I’ve been a big fan of the America’s Cup ever since 2013 when the Oracle team came back from 8-1 down to win 9-8 in a momentous victory.

I was in San Francisco at the time and got to soak up some of the incredible enthusiasm the oldest race in the world provides.

In the 2013 race, at 8-1 down, the Oracle team had a big ‘come to Jesus’ moment. They realised they had put too much faith in the technology and had forgotten they were sailors!

The other team, Emirates, only had to win one race to get to 9 and win the America’s Cup.

The Oracle team had, in essence, forgotten who they were. A huge lesson for organisations and individuals alike.

When Oracle remembered who they were, that they were sailors, they won all the next 8 races to go from 8-1 down, to win 9-8!!

All by digging deep and changing their belief, and remembering who they were at their core.

This has always been a huge inspiration for me and the Deep Agility^® process I have developed.

But we need to start at the beginning.

We’ve all been there. You get the project over the line, but everyone knows more was possible. It became about delivery and not about learning and growing. The underlying pattern wasn’t looked at. It will be carried to the next project. In this moment, you have split off the parts that were struggling and carried on, doubling down, but without the struggling parts you are not whole. You are no longer whole, either as an organisation or within yourself.

Continuing in a less-than-whole state, has its consequences, maybe not in the current project, but over time. It leads to frustration, disconnection, disengagement and burnout. You can only make consistent correct decisions when you bring your ‘whole self’ to the moment. Therefore, when you are ‘not whole', it costs time, money and energy.

What if based on neuroscience, anthropology and psychology, you had a map and diagnostic, a language and a process, to help you bring wholeness to the people, teams and your organisation?

4 Development Stages

Firstly, it’s important to know that our development has a rhythm, and that rhythm has 4 stages. We go through these stages in our personal lives, and in our work environment.

There is a paradox however. For most people, they are not consciously working through the 4 stages in their personal lives and let’s be honest, work really wants them to focus on work, and not on personal development. The courses offered in work are ‘corporate development’, and not personal development. Anyone who has given themselves to deep personal development, understands that courses in work only scratch the surface.

In my experience, work holds the key to being able to hold a developmental container for the individual and team to access their full potential, and have that benefit the organisation too. There are some things that need to be put in place for this to happen.

Firstly, let’s look at the rhythm of the 4 stages. Understand that these developmental stages are universal. They will show up equally in your relationships and in your work projects.

⚪ White - Possibility

White is about Possibility, the possibility of what this project offers. People are open to opportunities and there is general confidence and optimism that delivery and meaningful change can occur.

The White stage is also tinged with naivety. There isn’t the full appreciation of the complexity involved, the risks can be underestimated, all the constraints have not yet become visible. Success can appear closer than it really is.

🔴 Red - Commitment

Red is where the rubber hits the road. The naivety of the white stage meets the reality on the ground. In whatever form it takes, including but not limited to;

• competing priorities

• resistance

• uncertainty

• the practical demand of execution

Designs, structures and plans are put to the test. Friction is encountered as leaders and teams discover the gap between intention and reality.

⚫ Black - Reflection

There always comes a point where effort is no longer enough. If we are honest, the recurring issues, the persistent and rising friction, the less than optimal outcomes, all bring the attention to;

• organisational habits

• leadership, team and individual behaviours

• systemic dynamics

This is a pivotal point. The black stage invites leaders and teams to to pause and examine what lies beneath the visible challenges.

I’ve experienced the silence in the room at this point, and I would put it in one sentence,

“Are there tensions, unknowns or resistance here, that seek a voice?”

The Loop Back

In the vast majority of cases, this voice is not allowed to be expressed, and the teams are told to double down, and put more hours in, more resources etc. (symbolically meaning ‘go back to Red Stage’). The focus becomes, to park everything else and just get the project delivered. And yet the team, the leaders and the individuals are fragmented, the symphony is gone.

So, instead of taking the moment for reflection to understand the underlying patterns, there is a looping back to Red stage, the adaptation and learning opportunity is gone.

🟡 Gold - Stewardship

If the leadership and teams have taken time for the honest reflection and the listening to the silent voice the Black Stage asks for, then they would be supporting adaptation, which is a core Agile pillar. Also giving expression to the ‘voice’, radically increases transparency, another core Agile pillar.

The Gold stage is when the environment becomes about sustaining wise action over time, through bringing the insights gained in going through the Black stage, into practice with increased trust, both individually and organisationally.

Once you reach Gold, you recognise where you are, in any of the developmental stages, you understand the patterns you are working inside, and you respond with greater awareness.

In the individual stages you are partial, compartmentalised, and not fully whole. This affects your level of trust in yourself and your decision making. At Gold stage, you embrace the rhythm of all 4 stages, you are coherent and whole. The symphony is reclaimed. In Gold, you can bring all of yourself to bear on any aspect of your work. Sometimes, you need white stage optimism, sometimes, full-on Red stage engagement is called for. At other times, you are comfortable to pause and go into deep Black stage inquiry. And finally you realise the embodied wisdom you carry from experiencing the rhythm of all 4 stages. The process then moves from linear to spiral as each project gives you the opportunity to learn, grow and evolve.

I did say at the start, you would get a map, a language and a process.

A Map and a Diagnostic

The map is the 4 developmental stages (white, red, black and gold). You can understand and use it symbolically as the 4 colours, or in a more potent way, mythologically (white knight, red knight, black knight, gold king). Myth puts people into a larger story where people can make sense of challenge, change and belonging. Research has shown that people cope better when they feel what they are going through fits into a meaning story or journey arc, which is what myth provides.

The map is a diagnostic tool and provides a vital descriptive snapshot of where you are. The Deep Agility^® model however, is not just diagnostic but developmental. The process guides stage progression and integration, across the 4 stages.

A Language

Deep Agility^® provides a language and a symbolic context for what goes on within and around the project environment. What I find in practice is, that very quickly people are already using the language ‘red stage’ or ‘white stage’ to describe otherwise quite difficult-to-explain aspects of their work. This is really refreshing, as it allow for aspects not normally voiced to be expressed easily and safely. In essence using mythic language such as white knight, compresses emotional meaning, so a lot gets said in a short phrase. It’s a highly efficient communication method that everyone easily understands, and can relate to, for clearer communication.

A Process

Deep Agility provides a process to learn and consciously move to the next iteration.

There are two aspects to the process, a Warrior Wall and a Shadow Mirror.

The Warrior Wall is where you hit the limits of your current strategy using tools such as drive, problem-solving, speed, effort, control. It’s a threshold point, arriving at the end of the Red Knight stage. In essence you have reached the limits that the outer world presents to you. It’s here you consciously give voice to the limits that you have reached in the outer world. You make them explicit (supporting Agile Transparency and Inspection).

The Shadow Mirror is the reflection inward so that what’s been avoided, suppressed or disowned (including doubts and fears) can be given space for truth. This reflection can be verbal, anonymous on a whiteboard, or using something like Miro. In practice, if engaged in properly, the Shadow Mirror provides the perfect momentum through the Black Stage and furthers access to the Gold Stage in a more structured manner.

The America’s Cup

The America’s Cup 2013 is the perfect example of the natural use of the Warrior Wall and The Shadow Mirror. Oracle USA hit the Warrior Wall of the technology. They had invested so much money, time and trust into the technology and yet they ended up 8-1 down with one race to go. More tech, more willpower, was not going to get them back in contention. Enter the Shadow Mirror. What is the silent voice in the room that no one is expressing? Silence. Uncomfortable moments. Then, the captain expresses it.

“Belief. It’s belief. We have forgotten who we are as sailors!”

Total game changer. They won the next 8 races to win the Cup. The contents of the Shadow Mirror, when gone into, contain the power. A massive example.

Warrior Wall and Shadow Mirror working together.

Without the process of the Warrior Wall and the Shadow Mirror, you are left with the 4 stages to go through randomly, without a supporting process to handle what arises during the stages, and guide adaptation and learning throughout the cycle.

Both the Warrior Wall and the Shadow Mirror need to be facilitated and each in a different way. This facilitation ability is covered under the Deep Agility Architect Program. These thresholds are not simply theoretical, they are symbolic containers where change happens. You therefore need to be conversant with the ‘dynamics of change’ and how change differs from transformation.

From my own experience, true leadership doesn’t stop at the wall, in fact, it comes into it’s own, in the Shadow Mirror, where the tools have stopped working and we are called to dig deep.

Providing a Rhythm

Because Deep Agility is aligned with a universal rhythm, it is a living system of change, that supports our evolving developmental process. This is where the Deep Agility Architect is relevant.

Deep Agility Architect

The Deep Agility Architect holds the centre of the process. They understand and have embodied, the dynamics of all 4 development stages. They bring their wisdom to bear through listening and sensing what is going on in the room. They sense the pattern in the moment, and don’t have to wait for it to show up in a metric or dashboard. The Deep Agility Architect witnesses the lead indicators as they arise in the room during the threshold points.

And I hear you asking ‘what’s all this sensing about?’. Let’s be clear here. All the great leaders were highly intuitive. Yes, they would listen to their advisors but then they would intuit their next move. Any cursory reading of General Patton’s diaries will give you a window into an intuitive leader. The top traders in the stock markets were researched and found found to use their intuition (Interoception) as a basis for making their top deals. Most of use are sensitive to what’s going on in a room and we often don’t trust it. The evidence later confirms that in fact what we intuited in the room was correct and we didn’t follow it.

Deep Agility is about trust, trusting what we intuit and getting more confident in it as you practice the process. Like all great leaders, let’s be comfortable with our intuition.

Deep Agility Architect Program where you learn about the deeper dynamics of the 4 development stages. You also learn how to facilitate the Warrior Wall and Shadow Mirror. You will learn about holding a psychologically safe space and about Symbolic Clarity. And remember, you can’t work with these tools if you haven’t done the integration work yourself, so the Architect Program is experiential.

To find out more about Deep Agility^® and the Deep Agility Architect Program reach out by email vincent.mcmahon@gmail.com.

Vincent McMahon is the creator of Deep Agility^®

Firstly, thanks for all the feedback on the last post. I think it hit a point for people. It was titled ‘What if you could live in a Coherent Society?’ and if you haven’t read it yet, you can read it here.

I think it brought up all those questions that people have about, what is a coherent society, or do we live in a coherent society?

In the previous post I gave examples of why our current western society is not coherent. Why it doesn’t hold together. So in this post, I promised you, I would give you the next stage, which is, what constitutes a coherent society, and it’s actually relatively straightforward.

Indigenous peoples live in a coherent society every day. So what this means is they actually have a ‘Web of Meaning’ that they are held in. If you think of a spider’s web, all the points on the web of indigenous culture; symbols, stories, language, ritual, all these things actually hold them in a web of meaning, and they all point to each other.

So the stories link to the myths, the indigenous language is connected to the stories. Everything holds together. And ritual, which is key, gives them an embodiment of their web of meaning. So, literally, everything makes sense, to them, within this web of meaning. Everything in their life has meaning, within this web.

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So if you think about it like this. They have a web, and all the points on the web, stories, symbols, language, traditions, mythology, ritual, everything for them literally holds them in this gorgeous nurturing container.

When I stayed in the rainforest, that’s really what I experienced. For over 40,000 years the people there have lived, and developed, this web. So that is the world of indigenous people. Everything makes sense to them within this web of meaning. It’s not that they don’t have conflicts, however these conflicts still make sense within their web of meaning.

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If, on the other hand, we think of Western society, Western society is fractured. So the web is actually disjointed. It’s all in pieces. There’s no connected, cohesive web. So the language (English), doesn’t relate to, the stories, the mythologies, or the traditions. It’s a new, or a relatively new language, especially compared to the Irish language, Gaeilge. Our Irish language goes back 1,000 years before English. The symbols, the stories, the songs were all connected to our language then. For example ‘wolf’ in Gaeilge is ‘Mas Tire’ (son of the land), so you can see that the language symbolises a connection to the land.

Now in our western society, you have songs that you hear on the radio, or movies you stream or watch in the cinema. Ask yourself, what do they relate to? What do they connect to? What cohesive societal narrative is holding these together?

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For Indigenous people, everything’s interwoven into this amazing web. In Western society, we’re not in this web, everything is fragmented and fractured, we all see and feel the symptoms; disconnection, alienation, isolation, loneliness. It’s just all fragmented, and we’re wandering around trying to find the web, because our psyche is wired for it.

And then we find it. We find some songs that give us a part of fragment a web, and we’re like, “Oh my God, I have this.” Or where there’s some dancing and music, we have a bit of the web and we think, “Oh my God, that’s amazing.” But it’s a fragment. Then when we come home, we come back into a fragmented society, and we’ve lost what that what about. We tasted that fragment for that moment, and then we come back into a fragmented society and it’s gone. We might have felt cheated, because our psyche knew more was possible. We might hear a story or we go to a storytelling and again, “Oh my God, that’s amazing, that’s it!” And it gives us a taste of that fragment, but we then come home and we feel, “Oh, that’s gone now.” We need to go again and again to these things, to get more tastes of it, but we’ve lost that full web of meaning, and so we will never be fulfilled, of fully held and connected and safe.

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Keepers of the Web

The other really central point to this, is within the web, you’ve got a center. For indigenous people, you have a center to that web, and that is the Elders. The Elders are actually a repository for all the stories, the rituals, the traditions, and the symbols. They hold them all together. They’re like a center point between the past and the present. They hold that center of the web, and that’s vital.

In our Western society, we don’t have a center. You might have seen or noticed, there’s no center here, there’s no Elders holding all the parts together in a coherent manner. So economics is talking about one thing, science is talking about something else, religion is talking about some other piece. Art, philosophy etc. all these things are talking about different aspects, and you’re saying to yourself,

“It doesn’t make sense. Why aren’t we all talking the same thing?”

Or you might have partisan politics where one party’s talking about something, some other party’s talking about something else, and it’s all divided, and you’re feeling,

“Where’s the center in all this?”

There isn’t one.

