Navigating the Storm of Global Change

Part 2: Changes in Technology and Spirituality

In Part 1 of this 4-part series, I described our planetary meta-crisis in terms of the astrological dynamics associated with the birth of the Aquarian Age. We saw that the main difference between the outgoing Piscean era and incoming Aquarian one is that the former was structured primarily by top-down vertical hierarchies, whereas the latter will be organized through horizontal, peer-to-peer decentralized networks.

In this essay (Part 2 of the series), I want to look at how these changes are taking place in two key areas, technology and spirituality.

Technology: From broadcast to digital media

One of the most helpful frameworks I have found for understanding the deep structural dynamics of current world events comes from the work of systems thinker Jordan Hall. Building on the insights of media theorist Marshall McLuhan (among others), Hall argues that technological changes are altering the fundamental structure of how we make meaning together as a society, disrupting the organizing principles that underlie our core institutions.

For at least the last hundred years, Hall points out, the development of mass or broadcast media was crucial to how we were able to achieve social coherence amidst the complexity of modern life. The basic structure of broadcast media is asymmetric communication, a one-to-many dynamic in which relatively few (those with access to the academic lecturn, printing press, radio station, or television broadcast booth) create the narrative and the rest of us are the audience. The system grants credentialed ‘experts’ access to some form of media platform to broadcast their views, which then shape and place boundaries around what the culture comes to regard as ‘good opinion’. It is not that these expert views are bogus or mere propaganda. To the contrary, this system has been extremely effective at producing reliable knowledge and filtering out noise. Hall’s main point, though, is to identify the formal or deep structure of the system as a means of achieving social coherence. In broadcast culture, the few communicate to the many, and collective sense-making is an expert-driven, top-down process.

With the emergence of the Internet, the architecture of collective sense-making has fundamentally shifted. The Internet has created an essentially symmetrical, many-to-many communications landscape, giving nearly everyone a platform to express their opinions if they want to. In this digital media environment, the ability of the old centralized sense-making systems to control the narrative has been fatally undermined.

Note the resonance between Hall’s analysis and the astrological themes presented in Part 1 of this series. The top-down, one-to-many structure of broadcast media reflects the Piscean Age organizing principle, involving vertical hierarchies of knowledge and power. Digital media represents the horizontal, decentralized, peer-to-peer dynamics of the emerging Aquarian consciousness. Once we recognize the underlying pattern, it is easier to make sense of the shockingly disruptive nature of recent and current events.

Consider the election of Donald Trump. In the lead up to the election, there was widespread disbelief across the political spectrum that Trump was able to survive in spite of him saying things well beyond the bounds of ‘good opinion,’ which just a few years earlier would have seen him shamed off the political stage. The fact that he was able to remain in the game at all, let alone win the election, demonstrated just how far the media environment had shifted. In the age of social media, the broadcast media was simply (and shockingly) unable to achieve its usual control of the narrative. Millions of diverse political opinions were able to be voiced in the new digital public square, with enough pushing back against the legacy media consensus to subvert the traditional, expert-driven, top-down collective sense-making process. Since then the power of broadcast media to shape the narrative has only further declined.

With Covid, for instance, we seem to be witnessing this dynamic coming to a dramatic and highly consequential head. Centralized political authorities around the world are attempting to establish narrative control at a time when most people have immediate access via the Internet to alternate sources of information and can come to their own conclusions. Faced with the difficulties of achieving social coherence in this new media environment, centralized authorities are resorting to increasingly coercive measures, including attempts to censor contradictory views on digital media platforms. The situation is complicated by the fact that information is indeed being weaponized for political purposes from many different directions, making it difficult to know which sources to trust. The situation has been likened to a battle in a new kind of global information war, with aggressive attempts being made to recruit each of us as ‘soldiers’ for one side or another. Yet, as I see it, the more profound dynamic playing out is less partisan or international warfare than a confrontation between the traditional Piscean Age systems of centralized control and the forces representing the emerging Aquarian principle of decentralization.

We might lament the loss of authority of credentialed expertise, the fragmentation of society into increasingly disparate silos, and the dangerous breakdown in our ability to come into social coherence about anything. Yet we can also recognize that these developments are forcing more and more people to question their reliance on centralized authorities while sharpening their own inner compass in order to successfully navigate through the chaos. In astrological terms, this move can be understood as a necessary pre-cursor to the quantum leap in personal sovereignty that will characterize the Aquarian Age. We are being asked to let go of our dependence on external ‘parental’ authorities to tell us what is true, and instead to strengthen our connection with our own innate knowing, our own inner navigation system. (Not that we are letting go of specialization or expertise per se, but we are in the process of radically changing the way we relate to it.) In this respect, we can think of the shift from Piscean to Aquarian consciousness as an initiation of humanity into spiritual adulthood. As with any authentic initiation, the process is profoundly disorienting, demanding, and fraught with real danger. But, from the other side, an entirely new level of maturity and self-empowerment beckons.

