2012...The Shift
From The Secret of Shambhala by James Redfield

"The legends say that at a precise time in the evolution of Shambhala and the outer cultures, a great shift will occur. This shift can only happen when the level of awareness in the outer cultures has reached a particular point. The legends say it will be a time of great opportunity but also of dire peril. Many times during the hidden history of mankind, humans have developed spiritually to this point and then have lost their way and fallen back into ignorance. They began to misuse their technology, disrupting the natural course of evolution. For instance, right now in the outer cultures, some people are taking the natural process of food and distorting it by genetically manipulating seeds to have unnatural characteristics. This is primarily done in order to patent these seeds and control them in the marketplace.
"The same thing is occurring in the pharmaceutical industries, where a known herbal remedy, free to all, is genetically altered in order to sell it. In the precise energy system of the body, these manipulations can have terrible consequences on health. The same is true of irradiated foods, chlorine and other additives to the water supply, not to mention so-called designer drugs.
"At the same time, the technology of the media has reached a point where it can have dramatic influence. If it responds only to the needs of corporations and corrupt politicians, it can create realities for humans that are distorted and unnatural. As corporations merge, so that they control more and more of the technology and want to use more advertising to create false needs, this problem will grow.
"Most imperative is the situation of government power and surveillance, even in the democratic countries. Citing a need to combat drug dealers or terrorists, the government has infringed more and more on the privacy of the common man. Already, cash transactions are being restricted and the Internet fully monitored. The next step will be forcing the move to a cashless society controlled by a central authority.
"This growth toward a central, spiritless government authority, in a high-tech virtual world divorced from natural processes, where food, water, and the routines of living have been trivialized and distorted, leads to disaster. When health is subverted into just one more commercial cycle of worsening food, new diseases, and more drugs, Armageddon is the result, and it has occurred several times in prehistory. It could happen again, only this time on a much larger scale.
"But it need not happen. In fact, we are one small step in awareness from turning the corner. If we could just move fully into the idea that we are spiritual beings in a spiritual world, then food, health, technology, media, and government would all move into their proper roles in the evolution and perfection of this world. But for this to happen, the prayer extensions must be completely understoood in the outer cultures. They must understand what we do at the temples. The transition of Shambhala is part of this process, but the opportunity has to be seized.
"For this to happen, your generation must merge with the last two into an integrated prayer-field -- one that includes a final unity of all the religions.
"All over the world, the generation born in the first decades of the twentieth century, what our friend from the West call the World War II generation, used courage and technology to save democracy and freedom from the threat of dictators seeking empire. They won, using technological might, and continued to expand this technology into a worldwide economy. Then the next generation -- what Americans call baby boomers -- arrived on the Earth, and their intuitions told them that the focus on materialism, on technology alone, was not quite correct. That there was too much pollution, too much corporate influence on government, too much surveillance by the intelligence organizations.
"This criticism was the normal way that a new generation expands and intuitively leads us forward. They grew up in a hardwon materialism, or in some countries, the desire for the material, and began to react, to voice the idea that there was more to life. There was a spiritual purpose behind human history that could be grasped in more detail.
"That's what was behind all that happened in the sixties and seventies in the West: the rejection of a material-based system of status, the exploration of other religions, the popularity of philosophy, the explosion in thought of the Human Potential Movement. It was all the result of a series of insights that there was more to life than our material worldview knew.
"The intuitions of the baby boomers were very important because they began to put technology and material abundance into perspective, and to grasp the deep intuition that technology is being developed on this planet to support a culture where we can focus not just on surviving, but on our spiritual development as well.
"And now, since the late seventies and into the eighties, a new generation has been arriving to push human culture even further. You and your age group are the final members of this generation. Do you see what emphasis you are bringing into the world?
"The sons and daughters of the boomers have been characterizeed as reacting to the boomers' idealism and ambivalence toward technology by becoming more practical and, in fact, developing a love for technology beyond anything seen before."
"We sensed that technology has a spiritual purpose."
"Now, do you see how the three generations flow together? The World War II generation fought against tyranny and proved that democracy could not only flourish in the modern world but expand tremendously and connect the world's economies. Then, in the middle of the abundance, the boomers arrived to say that there were problems with this expansion, that we were polluting the natural world and losing touch with nature and a spiritual reality that exists beneath the whims of history.
"And now the next generation has come along to focus again on the economy, to refashion technology so that it can consciously support our mental and spiritual ability, the way it has occurred here in Shambhala -- instead of allowing technology to fall solely into the hands of those who would use it to restrict freedom and control others."
"But this new generation isn't fully conscious of what they are doing."
"No, not completely, but this self-awareness and insight is expanding every day. We must set a prayer field that lifts them in this direction. It must be a large and strong field. The new generation must help us unify the religions.
"This is very important, because there will always be controllers ready to manipulate this generation into creating negative uses for technology or taking advantage of their alienation."