Photo Credit: El Born, Barcelona, Daniel Etter, New York Times, September 2016

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Congestion and pollution in big cities hurt children and adults in ways we can’t fully measure, with everything from accidents to asthma, not to mention the stress it puts on the minds and bodies of the public. When a city is clogged up, the collective chi is also blocked. It becomes harder to tap into our spiritual center, thus harder to connect with each other in meaningful ways. This is especially true in North America, which has less experience developing community spaces that really work.

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Even Time Square has its moments and does what squares are meant to do. Just last year, a section of the Square officially became a “pedestrian plaza,” after a trial run and despite complaints by businesses. The yearly Mind-Over-Madness mass yoga event that happens on the summer solstice and attracts more than 10,000 people is another one of those moments.

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These are signs of the revolution going on in America in response to the dark energy at work, and it is something to be optimistic about.  

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Often, though, such efforts are annual or sporadic events.

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What we want is balance, internally and externally, and more spaces to gather in daily, so that the city square becomes a real “living” room for all its inhabitants, EVERY DAY  – not somewhere to go when we get bored or as a place of respite that we escape to, once in a while, to get away from the craziness of life in the fast lane.

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This balance, relatively speaking, is something Europeans have cultivated for centuries. It is the real distinction between Time Square and the typical European plaza that serves as the cities’ living rooms. But, as Winnie Hu writes in a New York Times article, "What New York Can Learn From Barcelona's 'Super Blocks' " architects and other city planners of New York are working on implementing similar changes in that city." http://www.nytimes.com/2016/

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We are at a stage in our spiritual evolution where we are being called upon by the universe to live more consciously - and to bring that consciousness out into our living spaces.

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When we do create these spiritual-based living spaces, which will take a great deal more than just urban planning to achieve, they will be the true "center of the universe." 

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Humans have built beautiful works of art at our city centers to express lofty ideals, flex our muscles as great conquerors and show our superiority over other nations. This is how we have understood the meaning of progress. We’ve seen the plaza shape-shift into rectangles, triangles, circles and all of these combined. We have played around with geometrical designs as if somehow by shaping the landscape we can also shape the minds of the people that live on it.

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The spaces we occupy certainly affect our mental state. But ultimately it is our collective minds that create those spaces. And what we do in those spaces is dependent on how spiritually evolved we are as individuals.

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If we don’t insist on engaging in the conversation, if we don’t work on transforming our inner selves, the spaces we live in will become what the one per cent decides it will be:  a “... tragic landscape of highway strips, parking lots, housing tracts, mega-malls, junked cities, and ravaged countryside that makes up the everyday environment,” as writer James Howard Kunstler refers to the landscape “where most Americans live and work.”

 

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In its most ideal form, the city plaza is a microcosm of the world in its most evolved spiritual self, a mirror of how human beings can co-exist peacefully.

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But for this we do not need ornate churches or stately buildings, however beauteous they are - and certainly not ones that have been built in a culture of violence and hate. 

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When a seedier Times Square underwent a transformation in the 1990s it wasn't for the common good, to build a stronger more unified community. It was polished for the one percent and for the lords of commerce to rule over. Low income people who lived nearby had to move because the rents had skyrocketed. New York isn't unique in this, of course. It happens all the time, all over the world, with few exception. It is part of the human condition, as we go through a transformation to awaken to a higher consciousness. As I've written about in a previous blog, we are still holding on to beliefs that no longer serve us as a race (if they ever did serve us, that is).

 

Earlier societies show examples of how we’ve attempted to achieve the ideals of building democratic communities (with the symbolic town square at the center). And each evolution reveals a growth in spiritual awareness as well as repetitions of old mistakes.

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Just as we see spiritual development on the rise in society, we also see our societal structures evolving in a more spiritual way ("green" spaces and so forth). Too often though it is done with a mind to the bottom line  - because it is considered good business rather than the right thing to do morally and spiritually.

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While building and renewing physical spaces is important, we also need to focus on building the spiritual values that were originally attached to these spaces. We need to work on our spiritual selves – and that goes for our economic and political leaders ten-fold. 

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We need the one per cent to help lead the way in this transformation of our communities, where all business has a triple bottom line rooted in a solid spiritual base. 

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In this sense, the old plaza has a new role, which develops on tried-and-true ancient beliefs and customs but with a more conscious purpose: to serve as a spiritual learning ground.