The Soul Journey – Working with Wisdom by Crossing the Threshold

It’s now a truism that the business, societal and civilizational landscape is radically changing under foot.  So too are the life conditions for all species of life on Earth.

This context – a meta-crisis – demands a radical shift in the dynamics of how we lead, live, operate and organize. The very way we are making meaning, perceiving, being and knowing needs to fundamentally change. We face an ontological and epistemological threshold-crossing – a metamorphosis of our being-and-knowing. A shift in individual and collective consciousness. Nothing less suffices.

This being-and-knowing threshold-crossing predicates a death-rebirth process of learning to work with wisdom. It entails a shift in our inner-nature from ego-as-dominant, to ego-as-servant to soul. And a shift in our outer-nature from a job to pay the bills with career-ladder to climb, to a vocation, a soul-craft that facilitates our developmental journey toward wholeness in service of life.

This article explores why and how this threshold-crossing is essential for our future-fitness.

Adapt or Die

The bubbling hot water is cajoling us. As the ‘boiled frog’ apologue goes, we are experiencing a rolling boil across so many systems that the status quo is unable to hold it together for much longer. Things are already getting messy. The boiling water, or what we can consider here as our collective worldview, is readying itself to shift from one state to the next, now starting to froth due to the alchemic heat of a death-rebirth phase-change.

The shift in consciousness unfolding on our watch is simultaneously a shift at the individual level and at the collective. It’s not linear, nor is it clean-cut. It’s unsettled, like boiling water, scalding us with blurts of the pressured heat bursting up from the unconscious within our own selves (sometimes feeling like depression, anger, frustration, confusion, disorientation, and personal breakdown) and within the collective (appearing as fragmentation of incrowd/outcrowd, othering, extremism, rising polarization and projection, mistrust, conflict, hatred, and social breakdown). It’s certainly not a bed of roses, this business of shifting consciousness, yet an up-stretch beyond the boiling water and through a death-rebirth threshold into a new way is a very real possibility – if we dare to pull ourselves out of our own fears and old habits. History shows that in times of breakdown, breakthrough can follow.

‘Why, when we are so desperate for change, do we become even more desperate when transformation begins? Why do we cling to old attachments instead of submitting ourselves to new possibilities?’  Marion Woodman

Only in opening ourselves into the unknown and enduring a psychological death will real transformation begin – the birthing of new life.

The shift in our individual psyche mirrors one in our collective worldview, with its stories and programmes that are habitually driving our socioeconomic constructs, logics, and narratives. The very constructs and logics that are fanning the flames of our crisis of crises are ripe for death-rebirth.

‘We cannot solve our problems with the same level of consciousness that created them.’ Albert Einstein

I call the status quo worldview Mechanistic Materialism (MM), which is a combination of outdated consciousnesses – mechanistic, materialistic, rational-analytic, and egoic. MM’s machine-mentality draws upon Newtonian-Hobbesian-Cartesian cause-effect reductionism. It thrives on and demands control-manage tendencies to control and cope with how it perceives life – as a competitive struggle devoid of meaning other than egoic fears and desires that drive consumerism.

For MM, fear and desire are the two gods running the show. One might reflect on how much of our current everyday experiences and so called ‘free choices’ are little more than the ego acting out its fears and desires, or unconscious mimetic copying of the in-crowd.

‘Greed, envy, sloth, pride and gluttony: these are not vices anymore. No, these are marketing tools. Lust is our way of life. Envy is just a nudge towards another sale. Even in our relationships we consume each other, each of us looking for what we can get out of the other. Our appetites are often satisfied at the expense of those around us. In a dog-eat-dog world we lose part of our humanity.’ Jon Foreman

Having tracked this meta-crisis for many years now, I’m noticing that my interest in the whys-and-wherefores of what’s caused the concatenation of crises is waning. (Side note – those interested in a detailed exploration into the causes of our current crises, see my earlier book The Illusion of Separation.) These days, what interests me is how best to catalyse the being-and-knowing threshold-crossing within individuals and the collective.  Because, all too often I’m witnessing the creative energy of our leaders, change agents and trend-setters being siphoned off into cul-de-sac dead-ends, shuffling deckchairs on the Titanic, rather than attending to catalyzing the threshold-crossing.

The Great Work

If we dare choose to engage in this death-rebirth threshold-crossing, then we embark on a momentous leap for humanity. It’s seismic, and has the potential to change everything. This leap is totally natural and allows us to become more authentic and connected to ourselves, each other and the rest of life.   It’s simply THE most important undertaking for the future of our humanity.

