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Health & Fitness

The New Consciousness

A new consciousness is arising. The newness is expressed in this consciousness becoming common to everyday people rather than just wise sages of old. It potentially lives in all of us.

In 2005 Eckhart Tolle published a book called The New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose that describes a new consciousness coming to the fore to assist us in addressing the planetary challenges we are facing.

Of course, this new consciousness is not new. The phrase, "united we stand; divided we fall" is attributed to an Aesop fable, so this consciousness was around in the The Middle Ages and prior. The newness comes in the idea of this consciousness becoming common to everyday people rather than just wise sages of old. It lived in them; and it potentially lives in all of us.

This new consciousness is a vague term and difficult to imagine what it looks like if we are entrenched in the old. However, it's important to understand what the old one looks like before imagining the new. The old is all around us and in us even in the example of the LADWP substation where opposing parties fight, place blame, and obstruct any progress toward a solution. It means holding tight to one's territory in lieu of what might be best for the whole. It involves both a lack of integrity and transparency.

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I have run up against my own pattern of protecting territory, and it's been an interesting process to see it and let it go. I love ideas. Ideas are my passion, and I have shared cool ideas with Pacific Palisades. I also am in touch with local communities and wanted to share these cool ideas with them, but I held back because I had an investment in these ideas being implemented here first. Then something inside told me to give the ideas away. I realized the new consciousness is expressed in being open source about things rather than proprietary, because too much is at stake these days to hold tightly to ideas. The spreading of good ideas that strengthen communities needs to be public and freely given, because we are one planet, a planet in quite a pickle.

The new consciousness involves big picture thinking. If we look at things from the big picture point of view, we can see that our lives are connected to a greater world. This adds a richness to our existence that makes life meaningful, joyful, and fun. That free-floating anxiety so common in modern life coming from a sense of not feeling connected vanishes. It can't help but vanish, because we see and experience a deeply connected way of being. We no longer need to search for meaning for it is written in the very fabric of our everyday lives.

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