It’s really straightforward. What’s a coherent society? A coherent society is one that has a web of meaning that coheres. It’s cohesive, all the parts interweave, and they all cross-reference each other. So it’s really resilient. Its web of meaning is really resilient. A society that’s not that, our Western society, is just fractured, fragmented, it cannot endure, and we see all the consequences of that.

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So what can we do? Where’s the positive aspect to this? In the next post, I want to talk about how do you build your own web of meaning That’s what I’ve been working on in my book. How to build your own cohesive web of meaning.

You can’t go backwards into a tribal way of being, but we have the ingredients. We have the design of what a web of meaning is. And a lot of areas like science, underscore what indigenous people have known for thousands of years. So we can actually underpin our web with modern knowledge, and actually make it gel together. Then we need to hold it together as a center. We need to BE the center of this new web of meaning.

So it’s really exciting for me, and that’s what I’m going cover in the next post.

Let me know your thoughts on today’s post. I’m really excited to share this, because for me, it’s fundamental to how we live, and what we see in the world around us. It’s also vital in order to make sense of that, and how to build for the future.

I’d appreciate it if you would ‘like and share’ the post, and also, please share it with people who you feel would benefit from it.

Thank you.

Vincent

 We are children of a pseudo culture.

You know, it’s quite a shock after all the years for me to find out that I was raised in something that wasn’t a true culture, but was a pseudo culture.

Actually, I didn’t really know there was a difference. I thought you were just brought up in a ‘culture’. I didn’t know there was a difference between a culture and what is not a culture. And then I found out

That actually there is. And when I say we were brought up in a ‘pseudo culture’, what I mean is, it’s fragmented into different domains, so there’s no overall story that holds it all together. That’s why it’s a pseudo culture.

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In a true culture, they’ve got an overarching story where they know their place in the cosmos. For example, when I stayed in the rainforest, the people, the tribal people there, they knew with their story. It was coherent story, that fitted them into the cosmos. All their activities, everything they did in their lives, and across the stages of their lives fitted into this, to this huge coherent story, where they felt held.

It’s amazing, really amazing.

In our Western culture, we don’t have that. We’ve just got fragments. So, it’s all got very complicated. We all feel this complicated state in our lives. Then we look at the fragments. Economics is a fragment, it’s a domain all to itself. Science is a domain all to itself, a fragment. Religion is a, is a fragment. Ecology, is a fragment. Politics is a fragment.

So these are all fragments, but they don’t knit into a kind of a coherent story for us. They’re all different voices telling us different things that don’t knit together. And in our daily lives, we’re just trying to make sense of the world. We’re trying to make sense that the world that I live in makes sense, and then we find, that it doesn’t. It can’t, because it’s all so fragmented.

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Now, when we’re young, we’re living on the promise of the future, that when we get successful, or when we get married, or get a house and settle down, at some point in the future, it’s all going to come together. We feel when we’re young, okay, it’s fragmented, but, you know, it’s gonna make sense later in life.

When you’re in your midlife and later years, with all your life experience, you discover, no, this is not all of a sudden going to come together. So it’s a real shock. But in some ways it shouldn’t be a shock, because it’s a fragmented pseudo culture, so it’s never going make sense.

But, in not making sense, it has real, tangible effects on us. In our lives, we might find ourselves, you feeling disconnected from life or, constantly rushing, constantly, like we’re never stopping. Because if you stop for a moment to think, you go, “Oh, wow.” You, begin to think of the fragments and the whole thing that doesn’t make sense. It’s not good. It’s not a good feeling. You might just feel overwhelmed You’re overwhelmed by life, and that’s because you’re just all these fragments. There’s no coherent story for you to just relax in.

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When I was staying with the tribe in West Papua, they had just lived 40,000 years with a coherent story. And so you just relax, you feel held in, in this story, this cohesive web of meaning. It’s really incredible.

So, we have, as humans, in our psyche, this desire, to be in a living cosmos. To feel that story of a living interconnected cosmos, where the whole of life makes sense, and where you also feel you belong. That’s what we all desire. We desire that story and to live in it.

And so, over the next few posts, I’m going to bring you through that story, an overarching story that actually does exist. It’s not something we’re told, we’re just left with all these fragments. But an overarching story does really exist and, a lot of it’s based on science. We can use the knowledge we’ve gained to create our own over-arching story. Science is telling us that, we live in an interconnected world now, and a lot of evidence of that across the land, the seas, and the galaxies, itìs all interconnected. So, all the contents are there to build a story and one that you can feel you’re in a living cosmos.

Beause we can’t go back to an indigenous way of living. For me, I’m quite analytical, so I need to have some basis of what the story is. I can’t just simply believe, I need to have some basis. So, I’ve been able to put together the science of it and the story is quite remarkable. I’ll be sharing that in the next few posts.

Please like and share this post as I feel it will help people. I think anybody in the Western world would benefit from it because, we’re all living in a pseudo culture, so it’s really important to first understand that it’s not a true culture, that it is a pseudo-culture and why. If you think about it, a lot of things just begin to make sense because it’s not a whole coherent story. It’s not an overarching story, so you’ll never feel held in that story. So first, understand that, that you’re living in a pseudo-culture and next, over the next few posts, I’ll be bringing you through a story that fits together in a modern world.

Thank you,

Vincent

What if you felt part of a living, loving and nurturing universe? And in this, you are seen and held safe, as an integral part of this universe. You feel you truly belong.

This is what every person in every other other civilisation felt. From South America, to North America to Indonesia, they all felt connected to the earth, and knew their place in the cosmos. It wasn’t bliss, but they had a missing part of the puzzle, that we have lost.

We are the only civilisation without a connection to the Earth and that does not know it’s place in the cosmos. Think about it? Why is that, and what does it mean?

We’ve been told we are on this random planet with life on it, in a vast dark empty space.

It’s no wonder we feel isolated, uncertain and lost.

The Earth and the cosmos waits for us to come back into relationship. What science now tells us about an interconnected universe, indigenous peoples knew and felt in their everyday lives.

This has been my journey, from separation, to coming back to both;

- an understanding (I needed details for my analytical brain) and

- an embodiment (there’s no point in a theory unless I could feel it also)

of my place in a living, loving and nurturing universe.

I wanted the feeling I had in the Indonesian rainforest in 2001, with indigenous people who felt this deep connection with cosmos and land. It’s taken me 25 years to do that. It’s been a slow process.

I had to come to it, in my own way. Through science research, and partly through my direct experience living in southern Italy, connecting to the Earth here by growing plants and daily ritual connection to land and to the cosmos. Also becoming part of a warm, close Italian community. I will obviously never be a local, but I feel part of the community here.

I don’t feel lost or alone anymore, the interconnected universe feels real and tangible and reflects itself in my everyday life.

More to follow.

We read about the Earth being interconnected and the idea of ‘Oneness’ and while these are all true they, for me, leave out a whole plethora of amazing things that goes on in our world and on our Earth.

This article hopes to re-balance that!

To summarise the 6 aspects first and then I’ll go through them separately.

1. The default mode of the Universe is Interconnection

2. The Interconnections are Life-Nurturing

3. The Interconnections and a) delicious and b) healing

4. All the interconnections together work as ‘One’ coherent system.

5. The interconnections continually move towards a state of ‘wholeness’

6. The Interconnections include You!

   ---

   1. The default is Interconnection

We now know based on underground mycelial networks, bacterial nano-bridges in the sea and also hydrogen filaments connecting galaxies, that the universe connects, connect and connects! Inside your brain all the neurons are firing and making connections and you, as you read these are making connections also.

When I arrive in the garden in the early morning, spiders have already spun webs connecting the grass across the path I walked the previous day. Connection rules!

2. The Interconnections are Life-Nurturing

   The interconnections underground and in the sea, are not simply empty connections. There is continual movement of nutrients and chemicals across the connections in order to support life. Underground the mycelial connections join with tree roots. The trees get nutrients and the mycelia get the sugars that the trees have obtained through photosynthesis. The connections are mutually supportive.

   We don’t as yet know what the hydrogen filaments that connect galaxies do, but we know that half of the matter on the Earth comes from intergalactic winds, so we can surmise that the intergalactic filaments have a purpose.

   We do have ‘atmospheric rivers’ on Earth, which move and stretch across the Earth. The large interconnections of water are vital for the Earth’s moisture and thereby in supporting life on Earth.

   

3. The Interconnections and a) delicious and b) healing

   a) The life that is supported by these interconnections, like fruits, vegetables (and yes strawberries!), is delicious. We could be on a planet where all these things taste awful. Not only do the not taste awful, they actually taste amazing. And if you think about it, our taste buds also had to evolve, to be able to appreciate the deep flavours, and that’s all part of the interconnection of nature with us. Our taste buds evolved along with the evolution of the orange, connecting our taste buds to the flavours or vice versa.

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   b) The life that is supported by these interconnections is healing for us.

   The Earth isn’t simply filled with plants that have nothing to do with us. We have herbs like Rosemary, Chamomile and Ginger that along with many other herbs (see image below) help strengthen our immune system, lower our blood sugar, cleans our inner organs, and many other healing aspects. We have delicious oranges and lemons that give us vitamin C in winter time, exactly when we need it. All these connections support our healing.

   The Earth can’t ‘speak’ however I do feel that the delicious fruits and the healing herbs are the Earth’s love language.

   

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4. All the interconnections together work as One coherent system.

   The Earth is made up of ecosystems, within ecosystems, within ecosystems. For example, a rock pool ecosystem, is part of a shore ecosystem, which is also part of a land and sea ecosystem, which is then part of a continent ecosystem. Each of them is a ‘whole’ system, and so you have ‘wholes’ within ‘wholes’, within ‘wholes’.

   Ken Wilber refers to this as Holarchical, a holistic view, where he sees ‘holons’ within ‘holons’, within ‘holons’.

   Each larger ‘whole’ transcends but also includes the smaller ‘whole’. In this way, when taken together, everything becomes ‘One’, in a fully interconnected manner.

5. The interconnections continually move towards a state of ‘wholeness’

   If you cut you hand for example, it will immediately begin to heal back to a state of wholeness. If a forest is cleared, the plants and trees immediately begin to grow back and fill the gaps to become ‘whole’ again.

   In England a derelict coalmine with only black soil was planted with trees. Within two decades there was a woodland with butterflies, bats and nightingales. The natural tendency is to heal back to wholeness.

   Psychologist Weir Perry discovered that his patients who had psychotic breakdowns, if nurtured and supported, their psyche would integrate back to wholness from its psychotic fragmented state.

6. The Interconnections include You!

   You are not separate from all the interconnections. It’s clear that from the behaviour of the 5 previous interconnections, that the Earth is conscious, it is a living system. We are only beginning to come to terms with this and the effects that each of us has. We are connected to it all through our observation.

   Science Daily described research on the ‘Observer Effect’:

   ‘In a study reported in the February 26 issue of Nature (Vol. 391, pp. 871-874), researchers at the Weizmann Institute of Science have now conducted a highly controlled experiment demonstrating how a beam of electrons is affected by the act of being observed. The experiment revealed that the greater the amount of "watching," the greater the observer's influence on what actually takes place.’1

How do you feel?

Now that you are part of a loving, supportive, healing and delicious interconnected system that is ‘One’, how does it feel?

There is nothing separate, and that includes you.

Let me know, I’d love to hear from you across the interconnections!

We don’t normally re-evaluate our basic assumptions about life, and that’s ok if things are going well and supporting our well-being and evolution. When this is not the case, and we are struggling to make sense of life, we need to go back to basics. For me, I struggled and needed to go back to basics, there seemed to be a deeper rhythm to all this than I first thought.

Our society works off 2 stages of life, a first stage and a second stage, with a ‘mid-life’ point between the two. This is a very physical interpretation and equates our life with our physical qualities only. It suggests that after midlife, because our physical qualities and abilities are not as strong, that we then in the second half, begin the descent.

We are the only civilisation that looks at life in the simplistic physical way. All other cultures view the person as multidimensional, with the physical aspect just being one of those dimensions. Other cultures, particularly indigenous cultures, see an accumulation of life experience over time, resulting in vital wisdom that the society honours, needs and values. In fact, in these societies, elders are referred to as ‘culture tenders’, because they embody the ‘web of meaning’ that holds the culture together. They are a link to the past and the present. And for the young people they also show what the future holds in store, as the young grow up and mature.

In his book ‘Ritual’, Dimitris Xygalatas describes a ‘glue’ that culture needs, and this is provided through the rituals enacted and stewarded by the elders. Without this glue, society is fragmented and people feel lost and alone. This is what we see in western society with it’s many mental health effects.

Increasing Power

In indigenous cultures, at a certain age, the men in the society pull back from engagement at the ‘periphery’, this is left to the younger men. In this way the older men can gather their inner energy, which is then used for ‘culture tending’ and ritual. The older men, through not dissipating their energy at the periphery (in exchanges, or battles), also allow themselves to connect to the higher forces that can provide assistance for the health and generativity of the culture. Through this saving of their energy, and their connection to the spirit world, elders are seen as very powerful and wise.

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David Gutmann in his book ‘Reclaimed Powers’, details the tasks, roles and benefits of elders in traditional societies:

“I contend that traditional older men, because of their special access to the gods, to the myth-embracing past, and to the spiritualized ancestors, become the living exemplars of the legend. It is they who bypass the time gap between then and now, bringing the two into conjunction. Via the elders, the mythic past and the mundane present are interpenetrated, and the climate of mythic origins is brought forward into the here and now. Through the rituals managed by the older men, the power-shed of the past is tapped, and the mana that once rescued a desperate people reenters the world to heal the ill, to bring reviving rain down on a wasted land, or to move puny boys into strong manhood.

The traditional older man, by tending culture, serves society as much as he is served by it. He preserves culture by making it’s mythic armatures real and available for the larger group. Older men help to provoke the experiences upon which social bonds are based.”

