Description
Book SynopsisAn inspiring manual for navigating humanity’s collective dark night and enacting personal and planetary transformation• Explores how Sacred Activism--specifically, creative, wise, sacredly inspired action--offers an antidote to the crises facing our world
• Reveals how to uncover and sustain joy and how to use it as fuel for continuing Sacred Activism in dangerous times
• Includes practical maps of the dark night process and of the four-part path to transfiguration drawn from the secret depths of the mystical traditions
Presenting a manual for navigating humanity’s collective dark night, Andrew Harvey and Carolyn Baker explore potential antidotes, drawn from mystical traditions and Sacred Activism, to help us find inspiration and take action in the face of the daunting challenges to our world.
Offering a deep discussion of our global dark night in terms of the Kali Yuga, the authors examine the dangers of a growing constellation of intractable crises--authoritarianism both in America and abroad, climate change, economic inequality, social upheaval, and spiritual malaise. They then explore the antidotes to these crises: Sacred Activism--specifically, creative, wise, sacredly inspired action--and a profound understanding of our evolutionary ordeal and its potentialities. Examining the power of joy to help enact personal and planetary transformation, they explain how joy, or ananda, is a force all mystical traditions recognize as the essence of the Divine. They reveal how to uncover and sustain joy in ourselves and how to use joy as fuel for continuing Sacred Activism in dangerous times.
Drawing on the visionary teachings of mystics such as Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and Sri Aurobindo, the authors show how the global dark night is part of an evolutionary mutation process and how its very intensity makes it the potential seedbed of a new embodied, divine humanity. They offer practical maps of the crises, of the shadows that this global dark night is casting, and of the four-part path to transfiguration drawn from mystical traditions. Sharing a vision of a new and focused global moment of love in action, the authors reveal that apocalypse is not inevitable--if enough people awaken to the extraordinary possibilities of Sacred Activism.
Table of ContentsIntroduction to the Radical Regeneration Quartet
PART ONE Savage Grace Living Resiliently in the Dark Night of the Globe
Foreword to Part One by Matthew Fox
1 Kali Takes America
Reconnecting with the Destroyer/Creator 2 Resisting the Modern Face of Fascism
3 Living Resiliently amid Global Psychosis
4 Regeneration
The Legacy of Love in Action 5 Celebrating Reconnection, Resistance, Resilience, and Regeneration
Suggested Reading List for Part One
PART TWO Return to Joy
The Journey beyond Happiness
Introduction to Part Two
6 Joy 133 The Ultimate Nature of Reality
7 The Adversaries of Joy
8 Personal and Collective Shadows
Confronting the Crisis Directly
9 The Myriad Flames of Joy
10 Dialogue on the Road to Joy
Conclusion to Part Two
Suggested Reading List for Part Two
PART THREE
Saving Animals from Ourselves
A Manifesto for Transforming Our Relationship with the Divine Animal Within
Introduction to Part Three
11 Opening to the Initiation
12 A Revolution in Perception
What Could More Than Human Consciousness Offer Humans? 13 Preparing the Ground of Initiation
14 The Tortured Human Animal
15 When We Cannot Look, We Cannot Act
16 What Is Being Done for Animals?
Suggested Reading List for Part Three PART FOUR Radical Regeneration
Birthing the New Human in the Age of Extinction Foreword to Part Four by Paul Levy
Introduction to Part Four
Covid’s Implacable Errand by Carolyn Baker
Prayer to Kali by Andrew Harvey
17 Radically Reframing the Crisis
18 Stage One of the Initiatory Process
The Magnificent Vision of Possibility 19 The Descent
The Apocalypse and the Antichrist
20 The Quantum Field and the Human Mutation
21 Transmutation
The Birth of the Divine Human 22 Nobility of Soul
Conclusion to Part Four by Ludwig Max Fischer
Suggested Reading List for Part Four
Appendix 1 of Part Four:
Regarding Shadow Healing
Appendix 2 of Part Four: The Death of Certainty in a Torrent of Trauma
Afterword
Notes
About the Authors
Index
