Those of you who receivemy daily Wisdomkeepers know I have been talking a lot about higher consciousness lately. It’s something that’s a challenge to define but easy to observe and totally convincing when it comes over you.

For Moses it was the Burning Bush. For the prophet Elijah it was a gentle whisper at the mouth of a cave, for Mohammed it was a visitation by the angel Gabriel as it also was for a young Jewish maiden named Mary. For Buddha it was a moment under the Bodhi tree. For Jesus it seems to have been innate.

For astronaut Edgar Mitchell it was the sight of Earth from the moon that led to the creation of the Institute for Noetic Science. For Martin Luther King, Jr. the Lord took him to the mountaintop and he saw the promised land of equality for all people. The result was the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act of the 1960s and a major transformation of American society.

I am sure many of you could tell stories of your own. For me it was an autumn afternoon, deep in a long silent retreat in 1968.

The focal point of much discussion of higher consciousness right now is the human brain and its capacity to renew itself. Previously it was thought that we were stuck with the equipment we were born with but now we know that the brain is capable of generating new cells within itself through a process called neorogenesis. There is also much discussion of diet and how it facilitates the renewal of the brain. (Read Power Up Your Brain by Perlmutter and Villoldo).

Of what value though is all this? On the purely biological plane it has great implications for the cure of Alzheimers and for the expansion of human potential . In the more metaphysical realm it is shaping a new vision of reality in which the human race, and all else in creation, is experienced as One by more and more people.

This can lead us all on a journey from a mainstream consciousness that says “Who cares about the minorities, take care of the majority” to a higher consciousness that, for example, leads hundreds of veterans to give up the comfort of their homes to go en masse to the bone chilling plains of North Dakota in winter to place themselves unarmed between the police and the Water Protectors. They do this out of a deep sense of oneness with the Native Americans, with a felt sense of the superiority of their cause to the cause of fossil fuel extraction for dirty energy and profit, with a sense of reverence for Indian Sacred Ground and for the life force of water, not just as a resource but as a living friend. They also do it because they hunger and thirst for justice, an unavoidable byproduct of higher consciousness experience.

In this season when a certain magical feeling is in the air and Love is on the rise, let us lay claim to the promise and portent of a new vision of reality where Light overcomes the darkness that cannot comprehend it.

(Bill O’Brien is a Consciousness Coach. He can be reached at billobrienconsciousnesscoach@gmail.com )