Stage One of the Initiatory Process:
The Magnificent Vision of Possibility
If we do not allow what is within us to develop, it will destroy us.
—“The Gospel of Thomas,” Nag Hammadi Texts37
The roots of Western culture lie in the stories, myths, and traditions of Earth-based, Earth-honoring peoples. Reverence for Greek and Roman mythological characters and the practices of such mysteries as the Eleusinian mysteries and the mysteries of Mithra, evolved into teachings and sects such as those of Jesus, the Essenes, the Gnostics, and eventually, the teachings of Islam.
But what was the purpose of these mysteries? Entertainment? Sexual pleasure? The refuge of altered states of consciousness? What modern scholars have discovered is that the fundamental intention of the mysteries was not merely the transformation of consciousness, but ultimately, the birth of a new species of human. Not unlike our current milieu, ancient peoples were weary of patriarchal wars, philosophies divorced from nature, and lack of meaning and purpose in times of suffering and despair. Tragic experiences made them aware of the need for a new kind of human being.
The Historical Evolutionary Impulse
As the influence of Christianity swept the ancient world, it borrowed shamelessly from the mysteries. Betty Kovacs writes of Christianity that the “true myth of the Western world was not to follow Christ, but to become the Christ.” More specifically, she explains:
And it is this myth of becoming that is in harmony with the principles of our own evolutionary development. This is the blueprint that is at the heart of all the world’s great spiritual traditions, their Mysteries and their myths. And it is the blueprint in the heart of each person.38
In the evolution of the Christ story, there is an inversion of our evolutionary myth. Church fathers such as Justin Martyr called them “demonic imitations of the true faith,” and yet, components of mystery religions began to be steadily incorporated into mainstream Christian thinking.39
Throughout the great mystical traditions of all time such as Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, and Buddhism, we see references in one form or another to “the evolutionary impulse.” Kovacs elaborates:
The great challenge of this evolutionary journey in Western culture—and now in most of the world—is twofold: 1) the lingering power of the old scientific paradigm in so many people who still insist that neither the human being nor nature is divine, that all life is a fluke, that we are an accident of nature without meaning or purpose; and 2) the lingering power of the Church’s inverted version of our evolutionary myth, which tells us to follow, to believe, rather than to become the Christ. Both the scientific and the religious paradigms devalue the human and negate direct inner experience or gnosis. Had our scientists been allowed to continue to develop as shaman-scientists, they would have drawn very different conclusions from their data—as many of them now do. And had we not lost the ancient techniques of the journey—the secret tradition that Jesus is said to have taught, the West would have a very different story today.40
After some eighteen centuries of bitter contention between science and religion, science won out. Only the material world was “worth” exploring, and as Betty Kovacs writes, “The scaffolding of this kind of thinking cannot support the complete loom, and this has brought the West—and now the world with us—to the brink of extinction.”41
The marriage of science and vision had been rendered impossible until the twentieth century when vision would begin to return to the scientific world. Through the research of quantum physicists and those luminaries who have wed Western science with eco-psychology such as ecologian, Thomas Berry42 and physicist, Brian Swimme43, the evolutionary impulse is being revitalized and given its proper function in scientific exploration. While this extraordinary union of science and vision is unlikely to spare much of our species from potential extinction, it exquisitely embraces us in our existential angst and the despair of our planetary predicament and infuses us with meaning, purpose, and the very best of our humanity. And there is just a chance—a chance that we hope the best of us will build on, that this marriage of quantum physics and the deep mysticism will create what could be called a “technology of transfiguration”—that is, a way of dancing inwardly and outwardly with what quantum physicists call “the field” in such a way that a new species is manifested with enormous new powers to create a world grounded in justice, harmony, and compassion?
