Humanity is ascending. It’s happening not so much individually as it comes through as a kind of collective — hive mind — phenomenon. It’s hard to talk about without breaking my own copywriting rules and employing the Royal We, so forgive my stumbling around as I try to bring the concept of universal development down to personal development.
Human beings are co-creating our future together. We are all coded with a deep sense of purpose. As a writer and blogger, especially in the realms of personal development, your blogging, your writing, your voice, and your sense of a personal mission or life purpose is woven with words. The internet is literally made up of words in the technological context — code.
Words are the handles when our thoughts become things. Information technology represents a tangible evolution of our power to manifest — to co-create reality.
Macrocosm — Microcosm
On the scale of the universal human, we discover and wield source code as a fine example of the emerging democracy of our thoughts, ideas, voices, and words. The collective wisdom — globally connected. Our understanding, our steady diet from the Tree of Knowledge is happening at all levels of creation — from cosmology and physics down to the scale of nano- and bio-technological wisdom.
On the personal level, there is a source code of conscious awareness waking within you. You are a social being; your deepest fulfillment is dependent on social forces. You feel this code switch on as a desire to “use your life” — to live your life with meaning and purpose — to create and express the piece of the experience you carry. The pieces only make sense within the context of everyone else’s bits/bites/bytes — like a switch in the grid that must be connected to others in order to function as intended.
You know this desire to participate as a kind of yearning you can’t put your finger on — a calling that can’t quite be named. You struggle to find it, even as it hides everywhere and nowhere, simultaneously. You know the life you wish to live must be made in order to be found.
“Can blogging really be that deep?” I hear you chuckling. Hell, yes it is! This is a miracle of our creativity we’ve already taken for granted. Step back a moment and remember your life ten or twelve years ago, and see how much your mundane everyday experience has expanded within the collective. Before we move further into taking the magic for granted, let’s be aware of what is happening here. Any participation in our collective wisdom is valuable — just using the web — lurking, without actively contributing — fires the grid of the emerging new universal human power.
You’ve already moved beyond that step to represent and participate in the minority of those of us who are seeding, growing, actively tending this new Garden. It’s hard to wrap your brain around the idea that as one of millions of bloggers you are still part of a special few.
Nothing on this earth is not affected by our innovation as a species. Sure, we make some serious messes in Sandbox Earth — we’re toddlers who just dumped Pandora’s Leggo box all over the carpet. The pieces are all over the place. We’ve got plenty of deconstructivist intellectuals examining the evidence of our Big Mess with valuable insights we must heed… But when did the greatest minds in the world decide to be adept at pessimism?
The sense of purpose you long to define — the code you feel turning on within you, not without discomfort, is a nagging awareness that the glass can’t continue to be only Half Empty. Perspective is a creative choice; positive vision is a behavior.
What is the meaning of our new power that’s good? Our power is physical and virtual — science and technology. It is ultimately social and spiritual, too. And now this awareness of your place within the Hive overwhelms — makes you feel smaller, somehow less powerful.
“I’m just a little dude here with nothing but words and ideas to share,” you think. But God — your humble stories now have the power to go everywhere, to reach anyone anywhere anytime in an amazing display of applied human ingenuity. We make tools out of thin freakin’ AIR!
You should feel mighty.
Writers are the last to see themselves as healers. Words heal. Talking, listening, connecting, responding, sharing are all powerful healing arts. As an artist seeking the context of your purpose, you should be asking yourself:
“What are the images — the stories — of the future equal to our new power?”
The paths forward barely exist in our modern culture — we have few images of the future — we’re still stuck looking backward… Wringing our hands about what a mess we’ve made on Mother’s carpet and how we have to put it all back together…
How can we go forward with no vision of where we’re going?
- What is the direction of humanity?
- What are we evolving toward?
- What is my place in it?
What is my purpose?
Your purpose will found if you seek it while asking:
“What is the meaning of our power that ROCKS?”
We’ve lost our self-image. We’ve lost our story to jaded intellectual criticism, and the notion that being a glassy-eyed utopian hippy is somehow embarrassing, stupid, naive. That hopeful visions, the stories of our future, are for escapists lost in their own gas-bag clouds.
As an artist, as a writer, as a blogger, your purpose is to find the stories of our future, to collect them like pollen, bring them home and stock the honey — to build the signposts, the treasure maps to the world you want to live in beyond 2012…
Do you have a glimpse now of how amazing it is that you’re just another blogger?
