By Zechaia Sitichin scholar Janet Kira Lessin
What began as a discussion among Anunnaki researchers Neil Freer, Gerald Clark, Robert Evans, Dr. Sasha Lessin, and me quickly widened. Panel members and I connected our personal contact experiences, ancient history, religion, human origins, kingship, consciousness, extraterrestrial intervention, and the figure of Jesus. Our talk became an inquiry into who we are, where we came from, and whether humanity’s religious traditions preserve fragments of a much older story.
The fantasy roundtable I created brings together researchers and experiencers who approached the subject from very different directions. Neil Freer had childhood contact experiences that began years before the modern UFO era and later led him to Zecharia Sitchin’s work. Gerald Clark approached the Anunnaki question through engineering, military aviation, ancient genealogy, bodywork, energy systems, and comparative religion. Robert Evans followed a trail through astronomical imagery and unexplained objects around the Sun, while Sasha Alex Lessin brought the perspective of a cultural anthropologist who had spent decades comparing Sumerian accounts with what he saw as unresolved questions in conventional anthropology.
I brought a different perspective because my own contact with nonhuman beings began at the very beginning of this life, and part of a much longer continuity that reaches beyond this incarnation.
At the center of our discussion stood the Anunnaki, beings described in Mesopotamian traditions and reinterpreted by Zecharia Sitchin as a technologically advanced population associated with the planet Nibiru.
NEIL FREER: CONTACT BEFORE THE MODERN UFO ERA
Neil Freer’s story began long before flying saucers became embedded in popular culture, with his first major experience in 1936, when he was only six years old and visiting relatives in rural New York.
It was a summer evening, and the men had gathered outside on a long front porch after dinner while Neil stood beside his father, listening to the adults talk. At some point, a light crossed the sky, and someone suggested that it might be a mail plane, although there was no engine noise and no obvious explanation for its silence.
Then, said Neil, everything changed. He looked along the porch and saw the adults frozen in place, caught mid-movement and mid-syllable, as though time itself had stopped, while he remained conscious and able to move. Neil felt compelled to leave the porch and walk around the side of the house into the darkness, where he sensed something enormous nearby.
His memory of what happened next disappeared, and when he returned to the porch, the adults began moving and speaking again exactly where they had left off. The family soon realized that far more time had passed than anyone could account for, and Neil later interpreted the episode as a missing-time experience during which he believed he had been taken aboard a craft.
His second major experience came when he was twelve, and this time he remembered far more.
Neil described waking in the middle of the night surrounded by a blue field while several short gray beings held him weightlessly above their heads. Another gray stood nearby, taller and more powerfully built than the others, and Neil took this being to be the group’s supervisor or leader.
When Neil asked what they were, the being said they were androids, a word that meant almost nothing to him then.
The year was 1942, years before Roswell and before the modern UFO era had established the vocabulary that later generations would use to describe such encounters.
The beings asked Neil to help them “get into” Earth, and when he agreed, he experienced what he described as an enormous transfer of information into his mind, far more than he could consciously understand. He felt that the material had been placed there for later use and that he might not comprehend its purpose until he was much older.
When Neil asked who directed the androids, he saw a tall, heavily built, bearded humanoid male in white, who gave Neil the impression that he and the others would watch over him for the rest of his life.
Although the being never identified himself by name, Neil later associated him with the Anunnaki. Neil’s direct involvement with Anunnaki research did not begin until decades later, when he was living in Woodstock, New York, in 1976 and experienced what he described as an unmistakable internal instruction to pick up a newspaper lying on his coffee table. He rarely read that newspaper, yet when he opened it, his attention immediately fell upon a pre-publication discussion of Zecharia Sitchin’s forthcoming book, The 12th Planet. Sitchin’s work provided a historical framework for experiences Neil had carried since childhood, and he immersed himself in the material, eventually meeting Sitchin, speaking at one of his conferences, and developing a relationship with him that led Sitchin to write introductions for two of Neil’s books. For Neil, Sitchin bridged personal contact and ancient history.
