Out From a State of Knowing and Perceiving

  1. We are living into times of an accelerated evolutionary change.
  2. The 3500-years epochal journey is reaching a culminating transition. An epoch is a measure of universal time (an actuating pattern inside of a universal blueprint), where certain developments and evolution are permitted and supported.
  3. As the epoch culminates all around and inside each one of us, humanity is experiencing a deep crisis of the spirit.
  4. The potencies and patterns that enabled life along the epoch journey have been used up to exhaustion. This is seen in the state of our global village, here on planet Earth, as it now reaches a breaking point that takes the nature of an intractable set of complexly wicked problems (the complexity wall shaping the meta-crisis).
  5. The seven-fold natures and influences that powered the epoch to propel humanity are reaching a collapse threshold and are therefore going through a transformative update and renewal that require new human engagement and elevation.
  6. The crises underway: the ecological, climate, environmental, energy, and extractive economic models; information and meaning landscapes; trust and credibility; social, cultural, and leadership voids…all these crises and the meta-crisis they together form, appear to directly emanate out from and/or are byproducts of the deeper crisis of the spirit.
  7. With these underway, people all over the planet are getting activated in response. Many are initiated and activated inside a community context and space. Those responses seek to address facets of the civilizational crises, and to source at a deeper level the developmental and evolutionary updates that may facilitate redemptive healing and elevation.
  8. The crisis of the spirit arises in part from the long-standing separation of human life from the nourishment of the blessing realms – the more-than-human luminous realms where life originates.
  9. Humanity has been “running on empty” for centuries. Many of the ailments and diseased conditions, physical and mental, are byproducts of the human system running-on-empty fuel tank. People are no longer enhanced and nourished by the natural essences, presences, and potencies that are meant to be their daily bread in their relational, and communal processes.
  10. The scientific revolution brought to humanity extraordinary breakthroughs that advanced and benefited many fields. It also has left behind, and largely thrown out like the baby with the bathwater, other inner and intuitive ways of knowing of the whole-person-living actuality.
  11. So much of the momentous development emerging since the mid-20th century has been technologically driven. This is wonderful in the versatile possibilities opened for us and is concurrently highly problematic in its byproducts.
  12. One of the problematic byproducts is the anchoring phenomenon in that most people alive now came of age with this formative imprint and mindset; namely, that technology can and will solve all our problems and challenges. This false premise and foolishness are extrapolated into techno-utopian madness that envisions uploading human consciousness to the cloud to have cyber-humans replace real humans. The curious and fantastically strange thing about this egoic arrogance is that even these ideas are made possible by the inner human technology and creativity of the human mind, the indication from which is that there is something far superior in the origination of human consciousness. This superior origin is falsely translated into the techno-immortality fantasy as a substitute, in the absence of a higher realization of immortal spiritual continuance into the greater universe.
  13. We are experiencing a global emergency and emergence. What shows up “below the line” takes the form of an emergency, appearing as a crisis moving on an unsustainable vector. And right there, inside the same space, “above the line” emergence is made possible, where new forms of being, doing, collaborating, creating, and becoming reveal themselves.
  14. Trouble, pain, and triggered trauma herald possibilities and the melting release of stop situations – individual and collective configurations that are frozen in time – that can now be metabolized and transmogrified to be integrated inside a new elevated possibility.
  15. Most local and global systems and institutions are reaching a complexity wall to discover a breaking point and operating system obsolescence. What’s on the outside is also present on the inside. Youth all over the planet openly describe a sense of bewilderment, anxiety, depression, fear, cynicism, and chronic pessimism about the future.
  16. The energy unleashed in these generations will in coming decades transform conventional ways and views of all the core domains of life, and will bring about epochal redefinition of:
    • The ways and purposes of living in collectives
    • The meaning and purpose of work
    • Leadership and how it evolves
    • The global (dis)order and dynamic alliances
    • Local and global systems that enable peaceful co-existence
    • The place, function, and ways of the sovereign state
    • Understandings and attitudes towards money and the social contract
    • Sustainable economic and ecological models
    • Attitudes and appreciation of health, well-being, medicine, and healthcare
    • The purposes of education and educational approaches and philosophy
    • The information landscape and ecologies of meaning
    • The truth-finding process and the function and the place of science in it
    • The purposes, functions and ways of celebration, ceremonies, and rituals
    • The distribution and application of power in all its facets
    • The family structure and ways
    • Sacredness, reverence, and presence-filled ecologies
    • New and renewed forms of art and expression
    • And much more
  17. There is an evolutionary purpose latent in the age of accentuated polarization and complex social and cultural crises. These challenges engender developments and formations of inner assemblies that can safely withstand impossible contradictions, and can disarm, metamorphose, pacify, transcend, and integrate these opposing forces. The evolutionary process needs these capacities developed, brought online, and activated.
  18. Life is the evolutionary purpose of the epoch. The epochal transition is an initiatory process that will birth a new kind of humanity, one that will bring to life a new model of human.
  19. Like sleeper agents from the future being activated, some were awakened 40 and 30, 15 and seven or three years ago, or today. It matters not. All generations are summoned in this co-creative response to a future that’s onsetting with the culminating transition of the epoch.
  20. No one person and no one generation can meet the magnitude of the task on their own. The challenge is so multifaceted that it needs all hands, all minds, all hearts, and all souls on deck.
