The Call to Rise Like a Phoenix
I am thrilled and honored to announce that I will be teaching a 7-part class for Shift Network, Embrace the Dark Night to Become the Phoenix Rising. We are living in terrifying times and I know we are all suffering intensely the horrors and ordeals that are exploding everywhere.
As I write this, fires are burning along the U.S. west coast, Antarctica is melting faster than even the doomsayers predicted, the Coronavirus pandemic is still out of control and millions of people worldwide are facing economic collapse.
Given all we are going through, it’s easy to run into the sordid embrace of magical thinking—as we can see from the idiotic and dangerous proliferation of conspiracy theories—or to fall into exactly the kind of nihilistic despair that increases the danger already afflicting us.
What I want to offer at this moment is a way through that is neither grounded in fantasy or tainted by the pessimism that saps will and robs us of the kind of rugged hope that we all now need like oxygen.
What I have learned from my own devastating, amazing journey is that the dark night process, while horrifying and infinitely demanding, is both ultimate grace and an opportunity of the most astounding kind to make an evolutionary leap towards realizing the greatest dream of our souls—to be born a humble, empowered divine human able and equipped by grace to co-create with the divine a wholly new way of being and doing everything.
I have understood viscerally that without dying, we cannot be reborn, without allowing our false selves to be systematically crucified, we cannot come into radical divine being. I know this in the cells of my being, the core of my heart, the last 25 years of my own experience of a devastating dark night and from the always expanding birth that it has made possible.
I have cried out against the new age fantasies and injustice of all kinds, because I have known that unless everything changed fast, we would be facing what we are now facing, a comprehensive global dark night which threatens us as everyone can see with chaos, agony, the potential birth of fascism and rapid extinction.
But my experience has also equipped me with what I believe is the map we must now follow.
Drawing on the deepest wisdom of the mystical traditions, we must understand the nature and structure of the dark night. We must align with the will of the divine through the dark night to let what we need to get rid of die, enabling the best of our divine self to be born. Finally, we must understand that the Great Secret hidden in the heart of the world mystical traditions is this: our global dark night is the unspeakably rigorous birthing canal for a humbled and divinized humanity to come together in heartbreak and in revelation with the divine to build a new world.
In my upcoming class for Shift I am offering the distillation of my lifetime’s experience and the radical transformative practices that will enable you to surrender to the rigor of the dark night without being paralyzed or driven mad, to allow the divine to birth in you new powers of creativity and compassion in action, enabling you to participate in the next level of humanity’s evolution—a human being who is consciously illumined in mind, vibrantly loving in heart and increasingly divinized in the cells of a new kind of body.
The map that I will be offering is not something I have invented. It is something that has been known by the great masters of the engoldenment process—Jesus, Rumi, Kabir, Sri Aurobindo, the Mother and her great disciple, Satprem.
It is one that was directly transmitted to me by my greatest teacher and the beloved of my heart, Father Bede Griffiths, whom I met in the last years of his life, when he was living through in his own being and body the great transfiguration that is now being offered to all of us through this excruciating dark night we are in.
I cannot think of any class that I could give that is more essential at this terrible moment. For myself I feel as if I have been waiting to give this class all my life. And I am now ready to share the secrets that have been given to me at a time when knowing them will make the difference between extinction and this radical regeneration, the birth of a new humanity out of the ashes of the old that has now clearly reached its terminal stage.
If you open to it, you will be graced with the skills, tools, creative imagination, energy, stamina, and the God-given power to rise like Phoenixes from the burning down of all the illusions and fantasies and fake philosophies that have limited and constricted you.
Please join me and help me help you. I need you. I need your willingness. I need your courage to see that one world is really ending. I need the truth that burns in your soul to take over your whole being so that you can rise to what I have tried and continued to try to rise to. I’m not giving these transmissions as a guru. The Evolution Adventure can only be taken by friends willing to share their weaknesses, heartbreak, doubts, agonies and deepest revelations.
The class begins in two weeks on Wednesday, October 14th. I will send out more details soon. You will find it, I trust, the necessary revolution of insight and hope that we all now need.
With all my love,
Andrew
