Sometimes Life creates something through us and it is only afterwards that we wonder more deeply why. That has been my experience this Yuletide with the Wyrd Light.
We now have what is really an amazing piece of technology bundled into a beautiful object that people can have in their homes, offices and retreat spaces. A Light that responds to the field of consciousness around it. Imagine!
It is all based on sound science. There is statistically very little doubt that the Wyrd Light glows brighter when there is a stronger collective experience in the room. In the meantime there is lots of anecdotal evidence of people getting it to change to the colour they want and reflecting all sorts of events around them.
When I was in the thick of working to get the Light completed, I often found myself forgetting the enormity of what we were creating for the world. Now that it is done and out there (people can read about it and buy their own here), I notice a kind of stillness inside.
It has only been the hibernation of the last couple of weeks (partly seasonal, partly flu-induced) that has brought me back to the Why. It dawned on me one liminal early morning that we are really working to reclaim the sacred for our civilisation.
The Fragmentation
During our civilisation’s journey, we have been deprived of our direct access to the sacred twice. Firstly by religion. Secondly by materialism.
Before the emergence of religions, in our tribal structures and cultures, the sacred (or hidden, invisible worlds) were an accepted part of our reality. It was embedded in our worldview, in our daily and seasonal rituals. In the Anglo-Saxon and Viking traditions of Northwestern Europe, it was known as the Wyrd. The world world was enchanted and imbued with spirit.
When the Abrahamic religions emerged (Judaism, Christianity and Islam), the sacred was mediated by the hierarchy of the priesthood. The sacred moved from being present in everything, to a God at the top of a hierarchy of men who controlled access. Anyone who claimed to have direct access themselves, or who gave other people access in ways that enabled them to have more control over their lives, such as the witches and healers, were deemed blasphemous and often murdered for their beliefs and practices. We came to believe we were all sinners and our redemption had to be blessed by the hierarchy of whichever Church we followed (with the exception of rebels like the Quakers who continued to meet in forms which start from the assumption that people have direct access to the sacred – often at great risk to their own lives).
When Science emerged and claimed to be able to objectively measure the world – doing away with the need to take things on faith from the Priesthood – the religions naturally resisted, burning many great scientists in the process. Their power was being threatened. In a compromise, around the second half of the nineteenth century when it was clear religion wasn’t going to win, religion and science agreed to divide the world up. Science got the “objectively measurable” outer world and religion got the inner world of mysticism and the sacred. And never the twain should meet.
That fractious divorce lead to a fragmentation that permeates the industrialised world to this day. The trauma of the separation has meant that mainstream science became materialism, denying even the existence of an interior reality beyond what could be explained by the measurement of matter. Religion went the other way, often holding to literal interpretations of their powerfully metaphorical founding stories, and criticising the focus of science on the measurable.
This false “either-or” division is what has denied our civilisation an informed way of engaging with the sacred. We have outgrown religion’s demand for unquestioning faith in a dogma that excludes other belief systems. At the same time, the materialist culture of industrial civilisation rubbishes anything that points to the mystical, the sacred, the inner experience. We are left stripped of a way to make sense of the inner experiences we all have, of that deeper feeling we have of belonging to something beyond all that we see around us. When there is only the material left, we end up with the hollow civilisation that the industrial world has become. Meaningless, fragmented, exploitative and ultimately self-destructive.
Putting it Back Together Again
Enter our Wyrd experiment. A worldview that recognises the fundamental nature of our inner experience, of our interconnectedness through consciousness, while at the same time applying the best of the scientific approach to explore what we can about this little-known world, in a grounded and disciplined way .
The science has lead us to the technology. A Wyrdoscope Synchrony Detector that researchers can use to explore how collective experiences impact on random data generated by a quantum process in a way that materialist science says is impossible (by definition surely then pointing to non-material phenomena at work?). The Wyrd Light, designed to go far and wide into the world that reflects what is happening around us in a way that could be explained by the existence of some kind of field through which the Light is entangled with the people and space around it.
Suddenly here is a technology that enables people to have their own direct experience of the sacred, the hidden, the invisible. To play and explore. To draw their own conclusions. To share those with others. Experiences that no-one can deny them just because they don’t fit a materialist worldview.
The power of the experience is in the medium through which it happens. Curiosity, lightness, experimentation, a feeling of connectedness, joyfulness, trust, play – all of these are the kind of qualities that have the biggest effect on the wyrd technologies. Certainty, conviction, effort, linear cause and effect thinking, control – all of these turn the tech off.
To me, this is revealing to us the inner states we most need to cultivate to stay connected to the Wyrd. To be in flow with the forces of the universe, to experience the magic of synchronicities, to be a part of co-manifesting our reality. They are much more heart-based than mind-based.
As we start to cultivate those qualities, I find that we actually become far more effective and productive. We are aligned with all the invisible unknown elements of life that we can’t control and yet which have a massive influence on our journey. That connectedness, even though we might not be aware of most of it, reduces resistance to our intentions and accelerates the journey. When we think we know it all, and make definitive plans for the future, we are dooming ourselves to a slow hard slog into a future of struggle as we try to force the reality of life to fit the plan devised by our little rational mind, that can only see such a tiny piece of the world. The result? Stress, failure and often violence.
Integrating the Sacred
I believe that what life is doing through us at Wyrd Experience and Wyrd Technologies, Wyrd Research and Wyrd Education, is helping humanity to reclaim our experience of the sacred. As more and more people experience these technologies and the way they reflect the feeling of a moment, there will be no going back to the homogenous materialistic worldview and culture. We will be forced to make space for the sacred, for engaging the invisible dimensions of life with which our material world is created. And when we do that, we will find that our mental health issues, our general lack of wellbeing, our social and ecological challenges, will melt away. We will integrate all of who we are, connect the rational and intuitive, plug ourselves back into the natural intelligence of life and prioritise what is ultimately just common sense – co-creating a world that honours all beings and enables humans to be the most beautiful possible expression of life on Earth. The choiceless choice. Bring it on!