If you've been magnetized to read The Enlightenment Imperative you are very likely what it calls a lightworker - one devoted to helping others however they can. As the Syntropy Group puts it:

'A lightworker is one who is moved by the needs of her or his environment to commit him/herself beyond self-interest to working for the good of the whole. The whole may be the family, the community, the biosphere, or the planetary evolutionary project itself.' (E.I. pg. 3)

Does this describe you?

As my partner and co-editor Jim and I were drawn to try to help with the urgent planetary needs enveloping us and to use the amazing potential of this unique historical time, we yearned for special knowledge, sometimes hard to come by in our culture. Could becoming ìenlightenedî help us to be more useful in these times? What is enlightenment in our time? What does it look like in daily life? How would it be expressed? These were the questions we asked when we received the information in this book.
Co-Editor's introduction:

Creating Psycho-Social Crystals

By Mary Beth Brangan
What weíre learning has stretched and surprised us, such as discovering enlightenment, as the term is used here, is an on-going process rather than an event.

Weíre learning enlightened behavior means playful, exuberant creativity and humor in the face of our incredibly dire situation and that we can actually amplify our efforts to co-create the new by recognizing each other as lightworkers.
In response to wanting to get to the deepest core of our problems, weíre learning that the root attitude held culturally toward love, sexual relationships and mutual attraction determine all the rest of the relationship patterns in our societies, from individuals to empires.

'The attitudes of scarcity, competition, exclusivity, dependency and control branch out into all areas of life and provide the deep patterning for relationships whether between people and people or between people and physical things and other species. This is the root of the collective dysfunction that needs to be transcended.' (E.I. pg. 115)

Additionally, weíve been encouraged to realize that despite us humans being on the edge of self-annihilation, we also have for the first time in history, the opportunity to create a culture of cultures. We stand on the brink of being able to interweave into our conscious experience of being human, the expanded realities of other dimensions and realms discovered by various cultures across the planet.

Intriguingly, we are also being invited to form enlightened relationships with beings not only in the physical plane, but in the higher, subtler planes as well.

How we received this information was through a process of aligning to what can be called our higher selves through meditating, then asking questions and writing our answers. We became a group of friendly collaborators, Jim and I together with our spiritual allies. I call them our 'buddies in other dimensions.'

Our group, an expanded set of connected consciousnesses, at different frequencies and levels of development, illustrate the principles talked about in The Enlightenment Imperative. We became a ìpsycho-social crystal,î transmitting and receiving energy. We became the Syntropy Group, expressing syntropy, the innate drive in all living systems for self-transcendence.

The voice in the book is from this expanded viewpoint.

For those who may be interested, Iíll tell a bit of our story:
I was a young mother living in a small town in Michigan happy at first to be in service to my then-husband and my two darling daughters. Once the girls started to school, I became active on local social service boards, yet within a few years, I wanted to be useful in a deeper way because from what ìnewsî I got of the wider world, I sensed everything was dreadfully awry. However I lacked accurate information and analysis of what was really happening and was surrounded by an anti-intellectual bias in my husband, friends and co-workers who believed it exceptionally rude to speak of anything political or spiritual.
Though I loved mothering, I was miserable at the prospect of merely being a corporate matron, going through the motions of the superficial and consumptive ëgood lifeí - building a beautiful home, playing bridge and tennis with top executives at the Dow Chemical headquarters where we lived, planning the next purchase and vacation trip, etc.

Finally, through my visionary mentor at Dow, Bill Sauber, I met my first beloved spiritual godmother, Barbara Marx Hubbard, an author, Futurist and inspirational speaker. I began to travel with both Bill and Barbara and met many leading edge people who were dedicating their lives to the good of the whole. I was beginning to learn about the wider world but when I returned home and tried to share my excitement and new knowledge, my friends and husband were frightened and upset by my discoveries. They thought I had lost my mind ñ I felt I was finally finding it!

For two years, I struggled to know what to do. Then, while driving home from work one day, I felt as if I had been hit between the eyes and a voice very clearly said, 'You must go to Washington, D.C. Now.' Having been raised Catholic, divorce wasnít in my belief system, and so I thought about my departure as a sabbatical.

In January 1982 I left my family in Michigan and job at Dow where my then-husband worked as well and began working in Washington, D.C. with Barbara. Temporarily leaving my daughters with their father was the most painful thing Iíve ever had to do. I trusted it wouldnít be for long; fortunately, it wasn't.

For one year I managed Greystone, Barbaraís lovely family estate and salon/office/home at the time. After several months, my husband and I divorced.