Slade Roberson is an intuitive counselor, ATP®, professional blogger, and the author of Shift Your Spirits, Automatic Intuitive Response, and the PageCoach Problogging Tutorial Series. Slade on Blogging shares behind-the-screens internet marketing, self-publishing, and blogging strategies with other personal development writers, coaches, and healing arts practitioners.
I’ve told you this before, Slade:
I am more amazed every day how my own (seemingly insignificant) voice reverberates among many others, strenghtening and being strenghtened by the whole. It’s like a wave, a tone… just barely under the audible limit.
Just a random observation… Does this have anything to do with the idea that society at large is coming closer to becoming an emergent consciousness through an information event horizon?
Society is an emergent sub-consciousness already… When (in your opinion) is the event horizon, the ‘birth’ of global self-awareness?
My vote is, barring a natural disaster on a global scale, around the fall of 2012… though few will notice all that much.
Slade,
I think you’re right, that the singular calling each of us feels is really a common purpose – a common purpose we advance by connecting with one another and using words as the sacred tools they are.
As “just another blogger”, I feel less significant as an individual. But as a pattern of connection emerges between insignificant individuals, they all become important in that pattern. Each node and strand in the web has a role that it plays through linking with others.
Individuals are important in relation with one another – the more you relate and connect, the more fully you play your part, the better able you are to Do What You Are Here For. And that could be tiny (insignificant) on an individual scale, but if it impacts the whole web, it really is important. Where significance implies surface values, importance speaks of impact and consequence.
-Sarah
Vitor,
Your tone/wave/sound analogy resonates with me. Concert and all that word implies.
Sarah,
I, too, feel less significant as an individual, while at the same time my awareness of the larger organism is an awesome perspective. Perhaps this is the ego’s proper place in a democratic system.
Adam,
I threw in the “2012″ as a symbolic point, more than a literal date. I do indeed think the paradigm shift rides on information technology, but just as we don’t have a specific day or month or even year we can say “The Year the Industrial Revolution happened” or “The Year We Woke Up and Started Using Agriculture” the time-frame is probably not that far off.
I do want to draw attention to the correspondence between “The End of the World” and “The Dawn of A New One,” if for nothing but the shift in perspective it illustrates…
I believe Ray Kurzweil points to a few decades from now for the total shift described in the Technology Singularity to have passed the point of no return — but at the same time, even Singularity scholars describe more of overlapping waves of change that occur across a fuzzier timescale — and that it won’t be an “Event” that we can necessarily predict, pinpoint, or even feel, as it occurs.
Looking at it that way, I’d say it’s already happening…
“What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls the butterfly.”
You were on a heck of a roll; good article. I can tell you really feel it. You are so right; this medium will change the world. Despite the proliferation of blogs the change has only just begun. There will be a coalescence, and a strengthening of the various camps of thought and desire.
The internet is much like internal energy, that vital force within us; it empowers whatever is there; the good the bad and the ugly. Energy doesn’t discriminate. Power doesn’t care about the message it carries.
With that kind of muscle shaping the world, we, more than ever before, need to genuinely commit to our best qualities and abilities. We need to develop and share this, and as you say “to create and express the piece of the experience you carry,” each of us embodies a different piece of the puzzle.
Folks, this is the time when we either rise or fall. The switch has been thrown. The power is on. We are the ones who are writing the history books of the future. Let’s be careful how we word it.
Thanks Slade,
John
Thanks John!
The tools themselves are one thing — what we do with them another. I feel like a lot of bloggers are still enamored with the technology itself. Excited by the new toy and a sense of “Wow! Look what I can do!”
Nothing wrong with that, but once we move past the novelty, what’s going to stick, you know? Now that you’ve been handed this incredible microphone, what will you say?
What can I say Slade, one of the best articles – and really puts a brilliant spin on how we see things. Thanks for the great message.
Albert,
You can say THAT! “Brilliant” works for me!
It means a lot to me to know that this type of conversation impacted you.
As well as its being encouraging, your response is very practically useful to me, too: WordPress meta-blogs, blogging how to information, marketing tips, etc are prevalent these days. I’m working to keep bridging the “worlds” in which I operate. Professionally, my income from Shift Your Spirits has slowly grown to match my “day job” as a marketing consultant. Who knows, I may always have one foot in both, because I do love both, but as I straddle this fence, I’m asking myself “What is this fence I’m straddling? What is the view from this bridge that is, ultimately, my unique experience?”
