Peer Reviews
THE POWER OF LOVE
LOVE, GOD AND EVERYTHING
Nicolya Christi –
Bear and Co, 2021, 242 pp., $20, p/b – ISBN 978-1-59143-421-4
Most readers of this journal will have a strong sense that we have arrived at a critical liminal or phase transition point in human evolution, an opportunity for a great shift anticipated in many indigenous cultures. In this crucial visionary contribution, Nicolya Christi asks if we will experience a new era of peace and harmony or continue to break down and destroy, noting that both potential outcomes are possible and that we have the collective responsibility to contribute to the former. The existing technocratic trajectory will keep us ‘locked into a world of fear, suffering, darkness, control, manipulation, conditioning and separation’ based on a love of power grounded in self-serving systems. The Network is devoted to ‘a new emerging paradigm built upon the principles and virtues of unity in diversity, equality, humanity, empathy, kindness, and love’ – this is the ‘new conscious paradigm’ founded on love, truth, freedom and unity’ that also corresponds to our deepest longing and fullest expression of our potential. The outcome depends on a sufficient number of awakened people coming together to overcome passive acceptance and compliance and to choose life in the broadest sense of the term.
In his foreword, Ervin Laszlo remarks that that this represents his own unwritten book based on the author’s alchemical lived experience and entirely consistent with his own vision of remembering our deeper identity and living the love and light that we inherently are. As Chris Bache has also pointed out in his work, we are in the process of awakening from a dark night of the collective soul and we each have our own shadow and healing work to contribute to this unfolding. Deep remembering is represented by direct gnosis that aligns us to Unity Consciousness in a Oneness of Purpose. As such, the book speaks to the soul that recognises its central premise as true: ‘we are LOVE, we are from LOVE, we are here to BE LOVE and to LOVE we shall return.’ This is our wake-up call and our capacity. Throughout the book, keywords such as CONSCIOUSNESS, GOD, SOURCE are capitalised and inherently related to each other (p. 39) – in gnosis, we come to this realisation that there is only one Centre of which we are all manifestations. Nicolya sees this as an evolutionary progression from Existing Earth through Future Earth to New Earth, corresponding to the self (survival), Self (awakened) and Higher Self (actualized/transcendent) becoming increasingly aligned to Soul, Spirit and SOURCE, leading to a radical transformation of heart and mind (see diagram on p. 53).
The self – also ancestral – is wounded by a sense of perceived separation from SOURCE and a feeling that something essential is missing. Sometimes everything has to fall away before we can discover what sustains us within and consciously reconnect to LOVE so that we can become part of a co-creative movement for a conscious and compassionate world by focusing our energies in this direction and not on fear and separation that has its own socially isolating epigenetic effect (‘as we think, we create’, ‘energy follows thought.’) This latter orientation makes us slaves to the existing dysfunctional power template that has dominated humanity for centuries and plans to extend its hold through digital ID and ongoing structural control of investment, energy, food and pharmaceuticals rather than the regenerative health systems advocated in this book, to which a separate chapter and appendix is devoted. One key question here is what we are absorbing or taking in on a daily basis at every level.
Ancient prophecies and astrological configurations give a larger perspective on our current situation, including the Mayan calendar and its connection with 2012. Other traditions also depict a shift of the ages to Aquarius in freedom and interconnectedness to bring in the power of love while transcending the love of power in joining together ‘as an empowered force of Light’ based on the directives of Consciousness, Heart, Truth and Courage. All these prophecies share a common theme of transition and transformation on the one hand and destruction and apocalypse on the other. A prophecy by the Bulgarian Sage Beinsa Douno (Peter Deunov) has a similar resonance, and here the example of Gandhi can serve as an inspiration when he speaks of soul power, Satyagraha: this prescribes who we must be and what we must do, reclaiming our freedom, moving towards decentralisation while also holding the existing manipulators to account as systemic corruption is more openly revealed in spite of widespread censorship. This also means that we ‘each need to become Self-Aware, Self-responsible, and Self-accountable’, asking what LOVE would have us do. In short, ‘LOVE is the answer to everything’ – this may seem simplistic, but becomes truer on deeper reflection. As they say, if not now, when? If not me, then who? I urge you to read this powerfully transformative book and choose to act from the LOVE, LIGHT and LIFE which we inherently are.
