This is an exciting moment for us as human beings. Today, we are in a time that calls for a jump, for a rapid change, not just because we can but because we must.
This is not the time to sit on the sidelines, to be a passive traveler of life. Life on the planet is on the hot seat, beckoning us to get in, get on and get engaged. What comes to us, what life shows us, is defined by the questions we ask, and most often, the best way to boost our learning is to ask better questions; life indeed talks to us back by what kinds of things we ask. My teacher, Carlos Castaneda, called this intending. An evolutionary question has been with me over this past month:
Where are we going? What is happening to our human species? What are our options moving forward?
Over the past thirty days, I immersed myself in two almost back to back conferences that, coming from completely different contexts and styles, gave me each the information and the experience of what this can be. This question brought me back an incredible landscape of what is coming to us, a Wow! moment that I am so excited to share with you.
I have just returned from a one of a kind conference in Brienz, Switzerland, called ‘Universal Spirituality’. Hosted by The Center for Unity, one of the longest successfully active spiritual communities in the world, and put together piece by piece over the past two years, it brought together twelve elders from different traditions around the world, such as a Maya Priestess from Mexico, a Qi Going master from China, a decades long Peace Envoy from the U.N, a 92 year old human rights leader from Ghana and a Sufi sacred musician from Iran, together with over one hundred leaders with decades of personal practice in peace and spirituality, for a sharing, discussion and inner silence practice experiment on the question of: What can be fundamental common elements of an Universal Spirituality?
What deeply committed individuals are in this world! What profound strength of spirit and heart do exist in people, regardless of culture and race! What a joy it is to feel safe, encouraged, and honored as a human being! I brought back from the conference hope, optimism and resolve. We can make it, we really CAN!
Here are 7 distinct shared elements that I found all spiritualties uphold universally:
- An open heart, having our hearts as a reference point. Being open in our heart center to receive affection and to give love.
- Optimism as a choice. Choosing to be shiny and engaging and positive because that is the state of our psychology where doors open and the best outcomes come from.
- A practice of being in the present, fully; not partially but fully. This is not a given but something that is cultivated purposely.
- Non-judgment towards differences in others, be it religion, race, capacities, predilections and all what is not like me or what I want.
- Actively allowing mystery in our life. The state of not knowing is intrinsic to the spiritual experience. Some things we will never know and that is not a threat, that is actually an awe-some, exciting feeling.
- Lightness, creativity and joy. Creativity feeds our non-linear self; it is a state of mind. The more detachment from our story we get, the more kid-like we become.
- An impulse to give, to help, to support others, to care for the planet. Feeling part of a bigger whole, feeling connected totally enhances our spirit and gives us meaning.
Here is a powerful pair of questions you can ask yourself, to guide your awareness towards answers within you that can give new meaning and new direction to your spiritual life:
How do you connect to the divine? What are the particular ways, personal to you, in which you feel connected to spirit, to a higher order? Consider this and bring it more clearly into your daily life?
What is important to you, right now, for your spiritual journey? What are the lessons that life is presenting to you in this moment that you need to be aware of, open your eyes to, and embrace? Consider this and let this larger context completely change how you are relating to what is happening now in your life.
During the second day, during a deep meditation practice with all the participants, I could actually feel the silence pressing on my body. Silence had physicality, I could touch it and it enveloped me and everyone around me. In this state, there was no doubt in my body-mind that we all shared these seven traits, and the possibility of really living them. Barbara Marx Hubbard, one of the twelve elders and a leading voice in conscious evolution, stood up and said:
“Evolution is not only gradual, sometimes it also makes a jump. Today, I am convinced that what is happening here is a jump into the emergence of a new type of consciousness for our time, a homo universalis.”
My awareness shoot up high into the sky, into orbit, and as I looked down into the Earth I could see a bubble of light shining in the middle of Europe, a message of true peace expanding onto the rest of the people in the planet.
I flashed back to my first first conference, two weeks before. It could not have been more different: Business Mastery, a mega event on steroids in Las Vegas, taught by life strategist Tony Robbins. Five days of complete 15-hours a day immersion into pragmatic tools, information and the necessary psychology to implement them and be on the cutting edge of our competitive world.
One of the guest speakers was Scott Klososky, head of one of the leading consulting companies on technology. He gave a ‘state of the union’ account of what is already here in tech and a projection curve to what new realities technology and gene manipulation is taking us. The most eye popping is this: we are right now at the statistical inflection point of a huge acceleration in the speed of change in the implementation of technology into human biology.
Data analytics and robotics are going to very soon completely change everything about how we live and what we can do. The projection is that, within 25 years, bio-enhancements to our body will be such that a new species of humans will be born: transhumans; that is, given the desire and financial means, we will be able to augment human function and integrate it with technology to the point that a person will no longer be comparable to a regular human as we have known it until now.
Throughout the weekend, as events unfolded and collective consciousness grew, an artist captured what was taking place into a gigantic art piece. We could all see how it was shaping, bit by bit, until but the last session it became a map, the map of the journey and a blueprint statement to the world of what an Universal Spirituality could be.
My teacher told me that having mastery of awareness mandated that we be in alignment with the mood and realities of the world we live in, what he called the tonal of our time. Being in alignment means we don’t resist it because we get tight and our functionality goes down; rather, we adapt to its presence and we take the best out of it, so we can dance with the world. Transhuman is coming, one hundred percent. It is a reality around the corner, for many of us within our lifetime.
Sitting in meditation at the Center of Unity, I could see the landscape of transhuman and homo universalis playing out in front of my field of consciousness. One is inevitable, the other one is a potential we can become. As early humans, we did a jump in evolution and began developing our brain until we could think. We became sapiens and, as engineers, we have gone far and will continue to soar, through transhuman all the way to other solar systems and space civilizations. But we also need to become universalis to reach our real potential, and save ourselves from ourselves. It is so scary in its implications, but, as homo universalis, it is also exciting galore, and I can’t wait. I am all in.
