MANURE AND THE AGE OF AQUARIUS

Out of millions of sperm cells only one flips the ovarian switch to turn on an infant's life. Though the potential for life is enormous, the critical mass of fulfillment of those potentials is minuscule. The same applies to human consciousness:  only a small proportion of humanity reaches a full flowering.  How many does it take to raise global consciousness?  Billions of humans have been born, each carrying within themselves a potential flower of full consciousness. 

The critical mass of enlightenment can be defined as the smallest number of awakened human beings whose collective influence can initiate a significant shift in global consciousness.  Creating this critical mass can be likened to the transformation of coal into diamonds. The great weight and pressure of the surrounding unconsciousness awakens, occasionally, an enlightened one from the seas of illusion. Only a few coal stones reach the appropriate mass to become diamonds. 

The 6^th century Zen mystic, Bodhiharma, may have been the first to use the metaphor of the mud and filth necessary to grow a lotus.  He said that most of humanity has no other destiny than to live and die as compost and manure enabling the flowering of isolated spiritual teachers.  There is a hint of this in St. Paul’s piece about a great house having many utensils.  The brush used to scrub the toilet is, in the overall picture, just as necessary as the fine china service for guests.  The rank stench of unconsciousness, sensed by the very few, awakens them to a consciousness which must be shared.     

It may not seem fair that so few reach that ultimate potential. Yet a small success rate is universal throughout Nature. Many a grain tower full of seeds must be produced by a great mother oak before one child from her wooden womb becomes a tree.  So why do we accept this simple law of Nature, but become offended upon discovering that the same applies to the blossoming of consciousness?

Humanity arrives as billions of seeds filled with hope; but in the end, almost all die as manure for the few.   Most do not miss what they never attained.  They have no awareness of anything being missing; spiritually sterile, they never had hopes or dreams of fecundity.  Never has mankind been so full of manure, nor needed so desperately the proper soil to cultivate consciousness, than at this dawning of the Age of Aquarius.

The influence of self-awareness on the world seems to be a quality rather than a quantity equation. The effect of the awakened ones on the mass of unconscious humanity is in proportion to the influence of an atom in a thermonuclear explosion. A split in the atom of awareness should be equally explosive in a spiritual sense.

The forewarned end of the world 2012 may not see civilization go up in a thermonuclear holocaust mushrooming out from Israel versus Iran.  It is more likely to be another kind of atomic explosion – an explosion of consciousness - in which the smallest mass of a fissionable material that will sustain a chain reaction is not uranium but Uranian. (Uranus is the ruler of the Aquarian Age.)

What is the number of enlightened people needed to set off the spiritual liberation of humanity?  The guru of TM, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, has predicted that only one-tenth of 1 percent of humanity is needed to create enough favourable vibration to usher in world peace.  According to the Indian mystic, Osho, the dark time of Kali Yuga exerts a higher pressure of unconsciousness, which could produce a greater detonation of joy and awareness. Osho estimates that at least 5 percent of the human seed base has the potential intelligence to germinate. Out of an expected manure pile of seven billion people fertilizing earth, there are more potential buds than at any time in history - between 275 to 300 million that could germinate. If only 200 of these find the right gardener to water them, this could turn out to be a great vegetable patch, shit and all, for the twenty centuries of Aquarius.