As Hall points out, the top-down centralized systems of collective sense-making are also simply no longer up to the task of managing the complexity of life on Earth in the 21st century. The pace of life in the digital age is increasingly overwhelming the responsive capacities of our legacy systems, which were designed at an earlier time in conjunction with simpler technologies. The breakdown in social coherence we are currently experiencing can be likened to the liquification phase in a process of metamorphosis that will give birth to new systems of decentralized collective intelligence far better adapted to the pace and complexity of life in the digital (Aquarian) age.

Blockchain: The technology of the Aquarian Age

The global technological infrastructure that will support these decentralized systems is already being developed. It is based on the technology of blockchain, the technology of the Aquarian Age.

Blockchain will complete the digital revolution that began with the introduction of personal computers and the Internet. It will enable all aspects of life to be organized on a decentralized, peer-to-peer basis, eliminating the need for middle-men and central authorizers.

The key innovation of blockchain is that each user of the network has a complete copy of the network database, and network transactions are verified independently by its users. This takes out the need for a central authority to record and verify what has happened on the network. As a result, it allows for a seamless transfer of information in a transparent, censorship-resistant, permission-less, decentralized network. This concept will revolutionize how society organizes itself in every sphere.

Crucially, blockchain allows for the secure exchange of not just information but also value, giving rise to the emergence of digital currencies like bitcoin. This is the real game changer, since the global financial system lies at the heart of the Piscean Age infrastructure of centralized control. If (or when) bitcoin and other aspects of the emerging decentralized digital currency system supersede the current fiat money system controlled by the central banks, it will release the cork in the bottle of global evolutionary change.

With good reason, we have grown wary of the promise of technological solutions to society’s problems. We have seen the early excitement associated with the Internet’s potential to bring the world closer together give way to profound disillusionment as we found ourselves instead becoming addicted and divided, increasingly the slaves and not the masters of our digital tools. Yet I have come to embrace the idea that it is not technology per se that is necessarily problematic but rather the intentionality with which it is designed. The twisting of the Internet’s enormous emancipatory potential into a growing digital cage of centralized control can be seen as a last-ditch attempt by the dying hierarchical structures of the Piscean Age to co-opt the power of the emerging Aquarian Age technologies for their own benefit. (I will have much more to say about this in Part 3 of this series.) If we can make it through this narrow initiatory passage into the Aquarian era, I believe that the potential of these technologies to support human flourishing in a way that is aligned with our deeper values may finally be realized — and in forms beyond our wildest imaginings.

Spirituality: The Next Buddha will be the Sangha (of Sovereign Individuals)

I want to change gears here and draw from personal experience to illustrate how the shift toward Aquarian consciousness is transforming our understanding and practice of spirituality.

In disclosing aspects of my story, I’m obviously revealing something very personal to me. But although my journey has its unique elements, my primary purpose for including it here is to highlight what I think are emerging universal trends.

Very early in my spiritual quest, when I was in my late teens, I was introduced to the work of the Indian mystic Osho. I instantly felt a profound personal connection to Osho and his teachings. When I listened to Osho’s discourses, I felt like I was hearing the innermost truths of my own heart. I had never felt a stronger personal resonance with any other figure, alive or historical. For several years, I was drawn into a mysterious spiritual love affair with him. In 1995, I traveled to his ashram in Pune, India and ‘took sannyas’. I never met him in the flesh, because he died shortly after I had first discovered his work. Nonetheless, I knew beyond doubt that I had established a profound spiritual connection with him.

I never lost that connection, but as time went on and my journey continued, other paths and teachers beckoned. I moved to San Francisco, enrolled at the California Institute of Integral Studies, and over the next 15 years immersed myself in the pot pourri of psycho-spiritual transformative offerings available in the Bay Area.

You name it, I’ve done it. Breathwork, plant medicines, holistic sexuality, shamanic journeying, depth psychotherapy, bodywork, meditation, astrology, magic rituals, ecstatic dance, mens work, gender healing — the list goes on. (And boy did I have fun.)

