The Spiritual Renaissance

Marianne Williamson wrote:

There is a spiritual renaissance sweeping the world. Most people feel it, some deride it, many embrace it and no one can stop it. It is a revolution in the way we think. Its torchbearers are a motley mix. Some are religious in a traditional sense, while some are not. Some are successful in the world, while some are not. Some of us genuinely like one another, while some of us do not. Some are politically liberal, while some of us are conservative. Some seek Truth in fellowship and some seek Truth alone. Some of us are old and some of us are young.

We are an assorted group, an unlabeled group, but together in spirit, we are affecting the world in significant ways. We are turning away from a purely worldly orientation. We seek an ancient God and a modern God. We feel a current of change, a cosmic electricity running through our veins now. However disparate our personalities and interests, we all agree on one very important point: Mankind has come to a major crossroads, at which the spirit alone can lead us toward human survival.

We wage, in our way, a revolution based on love. We seek to replace an old, oppressive order, not so much politically or socially, but within our minds where it lives and works. We try to hate no one, for we recognize that hatred itself is the enemy. We hope to change the world into a place of grace and love. The first shots have rung out in this revolution, but they were not shots. They were bursts of light, streaming silently yet dramatically through the hearts and minds of millions. This historic unfoldment has already begun, and it is playing out on inner planes. The question on most people’s minds, whether conscious or unconscious, is this: What will happen now?

From channeled entities claiming to hail from the Pleiades to fundamentalist Christians, from the prophecies of Nostradamus to visions of the Virgin Mary, from angels who whisper to a backwoods carpenter to scientific think tanks, come predictions of global shift, perhaps cataclysm, in the years ahead. Our own inner sense corroborates the evidence: It doesn’t seem as though the future is going to be much like the past. It feels as though something is up, as though something significant and big is about to occur. It feels, for one thing, as though something is fundamentally wrong. It isn’t just the environment, just the wars, just the gangs or the violence or the drugs. It isn’t just the lack of values or integrity or love. Something lurks. In Yeats’s poem “The Second Coming,” he describes a time in which the center cannot hold. Our center isn’t holding. The center isn’t there.

And yet, the deeper the despair that seems to creep around the edges of things, the brighter the light that seems to beckon from the center. It turns out that the center only seemed not to be there; it has merely been ignored. To those who look inward, it is bright indeed. Now, in growing intensity and yearning, the mind of humanity is seeking its Source. The antidote to what is fundamentally wrong is the cultivation of what is fundamentally right. Should we choose to expand who we are on a fundamental level, new structures will replace the casualties of premillennial disintegration, and the next twenty years will usher in an age of light more dazzling than the world has known. The next twenty years will be the deciding factor. We need all our attention and all our focus to turn the species in the direction of survival. Ultimately, the choice to love each other is the only choice for a survivable future. The meek shall inherit the earth because everyone else will have died on their swords.

Every time we open our hearts, we create the space for a global alternative. The opening of the heart is an awesome personal politic, providing us with an internal strength greater than any worldly power. As we receive God’s love and impart it to others, we are given the power to repair the world. As we give up our collective enslavement to the dictates of Western materialism, we relinquish the increasingly primitive belief that the world outside remains unaffected by our thoughts. We have begun to recognize that our individual minds create our collective realities, and we are ready to take responsibility for the world by taking more seriously our individual contributions to it.

Personal transformation can and does have global effects. As we go, so goes the world, for the world is us. The revolution that will save the world is ultimately a personal one. Some people think that things are no worse now than they have ever been, that all this talk of some millennial shift is nonsense, even dangerous. Perhaps this book is not for them. I am not trying to convince anyone of the reality of a global crisis; I am concerned, as are millions of others, with increasing consensus and hope among those who already believe that there is one. This is the drama of our times: the climax of our historical epoch as we reach the conclusion of the twentieth century. Our planet, our species, our generation is shifting. And they are all the same shift. This is not a personal story, though everyone’s personal life is affected andeveryone’s life affects the story. Like strands of DNA, all of us are coded with the history and possibilities of the species. Ours is a collective, generational drama, for our dramas at their core are all the same story. We all came from the angels and we have all fallen far. Now we are poised on the edge of a cliff. As a group, we will fall, or as a group we will fly.

(Williamson, Marianne. Illuminata: Thoughts, Prayers, Rites of Passage (pp. 1-6). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.)

That was written in 1994 – 23 years ago. So now let’s look at a piece she wrote last year.

Blog Post: July 11, 2016
In A Course in Miracles it says there is a limit beyond which we cannot miscreate. What this means is that when we are using our minds in a loveless, i.e. miscreative way, it will only be so long before the whole thing falls apart.
Modern civilization is in many ways predicated on miscreative thought, the realities of love and brotherhood and justice and mercy far too often pushed to the side by our blind obeisance to principles of greed and domination. In that sense, nature has needed to rebalance itself. It was an illusion to think things could continue as they were.
What we are experiencing now are signs of a reckoning, which of itself is neither good nor bad. If we place this period in a sacred context, enough of us rising to the occasion of co-creating miraculous possibilities wherever we are, then this will one day be looked back on as the time when humanity began to wake up. If, on the other hand, we allow ourselves to use contemporary dramas to simply bolster the ego, tempting enough of us to keep crouching within the self-created cages of our narrowness and fear, then this will one day be looked back upon as a time when humanity lost its mind.

If you’re wondering where the leaders are, then that’s a sign you are to rise up and be one. If you’re wondering what the Answer is, that’s a sign you are to answer Love’s call. If you’re wondering where the love is, that’s a sign you’re being called upon to look inside your heart.

The world is falling apart in many ways, because humanity has not cleaved to love. And in our modern arrogance, we thought we could get away with that. Alas we cannot, and the time has come when the moral order of the universe will re-assert self — with or without our cooperation. Denial and distraction can numb you to the revolution, but they can no longer protect you from the revolution. On the level of consciousness, it has already begun. There are only two choices for any individual: to join the revolution of love, or endure the revolution of fear.

Wherever you are and whatever you’re doing, you’re imbued with a mission: to be the presence of the Alternative, the uplifter of energy, the worker of miracles, a conduit of love. No one but you can determine whether you will accept this mission. But the time has come. Nothing is more important now than that we commit more deeply, and support each other, in doing our best to go all the way… to join our forces in co-creating with God the massive wave of cosmic love that will dissolve our fear and purify our hearts, that tears shall be no more.
The light within is the light of a new horizon, if it’s the light we choose to follow now. The outer eye reveals all kinds of trouble, but the eye within reveals trouble’s end. As God said to Joshua, “Do not be terrified, do not lose hope, for I go with you wherever you go.”

So as you go on your way this week, this strange week in American history, and always everywhere you go, remember God’s words to Joshua:

“Do not be terrified, do not lose hope, for I go with you wherever you go.”