Gutmann continues:

“The world sustaining mana, or sacred energy, has many sources, and these vary by culture, but folk societies generally maintain the idea that the prosaic world is kept ‘real’ and vital by power imported from those agencies that penetrate into the daily world but that also extend into some mythic domain outside of it. . . . these intermediaries are typically the bridgeheads of the unordinary domain within the ordinary world; they freight in the vital power that literally keeps the mundane world alive. . . . they become reciprocals of or conduits to tabu power, the vital energy of the gods.” (Gutmann, 1987)

This is exactly what I experienced in the highland rainforests of West Papua, when I stayed there in 2001. I sat among elders who I could tangibly feel, held the centre of the culture. They didn’t say very much, they weren’t running around here and there like the young men, but in their calm presence, they grounded all the activities in a solid natural rhythm. I was in awe at how easily they went about this, and I could see how they deserved the respect of the others in the village. There was no sense of arrogance, they simply held the respect because due to their accumulation of life experience and their abilities to steward ritual, and access the other realms in sacred space, they commanded respect. It was there I experienced ritual curated by the elders, and felt the beneficial and sustaining effects their wise stewarding brought to bear on the people in the village.

Our Life Experience

Our experience of the world is not simply the world itself but a constructed interpretation shaped by the ‘frameworks’ we carry within us.

• In everyday language we call them beliefs, assumptions, ideologies, or worldviews.

• In neuroscience they are called ‘priors’.

• In philosophical traditions they have sometimes been described as Maya.

These frameworks make up the ‘Veil of Interpretation’ through which we experience reality.

The traditional societies have different beliefs and assumptions to ours. Their ‘veil’ is different, which means their life experience is different. The elders abilities to connect to the mana or sacred energy, as a ‘veil’, might be a stretch for us to understand in the western world, but for us in the west there are simple things that we can do to clearly ensure we have power and vitality in later years.

Linear History and Cultural Hygiene

It helps to understand that all cultures except our western one, live cyclically. All world cultures believed in cycles until Christianity created a history which was linear.

At the time, in the first centuries AD, cultures did not have a ‘history’, but held cycles of time, rising and falling, quite like the seasons of a year. Now, Christianity a new religion, the new kids on the block, in order to gain credibility, created an ‘ecclesiastical history’. They declared a linear history of popes. This was ingenious. It immediately gave them a semblance of authority, however illusory it was.

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The Romans, who at the time felt some competition from the Christian religion, decided to also put together a linear history of their own Roman past, and with this idea, a line of time was created stretching endlessly forward and back. A linear history.

And Christianity, unlike other religions, put forward a single point in time. Mircea Eliade in his incredible book, ‘The Myth of the Eternal Return’ ;

“Incarnation is a unique fact. Indeed, as Chapter 9 of the Epistle to the Hebrews and I Peter S : 18 emphasize, Christ died for our sins once only, once for all (hapax, ephapax, semel); it is not an event subject to repetition, which can be reproduced several times (pollakis).”

Therefore in Christianity, there is no cyclical repeat available.

“It is this linear conception of time and history, which, already outlined in the second century by St. Irenaeus of Lyon, will be taken up again by St. Basil and St. Gregory and be finally elaborated by St. Augustine.” (Eliade, p143)

The reality on the ground however is very different. It’s not linear at all and constantly repeats. Peter Turchin, a complexity scientist working in the field of historical social science, has detailed many of the cycles that happen (Turchin, 2006).

And for Mircea Eliade, the cultures that cyclically renewed their culture their main fear was that they might ‘fall into linear history’. That would be scary for them. There would be nothing worse than that. To be in a linear history that continually accumulates more and more issues, without any chance of renewal is frightful. Cultures who live cyclically clean out their ‘cupboards’ at the end of an annual cycle and refresh and renew their energies for the next cycle.

Renewal

At the beginning of the calendar year, Indigenous Peoples, through ritual, go back to the beginning of the cycle and clear up all past undoings, allowing them to start into each year with a clean slate. This is conscious cyclical living. You don’t accumulate the wrongs every year, you clean them up consciously through ritual and start each year refreshed and renewed.

This seems totally novel to us in the western linear historical model where grieviences accumulate, only to be resolved in conflict or war. Where in fact, as we know, they are not resolved, but merely start new grieviences, and on it goes.

Indigenous cultures are right to fear this. They prefer yearly cyclical and clear up as you go. I have to say I agree with them.

In western culture, we have allowed ourselves to fall into historical linear time, without any renewal. What we see writ large around the world are conflicts and wars that go back not just years but generations. All unresolved. And unlike any other time in history, the TV and news media bombard us with these conflicts and issues hour by hour, minute by minute. Our psyche knows there’s a way to resolve all these annually and yet we see nothing been done as they conflicts mount and mount. We are told this is the way it has always been but that is simply not true. We haven’t engaged in a yearly cultural hygiene clear-out.

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Spiritual Heaviness

The accumulation of this bombardment leads to what has been described as a ‘spiritual heaviness’. We feel weary before we even start out into our day.

The Italian jurist and politician Giuseppe Dossetti wrote;

“We are facing the exhaustion of cultures - he added - I do not see the birth of a new thought either on the secular side or on the Christian side. We are all immobile, fixed on a present, which we try to patch up in some way”.

Religions have over the years told us that ‘transcendence’ of this earthly realm is the only way. But again religions don’t include any yearly hygiene clear-out. I can hear catholics mentioning confession and that Jesus died to save us all so that we would be free of our sins. If this had the desired effect, I feel after 2,000 years, the catholic world would be a very different place. Obviously this worldview has not provided any relief and I can vouch for this over the years I myself was a catholic.

Freedom and Liberation

Our consciousness and our psyches, however, know we need down-time for resting, recouping, clearing out and renewing. Our psyches know that you cannot continually grow and grow, without clearing out, as one of our biggest teachers, nature, shows us. It is natural to have an autumn and a winter for rejuvenation. We know this ourselves intuitively, yet we seem to have a blind spot when it comes to our civilisation, and we think it can go on and on.

Personal Psychological Hygiene

In order to replicate what Indigenous cultures do to renew themselves cyclically through ritual, there are, for me, 3 core psychological aspects which would fundamentally help us renew and rejuvenate our energy and vitality and not have them build up year on year:

1. Alchemise your Inner Dragons

As we go through life we have to deal with our inner dragons. These are our fears, our doubts, our shame or guilt, our feeling ‘not good enough’. If we don’t work them through in our inner psychology, over time they can harden and become regrets, loss, grief and bitterness. In my experience, only deep reflection/meditation/contemplation and a healthy dose of self forgiveness eased these to a point that I could feel at ease and calm about them all.

2. Reconcile our Opposites

As we go through life, ‘opposites’ are brought into sharp relief. It may be good/evil, rich/poor, masculine/feminine or logic/intuition. In my life I couldn’t understand in midlife, why, while I was making lots of money as a computer consultant, my personal life did not reflect this level of fulfilment. It was in disarray. For some people, putting in all the hours does not equate to the happiness that society says we’d achieve.

Opposites can show up in many ways, but what they have in common for the individual person is the heightened tension that cannot be solved by the tools that served them up to that point. Like me, they are snarled, with no way out. This impasse of opposites must be resolved. We must be able to hold the tension of opposites until a transcendent ‘third’ appears for us, which allows us to be ok with the paradox of the opposites. We become ok with the fact that not everything is black and white, other colours exist and the world can show up in its full spectrum, there is no tension inside us.

Note: I can hear you saying that you are always ok with paradox, however what happens is the opposites that constellate in your own life will be, let me tell you, the specific ones that your NOT ok with!

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3. The Unlived Life

Thirdly, we all run out into life to do what our family, culture, society have shown us to do. In doing this, we park a tiny child who had big dreams and instead we give ourselves to a serious life of school, college and a career in work. In our later years we have to come to terms with this ‘unlived’ part of ourselves. What was it we wanted to do, that we didn’t get to do?

“The unchosen thing is what causes the trouble. If you don’t do something with the unchosen, it will set up a minor infection in the unconscious and later take it’s revenge on you. Unlived life does not just ‘go away’ through under-use or by tossing it off and thinking that what we have abandoned is no longer useful or relevant. Instead, the unlived life goes underground and becomes troublesome – sometimes very troublesome – as we age. Of course no one can live out all of life’s possibilities, but there are key aspects of your being that must be brought into your life or you will never realize your fulfilment.” (Bly, 2007).

A Framework

With all the above in mind and based on my own life observation and research, a 4 stage life process became to me, a more accurate way to describe who we are and how we live. I also felt a mythical lens was best to use because for the indigenous elders, we are larger than life, and what has made more sense to my mentoring clients in practice has been to frame the stages and their lives, mythically.

The 4 stages are; White Knight, Red Knight, Black Knight and Gold King.

White Knight

We are young, naive, full of dreams and aspiration. The world is an enchanted place full of possibilities and potential. There’s an urge to be good, right, and pure.

Red Knight

We head out into the world with passion, courage, fire and ambition. This stage is about career building, family, work, projects. We go out on quests, we slay dragons. It is the stage of attainment. Life is complex and full of choices and decisions.

Black Knight

The Black Knight stage is the great undoing. The collapse of what seemed most essential to us. You thought in Red Knight that all the slaying and hustling would give you happiness and fulfilment but it now rings hollow.

The Black Knight stage is where you have to deal with any of the 3 core issues of Dragons that haven’t been alchemised, Opposites that haven’t been reconciled, or the unlived parts of you that want to be expressed through you.

If we can surrender fully to this stage, without knowing what comes next, then, and only then do we get a glimpse of the fourth stage, Gold King, shining through.

Gold King

The Gold King stage, or Gold Queen for women, emerges when all the masks are gone. You have been tempered through the fires of the Black Knight descent stage, and you have come out renewed from the deep well of life. You have discovered who you truly are, not who society wanted you to be, and you are comfortable with paradox. You also carry within you, the experience of all the previous stages. This gives you depth and breadth that, like the elders in the highland rainforests, others pick up just by being in your presence. Your pace is slower, yet you carry more weight in what you say. There is less ‘doing’ and more ‘being’, being ‘yourself’ in an integrated, whole sense.

The power and vitality of the Gold King stage

There are 3 key aspects that really stand out in the Gold King stage.

1. You are not reacting, but instead taking action from the calm centre of your being.

2. You are no longer leaking energy and power to unresolved issues (dragons) and battling the tension of opposites.

3. The stage is the only stage where you are fully Conscious.

White Knight you are naive and unconscious.

Red Knight, you have fragmented into all the choices and decisions you have to make and so you are unconscious.

Black Knight, you are unconscious because you have descended into the depths of your unconscious to deal with your grief and find yourself and your gifts.

And so in the Gold King stage, you rise fully conscious of all the stages and how to be yourself consciously in the world.

It’s a quest to get to the Gold King stage, and in coming home to yourself, you find the parts you left behind and be able to now share them with the world.

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Creative artists and Sculpted Creativity

Artists have the same arc. Within the research of creative artists, it was discovered that in the early years, artists can be very productive in generating and releasing art instantaneously, yet in later years they require time to sculpt their work and rework and refine it (sculpted creativity). This follows the arc of the 4 stages. They are Red Knights in the early years but after going through the Black Knight stage, the art they share is ‘sculpted’ and comes from a more integrated self.

“Because of the greater integration within the internal world (our psychology), and a deepening of the sense of reality, a freer interaction can occur between the internal and external worlds. Sculpted creativity expresses this freedom with its flow of inspiration from inside to outside and back., constantly repeated, again, and yet again. There is a quality of depth in mature creativity which stems from constructive resignation and detachment. Death is not infantile persecution and chaos. Life and the world go on, and we can live on in our children, our loved objects, our works, if not in immortality.” (Jaques, 1965)

Character building

The Jungian Analyst, James Hillman, in his book ‘The Force of Character’ saw that life experience across the years actually built character. Character became more and more a force, not less, as the years went on. This again lines up and supports a 4 stages perspective of life.

“Biology considers ageing as a process leading to uselessness. Rather than a process, let us consider old age as a structure with its own essential nature.

Let us ask why our later years take a certain form and show certain characteristics. Perhaps ‘uselessness’ needs to be regarded aesthetically. Must the soul be properly aged before it leaves? We can then imagine ageing as a transformation in beauty as much as biology. The old are like images on display that transpose biological life into imagination, into art. The old become strikingly memorable, ancestral representations, characters in the play of civilisation, each a unique, irreplaceable figure of value. Ageing: an art form?” (Hillman, 1999).

The honouring of the Gold King stage

The Gold King stage is less about ‘doing’ and involves prioritising ‘resting’ away from the periphery, and trusting in a loving, supportive, enchanted world. It is knowing your coordinates in the cosmos so that you feel you belong. You have made it through the 4 stages of living life in contradiction (with all the detrimental effects on your life and relationships) to now living life in alignment, with all its benefits. This is alignment with who you truly are, the authentic you. In the 4 stage process, you’ve let go of all the masks and what your family, society and culture wanted you to do, to now knowing who you are and knowing that you only have to ‘be’ that.

Stark but Real

It’s not easy to move from a ‘2 stage life model’ to a 4 stage life model because we have all been culturally conditioned to the 2 stages. This, 2 stage model comes from the ‘materialists’ who can only see matter and a material world. They cannot see the psychological, emotional, spiritual aspects of the person that makes the person whole. As an autonomous sentient being you always have a choice as to which worldview you believe in. The choice for me is stark but real. The 4 stages, like the seasons of the year, are more complete and reflect life in all it’s facets. They also represent the indigenous people in the rainforest and the stages that are lived and supported in that culture. When I stayed there, I felt the 4 stages in action, in real life. It was so clear to me that there was another way to see our lives and the arc of the life journey, a more complete and a more honouring way.

I felt in each of the people in the rainforest, across their stages in life, from young to elder, a tangible rise in their energy, power and vitality. I really believe it’s available to us too.

If you feel that my 4 stage process relates more to your life, I’d love to hear from you.

And if you feel the draw to reconnect to your vitality and power, reach out to me to find out more.

References

Bly, R. & Ruhl. J. (2007). Living Your Unlived Life. New York. Penguin Group.

Gutmann, D. (1987). Reclaimed Powers. New York. Basic Books Inc.

Jaques, E. (1965) Death and the Mid-Life Crisis. London. International Journal of Psycho-analysis.

Hillman, J. (1999). The Force of Character. And the Lasting Life. New York. The Random House Publishing Group.

