…then why does enlightenment seem so far away?
When you imagine the new age, what images spring up in your mind? Do you imagine conscious, healthy, smiling people? Do they have a look of quiet intelligence, while also being well grounded in their bodies? Do they look radiant and clear eyed, as if they can experience hope, while also utilizing their critical thinking skills? Would the emerging new age world feature signs of peace, well-being, and creative approaches to problems, great and small?
These idealized pictures represent possibilities, and possibilities can help you move forward, because they open a space in your world where your higher ideals might potentially exist in reality. For now, these ideals are symbols, but until you ground them into reality, they are merely notions — castles in the sky that exist to inspire you. And inspiration is a good thing, so honor it for what it is. But on this earth plane, inspiration does not replace reality, because you are actively co-creating the emerging new age reality each day. You are reality-sculpting it into being.
Are you waiting for the new age that features smiles, rainbows, and continuously soothing vibrations? Perhaps you remember these from some of the higher dimensions that your soul experienced in-between lifetimes. Perhaps you still feel the resonance with certain lifetimes, lived in faraway galaxies. Those lessons and experiences, inspiring though they are, reflect the higher dimensions, and though life can be seemingly easier there, your soul incarnated here to learn and develop — and explore the possibilities for manifestation within this earthly dimension.
The higher dimensional lessons that you learned before will serve you here on the earth plane as symbols of what is possible. However, the earth plane, especially at this time, is an excellent laboratory where you can test your lofty theories, and this requires patience. And you will have to re-think, and intuit your way through. Then you will access the feeling that you remember, then refine it, and you will test it yet again. Perhaps this is not quite as smooth as it was on the higher planes, but it is very effective for your spiritual growth.
Let’s explore what the new age of higher vibrations really is. The new age is a set of evolving possibilities for a healthy, balanced, creative, and spiritually attuned world. But what exactly does it look like? This is the answer that you provide, because you are taking responsibility for your contribution. Even if someone else writes an instruction book, it may have some value for you, but it is essentially their instruction book, and you will have to create your own personal new age manual, or at least your own chapter.
You are creating your own definitions of reality each day, expressed through your own living example. You bring this world forth from your essence, introducing it in appropriate ways into your personal and business life. However, there is no definite new age set of rules, and that is why you test and refine when you bring forth your contribution each day.
The new age is not a set of definitions that the universe is imposing upon you. The quickening vibration in our world does reflect vibrational shifts in the universe, but these shifts are simply helping you to become more conscious. Although there is much spiritual potential in this quickening, the universe has no specific agenda about how you will utilize your higher consciousness. The truth lives deep within you, and your truth reveals itself, when you discover it each day, as a gradual process of unfolding.
There is no official commission of the new age that will make you live your life in a certain way. And if such a commission, making such a claim, does appear, they are the shadowy forces masquerading as higher truth. This is because the new age cannot be legislated or imposed. Rather, the new age is something that you choose to bring forth in each moment. The new age is a reflection of how you feel, think, and live in each moment. This emerging consciousness is more a matter of your subtle alignment with the universe, than how you appear to others, or whether you fit into anyone else’s categories.
People are awakening to their spiritual potential at different rates, because each soul has different capacities. The older souls generally have more experience in seeing the possibilities, because their soul has refined itself to resonate with a broader range of energies — vibrations that could exist in the future, but which may not yet exist on the material plane. Your exploration is to find healthy, balanced ways to ground these possibilities into reality.
The younger souls are more likely to be swept up in the limited patterns entrenched on the earth plane. Their task is to open to their higher soul wisdom, without losing their grounding. With an entire population that is collectively awakening, and all at different rates, it is tempting to look for easy answers. There is where deception exists, because every soul is unique, and so the easy answers, intended to magically apply to everyone, are likely to be overly simplistic solutions.
Your task is to expand your possibilities — your older soul aspects — and ground them into your reality as much as possible. You exist on many levels, including your younger soul aspects that have become entrenched in ancient stuck earthly patterns. You are learning to heal and awaken your younger soul aspects so they can gently release their limitations. This is a gradual process, and requires your love and patience, along with a gentle, yet firmly honest awareness of yourself each day. It is daunting task, to be sure, but a worthy one.
So if the clichéd new age images are not actual realities, but are only inspiring symbols, what are you to do with the often-troubling emotions that are surfacing with the rapidly elevating vibrations of this spiritually awakening age? When you understand that the expanding consciousness makes you conscious of many deeper patterns and emotions that have been deeply suppressed in your mind and soul, then you begin to have compassion for yourself. You are feeling more, because you are more aware.