Brian Swimme notes that the very evolution of our planet is unfolding through the consciousness of the human being. “What we believe, the stories we create, the decisions we make are going to determine the way this planet functions for hundreds of millions of years in the future. This is the moment that our planet, through us, can awaken to its own deep aim.”44
And if the planet, at large, cannot or will not awaken to “its own deep aim,” everyone reading these words can. We believe that the evolutionary impulse is more than just an impulse. The words from the Gospel of Thomas, which declare that if we do not allow what is in us to develop, it will destroy us—also warn us against ignoring the evolutionary impulse seeded within us. If we ignore or minimize the divine wisdom within us and do not dedicate ourselves to developing it internally and birthing it to help heal the world, especially at this moment of naked and extreme global crisis, it will destroy us. We argue that these two imperatives are at the core of the planetary rite of passage we are experiencing, and therefore, they are not simply “impulses,” but urgent moral and spiritual obligations.
The Space between Extinction and Evasion
For several years both of us have distanced ourselves from those who have insisted that if we just reduce our carbon footprint and our carbon consumption or if we just transition from fossil fuels to renewables, we will save the planet. We have also distanced ourselves from those who focus only on near-term human extinction and argue that it is foolish to pretend we can do anything about climate chaos. Neither story, we insist, is the complete one. We do not claim to hold the complete story, but we live our own lives from the perspective that it is far too late for some actions, but absolutely not too late for other actions. Humans living now may never live to see the fulfillment of the evolutionary impulse, but to devote one’s life purpose to it is the highest sacred intention. If climate chaos cannot be reversed and extinction awaits most or all of our species, what else is worthy of our wholehearted commitment? And what else could work wisely with unforeseeable new possibilities?
The latest climate science published at this writing in the spring of 2020 by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which continues to be one of the most conservative bodies of scientists on Earth, states that we are beyond an emergency situation in terms of climate chaos. “In our view, the evidence from tipping points alone suggests that we are in a state of planetary emergency: both the risk and urgency of the situation are acute.” One global sustainability researcher stated: “I don’t think people realize how little time we have left.”45
We believe that it is far too late to focus on pleading with governments to transition to fossil fuels and that it is far too late to beg them to hammer out climate agreements or naively expect them to abide by them, even if they did so. However, we believe it is not too late to lovingly take care of whatever little patch of Earth we inhabit. Nor is it too late to look after animals and lessen the pain of their demise. It is not too late to be kind to all living beings, nor is it too late, with an arsenal of spiritual practices in our toolkit, to struggle for justice, equality, the absence of violence, and the right of all people to have food, clean water, shelter, and healthcare.
Even in the throes of our planetary meltdown, we are witnessing extraordinary eruptions of Sacred Activism in our midst. Recall the Standing Rock uprising of 201646, the Black Lives Matter47 movement, the Poor Peoples’ Campaign48, and the Positive Deep Adaptation Movement49 organized by Professor Jem Bendell in the UK. As all those who are awake can see, the eruption of the Coronavirus has revealed the down-home, hands-on heroism of millions of extraordinary-ordinary people—first responders, nurses, doctors, grocery clerks, postal workers, farm laborer, janitors and domestic workers. Imagine what such a diverse movement could potentially flower into as the virus continues to explode. We may very well be looking at the beginnings of a movement of global Sacred Activism that would rise to meet the other terrible crises ahead.
We do not hold a false hope that any of these movements can change the world, but they do represent the evolutionary impulse that has not been completely quashed. As Betty Kovacs writes, “All of these movements are committed to a very different kind of civilization. They are rooted in a clear view of the dishonest, immoral, and unethical agendas of our government(s)—and they are demanding change. They are not tolerating inaction, disrespect, or lies.”50
Even more importantly, perhaps, they represent the fragile, ragged, not always coherent, and brave beginnings of the birth of a new humanity.
What Is the Divine Human?
What we know from the mystical tradition is that our planetary predicament opens up, even in our desperate condition, extraordinary opportunity. Those who have connected with the evolutionary power of the sacred, understand that its will is to birth a new form of intelligent, wizened human, who is not simply a genius human being with a consciously divine awareness. Rather, the evolutionary impulse seeks a mutation into a new species. “Becoming the Christ,” in the words of Betty Kovacs and the language of many Western mystics, is to open to the possibility of such a mutation. This is an event of far more significance and substance than “transformation” which only results in a better version of our old selves. Such a mutation is nothing less than a divinization of the whole being—heart, mind, soul, and body, and so, the evolutionary mystics tell us, the formation of a Divine human being, capable through grace, of co-creating with and in the Divine, a whole new set of political, social, economic, and artistic institutions. This is nothing less than a mutation that is itself a revolution and engenders a revolutionary change of all of the structures of inner and outer oppression.
