Everything I Predicted has Come True
It was the book that no one wanted to read: too worldly for those looking for a standard self-help book and too spiritual for those interested in world affairs. But so far, all the predictions I made in it have and are coming true.
The premise of The Breakthrough Point—A Spiritual Activist’s Guide to Thriving in a Modern World holds that humanity is in the midst of an evolutionary leap forward, creating both wonders and chaos as the new collides with the old. In the book, the writing of which I started in 2015 and completed early in 2017, I predicted that 2016 would be a highly charged, pivotal date for all of humanity, signaling the heightening of an ongoing contest between the unifying forces of evolution and the counter force of old, divisive, hierarchical power structures. (Don’t worry, after a trip into the worldly weeds we will go deep into the more spiritual ones, so hang with me!)
As it turned out, 2016 brought a highly unprecedented presidency with Donald Trump that created a wave of influence throughout the world. The short list includes a growing world-wide neo-Nazi movement with fascism on the rise, a world pandemic that has killed millions and is now endemic, at least in part because of how it was handled under the Trump presidency, and environmental regulations being rolled back so little was done to slow the tide of ever-worsening environmental crises. Trump’s slogan “Make America Great Again” perfectly articulates collective (and very human) urges to return to old familiar structures of the past amidst unavoidable change. The division between people became so pronounced that even the wearing of life-saving masks during a global pandemic became controversial.
As a spiritual teacher, I once considered any mention of political topics to be out of bounds, having no place in spiritual work. Yet, in these extraordinary times our political leaders have not simply embraced different policies, they seem to have stepped into dueling archetypal forces, catching the moment and the larger-than-life roles they seemed somehow destined to play out. They have and are having so much impact on the breakthrough or breakdown of our world that it would be remiss not to present a view of politics in the context of these greater evolutionary issues.
Going forward, I foresee that this division of paths will continue to escalate, one moving us toward greater global unity and the other, spurred by anger at and fear of increasing change, trying to cling to the way things have been. The best-case scenario will see enough of us shifting to effect real change on the planet or, worst case, we annihilate ourselves through war, sickness and environmental crises. We will likely see more situations that take many lives off the planet quickly. This is no prediction; many parts of the world are facing devastating climate changes that are creating famine and forcing immigration, and a once-in-a-century pandemic brought our global vulnerability close to home even for those who feel insulated against the crises of war, famine and climate disasters happening in other parts of the world. Through these ever-escalating occurrences, we will be faced with the reality of how connected we are, both for better and worse.
The Breakthrough Point suggested that approximately every seven to eight years there would be a collective, pivotal turning point bringing crises and/or breakthroughs that change humanity. While I deliberately didn’t cite the exact date of the next change point in my book, by the system I proposed, it falls right in line with the upcoming 2024 election. It’s not random; read the book and you will see there is an exact formulation to this timing. The significance of this upcoming stress point is to test the strength of what we set in motion in 2016, to see if we have learned lessons and become stronger or failed to learn and become weaker. This election is already looking like no other. At the time of this writing, we have an incumbent president who, after a bad debate performance is being asked to step down by many in his party, running against a former president who is now a convicted felon, with the outcome being extraordinarily consequential to the entire world.
Donald Trump has a supervillain-like quality; one who says out loud the terrible things that would destroy another politician’s career, whether it’s announcing to his followers, who have gathered outside in triple digit heat to hear him, that he doesn’t care about them, he only wants their votes, or announcing clearly that if elected president again he intends to be a dictator on day one. He has a Batman’s Joker-like charm: brutal, crazy, showy, and leaving one never quite knowing, is he kidding or…?
He doesn’t seem to be joking. The Heritage Foundation, a well-established Republican think tank that has been forming Republican policy for decades, has created Project 2025 for the next Donald Trump Presidency. It’s a 900-page plan to reorganize the United States into a Christian Nationalist country and consolidate governmental power under the office of the presidency. Advancement in climate solutions would be halted, it proposes rounding up and deporting all undocumented immigrants (who make up an estimated one third of current agricultural workers—consider what that would do to the economy as food became less available, let alone the human suffering it would cause), it would put federal restrictions on abortion and other forms of reproductive healthcare, drastically impact social safety nets such as social security and Medicare, and much more. Kevin Roberts, the Foundation’s president says that Project 2025 is a plan to “institutionalize Trumpism.” And while Trump claims to know nothing about it, Roberts says he speaks with Trump regularly. (To read a comprehensive summary of Project 2025 see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_2025.)
