One of the signature trademark expressions of Living Dialogues is: “Global Talk Unites Us.” These two dialogues between myself and Eckhart can also serve as an illuminating and deepening complement to the unprecedented interactive live webcast inaugurated and conducted by Oprah and Eckhart for 10 weeks from the beginning of March to the beginning of May 2008, with over 11 million people coming together each week online “to the same place – with the same purpose – to create a new earth”. (See www.oprah.com to participate live during that timeframe or listen anytime to those archived programs.)

In commenting on Eckhart Tolle’s contributions to our ongoing planetary dialogue addressing the big questions Who Are We? Where Do We Come From? Why Are We Here? And Where Are We Going? in the “great big classroom community around the world that we are participating in in this live webcast”, Oprah described The Power of Now and A New Earth as “not, let me repeat, not, a new religion or a new doctrine, but really an invitation for you to connect to your authentic self, and to connect to your spirit, to your soul, to our inner being, to your consciousness, whichever word you want to use.”

Here is an excerpt from this Dialogue Program 46, in which Eckhart and I explore further the personal and collective “pain body” and how consciousness plays “hide and seek” in form until we come to the realization that we are not the form in which awareness is embodied, but in our essence we are the awareness itself. This realization arises from an appreciation of the historical evolution of our species and of our own life’s unqiue progression. This awakening moves us from depression or even despair in the face of suffering and feeling separate and isolated to an appreciation of these feelings as a necessary initiation into a mature sense of conscious unity: that “out of the many we are one”, even as we come to accept and celebrate our unique being and the diversity of all other persons and manifestations in nature and in the cosmos.

In the face of the declaration “Humanity is faced with a stark choice: Evolve or Die”, we have a choice, and together we can create a New Earth:

“Duncan Campbell: I'm thinking of it, also from the evolutionary perspective, we started this particular Dialogue talking about Joseph Campbell’s perception that the way of the Sharman that began 40,000 years ago was perhaps the first example in the development of the human species where the collective mind began to move away from its embededness and unity and in nature and the individual experience of the path of suffering and separation began to be seen as a vehicle of transformation.

In here, I'm thinking, that when we talk about pain and suffering, it's not as if we made a mistake or there was anything wrong with the development of this egoic separation. It has been a part of this vast evolution of consciousness coming to know itself, moving into self-awareness and this painful birthing process of losing the unconscious embedded sense of unity in order to create a sense of separate--almost like an adolescent moving away from the matrix or from childhood.

Now, the species itself being challenged to either move beyond the space of separation and move into a deep maturity and co-creative bringing together of all of these experiences or as one person put it, “Committing teenage suicide.”

Eckhart Tolle: Yes.

Duncan Campbell: It's very similar at the species level to teenage suicide where the sense of isolation or not being understood, not crossing the threshold into another layer or adulthood or maturity seems so intimidating that one actually commits suicide.

Eckhart Tolle: Yes. So there's no absolute guarantee which way it will go, but the fact that we are sitting here, talking about this, the listeners are sitting somewhere else listening to this should help us to see that actually it's arising at this moment. It's not that let's hope that the new consciousness is going to rise on the planet before the old consciousness, so to speak, has destroyed it completely. The new is already arising at this very moment and so I am quite optimistic more than perhaps once before about the humanity’s possibility of surviving and go beyond this particular evolutionary stage into liberation.

Liberation, has until now, been an isolated phenomenon. Liberation from egoic mind. Liberation from thought has been an isolated phenomenon. Only a few individuals here and there became free because it was never a necessity on the planet. I call them the first flowerings of human consciousness, those few individuals the Buddha and some others that perhaps we haven’t heard of. In those, the flowering happened and those were the first flowers, the early flowers.

I was told by somebody who studied the evolution of the evolution of the planet that before any flowers appeared on the planet, the planet was already covered in plant life for millions of years. Plants were everywhere but not a single flower had opened yet. So one good site to use this analogy that the flower represents a new evolutionary level in the life of plants.

There must have been a day on the life on this planet when the sun rose one morning and suddenly, the first flower opened. Maybe it didn’t survive for very long. Perhaps, a few thousand years later, two flowers opened and a few more and suddenly, a point was reached when flowers opened all over the planet.

I believe humanity has reached that point now where enlightenment, liberation, whatever you want to call it, is not a luxury anymore. It's happening now on a larger scale because if it doesn’t happen, the species will not survive humanity. Often, transitions, evolutionary leaps, evolutionary transformation happens only through necessity when there's no other choice but to evolve.

You can see this in your own personal life. You can't stand it anymore. Life becomes so dysfunctional with this self-created pain that now, you have to evolve or die. That is the point that we have reached now, that humanity has reached now. Another hundred years of the old egoic consciousness that has created the history of the 20th century which is mad, the planet will not be able to survive another 100 years of that madness.”

And be sure to listen to next week’s Living Dialogue Program 47 with myself and Richard Tarnas: Initiating a New World View Through Dialogue, when we go into further rich exploration of the above subjects. These themes are the thread running throughout the vision and practice embodied in all Living Dialogues. All other programs in this series will be of interest on these themes, but particular ones you might wish to click onto listed on the right hand column next to the programs with Eckhart Tolle are those with Byron Katie and Stephen Mitchell, Gangaji, Joseph Chilton Pearce, Rupert Sheldrake, Steve McIntosh, and Stanislav Grof.

SUBSCRIBE HERE FOR FREE TO LIVING DIALOGUES AND IN THE COMING WEEKS HEAR DUNCAN CAMPELL’S DIALOGUES WITH OTHER GROUND-BREAKING TRANSFORMATIONAL THINKERS LISTED ON THE WEBSITE WWW.LIVINGDIALOGUES.COM. TO LISTEN TO PREVIOUS RELATED DIALOGUES ON THIS SITE, SCROLL DOWN ON THE LIVING DIALOGUES SHOW PAGE HERE -- OR CLICK ON THE NAME OF A GUEST ON THE LIST AT THE RIGHT -- TO HEAR DUNCAN’S DIALOGUES WITH DR. ANDREW WEIL, BRIAN WEISS, COLEMAN BARKS, RUPERT SHELDRAKE, LARRY DOSSEY, JUDY COLLINS, MARIANNE WILLIAMSON, MATTHEW FOX, JOSEPH CHILTON PEARCE, DEEPAK CHOPRA, BYRON KATIE AND STEPHEN MITCHELL, CAROLINE MYSS, GANGAJI, VINE DELORIA, JR., MICHAEL DOWD (THE UNIVERSE STORY OF THOMAS BERRY AND BRIAN SWIMME), STANISLAV GROF, RICHARD TARNAS, MARC BEKOFF AND JANE GOODALL, RICHARD MOSS, PAUL HAWKEN, PAUL RAY, JOSEPH ELLIS, DUANE ELGIN, LYNNE MCTAGGART AND OTHER EVOLUTIONARY THINKERS FROM AROUND THE WORLD.

To order a full transcript of this program you can contact me at my website: www.livingdialogues.com or at [email protected]. Many thanks again for your attentive deep listening in helping co-create this program. All the best, Duncan