The challenge of our times is not to confuse ourselves with busyness, overwhelm or clever technospheric solutions, but to challenge ourselves to go deep and get vulnerable for death-rebirth to occur. Then, we cultivate space for the flame of conscious free-choice to transmute individual and collective neurosis. We cease our violation of life and begin to enter a new dawn by activating soulful being-and-knowing.

We walk through our fears into the twilight zone with the aid of a lantern – lumen naturae – daring the descent into leaden darkness to mine silver and gold. This soul-making simultaneously dislodges old conditioned patterns, opens spaciousness for spontaneity and creative imagination, and brings forth deeper wisdom from the infinite Field.  This radical act is essential not just for our future-fitness as leaders but for our humanity to return home with renewal and regeneration.  No dawn can be born without it.

The Great Work is really a Great Wake-up or Great Remembering which brings us back home into our true nature, and rewards us with the very Future-fit Leadership qualities we need to navigate the stormy seas ahead: deeper presence, wisdom, systemic-awareness, empathy, creativity, curiosity, compassion, ethical consideration, coherence, complexity-thinking and regeneration.

My work draws upon thirty years of business advisory, systems analysis and design, and organizational and leadership development (L&OD) experience, with the last fifteen years specialized in three domains of action-research that I feel are critical for Future-fit L&OD: Business, Consciousness, Nature (Living Systems).

Based on my first-hand empirical experience of coaching and advising hundreds of leaders, change agents, coaches, practitioners and leadership teams, I can safely say that a midlife psychological death-rebirth – often labelled as the mid-life crisis – is essential for reorientating our being-and-knowing for future-fitness.

This death-rebirth soul-journey reorientates our ego-soul dynamic which enables us to see with new eyes and welcome-in different ways of being-and-knowing. We move to a deeper center of gravity inside ourselves and gain a coherent way of embracing change amid rising complexity.  Only by enduring this psychological soul-journey can our humanity hope to navigate the meta-crisis. Anything less is merely shuffling deckchairs.  

That said, I am not saying that every adult has to go through such a significant mid-life reorientation. Evidence suggests just a small percentage of leaders, change agents, entrepreneurs and cultural creatives need to endure such a reorientation for a wider collective shift to occur.

The likelihood is that if you’re reading this article, you’re in that small percentage, and considering the relevance of such a soul-journey for yourself, for the future of humanity, and for the future of all life on Earth.

What prevents us from embarking on the journey is fear.

What we need to endure the journey is courage. 

The courage to question who we truly are, to examine our inner-nature, to dive deep down into the dark labyrinthine depths where dangerous dragons and haunting fears lurk in the shadows. With courage these dragons are transmuted into creative energies, insights and forces we need to traverse the meta-crisis.

‘OK!’ you may say. ‘I get it! To shift our being-and-knowing we need to embark on a soul-journey.  ‘But why the hell would a busy leader or change agent wish to pull themselves away from all the urgency amid rising volatility to embark on an inner journey? Surely that’s unlikely?’

Well, it’s not an either/or polarity that faces us: it’s not either I remain busy, focused on reacting to outer-change or divert my attention to an inner-journey.  Ours is not the time for such polarized luxuries. Future-fit Leaders can, indeed must, attend to inner-work while performing outer-work.

The vast majority of the leaders and practitioners I coach don’t have the luxury of taking months/years out from the day job to attend to some serene inner journey. Nor would I suggest that’s necessarily a good idea even if context allows.

The current environment we’re in – the day job, personal relationships, patterns of behaviour – is our space for death-rebirth. We learn a lot about ourselves when we’re ‘in’ the thick-of-it. A far-flung monastery, mountain-top cave, or remote peace village is not necessary. The busy marketplace is a useful alchemic learning-lab for the Future-fit Leader.

 ‘Well fine’ you may say. ‘But why would anyone want to embark on a burdensome journey when already consumed with overwhelm?’

Two very good reasons.  Let’s call one of these reasons the ‘push’ and the other the ‘pull’, as both work together to cajole us into daring to cross the threshold.

Firstly, the ‘push’ factor: Rising digitization and the increasing adoption of Artificial Intelligence (AI) are reshaping economies, transforming business models and impacting labor market dynamics. What was once called the ‘Knowledge Economy’ is now facing an existential ‘adapt or die’ moment. Adapt into the ‘Wisdom Economy’ (where what’s valued is insightful wisdom which AI can’t provide) or become obsolete. Simple really.

