Great Throughts Treasury

"Raising one's consciousness and raising one's vibration are synonymous."

"People create their own realities by what they think and believe. The new Being is destined to become the essence of boundless freedom and beauty."

"One should not become preoccupied by fearful details, giving them energy, but should develop the facility of faith, while keeping one step ahead of reality."

"Every major culture of antiquity revered as sacred its particular version of the World Tree with its roots and branches linking Earth (as matter) and sky (as spirit.) Every sacred mountain became the center of the world, the navel of the Earth, as did every sacred city. This was the holographic model, whereby the center was everywhere and the periphery nowhere."

"In the beginning the One set out to become the many. In ever widening circles of complexity, the great spiral of creation evolved a complete menu out of the primal soup. From the gas that burned the minerals, that cooked the plants, that fed the animals, that in turn fed the humans who analyzed and named everything down to the last quantum particle, the One has indeed become as many as it could possibly be. Now the turning point of history has arrived when matter begins to merge gently back into spirit ,and the many can again become the One. But the spiral has swung so far out it has lost its curvature. The evolutionary journey is supposed to be a round-trip, not a one-way ride to oblivion. Historically, we are at the fork in the road where the choice between two paths must be made. The problem, however, is that under the linear, left-brain, materialistic, patriarchy, the outer reaches of the evolutionary spiral have taken on the forward thrust of a line and the Center is no longer holding."

"Most, if not all, ancient civilizations shared a comprehension of time as cyclical. This enabled them to plan for the short term, and to predict and prophesy with astonishing accuracy for the long term. This is why the various world prophecies form a coherent whole, and why most archaic traditions share similar cosmologies and eschatologies. Western culture's linear march- of-time model, however, has been the means of our undoing and is responsible for ecological and planetary crisis on a scale unprecedented in human history. So, to understand where we have come from helps us to understand where we are going. The legacy of high wisdom from past and present traditional cultures awaits our comprehension. It is our blueprint to the future; the means of our survival."

"Mythic themes are emerging as dominant archetypes now because they are becoming real-ized in our collective experience. Myths provide a contextual understanding for our existential predicament, clarifying what is being played out, what our role is, and who we are in the greater scheme of things."

"The frequency at which matter vibrates has been speeding up, causing an acceleration of personal and planetary karmuppance. This, and associated phenomena, are purifying and transforming the world into something considerably more refined than the physical plane as we have come to know it. Like the ice-cube that transforms from frozen solid, to water, to steam, then vapor, the physical world itself is now becoming spiritualized. We are seeing this process unfold as science and prophecy, physics and metaphysics, begin to segue and come into agreement. Increasingly, we can expect to experience the apparent separation between past and future, inner and outer, dreamtime and waking, self and other, as a semipermeable membrane allowing oneness with and flow between. Hindu yogic teachings explain that as time speeds up synchronicity increases. As awareness begins to stabilize in the higher chakras the polarities within us reconcile. And, we are told, that when the Self is real-ized temporal time ceases to exist altogether! Modern Chaos Theory seems to agree, and asserts that maximal chaos ultimately resolves into synchronicity. So, "no problem!"

"The two universal forces that most concerned ancient peoples seem to have been those of cosmos (harmony, and the organized, known order) and chaos (the forces of entropy, confusion, and the unknown). Preserving cosmos and repelling chaos have kept us busy and preoccupied since time immemorial. When the magnetic Center that controls the periphery fails to hold, things fall apart and the chaos that was in the beginning begins to return. Chaos, of course, has always been the most feared of all the primal powers. Beyond the known order--the light of the campfire, the walls of the city, the edge of the forest or horizon--loomed the unknown, the domain of darkness, danger, and demons."

"The world over, ancient and indigenous cultures had an innate sense of themselves as existing at the Center of the universe, and the coherence of their world depended upon maintaining their connection with it. To that end, archetypal symbols --such as circle, spiral, tree, pillar or pole--were magically and ritually employed to preserve essential order. To provide safe space, central space "on call," people learned to do just that. They called upon the four directions, defining the boundaries of sacred space and time to create an instant mix of Center, the directions of above and below forming the central vertical axis that connected heaven and Earth. The Center of the Center was the direction found within each individual."

"There has never been anything quite like the unknown, of course, for bringing up our fears, and providing a fertile back-drop for our worst projections--especially those of our own "shadow." Being "afraid of one's own shadow" is, in fact, the crux of the whole matter where chaos is concerned. And so it was since primitive times that outsiders were regarded with suspicion, feared, and often hated. In the harsh struggle for survival, the security of one's own kin, clan, or tribe was primary. While alien "others" were always lower or less--"butt-faces" and "barbarians"-- only one's own kind were believed to be the real human beings. At worst, "they" were not fully human and held in contempt as flawed animals, or even demons. For the most part, that which was of the unknown was dealt with by means of superstition and magic. Remnants of these attitudes still prevail today, reflected in class systems, racist attitudes, the separative dogmas of the religious right, and hate crimes."

"Today, it is believed that we are responsible for our own reality, so we must all be accountable. When an evolving species learns to split the atom and unlock the secrets of nature that fuel the stars, it brings about its own demise if the resultant technology is not harnessed in the service of the planet. Is that what happened in previous cycles? Atlantis? Lemuria? Today, the whole systems that maintain the working harmony of our biosphere are breaking down because we screwed up and disconnected wisdom from knowledge. We have been ripping the web of life to shreds, basically to support profits."

"Very few of us today can claim to be one of the "real" human beings because we are still in the striving mode; we are more like "human becomings." Each of us is one of the many that the One has become. Through the mobilizing archetype which gives meaning to symbols of the Center, we evolve back into Oneness. Such a symbol always arises from the depths of the collective unconscious at the conclusion of major historical cycles when primal chaos again threatens to engulf the world. Not everyone perceives the symbol. And out of those who do, few recognize its significance. However, such images are themselves keys or codes that inform our consciousness, whether we understand it with our rational mind or not. The advantage of understanding, however, is that it increases our effectiveness in co-creating and consciously participating in the process that is unfolding."