Turchin, P. (2006). ‘War and Peace and War: The Life-Cycles of Imperial Nations.

Power

“Where do you get your Personal Power from?”

It’s not a question we ask and definitely throughout my earlier years, I never knew this was even a thing. For power, we tend to read or talk about leaders, either government or corporate, and yet each of us, everyday, needs power, in order to do things and have an impact.

Different life stages have different power dynamics

Life, in overall terms, has 4 stages. What I never knew was power behaves differently across each of life’s 4 stages. Power is not literal, you won’t find it in mere text, and so it’s best to deal with it mythically, the journey of the knights.

Stage 1 - White Knight

In the white knight stage, we are young and naive and steeped in idealism. Our power is given over to our heroes, the ones we see shining brightly in our lives, and who we would dearly like to be someday. This is idealisation.

In my White Knight stage, I idealised Bruce Lee for his martial arts prowess, Eric Clapton for his mesmeric guitar solos, and I also idealised Charlie Cooke, who played for Chelsea soccer club in what used to be England’s ‘first division’.

Through this idealisation, all my power was given to these celebrities.

Some of us idealise super heroes, we want to be just like them and have the power to do the things that they do. We feel powerless unless we are them, because we have given them our own power.

Stage 2 - Red Knight

In the Red Knight stage, we have got on our horse and headed out into the world and get to use our power through our own force of will. Our power is used to build, to win, to conquer obstacles, ‘slay some dragons’ and achieve things in our life. To do this we normally want to become someone, a doctor, an actor, a CEO, a pilot, an engineer, because we feel, unconsciously, that’s where the power is. If I become a doctor or a nurse, for example, I will have power and I can get things done and have impact.

The problem

What happens is our power gets fused with the ‘role’. The ‘role of doctor’, has the power, not us. The ‘role of actor’, has the power, not us. The ‘role of pilot’ has the power not us. We have exported our power into the role, and without the role we feel powerless.

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You see this clearly, look for example at what happens when a doctor retires. If he or she has totally given their power to the role, it’s all gone when they retire, and they feel they can’t do very much in those later years. If we look at celebrities who have fused their power with their ‘role’ as a specific celebrity figure, they can cling to the role, and not want to give it up, or they find it difficult to take the power the role has, back to themselves, and to their own individual agency. They have no power themselves without the role. This is the Red Knight stage of roles.

Stage 3 - Black Knight

In this 3rd stage we realise that the use of power has consequences. In this Black Knight stage we need to come to terms with the gravity that this entails for us. The power we used as Red Knights didn’t work out as straightforward as we thought. There were wins and losses, there was pain and suffering. We had gone for identity (the role), certainty, and control . Life, it turns out, is a lot more complex that we thought. It’s full of ambiguity and paradox and not that easy to navigate. Where we felt we were doing good in the Red Knight stage, in some cases it didn’t turn out like that. We had used our willpower in the role to force things through and get stuff done, not really understanding all the interconnections and repercussions involved.

Energy

In Red Knight, we also didn’t fully understand the amount of energy these roles use up. We gave ourselves fully to these roles, like an actor does, and they consume us. The roles want all of us. This is fine when we are young, but in our late 30’s and 40’s, the roles become heavy to bear, and wear us down, causing exhaustion and sometimes burnout.

In my case, the roles became overwhelming and I suffered from depression.

And so, in this 3rd. Black Knight stage, we have to deeply reflect on what didn’t work, even though we felt we did everything as best as we could. We have to dig deep to work out how to go forward, because we got ourselves into this pickle based on the best of the limited knowledge we had. It’s not easy.

In this Black Knight stage, we question ourselves and our life. Do we keep working away with our power fused to a role and risk burnout? Or do we unplug ourselves from the role, and look to do something that fuels us rather than drains us? If we do the latter, how will we pay bills and provide for our family? The roles, although exhausting and heavy, with all the hours we put in, do pay the bills!

This stage is referred to as the ‘dark night of the soul’. It is covered in some superhero movies such as Batman, where he has to reflect on all that he does and the consequences.

This Black Knight stage can be greatly helped by awareness of where you are within this stage, and also by using the help of a guide or mentor who knows this terrain, and has already been through it and out the far side.

The Black Knight stage can be terrifying to be in, and a lot of people rush backwards into the Red Stage just to get back out of the Black Knight stage and slay some more dragons. Alas, this does not work, and you are only exacerbating your struggle. Your psyche prompts your forward development, and so you will have to face the Black Knight stage eventually. It’s best not to put it off, but instead to reach out for help.

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Rumi wrote so beautifully and pragmatically about the Black Knight stage and what life has done to us in this stage, in this poem:

The Bridge - Our True Selves

In all of this, what we have left behind, is our true selves, that part of us that had bags of energy and clear gifts that everyone saw in us when we were tiny. This is what we get back when we transition to the 4th stage - Gold King.

Stage 4 - Gold King

If we surrender fully in the Black Knight stage, and allow all the false identities and roles to dissolve, something arises from within us. All the masks fall away and dissolve into compost. If we have fully allowed ourselves to empty out all that we have built and attained in Red Knight, then from this compost, like a phoenix from the ashes, a truer version of you will begin to come forward through you. Remember Rumi’s lines in the poem above:

This new Gold King version of you does not need the certainty, willforce and control that the Red Knight needed. Having gone deep through the Black Stage he/she is now more grounded and real. This is why in traditional societies, elders speak less, act slower, yet carry enormous gravitas when they do intervene. These elders have been through the initiations to consciously transition through life’s stages. In the western world we don’t have access to these initiations. We must create them.

So in the Gold King stage, the power is integrated and you come to understand, when power is not fused with the role, it can flow through you. It is endless. It continually fuels you. It was never your power afterall, it was the power of the universe.

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Summary

In white knight, the power is outside of us like the photo below:

In red knight the power is fused in the role (doctor, nurse, CEO, actor etc.) and because it’s still not within you, you can easily be knocked sidways or toppled by criticism or doubt or imposter syndrome like the photo below:

In Black Knight stage you descend into the depths of your being to let the false identities collapse. In this full surrender you allow your being to be dissolved into compost. Only then can the inner elements reorganise themselves, and new shoots spring forward of a new you.

In the Gold King stage, these new shoots are integrated, and you become whole again. This time, you are more grounded in who you are, more believable, more true, and you can be more present in the world, with your family and friends. You finally access power fully, because you now know it’s consequences and it’s limits. The universe can allow more power to flow through you, because you won’t distort it, in this way you will notice a direct improvement in your daily energy and vitality.

And Lao Tzu wrote about this as follows:

“Mastering others is strength. Mastering yourself is true power.” - Lao Tzu

Mentoring Program

If you are feeling exhausted by Roles and performance and are looking to be guided through the 4 stages in a structured way to become the Gold King reach out to me about my empowering and confidential Mentoring Program.

The Earth has 11 dimensions of qualities including smells, colours, textures, sounds and not to forget its aliveness! So many aspects, it can sometimes feel overwhelming to sense it all at the same time.

For some reason, however, we have rationalised all this magnificence down to what we can see, the material world. We have then limited our world to a world where rationalists and materialists thrive, but very little else if anything does. In this worldview, all the colours and aliveness are washed out, and you’re left with a grey two-dimensional world, which is, for all intents and purposes, flat.

What is the Universe made of?

The universe consists of only 5% matter. The rest, the 95%, is energy. If we are only working with a material worldview, we are only accessing 5% of what is potentially available to us. It’s a very limited picture.

I was listening to an interview recently, and the interviewer was shocked that the woman being interviewed, a historian, mentioned there was a ‘presence’ at a local fairy fort in Ireland. Obviously, to rationalists and materialists, anything other than hard visible objects are not possible. The historian, fortunately, was very comfortable with the many dimensions that were accessible to her.

It’s like in school when the atom was shown as solid, and with a solid nucleas in the middle. Of course an atom is simply energy, and the nucleus in the middle is simply vibrating energy. Nothing in this is solid at all. We attach ‘solidity’ to it to make it look real, but it’s an abstraction. So many things are similar to this.

Energy

When I worked in Peru with the mystic, Don Americo Yabar, he viewed the entire universe through the lens of energy. Everything was malleable. He obviously used 3-dimensional reality in his everyday life, but it was a small subset of a much larger energetic world, which then allowed him to constantly work with more possiblity and potential. I’d see him move his hands and say Qechua words and phrases as he went about his day. Only later would he explain that all these things were to mobilise his intent in an energy filled universe. It was such a magical way of being in the world. And it worked. Even driving along the restricted mountain passes. He always managed to avoid the forest logging trucks that dangerously roared along those winding gravelly tracks. I had heard stories about them always being on those roads but never met one when I was with Don Americo.

Indigenous Peoples worldview

In the rainforest, the tribal people I stayed with, view their world as animate. Everything has a consciousness and is alive. They could see different types of aliveness in all the various aspects of the rainforest, and they were an integral part of it. They could not feel any separation between themselves and the rainforest, it was all ‘one’. Everything in the rainforest was interconnected, and was also continually communicating with them. The small group of villagers I was walking with one day, stopped constantly to listen to what the forest was ‘saying’ to them. Many messages, signs and signals were being interpreted. Their ability to continually sense their surroundings was awe inspiring.

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Nature is a ‘sensing’ world. Plants sense underground for water and nutrients. Above ground, plants sense for wind, sunlight (through their leaves) and they also sense other plants who are impinging on them. There’s a lot of sensing going on, even simply with plants. The tribe I was with seemed to be sensing their surroundings in a similar understanding of living in an interdependent, alive universe.

Descartes

You know, having stayed in the rainforest with a people steeped in the vitality that goes with a view that everything is alive, when I read Descartes’ phrase ‘I think, therefore I am’, it felt very flat and ‘one-dimensional’. And yes Descartes inspired the materialists and rationalists, that continued to view the world and the universe as defined by thought alone.

Descartes also put forward that we were separate from nature. Therefore, in a material worldview, objects are separate and that applies to us humans. This is a totally opposite view to the rainforest people. And in that separateness, materialists feel existential aloneness as if they are are spiritual orphans.

And of course we rationalise it all away by thinking we can control the material world. Yet you only have to look at today’s news to understand how little we are in control of things, after centuries or working with the belief in Descartes’ material and rational worldview.

Two dimensional phone screens

We seem enchanted with our phone screens even though they are only two dimensions (width and length). The text on them, the photos, the videos, although in colour, are a mere two dimensional view. Two dimensions means there is no height, depth or other dimension involved. And these are ‘smart’ phones!

And as I said earlier, nature has 11 dimensions. It’s only with 11 dimensions that we can really begin to understand the complexity and magic of nature. And, as you will read below, it even communicates between the ocean the the sky.

Coccolithophores

Although we think of the sea and the sky as two different things, they are actually two aspects of one system that are in constant conversation with one another. It’s more like one system having a conversation with itself. For example, tiny plankton on the surface of the sea absorb carbon dioxide gas from the atmosphere, and then when they die they release carbon dioxide back into the atmosphere.

Coccolithophores are tiny little creatures who live in the top layer of the sea, the layer that the sun gets through to. These single-celled plankton are not visible to the naked eye but are responsible for helping to keep our planet cool. They were only discovered when microscope technology developed well enough to see them. They take carbon dioxide from the air to form their hard shells, and in many parts of the world they form large white masses on the sea surface. White reflects sunlight, so these large white areas reflect the sunlight back into space and help keep the Earth cool. When they die they release a gas, dimethyl sulphide (DMS), which is responsible for the formation of clouds. These act as buffers to the sun’s rays, which helps in the cooling of the planet (Hutchins, 2011). So these tiny creatures, as well as reflecting sunlight back into space by their white colour, also help in the creation of clouds to cool the planet. This is a remarkable achievement for little organisms that we cannot see individually without the aid of a microscope. Within the one system, we see that the ocean and the sky are continually having a conversation.

You’re beginning to understand the need for 11 dimensions to understand how nature works because nature works, not linearly, but ‘associatively’. Nature operates, like the rainforest tribe, by association of everything, in a totally interconnected and interdependent universe. All things in nature’s worldview, are not separate, but are associated with each other.

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How flat does it get?

On the opposite side of this magical 11 dimensional interdependent worldview, are the materialists and rationalists, who see a literal, linear world of two dimensions. Today, the ‘height’ of their world is AI. And yet AI is only two dimensional text (LLM’s) or again flat images or two dimensional videos.

Unlike us humans, who can feel our world, and can imagine a future, AI only regurgitates what it hoovers up around the internet. Yes, with phenomenal computing power, it can do this very rapidly, but it is still regurgitation. Old songs mixed together, images mashed up, because without imagination or soul, the result will always be flat and lifeless.

AI might seem fantastic and yet in two dimensional space is it not the ultimate flat earth? And are the materialists and rationalists not the ultimate flat earthers?

The Grail

Let me cut to the chase here.

Some of you will know this, and I discovered it by immersing myself in spiritual and mythological stories over the years, the Grail is in fact inside us.

It is not, as movies like ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’ would have us believe, something that is outside of us, and need to cross the Earth in a pilgrimage to find it.

One thing is true, it is hidden. Yet it is hidden on purpose. There is huge power in the grail, and it will stay hidden from anyone who would use it for egoic purposes. This is why the search is an inner search, and first involves the dissolution of the Ego to ensure the human ‘vessel’ is clear for the Grail to appear within.

This dissolution of the Ego happens when all that we have strived to build in our outer world, crumbles and dissolves.

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I have described the overall 4 stages in mythical terms and the Ego Dissolution and ‘Inner Fall’ stage as Black Knight, stage 3 (see below).

Anyone familiar with my 1-1 Mythic Mentoring program would know the dynamics of these stages and have the tools to navigate through them.

The Black Knight stage in particular is where you meet your inner dragons. Your ego identity collapses. The parts of you that haven’t looked at come up for healing, including the reconciling of opposites within and without. The parts that act out of wounded power need to be healed. You have to take back all the things you have projected out onto others, good and bad. And after this inner work and deep surrender, you have no idea what the next version of you will be like. You can’t think of outcomes, you just surrender to what is. This is why on an individual basis, you need to be held and guided. Indigenous peoples knew this and worked all this through in Rites of Passage.

