Explore every episode of the podcast Portals of Perception
| Title | Pub. Date | Duration | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 112 - The Epoch Mystery - Current Openings #20 | 24 Oct 2025 | 01:11:52 | |
A powerful way to envision our entry into this new phase of evolution and epochal shift is as a fusion process — a merging of the physical realm with a new universal potency that unlocks immense possibilities and profound renewal. Imagine it as an energetic Cambrian release for humanity and the planet. We dive deeper into the mysteries of the epochal shift underway in the latest chapter of the “Current Openings” series with Aviv Shahar and David Price Francis. To better understand what we mean by an epoch, Aviv and David begin with a closer look at the energetic nature of the human and the cosmos. Modern thinking often confines reality to the limits of our biophysical form. However, we recognize an energetic dimension residing within and between all layers of organic, physical existence. Humans can sense and attune to these spiritual or energetic frequencies through finer faculties naturally embedded in our design. The energetic or unseen natures of the human and the planet evolve over time, which can be traced in the evolution of culture throughout history. This perspective reveals epochs as intelligent, purposeful programs of growth and refinement — forward-looking pathways guiding us toward a universal future. Other insights and ponders:
This conversation is part of the continuing Portals discovery into what is emerging on the frontiers of human experience in this time of profound change. Information about upcoming special events can be found on the Events page. Also visit and subscribe to our YouTube channel. TWEETABLE QUOTES
“An epoch is an evolutionary program, a program afforded by the universe and the planet, where humanity can go through specific and necessary development. The idea that the evolutionary process is just a random trial and error makes no sense; it's too brilliantly constructed. And there is clearly an ascending refinement and complexifying vector of life wanting to support higher levels, higher capacities, higher sophistication, higher consciousness.” (Aviv) “This realization that in learning there is renewal. Because what it actually means is that we metabolize new impressions, and those new impressions activate in us new capacities and perceptions. And that, in that itself, is a profound act of renewal. And that therefore, as the epoch shifts and a new energy permission is afforded to human experience and to humanity at large, we are to truly expect that everything around us will continue to change in an intensified manner.” (Aviv) RESOURCES MENTIONED
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| 111 - The Five Stories of the Epoch | 10 Oct 2025 | 00:58:37 | |
Let us imagine that one of the most powerful ways to create space and be open to an incoming wave of evolutionary progress — the future — is to consciously heal and absolve the past, with all of its trauma and scar tissue. Not just our personal past, but imagining in ourselves the flow of history through the current epoch. It’s not just possible, but some would say a vital process in a time of great change and new possibility. In this conversation, Aviv Shahar and Portals friend Jeff Vander Clute take a deep look into the epoch’s seven stages and the corresponding potencies of the energy spectrum, Red through Violet. It’s a way of attuning to the flow and energetic nature of history, and to what Aviv and Jeff believe is a step-function leap underway to a new wave of evolution. Jeff is a consultant and author of three recent books, including Beyond Every Teaching, a collection of transformative spiritual transmissions. In today’s exploration, we focus on the main stories or perspectives of the epoch, especially the very real human capacity to revisit, rewrite and clean in ourselves painful and traumatic aspects of history. It’s a process of energetic dialysis powered by the spectrum frequency of Yellow, which we can also trace in the epoch to the emergence of the axial religions. Other amazing insights from Aviv and Jeff’s conversation include:
This conversation is part of the continuing Portals discovery into what is emerging on the frontiers of human experience in this time of profound change. Information about upcoming special events can be found on the Events page. Also visit and subscribe to our YouTube channel. TWEETABLE QUOTES
“And so we build into this the recognition that the epoch is not a concept, it's not a mental structure, rather it is a living process. It's arising inside us. It's arising in between us. It arises all around us, and it is something we can live into, inside and in between us, in our conversations and discoveries, which is the premise to come together in small pods or in a larger network, to metabolize, to ease, to decode these ideas as they unfold.” (Aviv) “I've had an interesting esoteric experience in which I actually changed the past and suddenly the map of where I was going in life changed, instantaneously. It's as if the past is actually quite malleable. So when we're rewriting the past here, I would say that it's powerful beyond the words that we use to tell these stories, there's something going on energetically, and archetypally, within the collective.” (Jeff) RESOURCES MENTIONED
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| 102 - Evolution, Consciousness, and the New Truth | 06 Jun 2025 | 01:33:43 | |
Where is our global culture today? How did we get here? What steps might we need to take now to shape a future that could become a saving grace for humanity? It feels special to find a clear, cohesive and compelling picture, one that encompasses the insights that help us make sense and meaning out of the tumultuous times we live in and answer these questions. We dive deep into a new, emerging worldview in this conversation with Steve McIntosh, a leading developmental philosopher focusing on the evolution of consciousness and culture. Steve is the author of Developmental Politics, The Presence of the Infinite, Evolution’s Purpose and Integral Consciousness and the Future of Evolution. He is co-founder of the Institute for Cultural Evolution. With Steve’s help we trace the major forces that shaped human history and culture, from the Renaissance and Enlightenment, through the fuller development of the Modern era, to Postmodern culture, and into today’s search for a new truth. We view the past with a new understanding that these are not fixed periods of history, but a form of living consciousness that evolves inside us. As the first Enlightenment opened up our understanding of the external universe, the new worldview that has been emerging promises to illuminate the interior universe of consciousness and connection. We actively contribute to the evolutionary process when we bring to life the universal values of truth, beauty and goodness. Many more enlivening insights and profound understandings emerge in the conversation. This conversation is part of the continuing Portals discovery into what is emerging on the frontiers of human experience in this time of profound change. Information about upcoming special events can be found on the Events page. Also visit and subscribe to our YouTube channel. TWEETABLE QUOTES
“The sense that we know deep in our bones that a better way is possible, that has an influence on our consciousness, and it's what drives cultural evolution. It's not just this quest for the good life, it's also the quest to know what's true, and the quest to make our circumstances more beautiful. More beautiful architecture, more beautiful homes, more beautiful bodies. Those are all ways that we're lured to make things better. And so understanding that as an attractive force, or a kind of gravity, on consciousness, that the evolutionary impulse that our sense is responding to - that begins to illuminate what it is that we're trying to define and understand better.” (Steve) “The greatest human purpose, at least while we're in this world, is to contribute to the evolution of the noosphere because, by doing so, we're contributing to the purpose of the larger universe as a whole. And so just being able to land that truth can really help people appreciate how science and spirituality are pointing to the same thing, properly interpreted, that I think can go a long way toward helping to plant the seeds for this next emergent worldview.” (Steve) RESOURCES MENTIONED
Evolution, Consciousness, and the New Truth with Steve McIntosh | |||
| 012 - The Evolution of Artificial Intelligence | 27 Jan 2022 | 01:19:09 | |
The central propulsion of Portals of Perception is an inquiry about how we humans evolve with our consciousness and perception, and where and how the future emerges. In this conversation, we are seeking to understand and appreciate how the nature of human experience and perception interrelates with technology. In other words, how our natural human capabilities and cognition correspond with and shape and then are influenced by the technologies we build and how these cross-pollinate and influence each other. Some researchers see in the advance of technology unlimited potential; others see a danger in its expanding influence.
Join Aviv Shahar and Dr. Alan Litchfield and Wai (Albert) Yeap, two global researchers on the leading edge of technology development, as they explore the evolution of artificial intelligence and its implications for the evolution of humanity. KEY TAKEAWAYS
02:26 – Albert Yeap and Dr. Alan Litchfield join the show to discuss today’s fascinating topic: The Evolution of Artificial Intelligence 07:58 – The relationship between humans and technology 10:36 – Albert breaks down the origin story of computability and the birth of Artificial Intelligence 18:06 – Dr. Alan provides his thoughts on the evolution of technology in society 23:14 – An inflection point in technology 31:34 – The repercussions of replicating humanity in machines 39:30 – Dr. Alan and Albert dissect unintentional consequences of A.I. 48:51 – The mystery of learning 1:02:53 – Relativity 1:13:19 – Aviv poses three overarching inquiries pertaining to Artificial Intelligence 1:17:16 – Dr. Alan and Albert leave the conversation with one final thought TWEETABLE QUOTES
“People consider that technology is something which is separate from the person themselves. My view on this is that, actually, technology is a representation of our current state of mind. Technology has often followed what we have been doing or considering, and you see this as an example in the lead up to the Industrial Revolution. What we are now seeing is that technology has become a trigger for change, personally and socially.” (08:17) (Dr. Alan) “The notion of computability really led us to understand what can be computed and what cannot be computed by computers. And incredibly curious minds of those days, especially Alan Turing, had discovered that notion of computability and asked the questions, ‘Could a machine be intelligent? And can we test that machine to be intelligent?’ From then on, the birth of the notion of A.I. emerged without us knowing.” (10:57) (Albert) “We had an existence there where people constructed objects and artifacts according to input often that was socially mediated. So, you would have, for example, an artisan who was taught to be a carpenter by their father, or a weaver or whatever it may be. The function doesn’t matter. What matters here is that they came from a long line of previous artisans and they grew into a cultural construct that was built around that identity.” (20:35) (Dr. Alan) “So, we have this problem where we don’t know how to make the shift in technology yet so that it better reflects the contents and intent of people collectively and individually. And that’s where we are now.” (22:47) (Dr. Alan) “The trouble is this. Did we intend to create this thing? No, we didn’t intend. But we keep creating these things, which means that these machines will be more and more powerful and they will, I believe, one day take over the world.” (37:13) (Albert) “In order for you to create a new cultural landscape, you have to dismember what already exists. In order for people to shift themselves out of a culture and into a new one, you have to break what already exists.” (1:09:01) (Dr. Alan) RESOURCES MENTIONED
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| 011 - The Human as Spiritual Resource | 17 Jan 2022 | 00:52:38 | |
There is a deep emergent need in humans to access more and to understand more in terms of the spiritual dimensions of life. In this conversation, we explore the nature of what drives us and we look at some of the obstacles that we face when we seek to access the realms of originality and to access original experience, which is central to the story of human life. Join Aviv Shahar as he and Ron Lingard engage in a rich discussion of The Human as Spiritual Resource. KEY TAKEAWAYS
01:53 – The Human as Spiritual Resource 06:55 – Ron shares a brief story from his childhood 10:17 – Is it possible to capture original perceptions and experiences? 13:49 – The objective actuality of the spiritual realm as an emergent phenomenon of human life 21:36 – The concept of expansion and contraction 25:19 – Aviv presents a compelling argument against a Biblical assertion 34:15 – Aviv and Ron expound on the concept of agency 39:42 – The Octopus Teacher 42:19 – How Ron places expansion and contraction within the lens of human experience 50:40 – Ron leaves the conversation with one final thought TWEETABLE QUOTES
“So, when I say spiritual resource, what I mean by that is access to what the universe is actually trying to call out from human beings, to find its next steps, somehow, because we are at that forefront, somehow, of forging portals, forging new perception and new vision, about futures.” (09:15) (Ron) “I think it’s not so much being able to describe it externally so much as it’s what is being called out of people now. There is a basic humanity I believe that lives within ordinary people. It’s the very fact that things are coming up to a point where the way forward is almost forcing this inner resource to actually come to the surface.” (18:00) (Ron) “A very important aspect of ‘thinking new’ is bringing language more into the open and making it more connected and more meaningful in a way.” (24:53) (Ron) “If you think about the Self in its other context, then it really needs to be the idea of self-realization as a process of discovery as we meet different languages to express what we are and contacting something that is not a personal property in that way. So, it’s tapping into something else that is actually being realized through human life.” (38:58) (Ron) “The important thing that was catching me about the idea of contraction and expansion was the idea of seed. If you think of the way that floral life expands and then contracts, the one constant is the fact that the seed continues in that expansion and contraction. And what the seed represents is what’s needed for the next generation.” (43:38) (Ron) RESOURCES MENTIONED
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| 010 - Essence Music: The Emergence of a Collective Agency | 02 Jan 2022 | 01:09:33 | |
Almost everyone can remember being moved by music. Feeling joy, inspiration, or even healing brought my listening and engaging in music. Different stories and perceptions are in place that could prove the ability of music to move or inspire a listener and that it doesn’t just come from a technical skill or a particular setting, it’s what’s inside the artist and the music itself. Join Aviv Shahar as he welcomes the musicians, Ed Dowrick and Paul Stone, to unravel the mysteries of Essence Music through their own experience and inspiration. KEY TAKEAWAYS
07:20 – Aviv introduces today’s topic, Essence Music: The Emergence of a Collective Agency 08:07 – Paul talks about the interesting challenges on music languages 12:14 – Paul shares about the weakness of his left hand 17:10 – Aviv recaps what Paul has just said and shares his thoughts as well 24:01 – Ed speaks about his thoughts on Essence Music 33:39 – Ed opens up on something he heard from Hans Zimmer 39:05 – Paul shares his realizations on being in the audience in the previous years 48:54 – Ed shares his thoughts on the language and grammar of emergence 55:10 – Paul talks about museums and why he thinks it’s gives exhaustion 1:00:51 – Ed shares about great things music can give more than just physical healing 1:09:08 – Aviv thanks Ed and Paul for joining him TWEETABLE QUOTES
“But I discovered that my left hand is very weak or was very weak. So, it’s been on a long program of strengthening and reconditioning. Not ‘cause I want to play good, it’s more in terms of so that it can be more versatile in what it can offer into any session or live piece of music”. (12:16) (Paul) “Many times, I would think that you can play the same piece of music, like for example, when you hear one rendition of Mozart from one orchestra on one day, and you hear it a month later, and it’s the same music but it doesn’t move you. Or di doesn’t move the audience.” (24:01) (Ed) “In a way, people assume, I think in not just in music, that because a person has chosen to play an instrument, that all of a sudden there’s a bond between another person who has chosen to play an instrument. And it’s not the place to start. And I think again the world makes this mistake in many areas outside of music.” (33:14) (Ed) “I stopped letting myself off the hook of being in the audience and thinking as the member of the audience, I had no effect on the musicians, the conductor and the song.” (39:05) (Paul) “All of a sudden, out of the blue, this lady broke through. And something beautiful came through her voice and through her music. She was playing a harp. And it was brilliant!” (50:42) (Ed) “But to be able to find the music that would say, not just to healing at a physical level, but music that would transmit say, for example, huge stream mental healing, or you could share the feeling somehow in a collective sense” (1:00:51) (Ed) RESOURCES MENTIONED
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| 009 - Inquiries into Humanity’s Future, Part 2 | 21 Dec 2021 | 01:16:15 | |
In Part Two of this episode, the invitation is let’s be daring, in the sense of being prepared to challenge almost any assumptions we have. Because often when we frame inquiries, we already have some working assumptions. So here, what we’re proposing is a simple practice because what we want to do is approach the territory of inquiring into humanity's future whilst we also offer practical briefs, and practical tools, and practices that people can pick up and use. Join Aviv Shahar as he, Kyriaki Nikandrou, Avshalom Zack and Peter Barry continue with Part Two of Inquiries into Humanity’s Future. KEY TAKEAWAYS
01:55 – The Economic Stop-Situation 08:23 – Kyriaki addresses the challenges of dealing with economic turbulence 18:57 – Peter speaks to the need to change the purpose of the economic system before changing the actual system 22:41 – The critical role of ethics 27:39 – Kyriaki explores the concept of The Wise King 36:04 – What comes to mind when you hear ‘experiential knowledge?’ 45:42 – Other thoughts on the substrates of knowledge 52:29 – The threat of misinformation and false knowledge 56:36 – The Gender Issue 1:05:52 – Peter speaks to the relationship between energy and matter 1:10:47 – Kyriaki shares her thoughts on nurturing communication 1:13:40 – Aviv leaves the conversation with one final thought TWEETABLE QUOTES
“A phrase that I’ve used for years is that, ‘There are no solutions that are not spiritual solutions.’ What I mean by that is what is the greater premise behind what we’re doing? What are the reasons why we’re doing this?” (19:23) (Peter) “Any sphere of human activity that we will approach or look at is, in one way or another, infected with a lot of diseases. And if we want to find a new operating system to replace a failing one, then we can’t ignore the ethical and spiritual dimensions.” (22:59) (Avshalom) “Knowledge is not experience to start with. So, experience is higher than knowledge and real life is what is needed to gain real experience.” (38:16) (Avshalom) “The majority of the education system has been oriented to make the young proficient to succeed in the economical requirements of that life. Well, what if the entire paradigm is changing and you need to have new kinds of skills? To create a sustainable future for humanity education will have to change as well.” (45:01) (Aviv) RESOURCES MENTIONED
