeker and a change-maker. She was in a process of ever more conscious co-creation and co-evolution with others and with the universe. She was living in her authentic self from a place of love, and had healed many of her past traumas, and she had a working process for continual healing and the maintenance of personal balance while in motion. She saw her herself as making change by embodying the change, creating space, and giving permission for others to step into their authentic selves as well. She has no desire to control, is a clear communicator, and has no desire to lead at all, but rather to move with others in a direction. Her natural role is that of leader within this collective. She is a natural healer, peacemaker, and empath who has developed her own self-healing tools. She understands herself and that she is constantly evolving. She understands that everyone else is as well, and this fuels her compassion and hope. She listens and hears – she looks and sees. And, she articulates and translates well the goals, needs, and ideas of other individuals within the collective to each other, and is good at helping everyone stay together on the same page. Noel brings her self-aware authentic self, her articulation, her non-hierarchical leadership, some property that she has never considered hers, and a burning desire to help move society forward towards a symbiotic relationship with this earth and a new level of human consciousness. Her real talents are her broad vision and perspective as well as her ability to hold space, give permission, and catalyze change.

Jackson: a property owner with a modest yard, who has taken permaculture design courses, and has designed a couple of projects. Jackson may not know everything there is to know about permaculture, but he does have a good idea of where to start. And, what’s more, he has some connections to permaculturists who have been consulting, teaching classes, and designing for years. He has done some deep personal work and has a solid meditation and self-care/healing process and practice in his own life. He is a changemaker who seeks to help people see that they really do have the power to change themselves by taking a hard look at what they are doing and working systemically to make improvements. He is interested in the top-level design process for permaculture more so than the implementation, and he has a good understanding of how to work with computers to coordinate projects. He has another job now, but also has an interest in transitioning out of it. He also has a broad base of knowledge of plant based diet and nutrition, which would help in designing the projects to connect in a useful way and ensure the projects are yielding not only a variety of foods, but foods that would theoretically allow for members of the collective to thrive without having to go outside of the collective unit.

Millie: a property owner with an extensive garden in a large yard, who knows a lot about plants and growing things and is also interested in building sustainable community.

Ellie: previous owner of a landscaping company, and hobby-herbalist, interested in healing herself and bringing plant medicines to the world.

Isaac: a human of many talents, who was good at understanding systems, and could build and implement pretty much any design …

Each of these initial members could ultimately help fold in more members, and membership in the collective would be sure to grow, and Noel figured those archetypal characters would become clearer with time. She realized as she was thinking about it that, no matter the skillets and abilities of the individual members, they would all need to share some fundamental values, a certain type of vision of the future, and a level of self-actualization and self-awareness appropriate to the endeavor. There would have to be some core characteristics shared by all members of the collective:

(But first, Noel quickly disclaimers herself in her head: “None of this speaks to the specific beliefs or practices of the members, and that is also an important point – for this collective is not designed to carry with it any set belief structure – no specific teacher or guru – for it is not about control, and must be built in part on the understanding that every individual will have their own, completely unique, way of interacting with the universe and understanding what is.”)

We know that we do not live in a mechanistic, Newtonian universe. We understand that this model for understanding our reality is very useful in many circumstances, and we are not abandoning that or saying it is wrong. What we are saying is that this model is not enough to describe what we know about how the universe works. Evolutionary biology, quantum physics, and eons of religions and spiritual practices point to a different model of the universe. The universe can be modeled as a non-locally connected, constantly evolving, organism. It is a massive complex adaptive system, made up of many smaller component complex adaptive systems. Life is not meaningless: life is evolution. We do not “understand” consciousness, yet each of us experience it and know it well. As humans, we are here to evolve and create greater and greater symbiosis for evolutionary growth. We are ready to move beyond our individual egos and to understand ourselves, and to feel ourselves, as integral parts of the system in which we exist. We are ready to move past duality – to take on and embody the fact that there is no plain right and wrong, or up and down, or black and white, and that all is relative, and all is rich with complexity. This does not mean that there is no moral compass, this is to say we are finding our moral compass in a new way. What this all means is that there are possibilities, humans can change, we can be better, and we can learn from our mistakes both individually and collectively.

