Breakdown-Breakthrough

Note: I am looking forward to publishing Part 4 of my series Navigating the Storm of Global Change within a few weeks. This essay is in honor of the recent passing of a good friend, and for anyone going through an especially hard time during this intense passage.

Like so many, Kate and I have endured a number of trying personal circumstances over the last several years. In 2019, a close personal friend of ours died in tragic circumstances. A medicine circle we had been a part of for a long time went off the rails and disbanded, leading to the splintering of our social network. I picked up Covid at the end of 2020 and it took me on an at-times scary ride for 6 months. Kate too developed a number of burdensome long-Covid symptoms, which she had to deal with for over a year. Around the same time, Kate’s father and sister were diagnosed with serious, life-altering illnesses. Last summer we suffered the devastating loss of our beloved dog Jackson. For the last two months, Kate and I have again been sick with an unusually intense and long-lasting virus, which, although not Covid, we now suspect to be Covid-related. I’ve also developed a painful neck and shoulder injury from keyboard over-use. And since the pandemic began, I've been unable to visit my family in Australia, adding to the sense of isolation. It's been rough sailing.

I'm confident that everyone reading this would be able to share their own tale of hardship from the last few years. None of us have been untouched by the pandemic and other aspects of the global crisis. In truth, it feels like a spiritual war is raging on Earth, with humanity itself under siege. On the energetic plane, the scene resembles to me something like triage on a battlefield, with overworked forces of light stretched thin trying to prioritize care of the fallen. And we seem to be approaching a phase of peak intensity in the struggle.

In these intense circumstances one starts to wonder, how much can we handle? What are our individual and collective breaking points? And when or how might breakdown lead to breakthrough?

On April 1st this year, a dear friend of mine took his life. He was a leader in the consciousness movement, a server of humanity, a very pure soul and bright light. He led groups on pilgrimage to sacred sites in India. He presented at international conferences on peace-building. He wove connections between spiritual leaders and provided platforms to elevate their work. He was an early champion of my own work in subtle activism, helping me put together an online summit that was pivotal in launching my work. He became a member of my project’s Wisdom Council, which met weekly for over 10 years to meditate and attune together to the deeper currents moving in ourselves and the world.  Our souls became intertwined on a deep level.

His descent into darkness is a strange and sad tale. He had worked with a spiritual mentor in an established tradition for decades. But several years ago he came to suspect that something was not quite right in the relationship. When he tried to break away, however, he immediately experienced coming under intense psychic attack. He reported burning pain up and down his spine. He previously was someone with sublime access to higher realms; these were now completely cut off to him. He was previously physically very fit and active, cycling many miles a day; now he couldn’t do any exercise and put on weight. He became unable to function at work and developed mental health issues. I’ve been writing about ‘dark’ forces recently and have had my share of experiences in these realms. But I had never encountered anything like this.

I was part of several group efforts to help him find his way back to the light. He had the support of a large, loving family who did everything they could to support his healing. But there was a strange sense of inevitability about where it was all heading. It was obvious he was in acute psychological and spiritual turmoil, and that he could only endure that level of pain for so long. Part of the problem was that he became afraid to go outside his spiritual lineage for help. He came to think that it was his attempt to create distance from his mentor that had been the source of all his problems, and that he risked incurring even greater wrath if he took further steps to break free. So he rejected the many offers of psychological and spiritual support that came his way. Eventually, the burden became too heavy.

There are issues to explore here about the abuse of spiritual power, the possibility of psychic attacks from dark forces, and the complex intersection of spirituality and mental health. But the point I want to emphasize is a simpler one, namely, how my friend’s suicide highlights the vulnerability of those on a spiritual path, particularly those who identify as servers, healers, light workers, or teachers.

My friend's death resulted in an enormous outpouring of grief from those who knew him in the consciousness movement. Apart from the fact that he was widely loved, I think the strength of the reaction was due to a sense of shock that someone could fall so far into darkness from such heights of illumination. For many of us it hit a little close to home. “There for the grace of God….”

For those who came together to mourn his loss, my friend’s suicide exposed the reality of the pain that many empathic servers and healers are grappling with during this time of such intense collective suffering. Empathic types by definition feel the collective currents more than most, so they tend to absorb more of the pain. Yet their suffering can be minimized by a culture of "toxic positivity" that infects many spiritual and New Age circles.