GERALD CLARK: AN ENGINEER’S TAKE ON ANCIENT HISTORY
Gerald Clark’s background included electrical engineering, military aviation, religious study, bodywork, consciousness research, and an intense interest in the relationship between energy and matter. Born in San Diego, Gerald spent part of his youth in rural Arkansas, where he described a UFO encounter at around age 14. He grew up immersed in Southern Baptist Christianity and understood the doctrine of salvation from the inside, yet he also felt that certain spiritual and energetic experiences could not be fully explained by the religious language available to him. Clark studied electrical engineering at the University of California, San Diego, and spent seven years flying helicopters for the U.S. Army. Engineering gave him a framework for thinking about reality through frequency, structure, energy, gravity, matter, and measurable relationships, while his later exploration of structural integration and bodywork brought him into another understanding of how physical structure and energy might interact. That search eventually brought him to Hawaii, where he began connecting human physiology, gravity, energetic change, consciousness, ancient history, and the work of researchers such as Zecharia Sitchin and Laurence Gardner. The more Gerald read, the more he saw ancient history as a genealogy rather than a collection of isolated myths, and he began constructing extensive charts that traced Anunnaki figures across cultures, names, dynasties, religions, and historical traditions.
ROBERT EVANS: TRACKED NIBIRU’S ORBIT BETWEEN DARK STAR NEMESIS AND SOLARIS
Robert Evans approached the Anunnaki homeland planet, Nibiru, from observation rather than ancient texts. Evans began examining unusual astronomical images and objects appearing in online telescope data around 2007 and 2008. He tracked coordinates, studied solar imagery, contacted people with technical backgrounds, and compiled thousands of images from solar-observing satellites that he believed showed enormous artificial objects orbiting the Sun. Some seemed to approach it, others appeared to move away, and still others seemed to interact with objects outside the visible field.
Robert began comparing the shapes he observed with ancient depictions from the Middle East, particularly winged figures and symbols associated with Zoroastrian traditions, and over time he became increasingly convinced that modern imagery and ancient accounts might belong to the same larger story. He concluded that Sitchin’s reconstruction of ancient history matched modern astronomical data.
SASHA LESSIN: ACADEMIC ANTHROPOLOGY AVOIDS ANUNNAKI ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
Sasha Alex Lessin entered Anunnaki studies after becoming dissatisfied with conventional anthropology’s explanation of human origins. Dr. Lessin says that standard evolutionary models left too many anomalies unresolved and failed to account for many abrupt rather than gradual developments.
As a cultural anthropologist and ethnologist trained to compare information across societies and build broader explanatory models, Dr. Lessin approached Sitchin’s work as a proposed historical framework to compare with archaeology, anthropology, astronomy, religion, and the ancient texts themselves. Dr. Lessin attended Sitchin’s seminars and certification program, studied the ancient narratives intensively, and spent years examining how the Anunnaki account might explain aspects of human history that conventional models treated separately. For Sasha, the Anunnaki story was not simply about ancient gods; it was about human origins.
SPINOZA SUPERCEDED SUPERSTITION AND DOCUMENTED JESUS’ LIFE AFTER THE TEACHER’S EXECUTION ACT
Sasha embraces what Spinoza wrote: If God is infinite, nothing can exist outside God. There is only one endless reality-Deus sive Natura—God, or Nature. Everything else is a mode or a way in which the infinite expresses itself. Creator and creation were never separate. Spinoza embraced the Partnership Consciousness of Nature itself and, by extension, the potential partnership of all humans as an alternative to the dogma of his day. Spinoza argued that scripture is a human, historical text; the state should be secular; true piety is justice & compassion; and freedom of thought is sacred. Everything flows necessarily from the Nature of God/Nature, and in which joy grows with understanding. Religion, he believed, creates superstitious behavior and subservience to ecclesiastical authorities. Pantheism leads, he wrote, to enlightenment, freedom, and true blessedness (i.e., peace of mind). Spinoza glimpsed the divine as one infinite substance; Einstein extended the view, seeing sacred order in the cosmos’s mathematical laws. Now modern thinkers like Michio Kaku imagine countless “bubble universes,” each with its own mathematics, geometry, and constants. Spinoza’s God-or-Nature manifests as not just one world, but many—each lawful, each beautiful, each emerging from a deeper master-equation we have yet to discover.
