by Stacey Nemour, black belt in Kung Fu, and highly respected martial artist

It is said when the student is ready the teacher will appear. In this case, spiritually-aware people in entertainment and media have been waiting for a movement that will echo the awakening now happening around the world. And it has arrived, in the form of “GATE.”

John Raatz is the founder and Eckhart Tolle and Jim Carrey are honorary co-founders. The Global Alliance for Transformational Entertainment (GATE) is shepherding the emerging and rapidly expanding transformational entertainment and media genre worldwide.

I interviewed John about the upcoming “GATE 2,” which is an event that cultivates, promotes and advances collaborations between transformational content creators and purveyors, and it is open for all those interested in being part of the expansion of the transformational genre that is currently happening around the world.

According to John, “Many have thought that religion, big business or government would save us … but, with most of these institutions in serious disarray today, the one remaining infrastructure through which wisdom and possible solutions can flow is the entertainment industry and all forms of media. Many people within the industry are already transformationally oriented. One of our missions is to bring together these individuals and assist them in creating and disseminating content of a transformational nature for the benefit of all humanity, of the world.”

Raatz feels that each person in the entertainment and media industry has a role and a responsibility to facilitate personal, social and global transformation. He explained his observation that “there is a schism between the business and creative sides of the entertainment industry. One that’s usually been there. Often, the creative side wants to develop meaningful, more transformationally oriented product, while the business side is focused on commercial value. Once in a while, they coincide.

“This also reflects a general split in our culture — an imbalance that favors commercial success over deeper, more personal success on a human level. Whatever is happening on a microcosmic level is also happening in the larger reality; it is all mirrored back. And now’s the time to try to find a healthier balance, when so much of our world is threatened in so many ways. That’s what GATE is seeking to do in the entertainment and media industries.”

Raatz continues, “Many Native American tribes would sit in council when they had an important decision to make. If it was determined that the decision would negatively impact any of the next seven generations, they simply would not do it. We need to bring more of that spirit to the decisions we make in all aspects of our lives.”

Eckhart Tolle, author and spiritual teacher, GATE honorary founder, notes, “The only actions that don’t cause opposing reactions are those aimed at the good of all. Inclusive, not exclusive. They join; they don’t separate. They are not for ‘my’ country, but for all of humanity, not for ‘my’ religion but for the emergence of consciousness in all human beings.” That spirit is also often embodied in transformational entertainment and media, according to Raatz. Tolle will be speaking at GATE 2.

Jim Carrey, actor/activist and GATE honorary founder, has said, “I am so lucky to be a part of this community, and to do something that is of value.” Carrey will also be speaking at GATE 2.

John identified the audience for transformational entertainment and media as one that is rarely paid attention to: what he calls the Cultural Creatives. In early 2000, two sociologists were commissioned to record Americans’ values and lifestyle preferences. Some of the 19 characteristics these Cultural Creatives relate to are: preservation of nature, a strong awareness of planet-wide issues, spirituality as an important aspect of life, maintaining loving relationships, intense interest in spiritual and psychological development, and wanting to be involved with creating a new and better way of life.

It was determined that 50 million Americans then fell into that category, with an additional 90 million Cultural Creatives in Europe. The numbers are even larger now, as this is the fastest growing segment of the U.S. and world population. The book that resulted from this research was The Cultural Creatives: How 50 Million People are Changing the World, by Paul H. Ray., Ph.D., and Sherry Ruth Anderson, Ph.D.

Raatz notes: “At GATE, we want to be the supporting mechanism that assists those in the entertainment and media businesses who are transformationlly oriented to speak their truth through their work. And guess what! That’s monetizeable! The audience is ready!”

Raatz is not new to aligning his spiritual light with his creative expression. He is the founder and principal of the pioneering “transformational” marketing and PR firm, The Visioneering Group, whose mission is “Linking Spirit, Vision & Progressive Values with Compassionate Communication to Promote a Positive and Sustainable Future.”

