Becoming Conscious
We pride ourselves on being the most intelligent species that has developed the capacity to control nature and even travel to the Moon and beyond. But what exactly is our intelligence as most commonly manifested in our societies?
Most of the time, we are far less balanced and centered in our bodies than the king of the jungle above, far less fully mentally present and more distracted. But at least in the West, we prize the readiness to pounce on our financial prey and make a profitable move. It’s a kind of savviness that, these days, holds a lot more attraction than wisdom. Wisdom cannot be monetarily priced.
And what is wisdom, you might ask? Here is how indigenous elders, leaders, and thinkers over 40 years of consultations across tribes have come to described The Fourth Way, the way that does not rely on (1) dominating each other, (2) resisting each other, (3) giving in to each other: Starting from within, working in a circle, in a sacred manner, we develop and heal ourselves, our relationships, and our world.[1] In my psychological and spiritual perspective, that implies becoming fully conscious of the interconnected spiritual beings that we are and showing up accordingly in our personal and professional relationships and business endeavors. Realizing that if we blast each other, or take advantage of each other, we are ultimately hurting ourselves. In the language of the indigenous elders, which is also a universal spiritual principle, where there is no unity, there is no real development.[2] This is what becoming conscious means — an evolved spiritual intelligence that our world in trouble is calling forth in more and more of us.
We have evolved through many degrees of more circumscribed unity — with our families, clans, tribes, nations. Now, not just our further development, but our survival depends on our ability to create a larger unity with the rest of the human family. That is the new stage of social consciousness and spiritual evolution that our planetary crisis calls for.
A friend recently asked me to write on the connection between social consciousness and the evolution of our spirit. This same friend, Geoffrey Newton, has been writing a brilliant sequence of pieces on The Fight of Our Lives, in which he shows through extensive and diligent research that our brains’ most adaptive and intelligent structure, the hippocampus in the prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for memory, does not shrink with aging under conditions of nurturing, socializing and constant communication.[3] Further, he suggests potential links between the explosive growth and doubling of the human brain during the period of Homo Erectus two million years ago, and the likely existence of matriarchal social structures at the time, as well as the development of language.
In other words, the prominence of the feminine principle of nurturing connections, emotional expression, and communication is central to our ability to thrive. Another universal spiritual principle, also articulated in the mid-19th century, upholds the importance of the essential equality between feminine and masculine in human society if it is to progress beyond its current state of wars and unsustainable divisiveness. It also states that, given the tragic history of millennia of wars, the feminine principle will have to lead the way in the transformation of social consciousness and in planetary transformation.
The world we now live in, where greed and unbridled competition have brought the planet to the brink of disaster, is the world we have created with the earlier stages of development of our social consciousness — which also correspond to earlier stages of spiritual evolution, where religions could claim superiority over one another, and could encourage tribal attitudes.
At this stage of our social and spiritual evolution, the universalist Baha’i spiritual perspective calls for a spiritual and religious understanding of all wisdom traditions as originating in the same source and guiding humanity on its evolutionary journey. It also calls for a social consciousness that corresponds to this spiritual perspective — one of global citizenship.
That one indeed is a man who, today, dedicateth himself to the service of the entire human race. The Great Being saith: Blessed and happy is he that ariseth to promote the best interests of the peoples and kindreds of the earth. … It is not for him to pride himself who loveth his own country, but rather for him who loveth the whole world. The earth is but one country, and mankind its citizens.[4]
How are we going to arise to this tall mandate across our over 6500 languages, and vast religious and cultural diversity, without losing any of it? By becoming conscious our true reality — our spiritual nature, the spiritual nature of life, and its deep interconnectedness in all its diversity. That consciousness has to become so strong that it can prevail over our tribal ways which Geoffrey Newton describes at length in his piece quoted above. Not only does it have to grow very strong, but it has to happen fast, under conditions of code red for humanity. In my essay on Concerted, Connected, and Consultative Action Amidst Code Red for Humanity[5], I describe how communities around the world are organizing themselves as active moral agents in the transformation of global culture at this critical time. These interfaith and inter-spiritual citizen-activism communities are working in every locality worldwide to create a new polis, a new form of governance — one that applies The Fourth Way described above. They are becoming skillful together as they hold sacred open spaces for everyone to join a consultative process that leads to direct and unifying action. This process is open to each of us.
As my dear brothers Jon Ramer and Phil Lane write in the essay quoted above, we only have the world that we create with ourselves. Hence the primary principle in the Indigenous Fourth Way is that “human and community development unfolds from within each person, relationship, family, organization, community or nation.”[6] That means that if we love our children enough and do not wish to compromise their ability to live on this planet, we have to take a good hard look at out of what values we are living and working. Are we operating as though the only things that count are the ones we can measure and price? Are we carrying on with our consumption and daily preoccupations hoping someone else is going to solve the problem of the unsustainability of our lifestyles? Or are we taking stock of our deepest values — not the ones we profess but the ones we actually live and work out of? Are we willing to undergo radical growth, radical awakening, however uncomfortable it may be? Are we willing to examine our cultural world views and the language through which we mindlessly express them, and make conscious changes?
Are we willing to become conscious enough to act in conscious and intentional ways? As Geoffrey Newton puts it so beautifully, “at the beating heart of consciousness is the human soul which gives us moral awareness.”[7] This moral awareness allows us to know that we, too, can step forth and create inter-spiritual communities of concerted, connected, and consultative action and respond in a spirit of unity to the challenge of our times.
Adapted from my new book, Global Unitive Healing: Integral Skills for Personal and Collective Transformation
[1] Jon Ramer and Phil Lane Jr, Deep Social Networks and the Digital Fourth Way, September 21, 2009.
[2] See Elena Mustakova, Global Unitive Healing, https://www.amazon.com/Global-Unitive-Healing-Collective-Transformation/dp/1945026766/ref=sr_1_1?crid=Z19I0JOZ5GEF&keywords=global+unitive+healing+mustakova&qid=1642863077&sprefix=global+unitive%2Caps%2C86&sr=8-1
[3] https://medium.com/@geoffnewton312/human-singularity-what-is-it-397b1262791d also https://medium.com/@geoffnewton312/we-are-in-the-fight-of-our-lives-e7fb8e61c99
[4] Gleanings from the Writings of Bahá’u’lláh, XCVII, recorded in the second half of 19th century.
[5]See https://issuu.com/theowlmagazine/docs/the_owl_magazine_winter_2022/38
[6] See footnote 1
[7] See footnote 3
