New Moon Magic

Rose Diamond

On Saturday 27^th December, we held our first local meeting of A Whole New World. It was New Moon in Capricorn, a potent time for planting seeds, and we met to create New Moon Magic.

Sitting in our heart sharing circle, we talked of many things. Most of the people in the group defined themselves as creative. An important aspect of my vision is to build a world in which everyone is free to develop and express their creativity and to live their passion. I’m convinced when each of us is free to be authentic and to offer our unique gifts, the whole will work perfectly together. Each of us carries a fragment of a Grand Design, and when we bring our fragments together we reveal the whole picture. The fragmented picture is full of stresses and strains; when the whole comes together there is a beautiful flow and luminosity.

We are a long way from achieving this vision. Most of us who have chosen to follow our creativity get by on a wing and a prayer. A creative state is open, expansive and focused, it is the realm of possibility and it demands all one’s attention. It is easy to get lost in this state and forget that the bills need to be paid. Then suddenly, yikes, it’s rent day, and we contract into survival mode, a state of fear and lack.

I know both of these states very well, since the evolution of A Whole New World has involved three years of mostly unpaid work. The creative benefits are huge yet the economic hardship is stressful at times. I know the majority of people in the world live in economic stress far worse than anything I will ever experience and my own financial limitation brings me a little bit closer to understanding them and being compassionate towards the struggles of others. It is very hard to be creative from survival mode. Fear is a contraction on the physical, emotional, mental and spiritual levels. It creates physical disease and keeps us trapped in limiting emotional and mental patterns. Fear cuts us off from Source energy, it creates the illusion we are separate and struggling alone, it is the great controller of the human spirit.

As the economic meltdown deepens more and more people are being pitched into survival mode. Yet we are resourceful. We can learn how to live a different way. We can learn to share more, to be more compassionate to each other’s struggles, to live without material luxuries, to find our satisfaction from within and through building community together. We can learn to drop the prideful egoic beliefs that have been instilled in us as part of our western conditioning: that we have to do it alone, that we can’t show each other our vulnerability, that success comes dressed in a corporate suit. We can learn to live more simply, more sustainably, more deeply, more authentically. We can learn to build co-creative businesses with heart to sustain many people.

We are in the transition right now, from the old to the new. We are standing on the edge of a crumbling cliff and the new is on the other side of the chasm. How will we build a bridge to take us across? Perhaps we will be like the spider spinning the silken threads from her own body to build a web which is strong and mostly invisible, creating something out of nothing, just because it is in her nature to do so.

One of the prime intentions of A Whole New World is to bring together people who are awakening to the new consciousness, to the realization of our essential interconnectedness, and our collective need to start living in a different way. We are building a local, national and global community of people who want to support each other through this transitional time, to share or experiences, to learn new skills, and to co-create. As an educator one of my passions is to live the experience and then to pass on the fruits of that experience to support others: this is one of the purposes of our monthly New Moon Magic publications and local/global sharing circles.

On Saturday we joined our energies through a meditation and visualization and we sent out New Moon seeds of vision, love, and intent. New Moon in Capricorn is the moon of Christ Consciousness, or Love-in-action. Together we can create more of that expansive, creative, loving energy, latent with possibility. We can support each other to be Love-in-action; to walk the talk.

Each one us makes a difference

and together we can do what seems impossible.

To join us in creating A Whole New World, go to http://livingyourpassion.info/nmm/

Happy New Year and a Whole New World

Love and peace, Woods

I confess to much difficulty getting excited about and into the upbeat expectancies of the holiday season. This is true partly because generally, I really don’t get in the swing of a nationalist calendar as a rule. Beyond, say, Thanksgiving, my favorite national day of celebration, I really don’t relate to the rest of what we call holidays, which are seldom holy for me.

In my soon to be published long e book with photos I call Dazzlephrenia, I have, near the end, a few works of thought, which capture my longing for some new holidays (when we can feel our lives as sacred), and when people from around the world, can gather en masse, for spiritual growth, human betterment, and evolutionary advancement.. They have the flavor of a whole new world I dream of.

my new pledge of allegiance

I have a new pledge of allegiance hanging very visibly in my studio. I bet many of my readers would take this new pledge also:

I PLEDGE

ALLEGIANCE

to the

EARTH

and all the

LIFE

which it supports,

ONE PLANET

in our care, irreplaceable

with sustenance and respect

for all.