Most of us learned in high school biology and beyond about evolution and gene mutations. Quite simply, we learned that a gene mutation is a permanent alteration in the DNA sequence that makes up a gene, such that the sequence differs from what is found in most people. A more technical definition would be one offered by the National Institutes of Health:
Evolution is the process by which populations of organisms change over generations. Genetic variations underlie these changes. Genetic variations can arise from gene mutations or from genetic recombination (a normal process in which genetic material is rearranged as a cell is getting ready to divide). These variations often alter gene activity or protein function, which can introduce different traits in an organism. If a trait is advantageous and helps the individual survive and reproduce, the genetic variation is more likely to be passed to the next generation (a process known as natural selection). Over time, as generations of individuals with the trait continue to reproduce, the advantageous trait becomes increasingly common in a population, making the population different than an ancestral one. Sometimes the population becomes so different that it is considered a new species.51
Imagine if you dare, what hundreds of thousands of individuals, dedicated to realizing the evolutionary impulse, could potentially create.
Perhaps the evolutionary transmutation most familiar to us is the process in which the caterpillar becomes a butterfly. According to Scientific American:
First, the caterpillar digests itself, releasing enzymes to dissolve all of its tissues. If you were to cut open a cocoon or chrysalis at just the right time, caterpillar soup would ooze out. But the contents of the pupa are not entirely an amorphous mess. Certain highly organized groups of cells known as imaginal discs survive the digestive process. Before hatching, when a caterpillar is still developing inside its egg, it grows an imaginal disc for each of the adult body parts it will need as a mature butterfly or moth—discs for its eyes, for its wings, its legs and so on. In some species, these imaginal discs remain dormant throughout the caterpillar’s life; in other species, the discs begin to take the shape of adult body parts even before the caterpillar forms a chrysalis or cocoon.52
What if our exploding global crisis is a global dark night designed to melt down one form of humanity so that the imaginal cells of a new species can emerge from the boiling chaos?
The Evolutionary Struggle
The caterpillar literally disintegrates all of its tissues into a protein-rich soup that may consist of more than 50,000 cells. In fact, the caterpillar literally digests itself. Many of the organs are hidden in the caterpillar and they take a new form within the chrysalis. The old body is broken down into imaginal cells, but not all the tissues are destroyed. Some old tissues pass onto the insect’s new body. The caterpillar’s old body dies inside the chrysalis and a new body with beautiful wings appears after a couple of weeks.53
Some 460 million years ago, fish began to crawl out of the water and make their long evolutionary journey, becoming amphibians and then vertebrates, and eventually even birds. We can only imagine the disorientation that a member of a new species might experience in the mutation process. One way of beginning to understand this is to look back in the evolutionary record and imagine what fish endured when they left their habitat, the sea, and timidly explored dry land and a totally new environment. Over millennia and through immense suffering, they developed the organs that turned them into birds. Imagine their confusion and disorientation in the process. Indeed, that is what humankind is currently experiencing. One form of humanity is ending, and another is being born.
The fact that we are in a crisis of mutation explains the almost-unendurable intensity of what we are living. Each one of us has been challenged not just to awaken to our essential consciousness, but to allow the transmutation of our whole being to take place through cooperation with what we now know as the Divine will that is ordaining the birth of a new species and a new world.
The Jesus story provides one example. An ordinary human being steeped in the traditions of his heritage becomes a wisdom teacher and in the process, an activist who confronts the injustices of the ancient world, then is arrested and killed. According to the Jesus myth, he did not remain dead but returned to life as a new species of human. Believing in a literal Jesus, a literal teacher, a literal death, or a literal resurrection is completely irrelevant. What matters is the archetypal theme of The Christ and the evolutionary process of becoming The Christ. Others such as Rumi, Kabir, Teresa of Avila, and Hildegard of Bingen experienced similar transfigurations. All experienced deep suffering which they allowed to shatter them and reorganize the fundamentals of their identity and presence.
