Reflections on Turning 90 Years of Age, by Janice Dolley
Janice at her 90th birthday celebrations 2025
Question: “How do I know if my mission on earth has been accomplished?”
Answer: “Well if you are still alive, it hasn’t.
The Reluctant Messiah, Richard Bach - best known author of Jonathan Livingston Seagull
This is one of my favourite sayings. Amidst the many wonderful celebrations of my 90th birthday I have had time to reflect on what TS Eliot meant by,
“At the end of all our searching, we come back to where we started, and know the place for the first time.”
Where I truly started was with what can be called a peak experience which has stayed with me ever since. This was an unexpected moment in the garden when, sitting to meditate, the whole scene suddenly shifted and I saw an energy flowing through everything - trees, plants, insects and also through myself. I knew this energy was loving and beneficent, that it was Life itself and was in fact what we call God. I saw the reality of oneness and how all expressions of this one life are deeply interconnected.
Janice and the WholeWorld View team meeting, UK (June 2024)
So no wonder when I first met Jude Currivan who, at the time was working on her book ” The Cosmic Hologram,” all her ideas made sense and I have supported this energy flow, now called The Unitive Narrative, ever since. This was a time when many were waking up to these ideas and we had some wonderful gatherings in a hall in Kensington, London. We held a conference also in Westminster and later several follow up meetings in the House of Lords where we shared ideas and encouraged each other. Being a pioneer ahead of the majority is not easy so it felt supportive to be with others of like mind.
My background is in Christianity though I have moved very far from the old orthodox interpretations which were turned into beliefs that are still being recited in ecclesiastical settings to this day but are now being overtaken by an inner knowing in many of us that assists us to see the deeper meaning behind the words attributed to Jesus.
Such statement as “The father and I are one, even as you and I are one” and “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you“ are similar to the messages of the Unity Community in which we realise that all life is deeply interconnected. We are currently shifting from separate isms to a more universal understanding, to the enhanced perspective of a “whole world view” and to the realisation of that early evolutionary leader Barbara Marx Hubbard who put it this way:
Anne-Marie, Janice & Jude at her 90th birthday celebrations
“A universal human is one who is connected through the heart to the
whole of life, attuned to the deepest intelligence of nature, and called
forth irresistibly by spirit to creatively express his or her gifts in the
evolution of self and the world. Above all, a universal human has shifted identity from the separated egoic self, to the deeper self that is a direct expression of service.
To become a universal human is to evolve consciously, choosing a path of development that has never been mapped before, in a world that has never existed before.
”
Janice Dolley
At ninety several people seem to say that I have a lot of wisdom which Google describes as “the ability to apply knowledge, experience and good judgement to negotiate life’s complexities.” I certainly hope that this is so. As I look back I feel enormous gratitude for a loving husband of 63 years, four wonderful daughters, seven grandchildren all contributing to life’s flow in different ways and the sixty or so friends who gathered two weeks ago on the topic of ‘Building Bridges to the New” and included a showing of Jude’s film ‘ A Radical Guide to Reality.’
That was an inspiring day together drawing on past and present but what about ‘the call of the future’? If indeed my ‘mission on earth has not yet been accomplished’ then it does still include writing two more books and sorting my multitudinous boxes of papers that my daughters will not thank me for bequeathing them!
Charles Eisenstein has described our collective role as co-creating ‘the more beautiful world that our hearts know is possible.’ This is quite a challenge at these troublesome times but as my childhood was spent underneath the daily bombing of South London in WW2. I guess myself and my contemporaries all embraced a resilience that will help us to ‘keep on keeping on.’