Five Shadows Slowing Down the Great Shift

Anyaa and I just spent an amazing two days with mystic and spiritual teacher Andrew Harvey, author of The Hope, one of my favorite books this year. 

Andrew is one of those teachers who is not all light and love. Don't get me wrong, he is light and love, but he's also a no-bullshit kind of teacher who understands, like Ken Wilber, that true transformation doesn't happen through new age platitudes like The Secret, avoiding negative thoughts, and not facing one's fears. Andrew takes people apart so they can be put back together again with new perspectives and awareness by being "in your face, disturbing you, terrifying you, until you radically awaken to who and what you really are." David Deida is also one of those teachers. Andrew is simply one of the most authentic teachers around.

Wait for the video to load or visit  http://youtu.be/SgK_pywP-84

Andrew believes, and Anyaa and I agree with him, that everything is collapsing; That we have passed the point where what passes for civilization can be "fixed." It's too far gone. He also believes that the whole concept of collapse is a necessary event for the new human to be born, for humanity to move to the next level, a more evolved human. I've shared this belief for a long time, and history shows us how major shifts in consciousness take place, and it ain't by wishful thinking. It happens by getting down in the muck and doing the work, and we're about to see a lot of muck, in ways that we can't even begin to imagine.

Harvey talks about the Five Shadows of Collapse, shadows we need to face and come to terms with, or we're just spiritually masturbating to make ourselves feel good and dull us out through light polarization and Spiritual Puffery.

The first Shadow is disbelief of the immensity of what is happening on the planet and how bad it will be, perhaps even beyond our comprehension to understand. All true change comes from standing in the fire, not from feel-good pats on the back or the saccharin "sweet path of stress reduction and egoic comfort."

The second shadow is Denial: The more ugly things get, the more I deny what I see and feel can be real. My denial allows me to detach from the suffering of others because it's not touching me....yet.

That leads us the the third Shadow: Dread. Immense dread. You cannot believe in "the oneness of all" and ignore what is already happening to millions of others. Collapse isn't a future event for 4 billion people on the planet. it's already happening, and it reveals the true nature of humans: all of us. We've ignored the warnings of 50 years and we've chosen  to ignore them. It's all of our responsibility, and we've done it because of the dread we feel about losing our comfortable lifestyles.

The fourth shadow then becomes Radical Disillusion with human nature: The systemic explosion of horror on every level. We are profoundly paralyzed by our own lack of substance. We've almost run out of fantasy and our schizophrenia has turned into psychosis. A mysticism that doesn't embrace the darkside of God is not real, and it's not sustainable.

The fifth shadow is the Death Wish - collectively and individually. The desire not to be here at all. I've heard over and over from people that id things get as bad as I think they'll get, that they don't want to be here at all. They'll just kill themselves. Collectively, we're already committing suicide, and individually we've each contributed - by our lifestyles, our belief in infinite growth on a finite planet, and our total consumptive mindsets. We have to own that we are doing this.We don't realize how our inner suicide claims our lives, and that we need to befriend that inner suicide.

Once we face and own our shadows around collapse, there are five things we must do to navigate these times so that the new human can be birthed :

1) Get real. Get out of denial and do what you must to transform; 

2) Develop practices and shadow work to help you cope; 

3) Be of service to ALL sentient beings; 

4) Think Globally, act local; 

5) make your vote, your expenditures, and energy congruent with the new birth.

Don't wait. Start now, There's not a lot of time. 

Thank you, Andrew, for your powerful teachings.

See the rest of Andrew's videos in this series at http://www.andrewharvey.net/sa_videos3.php

Sometimes I wish I'd Swallowed the Blue Pill....

Those of you who have followed my blog for any length of time know what my long-time perspective is on what's happening on the planet. I've not been shy about making my views on "collapse" known for several years, and a quick review of those blogs will show that I've apparently been listening to the right people.

Starting in mid-2007 with this blog, I began to wake up about the geopolitical realities that had already begun shaping the world we inhabit. In October of that same year, quite by accident, my world view on where we were headed shifted, again, into a deeper understanding about the "perfect storm" of the "Three E's:" - Environment, Economics, and Energy. That shift resulted in posting this blog about Peak Oil.

There were more articles, here, here,  here, and here, just to point out a few.

Okay, so I could see what was happening as far back as 2007, have written about it a lot, and have been shown to have pretty much nailed it. I wasn't ahead of the curve, I was at the back end of the leading edge, but that put me ahead of about 99% of the population.

This is the Red Pill from The Matrix. Once you go down the rabbit hole, you have to go ALL the way down, embracing the sometimes painful truth of reality. There is no unlearning what you've discovered...unless you take the Blue Pill of blissful ignorance of illusion and go back to sleep with no knowledge that anything is wrong.

Why do I sometimes wish I'd taken the Blue Pill? Because it would have been so much easier. The community we live in and some of our friends and family wouldn't think of us as "whacked-out end-of-worlders" (a term we've never used).

Last night, we watched an amazing video of Chris Hedges calling everything out, no bullshit, no pulling punches. Chris is an author and was a war correspondent for the NY Times until he got fired for speaking out against the Iraq war. In this powerful video, he offers a poignant and insightful analysis of the psychopathology of American society/culture; and how this "dystopian society" systematically drives its citizens to despair, disillusionment, and ultimate insanity. 

Chris Hedges: The Psychological Death of the West - Full Speech

Welcome to the Red Pill.

This is why Sacred Activism is the ultimate path of the Integral Warrior. Third stage Masculine ("Yellow," second tier consciousness in Integral terms) is no longer searching for freedom, but embodies freedom in their very being. The third stage man IS freedom, and third stage man cannot abide by any kind of tyranny (todays Fascism in the US) that constricts that freedom towards a man's highest purpose. This tyranny is the marriage of corporatism and government that rules the US today. This marriage results in corporate "terminators" who value nothing but profit, greed, and power, and third stage masculine, and all conscious beings, have a moral imperative to resist, no matter what the cost.

From the opening lines of my book, Awakening the New Masculine: 

It is clearly time for men to wake up. Just a little over one decade into the 21^st Century,  finding ourselves in the biggest struggle of our existence - a struggle where the outcome is still unknown - It is time for men to stop acting like little boys.

No longer faced with mere territorial struggles, the consequences humankind faces today are global, and we are faced with the very real possibility of our own demise as a species. To be sure, these are issues of patriarchal power and the light and the dark forces on the planet facing off against one another. It is the oldest story on the planet. It's time for the patriarch to be disassembled and for its sons to grow up.

Never before in human history has humankind been this close to a global psycho-social and spiritual awakening. At the same time, never have we been in such danger of being swept into a global totalitarianism, potentially more oppressive than any system known before. Technology, at the hands of little boys pretending to be men, has led us to this new geopolitical reality.

Never before have we been called to wake up on the scale that is required today.