Established in 1988, Visioneering exclusively serves the Cultural Creatives (body/mind/spirit) market, and was the first such firm to do so. He played a large part in putting the game-changing transformational film “What the Bleep Do We Know?” on the map, following with “Peaceful Warrior.” He worked with Madonna on her “Ray of Light” album and set up a private screening for her of “What the Bleep.” She was so moved by it that she introduced John to her teachers at The Kabbalah Center, which became a Visioneering client. Over the years, the company has worked with a wide array of authors, musicians, filmmakers and influential spiritual teachers, whom he calls the “Leading Lights of Consciousness.”

Raatz has been teaching Transcendental Meditation since 1976 and found, 30 years ago, when he started in the film business, that many well-known celebrities, such as Merv Griffin, Mike Love, Clint Eastwood and Ned Beatty, were also practicing TM. At the time, they formed an organization to teach it to people in the entertainment business.

The upcoming GATE events will be held Feb. 4, 2012, at the Saban Theatre in Beverly Hills, Calif. For more information and discounted tickets, visit http://www.gatecommunity.org. Use Promo Code TRANSFORM for an additional 20 percent discount.

by Duane Elgin
Visit Duane Elgin’s blog

The phrase “axial age” has been used to describe the relatively brief period of time — roughly 700 years — when the great religions of the world arose: Hinduism and Buddhism in India; Confucianism and Taoism in China; and monotheism in the Middle East. The period from roughly 900 BC to 200 BC is referred to as an “axial age” because it set the orientation or direction for spirituality for more than two thousand years into the future.

Around the world, the axial age was marked by the growth of trading networks, the rise of large cities, and massive armies equipped with iron-age weapons. This was also a time of extreme violence and widespread warfare. All of the world’s great religions understood that a core challenge was to moderate the violence that emerged from our perceived sense of separation from one another. Despite their great diversity of culture and geography, a common understanding of the need to put compassion at the forefront can be found in all of the world’s wisdom traditions. Here are a few examples:

As you wish that men would do to you, do so to them.
– Christianity
What is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow man. This is the law: all the rest is commentary.
– Judaism
No one of you is a believer until he desires for his brother that which he desires for himself.
– Islam
Do naught unto others which would cause you pain if done to you.
– Hinduism
Hurt not others in ways that you yourself would find hurtful.
– Buddhism
Do not unto others what you would not have them do unto you.
– Confucianism
Regard your neighbor’s gain as your own gain, and your neighbor’s loss as your own loss.
– Taoism
All things are our relatives; what we do to everything, we do to ourselves.
– Native American

As these quotes reveal, the first axial age began with a view of separation and the “other.” In a world of growing individualism and differentiation, the religious emphasis on compassion served as a vital bridge between people. Now, a second major axis with a very different orientation is opening in the world. Religions of separation are becoming religions of communion as we realize there is no place to go where we are separate from the ever-generative womb of the living universe. The second axial age begins with a recognition emerging from the combined wisdom of both science and spirituality; namely, that we are already home — that the living universe already exists within us as much as we live within it. In the words theologian, Thomas Berry, “The universe is a communion and a community. We ourselves are that communion become conscious of itself.” Compassion remains a vital element of spirituality, but it is now being held increasingly within a context of communion rather than separation.

As people around the world move into spiritual communion and empathic connection with the living universe, we see the role of religion differently: Less often do people look for a bridge to the divine. Increasingly, people seek guidance and community in the journey of awakening within the living universe. People want to know there are others on the journey of soul-making and seek guideposts along the way to support the awakening of their experience of unity and intimacy within the universe. Less and less are people seeking only religions of belief. Carried along in this great cultural project of awakening, we are increasingly seeking religions of direct experience — religions of communion with a living universe.

