Rooted and awake.

Dear Ones,

In the last email, we looked at the living map of the Ray of Creation and how it can be helpful to find ourselves within it, so as to inform the way we live. It is one way of framing the task that we are being invited to take up, the post we are to hold as participants in the divine exchange. We might consider this a map that describes and orients us more toward the vertical dimension of reality.

Now, we will turn our attention more fully to the horizontal dimension, to our unfolding in time. Across many disciplines and lineages, a shared perspective is emerging that humanity is living through an in-between time. Many philosophers, scientists, mystics, and systems thinkers recognize that ways of viewing and organizing the world—characterized by rationality, progress, individualism, and industrialism—are reaching their limits. What is unraveling is an entire way of perceiving and imagining reality, and what is beginning is not yet fully visible. Whether we call it the breakdown of the Mental structure of consciousness, the death of modernity, the Anthropocene, the Metacrisis, a Second Axial Age, or a collective dark night, we recognize that we are in the throes of the death (or birth, or both?) canal as old forms are unraveling and dying in front of our eyes. It seems that each of these lenses illuminate what we are facing and provide a useful piece of the picture. 

For example, Jean Gebser’s Ever Present Origin presents a map of the structures of consciousness, which Cynthia Bourgeault has drawn from extensively in recent years. Gebser suggests that the Mental structure of consciousness—with its decisive spatial awareness, measuring, reason, linear time, rationality, dualism, and possessiveness of the world and resources—has moved into its deficient stage. Now, according to Gebser, the Integral structure of consciousness—with its liberating quality and freedom from and for all perspectives—is breaking through. In this new structure, space becomes boundless, time becomes presence and wholeness, and rather than simply observing the world, we participate with it through time. Gebser points out that the transition from the Mental structure breaking down to the Integral structure breaking through, is one of crisis, disintegration, disorienting, and fragmenting of old forms.

Thinkers such as Jean-François Lyotard and Vanessa Machado de Oliveira describe our era as one in which the promises of modernity are unraveling. For over four centuries, the modern world has been guided by a deep story that through reason, progress, and control, humanity could master nature and secure well-being for all. Both Lyotard and Oliveira suggest this vision brought immense creativity and scientific power, yet it also contained seeds of estrangement from Earth, one another, and the interior life of soul and meaning. The institutions that carried its faith—politics, economics, religion, science—no longer inspire trust or coherence. The modern self, once confident in its autonomy, now experiences fragmentation, anxiety, and a sense of rootlessness.

As modernity falters, scientists such as Paul Crutzen suggest its outer expression appears in what is called the Anthropocene. The Anthropocene is considered a planetary epoch in which human activity has become a geological force that has remade the chemistry of the atmosphere, altered ocean currents, and initiated the sixth mass extinction. Cultural historian Thomas Berry viewed this epoch as experiencing a moment of cosmic self-recognition in which the Earth is showing us what our consciousness has created. This mirror is revealing the scale of humanity’s impact, the collapse of the old boundary between “human” and “nature,” and the invitation for humans to see ourselves not as masters of the Earth but participants in a vast web of reciprocity and consequence.

The metacrisis lens, articulated by Daniel Schmachtenberger, Jonathan Rowson, and Jordan Hall, invites us to see the convergence of crises as more than coincidence. Ecological collapse, political polarization, economic inequality, mental health epidemics, and technological disruption are all expressions of a deeper systemic disorder. These thinkers suggest that the metacrisis points to the breakdown of our collective capacity to see clearly, coordinate action, and generate shared meaning. It is as much an epistemic and moral crisis as it is a physical one. Our tools for knowing and governing reality were built for a world far simpler than the one now emerging. In this view, the challenge is not merely to solve discrete problems but to evolve the underlying consciousness that created them, to develop new forms of collective intelligence, relational ethics, and planetary stewardship.

Where the metacrisis describes the outer breakdown of systems, the meaning crisis describes its inner echo within the human psyche. As John Vervaeke observes, we are suffering from a collapse of coherence. The symbolic world that once oriented us has frayed. Our attention is fragmented, our communities eroded, our rituals hollowed. We are flooded with information but starved for wisdom. This interior dimension reveals that our predicament is not just political or technological, it is spiritual. He says we have forgotten how to dwell in mystery, to hold paradox, to experience belonging within a living cosmos.

Some thinkers, such as Ewert Cousins, Thomas Berry, Bruno Barnhart and Ilia Delio, interpret our current turbulence as the birth pangs of a Second Axial Age. The first Axial Age (around 800–200 BCE) gave rise to the great religious and philosophical traditions that awakened humanity to interiority, conscience, and transcendence. Now we may be entering another axial turning, an awakening not away from the world but within it, a recognition of the sacredness of matter, Earth, and relational being. Where the first axial shift separated heaven and earth, the second may reunite them.

Likewise, contemporary mystics and scientists alike are rediscovering Gaia as a living, self-organizing system, of which we are not stewards but cells. If such an emergence is real, it will not be achieved through ideology or design but through an inner transformation of perception.