On a full moon night in August 1982, Jim came to dinner at Greystone. Jim and Barbara had become friends when Barbara gave the keynote speech at the dedication of his Positive Future organization in Seattle. Being in D.C. on an interviewing trip for his latest film project, Jim phoned Barbara and she invited him over. Unlike most dinner guests at Greystone, Jim didnít speak much, yet I was immediately aware of his strong magnetism. Later that night, after heíd helped me with the dishes, I asked him if heíd ever seen the moonlight on the monuments?

We drove to the Lincoln Memorial. Arm in arm, he and I then walked along the portico, huge pillars towering over us, warm marble under our bare feet, marveling (privately to ourselves since we had just met) how we had seemed to have been doing that together forever. (We discovered months later weíd both simultaneously had the same eerie experience.)

Next we went to the Jefferson Memorial where the stone-carved inscriptions about democracy deeply inspired and moved us both, especially this wisdom by Jefferson:

'I am not an advocate for frequent changes in laws and constitutions, but laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths discovered and manners and opinions change, with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also to keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.'

We both felt strongly that our cultural patterns, laws and institutions did indeed, need to change and be upgraded in our time.
Jim talked with me for hours about his values and experiences.† His yearning to be of maximum service in his life had led in stages from ministerial studies, to civil rights to social work to filmmaking to university teaching to becoming trained as a psychotherapist.† He had administered the Graduate Psychology Program at Antioch University in Seattle and founded a non-profit, The Positive Futures Center. Along the way, he had become a practiced meditator informed about yogic practices through his association with the Himalayan Institute. He'd been married, twice.

Now he was making a film supporting the democratic choice of a tiny island nation, Palau, whose citizens had overwhelmingly approved the worldís first nuclear-free and ëgreení constitution, causing immense displeasure and opposition from the U.S. Defense, State and Interior Departments. He was curious to see if media could be used as family therapy intervention in this international situation since it resembled so much the dysfunctional family, with the US as the abusive father, the UN as the collusive mother and Palau as the abused family member.

We spoke also of our mutual discovery that monogamy, in the sense of ownership of another, was abhorrent to both of us. I had been appalled to discover, after leaving my monogamous marriage of fifteen years, that I had harbored an unconscious belief that my former husband ìownedî my body! This clearly was contradictory to my inner sense of sovereignty over myself. How interesting Jim had come to the same conclusion!

We ended our intense talking just before dawn, kissing while our toes squished in a mud puddle, grounding the exhilaration of our meeting.

Looking back, we realized that first night presaged our entire trajectory in the service of the basic right to informed choice ñ to what weíre calling deep democracy or substantive democracy.

(By substantive democracy or 'deepí democracy we mean that it comes up from the trans-nationally linked ëgrassroots.' Itís distinguished from ëstructural,í or managed democracy, which comes down as limited choices posed by internationally linked ruling elites.)

About six months after we met, Jim and I began living together. I had discovered I was in love both with Jim and with being able to use media to affect social change.

Within two years, we moved with my daughters and youngest sister to San Francisco. There, in the Bay Area, my second spiritual godmother, for whom I am so grateful, LaUna Huffines, introduced us to Sanaya Roman and Duane Packer, who were then beginning their fine work of teaching folks to connect with their souls and beyond. We were intrigued.

One sunny afternoon in our San Francisco flat, Jim decided to put his skepticism and censoring mind aside to ask questions and then to see what happened. Hours later, when he next looked, he'd typed multiple pages of information which he'd not had conscious knowledge of before. I had had similar experiences with handwriting.

Amazed and delighted, we began working together to connect with our expanded consciousness to see what, and who, was there. The result of the subsequent years of my yearning, curiosity and questioning is the Syntropy Group and this book.

With help from the point of view of the Syntropy Group through the twenty-six years Jim and I have been together, weíve attempted to live our lives ever more congruently with our values, both personally and professionally. We've collaborated in many political, environmental and human rights campaigns and produced dozens of video tools and documentaries to inform and catalyze action for human, indigenous and environmental rights around the world. (www.eon3.net)

I'm honored to share these meditation responses from the Syntropy Group to our questions for those who may resonate with them. I hope they help others as much as I have felt helped by them. And though these thoughts have come through us, please remember that even if we articulate the words, they are not from our individual selves.

May we all be ever more consciously in the light and dance our life for planet earth!

Syntropia Press is a project of EON, The Ecological Options Network a 501 (c) (3) non-profit organization © 2009