ARE WE ENTERING INTO A GLOBAL VISION QUEST?

As human ‘beings’ I believe that we have always sought a higher vision.

 

Whether this seeking is connected to our aspirations for our personal life, or the search for higher and more evolved forms of collective social purpose, we are naturally ‘questing’ creatures, constantly striving to know more, to be more and to experience more.

 

In the fast changing and tumultuous times we now find ourselves living in, our human hunger for ‘more’ can be seen for what it truly is – a force that is both enabling and destructive.

 

Hunger itself is neither bad nor good – it is simply the catalyst for a response to the call of evolution. When aligned with the classical hero’s journey, the traits of human hunger can be seen as either destructive or creative depending on our individual and collective response to them.

 

Answering the call ?

 

If we can feel and acknowledge that our hunger is to simply to become ‘more’ than that which we already are, then we can ‘answer the call’ to evolution in our life and summon up the courage to leave behind everything that we have known up until now.

 

In doing so we leave all our comfort zones behind and embark on our quest into the unknown, confusing and challenging world beyond our old stories. We don’t know where we will go, what will happen to us in our life or, most importantly, who we will be when we finally emerge from our quest. But we leave willingly to seek a vision of what is possible. We surrender our control games, our safety habits and our desperate attempts to force life to do what we want it to. We allow ourselves to become infused with the mystery of not knowing what will happen or who we really are underneath the trappings of our persona.

 

Or ignoring the call ?

 

On the other hand for some of us, the powerful nature of our inner and outer hunger is deeply frightening and therefore we do our best to ignore it. We numb ourselves to its signals and bury our discomfort in addictions and excuses.

 

We listen to everyone else’s story apart from our own, and become subsumed in the drama of the collective media and social mythology.

 

We tell ourselves that everything will be ok / go away / won’t affect us, which enables us to stay locked in our old stories patterns and beliefs. That is, until the outer world changes so irrevocably that we have no choice but to look at it. To look and feel the fear of that we have been trying to ignore.

 

So which answer feels more familiar to you?

Which one scares the living daylights out of you?

 

Vision quests have been used by indigenous cultures across the world for millennia as a mechanism to remove ourselves from our old story, humbly seeking a higher vision from Nature and the forces in our Universe in order to inform the next chapter of our life purpose.

 

As someone who regularly ‘vision quests’, I have not been able to ignore the ‘once in a lifetime’ opportunity that the global COVID situation is providing us all – to embark on an individual and collective vision quest right this moment. We are all being shown the mirror of our personal and social hunger in spades. Will we answer the call of our quest to seek a higher way of living, or blot it out it for as long as we can?

 

What will you choose?

 

My lifetime(s) friend Giles Hutchins and I are launching a new format for the Retsorying Life podcast, with the creation of the first of three short Tea Sessions. Over tea, on Zoom, we explore the three distinct stages of the mythic vision quest and how we are experiencing them unfolding in the world around us, both from a personal and a social viewpoint.

 

You’ll find our 20 minute tea time session on Soundcloud & Itunes.