The Three Crises of Belief

We begin by codifying the crisis of belief on three levels:

a. The first crisis of belief is whether we have a story that explains the past and present and offers a path forward — a meaning structure in which an emergent future begins to appear

Many of us, born in the latter half of the 20th century, grew up with a unifying story of progress. In its most idealistic form, this narrative promised a future free from disease and major problems. Its peak came in the 1990s, with the end of the Cold War and the promise of Pax Americana suggesting unending progress. Fukuyama’s proclamation of the end of history encapsulated the belief that liberal democracies and free market economies, powered by emerging technologies, would resolve all our challenges.

However, the early decades of the 21st century began to expose both geopolitical and economic cracks in this hopeful narrative. Many felt abandoned and betrayed by a story that could no longer meet the demands of a changing world.

Moreover, simplistic binary story structures — East and West, religion versus science, good versus evil, geopolitical alignments of the Cold War, left and right, and socioeconomic frames of have’s versus have not’s — offer transitory facets. They do not provide a durable and credible map of meaning that describes and decodes the disruptive transformations underway.

The seven-fold epochal trace reveals that the 1990s brought the modern Blue impulse through Pax Americana to its peak, and also signaled its decline and the rise of the Indigo intensification. As the Indigo wave dissolved the post-WWII Blue order, it unleashed increasing integration and global transference of ideas and possibilities, powered and expressed by the computing revolution and the advent of the Internet.

A global story by itself is insufficient if it cannot address two inherent needs — where the second and third crisis of belief arise.

b. The second crisis of belief is whether I see myself in the story. Do I believe I have a future in the prevailing story?

Perceiving and mapping a global story that reflects the past and present, and describes a possible future, is the first challenge. Equally crucial though is that this narrative demonstrates how we each fit into the picture. A story about external events alone is insufficient; we need a narrative that allows us to include our personal experience. It needs to offer each one of us an opportunity and even a role in shaping that future.

In our Epoch Journey work, we address this by encouraging personal discovery through artistic expression, somatic practices, and more. This approach integrates individual interior experiences into the broader story we are collectively mapping. For example, we may decode that one nature of Indigo is expressed in dissolving boundaries and separations. We then inquire how this phenomenology is expressed in the arts, and how we are each experiencing the melting of Blue holding structures.

c. The third challenge and crisis of belief is whether we have a story that serves a communal need — one that shows where we are, what led us here, and what the future holds for us?

A powerful story provides a shared framework for meaning. It not only reflects our individual experiences, but also weaves them into the collective tapestry of our community life. An effective story invites us to journey together, offering context that helps us understand both personal lives and our endeavor as a community.

In our Epoch Journey work, the combined appreciation of the Indigo-Violet intensification serves as fertile soil for this kind of connective meaning-making discovery, addressing all three crises of belief and the challenges they present. It frames a big picture appreciation of the challenges and opportunities in the decades ahead.

The Self-Authoring Appraisal Practice invites a generative way of being, releasing us to discover who we are becoming at the frontier of emergence, as the world around us continues to shape-shift and evolve. The practice liberates us to explore novel stories and experiment with new perception lenses and maps of meaning.

The Situation Room Analogy

• What is the self-appraisal updating process?
• What does it serve and why is it important?
• How can an appraisal process help us explore the liminal frontier today?

Consider the central command situation room: it is designed to gather comprehensive information from all action theaters on the battlefield. Its purpose is to create an overarching picture of the unfolding conflict, enabling strategic decision-making through informed appraisal of the situation.

In the business world, executive teams adopt a similar approach. They engage in ongoing conversations with customers, partners, and suppliers, continuously evaluating market dynamics and competitive action. Their appraisal process is both data-driven and creative, guiding their next innovation move and go-to-market strategy. This same method is employed in fields as diverse as military strategy and sports, where continual appraisal leads to adaptive, strategic decision-making.