At a certain point along the way, it became clear that my calling was to focus on the collective dimension of healing, a path I came to call subtle activism. For a long time, I looked toward teachers and systems to give me the credentials and training I thought I needed to stand in the world as a collective healer or ‘subtle activist’. I wrote my PhD dissertation on the topic, which later became an academic book. But still I searched for mentors who I thought could ‘complete’ my preparation and initiate me into the esoteric secrets of facilitating collective transformation.

One day, however, during a personal retreat in a remote cabin in Colorado in the dead of winter, I finally reached a pivotal moment. Something from deep within me welled up and declared, “I’m done — no more intermediaries! From here on out, I am going to trust my own spiritual creativity.” It was in the end a rather straightforward declaration of my soul, rather than any kind of mystical experience with flashing lights. I simply decided that I had done enough — prepared enough, trained enough, studied enough — and that I was just going to trust my own spiritual capacities from that point on, even if I were imperfect and not enlightened.

It was about two weeks later, having returned to California, when I first started receiving ‘downloads’ about a revolutionary way of working with groups to support collective healing. I was shown step by step a method for building a profoundly coherent group field that could serve as a conduit for the flow of vast healing energies into the collective. There was a fresh, numinous power in the revelation. In all my study and practice, I had never encountered anything quite like it. It was a deeply exciting time.

It felt to me that my decision to trust in my own spiritual creativity had opened a direct channel with creative source. That channel has remained open ever since and continues to guide the unfolding of my work. Having that channel open didn’t make me ‘enlightened’. It didn’t ‘perfect’ me or make me a noticeably different person. But it did fundamentally alter my sense of spiritual sovereignty. Knowing I had established direct access to a consistent source of creative spiritual guidance meant I no longer felt dependent on any intermediary teachers or traditions for direction. I might still find them helpful, but the spiritual umbilical chord linking me with them in a state of need had been severed.

It also established in my life a new baseline level of joy and fulfillment. There is a very particular delight that comes from being used as a channel for a gift that is uniquely yours to bring through. My life continued with its usual ups and downs, and I knew there were many more stages of the journey ahead. In many ways I still felt at the very beginning, with so much to learn. But the creative satisfaction I began to experience from participating in such an intimate and meaningful dance with the mystery felt like a continual blessing.

Everyone’s spiritual journey is a very unique, personal, and ever-deepening relationship with the mystery out of which we have emerged, and mine is no exception. Yet I can easily identify aspects of my process that also reflect the more universal traits of the rising Aquarian consciousness.

1. No more intermediaries! — Declaration of Spiritual Sovereignty

As we have seen, the Piscean Age was structured primarily in the form of one-to-many, top-down, vertical hierarchies of knowledge and power. Spiritually, this manifested as a concentration of spiritual authority in the extraordinary realization of a few, special enlightened beings, who mediated the connection with Source or God consciousness for everyone else.

In this context, the statement “No more intermediaries!” can be seen as the quintessential declaration of sovereignty that will underlie the emerging spiritual worldview of the more decentralized Aquarian era.

As a crucial step toward the maturation of individual sovereignty that is associated with the Aquarian Age, more and more people are likely to declare “no more intermediaries!” in order to release themselves from their dependence on outer spiritual or religious authorities. We might view such a statement as a new Declaration of (Spiritual) Independence, that affirms each person’s unique and innate connection to life and Source, and thus initiates us into a new level of spiritual adulthood.

It is not that we will no longer need spiritual teachers or be able to bypass a process of inner maturation and development. In my own case, the development I described occurred after a long period of preparation involving many profound external teachers and teachings. It is also not the case that there will be no place for inspired leadership or natural hierarchies of spiritual competence. But the role of spiritual guides and systems will increasingly be to support each person to discover their own unique connection to Source — and thereby to actualize their unique medicine and spiritual gifts — rather than leading them merely to reproduce the realization of the teacher or that of the tradition’s founder.

This development could result in a beautiful flourishing of spiritual creativity, with many more genuinely original approaches emerging that express the unique personal essence of each individual. Rather than spiritual enlightenment being the preserve of the special few, it is likely to become more distributed, democratized, and natural. It may seem increasingly self-evident that every person is innately connected to the broader matrix of reality, and thus has a unique, direct connection to a source of knowing they can draw from to navigate through life.

2. Individual Sovereignty and Collective Intelligence: A Dialectical Dance

In addition to supporting each person’s unique journey to spiritual sovereignty, the other primary role of teachers and systems in the Aquarian age will be to create the conditions that enable individual group members to blend their unique spiritual gifts together to form a greater, harmonic whole. This dialectic of individual sovereignty and collective intelligence is at the heart of the Aquarian archetype.

