Awakening Planetary Consciousness

Path Notes # 23

“Orbiting Earth in the spaceship, I saw how beautiful our planet is. Let us preserve and increase this beauty, not destroy it.”

Yuri Gagarin

A couple of years ago I was invited to meet with the senior representative of someone I’ll call “a well-known space entrepreneur.” They wanted to develop a training program to prepare citizen astronauts to become ambassadors of a new planetary consciousness.

You really cannot make these things up!

In this post, I’m going to examine how we might catalyze the kind of planetary consciousness that has been called the ‘Overview Effect’ - the awakening experience described by astronauts seeing Earth from space - right here on Earth.

Globalism is on the ropes right now.

The heady and optimistic days of post-WWII global institution-building (UN, Bretton Woods, WHO, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights) have given way to suspicion, fragmentation, polarization, and the erosion of shared global frameworks.

In their zeal to build integrated global systems, many post-war leaders failed to bring their domestic publics along. There was an assumption that rising prosperity, peace dividends, and the self-evidence of global interdependence would speak for themselves. They underestimated how unevenly the benefits would be distributed, how dislocating the transitions would feel, and how quickly people would interpret global cooperation as something done to them rather than for them or with them. This disconnect has created fertile ground for resentment, conspiracy, and anti-globalist mobilization.

Its opponents – both the nationalist populists (who reject globalism as a threat to sovereignty and traditionalist identities) and the post-modern decolonialists (who critique neoliberal globalism as Western hegemony) - form a functionally convergent horseshoe spectrum. They arise from vastly different value systems, yet both help to undermine the fragile unity of a coherent global order.

And let’s not forget the shape-shifting servants of schismogenesis – from sophisticated state actors to deluded conspiracy theorists - who weaponize the very real challenges of globalism to serve their own narrow interests and impoverished worldviews.

But I don’t know how to love this world without being some kind of globalist.

I’m not talking about free-markets and the WTO.

I’m talking about something like planetarity.

Planetarity?

The term was originally coined by post-colonial scholar Gayatri Spivak¹ as a way to describe a worldview and ethical stance that recognizes Earth as a single, interconnected community, inviting humans to act with humility, relational responsibility, and care for the planet and all its inhabitants beyond narrow national, cultural, or egoic boundaries.

It’s something like a deeply felt-sense of shared belonging to the living Earth.

Because deep down, we all know that we’re one planet. We just don’t feel it.

And that brings me back to our ‘space entrepreneur’.

I know!

Space entrepreneurs haven’t exactly established themselves as the most trustworthy or socially grounded global citizens recently.

But the meeting had an interesting premise. How do you prepare people – before they go to space – to be ambassadors of planetarity when they return?

At one level it’s an absurd notion. It’s a bit like asking how would you prepare a group of eager tech-bros to become ambassadors of the psychedelic renaissance before their first ayahuasca experience.

What could possibly go wrong?!!

But as the meeting progressed, it was clear that they weren’t looking to cultivate an ambassadorial skillset. They seemed curious about what they could do on earth to increase the likelihood that people experienced the consciousness-shifting overview effect when they went to space.

The Overview Effect?

Baha’i prophet Baha’u’llah famously wrote that “the earth is but one country and mankind its citizens.”

Multiple astronauts have awakened to the same consciousness-shifting realization after viewing the earth from space.

Author and space philosopher Frank White has spent decades interviewing them about their experiences and found that some two thirds seem to experience something he calls the Overview Effect². It’s the experience of seeing Earth from space and realizing, in a single instant, that everything is connected and fragile - one planet, one people, one destiny. White describes it as a shift from intellectual knowledge to experiential knowing of Earth as a unified, interconnected, fragile system - moving from seeing ourselves as separate to experiencing ourselves as part of a whole.

‘I went up an American and I came down a citizen of the world’ wrote Edgar Mitchell after two moonwalks with Apollo 14.

Mitchell literally went to the moon as a hard-nosed engineer and astronaut, had a mystical experience of cosmic unity, and then dedicated the rest of his life to investigating consciousness and interconnectedness through his Institute for Noetic Sciences. It’s another great example of paradoxical unintended consequences…a space race fuelled by competitive nationalism helped birth a truly globalist ethic.

One of the most compelling aspects of the Overview Effect is that it consistently unfolds for people who are not spiritually oriented.

Astronauts tend to be highly rational technologists who are selected precisely for their analytical thinking, emotional steadiness, and practical problem-solving abilities. And yet the experience of seeing Earth from space reliably catalyzes what can only be described as a profound spiritual awakening. These are people trained to maintain composure in extreme conditions, to think in terms of systems and procedures, to trust instruments over intuition. But confronted with the vista of Earth floating in space, about two thirds of them report experiences that sound remarkably like those described by mystics and contemplatives across history: a dissolution of separation, an overwhelming sense of unity, tears of recognition, and a fundamental reorientation of values and purpose.