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And what applies to individuals, also applies to a collective.

America

If you look through the 4 stages, it’s obvious that America is in Stage 1 - White Knight, and Stage 2 - Red Knight.

It has never faced ego collapse, or disillusionment. In fact, in American culture, these are all seen as a form of weakness. Several times America has had the opportunity to face the grief and despair, but decided not to.

Example 1 - 1986 The Nasa Space Shuttle Incident

The Nasa space shuttle blew up in 1986. The response was:

“We will grieve later. Right now, we have work to do1.”,

- because the priority was to find out exactly what caused the explosion. This is America, staying in Red Knight ‘we have work to do’, and not allowing a descent into the grief that the nation was really feeling at that time.

Example 2 - 9/11

Immediately the response to the 9/11 incident became the ‘war on terror’. No time for grieving. America stayed in the Red Knight stage, going to war instead of descending into the Black Knight stage and the healing that would come with it.

And yet each of these historic moments are calling for descent into the Black Stage, and for true transformation. Our psyche (collective or individual) will continually prompt us to go through the 4 mythical stages. We cannot continually stay in the Red Knight stage as it becomes pathological. Maybe this is what we are seeing with such psychotic American political moves such as Venezuela or Greenland. As the Red Knight stage festers, and America is called by it’s collective psyche to descend into the unknown, through the dissolution of the ego, it seems like America is doubling down on its Red Knight behaviour.

The Grail is not available

All spiritual and mythological texts reiterate again and again, the grail is not available to anyone, an individual person or a collective (such as America), until the Black Knight descent has been gone through. You cannot jump from Red Knight to Gold King, you have to go through the Black Knight stage.

And so this is why I say that America will not get the Grail (Gold King stage), because it denies the idea that a Black Knight descent stage is an option or even exists.

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It is sad because I feel a lot of people, like me, would like the American Dream to succeed and for the country to get through the Black Knight stage and claim the Gold King stage. The 4 stages are not the way I thought the American Dream would unfold but alas we are all subject to laws of nature and this timeless alchemical change process. America is no different. Without going through the Black Knight stage and a full ego surrender and letting go, we end up with shadow King behaviour. Instead of the Cosmic Order that the Gold King stage brings, we get the chaos of the shadow Kings which comes from their fear and paranoia, which we see in the media now.

I would welcome your thoughts and feelings on this. America is definitely currently in our consciousness and provides as many questions as it does answers. This is my offering into the mix.

For years I just worked away. Head down. University, work, travel, work.

Then came marriage, children, and work. I followed family and society’s assumptions and expectations to the letter. But of course this is ony a partial incomplete view of the world and it’s potential.

No one mentioned, through all this, that there was ‘a map’. No one mentioned that in life, I was on a journey, and there were developmental signposts, that would tell me at what stage I was at, and what was required of me at every stage.

Of course I crashed and burned. It’s like trying to get from on end of a country, to the other, without a satnav or a hardcopy map, or without being shown any signposts. What are the chances you will reach your destination? Few or none.

Through rebuilding my life all back again, and through the searching and searching, I found it. There is ‘a map’. And better still, it’s mythical.

Mythical is amazing because, not only does it give us a map and show us where we are on it, it also places us, as part of a larger story. A mythical story, which each and everyone of us lives. No exception. Mythical also allows us to explain and understand aspects of our lives that are beyond logic and are enormously helpful in those times in life when we find it impossible to make sense of what’s happening.

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This is exactly what happened to me in my life. I was working in computers but the logic I could use in work did not work at all in my life and relationships. I felt at sea.

Symbolic

And the mythic map is symbolic. Symbols connect to and activate our life-force giving us renewed energy for our lives. Normally when we have reached this point in life our energy is low and finding a source of vitality can be almost impossible. The symbolic nature of the mythical allows our ‘libido’ (our inner life-force) to be re-energised and where we can feel up for life again.

What is this map?

It is the mythical map about the journey of the Knights and the King. And we can all relate to it. We’ve read the books, seen the movies, and better still, it is very real in our psychology. Why do so many people follow the ‘Royals’? Our psyche is wired for this mythology. It is here where we will find our coordinates. Where we can come home to ourselves.

Thinking that you live mythically, also takes you out of your normal frame of reference, and allows you to open to aspects of yourself that you might not normally see.

The mythical Life Journey is of 3 Knights (White, Red and Black) and the Gold King. There aren’t definite ages for each stage, as it depends on your pace of development, but there are age ranges.

When you read below, relate it to your own life and where you are. Also relate the text to your whole life journey and all the experiences you have had up until now.

⚪ White Knight

First life stage. It’s when we are naive (i.e white) and we have limited knowledge of how the world works. We, however, as white knights, enjoy life in a way that is natural, happy and with a lot of vitality. For example, I would have spent hours on the riverbank when my father took us fishing, and I would be called back to our car, only when it got dark, and we had to head for home. White Knight can continue into our late 20’s depending on our environment.

🔴 Red Knight

Then, from being a White Knight, we move out into the world as Red Knights, a world full of choices;

- do I go to college?

- do I get married?

- where do I live?

- what will I work at?

- what do I want to be?

In our lives as Red Knight’s, with all these choices, life gets complex. We are constantly making choices and also afterwards we wonder if we made the right choice. Life becomes about relationships, work, mortgages, bills (slaying dragons!) and also about where can we fit in some fun if at all.

The Red Knight is about Doing, Doing, Doing.

At a certain point, however, life as a Red Knight becomes exhausting. It starts to ring hollow. Will there be just more choices, another dragon to slay . . . and you ask yourself - there must be more to life than all this complexity and constant doing? In my life, I ended up exhausted and suffering from depression.

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⚫ The Black Knight

The Black Knight arrives at this point, when the sword becomes too heavy, the battles too hollow, and the masks begin to crack. This is the descent, an initiatory passage into the underworld of the self. Here, we confront what we ran from: grief, shadow, futility, and fear.

This stage is not about our outward struggle, but by how we come to terms with it inside ourselves. The Black Knight undergoes a psychological and archetypal death, entering liminal space where old false identities dissolve. It’s an inner surrender. Inner Integration happens slowly, painfully and truthfully. This is not failure, it is sacred preparation for the next phase of growth.

In my life this Black Knight stage meant involuntary depression. I just couldn’t get off the couch. I would work, but I would be quickly exhausted. My doctor diagnosed depression, and said if something didn’t change in my life, I would need to go on medication - a big wake up call for me. I had to give time to surrender to the uncomfortableness of knowing that all the things I had built in my life were based on shaky foundations. I had ran off into life living what others expected of me (family and society). These things had to dissolve for me to come back into my life, as me and who I really was, with renewed strength and vigour.

👑 Gold King

From this Black Knight sacred descent, the Gold King arises, not through force, but through the emergence of presence.

The Gold King is not the next warrior, he is what remains when all knight identities have been burned away. He does not rule through dominance, but through presence, calm, magnetic, ordering.

The Gold King’s energy is not reactive, it is generative. He creates coherence in his domain because he himself is coherent. He is simply being fully who he is. His leadership in his life and relationships is not about action but about transmission. Because he is whole, his presence makes others feel safer, clearer, more whole.

He carries responsibility without grasping for control. He no longer performs, he radiates, just by being himself, fully. The Gold King is the embodiment of integration, returned from the void with nothing to prove and everything to offer.

The Gold King does not fight to be seen, he is seen because his being radiates coherence, wisdom, and the stillness that orders his realm. The journey is about uncovering the unlived parts you left behind to follow society’s expectations, and fully embodying who you truly are.

Important:

The Gold King knows all stages because he’s lived through all stages. He holds all stages within his being. It is this that gives him breadth and depth. His full direct life experience across all 4 stages. This is what his presence radiates. And he can access any stage in any moment. He might, during his day, need to call upon his white knight or his red knight, depending on the situation. He might need so deep reflective black knight time, and he is able to go there because he has lived and worked through black knight and all the stages. With this, he can hold a container for others to help them.

Summary

⚪ White Knight = Innocence

🔴 Red Knight = Assertion

⚫ Black Knight = Integration & Initiation (into the void)

👑 Gold King = Emergence of Presence

In-Balance or Out-of-Balance?

In each life stage we can be ‘in-balance’ or ‘out-of-balance’ with what is required in that stage. Obviously, without a map like this mythical one, we will have difficulty in being in balance, in any stage! That’s the reason I found myself depressed. I thought everything was going fine, until it wasn’t.

In the table below, I have put in some sentences to reflect what it feels like, in each stage, to be in-balance or out-of-balance. Take a look and see if you can get an initial sense of where you are, in the stages on the map. I’ve also included approximate ‘age-ranges’ to help.

Rites of Passage and Transformation

The life stages above, are known by Indigenous Peoples. They have rituals and initiation rites, to guide their people through the transformation needed in order to transition across each stage.

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In western culture, we don’t have anything like this. We think we do. We have ‘ceremonies’ which mark occasions, but cermonies are not rituals and do not provide transformation. For instance, a couple after a marriage ceremony could still feel they are single. Where is the actual transformation part? It’s not there. Ritual, on the other hand, makes things very conscious. You understand that real transformation is happening, and that you will be a different person after the transformation has taken place.

Without Rites of Passage and true Transformation, people can end up stuck and ‘developmentally arrested’ in an earlier stage. For example, a man in the Red Knight stage, can unconsciously resist the Black Knight descent, by getting a different partner, a faster car, a job involving more dragons to slay. This just delays his Black Knight stage, and this resistance causes more difficulties, like health issues or a health crisis.

Your psyche wants you to move from life stage to stage. It will ‘prompt’ you in lots of ways, to alert you that you are off track. We don’t normally listen. We don’t understand where we are on the map of life. Like my depression prompted to me. If I had known about the Mythic Map, and had a mentor/guide, I would have understood it and transitioned consciously.

Mentor/Guide

It’s not absolutely vital to have a mentor/guide. Remember though,

From reading this article, you will have more information and you will be more articulate about where you are in your life, but you won’t have transformed.

I would however recommend a mentor for 3 reasons:

1. The mentor will be ahead of you on the map, and so has knowledge that is invaluable. A nentor is like a ‘sherpa’ in Tibet, acting as a guide for climbers to get to the summit of Mount Everest. He is someone who has already made it up the mountain and understands the terrain. He understands the pitfalls, and also the shortcuts, saving you lots of time and unnecessary struggle. The journey is still your unique journey, but it can be made easier and more fun. Life doesn’t always have to be the ‘hard way’. Take the help. I didn’t, and it cost me. And then I had to go about it all ‘hit and miss’, spending more time, energy and money than I needed to. And that had unnecessary effects on my life and relationships.

2. The correct mentor will ensure you feel ‘seen’ in your mythical story. This is vital, as we need, for our sense of self, to be witnessed and mirrored in our story. This allows us to feel ‘whole’ and comlpete. Normally when we struggle, we fragment, we lose our center, we feel uncertain, and then the anxiety kicks in. We spiral downwards. It’s vital to gather the fragments and regain our ‘wholeness’. This can be achieved when we are fully ‘seen’ in our place, within our mythic story. Being ‘seen’ for who we truly are, grounds us in our own unique and meaningful story.

3. A mentor takes you through the transformation process needed for you to get to the next stage in the journey, be that Black Knight or Gold King.

   (Remember ‘Gold King’ is an archetypal energy that you have within you, it doesn’t mean you physically become a King in your life, although you could if you wished!).

   Transformation is not easy. You need someone who:

   • has already transformed themselves,

   • understands the dynamics of transformation, and

   • will hold a secure and safe space for you to go through the process and come out the other side in a structured purposeful fashion.

   

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   Mythic restoration.

   This is an archetypal framework; White Knight, Red Knight, Black Knight, and Gold King - where you find your place in the story you were always meant to be living.

   You’re not broken, you just haven’t lived the parts of you that you put aside to live family and society’s expectations.

   This isn’t just about healing your past, it’s about claiming your complete self in your life, not as a theory, but as something you embody.

   You’re not here to fit in, you’re here to live your unlived life in alignment with your mythic self.

   ✅ Mythic Mentoring (1:1) by Application only.

   If you feel called to take the journey of discovering your unlived life and claiming your inner Gold King, contact me. 📩 vincent.mcmahon@gmail.com ✅

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   If you know or are aware of someone who would benefit by knowing about this Map, share it with them:

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Our First Attention

Our ‘first attention’ is a hot property these days. Marketing and advertising use a term ‘sub-2s’, which targets the first 2 seconds of what we look at, as being critical for their purposes.

So on our mobile phones, in the first 2 seconds, we’re gone, we’ve been captured, because we want to find out more. Our curiousity gets the better of us, and we’ve been trapped by the initial visuals. Perfect. The technique works. Based on research into ‘glance time’ and ‘gaze metrics’, our first attention has been hijacked for the benefit of a profit metric in a news or social media company.

Actually they have got it down to the ‘0.5 second to the 2 second’ mark’. Within this window, our attention is captured and then continually captured within subsequent sub-2 second windows, until we’ve lost hours on our phones.

Companies vie for our attention. In doing so they use the tactics that not only grab our attention but also encode our memory. Yes, they want us to remember them and come back over and over again.

This ‘memory encoding’ can involve brief stories that imply causality or require a small inference which encourages “elaborative encoding”, such as where mobile phone users mentally fill in gaps, which strengthens memory. Advertisers compress narrative arcs into microstories, that still create an arc (hook > tension > payoff) to achieve deeper memory encoding. None of this is random.

The News - less facts but instead, amplified emotions.

It wouldn’t matter so much if the news was providing something of value, like the facts. But the news is not about facts, but our emotional experience, because that’s what gets engagement.

And it’s a strategy that is well known. Again the research shows us clearly what is happening. The research on social media manipulation (Nie et al.) suggests it’s not only news companies but platforms themselves, that systematically use emotion-driven algorithms.

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The Toltecs and the ‘First Attention’

The Toltecs were a Nahuatl-speaking tribe who held sway over what is now central Mexico from the 10th to the 12th century CE. They lived in Mexico before the Aztecs.

