The R/evolution is Love (2011)
It was 2011 and things simply felt different. There was a buoyancy to the world’s energy. Even with disruption and strife, when I really listened in, there seemed a harmony inside it all, as though something else was becoming available, life being retuned. It felt true, like a sacred portal opening.
I don’t remember when I first heard of the ancient Mayan calendar with its revelations that move beyond our sense of time, space, and beliefs, but I was intrigued by its historical accuracy. Developed by the highly advanced thinkers of Mexico’s Olmec civilization from the fifth century BCE, the calendar system is a complicated series of inscriptions, codes and glyphs. As Dr. Carl J. Calleman explained, it is a timeline marking the evolution of consciousness, in nine “waves,” from the beginning of time, 16.4 billion years ago, into the future.
The last phase of that future, the “Ninth Wave of Consciousness,” was activated in 2011 according to Dr. Calleman’s calculations. It marked the end of “old time,” signaling the age of new beginnings and based on this ancient almanac of sacred time, we are now living in that long-awaited future. And this “new time” arrived riding on a wave of dynamic energy — boisterous, open-hearted, and centered in unity.
In addition to major Earth events in 2011 (including a catastrophic earthquake and tsunami in Fukushima, Japan), “a massive protest movement began against the ruling order all over the world,” Dr. Calleman wrote, creating a tumultuous push for liberty, self-determination and freedom of expression. “The Arab Spring began with protests erupting over the globe, including the Occupy Movement in the United States and other countries.”
And there was a royal wedding! Or as Allison Pearson wrote in Newsweek that spring: “In a world gone to hell, thank God, a wedding!”
Throughout history, royal weddings have often been harbingers of change, seen as a unifying moment of coming together in gratitude and appreciation. But this royal wedding in Great Britain in 2011 marked a break in dutiful tradition with a message for the future: a future king of a thousand-year-old monarchy married for love. Instead of a business arrangement to acquire property, power, and prestige (and historically women were considered part of the property), this marriage was about a man and woman making a choice together — through love.
Even so, in these changing modern times, what was the big deal about a royal wedding in an outdated monarchy? The world was roiled in conflict between those attempting to bring a peaceful message of equality and those committed to a hierarchy of haves and have nots. And because we were all connected through a vast digital hook-up, discontent had a global voice. Therefore, some thought the universal excitement of a royal wedding seemed the year’s biggest anachronism.
Nevertheless, since royalty can be archetypal in nature, affecting change for the masses, the wedding and the relationship that emerged was revolutionary in its own right. As over two billion of us witnessed this grand yet intimate event celebrating the marriage of Prince William and Catherine Middleton, the wedding rite of passage acted as an opening to bring people together, to feel more connected to each other in a divided world.
The wedding held the expressions of freedom and love carried in this evolutionary consciousness shift moving through the world at the time. A shift that the groom’s mother, Princess Diana, had sparked with her “lead with the heart” sensibility that shook up a mind-focused culture and with her death, cracked it open, breathing love into its hardened heart.
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The royal wedding in 2011 also continued Diana’s woman-centric legacy of change, its universal energy nudging open the heart center of the planet even more. William and Kate’s wedding marked a new paradigm of “relationships of the heart” and “marriage as partnership,” but it also carried the seed of change about a woman’s inheritance. It put into motion in late October of that year a plan to change the monarchy’s long-held succession laws where a first-born daughter could accede to the throne no matter if she had a little brother or not.
London correspondent John F. Burns wrote in The New York Times how this “decision to overturn the centuries-old tradition struck a historical blow for women’s rights.” Now, in this shifting new world order, sons and daughters of any future British monarch will have equal rights to the throne. The plan to make these dynastic changes — a very complicated affair — moved quickly under the leadership of Prime Minister David Cameron with Queen Elizabeth’s full support and with little or no opposition throughout the Commonwealth. (The first step to overhaul the royal laws, modernizing the monarchy and setting remarkable precedents, had already begun a few months earlier when female heirs were given new financial rights, allowing them to inherit their father’s peerage title that previously went only to males.)
“Indeed, it was the marriage last spring of Prince William and Kate Middleton, now the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge that accelerated the change,” Burns confirmed. “Their wedding spurred a widespread sense that the young couple, by bringing a more contemporary influence to the royal court, is likely to have a far-reaching, if not determinate, impact on the monarchy’s future.” (Princess Diana’s heart-focused influence could not be denied.)
“In her opening speech to the Commonwealth summit,” the BBC reported in the fall of 2011, “the Queen did not directly mention the royal succession laws, but said women should have a greater role in society. ‘It encourages us to find ways to show girls and women to play their full part,’ she said.”
What became known as the Occupy Movement in 2011, a movement that voiced opposition to social and economic inequality, echoed Princess Diana’s revolutionary spirit. She called on us to “occupy the heart,” to put love and empathy back into day-to-day conversations. Professor Charles Eisenstein, author of Sacred Economics, articulated Diana’s message in an interview featured in “The Revolution Is Love” video made by participants in the Occupy Wall Street movement: “What we want to create is the more beautiful world that our hearts tell us is possible…a sacred world…a world that works for everybody, a world that is healing, a world of peace….” These voices may have been silenced for a time by the greed and misplaced values of a dying corporate regime attempting to hold on to power, but the “revolution is love” voices remain and are being heard again.
Perhaps our “better angels” have been shaken by the cruel pushback of today’s volatile times — self-serving leaders with closed hearts encouraging their followers to forsake all that is honest and kind, twisting words of faith into hateful diatribes. But our heart knows. We are here to simply “love one another.” As Charles Eisenstein shared so eloquently: “As more and more people wake up to the truth — that we’re here to give…and as we get that reinforcement [from each other] then our minds and our logic no longer have to fight against the logic of the heart which wants us to be of service.”
In The Nine Waves of Creation, Dr. Calleman reported that originally the Arab Spring protests in 2011 were “secular and peaceful, and in the streets of Cairo and Damascus the main slogan was simply ‘one, one, one.’ This was in recognition of the fundamental oneness (or unity consciousness) of these movements in which religious and ethnic differences were set aside.” Even in countries where women had few freedoms, they participated in significant ways. “The Ninth Wave started exactly as you would expect from a wave bringing unity consciousness into a world of duality,” Calleman added.
We’re all being called to continue this “revolution is love” campaign. Princess Diana taught her sons to take on this mission of the heart to help move the world from separation toward unity. Dr. Calleman alerted us, however, that this evolutionary step may not be a smooth transition into this future where love, generosity, respect, equality, and reverence will be a way of life for all the world in the coming “Era of Fulfillment.” Although there were many who resonated with this new wave of consciousness — the emergence of the Ninth Wave in 2011 — there would be resistance from the “underdeveloped souls” stuck fearfully in the past. And Calleman was correct. The rise of authoritarian governments around the world, stuck in hate and fear, pushed back against this more awakened, conscious, and heart-centered way of being together.
This “unity consciousness” may be the natural path of evolution, but we must be open to it, available to embrace all it asks of us. The choice for humanity was never clearer: Choose love and kindness, or choose hate and fear. Diana’s legacy of the heart reminds us — the “r/evolution is love.” ~
[Written in 2016–2017 as part of book-in-progress, The Spiritual Mission of a Princess: A Revolution of the Heart.]
