Conscious Community

by Gregory Ellison

Carrie Chesney, our regular Conscious Community mistress, is taking a break to deal with midterm schoolwork crunch this month. She will be back as usual in the January mini-issue for a forward look toward conscious community in 2004.

Conscious evolution is a process of evolving into ever more inclusive conscious awareness … or to put it another way, a process of chipping away at our sense of what is “other than” ourselves, until there is nothing in creation from which we are truly separate. This is the movement from pure ego to spiritual awareness of our connection with all of life. In this sense conscious evolution and conscious community-building are one and the same, with the ultimate goal of our journey a reunion with the community of souls we might call God.

At this time of year it is natural in many religious and cultural traditions to give thanks for the blessings of the past year and to take stock of what we have accomplished, to revitalize and dedicate ourselves to the tasks of the coming year. For our little online community here at Conscious Evolution it’s been an amazing year! We’ve seen the first full year of publishing metamorphosis, which has grown from a tiny core of forum discussion members to over 10,000 subscribers worldwide. We’ve seen a growing awareness of ourselves as a true community with a mission to spread light and love across the planet — and that has manifested in a number of ways, including the formation of the Rainbow Light Circle to consciously direct love and healing energy to all who request it, and the launch of the Conscious Evolution Community Co-op to provide an outlet for members of the spiritual community to offer their labor-of-love products and services in an environment that emphasizes personal quality, craftsmanship and spiritual values in the world of trade and commerce needed to keep body and soul together here on the physical plane.

We’ve also seen a lot of personal challenges and transformations in our individual lives — as have all of us living on the planet in these critical times of change. With members from all over the world, we’ve walked with one another through massive power outages in North America and the U.K., open street riots in Guatemala, terror bombings in India, political murders in Sweden. We’ve been touched directly and indirectly by the violence and warfare in the middle east and elsewhere, watched and discussed — sometimes hotly debated! — the deepening struggle between the ideals of freedom and security in the “free world,” lived through the personal loss of livelihood and shrinking economic horizons in the growing divide between the “haves” and the “have nots” of the world as the rich get richer and the poor get poorer even as the rhetoric for spreading democracy and economic justice blares loudly from the mouths of our leaders. We’ve come to know each other better on a personal level, and to understand the behind-the-scenes workings of the “world order” on a deeper level.

It’s not been an easy year for most of us. Change is often painful, even when the final outcome is much to be desired. It is always hard to see the forest for the trees when you’re lost in the woods, but many of us are beginning to realize that we are not merely “looking forward” to the massive transformation of consciousness that new age prophets have been heralding as the entry into the Age of Aquarius, but are actually in the throes of it now … and understanding that the New Age is not a matter of simply waiting passively for a golden transformation to arrive, but of conscious choice and action to bring about the values we have the potential to realize on a global scale … and to understand the perilous consequences of failing to make those choices and act on them. We are beginning to truly grasp that there is a “new world order” in the making one way or the other … but whether it is a spirit-based world of compassion and harmony or an Orwellian nightmare of technology-based compulsion and control is an open question: one that only we ourselves can and must answer.

We are consciously evolving!

Making a difference

Longtime member Lindy Wren created a public service website recently (People Against Live Export) to protest the cruel treatment of live animal export from her native Australia. Because her web host wasn’t set up for it, we offered to create an online petition for her and host it on our own server. Many Conscious Evolution members signed the petition and voiced their outrage at the horrendously cruel treatment of these animals, as did thousands of others on her site and other animal rights sites. These efforts have won widespread public attention and over 65,000 petition signatures were tabled in the Australian Senate, with the likely outcome that this barbaric practice will be permanently halted!

* White light and love for… *

• Carrie (enchantress299) who recently lost her grandmother after a heart attack..



• Amykins, whose cousin James was declared brain-dead after a serious car accient



• Rainbow, whose mother passed away after a battle with cancer.



• Cristina (Libra-Sun) who lost her Aunt Luming to cancer.



• Dong-Yue Zhang, a 9-year-old who goes by the name Cecilia, who went missing from her home in a north Toronto neighbourhood.



• Ann, the grandmother of the 3 kids that Connie told us about on the forums (and for the kids themselves.) The kids are now in foster care and beg Ann to take them with her everytime she meets them. Ann suspects they may be facing some kind of abuse in their foster home, but her efforts at acquiring custody have not borne any fruit yet.



• Terri Schindler Schiavo, the mentally disabled woman whose life still hangs in the balance as her husband fights for her “right to die.” He is currently challenging the constitutionality of “Terri’s law,” the Florida legislature’s emergency bill that saved Terri’s life last October.



• All those who might not wish to be acknowledged in public, who have made prayer and white light requests to the Rainbow Light Circle.

Next month will be our now-traditional January “mini-issue,” when we’ll give our hardworking metamorphosis committee a chance to rest and celebrate the holidays with friends and family. We’ll be here in abbreviated form, with a look forward to 2004 and a peek at the exciting features and articles in store for all our readers in the coming year. If any of you have any comments, questions, community suggestions or white light requests, please either PM enchantress299 or e-mail metamorphosis@consciousevolution.com.

Happy Holidays!