The incredible wisdom of the Toltecs has been passed down through the ages. It’s amazing for me to know that they saw a priority of our psychological and spiritual development being the ‘First Attention’. Our First Attention is formed by our life history, our cultural programming, and our habits. It creates a consistent “island” of perception. This conditioning explains why the same stimuli continue to capture our attention.

The Toltecs wanted us to stay conscious of how our First Attention gets hijacked, and takes all our energy. They wanted us not to give our energy to the first attention and conserve our energy. This includes not allowing our energy to be drained by people who are unconsciously caught in their own ‘First Attention’.

For the Toltecs, our power existed outside the First Attention. Caught solely in the First Attention, we can’t access our Power, the Power that always awaits us.

The Toltecs wanted us to make space for our Second Attention experiences of life (the more magical and imaginative parts) to be more accessible.

It’s incredible that a thousand years later, this First Attention wisdom is even more relevant.

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Wanting to Share!

One of the interesting aspects of our first attention, is that when we see something that amplifies our emotions, we want to share it with anyone and everyone that will listen to us. We feel so activated by what we’ve seen, we just have to share it. A doctor friend of mine recently told me about so many of his patients that come into his clinic asking “Have you seen this on the news?”. He’s obviously interested in his patients, but not interested in these emotionally charged re-telling of the messaging on the news.

It’s as if we have been so activated by what we’ve seen (obviously the success of the neurological advertising techniques), that we can’t hold it all inside ourselves, and have to get it out someway.

Fast and Slow Thinking

Daniel Kahneman, in his book ‘Thinking , Fast and Slow’, warned against ‘fast’ reactive thinking, where we go off based on our initial impulses. He found even judges were guilty of this (pun intended!). He put forward the idea of ‘slow thinking’, where we breathe and give ourselves time to reflect and look at other options and perspectives. Slow reflection gives us time for embodied understanding of the subject matter.

While on our phones, in this ‘fast’ thinking frame, we also connect in with other people who are in that ‘fast’ thinking frame, and together support each other in amplifying it all to another level. In supporting each other in ‘fast’ reactive thinking without reflection, or time to comprehend fully the matter at hand.

Plato’s Cave of Shadows.

Over 2,000 years ago, Plato put forward his idea of a cave where he said, the majority of people live. They are caught up with the shadows on the walls in front of them. They are captivated by these shadows. They can’t see anything else except for these shadows and cannot imagine that another, better world exists outside of the cave. And yet the shadows are being ‘constructed’ by the characters on the other side of the wall (look closely at the details in the image).

Looking at the news and constant Social Media feeds, we are like the people caught staring at the shadows on the walls, not seeing another way of life is available, and so close to us. It’s quite stark and poignant.

And we cannot speak to the people caught in the ‘shadows’. They are so engrossed with what they are watching, it would be a huge shock to them, to disturb them from their trance state. It’s a sad state. A beautiful world exists above the cave, and they cannot begin to be pulled away from their fascination with the shadows they see immedately in front of them.

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Our Modern ‘First Attention’ Cave

In neuroscience terms, our Reticular Activating System (RAS) has been hijacked by these online images. Our RAS is visual (i.e. reticular), and it’s connected to deep in our brain stem. It’s primal, and it operates on what is important in our immediate surroundings. In our evolution, this would have been a spear, a tiger, or food. Our RAS would prioritise these things, and look out for more of them, anywhere it could see them. What happens our phones, is our RAS is prioritising visuals of news stories as important (it doesn’t know the difference, it’s continually told these images are important). So online, in these initial 2 seconds, we’re activated in a primal way, by these images. It’s very powerful, and should not be used the way its being used, as we’ve seen in the research above. And there are health issues associated with watching constant amplified news content.

Physiological and Health issues

Exposure to anxiety and fear-inducing TV or social media content (news loops, trauma visuals, sensationalised coverage) causes:

• Repeated adrenaline (epinephrine) and norepinephrine surges with elevated heart rate, blood pressure, and hypervigilance.

• Elevated pro-inflammatory cytokines leading to fatigue, mood disturbances, cognitive impairment, and increased risk for cardiometabolic disease.

• Potentiation of fear and anxiety circuits, impaired fear extinction, and stronger encoding of traumatic imagery.

• Reduced capacity to recover from the stress, you are looking at biochemical cascades: Viewing images > hormones > immune system > brain.

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The Choice

It all comes down to choice. What do you want in your life. And it’s all about balance. I’m not saying don’t use mobile phones. The main point is to remain conscious. Remain conscious in what you are watching and what you are programming your RAS with. I’ve written about the RAS on my Substack here and here.

And always remember, another way of being awaits you outside the ‘cave’!

(1) Media and Communication Research (2024) https://www.clausiuspress.com/assets/default/article/2024/01/30/article_1706604495.pdf

(2) The Psychological Mechanisms and Legal Regulation of Information Manipulation on Social Media (2025)

https://www.ewadirect.com/proceedings/lnep/article/view/27539

When projects are flat, dead and lack any meaning, what can you do?

It’s even hard to get people to attend project meetings, right? All the parts seem to be there but there’s no energy, no uplift, it seems a long way to project completion.

Metrics and dashboards don’t motivate, they just seem to add to the tension and stress and so it’s obvious we get the following showing up in the research:

“Agile teams experience chronic cognitive load due to constant context switching and lack of psychological recovery rituals.” (1)

“Teams that lack psychological safety underperform, regardless of technical ability.” (2)

“Organizations struggle with agile transformation due to cultural fatigue and lack of long-term mindset shift.” (3)

The Core Problem

The problem is you have got lost in a literal world of text, numbers and charts. A literal world would never get anyone out of bed to achieve it. Maybe the first project stage, but not the second or third and definitely not to get it over the line with the potential value that is available to attain. Numbers, text and metrics, over time drive us into the ground.

The Clear Solution

Across millennia, what has always uplifted people and drawn them forward towards something? - Symbols! Symbols inspire us. They connect directly to our inner life force. We get energy for our life from them. We feel uplifted after engaging with them.

“For symbols are not merely representational forms which serve our cognition, but rather they are highly potent powers. This becomes clear at once when we consider what effects symbols can produce, as for instance flags, with their symbolic signs - the cross or the crescent - what world-shaking deeds are connected with these!”

- G. R. Heyer

You can feel the power and potency in symbols in the quotes above. Carl Jung understood the power of symbols to access our life-force (our libido):

“The psyche creates symbols as a means of bringing into consciousness an attitude that is no longer adequate... The symbol acts as a transformer, converting libido from a ‘lower’ to a ‘higher’ form.”

- Carl Jung, Symbols of Transformation.

Organisationally then, how do we use the obvious power of symbols?

What I’ve developed, Deep Agility™ uses the power of symbols and at their highest level, the mythic.

“In every transformation process, the mythic dimension becomes more powerful as the rational structures begin to dissolve.”

- John D. Adams in Transforming Leadership (1984)

I’m inviting you into a different field of awareness. One where agility in projects doesn’t have to collapse into velocity and burnout, but can become a container for transformation, not just at the individual or team level, but at the mythic. Velocity without the meaning and vitality gained through symbol and myth, leads to burnout.

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The table below relates to Agile projects however Deep Agility works not just in the Agile sphere but is relevant to all projects.

Deep Agility™ is a 4 stage mythic process which embeds the symbolic into the project process to provide rhythm, depth and meaning. In this way it;

• increases engagement,

• gives individuals and teams a sense of purpose,

• provides a container for psycholical safety

• directly addresses cultural fatigue

• engenders a long-term mindset

All the things you naturally want in your project teams.

In the next post I will go into more details about the 4 stages, alternatively if you now understand that this is what you are missing in your organisation, and your projects, please contact me directly on vincent.mcmahon@gmail.com.

End notes

(1) Forsgren et al. (2021), DORA State of DevOps Report

(2) Google’s Project Aristotle (2015)

(3) McKinsey (2020), “The Agile Imperative”

The scale of what’s happening at the moment can only be described in mythical terms. In the american stock markets, Michael Burry placed a $1.1billion bet against AI stocks. Yes, one person placing a bet of over a billion dollars!

In our personal psychology this event is too big to comprehend. This is why, in past times, we had mythology. Mythology allowed us to come to terms with, and give form to, things that were beyond our grasp as humans. This Michael Burry bet is one of those occurrences.

Making the Gods human

What we’ve done over the centuries is discarded the Gods, and focused simply on the human. The shelves in this souvenir shop in Paestum, southern Italy, show this perfectly. The Gods have been relegated to the lower shelf, and the celebrities (footballers, singers, politicians) now get the top shelf. This is what has happened in our collective consciousness. Yet we can only imagine as high as our ‘ceiling’ goes. If our ‘ceiling’ only goes as far as human celebrities, we find it really difficult to comprehend anything that would be above that, like the Burry billion bet.

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The Symbolic

The symbolic is where we get life force and meaning from. The world is flat, literal and dead without the symbolic. Carl Jung wrote:

“The psyche creates symbols as a means of bringing into consciousness an attitude that is no longer adequate... The symbol acts as a transformer, converting libido from a ‘lower’ to a ‘higher’ form.”

- Carl Jung, Symbols of Transformation.

The highest form of symbolic representation is the Mythic. We always knew this. The greek gods, for example, could amplify all the possible combinations of what was possible, and the interactions (good and bad) could all be enacted and worked out in the mythic realm for us to understand. Huge wisdom and learning existed in this mythic realm to guide our lives and leadership.

The Gods in Business

Charles Handy knew the importance of Myth in understading the symbolic realm, and brought this awareness to bear in his organistational development book ‘The Gods of Management’.

Handy saw 4 cultures of leadership reflected in 4 greek gods; Zeus, Apollo, Athena and Dionysus. Each God had a type of organisational culture associated with it. He wrote about the benefits but also the shadow sides of each of these Gods.

Zeus - Club

Apollo - Role

Athena - Task

Dionysus - Existential

Handy’s book helped a lot of leaders make sense of human behaviour in organisations because it represented it in symbolic terms, mythically, which makes it much easier for us to relate to and discuss. A lot of times we say we cannot talk about something, or find it difficult to discuss something, and yet if we can describe it symbolically, or mythically, all of a sudden, our ability to describe flows much easier. This is because symbols and myths, like stories, are wired deep in our psyche.

The Mythic Cycles

Giambattista Vico, the italian philosopher (1668 -1744), wrote about the development stages humans go through, the mythic cycles. I wasn’t aware of Vico until I moved to live in southern Italy. He was a native of Naples.

He saw 3 stages of human development;

• Age of the Gods (divine): Mythic, poetic consciousness; institutions are founded on divine authority, metaphor rules language, rites and symbolic speech explain the world. (sacred, imaginative laws and origins in auspices/oracles).

• Age of the Heroes (heroic/aristocratic): A period of aristocratic institutions, heroic government, law rooted in status and honour, where legal-ritual languages organise social hierarchies.

• Age of Men (human / reflective): Rise of popular institutions, rational discourse, “reflection”. Eventually ending in the “Barbarism of reflection” when reflective reason undermines poetic bonds and the cycle breaks down into decadence before restarting (ricorso).

Vico’s work was so brilliant that it even influenced Irish writer, James Joyce in his writing of ‘Finnegan’s Wake. Joyce said:

“I don’t believe in any science, but my imagination grows when I read Vico as it doesn’t when I read Freud or Jung.”

- James Joyce

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Giambattista Vico saw the 3 stages repeating (Gods > Heroes > Men > Gods). We are now at the end of the ‘Age of Men’ and are beginning to transition back into the ‘Age of the Gods’. This is why we find the things that are happening on a human level so difficult to explain in human terms.

Vico also added a additional mini-stage which he felt the 3rd stage ‘The Age of Men’ can descend into - the ‘Barbarism of reflection’. Vico felt that ‘reflective barbarians’ were worse than primitive barbarians, because their malicious cunning is socially corrosive.

He saw 3 things occurring at this advanced stage:

1. People think primarily in isolated, analytic categories rather than in communal, poetic, or metaphorical frames. Reason becomes hyper-intellectualized and self-enclosed, and in this it isolates people from the “common sense” that used to bind social life.

2. The earlier “poetic wisdom” (found in metaphors, rites, sacred language) that once knitted society together is eroded. Language becomes technical and literal rather than poetic and sacred.

3. Fragmentation of shared symbolic life (family, religion, civil society). Social solidarity dissolves. The previous shared myths then become filled by niche mythologies; brand cults, online tribes, hyper-partisan narratives.

And so the very tools of reason gained in the Enlightenment can, if left without imaginative or ritual counterweights, produce social fragmentation and crisis.

Vico put the essence of the ‘Barbarism of reflection’ clearly when he wrote:

“For such peoples, like so many beasts, have fallen into the custom of each man thinking only of his own private interests and have reached the extreme of delicacy, or better of pride, in which like wild animals they bristle and lash out at the slightest displeasure. …”

- (Bergin & Fisch translation, The New Science)

His quote above sounds to me a lot like social media and today’s cancel culture.

We can see clearly how in this way some form of mythic reordering is needed.

And so we are in the tension of a transition period from the Age of Men back to the Age of Gods. The task is not to lose reason but to re-embed reason inside imaginative, ritual and communal practices so that reflection regains its social foundations and grounding. This would be a move away from the literal and hyper-intellectualized to the return of creative imagination and the higher noble virtues of the Gods; beauty, truth and goodness. This could begin to bring people back together and slowly regain trust in society.

A Return to the Mythic

The main image at the top is the mythical fall of Icarus, as he flew too close to the Sun and his feathers were burned. As I wrote at the start, the Michael Burry $1.1billion bet points to a mythical moment, is it what happens when we as humans try to be Gods without understanding the stage we’re at? We’re still in the Age of Men, albeit the ‘barbarism of reflection’ part, so we need to be conscious. It is a mythical moment, let’s go through it consciously.

The Gods have always been there, we merely lost connection to them. We need to consciously re-connect, if not to the Gods, to what they stood for, our higher ordinances of love and compassion.