The Overview Effect suggests that certain perceptual shifts can bypass our cognitive defenses and ideological frameworks entirely, breaking through even the most fortified rational mindsets to reveal something essential about our place in the larger web of life.

Of course, we already have spiritual and philosophical traditions that cultivate precisely this kind of worldview - multiple Indigenous cosmologies, Buddhist teachings on interdependence, deep ecology, systems thinking. But these traditions largely attract and shape those already born within or inclined toward such orientations - people who arrive with some openness to non-dualistic or holistic perspectives. Part of what makes the Overview Effect intriguing to me is that it’s not converting cultural insiders, universalist hippies or mystics who were already halfway there. It’s cracking open hard-nosed pragmatists, military pilots, and engineers - people who might roll their eyes at a meditation retreat or a lecture on interconnectedness. The experience bypasses their skepticism entirely, not through argument or philosophy, but through direct perception.

Which raises a provocative question:

How might we catalyze similar awakenings here on Earth, without leaving the planet?

What earth-based practices or experiences might be powerful enough to break through the rational defenses of those least likely to seek out transformation - yet who might be most crucial to reaching if we’re to navigate the complexity of our planetary moment?

What if we just looked at pictures?

The founder of Whole Earth Catalog (and later a catalyst for Earth Day), Stewart Brand, famously printed buttons and posters asking, “Why haven’t we seen a photograph of the whole Earth yet?” When NASA finally released the image, he plastered it everywhere - on catalogs, flags, and flyers - believing that if people could see the planet as a single, borderless organism, they might start to act like citizens of it.

It was, in its way, an early experiment in mass consciousness engineering: trying to evoke the Overview Effect without the rockets.

I’m certain that seeing those photographs has helped to shift something in our collective awareness. But it hasn’t catalyzed global awakening.

Looking at pictures – no matter how beautiful – is insufficient.

Astronauts do far more than see Earth from beyond its gravitational boundaries: they undergo an experiential arc that mirrors classical initiations, beginning with a selective call and rigorous preparation, passing through real risk and a death-rebirth threshold at launch, receiving a moment of vision in orbit, and then facing the profound challenges of return and lifelong integration.

The Overview Effect is not a simple perceptual shift. It is the culminating moment of an initiatory process. And without the right kind of transformative learning container, it risks – like any peak experience – dissipation, distortion or even self-inflation.

Overview-Effect Analogues

There are all kinds of experiences that consistently generate Overview-Effect-like transformations by activating similar underlying mechanisms. They include extended travel and cross-cultural immersions, time spent in wild places, eco-awakening experiences, the use of psychedelic sacraments, contemplative practice, near-death experiences, VR simulations, systems scholarship, parenthood, collective solidarity, a wide range of altered states (deep flow, weightlessness etc.) aesthetic immersion, and mystical or religious practice. Across contexts, these experiences combine awe, expanded connection, ego softening, moral widening, and systems awareness to produce enduring shifts in perception, values, and purpose. They are embodied and visceral, they anchor insights into lived experience and create a profound reorientation of self, world, and meaning.

Put them all together and you’d have one hell of a gap year!

Or the basis for a contextually-adaptable initiatory education curriculum.

Or the core practices for a planetary meta-religion.

But what if you bundled them all into one short, potent initiatory experience?

Initiatory Mysteries

For well over a thousand years, the Eleusinian Mysteries were ancient Greece’s central initiatory journey centered on Demeter and Persephone and the cycles of grain, harvest, death, and rebirth³. They involved a ritual descent into the underworld and were foundational to Hellenic civilization. To participate, initiates underwent a period of ritual preparation, learning and purification, culminating in a multi-day ceremony that included drinking the kykeon, fasting, walking the Sacred Way and witnessing the revelation in the Telesterion– the vast, sacred initiation hall capable of holding thousands of initiates where the climactic rites were performed. The experience was widely described by initiates as revealing the soul’s immortality and banishing the fear of death

The Mysteries were open to pretty much anyone who spoke Greek; slaves, women, and foreigners were initiated alongside every class of male citizen, creating rare cross-cutting bonds in an otherwise rigidly stratified society. And while much is still unknown - the central revelation remained genuinely secret for millennia – it was clearly a consciousness-shifting experience that retained a culturally generative potency for centuries.

