Finding Heaven in the New World Order

After my recent Moon Food posting, Headlines in Hell, I felt the need to balance things out with an appropriate essay here and so, here we are. I stated at the end that our earth is a kind of hell, and I truly believe this because all the trappings of hell are to be found, right here on Earth. Coming back for another go 'round is the 'eternal damnation' that's always talked about by the descendants of the Council of Nicea, who suppressed the Gnostic strain of the faith which argued that, in fact, the lord of this world was none other than the Devil himself.

At the same time, though, this world can be heaven. None of us would have any pleasant memories whatsoever if this were not the case. All those perfect moments in your life, in the company of friends, family and lovers or alone with nature or one's own private epiphanies, all of these are refractions of the heavenly kingdom, as it were, into our own 3-dimensional time-space continuum. In exactly the same way the nether regions of the cosmos refract themselves up into our experience, and so our world becomes a mixture of one and the other, in greater or lesser ratios depending on the particular moment in history that one looks at.

Now there's a lot of people out there talking about this thing called the Law of Attraction, which states more or less that you draw into your experience those things you focus your attention upon. What then are we to make of the general perception that things on this world are less-than-heavenly? You might say that's because they aren't, and you might also say that merely holding that perception enables that situation to continue and worsen. I'd add that there are those who profit by chaos and take their sustenance from suffering and have thus been cultivating this perception over great spans of time both by directly perpetrating the sort of acts that lead to it and then bringing those acts to as wide attention as possible.

And so we find ourselves in a world where parents don't trust the safety of the streets to let their children run around unsupervised, where every act must be minutely scrutinized and controlled lest something untoward take place. And all the while the grim tally of terrible occurrences continues to grow, with school shootings and suicide bombers and SWAT teams shooting grandmothers and pedophiles and rapists and muggers and embezzlers and.... Every day there's more cops, and more crooks to keep them busy; more laws, and more breaking them.

There's a shift I see, or I should say feel, within the noosphere. I'm not the only one to feel it, and though it's yet of a subtle nature, it's everywhere if you know what to look for. Here, for instance, is the Health Ranger's experience of it. Here's what Reality Sandwich is giving birth to as a result of it, and if you poke around there you'll see that the consensus seems ... positive. It's not a positive consensus that the slumbering, lumbering masses are feeling, of course, and while they are awakening they don't yet know why and there's still the danger that they might be successfully stampeded, like a herd of buffalo, off a cliff. But the awakened minority, that tiny handful who over the past few years have used the internet to free their minds rather than further distract them, are beginning to redirect their efforts, focusing less on exposing the lies and more on building something new and brilliant around the few grains of truth each has been able to collect. And as for our opposite numbers in this, those cold manipulators of reality that have for so long ruled by secrecy, fear, and misdirection, even they seem somewhat less sure of themselves, now. There's a fear in their eyes that wasn't there before, a realization perhaps that despite all their hard work, all their sacrifice of self and 'other' and soul and spirit ... despite that, they still might not pull off a win.

And the consequences, for them, of loss are catastrophic beyond anything we can imagine. Just as the prize for winning - immortal dominion over the material earth - is tantalizing to a degree few can fathom. It's a high-stakes game these high-rollers have been playing, and for a long time it's been the centrepiece of a fantastic ongoing party, but now....

Of course a large part of them losing inv0lves their opponents in this game simply walking away from it and starting a new game with their own rules, one perhaps in which concepts like 'win' and 'loss' are done away with altogether. If there's no one left to sit in the casino for the high-rollers to card-shark, there'll be no one left playing but them and the house. And we all know who always wins at the end of the day.

We can build a new society if we want to. A few people, focused on creating an experience of life fundamentally different from anything in recorded history, who have the patience and determination to become the change they wish to see, will be enough to shift the momentum (in fact, it feels like it's already shifted, or started to) towards the growth of a new and vastly better world.

There's this idea that's been kicking around Christianity essentially since the dawn of the faith called the Kingdom of Heaven, the gates of which, it's said, are to be found within. That's pretty much what I'm talking about here: a few people, focusing inside on their own personal idea of heaven while supporting each other in this will begin drawing the experience of that world towards them. The first manifestations of it will take place around those who are doing the work of manifesting it, but those early signs will give others a taste, thus drawing their attention away from the Spectacle of Death and feeding more emotional energy into the blossoming new paradigm, accelerating its growth still more until it becomes rampant and claims the world for its own.

The phase shift in consciousness that our world is approaching will be something fundamentally new: a social system shaped like a circle rather than a triangle; a reorientation from 'self and other' to self-as-other; a respiritualization of matter that reformats crass materialism into spiritual self-discovery; a change in values, such that narrow economic specialization and competition in the accumulation of stuff is dethroned in favor of a new guiding ideal, Self-realization through full development of all human faculties. The society that will arise from this will be the first truly ordered society in history, for the order will be built of mutual agreement and allowance from the bottom up, rather than clumsily imposed from the top down.

Conspiracy theories often talk about a New World Order, but isn't that exactly the same thing as what I'm describing here? Not the prison camps and the police states and the global banks and all that rubbish. What's new about that, outside some of the technology with which the finishing touches are to be completed? Where in that control system is real order to be found? Properly speaking a 'New World Order' should be our rallying cry, rather than their snickering in-joke, because what they represent is the Old World Disorder.

It's sad that the Old World Disrder we're all familiar with had to happen. But by succumbing to fear and greed throughout history its rise became inevitable, and so we find ourselves now, as a species, with the greatest challenge we have ever faced arrayed before us, a challenge that as of yet few admit the existence of let alone have a precise idea of what, exactly, is to be done about it. Perhaps it was always inevitable; life must include challenges, after all, and they must above all be convincing because otherwise, what's the point? And so, as a sort of final exam before graduating to the next grade, we are presented with the current conundrum. And what will our answer be?

No one knows, exactly. But if we don't know precisely what the answer will be, I think we have a pretty good idea about how we are going to answer. Maybe that'll be enough?

One thing I do know is that I'm not worried, really. I've never really suffered from test anxiety so, your mileage may differ, but ... cheer up, man. One way or another we're coming through this thing.