Reflections on my conversation with Alexander Laszlo
In my recent conversation with Alexander Laszlo we explored an idea that has come up repeatedly in my Third Attractor conversations: perhaps the Third Attractor is already here, and our task is to become aware of it and learn to align ourselves with it.
This is an interesting shift in perspective. When we speak about co-creating a better future, we tend to imagine something that doesn’t yet exist, something we need to design, organize, and bring into being. But what if there is already a deeper movement within life itself that we can recognize and consciously participate in?
Alexander describes this through the concept of syntony, a term central to his work. Syntony means a dynamic form of harmony, an ongoing process of listening, responding, and adjusting to what is emerging. He compared it to improvisational jazz, where musicians are constantly attentive to one another, creating something together without knowing in advance where the music will go. The harmony is continuously emerging through their participation.
I find this a helpful way to understand what it means to co-create. We cannot determine the future, and yet we are continuously influencing what happens. Every choice we make, every relationship we engage in, and every action we take contributes to the unfolding of reality. The question is whether our participation is aligned with the deeper movement of life or whether we are primarily acting from our own ideas, fears, and desires.
In our conversation, I described this alignment as a form of inner availability. To be available for what life asks of us requires a certain freedom from ourselves, from our personal preferences and the need to control outcomes. But this availability also includes the willingness to respond fully, to take responsibility for what we recognize as necessary. It is a delicate balance between surrender and conscious action.
Alexander shared a beautiful story about wanting to learn how to dance with the universe. Over time, his understanding changed from wanting to dance with nature to learning how to be danced, and eventually to recognizing that we are dancing as nature. I think this captures something essential about the nondual understanding of reality. We are not separate individuals trying to establish a relationship with a universe outside ourselves. We are expressions of the same evolutionary process that has brought forth everything that exists.
And from this perspective, the Third Attractor becomes something quite different from a future social model or a set of political and economic arrangements. It becomes a way of being, a conscious alignment with the creative movement of life itself.
But this raises an important question: how do we know what we are aligning with? We can find coherence within groups, movements, and ideologies that are ultimately destructive. History offers many examples of people sincerely believing they were contributing to a better future while participating in systems that caused tremendous suffering.
So coherence alone is not enough. We also need some sense of what makes a direction worth following.
Alexander suggested three qualities that may help us recognize this deeper movement: whether something is life-affirming, future-creating, and opportunity-increasing. I find these useful because they don’t prescribe a particular outcome. They offer a way to evaluate our participation while remaining open to what we cannot yet know.
This led us into one of the most interesting parts of our conversation, the relationship between love, consciousness, and spirit.
Alexander had asked several thinkers, including his father, Ervin Laszlo, what they considered most fundamental to existence: consciousness, spirit, or love. Interestingly, the answers differed, although most eventually acknowledged that these three may be different expressions of the same underlying reality.
When he asked me, my immediate response was consciousness. This comes from my own spiritual experience and from the nondual understanding that consciousness is fundamental, that everything we experience arises within consciousness. But Alexander was leaning towards love, and he offered an interesting argument.
Love, he suggested, has an inherent dynamic quality. It is always relational, always moving towards connection. Consciousness and spirit can be understood as states of being, while love seems to contain within itself the movement of attraction, relationship, and creation.
I found this fascinating, although I am not sure I agree with the distinction. In my understanding, consciousness is not static. It has both the timeless dimension of Being and the dynamic dimension of Becoming. The evolutionary impulse itself can be understood as consciousness in movement, continuously creating new forms and possibilities.
Perhaps the difference between our perspectives has more to do with how we experience and describe the same underlying reality. In some spiritual traditions, the deepest realization is described as an overwhelming experience of love. In others, it is experienced as pure consciousness, or as spirit. These may be different ways of encountering something that is ultimately beyond our conceptual distinctions.
What interests me most is the possibility that love, consciousness, and spirit are not simply human experiences or values, but expressions of something fundamental to the evolutionary process itself.
If this is true, then the Third Attractor may be understood as an alignment with this deeper movement towards connection, coherence, and the flourishing of life. Alexander suggested that love may be the underlying force of attraction that makes such coherence possible. I would describe it as the evolutionary impulse, the creative movement of consciousness towards ever greater complexity and, potentially, greater expressions of truth, beauty, and goodness.
Of course, this remains a philosophical and spiritual proposition. Evolution does not guarantee goodness, and the history of life includes destruction, competition, and extinction as much as cooperation and creativity. We need to be careful not to interpret every development as evidence of progress.
But perhaps we can recognize within the evolutionary process a potential that we can consciously choose to support. The emergence of life, consciousness, cooperation, and increasingly complex forms of relationship has made possible something extraordinary: beings who can become aware of the process itself and deliberately participate in its further unfolding.
Towards the end of our conversation, we explored what this might mean when we come together with others. I spoke about the experience of recognizing the same consciousness in another person, something that can become particularly tangible in deep dialogue. My teacher Andrew Cohen sometimes said that consciousness delights in its own self-recognition. I have experienced this many times, and it continues to be one of the most profound aspects of collective spiritual practice for me.
When we meet from this recognition, our relationship changes. We are less confined to our separate perspectives and more available to what can emerge between us. There is a different quality of listening, a greater openness, and often a surprising capacity for collective insight.
Alexander connected this to his understanding of syntony, the ability to sense and respond to the larger patterns of which we are part. We also discussed the distinction between consciousness and thinking. For me, consciousness is primary, while thinking is a capacity that consciousness can use when needed. We can be fully conscious without thinking, and perhaps it is precisely this freedom from compulsive thought that allows us to become more sensitive to what is emerging.
I see a close relationship here between spiritual awakening and our capacity for conscious co-creation. The more deeply we recognize ourselves as expressions of the same consciousness, the more naturally we may become available for a shared evolutionary purpose.
What I take from this conversation is a growing sense that the Third Attractor may be much closer than we think. We don’t necessarily need to invent an entirely new direction for humanity. We may need to recognize and align ourselves with something that has been present throughout the unfolding of the universe.
This doesn’t mean that the future is predetermined or that our actions are irrelevant. Quite the opposite. If we are the evolutionary process becoming conscious of itself, then our participation matters enormously.
Perhaps the Third Attractor is already present as a possibility inherent in life, and it is through our conscious participation that this possibility can become manifest.
For me, this is an increasingly compelling understanding of what it means to co-create the future: to become sufficiently free, conscious, and available that the creative movement of life can express itself through us, and to take full responsibility for what that asks of us.