Part of the dilemma is that when one is on a spiritual path, it's natural for our identity to start to crystallize around being a "spiritual person.” Our old identity is falling away, but until we reach very deep levels of realization, the identity has to live somewhere. This tends to create a new kind of fake personality shell around always being loving, forgiving, wise, kind, etc. We need to be seen as such or risk feeling like a nobody. (And by this I don’t mean the profound, much-sought-after, zen kind of nobody. To the ego, it just seems like the plain old, good-for-nothing nobody.) The development of this spiritual identity is, I think, an inevitable stage of the journey. Rightly approached, it’s just more grist for the spiritual mill, one more egoic pattern for us to notice and work through with compassion.

These identities become problematic, however, when they result in us denying or diminishing the pain, anger, hatred, or despair that lives inside all of us. And to the precise extent that we fail to recognize our own shadow, we become vulnerable to being exploited by the darkness in others. That is what I think happened to my friend. Though he had a very real connection to the spiritual realm, he left a number of important suitcases unopened in the basement. This made it harder for him to walk away from a situation that ended up being fatal for him.

I don't begrudge my friend at all for his decision to leave. Everyone has their limit. He had been locked in a prison of pain for years and couldn't see a way out of it. My recent extended illness and neck and shoulder injury have opened a new window of compassion in me for those suffering from intense or chronic pain. Pain is just no fun for anyone. If it goes on for too long, and there are no reasonable prospects for relief, anyone might reach a point where they will say, “Enough.”

It seems that many people are coming closer to that point right now. It’s common knowledge that the pandemic has brought on an epidemic of mental health problems, especially in the young. Even before the pandemic, suicide rates in the US had risen by about 35% over the last two decades.

I don't find this surprising, given the dystopian timeline that mainstream society seems to be on. Perhaps this is what it is like to live through the dying of an age, when our institutions are failing and our cultural rituals are being stripped of all meaning. Perhaps before we can let in the fresh energy of the new era that is dawning, we have to fully acknowledge our despair at the decay and corruption of the one that is dying.

---

A little over 20 years ago, I took Ayahuasca for the first time. As the medicine came on, I was shown one scene after another of the hellish cruelty and suffering that has taken place on Earth. War, torture, enslavement, the murder of innocents. It was by far the most horrific experience of my life; I would never choose to repeat it. I became painfully aware that our separated sense of self serves in part to protect us from being overwhelmed by this dimension of reality. We may be intellectually aware of the horrors that have been perpetrated here on Earth, but we ordinarily screen out most of this information as an act of emotional self-defense.

But to go beyond the veil of separation is also to go beyond that which separates us from the darkness of the world, not only in our current moment but through all time. In the journey, the veil dropped completely and I came face-to-face with the reality of this horror.

As my mind scrambled for some redeeming framework or concept that could make sense of the suffering, the spirit of the medicine turned its gaze toward me. It mercilessly exposed the false construct of my separate self, one belief after another. I saw that my very sense of self – the “me” I thought I was – was comprised of a network of consoling beliefs that gave me a sense of hope in life. The medicine systematically exposed and dismantled each and every strand of my identity, each and every false hope. This process was even more terrifying than witnessing the cruelty of the world. It was coming for me at the most existential level.

Going into the journey, a part of me had been naïvely excited about the prospect of having some kind of profound experience that would accelerate my spiritual progress. But as the medicine deconstructed my sense of self, all hope evaporated. I no longer wanted anything from the experience; I just wanted to survive. I was literally brought to my knees, begging God for mercy.

Slowly, slowly, slowly, the pain and the chaos began to subside. I was without any hope, but neither was I hopeless. The stripping away of my sense of self, which had felt so terrifying, began to morph into a simple state of emptiness. I felt the emptiness enter my feet and slowly climb my body, like a silent, blissful, liquid light. My body vanished. “I” died. I found myself absorbed in an endless expanse of conscious, silent bliss. I merged with the One. Fully awake. Fully conscious. Fully knowing. I drank deeply from this infinite silent lake. In linear time, I was probably in that state for about ten minutes. Drinking, drinking, drinking.

Slowly, slowly, I began to surface. I observed the first subtle movements of form as they started to differentiate out from the formless One. I had no resistance to this. My thirst had been quenched; I was newly born. It had been a homecoming. My energy field remained completely open for about two weeks after the experience. I remember noticing with bemusement the first contraction of fear in my body. Gradually my patterns re-asserted themselves and my familiar self took on its old shape. It ended up taking me ten years to fully integrate the experience, but that's another story.