When our aliveness consciously connects with the aliveness of the universe, a current of aliveness flows through us. At that moment — when life meets life — a direct connection between the living universe and ourselves is realized and we have an awakening experience. We no longer see ourselves in the universe, we experience that we are the universe. We do not need to manufacture or imagine awakening experiences. Instead, we only need to experience directly what is already true about the fundamental nature of ourselves as beings who live within a living universe. When the conscious knowing of ourselves becomes transparent to the reality of our participation in an ever-emerging universe, we recognize there was no separation to begin with — we all emerge in communion at every moment within the unity of a continuously regenerating universe.

In life, we often carry excess personal baggage from our past that prevents us from living fully in the present moment, accessing our creativity and generally enjoying life to the fullest. We may try reading books, meditation, attending workshops and other techniques to get free of these brakes on our life. If you or anyone you know may be in this exploration, you may want to check out the deep transformative work of Rob and Thessa Egan’s Alchemy Techniques.

Rob had a spiritual awakening at Findhorn in Scotland. He then trained as a trauma therapist, Sivananda yoga instructor and is a Chi Kung practitioner. He worked For many years, with associates from around the world, and conducted extensive consciousness research, met Thessa and together they co-founded Alchemy Techniques.

Thessa is an experienced therapist in many modalities including trauma healing, nutrition, allergy therapy and herbalism. She says about her work, ‘I see my role as teacher in Structural Self Inquiry as one of guide, and fellow traveler along the path.

Alchemy Techniques provides a set of effective tools to move from experiencing the clouds of past traumatic experiences to the ‘sunshine’ of core expression. Some of their students have described this process as being like ‘falling in love with life’.

The more advanced levels their work becomes explores the nature of experience, identity, perception and consciousness. This process can lead to an understanding and experience of who we are at our deepest levels, which is then integrated into daily life.  The experience at this level can be described as a path of self realization eventually resulting in the fusion of pure being and pure awareness at all levels of consciousness.

For a first hand experience of Alchemy Techniques training, you can sign up for free access to three hours of free online videos and a workbook on their site.

Here is a 30 minute interview I conducted with Rob and Thessa about a year ago that will provide further insights to the background and a description of their work.

Click here to view this extraordinary post-modern rendition of the universe that aptly illustrates a certain level of understanding, as it were, and one we cannot pass on without boldly placing the fascinating imagery in an even larger context.

This extraordinary post-modern rendition aptly illustrates a common understanding, as it were,
Cary and Michael Huang’s demonstration offers an interesting object-lesson around the perennial wonder at our place in the universe.Their particular question-demonstration – the relative scale of time and space – strings together all the known dimensional equations that could possibly illustrate an answer, and all of it measured to the ‘nth’ degree, no less.

This is clearly a case of the mind bootstrapping it’s way up to the mystery, isn’t it – only embraced in the final moments out of sheer exhaustion! But it is also similar to a fish trying to analyze – and thereby objectivize – water, when it’s very existence could not possibly be separate from it.

We know that some can only ‘hold the mystery’ once they feel they’ve got their mind around it – or have at least given it their best shot. But many of these are people like you and I, though disguised as skeptical scientific materialists  – and having put aside their original childlike wonder, not to say their ‘divine intuition’, now trot out their strongest possible resistance to making any ‘poetic leap of faith’ whatsoever.

So this is why we turn to art, poetry, nature and our mythic sensibilities, and surely these are what really constellate the greater context in which to fully experience our humanity – in contrast to extolling the endless intricate measurements of a left-brain Newtonian world, more recently sopped up to the detriment of less expendable human qualities – and apparent today in all our societal institutions.

It is where we have found ourselves again through all the ages, and will continue to do so when the prideful machinations of ‘the scientific prerogative’ have either fallen to the ground in shattered and irretrievable shards, or soundly put in their place, as it were. For we, and all that is around us, are already greater than the sum of the parts!

Having said that, I notice that the musical back-up tells a lot of this story all by itself ….

