Parallel Experiences

Life has a humorous way of leading you where you need to go, often in spite of yourself, or even against your own ideas. In my early 20s, while still serving in the Air Force, I was led into a spiritual quest. During the day, we practiced dogfight maneuvers. In the evening and into the night, I was immersed in a deep developmental and esoteric inquiry. On certain occasions, I’d show up for the morning flight practice exhausted, and if I told anyone the truth — that I’d only slept for three hours — I’d be grounded, so I did not. Looking back, it was obviously foolish and irresponsible, but I attempted to live two lives in one and felt compelled to test boundaries.

One day, on the third flight of that day, toward sunset, as I approached landing, I asked the control tower to brighten the runway lights. “Sure thing,” the control officer replied. You could hear the smile in his voice when he added, “You may want to also pull off the visor,” humiliating me on the network in public. Still a young pilot, it would take a few more years until I began to truly appreciate that gentle humiliations would not just help you stay alive; they could also help you stay centered, keep your ego in check, and even fuel your development.

The unifying nature of these two parallel experiences was that both offered opportunities to operate at the edge. Flying jets was literally pushing the edge of life and death maneuverability. Developmentally and spiritually questing brought a different kind of vibrant threshold. 

Under the Radar

Several years later, I started leading development workshops, and after completing my Air Force service, this quest led to working with groups of seekers. What began in my 20s while I was still flying has evolved for more than four decades but has remained partly under the radar, to use Air Force language.

After arriving in the US in the mid-90s, as the 2000s approached, I quite literally parachuted directly to the top of the business world and began working with leadership teams in some of the most admired companies globally. I have helped senior teams in Silicon Valley companies develop their strategies and traveled all over the world to assist companies in rejuvenating their organizations. Up until 2019, these two lives continued to swim in parallel but separate lanes.

One life was devoted to pursuing a developmental mystery school immersion, continually seeking the highest point of communion in service of my own search and the maturation of our spiritual possibilities. In the other life, I found a way to thrive by helping senior executives unlock their creative brilliance. Quite miraculously, I was guided onto a path that opened lucrative consulting opportunities, all while I endeavored to stay resiliently tethered to an esoteric inquiry that nourished me.

The story I told myself was that my senior executive clients — mostly people with significant responsibilities — felt and intuited that while we were going to help their business achieve breakthrough results, we were also going to help them and their teams stay healthier and flourish in what is often a highly challenging or even somewhat toxic environment.

 

 

The Activation Signal

When the Portals project emerged in early 2020, it signified that these lives, which were kept separate, were ready to merge and integrate. Why did I need to wait until the age of 60 to begin this integration? I don’t exactly know. Perhaps I am a slow learner. Perhaps I needed to create financial freedom first. Perhaps certain aspects of my inner formation needed to crystallize into an indestructible core. There is a subtle appreciation here of the individuation-integration polarity. In the Epoch story, we are mapping the significance of individuation in the rise of the intellect through the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. We observe that the new significance of a greater WE occurs and is made possible not by a relapse into tribal consciousness, but through agentic individuals who find each other around a shared cause.

A parallel unfolding occurs in the individual case. The healing journey to integrate the parts works best when certain aspects or roles are allowed to fully mature and individuate. In other words, premature integration may prevent certain individual parts from unlocking their full potential. This could also explain why a fuller integration began to emerge only at 60. Or perhaps it was not about personal timing but about our collective human timing.

I have sensed for decades that many who appeared here in the second half of the 20th century are sleeping agents from the future, waiting to be activated by a clarion call. The activation signal has been building for years, and by 2014-2015 it became potent. Then, by 2020, it became inescapable for me.

