A New Project for a New World

Accidental Gods has just launched – a website, a podcast, a blog and a Membership Program, about facilitating the evolution of human consciousness – we believe this is urgent and necessary… and that it’s possible

Here is the full story:

A year ago, at the winter solstice of 2018, my partner and I sat with the fire, as is our practice, to reflect on the past year and ask for insight into what we might do in the year to come. We’ve done this for most of the fifteen years of our partnership, and for most of that time, I’ve been writing books and teaching shamanic dreaming and she’s been creating beautiful things: a textiles studio; an organic clothing line for children; websites and memberships for other creative people. For both of us, the fires were often simply support and a suggestion of ‘more of the same’.

But last year’s fire was different. ‘More of the same’ was definitely not on the menu. I was told to start teaching at scale. I was told to go to the US (actually, I was shown an image of teaching large numbers of people in the US – TED talk scale…) and writing books seemed remarkably low down the priority listing. In fact, if I hadn’t kept bringing it up, it wouldn’t have been there at all.

Pretty soon, the year became an exercise in asking for help. Because I had no idea what ‘teaching at scale’ meant and I had no intention of getting on a plane. XR notwithstanding, I haven’t flown since 2000 and wasn’t planning on doing so. And yet… when the offer came to teach – at scale – in the US, I took it. (one flight heading out is better than thirty coming over here, right?) Which meant that I had to start working out what it is that might be taught at scale that would be both safe and constructive. And somewhere in the early days of that, I was introduced to the Deep Adaptation paper – and so ‘urgent’ was added to the list of essential criteria.

And now, just over a year later, as we head towards the third decade of the third millennium, Accidental Gods has just launched – a website, a podcast, a blog and a Membership Program, all heading the same way.

Here’s what we got to:

–  We know that evolution happens in any species under moments of intense pressure.
–  This moment is about as intense as it gets – or at least, we’re heading fast into pressures humanity has never seen before. We are the generation that gave ourselves the power of species level extinction, a thing that has never happened in the entire history of the evolution of consciousness.
–  We’re due an evolutionary shift. But we don’t have time for the slow incremental steps of DNA tweaks and minor phenotypical adjustments.
–  Which is interesting, because this happens to be the moment when we could conceivably make the next evolutionary step one of consciousness.

So, this is what Accidental Gods is about – facilitating the evolution of consciousness. Because we believe it’s possible, necessary – and urgent. 

Human conscious evolution is not a new idea – but to date it’s revolved around theories of how we could get there by thinking more, or meditating more, or – recently – implanting chips in our brains.

Which is missing the point so badly that it would be laughable if it weren’t such a clear evocation of everything that is out of balance in our world.

Because we don’t have all the answer. We never do. I think it’s not our job to have the answers. It’s our job to be. To be whatever it is – each of us – that only we can be. It’s our job to be open to connection with the More Than Human world and to free ourselves from ego, projection, judgement and fear so that when we as ‘What do you want of me?’ we can hear clear, coherent, constructive answers.

Which is to say, we need to ditch the bullshit and self-delusion that can often cloud our capacity to connect.

And clearly, we have the tools to do this. Connection is our heritage and our birthright. It’s not that long ago that our ancestors lived fully in context with the earth and there are indigenous peoples across the world who still live this way: we can relearn it.

At the same time, we can use all the ancient and modern tools of meditation/contemplation and harness them to the latest neuroscience – specifically our understanding of neuroplasticity – to reshape the way we feel/think/act/BE in the world.

When we can do this, when we can stand flexible, open and receptive and ask ‘what do you want of me?’ and hear clear answers, then the last step is taking the empty handed leap into the void – that point where we let go of everything we believe to be true – because no problem is solved from the mindset that created it and we’re still in the old mindset.

This – the not-knowing— is the nature of emergence from complex systems.  But this has to be our baseline. Everything else leads on from here.  Because if enough of us can do this, then, together, the whole that we make can be so very much greater than the sum of our parts.

So… the aim is to build a worldwide community of people who get this, who want it badly enough to give up the time in each day to connect, to practice coherence, to walk towards the edge of letting go. And none of this is trivial. But it’s not impossible, either. We can do it. The more we work together, the easier it will be. And then another world is possible. If we listen carefully, we can hear her singing.

 Visit Accidental Gods