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apt in awe

apt in awe 

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rapt in awe 

The most beautiful and profound emotion we can experience 

is the sensation of the mystical. It is the source of all true 

science and art. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who 

can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as 

dead to know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, 

manifesting itself as the highest wisdom in the most radiant 

beauty which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their 

most primitive forms – this knowledge, this feeling is at the 

center of true religiousness. 

-‐Albert Einstein 

The Merging of Spirit and Science


Table of Contents 

Wrapping your head around rapt in awe 6 

Introducing awe 9 

Unwinding the mind 15 

My mountain methodology 18 

Evolving consciousness and cosmic creativity 20 

Socio-‐Cultural Evolution 32 

Revelations of awe 45 

Aboriginal Archetypes 47 

The Eros Tilt 56 

How Energy Flows into Existence 59 

The Mind of Matter 65 

Rooting thee, poet tree 75 

The poet tree 79 

Nondual, causal, subtle, gross 84 

State of Mind as a Geometrical Shape 87 

Revisioning Reality 90 

When God and I Are One 98 

Evolution Unfolding 100 

Be Your Bliss 110 

Flow and Creativity 113 

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Table of Contents 

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You an me as micro-‐manifestations of the whole cosmos 118 

The Red Road 123 

Creativity and Social Organization 128 

Pray By Play 130 

The Self-‐Reflecting Universe 142 

Climate Change as a Collective Opportunity 149 

smiling into the apocalypse a.k.a. the power if positivity 161 

smiling into the apocalypse part 2 – 

collective unconscious to conscious collective 168 

From the dream world to the real world 173 

The Extended Mind Hypothesis 175 

Identity and the internal guru 178 

Rites of Passage 179 

Psychology in a Nutshell 181 

Simply This 185 

About the Author 190


Wrapping your head around rapt in awe 

Rapt in awe is to writing what jazz-‐fusion is to music. It is a 

collection of spontaneous mind-‐drift riffs exploring the nature of 

reality and how we experience it in each moment. The content of 

this book is simultaneously very complex and very simple. Rapt in 

awe is full of such paradoxical contentions as it delves deep into 

the nature of our perceptions of reality, challenging certain 

common held beliefs. The complexity of the material comes in 

terms of the language used, often a specific vernacular outside of 

common use and in terms of deconstructing popular assumptions 

about the universe and life within it. When one is able to let go of 

such commonly held beliefs, opening up to a variety of alternative 

ways of seeing and saying, then the premise of rapt in awe is 

rather simple. The book is intended to unfold as an experiential 

process for the reader to unveil this inherent simplicity within the 

myriad complexity of daily life within one’s skin, senses, and 

extended thoughts. It is my contention that each of us is fully 

equipped to experience awe in each instant. 

Ultimately following conventional modern outlooks leads 

me to see myself as contained within my skin. This premise 

influenced all successive perceptions of reality. I take this whole 

idea head on, challenging this modern mindset, referencing con-‐ 

temporary science, ancient wisdom traditions and spontaneous 

insights. The aim is to provide a framework for interpreting reality 

– individually and collectively – that supports the ongoing 

evolution of consciousness. From ‘Unwinding the Mind’ to ‘Revis-‐ 

ioning Reality’, rapt in awe is written to inspire personal transfor-‐ 

mation, recognizing that this is a process unique to each of us and 

not a linear formula. Rapt in awe is intended to start the 

conversation and the reader’s input in open source dialogue is 

deeply desired. The content of this book is open to collective 

revision, remixing, and interactive dialogue. Rapt in awe is open to 

the evolution of consciousness. 

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Drawing from one particularly catalytic incident in my life 

that transformed my consciousness, rapt in awe delves into 

cosmological origins. An incident that verged on being personally 

catastrophic emerged as a profound personal awakening. At the 

cusp of global crisis – be it economic or climatic or pandemic – I 

project the insights from my experience into a call for collective 

action. I have found that sharing my story in conversations with 

others has opened opportunities for more complex and intimate 

relationships with everyone that I encounter. I see this dilation of 

opening hearts and minds as being the bridge to global 

transformation. Exploring the idea of flow, what I like to call our 

cosmic groove, and the implications this holds for us as we surf 

the crests and troughs of moment flowing into moment, rapt in 

awe invites the inspiration and innovation of the human spirit for 

collective transformation. I see consciousness as something all 

pervasive in the universe, stretching well beyond you and I, which 

is able to evolve toward greater complexity. By collective 

transformation I mean that all of us participate in ushering in more 

sophisticated modes of being, changing the world as we know it. 

What I have found from embracing positivity and pos-‐ 

sibility is more meaningful relationships and more fulfilling 

moments. Smiling into the Apocalypse explores how it is that our 

very thoughts, words, and actions contribute to what comes next. 

A consistent contention within rapt in awe ishowourcon-‐ temporary assumptions about both reality and consciousness 

actually inhibit the constructive progression of both. With the 

pervasive emphasis being placed on barriers and challenges and 

what is often deferred to being “human nature”, we are 

constantly co-‐creating a fragmented reality, a world of separation 

and isolation. I maintain a simple guiding principle derived from 

tangible experience with skiing: if you look at the trees or rocks or 

obstacles, that is what you will hit, if you look at the way in 

between, around or over, that is where you will go. Rapt in awe 

takes this simple philosophy of looking at the spaces in between 

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and extends it onto all other aspects of life. One of the most 

topical sections in rapt in awe is Climate Change as a Collective 

Opportunity our truly first collective global unifying challenge. I 

contend that transformation requires a catalyst and there is 

nothing better than imminent crisis for inspiring change. 

The self-‐reflecting universe is a way of seeing ourselves in 

everything around us. The concept has deep roots in many 

Indigenous worldviews and finds validation in the fields of quan-‐ 

tum theory and theoretical biology. As co-‐creators of our reality, 

our personal development is integrally tied to the broader evol-‐ 

ution of consciousness. Awareness of personal shadow as the 

dark matter that we protect and project helps in-‐form a better 

world. Rapt in awe presents the idea of collective co-‐creation as 

the foundation of purpose for each of us. To change the world, we 

must simply change ourselves – a collective critical mass of us. 

At this junction of evolving consciousness and creation, 

rapt in awe explores the links between our personal development 

and that of the Cosmos as a whole. Scratching the surface of 

questions like – Why are we here? What is this all about? What is 

my purpose in it all? – rapt in awe is an invitation for a broader 

conversation to aid in collective transformation. 

Thus rapt in awe will: 

• Explore emergent perspectives on the nature of reality, 

and in doing so challenge many commonly accepted 

outlooks, 

• Use personal stories as an invitation for the reader’s own 

personal reflection, 

• Invite insights and dialogue about frameworks for 

personal and collective transformation, and, 

• Provide an interactive platform for such stories, insights, 

and dialogue to take place. 

I invite your stories, reflections, and spontaneous insights. 

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Introducing awe 


rapt in awe is a collection of anecdotes, inspired insights, 

poems, and philosophical ramblings. It traces between certain de-‐ 

finitive experiences in my life, connecting the dots between me-‐ 

being-‐me as a living breathing body and me-‐being-‐me as a 

complex energetic field of awareness. Anyone’s life can be 

retrospectively sketched by drawing together similar definitive 

moments, experiences that have taken us outside of a conven-‐ 

tional understanding of who, and what, we are. The stories that I 

share within these pages chart the course of my personal interior 

exploration. The philosophy leans heavily on poetic metaphor, not 

following much of a linear logical progression. Paradox and free-‐ 

association are employed quite liberally within the lines and pages 

that follow. With this in mind, when my tangents seem too 

abstract, I encourage you to simply let go of trying to understand. 

It has been a consistent experience for me that understanding 

comes when we simply make space for personal insight and 

interpretation. Paradoxically, this involves letting go of grasping 

for understanding. The random connections that I draw between 

very diverse fields came to me by means of spontaneous insight. 

This happened by making space in mind for comprehension to 

follow. Holding a question in mind can very simply pierce the rigid 

confines of reason to better access intuitive insight. This book is 

built upon the types of questions that we all ask about the nature 

of life and our personal purpose for being alive. There is a place 

where we can all access these answers and I like to refer to this 

state as a unified field where our minds merge. 

This book has emerged from a definitive instant in my life, 

an experience that punctured the membrane of my material sense 

of self as a series of cells forming tissues contained within my skin. 

It was an opportunity for me to see beyond the confines of my 

mind, the bricks of materialistic outlooks that I constructed to 

reduce and define the world around me. There was a time where I 

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ardently believed that there was nothing more to life than our 

biological selves taking a few spins around the sun before our 

molecules moved on to some other mechanical process. That has 

changed. The story about how follows. I share a series of personal 

anecdotes with the intention of tracing my personal evolution and 

development, as I have matured with experience and reflection. 

With this I maintain that each path remains very unique and 

distinct, and any common threads are for you to draw, not for me 

to push or project. The catalytic experience that lead to this book 

did not make me abandon my scientific toolbox and embrace 

evangelical born again-‐ness. Rather putting the pieces of me back 

together again taught me to integrate both into a more rich and 

complete relationship with the world around me. This is what I 

mean by personal transformation. 

At a time in my life when I felt on top of the world a string 

of incidents shook me to my core and wore down my stubborn 

resistance. A near drowning while whitewater kayaking on a burly 

river set me into a reflexive place. Being held down in a powerful 

vortex of water to the point of letting go of any hope of 

resurfacing scared me deeply. This fear translated in a lot of 

personal exploration. A little more than a month later while 

driving on a windy road following a river canyon a sudden intuition 

guided me to pullover before entering train overpass. This hunch 

turned a potential high speed, head-‐on collision into a minor 

accident instead. This precognition thankfully saved me from a 

nasty incident, and deepened the reflection. Having spent a lot of 

time in the mountains I had developed a frame of reference for 

such intuition in the context of climbing, learning to heed a sense 

or feeling and make decisions based on such a hunch. But I had 

not integrated this level of trust in intuition into my every day 

awareness. I will go deeper into this pivotal point later on. After 

the near drowning and near nasty accident, I had a lingering 

feeling that something was going to happen, until finally it did. I 

was working as a tree planting foreperson at the time and the 

lingering something turned out to be having my leg pinned 

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between a big crew cab truck and a semi-‐tractor trailer. A crush 

injury to my thigh led to rapid blood loss. All of the knowledge I 

had from extensive emergency response training told me that 

things were bleak. My face and hands went numb and cold 

immediately. Tell tale signs of shock – the inadequate perfusion of 

oxygen to the cells. I lay in the back of an ambulance bleeding to 

the ambiguous state near-‐death as a friend drove it over the 

bumpy backwoods road. We were a long way from medical infra-‐ 

structure with a very time sensitive situation. I experienced a non-‐ 

locality, drifting aloft above my material body. I did not have any 

form of faith to explain this experience, merely a scientific 

agnosticism that could not account for the culpability of looking 

down on my material self. My consciousness had been rigidly fixed 

on the flowcharts of my first-‐aid training leading to the thought, “I 

am going to die.” I was rationalizing my situation and calculating 

the odds. What I would describe as another voice, and not my 

rational self, suddenly chimed in, affirming the possibility of life. 

This was an older and wiser voice, one that I’d listen to in the 

mountains or while paddling a river. This was a voice alluded to 

earlier, one that spoke through intuition and gut hunches. At that 

moment I dismissed my first aid assessments and simply breathed 

deeply and visualized an intact and healthy femoral artery in my 

crushed thigh. I had this profound sense of knowing emerge 

within my broader consciousness that illuminated the point that if 

I wanted to live, I needed to focus all of my being on doing so. At 

that time in my life I had been practicing cultivating mindfulness 

and applying it to activities of risk, training myself to focus 

exclusively on the way and not the obstacles. So that is what I did. 

Like water swirling down the drain, I felt as energetic presence 

flowed back into my physical body. I pulled in a breath as though I 

had just emerged from the depths. It was weird. I kept breathing 

and visualizing and mindfully feeling a sentient energy flowing 

through my gross physical form. The saga carried on and not 

without further complications, but the short of it is that I kept my 

life and my leg. 

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This third incident sent the personal reflection into an 

unprecedented realm for me. My understanding of reality had 

been simultaneously shattered and expanded into an unknown 

orbit. Rapt in awe is in many ways the culmination of this 

exploration. So the bizarre origins of the questions explored in 

these pages pretty much guarantees that things are going to get 

strange. 

The Tibetan Book of the Dead tells of the Bardo state. It is 

the plane of existence that the so-‐called dead inhabit between 

lives. When reading the book through the lens of rational analysis I 

had taken this to be some mythic metaphor yet the near death 

experience described above somehow provided me a sneak peak 

of the ‘bardo’. That time in the ambulance unveiled a kaleido-‐ 

scopic cross section of eternity. What ensued for me was a 

complete unwinding of the mind. 

Eight or nine months after this accident I was breaking 

trail in deep powder snow while backcountry skiing which is hard 

with fully fit and functioning legs. It hurt my leg but fueled my 

spirit. The broader experience of that accident, as a definitive 

moment, led me to ponder the nature of spirit, and how it 

manifests as gross matter and living organisms that have ideas 

and feelings and dreams and neurosis. That kaleidoscopic peek 

beyond the physical intensified my curiosity with new science and 

its relationship with spiritual worldviews. Being able to 

backcountry ski that first winter after the crush injury, what 

medical doctors referred to as a miraculous recovery, had more to 

do with feeding my spirit. This all provided my rational mind with a 

tangible test case to chew on. Letting go of my constructed beliefs 

about material reality helped me mind the gap between breaths, 

and get my limiting beliefs out of the way so that my body could 

heal itself. I reflect back on that accident with two minds – one is 

the persistence of pain as I can often still feel the crushing 

sensation in my thigh, and the other is of that “other voice” 

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coming from a much broader aspect of self than I had previously 

held. It was not my first aid training nor medical intervention that 

helped me to see the way, it was something beyond my rational 

reckoning, something more in the realm of the spiritual. The 

process that followed involved harmonizing my rational and 

spiritual interpretations of reality. The experience of this accident 

and the broader understanding that unfolded has impelled me to 

share my thoughts and experiences from beyond the punctured 

membrane of my material mindset. Perhaps it will help someone 

out there afloat in the experience of living, breathing, and being to 

relate. 

The contents of rapt in awe represent various styles of 

expression from analytical prose to lyrical verse, graphic diagrams 

to artistic sketches intentionally assembled in order to convey the 

abstract nature of the book. How you choose to read the text is 

for you to decide, you may choose to read sequentially from the 

beginning to the end as the book is laid out, or simply flip through 

and ruminate on a specific diagram or selection of text. To honour 

the premise presented within these pages about the very nature 

of consciousness, I must simply invite you to develop your own 

unique relationship with the ideas within. The way consciousness 

works is much like magnetic attraction – ideasthatresonatewith questions you are holding, thoughts you are pondering, will draw 

you to sections that are relevant to you. Language, at its essence, 

is a collection of representative symbols. Symbols require relation-‐ 

ship to be understood. The associated meanings must be integra-‐ 

ted into one’s own frames of reference. Letters come togetherto form words and words will hold slightly different meanings for 

each of us depending on our past experience, upbringing, culture, 

and education. The subtle deviations in comprehension of intend-‐ 

ed meaning can amplify in the context of a clause or a sentence 

particularly in the realm of the page, section, or an entire book. 

Thus each reader will have a unique understanding of what is 

written, and I may miscommunicate as much or even more than I 

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actually manage to get clear ideas across. The intentionsbehind rapt in awe areembeddedintheflowofthetext, andcarryan energetic vibration that you can attune to. The Bön traditionof Tibet cultivated awareness around thought energy, having a deep 

understanding of how thoughts transmit fundamental energy 1 . 

Thoughts influence energy as it forms into our tangible reality at 

the quantum level and this can connect each of us when we 

attune to it, and this is a concept that we will explore extensively 

in rapt in awe. Thus understanding can reached beyond this woven 

tapestry of words. Thissymphonyofstylesismeanttoelicit multiple modes of understanding, and to tap the diverse 

intelligences within each of us. 

Often when I encounter a word or concept that is new to 

me, I respond with a certain amount of guardedness and resist-‐ 

ance that is counterproductive to understanding. There are likely 

to be terms presented within that conjure such a response for 

many. I reference certain esoteric words from diverse fields of 

inquiry each with specific ways of saying. I have created footnotes 

to explain the intricacies of such terms to assist with this. The 

depth of the questions explored with rapt in awe is bound to illicit 

a potential sense of overwhelm for the reader. Despite writing it, 

this overwhelm stills happens for me when I dig in. If this happens, 

I strongly recommend closing the book and setting it aside until 

the time that it beckons again. Your own inner knowing is the 

most crucial component to accessing the ever-‐present awe. 

This awe is always there beyond what is immediately 

apparent to our senses. There are many other names for it from 

diverse cultural origins and fields of inquiry. It is not something 

that you can own or patent or put in a jar to sell. Awe is accessible 

to everyone at any time, including you. 

1 Christopher Hansard. The Tibetan Art of Positive Thinking (London: Hodder & 

Stroughton) 2003 

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Unwinding the mind 

True understanding lives on the land, 

through far of fields and mountain ranges, 

but with words I sketch a map. 

The treasure we all seek that for which we all long 

to have just a little peek, 

lies deep inside each and every one of us. 

The path toward our true self, 

our mischievous genius guide, 

falls before us when we can clear out the clutter, 

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Communication is a funny thing. 

We take these symbols called words and pass them back and forth 

in a commerce of confusion, a matrix of illusion. 

In trying to reach a mutual understanding we use words as bridges 

to show others what we think and feel. 

Yet each of us stands on our own shore of what we believe is real. 

A Tower of Babel of Babylon we build, 

cluttering creation with clouds of chaos. 

Communication is a funny thing. 

Understanding exists in a far-‐off field 

beyond the vain strivings of words. 

With these words, scarcely bound by structure, 

I cast pebbles into the pond of being to ripple the surface 

reflection, 

hoping to share a glance into the depths of your own perfection. 

I toss these ideas – these resonant waves into the still pond of 

static living 

to encourage you to self reflect, 

hoping that you won’t in turn reject 

that which you seek. 

It is something rather strange and intangible 

this broader aspect of yourself of which I speak.


that mud in the gutter, 

and still our minds tendency to doubt and mutter. 

These words connect and collect into an image of mystic bliss, 

they whisper about eternal love and a cosmic kiss. 

That which is believed to be solid, I speak of as mist. 

Having abandoned the scrutiny of the material mindset bound by 

Euclid’s grid, 

I welcome you to join my mutiny. 

On my path I’ve come to see that we can either reclaim the mystic 

or burn up spaceship Earth 

with our collective fixation with power and ballistic asunder. 

It is now time for a revolution – looking within to begin. 

Our minds are tricky instruments, 

complicated connections of electric impulses 

and ideas dutifully distracting us from simply being, 

and being simple. 

And our minds have such fantastic jaws that can clench onto our 

thoughts. 

Often we are embedded in our own thoughts 

and ideas such that we miss the subtle elements which are vivid 

when we approach our reality with open acceptance. 

Our minds play out some sort of Samara 2 ensemble, 

a skipping record of pathological patterns 

and ego projections spinning the wheel of life. 

How now is it that we create all our own suffering by issuing 

expectations? 

This is where Buddha began 

only to end up sitting in perfect harmony in want of nothing. 

And I only discovered this after many years of studying nothing 

in particular and everything in general, 

sitting with my own want of nothing. 

That is pondering the sense in it all if we do indeed come fluttering 

2 

Samara refers to the Buddhist Wheel of Suffering 

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out of nothing, and wondering about those fundamental 

questions 

about the very nature of everything. 

Long lost in the inner workings, 

off on far of tangents chasing answers to infinite questions. 

All paths eventually lead us to the nondual 

once we let go of projections of structure. 

Understanding exists in a far-‐off field – I’ll see you there. 

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All life is a fluid interaction of energy. 

Structure is static, 

a rigid grid that does not really resemble the lay of the land, 

but rather an interpretive tool dreamed up by Euclid. 

Our minds constantly quantify by judging and attaching value to 

our thoughts. Each of us has our own static beliefs about 

ourselves, 

and the world outside of our skin. 

Attachment to these beliefs is like standing on the banks 

of the river of life as it flows by. 

The primary challenge we face each moment is letting go of our 

mind’s judgments to be fluid with the wider environment. 

That goes to say that comprehension does not arrive by thought, 

but by intuitive acceptance. 

Once the mind sits back, open and not attached to any particular 

perceptual projections, understanding trickles and, filling the void. 

All religious traditions tend to blend in their mystical realms, 

the differences are merely a reflection of semantics. 

Words are truly crude tools towards a common understanding. 

What the sayers, sages, seers, and saints all say — in their own 

way— is that by transcending the limiting projections of mind 

we can intimately interact with the wider world and slip headlong 

into bliss. 

This hereby is the process of unwinding the mind.


My mountain methodology 

When I was 16 I sat in my room trying to conceptualize 

practical applications of Einstein’s theory of general relativity. I 

thought all this traveling at the speed of light in deep space stuff 

was pretty cool but wondered how it influenced me down here on 

the ground? My two adventurous older brothers then came in, 

compassionately trying to keep me both well rounded and 

remotely grounded, and invited me to go rock climbing with them. 

After a barrage of excuses created from me only seeing the 

obstacles I finally agreed. I was the kind of kid who asked a lot of 

questions: Why? Why? Why? Why was I reading about Einstein’s 

theory of general relativity at 16 rather than building a hot-‐rod in 

the garage like many of my peers? That is perhaps the perennial 

question that this book explores. How do we, as individuals, either 

choose or simply follow a path of character, calling and discovery 

in our lives? Are we guided by internal aspects or by forces beyond 

our everyday selves? Is it merely free will? The persistence of the 

questions ‘Why are we here?’ ‘ What does this all mean?’ ‘What is 

my purpose in life?’ have echoed in my mind from my earliest 

recognition. I don’t believe that I am alone in this questioning. 

It was somewhere on the side of a cliff, that first time 

rock climbing, when I finally let go of fearing gravity’s grasp and 

focused fully on the possibilities inherent to the rock. Suddenly the 

warm wind of clear understanding washed over me. To go upward 

I had to let go of holds that felt solid and secure and simply trust 

those above which held uncertainty, and find a way to orient 

myself through funky movements on seemingly precarious 

perches. I found out, then and there, that the body has its own 

logic, often more true than that of the rational mind. Time slowed 

down under the cadence of my breath, as I focused intently on the 

intricate details of the rock in each movement. Everything merged 

in the moment. Still holding the ever-‐present questions in the back 

of my mind during the climb, I also started to see an everyday 

understanding of relativity. 

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Ever since that first rock climb, I’ve wandered and 

pondered on many paths on many mountains, filling pages and 

pads with the eclectic scribbles of wild mind insights in the 

serenity of wild places. I found that being in mountain 

environments, or simply any form of wilderness, allowed me to 

access a source of clarity. My mountain methodology became 

philosophy-‐by-‐feet wherein spontaneous intuitive insight was 

favored over didactical logical thought. That was the path I chose. 

Herein is a collection of such philosophy-‐by-‐feet ideas, 

blending the seemingly preposterous with poetry and prose. One 

thing that I have learned from climbing many mountains is that 

one can only reach the summit if open to the possibility of finding 

a way. If we look only at the obstacles, that is often all we see. 

Our perceptions shape what lies before us. I think that the rest of 

life is the same. In observing this tendency within myself, and in 

others over the course of years guiding in the mountains, I see a 

macro manifestation of that very first instance I had on the rock 

where the constriction of fear inhibited my progress. The very act 

of opening my mind to the possibility unfolded the way through to 

the top. I take this opening of the mind to be the very core of 

faith, in its broadest sense. Just as there is no such thing as an 

atheist in war, nor is there an atheist in a storm on the mountain. 

Some of us pray to some specific God, some to the resolve of 

humanity’s rational capacities, and others to the amorphous 

universe at large. Ultimately – inmy mind – it doesnotmatter where this fundamental request for circumstances to change is 

directed the outcomes are thesame. YourGodandmyGodmay be as different as we are, but we are still fundamentally the same. 

Sometimes we simply need to believe in something beyond our-‐ 

selves to believe in ourselves. I started off clinging to the firm hold 

modernist agnosticism until I had a peek at the luminous awe on 

the side of a mountain. This peak experience set in motion an 

opening to the possibility that there was more going on than is 

immediately apparent to the ration faculties. Rapt in awe is 

19


composed of tangential wanderings from my personal path, my 

mountain methodology. I hope the anecdotes herein help to 

sketch a map of the mental landscape where we all meet. If we are 

to meet, in person or merely in mind, I know that your path to that 

place will be as unique as you are. 

Evolving consciousness and cosmic creativity 

At the very center of all the ideas expressed in his book, 

lies the premise that each of us contribute to creating the world in 

each given instant. A fusion of science, philosophy, and spiritual 

perspectives are blended together in an attempt to make abstract 

ideas more apparent. An example centered on the above state-‐ 

ment that each of us contribute to the co-‐creation of the world is 

the Global Consciousness Project 3 based at Princeton University. 

In this modern world that we have constructed, a true 

marvel of human capacity, we have collectively ingrained certain 

habits. Many of these persistent patterns are fundamental to how 

we think and perceive our reality. My scientific agnosticism as 

described earlier is an example of how I as an individual embodied 

a pervasive cultural habit. Rapt in awe directly challenges many of 

these ingrained tendencies. That is the point of it. By challenging 

the very worldview from which we perceive our reality, there is 

bound to be moments of aversion to the ideas herein. It is like 

trying to walk on a carpet as I attempt to pull it out from beneath 

your feet. I recommend only reading further when the ideas reson-‐ 

ate with questions you hold in mind or pause to ponder at this 

time. Aspects of aversion may be your own process of digesting a 

shift in perspective, or it may be you accessing novel insights. Then 

again, it may simply a resistance to change, which is a quality that 

we all embody and need to manage. Follow your curiousity for it is 

a wise guide. 

3 http://noosphere.princeton.edu/ 

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At the core of modern belief systems, which became 

preeminent from the Enlightenment 4 onward, is the separation of 

mind and spirit from matter. This separation and fragmentation, 

like all things, has both positive and negative aspects. The positive 

aspects of modernity 5 – this world we are embedded in – have 

brought us a more universal comfort in life through technology 

and principles of social equality. The ability to manipulate material 

substance promoted the widespread of individual free will. It let 

ordinary people know that they had power and influence by 

choice on their lives, that it was not just fated by mystical forces. 

This ushered in the cult of the individual that is so prevalent in the 

modern era. Many of our engrained cultural presumptions, parti-‐ 

cularly in the developed world, stem from the wonderful recog-‐ 

nition that we as individuals can stack the building blocks of our 

lives. Modernity fueled the shifts to democratic governance based 

on the inalienable rights of the individual. The separation of spirit 

from matter made industrialism viable as cause and effect were 

harnessed into steam engines and mechanistic contraptions to do 

our work. Modernity has made us out to be God – active agents of 

freewill. In Neitszche’s words, God is dead, in the traditional sense, 

in our hearts. Spirit and matter can be separated in a host of 

perspectives, but that then reduces the inherent complexity of our 

reality. It turns out that it really is not that simple, that mind and 

spirit and matter are integrally entwined, in all space and all time. 

The negative side of this modern mindset is a profound 

disassociation between mind and matter, the subjective and objec-‐ 

tive aspects of self, and all things. This severance between spirit 

and body, the ethereal and the real, is projected onto all aspects 

4 The Enlightenment is a period in Western thought beginning in the 17 th century and 

becoming prevalent in the 18 th century centered upon reason, individual liberties, and the 

scientific method. 

5 

Modernity refers to the pervasive worldview associated with Industrialism and post- 

Enlightenment scientific approach


of our current reality. Such fragmentary worldviews propagate 

conflict between individuals and groups, ecological imbalance and 

destruction, and threatens our very survival. Despite the vast 

amount of positive attributes that have arisen from the modernist 

mindset, the prevalent attachment to fundamental beliefs, even in 

their partiality, hinders our collective progress. 

Fortunately new emergent structures of thought are 

available to us. There is a great deal of theory and research 

regarding the evolving processes of consciousness from modern-‐ 

ity, to postmodernism, to integral outlooks. The point here is that 

it is an evolving process. Consciousness continues to evolve into 

states of greater complexity and sophistication. The perennial 

challenge of being human in each given instant is to release our 

selves from these preconceived beliefs that inhibit the ever-‐ 

evolving flow of consciousness. 

The evolution of consciousness is expressed through us 

by means of our personal creativity. The underlying premise here 

is that we are mere conduits of creative processes, as independent 

nodes of consciousness and the collectives that we form. There is 

an extensive body of scientific evidence and an ancient insight 

which tell us that the universe acts through us as apparently 

independent nodes of a collective medium. Just as a wave passes 

through water, the individual particles of water are moved by the 

wave, but do not move along with it. Although we appear to be 

separate and independent agents, contained within our skin, there 

is an entangled fabric of fundamental energy that connects us all. 

This very idea undermines many common beliefs about the nature 

of consciousness and material existence, and will likely conjure 

both confusion and resistance. Ingrained habits hold strong. I 

invite you to trust the process here, and allow understanding to 

unfold. The evolution of consciousness acts through you. 

Rapt in awe is a book about this broader concept of 

evolving consciousness, and chances are, if you are reading this, 

22

23 


consciousness is calling to you to express your creative genius. 

Modernity is merely one stage in the evolution of consciousness, 

and attachment to contemporary modernist beliefs tends to resist 

and restrict this unfolding developmental process. Again this is a 

habitual tendency that is becomes ingrained for each of us. Rapt in 

awe in its essence is about this evolution of consciousness and 

how our collectively disassociated mindsets inhibit this natural 

progression. Integral Theory, eloquently framed and popularized 

by contemporary philosopher Ken Wilber, provides a structure for 

understanding and analyzing the evolution of consciousness, and I 

rely heavily upon it to illustrate the ideas within rapt in awe. The 

Integral Approach 6 tells us that knowledge is intimately depen-‐ 

dent upon perspectives. One’s cultural orientation and personal 

frames of reference will determine what is perceived. Each facet 

of interpretation holds some aspect of truth, yet remains 

incomplete without multiple perspectives. A single photograph 

provides a perspective, whereas multiple images from various 

angles creates a much more accurate understand of the subject. 

The very act of integrating diverse modes of inquiry enables us to 

access Integral consciousness. The terms Integral 7 in this context 

directly refers to the act of integrating various viewpoints to 

create a more rich and comprehensive outlook. Ken Wilber 

identified the consistent correlations between multiple modes of 

inquiry and created the Four Quadrant Model 8 . The vertical axis 

distinguishes subjective approaches from objective, spirit from 

matter. The individual and the collective are parsed by the 

horizontal axis. 

The model suggests that absolutely anything can be 

looked at from a variety of perspectives or studied from various 

6 The Integral Approach refers to the application of Ken Wilber’s Four Quadrant model 

and the complimenting bodies of knowledge from his colleagues with the Integral 

Institute. http://www.integralinstitute.org/, http://www.integrallife.com/ 

7 The term Integral consciousness was first used by Swiss Anthropologist Jean Gebser. 

8 Wilber, Ken. Sex, Ecology, Spirituality (Boston & London: Shambhala)1995


methodologies, and that the most complete picture involves 

Figure 1.0 Ken Wilber’s Four Quadrant Model 9 

multiple perspectives with at least one from each of the four 

resulting quadrants – the subjective individual “I”, the objective 

individual “It”, the subjective collective “We”, and the objective 

collective “Its”. Wilber refers to this model as a map of reality. A 

map by definition is a representative tool to aid in understanding 

the landscape. When we are route finding over a landscape we are 

most often in unfamiliar terrain and a map creates a scaled graphic 

image to help us grasp the bigger picture of what is around. Maps 

provide layers of information that aid in orientation for finding our 

way. 

I love maps. From the earliest days of colouring maps in 

grade school to route finding in complex mountain terrain, maps 

have helped shape my relationship with the world around me. 

After my near-‐death experience I found Ken Wilber’s Integral 

9 

Wilber, Ken. Sex, Ecology, Spirituality (Boston & London: Shambhala)1995 

24


Theory a tremendous resource for understanding the abstract 

experiences of the accident, in the ambulance, and the wider orbit 

I came to inhabit afterward. Maps help link abstract relationships 

of our expanding frames of reference. Like the rungs of a ladder, 

we have some structure to ascent on to new, wider realms of 

understanding the world. This near-‐death experience was mind 

blowing, mind expanding, and emotionally tumultuous. I went 

searching to integrate the bizarre intangible experiences of that 

Bardo peek at something much, much bigger. 

In the Integral Approach there are no fixed absolutes, 

merely correlated perspectives that provide a more full and rich 

understanding of any given phenomena. Integral Theory can, and 

does, get much more complex. There is a comprehensive body of 

literature to articulate such complexities in detail, an extensive list 

of which is in the footnotes. I also must stipulate that what is 

written here is a personal, and hence incomplete, interpretation of 

Integral Theory. My interpretations are marked by my personal 

projections, as much as insights. 

Modernity as a mindset seeks absolutes, and carries this 

out by reducing variables. Such variables contribute to uncer-‐ 

tainties that do not fit well with the scientific process which rules 

out subjective view points preferring that which can be cut up, 

counted, and quantified. This reductionism is done by limiting 

context and isolating segments of reality through fragmentation. 

In limiting context, and fragmenting the raw experience of our 

reality, we limit ourselves and sever the flow of the evolution of 

consciousness. Modernity is the pervasive worldview at this time 

on the planet, and despite the many benefits it brings to 

humanity, largely through technology and individual freedoms, 

the shadow cast by this dominant mode of thought is the seed to 

many of the most profound challenges before us in the world 

today. 

The modern mindset is exemplified by Newtonian physics, 

25


which is the extent of what many of us are taught in school. 

Newtonian or classical physics is based on a building blocks model 

of matter, composed of separate and independent constituent 

parts that respond by means of mere cause and effect. Hard bits 

smashing into other hard bits with predictable outcomes quanti-‐ 

fied with algebraic equations. It is all very tidy, and rational. With 

this way of seeing comes a clear premise that consciousness is not 

present within material objects. Matter is considered inert, and 

acted upon, responding mechanistically to external sources of 

energy. This view is the foundation of structural mechanics, 

proving true in the contexts of bridges, buildings, and terrestrial 

transportation. This was the status quo of the physics up until the 

early twentieth century, over a century ago, although this remains 

the most commonly accepted worldview even today. Newton is 

often quoted as saying that he “stood on the shoulders of giants” 

to envision his remarkable contributions to our understanding of 

the physical world, referring to how his predecessors held him up 

to see further with novel understanding. This is a beautiful 

example of the evolution of consciousness that we are exploring 

here. To say that classical Newtonian physics does not encom-‐ 

pass the entire truth of the universe is not to negate his profound 

contributions. Rather it is to demonstrate how novel understand-‐ 

ings of our reality emerge through individual and collective 

creative insight. Newton became one of the giants with shoulders 

that other would stand upon. 

A quandary emerged for classical physics from two 

distinct sides – the very big and the very small – in the early 1900’s. 

Albert Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity (and later followed by 

the General Theory of Relativity) and quantum theory both 

demonstrated profound anomalies for conventional modern 

beliefs. This is an example of the evolution of consciousness, 

which we will explore in detail, as well as the partiality of any given 

body of knowledge. Newtonian physics proves true in certain 

limited contexts yet not absolutely true. In short, what relativity 

has taught us is that any observation is relative to a frame of 

26


reference, and thus bound to that particular limited context. 

Similarly, quantum theory has demonstrated the observer effect 

wherein the outcomes of an experiment are intimately tied to the 

observer. What we often see is what our consciousness projects – 

since this is the outcome I am looking for, this is the outcome I 

see. Both relativity and quantum theory are like Newtonian 

physics in the progression of consciousness becoming aware of 

itself; merely perspectives in the evolving understanding of the 

universe. Each of these facets of physics hold their own elements 

of truth, and being integrated together we can arrive at a more 

complete understanding of the physical universe. 

Fundamental physics is one realm in which we witness the 

evolution of consciousness in action, yet it is pervasive in all 

aspects of inquiry and existence. Rapt in awe will delve deeply into 

the implications of what relativity, quantum theory, and the 

anticipated fusion of these independent fields – a Unified Field 

Theory or Theory of Everything – hold for us as a collective 

humanity. Many other realms of inquiry have undergone a parallel 

process as consciousness evolves, and I will draw from these as 

well although this is rather random and far from comprehensive. I 

imagine that you, the reader of this line at this very time, could 

contribute volumes to accompany this premise drawing from the 

questions that you hold in mind, to which answers eventually 

relent and reveal themselves to you. The web portal 

worldbliss.com will serve that intention, building on the partial 

aspects of my thoughts through an invitation for dialogue. 

The social sciences have defined postmodernism as a 

rejection of modernity’s hard and fast objective truths and looking 

toward a global cultural narrative. What comes after postmod-‐ 

ernism as consciousness matures is integralconsciousness, a term 

that can be attributed to Swiss cultural philosopher Jean Gebser. 

