Dr. Jean Shinoda Bolen addressed the Community Plenary at the 2023 Parliament of the World’s Religions in Chicago, USA.

Hi everybody! It’s quite a week that all of us have been here and there has been a kind of where we end up and what we hear is not exactly planned. Many of them are accidental new connections. And there does seem to be a number of women at this meeting and I think it’s very clear that the evolution of humanity and the planet may depend on women and a shift from patriarchy to an egalitarian society. 

An egalitarian doesn’t mean just men and women because there’s a wide gender group. It’s about love. It’s about who you love and who you trust and our own experience of having support to be who we were meant to be and what we believe in and will we speak up? Well, if we only have, like, the end of this decade for those scientists who have said that the planet is in real trouble the way we are deforesting the planet and the way that the temperature is going up and up this year as you’ve experienced it, well, maybe we can still turn it around and maybe we won’t. I mean, we are actually in a crisis And my idea of what we are doing here is to speak about evolution or destruction of humanity in our planet.

That’s really where we are. To evolve. What if we evolved as human beings and moved into the heart chakra area in which we felt ourselves not superior to all life on this planet but as part of the life on this planet. Because that is the experience of human beings. We came in with the words that we are the dominant quality but we’re among the life on this planet but we are specifically evolving in certain ways.

That what if, what if in this particular time where the temperature is going up, where there are at least three countries with nuclear weapons that the men in charge could use it in order to maintain that they are in charge and forget it the rest of the world. Well we are in a time of enormous potential of growth or risk and I think often that is is very true of individual human beings.

My work is as a psychiatrist, as a Jungian analyst, and the sense is often that one comes into therapy in order to evolve and grow into the parts of yourself that you didn’t have an opportunity to grow into it. In fact if you spoke up from the very beginning and it and you weren’t the kid that the family expected you to be it was squashed and suppressed. But what if there is on the planet now among this audience and among the youngsters related to this audience. What if we are human beings who have over, who knows how long, evolved? What if there are many in this audience that you might think of yourself as old souls, that you have been in previous lives, you have had opportunities to have suffered? Now what? It may be just this life, but it may be previous lives as well when you run into your young children and you feel like this is not just a kid, this is an old soul who happens to be running around like a kid, but there is some quality of soulfulness that you recognize often. As this is a person who probably lived through many other lifetimes, we don’t know that. 

But what if? What if we now have a generation or so of people growing into adulthood, and people growing who are adults now and are moving into the next stage, and what if the next stage of evolution of soul and the spirit is where there can be the connection between the world, the spirit, and soul, and us still in our bodies where we have choice, where we have actions? What if, what if right now, many of you who are older may have retired from whatever you normally do? What are you going to do with the rest of the energy of your life? Now it may be that during this time of ending this decade, that the end of the decade will be the evolution to the next stage of humanity when we begin to realize what we began to see for the first time when Edgar Mitchell and the other astronauts went to the moon for the first time.

Do you remember seeing Earth from outer space? No national boundaries. This beautiful, beautiful planet in the middle of the sky, of blackness, and the sense of clouds and this lovely place that is planet Earth. Do you remember that? And it’s felt at the level of the heart chakra, which is a source of ability that we have from the heart. It’s called neural love. Love is something the more we give away, the more we have in us, and the more we have given away, the more there is in the world. And essentially that is the essential energy that we need more of all the time, that we need to give away we need to love. And any of you who are teachers, therapists, whatever you do at whatever you do in a realm that you love, you’re giving energy and you’re getting energy back. And somehow to stay with that sense of having love in your heart and being here on this planet now when humanity is between what is and what can be.

So as a psychiatrist and a Jungian analyst and an optimistic person who senses that whatever is in us that can evolve into our actions makes us become who we came here to be. So may you become who you were meant to be this now, next now, right now. Thank you.