The nature of the process I was ‘given’, for instance, is designed to bring spiritually sovereign individuals together to co-create coherent fields of healing power greater by many orders of magnitude than that which can be generated by any one individual. The ‘transmission’ comes primarily through the group field rather than from me or anyone else as teacher. (Though note that, as the group leader, I still have a crucial role to play to create the conditions that ensure that each person’s sovereignty is honored and best facilitate the emergence of the group’s collective wisdom.) The spiritual intelligence of the emergent, ‘symphonic’ group consciousness provides exquisitely attuned support for the healing and transformation of individual members, while simultaneously serving as a conduit for the flow of profound healing energies into the world.

The dialectic between collective intelligence and individual sovereignty will also play a critical role in the production of reliable spiritual knowledge in the Aquarian Era. It is important to note that the development of individual spiritual sovereignty that will characterize the Aquarian Age is not the same thing as the idealization of subjective truth that is common today in many postmodern and new age spiritual circles. It will not mean that “anything goes” when it comes to spiritual knowledge (or knowledge in general), or that all spiritual truths must be taken as equally profound. In the dialectic between individual sovereignty and collective intelligence, the insights and revelations of individual members can be calibrated by resonance with the perceptions of fellow group members, the collective wisdom of the sangha, and broader natural patterns of Earth and Cosmos. (At the Damanhur Community in Italy, for example, they have a principle that subtle perceptions are considered real only when three or more people experience them.)

If this kind of approach sounds abstract to us, consider that something like it is almost certainly the most common way human knowledge has developed throughout history. It was widely practiced among indigenous cultures, for instance, in the form of elder councils and community rituals, in which messages received from spirit or ancestors were discussed together until a common meaning could be discerned and agreed upon. As in many things in today’s world, the way forward joins a circle with the wisdom of our ancient past. 

3. Healing Collective Trauma ~ Our Initiation into Gaian Consciousness

When a group of spiritually sovereign individuals ‘clicks’ into ‘symphonic’ group consciousness, it is able to access extraordinarily rich and complex reservoirs of compassion, love, wisdom, courage, joy, and other qualities that exponentially expand the power of healing potential available. When a coherent group also comes into resonance with the vast natural forces of the Earth, the Cosmos, and the Mystery at the source of creation, it becomes a conduit for healing powers of extraordinary magnitude. Most groups who work with this dimension of collective intelligence intuitively sense that they have entered a new paradigm of spiritual work that goes beyond individual healing or awakening. That, rather, they are playing in a terrain with significant implications for collective or societal evolution.

I believe it is not coincidental that these creative fields of synergistic wisdom, forming out of the dialectic between personal sovereignty and collective intelligence, are developing at a time when so many of the collective traumas from humanity’s past are surfacing for healing. It will surely be among the most poignant applications of the higher order capacities of coherent group consciousness to help hold and transmute our collective historical wounds. In this sense, it is as though the wounds from our collective past are co-arising with the technologies of consciousness that will enable us to effectively heal them. Although many of these technologies are just emerging from a kind of beta testing phase, as they mature they will have profound implications for our collective evolution.

We can understand this dimension of spiritual work as being part of our initiation into the truly world-centric or Gaian consciousness that will underlie the Aquarian Age. If we are to enter the Aquarian era as fundamentally equal, sovereign beings, it will require us to heal the wounds from our collective past that have separated us from each other and the Earth. It is precisely — and only — through the emergent spiritual capacities of coherent group consciousness that we will be able to access together the healing power capable of transmuting wounds of such magnitude. In this respect, these emerging vehicles of coherent group awareness can be seen as initiation devices for the world-centric, Gaian consciousness that is being birthed as we enter the Aquarian Age.

4. World Spirituality ~ Interconnected Planetary Body of Love

Indeed, it may be that our entrance into the Aquarian Age will be when the long-held dream of inter-spiritual harmony among the many different spiritual and religious groups across the planet can finally be realized.

As we have seen, the vertical pattern of energy flow that characterized the Piscean Age manifested spiritually as a vertical link between the spiritual leader (guru, rabbi, priest, etc) and Source or God consciousness, with the followers’ connection to Source mediated primarily through the leader. This pattern structurally supported subtle or overt competition between different spiritual and religious groups, even when each of the various groups may have embodied a genuine realization of love and unity consciousness. Spiritual leaders need disciples just as disciples need leaders. This dynamic created a situation where the special spiritual status of the leader or special profundity of the tradition tended to be emphasized, over and above that of others. The extreme version of this dynamic took the form of religious wars. But it also manifested in subtler ways as an obstacle to greater synergy between spiritual groups on the energetic planes for the benefit of all.