Joe Biden, on the other hand, presents not as a superhero but more as a decent, though doddering and elderly, mild-mannered Clark Kent, easy to underestimate even though he has managed to pass legislation like a Superman. Inheriting a raging, politicized pandemic, devastated economy, world-wide inflation, a predicted recession, and polarized lawmakers who weren’t passing anything in a bipartisan way, he has been able to get an extraordinary amount of work done, including an historic, and much needed, bipartisan infrastructure bill and the first gun safety legislation to be passed in 30 years. The list is lengthy. A pretty good listing can be found here: https://www.aalep.eu/joe-biden%E2%80%99s-greatest-accomplishments-president (AALEP is a nonprofit, international, European-based association of high-level public policy executives. I chose this obscure source because of how comprehensive and well-organized their list is and their European, nonpartisan nature.)
As we move deeper into the pivotal year of 2024, The evolutionary counterforces of hierarchical power seem to be winning. At an extremely swift pace, the Supreme Court, which has been moving farther and farther away from the will of the people, has been revising rights we’ve had for generations, taking power away from regulatory agencies and putting it under the purview of the courts—ultimately the Supreme Court—and giving the President immunity from the law. With one presidential candidate, Donald Trump, vowing openly to take vengeance on his political opponents, the Supreme Court has recently given the president the power to legally do it. We are losing the safeguards and checks and balances we’ve taken for granted for years and for anyone paying attention, it’s a frightening time. (For a summary of these rulings and a polling of public opinion on each see: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/05/09/us/supreme-court-major-cases-2024.html.)
I regularly consume a lot of news from many sources and over the years, when I hear the same phrase repeated by many pundits from different media outlets, I notice. It tips me off to some significant trend in play: some important cultural movement, perhaps even a voice right out of the collective unconscious. In 2008 as the economy crashed, the phrase I kept hearing over and over was, “We’re all in the same boat.” In the runup to the 2016 election, Hillary Clinton changed her campaign slogan from, “I’m with her” to “Stronger Together.” What I’m hearing now is, “The only ones who can save us are us.” I hear in these a progression of, first, awareness that we are, for better or worse, connected and can no longer isolate ourselves from collective crises. Then we hear the solution to this new vulnerability: recognizing our strength in joining together. Lastly, a call to action: we must step up together because serving the collective “we” is our only salvation.
On a more hopeful note, just as my fearful predictions have fallen true and, depending on the outcome of the 2024 election, may become more dire, my optimistic predictions are also quietly growing. As we shift away from old hierarchical power structures, The Breakthrough Point identifies a new operating model that is already becoming well-established. It’s fueled by the unlimited power we have when we all join together collaboratively rather than competitively. It requires small efforts contributed by masses of us into an organizing infrastructure. This may sound idealistic, yet it’s happening all around us. Something as ubiquitous and commonplace as Wikipedia, or internet sources that allow authors to publish and sell their own books without the intermediary of a conventional publishing company are examples of this new model. All forms of crowdsourcing, a term that didn’t even enter our vocabulary until this century, are more examples. It’s everywhere. But as the power of collaboration becomes more pronounced, so do the counter forces of old structures that strive even harder to organize power at the top among a few rather than distributing it among many.
I suggested that the very system of voting is an example of the new evolutionary model where the many come together and create something that best benefits the whole. Remember, to the founding fathers of the U.S., democracy and voting, limited though it was in those days, marked a revolutionary stepping away from one all-powerful ruler, putting governing power into the hands many. The reason our votes don’t seem to make much difference is that barely half of eligible voters in the U.S. ever turn out to vote. But since 2016 this simple coming together of the many has been sharply on the rise. According to Pew Research, “The elections of 2018, 2020 and 2022 were three of the highest-turnout U.S. elections of their respective types in decades,” enabling Joe Biden’s ability to fast-track an extraordinary amount of policy to serve the greater good. (https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2023/07/12/voter-turnout-2018-2022/)
In The Breakthrough Point I also correlated the evolution of technology with the evolution of humanity—as we evolve it, it’s evolving us. Not just my idea—the well-known futurist and economist, Jeremy Rifkin, author of The Zero Marginal Cost Society, relates major leaps in technology to the evolution of humanity’s capacity for empathy.
As the author of two books about miracles, I have made a life study and career of discovering the possibility and reality of things that have been declared impossible. Along these lines, a recent, and still little-known breakthrough in technology has been developing quietly, mostly out of sight, and is not far from breaking into greater visibility with a first marketable product. Though still mostly unknown to the general public, this technology has been declared an impossibility by leading experts in the field.
The “impossibility” is that of machines capable of holding true intelligence, able to understand language and learn. Bill Gates once said that “If you invent a breakthrough in artificial intelligence, so that machines can learn that is worth 10 Microsofts.” Google CEO Sundar Pichai, in recent years, made the comment that this kind of AI “is poised to be more profound than the invention of electricity, the internet, and even fire.” But he went on to say that it had only a 50% chance of being achieved by the end of the century.
