Meta-Crisis to Metamorphosis
When a caterpillar, is within a chrysalis and in the course of becoming a butterfly, much of its
old body dissolves into a chemical soup, leaving intact only its ability to breathe, to digest
and to retain a residual memory. Crucially, so-named imaginal cells, present but dormant in
the caterpillar’s body since its birth and containing the DNA blueprint for the butterfly, now
become active.
At first, they are viewed as invaders by the immune system of the fading caterpillar and
attacked, which actually results in their becoming stronger and more active. Forming body
parts unknown to the caterpillar but essential for the butterfly, such as complex eyes,
antennae, legs and wings, they link up with the remaining caterpillar organs to become the
emergent butterfly. When the process is complete the chrysalis cracks open and the butterfly,
its wings wet and crumpled, crawls out. Usually doing so mid-morning, enables its wings to
dry in the increasing warmth of the Sun, before it flies off to start its new life.
This emergent development, known as metamorphosis, derives from the ancient Greek word
for transformation, such is the radical nature of the changes undertaken; not only biologically
but into a completely different way of life. Whereas a caterpillar lives to eat, consuming as
much as possible, a butterfly lives to pollinate, sipping the sweetness of flowers and
fertilizing new life.
The multiple and existential threats and challenges we are currently facing has been termed a
meta-crisis. Yet perhaps, with the example of the caterpillar transforming to become a
butterfly, we may reframe these challenging and turbulent times in terms of a potential
metamorphosis for our species. While likely involving major changes to our ways of life,
rather than biological transmutation, our metamorphosis will be foundationally based on the
emergence of a transformed worldview.
In 1999, writing in his seminal work The Mystic Heart – Discovering a Universal Spirituality
in the World's Religions, Brother Wayne Teasdale declared that: “We are at the dawn of a new
consciousness” and invited a collective awareness to, “understand, to really grasp at an
elemental level that the definitive revolution is the spiritual awakening of humankind.”
Dr Kurt Johnson and David Robert Ord subsequently wrote in their book The Coming
Interspiritual Age (2013), of Interspirituality being: “The common heritage of humankind’s
spiritual wisdom and the sharing of wisdom resources across traditions” in a movement:
“toward the experience of profound interconnectedness, unity consciousness, and oneness”
and: “so based on the heart and unconditional love that it would be impossible to feel separate
from anything.”
While they and many other spiritual leaders have appreciated the evolution of human
consciousness needed to manifest such an awakening, all three authors concurred that it
would emerge due to: “A new set of historical circumstances.”
Twenty-five years on from The Mystic Heart, I suggest that rather than despite, it is instead
because of the level of existential threats we now face, the scale of turmoil and polarization
and collective exhaustion at the unsustainability of the status quo, that have the evolutionary
potential to offer such ‘new circumstances’ able to usher in an epoch of Interspirituality.
When the term Interspirituality was coined, while its founding was on a commonality of
spiritual wisdom, one key ‘tradition’ was exempt from its remit – the then prevailing secular
science of a reductionist and materialist paradigm.
Yet it is this paradigm, harking back to its late 19 th century heyday, that has pervaded our
collective worldview and societal organizations ever since. Ranging across economics,
corporate and governance structures, education, healthcare and much more, the entirety of its
hierarchical-based and siloed perspectives and resultant policies and practices, have
continued to drive separation-based choices and behaviors; accordingly maintaining conflicts,
exploitations, inequities and injustices with regard to people and our planetary home, Gaia.
Now however, scientific breakthroughs are revealing a radically new and wide-ranging and
evidence-based perception of the more fundamental nature of reality and which is convergent
with the wholistic precepts of Interspirituality.
Its revelations at every level of existence and vitally that of our everyday lives, are
profoundly relevant to each and all of us. In doing so, far more than a scientific revolution, it
offers to underpin and serve a (r)evolution in human consciousness.
Its most essential findings are showing that instead of being something we have and
experience at different levels of self-awareness; that mind and consciousness are what we and
the whole world really are. That, as wisdom teachings have maintained, universal mind
literally and meaningfully in-forms the unified appearance of our Universe, as its semblance
and not its fundamental nature. As Interspirituality declares, it is its unity, expressed in
manifold complexity and diversity, rather than separation or uniformity, that is indeed the
authentic nature of its unitive reality and that we ourselves are its microcosmic co-creators.
Beginning 13.8 billion years ago not in the implied chaos of a Big Bang but as an incredibly
ordered and fine-tuned first moment of an ongoing Big Breath its unitive narrative tells how,
as space has since expanded from its miniscule birth and time flowed forward, our entire
Universe meaningfully and purposefully exists TO evolve.
Its universal sentience embodies a profound evolutionary impulse driven, not by random
occurrences and mutations, but through resonant, harmonic and profoundly interdependent
relationships that are meaningfully and coherently in-formed and guided.
As Dr Robert Atkinson author of A New Story of Wholeness (2022) proposes: “This
empowers us to envision and co-create a love-based rather than separation-based future in
which regenerative and sustainable development leads to peace as a natural outcome of a
world that works for all beings and our planetary home.”
The potential for the emergence of such a unitive wholeworld-view, a unitive narrative that
frames its universal principles of unity in diversity, inclusion and belonging and the birth of a
Unitive Age, is already being embodied as the imaginal cells of numerous and varied
grassroots groups and growing movements that are now forming and developing around the
world.
Its emergence is being empowered by their progressively linking up and lifting up together.
Instead of mechanical hierarchies, they are convening as partners and communities to
collaborate and synergize their co-creative efforts. By learning from and embodying the
relational principles and holarchic organizations of living systems and guided by indigenous
wisdom, they are levelling up and lighting up the path to an authentically hopeful future.
They are exemplifying how when we dissolve our separated sense of self while each bringing
our unique gifts to serve the good of the whole, we can reframe and more deeply understand,
the breakdown and dying of the old and breakthrough and birth of the new; not as a meta-
crisis but as a metamorphosis.
Instead of the plunderers of our planetary home, we can emerge to become pollinators and
co-evolutionary partners and come to realize that our conscious evolution plays an integral
role in Gaia’s own evolutionary progress and purpose.
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