These lenses pointing to what may be taking place can be profoundly helpful for our time, as they suggest that much of the turmoil, chaos, and disorder we experience is the sign of a dying and birthing. Going through times of unraveling such as this are part of what it means to exist in this world. They are nonetheless disorienting and it is easy to get caught up in whatever the mass emotional experiences of hysteria, despair, rage, etc. are. For those of us who orient ourselves to a spiritual path and who take seriously our post in the cosmos, our task is to remain rooted and awake amidst such unravelings. 

When we look at many of our spiritual/contemplative/mystic/prophetic ancestors who have lived through times of great deathing and birthing, we see that they are familiar with this painful territory. They seem to carry the knowing that this very disorientation may be the doorway through which a deeper integration emerges and the opening for a new form of seeing.

The task before us is not simply to manage crises, but to midwife a new pattern of being, one that is adequate to the complexity and sacredness of the world. We too are invited to stand firm—clear in mind, emotion, and body—able to see and act skillfully rather than be swept up in polarization or despair. Our work is to offer ourselves as anchors and shepherds amid this great transition, consciously stewarding the mi-fa gap as it unfolds through the conditions of our time. Whether this birth succeeds or fails remains uncertain. What is asked of us now is presence, humility, and the courage to participate in the unfolding with great care as shepherds, doulas, and midwives.

Let us nourish our rootedness and awakeness amidst this great unraveling...

With love,

Heather

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Readings from last week's Daily Contemplative Pauses

*All previous readings & reflections can be found here*

Monday, October 13th

Readings:

The time will come when, with elation,

you will greet yourself arriving

at your own door, in your own mirror, and each will smile at the other's welcome and say, sit here. Eat.

You will love again the stranger who was your self.

Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart to itself, to the stranger who has loved you all your life, whom you have ignored

for another...

– Derek Walcott, Collected Poems 1948-1984

Chant: Return again, return again, return to the [Root of your Heart]. Return to who you are, return to what you are, return to where you are born and reborn again – Shlomo Carlebach, sung by Cantor Azi Schwartz of Park Avenue Synagogue

Tuesday, October 14th

Readings: "When we have a contemplative practice, it helps us to slow down and deepen our awareness so that more information arises in us. We can use that sensing to feel ourselves, and we can train the same sense to become aware of others in a deeper way.

It could be said that wisdom is a state of including more of the world in the way we live. To experience less separation or othering, and more inclusion of life. To have more of the world represented in us. That's how we can feel connected to our heart and more intimate with the world." – Thomas Hubl

Chant: You the One, One in All, say I Am, I Am You – The Oriental Orthodox Order in the West

Wednesday, October 15th

Chant: Deeply descend into I Am, deeply descend into One – The Oriental Orthodox Order in the West

Thursday, October 16th

Reading: "Only when the personality has become transparent is Essential Being able to pursue its redemptive process and pierce with its rays the shell of the world-ego.  Therefore, those who have woken to Essential Being fulfill their service to Divine Being by the way in which they do 'the one thing necessary': that is to say, by manifesting the Divine in the midst of the world in all their striving, all their creativity and all their love." – Karlfried Graf Durckheim, The Way of Transformation: Daily Life as Spiritual Practice, p. 137

Chant: May our hearts be full of grace, our souls fueled by love – Heather Ruce

Saturday, October 17th

Reading: “How you go about your work in the world determines whether your work is a vehicle for your spiritual awakening or for getting more caught in maya, increasing the illusion of separation." …

"To use your daily life and work as a conscious spiritual path means relinquishing your attachment to the fruits of the actions, to how they come out.  Instead of doing it for a reward or a result, you do your work as an offering, out of love for God.  Through love for God, your work becomes an expression of devotion." ...

"You serve others as a way of honoring God.  It's an attitude you develop, an attitude of offering.  Every action you perform, you offer as selfless service, 'seva' in Sanskrit.  In the same vein, Christ says about service, 'What you do for the least of my brothers and sisters you do for me.'

"Seva doesn't have ego in it; it's all soul.  Any action can be seva.  Everything you do – cooking, working, gardening – is an act you can offer to God.  Offering your work and all your actions to God takes daily life out of the realm of ego and into the higher Self…   Letting go of the doer lightens your load.  It's not even your load anymore. 'Not my will, but Thy Will'" – Ram Dass, Polishing the Mirror: How to Live from Your Spiritual Heart, pp. 32-3

Sunday, October 19th with Henry

Reading: 'Self-Portrait as Tuning Fork' by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer  

There is, perhaps you’ve felt it,

a moment when the day falls away

and your name falls away and

everything you thought you knew

falls away and for a moment

you know yourself only

as whatever it is

that continues—your whole body abuzz

with the eternity of it—and you quiver

as if struck by the great hand

of what is true,

becoming pure tone,

more vibration than flesh,

a human-shaped resonator

tuned to the frequency

of life itself,

and though later you might try

to dissect what happened,

in that moment you’re too abloom

to wonder how or why,

you simply are

this ecstatic unfolding

knowing the self as I am,

so alive and so infinite

you tremble like a song.

Chant: Mercy, Mercy, Mercy, deep within and all around – Henry Schoenfield

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