LOVE, GOD AND EVERYTHING
Nicolya Christi –
Bear and Co, 2021, 242 pp., $20, p/b – ISBN 978-1-59143-421-4
Most readers of this journal will have a strong sense that we have arrived at a critical liminal or phase transition point in human evolution, an opportunity for a great shift anticipated in many indigenous cultures. In this crucial visionary contribution, Nicolya Christi asks if we will experience a new era of peace and harmony or continue to break down and destroy, noting that both potential outcomes are possible and that we have the collective responsibility to contribute to the former. The existing technocratic trajectory will keep us ‘locked into a world of fear, suffering, darkness, control, manipulation, conditioning and separation’ based on a love of power grounded in self-serving systems. The Network is devoted to ‘a new emerging paradigm built upon the principles and virtues of unity in diversity, equality, humanity, empathy, kindness, and love’ – this is the ‘new conscious paradigm’ founded on love, truth, freedom and unity’ that also corresponds to our deepest longing and fullest expression of our potential. The outcome depends on a sufficient number of awakened people coming together to overcome passive acceptance and compliance and to choose life in the broadest sense of the term.
In his foreword, Ervin Laszlo remarks that that this represents his own unwritten book based on the author’s alchemical lived experience and entirely consistent with his own vision of remembering our deeper identity and living the love and light that we inherently are. As Chris Bache has also pointed out in his work, we are in the process of awakening from a dark night of the collective soul and we each have our own shadow and healing work to contribute to this unfolding. Deep remembering is represented by direct gnosis that aligns us to Unity Consciousness in a Oneness of Purpose. As such, the book speaks to the soul that recognises its central premise as true: ‘we are LOVE, we are from LOVE, we are here to BE LOVE and to LOVE we shall return.’ This is our wake-up call and our capacity. Throughout the book, keywords such as CONSCIOUSNESS, GOD, SOURCE are capitalised and inherently related to each other (p. 39) – in gnosis, we come to this realisation that there is only one Centre of which we are all manifestations. Nicolya sees this as an evolutionary progression from Existing Earth through Future Earth to New Earth, corresponding to the self (survival), Self (awakened) and Higher Self (actualized/transcendent) becoming increasingly aligned to Soul, Spirit and SOURCE, leading to a radical transformation of heart and mind (see diagram on p. 53).
The self – also ancestral – is wounded by a sense of perceived separation from SOURCE and a feeling that something essential is missing. Sometimes everything has to fall away before we can discover what sustains us within and consciously reconnect to LOVE so that we can become part of a co-creative movement for a conscious and compassionate world by focusing our energies in this direction and not on fear and separation that has its own socially isolating epigenetic effect (‘as we think, we create’, ‘energy follows thought.’) This latter orientation makes us slaves to the existing dysfunctional power template that has dominated humanity for centuries and plans to extend its hold through digital ID and ongoing structural control of investment, energy, food and pharmaceuticals rather than the regenerative health systems advocated in this book, to which a separate chapter and appendix is devoted. One key question here is what we are absorbing or taking in on a daily basis at every level.
Ancient prophecies and astrological configurations give a larger perspective on our current situation, including the Mayan calendar and its connection with 2012. Other traditions also depict a shift of the ages to Aquarius in freedom and interconnectedness to bring in the power of love while transcending the love of power in joining together ‘as an empowered force of Light’ based on the directives of Consciousness, Heart, Truth and Courage. All these prophecies share a common theme of transition and transformation on the one hand and destruction and apocalypse on the other. A prophecy by the Bulgarian Sage Beinsa Douno (Peter Deunov) has a similar resonance, and here the example of Gandhi can serve as an inspiration when he speaks of soul power, Satyagraha: this prescribes who we must be and what we must do, reclaiming our freedom, moving towards decentralisation while also holding the existing manipulators to account as systemic corruption is more openly revealed in spite of widespread censorship. This also means that we ‘each need to become Self-Aware, Self-responsible, and Self-accountable’, asking what LOVE would have us do. In short, ‘LOVE is the answer to everything’ – this may seem simplistic, but becomes truer on deeper reflection. As they say, if not now, when? If not me, then who? I urge you to read this powerfully transformative book and choose to act from the LOVE, LIGHT and LIFE which we inherently are.