This is why you may often feel more troubled, rather than more enlightened. Do not fear, though, because when you are more conscious, there is a marvelous opportunity for detecting and releasing old patterns. And it is certainly not a reason to indulge in self-judgment. In addition, your expanding awareness can help you discover your divine essence — and integrate with it. This will serve you in addressing the troubled thoughts that are surfacing. The sad, painful, and angry thoughts and feelings have been created over many lifetimes, and they reflect their times and their circumstances.
With your awakening consciousness, you have a chance to notice these inner patterns, to hold them in your love and light, and to share your higher consciousness with them. It is a powerful moment when the conscious part of you — your cosmic soul — extends itself into the parts that have been living reactively, continuously repeating their same ancient sorry song of woe and limitation. In that moment of sharing your love and light with your inner shadowy patterns, the transformative energies of your divine essence go to work, helping to gently dissolve the rough edges of your old patterns.
The healing energies that your soul extends to your limited patterns is shared with an attitude of love and kindness, and not with judgment. Just as you wouldn’t judge a frightened child, so too can you choose to see your stuck patterns as energies temporarily frozen by fear and limited understanding. These patterns need transforming assistance, and not punishment. And this is one of the biggest challenges you face as you spiritually awaken.
It is all too easy, and quite common as you spiritually awaken, to consider that you are going backwards in your development. And yet, in spite of your self-judgment, your awareness is growing and developing in a useful way, because you are sensing more than ever before. And yet, you had assumed that your awakening awareness would bring you peace and happiness. It can, potentially, if your awareness is not judging all you now perceive with your expanded consciousness.
When you let your expanded spiritual consciousness express patience, kindness, and love towards your limited patterns, you have the potential to change them. Spiritual awakening often involves paradoxes — contrary points of view that are both true. One paradox is that your spiritual evolution requires clear recognition of a problem, combined with your attitude of patient loving acceptance. These sound contrary, and they would be, except that they are both united as vital components in your spiritual development.
Your expanding consciousness lets you become more adept at moving forward towards your goals, and while also noticing areas needing improvement — these are focused mental skills. At the same time, you cultivate being in a state of loving acceptance — this is a loving heart skill. This combination of heart and mind helps you become more patient with yourself as you move forward. And you will have many opportunities to practice your patience and love when you consider the people in your world, because they are all working at their own pace, and their pace of awakening is something that is outside of your control.
Here you approach a more grounded definition of the real new age. It is based on a balanced unity of the heart’s loving acceptance, with the mind’s deeper questions and intuitions, united by the soul — your cosmic eternal self. This is not a new age of clichéd symbols, but a way of life that allows you, and others, to examine, to ask questions, to feel, to think and to divinely intuit. When you are stuck in the new age cliché of following your heart, while discarding your mind, you are no wiser than the materialistic realist who follows their logical mind, while discarding their heart and soul.
Have you noticed that the simplistic new age beliefs are based upon what supposedly should be so? People should be loving, people should be happy, and that should be all we need. There is an amusing contradiction here, because when you judge yourself for not being more loving, or when you judge others for this, you are using your critical mind to validate your supposedly loving new age beliefs.
When you recognize that the rosy new age ideas are simplistic, and cannot provide easy solutions, you may feel a sense of loss. This is the disappointment of the childish part of the self that wanted easy solutions. You can help this childish part by holding it in the loving arms of your soul, and sharing patience, love and wisdom with your childlike aspects. Gently bring them into alignment with your deeper soul essence.
What do you do when your critical mind runs away with itself and convinces you that you should be self-critical in a judgmental way, and that you are right to condemn others who are not behaving in the manner that you think they should? When your critical mind tries to judge yourself or others, you can patiently love that part of yourself. You listen, and you learn, but you do not become reactive. You experience the deeper truth that is trying to emerge as it reveals itself.
Patience and love are not replacements for logic and critical thinking, nor is logical mind a replacement for love. They are important yin-yang polarities, each being the needed balance for the other. They work together as a team, each bringing the other to deeper levels of higher awareness and grounded truth. And this is the potential for the new age.
The real new age isn’t a set of happy clichés, nor is it the simplified rationalist cliché of the materialist. The emerging new age is neither polarity, and so it is off the radar for many people. On this earthly plane, heart and mind have been divided, at least until now. No matter — balance exists deep within you. Tap into your essence. Cultivate your heart, mind, and soul, integrated within your body, with every breath you take. It’s not easy, but it’s not difficult, either. Welcome to the real new age.
Many Blessings,
Founder, Cosmic-Living teleclasses and mp3’s