SILVA CITED EVIDENCE THAT SILENCED OLD-SCHOOL SCEPTICS
“Giant telluric waves, undulating vertically & linked to the geomagnetic field of Earth, create a network of crisscrossing lines all around the planet.” The Anunnaki & other extraterrestrial settlers on Earth built Temples (with sonar technology & chemically-bonded cement) where lines of the field crisscross. “Every one of these sites is an advanced antediluvian world civilization whose messengers survived a catastrophe & disembarked [usually from the sea] at strategic locations after the Younger Dryas to build technologically advanced temples & establish laws which led to the sudden flourishing of human civilization.” But meteorites, comets & space debris periodically destroyed each network of temples. “An average of 200,000 tons of debris falls onto the Earth from interplanetary space every year. Earth crossed a two-week-long stream of comet debris, the Taurid Meteor Shower, like clockwork.
Around 10,800 BCE, the Taurid [from Taurus, between Orion & the Pleiades] Shower “contained fragments of a once massive planetary object, now disintegrated, portions of which triggered the Younger Dryas Ice Age. “An impact crater beneath the Hiawatha Glacier in Greenland & measures 19 miles in diameter & was produced by a mile-wide object. On the other coast of North America, one billion fish were found petrified on the former seabed off the coast of California around the period of impact that triggered the Younger Dryas.” Earth crossed the same path 1100 years later & closed the glacial period, when 7 burning mountains,” according to Enoch, “hurtled to Earth. The most recent Taurid Stream event took place in 1908, when a fireball streaked across the Northern Hemisphere & exploded over Siberia.” But the raining rocks did not destroy all the temples. Some temples, built with foreknowledge of the sky’s cycle of obliteration, survived. Rock strikes, floods, volcanic eruptions & earthquakes destroyed the Earth-wide network & its cultures. But some of the resilient temples remained.
ANUNNAKI SAGES SETTLED SURVIVORS, CULTIVATED CIVILIZATIONS
The Sages settled survivors near surviving temples, repaired damaged temples, or built new temples. In the centuries after each destructive calamity, the Sages taught survivors how to rebuild civilization. Ancient advanced Olmec, Maya, Aymara, Egyptian & Sumerian civilizations “sprang up completely with fully-developed understanding of astronomy, geometry, mathematics, language, writing, complex mythology, megalithic [sonar] construction technique, art, metallurgy, animal & crop domestication, & long-range ocean navigation—skills that require tens of thousands of years of gradual development. These cultures “arrived on the scene with identical creation pantheons—tall creator gods who traveled between worlds on a boat along the Milky Way. Knowledge of previous civilizations who succumbed to periodic cataclysms & man-made folly was wiped out & buried beneath silt & sea” are, in the surviving stories, “condensed to myth & megalithic structures.” That’s why the Anunnaki built the temple network. The “Sages gathered their accumulated knowledge & carved it into the faces of pyramids, buried it in sacred places, or hard-wired it into the very fabric of monuments built with stone of cumbersome size, engineered to withstand ten thousand years of pillage & politics, into which they poured the sum of their experience, reminding future generations of Earth’s place & the danger of complacency. They wished future generations to know there existed an advanced civilization that reached its apogee in astronomy, mathematics, telluric sciences & spirituality to create a golden age across a swath of Earth to remind us that the near-destruction of Earth is cyclical.”
The Brotherhood of Sages sent A LEADER, THE LEADER’S SISTER-WIFE & SEVEN SPECIALIZED SAGES TO EACH EARTHLING CIVILIZATION to save & re-civilize it. The rescuing ETs rose from the sea before or after the catastrophes. They said that when we’re ready, we’ll learn the star systems our ancestor-creators came from. The structures, monuments & frescoes embodied, as well as in writing & art, stated the laws of mathematics, geometry, chemistry, astronomy, and astral projection, which we need for spiritual enlightenment. >
Sacred sites are connected through common narratives, myths, & folklore. All share accurate triangles.” Yet “Two thousand miles separate the cities of Tiahuanacu, Cuzco & Machu Picchu”-all the post-Deluge Followers of Horus defined as “Navels of the Earth”–from Navel monuments of Easter Island. Nonetheless, the same culture of light-skinned, red-haired, & bearded. “Features link the antediluvian gods–based on testimonies from the oldest of cultures from the Andes through the Pacific to Egypt.
