Spiritual Formation for a Quantum Age of Intuitive Intelligence
“I’m not falling behind or running late...
Wait for it...
I’m not standing still
I am lying in wait”
People are fond of calling the times we are living in ‘unprecedented’.
The problem is that they are entirely precedented. They only *feel* unprecedented if we have not paid attention to the story arcs of history. This time that we are living in is in fact, a great awakening. Scales are falling from our collective eyes, and the fields of science and spirituality, which humans have long thought were at odds with one another, are now colliding in the quantum realm as science starts to approach what was once relegated to mystery, and explain it to us in the language of physics, or geometry, or biology – whichever you prefer. Powerful truths about the nature of reality are now being experimented with scientifically and bringing forth ideas which humans used to rely on religious mythologies or archetypes to articulate.
Lets start this in prehistory or in deep time, which is a term I’ve learned from one of my brilliant friends to describe the pre-human epoch.
This time can only be entered into either by sacred imagination, which is how the religious motifs bring it to us; or by science, which is a language I confess I do not speak fluently. What we can conceivably understand about this time, is that nature worked upon itself in endlessly creative ways birthing, breathing, dying, re-making a world which was by turns beautiful, fearsome, dangerous, tranquil, hospitable and deadly. This evolutionary process results in the paradox of ever increasing levels of diversity, and yet also moves the arc of creation toward ultimate unity within and without. Every ancient civilisation has mythologies to explain this period. These mythologies give us clues as to their cosmological lens, their world views around human origins, including both divine action and inaction, archetypal patterns which describe human behaviour and engagement with the community and Divine, and which contain warnings, parables, contracts, oaths or covenants and wisdom.
As I am now attempting to sketch the contours of how I see a new cosmology emerge in the next epoch of time, which necessarily arises in a complex alchemical conversation between human development, science, ecological wisdom and religious thought, it is important that I describe my own origins tale, so that you can easily map my own lens, biases and blind spots, and so freely engage with my offerings without my interpretation getting in your way.
“I grew up on a very strange literary diet for a small child. I devoured ancient Greek, Roman and Norse mythology by the giant volume, I read the dictionary most mornings over a bowl of cereal, and regularly consulted encyclopaedias and ethnic historiographies.”
I would spend hours at my local library researching things like the lost city of Atlantis, astronomy, the Yeti, UFOs, the Loch Ness Monster and other unexplained mysteries or conspiracies. To counteract all that, I also grew up on a steady diet of de-colonised Australian history, learning how to link our own colonial brutal history to other colonial histories in other countries where Indigenous wisdom traditions had been silenced by genocide, rape and spiritual abuse, and how elders and teachers in those traditions were exiled and the gross injustice and loss of collective soul, wisdom and integrity which ensued. I grew up on Anglican liturgical spiritual practices, including fortified wine at the communion table, the Chronicles of Narnia, pulp fiction out of the UK from the 30s, 40s and 50s, 60s rock and roll, and eco-justice conversation at the dinner table. I grew up understanding I had been gifted three different citizenships in three different countries on two continents and that my white skin and educated mind meant I had unearned privilege, and that I thus carried an enormous responsibility for the stewardship of justice and mercy.
My dad was the first feminist I ever met. He made all three of us girls toolboxes, had a bumper sticker on his car which said ‘Give A Girl A Spanner’, and would frequently encourage us to pursue careers in the sciences, leadership, or politics. His firm belief in our co-equal value with our male classmates was never for one second questioned. We thought this was quaint and amusing, at the time.
Now I realise it was revolutionary.
My parents can best be characterised as academic hippies, so the conversation was decidedly left-leaning, always adjudicated by two gifted minds with – or working toward- PhDs, and all our viewpoints, comments, assertions and interjections needed to be supported by research, evidence, humility and rational thought. I grew up surrounded by music of every genre, which was probably my second language. Many nights after dinner, my dad would start quietly packing away the dishes and putting the leftovers in the fridge, and my mum and my two sisters and I would sit around the table singing in rounds, practicing complex and inter-woven harmonies, for hours on end. By the time I was 13 I had picked up and abandoned several instruments, and I knew if I wanted to pursue a career in music, I could be successful at that. But I was too lazy to practice and I let it slide.