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| 008 - Inquiries into Humanity’s Future, Part 1 | 09 Dec 2021 | 00:58:45 | |
What we have tried to demonstrate here is the idea that if you're going to approach an inquiry, if you're going to approach a domain - if you're going to approach anything - a good mindset is not to assume that we may be able to climb Everest just from anywhere. We'd need to get to basecamp, we need to make sure we have with us the right provisions, we need to make sure that we’re fit. In other words, we need to engage in a whole preparatory work to create the scaffolding to embark on a journey. And we are still using the conversation today to substantiate that point, which is that you need to make the journey before you can make the journey. Join Aviv Shahar as he welcomes Kyriaki Nikandrou, Avshalom Zack and Peter Barry to dive deep into these rich inquiries. KEY TAKEAWAYS
02:06 – Aviv introduces today’s topic, Inquiries into Humanity’s Future, Part One 02:38 – Kyriaki opens this rich discussion by sharing her thoughts on inspiration and encouragement 06:56 – Avshalom introduces the inquiry he brings to the table today 10:42 – The Three Premises 20:17 – Permanent Line Inquiry 25:02 – Kyriaki stresses the importance of challenging dogmas 28:27 – Aviv proposes a simple practice 40:13 – Peter expounds on the process of finding your question 43:11 – The living issue of Permanent Line Inquiry 49:13 – Aviv provides a quick recap and introduces a second practice 52:25 – Aviv teases the twelve challenges he will address in future episodes exploring this topic furthe TWEETABLE QUOTES
“A true inquiry is not a destination. A true inquiry is a journey.” (09:15) (Aviv) “One of the biggest questions is: what kind of changes are necessary to get a different result? It is quite a common understanding in the world these days that you cannot really change the world before you change the humans that live in this world – and behave in this world, and cause things to happen in this world – and start to do it in a different way. It would provide a totally different result.” (14:59) (Avshalom) “If you can find those important questions to your life that you will see them arising in the way you’ve gone on and the places you’ve been and the things you’ve done. Then there’s the confirmation of that by the reality you’ve experienced. So, you’ve brought from a great depth of yourself to a level of consciousness, something that really can be brought forward every day.” (41:25) (Peter) “All the great men have gone and now it’s your turn. It’s a personal responsibility and the capability of each human to be part of the change and be an active part of the change.” (44:15) (Avshalom) “Information or knowledge might seem unimportant but gets important and might be the exact key and the exact answer to your inquiry once you touch upon this core need.” (47:55) (Kyriaki) RESOURCES MENTIONED
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| 007 - Polarity Management Moves | 02 Dec 2021 | 00:48:31 | |
The core invitation we're making here is to recognize that each of us is one whole, integrated life. And that one whole integrated life is made of and is encompassing, and encompassed by, a universe of tremendous multiplicity within and without. And what we have explored here are the different moves you can make to release, to unleash, to unlock, to free up, to integrate and to transcend as we become a more fully embodied human life. Join Aviv Shahar as he welcomes Kyriaki Nikandrou and Liz Halter to engage in this rich examination of Polarity Management Moves. KEY TAKEAWAYS
02:04 – Aviv introduces today’s topic, Polarity Management Moves 03:26 – Aviv introduces today’s guests and poses the inquiry, ‘What comes alive in you when we bring the focus to Polarities?’ 10:25 – Aviv names some of the moves of polarity management that we operate in every day 16:06 – Kyriaki talks about the ‘Go with the Flow’ move and the ‘Disarming’ move 25:21 – Aviv highlights the ‘Integration’ move 36:58 – Separation between professional and personal life 40:48 – Project Aristotle 45:40 – Aviv recaps today’s episode and thanks Kyriaki and Liz for sharing in this rich discussion on polarities TWEETABLE QUOTES
“If we don’t actually work to identify and move beyond, then we spend a large part of our life with a lack of consciousness and being stuck in a kind of reactivity of actually something else running the show and we’re unaware of it.” (04:50) (Liz) “There is an art to compromise and to not being locked in the either/or, but to find other options and other percentages that lead to solutions, that lead to agreements or co-creating, and that allow movement. Otherwise we are stuck, we are polarized, and a lot of disputes and quarrels ensue that really deplete us and we misspend our energy and happiness.” (09:49) (Kyriaki) “A complaint is the misdirected energy of an unmet need.” (21:38) (Aviv) “The importance between balance and movement which is, in a way, another move because when we stop to move, we are bound to fall on one side or the other. Let’s say when we’re cycling or walking on a narrow bar or when we want to stay very immovable, we need to move a small part of our body, like the guards outside the palace.” (38:57) (Kyriaki) “We possibly touched on a dozen different moves, some we instantiated with examples and some we only touched on briefly. And the core invitation we’re making here is recognizing that you are one, whole integrated life. And that one whole, integrated life is encompassing and encompassed by a universe of tremendous multiplicity within and without.” (45:55) (Aviv) RESOURCES MENTIONED
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| 006 - The Human as a Fountain of Encouragement and Hope | 22 Nov 2021 | 01:37:07 | |
The focus of our conversation today is that the human is a fountain of encouragement and hope. We want to sense into, and reflect on, the qualities of hope and encouragement, to explore what they are and how those properties, those qualities, those essences - how they influence our lives. The essence of this conversation you're about to listen to and to discover is a weave of experiences from teachers, parents, and people who were touched and who touched others in moments where all that was needed was a little bit of help, with encouragement and hope, and how central these qualities are in our lives. Join Aviv as he and his guests dive deeper into this exploration. KEY TAKEAWAYS
01:51 – Aviv introduces today’s topic, The Human as a Fountain of Encouragement and Hope 05:07 – Aviv introduces today’s panel of guests and poses the inquiry, ‘What comes alive in you when you hear the phrase ‘The Human as a Fountain of Encouragement and Hope’?’ 08:21 – Perry speaks to what encouragement means to him 11:43 – Miriam shares her thoughts on encouragement 14:12 – The importance of self-encouragement 14:51 – Lisa discusses the concept of stepping into our futures with hope 17:25 – Karen speaks to the elusiveness of encouragement 23:22 – Why hope is such a critical component to the human spirit/experience 33:01 – The panel continues to share examples of the power and significance of encouragement in their own lives 37:30 – George speaks to encouragement as an influx of energy 41:56 – Encouragement and creativity 45:28 – Why encouragement and hope are the antidote to the world’s woes 46:58 – Turning stumbling blocks into steppingstones 55:22 – Daring to try 59:26 – The role teachers play as encouragers 1:08:19 – Best practices for encouragement 1:32:16 – George shares a quick story about his daughter 1:34:21 – Aviv thanks the panel of guests for sharing in this rich discussion on encouragement and hope TWEETABLE QUOTES
“I feel [encouragement] is an instinct. I feel it’s a natural desire for one human being to give of itself to another human being the benefit of its life. And it’s a very powerful thing.” (06:38) (Trevor) “Hope is a choice. Hope is something that, in the area of encouragement and specifically self-encouragement, something that I find really important. How to teach myself and how to teach children how to encourage themselves is important because being dependent on encouragement from an outside source can be really dangerous.” (12:37) (Miriam) “There is no future without hope. We can’t step into our tomorrows. Hope is what leads us into our tomorrows.” (15:11) (Lisa) “A very powerful encouragement of other people, particularly children, is the encouragement that will enable them to find their own voice, their own awareness of their own choices, and their own ability to cause that self-encouragement. And it is such a call. You try to think about where encouragement comes from. It’s quite elusive because it’s almost a very internal part of the human mind but at the same time it’s very neutral and hard to pin down.” (17:39) (Karen) “Hope is something we need, particularly today in the face of the world’s situation. Definitely it’s something to be, not manufactured, but kept alive in the light of the history of people who have had hope despite the worst of circumstances.” (26:16) (Trevor) “I have to mention the word forgiveness because forgiveness is a big part of hope. As it’s been said, forgiveness begins in one’s self so this is all tied up into hope and encouragement. And the most important thing I think anyone can do for anyone is to believe in them, to believe in their life, to believe in the value of that life and encourage that life to fulfill its possibility and promise.” (36:01) (Lisa) “People want to be seen. And today we live in a world where people are not seen and they’re passed by. It doesn’t have to be a long relationship. It can be just a passing by, a look, a touch, a comment, that can give so much to someone else.” (51:49) (Lisa) “We can liberate the world by the sharing of the passion that we have for life.” (1:07:04) (Trevor) “I think encouragement for dreaming big or expanding one’s mind out to what could be possible is a wonderful gift, particularly with young people, that we can offer to another life.” (1:12:30) (Lisa) “One practice I employ is saying, ‘thank you,’ manners, taking the time to have a rich interaction between people that I meet and not to speed through things.” (1:25:12) (Perry) RESOURCES MENTIONED
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| 005 - The Role of Touch | 13 Nov 2021 | 01:01:03 | |
There was, perhaps, a time when the only tool of healing was the human hand. And, to this very day, whenever we have an unfamiliar feeling in our body, the first thing we do is touch the area it is arising from and perform our simple, initial, diagnosis. Today, however, we hear advertising touting the touchless world we live in. How did we get here? And, is this where we want to be, or is there a better way? In this conversation, Aviv Shahar speaks with Jessica Wapner, who traces the arc of touch as a healing modality through the centuries, and how it has gradually been removed from our ever more standardized methods of healthcare. And then she gives us a peek into where we might go next. Join Aviv, as he dives deeper into this exploration. KEY TAKEAWAYS
02:13 – Aviv introduces today’s guest, Jessica Wapner, who provides her thoughts on this inquiry exploration into The Role of Touch 04:31 – Wall Disease, explained 07:16 – The role of touch in healing and medicine 14:20 – The healing power of touch in the Bible 17:33 – The King’s Touch 23:09 – The rise of the Scientific Method 27:46 – The surge of advancements in medical science 31:16 – How touch impacts us as humans 37:23 – The introduction of ‘Wellness’ 50:36 – What the future holds for touch 57:06 – Final points from Aviv and Jessica 1:00:30 – Aviv thanks Jessica for joining in this discussion today TWEETABLE QUOTES
“Wall Disease is multi-dimensional and expresses itself in different ways such as the feeling of being oppressed. When you see a wall near you every day, there’s a sense of – as one person I spoke with put it to me – ‘your life is being stopped here.’” (04:40) “It seems that, from what I can piece together, there are references to touch coming from all over the world to do with the healing power of touch and what the hands are capable of doing.” (11:30) “It’s almost a hard mindset to imagine that I can say that I’m sick. It’s up to me to say that there’s something wrong? I don’t need you, doctor, to confirm that. And that switches with the progression towards more and more technology where the doctor becomes the authority. And that’s what interested me in ‘The King’s Touch.’ There is this kind of thing through history where there is a person who has the capability to offer healing and I put myself in your hands.” (29:58) “Doctors don’t call themselves healers, which is really interesting and weird if you stop and think about it. I never say, ‘I’m going to the healer today.’ But why wouldn’t I say that? Of course I want the doctor to heal me.” (36:56) “So in the 1960s, the World Health Organization put out a statement about wellness that was more than not being sick – that wellness is about ‘Is your life progressing from one day to the next?’” (39:26) “There’s an opening now for medicine and healing to stitch themselves back up together and for this rift to not be so dire.” (56:01) RESOURCES MENTIONED
Jessica’s Books:
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| 004 - A Study of Balance | 04 Nov 2021 | 01:34:53 | |
We live in a world of rapid change. And to engage with the many challenges this unique time can bring may leave us struggling with what it means to have a balanced life - a life of clarity and purpose of what is truly important. But what is a balanced life? A key perception is that life is a journey of coming into and going out of balance. Resisting the pressure to continually define ourselves and preserving an inner space in which we can grow, change and evolve is itself a pretty radical idea and important in this study. Join Aviv Shahar and Ofer Dotan for A Study of Balance. KEY TAKEAWAYS
02:11 – Aviv introduces today’s topic, A Study of Balance, and welcomes Ofer Dotan to engage in this rich discussion 09:11 – Life’s journey of going in and out of balance 14:24 – The concept of balance in movement and how we define ourselves 19:32 – Balancing the Five Energy Centers 25:58 – Three Levels of Resilience 33:59 – Getting clarity on your space and defying inconsistent narratives 38:06 – The importance of ‘Tuning’ yourself 48:20 – What it means to see and treat another person justly 52:30 – Ofer describes her purpose 54:56 – What it means to treat yourself justly 56:06 – Aviv proposes the concept of ‘Three Lives’ 1:04:58 – Naming and disarming Friction 1:13:53 – Faking it until you make it 1:24:07 – The Universal Life and being compassionate with yourself 1:31:51 – Final words from Aviv and Ofer 1:34:14 – Aviv thanks Ofer for joining in this discussion today TWEETABLE QUOTES
“For me, balance comes when I set the terms, when I am engaging with the world through my own center and not through the structures that are being imposed on me.” (08:31) “We live in a society that pushes us all the time to be very critical towards ourselves and not so accepting, which has its positives because it maybe pushes us to grow in some respects. But it also has many negatives because we’re constantly under pressure to fit some narratives that maybe we’re uncomfortable with.” (32:42) “I think for me love is treating another person justly. And what does that mean? I have this sense that it’s kind of rare that we’re doing that with one another. And it has to do with wanting to understand and not seeing others through your own eyes but trying to at least appreciate them through their own experience of this life.” (48:31) “I think there is not one all-encompassing purpose. I feel that my purpose, and my set of skills that support me in believing that, has to do with facilitation - facilitation for people to be who they are, to have space like I’m trying to claim my own space. I’ve been told I’m pretty good at giving this space to others.” (52:37) “Real forgiveness, for me, has to do with fairness and justice. I don’t like the everyday use of the words ‘forgiveness’ and ‘compassion’ because I feel like sometimes they are lacking.” (1:28:21) “From my experience, I am still searching what it means for me to be compassionate towards myself without using it as a way to absolve myself from doing the work that I need to be doing.” (1:30:48) RESOURCES MENTIONED
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| 003 - Chivalry in a Postmodern World | 21 Oct 2021 | 01:15:22 | |
The propelling impulse of Portals of Perception is the sense that we are entering or have entered a meaningful and important evolutionary upgrade process. That actually we all have a part to play in this process in that we can contribute by way of leading, healing, discovering in a variety of different roles and functions. There is also the element of looking to discover what of the past is still true and is a necessary bridge to whatever may unfold in the next evolutionary upgrade that is developing in front of our eyes. So there is a function in honoring and harvesting the best of what was as a bridging work for tomorrow. Today’s conversation is about the idea of chivalry. What was chivalry at its core? How is this core separate from the romantic legends that developed about it later? Why did people, throughout the ages, feel drawn and attracted to chivalrous ideas values and virtues? Are these just old, outdated ideas or do they have some validity in this postmodern, cynical, postmodern world? Join Aviv, as he dives deeper into this fascinating inquiry. KEY TAKEAWAYS
02:03 – Aviv introduces today’s topic, Chivalry in a Postmodern World 14:13 – The distinction between being a woman and being a lady 17:54 – Developing personal character 23:52 – Energy is energy 30:23 – A double standard in chivalry between genders and searching for equality 43:23 – Chivalry, honor, and making purposeful choices 50:17 – The true meaning of fairness, loyalty and courage 58:32 – The importance of being of service 1:03:51 – Recognizing chivalry 1:10:18 – What chivalry looks like today 1:20:22 – Final points from Aviv and the panel 1:26:56 – Aviv thanks the panel for joining in this discussion today TWEETABLE QUOTES
“I think respect and decent behavior is hardwired in humans and the opposite has to be learned. Disrespect is something that you learn.” (12:16) “Being a female, you’re born a female and grow into a woman. But being a lady is something that you can choose to be, or not.” (14:54) “Somehow the whole idea of ‘character’ feels very natural and feels very important. It also feels very dignified the idea that there would be certain qualities or traits that you could recognize a person by.” (18:23) “I want to be an expression of the art of living as a female. And I want to learn what it means to give space to the art of living as a man.” (42:28) “The key avenue into chivalry, for me, is through the aspect of honor. I’ve always been drawn to honor and being honorable.” (43:30) “We can’t be loyal to the values of chivalry from the 16th Century. We need to take the enzyme of those values and fertilize the new values which will adapt to the future.” (51:53) “Life is a process of change from the moment you are born to the moment you die.” (1:19:17) RESOURCES MENTIONED
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| 101 - God: An Evolving Revelation | 23 May 2025 | 01:40:40 | |
How can a forward-looking, evolution-inclined spirituality, not tied to dogma or history, offer us a sense of meaning and purpose in a time of cultural upheaval powered by AI? Can a metamodern spiritual path also include a new perspective and appreciation of Christianity and the many faces, or dimensions, of Jesus Christ? In the newest conversation in the Portals series exploring metamodern spirituality, Aviv Shahar welcomes back metamodern leader Brendan Graham Dempsey. Brendan is a unique voice who combines a deep personal experience with Christianity and a pioneering study and exploration of metamodern thinking and philosophy. Together, he and Aviv trace the amazing evolution of the human notion and idea of God, from ancient cultures through the Enlightenment and into today. There are new insights into the appearance of Jesus and the rising importance of the individual, which explodes in the modern era with its elevation of self-actualization. (You can also see the discussion about Jesus excerpted below.) The conversation does not just look back, but also forward; in a learning, growing universe, what’s next? What’s on the horizon with our concept of God? Is there a metamodern integration of perceptions that can activate a more powerful inner conductivity and capacity for universal connection? Other ponders and insights include:
This conversation is part of the continuing Portals discovery into what is emerging on the frontiers of human experience in this time of profound change. Information about upcoming special events can be found on the Events page. Also visit and subscribe to our YouTube channel. TWEETABLE QUOTES
“This gave a new way of looking at all this, in terms of development, that as we go through learning our conceptions of God change. And that really kind of hit home, because as I studied very deeply a lot of the developmental literature, the psychological literature, people who had looked at what they call like stages of faith or religious judgment, and there was a clear way in which the learning process that we go through as people impacts the conceptions that we have of the divine, and the meaning of life, and value, and all these things.” (Brendan) “My entryway into this was through a breakdown of meaning, to go all the way back to my own existential crisis, was the occasion by which I felt the need to find a new way of being in the world. Talking about these things might sound like concepts following concepts, but this is ultimately a lived experience. This is the story of humanity, but it's the story of humans. And so human beings are moving through the world, and we're experiencing the social and collective consequences of all living together with each other through time, figuring out things together, and changing the world around us as a consequence.” (Aviv) RESOURCES MENTIONED
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| 002 - Discover the Human Orchestra with Rita Lampen, Patrick Summers, Kyriaki Nikandrou, Bernie Doyle, Aud Wilken, Don Giuliano and Mona Martin | 15 Oct 2021 | 01:21:03 | |
We see it among a group of people all the time: one person is shy while another person loves to be the center of attention. One person is intellectual while another person is more emotional. We see the nerdy, geeky types and we see the athletically proficient. But what we don’t always acknowledge is that we have all of these characters within us and, depending on many factors of our life thus far, some of them get more outplayed than others. So the artist, the caregiver, the friend, the parent, these are all part of the collective instrumentation of the human life and it’s possibilities. Join Aviv Shahar as he invites a panel of guests to explore this 4 - part series on the idea of discovering the human orchestra and the significance that we are not just one thing, but many things in one. KEY TAKEAWAYS
02:16 – Aviv and introduces today’s panel of guests, Rita Lampen, Patrick Summers, Kyriaki Nikandrou, Bernie Doyle, Aud Wilken, Don Giuliano and Mona Martin 15:49 – Why the human spirit is not a solo instrument, but rather a full orchestra and why that is important 29:19 – The Double Whammy of the Human Orchestra 35:35 – The multifaceted nature of the Human Orchestra 47:28 – Other thoughts on the inroads being made around this concept of the Human Orchestra 1:01:02 – The music, the silence and being of service 1:19:38 – Aviv thanks the panel for joining the show TWEETABLE QUOTES
“How does an orchestra play together? They have a conductor. So I started thinki ng, ‘What or who is conducting this orchestra of Patrick?’ At any given moment is there a conductor? Is there something or someone trying to bring order to all these different parts of me so that they can actually be coherent and make some kind of coherent noise.” (07:25) (Patrick) “I think in the discovery process a human being really just needs to look at the different reactions that they have. You go through life and you have a reaction to something you see or you think a certain thing or you feel a certain way. And every single one of those pieces is something else, a part of you that has a response to the world around you.” (17:57) (Mona) “Partly what I am searching for in this initial inquiry is the idea that when you begin to encompass and embrace the kind of thinking that you each offer from a different angle, you are each offering a pathway to transcend the myopic view of ‘I am one thing.’” (34:25) (Aviv) “I’ve found life continuously presents a multiplicity of offers for me to choose. But it’s just this type of stirring conversation now that the empowering part of it is that you do not need to be stuck in what the world has turned you o ut to be.” (46:02) “It’s a journey from choosing what you love to loving what you do.” (1:10:55) RESOURCES MENTIONED
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| 001 - The Power of Community with Jane Goodman | 07 Oct 2021 | 01:19:37 | |
Humans have been building communities since the dawn of time. Yet, their importance to an individual’s life, to the family’s life and to the neighborhood’s life may never be more critical than today, while their actual place in our daily world may never have been so fractured. Join Aviv as he and guest Jane Goodman share in an exploration of the power of community. Aviv and Jane seek to answer questions such as: What is community? What purpose does it serve? And what enables communities to thrive? Jane shares her unique experience building a rural community and the lessons she’s learned about herself and leadership through her trials and tribulations. KEY TAKEAWAYS
01:45 – Aviv introduces today’s guest, Jane Goodman who joins the show to share her insights on today’s topic, The Power of Community 06:41 – Greater understandings through community 12:35 – Choosing to build unique communities and letting go of differences 22:19 – The secret to a thriving community 23:11 – Lessons Jane has learned throughout her journey 31:01 – Overcoming challenges in building a community 41:31 – The consensus approach 46:37 – Two practices that Jane values above all others 47:49 – What Jane has learned about herself through her experience living in many different communities 52:34 – Leadership does not mean recognition 53:46 – Action communities 58:41 – Personal development for the sake of serving a greater purpose 1:08:37 – The importance of not talking behind people’s back 1:10:59 – Final words of wisdom from Jane 1:18:59 – Aviv thanks Jane for joining the show TWEETABLE QUOTES
“Each of the experiences opened doors to greater understandings – greater understandings about human beings, greater understandings of organizations.” (09:34) “Just as your life is a journey – never ending until your last breath – so is a community. And you can say that for twenty years this community has been on its journey, almost eighteen years being on the land. And so many different things have been learned.” (23:44) “Whatever you need to get to where you’re going is different from what you need once you’re there.” (28:45) “Another thing you were saying which can be a pitfall – and this is where we always help one another – it’s easy to think you know what’s better for someone else than they do.” (45:18) “There’s Action Communities. There’s communities that have an external mission, an internal mission. When I say an ‘Action Community,’ I mean they have a message to get across.” (56:17) “It’s not personal development for development’s sake. It’s because I want to serve a greater purpose as a life.” (1:04:10) RESOURCES MENTIONED
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| Welcome to Portals of Perception | 12 Aug 2021 | 00:14:08 | |
Portals of Perception endeavors to create conversations at the frontier of discovery, and to bring to life the natural processes of human development. Each of us, by design, can become a living agency for the evolutionary process, as it arises, through our living expression, and can become an intentional participant in the emergence of a wiser future. Join our hosts Aviv Shahar and Peter Barry every week for conversations on a wide variety of topics including human purpose, personal development, evolution and the future, community of conversation and discovery, and more. | |||
| 100 - Current Openings #17 – Burning Questions | 09 May 2025 | 01:11:43 | |
Imagine being able to connect with a level of potency, passion and energy that could help reveal even deeper intelligence and meaning to our most compelling “burning questions” — the inquiries and mysteries that drive and inspire us to search for answers. In several ways the potency of an inquiry is generated in how we think about and ask the question. For example, asking “why” attunes our mind to the energetic dimension or core of a question; it can link us to the powerful fuel of our emotions: e-motion, or energy in motion and flow. Does the question form up when we reach the leading edge of our experience — just beyond the limits of our knowledge or comfort zone? The leading edge is the place where we prod and sense our way into the unknown and can find the revelation of the “new” answer trying to find us. Why does any of this matter? As we have discovered in Portals, a potent inquiry or contemplation can activate and energize the far-reaching faculties that enable connection with our universal nature and possibility. We delve deeper into the meaning and mystery of profound “burning questions” and the art of the inquiry in this special conversation with Aviv Shahar and Portals collaborator David Price Francis. Aviv and David invited several Portals friends to bring their own burning questions and together look for new insights, including:
This conversation is part of the continuing Portals discovery into what is emerging on the frontiers of human experience in this time of profound change. Information about upcoming special events can be found on the Events page. Also visit and subscribe to our YouTube channel. TWEETABLE QUOTES
“Building on this, where you talk about 'what do you want?', which to me is one of the entry points into the inquiry of purpose, I would say that leading oneself in a chaotic world one wants to be grounded and anchored in some guiding principle and guiding purpose that is central and centering for a person's life. You first need to actually ask, well, how do you find that sense of purpose, that sense of mission?” (Aviv) “There is a core impulse in human life, or in life at large. It's the impulse of life expressing itself in human life, which is the impulse of freedom and liberation. Life wants to express itself and come to its fuller possibility and expression, and be free. And you see that that is arising in each and every one of us, we want to discover what is our natural talent? What can we do? How do we live into the fullest freedom of our potential?” (Aviv) RESOURCES MENTIONED
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| 099 - Portals Into the Soul, Chapter 4: A Growing Space for the Soul | 25 Apr 2025 | 00:53:25 | |
In the third installment we described two ways to apply Einstein’s admonition when he observed that we cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them. The first practice involved placing the problem you are working to solve inside an even bigger problem. The second practice involved the cultivation of a symphonic loom of expanded considerations. The realization latent in this admonishment from Uncle Albert is that we cannot expect to stumble on new perceptions with the same toolset we used to fashion the map of meaning that generated the problems we now confront. Moreover, the faculties and “organs” of seeing, intuiting, and believing used when we generated our worldview are likely insufficient in our search for new ways of perceiving with which to be able to solve the problems we face. In this and in the following installments we are embarking on the search for ways to unlock new perceptions, connections, and intuitions. We seek the activation of sense organs that naturally court and grow the spaces available for the soul to liberate. We will develop this pathway one step at a time and invite you to engage and play with the practices we demonstrate. This work is part of the continuing Portalsdiscovery into what is emerging on the frontiers of human experience in this time of profound change. Information about upcoming special events can be found on the Events page. Also visit and subscribe to our YouTube channel. TWEETABLE QUOTES
“We don’t seek to empty the mind by releasing identification with passing thoughts as a way of calming the survival wiring in the brain. Instead, this work into the Soul invites you to free the mind to its connective communion capacity, where it brings to the Soul potent energies to nourish its two higher natures.” (Aviv) “As we develop these conversation pathways into the soul, naturally we confront several challenges. A key challenge is finding the courage to drop the lies we have been told about what a human is. There is a catch. How do you let go of misleading lies you have been programmed to believe in, without having new or elevated or clearer perspectives that can replace those convictions and beliefs?” (Aviv) RESOURCES MENTIONED
Portals Into the Soul, Chapter 4: A Growing Space for the Soul | |||
| 098 - The Universalis Project #10 - Why the World is Breaking Down | 11 Apr 2025 | 01:03:42 | |
Even if we’re familiar with the themes of evolutionary change and upgrade that run through Portals, what’s happening in the world today seems startling: the operating system that enables modern life as we know it appears to be crashing. The key questions now: Is this an irreversible slide into self-elimination? Does evolution ever offer a chance for reboot and renewal? If so, how would we spot new universal intelligence nudging its way into humanity? Our understanding of the “operating system” comes out of the Portalsexploration of the progression of human and planetary history as part of the current epoch, or larger universal cycle of change and upgrade. What we call the “Blue” phase of the epoch (which corresponds to the seven colors of the spectrum) brought to humanity the energy and intelligence for collaboration and working together. It was the power of cooperation that allowed the building of cities, political and economic systems, and the civility that enables the orderly and peaceful flow of everyday life in all its many nuances. The multiple crises of ecology and culture that are transforming the planet today suggest the modern Blue system is no longer sufficient in the face of an Indigo and Violet intensification. We see the evidence in the eruption of wars, environmental destruction and political chaos. How did we get here? What happens next? As we discover in the latest Homo Universalis conversation, even with a failing operating system, the evolutionary process offers the opportunity for renewal and regeneration. Aviv Shahar, Karen Heney and Kyriaki Nikandrou share their ideas and insights. This conversation is part of the continuing Portalsdiscovery into what is emerging on the frontiers of human experience in this time of profound change. Information about upcoming special events can be found on the Events page. Also visit and subscribe to our YouTube channel. TWEETABLE QUOTES
“Could this be one of the ways we are already being naturalized and acclimatized to the actuality of universal life? Where you can be together with others and there is a chain reaction, running revelatory process; some will then put it to music, some will put it to art, some will put it to writing, some will put it to the causes they serve. Okay, is this a way to think about universal life: you are engaged in an ongoing revelation, a running revelation, rather than one singular revelation for a life?” (Aviv) “That is the inquiry we are now facing, what is the operating system that needs to emerge? I don't know that we have the solution or the answer here. But you're beginning to articulate some of the principles that are likely to be critical in the new operating system. The principle you just described is, it has to have the capacity to integrate and bridge all interests.” (Aviv) RESOURCES MENTIONED
The Universalis Project #10 - Why the World is Breaking Down | |||
| 097 - Normalizing the Extraordinary: In the Metamodern God Lab | 28 Mar 2025 | 01:17:56 | |
A laboratory is where we’d expect to find a safe space of discovery and purpose; an environment that supports experimenting with diverse ideas and mysteries in the search for truth. Add in an atmosphere of mutual trust and acceptance, and now we’ve created an ecology that invites something even deeper — a God lab. Imagine a God lab as an intensified spiritual retreat, a gathering of like-minded and like-souled individuals seeking new understanding and experience with the divine. In this conversation, we are invited to appreciate a metamodern God lab as a community, created through the shared exploration of the sacred by people who each represent a unique expression of universal possibility. In a metamodern God lab, every person is recognized and accepted as they experiment with creating and evolving their own vision, practices and art; an ecology where people find the inner balance that allows them to embody more fully at the spiritual leading edge of themselves. We get to explore in this conversation the nature and possibilities of emergent metamodern spirituality with two metamodern leaders, Layman Pascal and Brendan Graham Dempsey. (This is the latest in a series of conversations sensing deeper into metamodern spirituality.) Layman and Brendan discuss with Aviv Shahar the recently completed Metamodern God Lab at the Sky Meadow retreat in Vermont. This conversation is part of the continuing Portals discovery into what is emerging on the frontiers of human experience in this time of profound change. Information about upcoming special events can be found on the Events page. Also visit and subscribe to our YouTube channel. TWEETABLE QUOTES
“I think what I'm seeing, what I'm taking away from this weekend, is the sheer importance of setting up these kinds of hive-like fields for the bees to go to and from. And if you get a few new ones each time it starts to spread. And ideally, we would have dozens or hundreds of things like this around the world to be a generator of the leading edge of the culture. As much as we need all these different subsets, what we fundamentally need is the right kind of a scene that's just a constant generator of all the different tentacles of the leading edge.” (Layman) “I think there’s something deeply important about having a place where we come together and gather, and connect, and feel this vibe and these energies with each other, and sort of remember our connections with each other and to what we’re doing, and the sorts of aims and goals that we have, and the shared vision and the friendship, the relational connections. And being able to continue to deepen; increasing deepening into the relational field of it all is something that I find deeply renewing, and it’s kind of like returning to that well of relationship with this incredible community.” (Brendan) RESOURCES MENTIONED
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| 096 - Current Openings #16: The Octave Leap Mystery | 14 Mar 2025 | 01:04:47 | |
How many of us remember having what some people call a “chrysalis” moment? An octave leap, with mind-opening perceptions, in real time. A powerful flow of energy, a quickening, triggered by a connection or breakthrough that can happen anywhere, at any time, and transform us and the circumstance we’re in. The chrysalis we probably know as the middle stage of the three-step transformation of the caterpillar into a butterfly. It’s a beautiful example of growth and change that happens in stages, or gradations, and is often generally described as a change in octaves, or levels. An octave change can be a long journey of refinement, or it can feel like a quantum leap, in an instant. Why an octave in the first place? What is the benefit of an ordered transition or progression from one state to another? For example, from the physical and dense to the energetic and spiritual? The universe likes octaves; it’s the engineering that facilitates change and innovation; a natural technology that enables the safe entry and movement through successively higher energetic states. How does it work? Can we really “leap” from a lower octave to a higher one? We turn for insights to Aviv Shahar and collaborator David Price Francis. Their conversation is the latest in the “Current Openings” series. This conversation is part of the continuing Portals discovery into what is emerging on the frontiers of human experience in this time of profound change. Information about upcoming special events can be found on the Events page. Also visit and subscribe to our YouTube channel. TWEETABLE QUOTES
