Can We Measure Culture and Consciousness?
Can We Measure Culture and Consciousness?
featured photo by Phil Clothier
Kosmos | Phil, I was just remembering what you told me—that your parents ran children’s’ homes in the UK when you were growing up. So you had, quite literally, about 350 foster brothers and sisters. I have been trying to imagine this idea of a ‘new child’ arriving, likely with a very unique set of needs and wants. And I can’t help but wonder what that was like for you.
Phil | You’ve actually made me feel a little tearful as you say that. Has brought something up for me. There really was a lot of suffering. We saw children who were coming from broken homes, and often had feelings of trauma and abandonment. Some just curled up and wanted their own space. Some were very ‘clingy.’ It would be a process for my parents and the other kids in the house to receive them and allow them to be where they are, and gently break down those barriers to find out what they need.
Kosmos | Do you see any connection between this experience and why the Barrett model inspired you so profoundly when you first encountered it? This idea of aligning with group values and what happens when certain needs do not get met within the family or group. Can you see any connection there?
Phil | Yes, absolutely. In fact, my first two experiences with Richard Barrett’s model—one was reading his book. It was truly a mind-blowing moment for me and provided a form of language for all the feelings in my heart that I never knew existed. And the second was, I took the Personal Values Assessment and Richard Barrett fed back the results. I remember very clearly one of my values was the value of ‘being liked,’ which Richard considered potentially limiting. I said, “How can being liked have a limiting side to it?” Richard replied that, if being liked is more important than having integrity then you might do things in order just to be part of the crowd. And in that moment I saw times in my life that I had overstepped my integrity in order to belong and to be liked. It was a massive aha moment for me actually.
Kosmos | And Tor, tell us a little about your childhood.
Tor | I grew up in Sweden in a family with a lot of love and appreciation. I had a very loving and caring childhood, but I also have a picture I sometimes use when I introduce myself. That I am actually in a cage. I am in the cage because I was a super active, hyperactive kid. And I woke up my parents very early. So my dad kind of made a cage for me out of my bed. He literally locked me in this bed that was screwed to the floor so that I didn’t wake everybody up at three, four o’clock in the morning.
I also recognize that this has actually haunted me throughout my life. Not the fact that I was caged exactly, but the fact that I had this super activity and was not present. And in order to be a good child in school and all that, you need to be present in a way that I wasn’t. So I taught myself during my childhood that I am not smart. I’m not as intelligent as others.
The Barrett model has helped me to realize that I also was always wanting to show that I am good. Level 3 performance, so to speak. And in my professional life, I worked long hours. I worked 80 hour weeks. And in order for me to contribute to the world today, I needed to let go of that fear of not being good enough and just open up and share who I am. Richard Barreyt gave me the language—how we can actually talk about our development psychologically, and from a needs perspective.
If you are Level 1, having fear of not getting food on the table, then you have difficulties to liberate your soul—Level 5. If you’re having difficulties with relating—level two—then you’re going to have difficulties with the other levels. In my case, it was very much Level 3. I was afraid of not being good enough. That held me back from truly giving back to the world so to speak. We all have wisdom. It’s just that that was holding me back. So that’s kind of my relationship and my journey with the seven levels, and my childhood.
Phil | There are three underlying fears, which are the buckets for all the other fears that exist. It’s really important that we understand those. So at Level 1, which is the survival level. The fear is, “I don’t have enough.” I don’t have enough food, money, shelter, the basic stuff in order to feel safe within my physical existence. The second one is expressed as “I am not loved enough.” That was really my biggest one.
And the third one is very simply, “I’m not enough” or you could say I’m not good enough. Every human fear is actually a subset of those three basic things. That is what holds us back from fulfilling our own lives, creating great relationships, creating wonderful careers, creating the community we want to live in, and ultimately what holds humanity back from the big job right now, fulfilling the SDGs.
Kosmos | Thank you for sharing these very personal stories. So please tell us more about the Barrett model.
Phil | The Barrett model allows you to measure the culture and consciousness of any human entity from a single person an organization, and even a whole nation. The framework was developed by Richard Barrett by bringing together Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs with the Indian Vedic tradition. It allows us to make the invisible aspects of culture, (challenges, needs, desires, and priorities) visible as a start point for powerful new dialogue towards healing and transformation of any human system. It has been used by approximately 8000 organisations and governments in over 100 countries and is translated into more than 60 languages.
The model is a modern application of the chakra system applied to teams, organisations, communities, governments, and nations. You can try this yourself with a free Personal Values Assessment. www.valuescentre.com/pva
Kosmos | The Barrett model seems very much about alignment and integration. Can you show us a case study and a situation that you’ve gone into where there’s been disconnect and how was it mended? What was the process?
Phil | So I’ve got two to share with you. This one is something that’s very much in the process of not being healed yet. There’s a lot of work that’s necessary here, but this is a value assessment for the USA. And this is the first question, “what are the things that most reflect who you are?” And when we cut the data by those people who were Democrat and those people who were Republican, we actually saw that nine out of the top 10 values in 2011 were exactly the same. They’re in a slightly different order, but the only difference here is that Democrats prioritize the word compassion in their list, and Republicans prioritize the word integrity.
Phil | We say, ‘beliefs divide and values unite.’ Beliefs operate at this level up here—in the mind, but values operate much more on a heart and soul level. And when we can be in dialogue at a values level, we really start to discover what’s important to our hearts. We can connect to people. A real example of this would be in Latvia where there was big division of racial tension between the native Latvians and the Russians living in Latvia. And they brought together a Latvian teenagers and Russian teenagers to really talk about how they would reconnect. So the simple answer to your question is dialogue. Once you get these insights, then it’s down to dialogue.
Tor | A dialogue you can have with yourself as well, which is called reflection.
Kosmos | Do you feel the definitions of those values are the same?
Tor | If I go and talk to the Pope in Rome about respect, he will have certainly a definition of what that is. And if I go to the Hell’s Angels leader and talk about respect, I’m sure he will have a definition of what that is. It’s still respect, but values are contextual. And it’s combining with the world view that you’re living in as well. That’s why you have to have this dialogue that Phil is talking about, where you actually co-create and understand, if that makes sense.
Kosmos | It does make sense. In conflict resolution, the first order of business is to get people in a room and find out what they can agree on. We all want the best for our families. We all want to be safe and secure. So yes, we always want to start from the place where we have some agreement. But I think your point, Tor, is it’s really important that we can have very different interpretations of these values.
So looking at the example of Latvia in 2007—the first array of dots is the participant’s personal inventory, a personal assessment of ‘my’ values and what I care about. And then the second set of dots is my perception of the ‘other,’ the organization or community I am part of—in this case my perception of deficits in the cultural values of Latvia. And the third set shows the desired transformation, or integration that must take place through some process.
If we apply the model to humanity and nature, right now—we would see that humanity is saying, “I want more of something, because I’m fearful and distrustful.” But when we look at the values we aspire to, we might say cooperation, living within limits, honesty. There’s a disconnect.
Phil | Let me just pick on honesty for a second, because this list is a list of personal values. These are what people need in their lives. It doesn’t say this is what I’ve got fulfilled in my life. In fact, when something is fulfilled, it probably wouldn’t even show up on your list because you don’t think about it anymore. When the word honesty shows up, it says I’m still working on honesty for myself and in my relationships because I have not yet achieved that. So the fact that the word is honesty is there, it very rarely means that someone has achieved nirvana, the ultimate of honesty. It usually means this is really important to me, but I’m not there yet.
Kosmos | So, many activists experience a burnout experience. And we each have had some burnout at some point in our lives. How do we understand burnout from a values perspective? When I burn out, it’s like I just don’t care about the things that were so important to me, or if I do, I’m just so overwhelmed or disappointed that I want to give up.
Phil | You’ve actually just sparked me by looking at this through the lens of burnout.
That is the culture that people saw of the USA in 2011. Blame bureaucracy, waste of resources, corruption, materialistic, uncertainty about the future, conflict aggression, crime violence, unemployment short-term focus. There’s not a single positive value in that list. I would say at that stage the USA was in psychological burnout. But most people could leave their homes in the morning. They could go to the shop, they could go get a coffee, they could go to work. However, these things were all seen as aspects of society, because that’s the message the media was feeding them.
Tor | If I take myself as an example, I was 37 when I was diagnosed with diabetes. I didn’t think of health. I didn’t think of what I was eating, but that became a very important question for me. So it didn’t change my values about wanting to do or make a difference, but my focus was drawn down to my health naturally, because being healthy is a basic need we have as humans. When activists burnout, their basic needs are not being met.
Presently, we hear the call for common good, but we are drawn to meeting our basic needs because of the crisis. In order to move from that, we will need to develop more common good values, more uniting, and what we really all aspire to.