The Self-Appraisal Updating Process

In our personal development journey, we are not confronting external adversaries, like those found on a battlefield, in competitive markets or sports arenas. Instead, we transform what might be called a war room into a peace room: a space dedicated to inner exploration, renewal, and transformation.

By deeply examining our inner landscapes — our beliefs, perceptions, values, maps of meaning, experiences, skills, resources, and aims — we initiate a revitalizing process, birthing ourselves anew. This generative, connective, and co-creative way of being becomes essential as we lean into the liminal unknown at the Violet-Indigo frontier of emergence.

Engaging in communal appraisal deepens the power of this exploration. As we collectively explore the big picture story, and our place within it, we uncover hidden dimensions, dissolve blind spots, heal old wounds, generate novel perceptions, and foster fresh connections and uplift.

The purpose of appraisal is to continually update our worldview and lived experience. Through this inquiry, we release limiting perspectives and outdated beliefs, disarm defensive "shrinkage patterns," and open ourselves to generative self-authoring. This intentional process helps us align with our evolving sense of purpose and refining possibilities.

Honest, reflective self-appraisal can be dialytic and transformative. It invites a witnessing awareness rooted in clarity — asking where we are, what has led us here, and what potential moves can liberate our creative and connective energies.

When we view our situation from a place of clarity, curiosity, and compassion, we open ourselves to the greater flow of life. Personal evolution accelerates when we avoid denying, diluting, or blocking the open-ended search that welcomes novel possibilities. Denial or suppression distorts our perspective and prevents us from accessing truth, disconnecting us from the goodness, beauty, and wisdom essential for purposeful living.

By centering our appraisal inquiry on perennial values and by releasing limiting views, we expand our range and creative possibility. We do not bypass pain, suppress struggle, or ignore unresolved concerns – bypassing, pretending, or hiding distort our perspective and set the stage for future challenges. Instead, the self-authoring appraisal process enables us to metabolize and transform difficult experiences, turning them into virtues and steppingstones towards higher development possibilities.

When we process and sublimate pain or struggle — whether recent or longstanding — we release frozen energy and trapped potential, turning pain into a crucible of transformation, where the elixir of special development can find us.

The Self-Authoring Process - Fostering Your Universal Life

How can this appraisal process assist us in our journeys, both individually and collectively?

Let us explore why to engage in self-authoring appraisal:

• Dissolve blockages and stop situations. Identify and release deeply held beliefs or traumas that limit our potential.
• Integrate the fragments and unlock frozen energy. Fragments are contracted parts of us that hold on to constricted patterns and arrest energy flow. Through the integration of fragments, we bring coherence and unlock creative abilities and energy.
• Liberate greater versatility, spontaneity, and range: Why be a piano that only plays one octave when you can play all seven octaves? We access senses, intuitions, and perspectives we used to dismiss or suppress; we relearn to metabolize those in a compassionate environment, where we discover how to encourage and sometimes challenge each other, expanding each other’s range.
• Update beliefs and values. Engaging critically with our current worldview and exploring expanded perspectives and perceptions from a place of neutrality, we ask: do our beliefs empower us, or do they limit our possibility? Do we hold them consciously, or are we held captive by them?
• Calibrate truth and alignment to purpose. As we evolve, our capacity to see larger truths expands. This is at the heart of the appraisal process; it dynamically aligns us with our authentic purpose and deeper truths.
• Develop new capacities and configurations. We step out of comfort zones, "picking up new instruments," expanding our ability to connect and create.

• Retether to the core. We recenter on our authentic and agentic work. Just as each tree grows from its own roots, we may draw inspiration from others, yet each of us must ultimately discover and nurture our inner sources of inspiration and strength. It is then that the full mycelium network we together generate will support us.

These are all dimensions we can explore and cultivate. The self-authoring appraisal process enables us to unlock profound creative possibilities, transforming crises and challenges into development opportunities for self-realization and collective evolution.