Its estimated there’s about 1+ billion knowledge workers globally. Studies predict millions of these people will be displaced within just a handful of years if they fail to up-stretch from propositional/procedural forms of knowledge into wisdom. Wisdom begins with the capacity to integrate different ways of being-and-knowing, i.e. the ontological and epistemological threshold-crossing.

Secondly, the ‘pull’ factor: Leaders and entrepreneurs able to up-stretch from MM’s narrowed left-hemispheric rational-analytic egoic-awareness into a holistic, systemic, intuitive, embodied, participatory and perspectival knowing will become Future-fit Leaders. They will better navigate complexity while holding-space for the ongoing transformations of their organizations amid hyper-volatility. 

Leaders that fail to expand their being-and-knowing will struggle to cope amid rising complexity, and their organizations will fast become yesterday’s news.  Ditto for the leaders of our institutions, governments, think-tanks, investment houses, family offices, charities and philanthropic ventures. Ditto for any adult seeking meaning in an age of anxious distraction. This is the real ‘pull’: engaging in this threshold-crossing enriches and expands our humanity for meaning, creativity, enthusiasm, connection, integrity, coherence and inner-peace in a world plagued by distraction and dis-ease. In crossing the threshold, we don’t just become better leaders, we become more in touch with who we truly are, which impacts everything we think, do, design and implement. We live up to our name of Homo sapiens, ‘beings who work with wisdom’.

‘What is essential…is not embedded in buildings, is not embedded in clothing, is not necessarily embedded even in rule. It is somewhere along the line of something deeper than a rule. It is concerned with this business of inner transformation.’ Thomas Merton

If we fail to embark on the soul-journey, not just our being-and-knowing shrinks into what can be easily replicated by AI, but our whole life-experience shrinks, leading to rising frustration, dissonance, drudgery and neurosis. We become beset by illusions (fake news, conspiracies, gossip, office politics, hyperbole, propaganda, etc.), caught in consumeristic mores, easily lead by groupthink echo-chambers and community-tribalism, unwittingly projecting our unresolved complexes onto the ‘other’ creating rising polarization, division and extremism. Enter today’s malaise.

‘There is a risk that a breakdown could precipitate regression to a more unconscious state where we could lose the priceless treasure of civilization. Everything depends upon whether we assist or resist the simultaneous process of death and rebirth that is taking place within us and our culture. It is a time of awesome responsibility.’ Anne Baring

If we choose to embark on the soul-journey then we step in to the expansion of energies for aliveness, creativity, enthusiasm with a far greater depth of being-and-knowing than AI can compute. We dare step into the cosmic arena of our true nature in touch with the infinite. Archetypal aliveness, mythic meaning and sacred sensitivity afford us a life well-lived, the grand tour of the magnificence of existence with a revelatory relationship of reverence, in right-relation with inner-outer nature. Life becomes an awesome learning-adventure whereupon we continuously integrate the unconscious with our conscious awareness to unfurl soul, wisdom and love.   We become more fully human and live into our soul-dharma. This is the foundation for a new civilization untainted by the flawed thinking that created our crises in the first place.

‘Then Sunrise kissed my Chrysalis

And I stood up

And lived’   Emily Dickinson

It’s this death-rebirth catalysis of our own humanity that will give us not just hope but practical vision and action for navigating the highly volatile rapidly changing post-AI world in meta-crisis.

Right before us is a monumental demand for cultivating human depth.

The only durable way to shift our being-and-knowing is to embark on a soul-journey – the greatest voyage of our lifetimes no less.

‘Birth is the death of the life we have known; death is the birth of the life we have yet lived. We need to hold the tensions and allow our circuit to give way to a larger circumference.’ Marion Woodman

As the philosopher Nietzsche knew, when embarking on the journey one needs to find the lantern to light-up our way through darkness; what the ancient alchemists called the lumen naturae – an inner-lantern that guides us through the dark labyrinthine soul-journey for working with wisdom.

Amid this journey we touch the Field of infinite potential where creativity, imagination, insight, enthusiasm, soul-service and purposefulness flow. We make meaning in a totally different way, and become true to ourselves while serving others throughout our soul-craft.

‘If we understand and feel that here in this life we already have a link with the infinite, our desires and attitudes change.  In the final analysis, we count for something only because of the essential we embody, and if we do not embody that, life is wasted.’  Carl Jung

Unfortunately, this soul-journey is rarely given a mention in MM’s educational and cultural programming, because it’s a disruption to the norm. 

The root of the word ‘education’ is educere, meaning to bring forth our potential into the world, and then lead forth from this place of true being-and-knowing.

