If we’re seeking a feeling of illumination or deeper connection to the universal and divine, what clues and meaning can we find in perhaps the best-known story of transformation in western history — the Transfiguration of Jesus Christ? Does it reveal an esoteric path to active engagement with evolution and expanding consciousness? Or is it a powerful metaphor for an innate human species capacity to grow and develop?

In this conversation, Aviv Shahar and metamodern thought leader Brendan Graham Dempsey continue their lively dialogue on the many faces of Jesus Christ, the central pillar of Christianity. Building on their previous conversation, they focus on mystical and metamodern appreciations of the mystery of the Transfiguration.

• The exploration goes beyond historical accounts to seek the significance of such a transformation to our own pursuit of meaning, connection, purpose and expanded awareness. How do each of us experience our own moments of sacred empowerment and profound, life-changing insight and inspiration?
• The conversation expands our understanding of this unique time, into the evolutionary possibility to experience and express our true universal nature. Aviv and Brendan’s many insights include:
• The story of Christ’s transfiguration is a key moment of storytelling in the broader narrative that we see unfolding in human cultural evolution towards a shift in higher consciousness.
• We have entered a unique time where the species is reaching for something beyond Homo Solaris — the Universalis human, where we can again embrace plurality.
• We are not human beings seeking a spiritual experience, but spirit beings becoming human to develop, mature and become vessels for continual evolution to occur through us as co-creators.
• The first consideration in an esoteric contemplation is that a prophecy, or any learning, is actualized not when it occurs, but when it has been witnessed and validated.
• If the spiritual discourse is not amenable to the same kinds of justification dynamics as science or other discourse, it is insulated from critique, and breaks down into ‘you feel it or you don’t’.
• Focusing only on exterior sources of knowledge, and giving credence to the microscope and telescope, can disenfranchise the ‘interior scope’ and natural inner sense organs.

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.

“We are not actually flying here on our own. This is not just a biological experience. That we are, in fact, not human beings seeking a spiritual experience, we are, in fact, spirit beings coming into the human experience to gain development and maturation such that we become vessels for continual evolution to occur through us as we are co-participants and co-creators of this evolution.” (Aviv)

“How do we make this journey? And we went back and forth in finding, carving, a way to enable a space that perhaps is not defined by the gravitational logic that we process every day, and at the same time that is not going to abandon certain frameworks and certain ways of thinking and being that will afford us freedom and safety and collaboration and, ultimately, possibilities to solve big problems on the global stage.” (Aviv)

Portals of Perception Website

Aviv’s LinkedIn

Aviv’s Twitter

Aviv’s Website

The Transfiguration Archetype

One of the most powerful tools of personal transformation is also one of the most accessible: it’s the story we tell ourselves about who we are and the future we imagine. It’s a story we can update and recalibrate every day — no permission beyond ourselves required to create and recreate the person we want to be and the way forward.

In this conversation, we continue the Epoch Journey series as Aviv Shahar and longtime Portals friend Jeff Vander Clute explore the process of self-authoring appraisal. How do we identify the blockages, possible pain and trauma, and limiting beliefs that hold us back from the vast field of larger potential that is our natural birthright?

As we update and realign our values and mental maps of meaning, we liberate greater versatility and range, and foster new pathways into our deeper universal nature. Appraising who we are today and the influences shaping our lives does not deny or bypass real challenges we may face. It allows us to melt and heal many types of inner scar tissue and discover our natural resilience.

Among Aviv and Jeff’s other insights and discoveries:

• What external persuasions do we allow inside ourselves? A modern vulnerability is openness to impressions that foster self-doubt.
• If we deny the point of pain, or suppress unresolved trauma or unmet essential needs, then already we are in a distorted view, bypassing what the case actually is.
• We explore in the self-authoring appraisal process a way in which we let life itself lead us within the various domains of our growth, development and engagement.
• With enhanced resiliency available to humanity, the big question for the species is, are we going to make it? Do we have enough resiliency to shift from Homo sapiens sapiens to becoming Universalis?
• The self-authoring appraisal is a technology we can apply to almost any aspect of our lives, much like carefully attending to a garden, instead of running on autopilot and habit.
• We can receive guidance by connecting with our inner resources, or inner conclave. If we ask a question, and then clearly see our situation, we’re already beyond it.
• In a post-guru, epochal transition, we all lead; we need each other. Through shared discovery and co-creating, we provoke ourselves and create a greater ecology for the divine.

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.

“Life is open, life is an open system — the universe is actually an open system. So how do we live? How do we dance with life in an open system? It seems that you are pioneering certain understandings and modalities for how to dance with life, in openness. And in the openness each of us can show up fully, and very resiliently, and creatively. Openness is liberation, and inquiry grounds us in our own nature, which then allows us to continue to express and flower.” (Jeff)

“Just capturing two words from what you said that are so central to this appraisal process, and to being generatively creative in telling the story of your life anew every day. Waking up in the morning and saying, 'No, I was who I was yesterday, and today I'm telling the story again in a new way.' You are your own creator. You wake up in the morning and you have permission to rewrite your story today. That is, in what you said, that stopped me.” (Aviv)

Portals of Perception Website

Aviv’s LinkedIn

Aviv’s Twitter

Aviv’s Website

Resilience and the Crisis of Belief