We are in unprecedented times. As a species, we’re moving out of the illusion of being ‘apart from Life’ to the reality of being ‘part of Everything. We don’t know how difficult or dangerous this transition will be, but as a Heart Circle Community, we do know that our purpose is to support each other as we change with these changes together.

Right now the times are changing so dramatically that many people find themselves getting up each morning wondering ‘what is the crisis de jour?’ Will it be continued economic collapse, the flu or a tsunami? Maybe it’s a terrorist bomb or another species gone? Whatever it is, the calamity menu is frightfully long and varied. Each event has it’s own built-in debate and fear surrounding it. And each event seems unrelated to what has just transpired before it.

But these changes are not unrelated. There is a single context that gives them meaning, purpose and value. By understanding this context we are better able to both accept these changes and then better prepare for them as they continue to occur. By anticipating and understanding their necessity, we are in a better place to harmonize with them. We won’t be shocked or victimized by them nor will we deny their significance or difficulty.

Without this understanding, we’ll think that all these changes somehow shouldn’t be happening or that it is increasingly horrible that they are - that we’re on a runaway train just waiting for the next catastrophic crash to happen.

A context for all these changes is this: Imagine that everything we have done and created as human beings in the last several thousand years has been created out of a certain ‘consciousness’ or ‘state of awareness’ we have been in collectively as a species. From this level of consciousness come all of our beliefs and perceptions of life and includes everything: the way we raise our children, find our food, make war with each other; the way we mate, play, do business, relate to nature. We create all of this out of the way we perceive life.

For the sake of pure simplicity, let’s assign a color to this consciousness that we have been in all these thousands of years. Let’s say it’s ‘brown’. We have all been operating out of ‘brownness’. From this ‘brown consciousness’ we create brown schools, brown governments, brown food, brown entertainment, brown religions, brown thoughts, brown everything.

The dramatic changes we are beginning to experience right now; changes within ourselves and in our world, are all stemming from one phenomenon: we are switching colors. Our individual and collective consciousness is changing dramatically in a very short time period.

Again for simplicity, let’s say we’re switching from ‘brown consciousness’ to ‘green consciousness’. Everything we’ve created out of our brown beliefs and perceptions are either quietly changing or loudly collapsing. What we have created in the past all had its rightful place in a brown world. But now we are changing to the new color of green. Browns, once first, will now be last. Brown financial systems will either change or fail. Brown schools are becoming increasingly silly to green students. Brown energy sources are being depleted. Continuing to color our planet brown will continue to utterly destroy the ecological balance of its unified systems. And even brown answers are now obsolete as brown problems can only be solved with green solutions.

But with this simple metaphor we now have to describe what it actually means to go from brown to green consciousness. We have to ‘awaken into this new consciousness’ and intentionally come into community together as we do so.

Therefore, just as we once had to give up the notion that the earth was flat, we now have to give up the notion that we are separate, physical bodies existing apart from everything else. We have to reconsider our fear of death, our belief in struggle and suffering, our terror of deep, personal intimacy. We have to embody the basic teachings of the ‘green’ teachers that have come before us - that it’s love and kindness that conquers all, not weapons of mass destruction; that when we harm another we are harming our own kin. We must act in accordance with the fact that human nature is part of Nature. And the myth that every child is born in sin must give way to a more joyful, accurate story.

As we awaken to these new realities they will bring to us opportunities and possibilities we can hardly imagine; a population of human beings living open heartedly with each other and in attunement with nature. This is not a utopian dream. It is simply the reality we are moving into.

But with this reality will come the transition or collapse of all things brown. We don’t know what this actually means in terms of difficulty or ease. We will not be able to control it, but we will be able to control our response to it. If our response is fear-based and tight we will stay stuck in the color ‘brown’. If our response is loving and light, we will move even more quickly into the color ‘green’.

What can help us most is to understand that the very difficulty of the times we are in, is in itself, helping us to awaken with everyone around us.