From the earliest times, human beings have shared narratives and told stories to try to understand the nature of the world and our place in it. We have sought to embrace and reconcile our inner and outer experiences of life and to imbue them with meaning and purpose; over time evolving our narratives as we discovered more of the nature of reality.
Earlier narratives that were based on faith and metaphysical traditions, mythology and psychology, have increasingly been peripheralized and superseded, by a paradigm based on a secular science of solely materialistic reality and a worldview of apparent separation. This paradigm co-evolved with economic and political power systems, creating and justifying unprecedented levels of conflict and inequity. In considering evolution to be driven by random occurrences and mutations, secular science also views immaterial mind and consciousness, without explanation, as somehow and solely arising from material brains.
While such a perception has enabled us to achieve significant technological innovation, including planetary communications as a species, its cosmology describes a Universe devoid of life-affirming meaning and bereft of purpose. Despite their benefits, its technologies also suffer in their outward applications from the same deficit – a dissociation from our innate humanity and kinship with all life and cultures on Earth.
In only describing the outer appearance of the world, the pervading paradigm can preclude probing more fundamental truths of universal relationships and the nature of consciousness. In not acknowledging such deeper wisdom it has been unable to provide an authentic and wholistic worldview. This has progressively driven a schism in our collective psyche and motivated duality-based and unsustainable behaviors that have come to existentially threaten our collective future as a species as well as our planetary home.
Now, however, the presumptions of the secular science of separation are being found to be fundamentally flawed and instead, scientific breakthroughs are enabling an understanding of the unified nature of reality and a new and unitive narrative to emerge.
To paraphrase the great narrator of human experience, Joseph Campbell: The only narrative that is going to be worth thinking about in the immediate future is one that is talking about the planet and all beings on it. This new narrative will need to be grounded in widespread unitive consciousness, which includes a felt sense of unity with all life, unity with the ineffable source of all being, and unity with the evolutionary flow.
A new paradigm, based on scientific breakthroughs, with evidence at all scales of existence and across numerous fields of research, is revealing a radically expanded perception of the world. It is converging with universal wisdom and spiritually-based teachings. In realizing the unified nature of reality, it calls for a collective evolutionary shift of consciousness and the emergence of an inclusive interspirituality which provides essential practices for awakening to this unitive consciousness. Central to its unitive narrative is the recognition of our interbeing; our interconnectedness, interdependence and belonging with the whole community of our planetary home, Gaia, and with the entire Universe.
Revolutionary insights are discovering a Universe whose appearance emerges from deeper levels of causation. Our Universe not only exists and evolves as an entirely unified and innately sentient entity, but, meaningfully and purposefully, exists TO evolve; from simplicity to complexity and diversity, and toward ever greater levels of individuated and collective self-expression, self-awareness and conscious interdependence.
Above all, multiple scientific disciplines are concluding that mind and consciousness are not something we have but rather, what we and the whole world fundamentally are.
[The complete Unitive Narrative can be found here].
Bridging the Gap between Science and Spirituality (without the religious dogmatics) 