Kosmos | That is a very felt sense for me right now that on the one hand we seem to have a disintegration of values in the US—the values of truthfulness, civility. At the same time, we have seen an upswing in values of sharing, cooperation, working together, alleviating suffering.
You said something really important, Phil, and that is the picture that the media paints. We can all do this inventory of what our values are, and maybe we can be honest about that to the extent that we have self-awareness. But when we project onto the outer organization or the society, we bring a lot of baggage along with us. And it’s mediated by many things including our own trauma. That doesn’t diminish from the value of the model I don’t think, but has to be taken into account.
Tor | We did a national survey of Sweden. We saw a huge increase of words, like hate and crime during a time when we had this huge intake of refugees coming from Syria and Afghanistan. When we looked at the actual statistics about crime, the increase was 0.1%—negligible. So perception is everything as we say. It doesn’t mean that it’s wrong—people are going to act on perception, not statistics. And what the media is feeding is actually also creating that reality.
Phil | Just to add to that in both the UK and Sweden, we’ve done a values assessment where we ask, “how do you experience living in your community?” We see things like buying local and friendship, and there’s some problems like drug addiction within there. But generally it’s a very positive picture, but then you ask, “how do you perceive the nation?” And suddenly, it’s all negative.
What we’ve learned is that you can only experience what you can see and interact with through your physical senses. You don’t experience a whole nation. You perceive the nation through social media, the news, the television, and all those other things. The message that they send to you every day is the message that then becomes what the nation looks like.
Kosmos | So there’s a sense that, the closer we are to our body, beginning with our mind perhaps, the less distorted our perceptions. And then as we expand out, we have a more distorted view perhaps.
Phil | In a way. Because we can also have a very distorted view of what’s happening inside of our mind, depending on the degree of our consciousness, but there is an overlay. Consciousness enables us to say, “How big is the world that I’m part of?”
As soon as my world is big enough to encompass my village, it’s like, “Oh, these people are all me.” That’s why we see so many kids today who are very quickly coming to the consciousness that, “I’m a citizen of the planet.” Then they can’t drop litter on the streets anymore because that street is them. They completely identify that being is unitary with the planet. They can’t harm more.
Kosmos | So the intervention, if I understand the model correctly is a process of dialogue as a critical key for unlocking healing and integrating. I think that’s a good place to bring in the SDGs, because the SDGs ask us to look at our interconnection with the world and connect to a bigger vision of responsibility, stewardship, and interconnection. And if that can happen in a group, and then if those groups can then influence the society, maybe this is a key to the whole process somehow. That we unlock the ability for the individual to see themselves, to have the insight that they are part of the universe.
Tor | That is coming back to that fact that it all starts with the individuals being sustainable themselves. It’s me as an individual. So to create a sustainable world, we need to think about how can I become sustainable myself in who I am and how I regard myself and how I live my life and how I act in my life. That’s the starting point.
Kosmos | It is. Perfect. There is that energy of personal transformation and personal consciousness, and I think also we generate that collective energy when we can come together and reflect upon our connection.
Tor | We attract these different energies with each other. But if we are individuals who have energies based on fear, we will separate. If we have energies that are more based on love and care, so to speak, or togetherness, we will attract those individuals. That’s why we see different kind of movements. That’s why even the fear could attract it.
Kosmos | This is happening with QAnon. They do feel they are part of a family. So there’s these very positive values of connection and family on one hand, but it’s within a bubble that is quite dangerous and destructive.
Tor | Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So we need to have sustainable individuals that create sustainable organizations.
Kosmos | The new edition of Kosmos is called ‘Century of Awakening.’ Now, this is a pretty bold claim that we are in the midst of a century of awakening. Maybe we could spend the last part of our discussion just talking about what that would mean from the perspective of the Value Centre. What would a century of awakening look like and how could this model help us to achieve it?
Tor | Right now we are suffering from a worldview that doesn’t serve us. We are trying to transform to a new worldview. Richard Barrett has this world global consciousness index, where he is looking at nations and different type of world views in different parts of the world. It’s also called the wellness index. Some nations, I would say most nations today are operating energetically, like on level three. Then there are some who are energetically operating on level four, you could say.
Phil | I’ve got two quick, two examples of what we’re actually seeing and how this is working right now and how the model is helping. One is six weeks into the pandemic we launched a global values assessment to look at what was the impact in organizations of the pandemic. And the short version of the story is that in six weeks we saw a transformation that would typically take organizations five to seven years. And to characterize that, what we saw was a shift from the industrial age, which was all about hierarchy, control, and power to more of a human age. A people age that was more about caring, collaboration and agility.
So people can now work together and that’s what people are experiencing now. Adaptability, digital activity, teamwork agility, balance homework, cross-group collaboration, caring, amazing things. And what they also want for the future is largely what they’re already experiencing. It was, as I say, a tremendously fast transformation!
Kosmos | Is there some something here where these kinds of pressures or converging crises are in some way catalyzing us to make a significant shift in consciousness? Do you see that, or is that wishful thinking?
Phil | I would say yes. I believe that it is possible to go to a transformation process based on positive vision of the future. But I think 99% of transformation comes from the requirement to…or being plunged into crisis. You’ve got to figure it out something new.
Kosmos | Yet, certainly if I turn off the TV, I can walk outside my door and I’m in a literal paradise. The woods and everything—I don’t live in fear. (Maybe the coyote, but I’m not really afraid of him.) However, that experience could be completely different if I lived in North Philadelphia and I’m a single black mother worrying that my children may not make it home from school. A very, very different reality.
So, it falls to those of us not in deep crisis, who have the privilege and capacity to make this shift, to play a significant role. Not everyone has the capacity to receive a message of hope. They just don’t. They’re embroiled in what they’re in and hope to them rings completely false.
Tor | Something came into me. Nelson Mandela coming from where he was treated and the situation he was in, but he had that stillness and that life inside of him that helped him understand.
Kosmos | Yes, of course—and look at the Black Lives Matter movement.
Tor | Exactly. Sometimes we believe that the more fortunate must lead, but they can be even more suppressed and stressed, so to speak. I completely agree we need to work together to make this happen.
Phil | In the summer if 2019 we had a call from Wendy van Tol, a truly brilliant leader with a big heart, from PwC. She said that many of their clients are aligning their purpose with the UN Sustainable Development Goals but didn’t know how to align their culture. She asked two questions: How can organizations measure their cultural alignment, progress, contribution to the SDGs? Is it possible to find a values-based measure for SDGs? Her questions inspired Tor and I and sparked arguably the most important development process in BVC since the development of the original Barrett model. To apply the work directly to the biggest challenges facing humanity at this moment in history.
Using the UN 5Ps for Sustainable Development (People, Prosperity, Planet, Peace and Partnership), we have created a way to take the data from the Barrett values assessment and show both how sustainable the culture is and the actions needed to live and contribute to a more sustainable future for all. Jim Morrison said this very simply: “There can’t be any large-scale revolution until there’s a personal revolution, on an individual level. It’s got to happen inside first.” That applies to everyone but in this context, particularly to leaders, organizations and governments.
This report helps you to see your focus and gaps to identify your strengths and shortcomings to grow a sustainable culture.
Kosmos | Anything we put our attention on and make sacred, become sacred. Only we can make life sacred again. Only we can do that. So, this is so key to the Sustainable Development Goals—that we have a sacred responsibility to them. Thank you.
Vow of 120,000 Actions
Vow of 120,000 Actions
Imagine being a child on the riverbank, the waters rising so rapidly, above the banks, spreading out in every direction that there is nowhere to run. In a moment you cannot stop, your mother collapses with the current, arms flailing to keep afloat, to keep from being carried off. You can’t reach her, as the flood overwhelms her body—and she’s gone.
This is the lasting image that informed the life of Enku, a Buddhist monk living in the 17th century. His mother, like many of the inhabitants of Kisogawa, Japan, had left behind many orphaned children and a township in ruin. As a result, Enku’s path was chosen for him and he entered a monastery. Once older, and time to venture from the safety of the temple, Enku, like many monks, dedicated his life to ending the suffering of others. On the anniversary of his mother’s death, this traveling monk returned to the river of his childhood and made a vow of 120,000 actions.
A Vow to Last a Lifetime
During his travels, as a form of mediation and prayer, Enku had begun carving crude wooden statues of the Buddha and leaving them with the people he’d encountered—farmers, artisans, children, the poor, homeless, and sick. Each Buddha carving held a particular feature, that of a ‘faint, gentle smile.’ This was Enku’s signature, the teaching he’d lived, experienced, and now passed on, through the statues, which was the understanding of the power of a smile to ease the suffering of others.
