Raising consciousness for a new world
Newsletter - November 2025
A portal for information and tools about conscious evolution of wholeness
At Groking Wholeness, we believe in the transformative power of integrating mind, body, and spirit to foster balance within oneself and one's surroundings. Changing oneself is a prerequisite to changing one’s surroundings or society because personal growth creates the foundation for the broader impact.
Cooking The Frog
(Are we running out of time?)
Bob Staretz
There is an old parable about a frog being cooked in a pot. According to the story, if the frog is placed in hot water, it will immediately try to jump out. However, if it is placed in water that is at room temperature and the water slowly heated, the frog will not notice the temperature change until it is too late and will be cooked alive. Fortunately for the frog, this story is not true in reality; as the water temperature rises when it gets to the point where the temperature is no longer comfortable, the frog will jump out of the pot.
Unfortunately for humanity, this parable seems to hold true. Most people focus their future plans on a very short-term horizon and ignore the long-term consequences of their actions; a clear definition of selfishness and immaturity. Nature, however, does not operate on human time scales nor on human expectations – compared to a human life span things happen vastly slower and are extremely difficult to change course.
A Message Across Time
A view from Space to the Crew of Spaceship Earth
Dr. Edgar Mitchell Apollo 14 Astronaut
In early February 1969 Apollo 14 astronaut Dr. Edgar Mitchell during his return trip from visiting the moon, experienced an epiphany of universal interconnectedness so profound it compelled him to investigate the nature of consciousness and ultimately to create an organization called the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS) to study it. IONS was created to be a research organization to study inner space exploration similar to what NASA was to outer space exploration.
Click on the button below to listen to a recording made many years ago at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, where Dr. Mitchell reaches us through time with the greeting, "Good evening, fellow Earth people". Addressing us as fellow crew members of Spaceship Earth, he encourages us to take an urgent, new collective perspective on our planet, our Universe and our relationship to them.
Why Care About Sustainability?
Bob Staretz
On a planet like earth with vast but finite non-renewable resources, with economic models that are based on the premise of continual growth and without constraints on consumption of precious resources, indefinite continuous growth is unsustainable. Sooner or later, in any closed system, the switch must occur to a more sustainable approach if future generations are to have any chance at best for a standard of living taken for granted by earlier generations and at worst, for the very survival of life itself.
Sustainability is about meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. It involves a balanced integration of three interconnected pillars: environmental health, social equity, and economic vitality. This means using resources wisely and conservatively to support ecological, human, and economic well-being over the long term. More specifically, sustainability aims to create and maintain conditions under which humans and nature can exist in productive harmony to support current and future generations. It addresses the finite nature of resources and promotes practices that do not deplete or degrade natural systems, while also ensuring social justice and economic development.
Awakening The Dreamer
The poem, below, was excerpted from Hieroglyphic Stairway, Drew Dellinger, 2003, for use in the Awakening the Dream Symposium offered by The Pachamama Alliance.
"It’s 3:23 in the morning and I’m awake because my great great grandchildren won’t let me sleep.
My great great grandchildren ask me in dreams:
What did you do while the planet was plundered?
What did you do when the earth was unraveling?
Surely you did something when the seasons started failing?
As the mammals, reptiles, birds were all dying?
Did you fill the streets with protest when democracy was stolen?
What did you do once you knew?"
Context: The Achuar Tribe from South America, a “dream culture,” shared their dreams with each other in the mornings believing that they were visited by Spirits, or perhaps ancestors at night to give them messages. After elders in the tribe began receiving the message that their lands were being taken over and spoiled, and discovering that oil companies were encroaching on their lands, they reached out to the North and asked that we change the dream of our extractive and consumptive culture, which was harming the Earth and jeopardizing future generations. In response, The Pachamama Alliance was formed in 1995 and began the symposia to help raise awareness of our interconnectedness.
The goals of the Symposium were to bring forth an environmentally sustainable, spiritually fulfilling, and social just human presence on the planet. The Symposium emphasized that these are not three separate issues, they are one, and can only be addressed through our understanding of the emerging story of oneness, wholeness and interbeing.