Rapt in awe is intended as a work of integralism bridging various 

bodies of knowledge into a more holistic view representing both 

27


the solid and the subtle. It is meant to provide tangible methods 

for action to improve your life and the world at large. This is a big 

claim, for a little book, no doubt, yet the urgency for collective 

action, and more specifically – intention – is acceleratingineach passing moment. Toward a catastrophic collapse or transform-‐ 

ation 10 we go as our collective disembodied mindset and the in-‐ 

grained habits of humanity turn up the heat. Optimistically, 

climate change provides humanity with a singular collective 

challenge for unification. Many indicators suggest that the 

evolution of consciousness is tending toward unification, and this 

is a position embraced by me within rapt in awe. Maintaining this 

belief is the primary challenge that I face in each instant. Yet many 

others would contend that indicators are tending toward 

impending collapse, which conjures the bifurcation principle11 — a 

binary split, going one way or the other — identifiedwithinsuch theories as Chaos, Complexity, and Systems. 

I personally see global warming as an indicator of bifurcation 

10 

Taylor, Graeme Evolution’s Edge – The Coming Collapse and Transformation of Our World 

(New Society Publishers) 2009 

11 

The bifurcation principle refers to an inevitable split in a system or process (or 

humanity) in either evolution and transformation or devolution and collapse. 

28


processes, with the possibility and potential for global unification 

and transformation or utter systems collapse. What I do know for 

certain is that our consciousness, individually and collectively, will 

determine which outcomes manifest. My contention, and the 

purpose of this book, is that each of our thoughts, words, and 

actions contribute to the co-‐creation of our world; that is, we 

collectively create the world around us in each moment. It is not 

as simple as happy thoughts equal material abundance as the 

popular law of attraction may have one believe. Our consciousness 

is operating on various planes simultaneously, and we need to 

attune to a myriad of external factors. This is by no means a new 

idea, but one that blends with ancient mythic cosmologies and 

also holds the potential to unify the most avant garde astro-‐ 

physical cosmologies and the micro domain of the sub-‐quantum 

realm. 

Living in the modern world, in the truly global info-‐sphere, 

our preferred or perhaps default setting for relating to inform-‐ 

ation is quite cognitive, marked by rational thought. This very 

approach has created a skewed foundation on which this 

knowledge-‐based civilization is built. The observer effect of 

quantum theory demonstrates that the outcome of an experiment 

is invariably entwined with the consciousness of the observer. 

Some theorists believe that it is the interface of this consciousness 

that actually brings the observed entity into material existence. 

My contention herein is that our collective mode of thought is co-‐ 

creating the world as we experience it. All the good and all the 

bad are projections of our collective consciousness. So far I have 

hung a great deal off the word “consciousness” I will spend some 

time articulating just what I mean with that word in varying 

contexts in the first section of rapt in awe. 

An alternative to the most commonly accepted theory of 

quantum mechanics, known as the Copenhagen Interpretation, is 

one based on wholeness and unity rather than separateness and 

29


individuality. David Bohm wrote in Wholeness and the Implicate 

Order, 

To begin with undivided wholeness means, however, 

that we must drop the mechanistic order. But this order has 

been, for many centuries, basic to all thinking on physics. 

…the mechanistic order is most naturally and directly 

expressed through the Cartesian grid. Though physics has 

changed radically in many ways, the Cartesian grid … has 

remained the one key feature that has not changed. 

Evidently, it is not easy to change this, because our notions 

of order are pervasive, for not only do they involve our 

physical movement, our relationships with other people 

and with society as a whole and, indeed, every phase of our 

lives. It is thus difficult to ‘step back’ from our old notions 

of order sufficiently to be able seriously to consider new 

notions of order. 12 

Rapt in awe aims to be that ‘step back’ to unwind the mind from 

just how it engages with reality in each moment, to make space 

for such new forms of order that are in line with the evolution of 

consciousness. It is these pervasive habitual tendencies of the 

mind and the entrenched beliefs of fragmentation that inhibit self-‐ 

organizing solutions within individual, social, cultural, and global 

scales. What I am suggesting here is that we are the source of all 

of our own problems, and that we have the capacity to be the 

solutions as well. 

We will spend some time exploring fundamental 

cosmology – looking back at the origins of existence both through 

myth interpretation and through the forefront of science. rapt in 

awe at its core explores the profound implications of these 

foundational perspectives that sit as the very seed of all human 

reality and pathology. It is our relationship with reality – con-‐ 

sciousness becoming aware of itself – that is leading to potential 

12 

Bohm, David Wholeness and the Implicate Order (New York: Routledge) 1980, P. 176 

30


collective systems collapse. This is a hard pill to swallow for any, 

and all of us. It involves acknowledging the potential evil in us as 

individuals, which I see as merely our personal attachment to what 

ever limited beliefs ignite our temporal fancy in each moment, 

thereby excluding the broader flow of consciousness. “Thus, what 

is at the origin of evil is just the fact that each man pursues his 

own fragmentary notion of the good.” 13 

Fortunately, there are a plethora of options available to 

us that orient us toward solutions and optimism by means of 

devotion or rational analysis. For when we are able to recognize 

our own shadow elements we can turn “evil” around and “live”. 

The collective transformation of consciousness is the panacea to 

climate change, warring factions and terrorist cells, and even our 

domestic and personal problems. These challenges are very real 

and very urgent, yet we are ideally positioned at this juncture in 

history to truly create a fundamental global unification. “The 

whole future of Earth, as a religion, seems to me to depend on the 

awakening of our faith in the future.” 14 Unification does not 

require homogenization, but rather a collective celebration of the 

diversity of life, cultural, and creative expression. When I reflect 

on my experience of personal crisis in the back of the ambulance, 

an individual bifurcation point, I now project the transformative 

outcome to the collective global scale. I experienced first hand 

how my own modernist materialist mind-‐set inhibited the whole of 

me to function fully and heal and managed to transcend the 

limiting confines of my mind. From this I extrapolate a call for 

collective awakening to purpose as apparently independent nodes 

of cosmic consciousness intertwined as threads composing the 

fabric of our reality 15 . 

13 

14 

Bohm, David On Creativity (London and New York: Routledge) 1996, P. 107 

Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre The Future of Man (Harper & Row) 1959 

15 

Alluding to Deutsch, David The Fabric of Reality – The Science of Parallel Universes and 

Its Implications (Penguin) 1997 

31


Socio-‐Cultural Evolution 

In its simplest terms socio-‐cultural evolution means that 

our structures for bringing order to groups of people follows a 

progressive development. We started somewhere and will end up 

somewhere else. Early hominids grouped together and populated 

the planet over the course of millennia. We have now come along 

way from the African grasslands of our ancestral past to our wildly 

diverse current array of cultures and social norms. In essence we 

are all cousins according to the Human Genome Project 16 . Despite 

our common origins our lineages have followed divergent paths 

and crafted beliefs nearly as vast and diverse as the planetary 

ecosystem that we inhabit. These beliefs are the cosmologies that 

shape our relationships with both our local environment and each 

other. The wondrous diversity of the human narrative is direct 

evidence of socio-‐cultural evolution. We are a being that revels in 

novel forms of insight and discovery. On this journey across 

continents, oceans, tribal boundaries, and our own intricate fears 

some perennial tendencies have shown up. There is a core faculty 

in us as humans that persists in each moment of our lives and 

shows up in every interaction we have. This is the process of 

seeing where we fit with others, and either seeing the inherent 

similarities shared or the perceived (and real) differences. 

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi refers to the Veils of the Maya in 

his The Evolving Self as being three things that we have to 

mindfully overcome in each instant. Genetic drives, cultural lenses, 

and our ego oriented self are the veils that can inhibit our raw 

exposure to life in the world. 

The brain is a wonderful mechanism, but it is also 

deceptive. To guarantee that we don’t relax too much, it 

forces us to strive for endlessly receding goals. To keep 

us from settling for our daydreams, it begins to project 

16 

http://www.ornl.gov/sci/techresources/Human_Genome/home.shtml 

32

17 

Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. The Evolving Self: A Psychology for the Third Millennium 

(HarperCollins: New York) 1993, p. 55 

33 


unpleasant information on the screen of consciousness 

as soon as we stop doing something purposeful. It makes 

us feel good when we do things that in the past have 

served survival, but it can’t tell us when pleasure 

trespasses the threshold of danger. Whether we like it or 

not, it primes us for actions that made sense when 

people lived in caves, but are now out of place. These are 

some of the biases built into the machinery of the brain, 

and in order to gain control of consciousness we must 

learn how to moderate their influence. But they are not 

the only obstacles that stand in the way of freeing the 

self. We normally allow a whole series of illusions to 

stand between ourselves and reality. Built out of genetic 

instructions, cultural rules, and the unbridled desires of 

the self, these distortions are comforting, yet they need 

to be seen through for the self to be truly liberated. 17 

These three veils that must be seen through have been the playing 

field of history. From finding ways to meet our most basic and 

primal needs guided by genetic instruction, we have grouped as 

families and tribes and communities. These groups have created a 

cultural narrative that shapes our perceptions of the world around 

us. We need only travel amidst a vastly different culture than that 

of our origin to wake up to this fact. But the one that I find that 

most interesting is that of our own individual self interest, 

commonly associated with our ego. This is the part of our self that 

clings to concepts of self and tries to protect the perceived order 

around us. This is the voice within that sees a new face as an 

“other” rather than “one of us”. With respect to socio-‐cultural 

evolution, this protective veil that tries to profile the surrounding 

environment in each instant to maintain safety and social rank is 

perhaps the one that we are least equipped to recognize and see


through. There are many methods that can aid in seeing beyond 

our own protective barriers, most come with strong cultural 

lenses. The task for each of us is being mindful of these hard-‐wired 

tendencies and seeing through the obscurity that they create to 

see the awe in its most raw form. 

I reference this core faculty within human nature that 

aims to maintain the safety of ourselves and those closest to us 

with this phrase – where do you draw the line between us and 

them? Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi writes, “The larger the group with 

which one identifies, the closer to ultimate reality one gets.” 18 If 

there is an end point, an ultimate reality, a singularity that is the 

culmination of socio-‐cultural evolution, I think of it as seeing us all 

as one. We are all cousins. 

I want to clarify one point prior to going into some 

generalized terms for a framework of socio-‐cultural evolution. 

Integral Theory makes the clear distinction between the Structure 

Stage of socio-‐cultural development and the State Stage involved 

18 

Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. The Evolving Self: A Psychology for the Third Millennium. 

(HarperCollins: New York), 1993, p, 59 

34


in personal development and transcendental psychology. What I 

am describing below is the Structure Stages and does not limit 

individuals living within these socio-‐cultural structures from 

reaching enlightened insights. 19 

Another important point to keep in mind is that all of 

these developmental structures persist within each of us, as do 

the needs that have precipitated them throughout our ancestral 

past. All these modes of being are nestled within us and hold 

contemporary roles in our lives. Our social and cultural norms are 

formed by the necessity of our setting and progress as scarcity 

gives way to abundance within our day-‐to-‐day lives. The 

abundance of once scarce resources afford us the ability to 

innovate novel forms of being in the world, which then become 

engrained as the socio-‐cultural levels. Our cosmological outlook 

(sense-‐making structure) correlates to the external factors of how 

Figure 4.0 Socio-Cultural Correlations 

we relate to our environment (technology and artifacts). Our 

19 

Wilber, Ken. Integral Spirituality: A Startling New Role for Religion in the Modern and Post 

Modern World (Boston & London: Integral Books) 2007 pp.84-98 

35


modes of social organizing reflect worldviews in an entangled 

evolutionary progression. 

Archaic Clans were the earliest form of grouping for hominids, 

where families co-‐inhabited the landscape to better support survi-‐ 

val. I fold them into the broader tribal stage here for simplicity as 

clans are an early rendition of the tribe. 

Tribes 

In the early emergence of human social and cultural 

development, tribalism provided an effective means to meet the 

very fundamental need within each of us – thatof a senseof belonging. Along with water, food, andshelter, belongingisa truly basic human need. 

Tribal groupings are based on blood ties and kinship 

bonds, and these qualities remain a vital component to social 

order even in contemporary times. We are all part of teams in our 

daily lives whether at home as a family group that looks after the 

collective needs or at work or in recreation where the term team is 

an everyday vernacular. Our tribalism persists in both its positive 

forms as inferred above, or in more negatively associated 

functions like gangs. Although a common perception is that gangs 

are bad things, they are simple manifestations of kinship bonds for 

those who identify more with the margins than with the 

mainstream. It is the actions of gangs that are often negative and 

not the bonds that hold the members together. In the mid 1990’s 

I worked with gang members in post-‐Apartheid South Africa. Our 

work was based on restorative justice principles and guided by a 

socio-‐cultural framework called Spiral Dynamics. 20 We crafted 

value-‐forming experiences through challenge and adversity for the 

gang members in an intentional educational process. We 

consciously tried to reinforce the social fabric that bonded 

20 Becks, Don and Cowan, Chris Spiral Dynamics: Mastering Values, Leadership, and Change 

(Blackwell Publishing) 1996 

36


membership in their tribes, and encouraged them to reflect on 

their actions. I still have a vivid recollection of one young man 

stepping up in the midst of some serious tension on the cusp of 

erupting in to violence and saying, “Stop! I don’t want to do the 

killing anymore! We need to find another way.” The external 

circumstances had shifted for these young people enabling them 

to evolve beyond the engrained habits of violence as a means to 

gain a sense of power and control. With a more secure and safe 

environment the gang members were able to reflect and choose 

to move from the margins to being on the same page. 

The actions of gangs and tribal groups just described are 

examples of what develops when tribes begin to exhibit power 

over other groups. As tribal groups grow the social structure 

requires more complex organization to maintain order and this is 

typically done through power and control. Alpha dominance 

implants a hierarchical structure on the tribe which is most often 

accompanied by mythic power gods. This type of power over myth 

precipitates conquering dominator groups, which is not to say 

that every tribe orients this way. Some tribes simply co-‐exist with 

the ecosystem that embraces them, as they themselves embrace a 

cosmology more attuned to harmony and balance. As we get 

further in to the conversation of evolving consciousness and our 

current reality, these are crucial cosmologies for us to explore. 

What we often see written by the authors of history is 

tribal groups growing into feudal Power Empires. This leads to 

angry power gods and chosen peoples conquering other tribes to 

assimilate them through power and control. These tendencies 

remain pervasive even today in contemporary social institutions. 

As these Power Empires grow, the assimilating cosmologies take 

deeper root into Traditionalism. 

Traditionalism 

Within our ancestral past, human beings became the first 

37


domesticated animal, and then we brought a few others along 

with us. The gathering of plants gave way to cultivation and 

animistic beliefs relented to monotheistic and pantheistic gods. 

Agrarian communities arose with permanent settlements and 

larger social groupings, bringing along more complex systems of 

organization. As such settlements grew, traditional religious belief 

systems bound people together providing a means for city-‐states 

to grow into nation states with no clear separation between 

church and state. Traditionalism remains the foundation of our 

socio-‐cultural infrastructure and is imbedded in many of our basic 

assumptions about reality. Organizations, corporations, and 

countries maintain traditional models of governance with modern 

and postmodern interpretations. In the developed world, the 

contemporary work environment is embedded with the Calvinistic 

work ethic. This traditionalist worldview of working hard as part of 

the flock has come form the cultivated fields to the factory and 

now into the cubicle. It is a true marvel to see how such large 

groups of people can be magnetized toward shared beliefs and 

values. The fundamental infrastructure of traditionalist social 

organization remains a powerful political orientation, if not an 

entire party platform. 

The strength of traditional values shows up in our 

communities. My wife, kids, and I maintain a community garden 

plot. This functions as a social hub where people naturally help 

one another in a way that parallels the rural farming lifestyle that 

has been central to the growth of traditionalism. Larger cities have 

grown out of the cultivation of domesticated plants and livestock. 

When we have a bounty of cucumber or lettuce in our garden plot, 

we find that sharing our abundance with others equals out in a 

self-‐organizing exchange and makes us feel connected in 

community. Our kids play with other kids as we work in the garden 

with a clear understanding that there are shared values and 

acceptable standards of conduct binding us. 

38


Modernity 

The God, King and Country of Traditionalism fostered the 

evolution of centralized rule aligned with the church. The divine 

right of kings and queens ruled in the name of the cultures’ higher 

power. With the advent of exchange with neighbouring cities and 

cultures, markets provided opportunities for people to mingle off 

the farm and outside of church. Add the reading revolution 

resulting from Guttenburg’s printing press and widespread literacy 

and you have the fertile ground to cultivate modernity. Pamphlets 

and posters precipitated public outcries for justice and individual 

rights, beyond the exclusive privileges of divine right reserved only 

for the aristocracy and royalty. This widespread recognition of the 

individual’s ability to exercise free will is at the core of what we 

call the Enlightenment in western cultural history. Reason was 

seen in the material world and scientific inquiry replaced religion 

as the lens that many began to see the world through. With this 

we then had the French Revolution, the American Revolution, and 

then the Industrial Revolution. This modernist mindset remains 

the most prevalent worldview present in the developed world 

today. 

Modernity arose as a profound liberator of individuals, 

and has since increased the standard of living to startling levels for 

its active participants. Yet even with the profound benefits that 

continue to unfold from the modernist mindset, it also brings with 

it a burden of imbalance, as do the preceding levels of socio-‐ 

cultural evolution. Our fundamental tendency to relate to reality 

as being separate and distinct from it has created incredible 

capacities for destruction. The emphasis on the individual as an 

autonomous independent being has stretched to the point of both 

making the sense of belonging very diffuse in the modern world 

and has framed some basic assumptions about the nature of 

reality that precipitate destructive behaviours. Eachsuccessive stage of socio-‐cultural development holds both its assets and its 

liabilities. The task of being Integral requires that we mindfully 

39


recognize these shadow aspects, our developmental liabilities, 

and creatively integrate the assets of each developmental stage. 

Throughout rapt in awe there are recommended revised 

perspectives on commonly accepted modernist ideas. The new 

physics has been inviting us to explore a new understanding of 

fundamentals that subsequently strengthen the mythic meta-‐ 

phors that have provided comfort and inspiration in earlier stages 

of socio-‐cultural evolution. Modernity reduced reality into building 

block pieces that are not as accurate an interpretation of the 

cosmos as we once believed. Markets have supported cross-‐ 

cultural connections to new ways of seeing the world. Not only 

were our only slightly distant ancestors able to trade food goods, 

spices, textiles, and many other marvels of innovation, but also 

stories. As the contemporary conversation is transmitted through 

our day-‐to-‐day relationships, we craft the shared narrative of our 

time. This rapidly expanding story is the convergence of ponder-‐ 

ings from many minds mingling. It is the concrescence of human 

imagination tending to stretch beyond the confines of the times. 

Modernity has provided an elaborate global infrastructure with 

telecommunications and the world wide web that provide unpre-‐ 

cedented access to each others’ ideas. This global scope is at the 

cusp of consciousness emerging into human constructed artifacts, 

through us as creative nodes, so that we can come together in 

mutual understanding and appreciation as one. 

Postmodernism 

In the 1960’s, young people seeking a deviation from 

social norm formed a kind of collective groove. Morals along with 

everything else became relativistic. This pluralistic stage in the 

evolving understanding of people came as an equal and opposite 

reaction to the rigid social constructs of modernity and 

traditionalism. A tribal revival emerged as a countercultural 

revolution as many minds began to pop through the modernist 

paradigm. The idea of ecosystems and Gaia as a living system 

revitalized the animistic relationship with each other and all 

40


things. That all things are interconnected and relative to one 

another is the mark of postmodernism. With this came the New 

Age spirituality and an intimate appreciation of cultural diversity. 

Born in 1970 on Canada’s west coast, I am a child of post-‐ 

modernism. The hippy kid label has been tossed my way many 

times due to the impact this socio-‐cultural phenomenon had on 

my psyche. Both traditionalism and modernity coexisted as the 

prevalent ways of seeing the world and postmodernism marked 

the strong reaction to the homogeneity of both of these world-‐ 

views. Postmodernism lives strong in movements such as femin-‐ 

ism, environmentalism, and cultural revivals. 

Like each stage in the socio-‐cultural evolution of con-‐ 

sciousness, there are both positive and negative aspects to 

postmodernism. Coming to see the Earth as an animated living 

system where everything is interrelated rather than the mech-‐ 

anical cogs of either chance or some almighty God with a human 

physique allows us to truly wake up to the wonder abounding all 

around us each and everyday. Postmodernism opens the con-‐ 

ceptual space for the perspectives of others to truly take shape. 

More toward the negative side of this mindset, we can reflect on 

the dysfunctions that much of Postmodernism is a reaction to 

previous worldviews and takes its meaning more from what it is 

not than truly what it is. This relativism makes it hard to have 

traction, and subsequently remains dependent on early modes of 

perceiving the world to hold structure. Thus postmodernism is a 

perfect segue for Integralism, bringing to question many of the 

fundamental assumptions of preceding stages of conscious aware-‐ 

ness and inviting a new way for us to structure our understanding 

of all things. 

Integralism 

And now, as consciousness evolves into greater 

complexity, integralism invites us to harvest the best elements of 

41


each developmental stage and redefine our fundamental relation-‐ 

ship with reality and each other. Within each of us co-‐exist tribal 

bonds, traditional values, modern logic, postmodern diversity, and 

an integral conductor to bring the various faculties together to 

function through our day. The task that each of us is called to do 

in each given moment is to authentically reference this ring-‐leader 

and not put the blinders on any given facet of our developmental 

process. This is not an easy task to be on constantly, and we all 

tend to rest in certain habitual grooves carrying out patterned 

behaviour and attitudes. I contend that if this is the one thing that 

we do well, then we will do everything well. And if we can link our 

awareness of this moment-‐to-‐moment task to our breath, the 

tangible thing that we already do in each moment, then we have a 

great start. 

Each of us is a quasi-‐independent node of consciousness 

at a truly stunning moment in the universe. As we are each able to 

awaken to our role as a “creator” we can collectively manifest a 

more balanced world. I chuckle as I write this as I witness my 

rational-‐modernist self saying, “This is justNewAgedrivel!” and 

42

Teilhard de Chardin wrote about the Omega Point attractor that is drawing 

consciousness toward itself in the Phenomena of Man and The Future of Man. 

43 


yes, from that frame of reference, it is. As I integrate this aware-‐ 

ness, I refine my language, with skillful means, to also speak to the 

rational, to the cognitive aspects of you, the reader. Thus I switch 

“voices” quite often, and reference amazing scientific discoveries 

that even undermine the most basic tenants of the scientific 

method. This is not a scientific book, nor is it a spiritual book, 

despite several references to both these modes of inquiry. rapt in 

awe is more an invitation to explore your own internal landscape, 

to observe what ideas and words resonate and which ones repel. 

Raw experience is what conjures awe, and you have it within you. 

The form of discourse within rapt in awe is largely prose infiltrated 

by poetry with diagrams and commentary to aid in a common 

understanding. The invitation extends to participate in the 

collective transformation of global consciousness, to simply be 

your most true and essential self (cosmic self in Figure 4.1), as the 

Earth awakens unto itself through you. 

In December 1999 I had the privilege of hearing the Dalai 

Lama speak at the World Festival of Sacred Music at Kirstenbosch 

Gardens in Cape Town, South Africa. His Holiness spoke about a 

recent conversation that he had had with the Queen Mother, 

wherein he asked if she believed if things by and large were 

getting better or worse in the world. He recounted their line of 

dialogue as orienting to the affirmative, that things were by and 

large getting better despite the ominous problems faced around 

the globe, things were improving as a general trend. The optimism 

of this overwhelmed me – it was a wonderful perspective to 

embrace. I had spent far fewer years living in this skin than either 

of them and the optimistic orientation resonated throughout my 

being. His Holiness also spoke of an emerging Spiritual Revolution, 

and then and there I swear, I felt the rising swell of that wave 

carrying me toward some Omega Point 21 . The idea of a Spiritual 

21


Revolution was implanted intomy awarenessatthatpoint. I was 

undergoing intense personal challenges and breakthroughs at that 

time, as I was very much in the midstof healingfromthe crippling 

injury to my leg. Not only did this involve intense physical 

recuperation, but also a redefinitionofSelf. I couldnotrationally grasp what had happened to me, whichhad left me looking for 

answers and I did not have a traditionalist devotional path – ie. a 

religion – to plugintoandfollow. Theaccidentandthesubse-‐ quent fall out left me open to explore emergent terrain. Both my 

modernist and postmodern selves had an aversion to the word 

“God” thus I was not able to hold the intangible experiences of 

my near-‐death experiencein this light. The ongoing integrationof such intangible spiritual awareness that has ensued has softened 

my rejection, although my use of the word God is far, far from a 

traditionalistic religious acceptance. It is more a reframing of God 

as the cosmic consciousness that we all co-‐create. This Spiritual 

Revolution is, to me, synonymous with the evolution of conscious-‐ 

ness. It is the cresting wave of cosmic consciousness awakening 

each of us to ourselves as co-‐creators of the world we inhabit. This 

revolution begins within. 

Figure 4.2 Levels of Consciousness and Chakra Correlation 

44

Revelations of Awe 

45 


Each of us has profound capacities for the most ecstatic joy. 

As human beings we are wired for bliss. A harmonic symphony of 

brain waves will dish out a luminous sense of absolute awe, if we 

can only attune ourselves to the sympathetic vibration of cosmic 

elation. I am pretty interested in this, a curiousity that started with 

a random revelation of awe – the clear recognition that I can inter-‐ 

act with the universe at large. As I fire out labels and words to be 

associated with various experiences, I risk the skewed response of 

interpretation. Thus I invite you to participate in a reflective exer-‐ 

cise with the hope that you will have an experiential frame of 

reference for what I am going on about here. Think back on a time 

in your life where all things merged into a sense of utter per-‐ 

fection, where you were at complete ease and acceptance with 

yourself and the world around you. Perhaps it was in the midst of 

innocent childhood play, or in the calm presence of nature, maybe 

it was the luminous feeling of love and being loved. I believe that 

each of us has direct access to what I am calling awe, and that this 

experience may become easily overlooked due to rational refer-‐ 

encing and/or dogmatic devotional attachments. It is easy for us 

to overlook these experiences if they are not accounted for easily 

within our prevalent worldviews. These worldviews also shape the 

lens of interpretation of these personal experiences of awe. 

Ultimately each of us is either open or closed to the awe in 

each moment. This is the challenge brought by a self-‐reflexive 

consciousness in each instant. Being open to the awe makes us an 

agent of evolving cosmic consciousness. Whereas referencing 

fixed identity constructs such as rigid rational reductionist rules or 

dug in devotional dogma, inhibits the free-‐flow of cosmic energy 

to be in-‐formed by novelty. 22 Thus I believe the task of being 

human is the recognition and maintenance of this state of open-‐ 

22 Novelty refers to innovative new structures of thought or form. Newness.


ness, being rapt in awe. I will craft this monologue as an invitation 

for dialogue, attempting to invoke broader conversations that will 

facilitate the emergence of novel structures, by looking at some 

diverse realms of inquiry. 

rapt in awe explores the cosmological implications of the 

premise that human consciousness interacts with physical reality. 

On a circular journey we follow both branches of cosmology – that 

of fundamental science and that of creation myths – bridging the 

perceived semantic divide between these modes of knowing. rapt 

in awe then delves into questions around evolution and creation, 

again blending and bridging the dualism of language. The 

collective global implications will be examined with poetic 

precision and other forms of oxymoronic expression, tracing how 

our collective perspectives on reality do indeed co-‐create our 

reality. Also rapt in awe will explore the individual ramifications of 

an evolving cosmic consciousness, presenting how you, and each 

of us, is impacted directly by an alternative foundational view of 

being. This text stretches into forecasts and projections of 

possible directions for an evolving cosmic consciousness. This fifth 

piece is where the premise of dialogue comes in. Throughout rapt 

in awe I present some perspectives that have come to me, but it is 

from dialogue with you that a broader truth can emerge. 

In my life I have been blessed by living in geographically 

inspiring places, largely in western and northern Canada. Vast 

wilderness has been a prevalent view that has helped shape me 

physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. It has been in 

such wild places that I have routinely accessed this intimate sense 

of awe, dissolving the sense of a separate-‐self and merging with 

the medium in the moment. Bobbing in bliss at the intersectionof space and time. I spent a great deal of my earlier years roaming in 

wilderness, using the cadence of my steps to reflect on the ques-‐ 

tions explored here. It was philosophy by foot. After my accident I 

found it harder to escape like this, and I have been trying to better 

integrate into the world of others. I am now impelled to share the 

salient insights that came from those steps, and continue to trickle 

46

in as I remain open to the evolution of consciousness. 

Aboriginal Archetypes 

47 


I find the parallels between the diverse cultural narratives 

of aboriginal cultures utterly fascinating. Cultures that have main-‐ 

tained a sense of place around the world through the expansion of 

traditionalism and modernism, rooting their mythic stories into 

the surrounding landscape and the minds of each respective 

generation. The common threads between such stories can teach 

us much at this critical juncture in time. 

Human curiousity has lead to consistent questions across 

cultures, and perhaps this is why many of the answers also bear 

distinct similarities. Carl Jung thought the uniformity in world 

myths to be a function of archetypes – innate universal patterns 

that show up in the mythic cosmologies of cultures. That we ask 

such fundamental questions about the nature of life, the universe, 

and our place in it demonstrates the self-‐reflective process of 

human thought. We are wired to reflect on purpose as research 

into social psychology over the past several decades tells us. We 

humans are meaning seeking beings. 

The diverse answers to these meaning seeking questions 

provides a means for us, as it has for our fore bearers, to carry out 

our lives in relationship with each other and the world at large. 

Cosmology is our way of relating to our reality, providing a sense 

of meaning to living. Such answers are relational in their very 

essence, bound by cultural context – relative to the environment 

in which we live. Myths need to be absorbed within cultural 

context. They also closely correlate with individual and collective 

levels of socio-‐cultural evolution. Thus myth is a product of the 

collective’s developmental stage – archaic, tribal, traditional, mod-‐ 

ern, postmodern, and integral. 

If we look at the dynamic interplay between novelty (new


ideas) and confirmation (common interpretation) in the context of 

mythic archetypes we can arrive at some helpful insights to aid in a 

unified understanding of reality. The process of confirmation 

occurs by the act of ‘agreeing with’ which initially establishes and 

then reinforces a form of convention, rooting the status quo. 

Novelty is the cusp of evolution emerging as original insight, 

pushing the edge of ideas and understanding. Confirmation and 

novelty interact along a continuum and the balance between the 

two tips as it tilts with socio-‐cultural evolution. As consciousness 

expands novel modes of relating emerge. Tribal shaman pierce the 

membrane of the group’s common understanding and find novel 

metaphors to aid in a greater understanding of our personal 

relationship with the cosmos. There are spiritual visionaries at all 

levels of socio-‐cultural evolution that look beyond the status quo 

of confirmation beliefs and find new ways of seeing and saying. 

Novel ways of seeing reality require new ways of saying to 

translate the raw experience of awe to others, and often this 

change process is met with resistance. 

The act of confirmation has been associated with logical 

analysis correlating with the left hemisphere of the brain. Novelty 

relates to imaginative insight aligned with the right hemisphere of 

the brain. The relevance in this neurological explanation here is 

that each of us embodies this continuum within. Balancing these 

capacities keeps us both grounded in structure and fluid in 

innovation. Each of us have novel ideas pop up that we find ways 

to communicate and eventually have confirmation on from others. 

As consciousness continues to evolve, this once novel under-‐ 

standing becomes a confirmed belief structure, which then 

becomes a platform for further novel interpretations to emerge. 

This is the process of socio-‐cultural evolution at its essence. 

There is a progression in socio-‐cultural evolution, as we saw 

earlier. This collective developmental process brings with it 

interpretations reflected in a culture’s mythic cosmologies. The 

changes are in the metaphors of myth act as externalized images 

of internal processes. Our personal experiences of awe are 

48

49 


internally interpreted and related through external symbols for 

exchange with others. Often there is something lost in translation. 

Stories are shared and undergo confirmation by other members of 

the collective to affirm the interpretation of the awe. Individual 

spontaneous insights condensed into symbols for sharing. It is the 

metaphors that are confirmed, and they typically relate to the 

surrounding environment. Early forms of artistic expression where 

initially acts of novelty that were then confirmed – archaic shaman 

translated their visions into symbolic exchange – cave paintings 

for instance – which brought people together by means of 

confirmation. These visions are direct access to the awe in the 

language presented within this text. Tribes form by confirmation 

of interpretations of the awe that we call a group’s cosmology. 

Within the context of evolving cosmic consciousness, novelty is 

the driving edge of evolution and confirmation is the structural 

integration of novel insight. As long as this continuum is able to tip 

and tilt freely, finding its own balance, evolution progresses. Yet 

the tendency for us as modern humans has been to be rather 

attached to confirmation, using rational analysis to affirm and 

reinforce our cosmological outlooks such that novel insights are 

often squelched. The core premise of rapt in awe is that we must 

access this state of awe directly for ourselves to be active agents 

of evolution. 

Tribal groups communicate their collective mythic cosmo-‐ 

logies through oral story. Such stories are often told by com-‐ 

munity elders and from what I have witnessed first hand there is a 

great deal more going on than mere language. The storytelling 

tradition involves a transmission of energy with invites the 

listeners and receivers closer access to the awe, to a direct 

experience of the divine. The literal interpretation of oral story 

and mythic cosmology tends to overemphasize the act of 

confirmation while the direct experience of awe promotes novel 

modes of expression. The human capacity for language began to 

develop around 40,000 years ago, and the progressive evolution


of culture manifests through the dominant mode of communi-‐ 

cation. Tribal groups interpret their cosmological origins through 

the archetypes of animal spirits, as influenced by their immediate 

environments. Thus animistic cosmologies prevail in this develop-‐ 

mental stage where the external world is understood to respond 

to the actions of people, thus the painting of animal spirits is seen 

to influence the hunt. This interaction between people and the 

cosmos persists through the different realms of development as 

ritual, prayer, and conscious intention. How we interact with the 

broader cosmos is what rapt in awe is about. 

When the outside world is believed to be hostile and 

threatening tribal groups orient toward the warrior archetype. The 

protective drives encircle the tribe to perceive others as a “them”. 

This level of consciousness coupled with the perceived “us/them” 

divide is perhaps confirmation at its most adamant. Some scholars 

have thought of the warrior archetype as a socio-‐cultural stage, 

yet I see it more as a tendency that pervades all stages. Warrior 

groups tend to have more anthropocentric power gods with 

lightning bolts and bad tempers. As discussed earlier, we see 

Power Empires exhibiting the warrior archetype and asserting 

dominance over others. Tribal shamans are more closely aligned 

with priesthood and kingship, wherein the community leaders are 

believed to have special powers. Within the development of a 

warrior mindset within tribal memes certain groups attacked, 

raided, and assimilated other groups, forcing confirmation of a 

common myth. Power over is the prevalent paradigm with warrior 

consciousness where the gods or God are perceived to have 

power over us, and that is the model for social organization. The 

pathologies of the warrior level of development emerge in each of 

us when we feel in any way threatened, contribution to power and 

control issues within many relationships, as well as contributing to 

the divide between who we consider “us” and “them”. 

This warrior archetype is not alwayspoweroverothers, in 

many tribes, traditions, and cultures it has more to do with power 

over oneself. In the Wet’suwet’en 

50 

cultural tradition, from

51 


Northwest British Columbia, the role of the warrior is to “uphold 

the burden of peace”. I have witnessed how the responsibility of 

such a burden cultivates civil character and compassion. I have 

also been lead to believe that the warrior of the plains tribes of 

indigenous peoples in North America were messengers that 

actually liaised with other groups, upholding the burden of peace. 

I take from this that the warrior archetype also strongly involves 

overcoming the self and the cultural identity to stretch the 

diameter of the circle drawn between the “us” and the “them”. 

As we start to dig deeper into the implications of our own 

projected thoughts and beliefs, we will see how the integration of 

such noble traditions as that of Wet’suwet’en warriors can trans-‐ 

form the world into a more harmonious and unified place. 

The advent of written language as a novel mode of com-‐ 

munication contributed greatly to the development of traditional 

consciousness. Fixed settlements emerged around agriculture and 

city-‐states grew and the mythic cosmologies became religions. 

The first writing was limited to an elite few – scribes, priests, and 

rulers in a very stratified population. Oral story with its energetic 

transmission was replaced by the written symbol – words and 

glyphs and scriptures arose. Direct access to the awe, the divine, 

became the privilege of the priesthood and cosmologies were 

pretty much co-‐opted by confirmation and expressions of novelty 

typically became very risky. The epitome of the traditional mindset 

is very evident today in religious fundamentalism. The devotion to 

the written word of scriptures guides the actions and intentions of 

this level of consciousness with considerable fervor. As we have 

already illustrated, the essence of language is the use of symbols 

to aid in common understanding, these words holding associ-‐ 

ations. The literal interpretation of metaphor becomes quite mis-‐ 

leading and contributes to profound divisions in the world even 

today. Traditional fervor met with warrior methodologies turns 

into suicide bombings, terrorist attacks, and genocidal wars. The 

perennial pattern with traditional mythic cosmologies is a hostile


world with an omnipotent God figure. Social organization has 

central control with no separation between church and state, 

religion and rule. 

We are all familiar with stories of how novelty has been 

shunned by the traditional level of consciousness – Socrates, 

Galileo, Witch hunts, etc. Modernity emerged despite the rigid 

conformity to traditionalist confirmation largely through the 

parallel processes of science, technology, and art. Despite the 

persistent human tendency to be vehemently attached to old 

accepted, tried and true, ideas and modes of thought, con-‐ 

sciousness does continue to evolve and novelty rears its head 

seeking confirmation for itself. We can see this process unfolding 

at each level of consciousness, in ourselves and as a collective 

humanity. 

