I once heard an interview with an astronaut whose life had been transformed by his experience of seeing our planet from outer space. He commented that when you look at Earth from outer space, you see there are no boundaries and no divisions between countries and peoples. It becomes obvious we are all one.
The dying world order is based on the idea of divisions and boundaries. I don’t use the word dying casually. When someone experiences oneness, it becomes hard, if not impossible, to go back to believing the illusion of divisions and boundaries. When enough people have experienced oneness, the hundredth monkey phenomenon will occur and we will all experience ourselves beyond the illusion of separation.
Patriarchy is one way to describe the dying world order. Patriarchy promotes the values of productivity, goal orientation, intellectual excellence, and spiritual perfectionism as means to prove ourselves better than other people.
One problem with patriarchal values is that they are built on something that is not real; the illusion of separation. Patriarchy maintains that each of us is a separate entity that must compete for goods, services, love, praise, and a place in the world, when, in point of fact, we are actually all one holographic whole.
The truth is, that while we will play different roles in the hologram of life on Earth, we are all one. Each of us is divinity in a sea of divinity. This means climbing over someone else in order to get to the top is like hitting one arm with the other arm.
If we already are divine oneness, what is our job? Our job is to REMEMBER this oneness. There is no goal but to be present in the life we are living. We do not have to claw out a life at the expense of others by accomplishing more than everyone else or establishing ourselves as smarter than everyone else or beating out others for all the honors.
How do we remember oneness? LOVE ALL OUR PARTS! Not an easy thing, but light years away from beating each other up to get to the top.
Top of what any ways? There is no top in a sea of divinity.
Our world is moving away from patriarchal values towards a profound global experience of oneness. It may not look like this is happening, but birth usually begins with a lot of messy deaths. You can see the deaths in the clash between those who remain committed to patriarchal values and those who have let go into an experience of their oneness with all creation.
Take what sports announcers said about skier Bode Miller at the Olympic Winter Games. You would think he had committed murder. Sportscasters were determined to bully Bode into a state of shame for not upholding their values of medal harvesting, success through advertising revenues, and a competitive spirit that required forgoing every other pleasure in life in order to try and beat out everyone else on the ski slopes.
It was patriarchal world order meets the mystery of a new world order.
Let’s examine exactly what Bode did to incur the wrath of the NBC patriarchs.
He was Bode Miller. He went through the Olympic experience just like he lives everything else; exuberantly trying to soak in the experience of life. In an interview with Tom Brokaw, after what was being billed as a shameful performance at the Olympics, Bode looked half befuddled and half bemused by all the consternation. He explained that he had wanted to enjoy being part of the Olympic experience and he had. He said that during any race down a mountain, some people would win and others would not and this was his moment not to win. This is a big bugaboo with patriarchs who mistake effort with control. Bode was acknowledging that all the effort in the world did not guarantee success. Big taboo to mention this!
Bode went on the explain that he saw his own personal journey as accommodating his role in the Olympics as the favorite that didn’t win. He was working to understand this. He said he would have had more fun being the underdog, but life had cast him as the equivalent of the Russian hockey team in the 1980 games in Lake Placid. Another big taboo! He acknowledged that we do not always get to pick our roles. He was coming to terms with this.
As far as I could tell, Bode was handling the drama of his life with a mature detachment. This was driving everyone at NBC crazy because they couldn’t understand his values system that didn’t buy into the idea that someone was better because they won medals and worse because they didn’t.
They couldn’t understand that fame is a patriarchal construct, with no value or reality to someone who sees everyone as part of the same whole, someone who sees himself as part of Team Earth, so to speak.
When Costas closed out his Saturday Night Olympic coverage with his “Shame on you Bode†message, it was hard not to think about all the unpleasant, bullying ways patriarchs try to ride their dead horse.
In my e-mail and mail this week, people shared a number of situations in which they were attacked for talking to trees, loving Angels, and treating their fellow men as equals. Their attackers used scare tactics including showing up for a confrontation about equal treatment in police uniform, threatening to call child protective services about a person who talked to trees, and accusing the Angel lover of devil worship. What could one gather from this but that the patriarchal old guard is running scared?
The degree to which the bullying has accelerated only reflects the degree to which the patriarchal world order has ceased to be alive or relevant. People may still beat others with the dead horse, but the horse is still dead.
What can we do about these misunderstandings, even firestorms, as the old order dies? To see these frightened souls as the bad guys is to fall back into the patriarchal values of better than-worse than. Our Cherokee Trail of Tears Garden and combination Flower Essence were created by the Cherokee Grandmothers to help us always remember our oneness amidst polarizing events. This might be a good Flower Essence to keep close as the old world clamors to maintain a values system that cannot survive in the light of a common acknowledged oneness and divinity.
We can also rest in confidence that no matter what appears to be happening, this old order will pass away, even if it does so unpleasantly. Why will this old order pass away?
The transformation to a world of acknowledged oneness does not depend on high profile folks buying into the concept. It is a shift in mass consciousness born out of ordinary daily life. Each act of loving kindness is an acknowledgment and REMEMBERING of our common divinity. Each act builds momentum until someday we will have our hundredth monkey moment. Maybe it will be a grandmother’s hug, maybe a “stranger†smiling at another “strangerâ€, or maybe it will be a kind word when another has a difficult day. Who knows what act of acknowledgment will bring that hundredth monkey moment of spiritual transformation? But it will happen.
This critical mass of small loving moments will turn the tide. Conscious oneness on planet Earth will happen and each of us are the hands and hearts that will birth this new world. In the meantime, each loving acts matters. Each kindness matters. Isn’t that wonderful? Your every deed is sacred and significant! A critical mass of love is about to occur thanks to your efforts and the world that our love will birth is a mystery and a gift.
Last night as I talked on the phone to my dancing daughter Elizabeth, she commented that the historical forms of dance, including traditional ballet, honor someone else’s rules about movement and someone else’s ideas about what constitutes perfection in movement. They move the dancer out of the now and freeze them in someone else’s world view. Dance improvisation becomes the only form that can actually contain alive movement because dance improvisation exists in the now and expresses this now.
The territory where we are all going is about life improvisation. No other person or their rules for living can hold sway because no other person or set of rules can express our divinity for us. Life in a sea of divinity is one big improvisation. With life improvisation we won’t be able to have a patriarch’s illusion of control, but we will have the genuine experience of really living our lives, experiencing what it means to be divinity in a sea of divinity.
And back to that niggling issue of loving ALL our parts. How to handle the patriarchs that show up at our door in uniforms of the old order? I am going to try even harder to be kind to these frightened souls. They are our brothers and sisters who haven’t yet looked up to see the candle that lights the room, the love that permeates all reality. But they will, especially if we wink at them.
PS A patriarchal accounting of my Knitting Olympics would have me so far out of the medal contention as to be disqualified. I knit five of the twenty five afghan squares needed to finish Willy’s afghan. Yep, I could have pulled some all nighters, but I still might not have finished. Instead, I enjoyed the silliness of the whole project and put my laughter into the afghan, one stitch at a time. That’s got to be good news for Willy and the comfort this afghan will someday bring him, even if he doesn’t get it ‘til his twenty first birthday, ten years from now. Heck, I had my own Bode experience, soaking up the quirky pleasures of the Knitting Olympic games, savoring my own version of Olympic glory.