THE WAY FORWARD: EMBRACING INTERCONNECTEDNESS FOR HUMAN SURVIVAL

Thomas: The use of the energy for a positive sense can be done this way—or an energy. The thing that is responsible for all the human problems, when one human covers for another, is so subtle and yet so obvious as Khan said, that it is alluded in the great philosophers. The real simple thing is, as long as I see you as an object and not a subject, when you are different from me and external, as long as I perceive that external interface to you, I can disadvantage you and I think it doesn’t hurt me.

Reason with me for just a moment. If you could operate through an instrumentation system that could see the 4th dimension—now you do not—this physical thing here (his hand) is like a mechanical instrument. It destroys that dimension and so you see space, you never did see time since you were born. Like (?) says look around in the corner, you can’t find it nowhere. Because the act of looking, you see, the act of detecting, destroys it. But if you could see it, you would not see separate people sitting in the room.

Let me give you a simple-minded view of what I’m saying. The top of the table here is two dimensional. It’s a flat surface. If we had some little skimmer bugs or flatland people who lived in here, and some of them were learned scientists. (Holds up his arm) This is a three-dimensional object—my hand. If I place my fingers on the table this way, there are now in the flatland universe five separate intersections, and all the learned physicists and scientists could prove to you conclusively there are five separate things there. Since you can see in the third dimension, you have absolutely no trouble seeing how that can be one thing and five things at the same time.

Barbara: Tom Bearden has a remark in his book, The Excalibur Briefing, which struck me as extraordinarily true. And the remark was, a self-centered species in a high technology phase cannot survive. That is to say, a species that gains the power that we now are coming into—not only nuclear power but biological power, psychological power, mind power—in a state of feeling separate one from the other is bound to misuse that power and extinct the species as we now know it.

The only way through this predicament, to the potential that is inherent in the human race, is through some form of empathetic mind linkage. In other words, if we cannot experience ourselves as one body, we cannot survive. And whatever we’re going to go through in the next X number of years is going to be the process of creating that linkage. I personally believe we have two alternatives in ways of creating it. One’s disgraceful and violent. And the other, natural and beautiful. If we can link soon enough, we do not have to go through the destructive phase. It is like a birth in that respect. Every spiritual tradition has told us the same thing—we are all members of one body.

Thomas: I now see you as an object external, not a subject. If I could see you and perceive you directly as you are from the time dimension with me, there would not be a you and I. There would be one greater I. And I would see all of the people in this room as if I had multiple hands. I now see my left hand, my right hand, but I do not have one of my hands attack the other, or disadvantage to the other, or misuse the other. The secret or the solution to the fundamental problem of humanity is quite simple. You must eliminate the object. If everybody is always seen as a subject, and I do not mean thought of as a subject, but directly perceived as a subject, like looking at your own two hands, then you have the answer.

Barbara: Yeah well, whoa, I have to stand up. I can’t sit down after that. It has occurred to me in the last month or two that there is one single objective for everybody in the world, which is to experience oneness in time. And that every bit of work that anyone is doing must result in an experience on a planetary scale, that we are one. Tom has given here one of the most interesting ideas, that is new to me, except through him. That there is a mechanical aspect to the oneness. But if you remember what Buckminster Fuller said at lunch, he said the universe is technology. Everything that has any manifestation has a technological component, so why should it not also be that the experience of oneness has a technological component as well as a consciousness spiritual component?

I operate out of deep inner signals myself, and I imagine that almost everybody does. It’s a matter in your life of to what degree do you acknowledge that there is a motivational process going on in you that gives you signals as to what to do with your energy and where to put it. Now just and I, I have a terrible habit of listening and then trying to do what it says. I think that’s really what gets you in trouble in life. But on the other hand, it’s a glorious process of discovery. And I want to tell you two things, to share with you, a deep experience and to tell you how I think we can begin to act out our part of the steps toward a world experience of oneness.

The first experience happened to me in 1966 and it was the fundamental experience of my life that explains everything that I’ve been doing, and I think of it as an expanded reality experience. I had been reading, this particular day, Reinehold Neighbor on the subject of community. And he had been quoting from the Gospels, the famous phrase of Saint Paul, ‘All men are members of one body.’ And I took a walk one February day in Lakeville, CT, very cold day. And I was thinking pretty much as an agnostic. I wasn’t even thinking about the spiritual aspects of the food testament. I was thinking. I had this story, a child was born and then this happened, and then this happened and then this happened, and everybody could understand it as one story. And the image of the one body was in my mind. And I asked myself a question. And here’s the question I asked, what is our story? What is happening on planet Earth today? And at that moment I was pretty well convinced it was one story, because it’s one planet. And we’ve seen it from space. It’s obviously one body. Just like he says, it’s already there.

And with that question, I did a very typical thing that we all do all the time. I went into a slight daydream state. I called it going on auto drive. And I started to walk around the hill having posed that question to myself. And as I walked, an amazing experience happened to me. In an instant in time, the blue cocoon of earth opened up and my mind’s eye got into the blackness of outer space. And I had an out of earth experience. Out of my body. I got out of the Earth in an instant in time and experienced myself as a cell in the body of Earth and I saw what was happening on Earth as a speeded-up movie, like one of those Disney films. And the Earth was Gaia. I say this in the past tense because for me it’s already happened. It was a living organism struggling to coordinate itself as one. And I literally felt the planet gasping for breath with pollution. I felt the mass media communicate signals of pain through our body, and I felt it through the whole planet. It was my body because I was a cell in that body as everyone else was. I experienced the hunger. The whole thing was happening to me. And then I experienced us reaching together into outer space, with those rockets, and an amazing thing began to happen. We focused together on our common reach, and with the common moment of focus, the world began to link up. And it began to empathize, to connect, to link and this feeling of total joy for the planet began to take over, like ripples of empathy that were irresistible. And it spread visibly like waves, linking, linking, linking. And I began to feel ecstatic. Cosmic. I have to use this visual term. That’s the only thing you can really think about, coming together as a whole planetary body in one instant in time.

