world did not take place once and for all time, but takes place every day.”
Samuel Beckett, Proust*
Mine is the generation that came of age as strains of “this is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius” wafted through the airwaves to our car radios. A lot of us eagerly looked for the signs of that dawning any day. Now, more than forty years later, we can look back on a number of dates and years that various prophetic voices declared to be the Big One. We've harmonically converged and fired the grid. We've awaited 1998, and once that year came and went, set our sights on 2012. It seems to me that for my whole lifespan thus far we have been waiting for the Big Event that would transform our world.
As I write this, anticipation continues to build all over the world around the great hope that many of the spiritually minded hold for December, 2012, as a pivotal point of prophetic destiny. As you read this, December 21, 2012, (selected largely because the Mayan long count calendar ended on that date) will have come and gone. Now what? (The joke will be on me if December, 2012, turns out to meet its advance press. But in that event, this book probably won't have been published, so it's all right!) Depending on how far this date has receded into the past, by the time you are reading this there may well be yet another future date that has become the object of much hope and—dare I say it?—hype.
It's understandable, really, this human tendency to latch on to particular times and dates as the fulfillment of our spiritual yearnings and the answer to the problems we face as a human race. Who can deny the allure of the expectation that in a single day or year all of our spiritual yearning will be fulfilled and that all of our unfinished business, our failures of will, discipline, and purpose, and our too-often lackadaisical service to a higher good will be swept aside in an influx of transformative grace such as this world has never known? And lest we think this date watching is a distinctly New Age phenomenon, we need only look to the Left Behind books, enormously popular among evangelical and fundamentalist Christians, as just one recent link in a chain of apocalyptic expectations that stretch all the way back to Jesus' disciples asking, “What will be the sign of your coming and the end of the age?”2
Nor can we deny that, historically, there have been many threshold times of great transformative significance. The harnessing of fire, the development of agriculture, the first writing of language, the Renaissance, the Industrial Revolution—these are just a smattering of examples of transformative epochs that forever changed the face of humankind on the earth. Each furthered the reach of our combined knowledge, culture, and know-how, and thus in each of these we can see what was, in its time, a truly new age that brought the peoples of the world a little closer together.
Living on the Threshold of Change
Looking around us at the world today, it does not take much of a stretch to think that we, too, are on a major threshold. Global challenges on the economic, political, and environmental fronts rivet our attention. An unprecedented worldwide cross-pollination of spiritual perspectives as well as scientific breakthroughs and technological advances hint at solutions that will be a quantum leap beyond old ways of dealing with our problems. Perhaps most significant of all, the effective shrinking of the world through the Internet and other modern communications systems suggests that, for the first time in human history, a unified humanity is within the realm of possibility. Add to that the astronomical fact that, because of the precession of the equinoxes, Earth's vernal equinox is transitioning from the constellation of Pisces to that of Aquarius, and maybe the dawning of the Aquarian Age does not seem so far-fetched after all.
The interesting thing about dawns and crossing over thresholds, however, is that these movements are processes that occur over some period of time. There are multitudinous factors leading to the approach of a threshold, and complex internal forces propel individuals to become pioneers in its crossing. Who can delineate, for example, all of the influences of philosophy, science, mathematics, art, and politics that came together to produce the Renaissance? And what forces were at work within the makeup of an Isaac Newton or a Leonardo da Vinci to propel them over the threshold, thereby making them such influential figures in the widespread and lasting transformation that the Renaissance became?
Unlike a fix that swoops down from above, transformative epochs have always tended to rise up from within the participants. Even the birth of Jesus, held by those of Christian faith to have been the major transformative event so far in human history, was described by Edgar Cayce as coming in response to “continued preparation and dedication” on the part of those who knew the potentials of their day and organized their lives around it accordingly.3 We should expect no less a requirement of us if our day is truly to be one of transformation to a new age. In that context, we might look at the Aquarian Age as an invitation for us to participate in the next stage of a process that is synonymous with evolution.
At least that seems to be the Cayce readings' take on it. The only time that the readings spoke about the Aquarian Age by name occurred in 1939, when Edgar Cayce was asked if he could name the date when the crossover from the Piscean to Aquarian Age would happen. His response was that “In 1998 we may find a great deal of the activities as have been wrought by the gradual changes that are coming about….” He went on to further clarify that “…This is a gradual, not a cataclysmic activity in the experience of the earth in this period.”4 This emphasis on process and gradual transformation rather than sudden, cataclysmic change matches the very essence of evolution (which is defined as a process in all of its dictionary definitions).
Elsewhere in this same reading he said that where the Piscean Age brought the consciousness of Emmanuel or “God with us,” the Aquarian Age would mean the full consciousness of the ability to communicate with or be aware of our relationship to “Creative Forces” and the use of these creative forces in a material world. The opportunity of our day, then, would seem to be conscious engagement with the Creative Force behind all things and our own use of such creative capacity right here in this world. This is, in essence, a call to an evolutionary lifestyle, a spirituality based not on seeing how quickly we can “graduate” from the earth, but instead on how well we can participate in the process of creation. What else might we expect from a body of spiritual teaching that consistently links co-creatorship to our core purpose?
For us in this early twenty-first century world, so fraught with both peril and potential, the stakes have never been higher. The potentials of our time call us to engage with processes that will take us over the threshold into the attributes of the Aquarian epoch, rather than wait for particular dates that will bring it all together for us. In the language of the Cayce reading cited above, our astounding opportunity is to learn how to use creative forces—the same forces that have brought worlds into being—right here in this material world where we find ourselves. The perils of our day make the maxim that we cannot solve a problem from the level of consciousness that created it all too obvious. Rather than fix our gaze on some hoped-for event on the horizon, where a previously unattainable state of spiritual consciousness will fall like refreshing dew, today is when we must actively engage in pushing past the boundaries in our own consciousness to be that consciousness which will approach the world's problems in an entirely new way. It is time for us to find the ways we are called to be the embodiment of evolution—a process that is leading us toward a new threshold for life on this planet. As we learn to nurture those forces within us that will help nudge us over the inevitable hurdles that any threshold will entail, we will rise to the evolutionary potential of our age.
What's Distinctive about the Evolutionary Approach to Life?
Just what is it that makes the evolutionary approach different from other spiritual paths? Isn't all spirituality, by its very definition, evolutionary? Well, yes—and no. We might say that the main difference is one of context. From any spiritual standpoint that includes the long view of the soul's history, we're used to thinking of evolution in terms
