An Upwards Spiral

[Dear reader, please know that I refuse to use AI to do any of my writing. I have become rather allergic to the massive amounts of AI-slop out there, and have sworn off it’s use when it comes to expressing myself authentically.

If my writing resonates with you and you decide to follow me, you have my guarantee that AI will not be writing any of my content, full stop.]

A Movement

Have you noticed how often conversations these days turn towards topics like awakening, consciousness or transcendence? You’re not alone. More and more people from all walks of life seem to be undergoing profound inner shifts. It’s not confined to those who are deep into meditation practice or on some kind of dedicated spiritual path. Something deeper seems to be stirring.

Indeed, many at the Leading Edge of understanding awakening experiences are largely left-brained leaning individuals with deeply skeptical and materialist backgrounds. They are people with careers in business, science or academia, and who have gradually (or more often suddenly) found themselves with one foot in each of the camps of heart and logic. They are ushering in world views beyond materialism, to the fringes of various forms of idealism, panpsychism, panentheism, and many other -isms. They are supported by practitioners and academics with backgrounds in cognitive and neuroscience, physics and engineering, philosophy and a host of other disciplines.

A growing dream team of spiritually-enlightened philosophical giants like Iain McGilchrist, John Vervaeke, Bernardo Kastrup, Rupert Sheldrake and Federico Faggin, among many, many others, are leading a revolution in what today is still in most materialist circles considered heretical - that frontier where science and spirituality begin to meet, and indeed overlap.

Initially, I dismissed the number of people around me experiencing some form of awakening experience as anecdotal, perhaps a quirk of the spirituality and philosophically-inclined circles I find myself in.

Or maybe it was just confirmation bias. Besides, my own awakening had completely changed my relationship with reality, so that confirmation bias seemed pretty likely.

In my late thirties I was struck by my own transformational awakening in the form of a direct experience of unity consciousness. I was hiking that day. My mind was looping over some anxiety I don’t recall, when what you might call a deeper intelligence compelled me to ask: Who is the “I” speaking in my mind? And who is listening and engaging with it? Am ‘I’ the speaker or the one being spoken to? Are there two or more ‘I’s in a dance of thoughts, all competing for the title of self?

Although I had discovered Buddhism almost a decade earlier and dabbled in meditation, I knew nothing of self-inquiry or non-duality as practices, and I had always equated awakening with enlightenment, a lofty goal for high achieving spiritual types. But for whatever reason, on that day something broke open.

I was whacked by a full embodied realization of the illusion of self. In an instant my worldview collapsed, and I was given a glimpse into the absolute nature of reality. I experienced a visceral moment of non-duality and a recognition of the interconnectedness of all things. It’s hard to put into words, but it felt like waking up from a dream I didn’t know I was in. Waking up in this ‘more real’ reality came with the understanding that my true Self is infinitely larger than I previously knew it to be, and is inseparably woven into everything that exists.

Although it was a massively exhilarating experience and came with an air of liberation, I took away something far more important than the experience itself: a spiritual baptism which planted a seed in my heart that has transformed my internal and external worlds since, in ways that are (and I use the term quite literally), indescribable1.

As the months and years passed, many in my immediate and extended circle of friends were struck by similarly powerful life-changing experiences, in a variety of ways. For a long time I had chalked this up to the principal of attraction, but the vast spectrum and sheer number of people who admit to experiencing a greater reality have been appearing fast and strong, across the globe, and seemingly out of nowhere.

The Ineffable

I should probably pause here for a moment and say something about what I mean by a ‘transformational awakening experience’. It’s a very broad, deeply personal, and inherently subjective term, but there do seem to be some common threads. To me, awakening includes something along the lines of one or more of the following:

• A realization that you are not what you thought you were.
• Your reality is now far ‘more real’ than it previously was, very much how one feels when waking from a regular dream.
• Reality cannot be neatly packed into a box (let alone the box of materialism).
• Consciousness does not appear to be limited or localized to a separate self.
• All of life moves as One, and there is an undeniable connectivity between everything and everyone.
• The substrate or essence of the ground of all creation, what some call Source, God, the Absolute, can be described as unconditional Love.
• This Love is both the compass and the path by which we transcend and evolve.
• There is no real separation.
• What you really are is eternal and undying.
• There are multiple planes of consciousness, and our human experience is just one of them.
• Time is an illusion, an organizing principle within a timeless whole.
• Reality is filled with paradoxes, each is a “both/and” truth, and may be harmonized from higher planes of awareness.
• There is a deep logic and significance to the events and happenings in your life.
• There is no end to waking up.

