[PDF]Waking Up In Time Russell Peter PDF

Finding Inner
Peace in Times
of Accelerating
Chahge


Peter Russel]


“A wonderful book, masterfully balancing ecological doom with
spiritual renaissance." — Ken Wilber, author of A Brief Histcry of Everything


“Here is a fascinating and involving picture of humanity’s place in
the universe and a bold portrayal of our possible destiny based on
currently acceptable theories and ideas. This book is recommended
to all living beings who plan on living in the future.”

— Whole Life Times

“The writings of Peter Russell are always of interest. Here he explores
thought-provoking possibilities at this crucial juncture in human
history.”

—The Ley Hunter journal

“Relentlessly, dramatically, often with a touch of irony, Peter Russell
narrates this story of evolution, past, present and future. Given our
evolutionary track record and our checkered recent history, where
might we be going? A visitor from another planet could use this as a
briefing book on the human experiment thus far.”

— Brain/Mind Bulletin

“This is a book about the greatest of all unknowns . . . the place of
mankind in the continuing evolution of the universe ... an awe-
inspiring book because of the profundities it ponders in search of
answers that humans may or may not ever discover.”

—John Barkham Reviews

“This is a thought-provoking book that delights your mind, chal-
lenges your ingenuity and alerts your consciousness. Russell weaves
facts, opinions and metaphysical constructs in a ‘lead-along’ logic
that captures your agreement.”

—Buzzworm: The Environmental Journal


Waking Up in Time


ALSO BY PETER RUSSELL


The TM Technique
The Brain Book
The Upanishads
The Global Brain Awakens
The Creative Manager


Peter Russell


Waking Up
in Time


Finding Inner Peace

in Times of Accelerating Change


Origin Press


Origin Press, Inc.

1 122 Grant Ave., Suite C
Novato, CA 94945
415-898-7400

An earlier version of this book was published by HarperSanFrancisco as The
White Hole in Time.

Copyright © 1992, 1998 by Peter Russell.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner
whatsoever without prior written permission from the publisher, except for
quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

Cover design by Blue Design, San Francisco
Book design by Claudia Smelser Design, Berkeley

Special thanks to Joseph Sohm for the use of his photographs.

Photographic credits appear on p. 201.

Library > of Congress Cataloging-in-Pnblication Data
Russell, Peter, 1946-

Waking up in time : finding inner peace in times of accelerating change /
Peter Russell,
p. cm.

Rev. ed. of: The white hole in time. 1992.

Includes index.

ISBN 1-57983-002-1

I. Life. 2. Evolution I. Russell, Peter, 1946- White hole in time.

II. Title.


BD431.R77 1998
1 10— dc21


98-19130

CIP


PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA ON RECYCLED PAPER

109 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1


Contents


Acknowledgments vii
Preface ix

The Quickening

Acceleration — The Quickening Pace 3

Feedback — The Evolutionary Accelerator 1 1
Language — The Dawn of Thought 17
Hands — Levers for the Mind 21
Information — The Currency of Culture 25
Creativity — From Genes to Ideas 3 1
Today — Foundation for Tomorrow 35

The Crisis

Crisis — Sounding the Alarm 41
Crossroads — Choosing Our Way 51
Malady — A Planetary Cancer 55
Self-Interest — Misdirected Needs 59


Happiness — The Mind's Bottom Line 63
Materialism — An Addictive Meme 67

Fear — The Voice in Our Heads 7 1
Stress — The Wages of Fear 77

The Awakening

Dehypnosis — Breaking the Trance 85
Presence — The Timeless Moment 89
Enlightenment — A New Way of Seeing 95
Relationships — The Yoga of the West 99
Love — The Gift of Peace 105
Meditation — The Art of Letting Go 113
Maturity — Coming of Age 119
Freedom — Emancipation from Matter 125

The Future

Challenge — Crisis as Opportunity 135
Apocalypse — Premonitions of Transformation 139
Setbacks — Constructive Extinctions 145
Compression — The Collapse of Time 153
Singularities — The Shape of the Future 159
Omega — A White Hole in Time 167
Purpose — A Design to Creation? 175
Knowing — A Conscious Universe 181
The End — Or the Beginning? 185

