The Heart of Awakening

This Editorial precedes Volume 17, Issue 2 of Kosmos. Scroll down to access featured content.

Many of us are confused, angry, fearful, grieving, insecure. We watch in disbelief as our world begins to crumble—torrential rains, tornado winds, mass shootings, threat of nuclear annihilation, breakdown of civil discourse, drug addiction, fake news, economic inequality, paralyzed government, deniers of climate change, a broken justice system and the breakdown of infrastructure that is supposed to take care of all these concerns. We wonder if we are creating a death culture rather than a living one. It seems to be a little of both.

All living systems are born, blossom, die, and rise again reborn in a new form—this is nature’s way of evolving. We recognize these cycles in plants, but applying them to ourselves and to society has been a recent rediscovery to the Western mind. Our civilization has surpassed the limits of healthy growth and is in the process of collapse. At the same time, a dynamic and new future is emerging.

All things must end in order to be born anew. In our personal lives, we may experience a devastating Dark Night of the Soul or a Kali experience that rips away everything we love and believe in that no longer serves Life. On a larger scale, civilizations collapse and transformations disrupt cultures and infrastructures that no longer serve the common good. Nature has her way of making systemic change imperative.

We grieve the suffering and loss. Then, we fearlessly face healing our karma or shadow. In time, we recognize the evolving capacities that are gifts of our relentless efforts. These gifts enhance us individually, socially, culturally, scientifically, and technologically. As we endure the daily media onslaught of clashes and conflicts, we are gifted with the capacity to expand and deepen our wisdom. We realize that human rights, peace, and security that many of us take for granted are not inherently guaranteed. They require us to act, to stand up to power, to become Warriors of the Spirit.

Kosmos Journal Volume 17 Issue 2

Liminal Leadership

By Nora Bateson

Our liminal leadership will be as people together in a struggling biosphere—just you and me and the other 7 billion mothers and daughters and fathers and sons. We will not lead on behalf of a company or a nation, not on behalf of a religion or a belief system. We will hold each other through the storms of economic volatility, ecological turmoil, and political insanity. There will be trauma, pain, and loss through which our solace during this transformation will be nothing less than the creative expression of tenderness.

The Soul of Humanity and the New Civilization

By Nancy Seifer

For the very first time, as growing numbers of us enter more fully into soul awareness, we are developing the inner resources to subdue the powerful forces of our animal nature—instinct, passion, and all the insatiable desires of the lower self that have governed human history until now. It is foreseen in the Ageless Wisdom teachings that in time, as mastery of the lesser nature is achieved and human identity shifts from matter to spirit, we will learn to live consciously in the world as souls, reflecting the love and light of the higher Self in every aspect of our lives.

Kali Takes the World: Dark Night of the World Soul

By Vera de Chalambert

When in the summer of 2015 I saw the breathtaking image of the goddess Kali, the great Hindu goddess of death, destruction, and liberation projected onto the top of the Empire State Building for the documentary Racing Extinction, I ranted, “This a sign of the times—Kali takes New York!” A year later, as the shocking 2016 election results were similarly projected onto the top of the Empire State Building and I saw Donald Trump’s smug smirk and sly gaze staring victoriously into the shaken soul of the country, I raved, “This is a sign of the times—Kali takes America!”

Diary of a Watts Princess: A Memoir of Hopes and Dreams

By Tamara S. Hamilton

As I watch the news today, old feelings of fear and hopelessness engulf me once again. As a thirteen-year-old girl, I saw my neighborhood, Watts, burn. Then I wondered what would happen to my home, to my life, as embers from the fire floated in front of my face. I wondered who I would be if I lived through the chaos of urban anger and despair. That night, I wondered what my purpose in life would be.

Nondual Christianity – Seriously?

By Cynthia Bourgeault

The assertion that “I and the Father are one” was shocking even when emerging from the lips of Jesus himself! That jagged cleavage between Creator and created, God and self, seems congruent with a level of consciousness that is still splitting the world into inside and outside, running the classic dualistic program of identity through differentiation. From the phenomenological perspective, however, the picture shifts substantially.

Oasis of White Silence in the Heart of Manhattan

By Ralph Peterson

“Art is God’s way of clearing the path to our hearts.” These are the words of Dominique de Menil, who worked with Mark Rothko as the patron for the world-famed Rothko Chapel in Houston. These words inspired me as I worked with Louise Nevelson as the patron for the internationally acclaimed Nevelson Chapel in the heart of Manhattan. A recent biography of Nevelson states that she was offering “a window into her soul and perhaps our own as well.”