This list is far from complete, but if you’ve had an awakening experience suffice to say you’ll know it, and may have encountered one or more of these. And if, (this is a big if) you meet it with humility, you’ll notice one other thing: you can’t go back. You begin to orient your life around love. There’s no off switch. The seed has been planted.

Awakening isn’t a new set of facts that you add to your library of left brain knowing. It’s a deep, embodied recognition of something more. In fact, there’s decades old established research behind this known as Quantum Change, a concept from psychologists William Miller and Janet C’de Baca that describes sudden, profound, and lasting transformations in one’s relationship with reality. But as with many ideas that challenge a materialist worldview, such fringe topics tend to take time to filter into the mainstream.

You may have a different definition for awakening, and that’s perfectly OK. I don’t believe this list will resonate with everyone and I’m certainly not here to try to standardize a definition of awakening, or put what is ultimately a deeply personal experience into a box. Some interpret their awakening as proof of a specific God – say Jesus, Shiva, Kali or the Divine Mother in any of her forms – others (including myself) touch an ineffable absolute well beyond any anthropomorphic idea of divinity. As John Vervaeke notes, the underlying experience can be exactly the same: a knowing of reality as more immediate, more connected, and profoundly more real.

I’m aware that a sense of a collective awakening is not a novel idea. We are living in an era where conversations about consciousness are everywhere, and where boatloads of newly minted mystics, psychonauts, and philosophers are all describing strikingly similar shifts in perception. I’d even suppose that transformational awakenings, by and large, are experienced nowadays by many (maybe even most who have taken the psychedelics route, or those within particular spiritual or religious communities) and may even be considered common knowledge.

Scroll through podcasts or YouTube and you’ll find endless stories of psychedelic experiences, NDE’s, telepathy, and every variety of mystical experience or path to transcendence you can think of. The sheer volume of this content alone is probably sufficient to spark interest in folks seeking out their own awakening experience, likely with varying levels of success, depending on the level of sincerity and readiness of the seeker. And so the cultural momentum continues to gather steam.

Why? And Why Now?

As serendipity2 would have it, I’ve recently been exposed to the academic perspective on a so called great awakening (or in psychology speak: the interplay between evolving stages of consciousness and societal development) from the viewpoint of Spiral Dynamics, a developmental model of consciousness3. For what it’s worth, in my nascent training in Integral Alchemy, I’ve been exploring this framework in depth4, and it’s clear that many brilliant minds have long wrestled with the question of whether a collective awakening might actually be unfolding. I’ll save a deeper dive of that body of work for another time, but suffice it to say: while those who’ve devoted their lives to studying awakening might differ on the scale, speed, and even definition of what’s unfolding, they tend to agree on one thing: that something is indeed happening.

It might be fair to ask, then: why a great awakening, and why now? I suspect the reasons are many, but largely stem from the growing urgency of our failing world systems. The looming collapse of these systems has been framed by thinkers such as Daniel Schmachtenberger as part of a metacrisis – a web of overlapping environmental, social, economic, psychological, philosophical and spiritual breakdowns. Each pillar of the metacrisis deserves it’s own deep exploration, but I’ll speak to a couple that are closest to home for me to illustrate the point:

Nate Hagens portrays our environmental crisis by describing our civilization as a superorganism, a very real living emergent entity with its own metabolism, drivers, and feedback loops. As Nate powerfully puts it, “The Superorganism and the Self coexist in a recursive dance: while the Superorganism influences individual experiences, those experiences collectively influence the Superorganism.” John Vervaeke’s work centers on the meaning crisis: the breakdown of purpose, belonging, and truth, leaving individuals materially advanced but “spiritually and existentially disoriented”5.

I don’t intend to rehash these and the other crises that make up the metacrisis, there’s already more than enough written on the subject. Suffice to say that they are deep, interconnected, and mutually reinforcing, and in the midst of this tension, conditions for awakening are emerging.

There are many other reasons why the conditions for a collective awakening are ripe: For one, those brilliant thinkers considered heretical to materialists are now fairly mainstream. Add to this a global and powerful renaissance in psychedelics, the absurdity of living in a world addicted to smartphones and scrolling, and of course, the advent of perhaps the biggest mind-fuck of all, AI - which is suddenly everywhere, reshaping how we think, work, and relate to meaning itself.

These converging pressures are impossible to ignore, especially if one is operating within a strictly materialist worldview. And it all feels bigger than any one person’s existential crisis. It feels like a collective undercurrent of insanity. In fact the very emergence of the metacrisis itself may be evidence of a collective yearning to move beyond materialism. We see it in manifest in society as a growing distrust of political, financial, and health institutions, in the backlash against polarizing and broken ideologies, and in a renewed curiosity in and deepening recognition of the intelligence of nature, the power of imagination and intuition, the paranormal, and the rediscovery of all things “right brain.”