“There can't be an octave leap without new energy coming in from somewhere. So even when we see water boiling, there has to be the application of heat from somewhere to cause the molecules to get excited, and then it changes state. So when I think of now a quantum leap, or a change of octave, there's going to be a new energy incoming, a quickening as you say, a new energy incoming from somewhere to cause that to happen.” (David) “Teaching number one in there, which is we have to do whatever it is we're doing in the fullest possible way because, in actuality, the release of the portal from one octave to the next, that threshold, is reached for by the full realization of the octave we are in. And teaching number two you offered, there has to be resistance built in. If you actually try to bypass or skip the steps without growing by resistance, you may visit a higher octave, but you will not have the infrastructure to hold it in a sustainable way.” (Aviv) RESOURCES MENTIONED
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| 095 - The Universalis Project #9 - Deepening in Evolutionary Mysteries | 28 Feb 2025 | 00:57:51 | |
If we’re already diving deep into the core mysteries of the human experience — such as how to partner with a new wave of evolution and engage with the universe — how do we push even further on the edge of discovery? Can we go even deeper into the mysteries? What’s the real benefit? A curious feature of engaging with the natural human impulse to grow and refine is that as we develop, we begin to activate amazing innate capacities for connecting to intelligence and influence that are universal in origin and source. This, in turn, enables even deeper diving and connection to the mysteries of life and our evolving future. We explore the activation of the universal human in the Portalsseries the Homo Universalis Project. By deepening in our intention and pursuit of meaning in a chaotic time, we build stability and a stronger foundation, expand inner space, and birth new sensitivities and capacities. In doing so, we become an antidote for a superficial world consumed by multiple global crises. We discover more about the nature of the inner space in The Ghost and the Inner Conclave and The Guru Trap and the Golden Shadow conversations with Jeff Vander Clute. We also deepen to become available for an even bigger mission, bigger task, in our service to the new pulse of evolutionary possibility washing over humanity and the planet. Not a bad reason to dive in and deepen in the cosmic mysteries unfolding all around us. But how do we deepen? We explore more deeply the why’s and how’s of deepening in the newest chapter of the Homo Universalis conversations (recorded in September 2023) with Aviv Shahar, Karen Heney, and Kyriaki Nikandrou. Among their perceptions:
This conversation is part of the continuing Portals discovery into what is emerging on the frontiers of human experience in this time of profound change. Information about upcoming special events can be found on the Events page. Also visit and subscribe to our YouTube channel. TWEETABLE QUOTES
“That's a good reason to do deepening work, because unless you offer more of the depth of who you are and what you can bring to the table, unless you do that, unless you offer that facility, you will only be able to realize your purpose and what you love to the degree of the depth that you make available.” (Aviv)
“A deepening process is moving away from the linear shortcut that we are so much wired to in this post-modern age. Somebody asks a question and you try to answer it in the shortest possible way. Well, that's a skill one needs to have as well, for example, in the business world, but our endeavor is more to access the latent capacities such that we indeed give rise to the multiplicity that we can be.” (Aviv) RESOURCES MENTIONED
The Universalis Project #9 - Deepening in Evolutionary Mysteries | |||
| 094 - Evolving Together #4 - The Human Radio Set | 14 Feb 2025 | 00:49:24 | |
It may be time to finally change channels, or — if we really want better reception and perception — to trade in that old analogue transmitter and receiver for the best, state-of-the-art technology in the universe. We are referring, by analogy, to the most advanced radio set ever created: the human mind and network of finer, higher faculties — capable of tuning into any frequency, from humanmade, to planetary, to the deepest reaches of the cosmos. Its potential is vast and vital to our ongoing evolution and future. Much of our precious daily life is likely spent inside a narrow band of energy, often worrying about relationships, career or cultural and ecological crises. With awareness and training, it’s possible to tune sensitive inner technology to transmit and receive on universal frequencies natural to the human design. It’s activating a higher human operating system. It’s also a development journey enhanced and quickened by our companions and communities. Mutual respect and trust can help heal pain and trauma, as we become the signal that enables the emergence of new possibility in one another, evolving together. We explore the realms of mutual transformation and the amazing human radio set in the latest of our Portalsseries Evolving Together, with Aviv Shahar and longtime Portalsfriends Nigel Geeves and Well. TWEETABLE QUOTES
“One of the things I do in my development work with myself is I talk to myself. Why would you talk to yourself? We live in a time where people often seek to find a new feeling and a new experience as the first move they make. In my journey, I've discovered that actually you want to introduce a new frame of mind, a new way of thinking, and that then enables you to heal, transmogrify, metabolize, sublimate, and actually access new feelings and new experience.” (Aviv)
“I think what you're talking about here is beginning to open up the profound realization that yes, we are universal beings. And, therefore, it's possible for us to develop a higher operating system, which literally operates at universal level as we live upon the planet. And via that higher operating system we can do something about the conditioning that's happened to the soul.” (Well) RESOURCES MENTIONED
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| 093 - Portals Into the Soul, Chapter 3: Symphonic Seven-fold Soul Work | 31 Jan 2025 | 00:45:11 | |
In chapter 2 we described the nature of separation events and the compensatory act of the soul — the ghost. Before developing ways to recover the sense of connection and explore pathways to reengage and liberate the greater potential of the soul, this chapter begins to reflect on a whole loom of considerations, including the experience of showing up in a human model, which is governed by a seven-fold process. This is the first in a series of installments that will be seeking to place this soul odyssey inside the context of this moment in the unfolding epoch transition. It will open the way to prod the soul’s interface with the full orchestra of inner lives of a human, including in a later installment the brain and the mind. TWEETABLE QUOTES
“Do you ever wonder, is it possible humanity has lost contact with the natural terrain of what being human is and the meaning of life? Is it possible humanity has lost touch with reality and is now at a place where we cannot begin to recognize who we are? Is it possible our search for knowledge and for solutions to our problems has, for a couple of centuries, started from a displaced place?” (Aviv) “There are moments and situations where we act with increasing integrity, vitality, and alignment to our values and what matters to us, and moments when we act with lesser intactness and lose wholesome sense of clarity. These are the natural ebbs and flows of soul orchestration. When we respond and act with integrity, we produce an inner glow, accompanying soul settlement and well-being” (Aviv) RESOURCES MENTIONED
Portals Into the Soul, Chapter 3: Symphonic Seven-fold Soul Work | |||
| 110 - The 7-Fold Epoch Progression - The Universalis Project #13 | 26 Sep 2025 | 00:49:59 | |
For many, last year made it impossible to ignore the scale of global change — what we see as global instability is only one dimension of a larger meta-crisis. Portals has been following the signs of this broader evolutionary cycle, which is reshaping our planet and humanity. With the epoch insight and perspective, we can trace the emergence and patterns of this epochal movement across every area of life, from grand global systems to everyday human endeavors. In the latest conversation from the The Universalis Project, Aviv Shahar is joined by Karen Heney and Kyriaki Nikandrou to explore the flow of history and evolution through a “7-fold epoch.” This special lens examines the nature of each epochal impulse and its influence on culture, as well as on human growth and development. The epoch framework is not a new meta-theory about life or evolution; instead, it reflects an observable quality within all natural processes. We can see 7-fold patterns in the natural world — including flora, fauna, and human behavior. For instance, the world’s major religions arose during the Yellow phase of planetary evolution, while the drive to resolve conflict, balance pressures, and collaborate in scalable systems reflects a Blue impulse. Other insights from this exploration include:
This conversation is part of the continuing Portals discovery into what is emerging on the frontiers of human experience in this time of profound change. Information about upcoming special events can be found on the Events page. Also visit and subscribe to our YouTube channel. TWEETABLE QUOTES
“So the story of the evolution of life is accompanied by the story of the development of the capacity to destroy life. And the reason we feel so compelled to bring the consciousness of this story into being is that there is an awareness that when we bring consciousness to this story, we may intensify and unlock capacities for humanity to do both the healing and liberation work, at all the levels, the level of the individual, the level of the group, and the level of the tribe and the nation.” (Aviv) “Every human that's born on the planet, it's designed in such a way that every life can have a spiritual journey, can have a connective, purposeful life. And we're all born into this unfolding epoch. First of all, we need to be aware of it, which is the wonder of these recordings and this journey. Because if we become aware of it, and we opt in to being consciously mindful of these different progressions, then we're saying that we can co-join evolution and a human update.” (Karen) RESOURCES MENTIONED
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| 092 - Inner Conclave Consciousness | 17 Jan 2025 | 00:48:49 | |
How can we access greater intelligence, wisdom, and power to face the often-scary challenges of these times? In the Inner Conclave Consciousness, Aviv Shahar and Jeff Vander Clute develop further the three process octaves they began to explore in part one of this conversation. Why is this exploration so relevant now?. Portals is chronicling what we describe as the unfolding crash of the operating system underlying much of the modern era. It doesn’t make our journey any easier; whenever we step into a new space of development and learning we cross the frontiers of resistance — all levels: physical, mental, emotional. The Inner Conclave is a process to disarm resistance. It offers ways to help liberate the perception and awareness that add meaning and understanding in times of change. We can each work into this modality on our own and also in small pods, where we help each other activate the multiplicity of voices inside. In this conversation Aviv and Jeff explore the vast, inexhaustible and versatile resource of the Inner Conclave and its second and third octaves of process, and dive deeper into the exploration of the Epoch Journey. Among their insights:
This conversation is part of the continuing Portals discovery into what is emerging on the frontiers of human experience in this time of profound change. Information about upcoming special events can be found on the Events page. Also visit and subscribe to our YouTube channel. TWEETABLE QUOTES
“There's a question around to what extent do the diseases that manifest in the body, mind, world come about because we weren't listening? So if we can identify the true focusing need, and stay focused, and listen to the signals of the body, the signals of the world, well, that's a capacity - and probably a pretty useful one.” (Jeff) “The invitation was, well, if you really want to explore these spaces go on a pilgrimage to your inner cave, because the universe is in you. The blessing and the causing realms are in you to the degree that you enable yourself and allow yourself to access these realms. Will you skate to your own deeply-held beliefs and gently put them down? So you don't look at the world, and you don't even look at yourself, through your deeply-held beliefs, but you look at the beliefs and discover what they allow and support and where have they held you back, perhaps?” (Aviv) RESOURCES MENTIONED
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| 091 - Activating the Inner Conclave | 03 Jan 2025 | 00:58:53 | |
A glance at the headlines today often brings a deep sense of sadness about the escalating violence in many parts of the world, along with an urgent inner inquiry: what can one person do to promote peace, both within themselves and the global community? Several Portals conversations and, most recently, the first chapters of Portals Into the Soul, offered the insight that every human is born with natural qualities and higher connections that form a powerful inner source of intelligence and capabilities. This Inner Conclave of our many inner lives is a ready resource to assist in any dimension of our planetary experience. Even, and maybe especially, in the quest for peace. The Inner Conclave is not just an exercise in visualization. It is the energetic content and consciousness that can illuminate and transform our lives. The Conclave’s three levels, or octaves, of process include releasing and healing, learning and developing, and higher communion. Engaging with the Inner Conclave can update and rewire our internal operating system and expand its capacity to welcome new qualities and natures, including deep well-being and peace. Imagine that we are integrated with every other human through our higher universal nature. Imagine then that creating our own inner peace can heal and transform the energetic networks and communities that connect us all. Let’s take a deeper look at the amazing capabilities of the Inner Conclave in this newest conversation between Aviv Shahar and Jeff Vander Clute. Jeff is a consultant and author of three recent books, including Beyond Every Teaching, a collection of transformative spiritual transmissions. Among their insights:
This conversation is part of the continuing Portals discovery into what is emerging on the frontiers of human experience in this time of profound change. Information about upcoming special events can be found on the Events page. Also visit and subscribe to our YouTube channel. TWEETABLE QUOTES
“The first point was, hey, can we relax in the way we approach this? Can we relax into the discovery of the Inner Conclave? You don't need to change yourself, you don't need to think you ought to be somebody else. Actually, it's an invitation to integrate a part of you that you often leave out. So it is not about trying to get it right. It is really about discovering who you, who we, are becoming.” (Aviv) “And as we seek to inhabit and liberate and unlock the domain of healing, the domain of art, the domain of leadership, the different teacher-guides that we may choose to cultivate, can we do so in an embodied way? Can I feel how they live in different parts of my system? Physically, energetically, and in my space?” (Aviv) RESOURCES MENTIONED
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| 090 - Current Openings #15: The Four Development Zones | 20 Dec 2024 | 01:07:16 | |
It may be easy to see the wisdom of Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu, who noted back in the 6th century BC, "The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step." When the journey of a lifetime is measured not in distance, but in sensing and connecting with a universal source of purpose and potency, what is that single first step? We’ve explored throughout Current Openings the many facets and dimensions of the human development quest and challenge. From personal — transforming me — to the collective of together evolving ourselves through our relationships and communities, which in turn uplifts and transforms our world and humanity. All guided by the search for truth in a time of evolutionary change and new possibilities. So, the first step? We know from our Portalsjourney that the human is the only species on the planet with freedom of choice — the power to focus the full energy and creativity inherent in the human design in pursuit of an intention. Make a decision, and it starts to build the potency of one person being able to say, “I choose to do this.” We learn a lot more about the zones of human development in the new episode, #15, of Current Openings: What the World Doesn’t Quite Get Yet, with Aviv Shahar and David Price Francis. Among their insights: Many amazing ponders and mysteries to explore. Which we do in this latest Homo Universalis conversation with Aviv Shahar and Portals friends Karen Heney and Kyriaki Nikandrou. Among their ideas and insights:
This conversation is part of the continuing Portals discovery into what is emerging on the frontiers of human experience in this time of profound change. Information about upcoming special events can be found on the Events page. Also visit and subscribe to our YouTube channel. TWEETABLE QUOTES
“Human life is purposeful. And then, within the greater purpose of life, we each get a chance to first of all work on alleviating pain and suffering. And, secondly, work on optimizing wellbeing and creating positive results in anything we do. And then we may choose to work on the higher impulse, in Zone One, which I'm proposing as a starter place is to liberate my essence, to liberate my higher creational nature.” (Aviv) “One of the really interesting features of personal development, people tend to think of themselves as singular, like, ‘What do I want to do?’ Well, if their ‘I’ is based in their emotion on Tuesday, then they may want to go into a retreat, and they may want to try and make contact, as you said, with the divine. But then on Thursday a different part of their system, their mental system, may be in charge, and it's going, ‘Oh, my Lord, we're a bit short on cash.’ And then an hour later, a different part of their system is in charge, and it's saying, ‘What's for dinner?’ We're not singular - unless we do a great deal of deliberate work to become whole.” (David) RESOURCES MENTIONED
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| 089 - Universalis #8 - Partnering with the Universe | 06 Dec 2024 | 01:14:29 | |
