Transcending the chaos

Today, perhaps more than any other time in human history, we are seeing the rebirth of a unity consciousness that incorporates many ancient streams of knowledge with the desire to write a new destiny for the human race. This rekindling of ancient wisdom with modern day mysticism is being brought about by the quest to bring a deeper meaning into a world that seems to have lost it; a fast-paced, materialistic world that seems to be obsessed with violence, death, and killing. Perhaps one of the reasons this resurgence is needed is because we can see how badly the world needs balance. We feel it personally in the stress of our daily lives, the imbalance of our relationships, and the ecological crisis of the Earth herself.

Yet in the midst of this chaos there is a new kind of human being born, a being that I call homo luminous; a man or woman of inner light who may perhaps be the next step in our evolution as a species. These are people who yearn to create the type of world where war, pollution, and struggle are a thing of the past; who have an innate sense of the sacredness of life and are committed to finding a way back to it. As forerunners to this more enlightened kind of human, we seek to move past the distractions in our outer world to find a more eternal Truth. We want to transcend the chaos of our heavy-handed politics, our materially co-opted media, our patriarchal religions, and the dysfunctional patterns of our relationships that have been handed down by our families. We are people who search for the beautiful, the true and the eternal. These luminous human beings know that in order to bring a new and better world into being, they must somehow align with these more eternal principles, if the world we are living in now is to ever heal.

But discovering what has caused this imbalance in the world is not an easy task. Untangling the strings of history, culture, religion and power is not something generally discussed on the evening news. My book The Return of the Divine Sophia is a journey towards unraveling these elements of cultural belief that have caused us to fall out of rhythm with the Cosmos. By understanding how our past has shaped our present, and how our theological beliefs have programmed our societies, we can then chose whether to continue the path we are on, or rewrite our own destinies.

The ancient Mysteries of the past hold certain keys to recovering this inner balance that can help us to transform our world. These ancient teachings were taught within the great Mystery Schools some 4000 years before the birth of Jesus, and some 400 years after the Crucifixion. These sages saw the Universe as infinitely vast, and also profoundly personal, embracing the concepts of both God Within and God Without, concepts that we now call Immanence and Transcendence. They reconciled the disciplines of philosophy, religion, and science into one unified field, and they honored the Creator of the Universe as the Divine Father and Mother of the All.

At the heart of this wisdom is an inner alchemy that Jesus called the Way. It is a path of integration and transformation that embraces both the divine masculine and feminine within the heart. It is the inner path of Sacred Union taught by Jesus and by Mary Magdalene, but these teachings have also been taught by Thoth, the god of wisdom in ancient Egypt, by sages in Taoism and the Sufi world, and in the Old Religions of the Goddess, with people who lived close to the land and the natural cycles of nature. Intrinsic to the Way is the reclaiming of the Divine Father/Mother God within the heart. This creates a wave of enlightenment for ourselves and our societies… giving us the power to change our world.

Many of these secrets were encoded in the language of sacred myth and story so that they would not be forgotten, yet most of us can no longer translate the meanings behind this symbolism, steeped as we are in a less than enlightened society. It is only now as we embrace the sciences of astronomy, cosmology, genetics, biology, and quantum physics that we are really beginning to understand how these “myths” are really founded on deeper truths. We must explore the teachings of the Goddess, the inner alchemy of Union, the wisdom of the Masters, to discover the path that will lead us back to wholeness as a planet.

by Tricia McCannon, author of The Return of the Divine Sophia