Chapter Four
The Universe is Speaking To Us
An old story tells of a great warrior who walked up to and old monk and demanded, “Teach me about heaven and hell.” The monk responded scornfully, “How can you call yourself a samurai? Your armor is dirty, your sword is rusty, and you stink!” The warrior, outraged, drew his sword to strike off the old man’s head. As he raised his arms over the frail figure, the monk stared deep into the warrior’s eyes and said: “That’s hell.”
The warrior was pierced to the heart. He dropped his sword and fell at the monk’s feet. “Forgive me,” he sobbed, “for my arrogance and anger.”
Fondly rubbing the warrior’s head, the old man said, “That’s heaven.”
In every generation there have been teachers who, like the old monk, called the societies around them back to God. Every culture and civilization had its holy people, it’s Gautamas, Moseses, Lao-Tzes, Jesuses, those very exceptional individuals who had not forgotten the heaven from which they came, and who devoted their lives to reminding the people around them who had forgotten their source.
While in times past there were a few masters, and a seeker might have to travel for many years and many miles to find a true teacher, today there are many. A great number of the children being born at this time in history are masters, come to usher in a new world.
Our planet functions as a living organism. It has a circulatory system in the oceans, clouds, rain and rivers; a respiratory system in the great tropical forests, and all the other characteristics of a living creature. In this planetary whole, humankind plays the role of the global brain, a communicator and integrator of information. Humans are the conscious component of Earth.
Up to this point in history, acting as though our species alone mattered, humankind has been destructive. Our species has been like a diseased organ, planetary rogue cells preying on the whole organism in order to gain those things we short-sightedly consider to be in our own interest. Life works in synchronized harmony throughout the cosmos. Only in this one, curious, deviant world do we find the dominant species creating conditions which are inimical to its own survival and the survival of the whole.
The universe has given us gentle reminders of wholeness and integration from time to time, in the persons of great teachers like the monk, teachers who have come to call our memory back from hell to heaven. Sometimes the societies into which they’ve been born have killed them. Sometimes they’ve deified them, rendering their message impotent by wrapping it in the shrouds of religious dogma.
In the past, such exceptional beings donned human guise only occasionally. No age could tolerate too many of them. But today, a whole new order of beings is incarnating on Earth, choosing to assume physical forms in order to assist the spiritual regeneration of our planet. The universe is gifting the Earth with souls appropriate for this stage of our development as a species. They are not subject to the limitations of the last generations. They are pushing at the boundaries of all cultural forms.
Today, with so many new children bringing the message, our ability to deafen our hearts has weakened, and we are collectively ripe for a shift in our underlying assumptions about the nature of the cosmos and our position within it. The unsustainability of the old way of doing things is becoming apparent to even the most intransigent minds.
A second Renaissance is occurring, a spiritual Renaissance that marks the defining watershed of planetary history. Books, movies, print and electronic media are reflecting this spiritual revolution. It has even reached the organized religions, sometimes the first to reject and the last to accept spiritual regeneration. Fundamentalists, traditionalists, orthodoxes, modernists and reformists are finding their hearts rekindled by the deepest teachings of their faiths. It is reaching into the heart of every religion on the globe, subversively using the very teachings at their cores, long buried under the grave clothes of liturgical ritual, to revitalize them.
If we teach our children using even the most advanced lessons of yesterday, we will miss the mark. The lessons they need to learn are radically different. The most enlightened of the nineteenth-century educational approaches are inappropriate for a twenty-first-century child. To use them is like hitching an ox wagon to a bullet train. The new wave of ideas these children bring is vital to our planet’s survival, and must not be obstructed by the old forms of education.
So how do we as parents then take responsibility for stewarding these beings, guiding them? The most important education we can give them is instruction in the Perennial Philosophy, the enduring truths that the great masters have exemplified for us through the ages. If we as parents are able to represent the ways of life to them, and ground their minds and hearts in resonant connection with universal truths, the rest of education will follow.
The old way is characterized by unconsciousness: unconsciousness of the way that the patterns and rhythms of life operate in the universe. The new way is characterized by a conscious desire to be at one with the rhythms of cosmic and personal nature, to fit in with the larger scheme of things. Paradoxically, it is by fitting in to the whole that we discover the fullness of our individuality.
If we bring the innate order of the cosmos into practical manifestation by living lives which are true to its principles, we both fulfill our maximum potential as individuals and bring our personal worlds into the sphere of influence of the life-order. It is our day-to-day living that has the potential to link the part with the whole, the mundane with the sublime, the ordinary with the transcendent.
From Chaos to Cosmos
Look into the eyes of a newborn baby. There is a wisdom there, a connection with universal source, that is utterly present. Light streams from these beings.
As parents or guardians, our responsibility is to create a spiritual and physical climate that allows for the maximum shining of that light. In the bad old days, society tried in every conceivable way to smother that light after birth. Children were pushed through shortsighted processes of education and socialization. They were indoctrinated into something called a religion, the chief effect of which was to replace their inherent intimacy with God with the prevailing theological rituals.
The new parent rejects the approaches of yesterday in order to become a sacred nurturer of the light of the newborn. All parenting is sacred parenting. There is no part of parenting that is not inherently a sacred act. The parent has the responsibility of finding the means to allow free expression of the inner being of the child. Although the inherent potential dwells within the child, it is not conscious, and the task of the sacred parent is to provide an environment in which the child’s light is respected. The conscious parent kindles the unconscious light in the child. Every parent has an unceasing responsibility to the child to be the light, to represent the light.
Any parent can make spiritual contact with a child even before birth, establishing a channel of connection, bonding and understanding. In the process the parent’s own spiritual understanding deepens and matures.
Reinventing Earth
As these new teachers incarnate among us, they bring to the mass subconscious of humanity a measure of understanding and education in the processes of life. At present we are seeing an explosion of these global beings incarnating as newborns. The universe is speaking to us in the language of the future, and the words of the new language are our babies.
These newborns are a gift to us from the stars. They are the people of tomorrow. They will not be living their lives by the rules by which we live, our parents lived, or our grandparents lived. The divine impulse is reinventing the Earth, and with it humankind is being remade in its image.