This new book with a foreword by Matthew Fox comes out early next year. A summation, renewal, and extension of my work on the psychology, spirituality and mysticism of aging, it is meant to bring new readers to my earlier groundbreaking work, encourage previous readers to re-examine it, and apply its vision to the immense political and environmental challenges of today.
To call these "end times" is hardly hyperbolic. We are in trouble and the signs are everywhere: extreme political divisions; xenophobic violence, enormous wealth inequity; poverty and homelessness; racism, sexism, and ageism; arms buildups and unending wars; and, most critical of all, terrifying climate disruption associated with manmade global warming. This unfolding crisis is already resulting in food and water shortages, species extinctions, unlivable climate zones, and catastrophic weather, flood and fire events. It is also obvious that we are the cause of these dark times. Each of these crises originates in the human psyche – yours and mine. Driven by left-brain beliefs, illusions and obsessions, we race headlong toward the collapse of civilization. Fortunately, the solution to these mounting crises also lies in the human psyche, arising from a most surprising source: the right-brain's natural mystical consciousness. Our survival depends on whether we grasp and resolve this paradox in time.
I'm proposing that mystical consciousness, our long forgotten but fundamental human capacity for the direct perception of Creation, can be one of the most important resources for healing ourselves and the psychological split-brain schism that is risking our very survival. Indeed, divinity is pouring through the conventional world but for most sacred reality is still unseen. But this fast approaching apocalypse may be our turning point, moving us from the excesses of greed, power and false self to the all-infusing love and unity of divine being. This is not the end; it is a call for mystical consciousness and a time for mystical activism.
This book is about changing the world in a most unusual way - by transforming ourselves. When we awaken the power of mystical consciousness, we walk into a radiant new world before our eyes. Conventional problems and issues disappear and we return to our original Garden consciousness in deep communion with an all-pervading divine reality. Mystical activism is not about changing the world we think we see, it's about seeing through it into Creation as our truest home. From this awakening, we discover multiple tools of mystical consciousness that can change the way we process crisis, hardship, and loss, and awaken a new kind of human being.
This visionary transformation also reveals that the next stage of our spiritual evolution is happening right now, right before our eyes, evident in the multiple transitions described in the chapters of Mystical Activism - from spirituality to mysticism, left brain thinking to right brain consciousness, personality to Presence, Patriarchy to New Aging, false self to divine human, soul to prophet, and, with a little help from our friends on the "other side," from conventional reality to Heaven on Earth. In this new integration, earlier and new works combine for a new vision of human spiritual activism and evolution.
The mystical activism of self-transformation is here-and-now activism. We transform ourselves not to convince others to believe something or force institutions to change, but to convert our individual and collective experience of reality itself. It's about being utterly transformed and, as divine humans, letting life happen spontaneously from within the direct experience of divinity. This is a totally different kind of activism - unpremeditated, unpredictable, unprescribed, and unselfconscious. We become divine humans living in the flow of conscious sacred being working in ways never before possible.