Dear Reader,
(image) When did the world break open for you and reveal its radiant light?
I’m guessing we all have had fleeting revelatory glimpses of the sublime, the numinous. Sometimes it takes great loss or crisis to trigger the moment of grace. For author Nathalie Legros, it was a parent’s worst nightmare – a crash that scattered her children’s bodies on a highway in Belgium. You can read her extraordinary essay in Kosmos Quarterly. For contributor Kamran Matlock, it was Yogananda’s gaze from a paperback book cover that changed his life forever.
These diamond-sharp moments cut through our haze, yet inevitably fade. We may relegate them to a corner of our mind as moments of madness or anomaly, but such non-ordinary experiences seem to be on the increase and may be showing us a world more real than the one we think we know. Consider this quote from Wisdom of the Shamans:
“..at first, the shaman tells you that you are asleep, that you are dreaming, and offers you a path to awaken to who you really are…The shaman knows that all life is connected, all life is one. And this doesn’t just refer to the bodies we can see, but the space between everything as well. We are connected through the air we breathe, through the ground underneath our feet, the water we share that makes up so much of our bodies, and everything else that constitutes this planet and beyond. The connection is so obvious to the shaman, but the illusion of the mind and its constant dreaming prevent many people from seeing this truth. – Don Jose Ruiz
The spirals of ecological and political crisis on our planet could be the cycles of death and rebirth that serve our evolutionary growth, propelling us out of the dream world and into a higher state of being. Such a collective Shift might take place in a flash! This is not to advocate spiritual escapism by any means. We must work diligently to counteract our shadow – the dark realities of tyranny and ecocide – yet learn to ‘walk in two worlds’ with increasing peace and fearlessness, as we transition to a new era of light. (R. Fabian)
The next Kosmos Quarterly arrives September 21 | All Consuming! – what we consume and what consumes us. Transformational writing on water, food, media, desire and more by Daniel Pinchbeck, Charles Eisenstein, Pat McCabe, Li An Phoa, John Liu – and many others. Subscribe ‘in the gift’ | $0-$60 here.
In Kosmos Quarterly | Dynamic Governance, a social technology for organizations
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The 21st century is witnessing hundreds of millions of people caught up in cascading systemic transformation. Global society has crossed a threshold. We’ve entered the time of the Great Transition—a time when we hospice outworn ways of living that no longer serve us and the Earth, and give birth to an emergent, more compassionate, and resilient future.
Successful navigation of the uncharted climate change and sociopolitical territory before us requires that we embrace uncertainty, unlearn much of what we think we already know about our world, and embody the understanding of non-dual reality.
We all make meaning and find purpose using whatever tools and information are available. Global society is on an ecologically self-sabotaging course because the meaning we’ve made of the world is distorted by the illusion of disconnection. Our beliefs, behaviors, and the choices we’ve made proceed from the lenses of separation through which we’ve been trained to see for generations.
Western society, in particular, is built on the flawed cognitive foundation of duality. We’re educated to focus on analysis of atomized parts to the exclusion of their interdependence with all other parts of the larger system. This is the worldview in which hierarchical dominance, power-and-control dynamics, competition, hyper-individualism, compartmentalized approaches, and lack of communication prevails in organizations and isolates individuals.
(image) The organizations that we generate inherently reflect the quality of our own consciousness in the moment. Organizations that want to be relevant vehicles for our work in social change during these kaleidoscopic times need to “unlearn” linear, disconnected, and static approaches to governance. They must commit to ongoing transformation in sync with incessant societal shifts. Therefore, we—and the organizations that serve us—are poised by existential necessity to deliberately take the next evolutionary step in consciousness. We stand at the proverbial evolve or die precipice.
