Becoming Human in These Threshold Times
A Call into Function
What does it mean to become human at a time when humanity itself appears to be crossing a threshold?
This recorded event with Aviv Shahar and David Price Francis, begins with the proposition that the human being is not a finished project. We inherit a vast evolutionary and civilizational journey, and something within us remains emergent, unfinished, and capable of awakening into new forms of perception, participation, and responsibility.
The conversation approaches our time as a passage between epochs. Familiar structures and ways of knowing continue to support us, even as they appear increasingly unable to encompass the complexity, acceleration, and unknown possibilities now arising. The invitation is not to predict the human future or arrive at a fixed definition of it. It is to cultivate the inner faculties through which we may become available to what is seeking to emerge.
Through inquiry, dialogue, music, movement, somatic exploration, and small-group discovery, participants begin to sense two operating systems within the human. The planetary operating system provides grounding, continuity, memory, and the capacity to navigate the known. An emerging universal operating system reaches toward resonance, presence, inside-out activation, and the capacity to navigate what has not yet taken form.
The event asks how we might draw upon the stability of the planetary system and become increasingly receptive to the universal signals arriving through life. From this meeting may arise a human being more capable of entering the unknown, participating consciously in creation, and coming into function at a consequential moment in the human story.
Key Premises
The human is still becoming
To be human is not only to inhabit a given identity or biological form. It is to participate in an unfinished developmental process through which new capacities, sensitivities, and forms of intelligence can come online.
We are living through threshold times
The present moment may represent more than another period of social and technological change. It may be part of a larger epochal transition in which one long developmental arc is reaching completion and another is beginning to reveal its possibilities.
Not knowing can activate new ways of knowing
Remaining with an open inquiry interrupts the mind’s drive toward immediate judgment and premature definition. When we learn to inhabit the liminality of not knowing, latent faculties of sensing, resonance, and perception may begin to awaken.
Human development is both personal and epochal
Our individual developmental work occurs within a much larger human journey. Each person stands on the shoulders of those who came before and helps create a bridge for those who will follow.
Two human operating systems are active within us
The planetary operating system helps us navigate through memory, accumulated knowledge, predictability, and established structures. The emerging universal operating system enables us to orient through presence, resonance, direct perception, and responsiveness to the unknown.
Becoming human involves coming into function
The new cannot be realized through observation alone. It asks for participation, self-election, and a willingness to become available to what life may be seeking to bring forward through each person.
Six Themes in the Journey
- Taking the Question on a Journey
Rather than seeking a single answer, the event demonstrates how to surround an inquiry with multiple dimensions and allow it to disclose new layers over time. A living question becomes an instrument of discovery, capable of awakening more than conceptual thought.
- Recovering Attention from Secondary Signals
Modern life continually directs attention toward screens, commentary, information, and human-generated stimulation. The conversation explores the importance of reducing this bombardment and becoming receptive again to primary impressions arising from nature, the body, the unconscious, and the larger creative ecology.
- The Epochal and the Developmental
The inquiry is approached through two intertwined scales. The epochal dimension evokes the vast human journey and our place within a civilizational passage. The developmental dimension brings the inquiry home to personal choice, inner work, and the responsibility to shape what occupies the ecology of one’s life.
- Experiencing the Two Operating Systems
A guided IHOW practice allows participants to encounter the planetary and universal systems somatically. The circular O evokes wholeness, containment, grounding, continuity, and the completed formation. The ascending I, with its open point above, evokes reaching, expansion, possibility, and unrealized potential.
- Stability as a Ground for Exploration
The planetary system offers gravity, rhythm, embodiment, history, and home. These provide the stability from which the human can reach toward the unknown. As one participant observed, a ship may be safe in the harbor, and its deeper possibility is discovered when it enters the open sea.
- From External Structure to Participatory Belonging
Human beings have often sought security through identities, possessions, institutions, and structures outside themselves. The emerging universal orientation invites another form of refuge, found through inner attunement and participation in a living process. Belonging becomes less a structure we possess and more an ecology we consciously join, serve, and help bring into being.
The conversation ultimately opens a call into human function. The future is not presented as something happening elsewhere or arriving fully formed. It is a participatory possibility, approaching through signals, intuitions, and unrealized capacities that require human receptivity and response.
The invitation is to become grounded enough to enter the unknown, open enough to receive what is arriving, and responsible enough to play our part in what humanity may become.
This conversation is part of the continuing Portals discovery into what is emerging on the frontiers of human experience in this time of profound change. Information about upcoming special events can be found on the Events page. Also visit and subscribe to our YouTube channel.
So, we are saying there is an old planetary operating system, and there is an emergent universal operating system. We're saying the planetary system is largely complete. The universal system is incomplete… it's more of a seed of the latent universal human capacity
David Price Francis
David Price Francis helps individuals, couples, and groups understand and improve the quality of energy in their personal lives and relationships using techniques and strategies that he has successfully developed in private practice working with clients for over forty years. He is the author of Go With The Glow: From Psychological Pain to Spiritual Happiness; Partners in Passion: How To Positively Transform the Energies in all Your Relationships; The Tales of Dr. Woo: A Journey into Truth; and a 10-part online course, “The Human Aura: A Practical Introduction To Your Personal Energy Field.”
Visit: EnergyWorlds
Aviv Shahar
Aviv serves as the Portals' sherpa. He curates transformational journeys and is a storyteller of the epochal evolution culminating at this time. Aviv is the Founder of Aviv Consulting, helping leaders unleash strategic innovation, and is the author of Create New Futures: How Leaders Produce Breakthroughs and Transform the World Through Conversation.
Visit: Aviv Consulting
