People Get Ready

The year is 1965. People are awakening to social injustice, racial prejudice and the horrors of an unjust war. In the context of enormous fear, doubt, blind hatred and conflict, there is also so much hope. A song is written by Curtis Mayfield titled “People Get Ready,” and the words capture the spirit of the times:

“People get ready, there's a train a’comin'
You don't need no baggage, you just get on board.
All you need is faith to hear the diesels hummin.'
Don't need no ticket, you just thank the Lord.”

There was plenty for people to “get ready” for and there was much that would occur in those years that very much affects our lives now.

I am not a person given to bold prognostications and I have never been the least bit concerned about predicting the future, but I do, now, have something very important that I want to say: Something is happening in this world of ours, for the most part still unseen and unheralded—but nonetheless monumental—and it will make all that happened in the Sixties seem like small potatoes.

People are waking up! They are saying, “There is something more to life, and I want to know what it is.” What seemed so confusing and unclear before is now less and less so. Things that required great effort to comprehend no longer require that effort. Aspirations that in the past seemed to be impossible are now seen to be possible.

So often we have wished for harmony and peace in our lives, but never found it. We wanted our relationships to be easeful and filled with joy and intimacy, but failed to realize it. We looked to leaders to show us the way, but we never knew that we are the leaders we have always been looking for. We felt deep down at our most fundamental level that there was something present in us that never changed, despite all the change swirling about, but we could never touch it. But, but, but now there is something quivering on the edges that points to a way of being that is so incredible and awe-inspiring, and we can’t even begin to predict how exactly it will take shape.

I have had the experience over the past months where many people gathered together in a context of complete openness and benefit. They worked together closely without ill will, and they put the greater good ahead of their own selfish considerations. They dared to consider a world that would reflect what they were experiencing in their own lives: a world without conflict because people were no longer in conflict within themselves; enormous opportunity to benefit themselves and others and the willingness and ability to do so; the breaking out of the old ways of thinking into the clarity of being that comes from true freedom.

I feel great confidence in saying this. It is not based on some sort of New Age-type optimism; it is rather based on the hard evidence that more and more people are willing to make the simple change in themselves that allows the peace that is already present to flourish. There is something different in the air, although I can’t yet say exactly what it is. All I know is that it’s coming, and we are at a fortuitous turning point that will usher in enormous benefit and good will.

So, truly, people get ready, there’s a train a’comin’, you just get on board.