Although millions of words have been written about love over the ages, about the experience of love, about romantic love, about the love of God and so on, love remains an illusive topic. No words will ever capture it, explain it, communicate its actual impact, influence, and experience. It is in a word impossible. Science tries to analyze the biological sensations and phenomena of love but graphs, electrodes, and mathematical models tell us little about the actual experience. Nevertheless this article is another attempt to focus on it, even if briefly. Love is so important, so critical to human survival that without it, we are lost. We are rapidly approaching a time when the human race will take such a quantum leap that if we don’t understand the importance of love, we will enter into a horror so painful that no one even considers contemplating it. The good news is that is quite improbable and that is the good news.
What do we know about love? Science aside, the great avatars and spiritual teachers have told us enough to help. We know that love is magnetic in that it draws objects to itself. People that love each other are drawn to each other. When they are in others physical presence they sit close, hug, make love, or just hang out together. They revel in each other’s company. People who love a place desire to go there and will do almost anything to get there. People say they love their countries or their land and it is one of the few things that they will give their lives for. People who love certain aspects of life make it their interest like outdoor sports, hobbies, studies, and the like. They get close to it like bird watching, working with horses, or photographing flowers. So that is obvious. What most people do not know is that love is a magnetic force that draws particles together to form objects in the universe. The mere presence of planets and stars is evidence that love has drawn the particles together to form them. Without magnetism there would be nothing physical.
We know that without love people do not consider life worth living and that without love people, the other animals, and even plants cannot thrive but perish from negligence. Science has corroborated that and our own experience validates it. We also know that love is a particular frequency whose symptoms can be graphed and highlighted in scientific studies. Spiritual teachers tell us that love is a frequency throughout the universe, that it is all around us all the time, that there is no escape from it except in our imaginations.
Religion speaks of love as well, with phrases like “God loves us” and “God is love” and “God is everywhere so love must by definition be everywhere too.” Feeling loved by God makes people feel good and those who believe they are outside God’s love feel lost. The same goes for those who love themselves and those who do not. Loving self and others leads to happiness and the lack therefore leads to misery. Songs that speak of the misery of love are usually talking about obsession or lust that has little to do with real love.
So there you have it, what we know about love, but that is no substitute for the real thing. The real thing is what causes people to spend entire lifetimes seeking enlightenment and those that have brief glimpses of it have said that it rearranged their priorities forever. After an experience of total cosmic love nothing could ever substitute for it. That is all they ever wanted to experience again, sort of like a heroin high to use a poor example.
For a moment let us consider lack of love or what spiritual teachers say is the illusion of lack of love. If love draws us closer together then lack of love seems to pull us apart or create a sense of separation from ourselves, others, nature, and just about everything we can think of. When we operate from the illusion of absence of love there is fear and fear leads to suspicion, prejudice, alienation, judgment, reprisals, punishment, and attack. When we look at the world from this angle we can clearly see that it has led us to misery, suffering, and death. Human history is loaded with the consequences of this approach to life. We clearly have a choice to love or not, to attract or repel, to embrace or attack. This profound choice is what we face as we head for the massive changes that are upon us. Which route will we take? Down the road the consequences for choosing one or the other will be profound and as different as night and day. Seen this way why would anyone choose the same misery and suffering we have already seen so much of. Why would we not choose happiness? The answer is simple. Our worthy opponent, the false personality, the parasite as the shamans call it, wants it only one way. Separation and fear is the only way it knows how to stay in control. Essence on the other hand knows nothing less than love.
Now let us shift to the future. We know from many prophecies, Mayan, Tibetan, Hopi and others that a renaissance awaits us later this century (approx. 2070) and that first there will be a time of heavy tear down and reconstruction of our planetary civilization. Times are changing fast. Let us consider some of these changes and then look at what this transformation means with reference to love or lack thereof.
Let us start with the most influential and dramatic change of all; the shift in perception and values around the world. This is a dramatic shift in the values that dictate world behavior and dominate the world scene. We are moving from “I am king of the mountain”, “He who dies with the most toys wins”, and “I win-you lose” set of values to “We are in this together”, “I know how you feel”, and “I win-you win” perception. This is the long predicted shift from young soul to mature soul values and it is here now.
