Cleaning our consciousness – the New Land for the New Species

Changes in the environment cause species to change – that is, to evolve.  People also evolve according to changing conditions. But what is the environment of human beings? Only part of us lives in the natural world. The other part, of each of us, lives in the SOCIETY.

Our well-being, our very survival, now depends on the way in which we interact with other human beings and with society. It is society and the challenges it presents us with that now determine our evolution.

Humanity has been formed as a species by nature over millions of years. Now things have changed. Humanity is being molded by civilization, rather than by jungle predators.

New forces burst out from within us and push us towards the unknown goal of evolution, but we resist and pull back from the dark abyss of the unknown, where there are no images to rely on.

Human beings in a civilized society are not faced with the need to fight for survival. The worst enemy of contemporary humanity is the feeling of being alone and not valued. This means each of us must connect with one another. But the connection required is not corporate, and not even intellectual or emotional. We are already united in the ocean of consciousness, but we do not feel this. We have grown accustomed to regard our consciousness as no more than a set of electrical phenomena in the brain. But consciousness exists not between the neurons within the brain but between people.

Modern physicists apply the term “field” to describe anything they don’t understand. Let us assume that consciousness is just a subtle field.

What causes people the greatest suffering? Loneliness – to be out of this field. An individual cannot live without love and friendship. He needs to know that he is needed by someone. If only by being reassured that what he does is valued, that his solitude need not last forever. Total alienation from humanity has, at all times, been regarded as a huge misfortune. In ancient times, the outcast was doomed. In our own time, the number of people suffering from loneliness in comfortable homes appears to be reaching epidemic proportions. And absolutely nothing in our culture – not politics or politicians, not money or celebrity – will save individuals from this alienation.

Human beings, members of the species Homo sapiens, still carry within them the aggressive inheritance of their more ape-like ancestors, who were driven by the survival instinct to take rather than to give. What is needed is not a search for new forms of social relationship but an evolution in consciousness that will enable us to set aside our selfish individual needs in the interests of the wider community and, eventually, of humanity.

Humanity is maturing. And now it is attempting, as an adult should, to create models of the future it wishes for itself and to think up feasible ways of realizing them.

And one more source of pain – which drove us from the dwindling swamp – the sense of isolation from something higher than us.

We stop feeling comfortable in our suits – personalities. We now feel – it is not “who we are”, it is just a shell that guards us and limits our development. In ancient India, those people who could blend their own consciousness with those other others were called Mahatmas (atman is the spiritual essence of human beings, the spark of God in everyone). If you have strong atman, you don’t need strong shells for protection.

Evolution is pushing us towards greater freedom but also greater complexity. Those who feel and understand more also suffer more.

Only in extreme situations does the rational mind understand that the habitual list of old states will not suffice and that something new must urgently be created and learnt – like learning how to leave the water, how to breathe with lungs instead of gills.

The laws of evolution on Earth are very rational.  Nature, through evolution, promotes only those characteristics that are necessary either for survival or for further development. The unusual abilities which appear from time to time in human beings are a pointer to a future development. Reading the thoughts of others, the ability to “see” the contents of another’s consciousness, may appear to be “superhuman” but is not. They show that a broader spectrum of perceptions is available to us.

Like the first land dwelling creatures, crawling towards grass, we are crawling towards a state of love, a state of openness. But even this way will not normally help us to find the way. Our rational minds, which came into being as a result of the interaction of the Earth’s natural forces, simply have no other models available to show us the way to another reality.

The Brief Story of Kitezh

This theory, to some extent, explains what I was trying to do in Kitezh. In the beginning I thought this would happen by itself and quickly.

In 1992 I left behind my job as a commentator in the international department of the Mayak radio. I moved to the village of Chumazovo (translates as Dirty Face!) in an isolated corner of the Kaluga region, where I dedicated myself to the creation of my own little island of reality. I named it Kitezh, after the mythical Russian city that sank beneath the waters of a great lake, predicted to rise once more in Russia’s darkest hour, to herald the dawn of a new age .

I was 33. And at that moment I thought that I knew and understood my mission – to build a new way of raising children through creating a new way of life for adults. And all my efforts and doubts were now focused on one point of concentration and this gave birth to vast amounts of energy.

We built houses and took children in our families.

25 years passed. The result was impressive. Our adults made a very good team of professional teachers and foster parents and our children got absolutely new possibilities in life in comparison with children from orphanages. But some ingredient in this alchemy was missing. Former orphans and delinquent children, after 5 or 6 years of our efforts, began to read books, dream about careers in business or social work. For them it was a big step forward, but for me, we were not a new humanity. A fish grows to the size of its pond. Our communal consciousness still produced a shallow pond. Was it possible to achieve a deeper transformation of consciousness in a lifetime?

At the age of 58 I gave up a post of the big boss in Kitezh.  To some extent it was the end of the phase of my working to materialize Kitezh.

Later, I understood that my realization of this mission was so primitive. And as it was the creation of my mind, it was limited by my environment and experience. It was like swimming on the surface, you see only the surface of the water and my knowledge at that time of social relationships was at that level. It took many more years of pain and effort to make myself go deeper and change my whole concept of the purpose of life.

Dimitri Morozov