I am sharing this tale because it remains for me the ultimate personal reference point for the process of initiation and transformation. The death-rebirth mystery is, of course, a central motif in many of the world’s wisdom traditions, including the core Christian mythos of the West. It has been contemplated by sages since the dawn of time. It has been the theme of countless epic works of poetry, song, and cinema. But in that journey, I lived this mystery. I came to know it from the inside. It left me with the understanding that no matter how dark things may seem from the limited perspective of the separate self, it's all part of a much larger process of evolutionary change. I can't help but map this experience onto our collective initiatory crisis.

I believe humanity is experiencing the breakdown of the familiar structures of our collective identity as a painful but necessary prelude to our rebirth at a new and radically expanded level. Holding this view doesn't mean, of course, that we can avoid the pain and suffering of the process. We have to live the journey fully from the perspective we occupy at every moment. I don’t think anyone knows for sure just how far down into chaos the unraveling will take us, or the precise time-frame of the whole process.*

But is there anything that can be done to help facilitate the process of breakdown turning into breakthrough? Whether for individuals or society as a whole, it can seem as though this transformation just happens, that we are carried and propelled by archetypal forces far greater than us, that our individual wills have little say in the outcome. There is certainly truth in this. But conditions can be more or less favorable to the successful navigation of an initiatory process. In the Ayahuasca journey I described, for example, I didn't do it on my own. It was in the context of an intimate group, outside, at night. We had the support of nature all around us. We had the presence of a fire in the center of the circle. We had the group field. And each of us was personally assigned a "sitter" to accompany us through the ordeal of the journey.

These elements combined to create a sense of holding that, though subtle and in the background, felt to me crucial in enabling me to let go into the experience. In traditional cultures this role was provided by wise elders or shamans, who had passed through many initiations of their own and could thus offer initiates a calm presence grounded in experience.

In the context of humanity’s collective initiation, however, there are no wise elders who can play this role for all of us. The global scale is too unprecedented, we are all going through it together. Nonetheless, as I speculated in my book Subtle Activism, I believe a similar function could be provided today by the emerging capacities of our collective spiritual intelligence. Various concepts have been used to describe a layer of consciousness forming around the Earth through the combined spiritual presence of millions of people accessing deeper states of awareness (unity, silence, love, joy etc). Whether we think of this layer of consciousness as a “theosphere" (layered on top of the “noosphere”, “biosphere”, and “geosphere”), a planetary web of light, a planetary field, the “Gaiafield”, or by some other term, the basic idea is the same.

It’s possible that this emerging planetary field is playing a subtle, but crucial, role at this time to support humanity’s initiation, as well as our own personal journeys of initiation. And we can all both contribute to, and draw from, this planetary field, according to our needs and capacities at any given time.

In the weekly group that Kate and I convene, which we call the GaiaTree Circle, we are working this cycle with the theme of initiation. Our core practice involves the co-creation of a stable structure of group consciousness. We join our spiritual centers together to create a group heart, group ‘higher mind’, and group belly. We then open channels of connection between these centers and the Earth and Cosmos. This creates a ‘tree-like’ field of group consciousness (hence the name) that is profoundly coherent, grounded, and stable.

This field provides each group member a powerful source of holding for wherever they may be in their process of personal initiation. It allows their difficulty or pain to be distributed across a deep field of compassionate presence. We also offer the field as a source of support for humanity’s collective initiation.

The group field serves as an intermediary between us and the divine. The universal field is always available, but not everyone finds it accessible. The group field contains our own deepest essence, along with that of others we know. It thus tends to feel closer to us than the universal ground — more personal, more tangible and real, less prone to doubt.

Though it may not be as intimate as a small group field, the planetary field can be approached in a similar way.

Here's a practice I invite you to play with. When you next meditate, imagine offering whatever silence or peace you experience to the planetary field. Imagine communing in silence with all those around the world who are accessing their deeper nature of peace at any given time. Hold in your awareness all who have contributed to this sacred network from the past. Include those contributing their support from the other side of the veil. Sense that you're helping to strengthen this vast, invisible net with your silent presence. Imagine this net holding humanity as it passes through this storm of global change, providing support for anyone who is open to receiving it.

Then, imagine breathing in the light of this planetary field. Let yourself receive its support. Allow the field to go to any places you feel pain, doubt, or despair; feel the holding there. Ask the field for guidance, notice what answers come.

My heart goes out to anyone who is in pain or despair at this time. May we support each other to access the courage we need to endure the breakdown of our familiar structures — inner and outer, personal and collective — that always precedes a breakthrough to new possibilities.

*I did, though, offer some astrological speculations about the timing of the process in my essay Birth of the Aquarian Age.