So, thanks for affirming my path, man!
Sarah at Spiritually Engaged just sent me this link
TED : Ideas Worth Spreading
Theme — The Rise of Collaboration
Hell yeah — check it out:
http://www.ted.com/index.php/themes/view/id/19
Powerful piece Slade.
I love how you refer to humanity as a hive – calling to mind the interdependancy of bees where the good of the whole is the driving force rather than the good of the individual.
This is the leap I see us needing to embrace – a sense of ourselves not as a tribal species, fighting for dominance amongst ourselves over who will rule, or who will control the resources… Rather, once we feel ourselves as a hive species, all interconnected and interdependent, then we will automatically make decisions based on serving the needs of the hive, and in doing so, elevate ourselves as individuals.
All around me, I see people who just want to be heard, understood, listened to and valued. The best inside each and everyone of us yearns to be expressed, yet also wants to feel safe before expressing.
Slade, when you write articles such as this one are you aware of what you have created at the time or does it take the step back to realize? I know I read these words in November. It took me until today to absorb their impact.
This writing looks on the surface to be about one unitive idea. But there are more ideas here than in thirty articles.
The thought that came to me is this is more an outline for a book then simply a blogger’s scheduled post. Or maybe a place to present the many ideas for development.
I think the comments Albert and K-L made said the rest best, so I’ll defer to them.
Barbara,
I don’t know that there is any different level of “awareness” about what I’ve written. So many parts of my personal response are on this side of the results — technical stuff, editing, etc…
The impact on the reader is almost always surprising and not easy for me to “predict.”
I’m not sure what defines “articles such as this one” — but I do know exactly what you’re referring to. I know them when they happen. I particularly like these kinds of expansive, universally-inclusive posts, but I don’t often include them because they can also be less personal… Here, on this blog, I’ve made a conscious effort to publish more “inspirational” type of posts to balance some of the more technical stuff.
All the difference points that you refer to as “an outline for a book” — I see what you mean, that’s a compliment. I think of this article as kind of an “invitation” or a “spiritual To Do” list for writers — myself included.
Barbara,
I should also mention something that’s a little different about my process for writing a post like this one. This represents the essence of a Spirit Guide Reading I performed for another writer, combined with overlapping, personal intuitive information (a kind of channeling or “reading for myself”).
The Readings I do for writers or artists (especially those who have a Lightworker mission) are especially full of “juicy goodness” for me, on a personal level — it’s an opportunity to witness the conversation between creative people and their spirit guides. This helps affirm the more difficult and vague personal messages that I’m simply too close to, sometimes.
As an article writer, I try to interject more person-to-person language wherever possible, to make it more accessible.
Just thought I would share this for anyone who is curious about what some of my Path & Purpose-focused Readings tend to “sound like.”
It’s interesting, Slade that your thoughts in the first response went to the technical. I presume you mean by that the techniques of writing as well as technology.
So after I read your first response, I took a quick five minute look see back through the article and pulled out a list of things that jumped out at me. I’m not sure why I felt the need to do this, or even why I’m trying to get this point across. I think contrasting this article, to say a more recent one about using StumbleUpon illustrates what I saw here. The Stumble article has a singular thought and it’s purpose is to educate. It’s great, but not like this.
So here’s the list. I used things almost verbatim from your post, others I embellished with my own picture of what your phrases highlighted for me.
Your Voice – The piece of the puzzle only you can bring
A Sense of Personal Mission
Democracy of Thought
Your Deepest Fulfillment is Dependent on Social Forces
A Desire to Use your Life
Making The Life You Wish To Be Found In
One of Millions, Yet Still Part of a Special Few
A Longing to Define
Writers as Healers
Does that explain a little better about what I took away from what I perceived as many many topics rather than just one? Given a few more minutes I’m sure I could do the same all over again with a new list. I think you had the right word, expansive. The article literally expanded for me, maybe expanded me.
Wow, Barbara, what a gift (to me) your outline is!
Pulling out the bones of a piece like this is something agents and editors are very adept at — this, too, is a skill you should acknowledge and praise and perhaps be on the lookout for opportunities to consciously use.
If someone asks you to approach his/her writing/ideas in this way, please engage that role with confidence (if it’s an opportunity that interests you).
Very insightful!