Index 189


Vi I CONTENTS


Acknowledgments


Many thanks go to many people; without any one of them, this book
would not be what it is. Anne Pauli lived through the whole of the
book’s gestation and birth, contributing feedback and criticism on just
about every page. Ian Farquhar, Marilyn Ferguson, Oliver Markeley,
Paul Wheeler, Judith Meynell, Lindsay Cooke, Cynthia Alves, Ruth
Strasberg, Ray Gottlieb, Roger Evans, Bryn Jones, Leah Landau, Jane
Henry, Chris Hall, David Wynne, Tessa Strickland, Juliet Weston-
Lewis, Sheila Cane, Hag, Chris Coverdale, James Fraser, Edward
Posey, Kindred Gottlieb, Joe Sohm, Jan Bakelin, Gisela Pauli, Roger
Doudna, Robert Taylor, Christopher Bowers, and Sheila McCleod
also read the book at various stages of its evolution and helped me clar-
ify my thinking and expression. I’d also like to thank Marion Russell,
Alexander Shulgun, Sylvia Timbers, Wendy Feldman, Pat Markeley,
Terence McKenna, Linda Hope, Bill Whitson, Rupert Sheldrake,
John Reilly, Willis Harman, Michael Toms, Mark Salzwedel, Eileen
Campbell, and Anne McDermid, each of whom was of invaluable as-
sistance in his or her own particular way. And last, but not least, my
publisher Byron Belitsos and his production manager Julie Donovan,
without whom this new edition might never have appeared.

I would also like to thank Oxford University Press for permission to
use the lines from Christopher Frys play A Sleep of Prisoners and
Harper & Row for permission to quote, from Stephen Mitchell’s book
The Enlightened Heart, his translation of the Rilke poem.


vu


The Second Coming

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

The Second Coming ! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?


-W. B. Yeats


Preface


We are not slouching toward Bethlehem, as Yeats concludes in his
poem The Second Coming. We are being catapulted there. Bethle-
hem, or wherever— we’re headed there faster and faster. Indeed,
since the first edition of this book in 1992, signs of Yeats’ “rough
beast” are at hand; but so is the hope that we may finally awaken
from “twenty centuries of stony sleep.” However you look at it, the
sense that humanity is now facing its evolutionary moment of truth is
almost tangible. We are living through the most exciting, challeng-
ing, and critical times in human history— possibly the most critical
time in the history of life on Earth. Never before has so much been
possible; never before has so much been at stake. And never before
has the rate of change been so fast. We are being led ever more
rapidly toward what I have called a “white hole in time.”

This unusual phrase became the title of the first edition — The
White Hole in Time. The title was certainly intriguing, but it did not
always convey the right impression. Many thought it was going to be
a book about cosmology or new science — a sequel to Stephen Hawk-
ing’s book A Brief History of Time. Although I did study under him,
and his book does briefly mention black holes, a “white hole in time”
is the term I use to describe what the French priest and paleontolo-
gist Teilhard de Chardin called “the Omega Point” — the point of
unimaginably rapid change toward which our species’ evolution
seems to be headed. That is what the book is really all about.


ix


The publication of a new edition by a new publisher seemed a
good opportunity to improve the title and, of course, update the book
in many ways. I went through the text with a fine-tooth comb, rewrit-
ing bits I was not completely happy with, removing irrelevancies,
adding more examples, clarifying ideas, and generally editing the text
to make it read better. In the end, hardly a paragraph was not modi-
fied in some way.

The text also needed bringing up to date. The acceleration of evo-
lution is a central theme of the book, and I was amazed at just how
fast things had changed. When the first edition was published in
1992, no one had heard of the World Wide Web. Indeed, it had only
just been devised. And now, six years later, there can be hardly any-
one who has not heard of it; many of you probably use it. Never has a
new technology taken hold so rapidly, and never has a new technol-
ogy contributed so much to the further acceleration of change.

Not only had the world around me changed rapidly, I had also
changed. As I traveled around the world speaking on the themes of
the book, my thinking on various matters had become fleshed out.
Experiences in my personal life had led me to let go of some of my
assumptions. I had learned more about myself, delved more deeply
into the spiritual value of our relationships, and come to see the
global situation in a different light. A new edition was the chance to
include some of these developments, and so bring the book up to
date in terms of my own thinking — which is probably the most im-
portant update of all.

