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Through the years of producing and hosting New Dimensions, I’ve been able to recognize complementary themes emerging from a range of disciplines. We might have a psychologist talking about how emotions can affect our health. Several months later we’ll hear from a cosmologist revealing how we’re essentially microcosmic co-creators of the realities of our universe, embedded in fields of influence. This idea may be followed by a medical doctor talking about a near death experience. All this adds up to an emerging theme that reality may be far more mysterious than what our five senses are reporting. What is happening on the front page of newspapers and the lead stories on TV news may not be revealing the emerging great possibilities that are part of our planetary culture.
Most of the news that we’re hooked on is bad news. However, when history turns the corner, it is never on the front page. Philosopher Jean Houston urges us to look at the example of the beginning of Christianity. She says, “Who would have thought that [during] this powerful Roman bureaucracy of famous statesmen, orators, and philosophers some simple carpenter would’ve made all the difference. He made a powerful historical difference. And, the same thing is happening today.”
Houston adds, “Whenever history turns the corner it is never because of what is on the front page. It is always the X factor of human history that creeps in the back door. It doesn’t get too much celebrity status, so it can quietly yeast new kinds of areas.” She also suggests that the deep dialogues presented on New Dimensions are part of that quiet amplification of this great turning of our current cultural era. “I think it’s a very good thing that your kinds of programs are not great big national programs but are the subtle yeasting products because it’s done in darkness and quiet. Then it begins to create a new kind of harvest so that when traditional structures do erode, you have a whole new level of meta-structure, of new greening, that has gotten very, very deeply rooted. Then there arises a new culture of deep rooted blossomers.”
My life’s quest has been the pursuit of the biggest truth, the most fundamental truth I can trust and stand on. Now I’ve discovered a theme that is being repeated through many recent interviews. This theme is like grass seeds popping up everywhere. I discovered that the way to see this emerging new paradigm is out of the corner of my eye. Looking directly at the appearance, my view seems to be obscured by the fierce commotion of the world. As the Bible says in II Corinthians 13:12 “For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.”
The big theme I’m seeing dimly through the holy tumult of the world is the scientific view that is moving beyond the materialistic understanding of reality. The materialistic view – that the fundamental make-up of the universe is matter and that nothing exists beyond that – is slowly giving way to the larger view that consciousness is the fundamental source of the cosmos.
Nobel prize-winning physicist Max Planck declared in 1931: “I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything we talk about, everything we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.” And that puts consciousness, not matter, as the basis of all reality. That turns the equation on its head and puts us all in a position of co-creation with God, Or, if that term doesn’t’ sit well with you dear reader, then you might try this definition of God which is my current one, “God is the quantum field of infinite intelligence: a divine and dynamic force of energy that exists within everything, enlivens everything, and from which everything is made.”
For decades this idea has been a theme running through our deep dialogues. Only now am I starting to grasp it more fully as I hear from scientists, spiritual teachers, environmentalists, psychologists, poets, health practitioners, and others.
I hope it gives you some comfort to know that together we are co-creating this ever-unfolding thick weave of reality.
In closing I include a poem by business consultant Margaret J. Wheatley from her book How Does the Raven Know? Entering Sacred World, A Meditative Memoir:
I am not interested in being hopeful or optimistic or working diligently to reverse the patterned path of history we tread so reliably toward collapse.
I am interested in being able to stay in the midst of this terrible travesty that degrades the human spirit or denies we have one
caught in the balance beam of meaningful work and terrifying times I want to walk steady in the world, learning what balance feels like.
Blessed by the active presence of companions in sacred world.
I am blessed by your companionship as together we perform our deep and sacred work.
– Justine Willis Toms
P.S. The quote from Jean Houston is found in New Dimensions program number 1616.
