The Scale of the Universe
by Tom Huston
A few years ago, I discovered one of the coolest corporate promotional tools ever to strike the web — Nikon’s “Universcale,” an exquisitely rendered interactive Flash animation conveying epic orders of cosmic magnitude, from subatomic particles on the left to the entire known universe on the right. But this illustrated implementation of the same basic concept, created by a user of the site Newgrounds named Fotoshop, is definitely my new favorite:
(You can scroll with the mouse cursor or more slowly using the keyboard arrow keys, and the animation can be made larger using the controls in the top right corner.) Which do you think is better? Nikon’s Universcale or Fotoshop’s Scale of the Universe?
Sometimes new revolutions start in the most unlikely places. Take the “Gypsy Punk” band Gogol Bordello for instance. While they look pretty rough and wacky on the surface, this multicultural rock and roll tribe may be one of the leading voices in a movement to create a new post-postmodern expression of musical innovation beyond the status quo of derivative mash-ups, hyper-materialistic teen idols, and self-indulgent emo-pop that define contemporary music today. Combining traditional gypsy music with the rebellious spirit of modern punk their goal, according to their mission statement, is “to provoke [their] audience out of [the] post-modern swamp onto a neo-optimistic communal movement towards new sources of authentic energy.” Through their unique approach to music, they hope to “make the beloved statement of postmodernism, ‘everything [has] been done,’ sound as an intellectual error.”
Over the past two years, EnlightenNext’s Executive Editor Carter Phipps has been participating in a kind of global think tank for conscious evolution called the Evolutionary Leaders group. This meeting of what was initially 38 people, including Deepak Chopra, Michael Beckwith, Barbara Marx Hubbard, Jean Houston, Brian Swimme, Steve McIntosh, Don Beck and many more, started in 2008 with a 
What does it mean to be a spiritual hero? It is a bold and audacious idea, but I think that especially in our time, when there are many people looking for ways to step forward and make the world a better place, more and more of us are going to have to be willing to be just that, in order to take responsibility for where it is that we are all going. We’re going to have to be willing, in all our imperfection, to be exemplars of what’s possible and to stand for Spirit in a disbelieving world. When we awaken to the truth and reality of Spirit, we see much more deeply into the nature of who we are and into the nature of reality itself. And it is there that we can discover a fearless courage to live this life for the highest reasons, and be a representative of that deeper and higher reality in this world. I have no doubt that the degree to which any one of us is willing to do that is the degree to which we’re going to have a real impact on the future of our evolving consciousness and culture. 
There is more to enlightenment than the liberating discovery of the inherent perfection of the absolute, or nondual, nature of all things. And that more is the emergence of a powerful imperative to evolve. When something came from nothing, and the explosion in motion that is all of life came into being, a perpetual state of becoming was born. In the spiritual revelation, that movement is experienced as an impersonal command from the Self to transcend, to evolve, to utterly transform this world so that it can become a dynamic, living expression of the perfection that it already is. This spiritually inspired passion, which arises from the Self, unleashes the fire of absolute love and ego-defying compassion into this world. 