Communications technology provided another springboard 

for consciousness to evolve with Gutenberg’s invention of the 

printing press in 1454. The advent of printing on mass enabled the 

alleviation of the barriers of churchandstatecontroloverideas. Literacy remains the single greatest determinant of individual 

empowerment globally. Novelty had managed to find a means to 

promote itself. The ability for the broader populace to share 

thoughts and ideas and for literacy to spread beyond the 

controlled confines of the select few gave birth to modernity. 

Humanity began to recognize its own creative capacities and a 

radical new approach to cosmology ensued. Faith was placed in 

rational explanations and the scientific method. Church and state 

were separated and dissected in honour of the scientific method. 

Matter and mind and spirit where also divided and cosmology 

oriented toward mechanistic explanations. The universe was 

perceived to be God’s unwinding clock. Modernityusheredinthe rise of individual rights and freedoms and modes of governance 

that empowered the masses of common folk like no time before, 

evident in both the French and American Revolutions. Like in all 

transformative developmental leaps, the balance of the novelty-‐ 

confirmation continuum favoured new insight initially, until once 

52

again confirmation reigned supreme. 


Novelty and confirmation can also be described as the 

process of differentiation and integration. Novelty and differentia-‐ 

tion are closely related in ushering in new or different ideas to that 

of the mainstream. Confirmation and integration are in close rela-‐ 

tionship as well as mutual recognition of common understanding 

and parallel processes emerge. This evolutionary process is well 

explained in a tangible individual context by Mihaly Csikszent-‐ 

mihalyi, “Will I be able to learn something new (differentiation) 

that will add meaning to my experience (integration).” 23 Thus the 

processes of novelty and confirmation and differentiation and 

integration are dependent of the other for more complex 

evolutionary structures to emerge. 

Each of these levels of development emulates a pendulum 

swing, novel interpretations of the awe and all things reacting to 

the convention of confirmation. As explored deeply in the works 

of Hegel, the evolution of consciousness is a dialectic process of 

thesis – antithesis – synthesis or abstract – negative – concrete 24 . 

That is to say that as things progress into greater states of 

complexity or closer to a more comprehensive truth, they tend to 

react to what came before and then resolve into a better blend of 

both. In socio-‐cultural evolution we see the novel tendencies of a 

new level as overt reactions to the preceding level. This illustrates 

the process of differentiation as novelty emerging which then 

requires integration. 

Don Beck and Chris Cowan have presented Spiral Dynamics, 

a model of development based on the earlier work of psychologist 

23 

Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly The Evolving Self: A Psychology for the Third Millennium (New 

York: HarperCollins) 1993. p. 166 

24 

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. The Logic. Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences. 

2nd Edition (London: Oxford University Press) 1874 

53


Clare Graves 25 . Graves conducted research to further affirm 

Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs centered on both people’s 

and society’s values. Beck and Cowan have extended the ideas 

that Graves worked on, illustratingthedevelopmentalprocesses operating as a progressive dialectic. Within Spiral Dynamics the 

pendulum swing from a collectivist orientation to an individualistic 

orientation is evident from level to level. The levels on the right in 

Figure 4.2, archaic clans, power empires, and modern emphasize 

individualism. Those on the left, tribal, traditional, and postmod-‐ 

ern represent more collectivist perspectives. 

Figure 4.2 the Dialectic Spiral of Evolutionary Progress 26 

25 

Becks, Don and Cowan, Chris Spiral Dynamics: Mastering Values, Leadership, and Change 

(Blackwell Publishing) 1996 

26 

This diagram is greatly informed and inspired by Figure 3-1 from: Steve McIntosh. 

Integral Consciousness and the Future of Evolution (St. Paul, Minnesota: Paragon House) 

2007, p. 34 

54

55 


Postmodernism asserts the values of equality promoted 

within modernism into the collective sphere. Pluralism, embracing 

a diverse range of views, is the prevalent attribute of postmodern 

thought. The advent of cross-‐cultural and global travel and 

communication, supported by transportation and communications 

technologies and infrastructure, have contributed to the rise of 

postmodernism. Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity tells us 

that there is no fixed or absolute frame of reference, and when 

this general principle is applied to culture, we can see that our 

worldviews are coloured by the lens from which we look. Our 

cultural paradigm or pedestal is a frame of reference in them-‐ 

selves, and that other cultures will view the same object differ-‐ 

ently due to their fundamental cosmological outlook. The cosmo-‐ 

logies of postmodernism are pluralism and relativism, marked by 

resurgence in both animism and mysticism. Postmodernism ani-‐ 

mates the earth as a living, breathing, thinking Gaia and sees all 

manifesting creation as a dynamic process unfolding. 

To its detriment, postmodernism rejects healthy aspects of 

modernity and traditionalism as a dialectic reaction. The pendulum 

swing of developmental processes reacting to and rejecting what 

came before. Novel ideas are like individuating teenagers rebelling 

against their parents. Confirmation paradoxically embraces non-‐ 

conformity. Thus postmodernism tends to hinder fertile ground 

for new and novel insights to emerge due to its repulsion against 

ranking and value judgments that are embedded in the plurality 

and relativism the worldview. The dialectic pendulum of con-‐ 

sciousness evolving operates from an either/or mode of inquiry, 

where truth within one idea is assumed to automatically rule out 

the truth of another. 

Thus the evolution of consciousness has brought us here, to 

this moment where we can integrate the healthy and productive 

aspects of each stage of development – archaic clans, tribal, 

power empires, traditional, modern, and postmodern – into an


integral level of consciousness. This is the place where diverse 

perspectives can be integrated into more complete truths – an 

and/and or both/and truth can emerge. One idea does not need to 

necessarily displace or overrule the truth in different points of 

view as it does in debate. Both perspectives hold validity in their 

relative contexts, and neither is absolute nor complete in and of 

itself. Welcome to the integral level of conscious development, 

the novel structures of which are already expressing themselves 

through you. This is the state of mind that does not cling rigidly to 

the constructs of thoughts and perceptions, but allows them to 

reveal their metaphors of truth into an intricate web of under-‐ 

standing. The relational strands of thoughts, intuitions, and 

sensual experience enable us to integrate the and/and assets of 

multiple perspectives. The process of dialogue supports such a 

blending of diverse perspectives to arrive together through an 

exchange of ideas at more rich, full, and complex understandings. 

The social and cultural beliefs and assumptions that we 

accumulate not only shape our very perceptions of reality, but also 

create the reality that we experience. It becomes a cosmic chicken 

and egg debate. We have spent considerable time looking at such 

social and cultural processes to bring more clarity to what informs 

our own understanding of both ourselves and the world we live in. 

In truth, we are all these things concurrently. Each of us is a 

depository of not only the entire socio-‐cultural evolutionary 

process, but also that of all matter, mind and meaning. This is an 

awful lot to grasp in each passing moment, yet that is why we are 

here in this skin, breathing and seeing and thinking the world into 

being. 

The Eros Tilt 

Do we need a new mythic cosmology that enables this 

integration? A cosmology that integrates cosmologies, a new story 

of who we are and how we got here, blending the best of 

animism, religion, science, and all things in between, above and 

beyond? I think so, and I am hoping that you will allow this story to 

56

57 


be told through your own novel insights as an active agent of 

conscious evolution. 

When I was a small child I used to look straight at the sun. I 

did this mostly because I was told not to, that it would damage my 

eyes. I was just trying to see what the luminous orb in the sky was. 

I remember the sunspots that persisted long after I took my gaze 

away, and how I wondered if that was the damage done by the 

sun or if other people saw that too. I wondered if I was in any way 

distinct from other people, if others shared the same experiences, 

saw the same things, tasted the same tastes. My personal inter-‐ 

actions with the world around me stimulated novel insights and 

perspectives that sought confirmation with others. Even these 

words that I write here participate in this process of edging 

emergent ideas for me and sharing them is a communicative act of 

seeking confirmation. The analogy of staring into the light of the 

sun fits well with a broad archetype of spiritual experience and 

mythic cosmology – wisdom traditions have told us to view the 

Creator directly is too much for most of us, that we need an 

intermediate reflective glimpse first for if we were to see straight 

into our origin, we would become undone. This did not stop me 

from staring directly at the sun. Direct access to what I am calling 

the awe is truly and profoundly overwhelming. Yet it is also Eros 

the cosmic attractor that pulls evolution along to greater de-‐grees 

of complexity and the Omega influence described by Teilhard de 

Chardin, that coaxes us toward our own evolution. The use of 

intermediate reflectors, the cultural conduits and gatekeepers of 

awe, has created a hall of mirrors. These intermediary influences 

often deter from the Eros evolutionary influence and in many 

traditions and paths the reflectors themselves are mistaken for 

the awe itself. Thus the priesthood is associated with Godhood, 

the gurus with the god. I believe that we all need raw access to 

awe to be active agents in the evolution of complexity. 

It is my contention that at this stage in the evolutionary


process, we as a collective humanity need to have direct access to 

the awe in order for transformationtotakeplace. Theinter-‐ mediate reflectors have in most cases attempted to merely 

provide a glimpse at our cosmic origin, and to craft a story to bring 

each of us closer to that direct experience of awe. Some have felt 

the personal power of adoration and as such inhibited the 

progressive experience of awe. The new story of the origin of us, 

the origin of you, is an integral web threaded with diverse lines of 

thought from each level of evolutionary development. Thus we 

each must own and acknowledge the archaic clan, the tribal, the 

power empire, the traditional, the modern, and postmodern 

aspects of self in their various voices and rewrite our personal 

stories. 

I believe strongly that each of us has a gift that comes with 

us into this life as an energetic physical thinking breathing being 

and that this emerges as an intrinsic sense of purpose. This gift, 

though, is entwined deep within with our shadow, the darker 

capacities that we generally do not want to acknowledge within 

ourselves. I see gift and shadow as the two primordial serpents of 

the Caduceus, the Kundalini, the Zulu Umbilini, and the Mayan 

Kultanlilni 27 . This interplay of light and darkness within our nature 

is reflected in our thoughts, speech, and actions. Harmonizing 

these primordial energies within is how we free the Eros drive, the 

novelty creating purpose of us. 

Rapt in awe is a metaphoric stick in the sand aimed to 

inspire ongoing dialogue about just how we can urge evolution 

along. I am taking a stab at an integral story of the origin of us, an 

emergent cosmology that I continue to experiment with and 

refine each day. This is for me, and this process is truly self-‐ 

indulgent as I shout out in search of confirmation and validation. 

Yet it is also an act of me allowing novelty to flow through me. 

Armed with the one of the core principles of Ken Wilber’s Integral 

Theory, that everything is true, just partial, I forge forward upward 

27 

(http://www.astrodreamadvisor.com/M_yellow_se_warrior.html) 

58

28 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncertainty_principle 

59 


and onward with this partial picture inviting you to add colour, 

texture, detail, and dimensions to this story of us. 

I hope that you find diverse ways to share your sponta-‐ 

neous insights, and pose provocative questions to urge evolution 

along. If I have learned one thing from my philosophical ponder-‐ 

ings, it is that I can learn from everything and everyone. 

How energy flows into existence 

In the beginning, be it the Big Bang or God’s breath, all 

things were just an ocean of formless energy. Space-‐time and 

matter as we understand them had not come into existence yet, 

that took some seconds and a few symmetry breaks. It is arguable 

that there was even consciousness available to perceive any of it. 

This cosmic beginning can be seen from various perspectives, all 

of which hold facets of truth – a primordial soup, nothingness, an 

ocean of unstructured energy, a singularity, a unified field, the 

nondual, the quantum vacuum, the zero point field, the Akashic 

field, God, Allah, Shiva and Shakti, or simply the awe – truth is 

determined by the lens that is looking. This origin is really un-‐ 

knowable in the way that we classify knowing – the very act of 

analysis of the first instant of the universe is marked by a lingering 

uncertainty. In the realm of fundamental physics this relates to 

Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle 28 that states that all the vari-‐ 

ables of an entity cannot be known simultaneously as one expects 

with classical mechanics. For instance the location and velocity of 

an electron are indeterminate when analyzing its mass or struc-‐ 

ture. This raw state of cosmic origins is the realm of metaphysics – 

beyond physics – and an extension of this uncertainty is the multi-‐ 

tude of interpretations and ways of seeing and saying that have 

emerged to describe the origins of us. This first instant of creation, 

before space and time were even born, is herein referred to as the


awe to honour the felt experience that it invokes. This awe per-‐ 

sists in each passing moment as the universe expands into greater 

complexity. Thus the awe is thesubstrataofform, energy, and 

consciousness. 

In looking back at our cosmic origins, when projecting the 

images of subatomic particles and forces, the Standard Model of 

the Big Bang Theory 29 is considered the most valid interpretation 

among cosmologists. Alternative theories do exist and each 

contributes its own truths mapping diverse perspectives of the 

uncertainty and indeterminacy of the awe. In physics this period of 

absolute uncertainty is referred to as the Planck Era or Epoch, 

named after Max Planck 30 , which lasted 10⁻⁴³ seconds after the Big 

Bang. The four fundamental forces of nature – gravity, electro-‐ 

magnetic, strong nuclear, and weak nuclear – are believed to have 

been equal and symmetrical for this unimaginably small duration. 

The Grand Unification Epoch followed a symmetry break as gravity 

split from what is called the electronuclear or Grand Unified 

Theory force between 10⁻⁴³ and 10⁻³⁶ seconds after the Big Bang. 

Such symmetry breaks can be seen as novelty emerging amidst 

the confirmation of symmetry, thus the evolution of structure and 

complexity comes from flux. The Standard Model tells us that the 

Inflationary epoch came next between 10⁻³⁶ and 10 –32 seconds 

wherein the spatial expansion of the universe was exponential – 

meaning that is grew massively. The rudimentary forms of parti-‐ 

culate structure began to emerge as novel forms but where then 

assimilated by decay quickly. The Inflationary Epoch ushered in the 

Electroweak Epoch spanning from 10 –36 to 10 –12 seconds, both 

precipitated by the symmetry break between the strong nuclear 

force and the electroweak force due to sufficient cooling. We are 

29 Fred Hoyle is attributed with coining the term “Big Bang” in a 1949 BBC Radio 

broadcast, although he was not an advocate for the model of the universe. The Standard 

Model refers to the most commonly accepted interpretation of the observations, and is 

by no means the only astrophysical nor cosmological understanding of our origins. 

30 Max Planck (1858-1947) was a German physicist considered to be the founder of 

quantum theory. 

60


still in the realm of an incomprehensible primordial soup, the uni-‐ 

verse being an amorphous hot plasma from a process of reheating 

just after the inflation. Novelty brings forth the first stable parti-‐ 

culate structures with quarks, electrons and neutrinos within the 

dominant radiation. 

The next projected symmetry break occurred in the four 

fundamental forces that we know today with the split of the weak 

nuclear force from the electromagnetic force. Known as the Quark 

Era, between 10 –12 seconds and 10 –6 seconds after the Big Bang, 

the universe is still too hot for quarks to form into hadrons, which 

segue into the Hadron Epoch. As quarks become confined within 

hadrons between 10 –6 seconds and 1 second after the Big Bang, 

the universe cooled and condensed to facilitate the creation and 

subsequent annihilation of matter and anti-‐matter. Here we have 

the formation of protons, neutrons, and the hydrogen nuclei. 

Further cooling processes result in a mass cancellation of hadrons 

and anti-‐hadrons to usher in the Lepton Epoch between 1 second 

and 10 seconds after the Big Bang, leptons being electrons and 

positrons. The matter/anti-‐matter cancellation and annihilation 

continues resulting in the Photon Epoch between 10 seconds and 

380,000 years after the Big Bang where photons interact with 

electromagnetic charged protons and electrons. A period known 

as the Big Bang Nucleosynthesis is contained within the Photon 

Epoch taking place between the comprehensible 3 and 20 minute 

marks after the Big Bang. Within this seventeen minute period the 

universe retains enough heat for atomic nuclei to form through 

fusion resulting in hydrogen and helium nuclei. 

How was that for some light reading? Embrace the awe. 

We all have a sense for minutes passing and can likely 

recall the concept of atomic nuclei from our education in classical 

physics so at this point the universe starts to make some sense. 

The important process here is that theabstractandamorphous 61


origins of physical reality exist concurrently with our gross mater-‐ 

ial reality. That is our comic origins continueto unfoldin each pro-‐ 

gressive instant. The formative causation 31 of this very moment as 

you read holds within the persistence of memory 32 of the origin of 

the universe, the perspectives required to peel the moment down 

through exponential layers of milli-‐, micro-‐, nano-‐, pico-‐, seconds 

down to the uncertainty of the Planck time (10⁻⁴³ seconds) also 

unveil the information and energy fields of an implicate order, as 

conceptualized by David Bohm. The passing of time is the accumu-‐ 

lation of novelty concreasing as a more evolved consciousness. 

We will return to this premise with further detail and from diverse 

perspectives, but now I will get back to a universe that is just 

beginning to make sense. 

After this twenty minute mark the universe cools to the 

point that fusion ceases and the Photon Epoch persists for a long 

stretch wherein relativistic radiation (photons) and matter (nuclei) 

interact, reached equality after 70,000 years to usher in matter 

domination as the gravitational effects of harmonize with nuclear 

forces to manifest progressively more stable material structures. 

With ongoing expansion the density of the universe falls and 

electrons bind with hydrogen and helium nuclei and atoms are 

born between 240,000 and 380,000 years after the Big Bang, 

referred to as the Recombination. Most of these hydrogen and 

helium atoms are now electromagnetically neutral and thus 

photons can now stream freely in a transparent universe creating 

the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation. This brings the end 

to the Photon Epoch and welcomes the Dark Ages, which last a 

long, long time – 100 million years from the Big Bang. I am sure 

that some would say that we are still in the Dark Ages. 

31 Theoretical biologist Rupert Sheldrake presented the Hypothesis of Formative 

Causation as an alternative to mechanistic origins within the bios. The theory suggests 

that each existing entity has a morphogenetic field that co-creates its form in manifest 

physical reality with fundamental energy. 

32 The Persistence of Memory is title of a Salvador Dali painting. 

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Transparent space composed of protostellar clouds of 

hydrogen and helium atoms collapse at the rate of free fall when 

they reach a minimum density of 10 –13 grams per cubic centimeter 

due to gravitational attraction and a quasar is born 33 . Within the 

Reionization Epoch, between 100 million and 1 billion year post Big 

Bang, the intense radiation emitted by quasars reionizes the rest 

of space into plasma. The persistence of gravity formed early 

galaxies at around 600 million years, which then lead to the form-‐ 

ation of clusters and super clusters of stars. After the seventeen-‐ 

minute window of fusion back in the Photon Epoch, no other 

elements were created in the universe until the advent of fusion 

once again emerged in the centre of stars. The stellar phenomena 

created sufficient pressures and temperatures to forge further 

structural complexity, and thus is the origin of all other heavier 

elements in the universe. The stuff that you are made of was 

forged at the centers of stars. Stars themselves are born, evolve 

and then die. Some stars simply burn out, other fade away, and 

then some terminate triumphantly in super novae, exploding and 

distributing their composite material and cosmic shock waves 

throughout the interstellar medium. Thus distributing heavier 

elements forged by fusion in the center of a star in the interstellar 

clouds suspended in a particulate dance with the four forces of 

the universe. 

9.1 billion years after the most improbable Big Bang, be it 

God’s breath, nothingness emerging as matter and anti-‐matter, or 

consciousness first seeing it original face 34 , a protostellar nebula 

reaching beyond the current radius of Pluto’s orbit was washed 

over by a shock wave of a supernovae. This precipitated angular 

momentum in the nebula, which accelerated its rotation creating a 

protoplanetary disk at ninety degrees from its axis of spin. Gravity 

33 Jantsch, Erich. The Self-Organizing Universe: Scientific and Human Implications of the 

Emerging Paradigm of Evolution (Pergamon Press) 1980, p.89 

34 From the Zen Koan: “What was Your original face before your parents were born?”


and inertia coalesced the nebulous protostellar cloud composed 

of seventy percent hydrogen, twenty-‐eight percent helium, and 

the remaining two percent being nitrogen, oxygen, and carbon 

distributed all distributed by an ancient supernovae. The proto-‐ 

planetary disk began to separate into orbital disks around the 

concentrated center mass due to collisions and density anomalies 

which then con-‐creased into protoplanetary structures. In a 

process lasting a mere decade our Sun and the formative fore-‐ 

bearers to the planets including our Earth were formed. Hydrogen 

fusion ignited in the center of the Sun and the solar system was 

born. Somewhere between 4.54 and 4.57 billion years ago the 

Earth formed – around about 9.13 to 9.16 billion year after the Big 

Bang. Novelty and confirmation, a formative flux, constantly 

created further structures of complexity. The advent of heavy 

elements supported novelty emerging as molecules, which in turn 

crystallized into minerals. This entire process of the crystallization 

of structure and function follows the expansion and subsequent 

cooling in the universe. Matter condensed from raw energy and 

can be seen as frozen energy. 

The salient insight that emerges from this protracted view 

of the creation of form and function is that what we perceive as 

matter is merely frozen energy. What we experience as rigid and 

static is a suspended web of interwoven energy in constant flux. 

The Standard Model of the Big Bang theory is highly confirmed 

scientific interpretation of creation, amidst many other fields of 

view, including those suggesting divine intervention. The risk of 

attachment to this model of the universe is that it does not leave 

room for further novel expressions or understandings. I simply 

encourage you to define an interpretation that resonates with 

you. I personally find that I can better intuit a sense of truth more 

easily than I can cognitively grasp one, let alone articulate it 

through the crude tool of words. The experience of living has 

taught me that my heart holds more wise understanding than the 

grasping of my mind. Our ability to attune to this intuitive pres-‐ 

ence – this awe – defines our capacity to simply be present and 

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65 


aware in each moment. And it is this presence and awareness that 

enables us to flow with the current of consciousness as it evolves. 

Thus in a world composed of frozen energy holding fleeting 

momentary form as matter, we must attune to the flow of novel 

change processes. In this vein, we are constantly creating what is 

and what will be. 

The Mind of Matter 

I love the elegance of the idea of frozen energy, congealed 

intention persisting through moments entangled with conscious-‐ 

ness as it evolves. As we explore a new story of cosmological 

origins, I think it best now to interject amidst the scientific search 

for some primary constituent building block. Both the mythic and 

religious traditions tend to be anthropocentric in their cosmo-‐ 

logical interpretations of reality, that is the projection of a human-‐ 

like intelligence at the origin of creation. The Standard Model of 

the Big Bang theory with its primordial forge of initial uncertainty 

from an undefined singularity leaves room for such an original 

intelligence, yet does not necessitate a prime mover as such. 

Perhaps nothingness simply became bored of itself and thus a 

chain of causation emerged from a dualistic split of matter and 

anti-‐matter, mirroring into ever increasing complexity but always 

balancing each other out as nothingness. It is within such mystical 

interpretations of the initial emergence of existence that we can 

all agree, if only we can bridge the semantics of our infinite 

interpretations of this raw experience of awe. 

In linking together such instances of awe from my own life, 

I extend an open invitation for you do the same. It is by owning 

such experiences that I continue to heal the pervasive tendency to 

marginalize – cast off into the margins – such sentient aspects of 

self, and thus come to know a deeper and broader self. That is to 

say, how do we cast off the persistent need for confirmation – 

acceptance from the collective – in order to honour novelty – our


own creative genius? This question is at the center of this book, 

and I hope that you can answer it for me by the end. My dreaming 

child’s mind had a much more available access to this experience 

of awe than the rigid constructs of my aging self, and amidst social 

convention this is viewed as maturity, knowing better, and putting 

away childhood delusions. Despite there being some truth to 

these perspectives, I suggest that it is also these so-‐called mature 

adult tendencies that inhibit the flow of conscious evolution. I 

have a vivid recollection of reading William Blake’s poem Auguries 

of Innocence in school. 

To see the world in a grain of sand, 

And the heavens in a wild flower 

Hold infinity in the palm of your hand, 

And eternity in an hour. 35 

The invocation of mystical insight flourished from reading 

this first verse. This was within an English class in the ninth grade, 

and I think that I was learning about Neils Bohr’s atomic model 36 in 

science at the same time, which precipitated visions of the 

parallels between the microscopic and macroscopic worlds – the 

subatomic world somehow resembling the solar system and 

beyond. Perhaps Dr. Seuss’s lyrical books inspired a parallel 

process in my early years, the view of worlds nestled within 

worlds. What I recall vividly is the idea of the universe as a series of 

Russian Matryoshka dolls fitting inside each other infinitely. This 

seems a fertile concept in hindsight with fundamental physics 

rhyming about the universe being one within the Multiverse 37 . 

What I want to take from this single experience of the awe is the 

image of progressive layers – multiple perspectives – simul-‐ 

taneously interacting with the world outside of our mind. Any of 

35 Auguries of Innocence from Life of William Blake (1880), Volume 2; Alexander Gilchrist; 

Macmillan & Co.; London 

36 Electrons orbit around the atomic nucleus much like planets orbit around the Sun. 

37 The Multiverse is a term attributed to philosopher / psychologist William James in 

1895, synonymous with Meta-universe or metaverse, and refers to the theory that our 

Universe is one of multiples universes, often called parallel universes. 

66

67 


these perspectives from the vast diversity of reference points hold 

validity despite their inherent variances. That one person sees acts 

of Allah and another sees gifts of God holds more in common than 

does differ. It is the persistent need for confirmation of what we 

see, understand and interpret that conjures the difference as well 

as our ongoing attachment to singular and narrow interpretations 

that propagate this fragmentation. 

Before we go on to a scientific interpretation of how life 

emerged through evolutionary processes, I want to scratch the 

surface of an idea that truly revolutionizes the most commonly 

accepted view of reality in our contemporary worldview. The sep-‐ 

aration of mind and spirit from matter is most often associated 

with Rene Descartes the French philosopher, mathematician, and 

scientist, considered by many to be the father of modernism. It is 

not so much the Dualism of Descartes’ philosophy that led to a 

prevalent disembodiment of mind and body, but the inter-‐ 

pretations by others of these ideas. Modernism is marked with the 

distinct perspective of nature and the body as being separate from 

spirit, and thus mechanistic. Think of cogs of a clock, or atoms 

bouncing off of each other like billiard balls. I make reference to 

this view as the modernist-‐thought-‐box, drawing from the cliche 

“in the box”. The emergence of postmodernist, and then integral, 

insights truly reanimates nature, the body, the earth, and the 

essence of mind and spirit in matter. And with modernity being 

the most prevalent mode of interpreting reality on the planet at 

this time, it is this reanimation and respiritualization which 

catalyzes our collective transformation. 

Theoretical biologist Rupert Sheldrake has been promoting 

the concept of Morphic Resonance for decades and certainly not 

without stirring controversy within the status quo ranks of 

contemporary scientific confirmation. Although I am not a trained 

biologist, or perhaps because I am not a trained biologist, I find 

profound resonance with Sheldrake’s interpretation of how evol-‐


ution unfolds into being with the concepts of formative causation 

and morphic fields. “The hypothesis of formative causation pro-‐ 

poses the morphogenetic fields play a causal role in the 

development and maintenance of the forms of systems at all 

levels of complexity. In this context, the word ‘form’ is taken to 

include not only the shape of the outer surface or boundary of a 

system, but also its internal structure.” 38 Morphicisusedasan abbreviated form of morphogenetic from the Ancient Greek 

morpho meaning “form” gignesthai meaning “tobeborn”, thus 

the term refers to the birth or origin of form. This idea as I 

understand it relates to the physical manifestation of form coming 

from morphic fields as energy interacts with and flowsthrough them. Morphic fields are like the ice cube trays and water meta-‐ 

phorically represents raw energy as matter manifests asfrozen energy. 

In my personal cosmological outlook, I envision two funda-‐ 

mental processes interacting to create our reality – energy and 

form. I see this so called form as being like morphic fields that are 

essentially nodes of consciousness – an in-‐formation field. Energy 

is like the river that flows, and the morphic or in-‐formation field 

acts like the rocks and bends that create unique features from the 

flow. Please note the Rupert Sheldrake may not agree with my 

interpretation of the concept, I do not want to misrepresent 

anyone’s ideas. As ideas and information flow through my con-‐ 

sciousness, my unique points of view, biases, shadow, and genius 

disrupt them – that is my personal node of consciousness or 

morphic field with its cosmic signature 39 . Each of us then, and all 

manifest structure in the universe, is in essence a node of 

consciousness emanating a morphic in-‐formation field. Funda-‐ 

mental energy in its various states of being interacts with these 

fields to manifest as initially indeterminate nondual nodes, then as 

38 

Sheldrake. Rupert A New Science of Life: The Hypothesis of Morphic Resonance (Park 

Street Press) 1981, p. 71 

39 

Ken Wilber refers to Kosmic Signature as being each of our unique and distinct 

spectrum of development represented within his AQAL – All Quadrant, All Level Model. 

68

43 Bohm, David On Creativity (Routledge) 1996 p. 130 

69 


a General Unified energy perturbation, then quarks… hadrons… 

leptons… photons and eventually as atoms, within molecules, 

within complex macromolecules, within cells, within tissue, within 

organs, within bodies, which have associated creative intelli-‐ 

gences, which organize comprising socio-‐cultural systems of 

increasing complexity as described in earlier sections. 

Quantum physicist David Bohm was a strong proponent of 

in-‐formation and what he called the Implicate or Enfolded Order. 

“The mathematics itself [of quantum theory] suggests a move-‐ 

ment in which everything, any particular element of space, may 

have a field which unfolds into the whole and the whole enfolds it 

in it.” 40 Bohm uses the example of a hologram in which the entire 

image is contained within an aspect of the hologram such that 

light can be shone through the fragment and we can see the 

whole thing. The holographic metaphor is now emerging as a 

mainstream interpretation of how the universe unfolds; Michael 

Talbot popularized the idea with the book The Holographic 

Universe 41 drawing extensively on David Bohm’s insights. “In the 

implicate order everything is thus internally related to everything, 

everything contains everything, and only in the explicate order are 

things separate and relatively independent.” 42 The explicate order 

refers to our ordinary perceived reality composed of what appear 

to be separate and distinct material constructs. “Consciousness, 

therefore, is really our most immediate experience of this impli-‐ 

cate order.” 43 I have tossed a number of terms into the mix here, 

which may lend to some confusion, ultimately implicate, enfolded, 

and holographic all refer to this in-‐formation or morphic field. I 

believe that consciousness itself is this in-‐formation field, and is 

40 Bohm, David On Creativity (Routledge) 1996 p. 129 

41 Talbot, Michael The Holographic Universe (Harper Collins)1991 

42 Bohm, David On Creativity (Routledge) 1996 p. 129


what actually evolves in the universe. Physics tells us that the 

universe contains a fixed amount of energy that is fluid in ex-‐ 

change but not created nor destroyed. Thus I contend that of the 

two cosmological foundations – energy and in-‐formation – in-‐ 

formation is what evolves toward greater complexity through 

novelty and confirmation. I also am suggesting that this in-‐ 

formation is consciousness, and that consciousness is contained 

within all manifest structure to varying degrees of complexity. 

Minerals and plants and animals have consciousness in this inter-‐ 

pretation, but it is not as evolved as the self-‐reflexive awareness 

that we humans have access to. 

Within rapt in awe I place both considerable and consistent 

weight on the word ‘consciousness’, and I will flesh out what I 

mean more clearly here. In our everyday use of the word 

consciousness, we are largely referencing the waking state of us 

humans. The psychology of Carl Jung has brought widespread 

attention to both the subconscious and the collective conscious, 

which certainly expand the context of the word much further. 

Consciousness as used herein can be considered synonymous with 

the in-‐formation field. In this context I do reference this at times 

as cosmic consciousness, the mind of the universe, but fail to do so 

at other times. The individual consciousness that each of us 

experiences first hand is a holographic node of the cosmic 

consciousness bestowed to us as agents of creation. We are 

cosmic consciousness waking up to itself, which is a truly exciting 

reason to get out of bed in the morning. Though our subconscious 

speaking through dreams is equally valid in this process of cosmic 

evolution. We will come back to this idea in more detail in later 

sections, when we come down from the cosmos at large looking 

closer at global and individual implications of this new story. 

So I am saying that all form and structure in the cosmos 

comes from this in-‐formation field and is animated by raw energy. 

Ervin Laszlo defines in-‐formation: 

In-‐formation is a subtle, quasi-‐instant, non-‐evan-‐ 

70


escent and non-‐energetic connection between things at 

different locations in space and events at different points in 

time. Such connections are termed “nonlocal” in the natural 

sciences and “transpersonal” in consciousness research. In-‐ 

formation links things (particles, atoms, molecules, organ-‐ 

isms, ecologies, solar systems, entire galaxies, as well as the 

mind and consciousness associated with some of these 

things) regardless of how far they are from each other and 

how much time has passed since connections were created 

between them. 44 

Laszlo writes about the quantum vacuum and shares that it is 

more a viscous plenum from which space is composed. Here I 

introduce more words to describe the same principle, each aligned 

with the in-‐formation and morphic field concept we started with, 

the prevalence of this core concept is evidence of the evolution of 

consciousness emerging through diverse minds as nodes of 

awareness. Laszlo refers to the ancient Sanskrit version of the in-‐ 

formation field as the Akashic Field or A-‐Field, from which all 

things emerge and eventually return. It is no strange phenomena 

that so many quantum physicists allude to the mystic traditions, 

East and West (but mostly East), since the self-‐reflection of 

consciousness onto itself, the raw experience of awe, in-‐forms us 

that we are all one and the same. 

In the context of the in-‐formation field, space and time only 

come into play by the unfolding of energy into form. In-‐formation 

as consciousness longs to evolve into greater stages of complex-‐ 

ity, pulled along by some Eros attractor. Thus time is an illusion to 

the primordial state of creation, as is space – the Big Bang persists 

in each passing moment in this explicate order and it is 

consciousness that is expanding. In this explicate order, which we 

44 Laszlo, Ervin Science and the Akashic Field: An Integral Theory of Everything (Inner 

Traditions) 2004, 2007, p. 68-9 

71


perceive to be our material reality, whatweexperienceasthe dimensions forming space and time, areholographicremnantsof ourselves looking for our original face. This original face is the 

awe, the nondual emergence from nothingness. The lingering 

metaphysical question is centered around a transcendent con-‐ 

sciousness, a godhead that is somehow outside the universe. 

Rupert Sheldrake addresses this question as one hypothetic 

scenario in the conclusion of his A New Science of Life, 

The universe as a whole could have a cause and a 

purpose only if it were itself created by a conscious agent 

which transcended it. Unlike the universe, this transcen-‐ 

dent consciousness would not be developing towards a 

goal; it would be its own goal. It would not be striving 

towards a final form; it would be complete in itself. If this 

transcendent conscious being were the source of the 

universe and of everything within it, all created things 

would in some sense participate in its nature. The more or 

less limited ‘wholeness’ of organisms as all levels of 

complexity could then be seen as a reflection of the 

transcendent unity on which they depended, and from 

which they are ultimately derived. 45 

This metaphysical question will remain a catalyst for 

dialogue. For me a partial answer serves my most immediate 

curiousity as I wait for something more complete and compre-‐ 

hensive. I believe in the participatory notion of creation within the 

universe, that our creative insights are the act of creation in the 

known universe. In accepting the indeterminacy of our ultimate 

origins, I then move onto the “so what and now what?” questions 

to define how I choose to interact with my reality. 

By looking at the process, we may glean insight into the 

purpose. According to Ervin Laszlo, “There is no need for setting a 

45 Sheldrake. Rupert A New Science of Life: The Hypothesis of Morphic Resonance (Park 

Street Press) 1981, p. 206-207 

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specific goal at the beginning: the goal is generated in the process 

itself. It is one toward which evolution in this universe generally 

trends; it is what gives it overall direction. This direction is toward 

greater and greater coherence and complexity.” 46 From unity back 

to unity the universe will go. Alan Watts wrote a beautiful 

interpretation of Hindu cosmology in The Joyous Cosmology 47 

which I paraphrase: Imagine an all-‐knowing all-‐powerful God living 

infinitely and alone. At some juncture God becomes both bored 

and lonely with the predictability and homogeny of it all and 

decides that she or he needs diversity, spontaneity, and surprise 

to give meaning to life. By taking on multiple archetypal roles in 

the theatre of life in the world veiled from knowing the self, God 

provides the purpose and meaning in life and the universe at large. 

Eventually the various players progressively wake up to them-‐ 

selves as co-‐creators of the world in which they are immersed. The 

task for us then as co-‐creators in this cosmological story of 

creation is to come to know ourselves as active agents of cosmic 

evolution. The experience of the awe is available to each of us, 

and we have all accessed it – often unknowingly. Each of us has 

felt the flux and flow of novelty, yet it is a habitual human tend-‐ 

ency to align with conservative confirmations, leading to the 

marginalization of these common experiences of awe. Contem-‐ 

porary modernist and traditionalist views emulate this tendency. 

