"Is there an optimistic way forward in the world today?"

Jonathan:There is so much turmoil in the world these days...emotional roller coasters. My sense is that all will work out (as it always does) because optimistic solutions eventually prevail in the world. Plenty of people disagree with me.  Do you have any thoughts on this?

Jane:The world is going through a major shift now.  It is a shift in consciousness.  Humanity has been becoming increasingly more conscious, as a part of the human evolutionary process.  What I mean by that is we are increasingly more able to access personal, direct experience of reality, as opposed to having to be told what reality is from outside ourselves.  At the same time, we have been building up a distorted idea of what progress is, which is an avoidance of consciousness. 

In order to address this, it's important to understand what limiting decisions are because they are what lead to the distortion of our perception of reality and the avoidance of truth, which is what cause our experiences in life to not work well.  Limiting decisions are unconscious decisions locked in place in early childhood.   They are a misinterpretation of pivotal life events that cause you to decide, for example, that you are not valuable, lovable, safe; or that people can't be trusted; or that there isn't enough to go around; or that you are bad, a failure, powerless and so on.  You therefore shut off the channels for knowing your value, receiving love, etc. in reality.  And so each time you made a limiting decision, from that point on, instead of being present and engaging in life in that area of your life and moving toward what really matters to you, your focus became diverted into focusing on, and compensating for, what you believed to be a deficit in the nature of reality, other people, and/or in yourself.  

The majority of people in the world don't realize that transforming these distortions is the way forward in life.  Instead they are just focused on compensating for them, as if that is what making progress in life is about.  By compensating I mean going toward symbols that symbolize what you want, but don't actually give it to you.  For example, the choices of food people eat, the kind of cars they buy, the career path they choose, the type of person they are attracted to in business and personal relationships, their choices of entertainment, the products they buy, the way government is organized, how financial institutions are structured, the way education is set up -- all of these to greater or lesser extents (depending on how conscious the person is or the people are) are often used to compensate for lacks in well-being, empowerment, a sense of stability and safety, and so on, rather than deal with the internal source of those lacks and thereby making progress in reality.

The world is structured, to a large extent, on this faulty foundation.  And this has worked, more or less, for a very long time, with some corrective shifts in consciousness along the way.  But there is a larger evolutionary timing, which is evolving our overall reality forward whether we are ready or not.  Now is the time for a very major shift, because the old, unconscious, distorted ways of what has been conceived of as human progress have reached the end of their course, and they are falling apart.  The house of cards is falling down. 

But there is something much more stable and true that is underlying all of experience that has been camouflaged by the unevolved avoidance of truth the world has been based on.  And actually there is quite a lot that has been built in the world that is based on the truth of the real world.  And that will begin to come much more to the fore, as the old dysfunctional structures fall away.  This underlying building up of consciousness, based on the essence of real experience (Universal Truth, Love, Principle, Life and Spirit) is what has really been sustaining us, and is where real stability, safety and well-being reside.  We are in the process of shifting survival systems, and it's difficult for people to let go of the old one until it is no longer working.  That is why it is falling apart.  So, yes, I see a very optimistic way forward.

© Jane Ilene Cohen 2011