Our long and revealing journey of discovery with homo universalis, the universal human, has taken us to what feels like a new beginning, but now as partners; a partnership that will transform both of us in the ongoing adventure of an unfolding new epoch and new future. This partnership with the cosmos actually begins inside of us, with ourselves. We are becoming more intentional partners with the many inner lives of connections, capacities and expansive intelligence natural to every human. We know from previous Universalis conversations that new sense organs and deeper awareness of our universal nature also are firing and coming online. Imagining a connected exchange with the universe as a partnership makes it easier to also think about our inner partners as an integrated, enhanced platform of new possibility. Which brings us to the conundrum we always face in wanting to integrate, consolidate and make our own these emerging new capacities. How do we internally welcome newly arising intelligence and awareness in a way that promotes their ongoing liberation instead of fixing or arresting our emerging universal nature? It’s really up to us. Are we ready to embrace the responsibility (and opportunity) to be self-authoring, self-electing, and self-configuring as we integrate with our universal partners? Many amazing ponders and mysteries to explore. Which we do in this latest Homo Universalis conversation with Aviv Shahar and Portals friends Karen Heney and Kyriaki Nikandrou. Among their ideas and insights:
This conversation is part of the continuing Portals discovery into what is emerging on the frontiers of human experience in this time of profound change. Information about upcoming special events can be found on the Events page. Also visit and subscribe to our YouTube channel. TWEETABLE QUOTES
“All of us humans are now invited into an evolving ecology of a new epoch, in which we get to reconfigure ourselves. And the self-electing, self-configuring, self-authoring responsibility is actually to step up to that dialogue, that conversation, because no one else can do it for ourselves. We are all children seeking to grow and mature into that kind of relationship with the universe to become adults in that sense of self-responsibility.” (Aviv) “The Universalis human project is to do with coming into some kind of partnering with yourself and with the universe you are emerging in. It's a new way of being, it's a new way of partnering on the inside with the universe at large, inside of which we are looking to liberate a whole new set of latent technologies within the human system, and codify those, and translate them, and build the topographical landscape such that we can liberate even more so all that becomes available for us - and that the next 1000 years is about unlocking that greater potential.” (Aviv) RESOURCES MENTIONED
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| 088 - The Teacher's Journey with Sarah McCrum | 22 Nov 2024 | 01:20:28 | |
The journey of a spiritual teacher can help illuminate the joy, pain, revelations and profound awakenings that often accompany someone on the path to discover the larger meaning of life and the universe. This conversation brings us an intimate look into one such life of spiritual learning and leading, as Aviv Shahar is joined by author, educator, innovator and business owner Sarah McCrum. It also inaugurates a new Portals series that will explore the unique developmental journey of spiritual teachers and leaders from a variety of disciplines. Sarah’s path of searching and teaching stretches from the high — experiencing the “source code” or creational origins of the well of being, or wellbeing — to the awareness of the energy of money as being an integral part of our wellbeing and spiritual purpose. Sarah reflects on the many lessons and insights from her years of studying directly with spiritual teachers from several disciplines and communities — the deep healing, revelations, and challenges inherent in the student-teacher relationship. Her experience reflects aspects of the Portals exploration into the Teacher’s Journey. The story continues as Sarah describes the feeling of freedom, of being both an individual, and connected to the divine nature that emanates from the core of the universe. Other insights from their conversation include:
This conversation is part of the continuing Portals discovery into what is emerging on the frontiers of human experience in this time of profound change. Information about upcoming special events can be found on the Events page. Also visit and subscribe to our YouTube channel. TWEETABLE QUOTES
“And what actually happened was that I heard or felt or sensed the words the well of being, and that well of being appeared to me to be in creation. Those were the words that came to me, and that was something I was very interested in exploring already - what is creation? And the well of being then becomes an experience which is a very deep, very fundamental inner experience of well being, which actually started, for me, a way of changing perhaps my own origin story about life.” (Sarah) “And I then experienced what I now know to be the light. And it was an experience, first of all, of total protection, absolute protection, absolute stillness that was not contrasted with any movement, but sits inside all movement. So it was an experience of the absolute within all non-absolute. And I saw that it was in everything. It doesn't matter how dark a situation is, the light is in there. And that became very important.” (Sarah) RESOURCES MENTIONED
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| 087 - Current Openings #14: What Does it Mean to Develop? | 08 Nov 2024 | 00:49:49 | |
It was a Portals cliffhanger: We were in midflight, in midair, final destination unseen, at the end of the last Current Openings as we journeyed into the deeper space of development and what it means for us and the universe. The conversation then paused, to pick up later. No need to worry. Our flight now resumes, as we aim even deeper into the core dimensions of what it means to be a true caregiver for ourselves, the planet, the cosmos, and future generations yet to come. The dimensions of care and love that determine our future with the choices and decisions we make every day. A good place to start might be to notice the word “care” can be found in caregiver and character. What sort of character builds the inner platform that offers a good home to the new evolutionary energy now finding its way into humanity and the planet? How do our values, principles and morals enable us to connect with the source of what powers us on the inside, in whatever we are aiming to do? As our “Current Openings: What the World Doesn’t Quite Get Yet” flight continues, Aviv Shahar and David Price Francis explore further into the five core dimensions of what it means to develop. Among their perceptions:
This conversation is part of the continuing Portals discovery into what is emerging on the frontiers of human experience in this time of profound change. Information about upcoming special events can be found on the Events page. Also visit and subscribe to our YouTube channel. TWEETABLE QUOTES
“I'm proposing, developing skills was developing what you can do. Developing inside a role in a domain was about developing what you serve. When you develop your character, you are again moving a little bit more inside, in the interior, and it's not that you disappear in the interior because often the best way to develop character is actually to be in service of the larger ecology you are serving. And so I'm proposing that character in this is developing what you are, or developing what you're becoming, or both.” (Aviv) “So often people think about the development journey, and they will go to describe their peak experience. Oh, I've experienced a non-dual illumination. I've experienced an ecstatic state. Okay, that's wonderful. The peak experiences are wonderful, both at an individual level and at a communal level. The trueness of one's development, and one's character, is more clearly defined by the point below which we never go.” (Aviv) RESOURCES MENTIONED
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| 086 - Journeying to Source | 25 Oct 2024 | 01:10:26 | |
It remains one of the most powerful and personal callings for someone on a quest for transformation and inspiration: the pilgrimage — a journey to what are believed to be sources of connection to the sacred or divine, the holy places. Many of the best-known religious pilgrimages involve a million or more believers or devotees, such as the Hajj, or sacred Hindu celebrations in India. A pilgrimage can be required by religious law, or begin with a singular calling, an inner urge, felt by the pilgrim for closer communion with the divine, however the spiritual or universal source is named or described. Why do people all over the planet from nearly every tradition take up these sometimes arduous adventures of spiritual devotion? What do they hope for? In this conversation we hear from two longtime Portals friends who recently completed what some people might call the pilgrimage of a lifetime, to the source high in the Himalayas of the sacred Ganges River, in Hindu belief the home of the Goddess Ganga. Jeff Vander Clute, consultant and author, and Grace Boda, teacher, consultant and executive coach, share with Aviv Shahar the feelings and power of their pilgrimage to this divine source. Among their insights:
This conversation is part of the continuing Portals discovery into what is emerging on the frontiers of human experience in this time of profound change. Information about upcoming special events can be found on the Events page. Also visit and subscribe to our YouTube channel. TWEETABLE QUOTES
“And I realized that I was having a total life reboot. And, with the benefit of a little bit of hindsight, I can say that the nature of the reboot was a reorientation from mining truth, like rigorously mining truth, in every circumstance: what is true, what is true, what is true, what is true? What is real, and what is not? That had been my inquiry for many years. Subsequent to going all the way to the source, and having this embodied experience, the inquiry changed to expressing love.” (Jeff) “Perhaps because this group was ultra coherent, we were somehow able to become a conscious microcosm of the whole, of let's say the species, and even the whole Gaian system, and offer ourselves in service to the transformation of the entirety and the healing of the human family. So we're going to the source, and we're going to the roots, and we're able to be correspondingly empowered in our service and devotion to the transformation of humanity at this time.” (Jeff) RESOURCES MENTIONED
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| 085 - The Time Between Worlds with Layman Pascal | 11 Oct 2024 | 01:12:14 | |
How do we reckon with a reckoning? We can look around at the many crises engulfing the planet and think that, yes, humanity is facing its day of reckoning, a time of consequences for many forms of unsustainable behavior throughout the modern era. The “twilight of the gods,” or unraveling of our inherited values and reality described in mythology and literature. Can we find a path forward from reckoning to renewal? In a post-guru era, the search for new intelligence and insight doesn’t rely on any single external authority. We are inspired by gifted teachers, shamans, and enlightened companions, but this also is a time of distributed leadership. Each one of us has the natural capacity to connect with a universal source of knowledge and creativity — homo universalis. Each one of us carries a piece of the puzzle that together form a clear image of a collective new future. Doesn’t it make sense to then together reckon new ways of creating community that liberate the best each has to offer? We are fortunate to again have a gifted guide as we navigate our way through this shape-shifting new reality. This is the third conversation between Aviv Shahar and Layman Pascal, a leader in Integral thinking and teaching, and a prominent voice on the Integral Stage YouTube channel and podcast. Among their insights:
This conversation is part of the continuing Portals discovery into what is emerging on the frontiers of human experience in this time of profound change. Information about upcoming special events can be found on the Events page. Also visit and subscribe to our YouTube channel. TWEETABLE QUOTES
“So I think the emotional quality of trust is something that we need to practice more individually, collectively, and as a culture. When we look at the broader sociopolitical situation in the world there are many objective reasons to not trust the systems that we are embedded in. But we also have a personal responsibility to become capable of trust, because it's not just a response to what's out there, it's also kind of a faithful act that we make in ourselves.” (Layman) “We're just shifting to a new system, so that we have to develop new responses collectively for figuring out how to be together, how to be in reality. And, in order to do that, we have to be able to sample lots of different kinds of perspectives and different kinds of reality tunnels. But not only sample them and acknowledge the plurality, not only go into the post-modern kind of consciousness, we have to be able to bring them back together in a way that is coherent and empowering. So that's the shift beyond the post-modern into the meta-modern sensibility.” (Layman) “There is a body of work that’s been emerging over the last few years inside the Portals project, which we call the epoch transition, or the epoch journey, where we tell the story of the epoch through sevenfold natures, or through the rainbow. But these colors mean something other than what they mean in the traditional integrative framework, or spiral dynamics, or any other they’re talking about. They are describing recurring potencies in nature that are emergent throughout the epoch.” (Aviv) RESOURCES MENTIONED
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| 084 - Current Openings #13 – How Can We Help the Future? | 27 Sep 2024 | 00:47:15 | |
How would we even consider paying back the universe — returning the favor — for the most amazing gift of being alive? In a simple appreciation, every breath, every heartbeat, demonstrates a greater permission, an ongoing love and care for the human species. Isn’t it reasonable to wonder how we might reciprocate? Fortunately, there are many clues and directions in Current Openings that explore the true nature and innate possibility of being human. Much of the discovery has broadened our understanding of a larger purpose in the cosmos and what it means to actually develop. We’ve learned, for example, that by design we generate and process energy at many levels, frequencies and qualities. We can choose to create and transmit into our lives and the world generosity, care, kindness and peace — qualities that enrich and uplift life itself — instead of being pulled into ever-more-toxic political and cultural polarities. The activation of Homo Universalis, a greater universal possibility, means each of us can choose to become a conduit, a safe harbor, for new evolutionary potential nudging its way into humanity and the planet. We help ourselves (and each other) by helping the future help us. Not a bad first cosmic “thank you.” As we continue the series “Current Openings: What the World Doesn’t Quite Get Yet,”Aviv Shahar and David Price Francis further explore the human impulse to reciprocate the cosmic love that keeps our hearts ticking. Among their appreciations:
This conversation is part of the continuing Portalsdiscovery into what is emerging on the frontiers of human experience in this time of profound change. Information about upcoming special events can be found on theEventspage. Also visit and subscribe to our YouTube channel. TWEETABLE QUOTES
“This is looking at the inner core design of the human and having a human perspective on how we can help humanity. And, at the core of that, to me, sits this idea of generosity, which comes from being stable in oneself and strong in oneself, from the personal perspective, having a good sense of who one is and why one is here, that the universe wants us to be here, and to realize that we are of kind, or even a stronger expression, we are kin. We're of kin to the rest of the human race.” (David) “So when we bring the cosmic perspective and we ask, how can you help the universe? The position we take, the invitation we make is, well, you develop yourself. By actually developing yourself you are helping the universe, you're helping humanity, you're helping the planet, you're helping yourself - by developing yourself, period. However, I'm offering the specificity of develop yourself as an agent of evolution, and develop yourself as an agent of the evolution of the universe in human and planetary affairs.” (Aviv) RESOURCES MENTIONED
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| 083 - Portals Into the Soul, Chapter 2 - The Ghost | 13 Sep 2024 | 00:57:31 | |
In chapter one we introduced the story of the soul showing up as part of a new life on the natural as was meant to be line. It is programmed with a threefold brief to orchestrate and guide the human to a) stay alive, b) learn, adapt, and improve opportunities, and c) discover and realize your higher purpose. The soul nudges you to bring to life and express the cosmology of your natural higher qualities. In chapter two we ask why and how we get separated from the natural as was meant to be line, and what happens to the soul when we do. How does the soul fixate on and try to compensate for the separation? We will also address the postmodern self-construction criticism of what we describe by the natural as was meant to be response of the soul. We put individuals to work in things that do not serve life, and they hate their work. The people who were meant to move life forward are being hijacked by the systems, and we create the crisis we have today. This conversation is part of the continuing Portals discovery into what is emerging on the frontiers of human experience in this time of profound change. Information about upcoming special events can be found on the Events page. Also visit and subscribe to our YouTube channel. TWEETABLE QUOTES
“You are a unique configuration: completely unique fingerprint like no other human; a unique, colorful intricate iris pattern of ridges and folds, and a unique cosmology of competencies, qualities, and essences. All of which means you represent a unique discovery lab for life. Life gets to discover and experience a once-in-the-universe algorithmic configuration through you. This is an extraordinary fact, a sacred fact.” (Aviv) “Every person has a spiritual journey, whether they believe in the actuality of the spirit or not. You cannot be a human and not have a spiritual journey. A human is a spirit being entering a planetary experience in the human model. It is accompanied by a soul whose job is to be a companioning liaison that helps navigate and orchestrate the human to realize the spirit’s purpose through development and evolution.” (Aviv) RESOURCES MENTIONED
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| 109 - Spiritualize the Universe - 20 Core Premises: Current Openings #19 | 12 Sep 2025 | 01:12:17 | |
Our adventure exploring the deeper nature of human life forever seeks to find new bridges — the special connecting insights and nuggets of wisdom that remind us why this journey of discovery is so critical to our personal and collective futures. What is the premise that inspires us to unlock the promise of the human capacity to engage with and shape this emerging new wave of evolution? To help build these bridges of connection, this conversation brings together Aviv Shahar and longtime Portals friend David Price Francis for the 19th episode of their remarkable series “Current Openings.” Even though these are the early days (comparatively) of the emergence of what we call the universal human, Homo Universalis, Aviv and David remind us we can be intentionally present in multiple spaces in the universe today, here and now. We have the capacity and permission of the human design to renew and reconfigure our finer energetic inner lives any time. One bridge into the unknown then might be the awareness of our energetic nature and possibility to actively engage with the flow of an evolving cosmos. Other connecting ideas and scaffolding include:
This conversation is part of the continuing Portals discovery into what is emerging on the frontiers of human experience in this time of profound change. Information about upcoming special events can be found on the Events page. Also visit and subscribe to our YouTube channel. TWEETABLE QUOTES