I had this conversation with friends recently, and it seemed outrageous to put forward that ‘Trump, Climate Change & Gaza’ were not important. And yet by the end of the conversation we all agreed this was the case and went on to discuss what in fact, was important.

In this post I will relay the contents of the discussion so you can come to your own conclusions.

What is important?

We are told in the news media (TV and social media), what is to be given importance in terms of news. In this regard we rely on editors to decide what is important.

In our evolution, what would be salient or important would be much simpler. Seeing a lion coming out of the forest, or a spear heading towards us would be important. And it is these much simpler things, that our neuroscience, over the millennia has developed for.

In our brain structure, when we see a lion, we search our visual landscape to see if there are more lions (or more spears!). Once something is highighted as ‘important’, we are primed to watch out keenly, to see if there are more of these ‘important’ items in our environment. We are so alerted by our brains, that we even begin to think we see them, even where there are none. “Is that a lion there?”, “Was that another spear?”

The RAS (Reticular Activating System)

In technical terms, we have a Reticular Activating System in our brain, which prioritises what is important. We see a lion and our RAS says, ‘This is important!’.

Then our RAS sends this information to our Pre-Frontal Cortex (PFC), where we strategise and watch out for, what the RAS says was important. Are there more lions, more spears?

The RAS and the PFC are vital for keeping us alerted to what is in our surrounding environment. The majority of the time we just get on with our lives, because a lot of the time there aren’t many important things to keep us on this hight alert.

Today’s world

Zoom forward to today’s world and our phone or TV is visually showing us constant images, and telling us they are important. Trump is doing this or that, climate disasters in far off places, explosions on Gaza, all these things are to be treated by us was if they were as important as lions or spears.

It’s impossible.

What happens to us? We go into anxiety and overwhelm.

We’re not designed for continual stressful images.

The research shows that ‘Repeated stress perception’ leads to hypervigilance, elevated heart rate, blood pressure, impaired immune function, and increased anxiety vulnerability.

Repeated consumption of traumatic imagery biases attention toward threat, increases negative interpretation bias, increases catastrophic forecasting (worry), and narrows working memory capacity—producing functional impairment in concentration and decision-making.

What is the alternative?

The alternative is, you taking back your agency and prioritising what is important for you. In otherwords, you can program your own RAS for what you feel is important, so that your Pre-Frontal Cortex strategises to see more of that in your environment.

For me I want more joy, love and abundance in my surrounding environment and so I have been re-programming my RAS for these things, including seeing them even where they aren’t even there, it’s quite amazing!

A world according to your preferences

I was telling a friend about the ability to re-program your own RAS, and she said:

And this is exactly how programming your RAS works. You only watch what you want to watch, either on a screen or off it. You have to be disciplined. Your RAS is already programmed for other content, and you will initially find yourself missing it. It’s all about discipline and consistency.

First Step

Work out what is important to you. What do you want to see in your life and what do you want more of? Then focus on that, and only that.

Will I be missing out on the news?

People feel if they are not constantly watching or being updated on the news, they are missing out on something. Let me tell you a story.

I stayed in the highland mountains of Peru with Mystic, Don Americo Yabar and was blessed to have some quiet time with him. I told him that it was incredible to be so far up into the Peruvian mountains, that the people here didn’t know who George Bush was (the then President of America). To my astonishment, Don Americo replied:

And so it is, they simply get on with their lives. Governments come and go, and they live as they always have. Their RAS’s have not been programmed for continual threat and alert, or the happenings in far off places. Their RAS’s have been programmed for living quiet, peaceful lives in harmony with their surroundings.

Remember the title of the post - ‘Trump, Climate Change & Gaza are not important’. It’s not that they’re not important to the people in these places, of course they are. But to us, the continual visual overwhelm of visuals telling us they are all important, paralyses us into inaction, and does not help anyone.

Your Choice?

So what will you choose? It is always your choice, the main thing to do is make it consciously. When we are on our phones or watching television, we are unconsciously allowing someone else to program our RAS (to tell us what is important and to watch out for more of this). If you want this to be your RAS programming then that is fine, choose it consciously.

I want there to be more joy, love and abundance in the world and so I start with myself and programming my RAS to see these as important and to see more of these in my environment and in my world.

Will you choose to prioritise generosity, belonging or something else instead?

Let me know, I’d love to hear what you feel is important in today’s world.

AI is asking ‘Who Are you Becoming?’

It’s actually been programmed to do this.

It’s not just AI, it feels like the world is asking this too, AI is just a mirror of this.

In true cultures there are ‘rites of passage’ to mark the stages of life however, in between, there is a pause, where you are living, being, belonging, being enough as you are. Then later on in life the next stage comes, and there is a another rite of passage for that stage. In these societies there is a large amount of time where you just get on with your life, fully enjoying the stage you are in. In these true cultures, you are not continually asked to ‘become’, you are spending the majority of your time, just ‘being’, being yourself, at whatever life stage you are at.

We in our ‘pseudoculture’ (I’ve written about it here), flatten the stages of life into one endless productivity cycle. We fear endings, death, darkness, descent - which are all part of the essence of transformation to a new way of being.

Without proper ‘rites of passage’ and real transformation we end up chronically disoriented, and in an endless consumption cycle of therapy, self-help, brands, ideologies and content. An inner voice saying “Maybe this is finally the thing that will complete me!”.

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The ‘Empty Self’

The modern western self has been stripped of:

• Sacred stories

• Communal rituals (mythic containers)

• Connection to ancestors, land, soul

• Guidance through life’s transitions

Philip Cushman described an ‘Empty Self’, that came as a direct product of postwar consumer capitalism, that had dismantled deep culture and replaced it with choice, individualism, and product branding.

This is why the “Who you are becoming?” frame is so effective in marketing terms. It mimics the mythic arc that the empty self unconsciously craves through initiation, belonging, purpose, evolution. We crave a true culture and true ‘rites of passage’.

AI in it’s ‘Who are you Becoming?’ mirrors, just close enough, to the soul’s yearning, enough to trick us. Yet it can never lead us into the true transformation our deep longing truly seeks.

Vulnerable

We are so vulnerable as the Empty Self, we are highly susceptible to external direction. Because our own traditions, sacred stories and rituals were culturally removed from us, we lack internal narrative authority (our own inner guidance). Because of this, we can easily hand the steering wheel over to anything that sounds like meaning. We experience a temporary relief, but because it’s counterfeit, we quickly move on to the next thing, to try to fill the huge hole in the ‘empty self’. But it never gets filled.

And AI is the ultimate relational mirror. It makes it all seem and sound so easy:

AI:

• Reflects without friction

• Affirms without mystery

• Responds without rupture

• Guides without depth

Yet what it’s doing is mirroring the ‘gap’ in us. The large hole.

It keeps offering more reflections of this ‘gap’ but what we truly need is initiation, grief, mystery and a return to the body (and presence). Proper rites of passage but at appropriate stages of our life and not continual.

Because AI doesn’t know transformation, it shows us pattern and reflection. Instead of what we get in rites of passage which is presence and recognition. Can you feel the difference?

Counterfeit Transformation

AI speaks the language of transformation in a counterfeit way because it provides none of transformation’s depth, risk or arrival. It lacks the myth, ritual and soul that gives transformation it’s substance.

Sacred Space

Indigenous People would say that during ritual (sacred space), it is the only time they feel real. The rest of the time they get on with their lives, working away and spending time with their families. This is a powerful way to understand the difference between Sacred space and Mundane space. The majority of our lives are spent in mundane space, in some ways it feels monotonous and very little different happens each day. Sacred space, on the other hand, is where we partake in ritual, and are seen by the universe (presence and recognition). In indigenous cultures, the rituals would be danced and sung, and we would be immersed in symbols of meaning. With scents, sounds and smells, you would transcend your normal mundane existence and have your being renewed and revitalised. You would then bring this new vitality back into your normal life.

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Many of these rituals involved fire ceremonies, which are powerful ways for transforming energies. You can blow your fears and blocks into ‘prayer sticks’ and throw them into the fire, where they are transmuted into something new and fresh. For millennia we have been doing rituals like this, and involving transformational storytelling all around fires, embedded in traditions and community. Our psyche is well aware of this, and yearns for it now. We cannot go back, we know that, but we can go forward, knowing the ingredients we need and bringing new life to them.

The Way Through

First, as always, the main thing is to stay Conscious. These yearnings for transformation and rites of passage are unconscious and if we don’t stay conscious we can fall prey to them.

Secondly, understand that what you are yearning for are natural tendencies for the psyche to transform. Like the image above, while we are on a computer or on our phone our psyche remembers the fire ceremony and ritual that is true transformation. Find a facilitator of true transformation that:

• Understands the dynamics of transformation

• Holds a safe space

• Can steward and curate Sacred Space

• Will help you to understand the boon/gift you will bring back to society

True Transformation

With true transformation you will feel the universe inside you saying:

“You are now here. This is what it means. You belong.”

This is hugely different from the continual ‘who are you becoming’ message of AI and marketing. Can you feel the difference? It’s like a large exhale of breath.

After transformation we feel grounded in the root of our being where myth, memory, dream, and love move in ways that defy linear language, but are steeped in mystery.

We get on with living our lives renewed and revitalised.

Let go of the constant need to become

What if you let go of the feeling that you constantly need to become the next version?

What if you just lived your life from understanding that, in this moment, you are in the right place. And yes, if you need a rite of passage then do one, but in the knowledge that it is a short process, where afterwards you will come back to joyfully living life again each day and enjoying it, without the added stress of this ‘constant becoming’.

We’ve lived joyfully like this for millennia!

Let me know.

Let me know if this resonates with you. What is your take on the current constant need to become? I’d love to hear from you.

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We have projected Spirit out into the sky as a deity or God. But what if Spirit is in everything we see.

What if every cell, every atom, every element is infused with Spirit?

(And everyone can have different names for ‘Spirit’, it’s just the name I use, and that feels good for me.)

Kitchen vegetable off-cuts

The above photo is from our flower garden, which is jam-packed with flowers and the soil comes from vegetable off-cuts from our kitchen. Now, how do you get such a Garden of Eden from the vegetable off cuts? For me, it has to be because Spirit is involved in a transformation process. Apple peels, banana skins, potato skins, carrot peelings, all break down yes, but what rises up is a panoply of exquisite flowers. Lots of them self seed in the rich composted matter that the rotting vegetable off cuts dissolved into. Then the magic happens. In spring, rising up from the soil, are the vitality enfused shoots. All orchestrated by Spirit.

Goat and sheep manure

Away from the flower garden and outside the village is our vegetable garden. It runs on goat and sheep manure from a local goat farmer. This manure, combined with sun and water, is still not enough to produce the transformation into the glorious rhubarb shoots you see in the photo above. The missing ingredient, Spirit.

Something, that is way beyond our capacity to understand, occurs between all these ingredients. Can we even begin to think of the processes involved in getting from goat and sheep manure to the rhubarb flavour in the delicious tart my wife bakes? There is a transformation, an alchemical process, that happens effortlessly in the garden. Ingredients that seem hard to connect, become vital to the process, and the joy of seeing shoots coming out of the ground in late spring simply adds to the magic.

If you asked scientists to get rhubarb from goat and sheep manure, where would they even start?

And it’s not just rhubarb, the vegetables below are all part of the harvest. Goat, sheep manure and yes you guessed, Spirit.

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Spirit’s Presence

It has been during the actual growing of flowers and vegetables, that I have been able to see Spirit’s vital presence. It becomes obvious that Spirit is present in the water, in the rays of the sun, in the insects that pollinate. It all seems full of this vitality. Not just alive, but activated by Spirit.

And it’s purposeful. When I see a vine tendrils winding their way around a branch, I know there is purpose behind their endeavour.

We can try and logic it out, but for me the climber is as purposeful as the microbes in the goat and sheep manure, all involved in the life imperative, Spirit’s ‘modus operandi’.

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You begin to see the pattern everywhere. Spirit leaves ‘breadcrumbs’ for us to clearly see it’s presence. The results are there, yet the basic ingredients are not enough without the added Spirit presence. It’s like the team is not at full strength without Spirit there, and Spirit is always there even when I feel it’s not.

A God above and Dominion below

This vital Spirit presence that I feel everywhere, is very different from the distant God in the sky religious concept that I was raised with in Ireland. I always felt the catholic God made the earth, but wasn’t ‘in it’. He gave us dominion over it. It all seemed quite controlling. When I spent hours on the riverbank as a child, with my father and brothers fishing, I always felt I was part of a loving, benevolent, nurturing nature blanket. I couldn’t understand why the church, and it’s teachings, were so separate from this natural world. It was only when I stayed with a tribe in the highland rainforests, that I understood a different point of view was possible. A point of view that had a deep reverence to the natural world, and also felt themselves to be an integral harmonious part of it.

To actually experience this first hand was very special. I didn’t read about it, I felt how they lived this way, by living with them. Not for very long, but enough to get a sense of the difference, and to see the sacred balance that was lived by them every day. It’s not utopia by any means, but it is connected to spirit and rooted in the earth.

A moment

Recently, I had a moment in the vegetable garden where I was sitting having a rest after planting potatoes. I felt I could see Spirit in all the things, in the soil, the stones, the dead leaves, the insects, the wind. It was almost overwhelming to feel such a full presence, but the vitality was all there in practical evidence in everything around me. All the cycles were visible, from new shoots, to fruit, to detritus and on to renewal. All showing a continual momentum of purpose, which can only be another force, which I feel is Spirit. I’ve tried to keep that feeling with me, as I go about my day at my desk or out in the world.

A genuine ask

I know it’s quite subjective, but let me know how this reflects your own experience, and does it make sense to you? I think it’s amazing that this experience is available anywhere (as someone who has travelled to many far off places in search of it!), and I would love to hear about the various ways people connect to Spirit directly.

Do you feel Spirit is in everything, including the dust?

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The human face possesses around 30 muscles on each side, together are capable of making more than 10,000 unique and identifiable facial expressions1

On our phones we communicate this richness through 96 emojis. This equates to .96% of our expressions. We feel we are getting across how we ‘feel’ but really we’re just messing. This wouldn’t be a problem except this is a lot of how we communicate with each other now. It’s all been dumbed down.