Coming full-circle, Enku returned to the riverbank of his childhood, and vowed to make 120,000 wooden carvings—a vow of a lifetime. No matter where he walked, he could find pieces of wood to work with. Often, if someone gifted him food, he was able to repay the favor by gifting a statue. If a child was sick, Enku would sit at their bedside, carving and meditating for the child and family. The historic record holds evidence that those who received the statues treated them as treasures, often noting they felt uplifted, proof of the energetic imprint Enku had left in the making of each one, like goodness, kindness, and love.
What it means to make a vow
A vow of 120,000 actions offers the modern person the opportunity to consider how they conduct their own lives. When and how are we committing to a single, unfaltering action—and one solely to serve others? We can infer by the very high number, that Enku had determined he would commit his entire life to making these statues. To grasp the amount, we can break the figure down, like this:
5 carvings a day x 1 year (365 days) = 1825
1825 carvings x 65.75 years = 120,000O
Or…10 carvings x 1 year (365 days) = 3650 carvings
3650 carvings x 32.8 years = 120,000 carvings
If at the time Enku made his vow he was anywhere from 25-35 years old, he may have viewed it as an unattainable goal, or not necessarily with the outcome of ever completing the task—but rather, in contrast, something he would act upon relentlessly, not necessarily through striving, but an active-will to serve others: when one was completed, he went on to the next, as one long infinite action. I imagine he didn’t actually count or keep track of his creations, but rather, worked without ceasing, a single-pointed focus on the present task and moment.
The vow becomes the teacher
When we make a vow, no matter the intention behind it, we’re doing so with the full strength of our will, rather than being half-hearted. In Sun Tzu’s Art of War, he explains that when a student on the path of self-wisdom makes a commitment (or vow) in earnest, they won’t need to resupply their passion (or the “weapons of war”in order to fulfill it (See Hidden Warrior, chapter 2). Even if we feel like we’ve failed, because we made our commitment in earnest, we can continue on in earnest. The more we honor the vow, the more we breakdown our own illusions and perceptions of difficultly, hardship, and suffering.
In theory, the amount of statues Enku carved wasn’t so much the point or focus, but the way he conducted himself each day when he met his practice to create them. If you have ever undertaken a goal—long or short term—you know that circumstances arise in and around it, creating imbalances within.
Our ability to persevere, to ‘wage war’ as Sun Tzu would say, to defeat the setbacks, grants us knowledge, which in turn transcends into inner peace, harmony, and a gentle perfection to everything we do.
The flood of thoughts
Every day, with or without a formal, lifetime goal, we’re being asked to consider the way we conduct ourselves in the service of others, with the hope of ending our own suffering, which then naturally permeates to also ending the suffering of others. If we were to consider a single action completed 120,000 times over the course of a lifetime, we might immediately feel burdened to arrange time to do it.
For instance, as a writer, I conceived committing to writing 120,000 short stories for others, then shortened it to crafting haikus, believing it to be more manageable. Worry arose as I imagined trying to arrange my day to accommodate writing at least ten haikus! This manipulation was like a virus in the mind—a raging flood—creating a duality of failure and success. Questions about the rules of the vow took over, like what would happen if I forgot one day, or what if life-circumstances made it impossible to write for weeks, would that mean I’d get behind or wasn’t serious enough?
As I asked and answered the thoughts arising, it allowed me to see the limitation that can perpetuate and manifest as soon as we make a vow. This is the ‘suffering’ that Enku understood and vowed to ‘root out,’ or battle. His vow was the determination to surrender control, not only to outcome, but the pursuit of suffering, which arises the moment we no longer trust that all is perfect and unfolding right now.
Daily vows for a lifetime
When I look around, I see the many vows I’ve made daily throughout my life. Like Enku, I suffered my own ‘flood,’ one that altered my path similarly, putting me on the road to an ascetic life and without formality, my choices once the waters receded, so to speak, created a seamless vow towards ending my suffering in the world.
Vows of 120,000 actions are available to us in each moment. It can be a daily vow of lighting incense in the morning and night. It might be 120,000 smiles, putting into practice Enku’s teaching that a faint, gentle smile can alleviate the suffering of others, especially in times of most need. We might cook 120,000 meals for others, or bow 120,000 times in front of a flower or tree giving thanks, or ring a bell 120,000 times to signal the present moment. We might even offer 120,000 thank-yous to everyone we meet.
As soon as we make the vow, we relinquish our need to know, to do, to forecast, but can rest inwardly, and with our own faint, gentle smile, unfold and become the next moment.
'Uncomfortable'
‘Uncomfortable’
Uncomfortable is a song I’ve journeyed with for some time. Like most companions, it reveals different facets of its character depending on the light in which it’s approached. At times, it’s a song about awakening from the constructed, conditioned self. On other days, it can feel like an expression of the seemingly interminable, crushing passage of dying to one’s known condition—or perhaps witnessing the death throes of the current version of one’s world, a world that simply cannot continue the way it is—with only the faintest hint that something new may be waiting to emerge on the other side. Sometimes the repeated line “I’m uncomfortable in this world” seems to be the only thing that registers for the listener, perhaps giving voice to the abiding angst and alienation—maybe subtle, maybe glaring—that many experience in this current moment of our human story. Since finding myself drawn to rekindling my journey with the song early in 2020, all these hues and more have taken on renewed life against a dramatic global backdrop.
The timing has had a certain poetry to it. As I was working on a song that insisted on highlighting the discomfort of inhabiting this world, the collective coronavirus shock and shutdown began to take effect, and by the time I had finished the new arrangement, North Carolina (my current and adopted home), New Zealand (my original and timeless home), and a significant portion of the world had effectively gone into lockdown. As George Floyd’s death reverberated through this country’s psyche, refusing to permit the perpetuation of cultural blindness and self-deception, this song kept playing as I accompanied it through the mixing phase. And as I reached the point of releasing the song, the country in which I’ve spent most of my adult life was in the final stretch of perhaps its most painful election in my lifetime. Needless to say, this has all been taking place against a backdrop of upheaval and rising stakes that’s been gathering momentum for as long as we care to remember.
A song can’t help but reveal itself anew to a traveling companion over the course of such a journey. One image that moved to the forefront of my mind and that has remained there since is that of the birthing process. In recent years, I’ve arrived at a simple description for my work with individuals and groups: I accompany people on their initiatory journeys through life. It struck me that this song is no different. Stanislav Grof’s psychodynamic and transpersonal model of the four “perinatal matrices” experienced by the fetus during birth provides an apt metaphor here. The second matrix, in which the first stage of potentially blissful intrauterine experience is abruptly severed by the onset of labor, is characterized in Grof’s understanding by feelings of helplessness and despair: With the commencement of uterine contractions before the cervix has opened, our previous home begins to crush us, giving rise to the feeling of being trapped in an impossible situation with no way out. The ensuing third matrix precipitated by the opening of the cervix and the descent of the head into the birth canal brings a further stage of ordeal and seemingly endless struggle, eventually building to a moment characterized by simultaneous annihilation and radical liberation into a qualitatively different state of being—the moment of birth.
The creation of this recording of Uncomfortable was itself much more protracted than I anticipated. The journey felt like an extended birthing process, and I began to experience the song in such terms—as an expression of an archetypal process that, in the current telling, foregrounds the elements of interminability, struggle, despair, and hopelessness that may precede a radical shift and opening. I have some experience with these dynamics, both in my own journey and with those I’ve had the privilege of working with, and I bow to their mystery and gifts. This is probably the ground from which the song originally sprang. I must admit, however, that I also dream not only of their individual expression, but also of the collective potential of such transformative dynamics, and I know this sense was at least partly present in the song’s inception. It feels appropriate to have been accompanied by this song through a time of such collective upheaval, an experience of upheaval that may well be just the beginning of whatever is to come in the time ahead. I recognize that the song gives greatest expression to the endings, struggle, and despair inherent in this archetypal birthing process. And while that’s an inevitable part of the journey, my hope and trust in this moment of our collective journey is that we will somehow find our way to what wants to be born on the other side of it.
Uncomfortable
On Stan Grof…
Stan Grof, MD, Ph.D., is a clinical psychiatrist from Czechoslovakia and a leading researcher in transpersonal psychology explores breathwork as a psychedelic. Grof distinguishes between two modes of consciousness: the hylotropic and the holotropic. The hylotropic mode relates to “the normal, everyday experience. The holotropic has to do with states which aim towards wholeness and the totality of existence..
Kosmos | Given your interest in Grof, did breathing or thoughts on breath, play a role in the birth of this song? How so?
Simon | This is such an interesting connection you’ve made! I experienced some pronounced breathing struggles in my early adult years that involved constant restriction and a sense of not being able to get a full breath. Moving through those challenges forced me to become familiar with the sharper edges of surrender, and it taught me a lot about the intensity of those archetypal death-rebirth dynamics. While I wasn’t consciously writing from this place, Uncomfortable is certainly resonant with the essence of that experience. I wrote an essay about this 10 years ago, and people struggling with “air hunger” often contact me after reading it. These queries have increased during the pandemic, so this theme you’re intuiting is there on multiple levels.