For those atheists and agnostics who embrace humanism but resist the realities of the mystical traditions, we assert that humanism, even at its best, can only conceive of human development in terms of intelligence, decency, and kindness. These are extraordinary advances, but the challenge that mystical systems pose for both humanists and conventional believers is that they are in contact with a larger-than-human force whose powers are infinite. Modern physics exploration reveals a quantum field with which we can engage in direct relationship and whose potential for transmutation has been shown to be limitless. We invite the reader to pursue the works of physicists Brian Swimme, Richard Tarnas, and Paul Levy’s, The Quantum Revelation: A Radical Synthesis of Science and Spirituality.54 All three researchers deeply explore the inextricable connection between the scientific and the mystical and the extraordinary possibilities for transfiguration that this unprecedented marriage is offering us.
The planetary rite of passage which we are being invited to engage with is not an initiation simply into a transformation of consciousness, but an initiation into an evolutionary mutation. Once we understand this and proceed accordingly, we realize that we cannot rely on any of the philosophies or constructs that have been created from an outmoded state of being. Therefore, the great advantage of recognizing the crisis as a mutation is that its appalling severity doesn’t shock us. In fact, it is expected.
Knowing this can enable you, dear reader, to stay steady as all the familiar structures, inner and outer, burn to the ground. The other great advantage is that you come to know that the only way you can hope to stay abreast of what is required in a mutation is to cultivate incessantly a state of what the poet John Keats called, negative capability. In one of Keats’ letters, written in 1817, he defines negative capability as, “capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.”55 Here Keats is referring to what mystics have called “unknowing knowing.” Only such a commitment to remain open to the paradoxical, mysterious, and even outrageous, can hope to keep you resilient enough to respond to the guidance that will arise if only you always admit to yourself that you do not and cannot know beforehand what each volatile and changing moment requires of you or where you are being taken. Could a caterpillar ever imagine being a butterfly? Could one of the first fish who staggered, gasping onto burning sand, ever imagine that one day, it would be an eagle?
Transmutation: Forced Out of One Era
In 2004, physicist Brian Swimme, produced his stunning DVD, “The Ten Powers of the Universe.”56 In it, Swimme explains that within the universe itself, ten essential powers or tasks reside within every life form, and he explores how these powers move within humans, how we can align with these powers, how we can recognize the powers of the universe in the world and within each other, and how to develop a deeper intimacy with the Earth. The Ten Powers are essentially: Seamlessness, centration, allurement, emergence, homeostasis, cataclysm, synergy, transformation, inter-relatedness, radiance, transmutation. (A full explanation can be viewed in Swimme’s extraordinary video, “The Powers of the Universe”.57)
In this book, we will not elaborate on all of the Ten Powers, but one in particular, transmutation, is relevant here.
In articulating the power of transmutation, Swimme states:
Returning last week from a few days’ holiday, I was appalled to see my front porch liberally splashed with bird droppings. Then I looked up, and my heart did a small dance of joy! Above the porch light sat a nest with several tiny feathered heads peering over the edge . . . the phoebes had returned! Last year, the nest sat empty and I grieved the loss. Now in a brief moment of rejoicing, I was thinking like a planet, rather than a dismayed human. I glimpsed something of the transmutations in our perceptions, our behaviors, we humans are called on to make in this time of immense change.
Transmutation, is the way form changes through time . . . clouds change into galaxies; primal stars transmute into stellar systems with planets; the earth herself changes from molten rock into a living planet.
The universe forces itself out of one era into another. If you are a particle you have nowhere to go but into an atom.
So, what do we do when we discover ourselves in the midst of the end of one era, moving into another? How do we participate in this Transmutation?58
How could we doubt that the current human species is being “forced out of one era into another”? Ablaze as we are in the fires of a global dark night, is it not obvious that the current human species is being forced out of one era and into another?
Swimme says we need to look at the way in which life moves from one form to another. The Earth uses a form of restraint, of judgment. At the moment when the Earth began to cool from its molten state to form a crust, there was a constraint into the form of continents. When two continents collide, there is further restraint on formerly free activity, enabling restriction and opposition that create mountain ranges.
