Ushering in the Next Civilization

"Suddenly, I was experiencing scenes of wide-spread human calamity - buildings on fire, explosions, people dying, deep social chaos. The strange thing, however, was that I was experiencing all of this taking place inside the vast ecstasy of Light. I kept experiencing waves of profound social disruption not as tragedy but as the birth of something beautiful. These sounds of pain were the sounds of humanity's birth...This perspective came from far beyond spacetime. It was to see the coming collapse for what it truly is - the occasion of humanity's awakening." - Christopher Bache in LSD & the Mind of the Universe

This was a vision Christopher Bache had on a high dose LSD session in the late 1990s.

Every time I have these days where I feel overwhelmed by this world, I come across something to read or watch that renews my faith that everything is on the path where we need to be and what we're living through will work to our benefit on the other side. Faith that this darkness is growing the roots that will one day blossom into the next level of human consciousness. And therefore a new civilization, with new cultural norms, laws, spiritual traditions and beliefs.

I recently watched a TEDx talk where I learned that for the past 270 years, we have been living through the “Post-Industrial age” of civilization. Historically, the average age of any civilization, no matter its size or power, before it collapses is between 250-300 years (Sarah Wilson TEDxTalk). These societies collapse because the systems they create become too overly large and complex and the resources required to keep them going exhausts it into complete collapse.

The generations living right now are at the crux of this transformation as we recognize that none of how we are living can be sustained. We are the first generations to experience the decline, as that perpetual growth mindset finally overwhelms everything into collapse.

I have felt this on a personal AND collective level as I have also gone through one of the deepest and most overwhelming burnout cycles of my adult life (but also not my first); and undergone a deep personal family crisis in which my step-daughter left our care full-time to live with her mom in another state. For me 2025 was a year of shedding. Letting go of all the layers to my “identity” I’ve accumulated since my birth into this life that actually aren’t Me. Burrowing deeper and deeper into myself, just to learn what all the conditioned layers are in order to shed them. I’ve been building my awareness of these layers for several years now, but 2025 was the year that everything finally aligned; the outer finally coming to match the inner of this work I was doing. There were certain things that were unsustainable in my own life. I realized so many things in letting the child I had raised for the past almost 8 years go, to live with a parent I had always deemed too immature or unstable to safely raise a child. Failing, refusing to acknowledge how my own immaturity and fearful isolating practices were keeping her from thriving here. I was trying to keep her contained, to keep her safe from all the predators, perpetrations and violations that I have known too many details of, for too many stories, for far too long.

Which leads me to the other unsustainable thing in my life: child welfare. This field has been my life. My entire identity was tied up in my position as the director of the University training partnership charged with providing the initial and ongoing training for all the newly hired child welfare staff, as well as the required continuing education credits for existing staff, for all of Nevada except Clark county (Las Vegas). I felt like my whole life had prepared me for this role, I was meant to lead this program and it was my pride and joy for the first 4 years I was with it. But it was also traumatizing me. Every day I taught, it was dredging up stories from my childhood, that I used for learning points, or in answering questions that specific modules and panels brought up. Exposure to the content of this field, even though I wasn’t in the field directly anymore, was too much during this time of deep personal loss. A loss that brought up all the losses before, starting from the age of two with the death of my dad, and then consistently, systematically from age 3 on, siblings loved and lost. Losing custody of my step-daughter was my dark night of the soul.

Maybe 2025 was more of a stripping away of skins, a flaying rather than a shedding. Because neither of these things were nicely and neatly let go of. It was a messy, ugly, grief-stricken ripping away of everything I had clung to, everything I had used to make myself “comfortable”. I use quotes, because it was never really comfort I achieved with these adaptations and mechanisms, only familiarity. Creating what felt familiar my whole life, even if it was toxic for my nervous system.

I sat in dark moments of regret and shame, ruminating and reliving all the triggered responses of immaturity and defensiveness. But it was the profound grief that I was finally learning to be with that cracked me open to the soul level and allowed me to actually see Her. The true Me.  And it was here that I found the loving warmth and endless grace and mercy of the Great Mother. In the depth of grief for my daughter, I felt that grief going all the way back through every lost mother of my ancestry to the Great Mother through whom all of existence has come to be. And as I’ve learned about Her archetypal wisdom and cyclical creation through waves of birth and death and rebirth, I’ve allowed myself that grace. Because we cannot do better next time when we are caught in cycles of shame, guilt, and regret. We can only show up differently moving forward when we can forgive ourselves and commit to loving actions and responses when the next opportunity arises. The use of “opportunity” here rather than “trigger” is intentional.

Chris Bache says we need to grow up. We need to recognize our soul perspective and enter into Oneness, through compassion and love, living in accordance with the truth that we are all one interconnected being and what I do to you is literally doing unto myself; that I truly can’t be well when my sisters and brothers are not well by my side.

I was reading through an old social work textbook from my master’s program the other day and I love the way it defined feminism. “Feminist social work asks us to imagine living in a world where there is no domination…where a vision of mutuality is the ethos shaping our interactions. Imagine living in a world where we can all be who we are, a world of peace and possibility” (Curry-Stevens et al.). This chapter goes on to describe the feminist – I will replace this with feminine – leadership style as “interactive, transforming and empowering; the mode of operation is caring, nurturing, teaching, cooperative, facilitative, and inclusive; structures created are collaborative, horizontal, decentralized; problem-solving style is qualitative, contextual, consensual, participative, and process-oriented; and tasks are to flatten hierarchy, diffuse power, share decision-making, equalize rewards, and increase worker participation” (Chernesky, 1995).

I think the tireless drive for economic growth stems from the tragic hole left in our spirituality when we are restricted from having our own personal connection with the Divine by dogmatic intermediaries. But in particular it is a lack of connection to the Divine Mother that has led to this current state of spiritual destitution. This longing is being exploited by capitalist advertisers hoping we will fill this gaping void with materialism. Stuff. Matter. Which literally means MOTHER, deriving from the Latin word “mater”.

It is my belief that we cannot come together in Oneness until we acknowledge that God is both feminine AND masculine and we bring these two energies into balance. The feminine must rise in Her own style of leadership, not trying to squeeze Herself into the rigid confines of patriarchal definitions of leadership – namely domination, exploitation, power-over hierarchies, and individualism. But to do this on a collective level, we must first do so on a personal one. Bringing the masculine and feminine energies within each of us into the Divine Marriage of Oneness.