In the Aquarian era, as we have seen, energy will tend to flow in a fundamentally different, horizontal pattern, linking sovereign individuals and groups in decentralized networks. The energetic ‘geometry’ of this pattern will relax the structural tension inherent to the hierarchical model, allowing for (and in fact encouraging) collaboration between nodes of the network, rather than competition. In spiritual circles, this pattern will likely manifest as a greater appreciation for the unique spiritual gifts of each group or tradition, and a greater understanding of how these groups form together an interconnected planetary body of love.

One beautiful expression of this rising Aquarian spiritual vision is spiritual teacher Marc Gafni’s World Spirituality. Gafni envisages the emergence of a World Spirituality that is not a new religion, but a ‘symphony’ in which the unique perspectives and gifts of each tradition are appreciated as ‘instruments’ playing their own unique sacred ‘music’. From the perspective of World Spirituality, every tradition is seen to hold a particular medicine that is crucial to the health of the whole. Paradoxically, it is precisely through the recognition of the uniqueness of each tradition that the need to emphasize the special and superior status of any one path can dissolve. Then, we can move toward a world spirituality “in which all gifts from all traditions are taken into account and woven into a higher, integral evolutionary embrace.”

My own sense is that a profound energetic interweaving between spiritual groups and traditions is now taking place at a deep organic level, orchestrated by the Earth itself. Through listening to the guidance coming from the Earth and following these prompts, people and groups are gradually co-creating with the Earth an organic planetary matrix of light that shares a common vibrational signature. As we move further into the Aquarian era of decentralization, the flow of energy connecting the nodes with each other is bound to strengthen.

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I still love Osho with my whole heart. And I’m deeply indebted to Hameed Ali and Karen Johnson of the Diamond Approach to Spiritual Realization, whose profound teaching on the unique personal essence of each individual supported me on so many levels to mature into my own unique connection with source. Many spiritual pioneers of recent times have themselves been pointing the way to the Aquarian spirituality of the future. (Osho himself was anything but a traditional guru.) Still, their teachings were inevitably delivered via structures that reflected at least in part the hierarchical pattern of Piscean Age consciousness. When I first began teaching myself, I was aware that there was a pre-made shape in late-Piscean spiritual capitalism that I was being invited to step into — that of New Age author and minor spiritual celebrity — which did not structurally fit with the nature and intent of the group work I wanted to facilitate. As the energy starts to flow increasingly in the new horizontal pattern of decentralization, we will inevitably see the emergence of new structures for engaging in spiritual work that are more congruent with the Aquarian ideals of personal sovereignty and collective intelligence.

Conclusion

I’ve looked here at some key ways that the shift in society’s underlying organizing principle — from top-down vertical hierarchies to horizontal decentralized networks — is manifesting in leading trends in technology and spirituality as we transition from the Piscean to the Aquarian Age. Although I’ve treated these areas separately, it’s not hard to imagine how these trends might mutually reinforce and impel each other. Those with a more materialistic orientation tend to believe that technology is the main driver of social change, whereas spiritually-oriented people tend to focus on the evolution of consciousness as the primary factor. But it seems more accurate to say that the relationship between technology and consciousness is complex and dialectical. When a new technology like blockchain is introduced, it sparks an explosion of creativity within the human imagination as billions of new possibilities come into view. And as our collective consciousness expands, the ideas that will seed the development of the next generation of technology are born. And so on.

We might imagine, for instance, how the flourishing of individual spiritual creativity and group intelligence in the Aquarian Age could inspire the design of many new technologies that serve deeper humanitarian purposes. Conversely, it’s already very apparent that the emergence of blockchain-powered decentralized networks has the potential to radically impel human sovereignty and freedom. From an astrological perspective, it is as though both consciousness and technology co-evolve in alignment with the underlying archetypal dynamics of any given era.

I have intentionally focused in this essay on the higher potentials of the Aquarian era that are just now starting to become visible, even if only as seeds of possibility. However I am under no illusion as to the narrowness of the passage we are currently navigating, and the much darker and dystopian forces at play in the world. It is truly as though we are poised on the brink of utopia or dystopia. In part 3 of this essay series, The Dance of Dark and Light, I will explore at length the profound dialectical dynamics taking place between the forces of creation and destruction during this great time of epochal transition.