Mainstream education these days is largely a utilitarian head-based programming for conformity, with little or no attention given to broadening and deepening one’s being-and-knowing, only how to fit-in and stick-to-the-knitting.  But we’re facing into a full-on meta-crisis requiring our radical reorientation, and so MM’s educational system is, alas, detrimental to our future-fitness.  We’re equipping our current and future leaders with the same old tools that created our crisis of crises in the first place. Bashing our heads up against brick walls. Feeling increasing overwhelm because of the rising complexity and chaos, many are dumb-founded about what to do or be. 

Any possible connection to the infinite seems like wishful-thinking, fancifully far-flung from the confusion of our competing urgencies.  

At the very epochal hour we need to step-in to life, we waste it. Any chance for evolution in consciousness is dashed.  Unwittingly, we violate life, sowing seeds of demise.

The meta-crisis that could bring us forth in our Great Wake-Up, instead becomes a permacrisis, a long-protracted period of suffering with no apparent end. We satisfy ourselves with increasing doom and gloom, hunkering down tighter into mechanistic programming. Fear reigns supreme. We might feel like we’re resolutely focused on being an ‘activist for change’ or a ‘force for good’ but really, we’re consumed by the very egoic-programming that created our problems in the first place.

‘That feels rather harsh’ you may say.  But just look at the transhumanism versus ecoposthumanism tension playing out today.

Either we technoengineer ourselves beyond the limitations of this Earth-sphere (transhumanism) or we technoengineer ourselves within the limitations of this Earth-sphere (ecoposthumanism).  

Vast swaths of human intelligence (and trillions of dollars) are inured in MM’s utilitarian narrative. Little room is made for any meaningful exploration into how to overcome the estrangement of humanity from nature, each other, and our own souls. Let’s face it, both transhumanism and ecoposthumanism might feel like they are in radical opposition but share the same mindset – materialistic-humanism. 

Materialistic-humanism has forgotten what it truly means to be human in this more-than-human world. Its lost touch with the spiritual kernel of sacred existence. In doing so, it substantively weakens humanity’s depth-capacity for meaning-making, and for the individual to live their personal myth in realizing their soul-dharma for working with wisdom. A grave error indeed that means solutions become superficialized. Starved of soul, we fixate on narrowing evolutionary cul-de-sacs that undermine our future-fitness.

The task of our time, and what this meta-crisis is here to wake us into, is a quest for soul within the sacredness of Life. To reconnect with the spiritual kernel inside ourselves and once again feel the magnificent mysterious animistic existence pumping through our veins. Then we begin to allow wisdom into our minds and wills. This quest for soul springs forth a mindset of animistic-humanism rather than materialistic-humanism, and predicates a worldview shift from Mechanistic Materialism (MM) into Quantum Complexity (QC).

From Mechanistic Materialism to Quantum Complexity

MM’s machine-mentality objectifies systems, relationships, transactions and events in its world of separateness. The individual is perceived as self-as-separate contorting our self-other-world relationality into separateness: humanity separated from nature; mind separated from matter; inner separated from outer.

‘The whole philosophy of hell rests on the recognition of the axiom that one thing is not another thing, and, specifically, that one self is not another self… it means the sucking of will and freedom out of the weaker self into the stronger. ‘To be’ means ‘to be in competition.’  C. S. Lewis

MM treats organizational change as something exceptional—an occasional episode—to be managed and controlled or defended against in a top-down structured way. QC treats change as an integral quality of life’s unfolding and ever-changing nature, and so views organizational change as an ongoing affair, something to sense-respond with across all levels of the organization. This necessitates empowering everyone in the organization by working with wisdom.

The further we move out of MM and into QC, the more we understand that change is not an occurrence or series of events to be managed, mitigated, or adapted to. Rather, change is the context within which the organization is immersed. We start to sense the organization-as-living-system which becomes future-fit through a DEE Culture – Developmental, Emergent, Evolutionary – which encourages wholeness and wisdom.

This table is an extract from my latest book Keys for Future-fit Leadership, and compares the worldview of MM with QC for Future-fit L&OD:

Without QC’s animistic-humanism we struggle to hear the cries of the soul and the call of the wild. Amid so much busyness and confusion, we fail to go deep and impatiently rush into the very mindset that created our problems when designing our well-intended solution. Precious time and resources are wasted. The meta-crisis becomes permacrisis. The opportunity to up-stretch out of the boiling water is engulfed by our confusion as we’re boiled alive by our own unindividuated unconscious. Humanity’s demise becomes inevitable.

