the apocalypse and the awakening

Here are some extracts from Richard Grossinger's "Conversation with Andrew Harvey" in Reality Sandwich:

I don't see in an ordinary sense how anything is going to get fixed or is fixable at this point. In fact it doesn't even seem to be going in the direction of getting itself fixed; it seems to be going in the direction of getting worse and worse, and the people who are making it worse getting more power and asserting more prerogative....

We are impotent against the scale of physical and financial forces. As Obama says, we can't plug the hole.

There is absolutely no way in which this crisis is going to be fixed, because the whole point of this crisis is that it unravels, destroys, disintegrates, utterly, utterly annihilates all of the agendas and illusions and fantasies that human beings have created out of what you could call a collective false human self. Which is now terminally addicted to a false vision of the universe, a lust for power over every other species, a crazed hunger to dominate nature, and a totally unsustainable fantasy of limitless growth.

At the same time... our presence here is a participation in something much larger that is invisible to us - something that on some level is connected and connecting to other intelligences in the universe and the intrinsic intelligence of the universe itself. These realms are being informed by our situation in some way - we are receiving aid, advice, and godspeed from them despite how things are going here, despite the fact that it looks as though morons and madmen and crime bosses are informing everything.

Things are a mess and inextricable, but we are alive and conscious and filled with the song and heart and yearning of the universe. So I think it's important not to over-focus on "fixing" things in the ordinary sense: politically, ecologically, economically. It's impossible. Yet... we must act. We must do the right thing. Service is absolute and non-negotiable.

It's like both are true and wrapped around each other: the apocalypse and the awakening. Only the apocalypse writes itself glowingly and brazenly on the face of our times. The spiritual awakening is deep and subtle, hidden inside our gestation in the universe, our pagan, untold initiation that is written in the whole of nature, and in the sky.

What we are looking at is an appalling, dreadful, ferocious, inescapable dark night of the species, which is going to get worse, very, very fast. That is the bad news. But there's good news within the bad news because when you understand through divine grace, and through the flicker of the divine evolutionary intelligence shining on your mind and heart, that this radical ferocious process is the sign of an enormous new potential struggling chaotically to be born, then you can begin to cooperate with that birth.

The transformation of the human into the divine human... works through terrifying horror and extreme chaos and almost unimaginable violence.

it's too easy to think of the people who are fucking things up - in governments and corporations and narcissistic stupors and militias and crime cadres - as being in some sense in alliance with evil, or the devil. I mean, there are some pretty bad actions, pretty bad choices, pretty sociopathic behaviors on the loose on this planet. And yet, at some level, the energy that is flowing in to create those acts is sacred too, and has to be used in our transformation.

We all have to look at the collective shadow of the human false self, which we all participate in, and the despair and disillusion and desolation and death-wish and dread, that it has completely, almost, possessed us with which enables us to do nothing as the powers that be destroy everything.

One of the things we need to be doing is.. praying for those who are trapped in their roles as masters of the machine... from any kind of enlightened perspective, they are the ones who are suffering in obscurity and unconsciously the most. Because in killing and in massacring and in destroying the environment, they are laying waste to their own source, they are laying waste to their own psyches, they're living in an increasingly polluted psychic atmosphere.

The Dalai Llama, upon hearing of the slaughter of the Tibetan nuns by Chinese soldiers, wept. When asked presumptively if he was weeping for the nuns, he responded, rather fiercely, ‘No, their souls were okay.' He was weeping for the soldiers who killed the nuns. His deepest compassion is extended to the most brutal of his so-called enemies, because he knows that they are preparing (for themselves) an enormous stinking karmic grave.

Somehow we have to be able, through sacred practice, (to) create a crucible in which we can become strong enough to endure what we have to endure, to hold the heart open, to hold the dark and the sadistic and the tormented at the center of our hearts, and keep constantly praying for them so that they can be illumined by the light that sustains everything.

We can make daily extraordinary steps by constantly being vigilant over our minds, constantly trying, with all the chaos of our psyches, to move toward compassion and true tenderness in our relationships with others... This is the foundation from which all manner of things can flower.

Any true act of empathy and compassion has resonances through known and unknown universes and domains, because everything is interrelated in unimaginable and mysterious ways.

The situation we're enduring is particularly horrible because something enormous is at stake: a birth of the divine in matter. The birth of the divine in the human through the catastrophic, apocalyptic violence of a dark night, is not for this Earth alone, which is why those forces that oppose it are so hysterical and violent.

This is known in the mystical traditions as supreme enlightenment (whereby) the whole universe is elevated.

That was the sacrifice of Christ, to use his body to break down a barrier between realms, to demonstrate that transformation and rebirth are possible, and nothing can intercede. It's a love beyond division. It's a love beyond reason. It's a love beyond agenda. It's a love beyond results. And if you can allow yourself to surrender to that love, that love has the power of resurrection within it, at its core.

In its own demonic way, the new cult of the suicide bomber is an expression of the lost divine and a direct attack on materialism. In a certain symbolic way, 9/11 remarkably resembled the Tower Card in the Tarot, down to the fine details. The suicide attacks are.. a direct confrontation with materialism... They are attacking the heart of a great materialist blasphemy.

(They are saying that) there is nothing whole about our culture. We are driven by greed. There's a kind of free-floating, dark promiscuity which is attacking so much of what is sacred about love and emotion and passion. The whole of our culture is in the hands of a few corrupt business-people.

Here are people who for all the wrong reasons, and a few of the right ones, are truly prepared to give up their whole lives in the name of a passion for a new world.

If only the New Age had the passion of the suicide bomber... If they had the passion, the commitment, and the sincerity... in fact, just the sincerity would do it. That's what's missing in the New Age... and the capacity to give your whole life for a transformation you want, which is what's going to be asked of us.

To galvanize people... first of all you connect them with the divine consciousness within them, secondly you give them the disciplines that really sustain that consciousness, and, thirdly, you help them follow their heartbreak and follow something they can really do in the real world to help the real agony of the real exploding real crisis. If you really see that the world is dying - and that means that not only your psyche is going to be destroyed, but that the world that you love is dying, that if you have children your children are going to inherit desolation - if you really see that, if you really allow yourself to feel it, if you really stop intellectualizing about it, but start feeling it and feeling it from the divine within you, then you will be driven, you will be driven to find something that you must do just to stay human.

The new paradigm is based on spirituality, a subtle rising wave of awakening. The old paradigm, based on control and greed, is now looking increasingly ugly day by day, as it tears itself apart in front of our eyes. The transformation from the familiar old ways to the new and unfamiliar ways will be forced on us if we don't take the initiative. We can be destroyed as part of the problem, or we can participate as part of the solution. Awareness is the first step to awakening.

Are you ready "to give your whole life for a transformation you want"?