Editor’s Note: Nearly a year has passed since Kosmos founder Nancy Roof passed away. As we considered how to remember her, we kept returning to her own words. For many years, Nancy opened each issue of Kosmos Journal with a reflection on the questions that most deeply concerned her: How are we being called to change? What new ways of living are trying to emerge? How might our institutions reflect a deeper understanding of our interdependence?
Reading these reflections again, some written nearly twenty years ago, Nancy’s prescience is most striking and the consistency of her vision. She returns to a few essential themes: the movement from separation toward wholeness; the inseparability of inner and outer transformation; service to the common good; our kinship with the living Earth; and the importance of listening deeply to intuition and inner guidance.
Toward the end of her years as editor, Nancy wrote that Kosmos had been, “chapter by chapter, the story of learning again and again to trust the deepest wells of inner guidance.” That may also be one way to understand Nancy’s own journey. In remembrance, we offer a selection of her words across the years as a conversation she is still having with us.
2006 | A Movement of Momentous Proportions
Generative dialogues and global conversations are taking place across the planet in response to the newly emerging global civilization that is being born through us. We are sifting through centuries of habitual responses to articulate what really matters as we tap our deepest knowing, and move from mere descriptions about material values to authentic engagement in the quality of life and concern for humanity as a whole.
We ask anew: Where are we headed? How shall we live our lives? What kind of a new civilization are we creating?
We follow the trajectory of the evolutionary impulse through time, which brings us face-to-face with present-day exploitation, and domination of nature and of others as we teeter on the edge of survival as a species. Our hope lies in a groundswell of spirituality based on inner experience, the new sciences, elevated interpretations of our traditions, and new discoveries intersecting with the compelling realities of world events.
Make no mistake. This is asking a lot of us. And there are lots of obstacles, too.
A little reminder as you unfold these pages. Let us not wait until we are perfect. Let us not wait until we have found the answers to our quest. Let us choose to follow our highest wisdom now. Let us ignite the conversation that is emerging into a living flame with the moral beauty for which we all strive. Let the beauty of new scientific truths, the beauty of a living spirituality, and the realization of our own exquisite inner beauty and power bring forth a new civilization of infinite wisdom and compassion.
2007 | What Kind of Leader Are You?
Sometime ago my son asked, “Mom, what kind of leader do you think you are?” I was taken aback as I had actually never thought about myself in this way.
I began to realize that I was a leader, but an entirely new kind of leader. I thought of myself more as a server, dedicated to making a better world.
Who are our leaders as we stand at the dawn of an emerging complex world civilization? A few things that come to mind are those that serve the needs of the times, harmonize different value systems, develop interior balance, facilitate resilience to change, practice both hard and soft power, and lead with authentic being and sustained will and purpose.
Perhaps leadership is not what we think it is.
2008 | Journey to Wholeness
We are discovering that in our deepest essence we are travelers on a journey to wholeness (holiness). Each step along the way is a new revelation and a co-creation that involves changes in all dimensions of our lives and in all fields of endeavor.
Focused within, many of us forgot to look at what was happening outside. We awakened to accelerating injustices and inequalities on a planet threatened by profligate lifestyles and modern worldviews. It was clear that self-actualization was necessary, but not sufficient to shape a newly globalized world in the direction of sustainability and compassion.
Conditions in the outer world and the impulse of evolution are calling us to recognize our interdependence and the power of connection.
We are creating the new world culture and civilization, enriched by the skills, the companionship, the expertise and the love for each other and the planet. “The collective” has become the edge.
2008 | Transforming Institutions
We understand that recognition of the inadequacy of our traditional institutions is the first step toward taking that great leap into a new era where a higher-level consciousness will be reflected in our transformed institutions.
Although we know that pervasive creative destruction will bring in a brighter light in the long run, we are deeply concerned for the suffering that will be endured by the most fragile members of our global family. Sensitivity towards this suffering spurs many of us on to make contributions way beyond what we ever thought possible.
2010 | Spiritual Discovery
One of the most promising directions of the new paradigm is the recognition that nature can teach us how the material world works. We discover that the code to evolution and transformation has already been written. Following its organic and natural processes teaches us about our own nature as well.