The Appraisal Process and the Study of Resilience

Here is an example of applying the self-appraisal process to the study of personal resilience. We can engage deeply with each of these questions to connect the dots and weave the different threads together, taking as much time as needed — minutes, hours, days, or even weeks — to thoroughly explore:

• • What am I learning about my resilience through recent experiences and challenges? What are my strengths and where do I perceive vulnerabilities?
  • What practices and ways have I developed on my journey that I cherish deeply because they forever renew me, and afford me freedom and possibility?
  • What genuinely makes me happy and energized?
  • Where am I still susceptible to psychic infection or psychological vulnerabilities, and why?
  • Which external influences do I tolerate, allowing them to produce self-doubt? Can I forensically assess these persuasions to understand which ones I'm ready to disarm and release?
  • What methods have proven effective in my recovery and resolve practices? How do I re-center myself? How do I re-energize and transform moments of doubt into fertile ground for my next development growth?
  • What am I discovering about the interplay of physical, mental, emotional, relational, and spiritual resilience?
  • What habits, protocols, and rituals can I embrace more fully to uplift my resilience across its five core dimensions — physical, mental, emotional, relational, and spiritual?
  • What am I called to initiate or create to facilitate greater freedom, sovereignty, and agency in my personal resilience journey?

Central to this process and generative creativity is how we consciously update our internal narrative daily. A powerful practice is to start each day affirming: Today, I am free. I am not limited to who I was yesterday. Right now, I am a co-creator of life — I hold the power to re-author my story.

Life itself is inherently resilient. By asking powerful questions like these, we open ourselves like a flower to the sunlight of our own realization and resilient connections. Each of us, no matter how far we've traveled, remains beautifully and endlessly a work in progress.

The Self-Authoring Appraisal Opportunity Landscape

The self-authoring appraisal practice invites you to become the gardener of your own inner garden. It provides the rich soil upon which we nurture our universal life. Embracing this practice opens a vast landscape of opportunities across all aspects of life:

• Health and caretaking of your body, including nutrition, rest, and recovery.
• Living situations and environmental contexts.
• Relationship with money.
• Preparation for the later stages of life.
• Relationship dynamics — what you bring to these relationships and what they bring to you. How might you update these relationships?
• Creativity and contribution.
• Spiritual well-being and intactness.
• The cause or purpose you are serving.

A core impulse of the appraisal practice is to proactively ensure life doesn't run on autopilot. Instead of reacting only when something breaks or fails, this generative process invites active stewardship.

Typically, we attend to something when it becomes a problem — something gets broken in our house, or with money, or relationships, or in our health. The self-authoring appraisal process seeks to proactively and generatively say: “I am the vessel of the living experience. I attend to the full range of the mansion of my life, and I bring this generative discovery process to it.”

The Portals Appraisal

In appraising the Portals project, there is a distinct sense that it has become a running revelation of new connections, perceptions, and practices. The project itself is a playground for discovery and appraisal, continually exploring novel inquiries and modalities, unlocking new knowledge and connections — all in draft form, always evolving.

This running revelation is accompanied by an augmenting sense of meaning, connectedness, well-being, and liberation experienced by those involved and the broader community of friends supporting the endeavor. This suggests we are involved in something naturally robust and inherently enhanced by vibrant presences, energy, and elevations that continue to sustain us.

Perhaps the most important element in the appraisal of honesty and integrity is by affirming what is notably absent: manipulation, financial exploitation, or hierarchical dependency. Rather than gurus, we have "sherpas" who may open new pathways, but each individual does the actual journeying, allowing breakthrough insights to emerge from anyone.

Life and the universe are open systems. How do we dance with life in an open system? The Portals appraisal process offers insights and practices to help us partner dynamically with life, allowing each person to show up fully, resiliently, and creatively.

The appraisal process grounds us in the true nature of being human, encouraging ongoing inquiry, discovery, and growth amid global change. We invite you to join the Portals discovery network, contributing to the emergence of self-authoring leadership needed everywhere today.