2 separate meteor bombardments (10,800 & 9645 BCE) hit Earth; each killed megalithic civilizations worldwide & triggered ocean waves that salted Lakes Van, Urmia, Aral, Caspian, & Titicaca & swept human & animal corpses on the Rocky & Himalayan Mountains. These meteor impacts & the floods they caused destroyed most life on Earth. One meteor bombardment, around 10,800 BCE, destroyed all of Earth’s high civilizations of megalithic builders with one style of rockwork & triggered the Younger Dryas Ice Age. New high civilizations, with the help of a group of Anunnaki sages, rebuilt civilizations with a new style of giant-stone temples. Around 9645 BCE, however, a second brimstone bombardment again destroyed peoples & civilizations.
When meteorites — huge space rocks — hit the Atlantic & Pacific oceans, gigantic plumes of vaporized saltwater, seabed rock, and minerals from the meteorites erupted. The reduced barometric pressure from the crashing meteorites sucked their impact plumes high into the atmosphere. Silva reports evidence of devastating meteorite impacts in 7600, 4400, 3150, 23455, 1628, 1159, & 207 BCE, as well as 536 & 1178 CE. Extraterrestrial plasma events occurred alongside meteorite impacts, driven by gamma-ray outbursts from stellar phenomena or mass coronal ejections from the Sun, with some strikes so intense they petrified entire cities. Earth’s passage through the Taurid shower in the 6th Century CE caused “crop failures, plagues & devastation that ushered the Dark Ages in Europe.” In addition to the plumes, meteorite strikes also launched a 3-mile-high circular wall of waves that “could travel long distances without loss of energy.” The first of these waves raced out from the impact sites at 397 miles per hour. These giant waves engulfed everything in their path. The initial waves crossed North America & the Himalayas as far inland as Tibet & left salt water far inland in lakes and inland seas (Lake Van, Urmia & the Aral & Caspian Seas in Armenia, Titicaca in Peru, & Eyre in Australia).
JANET KIRA LESSIN: CONTACTEE PROMOTING COOPERATIVE CONSCIOUSNESS OF NINMAH, CRETE’S ANUNNAKI GODDESS
My path into this work began before I had words for extraterrestrials, UFOs, Anunnaki, reincarnation, or consciousness research, because I came into this life aware of myself as an eternal being, with contact experiences that reach back to the crib, the state between lives, and previous existences. As a child, some of what I perceived and remembered frightened my deeply Christian mother, and I came to understand that my conscious access to certain memories was deliberately restricted so that I could function within my family and remain protected from people who might have harmed me if I openly retained everything I knew. Contact continued, but encounters were often followed by memory suppression, with fragments returning later when I could better understand and integrate them.
I agreed to participate in the hybrid program as a hybrid mother, and experience myself as an avatar of Ninmah. I consider my work with Ninmah an emanation of my higher self — part of a larger mission to help prepare humanity for open contact and for the awakening and evolution of consciousness that such recognition will require.
The Anunnaki never truly left Earth. They stay on our planet–sometimes hidden, sometimes walking among us–while humanity gradually approaches the point at which Contact will no longer belong only to isolated experiencers or secret institutions but will become part of our shared reality. The coming change is awakening us Earthlings to the larger community of consciousness around us and preparing us to participate in a Federation of Planets of Love and Light, whose members await our emergence into a more conscious, peaceful, and cooperative civilization.
THE ANUNNAKI STORY
The planet Nibiru, a world associated with a long elliptical orbit through the solar system, drove its deposed King, Alalu, to Earth, where the Nibirans sought gold to make powder for life-extension elixirs and a planetary shield. The Anunnaki, as the Nibirans on Earth called them, established settlements, mining operations, transportation routes, and eventually a substantial presence spanning Earth and Mars. The central figures included Anu, Enki, Enlil, Ninmah, Ninurta, Marduk, Nannar, and Ningishzidda.
DID SOME ANUNNAKI REMAIN ON EARTH?
Neil believed some Anunnaki may never have left, while Gerald proposed that long residence on Earth could have altered their physiology so much that returning to Nibiru became dangerous or impossible: beings who arrived as rulers, scientists, administrators, miners, and explorers may have become biologically tied to the world they came to exploit. Some may have departed, some may have remained, and others may have hidden from public view while continuing to influence human civilization. The Anunnaki never completely withdrew from Earth. The question is when humanity will become collectively aware of the Anunnaki presence that has continued all along.
FROM SUMER TO JESUS
Neil introduced the work of Laurence Gardner and the idea that the Holy Grail was not primarily an object, a cup, or a relic, but rather a bloodline.