Could it be that the social and planetary crises we are presently experiencing are signalling the end of an old way of organizing our institutions and the precursor of a new “commons approach” that benefits all equally?
Do we need to clear out our toxins before we can move on? Do we need to clear out past inequalities and imbalances and face the reality of the corruption and injustices of our institutions?
Just as the natural world has given us a map of evolution, the world of individual consciousness is revealing the map of collective evolution. Let us use these natural tools to bring in the new civilization based on the common good.
2012 | Reflective Approaches to Social Activism
We are at a defining point in history, when breakdowns are occurring, and institutional changes have not yet become stabilized and impermeable to change. In the past, sweeping historical changes have occurred through fear and catastrophe rather than through choice and wisdom.
We must examine the value choices that led to a threatening and materialistic world. Change can occur through a change of mind and a choice of values that includes global responsibility. Civil society, governments and we together can and must define our future through moral courage and the wisdom of our highest values.
2015 | The Gift of Life
What comes to mind when you hear the phrase “Living Earth?” How do you personally feel when you observe and honor the aliveness around you? Do you feel enveloped and enlivened by a nurturing life force that perhaps even defies words to describe it? How do you cultivate a more vibrant sense of your own inner aliveness? How is life calling you to evolve and with what degree of receptivity do you answer that call?
Through three decades of work spanning the United Nations and Kosmos Journal, I have been blessed to meet pioneering world citizens who are tireless servers for a better life for all beings. For many of these world servers, it is as if they are dying to live each day, maximizing their time in service of what they can bring to life, what they can do for the common good.
Their purpose and will is strong, yet the strongest of them also have a humble receptivity in knowing they are merely the vessel for life to come through. More than being the doer, they are the channel through which the intelligence of life operates.
Awakening to life and becoming such a channel can often ask unexpected things in our own evolution. Along the way, somewhat like the butterfly in metamorphosis, we cannot yet see what we are becoming. Some days, all we have is hope.
As a clinician back in those days, I could never have imagined my life’s work would culminate in a career as a publisher, trying to become a clear channel for telling The New Story. It is what life opened up to me. Step by step, although initially confused and self-doubting that I would ever know enough about global affairs to fill this role, I answered the call—rebirthing, transforming, and sometimes dying to my old ways of life along the way.
For me personally, Kosmos Journal has been, chapter by chapter, the story of learning again and again to trust the deepest wells of inner guidance. That soft, wise voice, which can be heard only in contemplative stillness, is somehow aligned with the life force in ineffable and beautiful ways.
Tragically, what I see around me is this: Many live as if they are never going to die, then end up dying never having fully lived. Embodying all that life has to offer—indeed, becoming what life wants us to become—is a gift. When enough of us practice that on the personal level, we will eventually awaken to the gift of what we can become as a global collective.
2016 | New Models and Practices
If life is the ultimate value, how can we design a new civilization aligned with all life?
We will discover that we all have access to a source of wisdom—the higher self beyond ego—and that a meaningful life involves helping others and helping the world evolve so that the soul of humanity can emerge.
Viewing life as constantly evolving, rather than a static system we all try to fit into, we will let our spontaneity flourish and bring vitality back to our lives.
We feel more alive in the presence of nobility, grace, elegance, beauty.
Transforming is disruptive and challenging. It requires discipline, courage, risk, as well as intimacy with the silent deep dimensions of our being. It requires compassion and tolerance of diversity.
Many of us give over our power to the ideas of others, rather than trusting our own intuition and inner knowing.
We are fighting for the soul of humanity now. What will we choose?
2017 | The Heart of Awakening
In an era when truth and trust are under siege, we must learn to rely on the truth of our own inner guidance. We can feel it as a loving, vibrational resonance of belonging and knowing what is right for me, for us, for all of us.
We realize that the critical challenges we experience in life, painful as they are, can be drivers of transformation. Overcoming them leads to new responsibilities for humanity, our sacred planet, and all Life.
Together we stand at the crossroads of a dying culture with the emergence of a vital living culture at the margins.
Let’s listen deeply to what our broken world is asking of us. Let’s support the disruption with courage and compassion, while living truth, loving goodness, being beauty, and living Oneness at the heart of awakening.
— Nancy B. Roof
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