Eckhart Tolle points out what happened to religion due to identification with form. We all know the story; we fight wars over what name to call God, we teach our children to be self-righteous and to give dirty looks to the kids across the street who go to that "other" church. We sneer at people and secretly relish the thought of seeing them burn in Hell for disagreeing with us. We believe in a God who hard-wired us to want one thing, and commanded us to do another. We feel guilty and ashamed of who we are. We hold up numerous books as absolute moral authorities, and then get into screaming matches about how they're supposed to be interpreted. And somehow, we convinced ourselves that this is what God wanted us to do.

What will churches look like after we've discovered total presence? What will we pray to God for, after our pain bodies have transmuted into newly awakened consciousness? What books will we study then? It's difficult, as always, to see from this limited, still-mostly-unconscious vantage point. For one thing, it will be interesting to see what happens when people stop worshipping their own mental noise, and start listening to God instead. But, we can start by speculating.

First of all, there will be a lot more jokes told in church. People will finally get that God invented all forms of humor, including the most twisted sarcasm known to man. Since humankind will have awakened and learned to enjoy the darker things in life, church will take on a new, more colorful element. The things that we used to get angry at God about (death, disease, poverty, etc.) will no longer be cause for upset, since we will have learned to fully embrace everything as it is. So, everything that we used to ask God for help getting through, will be another source of praise. In other words, we'll go to Sunday school and thank God for giving us brain cancer and letting our dog get run over by a car. Everyone will laugh, and we'll all mean it.

Church will no longer be something we have to take seriously, unless we just want to have the curious experience of thinking that God is serious. Some of us will want to remember what that felt like in the old days. We'll be teaching our kids how in the post-modern Dark Ages, people actually used to worship a FORM of God. The kids will laugh about it and they'll play "holy war" on the playground. Children will be taught at a young age that blasphemy does not exist, and that God blesses all that is.

We're going to learn soon, that God has been having a laugh at our expense for a long time.

In a world that's fully conscious, and every last one of us has accepted that the world is the way it is, will there still be any point in writing and enforcing laws? There of course won't be any need for it, but it might serve as a novelty. The government will mostly become ceremonious, and it won't really have any power. Pretty much the same way it works now.

Let's take a look at how Eckhart Tolle might view this. No one ever really had any power over anyone else. The only way to create the illusion of power over someone else is through their unconsciousness, and the only way that you would ever desire to have power over someone else is through your own unconsciousness. Tolle addresses this point in The Power of Now. So, when we're conscious, and nobody can be controlled, nor have any desire to control anyone else, where will government fit into the picture?

The legal documents, the buildings, the ceremonies, all of the standing institutions make pretty art forms. Including the illusion of power over another. I'm guessing that we'll want to preserve some semblance of it. After all, we did create this illusion for some reason, so I imagine we won't want to lose it. At some point, future generations will want to know what it feels like to be wrongly convicted of murder and put to death, so it will be helpful to have a court system in place to make that experience available. Doubtless, we'll want to experience being pulled over by a police cruiser every now and then, and plus, those flashing lights on top of the cars make for a good aesthetic touch.

The idea of having Rule of Law will be something worth examining in a collectively enlightened context. We'll surely enjoy watching ourselves run in circles like little rats in a cage, obeying and breaking laws for no particular reason. Hasn't it always been that way? But the point is, the experience of having an agreement in place that we call "the law" is an art form that we'll continue to enjoy, until it no longer pleases us.

The new function of government in the Enlightened Era will be to manage the flow of consciousness and unconsciousness. Doubtless, the experience of being unconscious is not something we'll want to just give up completely. We fell into this sleep for a reason, after all. So, what I see the government doing is maintaining a level of forced unconsciousness such that the people always have the ability to experience it as desired. The way that this might look: prisons are created, not to physically contain people, but to keep them unconscious and return them to a suffering state.

The purpose? Plain and simple: to preserve all experience, so that it can be experienced again at will.

When the world is enlightened, we obviously won't "need" anything in the sense that we relate the word now. There won't be any such thing as a shortage or a surplus, since both of these terms imply an imbalance, and they suggest a condition of things being other than the way they should be. In the enlightened world, we will simply delight in making use of the resources that are present during any particular moment, without concern for supply and demand.

They say "time is money," and the enlightened world will have no use for time. So, conventions such as paying people an amount of money in exchange for working a number of hours will seem strange indeed, when we have given up the illusions of past and future. One thing's for sure; we won't stay in jobs we can't stand just because they pay good money. Not that this will be an issue anyway, because there will no longer be any jobs that anyone can't stand. There will simply be different experiences, and people everywhere will delight in them all, from flying airplanes to scrubbing toilet bowls.

So, I'm sure that money will continue to exist, as with other things, as an art form. The art of currency exchange will remain in place, and so will the odd practice of assigning arbitrary numerical values that equate to symbolic pieces of paper. It will be an act, just like everything else. We'll keep paper currency and make a game of counterfeiting it over and over, taking on the challenge of making money harder to duplicate. That won't be much different than things are now. We just won't be taking it quite so seriously any longer.