The phenomenal world is its creation: the realization 

and concretization of its inherent potential. Basically, the 

same kind of experience [being rapt in awe] is recounted 

by people who practice yoga and other forms of med-‐ 

itation. The Indian Vedic tradition, for example, regards 

consciousness not as an emergent property that comes 


Traditions) 2004, 2007, p. 91 

47 Watts. Alan W. The Joyous Cosmology: Adventure in the Chemistry of Consciousness 

(Vintage) 1965


into existence through material structures such as the 

brain and the nervous system, but as a vast field that 

constitutes the primary reality of the universe. In itself, 

this field is unbounded and undivided by objects and indiv-‐ 

idual experiences, but can be experienced by individuals in 

meditation when the gross layers of the mind are stripped 

away. Underlying the diversified and localized gross layers 

of ordinary consciousness there is a unified, non-‐localized, 

and subtle layer: ‘pure consciousness’. 48 

This ‘pure consciousness’ is what I have referred to earlier 

as cosmic consciousness, or the raw state of awe, which we can all 

access. And consciousness precedes the physical constructs of 

matter, rather than resulting from it. 

The bridge between the material sciences and spiritual rev-‐ 

elations is built by peeling back the layers of semantics used to 

describe our direct experiences of the awe. The closer we get to 

the raw experience of awe, the more we can simply smile and nod 

in affirmation that despite the different languages used to express 

our experiences and interpretations, we do indeed see the same 

luminous source. This profound recognition of our cosmic origins 

can then be seen in each other’s eyes, heard in each other’s 

voices, and felt in subtle energy fields and through the warmth of 

our touching skin. The ancient Maya had an expression for this: In 

Lakesh, “I am another yourself.” 

Thus, we are one unified humanity bound by our common 

origins in the in-‐formation field that we can access in any given 

instant. Accessing the in-‐formation field is how novelty and con-‐ 

firmation express themselves through us to urge evolution along. 

Our original insights are rooted in cosmic consciousness as it 

comes to know itself. All of this is happening all the time, in all of 

us – the Big Bang is expanding through us in each given instance, 


Traditions) 2004, 2007, p, 120 

74

75 


inviting us to see ourselves in anything and everything else in the 

perceivable universe. You are a mere node of cosmic conscious-‐ 

ness caught up within a vast holographic hall of mirrors, as the 

primordial embers of the original indeterminate instant cool and 

crystallize into the magnificent forms of living breathing loving 

learning life. Matter is merely frozen energy flowing through the 

mold of in-‐formation fields, which are making sense of it all in ever 

increasing coherence and complexity. The one becoming many, 

and tending toward greater complexity and coherence, which is 

one. 

Rooting thee, poet tree 

The loss of my father at 11 was another deeply definitive 

moment in my life. Pondering the intersection of living and dying 

tends to prompt both philosophical and spiritual questions. I did 

this more from the modernist outlook, gravitating toward 

philosophy and science more than religion. Also, every child goes 

through periods of discovery to get to know their parents through 

the various stages of personal development; it is part of the 

process to know oneself, knowing one’s primary caregivers. I 

came to know my father from more mature perspectives through 

both the books on his shelf and his own writing – his vocation. 

Both avenues were deeply imbued with philosophy. I would sit 

reading these books with a dictionary at my side trying to 

understand what it all meant – books well above my head about 

what it all meant. We all deal with the awkwardness of 

adolescence in different ways; mine was in Hegelian dialectics and 

existential angst. My curious mind was accelerated by 

circumstance into the parallel processes of contemplating life and 

death, rather than the hormonal changes of my age. Coming to 

understand my father and his ideas after his passing deeply 

defined the wanderings of my mind. 

Reading books about abstract ideas, with the dictionary


nearby, became an enduring habit, such that the same two 

brothers that dragged me away from thought experiments in 

deep space recommended reading a book from their first year 

philosophy class in university. I was hereby handed the Tibetan 

Book of the Dead. I became utterly fascinated with this ancient 

text due to the departure it meant for me from the pervasive 

Western world Judeo-‐Christian thought constructs in was 

immersed in. Language is rooted in symbolism and perspectives, 

and different cultural outlooks aid us to access new symbols and 

perspectives. A persistent dissatisfaction with Western philosophy 

and modernity was prevalent around me growing up in the 

postmodern hot-‐bed of the Saanich Peninsula on Vancouver 

Island, otherwise known as a hippie haven. 

My introduction to eastern ideas came earlier through my 

worldly grandmother who spent time studying Buddhism in Indo-‐ 

nesia. Growing up in a radical leftist family, my grandmother was a 

very early postmodernist. She imparted various practices and 

outlooks on me as a young child prior to the rigid blocks of mater-‐ 

ialist logic taking shape. Sitting in meditation was framed as a 

game to play, embraced with the innocent fervor of a child’s curi-‐ 

ousity. I recall getting into lotus position and then walking on my 

knees, which then became a show-‐and-‐tell trick in school. The 

clever integration of Eastern practices helped form the very fabric 

of my perceptions prior to the rigid rule orientation of skepticism 

took over. And it did. Skepticism is such an active tool in the 

modernist intellectual repertoire that profoundly influences our 

receptivity to both new and different ideas, a contemporary 

manifestation of conservative confirmation. I’m grateful for my 

grandmother’s teachings, particularly the ones when I was injured 

playing some sport, “do you know that you can heal yourself?” 

And so went a lesson in visualization and guided meditation. 

Looking back I believe that this influence in my formative years 

aided in my so-‐called miraculous recovery, that this insight and 

experience played a part in the back of that aforementioned 

ambulance and beyond. 

76


Another influence on my young psyche was my father’s 

nature mysticism, another postmodernist trait. A close relation-‐ 

ship with wilderness influenced my ongoing inquiry and bridged 

the metaphoric nature of Aboriginal myth and lore. This likely lead 

to my path of self-‐discovery tending toward wild places as climb-‐ 

ing was conducive to. Climbing also acted as a moving meditation, 

the movement and focus peeled through the layers of mind to get 

to raw experience. A certain fascination with death lingered from 

my father’s passing which likely lead to the consistent reading of 

the tattered pages of the Tibetan Book of the Dead that I kept in 

my backpack. The most salient concept that I extracted from this 

book, not really understanding it consciously, was that our per-‐ 

ceived reality is merely projections of our mind, that our fears and 

limiting beliefs are the shadow aspects of consciousness, and our 

inspired insights are novel expressions of evolving cosmic con-‐ 

sciousness. So I packaged these ideas into a quasi-‐belief system 

suspended on an enduring agnosticism. When climbing I experi-‐ 

mented with focusing my mind and visualizing intended outcomes 

and labeled my fears as projections of my mind. Meditation 

became a central part of my practice and of this broader process. 

Gravity was my keisaku, the “awakening stick” used by the Zen 

master to ward of sleep or distraction within zazen meditation. 

In contrast to the prevalence of the modernist mater-‐ 

ialism of the world around me, my family tended to live on the 

fringe of wild places. With trees and hills to explore, borderedby the steamroller of Western development, I have been privileged 

to live at the fringeofwildernessandsettlement. In each place I 

lived while growing up – NorthVancouver, Whitehorse, andVan-‐ couver Island – FirstNationscommunitieswereprevalent. My 

exposure to Aboriginal cosmological perspectives as a child had a 

profound impact on my developing worldviews. The integration of 

animistic appreciation of the natural world resonated with the 

postmodern sentiments of the time and place, and influenced my 

chosen path in life. Church did not appeal to me but the resonant 

77


Coast Salish drums that carried across the Brentwood Bay on the 

Saanich Peninsula permeated my imagination. 

In First Nations and Native American ceremonies that I 

have participated in, the perennial concept of Mother Earth and 

Father Sky has stood out to me. Growing in the mix of modernity 

and postmodernism, prayer was not a big part of my life. Yet I 

have come to appreciate the poetry in this way of seeing and 

saying and have come to embrace the metaphor of being the 

hollow bone for Mother Earth and Father Sky to commune 

through. Grounding the ethereal vastness of the cosmos into 

progressive steps down here on the ground in daily reality. The 

process of meditation or contemplative prayer is simply surren-‐ 

dering to the ebb and flow of cosmic consciousness with refined 

intention. 

The principle and practice of grounding and grounded-‐ 

ness is something I attribute to my mothers influence. Through 

the turmoil of my father’s cancer, the turbulence of being a single 

parent in an inherently sexist society, and supporting three adoles-‐ 

cent boys to flourish, my mother maintained a rare and exquisite 

calm. Embracing the charms of postmodernism but an intuition to 

integral, my mother embodied kindness, equality, and sought to 

see the good in everyone and everything. These influences equip-‐ 

ped me for finding a path of heart to balance an over active mind. 

As a result of such influences I became able to converse around 

spiritual and metaphysical questions without bias or an evangelical 

agenda. 

This book represents the outstretched branches of in-‐ 

quiry from the tree of me. The fertile ground that I have found to 

root my poet tree. My ideas continue to grow, my understanding 

photosynthesizes the luminous light of consciousness expanding 

into complexity, and the process is organic and adaptive. I have 

herein indulged sharing aspects of my story, the roots that tap 

most deeply into the resounding voice of me. 

78

The poet tree 


This is the story of the poet tree, 

whose roots reach deep and branches far, 

and sometimes the sweet sap of the poet tree runs through me. 

To tap this sap, muse booze, we need to puncture the membrane 

of a single moment in time. 

And hopefully I won’t go off on a tangent of rhymes. 

So about this moment – a momentthatrelatestoallmoments – 

the roots of which are entwined. 

I was sitting scribbling lines early in the morning unable to sleep. 

I woke in a puddle of words that continued to seep 

progressively more deep. 

That’s a double entendre because I was lying in bed trying simply 

to go back to dreaming but I couldn’t help but ponder the intricate 

connection between quantum entanglement and love. 

And how the entire cosmos canbe compressedintoabearhug embrace into my heart with each beat expanding the potential for 

pretty much everything and anything. 

I’m still trying to work out just how to specialize in life – quantum 

theory, poetry, or contributing to the economy. 

Sometimes I feel like I’m stuck in a prison of indecision 

because I listened to the conventional view of what is real. 

Can you surf on a quantum wave function? Or eat a metaphor? 

Can I ponder the ramifications of relativity from the branches of 

the poet tree and still be part of the economy? 

Speaking of branches, 

I’ll get back to puncturing the membrane of the moment. 

You see it all made perfect sense, 

in this moment, in this dream 

that lapped the delicately sloped shores of my waking state, 

Ripples of complete utter clarity 

and the liquidity of my dreams washing over 

the stick-‐drawn linearity in the sand of the everyday me. 

You see poetry, at least for me, is the shoreline between the lands 

79


of me and dreams of the sea, 

The interplay between perceived rigidity and buoyant salinity. 

But before I get any further off on a tangent I’ll bring it back 

to 5 AM in a stream of ideas converging to create 

this collection of words coming together 

in a cauldron of intentions called a moment. 

You see I am inspired, and stories are asking to be told. 

It is not often anymore that I write verse or even random rants, 

Is mostly reports, proposals, spreadsheets, and grants. 

Having tried to bridge the gap to ordinary everyday reality, 

and being part of the economy, 

has cut me off from the roots of my poet tree. 

This brings me back to quantum entanglement and love. 

In my dreams it is quite clear that life, the universe, and all things 

are not what they appear. 

The so-‐called solid bits of us -‐ and everything -‐ are really vibrating 

strands of pure potentiality. 

An interconnected tapestry -‐ an Eleusian Mystery. 

It’s like the fabric of reality is the blended limbs and sweat and skin 

in a kind of cosmic orgy. 

The entangled roots reaching deeper farther longer -‐ 

might it be the Tree of Life is also the poet tree? 

The world is not made up of the linear 

Tick-‐tock tick-‐tock tick-‐tock of God’s unwinding clock. 

It is not a mechanistic universe 

governed by fragmented participles put in random motion 

by some figment of devotion – 

this is the churning of years 

turning the gears of collective fallacy. 

The mind-‐blinders that I put on to earn my daily bread 

by pulling along the great cart of mass consumption 

and production we call the economy. 

You see when I’m harnessed up with the herd 

I’m cut off from my words – 

the prana-‐chi energy – the roots of the poet tree. 

This momentary insight, the seed of an idea 

80


within these words taking flight, 

comes from having somehow been unlocked, 

unfettered, and freed from my self-‐created 

21 

81 

st -‐century wage-‐slave identity 

to see the interconnected wholeness of all that really is. 

In reaching into my dreams, 

the ethereal clarity of pure potentiality 

rather than the rigid rules of physical reality, 

I can see what fundamental force fuels my pen, 

In-‐forming symbols to form the letters of a language 

into these words of unstructured verse. 

Quantum entanglement? You may ask 

But bear with me I’ll get around to that. 

I woke to an image merged with words that seem to me to be like 

the course of the uni-‐verse, our singular song. 

This misunderstanding about the tick-‐tock tick-‐tock tick-‐tock 

of God’s unwinding clock is really the obsession of Modernity. 

Please humour me as I tried to plant a new image of reality 

that comes to me by means of dreams 

and which just may be more kind to rooting me the poet tree. 

So close your eyes and breathe deeply into your being. 

The image and words of how this moment of inspiration came to 

me, and, I think all things come to be, 

is more of a flutter-‐by-‐sing flutter-‐by-‐sing flutter-‐by-‐sing 

of a butterfly’s wing. 

The butterfly effect was first described by Edward Lorenz to 

explain complex weather systems, stating that the mere flutter of 

a butterfly’s wing can be come a hurricane across the sea. 

Each moment emerges as an intersection of multiple intentions, 

like the flutter-‐by-‐sing of a butterfly’s wing, 

the extensions of each of our thoughts 

co-‐creating the intricacies of complexity 

that manifests as you and me. 

So back to quantum entanglement 

and how it unifies you, me, and everything.


Let’s simply start right here, right now 

in this place in space and time. 

Each of us has ended up here 

by the interplay of intention and probable chance, 

This is the toes touching down in the cosmic dance. 

You see if each of us is an independent node 

of consciousness connected 

in a collective field of in-‐formation, 

The vast condensate of our thoughts 

have synergistically emerged as this moment manifest, 

As a forum for potentiality to progress, 

the culmination of sympathetic vibration in-‐forms creation. 

Entanglement implies that any energetic entity, 

small or vast, that interacts with another 

is eternally bound in coherence in the present, future, and past. 

I’m sorry to say that this means that everyone here is forever, 

eternally stuck with a little bit of me in them, 

and vice versa all around. 

I’m not suggesting the entanglement of limbs, sweat, and skin but 

rather the seeds of our ideas resonating out to become real. 

We are more intimately connected than it would appear, 

no matter how far, near, there, or here. 

So that is how love comes in, and also fear – 

for they in-‐form our reality in action, 

Giving every passing thought and reaction traction. 

It’s like our state of being, however we’re feeling, 

is what in-‐forms what we will become and be. 

As a stream laps up in rhythmic waves on my waking state, 

I feel that this insight brings with it a heavy weight. 

It implies that I have an effect, 

that each of my thoughts 

is the flutter-‐by-‐sing flutter-‐by-‐sing flutter-‐by-‐sing 


This insight tells me that I do have a part, 

that I am already equipped as an agent of change, 

and that I’d better start. 

82

What I like about this dream into being 

is that it affirms what elders have long taught 

about how we’re all connected, 

Entangled in creating our emerging reality. 

Which is frankly awful lot more inspiring to me than the 

tick-‐tock tick-‐tock tick-‐tock of God’s unwinding clock. 

So in an attempt to leave thee swinging freely 

from the branches of the poet tree 

I ask that you join me to co-‐create a harmony 

with the flutter-‐by-‐sing flutter-‐by-‐sing flutter-‐by-‐sing 


Figure 5.0 Lorenz Attractor, origin of the Butterfly Effect. 

83 

rapt in awe


Non-‐dual, causal, subtle, gross 

The two streams of cosmology – that of mythic origins and 

that of astrophysical inquiry – truly do reach a confluence. As we 

peel through the semantic layers of diverse languages and inter-‐ 

pretations, we find a perennial philosophy. As we move toward an 

integral consciousness, cosmological outlooks identifying a com-‐ 

mon language will aid in reaching a unified field of understanding. 

The perennial philosophy, or theosophy, does not 

belong to any single culture or regional tradition. It is not 

strictly Asian, as has been suggested by some writers, just 

as it not European, African or Mayan. It transcends all of 

these specific traditions. Moreover, a wider and truer 

understanding of the perennial philosophy is more likely to 

be had by not holding fast to traditional, regional inter-‐ 

pretations. For instance, a fundamental perennial teaching 

is that there is a state of awareness of insight and com-‐ 

passion. Christians refer to the all-‐comprehensive reality 

that is the state of awareness by the name ‘Christ.’ 

Buddhists might call it ‘Avalokiteshvara,’ [a Bodhisattva of 

compassion who postpones Nirvana to help others] while 

people in other religions and cultures give it yet other 

names. From the perennial perspective, the names and the 

cultural trappings that go with them are of little import-‐ 

ance; what is important is daily communion with the 

insight-‐compassion. 49 

The Great Nest of Being describes the nestled layers of 

being from a spiritual perspective. Working our way from the 

origin of our existence – Spirit is the ground of all being, spirit is 

the causal realm (note the case change on the ‘s’), soul is the 

subtle realm of being, and the body is manifestation of gross 

matter. 50 We can get much more detailed and complex with this, 

49 

Sanat, Aryel The Inner Life of Krishnamurti: Private Passion and Perennial Wisdom (Quest 

Books) 1999, p. 16 

50 

Wilber, Ken Sex, Ecology, Spirituality: The Spirit of Evolution (Shambhala) 2000 p. 444 

84

85 


but I will reference the four most definitive layers – non-‐dual 

(Spirit), causal (spirit), subtle (soul), and material (gross) and align 

them with other perspectives to describe the same intention. The 

point here is that these states of being all simultaneously unfold 

into form – ie. being – just as our earlier examination of funda-‐ 

mental physics does. The non-‐dual aligns with the primordial 

unified field, the in-‐formation field. The causal realm correlates 

with the sub-‐quantum world, which then unfolds into subtle 

quantum particle-‐wave entities. The gross material manifestation 

of form is our palpable space-‐time frame of reference. 

Figure 6.0 Great Nest of Being 

As we integrate multiple perspectives, we peel through the


inherent limitations of our material minds and access more uni-‐ 

versal states of awareness such as compassion. Ritual and 

devotion can prepare us for such experiences, and even induce 

them. Attachments to ritual and devotional practice can also 

inhibit the necessary openness for our individual node of 

consciousness to atone to the broader cosmic consciousness. 

Aldous Huxley popularized the perennial philosophy with his book 

by that name – The Perennial Philosophy. “But according to the 

Perennial Philosophy, the eternal now is a consciousness; the 

divine Ground is spirit; the being of Brahman is chit, or know-‐ 

ledge.” 51 Mycontentionisthatcosmicconsciousnessisthe medium that is evolving in the universe, and in the Ground of 

Being, and that we are awakening as agents of evolution. 

The commonly held Darwinian evolutionary outlook sees 

the genetic mutation by adaptation as the sole driver of evolution. 

I see this as a partial truth anchored in the modernist mindset of 

material building blocks. If we are willing to go a little deeper 

down the rabbit hole, the either/or squabbling between tradition-‐ 

alists and modernists, creation versus biological evolution, merges 

as a both/and matrix of consciousness reaching toward increasing 

complexity and coherence. 

When we limit ourselves to our mere physical form, margin-‐ 

alizing the more subtle aspects of self, we constrict our capacities 

to be channels of cosmic consciousness, and subsequently evolu-‐ 

tion. I will continue to build on these correlations through further 

diagrams and text, but the essential aspect that I am trying to 

convey is that of a progressively broader radius of self beyond that 

which is apparent. I imagine that each of us have experienced at 

least fleeting moments of subtle, causal, and even non-‐dual 

awareness. It is just that we tend to marginalize these experiences 

when rooted in the modernist mindset. Despite all the necessary 

structures that have emerged through modernity, it also inhibits 

cosmic evolution. 

51 

Huxley, Aldous The Perennial Philosophy (Harper & Row) 1945 p. 187 

86

State of Mind as a Geometrical Shape 


It may be strange to associate a state of mind with a geo-‐ 

metrical shape, but I do. Squares and their three-‐dimensional cubic 

cousins induce a sense of dread and even depression for me. 

When I was 17 years old I stood on a dock at a logging camp at the 

head of the remote coastal fjord of Bute Inlet in British Columbia. 

Looking up the valley I was struck by the magnificence of glaciers 

amidst the jagged mountain peaks. And I felt a profound calm 

throughout my entire being, magnetized by mysterious mount-‐ 

ains. A summer job took me there as a means to pay for my for-‐ 

mal education. I worked hard for my learning and I placed a very 

high value on it. The deep peace that I felt was strangely foreign 

to me such that stood out as an epiphany – I found myself to be 

emanated in bliss. What this moment illustrated to me quite clear-‐ 

ly was the irony of me not truly being happy while actively pursu-‐ 

ing and fulfilling the socialized expectations of higher education, 

yet finding joy in the work that was meant to support the school. 

Here’s where I take it back to squares and cubes and what I call 

four walls and a ceiling education. Any body of knowledge, field of 

inquiry, or way of seeing and saying is built upon presumptions. 

Such presumptions are perspectives with a frame of reference so 

that any ideology is constructed upon a foundation of beliefs. This 

foundational truth – that all knowledge is relative and that there is 

no absolute fixed frame of reference – bent my brain and made 

my mind unwind. After this vivid recognition at 17 years old, I 

found it very hard to fit and sit within four walls and the ceiling. 

The square thoughts and cubic building blocks of conventional 

universal education contributed to a deep sense of depression. 

Hindsight allows me to now see that I was simply not attuned to 

my soul’s path. Modernist social convention had me negating this 

sense of soul, and it was the majesty of the mountains that helped 

me to reclaim it. 

In my understanding, the origins of public education in 

87


the Western world point back to the Industrial Revolution. Univer-‐ 

sal public education was designed to support the mechanization 

of commerce, to create human cogs to turn the wheels of 

industry. The presumptive beliefs beneath our education system 

are rooted in a mechanistic modernistic worldview. Curriculum is 

created to craft conformity – to reduce reality to fit into the 

popular philosophical fashion box. With an upbringing much more 

kind to wild mind than the cultivated rows of conventional 

education, dread and depression were triggered within me. As I 

look back in reflection, I recognize the vulnerable shoots of fresh 

ideas having been crushed by the concrete blocks of mechanistic 

logic. Novelty was being trampled by rigid structures of confirm-‐ 

ation within social convention. 

Thankfully teachers fulfill a role not totally squelched by 

the educational system and its curriculum. Many teachers foster 

the creative capacities of their students and promote authentic ex-‐ 

ploration of new knowledge. Kudos should be given to those who 

inspire. Each of us can likely also recall certain curriculum drone 

teachers who did more to inhibit authentic modes of expression 

than to prompt its potential. I imagine that these particular 

educators have soured in cynicism and severed their connection to 

the ever expanding and evolving consciousness that we all can 

access. Having spent some time myself within bureaucratic 

organizational structures, I can sympathetically understand how 

one gets soured, as I have most certainly been myself. Any time 

that my work mandates that I spend an inordinate time within 

four walls and a ceiling the old dread and depression pop up to 

remind me to steer more toward authentic expressions of self to 

honour the evolving cosmic consciousness. In recognition of these 

indicators, I simply choose to move on from any structures or 

systems that I find prohibitive to atoning to my creative flow. This 

book is about this connection to consciousness at large, and after 

we will soon begin exploring some approaches to staying in tune 

with all that is evolving. 

88

89 


One of my favorite passages from Ken Wilber, amongst the 

many poetic turns of phrase he has quilled within his many books, 

comes from One Taste: 

When I was a youngster, and being the mad scientist 

type, I used to collect insects. Central to this endeavor was 

the killing jar. You take an empty mayonnaise jar, put 

lethal carbon tetrachloride on cotton balls, and place them 

in the bottom of the jar. You then drop the insect – moth, 

butterfly, whatnot – into the jar, and it quickly dies, but 

without being outwardly disfigured. You then mount it, 

study it, display it. Academic religion is the killing jar of 

Spirit. 52 

Figure 7.0 The Nested Layers of Reality 53 

52 Wilber, Ken The Essential Ken Wilber (Boston & London: Shambhala)1998 p.152 

53 Human figure adapted from iStockphoto © Max Delson Martins Santos;


Revisioning reality 

The collectively perceived reality that we live within is 

marked by material bondage. The majority of us are orienting our 

outlooks from the modernist mindset and are limiting ourselves as 

active agents of evolution. For the most part personal power is 

assumed to come from having “power over” something or some-‐ 

one else within a mechanistic universe. I contend that this whole 

way of seeing is what propagates much of the strife and 

fragmentation in the world today. We are living with the residue 

of earlier stages of socio-‐cultural development at a time in our 

shared history where the insights for new modes of being are 

more widely available to us than ever before. The prevailing 

conquest driven cultures have progressed on such partial philo-‐ 

sophical assumptions of presumed absolutes, based on ruthless 

justification of power over rather than ecology. Be it a group that 

sees itself as the chosen people within a tribal -‐ warrior – trad-‐ 

itional continuum of worldviews that believes in the assimilation 

of other cultures and communities as the good work of their 

Godhead, or the modernist interpretation of saving people from 

their own ignorance, but also using them as cogs in the machine of 

industrial progress. Ecology itself is a postmodern idea recognizing 

the profound interdependence of all things in this ornate tapestry 

of being. Everything that exists serves a purpose that is little 

understood. Even ecosystems appear ruthless in their own right as 

life forms swallow other life forms, yet these are symbiotic rela-‐ 

tionships for species to maintain the flux of evolution. Within our 

contemporary reality the attachments to absolutes from tradi-‐ 

tional and modern worldviews are entrenched in social and cult-‐ 

ural systems. The free flow of conscious evolution is stuck in the 

mud of conservative confirmation maintaining the status quo 

attached to perspectives of how the world once was, but no 

longer needs to be. 

Causal diagram element by Nina Hernitschek www.techfreaq.de/physikStringtheorie 

90


In recent decades, if not the last century, science has 

come around to eat its own tail much like the archetypal symbol 

from Earth-‐based goddess cultures of Orobus, the serpent swal-‐ 

lowing itself to represent the cyclical nature of all reality and the 

fundamental connectedness of all things. In seeking ultimate 

answers to fundamental questions of our origins through the 

projections of a reductionist modernist-‐thought-‐box method-‐ 

ology, the universe has mystified these observers and aligned 

them with the animated interpretations of the perennial philo-‐ 

sophy and mythic cosmologies. 

Beyond the ideas of this and that, there is a unified field 

where we all meet, the nondual, morphic, implicate, in-‐formation 

field of pure Spirit. It is a place with no place, a space outside of 

space. It is the mere reflection of a great dream. Physical reality – 

the pinch we feel – iscausedbyquantumfieldsofenergyin-‐ formed into being what we feel is real. That is to say that before 

matter is matter as we perceive it, it is pure energy shaped by in-‐ 

formation. The building block model of matter is merely a map 

projected onto reality – a sophisticatedillusion, a reflectionof 91


expectation, yet it is also real – just not absolutely real. This is 

where we stumble upon the paradoxical nature of everything, 

governed by a primordial uncertainty of our cosmic origin. The 

world and our apparent reality is like an inflated balloon when we 

squeeze one part, seeking understanding, another part swells. 

Merely by inquiring, by means of quantum entanglement, we 

influence the outcome of an event and the behaviour of some 

other entity. This is the resonant displacement of energy – ripples 

reaching outward – as consciousness self-‐reflects. Science is 

awakening to itself, yet is still bound by its own narcissism. To 

better comprehend the implications of modern science we need 

to step outside of the modernist-‐thought-‐box – the limiting way of 

seeing and saying that separates and dissects. Modernity takes 

reason to be an absolute and set science off on a series of far and 

wide tangents, assuming that mind and body are not unified, that 

spirit and matter are separate and distinct. Yet the circuitous 

journey of scientific inquiry has now validated the metaphors of 

thousands of years of cultural story and poetry. The scientific 

method stands before its own original face. 

The modern reductionist approach to observing the phen-‐ 

omena of existence implemented itself as the primary method of 

scientific inquiry. This process of logical dissection has become the 

prevalent philosophical fashion for 300+ years. This means of in-‐ 

quiry has enabled humanity to reach remarkable achievements by 

manipulating matter, freely squeezing the balloon of nature out of 

balance. Any culture that had not cleaved Spirit from matter and 

separated its God-‐head from its God-‐body would never have 

poked and prodded, scratched and scraped, dug and dissected, 

smeared and smelted, bridged and built, manipulated and 

manufactured matter into all the technological artifacts that we 

see today. Yet at the end of the seemingly endless search for the 

fundamental building blocks of matter, the paradoxical nature of 

reality forces us to rethink this linear methodology as an absolute 

truth and integrate the cumulative insights of all human 

knowledge, creating a tapestry of the many ways of seeing and 

92

93 


saying. The emerging philosophical fashion is the arcane 

acknowledgment that what we call matter is somehow entwined 

with energy – which is synonymous with Spirit. Postmodernism 

holds an antithetical aversion to all things modern playing out its 

role in the dialectic of evolving cosmic consciousness. An integral 

approach takes the merits of each and all the developmental 

levels, including technological artifacts that are truly a marvel of 

universal creativity acting through human ingenuity. I see this as 

cosmic consciousness evolving into increasingly complex and 

coherent systems and structures by means of human creativity. 

Evolution acts through us. 

Since the rise of modernity and subsequent scientific 

reductionism (other ways of saying modernist-‐thought-‐box) the 

Western world has gravitated towards complete attachment to 

material reality, largely leading sentient – felt or intuited – exper-‐ 

ience out of so-‐called serious inquiry. Yet we are subconsciously 

tied by our sentient experience to the subtle energetic foundation 

of material reality. Not only do we exist in the physical realm of 

atoms, molecules, and billiard balls, but also in the subtle, causal 

and non-‐dual realms simultaneously. Thus our comprehensive 

understanding of the phenomena of existence comes from intu-‐ 

ited experiences where we can connect to the flow of energy 

before it makes itself appear as matter. This state of awareness is 

commonly known as the flow. 54 The subtle energies are abundant 

around us and easily perceived by our pre-‐cognitive faculties – that 

is our intuitive senses. As we peel through the layers of selfhood, 

the subtle realm is immediately available to us simply by letting go 

of our materialist attachments, and many traditions provide 

tangible and contemplative practices to promote this interaction 

with subtle energy. 

54 Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (HarperCollins) 

1991


94


A quantum is defined as an excitation in a wave of energy 

within a field. Matter manifests from quantum fields as vibrational 

energy sources interact with fundamental in-‐formation or morphic 

fields. All things are invariably tied to each other in the suspended 

co-‐creative process at this foundational level. So what appears to 

be separate in our physical reality, like each of us within our skin, is 

unified within these substrata realms. We cannot separate func-‐ 

tion from form. Before we are bodies we are a system of organs 

which are a system of cells which are a system made of molecules 

which are a system of atoms which are a system of electrons, 

neutrons, and protons which are a system of quarks, neutrinos, 

and whatnots which are all just increasingly complex forms of fluid 

energy frozen into form. When we tap into this awareness and 

accept ourselves to be pure in-‐formed energy, we are free to 

interact more intimately with our wider environment. A hunch in 

our gut becomes our guide. We are free to be in the flow of cos-‐ 

mic evolution as it reaches for further complexity and coherence. 

As linear thought has relentlessly sought an explanation 

for all existence, God was not good enough for some anymore. 

Yet God is the Great Mystery, that which lies beyond the tangible. 

If each of us is a blade of grass, God is the groundoftheunified field. The material mindset of modernity – a.k.a. modernist-‐ 

thought-‐box – hascontinuallypeeledawayatcosmological causation seeking the prime mover at the beginning of everything. 

It was believed that each effect had a cause along the chain of life. 

Yet this assumes that there is a beginning and an end, and that 

existence follows some linear procession of an unwinding clock. 

The chief failing of this approach is the approach itself. Modern 

science has probed deep into the massive and the micro, peering 

into deep space and it’s mirror in the subatomic realm, what has 

been revealed is that the outcome of any scientific inquiry is 

inseparable from the observer and their frame of reference which 

includes their perceptions and the associated assumptions from 

their worldview. Our perceptions are embedded in the event 

95


being observed such that they influence the actual outcome. What 

we seek to see then tends to be as our broader consciousness 

interacts with the causal foundation. Einstein and his 

contemporaries demonstrated that all observations reveal 

elements of truth that cannot be reduced or expanded upon 

beyond that particular place of observation. Newton’s laws prove 

true in the context of the material realm yet they cannot be 

assumed true elsewhere, as they so often are. Truth is wholly 

contextual. Everything is relative to various pointsofreference amidst multiple perspectives. 

One of the best examples of how an outcome within 

scientific hypothesis is projected by perceptions is the Second Law 

of Thermodynamics 55 in its expansion into cosmic entropy and the 

slow death of the universe. The whole idea that the universe is 

steadily dissipating toward disorder can be quite depressing and is 

easy to identify with if you watch the news, but it is an 

extrapolation – a stretching of an idea beyond its original context. 

This law is substantiated within a particular frame of reference 

such as molecular movement in a closed system in the material 

realm. It has practical application within the tangible material 

world of daily life just as Newtonian physics works for building 

bridges. But to project this law into the subtle sphere of the 

quantum realm or deep space cosmology is purely an assumption, 

a projection of the scientific methodology, which assumes 

objective absolutes. Cosmic entropy suggests that the entire 

universe is moving toward an ever-‐increasing state of chaos – the 

slow death of the universe. This presumes that there was some 

proceeding order within the cosmos to dissipate into disorder. 

More current observations suggest the opposite in fact, that order 

forms despite chaos. Negentropy (negative entropy) demon-‐ 

strates the inherent intelligence in all forms of energy, in all 

systems micro or massive. Some may even say that negentropy – 

55 

Energy can be neither created nor destroyed in the energy within a closed system 

moves toward an ever increasing state of randomness. 

96


the self-‐organizing tendencies of both micro and macro systems – 

is God acting improv rather than a scripted play. Be it molecular 

bonding or the herding instincts of musk oxen, consciousness 

organizes itself in consistent patterns. Regardless of the way of 

saying, negentropy demonstrates the underlying evolution of 

consciousness as energy organizes itself into matter and matter 

organizes itself into our tangible reality. As Systems Theorist Erich 

Janscht articulates, 

Self-‐transcendence means reaching out beyond the 

boundaries of one’s own existence. When a system, in its 

self-‐organization, reaches beyond the boundaries of its 

identity, it becomes creative. In the self-‐organization 

paradigm, evolution is the result of self-‐transcendence at 

all levels. Symmetry breaks unfurl space and time for the 

unfolding of self-‐organizing system dynamics, ranging 

from dissipative structures and the microstructures of life 

to the macrostructures on earth and in the whole uni-‐ 

verse. 56 

Chaos theory closely correlates to this self-‐organizing 

principle as energy finds order amidst chaos. The universe, within 

the multiverse, is constantly creating more complexity and co-‐ 

herence as a result of evolving cosmic consciousness. In utter 

randomness organization ensues, bonded by the strange attrac-‐ 

tor, the perennial glue. In revisioning reality we open ourselves to 

the flux and flow of cosmic consciousness, the strange attractor 

improv actor. God is the glue. If you have an aversion to the word 

God, as I do, simply insert your own favorite higher power name – 

Allah, the Creator, the Ground of All Being, the nondual, the Is-‐ 

ness, the awe, or otherwise. 

56 

Jantsch, Erich. The Self-Organizing Universe: Scientific and Human Implications of the 

Emerging Paradigm of Evolution (Pergamon Press) 1980, p. 183 

97


When God and I Are One 

I decided to look at the aspects of self 

So I opened my closet and looked on the shelf 

I saw anger and pain and humour and health, 

Amber, great chains and rumours of wealth, 

Suffering sat dejected all by himself, 

The pompous self paraded in front of my eyes 

The neurotic self pondered the size of my thighs 

The controlling self tried to rule the roost 

The innocent child asked for a boost 

Who are you I wondered as he looked in my eyes 

He just smiled and welcomed me to come inside 

I saw shadow and light dance through the dark 

Noah and his animals and the whole bloody ark 

Triumph and tragedy wrestled for fun 

A procession of paradoxes saying, “we are all One” 

The deeper I looked, the more that I saw 

I stood there dumbfounded, rapt in awe 

I saw creation arise before my eyes, 

Einstein twisting ties into infinity signs, 

The Big Bang as a big breath as an evolving idea, 

The Integral geek trying to quadratically map a panacea. 

The seeker like Sisyphis jumped for a string 

To turn on the light to illuminate everything 

The dark parts were scary like monsters under a bed 

But I remembered those are merely projections from my head. 

There were stages and states and waves to surf on, 

Lines, levels, and types and a big Buddha icon 

Schrodinger’s cat playing with laboratory mice, 

And an old school teacher squeezing my head in a vice. 

As I looked in my closet it all became clear 

But the deeper I got the bigger the fear. 

It was then that I heard a soothing voice, 

98

“Be Big Mind, be Big Heart 57 , it is your choice.” 

So I breathed very deeply and reached for above 

I trusted the process, and the voice of Big Love 

I pulled on the string until I heard “click” 

Then I opened my eyes, it happened quite quick 

Bathed in bright light it dawned upon me 

That it is this simple to be empty and free 

To peel through the complexity of identity 

and embrace the luminousity. 

My heart chants Om Mani Padme Hum 

When God and I are one. 

