I recently attended the IONS Conference put on by the Institute of Noetic Sciences, which in laymen’s terms, is all about the study of consciousness. The week long conference is full of sessions and speeches on the state of global affairs in regards to human consciousness, a myriad of spirituality workshops on all the latest trends in energetic psychology, talks by authors of the current bestsellers in the vein of Deepak Chopra and various tools to turn on the masses of hungry searchers. I was skeptical that I would be swept away by anything entirely new until I enrolled in a six-hour session with Sacred Activist Andrew Harvey and got my whole judgmental ego kicked to the curb by a hammer of humility.
According to Harvey, the world’s apocalyptic chaos is certainly going on all around us, albeit for some and especially us here in America it is somewhere on the other side of our television screen.
This is reflected in the way that the Earth is being affected by the changing weather patterns. Although the erosion of the Earth by weather patterns, and the changing of climatic and geographical terrain, is a natural phenomenon, we as humans have done nothing but contribute to the rapidness of that decay by polluting the ethers, poisoning the waters, and cutting down the oxygenated foliages of the world that breathe for us, wildly denying our own connection with the Earth as our key life giving source.
This is the reflected in the way we are wildly addicted to material things and mind-altering escapism that causes a numbing and obese disconnection of ourselves from other human beings.
This is reflected in our ability to murder each other because of our egoic need for control and power as is seen in the incidents of war and genocide.
It is mind-blowingly insane yet we dampen this knowledge with our blind attempts at self help fix-it-alls as seen in the popularity of the DVD The Secret, which although is hopeful in its ability to reach into the mainstream and express inherent truths, oftentimes just leads us to use what we learn about manifestation to get more, more, and more for ourselves. More, more, more is the last thing we need when we are living on a planet with resources to sustain only two billion people but that currently sustains four billion. Mother Earth is heaving beneath us but in our pocketed worlds of disconnect, we manage to assuage our souls with the thought that we are not here forever so what does it matter; or that it’s too late to affect any sort of change.
According to Harvey, all of the world’s ails are a mirror reflection of the way we have continued to repress our shadow sides. In a world of PC perfection and the need to feel superior, we deny the anger, rage, pain, ugliness, and raw primal elements we all contain and wrap it in the sin of religion or the things we dare not speak of. All of this repression is what disconnects us from our true integrated whole and allows us to relegate these things as separate from us. It is the powerful way we let ourselves ignore all together. It is why the human race has turned into a virus rather than a flourishing growth.
It’s no longer as simple as complaining about the President. This is a worldwide epidemic. Harvey spoke of the fact that the hippies and liberals are wildly ineffective because they’ve been trying to spread love to those who will not accept it, trying to talk people into change without really doing anything concrete and ohming into higher states of bliss that keep them on the couch. He spoke of problems with the activists who are so angry that any true message is lost in their erratic confrontationalism. He said that the solution lies in being a sacred activist—a person who is willing to take a moral, mental and physical inventory right this second and then continue to walk with a conscious intent on being a strong, spiritually and universally connected being. A person willing to crack the ego constraints and facades placed upon them to become a new vibrant and powerful being of presence in every moment. Someone who thinks about everything going into the body, who minds their words with graceful truthfulness at all times, who doesn’t waste time on game playing or lies, who makes every moment productive not destructive. It’s about becoming the change we wish to see and leading by example so that this interconnected network of conscious activists can individually build a new language of education, sustainability and progressive mentality that will outreach and begin to connect a whole.
Harvey’s is a trying and challenging blueprint of radical transformation that has nothing to do with a paint by number kit of ten steps to becoming a goddess, but everything to do with personal accountability and conscious presence. It is something completely simple to understand but much harder to take into the heart, do, and become.