Theodesius I – the last ruler to govern both halves of the Roman Empire – banned the Mysteries around 390CE and soon afterwards, the temple/sanctuary at Eleusis was destroyed. The initiatory descent into the underworld and its regenerative wisdom were exiled to the margins of cultural and spiritual memory - a pattern that has been repeated in the suppression of Indigenous, gnostic and place-based knowledge systems ever since.

The fertile initiatory darkness of the underworld was recast⁴ as a place of eternal damnation, and our scriptural traditions have been focused on ascent and heading for the light ever since!

Perhaps one of the closest contemporary Eleusinian analogues is the Hajj.

While obligatory for those who can manage it, performing the Hajj is not required to become a full member of the Muslim community. But it’s profoundly transformative for those who undertake it. As a ritual journey to the Kaaba, the cosmic centre and axis mundi of the Islamic world, it orients pilgrims within a vast moral and mythic geography. Moving in synchrony with millions of others, stripped of markers of class, status, or nationality, pilgrims enact a powerful vision of human unity and equality. Through its choreography of circling, walking, gathering, and standing at sacred sites, the Hajj dissolves ordinary identities and re-centres individuals within a global community and a sacred cosmology. We could say it creates a kind of “horizontal overview effect” that expands one’s sense of belonging, perspective, and place in the world. (I don’t want to overdo the analogy…there are obviously some important differences⁵)

It probably goes without saying, the rites of Eleusis were something quite distinct from a rite of passage⁶. They were not linked to developmental stages or the transition between social roles. They weren’t required for full citizenship or adulthood. The same is true of the Hajj. It’s important to distinguish adolescent rites of passage from the broader field of initiatory experience that has nothing to do with social status. Initiations aren’t about becoming a new kind of person in the eyes of the community, but about becoming a new kind of self in relation to the world. Eleusis offered precisely this: a symbolic descent that reconfigured perception and belonging. The Hajj functions similarly - a transformative re-centering of identity within a vast moral, communal, and cosmological field.

So here’s the thought experiment my meeting left me with.

What would it look like to channel some of the resources, creativity and energy that we’re putting into getting off the planet into building a living temple for planetary awakening? A secular mystery school where people might choose to undergo a modern initiatory passage into Earth citizenship.

To create a terrestrial equivalent of the Overview Effect that might awaken planetary consciousness and deepen a sense of kinship, connectedness, reverence and inter-generational responsibility towards the greater Earth community.

Eleusis 2.0

We know how to do this!

Across history, nearly every civilization has built physical spaces designed to elicit awe, reverence, and a felt alignment with its deepest values – stunning cathedrals, temples, synagogues and mosques, the pyramids of Egypt and Mesoamerica, and the mounds, medicine wheels, malokas, henges and earthworks build by first peoples all over the earth. Carefully calibrated structures that tuned the human psyche toward particular forms of beauty, ethics, and cosmology in ways that shaped perception and identity.

Places like Disneyland or Efteling - whatever else one may think of them – also construct carefully curated, psychologically coherent, aesthetically integrated lifeworlds.

Built in a suitable jurisdiction⁷ a contemporary telesterion would be the centrepiece of an initiation complex precisely designed to open the psyche and bring a new level of consciousness and connectedness to our ecological work, our social innovations, our regenerative business aspirations, our permaculture initiatives, our various forms of activism, dreaming, entrepreneurship and collective action towards a flourishing future.

I can imagine something that combines design elements from the Eden Project, Burning Man, Cirque du Soleil, the Vegas Sphere, Auroville, the Deep Space exhibit at Ars Electronica, Singapore’s Cloud Forest, teamLab Planets, or other next-generation VR environments that blend architecture, technology, narrative, immersive multisensory design, the psychology of ritual, the natural world and improvisational dramaturgy in ways that are consciousness shaping. Living biomes, gardens and seamlessly integrated wild spaces. A grand planetary chamber…a 360° immersive dome that tells the universe story. VR that weaves seamlessly into real biomes – that might incorporate spatial audio that responds to breath or movement, holographic and projection-mapped storytelling, viscerally accurate simulations of Earth from orbit and opportunities to experience weightlessness and movement through space. Vigil sanctuaries – cave-like chambers, forest clearings, and night environments attuned to the incubation of deep dreaming and the subconscious…contemporary enkoimeteria. Opportunities and spaces for extended periods of true solitude while also experiencing the profound communitas of a journey with a global cohort. A literal underworld experience where participants pass through a multisensory descent passage - architecturally, emotionally, and ritually designed to dismantle habitual identity structures. A planetary Council Hearth – circular architecture optimized for deep listening, vulnerability, and moral imagination.