99 


I wrote this poem in Istanbul, Turkey in April 2008 while 

attending the second Integral Without Borders conference. I had 

the opportunity to experience a truly remarkable process called 

Big Mind – Big Heart, a technique developed by Zen Master Genpo 

Roshi and delivered by another Zen Master Diane Musho Hamil-‐ 

ton 58 . Big Mind – Big Heart is a contemporary fusion between 

Zazen (ie. Zen) meditation and Jungian Voice Dialogue, and stands 

as one of the coolest things that I have ever done to peel through 

the complex layers of self. 

Sitting close to the Hagia Sophia in a room full of diverse 

spiritual practitioners – Muslims, Buddhists, Christians, Hindus, and 

other – digging through the perceived constructs of personal 

identity with Big Mind – Big Heart demonstrated that there is an 

integrally informed spiritual revolution happening. The call to 

prayer added to the majesty of the moment and the salient insight 

that collective transformation is possible. It even helped me to get 

over my personal aversion to the word God for this last section 

and poem. 

57 

Merzel, Dennis Genpo Big Mind – Big Heart: Finding Your Way (Big Mind Publishing) 

2007 

58 

http://www.dianemushohamilton.com/


Evolution Unfolding 

A little more than four and a half billion years ago the Earth 

formed from the protoplanetary disk suspended in orbit around 

the Sun. The cooling, congealing, and condensation of matter, the 

frozen energy from the ever-‐present origin, manifested as organic 

compounds, the foundation of life. As energy flows through, and 

interacts with, in-‐formation fields, consciousness evolves into gre-‐ 

ater degrees of complexity and coherence. In-‐formation fields = 

morphic fields = Spirit = consciousness in the broadest sense of 

the word. The evidence is that life is all around. The concept of 

evolution is a widely accepted modern idea, although traditional 

fundamentalist perspectives continue to contest this. Most com-‐ 

mon thoughts about evolution are explicitly materialistic stem-‐ 

ming from the work of Charles Darwin. Darwinian evolution is a 

product of the modern-‐thought-‐box with a distinctly materialistic 

and mechanistic view of the process. It certainly holds its truths, 

but when the multiple perspectives of an integral worldview are 

incorporated, we begin to see that more is actually going on. 

As a contemporary of Darwin, fellow Englishman Herbert 

Spencer suggested a broader use for the word evolution. Spencer 

believed that evolution was a comprehensive process evident in all 

facets of existence not simply the physical constructs of biology. 

Evolution was seen by Spencer to be the development of all 

structures and systems in the universe from simple, singular 

homogeneity to a complex, differentiated, heterogeneity demon-‐ 

strating by progressive integration of the different parts. Evolu-‐ 

tion was a natural law governing galaxies and stars, solar systems 

and biology, as well as social and cultural development and per-‐ 

sonal psychology. In short, rapt in awe aligns more with Spencer’s 

view of evolution than with the conventional interpretation built 

around genetic mutation. 

This protoplanetary disc formed largely due to the force of 

gravity collecting interstellar dust forged in the center of stars and 

from the Big Bang itself. The elements participating in this process 

100

101 


were hydrogen, helium, and traces of lithium created by the Big 

Bang nucleosynthesis composing 98% of the total mass, and 2% 

heavier elements formed in the center of early generation stars 

that had dispersed their creations into the interstellar medium. In 

the dynamic evolving context of what we call space, evolution 

unfolds over millions, if not billions of years at a time. Symmetry 

breaks are cited routinely in fundamental physics as the means by 

which matter manifests, and we can view a similar process in the 

unfolding of the bios. 

The history of universal evolution may be described 

in terms of symmetry breaks.... Each symmetry break 

unfurls a new space-‐time continuum for the self-‐organ-‐ 

ization of structures. Each new kind of symmetry break, 

however, also implies the transition to a new level of 

evolutionary processes and thus self-‐transcendence of 

evolution in meta-‐evolution. The symmetry breaks may be 

interpreted as alternating breaks of temporal and spatial 

symmetries. 

In cosmic evolution, this is not so clearly evident... 

Nevertheless, some of these symmetry breaks are not 

difficult to recognize at the macrobranch of cosmic 

evolution. The big bang established an expansion of the 

universe that, for our purposes, may be regarded as 

irreversible. Thus, a temporal symmetry between the 

past and the future is broken. The origin of matter from 

an excess over antimatter breaks a temporal as well as 

spatial symmetry. The condensation of macrostructures 

in a multilevel hierarchy breaks the macroscopic spatial 

symmetry of the originally homogeneous universe. And 

with the appearance of stars, a further time symmetry is 

broken, perhaps already with galaxies. Individual evolu-‐ 

tion commences. The energy generation in the trans-‐


formation processes of matter has a beginning and an 

end and runs through a specific sequence of qualitatively 

different phases. 59 

The work of systems theorist Erich Jantsch, quoted here 

from his remarkable book, The Self-‐Organizing Universe, is quite 

technical and the terminology is rather esoteric. His academically 

rigorous description of macro-‐evolution and micro-‐evolution pro-‐ 

vides profound insights into how consciousness has evolved into 

the self-‐reflecting universe we now inhabit. For the purposes of 

this book, I will ease off of the academic rigor and paraphrase the 

ethos with less obscure language. 

With the Earth forming roughly 4.57 billion years ago, life as 

we understand it began on the planet 3.5 – 4 billion years ago. 

Some refer to the early Earth as a chemical soup, from which life 

emerged. Organic compounds evolved into prokaryote cells – 

bacteria and archaea. Photosynthesis began 3.5 billion years ago, 

as cellular organisms transformed light from the sun into struc-‐ 

ture. An oxygen rich environment emerges on Earth around 2.3 

billion years ago, which likely catalyzed the development of the 

more complex cellular structures eukaryotes through the endo-‐ 

symbiosis 60 of prokaryotes. At this place in the progression of 

evolution on the microbe scale the key function and attribute of 

life is metabolic, carrying cosmic consciousness from chemical 

soup to the pre-‐biotic, that is precursors of what we call life. 

Multicellular life emerged from the endosymbiosis of eukarotes 

around about 1.5 billion years ago, ushering in plant life in the 

oceans. Aquatic shelled animals started emerging around 700 

million years ago, with the first vertebrate land animals coming 

along about 380 million years ago. Dinosaurs populated the 

planet 230 – 65 million years ago, and human beings have been 

walking the Earth for the past two million years. In Erich Jantsch’s 

59 

Jantsch, Erich. The Self-Organizing Universe: Scientific and Human Implications of the 

Emerging Paradigm of Evolution (Pergamon Press) 1980, p. 222 

60 

The process of an organism partnering with and living within another organism. 

102


words, “…four pairs of symmetry breaking processes may also be 

correlated with four phases of the microevolution of life: thermo-‐ 

dynamic/chemical, biological/genetic, epigenetic and neural (socio-‐ 

cultural) phases.” 61 There are various theories about the origin of 

life, just as there persist to be many theories about the origin of 

the cosmos, as Rupert Sheldrake attests, 

First, what happened in the distant past can never 

be known for certain; there will probably always be a 

plethora of speculations on the circumstances of the 

origin of life on earth. Current ones include the terrestial 

origin of life within a Primaeval Broth; the infection of the 

earth by micro-‐organisms deliberately sent on a space ship 

by intelligent beings on a planet in another solar system; 

and the evolution of life on comets containing organic 

materials derived from interstellar dust. 

Secondly, even if the conditions under which life 

originated could be known, this information would shed 

no light on the nature of life. Assuming it could be demon-‐ 

strated, for example, that the first living organisms arose 

from non-‐living chemical aggregates, or ‘hypercycles’ of 

chemical processes, in a Primaeval Broth, this would not 

prove that they were entirely mechanistic. 62 

Here again the scientific method interacts with the perva-‐ 

sive indeterminacy illuminated by quantum theory. My personal 

favorite theory about the origin of life is panspermia, not merely 

for the etymological inspired image of the mythic half-‐goat half-‐ 

man ejaculating all over everything in space (which has more to do 

with my persistent adolescent-‐boy humour). This has lead to some 

colleagues and I referring to cosmic consciousness as the cosmic 

61 

Jantsch, Erich The Self-Organizing Universe – Scientific and Human Implications of the 

Emerging Paradigm of Evolution (New York: Pergamon) 1980, p. 227 

62 

Sheldrake, Rupert A New Science of Life: The Hypothesis of Morphic Resonance (Park 

Street Press) 1981, pp. 206-207 

103


goat. Panspermia suggests that biological life was seeded in space. 

Some proponents of panspermia believe cosmic consciousness to 

be carried by intergalactic mushroom spores, and these same folks 

are more attuned to Goddess imagery than that of the cosmic 

goat. I tend to be quite utilitarian in what I believe, so I simply 

revel in the uncertainty of the ever-‐present awe of it all and play 

with words and metaphorstocatalyzenovelconversations. Perhaps it is a process of growing up on in a temporal rainforest 

conducive to self-‐organizing mycelium of psychoactive mush-‐ 

rooms with a self-‐organizing subculture that could freely distri-‐ 

bute them, but I intuit that more is going on than random 

mechanistic mutations. 

Regardless of whether life originated on Earth or in 

space, the question remains: How could complex organ-‐ 

isms emerge in the known time frame that was available 

for it on this planet? This remains a mystery to mainstream 

science. Most biologists adhere to the materialistic con-‐ 

cept of the world as purely physical and evolution as the 

expression of random forces. In addition, DNA and the 

genetic code are generally regarded as being preeminent 

in understanding biological processes. However, Fred 

Hoyle, who is his later years took a great interest in the 

origins of biological life, calculated that if only random 

processes would have led to the formation of DNA, it 

would have taken far longer than the current age of our 

universe. But even if DNA evolves from simpler molecules 

that blur the distinction between what is life and what is 

not, Hoyle’s argument about the timeline of evolution still 

holds. If the universe is indeed a random process, 

evolution could not have given rise to complex species in 

the known time frames, and we would not be here to 

discuss how this could have taken place. 63 

63 Laszlo, Ervin & Currivan, Jude CosMos: A Co-creator’s Guide to the Whole-World (Hay 

House) 2008, p. 113 

104

105 


A great deal of human energy goes into the and/or creation 

versus evolution debate, when both hold there own cryptic truths 

but neither position endures as an absolute. In a cosmos of utter 

flux, our collective grasping for absolutes is the very source of 

error. It is our fundamental relationship with cosmic conscious-‐ 

ness as it evolves into greater states and stages of complexity that 

needs to be examined. Pierre Teilhard De Chardin was a Jesuit 

priest and philosopher who worked as a paleontologist and geo-‐ 

logist who managed to integrate the very different worlds of 

creation and evolution into his life and work. Despite publishing 

limitations being placed upon him by the church, Teilhard de 

Chardin wrote extensively about the evolution of consciousness 

and the emergent role of humanity at the cutting edge of 

complexity. By distinguishing the physiosphere or geosphere (in-‐ 

animate matter) from the biosphere (biological life), Teilhard de 

Chardin also popularized the concept of the noosphere first 

identified by Vladimir Vernadsky. Essentially the brain of the planet 

embodied as the sphere of human consciousness, a composite 

collective intelligence. Teilhard de Chardin promoted the idea of 

an Omega Point attractor pulling complexity and consciousness 

toward itself. In essence, the phenomenon of life is all around us 

and the origins of living breathing intelligent life are still indeter-‐ 

minate without any presumptive metaphysical conjuncture. Thus 

even the scientific method requires acts of faith to affirm its 

process. The seemingly hard facts of objective analysis are sus-‐ 

pended on a raft of beliefs. Teilhard de Chardin‘s visionary role as 

both a scientist and a spiritualist established a foundation for us to 

better understand how each of us fit into the global brain. 

Yet when the first spark of thought appeared upon 

earth, life found it had brought into the world a power 

capable of criticizing it and judging it. This was a formi-‐ 

dable risk which long lay dormant, but whose dangers 

burst out with our first awakening to the idea of evolution. 

Like sons who have grown up, like workers who have


become ‘conscious,’ we are discovering that something is 

developing in the world by means of us, perhaps at our 

expense. And what is more serious still is that we have 

become aware that, in the great game that is being 

played, we are the players as well as being the cards and 

the stakes. 64 

The symmetry breaks of neural activity – epigenetic activity 

to imaginative thought to self-‐reflexive through to integrative 

thought – are drawn toward some Omega Point attractor, which 

many, including Teilhard de Chardin, see as a transformation or 

unification. I prescribe to this broader view of evolution as is 

embedded in this text. This section of rapt in awe has skimmed 

over processes that have taken billions of years to evolve into 

their current state of complexity. From this contemporary view of 

evolution inviting integrative awareness, we have followed a few 

paths to this gateless gate 65 of utter awe of how life flows through 

us, how thoughts emerge and pass by like clouds in the sky, and 

how our curiousity impels us to question and create. 

Terrance McKenna extended ideas of the noosphere into 

the Gaian Mind, suggesting that each individual and apparently 

separate human mind is a mere cell in the greater. McKenna fused 

academic inquiry with exploration of the interior landscape by 

means of ethnobotany and illicit drug use. Also a proponent of the 

Omega Point, McKenna integrated certain traditional indigenous 

shamanic approaches to insight into his various books. An enthu-‐ 

siastic proponent of hallucinogenic mushrooms, he also eloquent-‐ 

ly supported the aforementioned panspermia principle for the 

origins of life and a resurgence of Goddess cultures. 

Human history represents such a radical break with 

64 

Teilhard De Chardin, Pierre The Phenomenon of Man (New York: Harpers & Row) 

1959 pp. 228-229 

65 

Zen koan: The great path has no gates,/ Thousands of roads enter it./When one passes 

through this gateless gate/ He walks freely between heaven and earth. From ed. Mascetti, 

Manuela Dunn Koans: The Lessons of Zen (Hyperion, New York) 1996, p. 18 

106


the natural systems of biological organization that preced-‐ 

ed it, that it must be the response to a kind of attractor, or 

dwell point that lies ahead in the temporal dimension. 

Persistently Western religions have integrated into their 

theologies the notion of a kind of end of the world, and I 

think that a lot of psychedelic experimentation sort of 

confirms this intuition. I don’t believe it is isn'tgoingto happen according to any of the scenarios of orthodox 

religion, but the basic intuition, that the universe seeks 

closure in a kind of omega pointoftranscendence, is 

confirmed, it's almost as though this object in hyperspace, 

glittering in hyperspace, throws off reflections of itself, 

which actually ricochet into the past, illuminating this 

mystic, inspiring that saint or visionary, and that out of 

these fragmentary glimpses of eternity we can build a kind 

of map, of not only the past of the universe, and the 

evolutionary egression into novelty, but a kind of map of 

the future, this is what shamanism is always been about, a 

shaman is someone who has been to the end, it's some-‐ 

one who knows how the world really works, and knowing 

how the world really works means to have risen outside, 

above, beyond the dimensions of ordinary space, time, 

and casuistry, and actually seen the wiring under the 

board, stepped outside the confines of learned culture 

and learned and embedded language, into the domain of 

what Wittgenstein called "the unspeakable," the transcen-‐ 

dental presence of the other, whichcan be absanctioned, 

in various ways, to yield systems of knowledge which can 

be brought back into ordinary social space for the good of 

the community, so in the context of ninety percent of 

human culture, the shaman has been the agent of evol-‐ 

ution, because the shaman learns the techniques to go 

between ordinary reality and the domain of the ideas, this 

higher dimensional continuum that is somehow parallel to 

us, available to us, and yet ordinarily occluded by cultural 

107


convention out of fear of the mystery I believe, and what 

shamans are, I believe, are people who have been able to 

de-‐condition themselves from the community's instinctual 

distrust of themystery, andto go intoit, to go into this 

bewildering higher dimension, and gain knowledge, re-‐ 

cover the jewel lost at the beginning of time, to save souls, 

cure, commune with the ancestors and so forth and so on. 

Shamanism is not a religion, it's a set of techniques, and 

the principal technique is the use of psychedelic plants. 

What psychedelics do is they dissolve boundaries, and in 

the presence of dissolved boundaries, one cannot contin-‐ 

ue to close one's eyes to the ruination of the earth, the 

poisoning of the seas, and the consequences of two 

thousand years of unchallenged dominator culture, based 

on monotheism, hatred of nature, suppression of the 

female, and so forth and so on. So, what shamans have to 

do is act as exemplars, by making this cosmic journey to 

the domain of the Gaian ideas, and then bringing them 

back in the form of art to the struggle to save the world. 

The planet has a kind of intelligence, that it can actually 

open a channel of communication with an individual 

human being. The message that nature sends is, transform 

your language through a synergy between electronic 

culture and the psychedelic imagination, a synergy be-‐ 

tween dance and idea, a synergy between understanding 

and intuition, and dissolve the boundaries that your cul-‐ 

ture has sanctioned between you, to become part of this 

Gaian supermind, I mean I think it's fairly profound, it's 

fairly apocalyptic. History is ending. I mean, we are to be 

the generation that witnesses the revelation of the 

purpose of the cosmos. 66 

Here at the unfolding apex of consciousness, we are 

collectively awakening to an Omega Point – a singularity at the 

end of time pulling us toward a transformative process. 

66 http://deoxy.org/t_re-evo.htm 

108

109 


A fascinating synergy emerged between some of the work 

of Terrance McKenna on what he termed the “concrescence of 

novelty” and the Mayan calendar. McKenna developed a com-‐ 

puter program to measure the ebb and flow of novelty called 

Timewave Zero based on an interpretation of the ancient Chinese 

book of changes, the I Ching. The increase in novelty increases 

human cohesion and coherence in consciousness to reach a 

singularity, and claiming to have no prior knowledge of the much 

hailed Mayan calendar, this singularity of the Timewave Zero 

turned out to be remarkably similar to the end date of the Mayan 

Long count on December 21, 2012. There are various inter-‐ 

pretations of this highly anticipated event from apocalyptic to 

utopic transformation, and these interpretations reflect the 

diversity of beliefs and fundamental assumptions about cosmic 

origins. I hold very little interest in trying to persuade anyone of 

anything, but I do appreciate the facets of truth that emerge from 

the diverse spectrum of ideas, insights, and stories that people 

share. This particular synergy is consistent with several other 

stories and interpretations enough to catch my attention and 

explore further, but later in this book. But for now, back to life. 

So here we are, in this instant, wearing our skin that never 

quite feels like it fits perfectly. Stretching into our material form 

living and breathing into being from moment to moment with the 

lingering interplay between a hollow existential angst and an 

inspired divine purpose. So much of our energy is spent just trying 

to figure out what to do next, and the answers are invariably 

suspended on belief. At the cusp of self-‐reflecting consciousness it 

is these constructed beliefs that in-‐form what comes next, and 

that is truly the most miraculous thing about each and every 

moment. You are co-‐creating the world around you with your 

thoughts, words, and actions all in relationship to everyone and 

everything else all around you. Take a moment to look around, 

revel in what you can see, feel, smell, hear, and sense, and be rapt 

in awe by it all.


Be Your Bliss 

At a time in my life when I was searching for beliefs to 

adhere to I was introduced to the work of Joseph Campbell 

through the Power of Myth, a book based on interviews with Bill 

Moyers. Campbell was a comparative mythologist. Deeply im-‐ 

pacted by Carl Jung’s mythic archetypes, Campbell had a passion 

for tracing the common elements across cultures in how we 

interpret our cosmological origins. Campbell’s heavily popularized 

personal philosophy of “follow your bliss” strongly resonated with 

me as I was forming my own relationship with the world. I read 

The Power of Myth around the time that I began my career in 

adventure based education, a process that I came to view as 

contemporary rites of passage. I must cite Campbell in hindsight 

of this recognition. This was a time in my life where I defined 

myself by climbing things and scratching the surface of those 

experiences for an intrinsic sense of meaning. My rejection of the 

pervasive materialistic world around me left me somewhat adrift, 

and thus searching. I was impelled to seek meaning through a 

personal journey of discovery rather than through a religion. I can 

see the parallels between my personal journey and Joseph 

Campbell’s Hero’s Journey, the core archetype expressed in all 

world myths. 

“If you follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track 

that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that 

you ought to be living is the one you are living. Wherever you are – 

if you are following your bliss, you are enjoying that refreshment, 

that life within you, all the time.” 67 As someone who was drawn to 

pondering the re-‐circulating questions in the infinite procession of 

“why”, I have found that true understanding rarely comes when 

we are first exposed to an idea, that there is a latency in genuine 

comprehension that comes as spontaneous insight when the 

subject of our curiousity shifts to being the object of our under-‐ 

standing. Thus I pondered the principle of following your bliss for 

67 

Campbell, Joseph & Moyers, Bill The Power of Myth (Anchor Books) 1991, P. 113 

110

111 


some time considering it an effective indicator of how attuned I 

was with the world around me, and ultimately with my own sense 

of meaning and purpose. Campbell shared how he arrived at his 

own recognition, 

Now, I came to this idea of bliss because in Sanskrit, 

which is the great spiritual language of the world, there 

are three terms that represent the brink, the jumping-‐off 

place to the ocean of transcendence: sat-‐chit-‐ananda. The 

word "Sat" means being. "Chit" means consciousness. 

"Ananda" means bliss or rapture. I thought, "I don't know 

whether my consciousness is proper consciousness or not; 

I don't know whether what I know of my being is my 

proper being or not; but I do know where my rapture is. 

So let me hang on to rapture, and that will bring me both 

my consciousness and my being." I think it worked. 68 

So what then does it mean to follow your bliss? My inquiry has 

shown me that the felt experience of bliss is not an externally 

gratified thing, arrived at through hedonistic indulgence, but 

rather an internal, and very personal, alignment with the broader 

evolution of consciousness. Some of my most profound moments 

of bliss have come at times of considerable discomfort and suffer-‐ 

ing, as a spontaneous recognition of a deeper identity than my 

mere transient flesh and bones and neurosis. I see one’s bliss as 

being synonymous with the felt experience of truth, these truth’s 

being intensely personal and subjective. It is the intersection of 

these many truths, an intricately woven web, upon which the 

universe is suspended in being. There is a Buddhist metaphor for 

the universe as Indra’s Jeweled Net, “which reaches out to infinite 

space. At each knot on the net is a crystal gem, which is connected 

to all the other gems and reflects in itself all the others. On such a 

net, no jewel is in the center or at the edge. Each and every jewel 

68 Campbell, Joseph & Moyers, Bill The Power of Myth (Anchor Books) 1991, P. 120


is at the center in that it reflects all the other jewels on the net.” 69 

It is my contention, and the motivation behind this book, that the 

progressive flow of the evolution of consciousness in the cosmos 

is either promoted or inhibited by each of our abilities to be with, 

and follow our own bliss. The world that we experience through 

our senses is embedded with the meaning and purpose of 

consciousness evolving. I like to look at everything around me as 

the self-‐reflecting universe illuminating signals for me to stay in 

the flow and be rapt in awe. Alan Watts explains Indras Jeweled 

Net as well, “Imagine a multi-‐dimensional spider's web in the early 

morning covered with dew drops. And every dew drop contains 

the reflection of all the other dewdrops. And in each reflected 

dew drop, the reflections of all the other dew drops in it. And so 

ad infinitum. That is the Buddhist conception of the universe in an 

image.” 70 Being in your bliss is abiding in your authentic self in 

each moment. In working with hundreds of people in adventure 

education programs, many of which taking place in deep 

wilderness, I have had a rare privilege to witness the results of 

what I refer to as contemporaryritesofpassage – thatis people 

unveiling how it is that they reference their authenticity. In the 

modern world much of our identity is constructed from external 

influences imposed upon us by family, teachers, and the 

bombardment of mass media campaigns with the same 

sociological origins as Nazi propaganda. In a rite of passage, social 

distractions are shed, layer by layer, generally leaving us with only 

our most basic needs – water, foodforsustenance, shelter, 

warmth, and a sense of belonging. Peeling through the 

constructed layers of identity wearethenabletowitnessthe resonant echo of personal truth from an internal source. Just 

where this internal sense of truth comes from takes us to 

metaphysical questions. I simply lean on poetic expression to say 

that being in our bliss is merely flowing in the cosmic groove, 

attuned to the ever-‐evolving cosmic consciousness. 

69 

His Holiness the Dalai Lama. The Universe in a Single Atom: The Convergence of Science 

and Spirituality (New York: Morgan Road Books) 2005, p. 89 

70 

Alan Watts Podcast Finding the Middle Way #3 alanwattspodcast.com 

112

Flow and Creativity 

113 


I see the process of being in the flow as synonymous with 

following one’s bliss. There is a close correlation to this inter-‐ 

pretation of flow experiences popularized through the book Flow: 

The Psychology of Optimal Experience by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. 

The turn of phrase go with the flow is common place, often sum-‐ 

ming up one’s comprehensive philosophy of living. What I’d like to 

explore is the question: The flow of what? If we simply follow 

convention of consumption we are not really striking a balance, so 

I see defining what the flow is as being crucial. My contention is 

that it is cosmic consciousness that is flowing, and that is where I 

am coming from when using the word flow. I deeply appreciate 

the research that has gone into flow states of being as optimal 

experience, and I trust that you will find your own parallels and 

correlations amidst the different ways of saying. 

Communication is the mere exchanges of symbols and 

words with associated meanings, and meaning is exchanged 

through such symbols to aid in relationship so that we can identify 

that which we share. This identification of similarities enables 

coherence and complexity within the social and cultural realms. 

We share a common language. Thus I am writing the same thing as 

before, yet with different words in the hope that our shared 

experiences are better illuminated. In examining our ability to 

access flow I think that it is worth examining the very nature of 

thought for which I will rely once again on the quantum physicist 

and philosopher David Bohm. “What, then, is the creative state of 

mind, which so few have been able to be in? … It is, first of all, one 

whose interest in what is being done is wholehearted and totally 

like that of a young child. With this spirit, it is always open to 

learning what is new, to perceiving new differences and new 

similarities, leading to new orders and structures, rather than 

always tending to impose familiar orders and structures in the


field of what is seen.” 72 Building on his line of thought, Bohm 

continues, “…like the processes of nature, those of the mind are 

basically of an infinite order that is always tending to evolve 

toward new orders, and thus to develop new hierarchies consti-‐ 

tuting new kinds of structure.” 73 Flowand creativityaremanifest-‐ ations of cosmic consciousness pouring through the open vessel 

of self, as novelty creeps through the habitual orders of confirm-‐ 

ation. 

Bohm identifies clearly how the childlike openness to the 

ever-‐present awe invites acts of creativity in us. 

72 

We have thus come to the point of seeing that the 

question of being clearly aware of the difference 

between the creative and the mechanical character of 

human responses lies far beyond limited fields such as 

art, science, and so forth. Rather, it involves the entire 

human race as a whole. What is needed is a generally 

creative quality of living in all areas of human activity. But 

how are we to achieve this? Given that we have generally 

been conditioned to mediocrity and mechanicalness how 

are we to break out of this conditioning? 

It seems that, in some way, each person has to 

discover what it means to be original and creative. After 

all, generally speaking, the childlike quality of fresh, 

wholehearted interest is not entirely dead in any of us. It 

comes in a burst, and then it gets lost in confusion as all 

the old special interests, fears, desires, aims, securities, 

pleasures, and pains come up from the past. These twist 

the fresh clarity of the mind in a mechanical way, so that 

the capacity for originality and creation are deadened 

and gradually ‘go to sleep.’ As a result, the more subtle 

capacity for original and creative perception has by now 

Bohm, David On Creativity (London and New York: Routledge) 1996, p. 21 

73 

Ibid. p.24 

114

115 


atrophied, so that it is generally rather weak and inact-‐ 

ive. 74 

Our own creativity is essentially channeling flow. It is no 

wonder that Csikszentmihalyi’s research into optimal experience 

involved conducting interviews with high performance athletes, 

artists, dancers, musicians, and other people excelling in creative 

and original expression. Csikszentmihalyi’s work articulated the 

flow state, yet it set out to explore the nature of happiness. Being 

in the flow is being in one’s bliss, much like a child immersed in 

play. 

It has been an enduring interest of mine to analyze 

human dynamics through the metaphorical lenses of both rela-‐ 

tivity and quantum theory. It is no wonder that the work and 

insights of David Bohm hold such appeal. 

…approaching the question in different ways, relativ-‐ 

ity and quantum theory agree, in that they both imply the 

need to look on the world as an undivided whole, in which 

all parts of the universe, including the observer and his 

instruments, merge and unite in one totality. In this 

totality, the atomistic form of insight is a simplification 

and an abstraction, valid only in some limited context. 

The new form of insight can perhaps best be called 

Undivided Wholeness in Flowing Movement. This view 

implies that flow is, in some sense, prior to that of the 

‘things’ that can be seen to form and dissolve in this flow. 

One can perhaps illustrate what is meant here by consid-‐ 

ering the ‘stream of consciousness’. This flux of aware-‐ 

ness is not precisely definable, and yet it is evidently prior 

to the definable forms of thoughts and ideas which can 

be seen to form and dissolve in the flux, like ripples, 

74 Ibid. pp. 27-28


waves and vortices in a flowing stream. As happens with 

such patterns of movement in a stream some thoughts 

recur and persist in a more or less stable way, while 

others are evanescent. 75 

With the insight of hindsight, I now see that the sense of 

depression mentioned earlier had more to do with my disconnect-‐ 

edness from the flow, being alienated from my authentic self, 

being estranged from my bliss and out of the cosmic groove. By 

flow I mean the all-‐pervasive stream of universal energy that is 

always evolving into greater complexity. The rigid rules of school 

are not connected to the natural cycles of the earth and cosmos, 

they emulated the mechanistic discipline of a universe reduced by 

reason, bound by a fixation on modernity. Since we live within the 

boundaries of our skin, it appears to us that we are separate, 

which is a limiting perspective for the interconnection, the flow of 

universal energy, is the undivided flux from which we all emerge. 

Awakening to this understanding is what frees us from the 

isolated coil of ourselves, and allows us to commune with the 

evolving cosmos at large. 

My little epiphany on the dock of a remote coastal inlet, 

the felt sense of genuine happiness, was a moment wherein I 

connected to this flow. The anabatic air awakened my sense of 

smell amidst the grandeur of wilderness, my senses dissolving my 

socially and culturally constructed self so that I could simply be 

immersed in the moment. This constructed self that I mention – 

identity constructs built upon past experiences under the influen-‐ 

ce of internal dialogue, parents, sibling, friends, random strangers, 

teachers, preachers, mentors and myths – is what I want to bring 

to question here. We build up a personal spectrum of beliefs as we 

learn and grow heavily influenced by the dominant culture within 

which we live, creating a mechanistic mode of thought over-‐ 

wrought with confirmation. Our drive for a sense of belonging 

75 

Bohm, David Wholeness and the Implicate Order (New York: Routledge) 1980, p. 11 

116


often overrides our authentic internal awareness of self. As we 

come to know ourselves what we perceive ourselves to be is 

sculpted by these dominant ideas and the popular modes of 

inquiry. To some extent rigid rule worldviews provide the rungs in 

the ladder for further development – the structure that can give 

us traction for original and creative insight to emerge. Yet due to 

our persistent experience of separateness we often tend to 

reference our sense of belonging, a fundamental need, through 

others rather than through the interwoven web of being that 

connects us all. The subtle, causal and non-‐dual aspects of self are 

negated by our attachments to the immediately apparent gross 

physical elements in our awareness. 

These worldviews are often akin to a map, where as raw 

reality is the actual terrain. Modernity has the tendency to take 

the map as literal truth rather than a scaled representation, an 

intermediate metaphor to break down something so vast and ex-‐ 

quisite that it blows the mind. My contention is that the raw 

beauty and splendor of life is often inhibited by our fundamental 

beliefs, our interpretive maps. My aim is to address these ideas, 

the substrata that guides our perceptions and perspectives, to 

better access the naked truth beneath the façade of separateness. 

Once we are aware of how our values and beliefs, our 

fears and triggers influencewhatweexperienceandsee – being 

the lens we look through – we can identifywithour authenticself. This authentic self is alignedwithourdeepestsenseofpurpose, accessing insights from our timeless eternal being, wrapped up in 

our particular gift, our genius, to aid the evolution of conscious-‐ 

ness. The recognition and maintenance of this authentic flow state 

is a fulltime process, breath to breath, in being mindfully aware. By 

attuning to our cosmic groove and honouring our genius capabil-‐ 

ities, we urge evolution along. Collective transformation happens 

from the sum total of such individual attunements of flowand creativity. The cosmos creates through us as agents of evolution. 

117


You and me as micro-‐manifestationsof the whole cosmos 

To better understand flow and the significant role it plays 

in our lives, I will back up a little and deviate into an abstract 

model of manifestation, that is, how fundamental energy comes 

into being as a breathing body, a thinking mind, and a searching 

soul. Think empty space: each of us as independent nodes of 

cosmic consciousness is the intersection of two interacting funda-‐ 

mental things. The first can be looked at as life energy, chi, prana, 

lung ta 76 or the stuff of the very early universe – raw energy. From 

the astrophysical angle we may consider this to essentially be light 

– random photons. The second is what defines us as a separate 

entity amidst the rest of the manifest universe, our soul or 

timeless-‐eternal self, a multidimensional imprint of identity not 

bound by gross physical form or time or space. This second thing is 

what I mean by authentic self, and it is the key to accessing a 

harmonious sense of purpose within one’s life, thereby accessing 

flow states. The recognition of flow is generally how we can clear-‐ 

ly identify with the second aspect of this fundamental interaction 

and recognize our authentic self. The Zen koan: “what was your 

original face before your parents were born?” 77 invites us to 

recognize this timeless eternal aspect of self by contemplating 

paradox. 

There is bound to be considerable confusion here as I 

delve into different dimensions, and frames of reference, with the 

finicky bonding agent of language. Thus a reflective exercise may 

aid in bringing us to a common understanding to put us on the 

same page, paragraph, and line with common understanding of 

what the words mean. Reflect on an instance in your life where 

you have felt the state of flow, a quiet sense of perfection and 

balance. Use the format in Exercise 1.0 to assist in this process, 

and alter it to best suit your learning style and needs. 

76 

Lung ta is Tibetan for wind horse referring to the essential energy of goodness. 

77 

Zen masters use koans as mind puzzles to transcend rational cognitive processes and 

intuitively arrive at a broader and deeper understanding of the manifest universe. 

118

Exercise 1.0: 

Describe any flow instances you can recall. 

Describe the setting (time and place). 

What factors contributed to the flow state? 

What do these flow instances have in common? 

How have flow instances had a bearing on life choices? 

119 


In reflection, what have these flow instances told you about your 

authentic self?


Based on decades of research Mihaly Csíkszentmihályi has identi-‐ 

fied ten factors contributing to flow experiences: 

1. Clear goals (expectations and rules are discernible and 

goals are attainable and align appropriately with one's 

skill set and abilities). The challenge and skill levels should 

both be high. 

2. Concentration, a high degree of concentration on a limited 

field of attention (a person engaged in the activity will 

have the opportunity to focus and to delve deeply into it). 

3. A loss of the feeling of self-‐consciousness, the merging of 

action and awareness. 

4. A distorted sense of time, one's subjective experience of 

time is altered. 

5. Direct and immediate feedback (successes and failures in 

the course of the activity are apparent, so that behavior 

can be adjusted as needed). 

6. Balance between ability level and challenge (the activity is 

neither too easy nor too difficult). 

7. A sense of personal control over the situation or activity. 

8. The activity is intrinsically rewarding, so there is an effort-‐ 

lessness of action. 

9. A lack of awareness of bodily needs (to the extent that 

one can reach a point of great hunger or fatigue without 

realizing it). 

10. People become absorbed in their activity, and focus of 

awareness is narrowed down to the activity itself, action 

awareness merging. 

Not all ten factors are required to be in flow experiences. 78 

78 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology) 

120

121 


Many North American aboriginal groups practiced vision 

quests to access and identify authentic self. The cultural cosmo-‐ 

logy interpreted the process through the visitation of the spirit 

totem, an expression of the animistic relationship with the spirit 

world. The validity of this practice in terms of accessing and under-‐ 

standing a one’s deepest, truest self is profound. By removing 

social constructs that distract us from our recognition of spirit 

within is a key factor in identifying authentic self. The translation 

of this recognition of spirit within will always be influenced by the 

cultural constructs of language – be it animal totems, or deities, or 

angelic archetypes. It is the raw experience of our timeless eternal 

self, our original face that impels our sense of purpose in the 

context of our gross body form within this life. 

In this section on flow and creativity, I have leaned upon 

the insights of David Bohm considerably. Here again I draw a 

connection to this evolving argument from Leroy Little Bear who 

wrote the preface to the Routledge Classics Edition of Bohm’s On 

Creativity, “The Blackfoot mind is a repository of creativity be-‐ 

cause of the notion of flux. If one were to imagine this flux at a 

cosmic scale or at the mental level consisting of energy waves, 

one can imagine him-‐ or herself as a surfer: a surfer of the flux. 

While surfing, one goes with the flow of the waves, becoming one 

with the waves. One is not limited to focusing on the immediate 

surroundings but takes in everything, from the local surroundings 

to the distant horizon. In the process of surfing the flux, one takes 

in and experiences all different combinations of energy waves. It 

begins to look abstract not unlike an abstract piece of art but full 

of motion and movement. Visually, the dance of the energy waves 

is elegant and beautiful, similar to the dancing northern lights.” 79 I 

love both the metaphor of surfing and the northern lights, as they 

each hold special meaning from personal experience beyond the 

79 Words by Leroy Little Bear, 2004 from the preface of David Bohm. On Creativity. 

Routledge Classics. 2004


constructs of words. What also strikes me from this passage is the 

intimate understanding that the Blackfoot had prior to modernity 

of how the world works. This was not exclusive to the Blackfoot, 

or to just aboriginal cultures. It is an understanding that stems 

back to a perennial wisdom that we must now integrate into our 

more complex daily lives in the modern world. 