Kosmos | Collectively, which of Grof’s four perinatal matrices do you feel we are in at this moment in time?
Simon | Both in individual and collective contexts, I tend to think in terms of an ongoing initiatory journey—one that is always unfolding through cycles within cycles building upon one another. On the longest timescales of human existence, perhaps it could appear that humanity is approaching a potentially monumental transition akin to the liberation and new life of the fourth matrix. But if we zoom in on the present century, I think it looks more like hovering on the precipice between the second and third matrices amid profound struggles that will require courage and grace. Zooming in yet again, we could say that 2020 initiated a sub-cycle by disrupting a limited form of intrauterine stability and abruptly dropping us into the second matrix.
Kosmos | If we find our way through, what are your hopes be for what we collectively find on the other side of our recent struggles?
I hope that we’re able to find our way toward genuine acknowledgement of one another’s experience and the generative process that can emerge from conflicting perspectives. My larger hope is that we will eventually foster a culture that honors a greater sense of what it is to be human and an expanded understanding of humanity’s role on this planet. I imagine, among other things, a profound awareness of beauty and a new level of intimacy with the creative unfolding of life.
Remembering Nature
Remembering Nature
I’ve been making short films and sharing them online for some years. A while back, someone commented that one of my films, which hadn’t had many views, was ‘rotting on YouTube’. Isn’t that great!?
Rotting.
Apart from cracking me up with its bluntness, I like that the metaphor is so inaccurate. My films, along with the cat videos, conspiracy montages, and countless other digital impressions, might last hundreds, even thousands of years and be perfectly unchanged. Google’s data centres will probably remain some of the most secure buildings on the planet, until the binary building blocks of the Web are transferred to whatever the next evolution of data storage looks like.
It also makes me think about the vastness of the digital world we’re creating. More than five hundred hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute. TikTok has soared from infancy to an estimated one billion users in the space of four years.
How is that exponentially expanding digital world affecting the physical one?
This is one of the tangle of questions that led me to make a new short film called Forgetting Nature.
Forgetting Nature
As the film is only a brief introduction to that tangle, here are a few more reflections on what it’s about.
One message in the film is familiar. As more and more of our lives become a conveyor belt of websites, emails and infinite scroll, our time available — or our desire — to spend outdoors and experience the living world gets cut. And with that, we are losing a more vivid variety of experience that would make our lives richer. For an increasing number of people, we’re more disconnected from wild nature than ever before.
Well, what gives? We’ve heard that before…
Yes, we’ve heard it before and the perniciousness of the problem is exactly why I wanted to try and make a film that gets at the feeling rather than just the idea. How can we make enough of a dent in our daily routines to notice the bigger picture?
The situation becomes more urgent when you consider these increasingly urban, sedentary, pixelated lives merging with the collective phenomenon of environmental amnesia, also known as shifting baseline syndrome. People don’t perceive the changes that are taking place in the natural world — either by generation, taking the state of nature in their childhood as the normal baseline despite it being already depleted — or from personal amnesia, simply forgetting.
Peter Kahn, a professor at the University of Washington in Seattle, was one of the first people to research this in the nineties and his words carry the film. Since his early work, more studies have proved this misperception of wildlife to occur.¹ Taken with the digital overhaul of our lives, it’s like we’re cutting down the forest we live in, while putting a blindfold on, and we’ve got amnesia to boot! No wonder we’re not more upset by our actions.
There’s an anecdote I’ve told many friends, which my grandfather actually told me in the car on a drive back from screening my first documentary in a little cinema in Oxford in 2010. Although that film was about climate change, it got him thinking about how the world was changing. His voice strained with urgency as he exclaimed how much less wildlife he saw these days, and in particular, the complete absence of insects on car windscreens. When he was young, he told me, you would turn on the windscreen wipers to clear the number of bugs on the glass. The story stuck with me as a clear and dramatic change in a generation: I’d never seen that many bugs growing up.
In the past few years, it surprised me to see a flurry of news articles and studies echoing my grandad’s story: 80% declines in insects reported in 20 years, an ‘insect apocalypse’, ‘plummeting numbers’, ‘threatening a collapse’.
Part of my motivation in making this film was to challenge this idea of a ‘collapse’ in the future that might happen. We are living in the collapse. This is it. It’s outside our windows (or disappearing from them) right now. Our changing lifestyles are part of this too, our experiences stripped of the thrill and variety of time in wild nature. The creeping evolution of our inner worlds and the changes to the world out there aren’t a parallel coincidence, they’re connected.
So, what should we be doing?
The film is meant as a little catalyst, and of course I don’t have all the answers. The good news is, there’s a movement of many brilliant organisations and people already working towards a more hopeful future. You can find one close to you in no time.
Certainly one useful way to start countering the problem of environmental amnesia is to get older generations sharing stories of what’s changed with younger generations, and this is what the Forgetting Nature website is encouraging as an immediate activity. Hopefully some of these uniquely personal conversations will germinate new conservation actions; from wildlife gardening to ecosystem restoration, it’s all important.
Spending time outdoors, paying attention to wild nature — these are such simple things, but so valuable, especially for children.
In such a short space of history, human childhood has been transformed by technology. I was born in 1991, and will be the last generation to have experienced my early years without pervasive social media and smartphones. This is what makes the perspective of our oldest generations so valuable in this moment; it’s the last opportunity to see in both directions. Both in terms of wildlife and human life, what were things like in the mid-twentieth century? As Peter says in the film, “We’re usually aware of the gain, because we can feel what the gain is, the question is, what are we losing?”
There are cultures whose traditions and values aren’t based on the extractive, dominance mindset of Western capitalism, and these perspectives also need to be championed in the conversation about reconnecting with wild nature. This was, in fact, going to be a strong theme of the film before it was cut short by various obstacles in the past year.
While filming, I was fortunate to experience the hospitality of people from the Nuxalk Nation in British Columbia, and speak to some of them about changes they’ve witnessed. Talking about the landscape, passing on a relationship with it, practicing rituals of reverence and gratitude to the rest of life, these are much more part of their culture than the one I grew up in.
One elder’s comment that “it’s so uneven throughout the world: what’s gained, who gets the upper hand, what’s progress,” drives home the inequalities of different people’s experiences of the natural world. From the colonisation and resource extraction that white settlers have wreaked on indigenous lands on Canada’s west coast, to the lack of inclusion and representation of Black people and people of colour in outdoor culture where I live in the UK, improving access to nature needs us to dismantle different barriers at the same time.
Forgetting Nature is trying to get at something universal: our capacity for wonder at the natural world, and the risk to all of us if that is eroded.
For me personally, nurturing that capacity will also mean trying to leave my camera behind more often. The one time I did that while in Canada was when I decided to take a break from filming and camp a night on Flores Island. It’s Ahousaht First Nation territory in the Clayoquot Sound, on the west coast of Vancouver Island. The forest there is some of the most extensive old-growth in the region, still standing thanks to indigenous blockades and protests against logging companies in the eighties and nineties.
It’s dripping with life. I was the only visitor on the hiking trail at the time, and as soon as I stepped out of the first cove on the 7-mile path away from the village, I could feel my awareness expanding with the vitality of my surroundings. It definitely heightens your senses to wake up with your tent surrounded by wolf prints, too.
The irony of promoting a film warning about the attention-grabbing dangers of social media in an attention-grabbing style on social media isn’t lost on me. Think of it as a Trojan meme meant to stick with you, as my grandfathers’ story did with me. Even better, find out your own personal stories of changes to wildlife where you live, as explained here on the film’s website. If something’s been lost, what could you do to help ecosystems regenerate?
Whether this film rots on YouTube or eats it from the inside like those Cordyceps fungi on Netflix that gave ants everywhere nightmares, I hope it gives you pause for thought, and that pause leads you in search of new experiences away from this screen.
We want the film to spark real conversations. Personal stories, learning from people we know, these things stick with us and can change our perspective.
Create a post #RememberingNature
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How has wildlife changed in your local area since you were young?
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What species don’t you see now that you used to?
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How was time spent outdoors different from today?
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Where has nature flourished?
Not old enough to know? Find someone who does. Ask a parent, grandparent, or someone you know in your area the questions above.
Master Sha | Tao Calligraphy
Master Sha | Tao Calligraphy
“The seeds of hope and collective healing should be planted within ourselves first.”
Our world is more divided and disconnected than perhaps at any other time in our history. We are facing storms of our own creation. Existential threats of climate change and annihilation drive humanity’s inability and reluctance to truly come together and share the energy that connects us all.