And the words that came to me, was our story is a birth. It’s the birth of humankind, what the saints and seers of the race have predicted is true. We are one body. And with that, I experienced what I call the planetary smile. The entire planet smiled at one instant in time. And it was the moment when the nervous system of the body politic linked up. And we opened our collective eyes—not just our individual eyes. And when we opened our collective eyes, the world was bathed with divine light. Now this was the light the simple mystics have seen, and they always report light. But it was a cosmic love affair that was going on here and we were surrounded by love. And I had the sense that if I was one more frame ahead in the movie, we could communicate with it and it to us. And I was poised there like two or three frames ahead of where we now are. It was like a planetary precognition.
Then another amazing thing happened. I was catapulted back in time to the origin of the universe. I experienced that original act of creation and kind of tumbled through a spiral where I felt the fusion of the elements becoming the material of our earth and our bodies. And I seem to experience the molecules getting together and becoming a cell and for the first time seeing. And then the multicellular organisms, and then the biosphere, and then early humanity. And then I got back up to the present. That should become the past, because I’d already gotten ahead. And I felt myself back in the present, in a time warp with the message, ‘Go tell the story of our birth.’

And then the entire scene closed down. I was a little stick figure walking along the hill in Lakeville, CT in the cold. And the tears were streaming down my face, and I ran home to tell my husband. It was by far, the most real experience I’ve ever had. It wasn’t even mystical. It was expanded reality because it’s all obvious.

So now to back up to the present, where I think we are we have the option of Armageddon or the Planetary Smile. There are many versions of this experience and I bet it I’d like to just ask for a second, how many in this room have had some intuition of a coming together of the whole planetary body? I see there are many, many people and sometimes the conference, as I say, let’s share the visions. And we all have had little pieces of it. OK, here’s what I think we should do. I am now taking it absolutely seriously that we should consciously work for a moment of world connectedness. Here are the elements that I see so far of an event that cannot be totally planned by humans but can be prepared for by humans. And maybe it’s got an element of what Thomas saying, I don’t know. I think the first step is what we’re already doing is what I call mapping the potentialists. That’s identifying the people who already know that wee are one, we are whole, and we have potential if we get together for an infinite future and bring ourselves together, consciously connecting up those elements worldwide in every region of the world.

I think we need to identify the artists, the visionaries and creators around the world who can symbolize the transcendent vision of the entire human race. In Israel, it’s the covenant with God. In India it’s self-transcendence. In Egypt, it’s the pyramid going for rejuvenation. In Christianity, it’s the resurrection and the ascension. We all know it. It’s the one thing we all know. And we may not know the present, but we all know the future because it’s come to us in our religions already. The religions are the ancient futurists. They got it first. Now it’s up to us to act it out.

I think what we need to do is pray a lot, because this event cannot be planned like a World Future Society conference. But it can be intended. And we can get ready for it like those disciples in the Upper Room at the time of the first Pentecost. They were there at an international conference, by the way, because when that energy came in, there were people of all nations and something amazing happened—they all heard it in their same language. I think we need to get ready to hear it in our own language all around the world. Carol Rosen and I, God bless us, have dedicated ourselves to speaking about this and joining with anyone else who believes they like to work on it with us. It’s a mystical event. And that is what Tom was speaking with absolute seriousness; I think I feel the same way as he did. If that’s the alternative to Armageddon, let’s go for it.
Barbara (summary at the end of the session): I think that we all be in a state of empathetic consciousness at all times. And what has been the highest peak experiences of the human race, will become a new norm. For me, the very best model of that is the life of Jesus. And I did an evolutionary interpretation of the New Testament, and I just imagined Jesus as our potential self—that’s what we’re going to be like.

I took that as a hypothesis, if you will. Well, we’ll be healing. We will be producing in abundance out of no thing at all, like the loafs and the fishes. We’ll be changing the weather at will. We’ll be levitating. We’ll be teleporting—all the things Tom is talking about he did. And we’ll be totally attuned to the creative process of evolution or God, so that we will be aligned with all other beings who will also be totally attuned. The selection process will have occurred, and the state of self-centered consciousness will be extinct. Not necessarily the people, but a stage of consciousness will be no more on planet Earth. That’s my thought.

When you think of it, self-consciousness was a phenomenon that was new at its time. X number of million years ago when the first early humans emerged in the animal world, about 5000 years ago on this planet, people started emerging in the new state of consciousness in Egypt, India, Greece, Judea. That’s the new norm. And if we look at the highest spiritual examples of human beings. I think we’ll catch a glimpse of ourselves. If you remember the words of Jesus, he said ‘you shall do the works that I do, and even greater works than these shall you do.’ I think he was giving us a future forecast of a new norm.

Thomas (summary at the end of the session): I think quite literally by that time, by whichever scenario we take, we will be directly one with God all-encompassing. Everywhere. Every when in the past, including every when that didn’t occur but could have. Every when in the future, including every when that doesn’t occur but will. We will escape all limitations because we are already past that. What I’m saying is that everything the visionaries say, everything the sages have said, everything the gist of the religions, great religions, say if you do not become dogmatic about them. I am saying that is, in my opinion, is quite literally true. And I’m also saying we are there.

Barbara: Hallelujah!