Saturday, April 09, 2011

Toward a Consciousness of Oneness by Robert Atkinson, PhD

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This article comes from Robertson Atkinson at the Noetic Now site (a publication of the Institute for Noetic Sciences). Dr. Atkinson is Professor of Human Development and Religious Studies, director of the Life Story Center, and Senior Research Fellow in the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute National Resource Center, at the University of Southern Maine.

Toward a Consciousness of Oneness

At a press conference immediately following the earthquake in Japan, President Obama noted that “for all our differences in culture or language or religion, ultimately, humanity is one.” A century ago, earthquakes in California, India, and Italy similarly evoked shared grief and mutual assistance, although oneness was not yet part of our mainstream vocabulary – nor our consciousness. This significant shift in awareness during the last century illustrates the power and promise of evolution. A century and a half ago, evolution wasn’t discussed, but once Darwin’s work brought it into popular discussion, we grew to understand that everything evolves – life, societies, cultures, civilizations, science and technology, and consciousness itself.

Humanity’s Wake-Up Call

We stand at a critical juncture in our collective evolution. As our twenty-first century society undergoes rapid change, people seek more solid ground in ethical and moral values to serve as guideposts for navigating these uncertain times. We want answers to the deep questions, which continue to perplex us: Is there an underlying purpose that drives evolution, or do change and transformation happen randomly? And if there is a purpose, what is evolution moving us toward?

Humanity faces the crisis of a divided consciousness. As we struggle through a time that begs for a momentous breakthrough, will we let this crisis get the best of us, or will we midwife our current transformation-in-progress toward collective harmony and planetary sustainability?

Our collective story is lagging behind, resisting the flow of evolutionary change. The pre-twentieth-century story we have carried with us into the twenty-first century – built on the assumptions of duality, separation, and boundaries – has lost much of its meaning, power, and, most alarmingly, hope for the future. It faces crisis after crisis without offering any lasting resolution. The once well-understood principle of continual progress toward a collectively desired and beneficial goal is missing.

We need a new chapter in our evolving story that will restore hope, infuse new meaning into the wondrous process of creation, and unify our consciousness with a vision we intuitively trust. We need a story that keeps renewing itself. The one we have will not abruptly stop on December 21, 2012, with the end of the Mayan calendar, though some think it will. The Mayans believed in cycles: at the end of one calendar cycle, another begins with year zero. Our story is meant to continue and evolve, from one chapter to the next, just as natural cycles continue from one to the next.

Go read the whole article. He goes to explain the seven basic principles he believes are driving our cultural and societal evolution:

Using “principle” as an essential tenet that explains a natural action or order in the makeup of reality, here are the principles I believe are guiding our evolving story:

1. Consciousness is a potentiality set in motion by a dynamic process.

2. Change is inevitable and necessary for evolution.

3. Growth by degrees is inherent to life.

4. Transformation occurs through the conscious confrontation of opposing forces.

5. Consciousness expands along an eternal continuum.

6. Consciousness progresses toward unity.

7. Reality is a unified whole, and revelation is continuous.

He offers explanations for each of those seven ideas and then moves into a more esoteric discussion of the transformative process as he sees it.


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