2021 — A New Era for Humanity
How to Heal Ourselves and our World in 2021.
Standing on the threshold of 2021 we welcome, not just a new year, but a new era for humanity. In 2020 the world as we knew it shifted on its axis with unprecedented breakdown, the scale of which has to signal that we are in fact living through a moment of profound evolutionary shift. We stand between two ages as never before — our old way of being is coming to its natural end and a new consciousness is trying to come in.
Yet, the breakdown and chaos of 2020 has also prompted an awakening of hope within our hearts and a collective longing for a more loving world. We want to create a world of peace, love, harmony, justice and equality for all. Importantly, this longing for a better world is actually an expression of the new consciousness that seeks to move us from individual concern to concern for the whole. The era of the individual is over and the era of the collective is being born. If we follow the natural longing of our hearts we will create a better world for all.
2020 was a year of transition — a bridge between the old and the new. Knowing this gives comfort and offers hope for the future because it allows us to trust that there is a higher, divine intelligence at work in all that is unfolding. Our role is to seek to understand these extraordinary shifts and find ways to welcome and support their unfolding within ourselves and in the world in general.
Looking to the past can help us find necessary wisdom to engage with and process all that is unfolding. The last time humanity experienced an equivalent shift in consciousness was approximately 2,500 years ago during the era that philosopher Karl Jaspers called the Axial Age. The major shift that occurred in that era was the birth of reason. The major shift that seeks to come in now is the birth of love.
Reason introduced extraordinary change for humanity but it had a shadow side in that we allowed reason to take the lead over all other valuable meaning making practices. We allowed reason to dominate over everything else and most especially over our natural spirituality. We made reason the narrow lens through which we understood ourselves and our world and this led to a fatal rupture between our rationality and our spirituality.
Prior to the era of reason, humanity lived in sacred connection with the whole, in what is called animism, which is the deep awareness of the spirituality of all of life. Back then we understood the natural relationship of the parts to the whole but the result of leading with reason meant that we lost our natural sense of connection to ourselves, each other, nature and God. Philosophers name this as the era in which humanity began to become de-spiritualized, de-mythologized and disenchanted all of which has reached its apotheosis in our times and in 2020 in particular.
It is this 2,500 year old disconnect from our natural spirituality that we must heal if we are to create the better world we all long for. The way to heal these historic fractures in our psyche, our soul and in our world is through the singular experience of spiritual awakening. Spiritual awakening as a natural life event has been lost to Western consciousness and this is what we must recover in 2021 if we are to heal ourselves, our species and mother earth.
Just as we must help the earth to heal by re-wilding mother nature, we must also allow ourselves to heal in how we re-spiritualize, re-mythologize and re-enchant ourselves and our lives. This is how we restore balance and harmony among the parts so that the whole may thrive. This is the mystic way of knowing the onenesss of all in love and this is the mindset that will allow us all to heal and to go forwards in a truer and more loving way.
We stand at the dawning of a new age and there is every reason to hope for a better world individually and collectively. The gift of our times is an invitation to make love the foundation stone of our lives, to assist in the birthing of the new age of love and to be midwives of our own future by waking up to divine love. In 2021 we are invited to wake up to a higher level of consciousness by allowing our spiritual awakening to unfold as a natural life event. We are invited into a higher human consciousness by waking up to divine love and this fills out hearts with hope for a better future.
We are once again in an Axial Age and the gift that life now offers is the gift of love. I encourage us all to trust the longing that we feel in our hearts — to trust that it is true and to believe that we can create a more loving world by waking up to our truth as beings of love belonging intimately to divine love itself. I encourage us to trust in the seismic energies of our times and to wake up to the higher reality of divine love here and now.