There’s much more that could be said about the why, but for now, it’s enough to recognize this: there’s good reason to believe a great awakening may be underway, and more than enough reason why it may be happening precisely when it needs to.

Cool story, bro!

So what does any of this actually look like in real life?

I’ve been fortunate to explore the many attributes of awakening in my life, sometimes joyfully, sometimes painfully. Parts of the journey have been deeply solitary, others have unfolded in community with fellow travelers walking a similar path. In my desire to learn more, I’ve drank tea with the Huni Kuin and the Yawanawá, spent seasons embodying the lessons of our mycelium teachers, and taken equally long breaks away from plant medicine to focus on discipline, integration, and the everyday embodiment of what those lessons revealed.

I don’t claim to have found “the answers”, in as much as they exist to be found. Perhaps I can speak to a growing humility on how little we can capture with the human mind, how humble we must remind ourselves to be, if we ever dare to think we have the answers. And there’s still so, so much to learn.

But through these experiences I can say that I’ve been blessed to better understand the nature of Self, embody a remembrance of my eternal nature, and tap into the wellspring of unconditional love far more regularly in my life.

It all sounds pretty good, right? Love, transcendence, connectedness - these are all undeniably great things. And on this basis who wouldn’t want an awakening?

However, Gavin Aberatyne, the creator of some remarkable new somatic healing tools and the person who first introduced me to Spiral Dynamics, sums it up far more eloquently than I ever could:

“Cool story, bro!”

Which leads me to the point of this story: An awakening can be profound. It can create a sudden increase in awareness, a remembrance of why we’re here, a touchpoint to a wellspring of eternal love. But it doesn’t come with an understanding and embodiment of how to operate in a world that is largely not awake. It doesn’t come with a handbook on how to move between transcendence and everyday life, how to integrate the many stages of consciousness development, how to embody higher awareness while still navigating judgment in the world, deadlines, and the general messiness of being human.

Bills and mortgages still need to be paid, income needs to be found, jobs to be worked, food must be on the table, and the world keeps turning. “Before enlightenment; chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment; chop wood, carry water.”

And I feel like I can speak to this reality: I spent close to 15 years working a corporate role at a Fortune 500, helping drive billions in M&A and building the world’s largest anti-financial crime technology business. In context of awakening it might seem unfashionable, even a bit cringe, to speak warmly of these worldly things, but I disagree. Those years were formative. I absolutely loved my time working at the cutting edge of technology and finance, I felt very grateful for the opportunity and career I had, I learned a lot and I enjoyed it, I was good at it, and I got to travel the world and achieve some of my younger self’s goals.

Of course, business is often a very left-brain kind of world. But honestly, after awakening, I didn’t feel that my work was either aligned or misaligned with my higher Self, it’s just that it belonged to a different level of awareness. Over time since, life has unfolded serendipitously into work that feels far more congruent with where I am now. I’m running a startup, enjoying the challenge deeply, and have no plans to step away from the world of business. Only to keep bringing more consciousness into it. But that’s a story for another post.

For now, the point I am trying to make is that to be a mystic and embedded in the world of corporate strategy (or any other worldly job) was not the easiest thing to do. There’s no manual for it. The world of business runs on linear thinking and measurable outcomes. Awakening invites a kind of surrender to mystery, intuition, and love. I’m not saying that business is incompatible with deeper awareness. Just that in it’s current form, they just operate on different frequencies.

There is a real opportunity in discovering ways of working that are more advanced, more integral, more embodied, and ultimately better for both us and the earth. There are people already experimenting on this frontier, expanding their leadership capacity, exploring new ways of being, and redefining what good business looks like. But they’re still the minority. In Spiral Dynamics I have learned that those who inhabit more transcendental stages of consciousness often find it difficult, sometimes even painful, to function in societies that haven’t yet evolved to meet them there. In fact, history is littered with examples where it can be downright unsafe to do so6.

The Need for Community

And so there is a gap – some might say in practical wisdom, but I believe it to be more than that – there is a gap in understanding, embodiment, confidence, and discipline. We live in a world ruled by large forces of energetic machinery. No one inside society is outside its influence. Unless you pack up and move off-grid or to a monastery or a cave in Tibet, you’re part of it, and both affected by and contributing to it.

And so there exists a massive demand for practical wisdom. You can see it in the rapid growth in the personal coaching industry, the endless stream of self-help content, and the millions of YouTube channels and podcasts with teachers of all stripes offering their knowledge, wisdom and experience. A full buffet of spiritual and philosophical traditions are available, each bringing their flavor of Buddhism, non-duality, Stoicism, idealism, the list goes on. And there are billions who are eagerly eating them up. There are many, many good teachings out there, but sadly for every good teaching there are perhaps hundreds or thousands more who are simply noise in a world starved of signal.

