I recently saw a recorded lecture given by Viktor Frankl, author of Man’s Search for Meaning, where he talked about recently taking up flight lessons. His instructor was next to him while they were flying, and he pointed out on the navigation map the airport they were headed for, which was due east on a straight path from their current coordinates. The instructor told him, “But we have a headwind from the north, and if we continue to fly straight at this level, we will end up south of our destination. So we must aim higher, northward, so that will place us where we need to be.”

Frankl pointed out that this is similar to how we must view humanity. We should not be interested in humanity as we perceive our species daily in society. We should picture humanity in the most positive and encouraging light, so that our aim can meet entropy and compensate, allowing us to lift humanity to where it needs to be. He pointed out that this is why it is better to be an optimist, since the optimist lifts humanity up and gives direction, whereas the pessimist only adds to humanity’s decline.

We live in an age of cynicism. In the last hundred years we have constructed several ways to destroy ourselves: nuclear war, biological war, the environmental crisis. And each of these existential threats has been wrapped inside a global economic system that rewards extraction over care, consumption over meaning, and profit over the flourishing of life. We watch as tyrants come to power and manipulate the social order for their own gain and control. Technology that was meant to connect us has instead produced a worldwide pandemic of personal isolation and loneliness. The depth we were supposed to have enshrined in our people and in our cultures from the countercultural movements appears to have all but diminished as corporations dictate what types of people and messages get put out to the public via television, streaming, publishing, music, art, and politics. For some reason, depth and high-minded calls for peace and personal evolution have been relegated as “uncool,” “outdated,” “hippy-minded,” “unpopular.”

And yet. Walk into any bookstore and watch the twenty-year-olds gravitating toward Thich Nhat Hanh and Alan Watts. Look at the resurgence of community gardens in abandoned urban lots from Detroit to Lisbon. Notice the millions of young people who marched for the climate in cities across every continent. Something is stirring. Something has been stirring for a while now, and it is getting louder.

There is a pattern of movements that have historically occurred and uplifted humanity and society in waves, followed by troughs, followed again by waves. We see this clearly when casting our present gaze at Western history, particularly the Transcendentalist movement led by Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. The next major wave did not occur for almost one hundred years when the Beatniks ushered in revolutionary ways of thinking, leading into the 1960s and 70s counterculture. It has now been fifty years, and a new wave is beginning. Only this time it is global.

The convergence of crises was given a name by French philosophers Anne-Brigitte Kern and Edgar Morin, who coined the term “polycrisis” in their 1993 book Terre-Patrie, a seminal work arguing for a new consciousness of planetary interdependence. Historian Adam Tooze popularized it in 2022; in 2023 the World Economic Forum’s Global Risks Report adopted it. A polycrisis is defined as any combination of three or more interacting systemic risks with the potential to cause a cascading, runaway failure of Earth’s natural and social systems.

And every polycrisis in history has planted the seeds of its own transcendence.

Transcendentalism was preceded by cultural disenchantment with Unitarian American rule, which opened up the American mindset to texts and philosophies of the East. By the 1830s the country was coming out of its worst financial crisis up until that point. Industrialization was on the march, and workers, women, and people of color were inspiring people like Thoreau to create his manifesto Civil Disobedience, which would go on to inspire India’s Independence movement, the American Civil Rights movement, and Mandela’s movement against South African Apartheid. From crisis came a body of ideas so powerful it reshaped the moral architecture of three continents over the next century.

The 1960s were preceded by the looming specter of nuclear holocaust, a population jaded by stifling conformity, and a war machine gearing up for battle in the Far East. From that pressure came the most explosive expansion of consciousness and creativity the modern West had ever seen: new music, new communal experiments, new visions of what human beings owed one another and the Earth. The world after that wave was unrecognizable from the world before it. There was no going back.

Today’s beginning wave has been preceded by an ecological crisis that threatens all future generations, a declining economic outlook and massive growth of income inequality, and a resurgence of fascistic manipulators working toward complete power and control. Add to this the severe and widespread loneliness a majority of people experience in this tech-driven moment, and we have the perfect storm of polycrisis, which, as we have seen, leads straight into another wave of human evolution.

But this time the wave is not contained to one country or one culture. A teenager in Jakarta and a retiree in Buenos Aires and a student in Bellingham, Washington are all breathing the same air of crisis and possibility. The polycrisis is planetary, and so the awakening will be planetary. Indigenous land defenders in the Amazon, youth climate strikers in Nairobi, mutual aid networks forming in the wreckage of hurricanes and wildfires across North America: these are not separate movements. They are the first tremors of a single seismic shift.

Remember, these evolutionary periods take society to a transcendent level that leaves the old world behind for good, even when the trough comes again. The waves of spiritual and cultural transformation leave an indelible and permanently shifted world in their wake. Looking at it this way, perhaps the wave and trough analogy becomes inadequate for describing the patterns of society’s evolution. Let us instead consider a spiral.

A spiral is shaped like a twisting metal spring, that looks like a wave and trough from the side, and from the front or back just looks like a circle. What it is, though, is a circling movement through three-dimensional space where each successive rotation ensures each present moment never reaches the same exact place as before, despite any patterns that seem to repeat. With this metaphor, we can view growth as an individual and society as a perpetual, forward-moving, ever-changing marvel that carries learned lessons and historical change with it along the way. Each new spiraling rotation plants the seeds that sprout in the next rotation’s garden, so ad infinitum.

We are in the turn of a new rotation right now. You can feel it in the exhaustion people have with performative culture, the hunger for something real and rooted and alive. You can feel it in the way strangers are beginning to look one another in the eye again at farmers’ markets and protest marches and community dinners, searching for the connection that no algorithm can deliver.

The current polycrisis is global, and is felt by all in varying countries on all continents. The project to adjust course to avoid ecological catastrophe requires coordinated effort and agreement of action from each nation at once. Economic inequality, along with the destruction of the environment by means of industrial production, have combined to awaken today’s youth to the need for questioning unfettered capitalism and the inherited and unquestioned supremacy of humankind over nature. And the vacuous spiritual depletion each person feels in a world where the community forum and meeting place has been usurped by Instagram and Facebook, and shallow representations of our culture are propped up to the top of the music charts and film theaters, is a clarion call and opening for spiritual and creative reemergence all at once.

Only this spiritual and creative reemergence is non-patriarchal and non-partisan. Our time and people do not call for more division, but an opening to every person as a family member in the human tribe. Being born as you are, skin color, ethnicity, sexuality, gender, level of wealth, is the root acceptance upon which today’s spirituality will be built. We are not interested in past interpretations of what it means to be spiritual. We are relinquishing patriarchy, homophobia, racism, hatred of other cultures, categorical judgment of our fellow beings. We are also awakening to our deep and ever-present connection with nature.

This is the spirituality the world has been waiting for without knowing it. Not a doctrine. Not a denomination. Not a leader on a stage telling you what to believe. A recognition, as old as the earliest human songs, that you are the Universe looking back at itself, and so is the person sitting next to you, and so is the river running through your town, and so is the child who will be born a hundred years from now into whatever world we leave behind.

What follows in these coming days, weeks, months, and years is a revolution of the self, and thus a tectonic shift of the whole of society. The seeds we plant today will see all future generations through and past whatever problems plague our world. Humanity is a gift to a Universe that wishes to be known. Awakening to that truth is one of the steps toward shifting our plane northward to adjust for the pessimistic headwinds of our time, so that we may lift our course higher in order to redefine what humanity is in order to match what humanity can be.

Aim high. Aim north. The headwinds have never been stronger, and neither have we.