So to follow flow, to be within one’s own cosmic groove, 

leaves a sense of peace and inner harmony. Similarly, when not in 

one’s cosmic groove, not in flow, a sense of disconnectedness, dis-‐ 

ease, or depression commonly arises. I see this as an indicator, sig-‐ 

nal flags to the self as if to say, “you’re off-‐track”. In the context 

of modernity, with both social and cultural constructs influencing 

us as well as our own ego identity constructs, such ruts of discon-‐ 

nectedness, disease, and depression are the norm. 

In a world where depression is considered normal and 

medication manages symptoms, it is rare for social institutions and 

cultural norms to support us looking at root causes. Depression 

and anxiety are like rumble strips on the road of authenticity, 

telling us that we have strayed away from our bliss, gotten out of 

our cosmic groove, and we are not flowing with the ever present 

evolution of consciousness. It is my personal conjecture that if a 

critical mass of people were to simultaneously reside in our bliss, 

be in our cosmic groove, access our authentic self, be in the flow, 

that the evolution of consciousness would result in a harmonious-‐ 

ly transformed humanity. Bam! Just like that! This would be the 

synchronic alignment of the apparently separate cells of the Gaian 

Mind – the Noosphere – and the Earth itself would then slide into 

it’s own greater cosmic groove. In this vein of thought, I see such 

things as climate change, species extinction, resource depletion, 

and economic collapse as the rumble strips on the side of the road 

of the Gaian Mind, our collective journey in the universe. The 

ominous dread that oozes from the evening news is a collective 

indicator for us to ground ourselves in authenticity and active 

become agents of conscious evolution. 

122

The Red Road 

123 


Having grown up in a world with mainstream current steep-‐ 

ed in modernity, I resisted any form of ceremony or devotion to 

anything but logic. I’d had multiple experiences defying rational 

explanation, but my willingness to conjure the courage to cons-‐ 

ciously acknowledge felt experiences as valid was very low. I 

inherently understood that the mechanistic tick-‐tock of God’s 

unwinding clock was not a good metaphor to live by, but I failed 

to find another one that was for some time. The first ceremony 

that I willingly participated in with an open mind was a pipe cere-‐ 

mony. A Lakota Pipe Carrier happened to be at my house and 

invited everyone around to sit in a ceremony. The novelty appeal-‐ 

ed to me, and having grown up adjacent to Native communities, I 

had much more openness to the aboriginal worldviews than those 

of traditional Christianity that were prevalent around me. The 

process of passing the pipe piqued my curiousity and openness 

such that I followed an invitation to a Sundance Ceremony that 

summer. To write the details of such ceremonies would violate a 

sacred trust, and it is not so much what is done, but the essence of 

intentionality that imbues such processes with their power. I can 

write about my internal process as I watched my own mind chat-‐ 

ter flip-‐flop between openness and receptivity and being skeptical 

and closed. My intent in sharing this story is to relate my personal 

recognition of the power of devotional ceremony, and an awaken-‐ 

ing to the practical applications of ancient wisdom in the modern 

world. 

In many aboriginal traditions, the Godhead is referred to as 

the Creator and speaks to us in cryptic symbols like the fluttering 

by of a butterfly or the timely soaring of an eagle. When we pose a 

question to the Creator, or even just hold one in mind, the answer 

is right before us. These cryptic answers need to be interpreted 

through symbols, generally through the natural world, which was 

quite accurately understood to be a manifestation of Spirit other-‐


wise known as cosmic consciousness. With a rather active rational 

brain, I found myself scrutinizing such symbolic interpretation, yet 

the more that I made myself willing to listen, the more I realized 

that there was often profound truth revealed by the interpre-‐ 

tations. Regardless of one’s preference for devolution be it a 

religious practice or a belief in rationality, a wise interpretation 

resonates. The use of symbols requires interpretation, and we 

tend to organize around those who speak the same language – be 

it a literal language or a vernacular of any subgroup. In practicing 

this means of interpreting my reality – that the cosmos ie. Creator 

– is reflecting my internal thought processes in any given instant, I 

have found considerable utility in understanding myself and how 

my thoughts interact with the broader world to create my life. I 

like to call this the self-‐reflecting universe since I can see the para-‐ 

llels between my internal thought processes and what is hap-‐ 

pening in the world around me. 

Wisdom is not so much transferred by words, which again 

are mere symbols requiring interpretation, but by energetic trans-‐ 

mission. Communication research has routinely demonstrated that 

the actual content, that is the words spoken, composed only a 

mere 15-‐20% of communication. Another 15-‐20% is annotation and 

inflection – that is tone of voice. Most communication (60-‐70%) 

takes place through body language. I personally believe that of 

this 60-‐70% much of that is an energetic vibration, the very 

essence of thought energy within the morphic in-‐formation field. 

Thus we are able to sense the subtle foundation of our reality as it 

is being co-‐created around us. Wisdom is often associated with the 

knowingness of one having felt this before, and I believe that it is 

this sentient communication that makes the interpretation of our 

queries resonant. The barriers that emerge are largely a process of 

the interpretation of language. 

In Tantric traditions theteacherorguruinvokesastate experience in the open presence of the student or initiate and 

thus conveys insight through the unfoldingexperienceofthe cosmos by a transmission. Tantra is another example of devotional 

124

125 


ceremony that involves open energetic exchange and elders 

guidance. From this insight, I began my own gonzo experimenta-‐ 

tion with what I call the self-‐reflecting universe. I would interpret 

what was happening in the external world around me and overlay 

my internal processes and look for any illuminating patterns. What 

Figure 8.0 The Self-Reflecting Universe (The physical reality experienced on the 

right side is a mirror image to internal processes correlating to subtle, causal, 

and nondual aspects of consciousness). 

I found was that it worked; that if I saw the relationships and 

events that occurred in my life as cosmic manifestations of my 

thoughts and processes I was able to continually learn and grow, 

gleaning a steady stream of insight from just how my thoughts 

and dreams cryptically reflected into tangible reality. It was totally 

trippy, each and every moment that I held this in awareness. This 

approach to understanding and interpreting natural phenomena 

was not at all new. It was simply an integration of a modernist 

slant on an ancient aboriginal practice of seeing the Creator’s 

answers unfold before my eyes. 

What I found in practicing awareness of the self-‐reflecting 

universe was that my shadow elements and fears, my negative


karma, was projecting things into my life. I had to acknowledge 

my negative thoughts and feelings as passing aspects of myself so 

that I did not simply re-‐circulate them in my subconscious and thus 

manifest them into my daily life. I began to witness just how my 

modernist tool kit of skepticism inhibited the free-‐flow of cosmic 

evolution. I was able to reflect in hindsight, as I would do daily in 

trying to heal the leg that had been crushed, on how the death 

process after that accident had been invoked by my rationalist 

fixation with going into shock. Simply by thinking that I was going 

to die because of rapid blood loss, started me down that road. I 

was manifesting my fears. In opening my mind to the mere possi-‐ 

bility that I could regulate the blood flow with my breath, made 

space for the miraculous ability for the body to heal itself. As I 

write this, I witness the skeptical voice of my rational mind derid-‐ 

ing myself as a flake, and I know enough now to let that voice flow 

by and interpret my reality with an open willingness to what can 

be, rather than what I think should be. 

Figure 8.1 Personal Example of the Self-Reflecting Universe 

At the Sundance ceremony that I was privileged to attend 

and contribute as a Firekeeper, I witnessed many things within the 

emanating energy of an extremely powerful morphic field. The 

126


ceremony itself created this field with the collective intention of all 

the people there. It was a veritable torrent of transmission. I sat 

with an elder who assisted me in interpreting what I was exper-‐ 

iencing, and he explained the idea of the Red Road. Each of us has 

a direct relationship with the Creator, and the Creator lays a path 

before each of us that is unique and distinct. Think of it as our own 

individual Songline as understood by the Australian Aborigines, to 

which we attune and follow the flow in our own cosmic groove. 

This path is the Red Road; red because it is the path of our heart. 

In my own interpretation, at the core and essence of aboriginal 

devotional practice, once we come to know ourselves from our 

heart by means of a rite of passage, we must then follow the path 

of our heart to be in our bliss and in the flow and in the cosmic 

groove in order that cosmic consciousness can further evolve. And 

that, I think, is why we are here in this skin, in this life. 

The elder transmission rooted in an ancient culture tradi-‐ 

tion resonated with my earlier gonzo cosmological exploration. So 

many divergent paths that I had pondered while wanderingbymy mountain methodology – philosophybyfeet– convergedinthe most salient sense of understanding. Several of the Sundance 

participants had survived combat in the Vietnam and Korean Wars 

and there was open talk about trauma. I was still very muchina conceptual place of trying to put together the pieces after the 

surreal stretching of consciousness from the accident and crush 

injury to my leg. I was told that I had Post Traumatic Stress 

Disorder, what I new was that I had a twitch ever since, and that 

the kaleidoscopic clarity that emerged from the accident remained 

available to me. When I stated in a conversation with a combat vet 

that the trauma I had experienced was nothing compared to what 

he had endured, he snapped back, “Trauma is trauma! It messes 

with us all the same.” When I learned about the Red Road, and 

heard about how the Creator drops cosmic bread crumbs to trace 

a path back to our authentic self, I came to the most startling 

revelation: life cracks us open sometimes, and when we areopen 127


we are able to be transformed by the ever present flow of cosmic 

consciousness. It was then that I understood why I had had this 

accident, and what gifts it persisted to reveal to me. 

Creativity and Social Organization 

The concept of genius dates back to Roman civilization, 

relating to the Ancient Greek concept of daemon. It was believed 

that each of us had a sort of spirit guide from the cosmic or ethe-‐ 

real realm – our genius – with whom we would commune. Our 

genius was thought to be our personal source of creativity and 

define our qualities and character in the realm of flesh and blood. 

This interpretation of an external genius persists to this day, and is 

advocated by many creative people who demonstrate the com-‐ 

mon contemporary interpretation of the word genius. I have often 

felt when writing that I surrender myself to simply be the quill in 

the hand of something far greater than I, and this resonates with 

the classical Roman genius concept. The premise that I would like 

to most strongly advocate and present here is that everyone has 

genius – that it is not merely a random gift for the few. The pre-‐ 

valent challenge for us as humans in our day-‐to-‐day existence is in 

accessing our genius, which I believe lies intimately entangled with 

our shadow – that which we do not want to acknowledge within 

us. We have explored the concept of flow extensively and it is 

integrally entwined with this idea of genius, simply said, residing in 

our genius puts us in flow. The recognition and maintenance of 

our genius connection is either prompted or inhibited by both 

internal and external influences. Most notably is our internal 

aversion to acknowledging our shadow aspects and the common 

human tendency to resist change and flow with the cosmos. 

Blame it on your skin, that thin cutaneous membrane that gives 

you the persistent experience of being separate. The external 

factors manifest in structures of social organization from family to 

education to economic and political systems. The modernist 

cultural paradigm can influence our ability to identify and access 

our genius, both positively and negatively depending on what our 

128

129 


genius is and how closely we identify with culture. As clearly 

described by Leroy Little Bear the Blackfoot understanding of the 

interwoven flux and flow connecting us, is a wonderful cultural 

metaphor to support genius identification. 

It is the cumulative co-‐creative process of a sufficient 

number of people residing in their genius, surrendering to the 

cosmic flow of evolving consciousness that will carry us to the 

shores of collective transformation. The concept of flow, as illus-‐ 

trated earlier, is synonymous with residing in one’s genius or 

following one’s bliss. Aligning with genius, flow, bliss, or non-‐dual 

wholeness are parallel concepts that both cutting edge scientific 

research and numerous spiritual traditions tell us that transform-‐ 

ation comes rapidly when the center of gravity shifts enough for 

the evolution of consciousness to tip. I liken this to the process of 

fetch (wind over water) translating into energy manifesting as 

swell which rises into the crescendo of a breaking wave when it 

reaches the resistance of shallow shoals, reef, or beach. Our indivi-‐ 

dual nodes of consciousness each creating positive wave interfer-‐ 

ence patterns at the quantum level of reality as it is being in-‐ 

formed into being. Our current modern paradigm, with its shallow 

social structures and individual inhibitive habits, is very much like 

the shore upon which the wave of evolving consciousness breaks. 

This beckons the question of how then do we reach the 

critical mass of genius identification, of surrendering to the flow, 

of being with one’s bliss? I believe that it is already happening, 

that a sufficient number of conscious living breathing beings are 

awakening to themselves as manifest nodes of cosmic conscious-‐ 

ness, and that we must simply name it, be it, believe in it, and 

socially network to satisfy that most fundamental human need to 

belong as the wave of conscious transformation sweeps through 

us. Rapt in awe thus stands as an invitation for co-‐creative 

dialogue for us all to change the world by being in our genius, 

staying in the flow, and resting in our own cosmic grooves.


I want to learn from you. I want to have generative 

conversations that contribute to my own personal authenticity 

and to the broader evolution of cosmic consciousness. This begins 

in every interaction, in each moment. 

Pray by Play 

A pervasive experience of my late teens that peaked in 

my early twenties was the feeling of not knowing where I fit into 

conventional social and cultural structures. I was encountering 

novel ideas about the world that struggled to find confirmation. I 

identified with the outsider perhaps through existential disassocia-‐ 

tion or perhaps subcultural identification. The seasonal migrations 

of the climber’s lifestyle facilitated a sense of belonging within a 

fringe dwelling quasi-‐nomadic tribe. Working as a treeplanter did 

the same and the two worlds certainly overlapped culturally. With 

the insight of hindsight reflecting back, I can see clearly my stages 

of personal evolution. As a mere, and mirror, vehicle of conscious-‐ 

ness evolving, I played out emergent constructs of cultural trans-‐ 

formation. It was the allergic repulsion to constructs of modernity 

and postmodernism that I was acting out, from slam dancing in 

northern BC bars to climbing remote granite peaks. Despite the 

constant feeling of fragmentation, I was never alone. The 

existential angst of feeling alone, a projection of my mind, was the 

process of individuation from the status quo of social and cultural 

convention. In the language framed by Integral Theory, this was 

the early stages of transcendence, without in-‐clusion. 

If we put together all of the scientific research on human 

development together, it appears that there are indeed at 

least these three broad arcs of human psychological 

growth: prepersonal to personal to transpersonal, or pre-‐ 

rational to rational to transrational, or subconscious to 

self-‐conscious to super-‐conscious. Each of the stages in 

those arcs continues to transcend and include its 

predecessor(s). As each new level unfolds, it enfolds its 

130

131 


predecessor – a development that is envelopment – so 

that the cumulative effect is integral indeed, just as with 

atoms to molecules to cells to organisms. Nothing is lost, 

all is retained, in the extraordinary unfolding and en-‐ 

folding, developing and enveloping, transcending and 

including, negating and preserving, that is consciousness 

evolution. 80 

At this time in my life, my backpack was my most 

consistent companion and closest manifestation of a home. 

Wherever I laid out my sleeping bag and mat was my temporal 

abode for the night. Under the resonant influence of Jack 

Kerouac’s Dharma Bums, I wandered both within and without, 

surfing couches and camps, and climbing things as the primary 

focus of my existence. I took to writing reflective journals of my 

philosophical ponderings and poetry, as a practice that has 

manifested as this book after the passing of years – the latent 

process of fermenting perspectives. I also carried a copy of the 

Tibetan Book of the Dead, a gift – much like climbing – from my 

brothers. I was ever lured by the complexity of the text as it was 

not bound by the rigid constructs of modernist thought, and also 

my own quirky desire to comprehend it. I now, years later, 

understand how the essential vibration and intention of the 

ancient book called to me for a reason that I did not comprehend. 

Yet I heeded this ethereal draw, which came to serve its purpose 

in my clear light recognition of eternal essential self when my 

physical being was in the process of dying. 

My seasonal migration centered around the rock climbing 

hub of Squamish, BC, nestled in between Vancouver and Whistler, 

and the ice climbing epicenter of Canmore, Alberta, between 

Calgary and Banff in the Canadian Rockies. As a self-‐described 

gonzo cosmologist, my quasi-‐experimental exploration at the time 

80 Ken Wilber The Integral Vision (Boston & London: Shambhala) 2007, p.125


was translating visualization into action, largely in the climbing 

context. I would meditate and visualize on a climb and then wit-‐ 

ness the unfolding of flow states of awareness – totalfocusand dissolution of cognitive process – which was largely fear, 

hesitation, and doubt in that context. I was experimenting with 

becoming one with the moment in the context of risk. The 

medium, steep rock, snow, and ice, prompted the natural 

response of fear, stress, and the associated tension, and the act of 

climbing requires intentional breath to calm the mind and body. 

From the repetitive process of this practice, I found myself able to 

better discern between the projections of my mind and the 

intuitive signals from merging with the medium. In more practical 

terms, I found myself better able to identify if my emergent fears 

were signally personal thresholds and barriers, or palpable risksin the environment like rock or ice fall. By being attuned to the 

medium, I discovered precognition of the external hazards, which 

in my circle of friends was affectionately referred to as Spidey 

Sense. 81 Thustheintimatesuspensionofeachmomentrequired the utmost focus, filtering extraneous signals and savoring those 

that served the moment. I developed my own little mantra for 

repetition when my doubting, fearing mind – that of projections of 

my limiting self – started to express itself: 

Fear is the only limit. 

Doubt is the only limit. 

Hesitation is the only limit. 

The human spirit is boundless. 

Let it flow freely. 

Through all this informal exploration and experimenta-‐ 

tion, I proved to myself beyond any doubt that mind and con-‐ 

sciousness are intimately entwined with matter – that thought 

influences both actions and the outcomes of physical reality. This 

particular vein of inquiry persists, as I try to better understand 

81 

From Stan Lee’s Spiderman series of comic books. 

132


how it is that consciousness comes into being, how thoughts 

manifest into physical form. 

An elegant phrase arose around this time from another 

node of the same emergent subculture but closer to the extreme 

skiers of Whistler – The Church of the Moment. In the frame of 

morphic fields, consciousness was performing the same, and 

similar, inquiries through other people, not bound by time, space 

or place. The Church of the Moment eloquently expresses the 

ethos of a transcendent tribe of seekers practicing their crafts at 

the intersection of wilderness and risk. The practice of focusing so 

exclusively on the next move when climbing, turn when skiing, or 

breath when merely mediating to dissolve the extraneous stimuli 

and the mind merges with the medium and the moment. This is 

how we play – and this is how we pray. Pray by play. 

With the luxury of leisure implicit in this chosen lifestyle, 

new constructs of consciousness could emerge and express them-‐ 

selves. This subculture that I identified with sought fulfillment 

through creative expression with whatis humanlypossible rather 

than the accumulation of symbols of security such as money, 

property, insurance plans, and investments in anticipated futures. 

Self-‐definition was carried out in the moment – praybyplay. Coming from relative abundance through the apex of industrialism 

and generally being generations away from the traumatic impacts 

of war, this subculture of outdoor enthusiasts, artists, and global 

travelers was free from the limiting constructs of seeking per-‐ 

ceived security. Security was sought from within, as an interface 

with the moment. Thus I personally identified with Eastern 

mountain mystics more than Western idols of modernity as I 

wandered both internal and external landscapes following my 

bliss, attuned to the flow. I see this socio-‐cultural expression of 

pray by play or the Church of the Moment, as being aligned with 

self-‐actualization pursuits drawing from the popular model of 

Humanisitic Psychology, Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. The result 

133


in many cases was also a process of self-‐transcendence, the pray 

by play process inviting opportunities for psyche-‐spiritual develop-‐ 

ment through peak experiences. Having the resources and skills 

available to meet progressive tiers of personal needs this sub-‐ 

cultural collective of Cultural Creatives 82 is freetoflowwiththe evolving complexity of consciousness. The subcultural spit is 

evidence of transcendence, and then inclusion is evident through 

the integration of such emergent constructs and relational frames 

of reference. Development by envelopment of preceding stages, 

as Integral Theory tells us. With this broader process of inclusion, 

the critical mass of Cultural Creatives increases driven by the as-‐ 

cending asymptote of evolving consciousness, the cresting wave 

of collective awakening. 

Anthropological analysis has demonstrated that art 

comes at the forefront of cultural evolution, that art precedes 

higher levels of social complexity. “Newly emerging, historically 

significant worldviews always arise in connection with new 

aesthetic sensibilities and new art forms.” 83 When the routine 

social constructs provide opportunities for leisure and creative 

play, new social constructs emerge. I contend that in the contem-‐ 

porary context of climate change adaptation, the solutions requir-‐ 

ed are already present within the creative subcultures that reflect 

the evolving transcendence of consciousness, and that integrating 

insight is the urgent necessity of inclusion. Within mainstream 

modernist culture, the consumptive tendencies and habits are at 

the epicenter of humanities contribution to global warming. The 

energy requirements to manufacture and maintain lifestyles built 

on the accumulation of property as perceived security is not sus-‐ 

tainable. This modernist worldview was cleverly dubbed Affluenza 

82 A term developed by Paul H. Ray, PhD and Sherry Ruth Anderson, PhD . 

Paul H. Ray & Sheery Ruth Anderson. The Cultural Creatives: How 50 Million People 

Are Changing the World. New York: Harmony Books, October, 2000 

83 Steve McIntosh. Integral Consciousness and the Future of Evolution (St. Paul, Minnesota: 

Paragon House) 2007, p. 293 

134

135 


by authors John de Graaf, David Wann, and Thomas H. Naylor. 84 

The subculture that I identify with consciously chooses quality of 

life above material security, and holds reduced consumptive habits 

as a cultural value. This will move toward a mainstream cultural 

identity as a critical mass attunes to the cresting waves of cons-‐ 

cious evolution, precipitated by the impending collective crisis 

since crisis does lead directly to questioning one’s basic assump-‐ 

tions. Despite my modest material presence, which is quite 

deliberate in limiting consumption, travel, and luxury amenities 

(although I could certainly do much, much more), I do live an 

incredibly rich lifestyle, which resembles an active retirement for 

mainstream Western societal norms. As an extension of the 

relative abundance of my middle class Western upbringing, which 

was not without hardship, I consciously choose a balance of work 

and play, achieving fulfillment from both. The crucial indicator for 

me in both contexts, which I do not really need to separate, is that 

I experience the flow of creativity, which I liken to opening myself 

to an ever-‐present eminence of life energy. Thus whether through 

work or play or in my moment to moment interactions with my 

family and friends, the process of attuning to my creative genius is 

how I follow my bliss and merge with the universe as an entity of 

evolving consciousness. Alan Watts, the beatnik preacher and Zen 

proponent saw work as play: “But in our culture we make an 

extremely rigid division between work and play. You are supposed 

to work in order to earn enough money to give you sufficient 

leisure time for something entirely different called having fun or 

play. This is the most ridiculous division. Everything that we do, 

however tough it is, however strenuous, can be turned into… 

play…” 85 If we look at some of the more creative economic 

sectors in the contemporary world –-‐ information technology and 

design –-‐ play is integrated into the work environments because it 

84 de Graaf, John; Wann, David; and Naylor, Thomas H. Affluenza: The All-Consuming 

Epidemic (Bereitt-Koehler Publishers) 2005 

85 Alan Watts. The Essential Alan Watts. Berkeley: Celestial Arts.1974 pp. 85-86


pays off, the return on investment business case is sound 

exemplified by Google’s 20% time 86 andtheResultsOnlyWork Environment 87 . This is a radical departure from the conventional 

structures of the industrial economy with mechanized assembly 

lines of production. This again is direct evidence of the evolution 

of consciousness in action with perhaps a more functional and 

healthy process of transcendence and inclusion than the sub-‐ 

cultures referenced earlier. By analyzingtheconstructedartifacts of information technology, we see human intelligence manufact-‐ 

uring the means for consciousness to expand and complexify 

beyond theconstraints, limitingbeliefs, andassumptionsofan obsolete structure. The original insights of creative potential have 

manifested the means for freeing minds from one form of media 

to another. As a neo-‐Romantic bush-‐boy, more comfortable in the 

wilderness than in the presence of technology, I have been very 

weary of television, computers and video games, yet as I open my 

mind to the positive attributes, I can see how telecommunications 

and social media are profound vehicles for propagating the 

evolution of consciousness. People today are able to interact with 

the media in the Web 2.0, rather than be mere receivers of inform-‐ 

ation and stimuli as with television, and thus can better discern 

and engage. Social media is a means for creativity to flourish and 

conscious evolution to tip rapidly. Web 3.0 and 4.0 are being en-‐ 

visioned and designed now as vehicles of collaborative intelligence 

find novel forms of structure. 

The founders of ThoughtStream, a collaborative software 

platform designed for social self-‐organization, became interested 

in bees. Research into Swarm Intelligence 88 inspired Thought-‐ 

Stream CEO Scott Meadows to examine how to focus the collect-‐ 

86 Google encourages their employees to spend 20% of their work time on project of 

personal interest. CEO Eric Schmidt claims that this 20% is where the most profitable 

intellectual property. 

87 http://gorowe.com/ 

88 Miller, Peter. National Geographic Magazine (2007, July). Swarm Theory as retrieved 

from http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2007/07/swarms/miller-text 

136

89 

From a personal interview with ThoughtStream CEO Scott Meadows. 

137 


ive intelligence of groups of people. The research hives of bees, 

flocks of birds, and schools of fish demonstrate collective 

intelligence in their group behaviours that surpasses the capacity 

of any one individual. Meadows research reached into aspects of 

economics, sociology, psychology, and organizational develop-‐ 

ment theory to tease out the simple rules that foster the 

emergent potential of groups of people. “What is so interesting 

about the swarm theory and some of the other drivers of 

collective intelligence in other social organisms, is the way this 

intelligence is driven by a few very simple rules. It is the 

importance of having a few simple rules, as much as what those 

rules are.” 89 The same simple rules that foster the collective 

intelligence of bees, birds, and fish can apply to human processes 

by tapping the underlying intelligence of complex adaptive 

systems. With groups of people this collective intelligence abides 

by self-‐organizing systems requiring diversity within the group, 

individuals to act independently, and some means to aggregate 

collective action. By emulating self-‐organizing eco-‐systems with a 

software interface, ThoughtStream is able support the emergent 

intelligences that transcend the single point solutions of the 

constituents. ThoughtStream is an example of evolving structures 

of consciousness enabling the integration of multiple perspectives 

to elevate social institutions beyond inhibitive structures. 

When information, ideas, and original insight are the 

marketable commodity, then work by play enables, and mandates, 

creativity and productivity aligned with conscious evolution. The 

traditional structures of social organization from the industrial 

economy are aimed at mechanization and this pervasive quality 

influences the constituent members – ie. the people working 

within it. I like to refer to this tendency as energetic osmosis where 

the pervasive intention, either conscious or unconscious, of any 

system will shape the minds and behaviours of its constituent


parts. The mechanistic constructs of traditionalism and modernity 

ie. industrialism thus propagate the mechanistic mindset that 

creates fragmentation from the flow. In this vein, I contend that 

the prevalence of depression and the self-‐medication through 

alcohol, drugs both legal and illegal, and thing-‐fetish 90 is a sort of 

numbing needed for people to endure the repetition of a mechan-‐ 

istic life. Most contemporary institutions are built around passé 

worldviews and limiting beliefs – schools, communities, work-‐ 

places, cities, etc – suchthatthecreativeemergenceofevolving consciousness is commonly squelched. Yet adaptive responses of 

such institutions are waking up and a few are leading the way to a 

creative mainstream culture attuned to and able to access the 

evolving flow of consciousness in work by play and pray by play. 

My personal search for answers to fundamental questions 

of being and seeing – why are we here? What does it all mean? 

What is my purpose here? Has lead to an intimate understanding 

that we are equipped to influence our reality through conscious 

awareness, and that we must do so not only to simply thrive, but 

also to survive. We share a collective burden and purpose of aiding 

in the expansion of consciousness. We are independent nodes of 

consciousness becoming aware of themselves. By aligning 

ourselves with our personal purpose in each given moment, flow-‐ 

ing in the cosmic groove, and following our bliss, consciousness 

can transcend the current mess that we have created. Our current 

reality is like the bone yard of modernity, and it is the broader 

realm of consciousness that is needed to clean it up. There are 

countless distractions, fears, doubts, and hesitations that emerge 

in each given moment to separate us from the raw experience of 

awe. This is the perennial challenge of being human, but we have 

countless resources available to us to overcome these self-‐ 

projected barriers. Thousands of years of spiritual development 

have created numerous methods, techniques, and practices that 

90 I have heard Terrence McKenna use the term thing-fetish within his spoken word 

recordings works. 

138

139 


we can choose from to aid in accessing awe. Many of these are 

wrapped up in old ideologies and institutions that can also amplify 

blocks and barriers so choose with your intuitive heart and your 

discerning mind. But find a way to access your bliss and be rapt in 

awe in each moment. That is why you are here. Some colleagues 

called it the Church of the Moment, I like to call it pray by play. 

In some of my early moments of exploration by stretching 

the bounds of what I perceived to be possible, I used my repetitive 

mantra. There was a time where this mantra centered me enough 

to pull through what I believed was a perilous situation while 

climbing. I was soloing, that is climbing alone and without a rope, 

a long ice-‐climbing route on Mt. Kenya known as the Diamond 

Couloir. The allure of climbing alpine ice so near the equator 

appealed to my sense of irony. I was living in South Africa at the 

time and climbing a fair bit of rock, but it had been awhile since I 

had been on ice. So it took some time to get in the rhythmic 

groove of swinging ice axes and kicking crampons, the spikes 

affixed onto my boots, into the ice. The crux section was near the 

top of the climb known as the Chouinard-‐Covington Headwall 91 

and I had intended originally to take a more conservative 80° ice 

ramp instead of the direct vertical headwall line. My mind started 

to entertain thoughts of doing the more aesthetic headwall line as 

I came closer to it, and I decided to follow a hunch and take the 

more challenging line. The headway was historically the crux of 

the climb but the first ice pitch turned out to be poorly formed so I 

had started on the climb on some very funky ice formations that 

were far harder than what rose ahead. This infamous climb, much 

like the Hemingway-‐famed snows of Kilimanjaro, had been 

ravaged by the early warming trends of climate change meaning 

that the first section of ice did not touch down on the glacier at 

the base of the mountain. Thus in February 1996 I was nearly one 

91 First climbed by the Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard and Michael Covington in 

1975.


of the first casualties of climate change – well, rather a near 

casualty of my own ambition (ie. ego) really. I was enjoying the 

rhythmic repetition of thunk-‐thunk-‐thunk of throwing the pick of 

my ice tools and the points of my crampons into the ice flow, 

feeling merged with the medium, suspend nearly 1,000 metres 

above the base of Mt. Kenya. It was a spectacular procession of 

moments merging in an ebb and flow of breath. I maintained this 

mechanical meditation, reaching higher and higher. And then, 

quite suddenly a metallic ping pierced the harmony of thunk, and 

my left crampon swung loose from the strap around my ankle, 

broken. My heart rate spiked and my breath fell from its medi-‐ 

tative cadence to a shallow wheeze as I looked down at the 

swinging crampon and the long ramp of ice that foreshortened 

below into a terrifying terminus. It is safe to say that I uttered a 

few profanities before I moved on to my little mantra bringing me 

back to a sense of calm enough to secure a piece of protection 

and plan my strategy. The moments felt long between the 

breaking of the crampon and the knowledge that I was beyond 

the imminent possibilities of a long, long fall. My pray by play 

philosophy, my mantra chant, and meditative breath work all 

contributed toward a profound transcendent moment for me, 

then and there, and that I survived to embrace the ethereal lesson 

of that beaded string of moments, embedding it into all the 

moments that have followed. 

Finding calm amidst the frenzy of fear, I managed to climb 

through by removing the broken crampon and moving onto the 

rock adjacent to the ice. To get to the rock though I had to pull off 

some intense moves over vertical verglas – clear ice over rock – 

only a centimeter thick. This two meter section of verglas with 

both ice tools and just one crampon was the hardest climbing that 

I have ever pulled off. I just breathed deeply and let my little 

mantra tumbled through the echoing chamber of my mind. 

Climbing is a powerfully direct way to access flow and this was 

absolutely necessary for me in this instant. I could not concept-‐ 

ualize my way through and some transcendent state took over my 

140


awareness. In ice climbing the very literal act of loosely placing the 

pick of the ice axe on either rock or an ice pocket is called hooking. 

Survival drives took over my conscious-‐ness and made my body 

hook delicately across the two meters of verglas to get to a much 

more manageable rock outcropping. A friend had explained how 

he had felt the hand of God lift him on a similarly desperate climb a 

few years before, to which I shamefully mocked him due to my 

personal aversion to the word God. Karma caught up with me for 

being an asshole. I prefer other metaphors from divergent cosmo-‐ 

logical paths to describe the bizarre in my life. I surrendered 

myself to the situation and some transcendent process enabled 

me to claw my way to safety. I was able to climb the remaining 

rock next to the ice headwall, on top of which I tied the broken 

crampon onto my boot to walk up the glacier to the Gate of Mists. 

Mt. Kenya has two summit spires Nelion (5188m) and Bation (5199 

m) split by the Diamond Glacier and Gate of Mists. My descent 

route was over the smaller Nelion, so for the true ascent I carried 

on toward Bation. After several minutes I stopped and sat, think-‐ 

ing. I had this funny copper-‐like taste in my mouth and it triggered 

a reflective response in me. I decided to heed the omens and fore-‐ 

go climbing the Bation summit. 

This incident proved a definitive moment for me and 

became a catalyst for transformation toward more complex 

orders of consciousness. After reflecting on that experience I 

decided not to push my edges with climbing anymore – I continue 

to find other ways to do that now largely by learning something 

new when I can find challenge with less risk. The most salient 

insight from that instant was that although we may not always see 

the way through with our conscious awareness, which is the same 

as the perennial challenge in each moment, but by surrendering 

ourselves to the broader cosmic consciousness we can transcend 

a perceived peril. 

So I stay afloat on the raft of optimism as the climate 

141


crisis gains momentum, the global economic system shows symp-‐ 

toms of collapse, and peoplebringharmtootherpeopledespite to the undeniable fact that we are one unified humanity. The 

critical mass of consciousness has not yet peaked, nor crested into 

a crescendo wave of transformation. Everywhere I look I see signs 

and signals of bifurcation and the wondrous potential for 

collective transformation. And like a surfer amidst the cosmic sea 

of universal energy, I look outward at the horizon, awaiting that 

perfect swell, because I don’t want to miss this one. Neither do 

you. 

The Self-‐Reflecting Universe 

I want to build further on the idea touched on earlier in 

the Red Road section of the self-‐reflecting universe. I presented 

this idea in the context of how our thoughts, feelings, and 

intuitions – the stuff of our inner lives – is directly reflected in the 

world around us – the tangible elements of material reality. I like 

to think of our consciousness as a holographic prism. When light 

or life energy shines through this holographic prism our little piece 

of the greater universe takes shape. Earlier I associated this quality 

of consciousness with the morphic in-‐formation field that evolves 

toward greater complexity and coherence. 

While contemplating this general idea, I would hold such 

questions in mind, and in recognition of this self-‐reflecting uni-‐ 

verse, I found that the answers to this inquiry continued to 

present themselves. One of the most illuminating collections of 

perspectives that have I stumbled upon were from Jungian psych-‐ 

ologist and Quantum theorist Arnold Mindell. Mindell refers to our 

gross material world as Consensus Reality (CR) which directly 

mirrors our internal processes (non-‐Consensus Reality) 92 . 

As an evolving node of consciousness coming into 

92 Mindell, Arnold Quantum Mind: The Edge Between Physics and Psychology (Lao Tse 

Press) 2000 

142

143 


awareness of itself, each moment in our CR existence provides an 

opportunity for both individual and broader collective conscious-‐ 

ness to further evolve. Attachment to rigid structures of thought, 

speech, and action inhibits the expansive process of evolution. 

Maintaining non-‐dual awareness in each given moment puts us in 

a flow state, hereby harmonizing us with the broader process of 

conscious evolution. Such an authentic flow state can be 

transmitted to others because we are all hard wired for bliss. If we 

can sense it or smell it, feel it or see it, we tend to fall in line and be 

it. When this type of group transmission occurs social organization 

then correlates with further complexity and sophistication in line 

with the ongoing unfolding of cosmic evolution. Collective trans-‐ 

formation is a possibility with integral structures and processes 

that inspire non-‐dual awareness and suspended flow states with 

their constituents. 

Figure 9.0 Manifestation Model (Image from iStockphoto.com © Julien Tromeur)


Examples of this manifest quite naturally and have touched many 

of us; when a group produces a harmonic resonance though 

sympathetic vibration as seen in a symphony, sports team, or 

inspired group. I am sure that we all have a frame of reference to 

relate to when this collective vibe has emanated and everyone 

around was in sync. I believe this experience to be a collective 

flow state, and see this sympathetic vibration as the vehicle for 

collective transformation to more complex orders of conscious-‐ 

ness. 

