...From an Old Epoch That is Fading to a New Epoch That’s Emerging

When we ask in Portals “Where does the future come from?,” we don’t mean in the narrow sense of a timeline. We’re actually asking: Where does possibility come from? Where does elevation come from? Under the idea of “future,” we invite a deeper sensing and exploration of the latent human potential within each of us, and of a universal potential that is becoming available now.

So, where does the future come from? It comes through all of us, each and every one of us, potentially. When you forgive someone deeply, you release the person or situation into a new future, instead of keeping it stuck in a historic point of pain. When you see your challenge in a new way, you open a path that was not there before — not only for yourself, but also for those around you.

Just by being human, alive on Earth at this time, we are each a living agent of the future.

Collapse and Transition: Where We Are Now

It’s no longer subtle: something is breaking down. The modern operating system, developed over the last few centuries, is showing signs of collapse. Institutions once admired now feel unstable, as fragmentation and chaos replace coherence.

This isn’t only a recent story. The 60-year trace we often speak of is embedded in a much longer arc that reaches back 250 years to the Industrial Revolution, and further to the Cartesian split of mind and matter that shaped the Enlightenment. Even further, we can trace back 5,000 years to the early civilizations and religious systems that formed the current epoch now fading.

We are entering a phase transition. This current epoch is dying. A new one is emerging. The coming decades will shape the next few centuries. What we do, and how we develop ourselves, matters profoundly.

A Soul-Centered Response to Crisis

The Portals Into the Soul work arose from a key realization: We cannot solve today’s challenges with intellect and technology alone.

That approach has run its course. Despite incredible advances, we now face new compounding conditions — autoimmune disorders, ecological stress, social and psychological disorientation. These may be symptoms of a deeper difficulty: the human Soul struggling to adapt to a new epoch.

So we ask: How can the Soul help us navigate this transition? How can we release what is ending, embrace what is emerging, and tend to the space in between?

The Three Movements in Us

Like our cells that die and renew each day, our consciousness lives between three movements:

1. The Dying: Something in us, and around us, is ending
2. The Emerging: Something new is being born, still fragile, still forming
3. The Liminal: The space between — unknown, uncomfortable, yet full of potential

Can we learn to hospice the dying epoch with care, and midwife the new one with tenderness?

Grace, Resilience, and the Not-Knowing

There is wisdom in the grace of the elderly and the innocence of toddlers. Can we meet this epochal shift with similar humility and resilience?

To do this, we must make space for the unknown. If we rush to fill every gap with what we already know, we leave no room for the new to find us. How do we embrace the liminal transition into the unknown, and how do we facilitate the discovery and the liberation of a new epoch?

Even in breath, we find an image for the shift:

• Inhale: A new future enters
• Exhale: The past releases
• Pause: The liminal space between — before inhaling again, pause to feel, sense, and listen.

Regulating and Attuning

This transition calls for inner regulation of our minds, emotions, nervous systems, and relationships. But regulation is not the end. It creates the conditions to attune.

Attune to what? To the emerging epoch, the new signal coming alive in and through us.

It needs us. We are its living theater.

Two Mindsets for Understanding the Meta-crisis

1. Systemic Obsolescence:
   The meta-crisis is the result of an outdated operating system. Recognizing this doesn’t solve the challenges we face, but it gives us an elevated perspective with which to look at whatever you are grappling with.
2. Inner-Outer Reflection:
   Everything we see outwardly has an inward dimension. 
   • The energy crisis echoes human depletion
   • Ecological collapse mirrors emotional and spiritual overheating.
   • The leadership void reflects self-leadership struggles.

These present a variety of concerns to the soul, inviting a deeper response.

Responses to the Meta-crisis

Let us take a moment to reflect on eight responses to the meta-crisis in recent decades and then integrate the journey of the ninth response:

1. Activism – Noble efforts to create change, often ending in disillusionment
2. Policy Influence – Trying to lead from within the system, only to find it rigid
3. Doomsday Despair – Feeling paralyzed by the scale of collapse
4. Nihilistic Gratification – Choosing personal pleasure in the face of meaninglessness
5. Return to Traditional Faith – Seeking redemption in ancient and traditional beliefs
6. Techno-Utopian Escape – Betting on silicon-based survival without Soul
7. Back to the Land – Reconnecting with nature as refuge and rebalancing
8. Spiritual Bypassing – Avoiding pain through escapist spiritual practice

The ninth response comes out of resolve not to settle to the consequences of the eight options above.