Paradoxically, in this very moment of mass extinction, new species are being discovered. We are compelled to notice that in 2018, the Natural History Museum in London described over 270 new species of both plants, animals, and minerals.59 Undoubtedly, some or all of these species are transmutations of other species from the very distant past. As we feel engulfed almost daily with extinction and the loss of species, it is crucial that we temper the sense of being overwhelmed with the reality of deep time or the longer view of the Power of Transmutation. This tempering is not a rationalization for the ecological horrors that are happening around us, but rather, a larger perspective which compels us to hold the tension of opposites—that is, the reality that climate catastrophe is rapidly ending life on this planet, and at the same time, planting the seeds of transmutation that may manifest hundreds, thousands, or millions of years in the future, if annihilation is not complete.
Understanding the Power of Transmutation may help us make sense of sometimes feeling out of step with others who do not grasp the momentous significance of the current era of Transmutation. Brian Swimme notes that:
The feeling mode of the person experiencing the Power of Transmutation is that one does not fit in. There is a sense of being cut off, set aside, rejected, even wounded. Yet those who feel most cut off are the ones who feel most deeply that the universe has made a judgment that this era is over. This is an invitation from the universe to look at what life does, to see in the opposition, the wound, one’s destiny. You may feel that the universe is rejecting part of you. Embrace the rejection, embrace that which is attempting to eliminate those aspects of yourself that are maladaptive, the elements that are part of the era that is over: a society based on consumerism, based on destroying opposition.
The planet is withering because humans have accepted a context that is much too small. We can no longer decide only what is best for a corporation or a culture, but we must move to a larger context, to the planetary level. Our decisions will affect thousands of future generations. We are the universe as a whole, reflecting on itself in this particular place.
We must look to the role models who inspire us. We co-evolve with all other beings. The great moments of beauty in the universe become our guides, and our criteria by which to judge. We look to the future, to beings who will learn to live in harmony, to enable the whole to flourish. Thus we learn to live in the context of the whole universe: past, present and future.60
What Brian Swimme is making clear is something we ourselves recognize deeply—that a perpetual sense of maladjustment to the lunacy of the times is, in fact, a sign of evolutionary preparedness and longing for mutation, the transfiguration of ourselves and of our obscene and appalling world. Are we not all longing to be changed utterly so as, at last, to live a full and joyful life in a just world?
Supported by the Ancestors
People in industrially civilized cultures are profoundly disadvantaged by our sense of alienation from ancestors and so do not realize how much support for the transmutation we are living through, is available to us. Connecting with this support helps us understand that the seamlessness of life surrounds us as we labor in this monumental birth and that the wholehearted support of all of our ancestors is behind us in this time of defining ordeal.
In many indigenous cultures, children develop deep relationships with extended family—grandmothers, grandfathers, aunts, and uncles early in life. Moreover, children are taught that these living, breathing individuals are not their only ancestors—that in fact, even though their ancestors from generations prior are not physically with them, they are deeply involved spiritually in their lives—guiding, protecting, and intervening on their behalf. In many cultures, children are taught to pray to their ancestors or simply have conversations with them. These conversations are not always pleasant, but children know that they can cry out, rage, and even curse their ancestors because the ancestors want to know what they feel, and ancestors welcome their cries for help.
One of the most obvious results of one’s relationship with ancestors is that one does not feel alone or isolated. No matter how daunting or heartbreaking one’s current experience, the ancestors care and are eager to assist. In Western cultures, a sense of the presence of ancestors rarely exists, and as a result, we tend to feel bereft of a support system beyond relatives or friends actually alive in our physical reality.
West African shaman, Malidoma Somé explains what having a relationship with our ancestors means to members of his village:
The challenge of not having found relationships with our ancestors is primarily a challenge of community, people suffering from a crisis of simple belonging and wondering what it is they are here to do. There is also the longing for connection with something greater than simple material pursuit and working hard just to pay the one bill. All of these little things, they add up to some crisis, some existential crisis, and at the core of that, is this missed connection with the ancestors. So the challenge of modernity is—we use the term—community. But in fact, the use of the word is more symptomatic of a longing. In the end, what matters more than anything else is recognition that the modern, individual crisis can be solved—can be resolved—with a reach out to ancestors, to the spirits of those who have preceded us here and who, from where they are, are much wiser and much more alert.61
We have discovered how important it is to learn about our ancestors—the good, the bad, and as much in between those two poles as possible, so that we have a sense of who they were and how they can support us. We are publishing this book at a time when we all need to know our evolutionary lineage because without knowing it, we won’t have the courage and strength to go forward and serve the evolutionary impulse. We are fighting a monumental battle for the future—for the birth of a new species, and we need, in a very grounded form, the testimony of the luminous warriors who have preceded us.
