An exploration of what this global awakening is and how we might play our part in it
For some time now my work has been to pull threads of connection between people and communities that are awakening to a way of being I call “the village consciousness.”
This season will be an exploration of what this global awakening is and how we might play our part in it. Together, over the course of this season, we will journey to communities, villages, ceremonies, gardens, peoples homes and firesides everywhere to ask ourself a simple question.
How do we live the village consciousness into life?
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This podcast is a question not an answer….. it’s meant to be a big old dialog creator….I ask that you share it with fellow world village builders, community members and use it as a place to open up dialog.
Share, discuss, Embody and create together.
* From time to time I will refer to ceremony Ceremony….is to me is any gathering where the pretence of modern life falls away into true humane connection.
The legend of Shambhala is one of the most ancient Tibetan myths
It is also one of the most striking myths of a sacred landscape, a landscape that inspires stories itself. Traditionally, Shambhala is located in the Himalayas, in the remotest part of Tibet, on a high plateau, surrounded by a ring of mountain peaks.
The myth of a lost Tibetan paradise came to the notice of Europeans in the 1580s, when travellers to the court of the court of the Mogul Emperor Akbar heard strange and wondrous tales of a remote Himalayan world. Although the story is told in a Buddhist text and is considered Tibetan, the tale seems to have been recorded first in India in AD 962.
The tale is that there is a land behind the Himalayas full of peace and harmony where an isolated people live in accordance with Buddhist precepts preparing for the day when the world will be ready to live in peace. The kingdom is in the shadow of a white crystal mountain, approachable only through a ring of peaks. Next to the mountain are a lake and a palace.
Here the wisdom of humanity is conserved, ready to save the world when needed.
The present Dalai Lama says this about Shambhala:
“Nowadays, no one knows where Shambhala is. Although it is said to exist, people cannot see it, or communicate with it in an ordinary way. Some people say it is located in another world, others that it is an ideal land, a place of the imagination. Some say it was a real place, which cannot now be found. Some believe there are openings into that world which may be accessed from this.”
Today, Shangri-La is seen both as a place, and as an era of enlightened consciousness. The Tibetans say that the need to find paradise elsewhere is what keeps us from having it. Wherever Shangri-La is, the search for it continues.
The Past
When I was a young boy my parents would take me to sit with a medicine man on the outskirts of Pretoria in South Africa. Although I was only 8 or 9 years old I have cassette recordings from those sessions.
- “There will come a great transformation in your lifetime” the medicine man used to tell me.
- “People will need to remember how to be people again”
- “This will be your work.’ He said `to serve that transformation”
Of course none of this made any sense to me at the time. And for years I never thought of it again. Then I’m in my late twenties just as I was entering into ceremony work I heard the myth of Shambala and some old memory stirred deep inside me.
Whatever the truth of that, the search for Shambhala traditionally begins as an outer journey that becomes a journey of inner exploration and discovery.
At that time I had begun to travel intensely to tell stories and sit in ceremonies and as I travelled far and wide I saw there was a state of consciousness that I began to think of as “the village consciousness” waking up all over the world.
The Present
This podcast season is an exploration of the myriad ways and characteristics of this singular awakening taking place inside of people all over the world. It attempts to capture the many ways this awakening is expressing itself through people from an inner world into our world. Each podcast is meant to be a conversation piece that I hope communities and friends can discuss with each other as a way for all of us to evolve our understanding in this awakening.
I have no answers except to say that whatever we do we will need to understand that the connection we find in doing it is the magical amplifier.
This season is a collection of dispatches from my travels in the world village, a mythical place, a state of consciousness and world inside you and world coming into form through you.
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Map of the pockets of light and find the others…
