By Miriam Knight and Julie Clayton
Doesn’t everyone want to know how the world works? For a small child, hopefully, the world is a magical place. Experiencing through all their senses, children probe and explore the cause and effect relationships between action and reaction. Their inquisitive minds seek to fit each new experience into an expanding mosaic of how the world works, and how they fit into it. They observe, test limits and create provisional hypotheses as to the nature of reality, filling in the blanks with their imagination.
If the child is very lucky, the adults in their lives may encourage the sense of wonder and the free flight of imagination that are its birth-right. Most well-meaning parents, however, feel obliged to prepare the child for life in the ‘real world,’ and discourage any perceptions or behaviors that are outside their frame of reference. Little by little, in the words of Don Miguel Ruiz, the child is domesticated by the adults in its life so it can live quietly with the herd. The imaginary friends, the knowing of relationships that endured in different forms through many lifetimes, the ability to see energies, heal others or know the future are denied validity and eventually are lost, along with an innocent sense of joy of life and a certain light in their eyes.
The thing is, after one has gone through school, gotten married, had children, had a career, and taken stock, there is sometimes a nagging sense of emptiness. There is a return to the deeper questions of what’s it all about? What is the purpose of my life? Why is the happiness that is supposed to come with material possessions, with security, with power and influence in the world so elusive?
An increasing number of people in this position are having dramatic experiences that call into question the very fundamentals of their assumptions about life. In terms made popular by New Thought and the New Age, one would say that they are inviting experiences into their life to catapult them into radical change. Examples of these precipitating events include: catastrophic accidents, loss of job, severe illness, a near-death experience, a dark night of the soul, visions of otherworldly beings or simply a deep knowing that penetrates the depths of the soul.
Often, such individuals go through a phase of questioning their own sanity, but the knowing persists and grows. As they surrender to this knowing, there emerges a sense of connection to something greater, a mysterious or mystical source of which they feel a part. People give it many different names: source, spirit, great mystery, the Tao, God.
Some may interpret their revelation within the context of their existing religious traditions, and this results in a deepening of their faith. For others it exposes a world that transcends conventional religion, a world of connected inhabitants sharing a communal spiritual experience. It imbues them with a sense of deep connection to the source of all being, to God, to love, and sets them on a path of service. Their perspective of what is important in life is radically shifted, and the material world no longer holds much charm.
The revelations and personal shifts that people have described run the gamut from profound understandings of the nature of the forces underpinning the very fabric of physical reality, to the ability to visualize the interior of human bodies and having the capacity to change their molecular structure and create miraculous healings, to the ability to hear and even see beings in other dimensions, and convey their messages to friends, loved ones, and the world at large.
It is my hope that the tales presented here will remind our readers of experiences in their own life that may have been dismissed as fantasy or coincidence, and give them permission to reconnect with the magic of the universe. It is time to reclaim our birth-right as joyous, limitless souls.
In his foreword Ervin Laszlo says: Our destiny is in our hands. Possibly and hopefully, it is not misplaced in our hands. There is, after all, more to our consciousness than most people realize – ‘our’ consciousness is not just ours. To paraphrase a passage in The Prophet: “Our consciousness is not our consciousness. It is the manifestation of the longing of the cosmos for itself. It comes to us through us but not from us.” Khalil Gibran made this remark in regard to children, but it applies to consciousness as well. The cosmos is longing for life and consciousness. On this small but remarkably life- and consciousness-friendly planet we are the species that can live up to this longing.
There is hope. It appears that the kind of experiences recounted by the contributors to this volume are spreading in the world. The kind of questions Miriam and Julie asked them, more and more people are asking of themselves.
The threat is real, but the prospect of overcoming it is less and less somber. This volume makes a real – and at the same time delightful – contribution to making it much less somber still.
Contributers: Ervin Laszlo | Allan Hunter | Anita Moorjani | Barbara Berger | Bernie Siegel, MD | Cyndi Dale | David Bennett | Dianne Collins | Eva Herr | Foster Gamble | Frank DeMarco | Gaetano Vivo | Gary Douglas | Geoffrey Hoppe | Georgina Cannon | Gregg Braden | Gyorgyi Szabo | Howard Falco | Irene Kendig | Jack Rourke | Jake Ducey | James Wanless | JD Messinger | Jessica Maxwell | Julia Assante, PhD | Kaya | Kingsley L. Dennis | Larry Dossey, MD | Meg Blackburn Losey | Nina Brown | Paul Chappell | Paul Von Ward | Penney Peirce | Peter Russell | Pim van Lommel, MD | Rajiv Parti, MD | Ruth L. Miller, PhD | Suzanne Giesemann, CDR, USN (Ret.)
Miriam Knight is the founder of New Consciousness Review (ncreview.com)—a showcase for the people, books and films inspiring personal and global transformation, and New Consciousness Radio. Julie Clayton is an editor of NY Times bestsellers and award-winning books on new consciousness, and Reviews Editor for New Consciousness Review.
What Wags the World is being published by O Books 26th September 2014. ISBN: 978-1-78279-605-3 (Paperback) £8.99 $14.95. ISBN: 978-1-78279-606-0 (eBook) £6.99 $9.99.