You Can’t Get Off The Train!
FOREWARD: This is an exploration of ideas presented in Gregg Braden’s book, “Deep Truth: Igniting the Memory of Our Origin, History, Destiny, and Fate”. This book explores the crises we currently face and new scientific discoveries that may help us better understand our history, and allow us to make wiser choices for our future.
Change is inevitable
You are on a train racing into a changing future, and you can’t get off! Life is a journey with no destination. We cannot stop; we cannot “go back”. Teilhard de Chardin said there is a momentum that causes life to move to ever more complexity and consciousness, towards an “omega point” attracting us into the future. Each of us changes slightly each day, as we have new experiences, develop new beliefs, and let go of beliefs that no longer serve us. Since we are each changing individually, the more of us there are, the faster the world around us changes. With 7 Billion people on the planet, Earth is now a rapidly changing place.
The future isn’t determined — we have choices
Although we can’t go back, we CAN steer the train towards a more desirable future. If we share our values and dreams, we can realize them through co-creation of our future. Perhaps the first thing we should agree upon is that the population of the planet is putting a tremendous strain on the resources we need to survive. Clean air and water are becoming more difficult to find. Food shortages caused by less than normal crop harvests in a few countries can lead to famine and starvation in many parts of the world. We are fighting wars over oil and other energy sources, as our global energy consumption soars.
Overpopulation is a serious problem
Paul Ehrlich described the problems with our population growth in his 1968 book, “The Population Bomb”. Early attempts to reduce the population explosion in China, by restricting family size, have led to imbalances in the gender ratios as male babies have been preferred to female. This has led campaigns to promote the value of women and has frustrated a number of young males looking for a mate. But China HAS been successful in reducing their population growth, to about half of India. Obviously, regulations that restrict births are unpopular and may exaggerate gender biases, but we need solutions that work to address this issue. Many of the crises we currently face would be reduced or eliminated if we could reduce the population.
William Jennings Bryan summed up the nature of destiny beautifully when he said, “Destiny is not a matter of chance. It is a matter of choice. It is not a thing to be waited for, it is a thing to be achieved.” We can’t afford to let the future happen to us, we need to actively choose the future. Gregg Braden says, “In full view of the broken and failed systems, we must choose: Do we work to embrace new ways of living that give us what we need in clean, sustainable ways that honor us and our world? Or do we fight among ourselves to prop up old and unsustainable ways of living that will eventually break again and leave us hanging in the abyss of the same choices again at a later time?”
We are living in a time of transition
We are entering a new cycle in the history of the world. Every 5125 years, the world begins a new cycle, according to the Mayan calendar and modern astronomy. The climate, both physical and political, is destined to change. It is time for us to choose what has worked in our history and what has not. What crises do we have to solve and what solutions will honor our shared values? We are the generation that has been chosen by destiny to determine how our world will look in the next cycle of history. Will we be recovering from massive catastrophes or will we find a path to achieve a sustainable and fulfilling life for all of the world’s residents?
Just as most of us don’t believe the doomsday predictions of Harold Camping, we also don’t need to accept the dire futures that experts claim are possible if we don’t change our direction. We just need to make some careful choices.
Our beliefs determine our lives
Braden: “We live our lives based on what we believe. [Everything we do] is based on what we think about ourselves and our relationship to the world.” Therefore, it behooves us to take a look at what we believe and where these beliefs originated. With few exceptions, our beliefs come from what others have told us about our world. The beliefs we have accepted may not be true and may be preventing us from fulfilling our potential, living our highest destiny.
Who are we?
To meet this challenge, we need to learn who we really are and what we are capable of. New discoveries have shown that our very DNA shows the signs of intelligent design and that we are NOT descended from Neanderthal man, our presumed evolutionary ancestor. Our true origins may never be known, but it is very unlikely that we developed from random occurrences.
We have a much larger brain than required to survive, thus we are designed to co-create our reality with the power of our imagination! As some mystics have said: “We are dreamers, dreaming the Universe into existence.” Religions say that God gave us free will, but God gave us much more — we have the power to create. Thoughts in our mind can become manifest reality with the proper intention and attention. Everything we see in our manmade world was once only found in someone’s mind, and then they made it real.
We are creators, not victims
When we recognize our power as creators of our experience (which is dependent on our beliefs), we will realize we are not victims of external forces and a predetermined “destiny”. Then we are ready to make the choices of what we want. As we consider these choices as individuals, we recognize the power of sharing our vision with others. Our problems are global and our solutions need to be as well, so we need a shared vision of what our future should hold.
There is no preset “end of times”
Regardless of what you may believe, modern humans have lived on the Earth for about 200,000 years virtually unchanged. There is no reason to believe that we shouldn’t be able to live here for another 200,000 years (if we plan for it). Native traditions speak of events and world cycles due to climate changes that occurred long before modern history of civilizations that began maybe 10,000 years ago. Despite predictions from Camping and others, there is no “end of times” unless we all decide to let it happen!
Cooperation is the foundation of survival
Our culture has accepted that competition is a natural condition, but the reality is that cooperation is the foundation of a successful species. This has already begun on the Internet social sites like Facebook, and dictatorships have fallen as a result. More changes are on the horizon as we work together to envision the world we want and determine how to make it happen.
Finding peace
Wars seem to be part of human nature if one looks at recent history, but Braden says, “We are nonviolent beings by nature, but can become violent when any one of three conditions are met: we feel threatened, we feel that our families are threatened, or we feel that our way of life is threatened.” Therefore, we need to work to reduce these concerns, to create a peaceful world. That is why the UN has set a goal to eliminate severe poverty and hunger by 2015, and to address other inequalities that cause people to feel that their survival is threatened, including: achieving universal primary education, promoting gender equality and empower women, reducing child mortality, improving maternal health, combat HIV/AIDS, malaria, and other diseases, and ensuring environmental sustainability.
Individual choices matter
Yes, we are racing into the future, but this is not a cause for panic or resistance, but an opportunity to share in the creation of a new dream for humanity, one that could last the ages. As Braden says, “Do we unleash our destiny of greatness, or seal our fate of war and suffering?” Don’t just sit in the passenger cars, go on up to the engine and take a turn at steering the train! The decisions and choices you make every day will affect the collective decision. Braden: ” In a world bathed in a scientifically validated field that connects all hearts, the question is less about how to reach “them”-the CEOs of corporations and the leaders of nations- and more about what we choose to place into the quantum field, or energetic matrix, connecting us all.”
RESOURCES:
Gregg Braden, “Deep Truth”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omega_point
http://www.un.org/millenniumgoals/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_States