The only future for our survival must be through awakening to the symbiotic power within us all and within the universe. We are all we have in this world, and it is only through our actions right now that the future of the planet can be assured. Without an individual yet cohesive acknowledgement of the scale of the challenges we’re living through, survival is not assured.
We need revolutionary ways to heal ourselves, heal each other, and together to bring this higher consciousness to our everyday journey on this planet. Creating new healing arts through the utilization and true understanding of ancient forms provides us with an authentic opportunity to do just that.
DaAi Greatest Love
Tao Calligraphy creates a high frequency energy field. Through this unique form of Oneness writing, we create meditative healing fields that radiate a heavenly vibration and frequency that can be harnessed to heal. Connecting with this frequency field helps to heal, transform, rejuvenate, and enlighten the mind, body, and soul.
The Tao Calligraphy Healing Field (literally a Source Field) has within it the way of all life. Tao is the Source and the Creator harnessing and directing the universal laws that govern all life. Through Tao Calligraphy, Source messages, vibration, and frequency are brought directly to humanity to nourish positive changes and enlighten all life on Mother Earth.
I don’t hesitate to extol the revolutionary nature of this healing Oneness art, as I was blessed to be passed the unique lineage of the ancient art of one-stroke calligraphy (Yi Bi Zi) from Master Li Qiu Yun. Through my need to create tangible opportunities for people to learn to access the qi that connects us all, I bring the essence of Tao Oneness into each flow of calligraphy.
Through this, we create powerful vibrational fields by harnessing the collective energy flow of Tao Calligraphy that carries Source messages. Unconditional love, harmony, forgiveness – all of these are gifted to those who become part of these healing fields. They soothe the soul and the physical body and create networks of positive energy reaching far beyond the barriers of our formerly closed minds.
We can transform negative energy and blocks to our understanding of the world within our own vibrational field through the absorption of energy generated by Tao Calligraphy. Not only does this positively change our own life, but every interaction, reaction, and outlook we have. All challenges of life stem from negative shen qi jing.
Shen is soul, heart, and mind; qi is energy; and jing is matter. Ancient wisdom teaches us that the soul leads, and it follows that blockages in the form of negativity need to be overcome. Positivity is created when we serve people, the environment, animals, and every living creature with generosity and compassion.
Tao Calligraphy Oneness writing is the culmination of my lifelong learning steeped in the energies from traditional Chinese medicine and ancient Asian healing arts. These came together as one through Yi Bi Zi Oneness Writing. I saw the opportunity to push these further by creating strong healing fields of vibrational energy. When we learn to create our own healing, we have the power and the understanding to heal much more than just ourselves.
Each calligraphy I produce contains the frequency of Tao Oneness. I teach this to allow others to learn the principle of Oneness and to share it with others. As the calligrapher, I apply one flow of qi in a single stroke, creating high frequency positive messages. When we practice Tao Calligraphy through the act of writing, tracing, or meditating within the Tao Calligraphy Healing Field, we align with the very essence of Oneness. This act of sharing and enlightenment through the healing field brings balance into our lives and our world.
It has the power, together with other healing arts that focus on cracking through our shells of denial and disbelief, to change the course of our collective future. We know what we have to do, deep down in our souls. But fear. and the vanity of living in the 21st century world we’ve built, simply stops so many of us from ever discovering the Source power within us.
Regular practice of Tao Calligraphy deepens the transformative experience so that we can experience profound and meaningful improvements to our emotional, mental, and physical states. The field is accessible to anyone through the wonder of technology when we are kept apart from each other in times of stress and difficulty.
Thousands of people around the world are already unleashing the profound benefits of Tao Calligraphy. Healing our bodies, minds, and souls is the basis of transforming our current trajectory. Without these breakthroughs within ourselves, there can be no meaningful changes in the way we all live.
COVID-19 is a wake-up call for a world that is struggling to break free from its own self-limiting beliefs and battles. We are witnessing the failure of different nations and governments to truly work together with one common cause – to transcend the fear holding us back. And in this failure, we are seeing the suffering of millions of people.
The next ten years are a tipping point for humanity. We know that the impact of climate change will forever change our world. We are already living in a world that poisons us and causes unimaginable suffering. Now is the time to start by healing ourselves. Enlightenment can only come from the individual reaching across the barriers that we have all built.
Tapping into the shared consciousness and Source energy of Mother Earth can bring us to a place of profound peace and mutual respect. We must learn to live in balance, not only with each other but with the very environment we rely on. There are better ways to live, and there are much more meaningful methods to demonstrate our commitment to a beautiful future. The seeds of hope and collective healing should be planted within ourselves first
DaKuanShu Greatest Forgiveness
DaGuanMing Greatest Light
Master Sha offers the Love, Peace and Harmony Song for the Century of Awakening.
When many people join their heart and souls to sing and meditate it creates a powerful field. We become what we sing, so as everyone sings, people have the power to create world love, peace and harmony.
Love, Peace and Harmon is a song received by Dr. and Master Sha from the Divine; and with it it carries the high frequency and vibration of divine love, forgiveness, compassion, and light.
By 2030, Master Sha wants to inspire 1.5 billion people to sing Love, Peace and Harmony for 15 minutes every day. Access the song: https://lovepeaceharmony.org/resources/
Our Struggle Is with Illusion
Our Struggle Is with Illusion
The misinterpretation of self is at the center of much current unrest. What does this mean?
Many who believe the US election was ‘stolen’, suffer because they mis-equate an erroneous belief (Trump won), with their personal identity or sense of self. We all do this to a lesser or greater extent. We become attached to our opinions and stories, which in turn are conditioned by our childhood, our traumas, and the opinions and stories we consume.
Yes, beliefs matter. Truth and justice matter. Yet, our emotional attachment to any belief or ideology rooted in fear, greed, anger or false-pride should not be confused with who we are.
Einstein called the misinterpreted self “an optical delusion of consciousness”, the incessant stream of chatter in our heads we call “me, mine, I.” None of us are immune to the illusory self. It is the ego craving attention and validation. It criticizes others and can be sharp, sarcastic, selfish and even violent. At Kosmos, we sometimes call the illusory self, wetiko, and you can find articles about this at our website.
Our tendency to crave attention and validation can make us easy prey to elaborately constructed conspiracy theories, which turn our own powers of reason against us. Make no mistake, conspiracy theories are not “organic”, the intentional creators of these mind toxins have agendas. They are the game masters who pose ‘questions’ and plant ‘clues’ that manipulate our natural curiosity and make us feel clever indeed when we discover the ‘answers’ they want us to find.
Rumi, the Persian poet and jurist said, “sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment.” He understood that the illusory self is the barricade we erect against the ambiguities of unconditioned reality.
Recall the last time you were awestruck. Even in the midst of hardship, confusion and pain, we still have the capacity to experience awe – the vast sea, a bird in flight, the full moon, a newborn child. At the moment we are awestruck, we fully sense our livingness – beyond words or theories. We encounter our true self – our connected self.
This openness to awe and beauty is not conditioned by race, wealth, politics, or age. Awe is a human non-ordinary state of being, available always to anyone.
By awakening to our inter-connection, we discover that “I” am not my thoughts, but instead am the watcher of my thoughts, the seeker poised between the surface world of the illusory self, and the authentic living heart of creation. Grief and loss can also initiate us into this heightened state of wakefulness where feelings of selfishness, vengeance or hostility suddenly seem pointless in the light of unvarnished reality.
And so, what we are experiencing now is not a struggle between good and evil, or right and left. It is an inner struggle between the illusory self that will use anything to fill its emptiness – even violence – and the awakened self.
As the Zen teacher, Thich Nhat Hanh states:
“We can’t change the world if we are not capable of changing our way of thinking, our consciousness. That is why awakening, collective awakening, collective change in our way of thinking, our way of seeing things is very crucial. And all of us can help promote that. Our task is to come together and try to produce that kind of collective awakening.”
A daunting challenge, yes. Yet, the current quality of events suggests a hand of destiny offering us an evolutionary choice, an invitation to wake up to the Source that binds us – to each other and all beings. Ours must be the century of awakening, if we are to survive.
More on the Wetiko Mind Virus from Kosmos
Covid-19 is a Symbol of a Much Deeper Infection | The Wetiko Mind-Virus
By Paul Levy
For almost twenty years I’ve been writing about an invisible, contagious death-creating virus that no one is immune to that has been insidiously spreading and replicating itself throughout the human species. This deadly disease is a virus of the mind—the Native Americans call it “wetiko”—that literally cultivates and feeds on fear and separation. A psycho-spiritual illness, it is a psychosis in the true sense of the word, “a sickness of the spirit.” The origin and medium of operations of the wetiko virus is none other than the human psyche.
