Awakening in Troubling Times

This episode begins with the recognition that, what the United Nations calls “the biggest election year ever recorded,” has left most countries on Earth more divided and less free. Any issue that arises quickly becomes another example of two opposing attitudes or conflicting views of life. As increased polarization fractures any sense of civil society, people come to believe that they literally live in two different worlds that are essentially unreconcilable.

Following a line from Shakespeare, Michael Meade considers the idea that we are in “a prison of our own making” if we believe we are simply living in two different stories. Rather, it is our mutual fate to be alive at a time when the underlying tensions of life rise to the surface. We are all in the same story which can either lead to a meaningful transformation of life on earth or leads us further down the road to oblivion.

Although people commonly now feel that we live on opposite sides in a divided world, the deeper divide and the more damning prison of our own making occurs when we forget that as humans we have always lived in two worlds. The heart of humanity has always been stretched between the ground of Earth and the endless expanse of the heavens. Humanity has always dwelt in the betwixt and between, the liminal space between the throes of hard reality and the wonders of great imagination.

We are most human when we suffer the tension of the opposites in order to find again the threads to the ongoing story of creation and the renewal of the world. The trouble is that genuine visions and meaningful revelations of the way out of the darkness tend to appear only after all the more rational, familiar and predictable ways of seeing and being have failed.

In truly critical times, we can’t solve our problems at the same level in which they were created. We become more trapped in time, more stuck in blind beliefs and more caught in despair when we have no other level of life to turn to. If there is no otherworld of spirit and imagination, there can be nowhere to turn to when everything around us becomes more irrational, more dehumanizing and increasingly chaotic.

As has happened at other critical times here on Earth, the keys for unlocking this prison of our own making have to include an awakening to the sense that there is an otherworld that exists right beside this world, that extends far beyond the political world, a realm that is not ruled by the blind march of time, but rather is connected to and can reconnect us to things eternal.

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