9. Ensouled Response – In this we ask: what’s the way to embrace this life, right here, right now, as a developmental Soul- and Spirit-centered opportunity? Can we reclaim the sacred, not just when we are in an altered state, but including the struggle and the pain?

Living the Sacred Now

The test of this time may not be about fixing the world, but about living fully, wherever we are, with whomever we are, with awareness, care, and presence.

The change is already underway, inside each of us. We are called to reclaim the sacredness of simply being alive, of being human in this extraordinary passage where part of us is dying, and another part is being born.

So we ask:

How do we relax into the liminality of not knowing?

How do we welcome the unknown with curiosity and courage?

Separate Yet Connected

If we ever needed proof that each of us is a unique configuration in a universe of experience, we can find it in the living laboratories of inquiry and experimentation we spontaneously create during our shared journeys. Life wants to discover itself through the distinct shape and expression of each of us. And when it does, it celebrates in the presence, recognition, and mutual witnessing we offer one another.

What is it like to be in this liminal transition from an epoch that’s fading to one that’s just beginning?

When we observe young children at play, we see they are not self-conscious about how they’re performing. They are simply playing. What if the emerging epoch, which seeks to awaken what is still latent in us, needs us to do just that — to relax into not knowing, and to revive the sense of playful discovery?

Here is an invitation, not to provide answers, but to offer entry points into exploration. What happens in you when you introduce the following invitations into your awareness, not just conceptually, but viscerally, energetically?

Soul Shifts: A Discovery Through Feeling

What arises when you give your soul permission to move — from being rigidly fixed to dynamically evolving? Where do you feel that shift in your body, your breath, your being?

And what happens when you add a second shift — from separated to connected?
These are not merely ideas, they can unlock profound psycho-spiritual, biological, and energetic movement within.

Aviv shares one reflection: “When I consider the shift from fixed to evolving, I first feel gratitude for the floor beneath me, for the stability that lets me stand. We need some things to remain stable. But for me to evolve, to go with the flow of life, I also need to find my own internal anchor, an indestructible center that allows me to move without losing ground.”

The Epochal Transition: Matter to Energy

One way to understand why this epoch is ending is to see it as a story of increasing descent into matter — a long journey into materiality. Over the last few centuries, and more intensely in recent decades, we’ve also seen an upswing in energy, more energetic intensity moving through life and through us. This is why so many experiences now feel heightened, sped up, amplified.

If you tell someone we’re moving from separation to connection, they may assume you’re referring to our digital networks. But true connectedness is much deeper; it is the recognition that we are not separate from the universe around us. There aren’t two realities "out there" and "in here." There is one interconnected whole.

Aviv highlights: "This contemplation on connection reminds me to honor the separateness we each embody. There’s a design intelligence in our individual uniqueness. We evolved out of tribal homogeneity to become individuated selves. And now, perhaps, we’re being invited into a new way of coming together — not by regressing into old tribal forms, but by discovering a deeper unity among differentiated selves."

More Invitations to Sense and Explore

Let’s play with a few more of these invitations:

• From valuing things to prioritizing relationships
• From anchored in the known to immersed in the unknown
• From reliance on plans to trust in the process
• From fear and defensiveness to confidence and curiosity
• From hierarchy to distributed leadership
• From arrogance and ignorance to humility and wisdom

How do these invitations move through you? Where do they take you when you let them land in your body, not just your mind?

Becoming Younger Inside

We used to recognize ourselves in the mirror by our physical form. But as we are each undergoing the aging of our planetary, carnal vessel – could it be that the new epoch is bringing an invitation to become spiritually younger? That within us, a new person is being born?

This isn’t a metaphor, it’s a deep process. A subtle becoming. An invitation to discover not who we were, but who we are becoming now.