The Grail represented a dynastic lineage that stretched through Mesopotamia, Egypt, Hebrew traditions, the Essenes, and eventually Jesus and Mary Magdalene.
Neil described Enki as the originator of a line of rulers intended to continue guiding humanity after the Anunnaki withdrew from overt rule.
Cain became central to that lineage, not merely as the familiar biblical figure of later theology, but as the beginning of a royal succession whose purpose was governance.
Kingship was not meant to mean domination; The ruler was supposed to serve the people.
JESUS, MARY MAGDALENE, AND THE GRAIL LINE
Neil described Enki as the originator of a line of rulers intended to continue guiding humanity after the Anunnaki withdrew from overt rule. Cain became central to that lineage, not merely as the familiar biblical figure of later theology, but as the beginning of a royal succession whose purpose was governance. Kingship was not meant to mean domination; The ruler was supposed to serve the people.
JESUS, MARY MAGDALENE, AND THE GRAIL LINE
Jesus belonged to a carefully maintained royal lineage governed by strict rules governing marriage, conception, birth, and succession. Jesus may have been born outside the expected timetable, which raised questions about legitimacy and succession, while James also became part of the struggle over who properly inherited the royal position.
Mary Magdalene belonged to a royal lineage of her own, and her importance rested partly on continuing that bloodline. If dynastic transmission depended upon women, then discrediting Mary Magdalene diminished her; and her lineage.
NINGISHZIDDA, THOTH, HERMES, AND JESUS
Gerald connected the Sumerian figure Ningishzidda with the Egyptian Thoth, the Greek Hermes, Melchizedek, Yehoshua, and ultimately Jesus. Gerald considered reincarnation, incarnation, consciousness transfer, and other ways a nonphysical intelligence might repeatedly enter physical embodiment.
If Ningishzidda had been sent to Earth to teach civilization, then later teacher figures associated with wisdom, transformation, sacred knowledge, resurrection, alchemy, and human awakening might represent different expressions of the same mission. Thoth, Hermes, Melchizedek, Yehoshua, and Jesus could therefore be understood not as disconnected figures but as parts of one continuing lineage of consciousness and purpose.
THE BODY AS THE TEMPLE
NINGISHZIDDA, THOTH, HERMES, AND JESUS
Gerald connected the Sumerian figure Ningishzidda with the Egyptian Thoth, the Greek Hermes, Melchizedek, Yehoshua, and ultimately Jesus. Gerald considered reincarnation, incarnation, consciousness transfer, and other ways a nonphysical intelligence might repeatedly enter physical embodiment. Ningishzidda received a mandate from Anu to teach humanity, and Gerald saw that role as one of the most important clues in the entire story. If Ningishzidda had been sent to Earth to teach civilization, then later teacher figures associated with wisdom, transformation, sacred knowledge, resurrection, alchemy, and human awakening might represent different expressions of the same mission. Thoth, Hermes, Melchizedek, Yehoshua, and Jesus could therefore be understood not as disconnected figures but as parts of one continuing lineage of consciousness and purpose.
Gerald said the phrase “the body is the temple” might describe the seven chakras, the pineal gland, the caduceus, alchemical transformation, and energetic awakening; the teachings attributed to Jesus could all be viewed as parts of the same larger process.
THE HISTORICAL JESUS AND THE THEOLOGICAL JESUS
Neil distinguished the historical Jesus and the theological Jesus created by later institutions, because over centuries political interests, ecclesiastical disputes, competing bishops, religious councils, imperial authority, and institutional theology reshaped the figure who eventually became the center of orthodox Christianity. The resulting “Jesus” represented a synthesis that obscured the original man beneath layers of doctrine. The teacher, royal heir, husband, father, and participant in a living historical movement disappeared beneath theology, while the religion built around him survived and expanded.
MARY MAGDALENE AND THE SURVIVING LINE
Sasha added traditions that placed Jesus and Mary Magdalene in southern France after the events traditionally associated with the Crucifixion, where Jesus was said to have survived, raised a family, and continued teaching. According to those traditions, their descendants later intermarried with European royal houses, creating a bloodline that continued long after the original events in Judea. The Grail was never lost; it simply became genealogy.