‘In times of turmoil the danger lies not in the turmoil but in facing it with yesterday’s logic.’ Peter Drucker

This meta-crisis is not a technofix. MM’s logic simply can’t hack it. Only a death-rebirth awakening will take us through this epochal moment into a new dawn. No matter how detailed or sophisticated our social and ecological statistics, environmental psychology surveys, bioregional ecosystem-services studies, carbon calculators and smart-grid cities are, ecoposthumanistic utilitarian metrics and control-measures fall woefully short in shifting our relationship to our own selves, each other and the more-than-human world, often creating manifold unintended consequences.  Worse, they busy beautiful minds with techno gyrations that distract the necessary catalysis for crossing the threshold.

To be clear here, I am NOT saying we don’t need sophisticated studies, stats, tools and technologies, sure we do, but these should be rooted in and arise out of a quality of consciousness that’s in-tune with the wisdom of Life. Today, this is rarely the case.

Now’s the time for mythos beyond logos, for meaning and wisdom beyond stats and data.  It’s time to look deep inside and bring forth our soul-wisdom in to all we create and deliver.

‘If you bring forth what is with you, what is within you will save you.  If you do not bring forth what is within you, what is within you will destroy you.’  Jesus Christ

Our prevalent mechanistic-humanistic approach to solving the meta-crisis is failing to bring forth what is within us. If we dare listen well enough, our souls already know our way home. We already have everything we need within us to welcome-in a new level of meaning-making for life-affirming regenerative futures.  

The real reason for embarking on this soul-journey of a lifetime is not just because our future-fitness depends on it, but because postmodernism’s mechanistic-humanism has starved our souls and superficialized our humanity, cutting us off from true meaning and purpose. Read the newspapers, watch to the 24/7 rolling-news, visit shopping malls, holiday resorts, restaurants and office-blocks to witness how much of humanity is cut-adrift from soul-meaning. Vast swaths of adolescent-adult neurosis feed consumerism for what’s mistakenly called ‘progress’ peddled through clever advertising to entice the entire human-race in to the profane desacralization of life.  On their own, stats and surveys fail to wake us from this egoic slumber.

Welcoming-in the inner-dimension of reality, where soul-spirit resides, emancipates ourselves by deepening the mythos and logos by which we live by, allowing a new worldview untainted by yesterday’s logic.

‘That the world has an inside as well as an outside, that it is not only outwardly visible but acts upon us in a timeless present, from the deepest and apparently most subjective recesses of the psyche – this I hold to be an insight which even though it be ancient wisdom, deserves to be evaluated as a new factor in building a worldview.’ Carl Jung

It’s a sad fact that the vast majority of adults in Westernized cultures these days only get to truly know themselves in their final moments on their death-bed, as their egoic-grip finally opens into a vaster reality.  What a waste of humanity, to touch the infinite and taste wisdom a split-second before passing-over.  Hence, why wisdom traditions the world over have at their kernel the death-rebirth process of ‘dying before you die’, so that we gain wisdom through a psychological death many years before physical death, and then work with wisdom in order to serve life as true adults and elders.

The Soul Journey

Today’s MM acculturation of society and business means that we spend much of our time in soul-sapping demoralizing work-cultures devoid of developmental meaning. No matter how progressive or inclusive these workplaces may purport to be, it’s still a tiny minority which take developmental meaning-making seriously. By developmental meaning-making, I mean ‘vertical development’ that consciously enriches the being-and-knowing of its employees.  One could use the Harvard professors’ Kegan & Lahey’s term Deliberately Developmental to convey organizational cultures that celebrate expanding meaning-making. Other movements like Laloux’s Teal-Evolutionary, Scharmer’s U-School, Ubiquity’s Wisdom School, and the mushrooming interest in Regenerative Business and Regenerative Leadership, all form part of this emerging trend toward increasing authenticity, connection, self-awareness, systemic-awareness, and a sense of interconnectedness.

Though even these exciting (r)evolutionary developments often hold-back from mentioning the profundity and centrality of a death-rebirth soul-journey. Often referred to as a midlife crisis, this death-rebirth unfurls a significant shift from Orange/Green Achiever into Teal/Turquoise Regenerator which I unpack in my recent books, the latest of which is Keys for Future-fit Leadership provides a number of illustrations to help convey the death-rebirth soul-journey.

It’s through this soul-journey that we broaden and deepen our being-and-knowing. Through what I refer to as activating our super-nature, we learn to work with sensory and super-sensory faculties that enable us to receive and work with Nature’s Wisdom. We find coherence and connection at the deepest levels of our humanity, and from this place work in-tune with inner-outer nature for regenerative futures.

