January/February 2006 Spirituality
An Evolutionary Shift of Human Consciousness

by Arjuna Ardagh talks to Miriam Knight

Arjuna Ardagh

M: Arjuna, what were you feeling when you decided to write The Translucent Revolution?

A: I was feeling like a misfit. I was feeling that my condition of experiencing the world and myself didn’t fit established pigeonholes. After many years of spiritual seeking, I experienced, in a moment out of time, a shift of identification: from being primarily identified with being a separate person, to being consciousness — spaciousness, to being the context in which all this is happening. In that shift there is a resolution of seeking. You really can’t think of yourself as a seeker any more. But at the same time I didn’t find that my experience conformed to the models of of enlightenment we have, someone just sitting in tranquil mediation all day. I have children and a mortgage and all the trappings of a regular life

I felt that my experience and what most people experience doesn’t really fit with the established pigeonholes that we have for spirituality. It really requires a new vocabulary, and that’s what prompted me to write the book, to look at all this with fresh eyes.

M: You used the archetype of Iago a lot in your book. Could you explain what you meant?

A: In the play Othello, Iago is a person who spreads deceit, mistrust, misunderstanding and separation. We all have our own Iago, an inner voice that creates doubt and separation and distrust. The Iago trance is the collective trance of mass consumerism. The idea that something is missing, the idea that if only you could change your life in some way then everything would be ok, that is what keeps us on the treadmill of improvement and change.

M: Isn’t consumerism a response to an underlying sense of lack?

A: I believe we need to make the important distinction between real lack and perceived lack. There is plenty of real lack in the world. But there is also perceived lack. Ironically, this sense that something is missing, that something is wrong, and the need to compulsively try and fix it is more prevalent among the privileged than among the underprivileged. If you go to a country like India, where a great deal of the population lives on less than a dollar a day, you see more people laughing, smiling, looking absent mindedly into the distance and enjoying trees, or a cup of tea. People in our country are actually much more driven by desire and the need for acquisition. It’s the obsession with imaginary lack that creates real lack. It’s the thinking that we don’t have enough that leads to such tremendous economic disparity in our world.

M: I noticed in the aftermath of the hurricane that it was actually ordinary people, even those with very little, who made all the difference until the government started moving.

A: I think also it shines a light on something that we also saw very poignantly in the months after 911. These kinds of disasters and catastrophes can bring out the best in people. While in one way the collective of society is heading more and more into this trance of consumerism, there is at the same time an undercurrent of people waking up from that trance and exploring ways of living on this planet without the compulsive need for more.

My book, The Translucent Revolution, is about this undercurrent of giving and generosity of spirit, and this is actually happening through more and more – people breaking the trance of separation and waking up to a dimension of themselves that is free, that is not lacking anything.

M: You said in your book that service is that antidote to the beggar mentality.

A: Yes, thank you for noticing that one.

M: I just loved that bit. I actually have St. Francis’ prayer tacked up on my office wall, and I am wondering whether that is the way to redemption for people who have been devastated by catastrophe. Getting into action to help each other, joining hands and working together; like old-time barn raising, it is joining in community and overcoming the feeling of isolation.

A: Yes, absolutely. We are definitely seeing evidence now of big collective shifts in consciousness as people learn the power of cooperation, the power for relaxing into one humanity.

M: For many Americans seeing poverty so starkly in their own country has been incredibly sobering. People are starting to ask harder questions of themselves too. What is really important? If I lost everything would I be able to start again? What would I do without a car or oil?

A: You know I think that everyone seems to recognize that we as a race are facing a time of change and crisis that is completely unprecedented. I think most people have come to accept what we are heading for some type of a crash and that it may well hurt more than we can anticipate. That is scary, and induces feelings of panic and powerlessness. But at the same time, although it can be difficult to see if from this perspective, from the perceptive of life itself and the evolution of life and consciousness, that kind of a crash could actually be a good thing, because it would bring with it the demolition of the machine that drives consumerism and the depletion of resources.

The more that we can voluntarily simplify, the more that we can voluntarily come back to really questioning "Why am I alive? What is important?" the more the shift can become easy, graceful, and simple.

M: It might help to have better leadership.

A: This shift needs to happen in us, not in Washington. It was Winston Churchill who said that people get the government they deserve. Washington will transform quite gracefully and naturally when we are willing to look at what is the deeper purpose, of human life. When you encourage people to really ask themselves "why am I am alive? What is it that gives my life meaning?" they discover that the reason really is much deeper; it’s for feeling the depth of this moment, it’s for the possibility of feeling connection in human form.

I know that I have come to find in my life sometimes just to look at one of my children sometimes to just savor the evening as I sit on my deck is so much more rich and meaningful and justifying than anything that can be traded, consumed, and which inevitably can also be taken away

M: Yes, it’s getting back to core values. Ok, what makes you feel good about the future?

A: Before I started to research and write The Translucent Revolution, I had no idea how vast this epidemic of sanity had become. For example, I had the thought that most, if not all big business was corrupt, was just there to take advantage of people. I had no idea that this awakening to a deeper level of fulfillment in oneself was not just the domain of so-called spiritual new age people. It had reached deep into organized religion, into politics, particularly social and political activism. It had reached deep into artists, musicians, writers, and deep into the business world. I realized that it doesn’t take very much of a percentage of a social system to shift for the whole system to shift, particularly when the shift is in the direction of greater sanity and wakefulness. This is what has become known recently as the tipping point.

Michael Gladwell wrote a book by that name, where he points out that it takes as little as one percent of people to wake up to a deeper truth for the whole social system to shift as well. That is what allows me to feel optimistic for the future. It’s really probably only going to take a few million people waking up in this way for the entire global society to be transformed. This is something that has already started to happen.

We are already seeing large multi-nation corporations transforming their philosophy and their way of doing business because of a shift in consciousness of a very few people within those organizations. I think the tide that has already turned under the surface and within the next years we are going to see the death throws of the old paradigm. We are going see that exhibited in warfare of fundamentalisms fighting each other. We are going to see some scary stuff come down. We are also going to see an evidence of a higher potential of humanity that has been brewing for some time arising more forcefully to meet the crisis. I think we are going to see, over the next years, our worst nightmares and our sweetest dreams comes true all at the same time

M: Well all we can do is pray that it comes quickly and as painlessly as possible.

A: Hallelujiah! That was the education I got from writing this book. You see an island here and an island there and you just see little islands. But when you can zoom out enough you can put them all together and you realize that it’s an archipelago. When you put the pockets of awakened consciousness in different parts of the world together you have an archipelago, and that is enough evidence of a really incredible, sustainable, undeniable evolutionary shift in human consciousness.

Arjuna Ardagh is the author of The Translucent Revolution: How People Just Like You are Waking Up and Changing the World. He is the founder of the Living Essence Foundation, which has trained over 450 practitioners to help facilitate our world’s shift in consciousness. Visit him online at www.translucentrevolution.org.

Arjuna will be speaking in the Pacific Northwest at the end of January, 2006. Check his website for details.