We live in an in-between time in which the old ways of understanding the world are falling apart, but nothing fully formed has yet taken their place. A shifting of tectonic plates is underway—not only geopolitical and cultural, but perceptual and existential. With this comes a release of powerful and dangerous energies that had long been bound in place by the assumed realities, power structures, and narratives of the era. As this unfolds, the old stories lose their credibility, revealed as unable to evoke conviction even when we wish they could.

But along with the danger and loss, these in-between times can also prepare the ground for a mutation in perception. As primal energies are set loose, something new and previously unimaginable in our way of perceiving the world may begin to take shape. A new way of perceiving who we are may arise, along with a new understanding of the type of world that aligns with our newly mutated self perception.

Around the 17th century, a mutation in perception took place in the West, through which reality came increasingly to be experienced in terms of quantifiable, discrete, law-governed parts, revealed through reductive and analytical ways of thinking. This shift underpinned the scientific revolution, the Enlightenment, and the industrial revolution, dramatically transforming human life. It enabled advances in science, medicine, and technology, and lifted vast numbers of people out of extreme poverty and significantly improving health, longevity, and material living standards. Socially, it helped bring into view ideas—such as equality between sexes and ethnicities—that had previously held little relevance in most societies.

However, alongside these benefits, reality also came to be revealed in a way that diminished the human sense of mystery and wonder. The world no longer appeared as something capable of harbouring depth, or the presence of the divine; instead, it become a collection of measurable objects, and exhausted by explanation. This was not merely an external shift, but an internal transformation in how reality itself was perceived. What remained was often an arid picture—one in which even our own inner life seemed flattened, reduced to a loose collection of thoughts and feelings, with nothing substantial beneath. In place of depth, a kind of diffuse subjectivism emerged: a sense of inwardness without grounding, and of experience without authenticity.

Across the world, entire ways of seeing—and the realities they sustained—fell away. For me, an evocative account of this is found in the short novel, Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe. Achebe depicts traditional Igbo life at the moment of its encounter with missionaries and modernity. The tragedy is not only political, but perceptual: the old stories do not simply disappear, but begin to lose their force. Prior to the missionaries, it seemed that the gods were present in the Igbo’s mystery rites. But after modernity makes contact with the Igbo and seeps into their perceptions, the narrator, himself an Igbo man, notices and reflects on how these rites simply consist of elder members of the village wearing masks. The act occurs, but the expected reality does not follow. And once that break appears, belief cannot fully recover.

This pattern repeated itself with every culture that was touched by modernity. Just as with traditional Igbo life, old ways of being and Indigenous cosmologies across the world, and countless other traditions found their worlds quietly undone—not always through force, but through a shift in what could be perceived as real. Even where cultural forms persist or are revived, it is difficult to return to a pre-modern way of experiencing reality once one has been shaped by modernity.

But is this time of change we are living through a moment when perception can transition again? If this is so, will the new perception be a further 'de-souling' of the world as some people fear, with the rise of AI, human life commodified by big money, and a further consolidation of power in the hands of remote Oligarchies? Or could be a mutation in perception instead lead to a 're-souling' of the world somehow, without simply regressing to the past?

What is needed now? The world-picture has lost its credibility, but we have not yet learned to live in a new world. I feel a sense of tension and dissatisfaction with the stories of reality I was born into. These stories do not truly satisfy me in any deep spiritual way, yet any of us know how to live a new belonging?

When a world collapses, I wonder if perhaps what is needed is not immediate reconstruction, but a listening—an attention given for the emergence of a new way of perceiving - a mutation of perception that this collapse, and only this collapse, can allow. Rather than immediately engineer a new world into place, I wonder if we can be quiet enough and attentive enough to notice what is called for or truly desired within us. What would that be?