We build progress narratives and seek to create, then enforce, feedback loops that will lead our selves and our species and our planet to regenerative and healing virtuous cycles. We understand that in doing so what we are doing is finding, breaking, and reversing a multitude of vicious cycles in play at this place and time on earth individually as well as collectively across multiple levels and layers of society. We understand that this is not anyone’s “fault” and that this place we find ourselves in is a step in our individual and collective evolutionary journeys. We understand that our systems here are coming under severe strain and that the way to move through this time is to ensure that we understand that we must find new solutions, and that while we can build on and incorporate what we have learned, the cycles must stop – we, as individuals, and collectively at various levels, must work towards learning from history so that it actually stops repeating itself. And, although we are at a tenuous point in our evolution as a species, and we have much damage to heal, we do believe that we can do it. We have hope in ourselves and in humanity. We have hope, and we look at open eyes at the state of the world and the current state of humanity and what we have done in our collective slumber fueled by consumerism, addiction, distraction, and massive-scale cognitive dissonance. We do not expect to be “perfect,” and we do not expect to become “healed,” or for life to become “easy” or “blissful” always. We know we will make mistakes, and we know these are lessons and a necessary part of our process. We live to keep healing and evolving, and we are willing and ready to consistently put in the work that it takes to do so. And we are ready to set aside all blame – of self and of others – to forgive and to love. To choose love and trust over fear and suspicion.

Our understanding of our selves and our place on this planet and in this universe informs how we want to live and how we want to interact with each other. We believe that it is time to move on from our current understanding of wealth in general, and of personal property in particular. We find value in healing and in evolution. We find value in co-creating with each other and with this planet and this universe. We seek to improve ourselves and to help ourselves in service to the whole. We understand that when we form smaller groups, or collectives, that they are always a part of a larger collective, and that we always must respect and understand our relationship to that larger whole. We must therefore always seek to help, rather than to take from or to use, that larger system as we build resilience within our smaller, more local, collectives. We understand that moving away from property ownership as presently established, and moving away from an economy based on accumulation of material wealth, are not going to happen overnight – and they are not going to come from some larger top-down plan, or new economic structure. They must emerge from the bottom – and part of the reason for this is that one thing the new structure must not have at all is a top-down, imposed structure. This is what we ultimately must move past.

In our current times, material wealth accumulation is impossible for a multitude and extreme for a few. Even though some individuals and groups thereof have amassed giant piles of material wealth, the basic needs of many are not being met. We believe that the new measure of the wealth of a community, or a species, is not by how much a few of them have, and it is not by adding up what they all have, but it is by the level of needs that are being met for everyone. Now, we have had ideas about ways to work on the inequity of wealth distribution many times. And we have a lot of good ideas from all that work, but we do not have some perfect and implementable system. Why? Because the problems are interconnected and complex and to come up with one would simply be impossible. But one thing is clear, in order to move on from this system the ways in which our basic needs are being met must change. Since near-global capitalism, and global commodification will never work to change this, we have to do something different. And, whatever we do has to also be able to co-exist with the larger systems in place. The idea is not to change the system from within the system (which doesn’t really work for such fundamental shifts), and the idea is not to come up with a sparkling new system and implement it. Instead, the idea is to incorporate some parts of the system while growing a replacement system from the ground up through healing and trust building and likely through facing much adversity.

Collectivism is a way forward that seems to be emerging somewhat naturally due to the pressures of our system. Collectivism means resource sharing and putting all intention towards the collective good. Ultimately, it would break down private ownership. This would not mean there is no ownership. Small level collectives would have use of certain things and materials – they would “own them”, in a sense. But it would be understood more like a resource allocation of what is needed for that small collective to do what it needs to do as a part of the larger collective…

Noel realized she was out on a bit of a tangent and reigned her thoughts in a little. Back to what the members of the collective would need to fundamentally have in common:

We do not have interest in ownership, possession, or control. We have no interest in the accumulation of material wealth. We are not interested in continual growth in the sense of number of members, or of land/resources, or of money. We are not interested in merely being sustainable. We want to be regenerative and evolutionary in our collective endeavors. We see a reasonable step to take in this direction is to have more of our basic needs met without reliance on the larger economic structures of society, and without the need for things to be transported over great distances. A starting point to this is to build a collective that has its basic needs for food met without economic engagement, or without the need for money at all. When we set out on this journey together, we will respect all our individual needs and journeys, while fully committing to our co-creative journey together. We will work to communicate fully, to bring our authentic selves to all we do, and to trust each other fully. We understand that we will hurt each other, make mistakes, and have disagreements – and we all agree to work through these things nonviolently, and with empathy. We understand that challenges make us stronger, and we are not interested in pride or ego. We understand that we are fully investing in this collective vision and what may grow or evolve from it together, and that no one of us could do any of this alone.

She thought that was a pretty decent start, at any rate. Next would come the interest gathering phase. Noel would have to reach out to those she knew might be interested in joining her in this endeavor of starting a seed collective. She knew her next step would be reaching out to her friends and connections to start to find those who shared this dream and were ready to work to bring it to life, such that the collective grow out of a co-creative process, naturally evolving into what it needed to be with work, laughter, leadership, shared vision, trust, and love.

FAGGTROPOLIS CHAPTER ONE

April 17, 2020

(Envisioning the Beginning of the Beginning)

image of roots growing down and up in front of a glowing white moon. Almost all black and white with a splash of yellow and deep read, signalling the beginning of a process of change -- and initiation. — ***Initiation*** *(Oil on Canvas, February* 2020)

Part 1:

There was no doubt the pandemic that struck the world was a good time to think about community building and change. It seemed like a good time, as well, to revision and strengthen existing community and relationships as well. As such, the time seemed right to take those first steps towards the vision of Faggtropolis that seemed at times so large, so far away, that it was impossible to see where to start. A lot of the time this was worst when the seer was attempting to be the sole origination point for his vision. Instead, it had to be a collective effort. Essentially from the beginning. The large-scale vision was a brighter future that was waiting in a distant potentiality. The current time period made that brighter future seem rather illusive on many fronts. The beginnings of severe climate collapse had appeared. A pandemic had struck the entire globe, both pointing to the problems we need to address with the way we have been doing things by showing us how the environment around us begins to heal if we can just stop what we are doing, and seeming to welcome in a potential new rise in fascism and a new low in economic stability, with a significant chance that efforts to stimulate the unstable and crashing global economy would in turn lead to an even greater rate of human-caused environmental degradation. It was possible the brief reprise of the first pandemic would be enough to turn the direction of the economy and beckon in the rise of a more environmentally resilient way of life for humans, but it was highly improbable. But this only meant that getting started was more important than ever. Or, perhaps, just that the time had arrived. In either event, Noel knew that there were many people that shared her vision of the future, and she knew that she personally had come to know several people – especially in recent years – who could (and likely would) be instrumental in shaping the rest of her life and contribution to that future because she saw clearly that it was not hers alone – either to dream or to create. So, Noel sat and pondered where to start, and how to gather the group of humans that would be a part of her seed collective. She hoped there would be many seed collectives formed that could work together, but she had to start with hers.

Noel was a property owner. She didn’t have a lot of land, but she had a reasonable lot with a house. She had several friends who were similarly situated. Some of them, like Noel, had employment they could do from home, so they were not being severely impacted economically by the pandemic. Some of them, however, did not. She also had friends with various backgrounds and amounts of knowledge and skill around building, landscaping, permaculture design, growing plants, computer programing, accounting, and more. And those friends had friends, and so on. Some friends owned property and were wonderful gardeners, knowledgeable in helping plants that provide food for us thrive. Noel envisioned the start of her seed collective to be a group of friends and friends of friends coming together to collectively start a collective organization (in which all had equal value as integral parts) that could work towards becoming a permaculture collective with the goal of providing for itself and for those that cannot provide for themselves within the collective’s community. This would be achieved by creating food forest/permaculture projects on the properties of those members who own property, as well as ultimately funding a property to serve as a larger food forest and also seed nursery and incorporating bamboo and hemp for use in building and other. The idea would be to be as food independent as possible, and to be as local and symbiotic as possible. Initially, however, it would just be the properties of the initial members.

