From a spiritual perspective, the greatest challenge facing humanity today is the monotheistic belief that God is other, that there is a deep division between humanity and the Divine that can never be bridged. This assertion is the first of the seven pillars of unwisdom that arise from the fragmented, split mind’s belief that we human beings are separate from God, Nature, and each other.

Yet, as many millions of people know today, the Divine Essence that we all share is Love. For as John wrote in his first epistle, “God is Love, and he who abides in Love abides in God, and God abides in him”, the text of Pope Benedict XVI’s first encyclical Deus Caritas Est in January 2006.

But it was not only Jesus of Nazareth who was Divine. We all live in union with the Divine at every instant of our lives, as has long been recognized in the East, particularly by Advaita sages and Zen adepts, and by Kabbalistic, Christian, and Sufi mystics in the West. And today, more and more people are discovering that when we realize the essential unity of humanity, organized religion is not only irrelevant but dangerous, a wedge that divides communities and individuals from each other.

This is the essence of the spiritual renaissance taking place today as evolution carries humanity from the mental-egoic age (me-epoch) of the past 5,000 years into an exquisitely beautiful eschatological age of universal spirituality (us-epoch). This is absolutely essential, for when there is separation, there is fear, particularly the fear of death, when we become separate from our Immortal Ground of Being, called avidya ‘ignorance’ in the East.

It is as exemplars of the emerging species Homo divinus that we can come to terms with the death of Western civilization, which dominates the world today through the global economy. But for this to happen, we need to die to the sense of a separate self, when Brahman and Atman are one, in Hindu terms, through the realization of Anatman ‘non-self’ in Buddhist terms.

The Paragonian Fellowship is being set up as a network of networks to give all actual and potential members of Homo divinus a common focus and vision, necessary if we are to stimulate the synergy that can carry us collectively into the long-awaited Age of Light. It is in this cooperative way that Love can conquer the fears that arise from separation.

This Love naturally includes love for all the religious authorities who seek to maintain the status quo, to prevent their followers from discovering their True Nature, necessary if we are ever to live in love, peace, and harmony with each other and our beautiful planet Earth.

For instance, Yehuda Berg tells us in The Power of Kabbalah that the Zohar, the primary Kabbalistic text, “warned that the ‘governing religious authority’ would always try to prevent the people from claiming the spiritual power that was rightly theirs.” Such authorities would “act as an intermediary between man and the divine”. For if they allowed people to “connect directly to the infinite, boundless Light of Creation” that “would mean their demise as gatekeepers to heaven”. 

So despite the great awakening of love, consciousness, and intelligence we are witnessing today, there is still immense resistance to change, to experiencing Total Freedom through Total Revolution. None of us can therefore know where evolution will actually take us in the coming years.

As Ramana Maharshi wrote when his mother tried to persuade him to return home from Arunachala in 1898 when he was 19, “What is not meant to happen will not happen, however much you wish it. What is meant to happen will happen, no matter what you do to prevent it. This is certain.”