“Love is essentially self-communicative; those who do not have it catch it from those who have it. Those who receive love from others cannot be its recipients without giving a response, which, in itself, is the nature of love. True love is unconquerable and irresistible. It goes on gathering power and spreading itself until eventually it transforms everyone it touches. Humanity will attain a new mode of being and life through the free and unhampered interplay of pure love from heart to heart.”

Meher Baba

We live peeking, through eye windows that look outwards to space, and inwards to the inner world of consciousness. Sitting on a verandah before my eyelids, I see outside a vast world of forms that dance around in infinite interactions, and when I look inside, I see an immense depth storing impulses, memories, opinions, emotions, contexts, unknowns, and sensations.

Looking out to both sides, from this singular point called “me,” I suspect that I am not who I think I am, and that others are also mistaken about their identities. Yet, we continue to pretend to be one another, carried along by the glorious inertia of life, on its unstoppable flows and rhythms. Every day.

There was a time when I believed I understood all, selecting from the opinions of others, and the many explanatory theories and methods. But after so many rounds around the sun, so much spinning on this spinning ball, a strange sense began to flash inside me. And I started to become aware of the miracle of life, like Alan Lightman, a physicist and professor at MIT, said:

[…]Because we experience that miracle every day, we treat it as ordinary, even guaranteed, mostly unnoticed at all. We postpone joy, assuming there will always be more time. We don’t see the beauty in small moments. We simply go about the business of life without taking a second to notice life itself.

The memory of that realization is an unannounced beacon that now sustains me every day and keeps me afloat in these intense and sometimes turbulent currents that flow toward some unknown sea. I feel it as a wake, handcrafted through eternity, silently peeking out from stars, ancient rocks, and solid mountains. From countless motions with multiple destinations, mixing energy, forms, instincts, and imagination. We call it living, while walking numb as to the mystery of what it is.

What a majestic theater, what a spectacle! Impossible to measure it, to applaud it, or to remain on stage. Yet there is never loss or gain, even when everything seems at stake. We take possession of momentary things, but we also learn to give and forgive while performing the roles assigned to us, to please the unknown director and producer of this wondrous work of Existence.

Sitting on the verandah of my eyes, while my body rests on a bench overlooking a quiet lake and a forest, once visited by Meher Baba in the 1950s, where a serene retreat now stands for the renewal of spiritual life, right in the midst of the booming coastal strip of Myrtle Beach.

From that vantage point, I ponder the exquisite coordination of every small force in nature’s display: the blooming flowers, the ripples on the lake, the fishing birds, the busy insects. The intertwined concert of life, including my own presence here, shaped by unknown events, the unexpected turns, the improbable encounters, the crises that became openings, the losses that became teachers, the coincidences that were not coincidences. Guided, I feel, by the same invisible coordination that makes a flower bloom at the right moment. Experiencing one of those rare moments in life, when one stops trying to understand the world with the mind and simply becomes it.

Albert Einstein, one of the great scientists of the modern era, once said:

A human being is part of a whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts, and feelings, as something separate from the rest — a kind of optical illusion of his consciousness… Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.

I sense that there is a new way emerging in which humans would relate to each other and the surrounding natural world. I actually feel it has already silently arrived, and it is just beginning to manifest. But, just as when maturity foreshadows itself in adolescence, it brings turbulence and confusion, because one does not realize what is approaching. We are undergoing a civilizational adolescence.

A world, for centuries structured into isolated tribes, kingdoms, nations, empires, and distances, has now become physically integrated. And this close connectivity, along with the scientific understanding of physics and biology, already tells us: energy and matter form a unified field; particles are entangled; space is not empty; everything is connected.

A seamless field of energy-matter-information interaction exists between cell and cell, between brain and body, between organism and environment. Science has brought us to the threshold of an ancient insight: we are all intimately connected; we are one substance, momentarily fragmented.

Contrasting this verandah view, this intuition that we are in a phase transition, towards an inner, enlightened humanity, is the current mindset of the powerful clique, the new global aristocracy that rules today’s structurally globalized economy.

A world, already globalized by technology and an overabundance of communication devices, has become a hubbub of electronic networks, with algorithms promoting unbridled consumerism and amplifying biased, superficial chatter. Social media has turned the world into a global Hyde Park Speakers’ Corner. Connectivity is predominantly used and presented as a materialistic tool, a competition for each person to get as much as possible. This is the present thrust of globalization.

