Often we are told to ‘manifest abundance’ as if abundance has to come from somewhere else. But what if the treasure has been buried in our back garden all along?

What if abundance is already present, in our friendships, our relationships, in our connections with our community, in our soul calling, in our sensual body and in the wild earth around us?

What if abundance is already present in the great gifts that we have within us. Perhaps all we need to do is tell people about these gifts and share these gifts with the world. Match what you have to what people want and need. Touch people deeply and help them fulfill their deepest needs. All our dreams may be close at hand, even though they may sometimes appear to be hidden.

Even in very difficult, barren, challenging situations where there is pain all around there is usually some small hidden source of abundance, some residual connection with another person or with a plant or animal present that we can cultivate or ‘garden’, that we can extend our attention, intent and tenderness towards.

We may have taken on the unconscious belief that abundance is something we have to struggle and suffer to get at, but in fact we may just need to take steady persistent steps towards it moving forward in as effortless a way as possible.

That is not to say that there may be challenges and difficulties on the path ahead, and we may need to sometimes be like a fierce warrior, to stand up against things and to draw on all of our resources. But instead of only fighting and struggling against these challenges we can also use our effortless cunning and magic to find a way to contact the medicine power that lives hidden under the problems.

Once we begin to appreciate the vast abundance and bounty that is already present it has a tendency to multiply itself, to make more of itself. Our socio-economic system also generates artificial scarcity and one way to work against this tendency is to begin to notice, amplify, tend to, share and cultivate the abundance that is around us.

Our fears may not be just fears of the scarcity that is around us but of the very experience of abundance itself. The very superabundance of nature and reality can be frightening and we may need to humble ourselves in self surrender, in gratitude, in connection to be able to receive it. We may need to find the courage to receive both the abundance that is present and the abundance that is to come.

Why is there so often an obstacle between you and the place you wish to get too? Why is there seemingly almost always a threshold guardian on the way to your desire, on the way to the treasure you seek? On the level of our planetary mythos, why do we have to experience ‘the age of separation’ before we reach ‘the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible?’ Imagine for a moment that your life is a dream, a myth or a computer simulation. Why would the dreamer of the dream, the creator of the myth or the programmer of the simulation create the problem, the threshold guardian or the obstacle? Perhaps it is because you are not yet ready to receive the treasure. You don’t have the wisdom, you are too inexperienced. You first need to learn to overcome the obstacle. You need the wisdom you will gain learning to overcoming the obstacle before you reach the treasure. And perhaps there is also a deeper mystery here. Perhaps you have been caught up in a kind of optical illusion and the real treasure is not what you thought it was. Perhaps the real treasure is not the desired object on the other side of the threshold but very the wisdom you receive in overcoming the obstacle in itself. You might find that this wisdom is what you really needed all long. How do you actually overcome the obstacle? In order to overcome the obstacle you need to shapeshift into the obstacle or the threshold guardian. You need to feel its qualities, the feelings associated with it, its deepest essence and its medicine power and to use this very power, the threshold guardian’s own power, to overcome it or make peace with it. Seen from the ‘eyes of eternity’, from the eyes of the primal dreamer or the mythmaker, these triad of elements; your ordinary identity, the threshold guardian and the treasure are all one univocal essence which has become temporarily divided into three parts and the purpose of the myth or dream of your life is to reunite them.

In my dream a black panther is standing outside my door, I’m afraid and try to close the door, but the door falls off it hinges and the black panther walks inside anyway. I look outside and see my garden has turned into a vast new world; there are trees laden with fruit, mountains and rivers with houseboats floating on them, forest gardens, animals including deer and kangaroos running around, and people sitting round fires whilst others dance and celebrate.

What is the meaning of this mysterious dream? We often live in a world of scarcity but abundance is nearby. It is not far away. It is hidden, but it is hidden in plain sight. Like the story from The Arabian Nights the treasure you search and suffer for in distant lands is to be found in your own back garden. Or perhaps it is near your house but you just need to climb over some small obstacle, like a barbed wire fence, to get to it, and then the garden, the primordial paradise, is right there. It was never far away in the first place. But for some reason you couldn’t see it. You already have what you need to fulfill your dreams, the great gift you have to give is already inside you. You have enough resources to pull off miracles and magic.

