I am thrilled and honored to announce that I will be teaching a 7-part class for Shift Network, Embrace the Dark Night to Become the Phoenix Rising. We are living in terrifying times and I know we are all suffering intensely the horrors and ordeals that are exploding everywhere.

As I write this, fires are burning along the U.S. west coast, Antarctica is melting faster than even the doomsayers predicted, the Coronavirus pandemic is still out of control and millions of people worldwide are facing economic collapse.

Given all we are going through, it’s easy to run into the sordid embrace of magical thinking—as we can see from the idiotic and dangerous proliferation of conspiracy theories—or to fall into exactly the kind of nihilistic despair that increases the danger already afflicting us.

What I want to offer at this moment is a way through that is neither grounded in fantasy or tainted by the pessimism that saps will and robs us of the kind of rugged hope that we...

For thirty years now, I have believed three related truths; that the exploding global crisis we are obviously in is, in essence, an evolutionary crisis, on whose outcome depends the future of the human race and a great deal of the natural world; that this evolutionary crisis is a mystical crisis with two phases, that of the dark night process and the potential Birth that it makes possible of an embodied divine humanity; that the birthing force of this new humanity is Sacred Activism, the marriage of profound and universal spiritual stamina, faith, passion, compassion, and urgent inspired wise action in every realm of Earth life.

Everything I have done and written has been dedicated to this vision and I hold passionately and doggedly to it because I know it isn’t my vision but the one I have been entrusted with to live, honor, make available and protect, whatever the difficulty and resistance that inevitably arise in world drunk on scientific fundamentalism, cheap new age...