As humanity heads into the third millennium, the world is
changing in ways that would have seemed like good science
fiction only decades ago. From biotechnology to nanotechnology,
from the information revolution to the deterioration of the
biosphere, from globalization to global warming, life in the
twenty-first century is becoming increasingly complex, chaotic,
and unpredictable. The challenge of keeping up with the speed of
life has never been greater and, according to most futurists, we
haven't seen the half of it. They tell us that the rate of
change itself is increasing exponentially, and shows no sign of
slowing down any time soon. This recognition has led many of the
most forward-looking thinkers of our time to the conclusion that
in order to meet the increasing demands of life in our evolving
world, new capacities are going to be required from all of us—not the least of which will be an unprecedented
willingness to change and keep changing in order to respond to
new life conditions as they emerge.
You are a teacher of what has traditionally been called
Enlightenment—the life-transforming realization of our
ultimate nature, which is widely considered to be not only the
summit of all spiritual seeking but the greatest and final aim
of human existence. This profound spiritual awakening has often
been described as the realization of the changeless, the
timeless, the unborn, the uncreated—that absolute
reality which remains forever untouched by anything that happens
in the world of time, evolution, and becoming. What I would like
to ask you is this: What does the discovery of this timeless
dimension of being have to tell us about how to respond to the
challenges of a world in which time itself seems to be
accelerating out of control? How can the realization of the
changeless help us to navigate a future in which constant change
may well be the only constant?