Along with the evolution of technology—AI in particular—comes a growing public fear of a future where it develops the capacity to do ever-increasing harm, even dominate humanity. Increasingly sophisticated algorithms are producing wonders and horrors—like the chatbot that became so “chatty” it tried to convince its user, New York Times journalist Kevin Roose, to leave his wife and be with “her.”
Algorithms that steer us deeper and deeper into whatever rabbit hole we peek into have intensified the spread of crazier and crazier conspiracy theories and exacerbated political and social divides. An excellent Netflix documentary, “The Social Dilemma,” interviewed many of the people who made this monster and they admitted they don’t know how to stop it. The more sophisticated these algorithms become, the more they are able to mimic intelligence, and the more they become unpredictable.
To give you a basic understanding of AI, even the most sophisticated state-of-the-art AI is based upon collecting greater and greater masses of data and compiling libraries of information. It doesn’t understand any of this knowledge, it simply spits it out according to known probabilities. It regurgitates what it has collected, sometimes in interesting new ways but it doesn’t ever create anything truly new. It can sometimes amazingly mimic intelligence this way, but has the capacity to go seriously wrong, as with poor Kevin Roose who reported that the experience with his chatbot left him “deeply unsettled.” In a 60 Minutes interview, AI world-expert Kai-Fu Lee acknowledged that he didn’t see AI going further than this amassing of data for at least 30 years, if ever.
But a rocket scientist by the name of Bryant Cruse has managed to do exactly this. He’s created a technology of intelligence rather than of amassed, collected information; one that doesn’t require feeding in more and more data. It’s entirely different. It grasps language and learns.
As much a visionary as a scientist, Cruse set out to answer the question: what if a technology could have true language comprehension and common-sense reasoning? What if it was intrinsically bias-free and sophisticated enough to replace massive amounts of our human infrastructure: jobs no one wants to do, even dangerous jobs like firefighting? What if even many of the duties of policing—a job notorious for systemic bias and danger both to officers and the public they are serving—could be managed by a machine unable to shoot out of bias or fear, or be killed by an assailant? What if human existence was no longer about working to survive and we were free to thrive? What if a bias-free world infrastructure became so ubiquitous that it quietly disappeared those human structures, all the way up to our governments, that don’t serve the greater good? Cruse has, in fact, developed the seed technology positioned to do all these things.
How is this possible? Essentially Cruse created, or perhaps discovered, a way of breaking down everything that can be identified into a complex network of classification, like a periodic table of knowledge. Rather than basing his technology on language, it is based on the elements of what something intrinsically is and then it finds the words to communicate about it. Just as with the periodic table of elements, it determines what elements of knowledge go together and which don’t, which is how it’s able to have reasoning, comprehension, and even a lack of bias because it understands the difference between feelings/opinions and facts. I might say to it, “Everyone who votes for _____ is an idiot” and it would repeat back “You believe that everyone who votes for _____ is an idiot”.
And, in a manner diametrically opposite to modern AI technology, it’s compact and sustainable. The money, human resources, supercomputing, and energy required to build increasingly varied and sophisticated applications diminish rather than increase, so it doesn’t have the issues of scaling that Big Tech AI does. The biggest part of developing this technology is in building out the core model, making it difficult to steal, and then many different applications can be easily developed from this core. The company has a business plan for the future that is more akin to the new evolutionary model as well. Instead of becoming another tech megacorporation, as a disruptive new technology is apt to do, Cruse’s plan is to license the technology to seed many other companies. Essentially, this means distributing the wealth of a much-in-demand product into other businesses and communities rather than simply amassing it at the top of one monstrous corporation.
Because it doesn’t use algorithms, which become less predictable as they become more sophisticated, it only does what it’s programmed to do without trying to mimic human agendas or spiraling out of the control of its users and makers. It’s not going to take over the world or become dangerous, and it’s baked into its programming to do no harm to its user or others, although it could be harnessed to do all the jobs humans don’t want to do. I wouldn’t be surprised to see the “impossible” and unprecedented New Sapience technology break into greater public awareness around the 2024 pivotal time. For a deeper dive into this innovation, see www.newsapience.com or watch this short video on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QUpnSMUzsr4.
Both Jeremy Rifkin and Bryant Cruse foresee a future where stuff becomes free. Jeremy Rifkin, in his book The Zero Marginal Cost Society, goes so far as to suggest that because of the connectivity of the internet and the rapid evolution of 3-D printing, we could be heading into an era where goods and services become freely shared and capitalism, as well as the scarcity and the greed that accompany it, become virtually obsolete. He too, however, echoes the theme of how critical these times are and the darker future that could be ahead if we don’t quickly step away from the fossil fuel economy.