“When a person has that spiritualized process they walk into the forest, and the trees and the animals, and the flowers they welcome the human. But if the human is full of anger and resentment and the mortgage and what's wrong, and checking their digital media and seeing what's on Twitter whilst they're walking through the forest, well, everything retreats from them because they're on a lower vibration frequency. So we have that amazing promise, but we're not told this is how you have to use it.” (David) “Everything that exists in organic life is processing universal energies, in some fashion, whether lunar energy, solar energy, energy from different planets, it's being processed and received by planet Earth. So I think of the planet in that sense as this amazing crucible of receiving different energies, and she needs form to receive an energy. So whether it be a squirrel, whether it be a cat, whether it be a tree, a bird, everything is processing energetics and delivering that energy into the energy field of the planet.” (David) RESOURCES MENTIONED
Current Openings #19: Spiritualize the Universe – 20 Core Premises | |||
| 082 - 8 Patterns of Transformation with Jose Leal | 30 Aug 2024 | 01:25:39 | |
What if the underlying natural intelligence and energy that help influence and shape nearly every aspect of our lives were actually identifiable patterns hiding in plain sight — visible in every domain of life to anyone with the eyes (perception) to see? Underlying patterns that together point to a unified universal operating system or source code that is guiding the growth and evolution of our own life, humanity and the planet…and all the ways we connect and interact. Identifying the patterns can open greater possibility of living and working in harmony with, not contrary to, the rhythms of nature and life. Making space and time for the dynamic flow of life itself can transform a society and culture — all that we do, in the workplace, legal system, relationships and communities. How so? We explore the guiding influence of usually unseen patterns and cycles in this conversation between Aviv Shahar and Jose Leal, a founding member of Society 2045, a gathering of visionaries imagining a future that supports and liberates the best of humanity. They first looked into their evolutionary crystal ball in the Portals conversation Imagine 2045. Among their current insights:
This conversation is part of the continuing Portalsdiscovery into what is emerging on the frontiers of human experience in this time of profound change. Information about upcoming special events can be found on theEventspage. Also visit and subscribe to our YouTube channel. TWEETABLE QUOTES
“There is implicit in these realizations some reframing of belief systems, such as what is it we believe the case to be about decay about dying? Do we believe it’s the end of everything? Or do we believe it is simply how the system reboots or regenerates or rejuvenates itself? And that leads us to the third pattern which you decoded as from transactions to relationships, or from impersonality of transactions to depth of relationships. There is an importance here of the word depth, say something about the significance of that depth and relationships in this pattern.” (Aviv) “Nature and its complexity is still happening, we are nature. And those patterns, be it in our organizations or in our agreements, or in the way we do finance or the way we do collaboration, all of those things actually operate at some level, at the nature level, in those rhythms. That is life and nature’s complexity. And we’re butting against those two every day. And so recognizing that, when we look at, say for example, something that we would call a strategy for a period of time and saying, let’s look at where we want to go, but adapt to the flow, the nonlinear flow of where, of how we’re going to get there. And recognizing that that’s a fluid thing that we do, not a linear story that we can tell and be beholden to the story, no matter what the reality is, in the moment.” (Jose) “Recognizing that we are interdependent as individuals, as life itself, changes our understanding of what it is that we're doing to and for each other. And the pattern that emerged that life seeks to serve life, not as an option, not as a choice, but as the very process of life is to serve life.” (Jose) “The very existence of AI is a pattern of life. AI as a tool, that humans have been building tools for millennia, will alter our landscape like every other tool has altered the landscape. And I think that looking at these patterns lets us understand that we're not here to dictate what happens and doesn't happen. We're here to figure out how to go with the flow of life, rather than contradict the flow of life.” (Jose) RESOURCES MENTIONED
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| 081 - What is Healing? #3 - Opening to Healing | 16 Aug 2024 | 01:22:38 | |
How do we sidestep a familiar and unhelpful pattern of thought or behavior in that moment when trauma or pain begins to assert itself and trigger a response? Can we in the triggering moment find a uniquely creative and new response that helps illuminate and loosen the trauma’s grip? Learning to pause before reacting to a triggering feeling or memory might be one of the most important moments in the healing process. Deciding how we will respond, if at all, engages a larger awareness or consciousness that lifts our perspective above the immediate, often polarized, circumstance. In this view of healing, consciousness is the medicine. In this moment we can remember there is no separation: we are naturally integrated with larger universal patterns of regenerative energy and intelligence. Which means as we heal, the universe heals, and we co-create a new future. We explore further into the realms of light and shadow and healing with a group of Portals friends who bring an amazing depth and breadth of experience as practitioners, authors, and teachers. In this new addition to the What is Healing? series, Aviv Shahar is joined by Lonny Jarrett, AlexanderLove, Randine Anderson Lewis, and Lorie EveDechar. TWEETABLE QUOTES
“I think when we talk about healing, it's really a concept very much applied to the bottom, which is that I cut myself shaving. And it takes two weeks for the wound to heal, or I broke my leg and it takes six months for it to heal. And the notion of healing in that regard in the physical realm and in the gross dimension of being is that something's going to get back to like it was, and it's going to be out of the way, and it won't be an inconvenience, and it will be resolved. And just over the course of my life, healing has really changed to evolution and the soul’s view of just a very deep time process.” (Lonny) “I love that distinction around healing, often being whether we're thinking about it consciously or unconsciously, as a returning back to something sort of like, oh, well, I had a big trauma in my life. And so, if I heal, then I'll be the person I was before the trauma. And it brings up for me how often, in the West, we think of ourselves as nouns, we think of ourselves as like these fixed things that kind of get broken, and then we have to patch back together. Whereas, in the East, there's a lot of invitation to explore ourselves more like a verb. And when we do that, it invites this notion that every moment is receiving the previous moments, and then creating something new.” (Alexander) “Where does healing come from? I'm really struck with this sense of our vastness, that we are multidimensional beings - it's not just the manifestation of the materiality here. I know from my own experience that what opens me up to that is my own brokenness, my own flaws, the ways that I can't seem to access the healing that I want. So all I can do is surrender and say, I need help.” (Randine) “The second a person says, okay, I'm going to do it, or I'm not going to do it, and I'm putting my stake in the ground and the karmic line ends now, then instantly all the forces that support the evolution of their soul toward the true, the good, the beautiful, toward this wholesome step, line up. And every force inside that wants to maintain the status quo and has no sincerity at all in engaging with healing also becomes perfectly clear - and then we really have something we can work with. And that shifts the whole orientation from healing to evolution.” (Alexander) RESOURCES MENTIONED
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| 080 - The Guru Trap and the Golden Shadow | 02 Aug 2024 | 01:04:17 | |
The teacher-student dynamic has been central for the unfolding story of humanity. Although universities began to emerge in Europe in the 11th and 12th centuries, the modern education system only developed during the Industrial Revolution, in part for adults to be able to go to work in factories. Modern education focused on exterior knowledge of the physical world and was shaped by scientific orientation. It also included learning and development of skills. These were mostly physical and mental skills that would facilitate participation in the workforce and employability. What was largely left out of modern education was the interior and the character development journey. Modern education had no capacity to address this need. It was left for the priest, rabbi, lama, and the guru-teacher. The therapist was added later. Anyone aspiring to deeper self-insight and understanding and the pursuit of perennial wisdom, both in the East and the West, needed to find the teacher and often the community where the quest for truth and self-knowledge could be supported. Recent decades brought new realizations about the dynamic between a searching student and their spiritual teacher. In this conversation between Aviv Shahar and longtime Portals friend Jeff Vander Clute, author of Beyond Every Teaching, they trace the teacher’s journey, the identification trap for both teacher and student, and the golden shadow phenomenon. They also are reflecting on the kinds of ethical evolutionary communities that are arising now to address these challenges. These ponders come at a critical time. We’ve explored on Portals the post-guru quest and the search for truth as new creative capacities come online with the activation of Homo Universalis, the universal human. We can integrate with the new incoming evolutionary impulse as self-authored and self-responsible — our own pathfinders with the help of others around us. Among their insights:
This conversation is part of the continuing Portals discovery into what is emerging on the frontiers of human experience in this time of profound change. Information about upcoming special events can be found on the Events page. Also visit and subscribe to our YouTube channel. TWEETABLE QUOTES
“And I would say a great way to realize the confirmation, not just the knowing, which could be abstract, to imbibe life and the experiences that life brings through interactions with students through interactions with anyone on the street. And to bring oneself into contact with the world is perhaps the most powerful way, not only to be confirmed in what one knows, you can think of the world as the playground for one’s spirituality, and more than that, the testing ground, but also to go deeper. And not only be in the cave from time to time, but to become the cave. So there’s no longer a need to go off to the cave. That happens when the inner and the outer are reconciled, unified, and ultimately seamlessly integrated.” (Jeff) “It’s well said and I’m seeing the value of the dysfunction in bringing attention and awareness to the higher potential for the teaching and for the teacher. And, as you said, if we start with the goal of empowering, enabling everyone to have their own source connection, source realization, it does flow more smoothly. And if there’s dissonance, that’s a great indication that maybe we could be, maybe it’s time, maybe doing more of that, maybe it wasn’t time before. So the dissonance is valuable.” (Jeff) “The trap is there already, it's always ever present, and unless we continually work with it we are captured by the ghostly behaviors, the ghostly patterns, of this trap. For as long as we are in the flesh, even when we feel that we have worked through all our disowned content, there will always be more patterns that with greater power, and with greater intensity, and with greater illumination will come to the surface.” (Aviv) “Now what I'm describing here, in some way, is a central feature of the human experience, even in the child-parent relationship. We each, as children, we had the first moment when we said, well, my father, my mother - hopefully a little later than earlier - and there was, okay, they are human beings, too. They're flawed in their way, they have their weaknesses. And many of us experienced it very early in childhood, for some of us it came later. So there is a disillusionment crisis the student now experiences in relation to the teacher.” (Aviv) RESOURCES MENTIONED
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| 079 - The Ghost and the Inner Conclave | 19 Jul 2024 | 01:11:33 | |
It’s good to remember that whatever the emotional, mental, or life pain or trauma we face — whatever the shadow or ghost — we can at any time assemble the most powerful team of advisors, healers, teachers, and friends available to help us. It can be anyone, close by or at distance; a quality, such as courage or kindness. Whatever we think we need. They all come together in what we call The Inner Conclave, a multi-dimensional interior gathering of the many lives and resources accessible within us. If we face the trauma caused by abuse or loss, for example, we can imagine in our Conclave a person or quality that represents love, or trust, or wisdom. It’s not merely a mental picture, but the energetic value and consciousness that work together to illuminate and in time transform the shadow or ghost, the pain and anguish. Where do our ghosts come from? Imagine an inner intelligence we call a soul that seeks always to keep us safe, and reconnect us to the natural love and wonder in us at birth. We discover much more about the ghost and shadow, and the healing possibility of The Inner Conclave practice, in this conversation with Aviv Shahar and longtime Portalsfriend Jeff Vander Clute. Jeff is a consultant and author of three recent books, including Beyond Every Teaching, a collection of transformative spiritual transmissions. Among their insights:
This conversation is part of the continuing Portals discovery into what is emerging on the frontiers of human experience in this time of profound change. Information about upcoming special events can be found on the Events page. Also visit and subscribe to our YouTube channel. TWEETABLE QUOTES
“These are two novel objectives. What I simply meant by the transparency offered was that, in this case, we are journeying with a global community of some 150 people where the emphasis is that it’s not a teaching or learning situation as a first principle, although the profound revelatory dimension, learning dimension, developmental dimension, and healing dimension all accompany nature and features, the primary impulse is this evolutionary frame of mind.” (Aviv) “One way the ghost compensatory act will express itself in this situation is the person will develop a whole set of behaviors to try to protect from any dimension that will take away from harmony. So, in fact, they're not living in harmony, they're actually defending against anything that will take away from them the sense of harmony, but they are more in the ghostly experience of having been distanced and separated from harmony.” (Aviv) “The stories that we tell ourselves, which so often are unconscious, or maybe at best semi-conscious, the scripts that are cycling round and round, which have their purpose to protect us from pain or to continue to remind us, perhaps, of a state that we feel has been lost. So you're providing a step by step path to go down a layer, down another layer, down another layer, access the agency, access the power of our own soul, frankly, to maybe burn away what is no longer serving, burn away the shadow.” (Jeff) RESOURCES MENTIONED
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| 078 - Evolving Together #3 - Choosing Our Families | 05 Jul 2024 | 00:41:59 | |
How often do we feel the people closest to us emotionally or energetically — though not related by blood or marriage — are actually our real family? We all know the saying “You can’t choose your family,” usually meant humorously when a relative does something we find embarrassing. What if we can choose our family, in all the ways that have consequence, meaning and value for our lives? We’re not referring to bloodline or DNA. It’s the special relationships — family formed from the bonds, exchange, and shared space of new possibility created when people come together in mutual purpose and vision. How does it happen? It begins with the very real connections among all humans. We are singular and individual, but also born with minds, systems, and highly sensitive faculties that can naturally tune into and connect with the frequencies of our fellow humans. Not only link with one another, but exchange and transfer. Which means my learning and inspiration can become your learning and inspiration; a real shared consciousness. It gets bigger. The same inner technology that connects us with each other also integrates with much larger universal systems and intelligence, allowing the flow of evolutionary energy to feel its way into humanity. Evolving together, us and the universe. Quite a family. This conversation continues our discovery of family and growing together begun in earlier dialogues among Aviv Shahar and Portals friends Nigel Geeves and Well. Among their ponderings and insights:
This conversation is part of the continuing Portals discovery into what is emerging on the frontiers of human experience in this time of profound change. Information about upcoming special events can be found on the Events page. Also visit and subscribe to our YouTube channel. TWEETABLE QUOTES
“You could say that each of us has three levels, three fundamental levels. And the first one is, you could describe it as your physical life, your planetary life that you're born into, that grows upon you. And in that, in the beginning, you're very helpless. And in the hands of others clearly, because you need support.” (Nigel) “And one of the problems with a materialistic perspective is that we can only consider the paradigm that begins with dust from atoms and goes up, rather than contemplate what has been the contemplation of people who quest and inquire into the universe, before science, and had their way of knowing and appreciating the universe before we stumbled upon the beautiful, logical roadmap of science.” (Aviv) “Whenever I meet another person, it allows me to be conscious of a different part of myself. I'm discovering that my systems are way more intelligent than me because they're trying to tune themselves all the time to whatever I'm facing. If I meet somebody from a foreign country, I notice my voice box is struggling to match their tone, their accent and, in that, find a different part in my own life. So it's a bit like new lives get born in each by the meeting with others. In meeting others, there's a development opportunity.” (Well) “The uniqueness, the specialness, of each of us as a life, as an individual is something to do with what we came into this world with - however you define that. But when we meet each other, we're actually coming into contact with something else that is different to us. And in the best case of two things that are different meeting, something else becomes possible that wasn't preconceived, wasn't pre-planned, wasn't pre-given, and life itself therefore takes a huge leap forward by the fact that lives can meet, and integrate, and build things together.” (Nigel) RESOURCES MENTIONED
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| 077 - Current Openings #12 - Why Develop Yourself? | 21 Jun 2024 | 01:09:11 | |