Most likely, when we attain a high level of consciousness, we'll come to the conclusion that nothing was ever scarce to begin with, and that the entire infrastructure we created to maintain the integrity of our money was really not all that necessary. But the monetary system and its components will still be fun to play with, somewhat like an intricate clockwork or a child's train set.

The main point is that like all external things, the illusion of finding fulfillment in a greater supply of money will disappear. When everyone finally understands how readily available fulfillment really is, how transparent money really is, and how unrelated the two actually are, we will all have a good, long laugh at the significance we gave money, and everything we made it out to be.

The ironic part is that we'll all finally be as wealthy as we want.

The old model of marriage, in case you haven't noticed, has some drawbacks. Just look at faces of the married couples in the mall. Ever suspect that people tend to get married for the wrong reasons? Eckhart Tolle covers this in great detail in his works, and like many other issues facing us today, marriage is plagued by a severe lack of presence. We create a set of false expectations about the mind-projected future where the right person will give us lasting happiness and fulfillment. We get married without addressing the real issue; refusing to accept what is. Not surprisingly, we remain unfulfilled in marriage, and continue to blame this lack of fulfillment on the other person. Aren't we getting tired of this circus?

So, if you're wondering what enlightened romance should look like, that's part of the problem. It's not supposed to look like anything. If you already have a partner, the one you have is perfect. Once we all come to that realization, the divorce courts will go out of business. Imagine if every new child born came into this world as a pure act of love and free choice, rather than as a "fix" for a relationship that wasn't actually broken. Imagine if children grew up in households where their parents exemplified a life of unconditional gratitude for what is. But, alas, in our jaded, overstimulated world, this still doesn't excite anyone enough to do anything about the problem. But the good news is, there isn't actually a problem.

In the awakened world, single people will enjoy being single, married people will love being married, and people who casually date a string of different people will do so from a conscious choice to have the experience and fully embrace it. Love between partners will deepen as the relationship grows, and passion will remain at the intensity of a teenager with the butterflies. Think about what it was like when you had your first kiss. There will come a day when every kiss feels this way, and every gaze into your lover's eyes feels as intoxicating as the first. If you're single, you'll enjoy the anticipation of landing yourself in a relationship, while savoring the anticipation.

Will the outward form of relationships change? Maybe it will, and maybe it won't. But I would suspect that people will start being a lot more honest about what they want in relationships, and as a result, they'll start getting it. After all, in the new world, we won't have any fear of losing a loved one; we'll simply enjoy being present with them in the moment. We'll know that every time we see them may be the last, and we'll act like it. Marriages may remain largely traditional, or they may morph into shorter-term commitments, but either way, it will simply be a conscious choice to have one experience or the other. There will be no illusion of finding fulfillment in it.

Take a look at what we're still teaching our youth. We teach them to seek fulfillment in ice cream, video games, and cell phones at a young age. Then we teach them to work hard and chase a dangling carrot. We teach them that if they do what they're told, they'll get to make lots of money and find the perfect spouse who will provide everything external that they need in order to live a happy life. And they buy it. Because we pull off a sufficiently effective con job to make it look like it actually works. After all, we're great at putting on a show and plastering on the smiles.

What if, instead of teaching children to memorize dates, identify different rocks and leaves, make mental noise by repeatedly doing tedious mathematical calculations that a computer can easily do, all under the assumption that someday they'll understand the point of all this, we taught them to be still, be present, and pay attention to the signals that their body is sending them about their thoughts? What if we taught them to look for real opportunities that are in front of them right now?

The entire model of education would have to be turned upside down, but it might not require much change on the level of external form. For example, we could continue to teach children history, but we could stop teaching them to judge past events as "good" or "bad." Instead, we could teach them to be grateful for having inherited the world as it is, and as such, to be grateful for all that happened in the past, accepting it unconditionally as a necessary lesson and a stepping stone that got us to now.

What about teaching children to mentally project a future that brings them intensely into the present? This, again, wouldn't necessarily require much change on the level of form, but it would require a different context for the lessons. For example, when planning for a career, students could be taught to focus on what steps can be taken now, and what steps can move them in the direction of the career they're seeking. They could then be taught to observe how their body feels as they consider each possible course of action, and take no action until they are fully present in the now. They could be taught to assess their presence in terms of their body's reaction.

How would your life look if you had been educated this way? Probably not much different than it does. But how would you feel, if you had been raised with these core values? How would you relate to new challenges as they popped up? How would workplaces and corporations function if their employees had been educated from early childhood to view future planning as a stepping stone into total presence? Probably the same way they do now, but with much lower attrition rates, a happier work force, and a larger bottom line.

None of these things actually matter, of course, but which experience would you choose to have?