But here I want to simply call attention to the way in which these and similar types of fashionable discussion result from our common insistence, in the western mindset – as an a priori bias –
that somehow existence precedes consciousness!

Fortunately quantum reality is showing us it can only be the other way round.

– Peter Oldfield

Two stories from a recent issue of the excellent magazine, Resurgence, illuminate the shifting sands of Science.

Remaking the World

Frontier research into the nature of human consciousness has recently upended everything that we have hitherto considered scientific certainty about our world, giving us new scientific stories with which to reimagine our future.

The American writer Joan Didion once observed that we tell ourselves stories in order to live. Of all our stories, it is the scientific ones that most define us. Those stories create our perception of the universe and how it operates, and from this we shape all our societal structures: our relationships with each other and our environment, our methods of doing business and educating our young, of organising ourselves into towns and cities, of defining the borders of our countries and our planet.

Although we perceive science as an ultimate truth, it is ultimately just a story, told in installments. We learn about our world in piecemeal fashion, a process of constant correction and revision. New chapters refine – and often supplant – the chapters that have come before.

Our current scientific story is more than 300 years old, a construction largely based on the discoveries of Isaac Newton, of a universe in which all matter is thought to move within three-dimensional space and time according to certain fixed laws. The Newtonian vision describes a reliable place inhabited by well-behaved and easily identifiable matter.

The worldview arising from these discoveries is also bolstered by the philosophical implications of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, with its suggestion that survival is available only to the ruggedly genetic individual.

These, in their essence, are stories that idealise separateness. From the moment we are born, we are told that for every winner there must be a loser. From that constricted vision we have fashioned our world.

IT IS NOW clear that the story we’ve been told is about to be replaced by a drastically revised version. Frontier research into the nature of human consciousness has recently upended everything that we have hitherto considered scientific certainty about our world.

To continue reading this story, click here.

God is not Dead

The evolution of consciousness is taking us towards a greater capacity for processing the meaning of our lives and the world around us.

A paradigm shift in science is taking place. This shift is taking us from a divisive, God-denying, matter-based science to one that integrates science and God or spirituality. This new scientific paradigm rests on solid theory-based quantum physics and solid evidence-based empirical data, not on fanciful ideas. And like all creative endeavours, the paradigm shift has come with a surprise: that science itself has to operate within a spiritual metaphysics.

In the 1980s there was strong emphasis on the ‘holistic paradigm’ which incorporated ‘pantheism’ or Nature-based spirituality. Holistic thinkers dominated such avant-garde thinking: Gregory Bateson, Fritjof Capra, Eric Wantsch, Francisco Varela, Humberto Maturana, John Lilly, Ilya Prigogine, Karl Pribram, David Bohm, Ervin László, and Roger Sperry. The list is very distinguished and very long. According to holism, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. It is greater because the emergence of novel phenomena cannot be reduced to the sum of its parts. Life, mind, consciousness, spirituality – all were explained as the holistic emergent phenomena of matter. Although holism was an integrative view, most holistic thinkers and writers still believed that everything was made of matter. Holism was not the only integrative track. Depth psychologists, starting with Freud and Jung, were openly positing the concept of the ‘collective unconscious’ that presupposed an irreducible consciousness.

Many holistic thinkers such as Capra depended on systems theory for their analysis; however, the scope of this kind of analysis is limited, as only generalities can be discussed. Others, Pribram, Bohm and Edgar Mitchell among them, expounded the idea of ‘hologram’, both literally and metaphorically. But the hologram is an object, whereas consciousness has both subject and object aspects. So how does subject-object awareness come about? This ‘hard question’ cannot be addressed from a materialist point of view.

Spirituality is more than pantheism, and an integrative theoretical foundation to provide a bridge between holistic thinking within science and psychological thinking within consciousness was lacking. Such a foundation came about only when quantum physics was properly interpreted in a paradox-free way.

To continue reading this story, click here.