For answers, rarely anything beats listening directly to the Source through an ecology of practices including meditation, silence, frequent immersion with nature, connection, movement and stillness. But for us who live in the trenches of society, to even get to a stage in life where this relationship with God has been forged, unless you’ve found a good teacher, personal coach, or community, many of us have relied on books and online content as our primary guides.

And honestly, I was one of them. I’ve probably spent the equivalent of years devouring YouTube lectures and podcasts at 1.5x and 2x speed, reading book after book, unpacking every possible tradition or ancient wisdom that I had a hint of natural enthusiasm to explore. Without YouTube, I might never have encountered McGilchrist, Vervaeke, Kastrup, or Faggin, or come across spiritual teachers that I highly resonated with despite their smaller followings, like Francis Lucille, Shinzen Young, Adyashanti, or John Astin, and so many others who have shaped my worldview. Through them I was led back to the perennial wisdom of Ramana Maharshi, Nisargadatta, Osho, Meister Eckhart, Socrates and Aristotle, and dozens of teachers who might otherwise have remained footnotes in old philosophy texts.

It’s kind of miraculous, really. The internet has become a modern day ashram where wisdom can literally find you through an algorithm, often arriving exactly when you’re ready for it. And with AI it’s only going to get better.

But consumption needs to be balanced with far more. All that input needs to land in an environment which is ripe to cultivate integration and embodiment: more silence, deeper meditation, somatic practices, and a host of other ‘non-left brain’ practices that allow you to learn directly from Source. In this context, it’s undeniably clear to me that solo learning only gets you so far.

Eventually, community calls.

An organic circle of good people has begun forming around me, and I call that community, and it’s good. But it’s also made me realize how large the gap still is between the number of people who’ve genuinely awakened and the availability of tools to help them live in the modern world afterwards: to integrate, embody, and develop practical wisdom.

I don’t think those tools will come from any single guru teacher or any single prescribed ideology. No one system can meet the needs of eight billion unique people. What we need instead is what John Vervaeke calls an ecology of practices, an evolving ecosystem of communities, disciplines, habits and shared spaces that support a practical life post-awakening.

Speira

Thích Nhất Hạnh famously said “The next Buddha may be a Sangha”.

As serendipity would have it, I recently spoke with Tom Morgan, who some years ago developed the practical wisdom community The Leading Edge. He’s since encouraged others to do the same, calling the network of communities emerging throughout the world the World Wise Web, and in a way this is my response to his call of arms.

In truth, I have been contemplating this for over a year, in parallel working on my Vervaeke-inspired curriculum called Realign. On the back of Tom’s latest call for arms I am now launching Speira. In ancient Greece, the triple spiral (speira) or Triskele symbolized the interconnection of all of life’s cycles and the embodiment of eternal motion. For me, it captures the essence of the continual process of awakening and transcendence perfectly. As Ken Wilber puts it, transcendence is like walking a spiral staircase: you keep returning to familiar ground in life, but each time from a higher vantage point7.

Speira will be a conscious, deliberately non-scalable community of no more than 150 members (aligned to the Dunbar principle), of highly agentic people who are both awake and interested enough to have read to this point in my article, are actively shaping the world, and may include:

• Executives and leaders with the influence to drive meaningful change in business, policy, or culture
• Founders and entrepreneurs building ventures that serve for a better world
• Healers, mystics, and thinkers who are also doers

Our shared goal is to cultivate a genuine ecology of practices, supporting each other through research, guidance, and lived wisdom as we navigate the tension between transcendence and daily life.

How it Works

If you’ve made it this far in my writings, we probably connect at some level. For years, I chose not to share my more personal reflections publicly. I felt a strong need to live, learn, embody and integrate lessons learned before I speak about them. But recently I’ve felt a quiet calling to open up a little more to the world, even just as an experiment.

As my reality has been rapidly rearranging itself, proof enough of Attractor Intelligence, I confess I have no fixed idea of where all of this will lead. What I do know is that I don’t want this to be about me. This is why Speira felt like a good idea, a simple intention to gather good people, share wisdom and evolve together - a community of equals who have touched the ineffable and share a natural enthusiasm to further their lives in service of it, and in the practical pursuits of all that entails.

If any of this resonates with you, then please reach out as we form the waitlist for the early circle of founding members. I will be progressively adding more details and guidelines to the community, as we co-create what comes next.

For now, this Substack will be my home base, so feel free to follow or subscribe as the next chapter unfolds.