by Dr. Jude Currivan

 Crucially, so-named imaginal cells, present but dormant in the caterpillar’s body since its birth and containing the DNA blueprint for the butterfly, now become active.

At first, they are viewed as invaders by the immune system of the fading caterpillar and attacked, which actually results in their becoming stronger and more active. Forming body parts unknown to the caterpillar but essential for the butterfly, such as complex eyes, antennae, legs and wings, they link up with the remaining caterpillar organs to become the emergent butterfly. When the process is complete the chrysalis cracks open and the butterfly, its wings wet and crumpled, crawls out. Usually doing so mid-morning, enables its wings to dry in the increasing warmth of the Sun, before it flies off to start its new life.

This emergent development, known as metamorphosis, derives from the ancient Greek word for transformation, such is the radical nature of the changes undertaken; not only biologically but into a completely different way of life. Whereas a caterpillar lives to eat, consuming as much as possible, a butterfly lives to pollinate, sipping the sweetness of flowers and fertilizing new life.

The multiple and existential threats and challenges we are currently facing has been termed a meta-crisis. Yet perhaps, with the example of the caterpillar transforming to become a butterfly, we may reframe these challenging and turbulent times in terms of a potential metamorphosis for our species. While likely involving major changes to our ways of life, rather than biological transmutation, our metamorphosis will be foundationally based on the emergence of a transformed worldview.

In 1999, writing in his seminal work The Mystic Heart – Discovering a Universal Spirituality in the World's Religions, Brother Wayne Teasdale declared that: “We are at the dawn of a new consciousness” and invited a collective awareness to, “understand, to really grasp at an elemental level that the definitive revolution is the spiritual awakening of humankind.” Dr Kurt Johnson and David Robert Ord subsequently wrote in their book The Coming Interspiritual Age (2013), of Interspirituality being: “The common heritage of humankind’s spiritual wisdom and the sharing of wisdom resources across traditions” in a movement: “toward the experience of profound interconnectedness, unity consciousness, and oneness” and: “so based on the heart and unconditional love that it would be impossible to feel separate from anything.”

While they and many other spiritual leaders have appreciated the evolution of human consciousness needed to manifest such an awakening, all three authors concurred that it would emerge due to: “A new set of historical circumstances.”

Twenty-five years on from The Mystic Heart, I suggest that rather than despite, it is instead because of the level of existential threats we now face, the scale of turmoil and polarization and collective exhaustion at the unsustainability of the status quo, that have the evolutionary potential to offer such ‘new circumstances’ able to usher in an epoch of Interspirituality.

When the term Interspirituality was coined, while its founding was on a commonality of spiritual wisdom, one key ‘tradition’ was exempt from its remit – the then prevailing secular science of a reductionist and materialist paradigm.

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Yet it is this paradigm, harking back to its late 19th century heyday, that has pervaded our collective worldview and societal organizations ever since. Ranging across economics, corporate and governance structures, education, healthcare and much more, the entirety of its hierarchical-based and siloed perspectives and resultant policies and practices, have continued to drive separation-based choices and behaviors; accordingly maintaining conflicts, exploitations, inequities and injustices with regard to people and our planetary home, Gaia.

Now however, scientific breakthroughs are revealing a radically new and wide-ranging and evidence-based perception of the more fundamental nature of reality and which is convergent with the wholistic precepts of Interspirituality.

Its revelations at every level of existence and vitally that of our everyday lives, are profoundly relevant to each and all of us. In doing so, far more than a scientific revolution, it offers to underpin and serve a (r)evolution in human consciousness.

Its most essential findings are showing that instead of being something we have and experience at different levels of self-awareness; that mind and consciousness are what we and the whole world really are. That, as wisdom teachings have aintained, universal mind literally and meaningfully in-forms the unified appearance of our Universe, as its semblance and not its fundamental nature. As Interspirituality declares, it is its unity, expressed in manifold complexity and diversity, rather than separation or uniformity, that is indeed the authentic nature of its unitive reality and that we ourselves are its microcosmic co-creators.

Beginning 13.8 billion years ago not in the implied chaos of a Big Bang but as an incredibly ordered and fine-tuned first moment of an ongoing Big Breath its unitive narrative tells how, as space has since expanded from its miniscule birth and time flowed forward, our entire Universe meaningfully and purposefully exists TO evolve.

Its universal sentience embodies a profound evolutionary impulse driven, not by random occurrences and mutations, but through resonant, harmonic and profoundly interdependent relationships that are meaningfully and coherently in-formed and guided.

As Dr Robert Atkinson author of A New Story of Wholeness (2022) proposes: “This empowers us to envision and co-create a love-based rather than separation-based future in which regenerative and sustainable development leads to peace as a natural outcome of a world that works for all beings and our planetary home.”

The potential for the emergence of such a unitive wholeworld-view, a unitive narrative that frames its universal principles of unity in diversity, inclusion and belonging and the birth of a Unitive Age, is already being embodied as the imaginal cells of numerous and varied grassroots groups and growing movements that are now forming and developing around the world.

Its emergence is being empowered by their progressively linking up and lifting up together. Instead of mechanical hierarchies, they are convening as partners and communities to collaborate and synergize their co-creative efforts. By learning from and embodying the relational principles and holarchic organizations of living systems and guided by indigenous wisdom, they are levelling up and lighting up the path to an authentically hopeful future.

They are exemplifying how when we dissolve our separated sense of self while each bringing our unique gifts to serve the good of the whole, we can reframe and more deeply understand, the breakdown and dying of the old and breakthrough and birth of the new; not as a meta-crisis but as a metamorphosis.

Instead of the plunderers of our planetary home, we can emerge to become pollinators and co-evolutionary partners and come to realize that our conscious evolution plays an integral role in Gaia’s own evolutionary progress and purpose.

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