We might want to stop and consider if a slightly different approach could help us unlock the core question this conversation is posing: Why develop yourself? Wouldn’t it be more accurate to wonder that since we will develop, one way or another, why not choose with intention and awareness what will fill our lives and help shape our future? The human is designed to develop. We know from earlier Current Openings, such as The Addiction Trap, that the open-ended potential of the brain and mind can be programmed by high-intensity, repetitive impressions and activity. Toxic or healthy; healing or harming: the choice is ours. There is no inner void. We can consciously direct our natural creative potential to the process of converting physical, mental, emotional, or spiritual energy into real impacts and results in our inner and outer worlds. Actually shaping our personal and planetary ecology, and the new universal possibility now emerging. The more finely we develop, the greater our inner conductivity and effectiveness in the life we choose. Maybe a beginning answer to our core question. Of course, there are many paths and possibilities to discover. In the latest edition of the Portals series “Current Openings: What the World Doesn’t Quite Get Yet”, Aviv Shahar and David Price Francis explore why human development shouldn’t be left to chance. Among their observations:
This conversation is part of the continuing Portals discovery into what is emerging on the frontiers of human experience in this time of profound change. Information about upcoming special events can be found on the Events page. Also visit and subscribe to our YouTube channel. TWEETABLE QUOTES
“I think, to help support something that you said, which is about the love of the universe, and how to look at that in a way that to me is infallible, and that is that we can see the love of the universe in what the universe supports. And if we bring that to planetary level - it’s easier to see in our own planet because this is the where we are, this is our home planet - that the planet supports actively the forms of organic life that exist on the planet right now. And a really interesting feature, the science tells us that about 93 to 97% of what has been on the planet, the different species of organic life, are already extinct.” (David) “We are designed to develop, so why not take a hand and develop what you would choose to develop, from a personal perspective, rather than what everything else would turn you out to be if you don't take a hand in the matter? In other words, everybody is developing, but are they choosing the way of that development, or are they going to turn out to be the way that life turns them out to be?” (David) “Someone says, well, what's your purpose? The answer might be, well, I'm here to help raise the level of vibration of the human race by connecting to higher cosmic energy as much as I can. And I'm developing myself as far as I can to be able to do that. Oh, by the way, I'm doing this, this, and this job to cover the economics because I'm not paid for being a Cosmic Agency right now.” (David) RESOURCES MENTIONED
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| 076 - Portals Into the Soul, Chapter 1: The Soul - A Threefold Orchestration | 07 Jun 2024 | 00:38:42 | |
Building on the context offered in thePreamble, this is the first in a series of Portals Into the Soul chapters we are publishing in a draft form. This work was seeded by the conversation The Ghost and The Inner Conclaveand, as the preamble narrates, by four decades of intense inquiry. Portals into the Soul will reflect on the core story of life from the perspective of the soul. It will:
Let us begin this trace by appreciating what the soul is, what it does, and its threefold nature. The Threefold Configuration of the Soul We each appear in a standard human model, if we are all healthy: two arms, two legs, two eyes, two lungs, one liver, one heart, and a soul. That is the standard human model, the same for all. Within that shared design we each have a unique threefold soul configuration. We describe the soul with a specific understanding, quite different to the general and often confusing use of the word. Okay, so what does the soul do? The soul functions as an intelligence loom that mediates, negotiates, regulates, and navigates the planetary experience in the human model. Imagine the human is given a soul as a liaison, a companion for life, because humans are spirit beings, showing up here inside a carnal form in the Earthly ecology. If a spirit showed up in a body without a companioning soul, the spirit and body wouldn’t know how to communicate with each other. The soul reads the cues of the spirit and is wired and programmed to offer translation to the body and back to the spirit; to orchestrate the human Earthly model and guide it through the planetary obstacle course. The soul as an intelligence loom runs a three-layered orchestration system. The foundational orchestration layer keeps you alive. The second orchestration process guides your continual learning. The third orchestrating impulse intelligently prods you to discover and actualize your universal purpose. Let’s reflect on these a little more. TWEETABLE QUOTES
“The soul functions as an intelligence loom that mediates, negotiates, regulates, and navigates the planetary experience in the human model. Imagine the human is given a soul as a liaison, a companion for life, because humans are spirit beings, showing up here inside a carnal form in the Earthly ecology.” (Aviv) “The other major benefit on this path is that it squeezed me time and again into the unknown, where no maps were available. I have had to work by discovering the map on the move. Stepping into a functional role and facilitating, leading, and coaching others into an unknown terrain helped to syphon and catalyze connective flow, revelation, and fortitude, inspired by inquiries I have been pursuing my entire adult life.” (Aviv) “When we draw closer to our soul’s nature, discover how we are meant to serve the situations we encounter, and connect to our calling, the spirit glistens and glows through the unique soul cosmology of qualities and natures. It may appear with a whimsical sense of humor; with others the soul glows with immense courage and the capacity to respond at the point of need and do what must be done. With another it is an inventive and innovative genius, or the intelligence of deep listening, care and healing support.” (Aviv) “The first soul directive is a standard issuance working to keep you alive. The seconddirective compels you to learn, adapt, and improve by using your unique capabilities and can-do talent. The third directive seeks to unlock your unique configuration as it guides and even haunts you to discover your greater potential in life.” (Aviv) RESOURCES MENTIONED
Portals Into the Soul, Chapter 1: The Soul - A Threefold Orchestration | |||
| 075 - Portals Into the Soul - Preamble | 24 May 2024 | 00:28:13 | |
Greetings, friend, Aviv is writing with exciting updates about Portals Into the Soul. On Christmas Eve, Sunday, December 24, I finally found space to sit down with notes Kyriaki Nikandrou of the Portals team created out of The Ghost and the Inner Conclave conversation with Jeff Vander Clute. We recorded that conversation after a four-day Epoch Journey event in September and it was published in December 2023. Once a space was created, what transpired on Christmas Eve took my breath away. I will get to what began to open below and describe the Portals Into the Soul work that started to emerge. I said above “finally” because the last four months of 2023 brought immense intensity and struggle. With committed work and then with the war erupting on October 7, and new commitments that emerged, I experienced the ferocity of a roller-coaster moving at warp speed, which felt like a couple of years squeezed into just a few weeks. These developments were tracking what we describe in the Epoch Journey as the violet upsurge. I believe the violet increase will accompany us for the coming decade or more. It will continue to be characterized by seemingly out-of-this-world events that will leave little of the late 20th century world order standing. It will also bring profound breakthroughs and opportunities. Both processes are integral to the violet phase-shift. In the seven-fold Epoch progression, each of the color fractals, including violet, are not “good” nor “bad”. They each represent certain natures of potential and are therefore accompanied by historic and cultural phenomena. Violet represents a catalyst function for transformations that arise at the end of an epoch. The shift can be experienced both “below” and “above” the line. “Below the line” violet is expressed through, for example, breakdowns that seem to trace regressive patterns to earlier evolutionary stages, such as with the rise of despotic leaders and the escalation of barbarous wars we thought were left in the past. “Above the line” violet appears with, for example, scientific and social innovation and development breakthroughs. As we wrote more than three years ago, emergence and emergency, breakthroughs and breakdowns, may show up at the same time, in the same place. In the coming year, we will offer more about the Epoch transition story as it unfolds. What took my breath away on Christmas Eve was a new open vista that started to emerge. For many years I have trained myself to pay attention when something new is coming through in my contemplative process. When the nudge of a new connective and creative current arrives, my practice is to make space to allow me to become fully immersed in the significance and flow of what is arising. Letting inspired discovery be my guide has made all the difference. My journey has not been academically fashioned. Instead, it arose in the trenches of life, in the merging integration of helping senior executives and leadership teams in one part; in another part, journeying through an esoteric initiation by immersing in the big questions of life, meaning, purpose, spirituality, and our latent and prospective evolution. All in the face of civilizational crises and imminent disintegration of the world as we have known it. Helping senior leaders in some of the most admired companies in the world kept me grounded and sharply alert to what is happening in culture, technology, geopolitics, and more. There also has been a humbling aspect in this. I would often be in the room with extremely bright people who are the best in the world in what they do; who know about their domain more than I will ever grasp. I’ve had to find novel ways of creating differentiating, even game-changing, value to them. Where could I find and source this kind of knowhow? It was found in the other part of my journey, which centered on an inquiry endeavor to align with perennial truths — the natural laws that shape the universe. It is a journey that forever connects me to the deepest sense of the sacred and fills me with awe about the mysteries of life, and the incredible valiance and vulnerability in being human. This path brought me to experience immeasurable kindness and the generosity found in friendship and the mutuality of purpose. The other promise of this adventure was that by orienting and aligning with first principles as an embodied endeavor, rather than a concept, over time it will enable me to parachute into almost any situation, connect with its core dynamics and the people involved, make meaning, and generate pathfinding possibilities. If there is a secret in this, it is that all the domains of life share a set of universal principles at core. The price of admission was to go through the experience, to be vulnerably exposed without having guarantees as to what it was going to catalyze in my formation. The core impulse of this path has therefore not been theoretical. Instead, it focused on helping teams in the business world, and groups and communities in the spiritual pilgrimage and personal growth and development space, to produce results. For many, these are conflicting spaces. For me, I have lived for decades inside the crucible of this convergence. The merging integration of these different worlds unlocked gifts I did not even anticipate. They tested me time and again to find and formulate modalities and journey choreographies to help people get from point A to point B. The context and the scenery of what A and B represented changed from one situation to another, but the common thread was that I just could not produce these results with fancy theories or models. Instead, I have had to test on myself first everything I was leading others into. I have had to become the living embodiment and the energetic plasma required to ease others into the journey. I have found myself in testing situations that brought me to the edge, exposed blind spots and capacity outages, and caused development I would never be able to cause in myself on my own. I figured this was one way to do the development of a dozen lifetimes in one tour of duty. I do not recommend this approach; it is not for the faint of heart. In the Air Force I learned that a landing you can walk away from is a good landing; near misses, humbling moments, and at times extreme stress, exhaustion, and loneliness were simply accompanying elements of this journey. The other major benefit on this path is that it squeezed me time and again into the unknown, where no maps were available. I have had to work by discovering the map on the move. Stepping into a functional role and facilitating, leading, and coaching others into an unknown terrain helped to syphon and catalyze connective flow, revelation, and fortitude, inspired by inquiries I have been pursuing my entire adult life. On that evening of Christmas Eve, I suddenly relaxed after weeks of intensity and stress. In that space, I experienced a blessed grace. Then, glimpses of Portals Into the Soul started to come together. Chapter 1: The Soul – A Threefold Orchestration, which will be published here on February 23, came through with intensity and flow. A high-level outline for the next chapter followed quickly. Still, there was a tinge of hesitancy. Was I crazy enough to embark on formulating and writing a whole new appreciation of the soul: what it does, how it works, and why this was now an essential revelation to integrate as the Epoch transition is culminating? Two issues arise when you attempt to approach the subject of the soul and the spirit. The first is the confusion problem. The second is the credibility challenge. The confusion arises in that there are many different usages and applications of the word soul. This is exacerbated even more by the hyper-subjective postmodern mood and discourse, where everyone seems to be entitled to their own definition of what a soul is. Postmodern thinking may be a gift opening the way for emergent novelty, but it is also a curse, since it breeds confusion and places everything in the equating soup of personal opinion and theory. Google, ChatGPT, and Wikipedia all offer something as bland as the soul is the spiritual or immaterial part of a human being or animal, regarded as immortal. Well, okay; how is that helpful? Perhaps they will be updating their definitions as we publish the Portals Into the Soul installments, but even then, the confusion problem is not likely to be solved. The confusing muddle is coupled with the credibility challenge, which is driven by reductionist materialist science that says show me the soul, please, in a way that can be reproduced in a repeatable test. If you can’t, the soul doesn’t exist. Before proceeding, therefore, I needed to answer one more question: Where will I find the temerity, where will I gather the chutzpah, to tackle these problems? If I were going to write Portals Into the Soul to recast what the soul is, what it does, and why you should bother to pay attention, and publish the draft as monthly installments through 2024, I needed to address the chutzpah challenge and the confusion and credibility issues head-on. The Portalsproject has proven time and again it is wiser than me. The agreement with the team at the outset was that we will let the project develop us and guide us with its own teleology. As luck or divine intervention would have it, a week before Christmas Eve, we published an end-of-the-year message with the writing An End of an Era & a Post-Guru World. In it we described the three traditional jobs of a guru and reflected on the individuation project, which we suggested is now leading us from planetary Sapiens human to the rise of universal human. This is where we are changing and updating our relationship with power and authority, with each other, and with life itself. The message then reflected on the significance of communal endeavors, where we support each other as we discover our own agentic self-authoring and self-regulating freedom and responsibility. I have always been suspicious and partly afraid of the guru archetype and model. For a start, there is much that has gone wrong in the guru-student relationships. Second, my intuition for decades has been that our next evolution cannot and will not emerge through solo all-knowing figures. That in fact the breakthroughs we need will emerge by Evolving Together. I now needed to confront a potential shadow element in this. I asked directly, am I holding back from more fully and freely stepping into the authenticity of the revelatory discovery I feel called to share, so to not be perceived in the historic slot of guru-teacher? Even though there was a tinge of this worry, having just declared we’ve entered the end of the guru era, I felt absolved and liberated. The Post-Guru World message was not suggesting the time of journey guides and teachers is over. In fact, we need more facilitators, mediators, spiritual sherpas, and midwives of revelatory discovery, truth, healing, beauty, and wisdom. These now often emerge in pods, teams, and communal gatherings, where a mutuality of purpose facilitates healing, development, and evolution; where we liberate each other to our greater and higher capacities, and where multifaceted and distributed leadership increasingly is on the rise. This has been my experience of the Portals project. There is a growing team here and it is the shared inquiry, mutual respect, and love of the project that fuel the creativity. Much of the new discovery work is siphoned through this mutualized agentic process and the greater learning organism we are becoming. On Christmas Eve, I realized I did not decide to write about the soul. The Portals project decided it for me, and I acquiesced and surrendered. What Portals Into the Soul will bring to life is not an invention of a new “theory” or “model.” The traces formulated here will offer actual pathways you can travel and test for yourself. Please do not take anything I write as a given before you validate these actualities in your own experience. My own discovery laboratory has been inspired by and is sourced in the deep universal truth of what the case for human life is, in the best ways I have been able to contact these great mysteries through more than four decades of intense development inquiry. The language formulation used in these Portals Into the Soul can be appreciated through a process like painting, where the painter comes back again and again to the same regions of the picture, to add new layers upon the earlier layers, so the picture gains depth, distinction, and significance. We approach this work as an on the move discovery process, and are serializing these chapters digitally in draft form as they emerge. The intention is to clarify, refine, and update the writings as the perception itself becomes clearer. For years, my advisory brief for groups I am working with has offered the following awareness about language. Because our objective is not theorizing but rather facilitating actual experiential discovery, connected development experiences, and elevation states and perceptions, language is an essential tool. At the same time, it is always an after-the-fact best approximation we can get to in the moment. Whatever we say and write is a) not claiming to be the actual case, but is the nearest description of the case we are able to get to at this time, and b) best viewed as an approximation draft until such time as we are ready to produce a better, more finely tuned, updated draft. In that sense, the project is forever a collective mutualized refinement endeavor. To help me stay inside the connective current emerging with this endeavor, it is prudent to also declare what Portals Into the Soul will not attempt to do. I am not writing these installments to try to impress or woo you into anything. I am not seeking followers or students; I am financially secure and free. In the face of increasing global turmoil, I feel compelled to offer discoveries that provide nourishment and fortitude, and to be in conversation with you and with a growing network of friends about the soulful future we