A WAR BETWEEN TWO SYSTEMS
Throughout the discussion, another pattern repeatedly surfaced: the ancient rivalry between Enki and Enlil and the possibility that human political, religious, and dynastic conflicts continued to reflect the competing systems associated with them.
Ancient wars, royal disputes, theological divisions, and struggles over human control could therefore be interpreted as later expressions of a much older conflict.
Gerald described these opposing systems as representing different relationships with humanity: one emphasizing hierarchy, obedience, domination, and control, while the other emphasizing knowledge, development, consciousness, and the possibility that human beings could eventually mature beyond servitude.
Within that framework, the story of Jesus became another chapter in the long struggle over what humanity was allowed to become.
HUMANITY MUST GROW UP
Neil shifted the discussion away from ancient history and toward humanity’s future because, from his perspective, endless debate about the past accomplished very little unless it helped us prepare for what comes next.
If humanity truly belongs to a larger cosmic community, then our greatest obstacle may not be technological at all. It may be psychological, political, and cultural.
We remain divided into nations, religions, races, ideologies, economies, military blocs, and institutions that continually reinforce separation and conflict.
Neil believed humanity had to “break the god spell,” stop surrendering responsibility to external gods and authorities, and begin functioning as a mature planetary civilization before we could participate responsibly in a wider stellar society.
WHAT WOULD WE SAY IF THEY RETURNED?
If the Anunnaki became openly visible again, how should humanity respond? Would we worship them, fear them, fight them, or finally meet them as relatives? Just because they are our ancestors does not make us their servants; if they possess technology or knowledge we need, exchange should happen through mutual respect rather than submission. We have developed our own cultures, sciences, identities, and consciousness. We can recognize ancestry without surrendering sovereignty, listen without kneeling, and learn without becoming slaves.
THE SHIPS NEAR THE SUN
Robert returned the discussion to the present by pointing toward the unexplained objects he believed were already entering the solar system and appearing around the Sun. Some of the imagery he studied seemed to show enormous craft interacting with incoming objects or threats, raising questions about whether these were Anunnaki vessels, another extraterrestrial civilization, or something else entirely. If artificial craft were already moving through our solar system, then humanity’s relationship with other intelligences might not be a future prospect at all; it might already be underway.
DISCLOSURE MAY NOT COME FROM GOVERNMENT
By the end of the discussion, the panel moved toward another shared realization: humanity may wait forever if we expect governments, institutions, universities, or official authorities to settle the extraterrestrial question for us. Contact may not arrive through a presidential announcement or government hearing. It may emerge through personal experience, archaeological discovery, astronomical observation, historical reconstruction, scientific anomaly, telepathic communication, or the appearance of something in the sky that can no longer be ignored. Neil and his colleagues were already sending what he described as a deliberate invitation to those other intelligences: We are ready. Perhaps not everyone is ready, and perhaps no civilization ever becomes completely ready, but enough people may already be asking the questions that prepare the ground for what comes next.
THE QUESTION THAT REMAINS
The Sacred Matrix roundtable never reached a neat conclusion.
Neil Freer understood his childhood experiences as the beginning of a lifelong assignment that eventually led him into Anunnaki research and the question of humanity’s future among other civilizations.
Gerald Clark searched for the hidden architecture connecting consciousness, genealogy, physics, ancient history, religion, and the beings remembered as gods.
Robert Evans watched the Sun and searched modern astronomical imagery for evidence that the ancient visitors never truly disappeared.
Sasha searched anthropology and ancient history for the pieces that conventional models had left unexplained.
And I continued asking the question that has followed me throughout a lifetime of contact: Who are they, and why have they remained connected to us?
Yet perhaps the more important question now is something else entirely.
Who are we becoming?
If humanity carries the legacy of another civilization in our bodies, cultures, religions, myths, bloodlines, and memories, then disclosure is not merely about discovering extraterrestrials.
It is about discovering ourselves.
If the beings remembered as gods once walked beside us, created with us, fought over us, ruled us, taught us, loved us, and left descendants among us, then their departure never ended the story, particularly if, as my own experiences have led me to believe, they never completely departed in the first place. The story continued through humanity, through contact, through consciousness, through the witnesses who remembered, and through those who began recovering pieces of a history that had never truly vanished.
The next chapter may not be the return of beings who went away. It may be humanity awakening sufficiently to recognize those who have been here all along and to take our place, consciously and responsibly, within the larger community that awaits us.
