A New Year’s Revolution

May we light the sacred fire that burns out the ego and enables us to pass from fearful fragmentation to fearless fullness in the changeless whole.
~ Katha Upanishad 

Although there was no singular cataclysmic event on the Winter Solstice of 2012, it still marks the transition point from one age to the next.  It marks the end of a time when we believed that the world was something outside of us and an awakening to the world as our collective creative effort.  Our world is as we dream it. 

The remnants of the old dream are crumbling fast around us.  The idea that we could control nature through technology is coming apart as we encounter super storms, glacial melting and epidemic diseases which defy medical intervention.  Global capitalism is becoming increasingly nonviable.  Large areas of our cities look like disaster areas, and that’s in the “first” world. 

Neither technology nor capitalism is really at issue though.  Technology can be wonderful as any new ipad owner knows (never mind that they are built in horribly inhuman factories.)  Capitalism can be fun.  As somewhat of an entrepreneur, I have enjoyed the challenges of trying to make self-employment work.  The real issue though is deeper and more fundamental.  It is “interior.”  It is the belief that we are each inviolably separate from each other, from our world and universe. 

Ego is a belief system which cuts of us off from the whole.  As A Course in Miracles tells us it is based in fear and the antithesis of love.  Yoga tells us that it is based in ignorance of our true being.  It is based in the disconnection between our rational/rationalizing brain and the deeper wisdom of the heart.  “Intellect a head-based operation incorporating ever more complex variations and applications, each needing further explications and qualifications,” writes Joseph Chilton Pearce, “has become separated from intelligence— the automatic and natural state of the heart that brings coherence.” (2012, Heart-Mind Matrix: How the Heart Can Teach the Mind New Ways to Think)

Simply put, our hearts generate an electromagnetic field that connects us with everyone and everything.  Our consciousness belongs to that field rather than the physical structure of the body.  We are an aspect of that field before and after we leave the body.  We are immortal beings of Love.  That field gives birth to all things, contains all things and eventually all things dissolve back into that field. 

The way to move beyond ego and to enter into that greater wholeness is through meditation, i.e. inner stillness.  We have to be willing to let go of the constructs of intellect to understand the coherence of intelligence.  It is deeper intuitive knowing, light-years away from symbolic manipulation.  It might seem like a scary place to go at first but it is the entrance way to peace.

Let’s make it our New Year’s revolution to ignite a sacred inner fire that burns away ignorance and ego and allows us to see beyond imaginary boundaries, to release fear-based thinking and to embrace humanity and the planet as a whole.  Let’s promise to practice self-reflection, inner silence, forgiveness and compassion.  It might sound crazy but it is the only way forward.  We can’t stay in the past.