At this moment, you and I are living in an information age. We are living through shifts in the meta-structures of the game that are very profound. We haven’t even begun to grow into it.
Our mythology is so based on our previous ages and consciousness, that we haven’t even understood it yet. I mean, we’re just beginning the dance of understanding what it means when we have a collective unconsciousness, when we have information moving at the rate it is. We’re still getting overloaded trying to collect it. But it’s obvious – you can’t collect it.
You and I are in a situation of very dramatic change, and the interesting question is how you respond to change, whether it’s in your own body, or it’s in the social structures you’re in. What happens when the family breaks down? What happens when the government isn’t functional? What happens? What happens when your IRA isn’t as good as it was? Feel the chills run through you.
It’s interesting to look at whether change is your friend or you enemy, and whether you can find a place in yourself from which you can see phenomena changing without being trapped in the fear that is generated by being identified with that which changes. That’s what the issue is.
You and I are not only here in terms of the work we’re doing on ourselves. We are here in terms of the role we’re playing within the systems of which we are a part. If you look at the way change affects people that are unconscious.
Change generates fear, fear generates contractions, contraction generates prejudice, bigotry, and ultimately violence. You can watch the whole thing happen, and you can see it happen in society after society after society.
The antidote for that is a consciousness that does not respond to change with fear. That’s as close to the beginning of that sequence as I can get.
-Ram Dass
