Patricia Pearce

Helping You Be the Change

When the People Lead

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It’s time to direct our energy and attention toward The New.

I feel like I should write something about Donald Trump’s impeachment hearing this week, but the truth is, I’m tired of Donald Trump. I’m tired of the drama. I’m tired of the vitriol, the division, the delusions.

I’m just plain tired. This political drama isn’t where I want to focus my energies anymore. It’s like an energy vampire that feeds on the very thing it seems to demand of us: our attention.

I know that what is ready to arise on this planet isn’t going to come from you or me or any of us focusing on how screwed up the existing system is. That’s obvious. We get it. We don’t need to obsess about it.

The time has come, instead, for us to turn away from the ego’s addictive drama—whether that drama is playing out on the political stage or in the recesses of our own mind—and be willing to turn in a new direction, toward the truth of Love and its embodiment in the world.

Before Trump arrived on the scene, I wrote very little about the political landscape. I was much more interested in the inner landscape, because that’s where true transformation happens.

But when Trump erupted on our national political stage I felt drawn to speak to the phenomenon we were witnessing, because it was so obvious to me that there was much more to it than most people were recognizing on the face of things.

From the outset I saw Trump as someone who is exemplifying the egoic consciousness of separateness that humans must now leave behind, if for no other reason than that the wellbeing of the ecosystem we are part of requires it of us.

I saw that Trump was serving an important purpose, quite unintentionally I might add, by helping us see so clearly how the ego mind operates and the kind of world it fashions so that we could choose differently.

That’s really what the impeachment is all about: giving those in Congress the chance to choose differently. Whether or not they do, though, won’t have any effect on the bigger picture. Unitive consciousness is emerging, even more quickly now because of the excesses of ego that we have seen of late. (As the Tao te Ching says, “If you want to shrink something, you must first allow it to expand.”)

Here’s something for us to remember: it is often the “leaders” who are the last to get on board with big change, and the current shift in consciousness is perhaps the biggest change this planet has ever experienced.

I’m reminded of the story of Jonah, the prophet in the Hebrew Scriptures, who was commanded by God to go to Nineveh and tell them they needed to repent because otherwise they were headed for catastrophe.

Jonah didn’t want to go. He probably had no interested in saving the Ninevites, who were, from his vantage point, the enemies. In fact, he so didn’t want to go that he tried to flee his calling, ended up (long story) getting swallowed up by a big fish and then vomited out on dry land, at which point he finally went to Nineveh to fulfill his function, albeit reluctantly.

Much to his consternation, upon hearing his message the Ninevites repented and their catastrophic fate was averted, which made Jonah exceedingly unhappy.

But the thing that has always intrigued me the most about that story is how the Ninevites ended up repenting. As Jonah walked across the city preaching his message of doom and gloom, it was the people who proclaimed a fast and put on sackcloth. It was the people who turned toward a new way (which is what repent actually means).

It wasn’t until the king got word of what was going on that he too put on sackcloth, sat himself down in ashes, and decreed a time of national repentance, making what the people were already doing a “public policy.”

We get all worked up when the leaders don’t lead, when they don’t have the vision or the guts to forge a new society, or prepare the way for a new world. But the thing is, transformation is never going to come from the Oval Office or the halls of Congress. It is going to come from us, from We the People.

And true transformation, the transformation that will give rise to a world that reflects the Reality of Love, originates within each of us. It is a shift in consciousness that, as I have said before, is an inside job.

It is toward The New, not the old, that I want to direct my attention and energy now. As Buckminster Fuller famously said, “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”

I don’t expect the Senate to convict Donald Trump in these proceedings. They might surprise me, but I think there is way too much fear in that body to defect from the ego and its ways. The “leaders” are scared, which means we are the ones who will need to be bold enough to repent, audacious enough to choose differently, radical enough to align ourselves inwardly and outwardly with the truth of Love. And when we do, you can be assured the “leaders” will follow.

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The Great Conjunction

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It is the conjunction within that opens the way for a new world.

When I was a child, one summer evening I was out in our front yard with my mother watching a sky ablaze with spectacular pinks and oranges. It was one of those sunsets where you feel like you are witnessing the otherworldly.

My mother was a woman of deep faith, although she rarely spoke about it. But that evening, gazing at the sunset, she confided in me, “This is how I imagine the Second Coming will be. Jesus will descend on clouds like these.”

As far fetched as it may sound, her understanding of the Second Coming was quite conventional. In the Second Coming, Jesus—who was understood to be the one and only embodiment of Christ—would descend to earth again and establish a long-awaited reign of peace.

The Second Coming has been anticipated for centuries, since the time of the first followers of Jesus who expected his return to occur at any moment, and certainly during their lifetimes. That no such dramatic re-appearance happened caused some consternation among the emerging community. There was no intervention from the heavens. No overthrow of the worldly powers-that-be—and all these centuries later we are still waiting.Continue Reading

Ode to Darkness

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As a culture we are starved for Mystery.

