As I was posting here Saturday David Spangler came up/in on my "radar screen" -- is that the field I see with other Eye? I heard David speak many years ago and was impressed by Findhorn stories and his relationship with a being from another dimension. I am posting the most recent email from David's Desk.
But Then What?
DAVID’S DESK # 71
David's Desk is my opportunity to share thoughts and tools for the spiritual journey. These letters are my personal insights and opinions and do not necessarily reflect the sentiments or thoughts of any other person in Lorian or of Lorian as a whole. If you wish to share this letter with others, please feel free to do so; however the material is ©2013 by David Spangler. If you no longer wish to receive these letters please let us know at
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My last David’s Desk was about waking up to larger realities in the world around us and within ourselves. In it I said “to be awake in our world today is not simply to see the dangers that beset us or the threats that surround us. It is to be awake to a fiery hope based not on wishful thinking but on the powerful reality of who we are as embodied spirit. It is to be awake to our potential, to the life we’re leading, to the changes we can make, and to the power within us to make a difference.”
A couple of days after that David’s Desk went out, a friend of mine wrote me to say, “I’m all for waking up, but then what?” She made the excellent point that people who have the courage to wake up to a new awareness or vision of human possibilities face resistance in the world and must themselves resist the pressure to “fall asleep” again. As an employee of a corporation that has an old-fashioned military-style hierarchical organization with an adversarial relationship between management and the employees’ labor union, she went on to write that “people develop faster than the systems where they are working.”
This is an important point. Inertia and resistance are integral parts of our world, which, if you think about it, is a good thing overall. We wouldn’t be able to walk around if the ground didn’t provide some resistance to our motion. Try running on ice and you’ll see what I mean! But not all inertia is helpful. Human inertia often arises not from the laws of physics but from emotions like fear, particularly the fear that we may lose our safety and power—and even our identity—if the status quo is altered.
When I have an experience of “waking up” as I described it above, I become different. I see myself and the world around me in new ways. It’s as if I and everyone else in my environment were walking about at the same pace and speed, but now instead of walking, I’m running. In my language, an “energy differential” has opened up between me and my environment. Now, unless I pay attention, there is an increased potential for resistance and conflict. I may feel the need to slow down again so I can fit back into the comfort of moving like everyone else, or I may make it difficult for others to maneuver in ways they’re used to because now there’s a runner in their midst, so they put pressure on me to slow down and conform once more to the norm.
Being the focal point of such an energy differential is not a comfortable place to be. It’s challenging, particularly if your life circumstances—like my friend’s—place you in a working environment that has little in common with your new awareness and perspective. It’s hard to wake up to your innate potentials as a human being and then have to work in a setting that ignores or even denies those potentials and treats you as simply a pawn to be manipulated one way or another. This kind of differential between your new inner state and the “old” outer circumstances can be frustrating and painful. You can feel the pressure of “developing faster than the systems” where you are working or living.
So what then?
The first thing is to pay careful attention both to yourself and to the people with whom and situations with which you are involved. Using my metaphor from above, if you suddenly speed up and start running when you’re only used to walking, you need to become familiar with your new status. Whenever there’s change in ourselves, an important first step is to integrate these changes so that we can find a new balance. Likewise, if you’re now running when everyone around you is still walking, you have to pay attention not to have collisions. You don’t need to slow down, but you have to accommodate the different pace of others.
I’ve known people over the years who have had an experience of “waking up” and having new and transformative insights into themselves and the world around them. I’ve observed that for a time, their attention is on themselves and their new experience, which is only natural. They may not be as aware of how their own change is affecting others around them. Sometimes if they are filled with joy, excitement or enthusiasm, they want to share it with people they know, trying to help them “wake up,” too. This is where resistance can appear. Most people don’t want change pushed upon them, even by well-meaning friends.
A man I knew some years ago had a powerful spiritual experience that led him to see himself in a whole new light. He felt loved and affirmed by God and felt validated as a human being. His first impulse was to share this good news with his co-workers, letting them know that they, too, had all this love and Light within them. The office where he worked was having a lot of morale problems due to people being unkind to each other in subtle ways. Experiencing the power of his own inner change, he felt that if he could convince his co-workers to see themselves and each other differently, with more compassion and love, the workplace environment would change.