The land-owning members of the collective (or, at least those who wanted) would agree to have their land used for permaculture production. We would need to have enough permaculture designers and gardeners etc. to plan and then implement the projects on these initial properties. We would have to have people working on building out a database and modeling system to keep track of the designs and plans. The initial properties would be designed to be all part of the same system of properties – meaning that they would be designed to work together, and to provide a good variety and hopefully to ultimately meet most of the food needs of that seed of people (at least to get as close as possible), and also to have a range of medicinal herbs and plants that would also be available for the collective members. All additional foods and herbs and other useful plants would be donated to the collective’s community.

The initial group would likely need to be on the smaller side, and the first real step would be to identify that group of people who might be ready to take the step of formally forming an organization of some kind, and beginning to work on how seed funding might best be obtained. Noel was seeing a group forming, and then getting a preliminary idea of how many properties might be involved (the scope land-wise of the initial permaculture project), and how many people it might take to implement this design. If a permaculture designer is not in the initial team, perhaps the team could consult with one at this early phase. With a basic idea of that scope, then we would understand how many people we might want to be able to support with the seed funding as implementers. Initially, Noel envisioned applying for seed funding – possibly as a grant and starting the collective as a nonprofit organization – that would cover the needs of several people who would be designing, building, and implementing the permaculture projects. Other people who were members that contributed land perhaps, but were still working in other employment, would keep that employment and would not take any money from the collective at first. All would be equal members, though, and that is very important. Equal in consideration and worth. Not necessarily all equal in what the collective would (particularly initially) be able to provide. Regardless of how the seed funding was obtained, it would have to be able to pay for the living of whoever would contribute their full service to the collective.

Noel tried to think through how many fulltime, or full commitment (?), members might be reasonable. She realized she was not going to find a number and would eventually just have to make her idea known and see who wanted to work on building that part of the dream together with her. But the idea would be that the seed funding would cover those who would be fully time committed to working for the collective good on collective projects. Members would have a balance with their personal time and personal projects, but these members would be spending most of their time on collective projects. These members would need to receive enough money to live comfortably from the collective. Economic support to match contribution in hours – but there is no hierarchy or pay scale, and everyone works together to ensure that all members are receiving what they need to live fulfilled, creative, lives.

In the beginning, it seemed there would be a lot of work for a designer, and this designer could work on the initial farm design (across all the properties) and could coordinate implementation. This would be quite a lot of work and may be more than one person. This person, or group, would work with a plant person or group. These teams would work with a landscaping and gardening team that would implement the designs. The same teams that implement designs could accomplish maintenance and possibly harvest. Eventually there may need to be a distribution team for all that is collected. Some people could fill more than one role, and ideally collective members would be able to spend time in multiple groups and learn more skills as they wished. Part of the funding could be for education. Members could be supported financially to the level of their contribution, in terms of what the group considers to be fair and reasonable – and always subject to more conversation and continual change.

All members would agree from the beginning that this organization, again, however funded and ultimately whether “for profit” or “nonprofit” would be non-hierarchical and evolutionary. The organization would be formed to meet a specific evolutionary goal, which is working towards healing and creating resilient communities that are symbiotic with our planet. Forging a path for a brighter future for humanity, and for this planet, although if humanity ends up going away, the planet will continue on and be just fine without us too, so really it is coming from a place of hope for humanities continued inclusion in the evolutionary path of this planet in this time and space. Ultimately the path of the organization would be determined by its members, and more than that, by what emerges from their work together and their interactions at the local level.

What this would mean in practice, is that all founding members (and all members taken on in the future) would have an equal consideration in terms of their voice in the organization regardless of role at a certain time. Leadership would be agreed upon and would never be just one person. Initially, Noel could see something like four or five landowners, a designer and a plant person, and maybe two or three landscapers. The designer could also help with implementation, if it worked out that way, and so could the plant person. Some of the landowners could help with implementation, or be designers, etc. The teams can overlap…

Noel’s head was spinning. A group of her friends – new and old – could come together. Some of them would own land on which pilot projects could be started. Some would be able to work on designing the projects. Some would be able to implement them. Once this happened, it seemed like the next step would be working towards a sketch of possible projects that could be included with a grant proposal, or a business loan proposal, or a proposal to investors or donors (whatever the case may be). But the first, first step would be trying to gauge interest and find that group of people.

