David's Desk is my opportunity to share thoughts and tools for the spiritual journey. These letters are my personal insights and opinions and do not necessarily reflect the sentiments or thoughts of any other person in Lorian or of Lorian as a whole. If you wish to share this letter with others, please feel free to do so; however, the material is ©2022 by David Spangler. If you no longer wish to receive these letters, please let us know at info@Lorian.org.
Liminalities
Liminal space is the threshold between two states, neither fully here nor fully there but somewhere in transition. For someone in such a space, a “liminalite,” it can be an exciting place, full of novelty and opportunity, and it can be a terrifying place as well. The familiar and the old are falling away but the new hasn’t taken shape yet. Promise and peril seem equally possible.
All around us, if we look, we can see the seeds of a new consciousness, a new way of being in the world, beginning to appear, taking root, forming sprouts. Some are more robust than others; some, like the seeds in Jesus’s parable, have fallen on inhospitable soil and others on fertile soil.
Although this new consciousness is taking many forms as it experiments with what works and what doesn’t, two elements are consistent. It is global in its outreach and its concern, exhibiting a compassionate caring for all life, and it takes a long-term approach to human and planetary affairs. That is, its vision is not captured by the short-term but considers the long-term consequences of our decisions and actions, believing us responsible not only for our own immediate welfare but that of our distant descendants, hundreds of years in the future. What kind of world are we leaving for them?
This new consciousness, which I choose to call a “Gaian consciousness” to reflect its planetary inclusiveness, is still in the background of human affairs; it has not yet coalesced sufficiently as a compelling and necessary worldview to change the course of human affairs. And, unfortunately, it might never do so. That is up to us, to the choices we make and to the vision we hold of the world we wish to inhabit.
However, the evidence is piling up around the globe that the institutions, habits, and ways of being that humanity has developed over the past two and a half millennia do not have the capacity to hold and express this new consciousness. They are creaking at the seams and breaking as a new world emerges around us. They are increasingly proving unequal to the task of gracefully and successfully meeting the challenges of this liminal period.
What is sad and dangerous about this time is that, seeing that what we have isn’t working, there is a reaction to replace it not with something new but with something older and familiar. We see this in the rise of autocratic rule around the globe, including the Western democracies, and in authoritarian leanings in the United States. It is a reversion to hierarchy instead of networking, to power over rather than power with. It is an impulse born of fear and a longing for stability and the known, an impulse that confuses conformity with safety. It is an impulse that values winning over collaboration. It is an impulse that would impose a monoculture, stifling differences of belief and custom, forgetting or ignoring that monocultures are highly vulnerable to change and never survive in nature.
Being a liminalite is not easy. Depression, hopelessness, anxiety, and cynicism can be daily challenges. But at the same time, being a liminalite means being open to creativity and opportunity, open to hope and vision, open to thinking and acting outside the box. While we may be living in liminal times, we don’t need to be liminal in ourselves, caught between old and new. We can embody our vision of the new right now. If our vision is of a world of ecological wholeness, compassion and respect for each other, collaboration and mutual support, then we can embody those qualities in how we act in the world right now. In some ways, the new, whatever it may be, needs to live in us before it can fully live in the world.
Being a “liminalite,” someone living between one world and another, doesn’t have to mean being confused. It can mean taking the opportunity provided by an emergent time to be a seed for something better. That is the seeding the world needs right now.
An Experiment
One of the advantages of David’s Desk being digital is that I can do things I couldn’t if it were printed. My Lorian colleague and friend, James Tousignant, and I do podcasts together. He thought it might be interesting to you, my Reader, if he and I were to have a discussion around the theme of that month’s essay and then add the audio at the end. That way, you could both read my thoughts for that month and also listen to me talk about them with James. So, without further ado, here is this month’s conversation. I hope you enjoy it and the added dimension it brings to David’s Desk.