Fortunately, as he told me later, before he could follow through on this plan, he had a sober moment of reflection and realized that if he started proselytizing and sharing his new insights, he would be more likely to make the workplace situation worse. It’s one thing to experience a deep awakening of compassion and love in oneself, and quite another to pester one’s workmates to be more loving and compassionate themselves. So what he did was to turn his cubicle into a mini-temple. He didn’t do this in any obvious or overt way. But every morning when he would enter his workspace, he would take time to go within, touch the love he felt, and visualize that love permeating his working area, blessing anyone who entered his cubicle. Other than that, he simply tried to be more loving and compassionate in his own engagements with his co-workers without saying anything about it.
He said that about a week had gone by when he began noticing that people were coming over to his cubicle more than ever before. They would make up some excuse to see him and would linger in his work area. At the same time, the general atmosphere in the office as a whole began to feel better, lighter, less conflicted.
This gentleman had an experience of waking to something new within himself and then paid attention to what was happening. He didn’t try to push anything on anyone, even though he felt a keen desire to do so. His “but then what” led him to silently and without any fuss create and nourish a loving space around himself, letting nature take its course; the result was that over time, the conditions in his office began to transform.
So paying attention is the first step. The second is to integrate whatever has awakened within oneself so that it becomes a solid and balanced part of one’s life. Any kind of inner awakening creates changes in your own inner ecology of attitudes, ideas, feelings, thoughts, hopes, and visions. You need to give yourself the gift of time to integrate these changes. Let them deepen and take root. This minimizes that risk that facing any resistance from the environment, or even from your own habits, you will “fall asleep” again.
The third step is to implement the fruits of these changes in your own field, particularly as you relate to others. If you have had new insights into the potentials within people and of what it can mean to be a human being, then let those insights shape how you respond to others. I don’t mean by rushing to inform them about their potentials but by holding them in your own heart in an honoring and respectful—and yes, a loving—way. If you have been accustomed to seeing yourself and others as made of lead and you suddenly realize you’re all made of gold and precious jewels, then you don’t have to tell them they’re golden; they may not believe you anyway. But you can treat others as the valuable and worthy beings that they are because you know they’re golden.
This is what the gentleman I knew did. Having experienced a surge of sacredness in himself, he began dealing with others as sacred humans, giving them the kindness and respect their core nature deserved. Some people responded, some didn’t, but over time, it made a noticeable change in his office.
He also began working with the subtle environment of his workplace by creating a loving and Light-filled space in his own work area. This is a powerfully effective way of setting transformative and healing forces in motion. It’s a form of spiritual induction, exactly the way a radiator warms a room. It doesn’t force anything on anyone, but it makes new energies available and accessible for any and all who want to respond. And he noticed that one way people responded to what he was doing was by unconsciously coming over to stand in or near his cubicle.
Many organizations have such strong, entrenched structures that it may seem impossible that they will ever change. People are deeply invested in the status quo if they hold positions of authority and power within it, or even if they see it as a source of safety and a regular paycheck. People are reluctant to rattle the boat.
But organizations are also collections of people, and a person who is awake to more spacious possibilities has an advantage in that he or she can bring that spaciousness into the human relationships they form with co-workers. I may not know how to change the organization I work for, especially if it’s a large, old corporation, but I can certainly change my relationship with the specific co-workers I deal with on a daily basis. It may not be easy, but it’s within the human scale where we all operate as individuals.
And if I’m paying attention, I may discern opportunities to open new channels of possibility, vision, and change within the organization. I may not know just when such channels may open or what form they’ll take, but if I’m awake and alert, I’ll have a better chance of recognizing them when they appear and responding.
The kind of awakening I wrote about last month is important. Our world needs new vision. But equally important is developing the attention, the integration, the balance, and the skill to answer the post-awakening question: now what?
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