Co-Creating the Next World—Kymani Thomas
What have the great minds said about living in the next world? Audre Lorde writes in “The Uses of the Erotic” that there “is a grave responsibility, projected from within each of us, not to settle for the convenient, the shoddy, the conventionally expected, nor the merely safe.”
Terence McKenna transmits the idea that we are fast approaching the “transcendental object at the end of time,” a fully realized dimension where we will all exist in our true forms in a collective objet d’art. We have limited “time” to shape the nature of this art piece and how we will all coexist within it.
Alejandro Jodorowsky says, “No more Dali, no more Magritte,” affirming that an individualist conception of artistic genius will not serve humanity’s deepest needs. He urges us to combine our creative powers to do something important for our future.
Seattle-based painter, muralist, draftsperson, and facilitator Mari Shibuya says the new world “depends on the integrity of how we show up in community. Harmonic creation is a right relationship with the world that ripples out into greater structures that we create together.” Shibuya’s emphasis on the underlying structures of reality shows up in her work in sacred geometry and mandalas. Her work, and the public and collaborative nature of its generation, point to the idea that reality is co-created, and co-creation can be training for next world living.
In a collaboration with the muralist Val Aurea in Tulum, Mexico, Shibuya found that co-creation is a dance of constraints and freedom, mutual respect and trust. Each artist had their own timelines, other projects to manage, and personal inspirations for the mural. Removing the ego was key to their coming together. Mari’s idea to visualize justice in the United States using scales fed into Val’s fixation on the Egyptian afterlife wherein the soul is weighed before it can enter paradise. These independently generated ideas merged gracefully over sessions of weed, cigarettes and coffee.
If you’re reading this, chances are you sense the next world coming—breaching our current reality-dream with bright shafts of highly-vibrating gold. Maybe you’ve felt it by consciously manifesting your reality, feeling awe at how your life situation looks exactly how you dreamed it years ago. Or maybe when a lover shined a beam of pure light into your darkest corners and loved what was there, and it melted your hard edges into soft rounds. Maybe you felt it on a Monday night dance floor, sweating it out to fast house music.
How did you come to this understanding? You read Alan Watts and had a breakdown? You reread The Alchemist and had an awakening? You read The Kybalion and your mind was changed? You read The Four Agreements and made a commitment? You practiced yoga and learned to watch the storms of fear and pain pass by. Perhaps at some point circumstances helped you realize the way you were living was a lie, and your life had become a corpse you were carrying around out of fear. And when the pain became too penetrating you dropped it, destroying everything, but finding that you still remained.
Next-world living seems to exist on the other side of a breakdown, a demolition of the training we receive as children. It seems to be the wide open field of tall green grass that you enter after crawling through miles of dank sewer tunnels. It’s marked by a sense of empowerment to dream and freely create anything desired. There’s an unrelenting sense of responsibility. Audre Lorde goes on to write, “when we begin to live from within outward, in touch with the power of the erotic within our selves, and allowing that power to inform and illuminate our actions upon the world around us, then we begin to be responsible to our selves in the deepest sense.” Responsibility, or “the ability to respond” as Sadhguru puts it in Inner Engineering, is emphasized by many of our greatest artists and seers as the key to immediately stepping into a new dimension of life—the next world.
Responsibility—freed from connotations of blame, shame, and guilt—becomes empowering and a conduit of generative creative energies. Empowered people rarely accept the things that upset them; they use all their power, privilege, intuition, intellect—any tool at their disposal—to make a change. In the Old World system, this level of action is reserved for the elites, those that can use their wealth and status to demand change or else. In a more balanced, new world, this level of action will be applied by all people, all the time.
Artists, seers, and awakened ones excavate new channels for us to journey through to the new world. They have, often at great personal cost, demonstrated that we are the dreamers and can shape the dream. Octavia Butler writes in Parable of the Sower, “God is change; shape God.” In this conception, God is impersonal and capricious but the adept and believing can, “with forethought and careful planning,” shape the nature of change—the only true constant in life. As with Lorde, Butler urges a higher sense of ability, feeling, responsibility, and empowerment. It is only with our full investment in life that we can have a stake in its direction.
“We are birthing a new age as a collective, and it’s only through our capacity to stretch our imagination that it’s going to happen,” Shibuya prophecies. She points to the influential global philosopher Nishida Kitaro as an influence on her worldview, especially his assertion that “we are creativity creating itself.” Can we imagine a world where imagination is held as a more powerful source of energy than money or credits? And where creativity is prized and supported as the genesis of all things and recognized as our fundamental human power?
For as much as the next world will be a fully realized physical plane, that plane will be generated in the image of the spiritual and mental states of its inhabitants. Today our world is shaped by the imagination of a few dominators, with ideas of classism, racism, patriarchy, borders, imperialism, subjugation of nature, and competition. The Amazon burning is a physical result of these ideas taking root in our collective imaginations. If we believe in and reproduce these ruling-class ideas, we take responsibility for their impacts. For the next world to be different, the majority of people on the planet will have to imagine, and then create, from a different set of ideals.
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Not only is the old world unsustainable by design, it is asking to die gracefully. We are living through the long slow death of the old and birth of the new simultaneously. It’s possible to see either world depending on where you look. The trick of it is that when you stare into the abyss, the abyss stares back. Stare deeply into the old world and become consumed by it, possessed by its wants and desires. Stare into the new world and become possessed by its cries for equality, justice, love and compassion.
French-Swiss film director, screenwriter and film critic Jean Luc Godard says “He who jumps into the void owes no explanation to those who stand and watch.” The void, or the abyss, is chaotic and always shifting. It requires all of our presence to ride the ever-changing waves of our current moment experience. It is also the place where we are activated, turn and face our fears, and learn to welcome change with grace and rigor. The void is the domain of the intentional.
It is so comforting to stand and watch, and critique. We are nurtured on critique. But to spend a life, energy, and savings to create the highest expressions of self creates an entirely different reality. To only stand by and comment is to say “I am not willing to act, nor do I want anyone else to act.”
New world living must be about action that honors artists and seers and the planet—now. It must be a way of living that addresses both the injustices of today as well as a completely new, almost alien way of being that taps into our deepest human desires for peace, connection, and oneness.
Let us eagerly look and listen for the next world. Let us watch and listen for the ambassadors of that world, desperately hoping to catch a glimpse of what can be. Let us follow the path of our deepest desires, striding past our fears, to create the stuff of our wildest imaginings. And may we courageously put the long dead parts of our lives to rest, so that we can enjoy the raging, glimmering waters of life together.
KYMANI THOMAS IS AN ARTISTIC CROSS-POLLINATOR—A CELLIST, COMPOSER, IMPROVISOR, AND GALLERIST with a commitment to identifying and celebrating difference, building bridges between cultures, and promoting new voices and decolonized realities within the framework of art music experiences.
Header Image: Gardens by the Bay, Singapore by Victor Garcia
Second Image: Muralist Mari Shibuya and Val Aurea in Tulum, Mexico
Author Bio Image: Kymani Thomas by Alexa Ashley