(1992, byJanine Lamb, Lamb & Lion Studio, New Hampshire)

new holidays for transformation

One of the important things it took forever for me to learn and seems so fully obvious once said, is how important human willpower is to set our intention for attaining something we want. The power generated by devout prayer, the miracle a healer performs, the blossoming splendor of purple morning glories bathing in the morning light, the thumping of hearts and liveliness in every living being, and all the rest of the magnificence dancing around us in our daily lives are all part of the cosmic splendor and radiance of being alive. And remarkably, we humans in particular, seem increasingly more able to access and make use of this primal life-giving, flowering, nourishing, creative, intuitive, manifesting and miraculous power. Because so many more people are awakening to higher consciousness, we are witnessing what Eckhart Tolle is calling the “Flowering of Human Consciousness”. (We’re the “early flowers”) and the beginning, in history, when new collective powers are coalescing for good. We will be able to do even more remarkable and brilliant things, as we learn how to harness the stupendous potentials of our Einsteinian collective mind and soul.

When a flowering is underway it is as unstoppable as a healthy fetus determined to develop fully according to its inherent plan or built-in design. I used to enjoy calling it the bloom force. In those days, I used to think of the very sky and atmosphere turgid and pregnant with a new world in the making. This is the manifesting force I wrote about near the beginning of Dazzle; how is it we can truly wield an incomprehensible power when we want something so fully we can taste it, and become determined to do everything possible for attainment? Aligned with this cosmic fecundity, creative humans can make things happen, become virtual creators. When come-to-life conditions are favorably ripe for unfoldment, all that’s needed are the space-time coordinates to materialize and come to life. When we set a sincere and sufficient intention, we create a virtual garden for flowering, and surely some kind of life ushers forth.

One way we could easily contribute to human flowering is to adopt a few new special holidays on a worldwide calendar. My suggestion would be to use the Solstices and Equinoxes as perfect coordinates already globally in place for a few new global holidays I have in mind. We need actual times set aside, when we can power gather for good (add the power of our own personal strivings, capacity to fiercely love, and live soulfully, to that same power in everyone else, and let the best of ourselves and the others rub shoulders at one time, and see what miraculous events can be alchemized and galvanized as we learn to power gather en masse.

So four times a year, all humanity would agree to congregate together with an agreed upon emphasis or common theme for the common good, in a mood of romantic idealism, and dream and stretch ourselves into a better world. This would give humanity a means by which we can sprout and grow by rallying for the good stuff: peace, justice, the new consciousness, love, collective healing, the soul journey, celebration of the mysteries, end of suffering, whatever else is good for everybody, all life, and all those special beings of all kinds who will come alive after us. Another way of putting it is the world needs to be willing to put four days a year on the same global calendar. Is it not appropriate in the transition to more global citizenship, that we begin the new global calendar in the high spirit of accordance with basic human decency, celebrating our diversity, the sacredness of all life, harmony with nature, and the unbelievable blessing it is just to be alive?

I was grappling with the idea of the importance of getting life’s finest, most joyful, and exhilarating experiences on the calendar, so they can happen to us and we can experience them. If we had special days set aside for these sorts of ultimate things, then there would be a better chance of attaining them. We need time set aside for finding solutions; times for the joys and pains of learning and growing, tasting higher states of awareness potential in us, taking the giant leaps each life requires of us, living our passion, feeling more unitive with others, feeling One with them, being love itself at the same time, and celebrating the wonderment of having life. By some yet unknown energy and dynamic mechanism, the creative force, we can embody what we are and manifest material things from desire and will. It is all very magical, mysterious, and divine.

If the world agreed on this, it could become a passageway to a more humane world. In this sense, there need to be Days to Manifest. Call the first of these holidays: a Day to Grow, on the Vernal Equinox, a time to plant what we want to manifest, to become more than we are. The 2000 leap together. You got the idea?

The second might be a Day for Discovery, a holiday for personal exploration and creative discovery.

A third one might be a Day for Love, one day to be more giving and expressive of feelings and love’s importance in daily life, beside Valentine’s Day!

How about a Day for Justice, to concentrate our collective powers on matters of social justice and equality?