  21. The epoch-long project that gave rise to the modern world, experienced a critical move through the second half of the 20th century. This move was expressed in the emergence of post-modernity, the social and cultural revolutions, the maturation of multi-paradigmatic and multi-perspectival capacities, and developmental stage theory coming into the foreground in multiple fields concurrently. Those currents and the Integral, Metamodern and other developmental narratives and maps are some of the salient artifacts of this evolutionary process. They also reveal that models, frameworks, maps, and categorizations cannot replace the whole-person living emergence, where the double helix of the individual and the communal-mutual endeavors offer theaters of discovery, and development practice.
  22. To meet this onsetting future on its terms, not on each of our historic terms, requires many to step out of the comfort zone, to discover new forms of being and doing expressions, and to relax into their emergent selves as they become naturalized to a new operating system.
  23. The evolutionary process is showing up as a summons, and a calling. It calls those who are ready to step forward, to make the choice and to focus on what they are each wired to respond to. What matters is not the size of the shovel, but rather that you use the one you have, small or large, to do the work.
  24. The time of training is largely over. Humanity has entered an activation and readying phase. The configurations needed to ease the future and the epochal transition integrate many different natures: the trained and developed capacities and formations; those that have the availability; the openness of heart; the courage of total vulnerability, and the unbridled readiness to leap into the unknown, and more.
  25. The evolutionary process is not linear. It has long durations of horizontal stabilization followed by spontaneous and abrupt vertical transitions. These punctuated equilibrium moves occur also in the transformational and developmental shifts of individuals and collectives.
  26. The slow steady refinement of gradual development is evermore essential in its beauty and custodial significance. Still, it is plausible that permissions for the window of 10 or 20 or 30 years of interior formation and development work be taken away for a time. Concurrently, a variety of credible possibilities for spontaneous elevations in the emergence of individuals and collectives are opening. These may occur by transference, by arcing, by radical openness and devotional embrace, by community presence augmentation, by response to a calling, by sources of higher conductivity, and by instantaneous spiritual flarings and joinings, where the stabilization occurs later.
  27. Communities and in particular the three kinds of emergent communities represent laboratories where such experimentations, discovery, and evolution take place. In these inspired ecologies, new living practices and ways of being and doing can emerge and be developed and refined.
  28. For example, much of what passes for entertainment today are activities designed to instigate energy discharge and release. Because of the extraordinary stresses impacting human life, and because of the overwhelming range of foreign frequency imposed on the human faculties, entertainment is used as release and relief mechanism.
  29. Imagine the cultivation of practices that rejuvenate the senses, renew, and harmonize the inner lives, calm the nervous system, and regenerate and heal traumatized and frozen capacities. Imagine connective and creative practices and processes not aiming to discharge and empty an imbalanced energy system but are fashioned for renewal of finer processes and faculties that engage higher presences and the unseen diaphanous realms of potential.
  30. Individual and communal responses are shaped by inclinations and talent, by passion, by environmental and domain resonance, and opportunity. Some are highly capable and mature in the relational and the collaborative capacity. Others bring obvious leadership presence and charisma. Some are domain experts, and some are effective communicators and storytellers. Others display artistic and creative capacities and bring skilled expressions in new media. Some are very well grounded in their self-knowledge and character formation work. Some cultivate acute somatic awareness and presencing capacity. Others have profound access to their sentiments and feelings.
  31. There are gifted teachers, coaches, consultants, mediators, counselors, therapists, and leaders, and some are natural listening priests offering a powerful witnessing and loving presence. Some are essence generators and carriers, others are healers: hands-on healers, auric healers, mental healers, soul, and spiritual healers; and Sherpas, and more.
  32. In business and organizational life, some bring financial acumen and strategic prowess, some are creative idea-generators, and others bring operational knowhow in building systems and getting things done. Some are the glue and the soul of the team and the communal endeavor, and others are the agitators of change and progress. Some create conflict that enable us to grow, and others metabolize and mediate the conflict to facilitate resolution.
  33. All these and many more are the capacities, competencies, and development lines that collectively make the larger super-organism of humanity more capable and ready. The diversities of gifts and developed capacities are awesomely inspiring. They are co-creating humanity’s future, readying to meet challenge and adversity as the brilliance and contributions of so many talented, passionate, and caring people are potentized.
  34. The new operating system intuited and emerging through many configurations includes the rediscovery of our non-rivalrous nature. These non-rivalrous, chivalrous, and valiant ways of being represent half of the work. It’s an important half as it contains a re-acclimatization and renormalization to the natural line of development – a line that has largely been overtaken by a distorting and destabilizing rivalrous conditioning. The unlock potential of re-naturalization is extraordinary, because of what is activated in humans, inside a safe, peaceful, and playful environment.
  35. Still, this retethering to the natural line of development is only 50% of the work. The other 50% uplift potential is found in evolutionary playgrounds that facilitate the higher activation and release of prospective human evolution. These permissions and possibilities are available and awaiting humans, where we get to transcend our planetary nature and become universal in the broadest sense of the word. We call this new form and model of life Homo Universalis.
  36. The first leap is from the conditioned line to the natural as-was-meant-to-be line. The second leap is to become available and activated on the evolutionary line, where new faculties come alive and where humans become 60 times wiser, more graceful, more loving, and lovable, and where currently unimaginable capacities get engaged and activated as part of the living theater of Homo Universalis.
The Portals Endeavor

