(From a Wednesday Evening Service at Sunrise Ranch)

We are building an online platform. We had expected to name it Regeneration Earth. But somebody right down the street in Boulder has a similar name, so we thought we had better find a new one. After a lot of brainstorming, we did—Global Emergence: Regenerative Culture for a New World.

We found a developer from Chicago, Spencer Foreman, to help us create the site. It will be an online educational platform as well as a social network. We think of it as a university with a learning community composed of faculty, students and alumnae. And within the university there will be individual schools with streams of knowledge coming through each one and sub-communities revolving around the streams of knowledge.

This platform is an expression of the evolutionary urge within us, and we are creating it to serve that urge in humanity. I recently found a relevant article by two scientists on the role of evolutionary urge. The authors point to the evolutionary urge operating within consciousness and culture as a central factor for humankind.

That same urge is present in all species and in all Creation. What thrives has an urge to thrive. So if you had a species without that urge, the culture of that species would not adapt to changing circumstances. The species that have survived are those that have adapted.

But it is not only the external circumstances that change. The unseen vibrational factors change also. We all probably notice that what worked last year is no longer relevant in the same way today. The evolutionary urge calls us to adapt to changes in the seen and unseen dimensions of reality.

There are politicians calling for a Green New Deal. Their proposal would transition the United States to 100% renewable, zero-emission energy sources. Clearly, this would be a drastic change to our culture. Is this not a response to the evolutionary urge? A response to the urge to thrive?

But it is not only in our life as a species where the evolutionary urge is operative. The same is true in an individual life, and for families, communities and organizations. The context in which we live is constantly changing, and if we do not adapt we become extinct. Things don’t stay the same at Sunrise Ranch, or anyplace else, and if we are struggling with last year’s issues, we are not adapting.

The evolutionary urge is at work in the field of Attunement, in which we are currently very active. We just developed an Introduction to Attunement seminar, which we conducted at Edenvale Retreat and Conference Centre and in Kamloops, both in British Columbia. Why? Because the world is changing. We are changing. The practice of Attunement is evolving. So the evolutionary urge within us calls us to adapt.

This is from the article I mentioned:

The adaptive changes in the species enable it to accept new opportunity for living or to resist the unfavorable environmental change. But the response may or may not always be successful. It is the intensity of the urge that determines the success or failure of the organism to adapt. The urgency for adaptation felt by an organism determines the intensity of its urge. Different organisms differ in their perception of the urgency for adaptation. The organisms that fail to adapt are thus eliminated because of their failure to properly assess and implement the urgency.

The urge of the species is having its own field, which is the field of its mind and thought.

Asima Tripathy and Rajat Kumar Pradhan

It is the intensity of the urge that determines the success or failure of the organism to adapt, and I do believe we are a group of people who are feeling that urge very strongly in our own lives. That’s how we all got here. We are feeling that urge now, calling us to grow into whatever is next. That’s true for everybody in this room and it’s true for us together. We can’t be last year’s Sunrise Ranch. We have to adapt and become the Sunrise Ranch we are destined to be. The evolutionary urge is present within the consciousness and the culture that we are sharing.

The authors’ statement regarding the intensity of the urge as a causative factor in the adaptation of a species reminds me of this statement by Lloyd Arthur Meeker:

According to your response, so is it established unto you.

The evolutionary urge is actually present in all people. But apparently we have an ability to turn our back on it; to listen to it or not. It has to land in our heart and then activate us to make a difference in our lives. So the distinction isn’t actually the presence of the urge. It is there in all people. We come from a lineage that has the urge within it. The difference is whether we open to it and let it activate us so that we become a living expression of the intensity of the urge. Then it becomes strong enough to get us off our butt. Strong, positive feelings and visionary thoughts are delightful and necessary. But adaptive changes don’t come until we get off our butt and we actually move with the urge.

That’s what’s happening for us individually and all together. The urge is moving us. We are part of a collective consciousness that is emerging through each of us uniquely. What is being born in your thoughts and in your heart is in some way different from me, or the person next to you. It is all connected but not the same. We each have a piece of the whole gestalt of Creation that is moving in culture and in consciousness. The evolutionary urge has us as a species acting together to thrive. We don’t thrive because we all run in opposite directions. We thrive because we become aware that we are doing one thing together, each offering our unique gifts to the project.