How long had she been sitting here? She did not know. She made a habit of never keeping clocks around, and if they were, she liked them to be wrong (and differently so if there were more than one in sight). She had left her devise at home. It was a beautiful day, so she decided to walk home with an eye towards perhaps working in her own, modest, garden. While Noel really wanted to work towards this permaculture collective, wanted to catalyze it, to contribute, and to grow it, she had a feeling she would not end up being in that part of things. She saw herself more as a supporter and space holder, and as someone that everyone could come to. She felt at home thinking of herself in that type of nurturing role. Carefully helping make spacer, hold space for, and caretaker through the rise of collectivism.

A New Way to Look at the Universe and Our Place Within It

April 10, 2020

**The Edge of the Shift** (Oil on Canvas, January 2020)

Humanity is on the precipice between the next quantum leap in evolution and our own destruction as a species. If humanity is destroyed, the universe will go on evolving. If humanity is not destroyed, humanity is poised to shift towards self-awareness of our collective consciousness, and beyond. The predominate model of the universe and our place in it is that we are the epitome of evolution – the pinnacle of live being – living in a rather dead universe. Humanity still sees the earth as predominately here for its use – and, in fact, it sees the rest of the universe that way as well – with ideas about mining in space and colonizing various planets to support still more humans once the earth is destroyed by our use and abuse practices. The predominate world view is that we live in a reality in which what is real is what science has proven – and outside of that there is no “knowing.” We have a theory for what happens at the level of the very small (quantum theory), and we have a pretty good tool for making estimates about how things work in our relative space-time at a scale on the order of magnitude of ourselves and up to planets, but that seems to fall apart at the very large end of things. Interestingly, we are now starting to see evidence that perhaps our theory of the very small also applies to the very large. This is somewhat of a strange concept to grasp, especially with our understanding about quantum entanglement and causality. What it means, essentially, is that quantum theory scales. Science is beginning to grapple with a new theory of the universe – and right on time. At the same time, humans are waking up to a higher level of consciousness. A consciousness beyond the self – a collective consciousness and an awareness of our selves as integral parts of a single, unified whole. This process has been ongoing for a very long time and is a product of evolution.

Evolution behaves like a search and find algorithm operating in a design space. We are the product of evolution, and so is everything around us. We have focused on our own evolution here on earth, and understandably so since that is our relative viewpoint, but evolution is much larger than us. Just as we ourselves are complex adaptive systems that evolve over time, so is our planet, and so is our universe. We humans have focused so much on our own evolution (which, naturally, we can only observe up to where we currently are – we cannot see the “future,” so to speak) and have seemingly assumed that we are “complete” biologically. The predominate view is that humans evolved to the point where they could build complicated technology, and the only way forward to a “more evolved” humanity is by merging technology with our biology. And, we have made great strides with this approach. An unintended consequence, however, has been that we have ignored the fact that we are still biologically evolving as well. Specifically, our conscious awareness is expanding. This means that we are becoming aware of the fact that our consciousnesses are linked and that we are, as individual human consciousnesses, like drops of water in an ocean. This collective consciousness allows us some awareness of the awareness that emerges from our individual thoughts and experiences across time and space as we know them.

We know a lot more collectively than we do as individuals – and the network of consciousness of which we are a part therefore often makes leaps forward occur seemingly out of nowhere. What I mean to say is that when great new discoveries and theories arise simultaneously across the planet, often seemingly at random in multiple places at once, what appears to be happening is that our collective consciousness has solved a problem for us (has become aware of a new relative truth) and then the collective consciousness plants the seeds of that solution back into our individual consciousnesses. Where biological evolution plays a part is in our receptivity to this knowledge and conscious awareness of where it comes from. With our egocentric world view we may think that we as individuals have come up with something, but actually it is more likely that we have all come up with something and now that something needs to be brought into our physical world and world view so that we can move forward. In the alternative, because we also still predominately feel like there is a god or creator of some kind, we may think that such an “all-knowing” being has reached down from the heavens to provide us with some vital information. And, when you think about it, it is pretty logical to say, hey, I know something I can’t possibly “know” (from experience), so someone who is outside of my existence must have handed it to me. Another possibility, and a more likely one, is that we live in more dimensions than we can perceive and in just such a higher dimension we are all connected as nodes in a giant network of consciousness.