Our present moment CR identity is the pebble in the pond 

of our full NCR existence, sending quantum “signals” through the 

unified morphic field to define our potential past and potential 

future. Quantum theory gives us potentialities rather than the con-‐ 

crete absolutes of classical physics. Concert pianist and Systems 

Theorist Ervin Laszlo scribed Science and the Akashic Field, cor-‐ 

relating the cosmic plenum, essentially the quantum realm, with 

the Vedic principle of Akasha – cosmic consciousness from which 

all things emerge. “The Indian Vedic tradition, for example, 

regards consciousness not as an emergent property that comes 

into existence through material structures such as the brain and 

the nervous system, but as a vast field that constitutes the primary 

reality of the universe. In itself, this field is unbounded and 

undivided by objects and individual experiences, but it can be 

experienced by individuals in meditation when the gross layers of 

the mind are stripped away. Underlying the diversified and 

localized gross layers of ordinary consciousness there is a unified, 

non-‐localized, and subtle layer: ‘pure conscious-‐ness’.” 93 Time is a 

perceptual tool (ie. dimension) to aid in under-‐standing CR 

experience. In the non-‐dual state, deep within flow, time does not 

exist per se, and this is where each of us as individuals can exper-‐ 

ience the awe of the Akashic field. 

93 

Ervin Laszlo Science and the Akashic Field: An Integral Theory of Everything (Rochester: 

Inner Traditions) 2004, 2007. P. 120 

144

145 


standing. Atoms


The concept of the atom is an interpretive map projected 

onto physical phenomena as Greek philosophers postulated the 

building block model of matter. The behaviours of fundamental 

energies demonstrate the probabilistic tendencies of atoms such 

that they do exist in gross physical realm. Being apparently bound 

within our skin in our gross material bodies with the separate self-‐ 

sense that emerges from this, we have perceived fragmentation 

as being an essential quality of matter. Such building blocks are 

rather stages in the evolution of energy into tangible matter as we 

experience it in our perceived reality. That these models, or maps 

exist because we look for them – the observation is inseparable 

from the observer. At any stage in this perceived chain of 

causation, which is more of a fluid stream with no actual defined 

breaks or links, there are two facets interacting: energy and fields. 

Energy is the breath of life, and the in-‐formation fields are the 

vessels to carry energy forward in evolution. Atoms are but one 

stage in the field of raw energy as it coheres into tangible matter. 

Figure 9.3 The Self Reflecting Universe as a Quantum Wave Form 

146 

The quantum wave 

form can be seen as 

concentric ovals on 

the two dimensional 

plane. Each moment 

acts like a cross section 

snapshot of the 

cosmic in-formation 

flux. 

When we let go of the building block model of reality and 

see everything as a notion of energy, like Bohm’s undivided flux,


we open ourselves to inter-‐dimensional awareness. The flicker of 

insight we feel in an instant or the external object that catches our 

passing attention begins to hold meaning in the context of our 

internal world process. Our personal connection to this unified 

field – Akashic, morphic, in-‐formation, or cosmic consciousness – 

connects us to other nodes of consciousness ie. people and 

evenwhat we perceive to be inanimate objects. This cosmic 

plenum that binds us all – and the entire expansive universe – 

together is what makes the ancient wisdom of diverse cultures 

hold such persistent truth. The metaphors for such ancient insight 

may need to be reshaped for the contemporary context, but the 

utility is proven. I have referred to this earlier as the self-‐reflecting 

universe where our external physical reality reflects our individual 

cons-‐ciousness. Each of us has the inherent capacity to connect to 

this fundamental field of awareness in each instant, which I 

repeatedly refer to being rapt in awe. 

Despite suggestions that our wakeful state of living is an 

illusion, a common sentiment in Buddhism, it is nestled within a 

broader sphere of reality. When we pinch ourselves we feel pain, 

which serves as a necessary function in the evolution of 

consciousness. Our tangible everyday reality, our pinch and our 

pain, as we perceive it with our dull faculties is not the full extent 

of our personal reality. This is where the paranormal blends into 

the normal. Just as our full spectrum of consciousness (NCR) goes 

well beyond our wakeful state consciousness (CR), as psychology 

and various religious traditions maintain, accessing the para-‐ 

normal is outside of our perceptions of time and space commonly 

called parallel universes. Time and space are dimensions, yet again 

maps to interpret reality, means of interpretation in relation to our 

thought projections. 

The idea of parallel universes and the multi-‐verse lead to a 

very recent spontaneous insight for me, long into a mountain bike 

ride recently (pray by play). It would not surprise me now if each 

147


us where indeed the center of our own personal universe 

suspended on our perceptions and projections and that each 

universe in the multiverse is interconnected and nested together 

like Indra’s Jeweled Web. Each of our individual morphic fields sits 

within an inter-‐woven tapestry of possibility and probability. 

I once visited a culture camp on the traditional territory of 

the Lil’wat Nation near my home at the time in Pemberton. Some 

people perceived the camp to be a “road block” to stop further 

development from happening with a proposed new ski resort only 

an hour or so beyond the notorious Whistler. What the camp 

actually represented was a conflict of personal interests for the 

use of the land. On my visit I learned about traditional foods and 

plant medicines gathered for hundreds of years, and learned 

stories of the Lil’wat. I brought with me a head full of ideas too, 

and had the most remarkable conversation that truly blew my 

mind. In speaking with a Lil’wat gentleman who had left the 

formal education of “the white man’s world” at nine years old, 

and proceeded to be educated in the ways of his culture, as well 

as those of many other indigenous cultures of North, Central and 

South America, I spontaneously realized that everything in my 

head was merely a projection of my cultural beliefs. He gracefully 

informed me that I was thinking “like a white man” and carried 

our conversation in the direction of traditional teachings and 

stories that informed his perceptions. He spoke extensively of the 

Hopi prophesies which I had had some novel interest in previously 

due to the Quatsi Trilogy 94 of films by Godfrey Reggio. He also 

spoke at length about the Mayan cosmology, and the prophetic 

calendar ending December 21, 2012. I observed how the precon-‐ 

ceived notions that I had arrived with dissolved, and a resounding 

sense of truth filled my being. This conversation became a key to 

unlock the doors of perception. This visit to the culture camp con-‐ 

tributed to a progression of experiences that continued to unwind 

my mind and awaken my heart. 

94 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koyaanisqatsi 

148


The Hopi prophecies speak of the dark ages of material 

bondage, which well describes our current condition locked in the 

modern-‐thought-‐box, consumer addiction, and the impending 

climate crisis. The Hopi visionaries long ago spoke of a time when 

the children are lost to a black box in the fourth world, we need 

not go far in the Western paradigm to see this current reality of 

television, video games, and computer monitors so often sub-‐ 

stituting parenting. This fourth world of the Hopi is certainly not 

an isolated idea as many aboriginal outlooks refer to an identical 

era in the cycle of time. The Upanishads, the Vedic Scriptures, also 

place us in the Dark Age of the Kali Yuga, wherein people are as 

far as possible from God. All these ways of saying also speak of a 

time of awakening to the inter-‐dimensional awareness, of trans-‐ 

formation. This type of awareness is purely the expansion of our 

wakeful state consciousness (CR) to our full potential conscious-‐ 

ness (NCR) – welcoming our own genius. 

From what I understand from a variety of sources of oral 

story and books, the Hopi are seen to be the knowledge keepers 

of how to live in balance with the earth. It is understood by many 

indigenous groups that their land based wisdom will be called 

upon as the key to human survival. Rising awareness on climate 

change is creating more openness to this wisdom. 

Climate Change as a Collective Opportunity 

One of the educational approaches that I have worked 

with over the course of a coupleofdecadeswithinadventure programming has been to create complex challenges for groups 

of people to adapt to. The founder of Outward Bound, Kurt Hahn, 

held at the core of his philosophy a motto: There is more in you 

than you think. Earlyin his career as an educator he had an intense 

heat stroke incident that from the accounts that I have read about 

emulated a similar near death crisis to my own. Hahn established 

several schools and educational processes, including the Outward 

149


Bound movement, aiming to expand people’s aware-‐ness of their 

true capacities. I like to refer to this as education for trans-‐ 

formation. The complex challenges that we would construct were 

often posed as group navigation through tricky terrain. The early 

part of each course involved considerable skills instruction 

culminating toward the course end in the groups working auto-‐ 

nomously as a collective without anything but crucial intervention 

from the instructors. The default social adage that “its just human 

nature” to exhibit selfish self interest suggests that this would be 

like Survivor with someone being voted off the island, or things 

degrading to the Lord of the Flies. Yet time and time again what I 

witnessed was the profound capacity of groups to harness 

collective intelligence and adaptive resilience to overcome 

complex challenges with style. This recurring experience fuels my 

optimism with respect to the complex challenges of both climate 

change mitigation and adaptation. 

Many of the socio-‐cultural assumptions that we project 

onto our reality, be it the technical orientation of modernity or the 

fatalism of traditionalism, are inhibiting the flow of self-‐organizing 

systems. The physical laws of the universe as well as the rules for 

collective intelligence operate with narrow parameters. Self-‐ 

organization requires things to be just right, which makes our 

current reality all the more miraculous. The rising urgency 

surrounding climate change signals to me a series of truly complex 

challenges that require nothing less than global transformation. At 

the heart of this book is this idea that our consciousness is tied to 

our reality. Never before has the whole of humanity faced an issue 

of collective shadow like climate change. Never before have we 

had the interpersonal connectivity to do something as vast and as 

vital for the planet we inhabit. 

In the ever-‐present ebb and flow of cosmic conscious-‐ 

ness, transformation is typically preceded by impending crisis. 

Such crisis, perceived chaos or maximum system entropy, leads to 

bifurcation points wherein a given system will either collapse and 

150


dissolve or transform to a new order of consciousness. Global 

warming has, in recent years, been appropriately branded the 

climate crisis, gaining popular attention. The urgency for a 

collective response to climate change places us as a global 

humanity at such a bifurcation point. Despite the onerous burden 

of potential collapse and catastrophic outcomes for our species 

and many others, there also stands the possibility of collective 

transformation. To better understand what this means, we will 

look closely at just what transformation entails, and identify tan-‐ 

gible steps to get there. 

As we have seen, Integral Theory provides requisite 

insight into stages or levels of development, identifying patterns 

of consciousness evolving. Evolution, as we have explored, goes 

far and wide beyond the commonly accepted Darwinian concept 

of genetic mutation; evolution describes the ongoing process of 

development socially, culturally, psychologically, and spiritually. 

Collectively we are being carried by this wave of integral awaken-‐ 

ing toward transformation. It is my contention that consciousness 

is pressing against a critical mass as it evolves into greater com-‐ 

plexity and coherence and that climate change is mere catalyst for 

collective unification. 

To better understand what such a transformation is, let’s 

examine what exactly is being transformed. Each of us holds a set 

of beliefs about the nature of reality that in turn shapes our per-‐ 

spectives about life, the world around us, and the vast universe 

surrounding us. It is these beliefs that are being transformed. The 

very ground we stand upon in relationship to all that is. This, I 

believe, is the crux of the human experience – thattheevolution of consciousness as it flows through us pulls us away from what 

we have constructed to feel safe and secure. The fundamental 

drive to feel safe and secure is a persistent perennial human 

tendency, and our constructed beliefs act as ballast to stay afloat 

in the torrent. Religious practices, mythic and modern interpre-‐ 

151


tations of reality, along with the artifacts and constructs of 

rational thought and cultural tendencies and social systems are all 

manifestations of our collective perspectives upon which our 

world is suspended. The contemporary modern mindset sees such 

things as rather static and fixed whereas the evolution of 

consciousness in the broadest sense is very fluid and dynamic. 

Uprooting this modern mindset, with its rigid reductionist con-‐ 

structs, is the greatest collective challenge we have faced as a 

global humanity. Within this true planetary crisis lies a profound 

opportunity for unification, and, in my view, this is the collective 

transformation required to resolve the current Chaos Point 95 . 

Beyond vague calls for collective transformation, we also 

need to know what this looks like and how to get there. Various 

wisdom traditions and spiritual practices that are centuries old and 

span the globe, provide tremendous reference points. This line of 

thought is aimed at a vast challenge – global warming – and as we 

move toward tangibles it will benefit us to narrow the conver-‐ 

sation down to individual terms. In doing so, I will inevitably 

challenge, disturb, or even offend some of your fundamental 

beliefs – I intend to, so I apologize for the audacity and I hope that 

you can understand why in the end, if not within the process itself. 

It is a persistent attribute of human nature that we cling 

to perceived security. Each of us carries this enduring legacy into 

each moment of living, as we seek a sense of power and control 

and belonging to calm our cosmological angst. All religious 

traditions and devotional paths, despite their wonderful diversity, 

provide faith. The essence of faith is what keeps each of us afloat 

within the flow of the river of life. Having faith in the most general 

sense is a willingness to believe that everything will work out, and 

provides an avenue to surrender the struggle and simply believe. 

In the rising swell of cosmic consciousness, evolving in complexity, 

our faith is like the surfboard on which we can ride out the surg-‐ 

95 

Laszlo, Ervin The Chaos Point: The World at a Crossroads (Piatkus Books) 2006 

152


ing crest of collective transformation. Herein is how skepticism 

bars both personal and cosmic evolution, by holding onto static 

rationality and not surrendering to the open acceptance of faith. I 

am not suggesting that we need to find religion, as I still have not, 

but we do need to practice openness to allow consciousness to 

evolve into a concrescence of complexity. Faith operates in the 

realm of the subtle, causal, and non-‐dual aspects of 

consciousness. The openness that comes with faith, however we 

choose to define it, interacts with the morphic in-‐formation field 

to energize potentialities. That is to say that quantum potential is 

influenced by each of our ability to remain open, as well as our 

propensities to be closed. 

The process of understanding the suggested premise of 

rapt in awe requiresexperientialreferencing – simplyreading ideas and thinking them over will lead to a conceptual attunement 

by relating to your own personal experience. For us to come to a 

common understanding of how the impending global crisis of 

climate change is an opportunity for collective transformation – 

our macro context – let’s examinehow our individualcrisesactas opportunities and catalysts for personal transformation – our 

micro context. Thus identifying a vivid personal example of crisis – 

the experience of not knowing just how you will get through a 

given instance – willexperientiallyillustratethepoint. Personal 

crisis is pretty much an internal process with external correlates – 

that is crisis is an emotional and thought based response to the 

external stuff, the felt experience of overt overwhelm. I wrote 

earlier about nearly bleeding to death (external correlate) in an 

ambulance and this, for me, is a vivid example of a personal crisis. 

The crisis took place in my mind, which appeared for a time to be 

definitely separate from my physical brain, head, and body as I 

looked down upon the physical interpretation of my perceived 

self. The crisis was the felt experience – ie. the emotionalresponse – to slippingawayfromthatcontainerofselfhoodandbelieving that I was about to die. The transformative part for me personally 

153


was the undeniable recognition of the broader aspect of self and 

the non-‐locality of consciousness. This is the blessing – the gift – 

that emerged in this moment. This transformative recognition 

shifted my focus from, “Holy shit, I’m dying!” to, “Breathe… 

focus…fix this.” I immediately started to visualize an intact 

femoral artery in my crushed thigh and focused on regulating my 

blood flow. Instantaneously the non-‐local consciousness of “me” 

spiraled from above back into my body and from that moment 

forward I never doubted that I would survive. I then focused on 

healing the injury to my leg to avoid major surgery for the fear of 

amputation. Without making light of a whole host of ongoing 

challenges, that persist to this day, one week later I limped into 

the office of a sports medicine specialist to ask how to get back to 

my usual activity level as soon as possible. The doctor was kindly 

astonished, saying, “You just walked into my office after a week – 

just keep doing what you are doing!” The body, as a self-‐regulating 

system, has a remarkable capacity to heal itself, if only we can get 

our limiting beliefs out of the way and focus our minds in attune-‐ 

ment with the ever-‐present flow of cosmic energy and in-‐ 

formation. This very process of getting our limiting beliefs out of 

the way to make way for the flow of evolving consciousness and 

its emergent potential is the very act of having faith. So my 

personal crisis most certainly provided an opportunity and created 

a profound catalyst for personal transformation that has carried 

forward resonantly. My entire concept of reality, and my place 

within it, changed dramatically. 

Reflecting on your own instances of crisis – a bifurcation 

point tending to either transformation or collapse – will ground an 

understanding of where I am going with this. Collapse may simply 

suggest the resurgence and recirculation of habitual behaviour. 

Developmental theory demonstrates how each of us play out pat-‐ 

terns projected by our concepts of self and the world. Trans-‐ 

formation implies new concepts and orders of self and the world, 

transcending and including existent structures. The implications of 

relativity show us that everything is what it is as defined by 

154

155 


relationships to other things. This includes us, as living, breathing, 

loving beings. Thus our identities are constructed by our relation-‐ 

ships to each other, our cultures and their beliefs, social systems 

and structures, and our very concept of the universe. So in the 

situation of personal crisis, and in any normal or mundane 

moment for that matter, we most often reference these identity 

constructs that we are attached to. For transformation to take 

place, we need to let go of these constructs and discover new 

means and modes of relationship. This is where the act of faith – 

the ability to surrender to the flow – comes in. 

To better understand the macro example of collective 

transformation catalyzed by climate change, let’s look at the 

prevailing worldviews that in-‐form and define our interpretation 

of our world. Anthropologist Jean Gebser identified universal 

stages of socio-‐cultural development – archaic to magic to mythic 

to rational to integral. Gebser’s lines of thought have been em-‐ 

braced and certainly expanded upon by Ken Wilber within the fold 

of Integral Theory. “The pioneering work of Jean Gebser is para-‐ 

digmatic: he sees cultural worldviews evolving – to use his words – 

from archaic to magic to mythic to mental to integral.” 96 Gebser 

was among the first to use the term “integral” to describe an 

order of consciousness. Steve McIntosh, strongly influenced by 

the integral grand synthesis by Ken Wilber, presents these stages 

in his own very functional language; these pervasive universal 

stages of development, that both individuals and collectives navi-‐ 

gate, are archaic consciousness, tribal consciousness, conscious-‐ 

ness, traditional consciousness, modern consciousness, postmod-‐ 

ern consciousness, and integral consciousness 97 . Currently each of 

these levels of consciousness co-‐exist in the world. Each progress-‐ 

sive stage extends the radius of the circle drawn between “I/us” 

96 Wilber, Ken Integral Psychology (Boston & London: Shambhala) 2000. P. 148 

97 Steve McIntosh. Integral Consciousness and the Future of Evolution (Paragon House) 

2007


and a perceived “them”. 

Figure 10.0 The Radius Between “Me and We” 

Integral Theory also describes this same progression of conscious-‐ 

ness as moving from egocentric or self-‐centric through to 

ethnocentric or socio-‐centric through to world-‐centric through to 

cosmo-‐centric. All of these descriptions are reference points 

amidst a dynamic flow, and we tend to shift from realm to realm 

with the flux of circumstance and varying stimuli, such that we can 

hold tribal, traditional, and modern (and other stages) points of 

view at any given time, and this is inherently healthy. The essence 

of being Integral is to be a conscious host of multiple perspectives 

in each moment, and to be aware of these various reactions and 

responses and from where in the self they come from. As a parent, 

I am very tribal -‐ warrior in my drives to protect my family. This is a 

156


good thing, but thankfully my inclination to pick up the club is 

muted by more evolved and sophisticated relational skills. So the 

baseline of just where we are at in either our personal or collective 

evolution of consciousness is referred to as our center of gravity, 

which is also coined poetically by Ken Wilber as our Kosmic 

Address 98 . The so-‐called developed world is centered in modern 

consciousness, with a bell-‐curve balance in archaic, tribal, tradi-‐ 

tional, postmodern, and integral. This collective cultural example 

helps to illustrate how each of the modes persists as even in the 

most privileged and developed cities in the world, we still have 

evidence of the tribal street culture and urban gangs and warrior 

tendencies. Integralism is the cusp of consciousness evolving. 

Modernity is marked by the mechanistic worldview that 

projects the tick-‐tock of God’s unwinding clock and the whimper-‐ 

ing slow death of the universe. Traditionalism awaits the Second 

Figure 10.1 Socio-Cultural Center of Gravity by Population 

98 

Ken Wilber. Integral Spirituality: A Startling New Role for Religion in the Modern and Post 

Modern World (Boston & London: Integral Books) 2007 

157


Coming and/or Apocalypse, and describes global warming as God’s 

wrath for gay marriage (I am certainly not labeling all religious 

denominations as being in this traditional mold, just those hard 

core fundamentalist ones). Jihad is a mixture of tribal, warrior, and 

traditional rising up to stop the globalization of McEverything. I 

would suggest the most prevalent tangible manifestations of Inte-‐ 

gral consciousness are happening with open source software and 

semantic web developments within information technology, NGO 

and not-‐for-‐profit sectors promoting global change 99 , and through 

integral spiritual and personal development processes 100 . This is 

the rising swell of an integral transformation and the most fluid 

means for us to include the greatest number in necessary change. 

Technology is an artifact of evolving consciousness, and I suggest 

that human innovation is merely an artifact of evolving conscious-‐ 

ness. Collective transformation to adapt and respond to the 

climate crisis requires opening ourselves to the pervasive flow of 

evolving consciousness. This necessitates the recognition that we 

are vehicles and vessels that cosmic consciousness uses to evolve 

through rather than being the drivers. Thus creative process flows 

through us just as waves pass through the ocean. Developing a 

personal practice to surrender to this fluid evolution of ideas and 

innovation is what will enable the crucial collective transformation 

that we need. Such personal practice just needs to open us to our 

flow. When in flow we are then carried by the current of the 

evolving in-‐formation field of cosmic consciousness. The Maharishi 

Effect of Trans-‐cendental Meditation (TM) suggests that we 

require 1% of the pop-‐ulation to manifest change in a given 

environment, “The Maharishi’s theory rests entirely on the 

premise that meditation has a threshold effect. If 1 percent of the 

population of a particular area practices TM, he claims…conflict of 

any variety – the rateof murders, crime, drugabuse, eventraffic incidents– goes down.” 101 

99 

Hawken, Paul Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being 

and Why No One Saw it Coming (Viking Peguin) 2007 

100 

http://www.ievolve.com/ ; http://integrallife.com/ ; http://www.integralnaked.org/ 

101 

Lynne McTaggart The Intention Experiment. (New York: Free Press) 2007 p. 182 

158

159 


There are many examples and paths to promote this 

process, and being integral means we accept each, every, and all 

without seeing our way, our chosen path, as something others 

need to follow. A common language, or means of relating as 

integral beings, is all that is needed, and this will simply emerge as 

a critical mass surrenders to embodying integral consciousness in 

each given moment. Research tracking cultural creatives tells us 

that, “Twenty years ago the cultural creatives made up less than 3 

percent of the total but at the turn of the century they totaled 

over fifty million people [in the USA] – and their numbers are 

growing.” 102 

So very simply, the path for collective transformation to 

survive climate change is through embodying our collective 

creative genius. Each of us must embody our essential authentic 

self by being in a flow state, moving to our cosmic groove. I 

imagine that this will play out like a great open source love in of 

innovation as the evolving cosmic consciousness flows through us. 

Once again to lean on my favorite metaphor by relating everything 

to surfing, rapt in awe stands as a clarion call pointing out that the 

storm swell is rising and the surf is up. The swell is cosmic 

consciousness and it is flowing through us. Personal practice, as 

defined by the path of your heart, acts like a surfboard to keep 

you afloat, the very breath that connects the moment as the 

dynamic flow of evolving consciousness to take us along for the 

ride. The requisite consciousness is here with us now. We must 

simply coordinate our intentions to manifest the waves of cosmic 

consciousness. This translates into connecting as individual nodes 

of evolving cosmic consciousness and seeing ourselves in others, 

each being a holographic piece of the fabric of the universe able to 

reflect the whole. I have been told about the Mayan concept of In 

Lak’esh as meaning: “I am another yourself”. As we integrate this 

type of ancient awareness into our contemporary ways of relating, 

102 Ervin Laszlo Quantum Shift in the Global Brain (Rochester: Inner Traditions) 2008 p. 80


we will manifest the needed solutions to the complex challenges 

that construct our daily realities. The solutions reside in the 

foundational fields of morphic resonance that are projected en 

masse by our individual consciousness which in-‐form our tangible 

reality. Outward solutions start with inward exploration and 

awareness. Global transformation starts with your next breath. 

The rapidly growing social networking movement is 

paving the way for this in binary bytes. Our ability to connect and 

share ideas stands as the main driver of the evolution of con-‐ 

sciousness. Being a vessel for novel thoughts to emerge through 

and taking the risk of sharing such fertile ideas for confirmation 

enables complexity and coherence to further evolve. We have 

constructed an extraordinary infrastructure for interpersonal com-‐ 

munications that is now driving profound emergent potential. 

Climate change stands as the truly first complex global challenge 

that can bring us all together as an integrated humanity. The 

persistent pattern of recognizing the differences between people, 

cultures, countries, and our issues creates ongoing fragmentation. 

We merely must also open ourselves as living, breathing, loving 

beings of cosmic concrescence to embody our potential as ve-‐ 

hicles of transformation. 

Figure 10.2 The Asymptote of Cosmic Consciousness Evolving 

160

smiling into the apocalypse a.k.a. the power of positivity 


Eclectic theories are nice and all if you are remotely 

interested in transferring them into useful practices in daily life. 

Ideas feed the analytical but the felt experience is where we come 

to know truth so we can slide into our cosmic groove. First we 

need to risk believing enough to try, putting aside the skeptical 

self and find our own special brand of faith in what comes next. 

When learning anything in our tangible reality, be it a new skill or a 

technique or activity, we must open ourselves to it. We need to 

relax and experiment by trying with an open willingness to fail to 

translate the teaching into a felt experience. We must translate 

the concept of the skill to feel the body logic. With our self-‐ 

projected expectations of perfection in the modern context, we 

tend to stop trying new things for fear of perceived failure. Social 

and cultural institutions often fail to support experimentation and 

free play, the sources of creativity. The emphasis on grading each 

little thing with the risk of social humiliation within conventional 

education tends to engrain the expectation of perfection. Thus we 

often default to being inhibited with our novel explorations. 

Think back to a vivid example of you learning something 

new. Reflect on the process of discovery – the steps from the 

teaching to the practicing through to competency. Learning is pro-‐ 

portional to our positivity and openness. Any element of scrutiny 

from inside, or out, prompts resistance to learning. The underlying 

positivity is what welcomes uninhibited in-‐formation fields and 

enables us to further evolve, both individually and collectively. 

Children are such amazing learners because there are open fully, 

that is until they accumulate self-‐effacing internal dialogue and 

pathological resistance to ongoing development. 

Positivity and negativity can be looked at as the binary 

attributes of cosmic consciousness, that whichwe, andallthings, are made. Energyisconstantthroughouttheuniverseaccording 161


to thermodynamics, what we’re calling binary attributes are the 

receptivity of any given form to embody or resist, to be either fluid 

or static. We have identified this fundamental process as cosmic 

consciousness, the Akashic Field, throwing in other related terms 

such as morphic fields, quantum plenum, and the Ground of All 

Being. In that, positivity is the open flow of energy allowing for 

the ever increasing organization of form and life. Negativity is 

simply a constriction or closure to the constant flow of energy 

filling form. In the formless ocean of energy from which we all 

emerge – the Australian aborigine dreamtime – these two primary 

forces or reactions are quite simply opposite. Our own particular 

openness is our songline, our primordial vibration, our timeless 

eternal calling, our cosmic groove dancing our flesh puppet in 

harmonious balance with the rest of the great dream. In the many 

ways of seeing and saying this binary pattern is archetypal, differ-‐ 

ing purely by the limitations of language: light and dark, God and 

the Devil, entity and nonentity, Shiva and Shakti, yin and yang, 

energy and resistance, love and fear, Allah and Iblis – beyond the 

bondage of words and their projected perceptions they all bleed 

into one. 

Although it may seem a stretch, basic electromagnetics 

provide a clear metaphor for all human interaction. Each of us is a 

magnet of subtle energy in the formless ocean of being. We repel 

and attract circumstance according to our particular projections of 

consciousness. Our individual morphic fields, in-‐formed by a 

combination of our attachments, shadow elements, and original 

insights, project the orders that emerge in our material life. Hence 

we are charged with potentiality both positively and negatively – 

add energy to an idea, thought, or impulse and it comes closer to 

being. To tell the compelling story of his initiation into the Bön 

tradition Tibet, which predated and deeply influenced Tibetan 

Buddhism, Christopher Hansard wrote in The Tibetan Art of Posi-‐ 

tive Thinking, 

To the ancient Tibetan practitioners of the spiritual and 

162

163 


religious discipline known as Bön, positive thinking was a 

skill to be learned and applied daily, in order to create a 

prosperous and fulfilled life. 

Bön teaches that the skillful use of thought 

energy is the key to empowerment. To understand and 

transform the nature of our own thought energy creates 

what they called a ‘fire in the heart’. This fire is the 

transformed essence of thought energy waiting for skilful 

use through our emotions, intentions and actions and 

with its power we can work daily miracles in our own 

lives. 103 

If the authentic self – our genius form – is nestled at the 

core of our being, so is our shadow. The primary challenge of each 

instant is to discern between these two polar potentialities and 

embody our ultimate selfhood for openness and positivity. The 

experience of fear is often the reflection of shadow elements in 

need of illumination which are at the cusp of our expanding 

awareness. “The first step to harnessing thought energy is to 

understand the power of negative thoughts and to learn how to 

banish them. No one on this earth is alone. We only become alone 

or lonely if we believe, as an unconscious level, that we are 

separated from the thought energy of the earth and the many 

people it connects us to.” 104 When fear emerges, we must witness 

it as fear – our own shadow elements of negative potentiality – 

and acknowledge it for the awareness it offers us, but then 

redirect our energy towards positive correlates. This is a conscious 

act of faith. Regardless of dogma or devotion, faith boils down to 

an open willingness to trust in a greater universal process than 

that which is immediately apparent. That said, it is fear that warns 

us of impending hazard. Here again, it is only conscious awareness 

103 Christopher Hansard. The Tibetan Art of Positive Thinking (London: Hodder & 

Stroughton) 2003, p.1 

104 Ibid. p.13


that can aid us to differentiate and balance risk with reward as we 

discern between the projections of our mind. 

Our genius-‐self is more concerned about the greater 

cosmic awakening to evolving consciousness than it is about our 

temporal physical and emotional wellbeing. And so fear and 

anxiety serve a vital purpose by keeping us in tune with the 

greater unfolding, like rumble strips on the road of our cosmic 

groove. A personal fear is parallel to and part of the collective 

unconscious’ resistance to evolving, as individual nodes of con-‐ 

sciousness we embody and reflect the pervasive trends. Herein 

lies the Buddhist Bodhisattva’s vow 105 to aid all sentient beings 

into being released from the churning wheel of suffering: “no 

matter how limitless beings, I vow to liberate them all.” 106 The 

Buddha’s Eight Fold Path to enlightenment emphasizes kindness 

and compassion laying down practices and processes for the 

maintenance of openness and positivity. 

Whether we talk of the transformation of con-‐ 

sciousness or of the introspective empirical analysis of 

what occurs in the mind, the observer needs a range of 

skills, carefully honed through repetition and training, 

and applied in a rigorous and disciplined manner. All 

these practices assume a certain ability to direct one’s 

mind to a chosen object and to hold the attention there 

for a period, however brief. An assumption is also made 

that, through constant habituation, the mind learns to 

improve the quality of whatever faculty is being primarily 

applied, whether it is attention, reasoning, or imagin-‐ 

ation. The understanding is that through such prolonged 

and regular practice, the ability to perform the exercise 

will become almost second nature. Here the parallel with 

athletes or musicians is very clear, but one might equally 

105 

A Bodhisattva is one who has reached enlightenment and vows to elevate all sentient 

beings to enlightenment as well. 

106 

Ken Wilber Integral Psychology (Boston & London: Shambhala) 2000, p.259 

164

165 


think of learning how to swim or how to ride a bicycle. 

Initially, these are very difficult, seemingly unnatural 

activities, but once you master the skill, they come quite 

easily. 107 

Within this quote from His Holiness the Dalai Lama, one can see 

the direct correlation with flow states which we have equated 

with following one’s bliss, the cosmic groove, and residing in one’s 

authentic self signature as a timeless-‐eternal facet of cosmic con-‐ 

sciousness. Practicing mindfulness can be done through countless 

means, yet involves an internal referencing point so that each of 

us is able to see our own mind as an object that influences aspects 

of creation. 

The apparent apex of physical systems organization 

within the known universe is the human neo cortex. Indeed it is 

the seed of rational imaginative thought – the greatest biological 

distinction between us and the other animals. The allusion is more 

a process of energetic organization than biological transform-‐ 

ation. Biology is a byproduct of being. Our full spectrum of 

consciousness is our soul identity – the morphic field – amidst the 

formless ocean of energy in-‐forming and encoding the mani-‐ 

festation of our physical beings out of the undivided flux of 

energy. Our neo cortex is the most densely ramified and complex 

concrescence of matter – the cutting edge of all systems 

organization in the biosphere 108 . The hubris, or shadow, of the 

rational and imaginative capacity of the neo cortex is the 

modernist-‐thought-‐box. Suddenly we become aware of our self-‐ 

indulgent soliloquy in this improv act of life. The brilliance of the 

human mind is serving a greater purpose towards a global 

awareness and capacity for communication. This is what Terence 

107 His Holiness the Dalai Lama. The Universe in a Single Atom: The Convergence of Science 

and Spirituality (New York: Morgan Road Books) 2005. pp.150-151 

108 Terrence McKenna from the Alien Dreamtime spoken word sessions.


McKenna called this the Gaian Mind, a planetary brain of which we 

are all cells andPierre Teilhard de Chardin called the Noosphere. 

McKenna advocated psychedelics to bust out of the modernist-‐ 

thought-‐box and further participate in the inter-‐dimensional 

awareness of evolving consciousness. I believe that there are 

more reliable means to access subtle, causal, and non-‐dual states 

aside from psychoactive plants and their synthetic mirrors, 

although these practices are not nearly as immediate or abrupt. 

This generally ensures the participant is much less inclined to 

totally unwind their mind. Residing in the flow is fluid participation 

in the greater Gaian Mind or Noosphere. 

The practical applications of these ways of interpreting 

reality boil back down to the essence of our internal experience of 

both positivity and negativity. When open and positive we are 

energetically available to the greater oceanic organization of the 

cosmos. Conversely when we are closed and negative we create 

resistance to the collective evolution of expanding consciousness 

and any such constriction or resistance binds us to the habitual 

patterns in the material realm. 

Resistance, negativity, and fear can be seen as shadow 

elements, they are the devil in the Christian tradition. And 

resistance, negativity and fear our inherent elements within us all. 

Process psychology 109 refers to our shadow as a useful bridge 

toward a deeper understanding of how our broader conscious-‐ 

ness influences our tangible existence. Shadow is the trickster – 

the double, the Raven, the coyote – in us all. 

The Blackfoot mind is a repository of creativity 

because it relates to reality from the perspective of order 

over chaos. Order over chaos implies that the universe is 

too vast for the human mind to absorb. From the very 

109 

Arnold and Amy Mindell have built on their Jungian roots, integrating traditional 

aboriginal wisdom and shamanic practices, quantum and relativistic physics, and perennial 

spiritual practices into a working understanding of Process Work. 

166


limited and restrictive perspective of the human, the big 

picture looks chaotic. It may have an underlying order, 

but it is too vast for us to see. Consequently, the only 

thing we can map out and put an order to, though our 

cultural windows, is our immediate surroundings. This 

view of the universe as chaos is manifested in the notion 

of the trickster figure in Blackfoot mythology. In a 

nutshell, the trickster is chaos. From a Western point of 

view, trickster stories seem outlandish and farfetched. 

From a Blackfoot view, the trickster is the manifestation 

of the flux. 110 

When we direct energy to an aspect of self or a particular 

thought process that is what we project into our in-‐forming 

reality. This is the very process of life. We experience fear or 

negativity or resistance when we are at the cusp of our own 

personal evolution, illuminating the shadow aspects of our 

timeless-‐eternal self as we evolve toward our own original nature 

as pure luminous light. To be a vessel of pure light, which some 

call Christ consciousness or Buddha nature, our shadow must be 

acknowledged and illuminated. But who really wants to walk 

down that dark road? Who would willingly sit in the calm pressing 

depths of the ocean of despair? This is where the authentic self 

comes in, acting out the apparently absurd to further illuminate 

our whole being, and thus not always prescribing to rational self-‐ 

interest. The authentic self is our trickster to play out paradoxical 

actions to bring us closer to our own true nature. Here again is 

where faith comes in, which is, at its elemental essence, the 

willingness to accept positivity, openness, or love in the face of 

negativity, resistance, or fear. 

Each of us, and all things, comprise the body, mind, and 

110 

Leroy Little Bear from the Preface to the Routledge Classics Edition of David Bohm. 

On Creativity (London & New York: Routledge Classics) 2004. P. xi 

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spirit of God, yet we also embody the devil. God is love and light 

whilst the devil is fear and darkness. Recognizing this internal 

interaction empowers us to discern right action in each moment. 

The open recognition of our own shadow elements participating 

in in-‐forming our current reality is enough to initiate illumination. 

Simply by acknowledging that, at a subconscious level, we parti-‐ 

cipate in creating our circumstantial life empowers us to alter it for 

the better. Yet if we resist this awareness it then compounds our 

circumstantial samsara. 