I love this time of year. I love the long quiet nights, the candles, the turning inward. For me, the winter solstice, when the days begin to grow longer, always comes too soon. I want more time to immerse myself in the darkness.

I know this is a difficult season for many people, when the lengthening nights seem to evoke feelings of despair and dread. Yet I find the darkness beautiful. I experience it as the Mystery, the Unknown, the Numinous that is so much vaster than my conscious awareness can fathom.

This morning I got up early, before the first daylight. The crescent moon cradled itself toward the eastern horizon and the morning star gleamed in the pre-dawn sky—and it was the darkness that bestowed upon them their beauty.

I am awed by the fact that the universe is comprised mostly of dark matter. It is overwhelmingly made up of something that is hidden to us, undetectable to us, and yet unmistakably present.

That’s the way I experience the darkness. There is a Presence in it that transcends the reach of my ordinary senses. In the darkness I perceive the limitations of my knowing. I bow before the Mystery.

I suppose it is our fear of the unknown that makes us fear the darkness and want to drive it away, dispel it with whatever feeble torches we can fashion. We are so afraid of not knowing.

And yet turning toward the Mystery is so essential. To apprehend that there is so much we do not know is the beginning of wisdom, the portal to awe.

I had a dream once, years ago, in which I am out in the wilderness, in the mountains, staying at a lodge. It is night, and I step out onto a balcony and look up. When I see the canopy of the Milky Way overhead, a deep relief washes over me, and I realize that, having lived for so long in the city, I have been suffering from star-vation.

As a culture we are starved for Mystery, starved for the awe that comes when we accept our inability to comprehend the vastness of our existence, starved for the parts of ourselves that linger beyond the light of our awareness.

In the winter months, we sometimes don’t get enough sunlight to meet our body’s need for vitamin D. But in our contemporary society, in which we go to such great lengths to banish the night, there is another sort of deficiency that inflicts our spirits: darkness deprivation.

This alienation from the Unknown, this estrangement from Mystery, is making this planetary time so much more difficult than it needs to be.

We find ourselves collectively in a time of darkness, of unknowing. Having watched in shock the sunset of our certainties, we no longer know what to expect, and we cannot see what is before us.

And yet Love encompasses All. It is as present in the darkness as it is in the light.

In this season, many of us celebrate the incarnation of Christ-consciousness. And while traditionally that consciousness has been ascribed to a single individual, it is a consciousness that lies within us all. Dormant perhaps, as the seed lies dormant in the dark soil, but present nonetheless.

Christ-consciousness has been described as the awareness of existing in relationship with All That Is, which means being aware of existing in relationship with the darkness as well as the light, the unknown as well as the known. This is the awareness that flowers into trust, into faith.

May this season of the long nights bestow upon you the blessing of the darkness. May you experience awe in the face of the unknown, and bow before the Mystery of your existence with All That Is.

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The Reality of Oneness

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You are the eyes through which the Universal Mind sees Itself.

A friend emailed me recently asking if I could clarify what I mean when I use the term “oneness.” It’s a term she finds quite distasteful because to her it smacks of an amorphous, undifferentiated blob.

Although in my writing I often use terms like inter-existence, inter-beingness, interdependence or interconnectedness rather than oneness, I thought I would take some time to describe in more detail what I mean by all of it.

To do that, though, I need to give some autobiographical context, because when I speak of this it isn’t an abstract concept for me. It comes from a very formative experience I had years ago.

Almost two decades ago, a very close friend of mine died, and her death prompted me to resolve to open to deeper dimensions of my existence that I sensed were there but had never known.

Some while later I began to experience an onslaught of synchronicities too numerous and implausible for my worldview to accommodate. It felt like my reality was cracking apart.Continue Reading

The Inner Election

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The most significant vote you will ever cast is the one within yourself.

I’ve written before that in this time of global awakening Donald Trump is a figure who is helping us see clearly what the ego mind looks like, how it thinks, what it values and how it behaves so that we can choose whether we want it sitting in the Oval Office of our own executive function.

What is transpiring inside the mind as we make this epic movement from one consciousness—the egoic consciousness of separateness—to the unitive consciousness of oneness is being reflected right now on the political stage during this election season. And because the events in the “external” world are depicting what is taking place on the inner plane, they can be very instructive for you in your own awakening process if you are willing to be open to what they have to teach you. So let’s take a look, shall we?

First of all, you can see how the ego mind keeps alive the idea of separateness by creating doubt and confusion in the mind, encouraging the mind to see the world through the divisive lens of us/them, gaslighting the mind to convince it that what is false is true and what is true is false, promoting the idea of enemy, spreading fear. You can also see the drama of the ego mind and how it constantly churns out fictitious narratives to distract you from the present Moment where you would inevitably encounter the Reality of Love and realize that the ego is a meaningless illusion, a story in the mind.