We can conceive of this concept on the scale of our experience of our own brain and when information we “know” is in our conscious, versus in our unconscious. Imagine you are working on a complicated project. You have read a lot of information about the topic of the project from a variety of sources, potentially over a long time (especially if you went to school for it). You have also got your lifetime of experiences from which to draw. Now, you are not consciously aware of all of the information your brain contains about the problem, and you may even hit a wall at which you just do not know how to proceed. One way this can be resolved is by you having an “ah ha!” moment. Many people speak about such moments occurring in the shower. When these moments occur we suddenly become consciously aware of a solution that our unconscious mind had been working away at. This happens because our brain is a connected neural network and we are only consciously aware of a small amount of its processes. Our brain the neural network is holding all of the information that we have. All of the information is not all part of our conscious awareness, and we have not consciously connected the dots. Nonetheless, our subconscious has connected the dots for us and has essentially spat back out the answer we were seeking.

This is the same essential process that occurs when humanity has a great breakthrough in consciousness. That is not to say that no “one” invents anything, it is not to say we are not individually important (we are individually essential, in fact), but it is to say that when we have massive shifts it is likely the product of this sort of extra-universal (in the sense that we do not understand it or have a way to scientifically describe what is going on at this time) process by which the collective mind has found a solution that no one individual is yet holding all of the keys to. When this happens, certain individuals become consciously aware of the new information. That is to say that it is received into their conscious minds. Think of this process like a radio receiving radio waves (only the radio waves in this case are at a higher dimension than we can currently perceive with any instrument). A person who has an evolved consciousness to the point of understanding themselves as part of a larger collective, who is good at tuning in to the frequency at which this information is being transferred, will pick up the waves of knowing. Once this occurs, that person will know more than they could possibly know. It is important to note that this process occurs whether the person receiving the information, or “knowing,” is aware where the information is coming from or not.

We are now at a stage at which more of us are becoming to be aware that the knowledge we have is more than we (alone) could possibly know. This knowing has been attributed to all types of things across history. For example, a classic place to attribute such knowledge would be to the “divine” in the form of whatever deity or angel or whatever that we have decided to believe in. Other examples are that such knowing could be attributed to a person’s psychosis. It could also be attributed to a person’s own “genius.” Instead, such knowing comes from a connection with the collective consciousness. When we sleep, we can be connected to this consciousness, or we can stay in our own – it is a matter of receptivity and evolution of consciousness as to which occurs. Similarly, when we meditate, we can scour our own minds and not go beyond our selves, or we can transcend self-awareness and connect with the larger consciousness of humanity, of the planet, and, ultimately, of our universe (and possibly even beyond that, but one cannot possibly tell that from here). Similarly, when we ingest various psychedelic medicines, we can explore our own mind, or, we can go beyond that. Now, in order to be able to get beyond ourselves, we do need to consciously work on it. This is in part because such awareness and connectivity has to be a choice (more on that later), and in part because we live in a society that has us not seeing reality and instead seeing our made up ideas about reality, which means that there is a significant amount of “deprograming,” or shedding of robot parts, or what have you that must occur before our conscious mind is ready and able to receive, comprehend, and integrate such information in a grounded and meaningful way. Without such work, even if information is received, it is highly likely to be misinterpreted. Misinterpretation can lead to messiah complexes and the formation of religion. It can lead to grandiose concepts of one’s own genius. It can lead to the dis-integration of a human’s entire conscious awareness. It can cause people to appear out of touch with reality. And more.