‘The seat of the soul is there where the inner and the outer worlds meet.’  Novalis

Activating our Super-Nature

As we journey from dominant ego-consciousness to integrated soul-consciousness, we activate our super-nature and readily experience what psychologists have called ‘flow-state’ where we feel in flow, simultaneously focused on the task yet open to thinking laterally and sensing systemically. Studies show that when in a flow-state we problem solve far quicker, have enhanced pattern recognition, form connections and trust with others, engender a sense of purpose in teams, and perform up to 500% better in complex, fast-changing environments. Novelty, creativity, heightened perception, amplified connection, and systemic meaning-making all come on stream. Not only are we better at regulating our own nervous systems and overall bio-circuitry, priming us for agility and purposefulness, but studies show that in this flow-state we help other people regulate themselves better.

In what neuroscientists call Quest Orientation, we’re able to embrace complexity in wholly new ways – our being-and-knowing up-stretches. Merely through our presence of being in this integral soulfulness we can positively affect those around us to aid their flow. Imagine all the benefits this provides the team and organization in terms of performance, systemic agility, creativity, purposefulness, and innovation. 

As a result of this physiological and psychological shift, our experience of life becomes less grasping, anxious, and outwardly focused. We embrace the ever-changing nature of life and flow within the lively, dancing dialogue of developmental learning, and cultivate developmental conditions for others around us to learn and grow regeneratively.

Yes, we still get stressed and doubtful on the journey, but we gain resilience, are more able to embrace complexity, access insight, make meaning, and learn from challenges. Rather than getting subsumed by fear, stress, self-doubt, overwhelm and insecurity, we notice the voices of judgement, cynicism, and fear creeping in and can realign and regenerate ourselves with each pitfall as a potential for learning. We become more future-fit, more able to renew ourselves, and can more easily cross the threshold from Achiever to Regenerator.

A New Inner Center of Gravity

Psychologically, the shift we undergo as we journey is a reorientation of the ego-soul dynamic inside our psyche.

The ‘ego’ is an important aspect of our psyche as it helps us deal with life, fit-in to the culture of the organization, community and society, and get-the-job-done. Yet when it dominates, it crowds out the deeper more soulful ways of being-and-knowing, reducing down our capacity for flow and wisdom.  The dominant ego superficializes how we make meaning and how we embrace change and complexity. We find ourselves becoming reactive to and fearful of change.   

As we journey, and our ‘vertical development’ moves us through Orange/Green into Teal/Turquoise, we become more masterful at taming the ego and its voices of judgement, cynicism, and fear that pull us out of presencing life more soulfully.

We learn to let go of the personal will’s ego-orientated, achiever drive and awaken a deeper purposefulness within ourselves and within life itself. Psychological energy that was consumed by the need to relentlessly achieve in order to better one’s career, status, salary, and personal ambition is now flowing into sensing what genuinely serves our soul-dharma and life-affirming purpose of the organization, initiative or job at hand, beyond simply hitting the numbers.

As we journey, the ego’s desires, fears and distractions start to wane as we start to align more with the soul. This soul-consciousness also opens us to Gaia’s World Soul and the more-than-human sacredness of life. Ancient animism deep in our psyche is awoken, like a home-coming. Opening our hearts and minds to an ancient half-forgotten animism expands our view of self-other-world beyond the reductive confines of ego-consciousness. We start to relax into and trust life, and flow with the Way of Nature.

‘Those who flow as life flows know they need no other force.’ Lao Tzu

This is a game-changer, because the ego has a habit of distracting life-force away from the soul and diverting it into the trickery of self-doubt, guilt, angst, repression, parent-child complexes, projections and fears. This feeds a vicious cycle. The more our thinking and feeling gets drawn into fears, insecurity rises. The more insecurity rises, the more we feel the need to worry, and so the ego reaffirms its place in the driving-seat of our psyche. The soul gets sidelined.  But, as we endure the soul-journey, the ego’s shenanigans start to be witnessed for what they create – ungrounded, head-spinning, self-fulfilling worries that keep us in fear and insecurity.  With our own self-awareness, we witness the ego-gyrations, bringing the light of our consciousness to the shadowy judgements, fears, cynicisms, projections and complexes.  Then, with this light of self-awareness, we can allow the shadow to come into the light, and the ego’s dominating power starts to ease. A new way – a more soulful way – starts to spread inside, like the imaginal cells in the caterpillar’s metamorphosis forming the butterfly.  