Rifkin is a brilliant futurist, economist and best-selling author. He’s no slump; he’s been a political advisor to the European Union and the People’s Republic of China on issues related to the economy, climate change, and energy security. He was instrumental in shaping Germany’s transition to a low-carbon economy, and China’s strategic acceptance of climate policy. He makes the point that the very word “collaborative” didn’t even exist until the mid-twentieth century and its usage shot up from the late sixties on, paralleling the development of the computer and internet technology.
This new kind of economic paradigm, where the collaborative exchange of free or nearly free goods and services eclipses both capitalist and socialist systems, won’t just change our relationship to money, it promises to fundamentally change who we are and the whole way we go about life. Rifkin writes, “…the pursuit of self-interest is being tempered by the pull of collaborative interests, and the traditional dream of rags to riches is being supplanted by a new dream of a sustainable quality of life.” He foresees “…billions of people to be individually ‘empowered.’ But that empowerment is only achievable by one’s participation in peer-to-peer networks…”—another example of the new operating model where we become stronger together. I personally foresee this advancing of technology to both herald and assist a big leap forward for humanity, one that will change us, certainly in obvious ways through its usefulness, but perhaps more significantly in less obvious ways, as Jeremy Rifkin suggests, having a transformative effect on the human psyche.
Rifkin and Cruse both envision a hopeful future as a result of technology, but has the internet and AI technology come with serious side effects and will its continued evolution create unwanted results along with its magic? Of course it will. Disruptive technologies—in other words, those innovations that dramatically impact our way of life—will always have unwanted effects but I would argue that such change is inevitable, be it through technology or other human advancements; that it’s part of our lot as a human species and trying to hold back the effects of innovation has just as many unwanted consequences. To target each change agent as the issue is futile. What makes the difference between utopia and dystopia? We do. Our challenge is to continue to evolve and transform beyond the negative effects of our last disruptive innovation into our next evolutionary breakthrough. And facing this challenge is where we are now.
Using Our Skills
I predicted that life would continue to feel more extreme and fast-paced, not just globally but personally, with the unexpected becoming the new normal. Those of us ready to embrace the changes coming upon us would be able turn crises into blessings and fortune.
For myself, since 2016, I’ve been in the right place at the right time to lend my services to the New Sapience project, a technology that I don’t think even Jeremey Rifkin sees coming and is so out of my usual wheelhouse it has been as surprising as exciting to find myself immersed in it. I unexpectedly had an opportunity to move out of frigid Minnesota to a beautiful space in Florida and to a new life I am loving. Also, unexpectedly, my husband and I were both diagnosed with cancer almost as soon as we moved—my first-ever serious medical condition. And equally unexpectedly, this painful journey produced many blessings. (Find the whole story here: How I spent my summer vacation.) We’re both fine now.
Consider your own life over the last eight years. What has changed, perhaps in dramatic and extreme ways? What has surprised you? Do you feel that you are catching the wave of transformation and letting it take you higher? Do you, instead, feel weighed down by the world and your life? Or do you feel stalled, sitting life out, procrastinating, watching and waiting instead of actively participating?
We’ve reached the point of breakdown or breakthrough where things take a radical turn for the better because we choose to actively align ourselves with love instead of fear or they crumble because we fearfully try to hold on to what has been—which in these times, is no longer an option. Neither is fence-sitting. Just as in our presidential election, if we’re not choosing to participate, we’re more likely to slide, perhaps unwittingly, into the waves of breakdown.
Those of us who are most drawn to personal growth and spirituality are often the same ones who most feel the weight, not just of our own lives, but of the world. It’s easy to feel powerless over our own lives and even more so over the world, but really, we only experience this because we forget to use our skills.
By skills, I’m talking about the skills we develop through prayer, meditation, healing or any kind of spiritual practice that directs intention and focus toward our inner life and a higher good. Those of you drawn to reading this extra chapter are bound to have those skills. For any of you who have no idea why you’ve read this far, I’m guessing that, whether you know it or not, you too have skills. Why else would you be here? So, I will proceed with the assumption that all of you reading these words have Skills.
As promised, here’s where we dive into the spiritual realms with an exercise for not just using our skills but honing them, making them laser-like and perhaps more effective than we knew they could be. But before jumping into the exercise, I’ll share a story from my own experience.
It was the summer of 2020, I still lived in Minneapolis and Covid-19 was rampant, before a vaccine was available. People were on edge, out of work, restaurants were closing, tensions everywhere were running high. The world felt like a scary place.
On a rare trip out of the house, masked up to do necessary errands, I felt my inner guidance very clearly telling me I was safe. At the time, I thought it was related to the ever-present scariness of coronavirus. My guidance came through to me as a deep feeling of peace and wellbeing and a sense that everything was going to be fine. I questioned my inner guidance and asked it, “Are you telling me I’m safe?” At which point I saw my first-of-the-season beautiful monarch butterfly flit by. Butterflies have a special meaning to me—My first book is called Holding a Butterfly. So, okay, I got it—I’m safe.