When such information is received by a person who is able to discern the information they have learned from themselves – and able to interpret it in a meaningful and useful way – and able to express it in language that is understood by others then the information becomes a breakthrough for humanity. Humans have had many such breakthroughs across recorded history. When our fundamental understanding, or awareness about, reality and our place in it shifts we can be said to have undergone a massive paradigm shift. At the global, societal, level there are multiple paradigms operating at all times, and there is an evolutionary progression occurring so that new paradigms emerge, and less complete understandings slowly fade away. For example, we used to live in a predominate paradigm in which earth was the center of the universe and there was one all-knowing god who created us and everything here. Now the dominate paradigm suggests that we are not the center of the universe, and rather that we are quite insignificant little biological beings that happened to evolve by complete chance on this planet with just the right conditions. We understand reality as that which we can experience with our five physical senses and that which we can perceive with the help of tools. We understand ourselves as living in three-dimensional space-time and we consider ourselves to be finite beings. We believe that our purpose is to grow indefinitely and to develop more and more technology to allow us to have a better life than nature, from which we consider ourselves separate, could provide. We are materialistic and self-serving, and we are killing ourselves. We are in desperate need of a paradigm shift. New paradigms emerge as an evolutionary process over time as the collective knowledge base grows. At certain points, when there is about to be a leap forward, some number of people will be able to intuit the shift and help push it along.

Once the collective consciousness becomes aware of a new truth that we are evolving towards conscious awareness of it can push the information back into our individual consciousnesses. When the information comes into our individual consciousnesses it is fragmented and distorted. Multiple people will have the same knowledge but will access and understand different parts. In order for such a message to be received and then integrated into our three dimensional society it must be understood and then presented in enough different ways that some tipping point amount of society sees it as true. Once this happens the new paradigm becomes the dominant paradigm, and progress continues at a slower, incremental, pace until the next large leap emerges. Quantum mechanics is holding a part of the key to our ability to scientifically explain a bit more about just how this might work, though due to the limitations of math and computing power it may be difficult to get to a full proof. For this reason, it is very good that we have other ways of understanding things. Namely, we can tap into this collective consciousness and we can develop and utilize our higher dimensional, or energetic, senses. Ultimately, it seems very likely that the principles of quantum mechanics apply equally to the very large as to the very small. It is very likely the principles do not quite apply (or rather that we will have a great deal of trouble measuring the effects there-of with any instrument couched in space-time) to our three dimensional reality as we perceive it through our five physical senses. This is specifically because we are living in a three-dimensional space-time that is definite. In other words, we are here in physical world – we have been actualized in a “solid” (at our level of perception) form. But, let us now consider a whole different level of perception.

If we were to zoom out many orders of magnitude from our current view of our selves we could look at ourselves as very tiny parts of the larger universe in which we reside. If we were sitting outside of time and space we would perceive of our reality in an entirely different way. We could see the web of consciousness that links us all together. We could see how consciousness and energy are everywhere – and we could see that these things are impacting our time-space reality, although we are unable to perceive them. When looking at our universe as a type of connected network of consciousness, one could still perceive individual units of consciousness (in other words it makes sense that one would be able to zoom in on the consciousness and find it to be comprised of some smaller elements). At this level, our individual consciousnesses are like small particles or groups of particles. Our consciousnesses are entangled – possibly at the quantum level — in this giant network. So, while in our physical time-space reality two consciousnesses may be very far apart in time and space, if they are close to in this extra-temporal-spatial network then they will impact each other. While we, as a species, have not developed a conscious awareness of these links, quantum mechanics is quietly hinting at their existence. Similarly, quantum mechanics is quietly hinting at the impact of both observation and intention on reality and at a new understanding of causality that transcends time and space. Though it may take a while to get there in terms of the math and actual scientific evidence and proof, many alive today have direct experiential understandings about the nature of reality hinted at by quantum mechanics.