The adults in my world were, in the main, gifted, thoughtful professionals with the same sensibilities as my parents; who always let us call them by their first names, and whose impressive contributions in their fields of practices – psychiatry, physiotherapy, medicine, pastoral ministry, theology, we could not possibly have appreciated as children. I appreciate them now. I appreciate that I was raised by a collective of some of the brightest, most curious and inquisitive, sensitive, gifted and agile minds in my country, and in our world. This upbringing occurred in the context of an evangelical Christian community which included the best and worst of that iteration of religious wisdom. Imagination, sacrament, revelation, abuse, misogyny, willful blindness. Divine intervention, emotional lack, intellectual rigour, word-of-faith living, shame-based parenting. It was a hot mix of the best and the worst. I cannot separate the two, nor do I need to anymore. My upbringing was, in short, remarkable. And it is the ground of my being in every way; so I must acknowledge it for that, and name it as such, so that what I say and how I frame my assertions can be appropriately located.
“That is some of my own personal alchemy, which worked itself out in my life in ways which have forced me to do away with religious dualism, and move ultimately into the kind of spiritual formation which has had to be rigorous enough to support inter-disciplinary academic thought, strong enough to hold room for epic failure as well as scandalous grace, and prophetic enough to hold room for mystery and reality to co-exist peacefully.”
I preface what I am about to suggest here with all of this, so that the reader will understand that my own locus of meaning-making has been the Christian tradition, in deep conversation with other academic disciplines, ecology, justice, social history, mythology, archetype, art and the ubiquitous specter of human suffering and pain. I am not a scientist by any stretch of the imagination, but the way I observe science playing with loves of mine; existentialism, mysticism, history and human behaviour, has piqued my interest deeply in the last 18 months and now I nerd out to whatever I can get my hands on in the realm of quantum physics, particularly. I have played with the quantum realm experientially using methods taught by several teachers in this space who bridge the worlds of religious thought, human development and spiritual formation – and have found those experiments mind-blowing.
I have no fear of playing with ideas, concepts, making meaning, discarding ideas, moving on, experimenting with thought and applying it to various real-life scenarios to see if it fits – or not. So religious dogma and I have never been great friends. For this reason, some will hail me as a prophet, others will deride me for a heretic. I have been called both saint and slut, both leader and lost, both fore-runner and forsaken, both seer and blind-woman. I could care less what names I am given by those who perhaps hold a snippet of my story and suppose it to be the whole, because my ego has died a million deaths over the last twenty years.
The name I have been given by the One who gives all names, is Beloved. And that is all I answer to these days.
At the heart of the Christian mystery lies a timeless truth which I’m convinced can be the cornerstone for the coming epoch of spiritual questing and formation, if only we learn to see it with fresh eyes. The “Christ Consciousness” is that mystery, and I believe it has been the blueprint for everything and will continue to be the blueprint for everything long after I’m dead and gone and these words are dusty relics in history. I got that idea straight out of the Pauline letter to the ancient church in modern day Turkey, now called ‘Colossians’ in the Christian Bible.
However, my observation is that the Christ Consciousness as universal mystery has been obliterated and obscured from view by all but a small band of mystics and for the last 500 years of human history. The arc of human development and the collective consciousness in the last several generations has been underpinned by literal interpretations of religious texts which has lead to untold war, suffering, genocide, silencing, misogyny and horror. This has happened on every front imaginable, by every religious group. For this reason, I believe that the only way religious thought, expression or imagination will get to ‘play’ in the coming landscape, is if people let go of the need for literal translation or time-bound historiographic explanations, and learn instead, to map archetypes and mythologies.
Those who have not benefited like I have from engaging deeply with mythology may suppose that when I use the word ‘myth’, I mean ‘fable’, ‘legend’ or ‘fairy-tale.’
I do not.
While fables, legends and fairy-tales have their place in the human psyche and experience, myth is an entirely different kettle of fish. Myths anchor us deeply in meaning-making, by which I mean, they help us make sense of reality. They are truer than truth. They are more real than reality. They are the sketched contours of shared story arcs which remind us that we are connected to each other, and Divine and the earth in ways that transcend individual consciousness, and are linked in fact to a shared consciousness. Within myth we find the tools for transformation, belonging, and identify formation – all the major features of a flourishing life. Within myth, we have observable patterns and story arcs which scaffold archetypes. Archetypes can be explained as the key characters in myths, with patterned identities which can be recognised across apparent cultural or religious divisions in mythologies, who carry the storylines forward in ways that reflect deep-time cosmology.
