Yes, the world is an illusion. But Truth is always being shown there.
- proverb

Esteemed Reader of our Magazine:

There is a great gasp in the throat of humanity when we recognize that the old forms don't serve. We see the dinosauric institutions - the nations, religions, and corporations - begin to stumble and fall in this new climate of hyperactive communication. They are lashing out in a desperate fight to exist, but their behemoth bodies and tiny brains are no longer suitable. Evidently they will not die off without a fight.

Those with half-open eyes see that a great change is on the horizon. The looming question is, Can it be completed gracefully, without destroying the possibility of a future of harmonious, fruitful human existence? Clearly the change must begin with individuals and small groups who divorce themselves from the deadly paradigm relentlessly propagated through the dying institutions' organs of inculcation - secular education, theology, and corporate media, with its shows and "news" and advertising.

But how does one shed the vestigial beliefs and assumptions that hold our minds and beings in bondage? To illustrate the personal and collective situation, I offer a parable previously told by a Sufi called Awad Afifi the Tunisian, to his students. In this story, a stream, from its source in the far-off mountains, and passing through every kind of countryside, ultimately reaches the desert.

The stream was convinced its fate was to cross the desert. None of the methods it had employed to surmount every other obstacle had failed. But in the desert it formed an unpleasant quagmire at the edge of the sands. Finally, a voice came from the heart of the desert. It whispered: "The wind crosses the desert, and so can the stream."

The stream objected that the wind can fly, and the stream, being composed of water, could not.

"By hurtling in your accustomed way, you cannot get across," the voice continued. "You must allow the wind to carry you over, to your destination."

The stream could not believe it, but saw that the best that could be attained without attempting the suggestion would be to become a swamp. Either way the stream could not stay as it was.

So the stream raised its vapor into the welcoming arms of the wind and was carried over the sand to the mountains. In so doing the stream discovered its essence, which was utterly different from its form as a stream.
We, like the institutions we comprise, hurl ourselves against life with always the same tactics, striving desperately to retain our familiar egoic form. What we see as "ourselves" are the many aspects of identity acquired over years of psychic accretion. The fundamental question is the one utilized in the praxis of Sri Ramana Maharshi - Who am I?, and by extension, "Who are we?

What do we mean when we say "I"? The list is endless. I am my nationality, religion, sex, ethnicity, vocation, name, age, education - all descriptions of a form, but this says almost nothing about essence. And it seems that an entire life can go by without the inquiry into what we are, or anything is, really.
What the Greeks call metanoia - "change of mind" - is the first step on the road to a transformation that opens us to transportation to our destination - from discontent to fulfillment, from futility to usefulness, from selfishness to service. The mind begins to loosen its grasp on the form of ourselves we know and love. It begins to peer deeper into our essential humanness and divinity.

Seeing and inhabiting essence leads to the perception of sameness in others, instead of difference. Both are real and true, but the former is a deeper view. Through metanoia we see ourselves in others. With this perception we see the futility and even impossibility of harming or killing. We see that removing obstacles by force only empowers what we seek to avoid.

The old institutions conspire to dominate the lives of individuals, to hold us in check. As the colossuses become ever more moribund on their way to extinction, a true "new world order" can emerge. It will be a spontaneous order of voluntary cooperation in which the individual joyously serves the larger body of humanity, just as each limb and organ serves the body because they are united by one and the same force, which is life.

As we learn to breathe in an atmosphere of unmediated relationship within ourselves and with one another, we will be ready for the crashing demise of the forms that prop up this house of cards. Through change-of-mind and relinquishing attachment to all the institutionalized forms of life-as-we-know-it we can be prepared to journey through the changes that are to come, just as the stream, through its willingness to change its form, traversed the desert.

- Jason Stern