Seeing Wetiko: Through the Eyes of a Seventh Generation Algonquin
By Marcus Grignon
Posoh mawaw niwak. Nekataw manawich kikitem. (Hello everyone. I am going to speak.)
The injustice we witness every day, whether it be environmental, societal, and even economic, has a root cause. Nobody sees it because it has been invisible since the genocide committed against the cultures who lost their voice to speak its name. This being is not one sole individual, but a metaphysical entity bent on destruction. Wetiko in the Cree language, Wendigo in other Algonquin speaking tribes scattered throughout the Great Lakes region is what they call this evil spirit who represents environmental destruction, greed and ego in human beings
Seeing Wetiko: On Capitalism, Mind Viruses, and Antidotes for a World in Transition
By Alnoor Ladha and Martin Kirk
What if we told you that humanity is being driven to the brink of extinction by an illness? That all the poverty, the climate devastation, the perpetual war, and consumption fetishism we see all around us have roots in a mass psychological infection?
By Myk Estrada,
While I once saw my fluent English as a marker of success, I now realized it partly came at the expense of connecting with a rich history only accessed through the language of my great grandparents. When I became aware of the concept of wetiko, I was finally able to put a name to this internal struggle that’s put a divide between me & my culture.
Reilly Dow | Art of the Scribe
Reilly Dow | Art of the Scribe
Cover Image | Series of Seven Dialogues (No. 7) (digital image created during the online Series of Seven dialogues with Dialogos, July 2020)
Series of Seven Dialogues (No. 6) (digital image created during the online Series of Seven dialogues with Dialogos, June 2020)
Series of Seven Dialogues (No. 4) (digital image created during the online Series of Seven dialogues with Dialogos, May 2020)
In my work as a scribe, I get to spend a lot of time listening, sensing, and weaving visual stories using quick drawing. I try to be careful not to name, package, or fix anything – holding the door open to possibility. This blurs the line somewhat between what can be a highly strategic and purposeful visual method, and scribing as a more open-ended, generative social art[1].
My work has been influenced over the last few years by training in generative scribing with Kelvy Bird; studying systems thinking and complexity, particularly Warm Data and the work of Nora Bateson; practicing intuitive painting with teacher Julie Claire; working alongside poets and musicians at the intersection of artistic and leadership practice with Mary Stacey; and supporting dialogue as a “living system” organizational practice with Dialogos.
When scribing, I often wonder, whose voice might be missing? What is coming to the surface, and are we not seeing? What is possible at this time, for these people and their families and communities? What is at stake?
We are each part of any system or situation we want to shift, and I think keeping that sense of rootedness in the first person while also reaching outward is really important. As a scribe, I want to be careful not to objectify — language, and information in its many forms, pass through us physically in this work. Listening, perception and feeling take place as we make marks, write, and draw. The intention, for me, is not necessarily for people to grasp more things at a faster rate, aided by the display of those things in a visual format. Nor is it to “capture the content,” which sounds something like hunting or trapping ideas. Even the language of “harvesting,” as it is often used by facilitators and scribes, can have an extractive connotation.
My aim is to show up as an artist and human being, with care, and to be openly and rigorously subjective.
[1] Bird, K. (2018). Generative Scribing: A Social Art of the 21st Century. PI Press: Cambridge, MA.
What is essential now in leadership? (digital image created during the online Burren Burren Leadership Retreat Community Call, March 2020)
These days, I’m especially curious how our practice as listeners and social artists can feed into ways of being, doing, working, and communicating that enact both a refusal to stay silent about injustice, and a continual awareness of not placing ourselves at the center.
Until a recent dialogue session, I had never (knowingly) included my own words in a scribed image. On that occasion, I crossed a small threshold and engaged as participant-scribe. What are those moments when it is right to break a previously held boundary? Who am I to withhold, anyway?
For me, painting can be a practice of listening to the self, to the moment, and following threads of inquiry that may not live in language. If we are going to survive collectively and sustain life on this planet, I think we will need to be highly creative; continually learning and in dialogue with each other; and, deeply honest about what we know, and curious about what we don’t. As an artist, I’m trying to do the work of listening, not-knowing, and caring, moment to moment.
Illustrated Quote (digital image created during the online Burren Leadership Gatherings, August 2020)
More by Reilly Dow
Measurement (ink and acrylic on tracing paper, kraft paper, cardboard and masking tape, created during episode 7 of the Warm Data Podcast)
The Power of Pausing
The Power of Pausing
Some time around the third month of the year 2020, people around the world experienced something truly extraordinary:
The whole world just stopped.
It was a terrifying and strange time.
We had no idea of the disease and death to come from Covid-19, and only a vague sense of the many forms of disruption ahead.
It was almost as if time had stopped altogether. And in that strange timeless moment, we were forced to re-examine much of our lives. We looked anew at education and parenting. We gained profound respect for millions of essential workers.
In the early days of the virus, many people stopped seeking medical treatment for fear of being infected. Health experts worried that illnesses would go untreated. Yet, after several months of sheltering-in-place, it was found that many health problems resolved without the need for medical intervention. One study concluded that more than half of doctor visits might be unnecessary.
In forcing us to re-examine our lives, we also discovered just how much we had been tormenting ourselves with our never-ending rush to get nowhere, and our constant need to fill a vague sense of inner emptiness with more and more “stuff.”
More than 60 years ago, the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda wrote the following words, almost as if he were thinking of the present time:
…If we were not so single-minded
about keeping our lives moving,
and for once could do nothing,
perhaps a huge silence
might interrupt this sadness
of never understanding ourselves
and of threatening ourselves with death.
Do you remember how the skies over Los Angeles, New Delhi and Venice were clearer than they had been in decades? And how, in the absence of car engines, suddenly you could hear birdsong? How many of us felt a new appreciation and gratitude for each other – that even in the midst of global crisis, we we were ‘all in this together’?
Neruda seems to have envisioned this too:
for once on the face of the earth…
let’s stop for a second,
and not move our arms so much.
It would be an exotic moment
without rush, without engines;
we would all be together
in a sudden strangeness.
But we were terrified too – not just of the virus, but of the growing economic meltdown. Millions of jobs and homes were lost.
And then, in the midst of it all, a series of violent, racially-charged outrages occurred. The events caught on video were so horrific, so obviously unjust, that they sparked protest around the world. What sparked this growing solidarity?
Is it possible that this huge silence of worldwide stopping, this Great Pause, carried within it something powerful enough to “interrupt this sadness of never understanding ourselves?” Was something being offered by this Great Pause that helped us be more receptive to the impact of those videos and scenes of social injustice?
If we allow for that possibility, then we might want to consider whether the power of pausing might enable new understanding, and offer new and profound ways of approaching our personal and collective lives.
What if we remember, again and again, to stop – to just “be” – if only for a moment? Perhaps in that brief moment, we could suspend our overly-confident beliefs and notions about how to fix ourselves, fix others, and fix the world. In doing so, we might discover a space, a clearing, a sudden strangeness in which we see differently, think differently, feel differently. And maybe then, we might discover how we all could really be together in a truly lasting way;
As Neruda wrote,
count to twelve…
and all keep still….
[and] allow the earth to teach us,
as when everything seems dead
and later proves to be alive . . .
Here’s a pause you can try right now:
Thoughtforms | The materialization of sustained ideas
Thoughtforms | The materialization of sustained ideas
Thoughts, ideas, and concepts are tremendously powerful, influential, energetic forces.
Thoughts that are clothed with intense emotion are exponentially powerful.
Thoughts that are clear, distinct, strong and sustained by focus and concentration take on a life of their own.
These thoughts and repeated thought patterns become thoughtforms.
Thoughts which are systematically sustained by groups of people over a period of time come to life as thoughtforms in the collective consciousness of the group.
Have you ever…
…Had strong ideas about the desired outcome you envisioned for a story you wanted to write, a special event you planned to convene, a canvas on which you were painting, or a room you were renovating? You held the concept, the strong vision, the idea firmly in the forefront of your mind. You constantly brought the idea up in your mind’s eye and methodically fleshed it out until it was objectified, externalized, and finally physically manifested.
Have you ever…
…Sat in a room for a time that was filled with likeminded people whose thoughts were collectively trained on one goal, and felt the palpable group intent? The group created and shared an energetic field, a collective thoughtform.
These are examples of the deliberate, human creation of a thoughtform. The shape of our empowered self, our objectified animated existential fear(s), the shadow material sequestered in the basement of our subconscious, our addictions, our inner child-selves, are all examples of thoughtforms.
A sustained thoughtform, healthy or unhealthy, which is invisible to third dimensional (3-D) “conventional,” ocular vision, lives as an energetic form in our biofield. That is, as long as we give it our sustained attention. Human-originated thoughtforms are dependent on the people who generate them. They can be creative, uplifting and growth producing or parasitic and energy sapping.
