Adam’s Peace

The English bard Damian of Be the Change, Tread the Path (a very interesting blog about his personal journey, with the central theme encouraging others to take action) asks the following question:

As we (the human race) appear to be accelerating towards a point of Spiritual Growth or Ascension, what do you see as the greatest hurdle and why?

I think that there are many hurdles on the path to humanity reaching Ascendancy. The most obvious of which is figuring out exactly what it all means.

If I had to pick just one hurdle that would be the most difficult to cross, I think that it would be getting past the idea that Ascension is one single point… It is like asking when a fetus changes from a mass of cells into a human. Do we define it as the time when the heart starts beating? Does human life start at the moment the sperm reaches the egg? Is that fetus a human when its nervous system develops enough for it to feel pain? Maybe the fetus doesn’t become human until some time after it is born, when it can demonstrate the ability to make decisions, rather than simply reacting to its environment.

The path to Ascendancy, just like the path to becoming a full human adult, is full of several blurred lines. Are we born when the head touches the air, or when our feet or placenta are no longer in our mother? We draw clearly defined lines in our concept of time because it then becomes easier to see time as an object, just as we define a desk as a surface with legs, and that surface thought of, more often than not, as being defined by its edges and corners, with no regard for the spaces between. I have already written about the concept of the spaces between, which remains one of my favorite posts.

The time period after which we can call ourselves Ascended would need to be defined before we can tell whether we really are Ascended first. What exactly is Ascendancy, then? Is the realization that there are things greater than ourselves in work in the world? Did it happen when Abraham brought monotheism to society? Did Ascendancy start when Jesus taught us that we can love our neighbors, reserve our judgment, and freely give our entire selves for strangers? How about when the prince Siddhartha became the Buddha? Perhaps society has to develop its own consciousness, bolstered by the increased speed of communication brought about by the Internet. Perhaps society already is conscious, and has been since long before electrical theory was created.

Personally, I think that humanity can be considered an Ascended race after those in power realize that we are all one people, no matter what our language, appearance, continent of birth, proclaimed religion, economic status, or gender might be. After that, war will be impossible, simply because there would be no enemies to fight.

Regardless of how we define Ascendancy, though, the day before will be much the same as the day after. We might know what year it happens in, or if we’re lucky, we might know what month, but the transition will be invisible. All that we’ll know, at first, is that it is easier to smile. We won’t mind bearing each other’s burdens as much, or helping out someone who is stumbling. We’ll see our neighbors as extended house guests, but we will have seen them as extended house guests the day before, and even the month before. Eventually, someone will comment that we haven’t had a war for a while… Someone else will notice that nobody really cares about the national boundaries any more… We’ll probably mark the beginning of our golden age as the day that the last war stopped, but that wouldn’t be terribly accurate, just as the day that we were born doesn’t mark the day that we began thinking. We were thinking long before we breathed air, but the evolution to complex thought didn’t finish until years later. Nobody told us on our sixteenth birthday that this year marks the time when most people start forgetting more, daily, than they learn. Nobody told us on our twenty-fifth birthday that our brain chemistry is going through its last change before settling in to be the same mind that we’ll have for the rest of our lives… Even if they told is, we wouldn’t be able to mark a specific day on our callendar and say that we became an adult, mentally… Each day is much the same as the day before and the day after, which marks the most difficult hurdle in Ascendancy: Realizing that we are an Ascended race, and that we no longer have to fight each other.

Some day, we’ll realize what it means to be Ascended, but by then, it will have already happened.

The easy part is living today, in this moment, and knowing that you can take action. That action will bring closer the moment when we’ll look back and be able to mark an approximate date. Right now, you can bring a smile to someone else’s face, or even to your own face, and be one smile closer to a day when everybody will smile.

Be the change that you wish to see in the world… That’s the easy part, because you can always be the change right now. The hard part is knowing when you have arrived after you have tread the path for so long.

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This entry was posted on Sunday, May 6th, 2007 at 12:49 am and is filed under Responsibility, Inner Peace, Spirituality. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.