yearn to co-create. As indicated above, I am not seeking to create a new meta-theory of the soul in a way that integrates all that has been said or written about the soul in the East and the West, and/or by wonderful authors of the last 150 years. This will not be a comparative study about different notions of the soul. That inquiry has its place and importance and is best led by others who are better qualified for such a study. Attempting here a comparative approach would be counterproductive for our endeavor. It would become an exercise of reconciling frames of reference and maps of meaning and predominantly engage the referencing brain. Which is an incredibly useful machinery we have learned to emphasize with the rise of the intellect over the last 400 years and the innovation wonders it brought to us. The great fascination and love of the brain to reference, name, categorize, and compare, and thereby acquire a sense of control, also created part of the problem humanity now face. It largely abandoned and disenfranchised other forms of knowing and appreciating. I will address this more concretely in chapter two, where we will reflect on the astrophysicist view of the world and wonder if it has a place for the soul. My aim is to invite you to relax the dominance of the referencing brain and the reductionist materialist logic most of us raised in the 20th and now the 21st century have been indoctrinated into. Come along for a discovery odyssey, in which you explore for yourself these portals into the soul and the experiential discovery pathways offered to contact directly the sacred actuality of being human. I hope there is interest in creating and joining a rare opportunity of embarking on this year-long journey with other like-minded friends who are interested to decode and metabolize this new revelatory work as it emerges. Imagine making this part of your 2024 voyage by participating in a Portals Into the Soul exploration pod. We are happy to facilitate these soul-inquiry pods coming together. Just let us know hereyou are interested to join a pod and we will connect you with others. I am always indebted to incredible mentors and journey friends who offered me guidance and inspiration. I am utterly blessed by many friends, especially the Portals team and the Epoch Journey network who fortify me with courage, kindness, and inspiration as we search and inquire into the evolutionary process underway. What became the Portalsproject started in my mind a few weeks after Talia, my granddaughter, was born. I imagined her asking me on her 21st birthday, saba (grandpa in Hebrew), what have you done since I was born to make this world a little better and brighter for me. As I write this on December 28, 2023, she has had her fourth birthday a couple of months ago, and she now has a younger brother Ari who is nine months young. The entire Portals project is for me a long love letter to them, their contemporaries, and future generations to follow them. We will put the chapters out for free as they emerge with this dedication and love for their future. I am personally funding the Portalsproject, which is made possible also through the generous volunteering and labor of love of the Portals team. Your support makes a difference and we would love to have you as a Portals memberso you can get access to members-only content and events, including the groundbreaking work of the Universalis Project. If you appreciate Portals, one great way to express your support and help me is to share Portalswith your friends. You are welcome to forward this news about Portals Into the Soul to your network. I look forward to seeing you at one of our upcoming events. With care, Aviv TWEETABLE QUOTES
“In the seven-fold Epoch progression, each of the color fractals, including violet, are not ‘good’ nor ‘bad’. They each represent certain natures of potential and are therefore accompanied by historic and cultural phenomena. Violet represents a catalyst function for transformations that arise at the end of an epoch. The shift can be experienced both ‘below’ and ‘above’ the line. ‘Below the line’ violet is expressed through, for example, breakdowns that seem to trace regressive patterns to earlier evolutionary stages, such as with the rise of despotic leaders and the escalation of barbarous wars we thought were left in the past.” (Aviv) “The other major benefit on this path is that it squeezed me time and again into the unknown, where no maps were available. I have had to work by discovering the map on the move. Stepping into a functional role and facilitating, leading, and coaching others into an unknown terrain helped to syphon and catalyze connective flow, revelation, and fortitude, inspired by inquiries I have been pursuing my entire adult life.” (Aviv) “What Portals Into the Soul will bring to life is not an invention of a new ‘theory’ or ‘model’. The traces formulated here will offer actual pathways you can travel and test for yourself. Please do not take anything I write as a given before you validate these actualities in your own experience.” (Aviv) “Come along for a discovery odyssey, in which you explore for yourself these portals into the soul and the experiential discovery pathways offered to contact directly the sacred actuality of being human.” (Aviv) RESOURCES MENTIONED
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| 074 - What is Healing? #2 - A New Togethering | 10 May 2024 | 01:19:33 | |
Sometimes it takes courage to heal. It’s usually easy to see, feel, and know the pain and trauma from our own lives, our communities, and the cultural upheavals upending many parts of our world. Being able to perceive and register hurt or isolation and loneliness doesn’t necessarily make the path to healing and wholeness any more visible, or smooth. How do we find and feel the inner strength to take the first step? One of the paths to healing and transformation begins in the special ecology or space that is created between people who share respect and value for what each life represents. It can be a simple conversation that brings a feeling of safety and trust — a special warmth that begins to melt whatever may be blocking us from connecting with who we really are and can be. A real mutuality not only dissolves the barriers between us, but also enables a shared support and elevation that can reveal the path to deeper emotional and mental healing. In the process, reconnecting us to a natural inner courage and resiliency that carries us forward. In this conversation, we explore further into the healing possibility enabled by a real human mutuality. Aviv Shahar is joined again by Alexander Love, acupuncturist, life coach, and cranial-sacral therapist, who took part in this conversation on approaches to healing. They are joined this time by Veronica Olalla Love, ontological coaching professional and CEO of the Newfield Network. Among their insights:
This conversation is part of the continuing Portals discovery into what is emerging on the frontiers of human experience in this time of profound change. Information about upcoming special events can be found on the Events page. Also visit and subscribe to our YouTube channel. TWEETABLE QUOTES
“One of the things that I see is so beautiful is that unfolding of somebody’s greatness, the big fullness of who someone can be, and also being able to articulate the areas in which we challenge our repeated cycles that we fall into, or to be able to give voice and articulation of that wholeness of life and to be able to speak to it in the space that can be present, with compassion and with care.” (Veronica) “The essential element I’m experiencing in both of you and what you’re describing, is a particular kind of courage. Because there is an invitation you’re making to become more spacious, to unravel or bring to life what has been frozen and potentially grow the filaments of possibility beyond that. (Aviv) “The new, or the novel, or breaking patterns can seem dangerous. So there's a sense of, is this actually dangerous? And if so, how? Or is it simply a signal that this is actually new and I'm in the unknown? My sense is that these times require us to be quite a bit in the unknown. And so as we cultivate our capacity to be in the liminal space or in the uncertainty, the ambiguity, the nebulous zones, that is a huge learning. (Veronica) RESOURCES MENTIONED
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| 073 - Evolving Together #2 - What Holds Us Back? | 26 Apr 2024 | 00:54:12 | |
Be honest: When we see a friend or colleague achieve a personal breakthrough — barrier overcome; milestone reached; the best of themselves coming forward — do we fully feel the value and joy of their success? Not even a tinge of jealousy, or wish that it had been us instead? What if we embrace a very different view of each other’s accomplishments and potential? When we acknowledge and appreciate the struggles and progress in someone else, we actually create space in ourselves for the same success. We grow in ourselves by watching others grow; we liberate a greater possibility that is only accessible when we come together as “we,” beyond the ego of “me.” What’s holding us back? Many of the outcomes of modern life: separation, fear, and trauma, which create an emotional and mental scar tissue that prevents us from trusting and accepting each other. Our natural human sensitivity is numbed, inhibiting the fountain of warmth, kindness, and generosity that is our birthright. Fortunately, we also have higher faculties and systems, still connected to our natural intelligence and creativity, that enable growth, development, and integration with an emerging new evolutionary potential. We explore the barriers preventing a greater human mutuality, and the seeds of our healing and integration, in part two of the conversation Evolving Together, with Aviv Shahar and two Portals' friends and life-long spiritual seekers, Nigel Geeves and Well. In part one, the three opened the question, Why evolve together? Among their insights:
This conversation is part of the continuing Portals discovery into what is emerging on the frontiers of human experience in this time of profound change. Information about upcoming special events can be found on the Events page. Also visit and subscribe to our YouTube channel. TWEETABLE QUOTES
“But the larger evolutionary strategy is that there is a better chance for survival, in most species in the flora life, in the fauna life, and for us humans, this was going to be more secure and guaranteed if we worked together.” (Aviv) “What it actually means is that we've been very successful in doubling down on sensitivity so that we don't feel or pick up on the vast majority of what is going on because it's too difficult to handle. So this is the beginning of a diagnostic process that really begins to open up those sensitivities again deliberately. So we begin to grow our awareness rather than retreating into a non-feeling state.” (Well) “Emotionally, as one grows and grows with others, and learns that it's possible to be safe with others, it is possible for the scar tissue in a life to begin to heal and melt. And the great benefit of that is that people become able to connect again, because trauma stops you connecting and causes isolation. And when people discover the great joy of being able to connect again, it's such a liberation that they tend to want to take that up and hold it as a valued thing.” (Well) RESOURCES MENTIONED
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| 108 - The Shared Intentions of Life - Evolving Together #6 | 29 Aug 2025 | 00:53:11 | |
Can we imagine that the simple act of coming together — the “togetherings” of ourselves with our inner lives, our friends, our communities — unlocks the intelligence that enables the “we” to become an integral part of our future and of the evolution of life? What if life itself is intentionally nudging humans together toward a greater discovery of its own nature and possibility? Longtime Portals friends Nigel Geeves and Well join Aviv Shahar for the latest exploration in Evolving Together, a series of conversations uncovering the creative potential unlocked when human beings come together in shared purpose or mission. If two people can face their differences and build the trust required to unlock greater mutual possibilities, can we “scale” that insight to the larger community and culture? Can it help bridge and neutralize the often toxic polarities that divide so many segments of humanity? Aviv, Nigel and Well explore different kinds of gatherings where the fundamental impulse for people to be together creates an ecology in which something bigger, often profound, can join and transform the dynamic (even a Led Zeppelin concert). As they discover, when people come together to consciously give life itself a better future, it fosters a deeper engagement with evolution than was previously possible. Other togethering insights include:
This conversation is part of the continuing Portals discovery into what is emerging on the frontiers of human experience in this time of profound change. Information about upcoming special events can be found on the Events page. Also visit and subscribe to our YouTube channel. TWEETABLE QUOTES
“If you think about it, life itself started somewhere, and the whole journey of the evolution of life has added value to the creation that it emerged at. Life has become more intricate, more interesting, more capable, more responsive in all sorts of different ways as the journey of evolution has gone on. For me, the whole journey of that is a journey of things coming together to offer a better response in all sorts of ways, and we're a shining example of that in the human form.” (Well) “So I'm experiencing three core natures in the language you're offering to the shared intention of life. Intention one is to continue. This universe doesn't want to ever stop. But there is an intention two and three, because it doesn't want to continue in an inert way. It wants, intention two, to be vital, be fresh, make a new start. And then there is a third intention, which is it wants to continue to get better, to improve, to evolve its nature - these three core impulses of life.” (Aviv) RESOURCES MENTIONED
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| 072 - Current Openings #11 - The Application Conundrum | 12 Apr 2024 | 01:09:25 | |
Where can the human Big Bang be found? It is: You become what you apply yourself to. It’s not just a different angle on the familiar phrase of becoming what we think about; it goes much deeper. Application happens when we bring intention and purpose to focus our energy, knowledge and passion to achieve what we most value in life; to turn learning into action; to transform our physical, earthly reality and shape our universal future as it shapes us. Great. But how? Applying ourselves with intention to transform our lives means unifying the action of our head, heart and hands in a self-chosen direction. In other words, we need to know what we want. It’s the first step in creating an ecology where higher intelligence and connections can find us and help our development. In deciding how and where to begin, help is already available. This conversation marks the start of a new series in the Portals feature “Current Openings: What the World Doesn’t Quite Get Yet.” Aviv Shahar and David Price Francis are leading into “The Human Development Challenge,” which builds upon the many insights, knowledge and practices in the first ten Current Openings. The Challenge will take us deeper into the esoteric knowledge at the heart of our universal nature and possibility, such as with the conundrum of applying our learning in a way that supports our evolutionary journey. Among the insights:
This conversation is part of the continuing Portals discovery into what is emerging on the frontiers of human experience in this time of profound change. Information about upcoming special events can be found on the Events page. Also visit and subscribe to our YouTube channel.
“So the harvesting principle is this idea that anything that the universe learns, anything the universe develops as a know-how, becomes downloadable anywhere in the universe - because the universe runs an open-source operating system. In fact, it demonstrates that any capacity that got switched on is shared throughout the universe. It's a generous and compassionate universe. It means that for the universe, what's economic and effective is one and the same with what's generous and compassionate.” (Aviv) RESOURCES MENTIONED
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| 071 - A Conversation with Layman Pascal, Part 2 - Pursuing Integral Wisdom | 29 Mar 2024 | 01:02:46 | |
We’re living in a time where increasingly we see what’s happening in the world around us and have to wonder how, or even if, we can find deep truth in the age of the “deep fake”. Artificial intelligence can distort or manipulate many forms of data and information we take in through our physical senses. Sights, sounds and “facts” on a page can all be faked. How then do we with confidence make sense and meaning in a life when even what we see with our own eyes may not be true? There are clues in the name itself: “artificial” intelligence. What about natural intelligence? We know from Portals conversations that the human is designed with the capability to connect with larger, universal sources of intelligence, creativity and inspiration, beyond the reach of even the most powerful AI. It’s a deep truth explored throughout history by spiritual teachers, shamans and wise men and women attuned to the finer, energetic, subtle realms as a living reality. Sources of profound revelation and learning that can transform lives and communities, and reconnect the human to its natural birthright. In this conversation we are once again fortunate to have as our guide Layman Pascal, a leader in integral thinking and teaching, and a prominent voice on the Integral Stage YouTube channel and podcast. He joins Aviv Shahar for part two of their conversation, begun with Protecting the Sacred. Among their ponders:
This conversation is part of the continuing Portals discovery into what is emerging on the frontiers of human experience in this time of profound change. Information about upcoming special events can be found on the Events page. Also visit and subscribe to our YouTube channel. TWEETABLE QUOTES
“I think up to that point, what I'm mostly thinking about is something vaguely like enlightenment. Right? So that I'm undertaking experiences very deliberately, because I want to transform my consciousness.” (Layman) “One of the most prominent ways that people have sort of subtle experiences in the modern world is with entities that they feel are extraterrestrial, right? And the work of Jacques Vallee in the 1970s did a lot of under laboring to support the idea that in a previous time period, you might have interpreted these as elves or angels or something like that.” (Layman) “A lot of these communities are centered around meta models, by which we mean attempts to do transdisciplinary philosophical integrations that take many different models and many different disciplines and many different types of perspective taking into account coherently.” (Layman) “There's a phrase I used in that series which was 'to naturalize the sacred and to sacralize the natural'. And I think this goes along with trying to bring the rational and the intuitive together. So you want to say, we embrace a natural science universe, not a reductive natural science universe, but an expanded natural science universe, and at the same time, it's only relevant to us if it can produce the cultural meaning and the individual transformation that's necessary for a human life.” (Layman) “Is it better for you to treat something like a person or not? You can't objectively have perfect knowledge of whether you're dealing with something that's sentient or not. But is it actually better for you to respect everything you're dealing with as if it was another sentient being? And that makes a lot of spiritual and emotional sense. Or is that the gateway to a path of delusion where we lose important distinctions, and we end up over attributing capacity and depth to things that don't have them and lead our society further down a pathway of simulation and meaninglessness?” (Layman) RESOURCES MENTIONED
A Conversation with Layman Pascal Part 2 - Pursuing Integral Wisdom | |||