David Lorimer
WHICH WAY WILL WE TURN AT OUR EVOLUTIONARY CROSSROADS?
‘As we consider … ecological and environmental changes, alongside the socio-political unrest across the globe, we can sense that a shift is occurring and that the world is in the midst of breaking down in order to break through.’ Nicolya Christi.
Somewhere along the line we humans forgot who we are and where we’re from.
Most of the world is at the kindergarten level in terms of psychospiritual maturity, says Nicolya Christi in her extraordinary new book, Love, God and Everything: Awakening from the long dark night of the collective soul (Bear & Company, US $20, November 2021 / UK £15, January, 2022).
A passionate embrace of the possible, Nicolya’s powerful vision, as expressed in this intense new work, is drawn from psychology and metaphysics, as well as a wider philosophy incorporating the ancient wisdom, and is founded on three fundamental principles: how to achieve psychological integration, conscious evolution and spiritual awakening.
Her essentially existentialist outlook does not offer philosophical ‘solutions’, in terms of technical problems in metaphysics, for example, but inspires answers concerned directly with the well-being of the human race both in the here and now and in the future.
In his foreword to Love, God and Everything, the Hungarian philosopher and systems theorist Ervin Laszlo hails Nicolya as a ‘true visionary, thinker and thought leader’ who connects with his own contribution to an emerging new scientific paradigm, humanist and non-materialist, within which consciousness is regarded as fundamental, primary and causal.
The most brilliant minds have long been preoccupied with the question of consciousness, Nicolya writes, but we have yet to plumb the depths and reach the very heights in our understanding of it: ‘We are all sparks of consciousness, and each of us holds a deep gnosis that we are part of something vast, unfathomable and boundlessly indefinable that we refer to as Source, God or the divine. Our deepest calling is to remember that we are consciousness …’
She quotes the French theologian and philosopher Teilhard de Chardin (1881–1955): ‘We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.’
When we have remembrance of our spiritual origins, and are able to remain profoundly connected to this through spiritual practice, then the pain that accompanies the human experience of separation soon dissipates, Nicolya maintains.
The German existential philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889–1976), a thinker concerned to show how humans could become themselves, made an exhaustive analysis of human existence and what it means to be.
He wrote that the comprehension of Being, of what he called Dasein, lay in forgetfulness which was neither accidental nor temporary but was constantly and necessarily renewed: ‘The basic, fundamental ontological act of the metaphysics of Dasein is, therefore, a remembering.’ (Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, 1929).
Standard of value
Seen through the lens of the optimistic ‘new existentialism’, formulated by the English philosopher Colin Wilson (1931–2013) who similarly believed that a new evolutionary direction is opening for us, and whose philosophy was based partly on that conviction, Love, God and Everything has much to offer in terms of seeking a heightening of human consciousness, a true understanding of positive human potential, and of the acceptance of existence as a standard of value.
Wilson wanted to supplant the pessimism and defeatism of the ‘dead end’ brand of existentialism characterised by Jean-Paul Sartre and others in the mid-twentieth century and so pointed the way the way to a constructive existentialism for the twenty-first century.
Certainly, the problems of the world today are largely due to the relative unconsciousness of people, the lack of existential reflection and critical thinking, and a fundamental misunderstanding of what constitutes reality. Everything to do with how we think about life, death and existence changes under the realisation that consciousness is universal and creates all material reality, that biological processes do not create it, and that instead we are participants in it, not the (hubristic) purveyors of it.
If consciousness is, indeed, the very definition of ‘All That Is’, then each one of us is part of that consciousness, and so we are all connected. ‘I’ becomes not just me, but everybody.
In a compelling part of her book, Nicolya tells how it was only through severe personal ordeals over several years that she came to her spiritual insights, not only having found herself without family, penniless and homeless, but with a collapse in her health that brought her to death’s door.
She describes how, from 1997, she underwent multiple psychic and out-of-body experiences which included mystical encounters, a life-changing experience of conscious dying, and a ‘consciousness-transforming experience of enlightenment’.
