The Invisible Thread

Despite deep fears of terrorism, economic or environmental threats, the anxiety that is present in our culture does not come from any outside force. The real problems we are facing are not political, sociological, or even ecological. Rather we are recognizing that something in our foundation no longer holds. This is the deep reason for our collective unease that we projectonto outer forces which appear to threaten us.

It is time to look closely at what is really happening. The mystic has always known that in order to find the cause of any effect we have to turn our attention inward, to look at the inner patterns. We look to the hints in our dreams, we read the images of our psyche that are not censored by our conscious conditioning. When Joseph interpreted the dreams of the seven years of plenty and the seven lean years, Egypt was saved a catastrophe.

And yet we have rejected the images of the inner as belonging to mythological past or the psychiatrist's couch. Instead, we try to listen to the voices of the outer experts. But with so many newscasters, political and economic analysts, and even spiritual visionaries, how do we knoe who and what to trust? And do we even know how to listen?

But if we look carefully we can find a thread that links it all together - links our dreams and the stories on the news, links the trivia, the mundane and the sensational. There is a thread that is our collective destiny, and it is inside each of us as well as in the world around.

This thread is so simple it is overlooked. It is so ordinary we pass it by. It is in our hope, in our need to be loved, in the warmth of a handshake or the touch of a kiss. It is in the most basic connection between human beings, not the words we say but the very nature of communication. It is the simple fact that we all live together, whether in the slums or the suburbs. It is in the primal knowing that we are one.

In the simplicity of our human values, love and joy, and hope, we are all connected together. But we can only discover this connection when we return to this simple core of being. Otherwise we will fall apart with a world that has lost its center. When we return to this connection of the heart we will see what is being born, how a linking together of individuals, groups, and communities is taking place, how patterns of relationships are growing and how life energy is flowing along these patterns. Once again humanity is recreating itself, creating a new civilization amidst the old.

(Llwellyn Vaughan Lee)