On the political stage it is also significant that during this election season there is such a frantic scramble to fill the vacant seat on the Supreme Court. This is, if you’ll excuse the pun, supremely symbolic because judgment is the very thing that keeps ego in control of the mind. It is judgment that creates the perception of separateness, and without it the whole egoic illusion would collapse in an instant. It makes perfect sense then, that, in this moment of decision, ego would turn to the institution that represents judgment to provide its last line of defense.

Now this is where you can begin to see the seemingly paradoxical nature of your transition out of egoic consciousness: it is the ego mind’s nature to judge and fight, so if you choose to judge and fight ego you have actually aligned yourself with it. You have, de facto, voted in favor of it.

Ego is not the enemy. (In fact, there are no enemies except in the egoic worldview.) Ego is simply a glitch in the matrix of the mind, an erroneous anomaly, a pseudo-self playing out the illusion of separateness that the mind mistook to be real.

Just so, Trump is not the enemy. He is simply exhibiting what this error of the mind looks like. If you see him as the enemy you are actually viewing him from the ego mind itself and are reinforcing the egoic patterns in your own mind.

The same goes for yourself. In what ways do you see yourself as the enemy? In what ways do you judge and try to fight against some aspect of yourself? How willing are you to relinquish such self-attack and to accept that you are and always have been one with Love?

So while the movement beyond ego is not about fighting, it is very much about choosing, and the key question is: Are you willing?

Are you willing to allow the egoic patterns in your own mind to dissolve?

Are you willing to release the concept of enemy?

Are you willing to yield to the Reality of Love?

The ego would have you believe you have to make all of this happen. But that simply isn’t true. In the Reality of Love, of inter-beingness, there are countless entities and energies available to help, and all they need from you is the go-ahead.

Yes, this is a confusing and turbulent time. How could it not be? The ground we’re standing on is shifting beneath our feet as one reality gives way to another, or more accurately, a false understanding of reality gives way to Reality itself.

And yet I am very hopeful, because, turbulent though these times may be, they are giving us exactly what we need in this moment of choice. More and more of us are seeing what is at stake, realizing we can’t go on like this, recognizing that the changes we wish to see in the world begin within us. And when a critical mass of us have cast our inner ballot to opt out of the ego mind and its version of reality, the world will change profoundly, and far more quickly than we ever could have imagined.

So please, vote. Vote in the national election, of course. But also remember that the most significant vote you will ever cast is the one within yourself.

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The Quiet Coup

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The coup that will change the world is already well underway.

For as long as I can remember, the ritual in our national political theater that has always moved me to tears is the moment after a presidential inauguration when the outgoing president boards the helicopter and flies away. It is an enactment of what is perhaps the most extraordinary characteristic of democracy: the peaceful transition of power.

It brings me to tears because I am aware of how precious it is, how novel it is, in a world that has for so long been governed by egoic drives for power and control, and it exemplifies the fundamental break with the past that the founders of our country made when they decided the United States would not be a monarchy.

Knowing that Donald Trump is completely beholden to the ego-mind, I have always had a hard time envisioning him peaceably getting on that helicopter and flying away, honoring the will of the people and the democratic process. This is not a condemnation of him. It is simply an observation of him. It is not in his constitution to yield power and control.Continue Reading

Our Collective Exhaustion

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It requires an enormous amount of energy to deny the undeniable

When I got up this morning and saw the news bulletin on my phone that Trump announced last night that he and Melania have tested positive for COVID-19, my immediate and instinctual response was concern for them both. Empathy, I suppose. Even though I disagree with Trump’s positions on, well, just about everything, I do not wish him ill. In fact, I wish him wholeness.

But along with the empathy, this morning I feel exhaustion. I think many of us do. This has been grueling. The body-blows that the daily news delivers are almost more than we can handle.  Day. After day. After day. After day. It has been relentless.

What I’m noticing, though, is that the exhaustion I feel doesn’t seem like it belongs to “me.” It feels like a collective exhaustion that is in the collective energy field.

It’s as if we’re trying to hold back a tsunami—frantically trying to plug the cracks that keep opening up in the dikes—to keep the world we’ve known from being inundated by a force that seems so much bigger than we are.Continue Reading

The Media and the Egoic Need for Enemies

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The media delivers what the ego wants.

I read a very interesting article recently by Matt Taibbi that summarized his book Hate Inc.: Why Today’s Media Makes Us Despise One Another. In it, Taibbi, a journalist, talks about the evolution of the media in recent decades, and how it has become financially dependent upon peddling the idea of enemy.

Taibbi explains how, before the advent of the internet and the proliferation of news outlets, the media’s strategy was to reach the widest possible audience, because the wider their audience, the more advertising revenue they received. As a result, the news media presented information that was acceptable to the largest segment of the population and avoided extremist angles or ideologies.

But with the introduction of 24 hour news channels and the Internet, which led to a proliferation of news sources and the decimation of classified ad revenue, the media’s strategy changed. Now the objective became to identify a niche demographic and give them what they wanted.

One thing they discovered is that most people want news that confirms their biases about people they don’t like.Continue Reading