She detached herself from society by going to live alone on a mountainside in southern France, needing to ‘disidentify’ from it all to rediscover who she was outside of and beyond cultural influence. She says she has now arrived at a place within herself where she chooses to re-engage with society on her own terms.
Her message is that humanity is undergoing a planetary wake-up call which, with her work, she seeks to encourage, but that in order to survive global spiritual, ecological and cultural crises arising from ‘the long, dark night of the collective soul’, we need to consciously evolve, heal generational trauma, and wake to the common potential for profound transformation.
‘As we consider these ecological and environmental changes, alongside the socio-political unrest across the globe, we can sense that a shift is occurring and that the world is in the midst of breaking down in order to break through. This evolutionary phenomenon is also reflected in the personal lives of many individuals.’
Wreaking havoc
She adds: ‘The abuse of human, animal, environmental and ecological rights, along with the effect of social injustice, an unethical banking system, consumerism, and an out-of-control pharmaceutical industry, is wreaking havoc across the globe. Yet an increasing number of people are starting wake up to this stark reality and act accordingly and responsibly.’
But, one has to ask, might it already be too late? At present, the world is going in exactly the opposite direction to the one for which Nicolya would hope. In the shadow of ‘an authoritative global machine firmly entrenched in duality and separation’ — some would say authoritarian — we might well wonder how such a system can be transformed.
The answer, Nicolya maintains, is through love: ‘When enough people join together with a unified vision and intention, especially when working through the mediums of prayer, visualisation and meditation, effecting a physically tangible and visible change becomes possible.’
How such an abiding love could be attained is not immediately clear, but a paradigm change from a reductionist scientific and social materialist worldview to one of a universalist cosmology, or at least an awareness of the prospect of such change, might assist as a first step.
Nicolya discusses the role that epigenetics — the study of how behaviour and environment can change the way human genes work — could play at the cellular level in altering our present fear-based reality. By changing our ‘story’, we could change the world and transcend the dark side of human experience. Envisaging a post-transformation future as if it has already happened would help bring it into being, she believes.
She cites the Global Consciousness Project, set up in the late 1990s with its ‘logistical home’ at the Institute of Noetic Sciences in California, which aims to determine whether, and to what extent, the collective consciousness of many individuals can synchronise and cause coherent action.
In this context, I might mention the Resonance Science Foundation which, taking its name from the physics term in which energy, in the form of waves or vibrations, both reflects from and causes other objects to take on the same energy, believes that if people resonate in their beliefs together they will share and grow that energy. The RSF says that, taking the concept even deeper, ‘unified science shows that the concept of resonance is intertwined throughout our entire universe, and that these interconnections can be harnessed to uplift humanity, our planet and our universe’.
It could be that the ability to think and act collectively for the highest good is natural to all living beings but has fallen into neglect, or disuse, in most people. It might yet be possible for us to reconnect with this aptitude and return our lives to wholeness and balance.
True and ultimate unity
And regarding consciousness as primary and fundamental, as the true and ultimate unity of which we are all part, should be capable of making apparent the provenance and significance of a beneficial collective intelligence.
But, as Nicolya warns, complacency is our greatest hurdle; we cannot afford to remain indifferent, for our attitudes and actions will determine a positive or negative outcome for the world.
Every dysfunctional and nefarious system within society is falling under the spotlight of truth, she says: ‘We have reached an evolutionary crossroads, a time for profound questioning and soul-searching as we seek to establish how to navigate the years and decades ahead in such a way that devolutionary systems, structures and forces are dismantled, dissolved and transcended. This is something that can only be achieved if we unite and act in the name of Love and Truth…’
It seems to me that Nicolya wishes to establish a priority of the passions because when an ambivalence of mind refuses to acknowledge the role of emotion as an impulse to thought and action it leads to hypocrisy, deeply embedded neuroses and distortions of truth, which is exactly what we see going on today among ruling cabals and elites. The repression of human passions only alienates the individual from himself or herself.
However, Nicolya believes we have never been more ideally positioned ‘to birth a new heart-centred humanity, a new conscious paradigm, and a new enlightened world’, and that there really is a conscious awakening going on. Whether it will be enough to halt the opposing forces, or whether those insidious energies will crush it, remains to be seen.