Archetypes can shift and merge to be re-imagined within the landscape of myth, and that is why having a basic grasp of them is a powerful tool for spiritual growth and transformation. Cosmology can loosely be imagined as the lens that we look through which allows us to intelligently intersect our religious beliefs with our belonging to earth (and the galaxy) and each other. This is obviously a grossly over-simplified birds eye view of enormous bodies of work pioneered by the likes of Joseph Campbell, Carl Jung, Clarissa Pinkola-Estes and many others. If your interest is piqued by these ideas, I recommend starting with Campbell’s work on archetypes and the hero’s journey, and moving on from there. He maps the progression of mythologies across four major epochs of time, starting in the Paleolithic era. None of what I am saying here is ground-breaking, new or shocking to anyone who has studied in the arts or sciences. It is only perhaps new for some iterations of Christian communities who have been siloed in their spiritual development.
When we read religious texts (including the Bible) archetypally and mythologically, they become *more* meaningful, true, applicable and real – not less. It does not diminish a text to call it myth – it exalts it. It sets it on the pedestal of shared imagination, it lays it out as a smorgasbord and invites all to feast on it. It cracks it open in ways that may have been unimaginable beforehand. It makes it meaningful and meaty and relevant in any dimension, timeframe, religious context or epoch of time. It welcomes deep engagement with other fields and disciplines, because an archetypal and mythological framework has holographic and multidimensional meaning-making devices – eliminating surface level divisions on the minutiae of issues like transmission, translation, and doctrine.
We are in a time now, which I argued at the start of this essay - was entirely precedented, where we are all seeking to make meaning of our religious ideologies and texts in fresh ways. I submit to you that we do this by engaging with both mythologically and archetypally, and so re-imagine them in fresh ways, with fresh vision, and fresh application for a whole new era.
Additionally, I would add that if we do read our texts mythologically, we are not only endlessly enriched, but we are also set free from all sorts of doctrinal wars, divisions, and nit-picking and can put that head and heart-space into more constructive arenas. Like responding intelligently to climate change, global hunger, human trafficking, slavery, gender wars and racism.
There are some archetypes which can be mapped across all religious myths, which I think are now being retired, and some new ones which are now emerging. I think we are seeing the end of the historical iterations of archetype of the priest, the patriarch, the evangelist and the crusader. We learned all we had to learn, as a collective, from these archetypes, and we are now gently (or not so gently) retiring them; thanking them for their service and preparing to archive them and move them to history, where they can accumulate wisdom for us in the rear-view mirror. They are not being allowed to influence the public square anymore, that much is blatantly obvious. To be clear, there are many deeply reflective and powerful humans still operating in these archetypes today, but my observation is that they are deliberately participating in their own archetypal self-annihilation in service to Divine. The dodgy ones are simply being removed and deleted like an old program from the Matrix.
We are also seeing the emergence of a number of new archetypes, and studying them has endlessly fascinated me.
For example, the intuitive empath healer who combines empathic sensibility with natural gifting to transmute individual and shared pain and alchemise it as healing and wisdom. So many empaths embody this archetype, and many are drowning in not allowing themselves to harness this power for their own benefit, believing that all their sensitivity is weakness and not their power. Some of these people are so powerful, that they have learned to listen to their own bodies and use them like instruments; what is light, is good; what is heavy, is dark. Theirs is the wisdom we need in this quantum intuitive age where religious doctrine is losing its relevance but we still need guidance and direction, because we know what resonates and what doesn’t but we perhaps don’t know why. I have been gifted with the friendship and presence of a number of these folks in my world, and they are treasures; every one of them. One of them texted me the other day from a different state, querying me about some dreams she had sensed I had been having that week. She was spot on. She reported to me that she had observed me having the dreams in her own dream-state, and knew they were my dreams and not her own. Because she had been given this intuitive insight into my own inner world, I knew to pay attention to those dreams in ways I might not otherwise have. This is just one example of the powerful gift of the intuitive empath healer. These people have to wrestle deeply with their own sense of crippling inadequacy, and face it head on in order to step fully into their own power. These people are often misunderstood as being overly sensitive, mentally ill or ‘too much’, because what is tolerable to many people is intolerable to them. This is because they embody the most sensitive of all energetic blueprints.
