Growing Up Out of the Current Collective Consciousness

by Mandy Peterson

Right now, if we look at the collective consciousness of the world in an objective way, we will see that there is:

• a child-like way to function in the world
• a teenage-like way to function in the world
• an adult-like way to function in the world 

When thinking about how we live at a personal level, it might be easy for most of us to place ourselves in the “adult” category. However, this article concerns how our collective way of living, being and believing keeps us stuck in the “child-like” category. How so? Because how we function as a collective tends to leave us completely dependent upon external parents without being able to “grow up” and gain independence and true freedom from them.

For example, the majority of us would feel utterly defenseless if the power grid went down, if a disaster caused widespread devastation, if food became scarce or polluted, or if the economy, banks or insurance companies collapsed. In such circumstances, many of us might not know how to survive or how to take care of ourselves. We’ve gotten used to our collective “parents” taking care of certain things for us. We completely depend on parental structures maintaining themselves. We feel afraid to grow out of this dependency in order to learn how to be free. We, thus, remain like children who are conditioned to feel it is “right” to follow certain parental guidelines that restrict our true freedom through telling us who to be, what to do, what to think and how to grow up in ways that we never do truly grow up.

Another way in which we are “child-like” is in our need for an excessive amount of toys. Not that the adult-like mentality cannot embrace play, but how we tend to embrace play leaves us trapped in child-like patterns of self-entitlement and “me, gimme, mine,” rather than caring for the group or the community. We tend to want what we want when we want it, but we have not learned how to be truly responsible for how our wants–and our drive to accumulate them–are affecting our environment and a bigger picture.

Not only this, but we tend to see the cumulative effects of our dependencies and our need for leisure and ease as something that we expect our external parents to clean up after us if it should create a mess. Like children, we are too needy to be responsible. We don’t know how to clean up after ourselves in bigger ways and, thus, we can end up complaining and hoping our “parents” (political and otherwise) will pay attention and take care of our complaints. This approach isn’t really working for us collectively, though. Since, many of our “parents” are stuck in the same dysfunctional rut that we are.

Out of all of this, however, there are some who will move toward rebelling against our collective parents. While this may not seem like the ‘adult’ way to approach things, it is a positive step toward becoming a young adult. The young-adult (or teenage) phase can, for some, be a first step toward autonomy and learning who we are separate from our parents. It can help those who embrace it to realize the beliefs and conditioning that it was taught to take on and to begin to question it—as well as the motives and abuses of various parents.

Some individuals will see this as a “negative” and unproductive step. Our collective conditioning tells us to simply obey our “parents” and to go along with the “system.” We are taught that that this is the way toward realizing peace and love. This mirrors how the dysfunctional family relationship functions: we, the collective children of collective parents, remain afraid to rock the boat. Seen from this light, it is easy to understand how abuses become enabled. For, if we remain quiet we can still gain from the toys and other benefits of the “system” and not be sent to our room (jail) as punishment for being disobedient. Yet, by avoiding entering the rebellious phase, we risk collectively remaining as dependent children. We feel limited as to how we can live in ways that do not go along with all that is unloving in the world (the environmental degradation, the corruption, wars and everything else).

Arising out of rebellious phase is a small movement of individuals who are starting to expand their consciousness into thinking and living adult-like. They are learning how to become self-sustainable and responsible for their own actions and desires affect a bigger picture. To the person with the child-like mentality, all of this seems tedious and unnecessary. Why would we want to give up being children where everything is being taken care of? However, how the energies on earth are manifesting, we cannot collectively remain children forever and will be pushed out of the tree to learn how to fly on our own at some point when our parents will eventually fail us or can no longer support us anymore.

Economic, environmental, and other forms of disasters may be the triggers that help us manifest a way out of our child-like unconsciousness if they force us to grow up or perish. Many new-agers talk about how the world is entering a “new consciousness” and how celestial and other energies are pushing this along. In loving ways, what transpires could force us to create a new reality through releasing collective beliefs and conditioning in order to come up with new ways to believe, to thrive and to grow.

While we do not necessarily need to “grow up” overnight (it is a process of growth), there are little things we can do to become more self-sustaining, independent and responsible, if we choose.

• Question the beliefs and conditioning we take on from the collective, society, media and parents and what it really serves; i.e., concepts of success, failure, abundance, self-worth, consumerism, money, government, nature, etc. The more we can separate ourselves from our “parents,” the more we can begin to see how much the majority of us give our power away to various illusions, as well as why we tend to do this.
• Become educated concerning developing more self-sufficiency and independence from our collective parents. This doesn’t require breaking laws, violence or being hateful, either. Learning to live more simply is all that is initially required, since becoming completely free might be too much of a challenge. That is, until more and more people can join together to learn how to live, love and manifest in new ways. 

All in all, working towards the adult-like mentality paves a path to being better able to work towards wholeness and oneness consciousness. Currently, concepts of “oneness” need to remain on the mental level and cannot be applied to life if we want to remain addicted to the world and its polluted consciousness. This is because to live in the world we have to strive for things, compete, create a better product, etc. Moving into a oneness energy not only allows us to safely let go of the lifestyles that keep us trapped in separation consciousness, but it also helps us become more responsible with acknowledging how one level of our “oneness” (i.e. our collective believing, desiring, and conditioning) is manifesting a bigger reality of collective suffering, lack of peace and environmental degradation. We are then able to become part of mirroring what helps heal our world, rather than thinking one way but passively contributing to all that pollutes what is sacred all around us.

A few things could happen as we transition out of our child-like mentality. We may find we drop the fast food or “convenience” mentality. We may find we start to move beyond the focus on the self in order to care about sharing and the good of the whole. We may find that we begin to redefine things for ourselves in positive ways that change how we live and believe as a community. There is so much potential to create the “New World” that the new-age predicts is coming. All we really need to do is overcome our fear of leaving old ways of living behind. For, the New World does not have to be the Old World with a pretty bow tied around. We are not required to think that mastering life means learning how to better cope with the corruption or pollution that manifests all around us from the unconscious work of our collective minds, hands, and hearts.. We can transcend and transform these realities thinking as a collective rather than an individual.

In the end, it is a process that each of us will take as individuals and the more of us who take it as individuals it will become a greater movement that begins to affect the whole. In the New World, we won’t have to conform. We can begin to serve a more loving and “whole”-some cause.

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About the Author

Mandy Peterson is a psychic visionary, empath, channel and EFT Practitioner. She is the author of the book I Am the Lotus, Not the Muddy Pond: Peace Through Non-conformity and the EFT Divination & Chakra Deck. As an empathic healer and reader, Mandy works 1-to-1 with clients, helping them to achieve clarity, peace and balance. For more information, see the website www.mysticmandy.com.