You may wonder what this means: ‘at the Centre of your Cross’.
Let me first point out that Rudolf Steiner[1], whose work inspired the Steiner or Waldorf schools and also permaculture, stressed the importance of engaging with geometric shapes when people’s minds are caught in materialism. Acknowledging that the social sciences such as education and social work are based on a materialistic paradigm, for my PhD study which focused on cross-cultural education, I found it extremely useful to explore the cross as one of the four central shapes that have been central to all cultures for as long as we know humanity exists: The dot, the circle, the square and the cross[2]. Exploring the symbol ‘cross’ throughout my study helped both myself and my research participants delve deeply into the conscious and subconscious collective mind, and explore the quantum universe.
In this book, the Centre of your Cross relates to both the fourth and fifth dimensions of life that you are part of, beyond the physical and mental senses that you identify yourself with in three-dimensional space (width, length, and height). The fourth dimension takes time into the equation.
The fifth dimension is an extra dimension of space that scientists identify with dark matter, which we do not see at the realm where we manage our daily lives, and which does not interact with ‘ordinary’ matter. In spiritual circles, the fifth dimension is seen as a whole new level of reality in which consciousness of love, compassion, peace and wisdom prevails.
Especially in spiritual development circles, there is much talk about the idea that we as a humanity are moving into the fifth dimension. The fourth dimension however kind of skips people’s attention. Yet the fourth dimension of time helps us to locate; offers us reference points in the timespace continuum. This dimension holds the collective collection of memories of what I call the Big Mind, which I will explore more in-depth in chapter 4.
This book fills a gap in the personal and spiritual development literature, because it highlights the importance of accessing and attending to those memories, not to savour them as souvenirs but to transform them. It highlights the fact that we operate on planet Earth as a human species that has evolved over time, and we will continue to evolve as a species. But how we choose to evolve is what we need to reflect on as individuals and as part of a collective species. We have the responsibility to make some new decisions after first identifying how we came to be over time where we are now. Because this book is written from a transpersonal perspective and takes note of time beyond three-dimensional space, and because we are body-mind-spirit beings, we focus on you at the Centre of your Cross, as a being who, over time, came to think as you think, be who you are, and do what you do.
Because you are part of the human species, it is time to become more fully aware of who you are and who we are, recognise errors made within and around ourselves, and how we tested the quality of ethics time and time again, across time in space.
As spiritual beings we have physical and mental experiences in a consciousness structure that we, as a collective species, created and inhabited, took on board and enacted out of curiosity. Now it is time to take this curiosity, a drive to know and understand, up a notch, into another level of consciousness, away from paradigm thinking which is inherent to what Jean Gebser (1956) called the mental consciousness structure; a realm where Mind is fragmented and divided, where what is essentially fractal is inverted into a hegemonic ideology where there is always some norm, something idealistic that does not exist in the here and now. And where people’s responsiveness has been converted into a currency, a trading tool.
Jean Gebser[3] spoke about the integral consciousness structure, arguing that this is what we are now growing into. The integral consciousness structure embraces, rather than reacts to the ‘previous’ consciousness structures that we hitherto ignored, being engrossed in the mental consciousness structure. These ‘previous’ structures that we fully developed and participated in were subsequentially the archaic, the magical, the mythical and to date the mental consciousness structures. We are now moving into integral consciousness, now not in resistance to but embracing these ‘previous’ consciousness structures that are embedded in the mind stuff that we engage with on a daily basis. They appear in our myths, in Indigenous knowledge systems, in magical manifestations. They have never left our overall state of consciousness. But being engaged in the mental consciousness structure we resisted them, believing in analysis, discrediting the spiritual self, and becoming good at scientistic developments and fragmentation. We could do this by ‘forgetting’ where we got the information from that led to the ‘inventions’ we made. We allowed ourselves to get so far off track that we forgot who we were as a humanity in complete harmony with Mother Earth, committed to suffering.
The cross is a metaphor for both suffering and transformation, and somewhere along the lines of the cross, either or both the vertical and horizontal axes, we now find ourselves where we are. In recognition of that space where we are, we have the capacity to look further, stretch out our horizons in a physical, mental, and spiritual sense. To increasingly shine like a star again, this time more self-aware than ever before in timespace as timeless beings with Power of Choice.
So welcome to the new integral consciousness structure where all the previous consciousness structures are integrated and worked with.
Here we recognise ourselves as free, autonomous beings who have been on a biopsychosocial-spiritual journey for a very long time in space. We have come and gone and continue to come and go to evolve. Nothing in the physical or mental universe is static, but always moving, always in flux and evolving. That is where this book is taking you, if you allow yourself to take yourself there.
This book is only an aid to the start of a journey of you remembering who you truly are, only the start of you as part of humanity being in a process of evolution that you share with each and every being you interact with, whether you like it or not.
Every piece of resistance you meet along the way is your teacher if you allow it to be. If you allow life to be as it comes and goes.
Going on this journey is like taking yourself through the eye of the needle, the centre of attention always expanding, your vision and perceptual field enriched with more self-awareness. Here the light returns to you. It returns as you are that light already and always were that light. But you had forgotten this, hidden yourself behind and within layers of ‘stuff’.
Along the way, you might find that you want others to join you, feeling a longing to take them through the eye of the needle as well, towards our liberation as a humanity as we restore the balance in the universal fabric of life as a whole.
Welcome to the journey of taking yourself through the Heart of the Cross, which is multidimensional indeed, timeless and spaceless, and all-embracing.
[1] Steiner, R. (2007). Balance in Teaching. Great Barrington, MA: Steiner Books. [2]Chevalier, J. & Gheerbrant, A. (1996). Dictionary of Symbols. London: Penguin. [3] Gebser, J. (1956). Cultural Philosophy as Method and Venture. First published in German under the title ‘Kulturphilosophy als Methode and Wagnis’ in Zeitwende/ Die neue Furche, 27(12). Gamburg, pp. 813-820. Translated by Georg Feuerstein.
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