The way of this…

Out From a State of Knowing and Perceiving is a work-in-progress evolving document on the beliefs and perceptions catalyzing the Portals of Perception endeavor.

These are informed and inspired by decades of intense, multifaceted journeying that can best be described as an initiatory experience in a modern mystery school. The last two decades of this journey have also involved consulting work to senior leadership teams at many of the most admired companies in the world.

The formative experience shaping these perceptions and beliefs is the fusion of three journeys in the trenches of life. Together, they make the babushka project (inner Russian Matryoshka dolls) of an inspired endeavor.

The three journeys are:

  • The life in the world. This endeavor developed a bifocal service nature. One effort involved cultivating and leading community endeavors where the focus has been on the development, spiritual growth and well-being of the people involved. The other endeavor involved an entrepreneurial pursuit that led to consulting at the highest levels of business, where the focus has been on helping leaders and teams produce breakthrough results and create new business and organizational horizons. These parallel endeavors shaped a practical and pragmatic application that combines a healthy and sober kind of idealism and optimism.
  • The life inside. This endeavor involved the development and harmonization of the inner conclave, while managing all the challenges and stresses of modern living and of raising a family. Finding the inner harmony and intact wholesomeness of the life inside became a crucial tasking, compounded by the intensities and pressures of the high wire walk produced by leading the two endeavors mentioned above, which often amounted to living three days in one.
  • The life in the universe (universal life). This endeavor centered on four decades of contemplative inquiry that forever sought communion with the highest emanatory and evolutionary presences and essences. The deep recognition in this was that rather than seeing life through the lens of “a human being seeking a spiritual experience”, the greater discovery opened in the flying upside-down view, of “a spirit being seeking the learning testimony of the human experience.”

In the integration of this threefold journey, direct experience and living one’s understandings and beliefs are the crucible where concepts and mental models emerge. Because in all these frontiers, in the work in the world, and in the interior explorations, often the need was to facilitate a journey from a current point to a future point, even when these were undefined or unknown. So, the impulse was not theory driven but actual, and one that involved an on-the-move endeavor to embrace and integrate the complex multi-dimensions of collective human endeavors as a central need in living a purposeful life.

As the journey continues, including through several Portals conversations, these beliefs and perceptions can now be distilled into an evolving draft.

Aviv Shahar, Founder Portals of Perception