Now let us look at specific changes that accompany this paradigm shift. Let us start with our national and international identities. Majority-minority polarities are breaking down around the world as racial intermarriage and immigration are changing the face of what we look like and whom we think we are. Citizenship is blurring as more and more countries recognize multiple citizenship and efforts to keep people out through draconian immigration policies will completely come apart. Alliances between countries are no longer clear as countries change economic status, change policies, and the people who traditionally make up the population change in values. Strict boundaries between countries will become a thing of the past. Mobility is increasing across the board for tourism, consulting, and cultural exchange and eventually who is a citizen and who is not will go away. Tomorrow billions of people will travel as compared with the many millions of today. With travel comes education, tolerance, more understanding of differences and compassion.
The means of travel will change as billions of people are transported by 1000 mile an hour vacuum tubes to every part of the planet. The clumsiness and expense of todays jet travel will be replaced by smooth efficient, and mostly below and on the ground tubes. These will run completely by solar power and non-traditional power sources. Get ready!
The world economy is already transforming itself in ways that make the old economic paradigm unrecognizable and untenable. With the advent of mechanization, robotics, consolidation, and too big to fail industries we are seeing an end to full time work for the masses. Many more people will not find employment in the future and those that do will be working under conditions dramatically different from prior times. They will be sharing jobs, workspace, machines, and job titles. Values are shifting swiftly to sustainability, social purpose, meaningful participation, and the integration of work life with personal life. Retirement plans, cradle to grave security, and permanent careers are going the way of the dinosaur. Few stay at the same job for more than a few years now and fewer less will do so in the future. In the future most people will be independents, working for themselves, contracting, and loaning themselves for remuneration.
Connectivity through social media and the world-wide web is already completely changing the game plan both for business and for entrepreneurial efforts. Anyone can now raise money through the internet for their personal projects and plans. NGO’s, non-profits of all stripes, and micro-loaning, are rivaling government structures for how things get done. Self-reliance and individual initiative are the new watchwords for survivability in the world. Creativity is now in everyone’s hands and allows for rapid change of traditional structures that were unrivaled before.
Social media will allow for massive participation in determining a government’s policies and direction. Political structures are falling apart to be replaced by direct voting and public suggestions about how to solve problems. This is already taking place in selected locations around the world. Tiny minorities and despots will no longer be able to control policies in resistance to what the masses want. Marijuana laws and gay freedom are cases in point. They are the tip of the iceberg for what is to come.
Remote Healing
Each month, around the new and full moons, Jose, Lena or Anna leads a remote shamanic healing session. These approximately 30 minute sessions are designed to be experienced in a quiet, safe place free from distraction. Even if you cannot join live they can be very powerful, and always include a good clearing and beautiful icaros. Recording access is included for a short time afterwards. See the product description for dates and times.
The demise of the written word to simple visual representation allows almost anyone to learn massive amounts through social media and become fully educated in the areas of their interest. Traditional education is going away. Verbal commands will quickly replace typing as the way to interface with new technology, robots that will continue to miniaturize and be interfacing with all aspects of the environment.
It is only a matter of time before energy will become cheap, localized, and environmentally sustainable, available to people living almost anywhere on the planet. People will live in cities for social reasons but not because they have to.
AI or artificial intelligence is in its infancy now but will rapidly proliferate as machines become sophisticated enough to create new more advance machines and so on. Sound scary? Get ready. It will happen. Drones, robots, and bioengineered devices are advancing as we speak and in a short time web will be able to be mass-produced through printers that make todays 3D printers look like buggy whips. Intelligent machines are already here and will advance at a breakneck pace. It will no longer be clear what is human and what is robotic, what is natural and what is artificial, as components of each are combined in ever more creative ways. Who will control these devices and how?
Biological and medical breakthroughs will continue to push back old age and disease will become less of a threat as we discover new ways to defend against it. Will there be new diseases perhaps created in labs or emerging out of our experiments? Most likely. We just don’t know the consequences of our actions now on the future generations of the planet. We don’t know if just because we can produce something highly sophisticated, it is a good idea. In many respects we are blindly hurtling into the future like a child running along with a nuclear bomb in her hand. In order to make certain we are not headed for disaster we need to answer only one question. Do we choose to come from love or from separation. That will be the critical difference in how things turn out.
