@perriwinkle10, I just turned 67. I have no idea what in blazes happened to us. Sadly, some of my peers, who were once actively part of the 60’s-70’s protests – Vietnam War, Civil Rights, Women’s Movement, etc. – eventually became the establishment people we were protesting against. Whether they became disillusioned because change wasn’t happening as quickly as they’d hoped, or they became too intoxicated with the almighty $ – I’m not sure what caused it. But it breaks my heart. We made a mess of some big things, and unfortunately it’s now up to the younger generation to fix it. I don’t have children, but I find your generation and those that follow to be incredibly smart, empathetic, and inclusive. And that gives me a lot of hope for our future.
I’ve always been an unconventional, odd duck. And in my advancing age, I have no intention of going quietly!
I'm your generation. I come from a family of Republicans (except my mother). We're Italian, and I think way back when the Republican party was more normal, they tried to help immigrants. Now, my father finally realized Nixon was a liar. But this is funny - I said to my mom, "When you were watching Ronald Reagan in the movies, did you ever think he'd become President?" She said, "I didn't think he'd become President THIS year."
@suspira44, That is funny. Your mother sounds great! My mom never liked Reagan and wouldn't vote for him, and here's her reason why: when mom was a young adult, she went to see Reagan when he was appearing in a live, movie-star showcase at the Hippodrome Theater in Baltimore. He snubbed mom and her friends when they approached him for an autograph. "Who does he think he is?" she would often say. So come the election ... Payback time!
It's funny what will aggravate someone. This doesn't belong here, and it can be removed but my father always refused to give money to a mission - why? Because every time he drove by there, men were outside smoking cigarettes. So he figured if they could afford cigarettes, they didn't need his help. Meanwhile my sister volunteers there and my other sister and I donate.
Pacosurfer,
I think the Text you are referring to is from the book of Isaiah Chapter 11.
“The wolf shall live with the lamb,
the leopard shall lie down with the kid,
the calf and the lion and the fatling together,
and a little child shall lead them.
The cow and the bear shall graze,
their young shall lie down together;
and the lion shall eat straw like the ox (verses 6-7).”
In my opinion it is a reordering of creation. Prior to these verses the Text talks about what we all long for..a new creation.
Under our current circumstances, it makes sense why you never felt as if you belong here.
I know of several psychic schools of thought that posit that as the 20th century progressed, more and more "old souls" were born to help humanity evolve. Now, they claim, the vast majority of children being born today are preternaturally wise. That's a comforting idea, and some of the long term visions on this site make references to wiser, kinder children.
I'm not much a fan of the practice of labelling generations and then classifying each one according to overly broad characteristics. Such a practice seems to breed unhelpful age-based grudges while also obscuring the reality that if we want to improve society, all of us, regardless of age, have to start talking to each other and helping out in our varying capacities. The way I see it, each generation is limited by inherited cultural and temporal biases and has done the best it can under the burden of those blindspots.
Which brings me back to the question; can we find meaning from the darkness, especially now when it seems like we've blundered mightily on a global scale? I've gradually taken on the view that this era is the culmination of tens of thousands of years of cultural trends towards ever greater human control of and separation from nature (the burdens that each generation has had to shoulder). Now that the ugly fruits of those trends are in plain view - ecocide, nuclear warheads, surveillance capitalism - we're at an inflection point where we can change course towards a more mature, life-affirming stage of human history (in Joanna Macy's words, the Great Turning). And perhaps all of the mistakes of the past 100,000 years or so serve a cosmological evolutionary purpose that has led us to the doorstep of maturity as a species. Such an interpretation might sound like cold comfort (or straight up woo woo) for anyone who's currently in the throes of despair. But taking the cosmological view helped lift me up out of my own dark night of the soul and has kept me ticking for the past 2.5 years. That's my take.
I agree. I've heard that as well, that the children coming in are all ready and raring to go to heal the world. I've read where many of them are being labeled as being on the spectrum. They are misunderstood because they are not from this world.
There is a great purging coming. I feel it in my personal life. The toxic masculinity of the President symbolizes much of the pain many of us had growing up. Whether we were bullied or sexually assaulted, the President's actions and words are painful reminders of what many of us women AND men experienced. In fact, two of the guys who hurt me the most in high school are huge Trump and FOX news supporters. And it feels like a constant ripping of those wounds.
@Stardancer...I knew it was something biblical! It's still a wonderful idea...that we are all at peace.
@coyote Wow. I love the cosmological view. Fits the Kali Yuga prophecy that says we are shifting to a more enlightened matriarchal system around to late mid 2020's. The millenials will herald this new age.
This thread just keeps getting better. Perriwinkle10 thank you for the pinhole story. Keeping it close to my heart.
I'm glad that the cosmological perspective resonates with you, Jeanne. I was indeed first introduced to it by researching Hindu cosmology and then reading the works of Joanna Macy and Charles Eisenstein.
In the spring of 2017 I had an NDE, which got me reading about other people's NDEs. That led me to this profound essay written by a young woman who induced a series of NDE-like experiences through meditation after the death of a close friend. She writes that in one of those experiences, she was shown:
a vision of a possible future for humanity on Planet Earth. In this vision, I saw humans behaving very differently than how most of us are accustomed to seeing humans behave in this era. I saw humans of many different types and personalities. They were in a natural area with woods holding hands in a circle and freely celebrating life. Their faces and bodies radiated with love, purity, joy, bliss, peace, innocence, and wisdom, and so did other creatures around them. These people were fully in touch with life. They were not afraid of any part of themselves or the world, nor were they burdened by rigid beliefs or identities of any kind. They were fully evolved and perfectly content living simply and in the now. Though, because of their realized nature as one and the same as the Source and their freedom from identification with form, they had the ability to do and create whatever they wished. They were truly free. They cooperated like cells in a body, for they knew that they were cells in the body of God. They had no doubts that they (and all beings) would continue living after death. In fact, they had brought life and death—Earth and heaven—together, along with all other dualisms, creating a world of perfect wholeness. This is the New Earth.
This is the most fascinating and inspirational articulation I've ever found of what an evolved future for humanity can look like. I continue to be struck by how much this woman's vision aligns with other accounts I've read about in religious texts and modern literature. For example, in one of my favorite novels, The Bone People, by Keri Hulme, the main character has a dream in which she sees a very similar scene. And then of course there is Matthew 6:10 from the Bible:
Thy kingdom come,
Thy will be done in
earth as it is in heaven
So perhaps the mystics and visionaries among us have always been aware of our true potential and that we have to go through the maturation stages before we ca reach a world "of perfect wholeness." Granted, the world the woman describes above is probably thousands of years off, but I think it's no small matter to be living in the Great Turning and thus be able to take part in the initiation of the New Earth.