The twin-flame archetype is another one we are just finding language for now- who embody both the feminine and masculine energy of Divine in two different bodies. These pairs are tasked with healing and spiritual awakening or teaching work which is either dangerous, difficult or both - and which requires two people to accomplish. They are called to work together, for this reason. These people are like mirror images of each other, totally identical in many ways, and yet holding polar opposites of the same energetic frequency. Like magnets or two strings tuned to the same resonance; they recognise each other at a soul level long before their conscious minds catch up. They often come from different racial groups, countries, age groups, or social demographics, with enormous logistical obstacles to overcome before they come into real sacred union. Often they are born in two different countries, and meet together in a third country. Ultimately, with this archetype it is not until their separation period – which is necessary and usually brought about by traumatic and explosive events - that they begin to understand unity consciousness and discover their powerful bond which cannot be broken through time, space or human will. Their energetic blue-print, or map, is the Tree of Life; which is the key to unlocking their particular wisdom tradition, and their spiritual awakening journey often has to occur while they are in separation, because their joint energy is so strong that they cannot be in each others’ physical realities without blowing things up until they are healed and strong enough to anchor it safely. Tantra is their natural discipline for grounding and connection with themselves, their counterpart and Divine, and is often the way they tap into their individual and shared spiritual power. These people are called to suffer and face their deepest fears of abandonment, rejection and unworthiness and will subconsciously push each other into these dimensions to catalyse one anothers’ growth and healing. They ultimately cannot love each other unconditionally until they learn to love themselves unconditionally, which is part of their archetypal pattern. As with all archetypes, this one is often misunderstood as being some new-age romantic love story – but that’s not its primary function. Its primary function is to support spiritual growth for the planet.
The sacrificial lamb or the ‘burning bush’ archetype are people who are called to suffer an inordinate amount of pain, trauma, heartache, abuse or all of the above; and ultimately discover that their own power, and – in a very concrete way - the deliverance of the world rises and falls upon their obedience to the mythology of suffering. These are some of the most powerful people among us. It is normal for these archetypes to spend time at one point or another in either a hospital or a psych-ward before ultimately deciding to heal themselves, because they tend not to respond to traditional medical models of treatment. Their pain is so great, that usually others cannot handle being in their presence, and they often experience alienation or isolation which compounds their suffering exponentially. In a very real sense, they are incarnational expressions of the ‘lamb who was slain’, and understand that part of the Christian story mythologically and instinctually, as they are called to walk in it experientially. It has been my great privilege to walk with a couple of these people in their lives. One of them, an old friend, died very suddenly recently, and I saw her in the heavenly realm on the night she died as a mythic Valkyrie; a warrior mounted on a winged horse ripping up an ancient demonic stronghold which had its tentacles deep into the heart of this earth as she went, using her last breath to fight the darkness she had been called into an embodied experience of. For these people, the only theological frameworks that make sense to them are typically mystical apophatic traditions. They would experience run-of-the-mill evangelical traditions as being spiritually violent, as there is often very little capacity to hold room for suffering with no hope in sight, in those spaces.
The entrepreneur archetype is coming into increasing visibility due to the rise of the internet. Entrepreneurs who feel called to their business as vocation can sometimes feel conflicted about their desire for success and making money, when what actually drives them is a powerful conviction about the kind of niche they are called to occupy in the marketplace. These are the people who are often called to steward significant wealth or resources, and can develop entire multi-national corporations from their couch with a laptop. Often their trajectory makes them feel alienated from their previous associates, friends or even family members, as these people can magnetise an enormous amount of jealousy, and can be targeted by unscrupulous partners who can tap into their altruism and bleed them dry. For people on this archetypal journey, there is a predictable pattern preceding their mastery, in which they must confront their own fears of failure, of unworthiness, and heal their deep-seated issues regarding money, security and lack – before they can land on the other side and into abundance. I see these people as having been handed keys to unlock solutions to some of the world’s most wicked and pervasive social ills. Think Bob Goff, Bill Gates, Oprah Winfrey and the like. This is their archetype.