Life-force gets freed from the vicious cycles of fear, insecurity, confusion and overwhelm into insight, developmental growth and evolution.  We become less reactive and more responsive.

As more life-force starts to flow with soul rather than ego, we ease out of fear and learn to trust life.

With courage, patience and practice, the ego-soul dynamic in us reorientations.  Ego finds it rightful place as useful servant to soul.  The soul becomes our new found center of gravity, our go-to place for being-and-knowing, whereupon we readily draw upon all of our natural intelligences, including rational-analytic logic, while remaining grounded in soul.

Then, we start to feel more connected to the Field of infinite potential, and the forces and energies we need to catalyse the threshold-crossing flood in.  From vicious cycles of fear, confusion and doubt we find virtuous cycles of insight, wisdom and service. We equip ourselves for navigating the meta-crisis.

We gain responsibility for our own presence and depth of being-and-knowing. The self-agency, social empowerment and ethical values of humanism integrate with the up-stretched being-and-knowing of life’s sacred depths for animistic-humanism.  Sophisticated technologies like AI can then be used as tools that serve life, rather than subsuming our uprooted self-as-separate materialistic-humanism.

This is not the end of things, but simply the beginning of becoming a true adult, whereupon we take full responsibility for our own developmental needs and growth opportunities. 

First Adulthood (adolescence) to Second Adulthood (adult)

Until this point on the journey, we have largely resided in the ‘first adulthood’ phase of life, still caught in an ego-identity created by trying to fit-in to societal and parental norms (or rebel against them) and alienated from our true nature, the soul. Self-as-separate with control-manage leadership dynamics.

It’s sobering to realize that many of today’s leaders of our government bodies, institutions, corporations, value-creating enterprises, charities and educational establishments are operating from this first adulthood. At this ego-stage we’re driven by fear and neurosis – parental complexes, projections, acculturated habits, protection rackets and unintegrated shadow urges. 

This is where the desire to blame the ‘other’ emanates from – the level of the unindividuated adolescent first adulthood. 

As tensions rise with the unfolding meta-crisis, so too does the blaming of the ‘other’.  Whether it’s the immigrant, imperialist, political party, class, sect or gender, the hallmark of this ego-projection is something ‘outer’ is blamed and an incrowd-outcrowd forms feeding yet more division and fear. This only breeds more frustration and confusion, unless we look deeper.

When residing at the soul-level, we start to take responsibility for our own projections and bring the light of self-awareness to our judgemental finger-pointing. This is an important step on the journey toward birthing a new organizational culture and societal worldview untainted by yesterday’s logic.

It’s all too easy to get caught up in group-think (whether it’s a mainstream meme or a counter-cultural one) in our ‘tribe’ we judge those outside it. We get sucked in the collective neurosis of group-think by failing to take responsibility for our own developmental learning. Dark shadows form.

True community honors and encourages individuation, as without it the first adulthood gets stuck in arrested development unable to dare cross the threshold. It’s easier to blame the ‘other’ than see our own projections and shadow.

All-too-often today’s activism is unwittingly inured in ego-projection. Instead of aiding social evolution such activism gets mired in blame, anger and vitriol that encourages social fragmentation and division, rather than diversity within unity.

Enter the soul-journey as the most powerful way through the boiled frog syndrome.

Transitioning to Regenerator

In transitioning to Regenerator, we come to perceive life as a continual act of dying and being reborn, and the process of becoming a Future-fit Leader as a constant shedding.

We welcome a never-ending surrendering into life. This is what the symbol of the crucifix inspires. It is not the outer, historic act of punishment, but the inner psychospiritual power unleashed through dying before you die, as we continually stretch ourselves open upon the crucifix of life.

We open more receptively and responsively into life with greater intimacy, joy, authenticity, and flow. We tap into the infinite Field of potential. We embrace the intrapsychic reconciliation of inner-outer through integrating our natural intelligences and drawing upon insight and creative imagination to provide guidance. We learn to work with wisdom.

Ultimately, this puts us in accord with our soul’s life-force. The way we sense the rapture of reality, and the awesomeness of this life-experience, is profoundly different than before. Our innermost being resonates with our outer experience. Inner-outer nature attune.