That is all to say that a subset of humanity is already aware of their connections with all others – some are even aware of connections that cross time and space boundaries. A subset of humanity is already aware of how our intentions impact and shape our reality – and of the dreamlike nature of this realized quantum event in which we reside. Greater conscious awareness of our connection to others allows us to more consciously work together to further our own evolution. Presently, humanity is only physically evolving at a slow rate, and a part of that is explained by the fact that we are only using a small part of our brain. As our brains become more connected our conscious awareness expands and we are evolving in that sense. Our perception, awareness, and consciousness are evolving. Socially, we are still not in a place where we recognize this to be the case – and therefore we are still writing such things off either as non-scientifically provable (and therefore false). Interestingly, our ability to prove a thing using the scientific method as we currently know it has no bearing on something’s relative truth or falsehood. No bearing on “realness,” so to speak. Now, in order to get past where we are and breakthrough into a new paradigm of human endeavor what we need is a fully integrated theory of reality that incorporates all our knowledge, not merely our scientific knowledge, and pushes our understanding forward. Currently, we have the tools to do this. Our understandings about complex adaptive systems, emergence, and evolution from systems science coupled with our own direct experience with connection and causality can at least get us to a working theory.

Let us start by looking at the universe as we know it as a type of living organism. Now, consider that within that organism exist various components. One such component is our solar system – a still smaller component of which is our planet, Earth. So, we are now looking at the entirety of earth – let’s say out to the edge of its atmosphere – as one, discernible, living system. The global system is a complex adaptive system that has evolved over time in this space. Before the evolution of beings that could receive consciousness, there would have been no awareness of its existence. That would not mean it didn’t exist, but it would mean that no one would perceive its existence because there would be no one. At some point, individual elements of the global system gained awareness of themselves as a discernible unit, or part. On Earth, as far as we can tell, human beings have the most advanced awareness of their own individual consciousnesses in this place at this time. The next step in our consciousness is to move to a collective awareness. When this level of awareness becomes the predominate level, humanity will have made a leap into a new paradigm. With collective awareness we become consciously aware of our connections with other beings – we begin to see ourselves as a consciousness receivers, and we understand that what we know is made up both from our own individual experiences and knowledge and from the larger collective knowing of our connected collective consciousness. We see that we are all individuals (and vitally important) components of this larger system. We understand that we are all at once other and at once the same. With this knowledge we can begin to trust and work with building up our ability to perceive things from the collective consciousness as relative truths.

In order to get there, however, we have to first heal ourselves of all the limiting and restraining patterns of belief we have established over a long, long time. We must let go of fear and blame and take responsibility for ourselves and our place in the universe. We must stop fighting to stay stagnant as humans – and we must expand our consciousnesses. Now, in order to do that, however, one must first ensure one is working towards an ever-greater level of conscious awareness of themselves. Discernment becomes incredibly important. This is because, especially at this early stage in the evolution of our collective consciousness, it is very easy to mistaken one’s own thought projections for information from the collective – and it is very easy to misinterpret the universal consciousness speaking though one’s self as either one’s own self or as something “supernatural” or from god or any number of other things. We cannot be forced to connect, or we would not have full awareness of the collective and we may not maintain our individuality (which is also very important to our continued collective evolution). Ancient cultures were much more in touch with their connectivity than we are today, however they did not have the same scientific and technological knowledge we do today. Combining the two is the way forward. Because the system in which we live is so complex, we have a very hard time understanding what impact any action we take locally will ultimately have on the whole. The aggregate results of all of the local interactions occurring between beings is impossible to predict. If we can work to gain connection with our collective consciousness, and be aware of that connection, in a grounded manner then we will have access to a wealth of information that will help us move human evolution forward.

In order to develop a more conscious awareness of our collective consciousness (and our part in it – note that, in theory, we would still have concentrations of certain information in various clusters of the overall network of consciousnesses), we must individually gain that awareness. Once enough individuals have such awareness we will consider ourselves to have evolved awareness of collective consciousness as a species. When we tap into collective consciousness and live aware of our connections to and through it we are able to see what we should, as individuals, do if we would like to be the most useful to the collective and to ourselves in the ever-unfolding march of evolution. We can get in touch with what many call the “higher self” and we can get in touch with various “guides” and we can develop our intuition. Intuition is a combination of collective consciousness and individual consciousness, and intuition guides us quite well if we learn to trust it. We still must have discernment. We each have things that we can bring into this world, and we each have the free will to choose not to. Intuition, as it is commonly understood, is only the very tip of the iceberg in terms of what we are able to perceive. We can also learn entire fields, get senses about the future, understand our connections across time and space to other realities, and we can receive information that is generally useful for our individual selves and for all of our collective being as well.