Subtle activism is a concept I have introduced to describe the potentially crucial role that consciousness-based practices like meditation, prayer, and ritual may play in supporting change in the world. Although in our modern Western culture these practices have more typically been used to support individual growth, they can also be harnessed for the purposes of social and collective transformation.

To be a pilgrim is to be committed to a vision that is truly your own, to a vision that may not necessarily be defined by external values of society but by a deep and tenacious, close-to-the-core belief in yourself and in living your values in the world, to make a better world possible.

By Thomas Moore A dark night of the soul is a kind of initiation, taking you from one phase of life into another. You may have several dark nights in the course of your life because you are always becoming more of a person and entering life more fully.

This is the first in a series of articles introducing the phenomenon and practice of Collective Presencing, a new capacity evolving in humanity at this time. Great thinkers have foreseen its coming—we recognise it in Aurobindo’s descent of the supramental and Teil-hard de Chardin’s noosphere. But what exactly do those terms mean? Where these gifted individuals intuited and envisioned the birth of this new collective capacity at the dawn of the last century, we are now starting to be able to describe it from experience. While many might recognise the phenomenon from transpersonal group work and other such practices, so far as we are aware, this is the first attempt to articulate it as a path and a set of capacities that can be intentionally developed.