Thoughtforms in human biofields are visible to sensitives and intuitives who are simultaneously aware of both dense and subtle bandwidths of reality. EVERYONE creates, can deliberately sustain, and summon thoughtforms with their creative inner vision.
Consider: With what exactly are people interacting when they?….
- Communicate with spirit guides or animal totems who appear to them during a vision quest initiation?
- Listen for guidance and “leadings” in silence, sitting on the Quaker meetinghouse bench?
- Invoke the benevolence of the Prophet Muhammad?
- Pray to Jesus on bended knee?
- Beseech beloved ancestors as they pour the ritual libation?
- Collectively witness apparitions of Mary, mother of Jesus, i.e., Marian Apparitions at: Guadeloupe, Lourdes, Fatima, and Medjugorje.
- Invoke the wisdom of Ascended Masters?
- Receive information that results in groundbreaking inventions and artistic masterpieces from characters in dreamscapes?
- Pray for the protection and guidance of angels, archangels, and saints?
- Meditate on and invoke overshadowing presences of bodhisattvas?
Every supplicant on the list above is invoking a thoughtform.
However, not all thoughtforms are created equal!
Some are generated primarily by consistent repetitive individual, human thought and emotional patterns.
Some are versions of ourselves experienced at various frequencies of our multidimensionality.
Some are generated by the collective unconscious into which we tap, and are recognized as universally shared archetypes. These thoughtforms are the grist of myths, folklore, and legends that are strikingly similar across cultures spanning the globe for eons.
Some thoughtforms are believed to exist independently of the individual or the collective unconscious. They are non-corporeal energy streams of various levels of attainment which evolve by facilitating the evolution of humanity or the Earth. These data/energy streams evolve by simultaneously assisting and learning from the experience of people in physical embodiment.
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A multiplicity of these thoughtforms facilitate the evolution of the planet and/or assist the collective and groups.
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Others may directly assist attuned individuals as well. Some remain with us throughout a lifetime and others only for a brief time. The energy streams who assist us at any given point match our vibration and our need for growth at that time.
It is my experience we come into embodiment with a lesson set, a pre-birth covenant to work through, and at that time non-corporeal presences who will be with us over the course of a lifetime are those who have a similar or complementary path of evolution. They don’t want or need to take physical embodiment but can assist us in staying on the path to successfully working through our lesson-set.
We may be completely oblivious to them over the course of an entire lifetime. We may get subtle inklings, or be occasionally aware of their presence. Or we may actively engage with them on a consistent, collaborative basis as fellow travelers on the path who have a vantage point on reality that compliments ours.
The strength and nature of a thoughtform in our lives is contingent upon:
- The bandwidth, in other words the range of frequencies, to which our consciousness is attuned in the moment. The bandwidth to which we are attuned at any point is in turn a function of our quality of consciousness
- Our individual or group evolutionary need of the hour
- How frequently we focus our attention with concentrated intentionality on the thoughtform
- How consistently we tune into it
- How many other people are simultaneously focusing on that same thoughtform for extended periods of time in the case of collectively experienced thoughtforms
The larger consciousness frame, spirit, the unified field, may use any or all of these thoughtforms as interfaces with humans to assist in our evolution.
Accessing Thoughtforms as Non-corporeal Guides
The thoughtforms noted below are conduits through which source energy, the undifferentiated field, can interface with humankind and assist with our evolution.
We encounter and interact with the thoughtforms that follow below when we are either in very low cycling brain wave states which are deeply relaxed, meditative, or dreamscapes (Alpha and on the cusp of Alpha and Theta, circa 4hz), or in very high, exalted states of transcendent bliss (Gamma). In both of these states, the analytical mind is still and silent.
We can operate very much like radio receiver-transmitters. All frequency bands carry information. When we turn the dial up or down on our radio, the receiver tunes into different music and information on stations at each bandwidth. Similarly, if we want to expand our awareness and collaborate with thoughtforms beyond the 5-sense conventional world, we must raise our own frequency, turn up the dial on the “radio of self,” to match the information that awaits us at higher bandwidths.
There are myriad tried and true paths by which we can “tune in.”
When we learn to consistently take our attention away from the “particle world” of matter and focus on the “wave world” of frequency and vibration, we become aware of a broader range of frequencies that offer access to dimensions beyond the world of form.
The thoughtforms noted below facilitate human evolution toward wholeness when summoned by our free will. Please note that “summon” here transcends the material universe notion of making a verbal invocation. We may also summon these thoughtforms through deep desire or intense focus and concentration.
They may…
- Heighten our awareness through synchronicities. In this way spirit, the quantum field, taps us on the shoulder to remind us that there is so much more to reality than that which is perceptible to our five senses.
- Help us cultivate our intuition and enhance the quality of our consciousness,
- Deepen and intensify learning encounters,
- Heal,
- Keep us on track with our pre-birth covenant.
Types of non-corporeal thoughtform interfaces:
- Ancestral figures/guides
- Animals (Totem, Spirit, and Shadow Totem)
- Archetypal
- Ascended Masters and Angels
- Multidimensional self
Ancestral guides are those who were physically related to us in this lifetime. Since every thought that has been thought and every life that has been lived in the multiverse is recorded in Akasha (i.e.the quantum field) we (or intuitives) can summon ancestral guides from the records.
Our ancestors and loved ones may have long since re-embodied. Yet, from my experience, the unified quantum field, Akasha, will often call up the archived data stream of the ancestor from the records as an interface for someone in current embodiment if their interaction is likely to promote growth and evolution.
Animal guides
Totem Animal: Protector who symbolizes and exhibits qualities we’ll need to summon from within ourselves at some point.
Spirit Animal: Our animal equivalent whose vibration is almost identical to our unique authentic essence. It mirrors our inborn traits, qualities needs, desires, purposes, strengths and weaknesses.
Shadow Totem: Has symbolic resonance with aspects of ourselves that we have denied or rejected and which remain disowned and unresolved in the subconscious or unconscious mind.
Archetypal guides reactivate identities that we would recognize, have symbolic meaning to us, or exemplify universally recognized behavior patterns and qualities. They resonate with the intention of our life lesson-set as well as those classically related to the workings of the human psyche and are available as teachers. As we learn and grow, different guides may come on stream.
Ascended Masters, Saints, Bodhisattvas and Angelic Guides are energy streams/presences magnetized to those whose pre-birth covenant revolves around reaching and/or working with higher spiritual planes. These presences are of very high frequency reality frames and often help groups of people with collective spiritual aspirations.
There are many thoughtforms in this category who have been invoked: 1) so frequently, 2) so consistently, 3) by so many millions/billions of people, 4) for so many eons upon eons that individuals or groups of people collectively and repeatedly witness what are known as “apparitions.” It is said that these thoughtforms are so accessible through the power and momentum of invocation that they “step through the veil” and can be witnessed in 3-D.
Mary, thought to be the mother of the historical Jesus of Nazareth, is the most universally known example in the west, witnessed all over the world for centuries. In the east, Kuan Yin (Chinese), the female manifestation of the bodhisattva of infinite mercy, Avalokitashvara, known as Tara and Chenrezig to Tibetans, and as Kannon to the Japanese is also witnessed by intuitives and is extremely accessible.
This accessibility is especially prevalent when the same thoughtforms/guides are included in the sacred texts of multiple faith and spiritual traditions such as the Archangels Michael, Raphael and Gabriel who all appear across Christian, Jewish, and Muslim texts.
Multidimensional true-self as guide: Our true-self at higher frequencies, as consciousness, has the hotline to source energy because it is, we ARE, source energy.
Thoughtforms that manifest as non-corporeal guides appear, or reveal themselves to our inner vision in forms that we can most easily recognize and offer information in ways that we can best metabolize for our evolution. It is through the interface of thoughtforms at various frequencies that the larger consciousness frame, source energy, often communicates with us.
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More thoughts on ‘thoughtforms’
Thought Forms, Annie Besant and C. W. Leadbeater
The Secret Doctrine, Helena P. Blavatsky
The Mahatma Letters to A.P. Sinnett, published by Trevor Barker
A Treatise on Cosmic Fire, Alice Bailey
Tibetan Book of the Dead (Bardo Thödol), Walter Evens-Wentz
Tulpa is a concept in mysticism and the paranormal of a being or object which is created through spiritual or mental powers. It was adapted by 20th-century theosophists from Tibetan sprul-pa (Tibetan: སྤྲུལ་པ་, Wylie: sprulpa) which means “emanation” or “manifestation”.
It Couldn't Be Clearer
It Couldn’t Be Clearer
It’s become an instant cliche as the pandemic reveals the threadbare fabric of our culture: the truly essential people that make day-to-day life possible are often the ones in the most precarious and poorly paid jobs. As grateful as I am to have professional people in my life, I am utterly dependent on the people who grow, harvest, and distribute food. The people who stack grocery shelves and check us out. The people willing to shop for the elderly and immunocompromised. The people picking up our garbage, manning the water and sewer systems. And, of course, the health care workers.