I think it was the English novelist George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans. 1819–80) who said, most optimistically: ‘It’s never too late to be what you might have been.’ Let’s hope this assertion can be applied to humanity at large.
‘As we consider … ecological and environmental changes, alongside the socio-political unrest across the globe, we can sense that a shift is occurring and that the world is in the midst of breaking down in order to break through.’ Nicolya Christi.
Somewhere along the line we humans forgot who we are and where we’re from.
Most of the world is at the kindergarten level in terms of psychospiritual maturity, says Nicolya Christi in her extraordinary new book, Love, God and Everything: Awakening from the long dark night of the collective soul (Bear & Company, US $20, November 2021 / UK £15, January, 2022).
A passionate embrace of the possible, Nicolya’s powerful vision, as expressed in this intense new work, is drawn from psychology and metaphysics, as well as a wider philosophy incorporating the ancient wisdom, and is founded on three fundamental principles: how to achieve psychological integration, conscious evolution and spiritual awakening.
Her essentially existentialist outlook does not offer philosophical ‘solutions’, in terms of technical problems in metaphysics, for example, but inspires answers concerned directly with the well-being of the human race both in the here and now and in the future.
In his foreword to Love, God and Everything, the Hungarian philosopher and systems theorist Ervin Laszlo hails Nicolya as a ‘true visionary, thinker and thought leader’ who connects with his own contribution to an emerging new scientific paradigm, humanist and non-materialist, within which consciousness is regarded as fundamental, primary and causal.
The most brilliant minds have long been preoccupied with the question of consciousness, Nicolya writes, but we have yet to plumb the depths and reach the very heights in our understanding of it: ‘We are all sparks of consciousness, and each of us holds a deep gnosis that we are part of something vast, unfathomable and boundlessly indefinable that we refer to as Source, God or the divine. Our deepest calling is to remember that we are consciousness …’
She quotes the French theologian and philosopher Teilhard de Chardin (1881–1955): ‘We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.’
When we have remembrance of our spiritual origins, and are able to remain profoundly connected to this through spiritual practice, then the pain that accompanies the human experience of separation soon dissipates, Nicolya maintains.
The German existential philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889–1976), a thinker concerned to show how humans could become themselves, made an exhaustive analysis of human existence and what it means to be.
He wrote that the comprehension of Being, of what he called Dasein, lay in forgetfulness which was neither accidental nor temporary but was constantly and necessarily renewed: ‘The basic, fundamental ontological act of the metaphysics of Dasein is, therefore, a remembering.’ (Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, 1929).
Standard of value
Seen through the lens of the optimistic ‘new existentialism’, formulated by the English philosopher Colin Wilson (1931–2013) who similarly believed that a new evolutionary direction is opening for us, and whose philosophy was based partly on that conviction, Love, God and Everything has much to offer in terms of seeking a heightening of human consciousness, a true understanding of positive human potential, and of the acceptance of existence as a standard of value.
Wilson wanted to supplant the pessimism and defeatism of the ‘dead end’ brand of existentialism characterised by Jean-Paul Sartre and others in the mid-twentieth century and so pointed the way the way to a constructive existentialism for the twenty-first century.
Certainly, the problems of the world today are largely due to the relative unconsciousness of people, the lack of existential reflection and critical thinking, and a fundamental misunderstanding of what constitutes reality. Everything to do with how we think about life, death and existence changes under the realisation that consciousness is universal and creates all material reality, that biological processes do not create it, and that instead we are participants in it, not the (hubristic) purveyors of it.
If consciousness is, indeed, the very definition of ‘All That Is’, then each one of us is part of that consciousness, and so we are all connected. ‘I’ becomes not just me, but everybody.
In a compelling part of her book, Nicolya tells how it was only through severe personal ordeals over several years that she came to her spiritual insights, not only having found herself without family, penniless and homeless, but with a collapse in her health that brought her to death’s door.
She describes how, from 1997, she underwent multiple psychic and out-of-body experiences which included mystical encounters, a life-changing experience of conscious dying, and a ‘consciousness-transforming experience of enlightenment’.
She detached herself from society by going to live alone on a mountainside in southern France, needing to ‘disidentify’ from it all to rediscover who she was outside of and beyond cultural influence. She says she has now arrived at a place within herself where she chooses to re-engage with society on her own terms.