We invite you to listen to the words of the poem not just from your head, but, more importantly, from your heart. Hear the words. Feel them deeply.
Wholeness of Timeless Building Design
Linda Sechrist
There is a process through which the order of a building or a town grows out directly from the inner nature of the people, and the animals, and plants, and matter, which are in it. ~ Christopher Alexander, The Timeless Way of Building.
According to internationally known architect Christopher Alexander [1936-2022], there is a timeless way of building. It is the same today as it was thousands of years ago, when people created the great traditional buildings, villages and temples, places in which people still feel most at home. In his book, The Timeless Way of Building, the Emeritus Professor of Architecture at the University of California, Berkeley proposed that designing and building with an integrative “pattern language” may make it less challenging to create great buildings or beautiful places where we can feel truly alive.
Embodying the Moses Archetype
Cosmic Musings
Douglas Bonar
I truly believe that many are awakening and becoming increasingly aware of what’s happening around us, socially, politically, ecologically, and spiritually. Nobel prize winning physicist Ilya Prigonine writes of dissipative structures and emergence. This is a centerpiece of chaos theory later to be named complexity theory. Things tend to spiral out of control and fall apart. This may be thought of in terms of the global polycrisis facing humanity, or more simply, the process of decay, the second law of thermodynamics. Things tend to veer toward collapse. This, in turn, invites and hastens the emergence of a new order of complexity. This is a positive story. The time of profound evolutionary advancement.
I also believe that many are feeling the internal urge to participate in solutions to uplift humanity from the fray, although just what the solutions are, and how to participate, may be vague in their minds. In a nutshell, how to cocreate, or participate in, the emerging story of wholeness to transcend the illusion of separation. This is the evolutionary way forward. In the words of futurist Barbara Marx Hubbard, this is our alignment with the evolutionary impulse. It’s asking, “What is my purpose and my role?” Looking deeper, soul-searching for answers, and, increasingly, finding them. Welcome to the Moses Archetype.
Connecting with Chickens
by Carol Roberts
"That the universe is the manifest body of a Divine Being of unimaginable intelligence, compassion, clarity, and power,
That we are all aspects of this Being, never separated from it for a moment,
That we are growing ever more aware of this connection,
That physical reality emerges out of Light and returns to Light continuously,
That Light is our essential nature and our destiny,
That all life moves as One,
That reincarnation is true,
That there is a deep logic and significance to the circumstances of our lives,
That everything we do contributes to the evolution of the whole,
That our awareness continues in an ocean of time and a sea of bliss when we die,
That we are loved beyond measure and
That humanity is driving towards an evolutionary breakthrough that will change us and life on this planet at the deepest level."
Christopher M Bache, PhD
How can we, as constantly learning, growing and changing creatures, help facilitate the transition to the next level of evolution? Let’s take one line of the above (philosophy? prophecy? poem?) and work with it for a moment.
“That all life moves as One”
Experiment:
Opening to the inner life can be hard. We are so invested in the outer world that we fail to listen to what goes on inside. Connecting with nature can bring us back to our original essence, slow us down, and even heal our emotional imbalances.
A Song for Merry Harvest
Eliza Cook 1818 - 1889
Bring forth the harp, and let us sweep its fullest, loudest string.
The bee below, the bird above, are teaching us to sing
A song for merry harvest; and the one who will not bear
His grateful part partakes a boon he ill deserves to share.
The grasshopper is pouring forth his quick and trembling notes;
The laughter of the gleaner’s child, the heart’s own music floats.
Up! up! I say, a roundelay from every voice that lives
Should welcome merry harvest, and bless the God that gives.
The buoyant soul that loves the bowl may see the dark grapes shine,
And gems of melting ruby deck the ringlets of the vine;
Who prizes more the foaming ale may gaze upon the plain,
And feast his eye with yellow hops and sheets of bearded grain;
The kindly one whose bosom aches to see a dog unfed
May bend the knee in thanks to see the ample promised bread.
Awake, then, all! ’tis Nature’s call, and every voice that lives
Shall welcome merry harvest, and bless the God that gives.
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