A recent article in The Atlantic described William Shatner’s return from a 2021 Blue Origin spaceflight. He tried to convey to Jeff Bezos the overwhelming sadness he felt at the contrast between the cold void of space and the warm, nurturing Earth below, a sadness that, he hoped, might help humanity “rededicate ourselves to our planet, to each other, to life and love all around us.” Bezos turned away mid-sentence, grabbed a champagne bottle, and sprayed it over a group of celebrating women. As the article noted, the moment seemed to confirm a widely held suspicion: America’s tech oligarchs are pathologically unreflective.

The internet and AI entrepreneur Peter Thiel said on Joe Rogan’s podcast in 2024 that introspection impedes action. He suggested that looking inward was the domain of “hippies,” who, in his view, derailed American technological progress when they “took over the country” in the late 1960s. And Stephen Miller, the U.S. White House deputy chief of staff for policy and homeland security, declared in a television interview: “We live in the real world, governed by strength, by force, by power. These are the iron laws of the world that have existed since the beginning of time.” He has missed some history — and some science.

So, today we inhabit an interwoven system of connectivity that allows human conversation and exchange across the entire planet. And there is a tension between two consciousnesses: one ripening quietly, inwardly, relationally and the other contracting loudly, outwardly, defensively.

This tension is precisely what a turning point looks like.

A new world is dawning, one in which the human spirit connects from within, where memory, inspiration, compassion, the sublime, and felt love lead us to recognize one another, each with our own rhythms, yet dancing to the same tune.

Every transformation has an “adolescent crisis.” In physics, biology, and systems theory, a system approaching transformation shows two simultaneous behaviors: the old pattern intensifies, it becomes rigid, loud, brittle, aggressive, doubling down on control, force, hierarchy, and domination while the new pattern appears silently, through individuals, relationships, values, and feeling.

What we are seeing today is a “power clique” speaking in the language of force, conquest, speed, domination, extraction, from a worldview that assumes humans are not interdependent, that power is external, that force is the only law, that introspection is weakness, that empathy is a distraction, and progress happens through domination. A worldview that sees the world as a battlefield.

But we will save ourselves from the ideologies, words, nationalism, greed, confusion, and fear that isolation generates, from clinging to “our” beliefs, customs, and borders while despising those of others. The integration of the planet into one humanity is the new civilization that is emerging. For most of human history, people lived in small, isolated cultural worlds. Today, economies are global, cultures are mixing, information flows instantaneously, and migration is an operative reality. This unification of humanity is the structural basis of the new civilization.

Quoting words from Rebecca Solnit in her book The Beginning Comes After the End:

Seeds spread by many means... Ideas, too, have many ways of striving. And some ideas that begin in obscurity, spread and proliferate and strengthen to become powerful elements of a culture, a society, and a civilization. The ideas that have taken root in the last three quarters of a century have borne fruit… and they add up to changes so profound that they amount to the end of a civilization and the beginning of another, with different values and beliefs.

When enough people feel this — even silently, even anonymously, the phase transition becomes unstoppable. Transformation takes birth quietly, like a cocoon, not in movements or institutions. It oozes out from the ripening consciousness germinating in each point of awareness, like seeds in a garden, like plants blooming. And the color and fragrance of the garden inevitably spread, naturally, spontaneously, as the latency within unfolds. The history of humanity is a garden maturing, blooming through cycles of civilizations. Transformation begins where no one is looking: inside.

The New Humanity is not coming. It is unfolding. Modern evolutionary biology shows that cooperation drives complexity, empathy increases survival, interdependence is the rule, altruism is adaptive, and ecosystems thrive through balance, not domination. The old worldview misread evolution through the lens of its own fears. The new worldview sees evolution as the flowering of unity.

The old worldview is not “evil.” It is outdated — a survival strategy from an earlier stage of human evolution. It is the worldview of the separate self. But from this verandah, the separate self is an illusion. One becomes aware, in a sudden instant, of the movements that link and coordinate the daily drama and comedy of unfolding life. What genius, what complexity, what simplicity! I was awed by the magic that unfolds and sustains all before we succumb to this “me” that thinks everything is about it. In that precious moment of hinted freedom, all is just a beautiful flow of love — a glorious morning in which the eyes can see integrated surrounding forms, processes of beauty and understanding.

This is where I would like to meet you all — including myself — to discover our unity, and to intertwine our inner awe in song and appreciation. In love.