Her message is that humanity is undergoing a planetary wake-up call which, with her work, she seeks to encourage, but that in order to survive global spiritual, ecological and cultural crises arising from ‘the long, dark night of the collective soul’, we need to consciously evolve, heal generational trauma, and wake to the common potential for profound transformation.
‘As we consider these ecological and environmental changes, alongside the socio-political unrest across the globe, we can sense that a shift is occurring and that the world is in the midst of breaking down in order to break through. This evolutionary phenomenon is also reflected in the personal lives of many individuals.’
Wreaking havoc
She adds: ‘The abuse of human, animal, environmental and ecological rights, along with the effect of social injustice, an unethical banking system, consumerism, and an out-of-control pharmaceutical industry, is wreaking havoc across the globe. Yet an increasing number of people are starting wake up to this stark reality and act accordingly and responsibly.’
But, one has to ask, might it already be too late? At present, the world is going in exactly the opposite direction to the one for which Nicolya would hope. In the shadow of ‘an authoritative global machine firmly entrenched in duality and separation’ — some would say authoritarian — we might well wonder how such a system can be transformed.
The answer, Nicolya maintains, is through love: ‘When enough people join together with a unified vision and intention, especially when working through the mediums of prayer, visualisation and meditation, effecting a physically tangible and visible change becomes possible.’
How such an abiding love could be attained is not immediately clear, but a paradigm change from a reductionist scientific and social materialist worldview to one of a universalist cosmology, or at least an awareness of the prospect of such change, might assist as a first step.
Nicolya discusses the role that epigenetics — the study of how behaviour and environment can change the way human genes work — could play at the cellular level in altering our present fear-based reality. By changing our ‘story’, we could change the world and transcend the dark side of human experience. Envisaging a post-transformation future as if it has already happened would help bring it into being, she believes.
She cites the Global Consciousness Project, set up in the late 1990s with its ‘logistical home’ at the Institute of Noetic Sciences in California, which aims to determine whether, and to what extent, the collective consciousness of many individuals can synchronise and cause coherent action.
In this context, I might mention the Resonance Science Foundation which, taking its name from the physics term in which energy, in the form of waves or vibrations, both reflects from and causes other objects to take on the same energy, believes that if people resonate in their beliefs together they will share and grow that energy. The RSF says that, taking the concept even deeper, ‘unified science shows that the concept of resonance is intertwined throughout our entire universe, and that these interconnections can be harnessed to uplift humanity, our planet and our universe’.
It could be that the ability to think and act collectively for the highest good is natural to all living beings but has fallen into neglect, or disuse, in most people. It might yet be possible for us to reconnect with this aptitude and return our lives to wholeness and balance.
True and ultimate unity
And regarding consciousness as primary and fundamental, as the true and ultimate unity of which we are all part, should be capable of making apparent the provenance and significance of a beneficial collective intelligence.
But, as Nicolya warns, complacency is our greatest hurdle; we cannot afford to remain indifferent, for our attitudes and actions will determine a positive or negative outcome for the world.
Every dysfunctional and nefarious system within society is falling under the spotlight of truth, she says: ‘We have reached an evolutionary crossroads, a time for profound questioning and soul-searching as we seek to establish how to navigate the years and decades ahead in such a way that devolutionary systems, structures and forces are dismantled, dissolved and transcended. This is something that can only be achieved if we unite and act in the name of Love and Truth…’
It seems to me that Nicolya wishes to establish a priority of the passions because when an ambivalence of mind refuses to acknowledge the role of emotion as an impulse to thought and action it leads to hypocrisy, deeply embedded neuroses and distortions of truth, which is exactly what we see going on today among ruling cabals and elites. The repression of human passions only alienates the individual from himself or herself.
However, Nicolya believes we have never been more ideally positioned ‘to birth a new heart-centred humanity, a new conscious paradigm, and a new enlightened world’, and that there really is a conscious awakening going on. Whether it will be enough to halt the opposing forces, or whether those insidious energies will crush it, remains to be seen.
I think it was the English novelist George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans. 1819–80) who said, most optimistically: ‘It’s never too late to be what you might have been.’ Let’s hope this assertion can be applied to humanity at large.
Geoff Ward – Medium.com