The Translucent Revolution

by Arjuna Ardagh
.....Late one evening, Robert was out taking a walk. He has passed through many trials and tribulations in recent years, and his mood was blacker than the night. “I am finished,” his mind announced.
..... He still has trouble explaining what happened next.
.....“I was overcome by a sense of relief,” he reports, “A sudden feeling of inexpressible freedom. My body was filled with happiness, as if I was suddenly getting a joke I’d been missing. I was totally here, in this moment. I could feel the trees around me, and hear the sounds without having to listen to thoughts telling me things needed
to be different in some way. Everything was being experienced, but the ‘me’was gone.”
..... Over the last twelve years, I have spoken to thousands of people who have passed through similar shifts of consciousness. Their awakening has changed who they know themselves to be and the nature
of the world around them. While some are notable teachers and writers, the majority are ordinary people leading everyday lives. Some have come to this awakening through contact with a teacher, some from entering the depths of despair, and others after years of meditation. It can occur in a
one time light-bulb moment or as a marinating over many years.
.....These awakenings initiate a gradual metamorphosis, which is both evolutionary and endless. A spontaneous generosity of spirit, an impulse to serve, and a willingness to transform living into an art form gradually replace the normal relationship to life marked by fear and acquisition.
I call this endless process of evolution and transformation “translucence.”
.....A transparent object, like a clean sheet of glass, is almost invisible. You see everything through a transparent object as if it were not there at all. An opaque object,on the other hand, blocks light completely. A translucent object allows light to pass through, but diffusely, while maintaining its form and texture.
..... Translucent people have access to their deepest nature as peaceful, limitless, free, unchanging, and at the same time theyremain fully involved in the events of their personal lives. Thoughts, fears, and desires still come and go; life is still characterized by temporary trials, misfortunes, and stress. But the personal story is no longer opaque: it is now capable of reflecting something deeper, more luminous and abiding. They play vigorously in their relationships with others, their work, their creativity, and their political and environmental causes, but they play to play more than to win. Translucents display an above-average generosity of spirit. Giving to other people and to the environment replaces old habits, based in lack, desire, and need. Above all, translucents have a humorous and often irreverent relationship to their personal life, beliefs, and identity.
..... They generally don’t follow one particular teacher, teaching, or group, although many have in their past. As a group they display as wide a variety of occupations, appearance, and educational and cultural backgrounds as humanity itself. They generally don’t identify themselves as “enlightened” or as having attained anything, and they are also not trying to become enlightened. They are not overly materialistic or spiritually cynical.
.....Over the last three years, I have interviewed more than 170 translucent writersand teachers. By asking them what they have experienced with their own students, I have also had indirect access to the experiences of millions of people around the world. Finally, with the help of sociologists like Paul Ray and Duane Elgin, I have studied numerous polls and bodies of research that suggest a radical change in collective consciousness. Conservative estimates put their numbers at three to four million worldwide.
..... Many of the people I interviewed feel that it is in the first buds of this emergence of a new kind of humanity that we have realistic grounds for optimism for our race. Open a newspaper today, switch on your TV, and you will hear one tale after another of terrorist threats, global warming, growing economic disparity and corruption, the depletion of natural resources at a rate completely out of proportion to anything in our past. Each of these disparate and complex problems seems to demand a unique solution, in most cases still out of our grasp. But they can also be seen collectively as symptoms of a mind set that is now dying: one which simply cannot continue because it is unsustainable.
..... Are you translucent? If what has been briefly summarized here sounds familiar to you, then you are already a part of this evolutionary current. You are probably more a part of the solution on this earth than a part of the problem. What you do, and how you live, is not as trivial as you sometimes think. What you choose to do in the next five minutes, and the spirit in which you do it, contributes to the difference between nuclear annihilation and the opportunity for this world to return to Eden. The future rests in your hands, and the stakes are getting higher. It is time for
all of us to wake up to our natural sanity, and to live it passionately, dangerously, and intensely. Translucently.

About the Author Arjuna Ardagh is the author of The Translucent Revolution: How People Just Like You are Waking Up and Changing the World. He is the founder of the Living Essence Foundation, which has trained over 450 practitioners to help facilitate our world’s shift in consciousness. For more information email arjuna@translucents.org