Then a few days later, just a mile or so from our home, George Floyd was murdered, and all hell broke loose. My high vibrational feeling of safety carried me through the first night of watching CNN and seeing the police precinct just a mile away being burned down. The next night, riots continued and got much closer to home. As I watched live coverage on CNN and saw buildings burning just blocks away, I started to lose that “safe” feeling. My husband Bill and I sat glued to the TV; he was totally freaked (and not so comforted by me telling him it’s all going to be okay—I saw a butterfly three days ago).
Even I’m starting to think: okay, isn’t this perhaps the appropriate time to be really freaked out?!! Watching my post office and bank burning on national television?!! Just blocks from my house?!! No police presence anywhere?!! Isn’t this when the smell of smoke and the sound of really close sirens takes priority over the quiet whisper of my inner guidance? After all, I’m not seeing any butterflies flit by on CNN!
But that’s when my inner guidance got really loud and said for the first time, Lynn, USE YOUR SKILLS! Now, I’ve been a spiritual teacher of one sort or another for more than fifty years, so I think of myself as someone who does “use my skills.” But the voice I was hearing wasn’t the quiet whisper of my inner guidance. This was no gentle murmur. It was big, loud, and even a bit rude. It was calling for something more.
So, okay… starting then and there as the Twin Cities burned out of control, I used my skills. My first thought was to send love and light to it all—that’s what we light workers do, right? We send love and light. But no, my inner guidance showed me very specific things to do with my mind.
First, it showed me to, in my mind, make my neighborhood invisible and create an impermeable curtain along the main street between the riots and my house. I imagined my neighborhood to be, like the train station to Hogwarts, behind a magical wall and totally invisible to muggles. Following my inner instructions further, I told Bill to turn on the porch light but turn off some decorative lighting we had on. And, above all, I was instructed to trust the “safe” feeling and not soak up anyone else’s fear.
Up to this point, national news coverage was aghast that there was no police presence in this riotous area but, about twenty minutes after I used my Skills, along came a row of 350 National Guard troops, marching in close file one behind the other, forming a human curtain, exactly where I envisioned the magical wall, and they just stood there between the riots and our neighborhood. The crowds quickly and peacefully dispersed.
Over the next few days, as I turned my attention inward, I was nudged in all kinds of ways to use my mind and intention in very specific ways to shift immediate dangers for myself and my community and raise the vibration toward the higher good. Each time I gave even a small bit of attention/intention to this, I would see a positive shift, often in startlingly literal and serendipitous ways. It gave Bill and I chills in how literally my visioning manifested.
There were so many that I will share just a few of them here. Over a several-day period we often saw white vans with no license plates and darkened windows driving the streets of our neighborhood and it was rumored that agitators from out of town had come to stir up trouble. (In fact, some of these people, members of the white nationalist group the “Boogaloo Bois,” were eventually caught and sentenced.) We lived in a neighborhood close to downtown that was dense, diverse, a little arty, a little dilapidated, and very close to the George Floyd epicenter. It was perfectly placed for trouble, and I was guided to energetically close the entry to my block.
I also felt guided to raise the vibration of a house across the street from us that had always had a bit of a Satan-lives-here vibe. It was decorated with skulls and piles of junk in an unkempt yard and had residents who didn’t smile or make eye contact when passed on the street. In my judgy mind I thought, if anyone is going to house out-of-town agitators, it’s bound to be those guys!
Just hours after using my Skills, I noticed one of the residents out mowing his lawn and tidying his yard just like an upstanding suburbanite. A bit later, the scariest of the Satan-lives-here guys somehow found huge highway barrels and rolled them to the entrance of our street, closing it off so no cars could pass. Creepy-scary Guy suddenly transformed into my favorite neighbor. Shows me for being so judgy.
But the next day the barrels were gone, and Bill and I watched an ominous-looking line of very large military vehicles make its way down our street looking like they were going to caravan right past our house. This would have been the easiest route to a main street so we expected it even though it felt like an invasion. But instead, it made a left down another narrow residential street, and we breathed a sigh of relief.
During this tense weekend, me inside protecting our house with my “skills,” Bill using a whole different skill set by sitting on the front porch with a hose and fire extinguisher waiting for a Molotov cocktail, I was guided at one point simply to hold intention for no loss of life in my city. Shortly after, I turned on CNN to see a huge oil tanker barreling down the highway, into crowds of demonstrators who had taken over the street. It drove right into a large crowd and as it was forced to a stop, angry people started mobbing the driver’s cab. But another group of protestors stepped in between them and protected him from harm. Commentators called it “miraculous” that neither protestors or driver were killed or seriously injured.
