Living along Puget Sound in the Pacific Northwest, I see reminders every day in the natural worlds of the integral part that persistence and transformation play in the growth and development of many forms of life. One of my favorite examples is the unique ecology created by estuaries, the place where freshwater streams and rivers merge with the saltier waters in the Sound and ocean.
Estuaries enable a critical transformation: this is where salmon and other species of fish hatched or born in freshwater will change and adapt to living in salt water, a necessary step for their survival and future in a new environment. A metamorphosis through stages — a process that allows safe passage from stream to ocean; from one state or octave to the next.
Another beautiful example of change by stages is caterpillar to chrysalis to butterfly.
But, why stages, steps and octaves? Why can’t salmon in their earliest forms just change and go straight to the ocean? Why can’t a caterpillar wake up one morning as a butterfly? It would be quicker. What’s so special about a chrysalis? It seems we need to make space in the transition from one octave to the next.
Great ponders, and among the universal mysteries we explore, beginning with “Current Openings #16 — The Octave Leap Mystery.”
The Octave Leap Mystery
What is the octave leap mystery? As David and Aviv Shahar explain, the study of octaves in their many dimensions, including octave leaps, is integral to human development. They suggest that octaves are a universal engineering to facilitate change and access to higher energetic states.
As we have explored in many Portals conversations, the Universe is a crucible of growth and transformation. If everything was at the same level of energy, all would be stasis, there would be no change. How do you produce a living ecosystem that enables learning and progress? It would need different levels, and an organic way to move in between steps. Octaves are a natural technology to enable such a system.
What are octaves in the bigger picture of our life and development journey?
A familiar reference to octaves is through music, which as David points out, is a good descriptive analogy for the journey from physical, denser realms to the more energetic: “Imagine a long piece of string, and you shorten it by half (halve the mass), you double the rate of vibration; it’s a universal law. It’s a relationship between the level of vibration, energy and mass. As we change our vibration and go up the octaves, it's possible to increase consciousness.”
Since they represent an orderly progression along a development journey, each octave has a distinct purpose and knowledge — insights we need to learn before we can continue. Aviv compares the system to advancing through different levels of school: “We cannot move from elementary school to high school without actually completing elementary school; the same with moving from high school to university. We need to do whatever it is we're doing in the fullest possible way; the release from one octave to the next is a threshold reached by fully realizing the octave we are in.”
In other words, a caterpillar can’t become a butterfly until it fully completes being a caterpillar, and then a complete chrysalis.
Even with defined stages and a logical progression of learning, people describe the experience often called a “chrysalis” moment — an octave leap, with new intelligence and perceptions, in real time. A powerful flow of energy, a quickening, triggered by a connection or breakthrough that can happen anywhere, at any time, and transform the person and the circumstance.
Aviv describes such a chrysalis moment that unfolded in a most unlikely professional circumstance, and the natures of the experience that appeared to transform not just himself, but the circumstance and the people in it. Each one of us can create the inner ecology that will enable our own moments of octave leaps and connections with a cosmic source and the universal human.
Deepening in Evolutionary Mysteries
We continue our exploration of the many dimensions of octaves in “The Homo Universalis Project #9 – Deepening in Evolutionary Mysteries,” with Karen Heney and Kyriaki Nikandrou.
The conversation with Aviv took place soon after a long weekend gathering of the Epoch Journey network tracing the seven-fold Epoch throughout history, and the significance of the Indigo-Violet phase culmination in our world today.
As Aviv explains, the central ethos of the Epoch journey in this post-guru era is to be responsible for ourselves: “To become an agentic, self-arising, self-aligning, self-regulating, fully responsible adult is very much the temperament and the orientation that we propose to this transitional moment. It’s not a teaching situation, or a learning situation, or a healing situation, although there are profound learning and revelatory moments for each and every one of us, and there are many deep and moving healing moments.”
The guiding principle in this profound change is to metabolize a shared mutual inquiry about the process that's underway, where the value is in being the witnessing consciousness of our evolution. Along the way, we each seek to understand, heal and balance our own experience, struggles and ups and downs.
As Aviv, Karen and Kyriaki discover, there may be no map of meaning that can fully explain everything going on in the world, but we have lots of help in staying intact, agile and buoyant in our spiritual and developmental journeys. One of the ways we stay tethered in ourselves is through the study of universal principles, such as octaves. As Aviv says: “If we embody those principles, they begin to work in us, and reveal their further potency, because we’re no longer studying the principles, but rather the principles begin to work through us and use us to express the stream of intelligence of life.”
This conversation also reminds us of perhaps the most powerful assistance we could ever hope to have: the human soul, a natural part of our universal design. We show up in this life with the soul’s mission to keep us alive in the human model and to facilitate, orchestrate and help us navigate our earthly experience. The soul is our constant companion as we seek our highest purpose by bringing to life the qualities and unique configuration that we each are.
With a name like “Deepening in Evolutionary Mysteries,” it raises an obvious question: Why? If we’re already immersed in a meaningful life of growth and transformation, why would we want to go deeper? Aviv, Karen and Kyriaki find a lot of good reasons.
By deepening in our intention and pursuit of meaning, we build stability and a stronger foundation; expand inner space; and birth new sensitivities and capacities.
Deepening in evolutionary mysteries and the universal human is not building something new; it’s bringing to life and liberating capacities, sensitivities and new sense organs already latent in the human, not acquired from the outside.
Once we answer the “why” of deepening, we face the matter of “how.” Curiously, the art of the inquiry — asking questions of self and in conversation with others — is one of the main ways to deepen.
Another is making space — creating interior room for something new to appear. Karen describes a key perception: space doesn’t mean a void: “It is filling and creating space at the same time. It's what you don't want to have, what doesn't fit, that is no longer required — but you don't have a void. Deepening is also what you bring into the space that will allow, ultimately, more space and more connection and more of the inner flow.”
Our trip deep into the mysteries of evolution and the future has been an extraordinary journey of discovery, as Kyriaki appreciated: “This was like a journey through the universe and back; so many revelations. Deepening and self-authoring are very important: one of the great propulsions in the renaissance in human evolution was that we are born like a tabula rasa, and we can write and self-author our own lives. Also, there is a universal part, like gossamer within our soul, within our psyche, unique to each person. We can bring that to life, more to the surface, in service of the collective.”
We hope you’ve enjoyed this newsletter and brief look at two extraordinary conversations available on the Portals website. Please feel free to share with us your thoughts, insights and inspirations.
Patrick,
On behalf of the Portals team
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