Many, many other very worthwhile themes are possible. The important part about this is to get days and times set aside on our calendars for worthwhile experience, and what is exceptional and unordinary. The unique goals, activities, rituals, traditions, rites, and observances could evolve with repetition and have all the pageantry and originality folks want to bring to them. I’m hoping people will really get off on the opportunity to begin a new rite of passage from scratch. This would make us myth makers.

What would happen if we decided to evolve in unison on a particular day? In concentrating our great human powers to love, expand beyond ourselves, to be highly sensitive, kind, and generous, and to evolve into a riper state of maturity and wisdom, to discover and embody more of what lies within our infinite potentials, could we discover a new societal means of transforming ourselves, improving our overall quality of life, enriching our moment to moment experiences of being alive, cultivating more of a Golden Age on Earth? I’d like to see what huge love fests and healing meditations and spiritual gatherings could co-create, for example. I dream of us evolving beyond ourselves, waking more, being more grateful for our amazing and mysterious lives, being more compassionate with all who live and each and every one becoming just a little bit more than we are now.

It’s time to evolve more. It’s time for humanity to learn how to evolve more consciousness and in so doing find its way to a greater savoring of life and more joyful states of gratitude for life. All that’s needed for this, is to simply let the enormity, beauty, and mystery of existence sink into awareness and shine through all else. There is a terrible shortage of gratitude for life in our human, especially Western, fast paced world. That’s what joy is all about: a heartfelt appreciation for our lives. Well, how about some new holidays which can help us to flower more of this sentiment?

The evolution sought takes nary a fraction of a second to go into effect, probably at the speed of light.

Please just commit yourself to this one single thing: go up a notch.

Resolve to evolve a little in the new millennium, go up a notch, and ask those you love to do the same. Use the power house of the new year as a gateway, as a power jump to a loftier, kinder world. Help make Earth ripple with new consciousness and the promise of a whole new world.

The New Consciousness

Rose Diamond

Someone asked me the other day to explain the “new consciousness”. I think the term was coined by one of my favorite spiritual teachers, Eckhart Tolle, to describe the shift in values he perceives to be happening amongst growing numbers of people on the planet right now. As I understand it, the new consciousness is a fundamental realization of the interconnectedness of all Life. It’s an understanding that we are all part of One Life, one energy, one consciousness; we are all connected in spirit with each other, and with all other life forms on our planet.

The new consciousness is not a religion; there is no church, no creed, no bible, no hierarchy. The truth is discovered within each soul, through learning to listen to the inner self and to trust subjective experience. From the point of view of the new consciousness, the Christ or the Buddha, or Mohammed, or Allah, or Krishna, were all embodiments of higher stages of enlightened consciousness, of which we are all potentially capable. They were models of our highest potential, great spiritual teachers and inspirers; all way showers rather than the One and Only Way and Truth.

Historically, the realization each of us carries a spark of the divine and is capable of direct knowledge of God was deeply disturbing to the religious authorities, who wanted to maintain political control and keep knowledge, power and wealth in the hands of the ruling elite (themselves). Disempowerment and colonization of one group of people by another has always taken place through repression and destruction of the spiritual beliefs, rituals and sacred practices that provide meaning and collective identity, in conjunction with theft of land. When we look back through history we can see many examples of this: the destruction of the Goddess religions for example, which were essentially religions of the people and of the sacredness of the Earth, culminated in the persecution and murder of millions of people during the Reformation. The genocide of the Jews during World War 11; the destruction of Native American Indian culture and of the Australian aborigines were similar crimes against the spirit by Europeans, as is the current desecration of the Tibetan Buddhist culture by the Chinese.

When our sense of connection to spiritual reality, and to inner truth, is broken, as it has been through the industrial and post industrial eras, life is rendered sadly soul-less. This disconnection from soul and spirit accounts for much of present day psychological malaise, a kind of emptiness which leads to compensatory addictions, eating disorders, and grabbing for material toys and image enhancers which can never fill up the hole inside.

As I write this I do not feel very optimistic about the human condition. It seems there has always been a senseless and unbridled cruelty in humans, alongside our brilliance. I think it is always important to remember these stark truths because they prevent us from becoming complacent and keep in focus the challenge that lies ahead of us if we are to raise the consciousness on the planet to a level where such atrocities of humans against humans and humans against animals cease to exist.