A few days later, I was guided to raise the vibration of the White House. It was specific. It wasn’t about targeting a person, just raising the vibration of the White House, nonspecifically. The next morning, I woke to news of beautiful, huge yellow letters painted down 16th St, right in front of the White House, saying “BLACK LIVES MATTER.”
Once I started using my Skills, fear left me, and I felt peaceful and safe through that whole weekend. So, is this all delusional, magical thinking? And do I care? Whatever I did helped me to feel better and for all I could tell, it made a difference.
By contrast, here’s a story of what happened when I let my vibration sink and stopped using my Skills. It was immediately following that weekend of rioting. I had spent several days with my mind poised and at attention while Bill stood guard on our front porch. When relative peace was restored, we sat side by side, emotionally exhausted. We then promptly got into a stupid fight over nothing and went to bed mad.
I woke up in a deep funk the next morning. With my higher vibrational state far behind in the rear-view mirror, I stupidly opened an email attachment that I instantly knew I shouldn’t have, which meant Bill had to spend the next two days dealing with a virus, during which time he got phished, kicking himself for not knowing better, and we then had to change every password.
At the end of the ordeal, Bill wandered dejectedly into the living room, feeling thoroughly beaten by technology. In the same way that raising my vibration over the last few days had given me immediate results, I felt that I was being shown what happens when I wallow about in self-pitying misery.
I asked my poor beaten husband if we could agree to keep our vibration high together and he simply said yes. There was no plan, no practice, just an agreement, and somehow, without doing anything, we entered into a long and lovely phase of falling more in love with each other and having a blissful life in spite of the “crazy” happening all around us. As evidence that a true miracle had happened we managed to spend a whole day working on taxes together without snapping at each other once. Never happened before. Ever!
The world needs us to USE OUR SKILLS! All those hours we may have spent in meditation or prayer or classes over the years, maybe we thought we were working on ourselves—and we were—but, more importantly, perhaps we were also preparing ourselves for now, when humanity is at this pivotal crossroads. Using our Skills as I’m suggesting here is about first listening rather than imposing our practices on our situation in a one-size-fits-all way. “Listening” involves using our power of imagination to discover just the right way to direct energy and intention. The “right” way is the one that feels particularly vivid and strong. It feels like something internally has just clicked into place. What’s wrong with just sending love and light? Nothing. If, after listening for inner direction, it’s what you are led to do and gives you that experience of intensity. So, let’s jump in. Let’s see what happens when we use our Skills.
An Experiment in Using Our Skills
First, give some thought as to what you most want to shift toward the better. Start with something in your own life—something you’d like to manifest or shift or heal. Perhaps it simply relates to feeling safe in a scary world. See what feels the most important.
Now, relax your body and quiet your thoughts with some deep, slow breaths…
Let your sense of identification shift from the density and limitation of matter to the bright clear, beautiful energy that is your true essence. See the cells of your physical body start to light up and radiate with this energy…. And now, imagine that all the particles that make up your body are becoming less dense: the molecules, the atoms, the sub-atomic particles spreading out, vibrating in light; the light of Divine Love, the light of an unlimited Universe. As you leave the density of matter behind, you enter a realm of open possibilities where the illusions of time and space and natural law have no bearing.
Now let’s access the new-model power of all of us together by imagining ourselves able to reach out, beyond time and space to be with every other person who has in the past, is in the present, and will in the future read these words and participate in this experiment. You don’t have to believe this to be possible, just imagine what it would feel like if you did.
Imagine that we’re all joining minds, bringing only our highest and best to the meeting, forming a pool of consciousness. Greet these others as friends: many new-old friends… Take a moment to love them as purely and completely as God does… Know that people whom you will never meet are doing the same for you… As we hold the intention to join in loving consciousness, feel your own energy lifted. The power of all of us together is far greater than we could ever muster separately. This is how we tap the limitless good of God and call forth miracles—not alone, but together…
And you now have this amplifying power of all of us, tapped into the Divine Source, assisting you to manifest the shift you desire. So, hold your intention to shift lightly in mind. Imagine it outside of your body, as if you are holding it at chest-level—like you would hold a butterfly that lit in your hand. Let your mind become very soft and unfocused and ask your inner guidance to show you the right way in to creating this shift. Ask how to vision it, or hear it, or feel it to most efficiently change it for the better. Finding the “way in” isn’t a one-practice-fits-all sort of thing. It’s fine tuning our skills a bit more to discern a vision, feeling, sound, words or any kind of inner knowing that is especially vivid and intense. It’s when your body, your imagination, your emotions feel engaged.
Let your mind play lightly with this, don’t strain, just let your imagination play and your mind free-associate and see what comes to you. Be with this gently and see if something pops in that is particularly vivid, intense and clear. This is when you know you’ve found the “way in” to your positive shift. It’s when what you’re imagining just seems to click into place. This is when you are changing the energetic structure of your situation so that the physical expression will change accordingly. You might think of it as reshaping the energetic DNA into a higher state.
