"New Millennium Challenge":
(Speech delivered by Ed Aurelio C. Reyes before the First Lambat-Liwanag Conference on the 15 Empowering Paradigms, held at the UST Main Library Bldg., Manila, Philippines on October 26, 2001):
Let’s Welcome & Help Hasten
the Sunrise of Enlightenment
Harmony and understanding,
Sympathy and trust abounding.
No more falsehoods or derisions—
Golden living dreams of vision,
Mystic crystal revelation,
And the mind’s true liberation…
I first came across these words almost 40 years ago in the happy refrain of the song, Age of Aquarius, which described the period then of the 60s as a dawning, the dawning of a new age for Humankind. Now, almost four decades later, are well into that age?
I stand before you once again (my second time in this Conference today), this time to represent Dr. Mina Ramirez, President of the Asian Social Institute where I have been teaching (in the Applied Cosmic Anthropology program) since last year, because she could not come to be with us here physically. ASI was founded a few years before the song Age of Aquarius became popular, and I am proud to say that through all the decades since that time, ASI has been resonating qith this dawning, even contributing to the hastening of this dawning. The role assigned to ASI this afternoon is thus appropriate: to challenge us all to do the same in the coming years and decades.
It may be difficult for the youth of today to even imagine life at the time that song was popular – no computers, no Internet, no cellphones or texting, no faxes, and no cable TV (And may we add— no need for bottled drinking water, no flash floods, no red tide, no ozone hole, no…) Things have really changed. And all that change did not happen in just a few years. It’s part of the movement of history that is as slow as the creeping of the glaciers but also as powerful as the glaciers that have redesigned entire mountain ranges. This is the gradual dawning of the glorious sunshine for us to let in so it could chase away darkness and shorten all shadows in our lives.
There definitely has been this dawning of a new human consciousness that loves all (of) life, prefers celebration to competition, chooses appreciation before intellectualization, consciously breathes in the divine spirit, earnestly stands for honesty, mutual respect and equality, democracy, pluralism, gender harmony, intergenerational responsibility, deep ecology, and the synergy that is dynamically based on healthy diversities among species, among races, and among cultural or belief-based groupings. Such synergy now confronts, for example, the “millennium monster” that is globalized greed. People all over the world have seen through the exploitative designs of the World Trade Organization (WTO), created by the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade , which was once quite prophetically described as “The Ten Commandments of the Golden Calf.”
All over the world, people coming from various races are getting spiritually magnetized by kindred frames of mind and action that empower and not shackle, frames of mind that unite people instead of turning them against one another, paradigms that would tear down walls and build bridges.
People have started, in the words of a poem-prayer Earth Synergy, to “stand in reverence before the rest of the bio-diverse citizens and elements of our living planet Gaia, to take full responsibility for past and present environmental destruction, and to lovingly commit a conscious synergy of efforts to rescue and heal, conserve and exalt our Mother Earth.” The poem (now translated into a dozen or so languages) calls this “a giant leap for Humankind,” not towards the moon or anywhere else in the “outer space,” but “right back to the bosom of our home planet.” This would be a strong metaphor for every human to start “going home” to oneself, and rediscovering one’s real individual and collective identity.
The development of consciousness of the human race has come a long way from the command regimentation that stressed faith and righteous behavior (Old Testament) while downplaying comprehension and free will. We have had more than two thousand years of enhanced free will and the admonition to love one another (message of the Christ), where the beginnings of comprehension (physics and other natural sciences) completely sidelined spiritual faith as by then misrepresented by dogmas of divisive religions. Through this period, the use of free will was often leading to disastrous consequences of intolerance and bigotry, oppression and exploitation, greed and tyranny.
And we are now gradually moving into a new period where human consciousness would really blossom in unconditional love and unconditional peace. We will fully be enjoying free will but matured enough, after centuries of experiential education, to freely choose love and synergy over alienation, separation and antagonism. Faith will still be there but no longer blind. Individual human dignity will be there but no longer as separative ego. Comprehension will be there, well beyond conventional (Newtonian) physics, but intellectualization will be underpinned by love, honest humility and spiritual discernment. Righteousness will be there in each of us but based on maturity and no longer externally commanded.
The conscious synergy of Humankind and of all Creation will emerge, a real and embracive unity, no longer an artificial and exclusive one. That will be the real age of the full Pentecost, where a fast-increasing number of people, not just a dozen apostles, will now feel the tongues of fire lighting up their souls from within, souls that would reach out to embrace one another and draw in more and more people into their informal families.
You may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one. I hope someday you will join us. And the world wil live as one! But you cannot say that to me in all earnestness. That was more appropriately addressed to Lennon of those days, not to me or to ASI or to groups like SanibLakas Foundation or Lambat-Liwanag Network of today. We all have reason to declare having joined Lennon in his dream, and that more people are joining up with all the rest. And we can all say, or rather sing with more feeling than we or our parents ever sand in the 60s—the Age of Aquarius has already dawned. This bright sunrise of enlightenment for real peace and real love has come!
The empowering paradigms are seeds of light. (see enumeration.) They resonate with the innermost whispers of our spirit. They are seeds of light that we can gather to plant deep within our hearts and minds, in all our talk, in all our walk of all our talk, and plant in heart-minds of many others. Are we ready to pledge upon our honor to help gather, spread and cast far and wide these seeds of light? Are we all ready to make extra efforts to contribute to the hastening of this glorious sunrise in the history of Humankind?
Are we ready to make the commitment on that Panata in your kits that I had earlier asked you to read immediately? Are you? I’m almost sure I already know your answer, and so, slightly ahead of hearing your response to this challenge, let me say this…
Congratulations!
(In the minutes that followed, the more than 50 participants in the Conference stood up to recite in unison the pledge to help develop, share and apply the 15 Empowering Paradigms.)
This was brought to you by: Sing Out 2011
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