The narcissist or the empty vessel archetypes have become more prevalent in this same era. Sometimes called ‘energy vampires’, they can exhaust you just by sitting in their presence because they feel like energetic black holes – like nothing you give is ever enough. They are, in many ways, the counterpoint to all this cosmic power and light and potency. They can be hard to spot, because their superpowers are camouflage and counterfeit. They can blend in and look like almost anyone; stay at home parents, caregivers, social justice warriors, nurses, teachers, psychologists, social workers, NGO leaders. They can be very emotionally intelligent, very skillful and very manipulative. Signs that you are in the presence of one of these people are feeling permanently exhausted, confused, trapped, unworthy, unsure, frightened or anxious. Gaslighting is their expertise and they do it reflexively, and expertly. They are almost impossible to spot, which is why we need these other archetypes to counteract and spot them.
Some old archetypes which have always existed are becoming more and more visible and their story-arcs are becoming more applicable to a wider swathe of humanity than before. Those are the mystic, the shaman, the teacher, the artist, the hermit, the matriarch and the prophet. We all know these archetypes, and can point to many examples of them in our holy texts, and in our human histories. They are more critical than ever before for this new age to come.
Some archetypes are timeless, and continue to endure because they transcend linear time and exist in another dimension. They include the queen and king, the emperor and empress, the fool (who becomes the hero), the mage, the high priestess, the mother and father, the trickster, the disciple and the judge.
We could take the Bible, and point examples of every single one of these archetypes. That is because they are timeless, and show up in every ancient people’s mythology; which is what the Bible is; ancient Jewish mythology.
The hermeneutic gymnastics which are now required to apply Biblical wisdom to people living in the quantum intuitive age of information saturation and overload, cannot be overstated. For the best part of a decade, I devoted my working hours to the fearsome and fraught task of training and equipping people to read the Bible intelligently, in my work at a Seminary, and I can tell you that even there – or maybe especially there – the kind of wisdom, reverence and initiation required to bring biblical wisdom to life in a way which is both authentic and meaningful is rare. Most people simply don’t have the time, patience or intellectual bandwidth necessary to do this work. Or if they do, they are unable to muster the courage to face and integrate their own shadow, and own how their own scapegoating interferes with their readings of this ancient and powerful text.
If we really love the bible and want to take it with us into the next 500 years in a way that supports human spiritual development, I’m now convinced that we need to learn to read it holographically, mystically, archetypally and mythologically. Wisdom literature is timeless, and the Bible is full of it. So is poetry, erotica, satire and irony. If we read the Bible for all it is worth, we cannot overlook all these elements, we must learn to see it as a series of fascinating and time-bound, geo-politically located, ethnically-oriented, culturally-relevant reflections on how a certain group of humans made sense of their big questions. Who are we? Where did we come from? What does it all mean? Who is God? How can we approach Divine mystery? How does it all come together?
Ultimately, if our engagement with our holy texts doesn’t leave us in awe, fits of giggles, shock, sorrow, wonder and amazement, we probably aren’t reading it right. I’m no expert, but I can tell you for sure, that we won’t get anywhere waving the Bible around and citing it to back up homophobia, xenophobia, ignorance, division, political agendas, empire-building, capitalism, misogyny or hatred of any stripe in the age to come. It just won’t cut it. Humanity has evolved beyond that now, and the time for arguing is well past over. Those who do that, will just be disregarded and relegated to antiquity, delusion or both.
These are just some of the contours of the spiritual reformation which is already in full swing, from where I’m sitting. There are a million more frontiers which I’m writing about in a larger volume right now, so this will be my last post for a while as I pull together a number of different threads into something more cohesive and supportive for engagement.
I’ve made some bold statements here, so let me just remind you that you don’t have to swallow them whole or subscribe to them. Just take what resonates and leave what does not. We all do that all the time anyway, its about time we started giving permission for it to happen.
Wherever you locate yourself on this journey, you are right where you are supposed to be. Whatever wisdom you need for the next stage, is already living and beating inside your human heart.
Go gently, and be kind to one another.