I can’t tell you all the ways it happened, but I can tell you why. It happened because it was time for consciousness to realize its next evolutionary state, with humans as its emissaries, its substance of incarnation. I’d known this in my heart for years, known what I personally needed to do towards that vision, and why, yet I never fully committed to the task.
Meanwhile, it wasn’t until the mortgage was paid off, all debts retired, that I left the rat-race and began studying further and fully acknowledged what humanity had been doing to its support system – planet Earth. Even being a staunch environmentalist since the early 70’s, I had not fully grasped the systemic implications of my and the rest of humanity’s cumulative invasiveness onto Nature’s symbiotic ways. And then it hit me like a brick: global human industrial civilization was going to collapse from multiple negative inputs; Homo colossus was going to go extinct. And I was not alone in that assessment. That was when I finally surrendered to what I determined was the only path forward for me, and collectively for humanity as a whole: living, breathing, serving the will of the Divine, his purpose for me becoming my sole reason to exist. Thankfully, there were many others going through the same process, too.
By 2024, cumulative human actions based on modern industrial civilization practices added up to an opposed non-alignment to the Divine’s ultimate truth – the oneness of everything and all of existence. But, at that time, I and 99% of humanity did not live there. It wasn’t our fault that we lived within the “system” – it was all we knew and was the only thing we were ever taught, nevertheless, the realization of a pending possible human extinction drove me to push through an already ongoing journey using the process of reason-based elimination to ultimately conclude that the necessary changes needed to humanity’s modus operandi were not going to come from the standard, mental consciousness humans normally operated within. If we Homo sapiens sapiens (modern wise man) were really that smart, and we really were in charge of the world like we thought, we would not have gotten into the ecological Overshoot predicament in the first place. Homo colossus had been created and nefarious forces kept him “growing” ever more destructive. I had intuitively known this for all these years, yet refused to fully acknowledge it, inculcate it, embody it, much less act upon it: I was trying to fix things by way of a capitalist system, but it never felt right, or enough. As a result, I live externally, denied my soul’s calling, refusing God’s purpose for me. I now began to spend my time in service to the Divine, offering the fruits of my labor and thought to the Divine only, foregoing personal benefit of my actions. Thankfully, there were many others doing this, too.
Fortunately, the evolution of Earth’s consciousness was shifting away from the ignorance and ego-driven Anthropocentric standard operating procedures, and humanity began to see and feel Nature’s acceptable limits had been breached. And Nature was beginning to fight back. The new orientation for shifted humanity became a what-was-best-for-Nature-first focus, including living, feeling, and understanding the symbiotic connectedness and relationships of all life on Earth. Hundreds of thousands of other people were feeling this shift in consciousness, too, and as the numbers increased, this higher consciousness expanded its influence and force and power. Once foo-foo to the masses, a spiritually-focused orientation, beyond and above religions, more akin to a personal, one-on-one relationship with the Divine based on direct experience and identity, became mainstream sincerity for humanity. No one knows when the critical mass in this consciousness shift was achieved, but it happened. Oh, to be a 100th monkey!
The shift in consciousness among a growing portion (but, not yet a majority) of humanity did not eliminate the pain and suffering to both ourselves and the rest of life that modern industrial civilization self-caused – much of which the planet is still dealing with and adapting to, but it did change how the shifted ones perceived the pain and suffering, how they acted within it. As more and more people consciously shifted to a way of knowing that was innate and intuitive – above the mind, that continually growing portion of humanity no longer believed man should dominate all other life, no longer consumed largely for convenience, no longer were the puppets of capitalistic propaganda and began living within and adapting to new, simpler means, no longer ignorantly or purposely polluted or damaged Gaia, no longer believed in or supported the divisive separateness pushed by still existing dark and evil forces, no longer worshipped the idol of economic growth and believing its promoters, no longer believed in war and violence as means of arbitration and negotiation, and finally understood that the materiality of our normal 3-D awareness is only the carrier for the spirit – spirit and love being the truth supporting all existence. Humans reconnected with the goodness of others’ souls, including the non-human. Taken together, the changes were dramatic, and unprecedented in brevity of Time. And, as biophysically required of any specie undergoing exponential growth within finite resources, the over-burdening human population was reduced by Nature, and by man, and its numbers are still dropping. Nature, though, will be the final determinate as to when, and if, humanity reaches a sustainable level.
The shift in consciousness would not have happened if man had tried to continue to live and operate with the business-as-usual mindset, the same level of evolutionary consciousness that precipitated the imbalances of the planet: extinction of Homo colossus was required. It took the power of a critical mass of humanity living day to day within and by the knowledge of a higher consciousness to enable some humans to survive the ecological Overshoot bottleneck. The higher consciousness gave the survivors new ways of being and living and knowing – knowledge above the mind, and they became conscious stewards and custodians of Nature’s ways. Of the millions of attempts to try new ways of being and living, many failed that were not divinely inspired and sanctioned. Nature no longer had use for actions initiated and pushed by a lower human consciousness. Evolution still has its ups and downs, fits and starts, but it does not go backwards.
In this my 98th year in this body, I’ve been blessed to both witness and participate in this massive shift of evolutionary consciousness, yet this last half century has been a challenge for all of life on Earth. I’ve seen many other humans, including some of my close loved ones, who did not make it through the bottleneck. Humans are superior in adaptation skills, but here, in this instance, the type of adaptation was not just physical, but one towards a higher knowledge base and consciousness that became the saving grace, and that must be paid forward, from this time on, moment to moment by humans maintaining a direct connection to and identity with the Divine.
Here in 2050, consciousness evolution continues and humanity is still here, but only because enough of humanity used the divine grace of choice to finally, purposefully, intentionally, choose to put God first in all actions and thought, an evolutionary leap that now leads most of humanity’s actions. As Sri Aurobindo stated over a hundred years ago, consciousness steadily unfolds towards an eventual “life divine” on planet Earth. Now, that’s a faith in a goal that can sustain. Namaste.
Bob Bates