Together, as Emissaries of Divine Light, we are playing a crucial role in a field of consciousness and culture that extends out beyond us. We are being activated as a living expression of the evolutionary urge within the larger field of consciousness and culture. And while this has been happening to us, it is now happening through us as well. We are at an amazing inflection point in this process.

At breakfast in Kamloops yesterday morning I was with Hugh and Barb Duff, Marilyn Manderson and Keahi Ewa. I was reflecting on the Global Emergence online platform. At one level, we are merging a learning management system with an enlightened social network, and that’s exciting. We will be able to produce courses and connect people in the context of a learning environment. Actually, Facebook itself was originally created as a social network for college students. In our case, we will be connecting people who are feeling the evolutionary urge and acting on it in the world. We’ll be offering them a place to learn and interact.

What I was sharing at the breakfast table yesterday morning was that a profound shift in consciousness isn’t brought without a form to embody it and give it expression. The Egyptians built the Great Pyramid. Lao Tzu wrote the Tao Te Ching. The poems Rumi dictated filled six volumes. And Moses didn’t come down from Mount Sinai empty-handed. He carried two stone tablets with the Ten Commandments. It’s put like this in Exodus:

And it came to pass, when Moses came down from mount Sinai with the two tables of testimony in Moses’ hand, when he came down from the mount, that Moses [knew] not that the skin of his face shone while he talked….

Yes, his face shone with Christ Consciousness. But he also had a stone form that carried a new spiritual reality to the people. There are specific embodied expressions of spirit that are harbingers of a shift of culture and consciousness. I believe this online platform is exactly that.

Generally speaking, we don’t realize how much the culture and consciousness that we are in is defining our life. What I am suggesting to you is that we, ourselves, as spiritually awake people are nonetheless in a field of culture that is largely mired in separation. Even at Sunrise Ranch, where we have made major strides in breaking down the walls between us and where we have committed ourselves to the end of loneliness, we are still laboring within a culture that is rooted in an experience of separateness. But it’s not just at Sunrise Ranch where people are in this position. Spiritually awake people around the world are laboring under this same cultural field with its paradigm of separation. Because of this, the field of enlightened consciousness and culture that would ideally be supporting us, connecting us, activating us and empowering us, is not present nearly to the degree that it could be.

And so, what I see is that this online platform, Global Emergence, is an opportunity for us to activate a new paradigm; to not only put up a website but to create a field of consciousness that is persistent in our own experience and persistent in the field of people that we are meeting and touching. We are inviting people to be in this field with us. We are energizing this field, so that for everybody who is participating in it there is a surround of uplifting conscious energy that carries the charge of Creation within it. We hardly know what that’s like because we have grown so accustomed to living without it.

When we catch a vision of what we could create among us—not only for ourselves but for people we invite to share in this endeavor—a magnificent opportunity opens up before us. The evolutionary urge is now activated in us, and we are adapting to the current circumstance of the world in which we live and to changing vibrational factors. So we are using this online platform as a form that brings a profound shift in consciousness and culture as an answer to the evolutionary urge and to the great need that is present in the world.

The urge to thrive was strong at the end of the Introduction to Attunement workshop in Kamloops. People could hardly believe the profound sense of connection they felt. We took down e-mails and we will do our best to stay in touch. But still, in some way it was the same old story. The participants were going back to their own homes and to a culture that is largely defined by separation and loneliness. That has been the spiritual experience for so many—a workshop high followed by a crash. The surround for them is not yet adequate to the need.

I envision that one day soon we will have an iPad at our workshops that we will use to register people as participants in the Global Emergence platform. The participants will be invited to be part of a learning environment and an enlightened social network. More than that, they will experience a cultural surround and an energetic field that connects them. The platform will be the living embodiment of that field.

This will mean that the culture they experienced in the workshop will persist. The creative energetic field they experienced will persist. It will sustain through time.

The creative field embodied by the platform will also be pervasive. It will be available through the platform around the globe wherever there is an Internet connection and a person with a mobile device. And about 5 billion people around the world have mobile devices.

That is what is so exciting. We aren’t just creating a website. We are creating a persistent and pervasive field of culture, consciousness and energy that connects, supports, activates and empowers people wherever they are.

Global Emergence: Regenerative Culture for a New World.