Everything designed to help initiates to not only see and marvel at our shared home but to viscerally experience their own deep belonging as a living face of its animacy, its wild intelligence – its sentience.

Of course such a facility, no matter how stunning and immersive, can only be the background for a deeply deliberate transformative learning journey. Like any truly initiatory experience, the arc of ritual design would necessarily include a perspective shift - spatial, temporal, or cultural - that lets participants see their lives and world from a radically different vantage point; awe-inducing stimuli that open them through beauty, vastness, and the sublime; embodied immersion that makes insight sensory and lived; boundary dissolution that softens egoic and cultural edges; and a revelatory encounter with the Other…the more than human, the sacred, the ecological, the cultural, or the mythic.

In this vision, that encounter would begin with the global cohort itself: a group intentionally composed as a microcosm of humanity, racially, culturally, religiously, geographically, and economically diverse. Months of preparation would scaffold the process - personal, communal, and eco-cultural study; somatic and psychological training; reflection, research, and ritual - laying the groundwork for the delicate balance of emotional safety and existential risk that transformation requires. The revelatory phase would unfold in the contemporary telesterion, where a week or more of immersive ritual, awe, mythic or cosmological framing, potential entheogenic experiences and other boundary-softening practices would lead toward a profoundly meaningful experience of revelation and deep connectedness.

This arc might culminate in a covenant of caretaking, a vow of planetary connectedness, devotion and responsibility that translates expanded perspective into service. And then comes the long work - perhaps lifelong - of ritual re-entry and integration, practicing what it means to live, love, work and create…to tend family and community…from within such a commitment, striving to serve as a quiet beacon and living model of planetary consciousness in a world still shaped by separation and polarization.

Sounds great eh?

But we’ve built all kinds of lifeworlds and theme parks before….many with noble aspirations.

And at the end of the day, you exit through the gift shop and carry on with your life as before.

It’s reasonable to ask whether I’m simply imagining a kind of very expensive, elitist, new-agey feel good festival experience. Because the initiatory hunger so viscerally felt by the children of modernity has manifested in all kinds of liminoid experiences and pseudo rites of passage that that end up buttressing spiritual materialism, self-delusion, continuing emptiness, predatory expropriation and the reinforcement of the isolated personae they purport to reincorporate back into the fabric of creation.

It’s a critical question.

Like any mystery school, such a venture could only be an expression of the consciousness from which it emerged and of those currently tending to it. Without moral and ethical scaffolding, humility, wisdom, the presence of true elders, a coherent framework of developmental maturation and a fierce accountability to the vision and purpose of such an initiative, a modern telesterion could easily turn into a dystopian and coercive spiritual theme park.

And the truth is…none of this requires expensive spectacle.

Human beings have been undergoing profound initiatory transformation for millennia without architectural marvels, immersive technology, or Cirque-level design. Some of the deepest awakenings arise in a hut, a forest clearing, a monastery cell, or the quiet anonymity of urban service. People come to planetary consciousness through spiritual discipline, wilderness vigils, devotional practice, caregiving, frontline solidarity, or the raw humility of tending others at the edge of life and death.

These transformations require little money and no fanfare.

But in a world where a significant proportion of humanity is shaped by digital saturation, engineered experience, and entertainment-scale aesthetics, it is naïve to ignore the cultural grammar people are already fluent in. A deliberately crafted, awe-saturated environment is not necessary for awakening - but it might be a powerful, accessible on-ramp, especially for those who might not otherwise seek depth.

Coming Home

Maybe this is the part where I have to loosen my grip on the daydream that some gleaming future temple, some architecturally stunning Telesterion 2.0, will be the thing that finally initiates us into planetary maturity. Maybe - if Eleusis has anything left to teach us - we remember that the Mysteries were not just a place.

They were an archetypal pattern: preparation, descent, dissolution, revelation, return.

A choreography of dying into a larger life.

A ritual technology for revelation and remembrance.

And if that’s true, then each of us already dwells within a field ripe with Mystery.

Every tradition, religion, every institution, every festival, every school, every field station, every park, every dinner table can be re-rooted in the living earth, and expanded or repurposed towards the great work of planetary metamorphosis. Small telesteria dedicated to helping one another descend, see, and rise carrying a different quality of attention.

We don’t need everyone to be an astronaut!

We need to tend the developmental and initiatory edges of the ecosystems, communities and lifeworlds we already inhabit.

Such work - quiet, patient, insistent - is how planetary consciousness actually spreads. Through the slower journey of inscendence: turning inward and downward into the living strata of relationship, memory, land, lineage, grief, and beauty until the boundaries soften and the world begins to speak through us again.

It’s not transcendence or escape.