 

A Liberation

Still, there were more hurdles to overcome. For decades, I have told myself that, at my core, I was not a “teacher”; rather, I felt I was a journey guide, a sherpa, and a catalyst for others to discover their own potential and inner journey. In my work with leadership teams, people would often say, “No, Aviv, you need to understand this: it’s the frameworks you offer and the way you convey this knowledge that’s powerfully activating…”

Still, I kept resisting the teacher archetype. I’ve always been afraid of the spiritual teacher role. So much has gone wrong in history with teachers that I decided it would be better to stay away from identifying with this role. Part of it was a deep conviction that we have entered a post-guru phase in the evolution of humanity, and a belief that the next evolutionary development is more about what we can co-create and how we can co-evolve. This intuition was codified in the post-guru article.

Well, life can be humorous, because a couple of months after writing this essay, I was guided to begin the Portals into the Soul work. Having placed a disclaimer, something was apparently liberated to allow a new body of work to emerge. I described this unfolding and its broader context in a recent YouTube Live we called The Truth About the Soul (below).

 

One way to engage with the Portals’ multifaceted inquiry is to imagine that we are endeavoring to discover the Inner Cathedral and how it is evolving. When we inquire into healing, the unfolding story of the epoch, development, evolution, new ways of knowing and connecting, the journey of the soul, consciousness, and the rise of a Universalis human, we are seeking to open pathways to the Inner Cathedral. Imagine each of the Core Inquiries represents a part of the Rose Windows (the stained-glass windows) of the interior human Cathedral. Instead of seeking to convey Biblical images, as in the case of gothic churches—for example, Chartres Cathedral—the Portals windows seek to discover a new evolutionary future emerging in the human Cathedral, including the new capacities, sense organs and creative possibilities that are coming online.

In This Epochal Moment we offer a unique perspective on the extraordinary changes and developments underway in the world and why the modern operating system appears to be breaking down. We’ve recently published the first in what I hope will become a series of "This Epochal Moment" conversations. See below the Evolution, Consciousness, and the New Truth conversation with Steve McIntosh. I welcome your ideas about voices that could bring unique perspectives to the shift underway.

Spiritualize The Universe – 20 Core Premises, the latest from the Current Openings series with David Price Francis, places the work of refinement, connection, embodiment, and ensoulment within a broader context of understanding and appreciation.

The latest addition to The Liminal Quest, where we explore with pioneering voices the potential for human advancement and evolution at this time, is The Goddess Arising with the Metamodern Spirituality Lab and Religion and the Esoteric with Brendan Graham Dempsey.

In Portals Into the Soul, we’ve just published Chapter 5 — "The Soul Courting the Brain." Chapter 1 described the three characters of the soul and their orchestration function. Chapter 2 traced the phenomenology of the Ghost as a compensatory act of the psychology of the Soul. Chapter 3 codified the symphonic sevenfold process of the soul. Chapter 4 described the process of cultivating a growing space for the soul. The Soul work continues to evolve through the live events where we’ve been guided to new discoveries and revelations.

 

The Epoch Journey conversations with Jeff Vander Clute started to map the far-reaching development space of The Inner Conclave modality. I believe we are in the early days of this evolution, and that the coming years will bring vast developmental intelligence and energy to this nascent emergence.

In The Teacher’s Journey, The Guru Trap and The Golden Shadow, we describe the subtle phenomenology of these experiences. The Teacher’s Journey with Sara McCrum provides insights to the joy, pain, and profound discovery that accompany this path.

The intuition of the Universalis Project is that we have entered a phase transition that will ultimately be even larger than the Enlightenment and the Axial transitions. For me, this is the core propulsion of what we are tracing and decoding in Portals. We have just recorded several Universalis conversations that we will soon publish as we continue to ride this revelatory wave.

 

Our anticipation that 2024 will bring an intensified vortex of change has been more than validated. As we approach 2025, I sense that we are at the precipice of a deeper reckoning and acceleration, one that may take us through to 2032. At all levels — the geopolitical, the global economy, and the social and cultural arenas — we should be surprised by nothing. Resiliently transforming and evolving through these imminent and dramatic developments is the work of this time. As events intensify, the very energy they release will unlock both interior and exterior evolutionary potential greater than our wildest imaginations. At Portals, we will focus on the decoding work of this emergence and its development and integration. Please share your insights about all of the above freely and openly.

Blessings to you,

Aviv