New Year's Message from IONS President James O'Dea
Just what is your speed as you cross the threshold from 2006 to 2007? Time is accelerating quickly, isn’t it? How many emails are in your inbox? How many times do you get in and out of your car? How many bits of information do you need to retain? How much "news" can you take in? What is your data absorption capacity?
And how much time does all that leave for quality relationships?
"Time is an illusion," Einstein noted, "but a very persistent one". It can be the great illusion that drives everything in your life at greater and greater speeds, taunting you with the notion that you will be left behind if you are not taking in more and more every nanosecond. And so the very tools that liberate us can also leave us frustrated and enslaved if they manage to rob us of a fundamental and centered awareness concerning the source of our being.
The very momentum of modern life, with its complexity and diversity of images, can be both so alluring and so repugnant that we get pulled off center and wonder why we feel constantly forced to be more reactive than effective. The sheer velocity of cultural transition, technological innovation, and massive distraction occurring against a backdrop of climatic breakdown, war, and social upheaval adds to a sense that we have lost a coherent evolutionary center for our species to emerge into healthy and sustainable planetary civilization.
Yes, these are big times we live in—but one thing is really clear: IONS finds itself working at the very core of evolutionary transformation. What is emerging at the interface of frontier scientific exploration and the great spiritual wisdom of ages is a new organizing center for humanity as a whole. The insights emerging from conversations between neuroscientists and spiritual leaders; the birth of an integral approach to health that includes the inner life and extends all the way to societal healing; the dazzling questions arising out of explorations of quantum physics and consciousness; and the worldview shift that is being created by conscious people everywhere, transforming beliefs in ways that begin to tell a credible story of peaceful, creative, and sustainable life on earth...all these are at the heart of IONS work and of its impassioned and discerning members.
So I challenge you to engage more fully with us in the year ahead. Join the weekly teleseminar calls with the great luminaries of this evolutionary wisdom; participate in dialogues after the calls; use the Shift in Action site to download some of the most important conversations you may hear anywhere; share with your friends and family your favorite IONS CDs and Shift magazine articles. Join us in the work of engaging science and spirituality in conversations around the things that matter most: health and healing, developing extended capacities for love and compassion, the cultivation of wisdom and transformative practice, and exploring the really groundbreaking issues around the nature of consciousness itself. And please do your own viral marketing to invite change agents like yourself to join the Shift in Action program as members of The Institute of Noetic Sciences.
The speed with which 2007 will come and go can only be tested against how much you live your values during this charged evolutionary moment. It will be measured by how much you enter the conversation in ways that will change the story. Participate vividly, deeply, and memorably, and you will find that time itself will transform. You will have time to breathe deeply, to relate to others in ways that are less superficial; you will experience more being and less frenetic doing. We have come to refer to this as living in a state of Presence.
More than anything, I look forward in 2007 to feeling your presence, the growing presence of our global membership, and the wider presence of a transformative consciousness turning the tide of history in ways that will be truly awe-inspiring for each one of us and for all life on Earth.
