On Twitter the other day, someone wrote, "I wanna hear from healers and energy workers. What are y'all sensing and getting from this time we are in? What are you grasping from the cosmos is really happening?" (The emphasis in that question is mine) The floodgate opened with "karmic justice" and "the earth moving into 5D", the "new consciousness anchored in unity and greater love" is being born, spiritual warfare, planetary realignments, the Earth cleansing herself and/or us. Capitalism falling, Mother Nature self-correcting (or correcting us), the Darkness keeping us from seeing THE LIGHT are others.
While I appreciate our nature and need to create stories or attach to old ones to help make sense of what is going on around us, here is what I wrote in response: "The stories about what is *really happening are just stories. We keep looking for *The event that is The Shift or catalyst or awakening moment in the same way others keep looking for the rapture.The ‘time we’re in’ isn’t much different from other times, we’re just disconnected from what has been experienced in other places for so long. What we’re seeing here has been happening all over the globe for decades. We forget very easily."
My primary issue with these stories we create or the mythic ones we return to in times of strife, particularly when perpetuated by those of the 'spiritual' persuasion, is that they are centered on us, humans, and at that, a select group of them. We are so absorbed in our own specialness that we think the entire universe thinks we are that much more important than any other species, be it plant, animal, virus, or mineral. It's as if we are so desperate to be part of something larger than ourselves, that Universe, that we forget it exists quite nicely without the mere 8 billion of us. We hold ourselves, or we hold some of us, in such high regard that we can't help thinking it's all about us. And, in one sense it is, quite clearly. However, that diminishes the essence of universality--one of entwined relationship.
In these stories, there is no consideration given to the hellacious experiences of those others elsewhere, those who we can't conceive as being enmeshed with us, as The Shift, The Catalyst, The Awakening, The THING that is pooh-poohed when evangelicals call it the rapture or end times--that final experience, a literal or figurative death, that either brings Christ back or brings on a new way of being. As these stories are created, there is no thought give to the events of Yemen, Syria, or the Uighurs in concentration camps and those in IDP camps across the continents. We have apparently forgotten children held in cage and behind bars, the Nigerian woman raped and murdered in a church last week, the churches in Rwanda that still contain bones, and the children enslaved for the sexual pleasure of others. We forget so quickly the protests across the globe only last year in France, Puerto Rico, Venezuela, Haiti, Algeria and more. Which of these incidents or when in the continuation of them are The Catalyst, The Shift, The THING, that burns the ugliness down and creates the New World, if there is truly such a thing? The frameworks of these stories we create maintains separation and division across humanity and those elements and beings with whom we exist together yet we don't acknowledge that others exist and have been striving for justice a very, very long time.
Bayo Akomolafe has said it better than me: "...there is no one world or stable category (like Gaia, or 'nature' or even 'human') by which any of these narratives, useful they may be, might be treated as gospel truth. Every virus in its unfolding mattering and mutability is the creation of new worlds; every jot and tittle come with their own universes...The staggering complexity of what is happening rattles our habitual modes of sense-making, our need to trace out logical origin stories and plots and characters. Such are the making of a world (by way of speaking, of course) that exceeds humans and our claims to exceptionality."
In clinging to us (only some of us, though) as the center of the universe's attention and care, we are refusing to engage with what is right in front of us as if doing so absolves us of any responsibility in how we got here and how we're going to fix it, if whatever it is needs fixing--a question that I think needs to be asked at many levels.
Whether we are creating another story about 'what is really going on' or attempting to apply the templates of myth to situations that are going on around us, we are creating space between us and what is going on around us, in front of us while simultaneously ignoring us--as individuals and enmeshed beyond individuation.
Many spiritual traditions hold that 'awakening' (used loosely here) requires going within oneself, not looking for The THING happening somewhere else, or at some other Being's design. That's what is really happening here except it happens every day, everywhere, for every human being, the opportunity to be within oneself, steeped in it long enough to understand you are not separated from that Other being and in that relationship, those relationships, we have shared responsibility.
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