It doesn’t take a pandemic to tell us that our culture has its values and rewards upside down. But it may take a pandemic to show us that we are also completely dependent on sound ecosystems, where viruses such as the new coronavirus have no reason to break away from their evolutionary niche. Destroy that niche and they will start migrating to other places. Tug on any one string, and you pull on the whole fabric. Tug on enough strings at the same time and the fabric loses all integrity. It will be years before we comprehend the full effect of this pandemic. But we can already see that we are all completely, intimately, and sometimes desperately interrelated.
Interrelatedness is one of Brian Swimme’s powers of the universe that I have been contemplating. I could have accompanied this particular exploration with any picture I have. Every flower, every leaf, every tree trunk, every mushroom is only here because of a web of relationships. With air, water, fungi, microbes, insects. With their fellow plants, the soil their roots penetrate, the beings growing on those roots, the slowly dissolving stone forming the soil. And they know they have these relationships. They smell each other, reach out to each other, signal each other, warn of danger. Trees nurture and protect their offspring. They send messages along savvy fungal networks. A seed won’t open its case unless it senses that its necessary cohorts for growth are in place. It will wait decades, even centuries, for that to happen.
I chose photos with insects, which biologist E.O. Wilson calls “the little things that run the natural world.” Mycologist Paul Stamets says much the same of fungi. I’m sure the scientists studying microbes would put in a bid for their billions of subjects. Every specialty could make a claim. The list is endless. Without flowering plants, there would be no vegetables, fruits, nuts, the foods enabling animals to evolve and thrive. Without leafing plants there would be no oxygen. Without the tiny, brilliant chloroplasts in the trillions of green leaves waving over the globe plants would have no way to grow.
If it weren’t for primitive bacteria evolving into those chloroplasts and eventually into all living things, the planet would be stone and water. If earth had never entered into a relationship with the sun, there would be nothing but a lot of floating rocks in our neck of the galaxy. If the galaxies had never formed, spinning out stars as they did so, there would never have been a sun.
In his talk on interrelatedness, Brian takes this vast, interdependent sequencing for granted. He focuses instead on a wonderful mystery. In order for the living planet to thrive, there has to be something that fosters this intricate web of relationships. He calls it care: the ability of living beings to nurture the lives of other living beings.
Where did care come from? It’s not a human invention. Mother trees take care of their young. Fish and reptiles, in fighting off predators, show parental care. Mammals of all sorts — think mother bears — are famous for it. Primates mourn deaths in their wider community. Humans are capable of expanding their care far beyond their families and tribes, even into future generations.
It makes sense that evolution would favor developing the hormones and neurotransmitters to foster parental care. Living beings would be much more likely to survive and reproduce, thereby keeping the species going. Evolving the emotions to foster community increases the prosperity of all forms of life. Working together enables groups to live longer and healthier lives, helping to overcome any obstacles in the way. And that is what has happened.
But here Brian enters more deeply into the mystery. He posits that in order for care to exist, to have evolved, it had to be inherent in the creative force we call the cosmos. For them to exist today, the swirling plasma at the beginning of the universe had to hold the possibility for life, for consciousness, for care. “There was a time when there wasn’t parental care and then parental care was invented in the universe. It’s valued by the universe.”
On the one hand, this isn’t news. Our stories of our ancestors, of our gods and goddesses, our varied religious cultures, all assume a caring energy operating in the world. The traditions we live with today ask us to embody compassion and care. The Jewish ethic of compassion is Jesus’s central tenet. Five centuries earlier the Buddha made it one of the two pillars of Buddhism, along with wisdom. Two thousand years later, the Dalai Lama tells us that without compassion, we cannot survive. Indigenous traditions share an even broader compassion, encompassing the earth itself and all its beings and elements.
All these traditions grew out of times when our stories of the origin of the universe were earth-based. The Abrahamic genesis stories, echoing even more ancient Sumerian ones. The aboriginal songlines. The Egyptian gods forming infants from clay and breathing life into them. The agents of genesis were beings we were familiar with — grand versions of humans and ancestors, which can include rivers, mountains, turtles, coyotes.
But in the last few decades, our origin story has receded in time, and out into the cold and dark of the vast cosmos. Our ancestors have become stars, plasma, energy. Brian’s revolutionary idea is that the care we now feel was inherent in that remote beginning. ‘Imagine the universe just being neutrons and protons,’ he says. ‘Then a process took place that eventuated in fish caring for one another. The power of care is evoked out of the plasma of the early universe.’
I can easily imagine many a raised scientific or religious eyebrow. Brian gives those a nod in his talk. But I join him in pondering what it means for us to allow the universe’s power of interrelatedness to guide us. We have, as our traditions show, been doing so for millennia. The reason it seems to operate so weakly in our culture isn’t that we don’t want compassion to be part of life on earth. We do, and many people are really good at it. But our industrial culture is based on stories that don’t foster care. They foster use. “Use assumes that things don’t have meaning in and of themselves. Their meaning comes from how they enter into our manufacturing process.”
Long predating industrialization, our stories fostered militarism, inequity, power, money. And they still do. Thus we have Silicon Valley, rich beyond measure from providing interesting nonessentials. Just over a short mountain pass are the farms where truly essential workers are paid so little they can’t afford the produce they pick. “How amazing that this envelope of humanity around the planet is making this decision about which species will live and not live.” Who will thrive and not thrive.
These are decisions we make. “Each is an act of the imagination because we can determine how we want to relate to various beings.” Though our stories tell us “that other beings are there for our use, there are other possible ways of imagining what the beings are there for. I’m trying to suggest a new way, a new value to begin to reorient our society.”
It’s through this imagining that we open to the power of interrelatedness and allow it to operate ever more fully through us. Our imagination expands the concept of care. It redefines priorities and values. It includes the entire earth, not just one species. It sees a world that could be.
Again, these aren’t new activities. Our religious, political, and philosophical histories are full of such imaginings. But the urgency is now so dire. The stories we need to leave behind are not just threadbare, they’re deadly. The pandemic shows this vividly because it devastates so rapidly. Climate change is equally urgent, and equally a product of ignoring interrelatedness. As is poverty and hunger and so many other issues we face. But our stories have allowed us to put off truly reckoning with them.
If the world is full of caring and compassionate people, how did we let our agenda be set by those who don’t care? How did we allow our stories to become those that justify the powerful, the greedy, the cruel? How do we buy into it? Why do we put up with it? These are the questions the power of interrelatedness propels us to ask. How have we failed this profound, life-organizing, and life-giving energy? Limited its reach? Ignored its implications? What kind of revolution would we launch by embodying this power? What will we lose by ignoring it?
Everything. If we don’t open ourselves to the vast implications of the power of interrelatedness, we risk it all. We are pulling on too many threads, all the time. The pandemic shows us that we are not prepared for the results of tearing down the fabric of the world. It shows us how much we have to do.
How do we cope with how much there is to do? With how much needs to change to create a just and sustainable culture? We engage. All the powers of the universe ask us for engagement with the energies they are showering us with; interrelatedness perhaps most of all. Each of us does what we can. Individually that can look like a pittance in such a vast field of urgent need. But fabrics are not woven of heroic threads. They result from the patient weaving of countless thin strands. The interrelated threads making up the tapestry of life on earth are all crucial. The mightiest tree trunk cannot live without the finest of fungal threads at its roots.
It’s fascinating that some of our ancestors’ most powerful deities were goddesses of weaving. Athena, the Greek goddess of wisdom, was one. In a version of her story the Egyptian Nit, source of the sun and goddess of Lower Egypt, was said to have woven the world into existence, and remained the guardian of weaving. Among her many domains, including medicine, midwifery, and earth itself, the Mayan Ixchel included weaving. Also combining birth, women, and weaving is the Maori Hineteiwaiwa. The tasks of the Celtic Arianrhod, Goddess of the Silver Wheel, included weaving the tapestry of life. So it’s been long acknowledged that the slow, repetitive, and often laborious task of weaving our fate from the threads we bring to life is one of our crucial tasks.
The tapestry that interrelatedness has us forever forming is infinitely rich and complex. There are always new connections to discover. All to be done with the utmost care and compassion. “The great thing about care is that it enables so much to take place. Devotion, service, nurturance. Where would we be without it?” At this stage in evolution, Brian suggests, we are searching for our role in the cosmos. We should look to the possibility “that care is seeking to expand out into a comprehensive role on this planet.” The reflective consciousness of human beings can provide the means for this to take place. Care, “pervasive in the universe from the beginning,” is looking to us for new ways to express and expand its energy.