At this time we are seeing an increase of social injustice and environmental destruction. What will be the eventual fate of human beings? One possibility is that runway feedback loops of entropy will occur and result in a downward spiral of increasing chaos and violence resulting in total system collapse. As entropy increases the natural wholeness of human community splits into two parts which seem to be at war with each other. We experience this phenomena on a human level as the relationship of the oppressor and the oppressed.

Right now humanity is faced with many existential problems such as resource depletion, climate change, imminent economic collapse and rising social injustice. When we look at these problems from the perspective of the separate, disconnected, traumatized individual and his isolated mind all these problems seem insoluble; we can only conclude that the likely outcome will be total system collapse, widespread ecological destruction and/or the decimation of the human population.

From the perspective of the separate, isolated, disconnected individual and his control based mind the only solutions to these problems are top-down control based solution such as geo-engineering, totalitarian social engineering, forcible population control or abandoning the planet entirely. Ironically, the disconnected control based mind gains little comfort from these solutions, as he often recognizes that they are in fact highly impractical.

When we shift to a more connected ecological self and expand our identity to include our wider community and even to include non-human life our perspective on the situation may radically change. Although the situation is still a serious one with many difficulties to overcome, it may become apparent that there is narrow chance that bottom-up community and grassroots solutions to human and ecological problems may become effective if we work together as a community and work together with the intelligence of nature rather than against it.

In fact right now we have answers to most of our problems. We have effective conflict resolution techniques to help us to create decentralized benevolent forms of governance, deep ecology practices to help people reconnect with nature, renewable technologies, permaculture based food production systems which would also allow us to regenerate soil and ecosystems and sustainable, non-growth based socially just economic solutions. All that we lack at present is the widespread application of these ideas.

These radical ideas are the vanguard, which may one day become the mainstream. In the future all those things which the mainstream world has cast aside may be raised up and will be put to the work of the restoration and repair of community and of nature.

Widespread social change requires us to work together as a community. From the perspective of the isolated disconnected mind this is impossible, because the isolated disconnected mind does not engage with community and from its perspective community does not exist. In a sense the disconnected individual is a skeptic in the philosophical sense. The disconnected individual doubts the existence of community in the same way Descartes doubted the existence of exterior reality in his meditations. This skepticism about community, generated by trauma and disconnection, is what lead Margaret Thatcher to once make the absurd statement that ‘there is no society, only individuals.’

When we begin to move away from disconnection and towards interbeing a new perspective on reality may emerge. When we shift into connection with nature and begin to work together with our community it may become clearly apparent that when many individuals work together as a community, and when many communities work together as a collective, it can create emergent change at the level of the whole system. These emergent changes cannot be predicted from the lower levels of the system, and from the perspective of the disconnected individual they are in fact invisible. From the perspective of the isolated disconnected individual large scale social change is impossible. From the perspective of the someone who is connected to their community it may become apparent that large scale social change arises at an emergent level when many individuals begin collaborating together.

We all know at some level that a better world is possible (even though it is uncertain) but sometimes we doubt it. The dreams, visions and stories of a more beautiful world which we hear sense, see or feel at first appear as a signal which we pick up intermittently. They appear at first to not be entirely ontologically stable; they seem to flicker in and out of existence. As we move deeper into connection with life and with nature we begin to pick up a more and more stable and continuous signal. The reason that visions of a more beautiful world appear as an intermittent signal at first is because they are a message sent back in time from the future. Visions of the more beautiful world move as if backwards in time and they work to create the effect of what Plato called anamnesia, the reversal of amnesia; they remind of something we already know at the deepest level of our being. They are a message from the the emergent level, from the ancient future, from the new world which is trying to bring itself into being.

It is not necessary for everyone to shift into a new perspective of reality at once for social change to become mainstream. It only will only initially require somewhere between one in thirty to one in a hundred people to recreate community, connect people together and facilitate psychological, spiritual, economic or social change. Some time after one person in a hundred has woken up, the process of awakening may become emergent and may spread through the whole system, rapidly increasing social integration and diversity, creating negative entropy, reversing social and ecological destruction, and eventually greatly reducing separation and disconnection.

Economic growth has taken on the place of the numinous or the divine in our mainstream culture. It takes the place of ‘God’ and is the ultimate source of ‘meaning’ and the means by which we ascribe ‘value’ or ‘worth’ to anything. People and things are ‘meaningful’ or ‘valuable’ not in themselves due to their own nature but only by virtue of how much they contribute to economic growth. But on the other hand the basis of this value system is being slowly eroded in some ways at the moment