Staying Connected Despite All Our Differences

Imagine being in a room where a clairvoyant medium, a channeller, a faith healer, and an acupuncturist are trying to reach agreement while all around them radios blare messages about UFOs, alien abductions, reincarnation, neardeath experiences, etc. This image stands for the current state of affairs, in which a welter of voices contends for our attention, and the logical question to ask is, ‘‘How can all these people find a connection?’’
    Connected thinking involves lowering the barriers between us and them. Each of us is personally defending our own experiences, and when somebody offers an experience that clashes or contradicts or intrudes upon ours, the automatic reaction is to push away the unknown and fortify what we already know. In the connected life one consciously stops rejecting as an automatic reflex. Instead of putting the burden of proof on the other person, you put the burden of belief on yourself. I don’t mean blind faith but a willingness instead to look into the unknown.
    Connected feeling involves recognising that all levels of consciousness are valid and equally human. We aren’t randomly connected at the subtle level like telephones, nor can we turn the connections off. We are bonded. Although human beings also can be connected through ideas, it’s at the feeling level that one sees past the wild disagreements created by the mind and replaces them with a shared regard for truth and love.
    If you meet citizens of a country that is enemy of your country, you will not feel them as enemies but as people just as human as yourself. This is even more true at a subtle level, where the wishes and vision of other people are worked out in one great design.
    The greatest enemy of consciousness is isolation. People who have had extraordinary things happen to them fear that they would be disbelieved or ostracised if they spoke about them. We live in a society that represses extraordinary experiences by labelling those who have them as cranks. There is a great need for all of us to engage in connected speaking: confide, share, and be intimate about who we really are.
    For connected action, the motto should be: ‘‘Go and see for yourself ’’. One can’t foresee social action in the sense of a consciousness movement, although the currently desperate need for a peace movement is part of living a connected life. Being an armchair sceptic or an armchair believer are both equally passive.
    By going and immersing yourself in an unknown experience, you will do more than add information to your mind’s storehouse. You will enter a new pocket of consciousness. Just as there is no substitute for travelling to the site of a great disaster or a war, there is no substitute for putting yourself in the direct path of higher, stranger, or just different levels of consciousness.
    We are living in a backlash of consciousness, and there is a danger that the cottage industry of higher consciousness may flicker and offer no real alternative to orthodox thinking. A new world view could be delayed by a generation. It all depends on how many people decide that they want to be connected and what they are willing to do about it.