The authentic self is pure light, which can see in the dark. 

The authentic self is pure love acting in compassion toward fear 

and resistance. The authentic self is your God body, your true 

nature in perfect balance with the cosmos. If the world is out of 

balance due to the widespread prevalence of fear and resistance, 

and we are conduits of this through energetic osmosis, we must 

become aware of this and fully open to find and embody our way 

through to personal and collective transformation. 

Smiling into the apocalypse part two – collective unconscious to 

conscious collective 

Within our current reality of material bondage, our world 

is largely structured by the confirmation of fear and resistance to 

evolving consciousness. There are a host of assumptions carried 

forward through the progressive stages of socio-‐cultural develop-‐ 

ment that in-‐form how we organized ourselves. The rise of our 

current global industrial civilization has happened so rapidly that 

we have not fully integrated our more advanced capacities and 

often orient toward our base protective instincts. The popular 

social adage “you can’t trust anyone” is an example of how under-‐ 

lying beliefs persist and orient people toward the less advanced 

qualities rather than those that make us trustworthy. These basic 

assumptions are deeply embedded in our contemporary work-‐ 

places, schools, social institutions, and even in our families. These 

structures subsequently are rarely conducive to the open evolu-‐ 

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tion of consciousness or authentic modes of expression. What is 

required for collective transformation is social systems and struc-‐ 

tures that support and encourage flow states. 

The Hopi referred to this as the fourth world of material 

bondage – Koyaanisqatsi – life out of balance. Our attachment to 

our perceived physical reality exemplified most by modernity and 

its cousin industrialism, is in-‐forming inhibitive structures that tend 

to propagate the less admirable aspects of human nature. One 

such assumption that feeds our contemporary social order is 

simply the statement, “It’s human nature,” which reduces our 

dynamic evolving capacities to a sum total of fixed deficiencies. 

Although what are often deferred to as human nature – base 

protective instincts and advantage seeking tendencies – are 

merely a aspects of human nature and not the sum total of who 

and what we are. The transference from animal to intellect has 

been a rapid rise. An active neo cortex has allowed the human 

species to truly play God within our collective hubris of modernity 

and essentially step out of the unfolding evolution of cosmic 

energy. Despite human intellect being at the apex of conscious 

evolution, it is overwrought with narcissistic shadow placing 

humanity on a pedestal above of other elements of creation. 

Rationality has transcended the biosphere but it has failed as yet 

to include and integrate the foundation on which it is built as 

being an essential part of itself. This is life out of balance as the 

Hopi prophecies describe, the trickster showing its face at the 

cusp of conscious creation. 

Despite the thoughtful and imaginative ideas about social 

organization, the actual practices of relationship in contemporary 

systems and structures arefundamentallyfeudal. Ourindividual fears are primitive animalistic responses to the perceived threats. 

Many, if not most, of our social institutions are built around the 

confirmation of our fears, emphasizing the illusion of security. We 

fear the dark, yet fear is the dark – a self-‐saturating monster. The 

169


hierarchal methods of social order are reflective of our primitive 

roots in power empires rather than our evolving consciousness 

and in many cases do not reflect nor promote our profound 

potential. In the transition from tribal groupings with primitive 

animalistic ways of saying and seeing to our current corporate 

consumer crazed capitalistic idealism, fear has been the primary 

mode of governance. The distribution of wealth and power persist 

as essentially feudal structures well into the modern age with 

power hierarchies having prevailed and proliferated. Our accept-‐ 

ance of power over being hailed as righteous is evident in our 

multinational mega-‐corporate world. As well our traditionalist 

religious outlooks have consistently been hijacked by fear moti-‐ 

vated power mongering to impart control over people as seen 

within fundamentalist groups to this day. Our structures for social 

organization constantly undermine the process of faith in the 

open evolution of consciousness. Church structures have tended 

toward monarchial reign or political institutionalism to manage 

the human herd. The notion of Original Sin in Christianity infers 

that we are essentially bad and have to make our ways back to 

Christ / God, and I see this engrained belief within the Judeo-‐ 

Christian worldview manifesting dominator modes of order. If 

people are inherently bad, they need to be controlled. Yet if this is 

the expectation that is projected onto people these morphic fields 

of intentional energy will lead to people embodying this tendency. 

That is, because we believe it to be so, it is so. The traditionalist 

view has propagated this hierarchal approach of top down control 

to social structure, and despite the pendulum swing of modernity 

with democratic revolutions, the same models of order have been 

institutionalized into modern institutions. To change the systems 

and structures of social order, we need to address the funda-‐ 

mental beliefs upon which they are built. 

A collective belief in this projected human nature is 

wrought with limiting beliefs. These underlying beliefs in-‐form the 

widespread resistance to social order which reflects our sophist-‐ 

icated communication capacities as the carriers of the complex 

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neo cortex. It is our own limiting beliefs, individually and collect-‐ 

ively, which hold us in a social stasis unable to fully evolve into a 

greater global community. And this is how fear constantly cap-‐ 

tures the masses and drives us closer to an imminent ecological 

apocalypse or global terrorism and warfare. That we view our-‐ 

selves as isolated and separate prompts an emotional response of 

fear and anxiety tending to close us off to the ever-‐present flow of 

evolving consciousness. Being closed off propagates disorder and 

fragmentation. When we awaken to the underlying fact that we 

are intimately connected as human beings, that we belong, have 

purpose and meaning, and that we are inherently good, we urge 

cosmic evolution along toward transformation. 

It is our own fears as individuals for personal safety that 

lead us to align ourselves with the material illusion of power 

through social order. Yet our true power lies within. True power 

comes from openness, and the faith to be open in the face of fear 

and resistance and collectively evolve with the self-‐organizing 

potential of evolving consciousness. Like our personal shadow, a 

collective shadow looms over us all as a limiting social order. Being 

bound to a culture provides the appearance of safety yet it can 

also bar us from experiencing the true essence of our personal 

power. This is one of the developmental tasks that each of us face 

– the need to transcend and include our culture of origin. 

This is certainly not to say that our current social orders 

are all wrong, my rant isa reaction. Muchliketheprimordial interaction of light and dark, our social structures have built a 

bridge to where we are now. The procession of imposed order has 

consistently supported the expansion of global awareness in its 

own way. Often within theparadoxicalnatureofevolving consciousness, things need to get worse to then acknowledge and 

illuminate the shadow. The same structures are now propagating 

the propensity towards mass destruction be it through nuclear 

holocaust or some ecological Armageddon though climate 

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change. We must collectively illuminate our shared shadow to 

evolve beyond this impending apocalypse. This all begins with 

each of us, and our ability to energize and magnetize the positive 

in each moment. If we can reside in our authentic flow, our cosmic 

groove, we are in-‐forming open evolution. It is merely a matter of 

a critical mass of cosmic grooving for the broader collective 

transformation to flourish. And I believe that we will. 

Although this is all more simply said than done, being 

consciously aware of our own fears and welcoming what it can 

reveal to each of us about our shadow requires considerable 

commitment and practice. Yet when we look at the alternative to 

our collective Koyaanisqatsi it becomes an easy choice to make. 

Accessing our authentic self and then relating our own loving 

luminosity requires an uninhibited belief in the co-‐creative organ-‐ 

ization of all things. When we relate to each other through our 

own authentic nature, right action in right relationship, then 

evolving consciousness unfolds a glorious semblance of order 

which actually nurtures each of our abilities to remain fluid in this 

sentient state of bliss. What we then experience is a neo-‐tribalism, 

a group of resident beings who hold us accountable to our true 

nature’s. In Buddhism, the Sanskrit word sangha is used to des-‐ 

cribe a group or community of practice, formed around a common 

vision or goal. Neo-‐tribalism embodies the collective support and 

accountability of a community of practice. This type of grouping 

provides the immediate sense of belonging that is fundamental to 

each of us as humans, and these tribes can hold us accountable to 

our genius capacities. We can each start by identifying the tribes 

we are already part of be it on Facebook, Twitter, or old school 

face to face. Tribes are healthy models to integrate in our current 

world. 

In maintaining this level of conscious awareness of the 

self-‐replicating interaction of energy and uninhibited form, we 

emanate a resonant harmonious balance. It all begins with the 

absolute open willingness to believe in something greater, regard-‐ 

172

173 


less of what it is and a causal wave of evolving consciousness will 

carry us all smiling into the apocalypse. 

To recap, the simple steps that each of us can take toward global 

transformation are: 

1 – Finding our cosmic groove and staying in flow, 

2 – Remaining open to the evolution of consciousness 

and allowing creativity to flow through us, 

3 – Finding and defining our tribes that can support us to 

be in creative flow and also hold us accountable, and 

4 – Work with our personal tribes to participate in a global 

network ecosystem. 

These conscious actions begin with our personal internal aware-‐ 

ness and then connect outward. The resonant impact of managing 

our individual, and then collective, consciousness is what enables 

reality to change for the better more so than our outward action. 

It begins with your next breath. 

From the dream world to the real world 

The deeper we delve into the great mystery, the bigger 

the great mystery gets. The more we tend to go with the flow, the 

easier it is to be in the flow. Life is but a cosmic hall of mirrors 

reflecting the great dream. The vast field of cosmic consciousness 

is the sum total of dreaming beings, the quantum Akashic morphic 

field that shapes light into flesh and breathing beings that contin-‐ 

ue to dream. When the real body begins to follow the dreaming 

body everything blends into balance. This is a strange but true


fact. We are much more than the flesh we bear in a complex mind-‐ 

maze of a great collective dream. Once we wade within the dream 

and live true to it then we are in the flow – in right relationship 

with the wider environment. We are all wound in a wild web of 

dreaming. The world forms around our collective consent, a 

composite of our intent, in the cryptic symbol speak of uncon-‐ 

scious actions seeking illumination of shadow. Our growth as an 

individual is contingent on our own openness. Conceptual and 

perceptual limitations continually disrupt the dreaming. A disturb-‐ 

ed dreaming informs a disturbed reality. Our collective obsession 

with dread, fearing to live because of death, co-‐creates our 

Koyaanisqatsi culture – a world driven by unconscious shadow of 

all individuals who are but cells in one great Gaian mind. 

The intelligence of humanity is now reaching a level of 

collective self-‐awareness that a whole new reality can be born 

from conscious intent. Aboriginal prophecies spoke of things 

getting worse before they would get better. The current political 

paradigm reflects this projection. Yet the rate of information 

doubling is an asymptote of coherence and complexity in-‐forming 

our solar system. The Gaian mind is waking to Herself via Her own 

experiences of unity with all things. Universal energy is acceler-‐ 

ating the independent awakenings to prime us all for the cosmic 

confluence coming soon to a planet near you. We all must simply 

let go of fixed ideas and dive into the flow of our own cosmic 

groove. Grounded in self-‐awareness, anchored in our authentic 

self, our personal power lies in openness and acceptance. Life is a 

journey toward wholeness and we are where we need to be in our 

collective awakening, we simply need to open ourselves to it. 

Evolving cosmic consciousness is always there, we merely need to 

embody our inter-‐dimensional awareness to grow into ourselves. 

Each life in a new body is like a brand-‐new pair of boots, just 

needing to be broken in by our timeless eternal soul, so we can 

find our stride and contribute to increasing coherence and com-‐ 

plexity for the evolution of consciousness. 

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We are at the cusp of an evolutionary revolution, a cycle 

of revolutionary evolution, which we are even now experiencing 

as a spiritual revolution. To turn our destructive tendencies around 

we need to abide by our internal awareness and confront our 

collective spheres of fear. Each of us is unique and special with a 

gift to share with the world. The process of life leads us all down a 

path to our own soulful awakening to our self beyond the appar-‐ 

ent now. Yet all we do have is the apparent now. Our external 

reality mirrors our internal process, illuminating shadow to keep 

us grounded as our soulful self in each precious moment. And 

each moment acts as an inter-‐dimensional mirror to reveal our 

true timeless eternal identities. We are all simply surfing on a 

prayer rippling the very energetic fabric of reality. 

The Extended Mind Hypothesis 

We must let go of any anticipated outcomes and residual 

past identities. We must become fluid within our wider environ-‐ 

ment. Shamanic traditions refer to the dreaming from which all life 

emerges. The path of the shaman is to pass between the various 

realms of dreaming and perceived reality, and carry the sentient 

seeing through inter-‐dimensional channels. It is not so much 

seeing the reason behind everything but seeing the patterns 

within everything. In contemporary terms, the role of the shaman 

is to integrate the multiple perspectives in the multiverse to 

engender novelty and act as living agents of cosmic evolution. In 

defining terms here, I risk the semantic associations with the word 

shaman as it holds reference to archaic, tribal, warrior-‐clan, and 

traditional, et cetera levels of consciousness. 

Taoism describes a state of being rather than doing which 

resides in perfect balance with the universal flow of energy. Wu 

Wei translatesto “non-‐action” yet infers “right action” which is 

much like “rightrelationship” to borrowa NorthAmerican native 

term. When we are harmoniously balanced with our wider 

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environment, in body and our true genius, life is fluid and effort-‐ 

less. The creative genius of novelty acting through us all can live a 

charmed life when we let it out of the cage of our own limiting 

beliefs and negative thoughts. 

Our present is the dreaming of our past coming into 

being. The dream of the present is actively informing our future 

and that is where we need to place our conscious energy. Thus the 

causal realm is formed by the cumulative energies of our 

thoughts, words, and actions. The morphic field in-‐forming our 

reality is a composite of our intentions and shadow, carried by 

thoughts, words, and actions into the unified morphic in-‐ 

formation field. We must also be aware that we are also projecting 

our shadow elements that reside within us all. 

Modern science suggests that if we could look through an 

infinitely powerful telescope deep into the cosmos, we would end 

up staring at the back of our own head. This mirrors the cycle of 

light and life in our universe. The universe is a process of con-‐ 

sciousness becoming aware of itself through us as active agents of 

evolution. This is the filling of form – energy flowing into life. Each 

cycle holds the potentiality of total self-‐awareness to stare at its 

original face as the Zen koan suggests. To step out of time and 

space and be our original face, this is the ultimate end all forms of 

life in the pathway to transformation. 

I have referred to the accident that catalyzed this book 

routinely throughout rapt in awe. One of the strangest parts of 

that whole abstract experience was the sense that I had prior to 

the actually incident that something was going to happen. I had 

begun practicing Ashtanga yoga – the traditional origin of power 

yoga – about a year before the accident occurred. The power of 

the practice was driving a much deeper awareness for me that 

included daily visions and precognition. The hormones that are 

released by a deep a yoga practice can induce little psychedelic 

trips, which are truly mind expanding. This practice was calling me 

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to step up to a new order of consciousness which I resisted, being 

pretty comfortable where I was. I can clearly see retrospectively 

that this broader consciousness was going to abide by the cosmic 

trajectory regardless of my resistance. Yoga has become a corner 

stone of my personal practice and continues to illuminate this for 

me. The dizzy inducing hormonal excretions help me to let go of 

the rigid confines of mind and abide by the extended mind of 

cosmic consciousness. If I hold a question of an intention in mind, 

focusing on it during my yoga practice, answers reveal themselves 

to me more saliently than through the striving of my mind. One 

such vision that has lead directly to these words on this page 

occurred just when my consciousness was lingering outside of my 

physical form in the back of the ambulance after my accident. As I 

came to the recognition that I could simply focus my mind and 

survive, my awareness was filled with clarity: “Write.” I came 

across this passage shortly after that gave me chills, “There’s a 

tradition in Tibetan shamanism of the ‘delog,’ the one who dies 

and comes back to life to tell the story, the ‘primordial’ hit. This 

traveler-‐to-‐the-‐Bardo seers returns with a new understanding of 

emptiness & form, thereby lifts the consciousness of the rest of 

the tribe.” 111 This description resonated frightfully for me due to 

my persistent fascinations with Tibet. This fascination started with 

the Tibetan Book of the Dead in my climbing bum days of pray by 

play. This interest in Tibetan cosmology was fueled by Chögyam 

Thungpa after I found a dog-‐eared copy of Shambhala – The Sacred 

Path of the Warrior in a used bookstore. That Chögyam Thungpa 

developed a secular practice appealed to me, and his writing help-‐ 

ed my to develop a personal practice. Trungpa wrote about the 

shamanic origins of Bön in Tibet and I have been magnetized by 

this ancient culture since it came to my awareness. This other-‐ 

worldly interest has deeply shaped who I have become by opening 

111 

Written by Anne Waldman in the Introduction to the City Lights Books edition of 

The Scripture of the Golden Eternity. Kerouac, Jack & Sampatakakos The Scripture of the 

Golden Eternity (New York: Corinth Books) 1960, 1970, 1994 

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me to the evolution of consciousness. In the words of Chögyam 

Thungpa, “Real Fearlessness is the product of tenderness. It 

comes from letting the world tickle your heart, your raw and 

beautiful heart. You are willing to open up, without resistance or 

shyness, and face the world. You are willing to share your heart 

with others.” 112 ThereferencetotheTibetanshamanicdelog haunted me immediately when I came across it, taking me back to 

the surreal out of body experience I had in the ambulance. 

After the near death experience I continued having really 

intense flashes of insight reminiscent of the kaleidoscopic vision of 

past-‐present-‐and future bended together. I began writing immedi-‐ 

ately after the accident but the weirdness of the parallel between 

the clear vision to write and the concept of the delog made 

profound sense. The microcosm of my personal crisis has illumin-‐ 

ated the contents of this book relative to climate change, resource 

wars, and global inequities as macro crises calling for collective 

transformation. Somewhat ironically I continue to find the weight 

of all this crushing, which according to the self-‐reflecting universe 

hypothesis must have contributed to the accident in the first 

place. Thus rapt in awe is my delog. 

Identity and the internal guru 

In the formless void, the ocean of raw energy, we reside 

in our timeless eternal selves, a medley of genius, shadow, and the 

constructed beliefs of self. This is our personal blueprint of being, 

the source of in-‐formation that energy projects through – our own 

DNA code of creation. As both light and darkness interact with this 

fundamental form we manifest into life in the physical realm. In a 

fully luminous state, without clouds of shadow redirecting the 

light, we reside in our cosmic groove, our own original nature. The 

ancient tradition of Bön permeated Tibetan Buddhism bringing 

112 Thungpa, Chögyam Shambhala – The Sacred Path of the Warrior (Shambhala/ Bantam 

Books) 1984 p. 23 

178

179 


with it the Vajrayana – the lightbody or diamond vehicle an enlight-‐ 

ened state of extraterrestrial awareness and power. “In fact, 

according to the Buddhist Vajrayana thought, there is an under-‐ 

standing that our bodies represent microcosmic images of the 

greater, macrocosmic world.” 113 To access this awareness we must 

learn to see through the dark, to permeate the shadow within our 

core and recognize it as the trickster in the great game of life. The 

lightbody is only activated by openness to universal energy. We 

must be fully in touch with our true nature, letting go of all extern-‐ 

ally imposed identity and simply be. Yet daily life prompts us to 

search for self which we tend to seek via feedback in the material 

realm, largely through feedback from other people. Our identities 

are mere reflections of our external worlds as we seek personal 

validation from it, as this physical world is being in-‐formed by our 

internal processes. In coming into wakeful consciousness, beliefs 

about ourselves are built by feedback we receive, first from family 

and then from everyone we encounter. These beliefs form our 

conceptual cosmology in-‐forming our reality. In the subtle inter-‐ 

action of energy we are sponges amidst energetic osmosis. We 

build a belief system by what we absorb, and this influences how 

universal energy fills our form. These beliefs are projected out-‐ 

ward – in-‐forming how our tangible reality comes into being. 

Rites of passage 

The inward search for self is exemplified by the rites of 

passage of various aboriginal cultures of the shamanic traditions. 

This process also exists within the prevalent religions of conven-‐ 

tional cultures – Christ’s 40 days and 40 nights in the desert is a 

vision quest as is Buddha sitting beneath the Bodhi tree to seek 

awakening. A rite of passage involves the individual going out into 

the wider environment, a place often feared or considered hostile 

113 His Holiness the Dalai Lama The Universe in a Single Atom (New York: Morgan Roads 

Books) 2005, p. 111


outside of cultural conformity to seek a vision of self away from 

external influences and distractions. 

Traditionally these processes are overseen and mentored 

being given cultural context by elders, aunts, or uncles. To face 

this type of loneliness is to face fear, to peer directly at our own 

shadow. To access our authenticity we need to emulate the 

essence of this experience seeking intrinsic identity. This approach 

to self-‐awareness often involves stretching ourselves to our last 

bastions and enduring great loneliness. Circumstance can create 

ample opportunity for this without consciously seeking it out, but 

most often requires some form of mentorship and guidance to 

give interpretation and perspective. The mentorship is in many 

ways like the guru in Eastern traditions, acting as an intermediary 

for the divine. The divine is a reflection of our own true nature 

through the thin veil of material reality, which is overwhelming to 

experience through a single spontaneous insight. Our typical 

response to such glimmers of insight is to marginalize the ethereal 

and cling to the apparently real. Mentorship or spiritual guidance 

provides confirmation for our novel experiences of the awe 

assisting us with integrating the insights. There are many paths to 

our true selves – from within the archaic, magic, mythic, 

traditional, and even modern and postmodern – we simply need 

to integrate them into a contemporary cosmology that aids us in 

being authentic in each moment. Residing in our cosmic groove, 

surfing the flow of the flux, as our authentic original face self, 

makes us active agents of cosmic evolution. 

Each instant can be seen as a reflection of the dreaming 

self either struggling with or harmoniously balanced with the 

conscious self to illuminate our personal path to transformation. 

We each have our own internal guru beckoning us to awaken to 

the full depths of our true luminous self. Our conscious selves are 

like fish in a line of cosmic inevitability – fighting and playing at 

resistance until we surrender. To navigate the path to enlighten-‐ 

ment, be it Buddha’s Eightfold or Christ’s loving heart, crazy 

180


coyotes call or just our own chests rise and fall, a kind and com-‐ 

passionate heart nears the dream where we all meet 

Happiness comes to those who project happiness. Also 

misery comes to those who project misery. This is the very nature 

of the self-‐reflecting universe, that each moment is an external 

reflection of our internal process of awakening. Thus by recog-‐ 

nizing that our immediate circumstance is the product of our 

dreaming mind, both conscious and unconscious, we can come to 

know who we are. When we recognize our true self and others we 

step closer to bliss, leaving us less alone. But the first step is to 

turn fear into our teacher, not our jailer, and risk being blissed. 

As I mentioned earlier, I came to see my work in outdoor 

and experiential education as a contemporary means for rites of 

passage, what I liked to also call education for transformation. Life 

is providing each of us with profound opportunities to transcend 

our current level of complexity and development, and these 

experiences are not always pretty or pleasant. Cosmic conscious-‐ 

ness has a preferred direction and trajectory and it wants us to be 

active agents of evolution. Whether it takes a crush injury and 

major blood loss, or something more subtle, our rites of passage 

are presenting themselves to us all the time. Our own recognition 

of what the self-‐reflecting universe can illuminate this often 

tumultuous path toward our deepest selves. 

Psychology in a nutshell 

If it weren’t for our minds, life would be a whole lot 

simpler. Yet the anxious activity of our sophisticated cranial 

capacity complicates everything. This is not meant to make mind 

out as the villain of selfhood where every aspect of our great 

glorious complex creature serves a vital purpose in the creative 

evolution of all things. Most conventional psychologies focus on 

dysfunction more so than function, assuming there to be some 

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almighty norm to measure each of us by. But there are others that 

integrate the mythic and the mystic. The universe is a resonant 

wave on which we surf not the mechanistic tick-‐tock of some 

God’s unwinding clock, spiraling concrescence of incidents in an 

ever-‐evolving improv act. We replay our daily dramas to unveil 

awareness to who we truly are. Our everyday conscious self either 

struggles or harmonizes with the dreaming self. Our authentic self 

tunes in to the energetic vibration of any given situation. Our 

broader consciousness reflects the substrata of causal and subtle 

energies that in-‐from the time and the place. 

Within the modernist-‐thought-‐box conditions or states of 

mind or being that can serve toward a broader awareness are 

treated largely as dysfunction or as psychological illness. We are 

considered unwell when we abide by the internal signals that are 

trying to wake us to our broader reality. Outside reductionist 

reality many individual psyche ailments are mere energetic osmo-‐ 

sis imbalances playing themselves out through us to illuminate a 

broader systemic health issue. That is to say that we merely reflect 

the unhealthy tendencies of the collective morphic field. The 

world built on false fundamental assumptions is sick, so we are 

sick. Children’s behavior commonly mimics that of their parent’s 

emotions, spoken and unspoken, conscious and unconscious. 

Social and cultural dysfunctions are mocked and mimicked by 

energetically open individuals, tuned like radios. Once we accept 

that each individual person is part of a larger whole, such as a 

relationship, family, group, subculture, society, culture, or collec-‐ 

tive humanity, we can observe in our behavioral impulses and 

attitudes as they reflect the systemic health of the greater whole. 

Here again, we are merely flesh puppets to the pervading energy 

of our wider environment. Our own internal climate reflects the 

outer environment. Resistance to our internal callings to reflect 

our authentic self tends to compound as internal anguish and the 

external circumstances to illuminate self-‐awareness. 

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The acorn theory 114 suggests that the design of the oak 

resides inside the acorn and seeks fertile ground to emerge, 

suggesting that our timeless eternal self (acorn) co-‐creates our 

lives (fertile ground) to grow into the oak. Just as leaves reach to 

the sun, so do the roots reach to the unseen. The hardships of 

wind and weather, dilution and drought grow the oak into a 

strong and healthy tree. Each tree reaches above and below 

towards its alternate selfhood, fulfilling the form residing in the 

acorn, but also is part of a forest which breathes life into the 

planet. This point of view suggests that we are not prisoners of 

circumstance but rather travelers within it working our way 

towards some un-‐known destination which turns out to be our 

true self beyond the temporal constraints of our skin. 

This view reflects that of karma carried between lives by 

our timeless eternal soulful selves. Karma translates to “action” in 

Sanskrit, reflecting the morphic imprints of our thoughts, words, 

and actions as they in-‐form our reality. 

Literally, karma means ‘action’ and refers to the 

intentional acts of sentient beings. Such acts may be 

physical, verbal, or mental – even just thoughts or 

feelings – all of which have impacts upon the psyche of 

an individual, no matter how minute. Intentions result in 

acts, which results in effects that condition the mind 

toward certain traits and propensities, all of which may 

give rise to further intentions and actions. The entire 

process is seen as an endless self-‐perpetuating dynamic. 

The chain reaction of interlocking causes and effects 

operates not only in individuals but also in groups and 

114 Hillman, James The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling (Grand Central 

Publishing) 1997


societies, not just in one lifetime but across many life-‐ 

times. 115 

Our karma is our morphic field, our Akashic imprint, in-‐forming our 

reality of our genius and shadow to aid in the evolution of 

consciousness. 

Integral theory lead by the grand synthesis of Ken Wilber, 

has mapped out a comprehensive understanding of development-‐ 

tal psychology. This work provides an unprecedented resource for 

transformative practice simply by integrating the multiple 

perspectives of psychological research and spiritual devotional 

wisdom traditions. “The Great Nest [of Being] is simply a great 

morphogenetic field that provides a developmental space in which 

human potentials can unfold. The basic levels of the Great Nest 

are the basic waves of that unfolding: matter to body to mind to 

soul to spirit.” 116 

I mentioned earlier on the profound impact my partici-‐ 

pation in a Lakota Sundance ceremony had upon my psyche-‐ 

spiritual development. One of the most resonant teachings that I 

received, somewhat ironically, was on the Hindu principle of the 

Vedanta. I complimented the head firekeeper, my direct mentor 

for my role the process, about her kind manner. She merely 

replied, “I am just a mirror of the kindness within you and that is 

what you see.” There was a spontaneous recognition of a deep 

truth as I absorbed these words and the transmission of com-‐ 

passionate insight. She followed the Hindu Vedanta as a spiritual 

path. The ethos of this moment awakened further recognition 

within me of a passing encounter some months prior, where I was 

first exposed to the premise of the Vedanta. Living in Pemberton 

at the time, a casual conversation about skiing turned to my 

ongoing healing process from my crushed leg, the pain was still 

115 

His Holiness the Dalai Lama The Universe in a Single Atom (New York: Morgan Road 

Books) 2005, p. 109 

116 

Ken Wilber Integral Psychology (Boston & London: Shambhala) 2000, p. 27 

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consuming much of my day at that time. As I acknowledged that 

the injury still had much to teach me, my friend summed up his 

spiritual outlook attributing it to the Vedanta: Everything is per-‐ 

fect, and it is simply our own imperfections that bar us from 

experiencing that in each given moment. 

Vedanta is based on two premises: that human nature is 

divine, and secondly that the purpose of human life is to realize 

the divine. Within Vedanta the aim of life is the personal discovery 

of cosmic consciousness, essentially to be rapt in awe. This is the 

non-‐dual state of flow consciousness, available to any and all of us 

in each instant. It is all but a breath away at any time once we 

awaken to the awe of it all. 

Simply This 

If there is a purpose to these pages of words, diagrams and 

ideas, it is simply this: That in each given instant each of us plays 

an integral role in the fabric of cosmic evolution. That all of our 

thoughts, words, and actions contribute to the co-‐creation of the 

universe, that we have an interactive and participatory contri-‐ 

bution to the unfolding of the evolution of consciousness. Nestled 

deep within each and every one of us is a kernel of profound 

potential, of creative genius that is as unique and diverse as we 

are. This genius relates closely to the broad concept of soul, 

persisting beyond our mere material form of body and mind, and 

reflects and refracts the very essence of us as we come into 

physical being in the world. 

I have reflected and refracted the story of how my accident 

pierced the perceived membrane of my physical existence. The 

intensity of this experience made it a transformative catalyst for 

me, making transparent everything before and after embedded 

with a sense of purpose. This sense of purpose brings with it at 

times a sense of taking myself, and everything, too seriously, yet 

the critical intensity of the current state of the world seems pretty


darn serious as well. I project my personal experience onto the 

broader collective sphere and urge insight to see how we can over 

come the complex challenges of climate change, food scarcity, 

resource wars, and general inequity. When I was suspended in the 

bizarre Bardo state for a momentary infinity, I came so see the 

kaleidoscopic clarity reminiscent of the clear light state. “Thisisa state of consciousness understood to be extremely subtle that 

manifests briefly in all human beings at the moment of death. Very 

brief similitudes of this state may occur naturally at other times, 

such as during sneezing, fainting, deep sleep, and sexual climax. 

The principal characteristic of the state is a total spontaneity, the 

absence of self-‐consciousness or self-‐grasping.” 117 Theluminous clarity of this experience persists for me yet my rather extensive 

imperfections and projections of my grasping mind do cast a 

shadow. It is a fulltime process of mindful practice to clear out this 

clutter and be clear. But as long as I attune to my cosmic groove 

and find my flow, I can aid evolution along. The modern world is 

far more complex than when the Buddha found enlightenment 

and we all must filter this chaotic barrage of stimuli to be agents 

of self-‐organization. As the Buddhist adage says, seek not what the 

Buddha found, but what the Buddha sought. 

So how does this play out in our daily life? I need to defer to 

metaphor to grapple with this abstract translation of ethereal into 

real. With the knowledge that our individual consciousness is a 

micro-‐manifestation of the cosmos at large, we can see that our 

thoughts, words, and actions contribute to what happens around 

us. The fundamental energy of the universe finds form through 

our individual consciousness in conjunction with the conscious-‐ 

ness of everyone and everything else. We are much like a fractal 

prism through which light shines to create complexity. Complexity 

is the aim and end of evolution as it reaches for ever more 

sophisticated structures of form. 

117 His Holiness the Dalai Lama The Universe in a Single Atom (New York: Morgan Road 

Books) 2005, p. 157 

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In terms of translating this into a moment-‐to-‐moment 

practice, we must then be mindfully aware of our thoughts, 

words, and actions, witnessing whether we are conforming to 

conservative structures of confirmation or emergent potentials of 

novelty. I see this metaphorically as being like electro-‐dynamics: if 

we are open-‐minded we act as conductors for cosmic evolution 

and if we are attached to rigid beliefs and perceptions then we are 

resistors to the flow of creativity. Many contemporary social and 

cultural structures fall into the resistor category, and for our 

collective transformation to be possible a critical mass of open 

and receptive consciousness must be reached. The challenge for 

each of us is to let go of identity constructs and past referencing 

belief tendencies. Our metaphysical insecurities are calmed by 

such past referencing beliefs that tell us “the world is this way 

because…” This is the pervasive practice of most religions and 

belief systems around the globe today, although each of them 

hold perennial wisdom as to how one can tap into the flow of 

cosmic consciousness. Our individual consciousness, the random 

passing thoughts that emerge, the intuitive impulses and flirting 

attractions, all act as a real-‐time reference for what is really 

happening in the universe in each instant. Some of these thoughts 

are manifestations of our personal shadow, karmic residue that 

we must work through to see the clear light of being. We tend to 

marginalize these thoughts, by and large, in acts of disassociation 

manifesting duality and fragmentation. But all of these shadow 

aspects are of us, and that is okay as long as we can be mindful 

and skillfully focus our consciousness on the light. 

This translates into breathing with awareness, bringing the 

mindfulness of mediation into each moment and witnessing all of 

the subtle aspects of our consciousness. Very simply this is how 

we can anchor the non-‐dual state into each given moment and 

clear the clutter of cosmic chaos, making space forever more 

complexity and coherence. Bringing it back to practice, we can 

observe our thoughts and not be attached to them, seeing them


merely as mirrors of the broader cosmic consciousness reverber-‐ 

ating the chaos of creation in each sustained instant. Thus our 

minds act as a reflective interface in a self-‐reflecting universe. This 

is our original face. Amidst the turmoil of cosmic evolution, the 

ebb and flow of novelty and confirmation, of chaos and 

complexity, we are able to see glimpses of what can be. As vessels 

of pure potentiality we can free the universe from structural 

dysfunction by focusing our minds on creative solutions, and thus 

empower transformative leaps in the evolutionary process. 

By simply watching the news or reading a newspaper, we 

tend to see the turmoil of a world gone wrong and feel the fear 

and dread of the living dead. Our task though is to see the 

glimmers of hope and focus our attention upon them, to gently 

fan the embers of novel possibility so that the spark of insight 

spreads and the fundamental fire of life evolves. Confirmation 

takes place when others see it too, affirming and verifying the 

vitality of something new. 

I carry this awareness with me, and try to implement the 

practice of mindfulness into each moment. I have, at times, 

constricted the external stimuli in my life to the voluntary simplic-‐ 

ity of a monk, and at other times exposed myself to the over-‐ 

whelming intensity of urban vitality. I tend to have the most 

success in employing these ideas in principle and practice, when I 

breathe deeply and meditate often. And often I falter and forget, 

stumbling amidst the stresses that I attract into my life, and that is 

okay because I can always bring it back to breath, and remember. 

With novelty comes this tensile instability of vulnerable ideas. 

Random sparks of insight that catch our attention, are often not 

seen by others nearby, and the confirmation that affirms that we 

are not crazy or just plain weird takes some time to come when 

we are urging evolution along. Our faith in the process can carry 

us through such dark nights. 

We are but breath bringing forth novel forms of complexity 

in each moment, and we do not want to be alone. And we most 

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certainly are not. When someone comes to mind, this is a signal to 

connect with them. It is a manifestation of ideas intersecting, a 

living example of quantum entanglement in action. When an idea 

emerges in mind in the company of another, it is highly likely that 

they too are experiencing the idea, the non-‐locality of mind acts 

this way. As active agents of cosmic evolution, we must merely 

surrender ourselves to the process of consciousness unfolding 

into greater complexity and coherence, which we do through 

communing with others willing to risk novelty. We do this by 

returning to our breath, and allowing the evolution of conscious-‐ 

ness to unfold through us, residing in our cosmic grooves. This is 

what each of us is here to both be and do. By being in the flow and 

following our bliss, rapt in awe, we welcome the transformation 

that the world is waiting for. 

This is why you are here in this life, in this skin. To work 

through all those inhibiting beliefs about self and let your genius 

shine through. The world needs you, and we need you. Despite all 

the instances of fragmentation that consume our consciousness 

from moment to moment, we have the means for collective 

transformation right before us right now, more than at any other 

time in the history of the universe. Find your flow, dance to your 

cosmic groove, be beautiful and spontaneous and free. It is no 

accident that you are being asked this right now, it is why you are 

here equipped with the amazing capacities that you have to share. 

So please join the dialogue on the evolution of conscious-‐ 

ness at worldbliss.com. We are waiting for your novel insights to 

urge evolution along.


About the Author 

Lee White lives in Cumberland, British Columbia with 

his wife Samantha and two children, Indira and Kai. 

He likes to play through much of each day and can 

often be found practicing yoga, riding bikes, skiing, 

surfing, and writing, residing in his cosmic groove. 

Lee consults on adaptation initiatives to create more 

open and responsive systems. Lee is passionate 

about fostering self-‐organizing systems and support-‐ 

ing climate action. You can find out more about Lee’s 

consulting services at www.leewhite.ca, or by e-‐mail 

at lee@leewhite.ca, or tweet @lee_d_white. 

Lee speaks at select events and facilitates innovative 

processes for shared experiences. If you would like 

to help coordinate a book reading, workshop, or talk 

near you contact lee@leewhite.ca. 

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