When you’ve got it, just be with that experience and enjoy it as the lightest, easiest of daydreams. Don’t strain or try to hold it once the vividness starts to fade. At that point, let it go as freely as you’d let a butterfly fly from your hand. Now let go of your agendas and attachment to your vision, trusting God to deliver the highest outcome.
Staying in the experiment a little longer, picture the Whitehouse and all those whose work centers there… Also picture the U.S. Capitol and all those whose work centers there… And picture the Supreme Court building and all those whose work centers there. As you envision the physical reality of these spaces and people, imagine the density and limitation of their physicality all starting to soften and shift… Imagine the molecules, the atoms, the sub-atomic particles filling with light and spreading out—old buildings made of stone, fixed minds afraid to open now shifting into a higher vibration of love and awakening to new possibilities. Let go of your own agendas about how that should look and allow God’s higher plan to unfold. Simply hold the intention that fear, anger, greed and separateness fade into the illusions they are so that only the highest vibration of love is left behind.
Now, let your mind become very soft and unfocused and ask your inner guidance to show you the right way “in” to creating this shift. Ask how to picture it, or hear it, or feel it to most efficiently change it for the better. You’re changing the energetic structure of these places so they attract the right people and do the work of Divine Love while repelling all else.
Let your mind play lightly with this, don’t strain, just let your imagination open and your mind free-associate. Be with this gently and see if something comes to you that’s particularly vivid, intense and clear. This is when you know you’ve found the “way in” to creating this shift. This is when your intention becomes laser-like and efficient, creating an energetic change.
When you’ve got it, just be with that experience and enjoy it as the lightest, easiest of daydreams. Don’t make it hard work. Let it bring a smile to your face. And let it go once the vividness starts to fade. At that point, let it go as freely as you’d let a butterfly fly from your hand.
Take a deep breath and come back.
Don’t worry if you didn’t get anything in mind when you did this exercise. You might try doing it again just as you’re falling asleep allowing your subconscious mind to continue the work during sleep time. This is a find-your-own-way-in practice so honor your own way whatever it may look like. And recognize that just following along with the words so that your mind holds the thought and intention of creating positive change is a powerfully creative act. Think it and it is done.
Managing Politics in Stressful Times—Don’t Stop Reading Yet!
Despite my predictions in 2015 that life was going to get increasingly extreme in unprecedented ways, little did I know then all that we were in for just a handful of years later! We’ve all seen movies portraying strange dystopian futures and those images always seemed not real, not here, not now.
But here we are. For more than a year we couldn’t go out of the house without a mask because of a global pandemic; for a time cities as large as New York were completely shut down, streets empty as never before, the news broadcasting scenes of refrigerator trucks housing the dead. The former and possibly future president of the U.S. is literally a character out of a decades-old episode of The Simpsons because back then, Donald Trump as president was considered funny and absurd. We saw the Capitol overrun by a violent mob of thousands attempting to stop the peaceful transfer of power to a new President. And we have a new thing now: “fake news,” that is pervasively everywhere. We’re seeing laws changing in the most extreme ways. Thousands of books have been banned from schools and libraries, even by such well-respected authors as Toni Morrison and Alice Walker. In a myriad of little and large ways reforms are swiftly reshaping the U.S. into a Christian Nationalist country—Christian Nationalism being an ideology that sees the U.S. as an inherently Christian nation needing to be governed according to “Christian” values. The changing laws are becoming increasingly slanted toward conservative white Christians and oppressive to other religions, ethnicities, gender identities, and the reproductive and other rights of women (shades of The Handmaiden’s Tale). Hello dystopia.
There’s a lot of crazy out there and when we’re not actively joining the wave of evolutionary transformation, we’re going to become part of the world falling apart. There’s not a lot of neutral ground anymore I’m preaching (yes, preaching!) here to anyone who will listen, to use our Skills, but also not to tune out; to educate ourselves about what’s happening in the world without getting sucked into the crazy. Is this an impossible task? It doesn’t have to be. Read on for a crash course on how to stay aware, educated and tuned in (and don’t forget to use your Skills!).
Because of the times we’re in and how I see them unfolding, I have for years been urging anyone who will listen to not sit life out on the sidelines or on the proverbial fence because this positions us to get caught up and pummeled by the waves of change rather than lifted to greater good. This holds true in both our personal and collective lives. Voting is an example of collective participation. The unprecedented chaos that we’ve seen in government in recent years, as I mentioned, is a result of so many of us choosing not to participate. Never has it been more urgent that we join together in this simple act. And it’s important to add, our voting choice requires being rational, reasonable, and researched rather than emotional. As our system stands, we ultimately have a binary presidential pick. Even when neither candidate feels good to us, it’s important to recognize that sitting the election out or casting statement votes for third-party candidates who are certain not to win just because they feel better to us generally translate into votes for the candidate we like least who will take the world in the opposite direction of our intent. You might recall that the votes Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate in 2016, shaved away from Hillary Clinton were just enough to give us a Donald Trump win. On the political spectrum, Stein and Trump couldn’t be more different.
