Earth Initiation and Breaking the Binary
How Civilization Shift follows Astronomical Realizations (Or why the Black Hole at the Center of the Milky Way matters)
About 500 years ago, and for a good long time in Western European consciousness before that, the Earth sat at the center of the Universe.
A surprising amount of people still believe the Earth is flat, but I haven’t yet met any alive human who contends that the sun revolves around the Earth, and not the other way around.
But back in 1500, at the dusk of the “dark ages”, it was fact that the Earth was the center of everything. After all, from our vantage point here on Earth, the sun, moon and stars do seem to revolve around us. However, not everything in this mysterious universe is so it seems.
In 1512, using a then advanced form of mathematical astronomy, Nicolaus Copernicus first proposed his theory of Heliocentricity, or idea that the Earth (and other planets), in fact revolved around the sun. It took a little while to catch on, but within years, nearly all of Europe accepted Heliocentricity. The sun was now at the center, and this perspective shift, at the deepest cosmological level, heralded the Renaissance; the explosion of art, science, ideas and culture on whose tidal wave of eventual modernity we were born into.
This era has been marked by Solar Consciousness or and flowering of Soul in the Western world.
I first heard about Soul from reading Bill Plotkin’s seminal book, Soulcraft, and subsequently spent the better part of a decade courting my soul through an at times otherworldly (and at other times, just confusing, and extremely painful), initiation process. I eventually came to lead Initiation work, and still do.
The Sol (sun in Latin), and Soul were at the center of my micro and macro cosmology.. or so I thought.
In the 20th century, Astronomists, most notably Edwin Hubble (yeah, the telescope named guy), begin to seriously consider that.. oh geez, we’re perhaps not just in a solar system, but maybe there is a even greater organizing system in this Universe - the Galaxy.
And so these smart dudes (and a few non-dick owning folks) slowly figured out that we in fact, were in a galaxy, the Milky Way, which you can look into the disk of on most clear and dark nights.
However, it wasn’t until the 1970’s, with the invention of a new form of radio telescope, that we realized, oh geez, the Milky Way has a center, and it’s center is a massive BLACK HOLE - 4 million times as dense and gravity powered as our sun.
And guess what - we humans, our Earth, our Sun.. we all revolve around this super-massive black hole (named Sag. A for it’s relative position in the Sagittarius constellation) - and we always have.
And only 2 years ago, with the unified power of over 100 different telescopes from around the Earth did we take our first photo of Sag. A - the true astro/cosmological center of our World.
And so, if the last time such an astro/cosmological shift heralded the Renaissance, an epic and eventual planet wide Soul flowering, what implications does this “discovery” of the Black Hole at the Center of our Galaxy hold for us here on Earth, amidst this wild time of convergent crisis?
About the same time 100 unified telescopes were taking a photo of Sag. A, I came in contact with Bruce Lyon, a founder of a few Mystery Schools, most notably The Shamballa School, Highden Temple, and ISTA.
I was amidst a full blown dark night of.. something.. and feeling pretty sunk, given I had previously spent 10 years on the Initiatory path, came out the otherside, and was feeling really grounded in offering my medicine to the world. (My teacher and elder Francis Weller, in consulting on a year-long men’s initiation journey I co-led last year, expressed that, “Initiation is about the installation’s one medicine, so it can be offered to the community.”)
Meeting Bruce two years ago helped to orient me to a deeper cosmology than just “Soul at the center of it all,” and understand that perhaps there were Initiations beyond that of Soul.. and perhaps that was what was causing my otherwise pretty little life to go so seemingly awry.
Two years later and I’m daily humbled by what this next step of the path has become, and so it was with such pleasure and gratitude that I got to speak recently in a 1.5 hour live interview with Bruce about this next wave of what he see’s as an Earth-scale Initiation, one straight into the that blackhole center of this galaxy.
The conversation was so rich, and touches on so many of the mythic themes that are and will be explored here, that I wanted to share the conversation with you all.
Additionally, I wanted to share that Ian Mackenzie, Julia Maryanska and myself (the team behind our documentary film, The Village of Lovers) are hosting two free upcoming webinars on the power of love, sexuality and conscious relationships to become the warp and weft of community.
These webinars represent the distillation of our 10 shared years of relational village study at Tamera and beyond and feel to us, like some of the most important conversations to be having right now.
The first one is happening this Tuesday, May 7th, at 12 pm PST:
And the next one, a week later, on May 14th, at 12pm PST:
Both webinars are completely free - but you need to register:
May 7th: BEYOND JUST US REGISTRATION LINK
May 14th: THE THIRD PATHWAY REGISTRATION LINK
We’d love to be in dialogue with you there!
And stay tuned, in coming weeks, more regular writings will again flow forth From the Dragon Heart.
And as always, I’d love to hear from you, via a comment, or direct email. And please do subscribe and share with your kin. Let’s weave the more beautiful world together.
~ John