NHNE Wavemaker News List
Current Members: 500

Sunfellow & NHNE on Twitter:
http://twitter.com/sunfellow

Have You Checked Your Pulse Today?
http://nhne-pulse.org/

Subscribe / unsubscribe / important links at the bottom of this message.

------------

THE HUMAN AGE
By David Spangler
Lorian Association
November, 2009 - #30

http://www.lorian.org/davidspage.html#gpm1_2

Almost twenty years ago, I started teaching workshops and classes on finding
and tapping oneıs deepest spirit. These programs were meant to be both
inspirational and practical, giving tools for finding oneıs inner sources of
creativity. They were precursors to the more advanced and sophisticated work
I eventually developed through Incarnational Spirituality. For the most part
they were successful in achieving their ends, and people felt empowered by
them. But in nearly every class, there was at least one person and sometimes
more who had difficulty with one of the key exercises.

In this particular exercise, I asked the participants to tune into their
humanity. We are, after all, human beings, not trees or dolphins, and our
spiritual core cannot be divorced from our humanity. But for some people,
this proved challenging as they felt ashamed to be human. For some this was
due to religious training in their childhood that taught them that the body
and human nature were ³fallen² and shameful things, while for others it was
because of their horror at what human activity was doing to the environment.
Whatever the reason, being able to honor and love their intrinsic humanity
was a stumbling block. I was not always able to help them move past this,
but when I did, it was because together we were able to redefine and
reimagine what it meant to be a human being and to appreciate the sacredness
that lived in humanity as much as in any other part of the world.

What does it mean to be human? This question has been at the heart of much
of my work over the past fifty years. For me, this is really three
questions. The first is what does it mean individually, that is, what are
the inherent capacities that you and I have by virtue of being the kind of
creature we are? What are we capable of as persons? This was the primary
question I explored in these workshops.

The second question is what does it mean to be human in relationship to the
Sacred and to the non-physical or transpersonal realms? The third is what
does it mean to be human in relationship to the world, by which I mean other
humans, society, the environment, nature, and the planet as a whole?

If you are familiar with Incarnational Spirituality, these three will be
familiar as the three-fold architecture for the incarnational process:
Personal, Transpersonal, and World (though in fact, I usually divide the
latter into humanity and nature giving a four-fold pattern). An incarnation
is the interaction between these three elements creating through their
blending the unique identity and life that each of us experiences.

As I have written at other times, one of the stimuli for investigating (at
least from a spiritual point of view) the nature and process of incarnation
over many years now was a statement from a non-physical colleague who said,
³The problem with humanity is not that youıre too incarnated; itıs that
youıre not incarnated enough.² This could just as easily be restated to say
that our problem is not that weıre too human, itıs that weıre not human
enough. In short, in each of these three fields weıre not being all that we
could be -- and not doing all that we could do.

Here is the problem. Not only are we not exploring optimal expression within
each of these three spheres of activity, in our modern culture we have
separated them and have consequently lost sight of the wholeness that exists
between them. Weıve turned the Transpersonal and Spiritual sphere either
into a fantasy with no reality in a materialistic world or weıve confined it
within narrow religious dogmas. Weıre reduced the World sphere into being
simply a resource pool to feed our insatiable needs for energy and raw
materials and a backdrop for the dramas of humanity. In so doing, we have
elevated the Personal dimension over the other two in ways that have brought
us to ecological, economic, and social disaster. To make matters worse, we
have so narrowly defined what it means to be a person and what weıre each
individually capable of that weıve robbed even that dimension of its
wholeness and full potential for engaging and integrating with the other
two. (For an exhilarating exploration of what some of this potential may be,
I recommend Michael Murphyıs book The Future of the Body:
http://bit.ly/VYPzd )

But what if this changed? What if we set about to reclaim our full humanity
by finding coherency and wholeness in the relationship of all three of these
spheres?

How might we start with such a process?

As I suggested to participants in my long-ago workshops, we can begin by
reimagining what it means to be human. We know all too well what separates
us from the world. We have built powerful images about ourselves that tell
us how we are different from all other species, how we are special, and how
we are at the top of an evolutionary tree. What are less prominent in modern
culture are images that tell us how we are part of the world, part of the
community of life. So this is one place to begin. We need to discover the
Gaian dimension of our humanity. We need to understand what in our nature
connects us to the world. At heart, it is our capacity to love.

The French Jesuit scientist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin famously wrote, ³The
day will come when, after harnessing space, the winds, the tides, and
gravitation, we shall harness for God the energies of love. And on that day,
for the second time in the history of the world, we shall have discovered
fire.² This is very inspirational, but he went on to write, "Love is the
affinity which links and draws together the elements of the world... Love,
in fact, is the agent of universal synthesis. Š Love alone can unite living
beings so as to complete and fulfill them... for it alone joins them by what
is deepest in themselves.²

Bringing love to the world is a human capability. It is more than just
liking and appreciating nature the way we might fondly love a pet. Itıs the
self-sharing, self-giving love that we have with a beloved in which we
surrender part of ourselves to let a larger wholeness emerge. It is the love
that sees the other as an equal, a partner, a collaborator.

This deep kind of loving is something we can and must bring to the world
because of who we are both as members of the planetary community and as a
species that can love and can do so on a global level. This is something our
technology cannot do for us. Only we can do it, drawing on our human spirit
in the process. How might we do this? Teilhard went on to say, ³All we need
is to imagine our ability to love developing until it embraces the totality
of men and the earth."

Imagine our ability.

Now we touch on a truly powerful human capacity: our imagination. Engraved
on the lintel above the entranceway to my daughterıs school is a quote from
Albert Einstein: Imagination is more important than knowledge. This is from
the man who more than any other in our culture is the paradigm of the
scientist, the man of knowledge.