My hope for a Whole New World lies in the “new consciousness” which is a journey of reconnection. I call it the soul journey. It is a peeling away of the outer layers of conditioning, all the rules and beliefs we have swallowed whole from family, school, religion and the media, so that we can hear the still small voice within: our own authentic truth, which paradoxically, when we listen deeply and well, turns out to be universal truth too. The deeper we go into self, the more we find each other, in a shared universal humanity. There are many different tools and practices to help us unfold the authentic self: the regular practice of meditation not only helps to clear and focus the mind but also, over time, dissolves the layers of ego which separate us from our deeper self and from each other.

Those of us who follow a non-denominational spiritual path, led from the inside, find our sense of belonging with other similar seekers. We learn to recognize each other and delight in finding each other. We create communities together, although these are not necessarily located in one physical place. Communities come together for a time in groups or gatherings and then disperse and regroup elsewhere. We are a global community. We are of all ages, all colors of skin, all ethnicities, all economic backgrounds and walks of life. When we can’t find each other we feel alienated and different, for from the point of view of more mainstream or materially focused thinking, we appear to be a little crazy, or idealistic dreamers. Connecting with others of like mind and similar energetic vibration is comforting, it feels like home. It’s empowering because we enable each other to be more of who we truly are. Separation from each other is painful and isolating. It takes a lot more effort to keep the flame going alone. Together we spark each other, we create rivers of fire, into which we can launch the survival ark of a Whole New World.

Although I’ve always lived in Western, English speaking countries, the experience of making a new life in four different countries: England, Scotland, New Zealand and now the USA, or actually five including Wales, has made me into a global citizen. I don’t have a permanent home anywhere so, like the turtle, I take my home with me. My friend, Green Willow, calls me a spiritual gypsy. Because I don’t have strong ties with my birth family or a lifelong partner, I’ve learned to love the ones I’m with and experience them as my family. Because it gets silly after a while lugging things across the world, I’ve learned to be mostly unattached to material possessions and to release egoic attachments too. There is freedom in this. Following my soul’s purpose in this way has built a sense of trust in my inner knowing and resources. At times I feel lost and abandoned too and I have had to work at trusting my inner calling and valuing myself without many of the external supports considered normal. All of this is teaching me not to judge other people too much, for we all have our own unique path to walk, and we each have different life lessons to learn at different phases of life. It’s never a good thing to judge another person because we cannot walk in their shoes, or hear the unique song of their soul. Yet we are deeply conditioned to judge ourselves, each other, other nations, other ethnicities, other spiritual beliefs. Recently, I discovered that judging others is an old, unconscious defense against feeling my own pain. It is easier to judge and blame others than to feel the pain of my own sense of failure, inadequacy, disappointment or loneliness. It is easier to judge, an attribute of the isolating ego, than to open deeper to the healing power of self compassion. The cost of judging is we remain fragmented: wholeness is born from deep acceptance of what is.

As the launching of our project, A Whole New World, gets closer (January 26^th) I have been experiencing an almighty stress. My understanding of the act of creating is, it is necessary to hold a clear vision on the one hand, and on the other to have one’s feet firmly planted on the ground in current reality. The closer one approaches the vision, the greater the stretch and tension between this and the as yet untransformed present. I have been feeling the expansion and contraction of the birthing process on a daily basis, one day flung wide into a loving universal embrace, the next day shivering on a cold ledge above a chasm of impossibility. At the same time I have felt like the neonate forcing my terrified way through the birth canal. I would love to be part of a learning community in which I could say this and someone would reply, “Yes, Rose I know exactly what you mean”, or “I experience something like that too, tell me more”. For me, a purpose of a Whole New World learning community is to develop a common language for our subjective experiences as we make our soul journey through the landscape of global transition. Such a common language and shared mythology reduces our isolation and gives us courage for being here now and for the work ahead.

Even amongst people of like mind, it is frequently challenging to get along and to accept our differences and idiosyncrasies. It is very challenging to create new ways of being and doing together, in which everyone feels free and everyone is responsible. It’s necessary to value the challenging times as much as the river of fire; to love and nurture our imperfect human-ness as much as our sparks of divine intelligence.

With this in mind, I humbly invite you to join us in creating A Whole New World. It’s a co-creative dance; an experimental dance; a dance at our Growing Edge, which we will learn one step at a time, as we cheer each other on to greater acts of bold love and death defying creativity.

Namaste,

Rose Diamond

Winter Solstice, December 22, 2008

To learn more about A Whole New World go to: http://livingyourpassion.info/nmm/