Malidoma Somé defines ancestors as “our forebears,” the ones who have preceded us in this dimension. He asserts that, “It is now time to expand the indigenous definition of ancestors to embrace all of the pioneers of the birth of a new humanity that have preceded us and that are calling to us to realize on a global scale what they have opened to us. Some of them, and the most obvious of them, are the biological ones, but as far as ancestors go, it could be much broader than that: basically, all of humankind. So, ancestors, defined in that way, brings the whole concept a lot closer to home, allowing the relationship to be worked on from within. Ancestors suggest those who have influenced us, assisted us as teachers, prophets, saints, ecstatic poets—role models, who have crossed over, but who are continuing from another dimension to inspire, guide, and urge us forward in this time of our greatest danger.”62
During the long and painful dark night Andrew went through after his break with his guru in which his life and that of his husband Eryk were constantly threatened, he realized this power of the ancestors in two ways: First, he came to understand viscerally that Jesus, Rumi, and Kabir, his three greatest sources of inspiration, were not in any sense dead but were interlocking fields of living wisdom that he could draw on in all circumstances. Secondly, in dream after dream, his military ancestors, a long line of soldiers and policemen which thread his family, appeared to him and made it clear that their courage and witness lived in him and that they were constantly infusing him with the steady passion he would need to survive.
Carolyn’s great-great grandfather, Balser Hess, was a landowner in Northern Indiana, living on the Elkhart River which joined the St. Joseph River some ten miles west. The two rivers were used by the Underground Railroad in the nineteenth century to help slaves escaping from the South to reach Michigan where they were assisted by abolitionists to then reach Canada. The Hess homestead still stands today and has become a historical site, still containing some of the underground tunnels used to hide slaves being transported on the river.
While it is true that Carolyn’s research on her family has also revealed that other ancestors of hers were brutal invaders of Pottawatomie Indian lands in Northern Indiana, and while she is aware of the two very different qualities of ancestors in her history, she honors her great-great grandfather Balser Hess, for his kindness, compassion, and commitment to the Underground Railroad. In her activism, Carolyn calls on him for support, giving thanks that he was part of her lineage, just as racist white settlers also were.
In Merchants of Light, Betty Kovacs traces a long line of luminaries who resisted the darkness from the deepest vision of possibility. They struggled against ignorance, bigotry, self-aggrandizement, and violent opposition on behalf of the evolutionary impulse. Repeatedly, in age after age, a cluster of evolved souls arose and gave everything to try to birth the new human. Often their efforts were massacred by forces of egotism and greed, but their examples and their fields of initiatory energy endure for us to claim as we at this unprecedented moment gather all of our strength to move forward.
As you read this book, we invite you to examine your own biographical and spiritual lineage and find one person in each that you recognize as a profound inspiration and a source of light. Summon their spirits to accompany you on the journey through the following pages.
Having offered you the Vision of Possibility, we turn now to the second stage of the rite of passage, The Descent. We do not wish to belabor the horrors of our predicament, but we know from experience that most human beings on Earth at this moment, even in this global pandemic, are still in denial of the severity of our predicament. At times, we find that we need to shake ourselves or pour cold water on our own heads, metaphorically speaking, because the impact of the ghastly realities of our time subtly elude us too.
Once you understand the momentous, life-altering significance of the evolutionary impulse and the severe demands that potential transmutation into a new species requires, you will understand why the global cata-strophe is upon us—and you will grasp both the appalling forces that appear to render the birth of a new human species impossible and the secret potential of these forces to compel mutation. Most importantly, you will understand what is required of us in order to navigate the cata-strophe and to dance to its astounding hidden music.