The Unfolding Rhythm of Life

You are the universe in ecstatic motion.
~Rumi

Is life as we know it just an amazing accident or is there a greater, intentional design behind it all?

Listening to the birds in my garden and sensing all the vibrant livingness of the natural world in its rich, cyclic patterns, it seems as though a greater Life is breathing through all our little momentary doings. On a busy city street, life can appear to operate in a series of serendipitous accidents as we jostle and bump into each other’s determined intentions, but an overview from a tall building reveals a coherent ordering of all the surface activity.

We are inherently dependent on order and rhythm. Our physical day is defined by the rhythmic pull of the relationship between our planet and its Sun and Moon; the seasons and years are underpinned by the vaster rhythms that guide our planet through its life path. And at the micro level our hearts beat a steady pulse and our bodies function according to rhythmic renewal. Our lives are organised by rhythmic patterns, from the tiniest atom with its circulating electrons to the galactic centre around which universes and star systems wheel.

This vast context reflects through the ordering of our lives into patterns of adherence to laws and values. As populations expand and bring together their different patterns, new ones become needed to establish an order that sustains our increasingly shared and varied living. Patterns based on religions move to a level of interfaith agreement; patterns based on political ideologies seek common ground on which to build new, more inclusive bases for social organisation; patterns based on values and priorities resolve into more universal rights and entitlements. Our inherent urge to organised living, under the impulse to survive, brings forth a greater order that transcends previously separate, diverse patterns of relationship.

Our very identity is changing along with it. In step with an expanding sense of the Whole, our sense of who we are is being stretched in order to live our place within it. We are expanding into increasingly subtle realms of being and activity. There is a kind of essentializing of what is ‘human’ beneath our surface differences. The process is revealing our point of inner unity through the very diversity of our outer expression.

This progressive dynamic unfolds through realization—the more globally focused one is, the more one realizes. And all the forces at work in the world, whether human-generated or natural, are guiding us through. Health is a global concern when pandemics emerge; natural disasters affect large swathes of the planet; climate change is a global issue; conflicts in any location draw in many other nations through alignment of interests or to aid those affected.

The coming together of groups previously based on location, culture, or religion has created a context in which new ways of resonance, grouping, and sharing have emerged. We align now not so much on physical criteria such as race, appearance, geographical location, or nationality, but more on subtle resonances such as values, goals, vision, and an extended sense of identity. We are finding points of common thinking, which lead to increasingly subtle modes of sharing and communication.

We live more subtly and pervasively, and our inventions both reflect and facilitate this trend to higher, finer levels of being and communing. As Einstein has been variously quoted, “a new type of thinking is essential if mankind is to survive and move toward higher levels.” Perhaps our most astonishingly powerful creation is the Internet. It reflects our subtle interconnection, facilitates transcendence over time and place, and brings instantly to hand past knowledge and current happenings anywhere in the world.

The Internet has become so familiar that one can easily overlook its significance, but from an expanded viewpoint, it has clearly changed human society and organised it into a burgeoning world community—a social synthesis wherein we are constantly adjusting into our meaningful place as it unfolds. This global infrastructure conveys a continually expanding range of things to our sensory perception, requiring us to become more subtly discerning in our choices and responses. Meeting those of similar view, no matter where in the world, stimulates subtle and telepathic resonance.

We are expanding in awareness, becoming subtler in perception and more identified with a wider world that is vibrant with sentiency and interconnection. Despite all that yet holds us back, human consciousness is evolving, revealing an underlying plan, as described in the Ageless Wisdom Teachings:

…the production of a subjective synthesis in humanity and of a telepathic interplay which will eventually annihilate time. It will make available to every man all past achievements and knowledge, it will reveal to man the true significance of his mind and brain and make him the master of that equipment and will make him therefore omnipresent and eventually open the door to omniscience.¹

This plan is organic. It is unfolding as the rhythm of Life expresses through us and through our world.

Endnotes

¹Bailey, A. (1934) A treatise on white magic, New York: Lucis Trust Publishing