Aviv is writing today with a Portals update. Here is what I am reflecting on. How do you navigate a confusing and chaotic world when the map itself shapes-shifts as you move?

Where do you find a sure path to transcend confusion and the corrosive exhaustion of cacophonous polarization, so as to find sanity inside a sense of fresh possibility?

Variations of these questions emerge in my work with senior leaders in Silicon Valley. They face tremendous pressures, and they seek me out to help them revitalize their organization and create new viable futures. In Portals we grapple with these inquiries not in the context of business, but in the even broader human condition and the challenges of these threshold times.

Peter Barry, the curator of the Portals site, and I chat weekly. We ask what is emerging for Portals. It is a curious threefold Venn diagram inquiry. We listen to discover what is catching our attention in the world around us. We tune into inquiries we have taken on as a lifelong practice, and ponder how these are merging and revealing the perennial Portals prod about where the future comes from.

These threads feed the discovery crucible as we seek to understand where this purposeful inquiry is nudging us next. With the Portals Into the Soul journey underway, we are creating the first Into the Soul Event, where I hope to be in conversation with you about this soul’s odyssey and about these strange, bewildering, and potently hopeful times.

A Deep Search

These last few months felt like a whirlwind. I have been living in the US for more than three decades, almost half of my life. Still, with family and many friends in Israel, the events of October 7th and what transpired since impacted me deeply.

I’ve been studying the growing convergence of crisis points shaping world events since the mid-1990s. I’ve always sensed the bigger crises of our times had spiritual roots. Humanity has been running on empty, separated and distanced from the sacred nourishing sources of life. There was an immediate sense that this was not merely a Middle East local crisis, added to the crisis in the Ukraine. These two kinetic wars I felt were both expressions and perhaps catalysts of an even bigger phase-shift underway.

The other dozen crisis points converging in the meta-crisis each represent an escalation vector, together signifying the end of the post-World War Bretton Woods order. In the Epoch transition mapping we describe the Bretton Woods moment as the final ascent of the modern Blue operating system. Earlier moments of the Blue trace of the epoch include the Magna Carta and the Constitutional Convention. The phase-shift underway has been accelerating the disintegration of the Blue operating system, giving way to an Indigo—Violet crucible of change and new possibility.

Inside the whirlwind of pain, grief, and confusion, I have been in a deep search. I have asked, what is mine to do?  How can I serve? What is the highest service we can each offer?

I don’t know for certain the answers to these questions because these are dynamically evolving, offering new insights every day. What I am finding nevertheless is that they prod me to deepen, and they test me in multiple ways, including the courage of my convictions. The inner voice wants me to irrevocably commit the rest of this planetary tour of duty to my grandchildren’s generation and the generations following them. But what does it actually mean to serve the souls and spirits showing up here for their planetary opportunity? How do we approach these contemplations in whole new ways to nurture universal permanent-line values into the future?

In a chain of unexpected events, these contemplative inquiries called me to embark on this Soul Odyssey. As described in The Preamble, developments all around were now tracking to what we describe in the epoch mapping trace as the Violet upsurge. I anticipate the Violet increase will accompany us for the coming decades.

As the world becomes more chaotic, we are called to make four moves concurrently. First, we must each find a deeper, stronger, more resilient center. Second, we need to connect with each other in new, more meaningful, and nourishing ways. Third, we need to discover where and how we find sources of healing and enlivenment to facilitate rejuvenating renewal. Fourth, we need to do all of these right here, right now, while we work on the longwave inquiry to imagine a hopeful, wiser, healthier, and sustainably brighter world for our great grandchildren 100 years into the future.

Portals is for me an opportunity theater to discover how to make these four dance moves together. The March 23rd event will focus on Chapter 1 of this Soul Odyssey, where we describe the soul as a threefold orchestrating system.

What else are we working on?

I am writing the next chapters of Portals Into the Soul. Although I did not initially anticipate it would evolve in this way, I am discovering the Epoch Culmination story has found a way to infiltrate the plot of this soul journey. I will write more about this in the coming months.

Patrick Summers, Kyriaki Nikandrou, and Peter Barry offer comments and suggestions. Kyriaki and Paul Stone are developing the soul installment videos and are now working on the video of chapter two to be published in April. Jerry Pike creates the episodes’ artwork. Emmy Schaling develops the practice outlines. Lisa Marcus co-hosts our events and nurtures with Kyriaki the Portals community.

We also are working on a potent piece we will publish later in the month decoding the teacher’s journey, the double teacher-student trap, and the pathologies of the golden shadow. We will continue to publish the Universalis conversation series with Karen Heney and Kyriaki Nikandrou, providing special content for members level two ($171.00 per year). We are concurrently building the Internal Human Orchestra Work (IHOW) series with Rita Lampen, Beth Simpson, and Eleni Makri. The first couple of practices will be accessible for all. We then will continue to generate these for members level 1-access ($57.00 per year). The spirit of this is offering value to everyone supporting the project. Please consider adding your support. We would love to have your involvement in the Portals project.

David Price Francis continues to collaborate on the Current Openings series. We just published CO#15 - The Four Development Zones. We have three more episodes lined up for the next several months, including a very special conversation coming in April.

In the epoch journey conversations with Jeff Vander Clute, we have several more rare conversations generated late last year we will soon release, including "The Guru Trap and the Golden Shadow" exposition later this month.

In the What is Healing? series, in collaboration with Alexander Love, we will soon release a new conversation with several healing practitioners.  In the Evolving Together series, with Well and Nigel Geeves, we have the next two installments lined up for release in coming weeks.

In An End of an Era & A Post-Guru World, we suggested the solutions to our wicked problems require us to collaborate and work together in new ways. The Portals project is an experimentation theater. It affords us opportunities for cultivating and testing these ideas, where we strive to embody and ensoul these possibilities in practical ways. We don’t pretend to have definitive answers to any of our questions. Instead, we set out to let the project develop and lead us into practicing daily our highest intentions so we can learn by doing, by making mistakes, falling on our face, and picking ourselves up to create new next drafts.

Living into the Violet Upsurge

Living into the rapid shape-shift of the Violet upsurge invites us to embrace every day as an opportunity for creating new drafts. Anything we claim or try to cement in definitive terms today will likely make us look like fools a couple of weeks later. Such is the way of the Violet tectonic shift.

There is something freeing in embracing the motto of relaxing everyday into creating new drafts in the project of becoming our better universal human version. It liberates each person to find their sense of aliveness and vibrant possibility. My own litmus test is simple. In 15 years, when I am 80 and my granddaughter is 19, will she be able to say: “I see that living is about continuing to discover yourself anew and evolving in the process; my grandpa is still discovering who he is and what he is about into his 80s…”  It is an effective imagery for me. It frees me up.

I don’t need to have answers to all my questions; instead, I need to keep asking new, deeper, more penetrating, and possibility-releasing questions. I never knew in my 20s and 30s this living practice would open the way to exhilarating and rewarding consulting work. It now liberates me to ask in new ways, how can I serve my grandchildren and future generations? How can we each serve the higher universal potential and purpose of human life?

Will you care to join this odyssey with us?