The New World

The following is a piece I read at an open mike last night:

Here is a selection of four dreams I had in the 1990s. They are about the end of the old world and the beginning of a new one:

1) Walking from old world to the new world is like walking from one room to the next. The room of this world is black & white, while that of the next is in color.

2) Society as we know it is over. I am with a group of people at a remote outdoor stage. No one knows how to live because all the technology in the world is gone. The world is now full of terrible beasts that we have forgotten how to subdue. I'm not panicking, but I am deeply worried. I start climbing up the rafters to the top of the stage. At the back of the stage is a deep pit where a terrible mouth-beast lives. I think that if things get too bad I can just throw myself into that.

I reach the top of the stage, which is very high. It is enchanted, full of old spirits. There are large, beautiful, totemic, symbolic things there that ancient people made. They are so amazing that I want to take them, but I feel that would desecrate them, so I think I should just leave. But then I think that we really are going to need one of them. Most of them are of the turtle – a symbol of the world. I take one of the turtle totems and throw it down to where the people are.

I imagine two ways the new society could be. In one version the people cooperate and decide on some general rules of behavior, and I see people living in helpful, nondestructive social order. In the other version there are no guidelines and it is totally chaotic. The people fall down because no one makes sure that the paths are clear.

3) Tom Robbins – the author - speaks with me and asks me questions. We talk about how insane the world is and how we arrived at this point. I say that since God created everything, God created the insanity. Tom Robbins says, with some anger, "Girl, God stopped creating long ago. God stopped creating after six days."

I understand. "We created it," I say.

He agrees. He constantly speaks about spending three minutes with God each day. Beneath all this and beneath the discussion, in another part of my consciousness, are the huge journeys of masses of people - wars, revolutions, migration, the movement of humanity across the long gaping stretch of its life. It is actually going somewhere, to a new place. It's not just cyclical. There is change. And maybe there is an end, as in a novel.

4) The new map is made up of circles. Each one represents a person who gives their heart to love. The circles are housed in color. There's no likeness between this map and the world map.

I had these dreams in the mid-1990s. Now, 15 years later, I have drawn these conclusions about the transition from the old world to the new one:

History is the story of one level of consciousness succeeding the previous as humanity adapts to its potential to be spiritual. History is also the story of the death and rebirth of man by way of his adaptation to inner, global and cosmic realities he has no control over. Answering to these broader realities would end his tribulations.

For a new world to begin, the old one has to end. People misunderstand the end of the world as the extinction of man. Instead, it is the extinction of history’s man, of the Beast in man. The apocalypse is, at once, the end of the old world and the beginning of a new one. The transition will be made possible by technology, education, the evolution of ethics, global interconnectivity, the arts, self-awareness, dreams, compassion, honoring the Feminine, honoring the Child, and using the imagination, and others.

People who think things will never change for the better don’t see that the future is much longer than the past. The future starts over every time a baby is born, and grows up to see the world in a novel way that no one before ever has.

We are spirits that got lost in the story of the Flesh. The personification of the qualities known as “Jesus” wants our emancipation from history. It wants us to meet the end of the story of how the Flesh became self-aware; and thence sacred – so that we can start a new story.