Imagine you are walking along a path through a rolling countryside. Sometimes the path takes you into deep valleys, with forests on either side of you. You cannot see to the sides, and you cannot see far ahead. But you have a map which you are following, and landmarks along the way are marked on the map. Eventually, your path brings you to the top of a mountain. From there, you can look back over the path you’ve already traveled; and you can look ahead over the path yet before you—as far, at least, as the next mountaintop. So, from this high vantage point, you take out your notebook and draw a new map of the road ahead. You mark on it the rivers, forests, rocky outcroppings, villages, deserts, swamps and other features you will have to pass or cross to reach that distant peak.
As the various Cycles of Time turn and turn again, each time we come round to the same season, it is like coming to the top of the next high mountain. And if we know how to look out, that vantage point allows us to see the next cycle—the path through the valley to the next mountaintop.
Throughout the ages, many Prophets, Seers and visionaries have viewed the coming ages from such peaks of history’s synchronicity waves and cycles. They have left recorded prophecies—which may be seen as “roadmaps of time.” But while the visions of such seers as Nostradamus, Mother Shipton and Edgar Cayce have provided intriguing “maps” of the future from their times to ours, they have only been able to see to the top of the next peak from where they stood. And that peak is where we now stand. Those prophetic maps are now obsolete, and can chart our path no further.
Creating the Future
It is now time for the making of new maps, and the charting of a new future—a future which we can create through our Vision and Imagination. Wizards say that the best way to predict the future is to create it. So let me tell you a little story about changing the future by magick…
At the beginning of the 1960s, when I was a young man, most people in the world believed unquestionably that a global nuclear holocaust was inevitable and immanent. Nearly every book, movie and TV show about the future made in those days assumed that civilization would soon be destroyed in a nuclear war, and any survivors would be battling hideous mutants in the radioactive ruins.
This conviction ran so deep that in 1960, when George Pal made an excellent movie of H.G. Wells’ 1895 novel, The Time Machine, he felt he had to include a nuclear war as the time traveler journeys into the future. But an important part of that story is showing the temporal “chronometer” on the dashboard of the time machine, indicating the date. So Pal had the time traveler make a stop just as the great nuclear holocaust was being unleashed. And the date on the dial read: “Aug. 19, 1966”—only six years from the release of the film!
“Boldly going where no one has gone before”
But when August of 1966 rolled around, we didn’t have a nuclear war. Instead, something else happened that changed our world. That September 8 a new TV show premiered—with a completely new vision of the future, in which there had been no global nuclear holocaust, and a united humanity was traveling among the stars. This show, as you have surely guessed by now, was Star Trek. Its creator, Gene Roddenberry, is said to have explained his intention as: “I’m trying to present a new vision of the future that will be so compelling that people will choose it over a global nuclear holocaust.”
And so he did—one of the greatest acts of magick in our time. Over half a century, eight TV series (all continuing in syndication) and 14 movies have created a future vision that has inspired both our imagination and our technology towards the unification of humanity and the exploration of space, and given us the greatest Mission Statement of magickal intent ever articulated: “To explore strange new worlds; to seek out new life and new civilizations; to boldly go where no one has gone before!”
And the same Renaissance Decade that brought us Star Trek saw the inception of the many Movements that have also changed the world in so many ways: Sexual Freedom; Free Speech; Civil Rights; Social Justice; Anti-War; Psychedelics; Environmentalism; Gay Rights; the Women’s Movement; the New Age Movement; and, of course, the revival of the Old Religion in the form of Neo-Paganism and Witchcraft.
2020 Vision
Now we stand on the threshold of another Renaissance decade, which will begin next year. It has already been given a name—“The Awakening.”
As happens every 60 years, this is a time of magick; a time for us to conceive and articulate a unified “2020 Vision” of the world we want to bring into manifestation—just as Gene Roddenberry did last time around. This is the decade when the “Post-Millennials”—born in the dawning years not only of this century, this millennium—but also in the Dawning of the Age of Aquarius—will be coming of age, just as our present Elders did 60 years ago.
A growing number of Pagan Elders are already talking amongst ourselves to conceive and promote a “2020 Vision” for the coming decade, as we prepare to mentor the new generation. Of course, we will be soliciting input from our entire community via social media. So the first thing we’ve done is create a FaceBook page and website for “2020 Vision: The Awakening.”
The Awakening
Just as each of us awakened into consciousness as an infant, so too is Gaea Herself poised on the threshold of a planetary Awakening—the evolution of consciousness into the next quantum leap. In Eastern traditions this is called Enlightenment. It is a full awakening of the spirit, in which one experiences with every fiber of one’s being the full connection with all other Beings, throughout all of Time and Space. It is the integration of both brain hemispheres into simultaneous consciousness, rather than the normal alternation of one or the other. We call this Apotheasis—literally, deification, or “becoming Divine.”
It has been imagined that this might come about as a kind of universal telepathy. But I think the emergence and rapid evolution of the Internet is already providing the seeds of a technological vehicleof global consciousness through which this Awakening will inevitably manifest. In a 1926 interview with Collier’s magazine, Nicolo Tesla said: “When wireless is perfectly applied the whole Earth will be converted into a huge brain, which in fact it is, all things being particles of a real and rhythmic whole. We shall be able to communicate with one another instantly, irrespective of distance.”
Coalescence of Consciousness
I believe that the two-handed coordination required for playing music and operating modern computer consoles is stimulating not only a re-awakening of the dormant right brain hemispheres of humanity, but a full synchronization of both forms of mentality into a new ambidextrous consciousness that will be able to sustain the awakened mind of Gaea. And as with the awakening of consciousness in our own minds, as the billions of neurons in our brains linked up synergistically, just so shall we all participate in the Awakening of Gaea Herself—and our full Apotheasis.
Scientist/philosopher Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955) envisioned just such an awakening of planetary consciousness as the “Omega Point”—the ultimate fulfillment of the entire purpose of creation and evolution. This would be the point in time when the individual consciousnesses of all living beings on Earth coalesce into a single collective consciousness. He said: “We are faced with a harmonized collectivity of consciousnesses to a sort of superconciousness. The Earth not only becoming covered by myriads of grains of thought, but becoming enclosed in a single thinking envelope, a single unanimous reflection.” (The Phenomenon of Man, 1955)
Art by Daniel Blair Stewart
The Gaiaspora
We stand at a great crossroads in evolution; the most critical in the entire history of Life. The very technology which presently threatens all life on this planet could alternately be used to build starships to carry our descendants throughout the galaxy. Perhaps humans are intended to be the spores of Gaea. Reproduction is, after all, an essential function of all living systems, and this applies no less to a living planet.
I predict that before the end of this century, we will see the beginnings of the great Diaspora of humanity out into the stars. Diaspora means “scattering,” or “dispersion”—particularly of a people with a common origin, such as the Jews after the Romans destroyed Jerusalem in 70 CE. But the root of the word, speirein, means “to sow,” as in the planting of seeds. Establishing space colonies, terraforming barren worlds—“flying Mother Nature’s silver seeds to a new home…” as Neil Young sings—may be the most important purpose for the evolution of a technological species.
And one day seedlings of Gaea will be planting new roots in distant soil beyond the farthest star…
(Art by Oberon Zell, 2020)