‘People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think that what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonance within our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive.’  Joseph Campbell

Make no mistake, our ability to shift our presence in this way has profound effects for not just ourselves, or the immediate systems we work within, but for wider ecosystem change (though one might rather say ‘ecosystem emergence’ as we’re facilitating emergence within the system rather than trying to change the system from the outside-in). As the Nobel Prize-winning complexity scientist Ilya Prigogine knew, amid rising volatility, small islands of coherence have the capacity to up-stretch entire systems to new levels. In fact, it’s the cultivating of coherence within self and system that creates regenerative ripples for emergence and evolution of the organization and society far more effectively than achiever-assertions provide for.

We allow ourselves to trust in life, and rest in Wisdom, with each step we take.

‘Eternal Wisdom builds:

I shall the palace be

When I in Wisdom rest.

And Wisdom rests in me.’  Angelus Silesius

The everyday conversations, meetings, email exchanges, project activities and informal interactions all contribute to, or undermine, future-fitness. Our attention becomes a moral act. The presence, intentional-attentiveness and level of consciousness we bring to these everyday interactions IS the front-line of Future-fit L&OD.

Summary

The real dilemma the meta-crisis is magnifying, is whether we shall remain in arrested development, stuck in status-quo self-as-separate mechanistic thinking or move through our own threshold and take responsibility for our own developmental learning. Then the neurosis that suffocates ourselves and our social systems starts to become integrated into wholeness for regeneration.

To recognize the bankruptcy of our conditioned acculturated norms implicit in the promise of our current culture (whether societal or organizational) is sobering yet an important wake-up call.  Superficial unindividuated materialistic happiness only fuels hedonic narcissism which is purported as ‘progress’ – more consumerism, more insatiable GDP-growth, more weapons of mass distraction, more pollution, more neurosis, more projection, more societal erosion. We’re waking up to the sobering reality that this is very far from ‘progress’ but rather a ‘philosophy of hell’ which we’re complicit in.

‘The very thing that is potentially destroying us is at the same time waking us up.’ Paul Levy

It’s time to embark on the only meaningful path available to us through this meta-crisis, the soul-journey where we learn to live into a deeper mythos and logos that life is trying to show us if we so choose to see with new eyes.  In doing so, we dare become more of who we truly are, and realize why we are really here. We become developmental adventuring wayfarers.

If we fail to have the courage to embark on this threshold-crossing, and ignore the inner-turn deep inside ourselves, we violate life itself. 

Today’s MM society is a violation of life itself, and breeds a carcinogenic consciousness. Let’s not taint our well-intended solutions with this flawed thinking, as it wastes precious time, resources and energy taking us down cul-de-sacs of confusion and overwhelm.

Mainstream leadership and organizational development, and mainstream culture and values woefully equip us for the necessary soul-journey ahead, so the majority find themselves in arrested development, stuck in the first adulthood, projecting problems on to the ‘other’ hoping someone will come along and sort it all out not realizing that the only thing that will save us is our waking-up to soul-sovereignty.

Organizations, leaders and change agents who learn to nurture spaces that encourage a deepening being-and-knowing, and cultivate soul-sovereignty, are sowing the seeds of a new dawn of a regenerative future.

The temperature’s rising, and as the boiled frog apologue warns us, there comes a time when we need to up-stretch and jump out of the status quo or get boiled alive.

Are you ready to die before you die, and embark on the journey of a lifetime?

“I have been most fortunate to have Giles as my coach over the last few years as Chief Executive. His supportive, kind, and engaging style has helped me traverse unprecedented challenges both personally and professionally.  Having my back, being there when I needed him, offering his wise counsel and sensing into my past, present and future, wrapped around with his regenerative leadership principles, has been like medicine to me!  I can’t imagine anyone else doing what he does!”  Sinead Butters MBE, CEO, Aspire Group

To book on a special 2-dayer overnight immersion on 30th April/1st May 2026 or explore 121 Coaching with Giles contact him via his website https://gileshutchins.com/

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You can watch a short 2min video about Keys for Future-fit leadership here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fjQ6s80ewNU&list=PL4fiSooXivB7D83ut1Igssgg0xZcf-mGN&index=34

‘Working with Giles over the past three years has been a deeply transformative journey. In his presence – whether walking through the ancient woods in Springwood, sitting by the fire, or in quiet conversation online – I found a safe space to grieve, unlearn, reconnect with what matters most, and integrate new ways of being. Giles gently holds space for paradox and for my own deeper truths to surface. The path is never straight, and what I value most is having someone who’s walked it before – holding space with wisdom and experience across business, spiritual, energetic, and the natural world. This is very unique in Giles and shaped not only my work with clients, but also the way I live, lead, and see myself as part of the living world. I can wholeheartedly recommend working with him if you are embarking on your soul journey.’ Christina Peters, Founder, Art of Self