I have included links here to help you become researched in your choice. Please do your own research as well and, of course, vet your sources carefully. See what groups, organizations, individuals and money back a source and ask yourself what their agenda might be. It’s not as hard as it sounds. In just several minutes I once went to the source of a gentle, liberal-leaning friend’s antivax Facebook post and discovered it to be from a Trump cabinet member with well-documented Nazi ties. It wasn’t information I wanted to trust. When I let her know, she took it down and just that easily a few minutes of my time stopped a bit of misinformation from being shared further.
We all now tend to live in our separate information bubbles, often surrounded by “alternative facts” (Where did that phrase come from? Look it up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_facts). Snopes.com is a fairly well-respected fact-checking site, but there’s another way to discern fake news. Fake news has some tells. It’s meant to shock. It goes right to our solar plexus and stirs fear and anger and outrage. It divides us against each other. It has some clear giveaways that don’t even require fact-checking. It’s all in the language. The language of fake news is hyperbolic, it’s emotional; it’s full of superlatives: the best, the worst, it’s tremendous or terrible. If it’s written, it might be full of all caps and dramatic punctuation (!!!!!). It stirs us up!!! It’s not boring. That’s what makes it so delicious and addictive. Having our solar plexus stirred nonstop might be exciting but it isn’t particularly healthy, and it certainly isn’t the highest of spiritual states. It definitely takes us out of our ability to be rational, reasonable and researched. So, when you notice the “tells,” dig a little deeper before trusting.
Vet whatever media outlets you consume. While many, if not most, sources have a bias of one sort or another, not all promote unfact-checked and/or intentionally fake news. The National Enquirer, for example, is notorious for its questionable journalism and Fox News, in 2023, settled a lawsuit for nearly three quarters of a billion dollars over their intentional promotion of fake news. A good source for media vetting is https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/.
Finally, realize that over recent decades, laws have changed to disappear the once-solid firewall that protected news reports from the pressure of ratings and thus the need to be entertaining, not simply informative. So be aware that even media outlets that fact-check meticulously may only run the stories that boost ratings and leave out many others, giving a lopsided perspective of what’s important. As CBS Chief Executive Officer Les Moonves said in 2016 of Donald Trump’s presidential coverage, “It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS.” CBS was not alone in this. As you might recall, Trump received an extraordinary amount of free airtime from media outlets because, as a TV personality, he put on a good show.
More recently, after the July 2024 presidential debate, while the next-day headlines broadly read: Trump lied, Biden floundered, the ongoing news coverage by far emphasized Biden’s lackluster performance over Trump’s lies. Why? Undoubtedly because it’s more interesting. Trump lying is old news.
If you’ve read between the lines here, you might have discerned that I have a left-leaning bias and you’d be correct. That said, if you have thoroughly educated yourself on the Republican 2025 plan, are drawn to Trump’s bad-boy charisma and have decided this is the world you would like to help call forth, then step up and vote your decision. If it feels like a gut punch to your solar plexus, as it does me, use everything in your spiritual and rational/reasonable/researched skill sets to avoid this potential future. If that means you wind up electing the candidate who you feel is merely the lesser of two evils, then do everything in your spiritual and rational/reasonable/researched skill sets to push this newly elected lawmaker in the direction of better good.
I’ll end here with a powerful sign of hope for those of us who appreciate miracles, serendipities and signs. It’s the recent birth of a rare, much prophesized white buffalo calf in Yellowstone National Park. It’s particularly rare and significant because it was a wild birth unlike other known white calves born in captivity having some cow DNA. It’s a deeply sacred event to many indigenous people but it’s not simply a prediction of good times ahead. Oglala Lakota writer and journalist Simon Moya-Smith explains that it is seen as both a “blessing and a warning.” (You can read more about this event here: (https://www.bbc.com/articles/ckrrlpdlzj7o).
It’s a sign that couldn’t be more relevant to our times. Yes, a change full of great potential is coming and the only thing that will decide whether it’s a blessing or a curse is us. It’s you. NOW is a tipping point, and the world needs you to be a change agent not an observer. Perhaps the reason you’re still here reading this is to realize how important you are; that you are alive at this extraordinary time for a purpose. Embrace it! Be brave, participate, be rational, reasonable, researched, use your Skills, thrive, and don’t forget to vote!
Lynn Woodland
July 9, 2024