But Einstein wasnıt saying that fantasy is more important that facts or that
daydreams are more important than reality. He wasnıt denigrating knowledge
but suggesting its limits. His full quote went on to say, ³For knowledge is
limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the
entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.²

In other words, imagination is the seed from which knowledge comes.

This is a precious seed. If we are to become planetary lovers, planetary
partners, it will begin in our imaginations. We need to be able to imagine
this possibility, see ourselves in this role, and have an image in our minds
and hearts of our ability to do this. Itıs out of such imagination that we
will gain the knowledge of how to do it. It is from this imagining that we
will gain new knowledge about ourselves.

Imagination is a core human ability. Our civilization -- all that we see
around us -- comes from dreams that we have had, images we have held and
striven to fulfill. Everything that we think of as ³human² begins in our
imaginations, including our images of ourselves. If we want to dream a
different world, a better, more holistic, more caring world, then this is
where it begins, just as the world weıre in began in the imaginations of our
ancestors.

Last monthıs Davidıs Desk described Peak Oil and some of the scenarios of
civilizational collapse that stem from this environmental predicament. Often
when I speak of this with others, the most common response is that
technology will solve the problem. This may or may not be so -- my feeling
is that we place way too much faith in technology as if it were a magic
genii -- but what lies behind this response is something deeper which I do
feel is appropriate. This is a faith in human imagination. It isnıt
technology that will save us but our capacity to imagine, to see ourselves
and the world in new and different ways and to think outside the box. Nor do
I mean by this just technological or scientific imagination, powerful as
that may be. I mean our social imagination, our political and economic
imagination, and our spiritual imagination. (In many ways, this is what
Incarnational Spirituality is, a new way of imagining ourselves and our
relationship to the other two spheres of activity I mentioned above.)

It may well be that there is no way that technology on its own can ³fix² the
ecological and planetary predicament that weıve created for ourselves, but
this doesnıt mean we canıt imagine forms of society, politics, economics,
spirituality, and just ordinary human living that adapt to changing
conditions and create a world well worth living in both for ourselves and
the other lives that share the planet with us. And if we do, it will
undoubtedly arise from the fact that we have reimagined ourselves and our
role in the world.

In fact, it is through imagination that we can learn to reconnect with the
other spheres of incarnational activity, bringing the Personal, the
Transpersonal, and the Planetary together in coherency. At the moment,
particularly in our culture, we live in a restricted imagination of who we
are and what is possible. To expand beyond these images into new
collaborative connections with spirit and the world, we must open and expand
our imaginations. We must think not only that this is possible, but that
itıs possible specifically for us, for you and for me as individuals.

In 1995 the Nobel Prize winner for chemistry was Paul Crutzen who won his
award for his research into ozone depletion. In 2000, he wrote a paper in
which he said, ³Considering [the] many other major and still growing impacts
of human activities on earth and atmosphere, and at all, including global,
scales, it seems to us more than appropriate to emphasize the central role
of mankind in geology and ecology by proposing to use the term
'anthropocene' for the current geological epoch.² In short, we are now
living in an age shaped and determined by humanity at a planetary scale: a
Human Age.

For many, the implications of such human dominance are not good, though if
the Peak Oil scenarios come to pass, this may be a very short ³Age² indeed,
though its consequences will be more long lasting as just the atmospheric
changes alone will not be quickly or easily undone and the extinction of
thousands of animal and plant species as a result of recent human activity
will never be undone.

Deciding whether or not we are in a ³Human Age² is not an option. The impact
that humanity is having is beyond question. We are reshaping the earth. The
anthropocene epoch is upon us. But what if through love and imagination and
the new knowledge that can come from both, humanity shifts away from
dominance to being a steward of the planet or even better from my
perspective, a partner? Perhaps then the idea of a Human Age might mean a
blessing rather than a curse, a promise for our future and not simply a
prediction of doom. Perhaps then no one will feel ashamed but will find new
meaning and new potentials in what it means to be human.

Is this possible? I believe so, but let me let Teilhard have the last word
this month, giving a definition of humanity with which I fully concur. He
wrote, ³Our duty, as men and women, is to proceed as if limits to our
ability did not exist. We are collaborators in creation."

.............

WHO IS DAVID SPANGLER?

http://www.lorian.org/davidspage.html

David's Desk is my opportunity to share thoughts and tools for the spiritual
journey. These letters David's personal insights and opinions and do not
necessarily reflect the sentiments or thoughts of any other person in Lorian
or of Lorian as a whole. If you wish to share this letter with others,
please feel free to do so; however the material is İ2009 by David Spangler.

Recent previous issues of "David's Desk" are available here:

http://lorian.org/dp_archivelist.php

You also can now buy a volume of twelve of David's Desk essays, entitled The
Flame of Incarnation:

http://lorian.org/booklist.php?pageNum_booklist=1&totalRows_booklist=28

------------

NHNE Wavemaker News List:

Send Some Green Love To NHNE:
http://www.nhne.org/DONATE/tabid/398/Default.aspx

To subscribe, send a message to:
nhnenews-subscribe@yahoogroups.com

To unsubscribe, send a message to:
nhnenews-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com

To review current posts:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/nhnenews/messages
http://www.nhne.org/tabid/1044/Default.aspx

NHNE's Mother Ship:
http://www.nhne.org/

NHNE Pulse:
http://nhne-pulse.org/

Sunfellow & NHNE on Twitter:
http://twitter.com/sunfellow

Integral NHNE:
http://integralnhne.ning.com/

Published by David Sunfellow
NewHeavenNewEarth (NHNE)
eMail: nhne@...
Phone: (928) 257-3200
Fax: (815) 642-0117

P.O. Box 2242
Sedona, AZ 86339