This short summary of our changing way of life and potential for the future has at best been simply scratching the surface, yet it tells us enough to be amazed, impressed, inspired, and perhaps deeply concerned. Let us then go back to the idea that we are moving from young soul values to mature soul values, from childhood into adolescence and see what this means for us as a world.
We know that latency age children are bright, innovative, increasingly independent, and love to play king of the mountain type games. They love competitive sports, beating on one another, and outdoing their peers. In fact they are heavily involved in bullying behavior in school and elsewhere. They are always playing games and require a high degree of entertainment and activity. In addition they are interested in testing their newfound abilities and become quite good at manipulating adults and bending the truth to get their needs met. Most children are loud, noisy, and energetic requiring a great deal of supervision and we know by experience that if they are not supervised they get into trouble. This was the great lesson of the book and film, Lord of the Flies. Lord of the flies is actually what we got on a worldwide level because young souls have not been properly supervised for a very long time. The height of the young soul era was the time of the absolute power of Kings and Queens, popes and despots, dictators and tyrants. They ran the world with an iron fist and all bowed to them. It was not much fun for everyone else but everyone did play the game, the Game of Thrones.” Those days for the most part are over but there are still hangers on. Witness North Korea and Syria. It is hard to give up childhood.
Here comes adolescence and we know that there is a huge difference between thirteen year olds and nineteen year old. This is a long sequence with dramatic growth and development in a stretch of six years. Fortunately not everyone is the equivalent of thirteen right now because there are about thirty six percent mature souls on the planet at this time and many of them are more evolved, say equivalent to a fifteen or eighteen year old in emotional maturity. In addition there are about fifteen percent old souls on the planet and together that accounts for about fifty one percent of the world population. Remember that old souls are the equivalent of adults so there are a fair number of people to educate, mentor, hold the line, and supervise the rest.
So what happens during adolescence? There is a huge growth in self awareness but not necessarily a huge growth in using good judgment. In addition there is massive development in social skills, in the ability to understand sophisticated concepts, even philosophy. Most importantly adolescence are developing interest in one another and have huge curiosity about sexuality and love. There is that word, love. Adolescents can be deeply compassionate and at times are forced into life situations where they have to support and help their families to survive. They know how to work hard for the benefit of others and are often involved in volunteer efforts and organizations that support the needy, the hungry, and the impoverished. They are like little adults and as they become eighteen and nineteen they may take on huge responsibilities, often in the military and in athletics. Adolescents are often the babysitters, the assistant coaches, the ones looking after the younger ones. They are mature enough to break up fights and help the younger ones to work things out when they are in conflict.
That is who are in charge of the planet now and that is a very good thing, yet they are young, uninitiated, idealistic, and do not always use the best judgment. They are learning however, and rapidly. And they know about love, are capable of loving, are interested in love unlike latency age children who are not interested in the subject at all. So we have an up and coming population on the planet, interested in love, and that is what we need to face the future. We can handle almost any social change, new set of technologies, new ways of governing and so on if we are willing to approach these things with a loving heart. Who is going to program those robots that make even more intelligent robots? Who is going to decide if a few individuals can control and dominate all the media outlets and the internet? Do we want latency age children doing it, those interested in dominance and a tiered social system, or do we want older adolescents and adults who see and know the value of altruism and love. The answer is obvious if we want to survive, prosper, and be happy. We have a choice and it is a choice already made far in the future because this planet is not going to go belly up.
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José Stevens
José Luis Stevens, PhD is the president and co-founder (with wife Lena) of Power Path Seminars, an international school and consulting firm dedicated to the study and application of shamanism and indigenous wisdom to business and everyday life. José completed a ten-year apprenticeship with a Huichol (Wixarika) Maracame (Huichol shaman) in the Sierras of Central Mexico. In addition, he is studying with Shipibo shamans in the Peruvian Amazon and with Paqos (shamans) in the Andes in Peru. In 1983 he completed his doctoral dissertation at the California Institute of Integral Studies focusing on the interface between shamanism and western psychological counseling. Since then, he has studied cross-cultural shamanism around the world to distill the core elements of shamanic healing and practice. He is the author of twenty books and numerous articles including Encounters With Power, Awaken The Inner Shaman, The Power Path, Secrets of Shamanism, Transforming Your Dragons and How To Pray The Shaman’s Way.
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