As I worked on the text, I became aware of another subtle way in
which the book was out of date. When I finished the original edition
we were entering the nineties, heading toward a new century, and a
new millennium. But although the turn of the millennium was on
many people’s minds, it was still a decade away. Today it is much
closer. For many of you reading this, it will be very close indeed; for
others it will have already come and gone. Writing with this perspec-
tive in mind had quite an unexpected effect. No longer was this most
celebrated date in history “out there,” sometime in the future; for me
the shift in thinking had begun. Just as when walking toward a street-
lamp there comes a point where we become aware we are in its light,
I had entered the ambience of that moment to which I had so long
been looking forward.


x I PREFACE


Overview


Ihis book is not about one single theme. It is a tapestry of ideas — a
picture of many colors, drawing upon many areas: physics, biology,
philosophy, religion, psychology, and personal experience, to name
but some. Not all of the ideas will be new to you. What may be new
is the picture that forms as the various themes weave together. Then
the familiar becomes fascinating, and a new vision emerges of our-
selves and our place in the Universe.

In building on the contemporary scientific understanding of the
world, I do not wish to imply that this worldview is necessarily cor-
rect. Perhaps the only eternal truth of science is that all theories
change with time. What I am interested in are the broader implica-
tions of our still imperfect understanding of the world. What is it
pointing toward? Where does it suggest our species may be heading?

The first part of the book, “The Quickening,” sets the scene. It
opens with the increasing pace of life we are all experiencing today. I
show how this trend is not limited to modern times, but can be traced
back through history all the way to the beginning of creation. What
we are experiencing today is the culmination of billions of years of
ever-accelerating development.

Why does evolution accelerate? The answer lies in the fact that
new evolutionary breakthroughs often facilitate future advances.
Multicellular organisms, sexual reproduction, and the emergence of
nervous systems have all done their part to hasten the pace of evolu-
tionary change. Now, with the emergence of human beings, two new
features are speeding development yet further. Speech allows us to
share our experiences and understandings with each other, giving us
the ability to accumulate a collective body of knowledge. Our hands,
which are among the most versatile organs Nature has evolved, have
given us the ability to take the clay of Mother Earth and reshape it to
our own ends. Combining these two evolutionary breakthroughs has
made us the most creative species this planet has ever known. And
the more we apply that creativity, the faster things change.

The second part, “The Crisis,” focuses on the less welcome conse-
quences of humanity’s rapid development, and the devastation we
are bringing to the rest of the planet. How is it, we ask, that a species
that is in some ways so intelligent can in other ways be so short-
sighted? Where have we gone wrong?


Preface I xi


These questions lead on to an exploration of our inner needs and
the way our societies have seduced us — in effect hypnotized us— into
a set of false assumptions about what it is we really want, and how to
go about achieving it. Amplified by the might of our technologies,
these errors of thinking are now having global ramifications. We see
that the global crisis is, at its root, a crisis of consciousness.

If we are to navigate safely through this critical moment of history,
we must make a break with the past, and look at ourselves and our
world with fresh eyes. This will entail a fundamental shift in thinking
and perception — a shift in consciousness more profound and far-
reaching than any in our history. It will mean awakening to the wis-
dom that lies within us all, of which the great sages have always
spoken. This is our next step in evolution — not an outer step, but an
inner step.

The third part, “The Awakening,” is more spiritual in tone. It asks:
How can we wake up? How can we liberate our minds from outdated
habits of thinking and make the inner changes that are being de-
manded of us? The answer involves learning to be more in the pres-
ent moment, less caught up in our judgments of the past and our
attachments to future outcomes. One of the most important areas of
practice is our personal relationships. It is here that we frequently
meet the various patterns that we need to let go of, and here that we
have the greatest opportunity to learn new ways of thinking and per-
ceiving. As we do, we rediscover the true meaning of love.

The final part, 'The Future,” looks at where we may be headed. It
considers some of the many prophecies that seem to foretell these
turbulent times. It also looks behind their literal interpretations to
deeper meanings, suggesting that they are metaphors for inner trans-
formation and awakening.

Will we wake up in time and avoid catastrophe? That is still an
open question. If we do not, evolution on this planet could be set
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