What would the divine feminine or Goddess nature want to ask or expect of a man today? If you were a man representing the divine masculine, and had the chance, what would you want to ask or say to a woman at this moment? Can we even imagine ourselves and each other as different expressions of a divine source, more than merely a personality?

These were among the inquiries that helped inspire a profound exploration of the divine feminine and the Goddess archetype at this Fall’s Metamodern Spirituality Lab. To learn more, Portals brought together Aviv Shahar and Lab organizers and metamodern leaders Layman Pascal and Brendan Graham Dempsey, along with participants Mariah Rose McKay and Antonia Louise.

This is the newest conversation in the Portals series exploring metamodern spirituality.

A central theme for this special collaboration of women and men was exploring the role of the Goddess, the feminine, in metamodern spirituality: an embrace, rather than historical denial, of the feminine presence at the heart of the human’s universal nature. The Lab itself was a space where gatherings and rituals supported a freer expression of the divine feminine and masculine influences in both women and men.

The openness allowed for the emergence of many facets of the Goddess nature: maternal, warrior, healing, wisdom. For many participants it produced a trust and chance for intimacy that in turn generated a deep sense of healing and release of ancient tensions between the genders.

Other Lab insights include:

• It’s the importance of community; we cannot do this alone. It’s the practical elements, but also the deep and intimate bonds we form, and the healing power of deep relationships.
• There is the long-wave dimension and nature of this work: we need to include the generational transmission; a project of the next 100 years.
• When the god and goddess are prepared to embrace each other, inside each of us, a birthing process occurs; those two configurations merge into a third nature that liberates a new future.
• We don't know the ripple effects of how our hearts and consciousness can affect the world when we change our relationship to the goddess.
• This quality of intimacy and way of being with each other, where people are held in a place where they can begin a sentence without knowing how they will end it, takes time to build.
• We honor the broad spectrum of ways women show up from a “masculine” stance, and men from a “feminine” stance; these are potent and helpful ways of looking at the world and ourselves.

This conversation is part of the continuing Portals discovery into what is emerging on the frontiers of human experience in this time of profound change. Information about upcoming special events can be found on the Events page. Also visit and subscribe to our YouTube channel.

“From the point of view of people who are interested in growth and development and depth and a transformation of civilization, a goddess who's also capable of growth and change and depth, and who could enter into more nuanced or richer relations with human beings, and in the masculine/feminine exchange, is something we would like to be able to facilitate through our thinking, and speaking, and hearts, and relationships.” (Layman)

“This is a favorite topic of mine, polarity in masculine and feminine dynamics, and there is something really valuable about having these distinctions and having a spectrum between those poles, but being able to create a magnetism, being able to create something that pulls together and also something that repels, not necessarily in a bad way, just in a separation, individuation way. We are separate, and we can be as one. I feel like there is a lot of healing that we are doing collectively; how do we embody those in the most healthy and conscious way?” (Antonia)

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The Goddess Arising

As we find our way each day through the often intense and personal struggles facing us and humanity, imagine that we can build our strength and resilience by exercising the right muscles; not just physical, but our emotional, mental and spiritual “muscles.”

In the newest chapter of the Homo Universalis series, Aviv Shahar, with Karen Heney and Kyriaki Nikandrou, explores how the “muscles” metaphor is not such a stretch as we face and learn to embrace the two big struggles in any developing life: the known and the unknown.

The known struggles are those we see and feel all around us, from personal, to family or community, to the global cultural, economic and ecological upheavals that affect the planet and each of us individually. Our struggle with the unknown includes trying to imagine and create a new future when so much of the present is uncertain and changing. Can we picture in our mind the person we want to become?

As Aviv, Karen and Kyriaki discuss, the activation of our Universalis nature, or universal human, brings online new capacities, perceptions and creativity to help us flex the right muscles that can balance and harmonize the many struggles we may face. Among their insights:

• The Universalis inquiry can help humanity at large to pivot from a barbarous operating system of “kill before you get killed” to a way of collaborating based in valiance, chivalry and virtue.

• As we enter new domains of possibility, what used to activate and energize us don’t carry the same impact; we feel different sources of energy, new capacities and parts of ourselves.

• If the human has a universal nature, and universal expansion is accelerating, are we also accelerating into the future, into the unknown, and who we are becoming today?

• To be available in new patterns and new ways, we need to relax the groove, the old patterns held at tension habitually. We make space for new processes, new energy sources, and new configurations.

This conversation is part of the continuing Portals discovery into what is emerging on the frontiers of human experience in this time of profound change. Information about upcoming special events can be found on the Events page. Also visit and subscribe to our YouTube channel.

“As we gradually see the corruption and dysfunctionality of various systems, the parallel is within our inner lives: any psychologies and patternings that don't have the sustaining energies of the now and the currencies that are ongoing into the future, equally are being weakened. And sometimes they will melt, sometimes they will fight, but there is this inner knowing that what may have worked before, well, maybe it's not going to be the enabling system for tomorrow.” (Karen)

“When we enter new domains of possibility there is a point whereby we look back and we say, hmm, I realize that what used to activate me very much, and energize me, no longer carries the same impact. I am now energized by different sources of energy, and I am activated in whole new different parts of myself. Sometimes you will even describe new sensitivity, new capacity, new expression, new art.” (Aviv)

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The Two Struggles - The Universalis Project #11

Where is our global culture today? How did we get here? What steps might we need to take now to shape a future that could become a saving grace for humanity? It feels special to find a clear, cohesive and compelling picture, one that encompasses the insights that help us make sense and meaning out of the tumultuous times we live in and answer these questions.

We dive deep into a new, emerging worldview in this conversation with Steve McIntosh, a leading developmental philosopher focusing on the evolution of consciousness and culture. Steve is the author of Developmental Politics, The Presence of the Infinite, Evolution’s Purpose and Integral Consciousness and the Future of Evolution. He is co-founder of the Institute for Cultural Evolution.

With Steve’s help we trace the major forces that shaped human history and culture, from the Renaissance and Enlightenment, through the fuller development of the Modern era, to Postmodern culture, and into today’s search for a new truth. We view the past with a new understanding that these are not fixed periods of history, but a form of living consciousness that evolves inside us.

As the first Enlightenment opened up our understanding of the external universe, the new worldview that has been emerging promises to illuminate the interior universe of consciousness and connection. We actively contribute to the evolutionary process when we bring to life the universal values of truth, beauty and goodness.

Many more enlivening insights and profound understandings emerge in the conversation.

This conversation is part of the continuing Portals discovery into what is emerging on the frontiers of human experience in this time of profound change. Information about upcoming special events can be found on the Events page. Also visit and subscribe to our YouTube channel.

“The sense that we know deep in our bones that a better way is possible, that has an influence on our consciousness, and it's what drives cultural evolution. It's not just this quest for the good life, it's also the quest to know what's true, and the quest to make our circumstances more beautiful. More beautiful architecture, more beautiful homes, more beautiful bodies. Those are all ways that we're lured to make things better. And so understanding that as an attractive force, or a kind of gravity, on consciousness, that the evolutionary impulse that our sense is responding to - that begins to illuminate what it is that we're trying to define and understand better.” (Steve)

“The greatest human purpose, at least while we're in this world, is to contribute to the evolution of the noosphere because, by doing so, we're contributing to the purpose of the larger universe as a whole. And so just being able to land that truth can really help people appreciate how science and spirituality are pointing to the same thing, properly interpreted, that I think can go a long way toward helping to plant the seeds for this next emergent worldview.” (Steve)

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Evolution, Consciousness, and the New Truth with Steve McIntosh