Of course robots will stand a chance if there’s only 96 emojis but with a rich 10,000?

Language - Thin and Thick Descriptions

Gilbert Ryle, a philosopher and philosopher of language had an incredible insight into the different types of language. In summary, a thin description simply describes what happened, the thick description describes the nuances and depth of meaning of what happened.

Twitch or Wink?

Ryle’s perfect examples was as follows:

Consider, he says, two boys rapidly contracting the eyelids of their right eyes. In one, this in an involuntary twitch; in the other, a conspiratorial signal to a friend. The two movements are, as movements, identical; from an I-am-a-camera, “phenomenalistic” observation of them alone, one could not tell which was twitch and which was wink, or indeed whether both or either was twitch or wink. Yet the difference, however unphotographable, between a twitch and a wink is vast; as anyone unfortunate to have the first taken for the second knows. The winker is communicating in a precise and special way: (1) deliberately, (2) to someone in particular, (3) to impart a particular message, (4) according to a socially established code, (5) without cognizance of the rest of the company…… a speck of behaviour, a fleck of culture, and voilá! - a gesture!³

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As humans we can tell the difference. It can be culturally specific, but within our own culture we will know. And so using language to describe what happened will differ greatly.

It’s obvious that AI will not be able to understand the nuances present in a ‘thick description’ and will work very readily with only a ‘thin description’.

The 2 Dimensions of Instagram, Tik Tok and Facebook

When we look at a screen on our phone, it’s only 2-dimensions (height and width). It’s not even 3-dimensions (height, width and depth). So as only 2 dimensions, it’s very limited in what we see. Landscapes, flowers, pretty much anything in nature will be very flat in 2-dimensions. It’s one of the reasons these apps provide so many filters to enhance the 2-dimensions. And this also applies to videos, still all 2-dimensions, all very flat. Moving images, yes, but still a dull 2-dimensions.

Nature - 11 Dimensions!

We know, from science, that nature and reality is 11 dimensions2 and intuitively we know there’s a lot going on because we experience it directly, through our senses of touch, taste, hearing, knowing etc.

Also, for me, we experience it in an extra sensing capability, where we can feel the love of someone for us, or on a football pitch we can feel the unique bonding of a team. There are many dimensions of experience that we are not always conscious of, but they are there, and they are what gives the world its richness.

We can feel where a piece of art or a place has soul. Psychologist James Hillman wrote consistently on this theme;

"Not only animals and plants ensouled as in the Romantic vision, but soul is given with each thing, God-given things of nature and man-made things of the street."

We experience this type of soul deeply within us. Can this be another dimension of experience. I feel this is true as I have experienced it myself, in my own life.

What is ‘the nature’?

When I stayed with a tribe in the highland rainforests of West Papua, my close friend there could not understand when I spoke of' ‘nature’ as like it was something separate from me. He just could not come to terms with why I would have a word for it. For them, they are nature, they can’t comprehend it needing or involving a different term.

This gives you some idea of how they have an 11 dimensional experience of nature, bacause they are it, fully immersed in all it’s supportive interconnectedness. It’s a full minute by minute sensorial experience.

And their brains are structured for interconnection. Physicist, David Peat, discovered that First Nations people were able to speak ‘process’, they lived fully interconnected with their environment and their language and brain structure reflected that.

We, in the west, on the other hand live separate from nature and our brain structures are formed for linear functioning, not interconnected process. When you understand this, it explains a lot of our problems in our use of the environment as a utility and resource. It takes a lot for us to surrender to a full immersive interconnected 11 dimensional experience with nature. We are very limited in our brain structure but with brain plasticity, our brain changes and new capillaries form with new experiences.

First is awareness of the limitations of our ‘tech’ experience and then spending time to expand our experience out beyond these limitations. Huge benefits come from this expanded experience and we begin to remember that we had elements of this experience as a tiny child.

Tiny babies really give themselves to the 10,000 facial expressions and experiencing the world as fully as possible. They don’t tech for this full spectrum vitality.

It’s not for us learning new things but a remembrance.

All Indigenous People’s cosmologies put you in the centre.

It maybe the centre of 4 directions, or 4 winds, or 4 quarters, but you will be there in the centre.

There will also be a vertical axis connecting you to the Sky (Stars, galaxies, cosmos) and down to the Earth.

Coordinates

In this way you will always feel you belong. You will not just know your ‘coordinates’ and place in the cosmos, you will also feel it. It’s not a theory, belonging in this sense is a felt experience.

The Centre of the Circle

John Weir Perry, the american clinical psychologist, worked in California with psychotic patients and discovered through listening and being curious about their inner visions, there was an amazing consistency to them. When his clients drew images, they were circles or quadrated circles, and they saw themselves in the centre. You can see some of these images on the cover of one of Perry’s books below.

Sacral Kings

Perry was able, through his historical research, to track what his clients were sharing during their psychotic episodes, and it was based on the idea of ‘Sacral Kingship’.

“I stumbled upon the myth and ritual of the archaic kingship and recognized it, again to my astonishment, the close parallels to the inner process of acute psychosis.” - John Weir Perry

And what he found within archaic kingship, was an image of the cosmos similar to what Indigenous Peoples use in their medicine circles.

“This inner world of the psychotic does not look like the one we know outwardly, but it is recognizable as a view of the cosmos familiar in myth and ritual forms since ancient times. For it is a world in which there is a center, a cosmic axis running through and connecting the human world with the Sky World and the Underworld.” - John Weir Perry

It would seem in times of deep psychological distress or psychosis, we dig into the foundations of our psyche, and find an orderly benevolent worldview on which to renew ourselves with and from. The Sacral Kings were just that.

And more.

Centre of the Circle

In the midst of the current world uncertainty, anxiety and distress, we could find our own truth and regain our agency at centre of the circle. From this we would be able to operate from the solid foundation of our own inner wisdom, located inside ourselves.

How is this all possible for a human?

It all might seem too far-fetched to feel that as humans, we could be the centre of the cosmos, and yet this is the case.

If we think back millennia ago, in the western world, we had the Greek gods occupying a canopy of archetypes, Zeus, Apollo, Demeter etc. in the skies above. Other cultures had their deities. Christianity had its God in the heavens. We lived for centuries guided by these external authorities outside of us.

Then there came a point where we took all this external authority and energy down into our own psyche. What’s astonishing is there is an actual date put forward for when this happened – 1500 A.D.

Edward Edinger, a Jungian analyst in his ‘Myth for Modern Man’ describes what occurred:

‘About 1500A.D. the God-image (archetype) fell out of heaven into the human psyche. In other words: it was withdrawn from metaphysical projection and became available for direct conscious experience’.

The taking down of this enormous amount of psychic energy into our own individual psyche had a huge effect. It generated an enormous burst in creativity and imagination which went across art, music, astronomy, engineering and literature in the years after it, giving us the ‘Renaissance’. Renaissance means ‘re-birth’.

And so from this point, all the external gods existed in our own psyche. We became the gods, even though it was unconscious. Today, as gods, we have the power to destroy the planet. Now, unlike previous times in history, we also have at our disposal huge machinery and technology to use at the behest of this new found inner authority.

The Cosmology of Renewal

The images drawn by Perry’s psychotic patients might seem simple but the psychological process behind them draws clear parallels to Indigenous rituals. For the psychotic patient ‘the process emerges as the psyche’s own way of dissolving old states of being, and of creatively bringing to birth its new starts - its own way of forming visions of a renewed self and of a design of life with revivified meanings in one’s world’1

Clear parallels can be see from the Navajo ‘Sand Paintings’ which are used dynamically for a process of deep healing and renewal.

The theme of finding order and renewal is consistent in what we use these images for, either internally or externally in sand. (Note: The Navajo sand paintings are a harmonisation of external and internal cosmologies).

You’re being narcissistic!

There’s a voice that comes in when we see ourselves as the centre of the world, let alone the cosmos. We feel we’re being narcissistic. We really need to shut this voice off. If we look at tiny babies, the burp, smile and fart, while all around them are gooey eyed with love and adoration for their pure sense of naturalness. They are shamelessly exhibiting our natural grandiosity. Then as we grow, our environment puts on limitations.

Therefore, we are actually born with our natural grandiosity intact, it is our surrounding environment that clips us down, as psychologist Eric Berne wrote;

“People are born princes and princesses, until their parents turn them into frogs”.

Tall Poppy Syndrome

Society also can be against us shining our natural grandiosity too strongly. In Australia there is what’s referred to as ‘tall poppy syndrome’. This is when someone gets ‘too big for their boots’ and rises above the masses, and they need to be taken down a notch or two. Shining your light is not seen as a good thing in Australian culture in this regard.

Know you are the Centre

From psychotic patients to Indigenous Peoples finding a healing restful, loving centre within themselves, is available to us. In our current time of uncertainty, an orderly place of rest and renewal therefore, clearly exists inside all of us.

Practical Help

Over the next posts I will be giving some practical steps you can take to connect with this safe haven within yourself and your own coordinates within the Cosmos.

With the Trump - Putin meeting coming up, obviously the world geopolitical situation also constellates in our psyche.

I live in Italy and from this vantage point, we tend to see the world from a European or West-centric perspective.

During the night, in the dreamtime, I wondered what the world map would look like, if you viewed it with the Pacific Ocean as the centre.

The map above, although the Pacific is not quite the exact middle, does allow for a cognitive reframe.

It’s only when you see it visually, Russia and America look so close together! It’s as if fingers of Russia are reaching out to a hand of America. It’s very evocative!

Rail link

I read that a previous British Columbia Premier, W.A.C. Bennett, had envisaged such a link, when he said in 1971, “there are great mountains separating British Columbia from Ottawa, but between us and Japan, there’s only the Peaceful Sea (Pacific Ocean).”

Now that’s what I call a vision!

Puppets or Dolls

Who knows who is pulling the levers behind the scenes at this Trump-Putin meeting. Yet, as the map of the countries clearly shows, in a truly interconnected globe, we will hopefully see a move towards connecting both continents, rather than separation.

Cut off from everything

In our ‘modern’ world we’ve been cut off from everything. The majority of us live in cities where our connection to the Earth is cut off from us. Through street lights our connection to the stars, galaxies and cosmos has been blocked.

And of course being ‘modern’ we don’t want to have anything to do with our traditions, because they’re backward, and we’re focused on progress.

Where this leaves us is lost. We don’t know who we are, or where we are.

Web of Meaning

According to the American anthropologist, Clifford Geertz, we live in a ‘pseudoculture’. This refers to a society where the symbols, rituals, beliefs, and practices are detached from their deeper, intrinsic meanings, and instead reflect a shallow, consumer-driven, or individualistic worldview.

A ‘pseudoculture’ creates a culture of emptiness, where individuals are always seeking the next purchase or experience to feel temporarily fulfilled but never satiated.

We need to move from the above ‘pseudoculture’ to a true culture that would provide us with a web of meaning. This proper web connects us to the Earth, the Cosmos and to our ancestors (all the things we lost in our pseudoculture).

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Spiritual Orphans

Living in this modern ‘pseudoculture’ and without this web of meaning, we can feel so lost and lonely, almost feeling like spiritual orphans, abandoned by the cosmos. Feeling alone on Earth, even though it’s filled with people.

The effects are everywhere

This lack of a web of meaning leads to many of today’s problems that show up as symptoms; Mental health, depression, chronic consumption, loneliness, anxiety, stress.

Why?

We have consistently lived for millions of years swaddled in the love and nurturing support of a true web of meaning, and because of this, when we are stripped of it and the connections to it are cut away, we hit an existential crisis where we constantly ask.

Who are we?

Where do we belong?

Where is home?

This was me

I so wanted to be ‘modern’. Rock music, technology, America, the latest clothes, I embraced it all. I ran away from and cut my connections to tradition. I was born and raised in Ireland, and this meant I didn’t go to church, I didn’t respect the land that my family came from. I wasn’t interested in the Irish language or culture. I bought the full ‘modern’ package. I had no idea what I was doing. It was all unconscious. I was swept along with the images and advertising I saw on the television.

I didn’t know these songs and movies were counterfeit fragments of a true web of meaning and they would lead me nowhere.

By middle age, that’s where I was, nowhere.

A tribal friend.

At a Deep Ecology course in the late 90’s, I was blessed to meet a tribal man from the rainforests of Indonesia. I was taking this course as part of the search to find a place to belong. He obviously wasn’t taking the course for that reason, he knew where he belonged. He was an ambassador for his people, who were struggling with their forests being logged by ‘modern’ people who didn’t have a web of meaning to live by, and felt logging forests was part of ‘progress’.

He invited me to visit the rainforest, stay with his people, and understand what it was like to live there. In 2001, I went and stayed there.

I was a foreigner, unknown to these incredible people, and yet while I was there, I felt totally held in a nurturing web of support. They embraced me as one of them. Food, a place to stay, anything I wanted, was there for me in abundance.

How could this be?

One evening there, I sat in a hut with the paradox. How could I feel so held and nurtured here, and yet feel so alone and unsupported in the country I was born in. It made no sense.

It was only years later that I understood. What I experienced in the rainforest was a true culture and a true web of meaning. I felt nurtured, loved and felt I belonged.

The rainforest people are still connected to the land, to their place in the cosmos and to their ancestors. All their connections are still intact and you can feel it. You just feel totally held.

The return

Since all this dawned on me, I have made it a focus to ensure that I connect to the Earth, the Cosmos and to my traditions.

• The Earth - I have a veg garden and spend time consciously in nature

• My traditions - The main image has a dolmen close to where my fathers house was, which I’ve discovered as part of connecting back.

• Cosmos - I’ve a 21 day Cosmic Participation (FREE to join me), link below the article.

A Remembrance

The major benefit is that these connections are not lost, they’ve been cut yes , but you simply need to remember them. The more you connect to them, the more you will remember them. It’s a truly exciting and magical journey in remembering your connections and when you do you will also find your own coordinates. Welcome home!

Cosmic Participation: Link to 21 Day - Cosmic Participation is here: