Co-Creating the Third Attractor
How do we create a better world? A teaching by John Churchill.
Created via Claude based off a Dr. John Churchill podcast transcript. Edited by Tucker Walsh.
Inspired by a conversation with Daniela Bomatter on the question: How do we create a better world?
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The Setup: Two Attractors and a Missing Third
The concept of “two attractors” (proposed by Daniela as the dialogue theme) rests on the premise that the world appears to be gravitating toward two futures.
One is authoritarian — a technocratic control system that promises order at the cost of freedom. The other is chaos and collapse — fragmentation, dissolution, the entropy of meaning itself. For many people watching civilizational events unfold, it feels like those are the only options.
But right here, right now — where are those attractors? They aren’t here. What they actually are — both of them — is stories. Stories have a cognitive dimension — certain ways of thinking — and then they are wrapped in imagery. The imagery is what makes them attractive. Even dystopian, fear-saturated imagery creates gravitational pull. So the question of the third attractor is not primarily a policy question or an ideas question. It is a question about story, imagery, and the imaginal realm itself.
Why Good Ideas Aren’t Enough
In many ways, we already know what needs to happen. If you go into the libraries of any serious thinker working at the evolutionary edge — the answers are there. The cognitive component of the third attractor largely exists. But the cognitive component does not make something attractive. The technocratic dystopia has been fed relentlessly — through media, technology, decades of imagery. Chaos and collapse get fed every day in the news cycle. The third attractor has been poorly articulated, poorly resourced, and — critically — never charged at the imaginal level.
The Missing Cosmology
The integral, metamodern, and evolutionary spiritual communities have made enormous contributions. But there is a significant blind spot: the loss of cosmology.
Most people in these communities awakened out of modernity or postmodernity — awakening to the ground of being, to the evolutionary drive, to systemic and meta-systemic perception. All necessary. But the awakening happened from the heart up. The lower three notes — the ones thrown out with modernity’s bathwater — remained offline. Three colors are missing all the way through the developmental stack. And what those missing colors represent is a living, structured cosmology: the sacred dimensions of reality, the subtle realms, the ancestral field, the soul-level reality of what a planet actually is.
Without that cosmology, spirituality gets reduced to psychology — a quadrant, a line of development. And the danger of making it a psychology is that you lose the battlefield. You lose a sense of the mission that we are here to serve.
Concretely, this means understanding that the subtle realms — heavens, hells, the imaginal dimensions — are real structures, not merely psychological metaphors. Because we no longer believe these realms are real, we haven’t been able to clean them out. The tissues of the planet are gunked up with a vast accumulation of unprocessed karma.
The Third Attractor Is Already Here
The perennial traditions describe a technology of manifestation in which cultures are designed and already operating in the interior before they crystallize outward into the manifest world. The direction is not just ascent — it is descent and opening into matter. This reframes everything. The third attractor is not something we need to build from scratch. It is already operational in the soul-realm, in the Sambhogakaya. It just hasn’t yet managed to bring itself fully through.
This matters practically because as long as all we’re doing is thinking about how to get there, we’re not tuning to what is trying to arrive. Part of the work is a refinement of what could be called telepathic capacity — the ability to pick up what is already happening in the deeper dimensions of sacred world. The Anima Mundi is attempting to do this with us. The synchronicities that arise as we deepen in our practice — that is the world system responding to our alignment. To the extent that we take this view, some of the static blocking the signal gets cleared. It doesn’t mean we don’t have to do things. But the signal becomes clearer.
The Technology of Manifestation: From Thinking to Being
The process of co-creating the third attractor follows a developmental arc that moves through four phases. Each represents a deeper level of embodiment and a greater degree of attractive power:
1. Thinking
This is where most of us start and where most of us remain. Much thinking has happened. Much cognition. This is necessary but insufficient. Ideas alone are too dry to manifest anything.
2. Feeling
You have to start feeling that world. Not just understanding it conceptually, but letting the emotional body engage with what it would feel like to be in a civilization that has bloomed into a planetary garden of truth, beauty, and goodness. The process of feeling creates a different chemistry than thinking — a greater degree of embodiment.
3. Seeing
At some point, the practitioner must actually see what that culture looks like in the imaginal realm. Not in an abstract, fuzzy way, but with specificity: How does it organize? What do the communities look like? How do people relate? What does the art look like, the architecture, the governance? You go into that imaginal space and see it, and you articulate it, and you share what you see with others.
To the extent that this vision begins to come into the brain — out of just ideas and into the imaginal capacity — it pulls the third attractor down into a more tangible reality. Because the world isn’t “out there.” The imaginal body is a real body, just as the physical body is a real body. The question becomes: What is your imaginal body populated by right now? Is it populated by dystopian fear and chaos? Or are you already sitting in the mandala?
4. Being
The final phase is being it already. This is what the Tantric tradition calls deity pride — the recognition that you are already that Bodhisattva, you are already in that world. How would that feel? And if you can maintain how that would feel, you create a certain kind of pressure and attractive capacity.
That is the third attractor in your life. Each person who has created this in their own imaginal body, their own emotional field, their own way of being, becomes a node of attraction.
As more and more people are thinking the same thing, feeling the same thing, seeing the same thing — the third attractor slowly crystallizes closer to manifestation. The imaginal is not merely psychological. It is a real realm, a tissue that connects. And as you populate it with the vision of sacred world, you are helping to bring something through into the collective imaginal field.
Story as Sacred Technology
Everything sits inside a story. Story is technology — part of the Tantric, esoteric, adamantine tech of manifestation. This is not metaphor. It is operational.
When the ancient city-states were built, the priests and leaders designed a reoridion — a subtle structure — and then wrapped it in stories and songs. The people would begin to inhabit that shared imaginal space, and a mandala would form: a sacred city-state whose coherence operated on both the gross and subtle levels simultaneously.
We lost this technology. It was suppressed — partly because sacred science is neutral, usable for good or ill, and partly because the forces of control have always understood the power of story better than the forces of liberation. When people go on psychedelic journeys and shamanic quests today, they are reaching back for fragments of this lost tech. But what is needed is a reintegration — the shamanic, the contemplative, the relational, the cognitive — into a tantric or Vajrayana technology that includes how story is used to synchronize, to manifest, to create coherence.
The language itself is psychoactive. The code — the specific words and concepts of a teaching — carries morphogenic charge when it has been empowered through contemplative experience. When a teacher uses a word that has been saturated with meditative realization, the content of the word carries something more than information. This is why spelling matters, why grammar (grimoire) matters. We are literally casting the imaginal structure of a world through the precision of our language.
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What Must Be Built: The Sacred Secular Operating System
To operationalize the third attractor, several things must happen simultaneously — like moves on a board:
The Architecture
A Sacred Secular Operating System must be articulated — a cultural operating code that integrates the three main drives of healing, awakening, and growing up into a simultaneous operating system. This is the next generation of integral tech: not just the maps and models, but the actual code by which groups of people can coordinate meaning, authority, power, care, and learning without ideological capture or charismatic centralization.
This code operates at three levels of cohesion:
Agreement — the Nirmanakaya level. What do we agree upon as physical, embodied beings? What are the ground rules, the shared commitments, the practical structures? This is personality-level coherence.
Coherence — the Sambhogakaya level. Do we feel the soul-connection? Do we feel the interconnectivity, the we? This is heart-field coherence — the felt sense of shared purpose and sacred belonging.
Alignment — the Dharmakaya level. Can we put power through the system? Alignment involves pure purpose, strong energy, and resources. It also involves confronting the shadow around power, money, and hierarchy. Alignment is the most difficult because it touches survival, control, and the deepest structural shadows of the human system.
Temple Tech and Village Tech
There must be two versions of this code. The Village Tech is an open-source, simplified version for secular people who aren’t embedded in any particular tradition — a minimal viable operating system that creates shared coordination without requiring metaphysical agreement. The Temple Tech is the full-stack sacred version — the esoteric architecture that shows how all of this works at every level, and that can be translated into any of the existing wisdom traditions without replacing them.
The Bards: Art as the Way Through
Politics often feels blocked. Finance often feels blocked. Consciousness and religion — stalemate. Science alone won’t break through. The way through, perhaps, is art.
The musicians, the filmmakers, the storytellers — these are the Bards in the Druidic initiation sequence (Bard → Ovate → Druid). You take the sacred secular teaching and put it into songs, films, stories, images. You show people what the world looks like. The arts create the emotional charge, the imaginal field, the juiciness that makes the third attractor attractive enough that people want to run toward it.
The question is: Are our Bards ready for a revolution, or are they still sucking on the tit of empire?
To the extent that the Bards get behind this — to the extent that sacred finance supports them — the dissemination of a technology of love-wisdom becomes possible at cultural scale. Imagine a global music event with a portal embedded inside it: a way for millions of people to encounter, through beauty and feeling, the deep architecture of sacred world.
Sacred Hierarchy and the Problem of Leadership
One of the deepest obstacles to the third attractor is the problem of hierarchy. Guru is a four-letter word for good reason — it has been catastrophically abused. And one of the shadows of the metamodern/Teal community is that it can replicate postmodern flatness at a higher cognitive level, making it nearly impossible to get agreement on who leads and how.
But here is the dilemma: the adversarial forces have no problem using command hierarchies. Hierarchy allows for power — like a lens focusing light. Without hierarchy, you cannot focus energy. The question is not whether to have hierarchy, but how to do it — how to combine centralization and decentralization so that the network is resilient and distributed while still being capable of coordinated, powerful action.
The communities that carry the signal must be linked. On the backend, this requires Temple Tech — the subtle coordination. On the frontend, it requires the Sacred Secular Operating System — the shared code. Neither centralized control nor flat, leaderless consensus will get us there. What is needed is a new form of sacred leadership — purified, accountable, and held within structures that prevent the accumulation of unchecked power.
The Fire and the Two Wheels
We began our tool-making journey rubbing sticks together. Everything we see around us — all civilization, all technology — is the harnessing of fire. And part of the mythology of the Kali Yuga is that we displaced that fire outward, externalizing our technology rather than internalizing it.
Now, with artificial intelligence, we are about to light a match and throw it into kerosene. Fire everywhere, all at once — the whole field alive with power. There are two wheels here: the wheel turns either toward sacred world or toward prison. Either we get sacred time or we get prison time.
The next fifteen to twenty years represent the critical firing period — an alchemical moment in the planetary Kalachakra process that will determine the trajectory for centuries, perhaps a millennium. It is going to get more intense. The pressure will build.
And within that pressure, we are being cooked. All of us. The prayer is that we continue to do the purification work — personally, interpersonally, intersubjectively — and that we take this seriously not just for ourselves but for the next seven generations. Not just human generations. The children of the daisies, the oaks, the lizards. The whole of life itself.
The Bodhisattva Imperative
What is needed is not transcendence in the traditional sense — not an escape from form into the formless. What is needed is the full development of love as it unfolds through stages of the Bodhisattva path.
Development up to the integral level — even 5.5 in Terri O’Fallon’s STAGES model — can still be contaminated by self-absorption. Cancer develops too. You can have stage 5.5 cancer: very sophisticated, very complex, and still fundamentally self-referential. The developmental stages, without awakening, are just increasingly elaborate expressions of separation.
The Bodhisattva path is different from a simple developmental path because what’s understood is that the developmental process represents levels of compassion. And the capacity to manifest that compassion is inseparable from awakening. You don’t get one without the other. The higher stages are not actually those stages without the awakening component. They are stages of awakened love — not stages of cognition to which awakening is appended.
This means the model John works with maps development not as colors on a spectrum but as jewels — Diamond, Emerald, Ruby, Sapphire — each of which must be purified. This is the Bodhisattva path as opposed to a mere path of development.
The target is not the highest possible perspective. Seventh-person perspective is needed for architecture — for seeing the whole. But the goal is the heart: fourth-person perspective fully purified into Emerald — a planetary civilization that has reached the heart center. A civilization of love.
The developmental sequence moves from communion (with self) to communication (between beings) to community (shared life) to commons (shared world). That is the developmental arc we are trying to walk — not overshooting into rarefied abstraction, not undershooting into therapeutic psychology, but landing right in the heart of the matter.
The Plea: Purify Your Motivations
We are seeing the same thing. The people drawn to this conversation — whether listening, reading, or working at this edge — are seeing the same pieces of the puzzle. But our motivations are still contaminated.
How do we know? Because if they weren’t, we would already be there.
How much contamination do you want in your champagne? One percent? Two? This is where honesty becomes non-negotiable. There are two wheels: the wheel of multi-generational trauma, and the wheel of liberation. Wherever we are still grasping at insecurity, still holding on, still driven by unexamined self-interest — that is the contamination that slows the crystallization of the third attractor.
So let us look at our motivations. Deeply. Honestly. Let us be aware of the depth of our intersubjectivity — that in the very act of sharing these ideas, our awareness fields are already intermingling like water. Let us explore how our interpersonal communication can shift more into the we — using the royal “we” not as pretense but as developmental practice, because the Bodhisattva level is a real level of development, and communicating from we is how it stabilizes.
And let us not overshoot the mark. If you’re reaching for a realization you haven’t yet stabilized — if you’re treating this as a state experience rather than a developmental stage — then you’re building on sand. The awakening alone is not enough. The story alone is not enough. What’s needed is the awakened story — because story is what turns the wheel. Understanding the full story — including that part of it is a war story — is what creates the urgency for military-grade awakening: the kind of stabilized realization that can hold steady under the pressure of what is coming.
The Invitation
The third attractor will not be built by consensus. It will be built by those who are willing to build together — who can move from agreement to coherence to alignment, and who can do so with purified motivation, sacred finance, and an unflinching commitment to the work of our time.
The fire is coming regardless. The only question is which wheel it turns.
Best story wins.
John Churchill is the founder of Planetary Dharma and the architect of the Sacred Secular Operating System (SSOS). His work integrates Buddhist, Vedic, and Druidic wisdom traditions into a contemporary framework for planetary transformation. He teaches through Planetary Dharma’s cohort programs and retreats.
Learn more at planetarydharma.com
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I really appreciate the attempt here to imagine a “third attractor” beyond both collapse and technocratic control. It feels important that people who care about inner work and collective healing are trying to think at civilisational scale, not just in personal-development terms.
There’s a long track record of communities and teachers who were genuinely oriented to awakening and planetary transformation but ended up reproducing hierarchy, harm, and subtle forms of control. For me, any conversation about a planetary dharma or new civilisational attractor has to stay very close to those histories and to the bodies of people who were hurt inside them.
So my question isn’t whether we need a third attractor – I agree that we do – but what design principles and forms of accountability would make such a vision meaningfully different from previous experiments that started with love and awakening language and still went badly wrong? I’d be very interested to see this inquiry stay in dialogue with that shadow side of spiritual and “evolutionary” culture as it develops.
I am former child of cults by the way, so its a visceral interest for me to participate in this conversation.
I love this piece! But I find it lacks a couple of important elements having to do with honoring our ancestors and looking back to what they achieved.
First, I'd like to mention Meredith Spearman's work on Substack: Maze to Metanoia. To me, she is a sort of cultural anthropologist, looking at the commonalities of "weirdness" through time and of different cultures. You did mention the increase of synchronicities. Put this along with the increase of UAP sightings, catalogues of near-death experiences, psychedelic research and the like, and then match this to old myths about trolls, fairies, and nomes, and you get a picture of how outward manifestation has changed over time to match the culture. What one does not see is going beyond the physical to the emotional and relational.
And second, I'd like to remind you that the stories you said we need to develop to "clothe" the Third Attractor are already present for those whose eyes can see and interpret them. See: "Hamlet's Mill: An Essay Investigating the Origins of Human Knowledge and Its Transmissions Through Myth," by Giorgio De Santillana (Author), Hertha Von Dechend .
Perhaps what needs developing is the eyesight to see what is already there?