Soul Searching

Reflections on lost souls, perpetual faith, choices, and a quantum leap into 'preferment.'

“The Society regrets to inform you that you are now officially classified as a lost soul.”

‘Preferment’

‘Send.’ I hit the button this week and sent a letter to make it official that I will retire from the University of Oslo on January 1, 2026. In that moment, a wave of possibility collapsed into a particular reality.

I’m making a conscious decision to scale back so I can move forward. I want to focus my energy on fractal approaches to scaling transformations to sustainability (FAST Sustainability) in society. I will enter “preferment” rather than “retirement” — preferred work, greater focus, and more time and space for fun.

It wasn’t an easy decision. I love teaching and research, and it’s been rewarding to collaborate with wonderful people from all over the world. Part of me would be happy to continue with my “everything, everywhere, all at once” approach to work, but a multiverse approach is no longer aligned with the difficult reality we are facing — a world where polar ice is melting while social polarization heats up.

It’s time for a different approach.

Destiny vs choice

To prepare for my “quantum leap” into preferment, I’ve been reading Connie Zweig’s The Inner Work of Age: Shifting from Role to Soul.

One of Zweig’s key points relates to an important shift in focus as we get older: “Our tasks now require us to move our attention from the exterior world to the interior one, from the ego’s role in society to the soul’s deeper purpose.”

Hmm, what is my soul’s deeper purpose? To discover this, I decided to ponder it while meditating, running, and cleaning out clutter.

I started my “soul searching” by decluttering an old file cabinet with lots of memories, including newspaper clippings about climate change from the days before the internet. One article from February 1989 tells us to Plan Now for Climate Warming, Scientists Say; another from April 1990 warns that warming is underway: Team of Scientists Sees Substantial Warming of Earth.

I found an article written in October 1989 by Donella Meadows, The greenhouse effect: left, right and center, where she listed seven conclusions that around 99% of scientists already agreed with back then, including:

7. Only a small amount of climate change is inevitable. The greenhouse effect is talked about too much as a matter of destiny and too little as a matter of choice.

More than 35 years later, this remains an important point. The changes we are experiencing now were not inevitable or destiny — they are the results of previous choices. We are in a decade that matters, and what we choose to do now will have implications for decades, centuries, and millennia to come. No pressure here!

Lost Souls

As I dug through files and piles, I came across a letter sent to my father in 1986 by a religious organization in Philadelphia called The Society for the Propagation of the Faith. He had left the Catholic Church as a young man, and in 1966 my grandmother paid $100 (equivalent to about $992 today) to this organization for his perpetual enrollment in the Society.

The letter informs him that he is officially classified as a lost soul, and then it berates him for steadfastly rejecting the grace of Almighty God and remaining outside the fold. And then it gets mean:

We endeavored to transfer your case to the Society of St. Jude (which specializes in hopeless cases) but they declined to accept you. They said that some cases are more hopeless than others.

The Society considered refunding my grandmother her money, but then rationalized that “she would only waste the money on some other bizarre cause.” After explaining that his name is being deleted from all prayers in their 749 mission areas, the letter ends with some good will:

We hope that this sudden release will not thrust you further into the clutches of satan. Perhaps your good mother will light a candle for you now and then.

The 1966 letter to my grandmother explains that Perpetual Members, living or deceased, receive the spiritual benefits of remembrance in 15,000 masses annually, and in the prayers, good works, and sacrifices of over 200,000 missionaries.

Perpetual for this Society turned out to be 20 years. What I hadn’t noticed the first time I read the letter, years ago, was that the enrollment was for “Mr. and Mrs. James Edward O’Brien and Family.”

In other words, I was (or perhaps still am?) a member of The Society for the Perpetuation of the Faith, without knowing it.

Reflections

What does this have to do with my role-to-soul quantum leap? This week I’ve been reflecting on the significance of these letters.

1. First, I’m thinking about how challenging it can be to deliberately step out of a group, an identity, a mindset, a paradigm, or an institution (including academia).

This is true for those who leave the group or paradigm, but also for those who remain within. Whether it’s a religious, economic, cultural, or scientific paradigm, it’s easy to conclude that “nonbelievers” and “leavers” are lost souls, misinformed, irrational, immoral, or just making stupid decisions. To have an open mind and ask questions, rather than give answers, takes courage.

2. Second, I’m wondering how many of us are part of a Society that we never consciously signed up for. We tend to accept social and cultural norms as a given, rather than consider whether and how they relate to what we deeply care about — not just for ourselves, but for all, including nature and future generations.

I didn’t grow up with religion, but did grow up with plenty of love, laughter, and kindness. My mother says that my father laughed when he received the letter, as I did the first time I read it. But the letter seems less funny now, when many are no longer concerned with transcending ideologies and -isms and instead we see more support for cruelty, hate, and “othering.” Living with difference and diversity takes kindness.

3. Third, in terms of my soul’s deeper purpose, I’m thinking that I do, in fact, want to work for the perpetuation of the faith. Not faith as in a strong belief in the doctrines of a religion, but faith as confidence that we can transform ourselves and our societies for a just and sustainable world. Not because it is probable, but because it is possible.

Quantum leap

Maybe I’ll keep a bit of my Everything everywhere all at once style, after all. The movie, with the same name, draws on quantum concepts like entanglement, superposition, and the multiverse, and it has an important message for us all. Google AI, of all things, summarizes it nicely:

The central lesson … is to embrace kindness and find meaning in the face of life's chaos and perceived meaninglessness, demonstrating that even in an indifferent universe, love and compassion offer profound significance. The film suggests that by choosing to see the good in others and accepting life's complexities, particularly within family relationships, one can navigate the overwhelming possibilities of existence and foster genuine connections.

It comes down to a matter of choice, and our choices matter. Where do we want to go? Who do we want to be? What do we want to do?

We can choose to contribute to a society that propagates not faith, but the principles of transformative change for a just and sustainable world:

• ensuring equity and justice;

• embracing pluralism and inclusion;

• fostering respectful and reciprocal human-nature relationships; and

• promoting adaptive learning and action.

Alternatively, we could choose to label those who are different from us as hopeless cases and accept the future as destiny.

I would prefer that we retire hopeless choices and instead consciously, collectively, collaboratively, and courageously generate quantum social change!

Your paradigm is so intrinsic to your mental process that you are hardly aware of its existence, until you try to communicate with someone with a different paradigm.
— Donella Meadows