It’s rooting and homecoming.

If the Overview Effect is a sudden shattering of the illusion of separateness from above, then its Earth-based analogue may be a gradual remembering-from-below: the realization that we are grown from this planet, composed of its minerals, carried by its weather, held in its gravity, braided into its story.

We’re part of the earth’s own emergent consciousness.

The next critical chapter of the human journey will be written not by those who flee the Earth for higher ground, but by those who can open themselves to the tangled intimacy of belonging and responsibility.

I’m not suggesting that we should close the door on space technologies and travel.

I think it has enormous value in its own right. And I’m open to the late Stephen Buehner’s speculation that space travel may be the living Earth’s way of extending life and its creative processes beyond the planet, with humanity serving as the planet’s own vector into the cosmos.

But I also think it’s imperative to learn and grow our way into the kinds of consciousness and culture that might live together here worthily and beautifully.

So perhaps the real experiment is not whether we can build a modern Eleusis - though I still think we should - but whether we can become the kind of people who would know how to inhabit it. People capable of carrying awe without inflation. People capable of turning vision into service. People willing to apprentice themselves to the patient, imperfect, communal labour of co-tending a planetary culture into being.

The Mysteries have always been less about what happens inside the temple than about who we become when we leave it.

And that is the task before us now.

To make our lives - our communities, our callings, our corners of the world - into small but potent containers that can support initiatory ripening and developmental maturation.

To help one another cross the perilous threshold.

To awaken, again and again, to ourselves, to each other, to the living Earth, and to the fragile, astonishing possibility that we might yet grow into a species worthy of the planet that birthed us.

And to midwife the deeply rooted planetary consciousness we’re going to need as we navigate the next chapter of the earth story.

And every one of us has a part to play in this story.

Still shooting for the moon!

Julian

p.s. If you haven’t watched it, here’s a link to Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield’s recording of Space Oddity from the International Space Station. It’s well worth five minutes of your life!

1. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, one of the most influential figures in postcolonial studies and a foundational voice in feminist and subaltern theory, publicly distanced herself from the contemporary decolonial movement in the early 2010s, arguing that what passed as “decolonization” risked becoming a performative mantra that reproduced the very binaries and exclusions it sought to undo. For Spivak, the rhetoric of decolonization too often collapsed into identity claims and institutional branding, rather than sustained epistemic and political transformation.

2. Frank White also distinguishes two related but broader categories of experience. The Copernican Effect refers to the cognitive shift that comes from deeply internalizing the fact that Earth is not the centre of the universe - an expansion of perspective that repositions humanity within a vast cosmic context. The Universal Effect goes further still, describing a deep, often awe-filled recognition of one’s participation in the larger unfolding of the universe itself, beyond planetary or even solar-system identity.

3. The entire initiatory arc moved through archetypal territory that cultures have consistently coded as ‘feminine’: receptivity, dissolution, gestation in darkness, cyclical rather than linear time, embodied rather than transcendent knowing.

4. Both the English word Hell and the Norse Hel derive from Proto-Germanic *haljō meaning “concealed place, the underworld,” ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *kel- (”to cover, conceal”). Early Christian texts used Hebrew Sheol (place of the dead) and Greek Hades for the underworld. Christian missionaries to Germanic peoples appropriated the existing Old English word hel to describe the concept of damnation, despite the original Germanic term referring to a neutral underworld - a continuation of life elsewhere rather than a place of punishment. This semantic shift from regenerative underworld (as in Persephone’s descent or the seed in dark earth) to a realm of eternal punishment mirrors the broader Christian suppression of cyclical death-rebirth cosmologies. The transformation represents not just religious conversion but linguistic and semantic colonization: taking indigenous words for natural processes of returning to earth and weaponizing them with threat and judgment. It’s the ultimate dissociative move - split off from half of reality and call it evil.

5. The Hajj is a theological pilgrimage with a doctrinal core that commemorates historical and prophetic events. Eleusis was an initiatory mystery with an experiential core – likely amplified by the use of entheogens in the kykeon – that centered on ecological processes. And while both were/are profoundly egalitarian, the role of the Divine Feminine are wildly distinct. In some ways the Eleusinian Mysteries were something like the Hajj crossed with Burning Man, overseen by a priestly lineage that included both men and women in high ritual roles.

6. There is much talk in the contemporary rites of passage movement that stresses the importance of such ritualized transition in healthy human development. But the movement is filled with a mixture of valid, alluring and misguided perspectives - if you’re interested, I’ve written about it in detail here.

7. Switzerland, the Netherlands, Colorado, Costa Rica or a domain of tribal sovereignty all seem like potential locations