Insights from My Conversation with John Churchill
After eighteen Third Attractor interviews spanning integral theory, developmental psychology, regenerative culture, intentional communities, and systems change, my dialogue with John Churchill opened a door none of the previous conversations had fully stepped through. It was not another take on complexity, collapse, or cultural evolution. It was a reminder that underneath all our models lies the imaginal—the charged, symbolic, living dimension of reality that actually shapes human attraction, motivation, and collective choice.
Here are the key new insights that arose with John, and why they matter for the emerging Third Attractor.
1. The Third Attractor Needs More Than Ideas
Almost everyone I have spoken with agrees: we already know a great deal about what a sane, regenerative, spiritually awake civilization would require. The cognition is there. The frameworks exist. The worldview is articulated.
But John points out something radical:
Cognition alone cannot make anything attractive.
He distinguishes between the intellectual content of a future worldview and the imaginal charge that makes people feel pulled toward it. Ideas do not magnetize. Imagery does. Emotional resonance does. Myth does.
This was a missing piece across almost all earlier conversations. We spoke about values, frameworks, ethics, development, quadrants—but not about the energetic architecture of human attraction.
2. Narrative Is Cosmological, Not Just Psychological
Previous dialogues wrestled with narrative—do we need a new big story, or will that fall back into old traps? John reframes narrative entirely:
A narrative is not merely a psychological storyline. It is a cosmological structure.
Modern and postmodern culture discarded cosmology, reducing spirituality to a quadrant, a line, or a psychology of awakening. But without cosmology, we lose access to:
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the vertical dimension of meaning
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the hidden architecture of subtle energies
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the realms of imagery that shape collective imagination
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the deeper “battlefield” of shadow and light
This was uniquely new. No one before John pointed out that integral and metamodern discourse has over-psychologized spirituality and under-recognized the metaphysical terrains where culture is actually generated.
The Third Attractor, he argues, cannot emerge from a worldview that is “cosmologically flat.”
3. The Missing Colors: Awakening That Starts Too High
One of John’s most provocative insights: many of us in the evolutionary space have awakened “from the heart upward”—meaning at modern, postmodern, or integral developmental heights—but without the lower, denser layers of consciousness fully integrated.
He describes this as “missing three colors in the stack.”
This explains several things that surfaced in earlier interviews:
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why higher-stage practitioners struggle to deal with power
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why relational and collective shadow keeps reappearing
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why we cannot hold polarity, conflict, or difference at scale
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why we lack the visceral strength to birth new forms
John’s insight is that a full-spectrum awakening must be fractal, chromatic, and embodied, not only conceptual or self-transcendent.
It is a striking addition to our exploration—none of the earlier conversations identified this developmental “gap” so precisely.
4. The Imaginal Battlefield
Several interview partners spoke about shadow, trauma, or grief, but John goes further:
The imaginal realms themselves are full of unresolved accumulations of karma—what ancient traditions call hell realms, subtle worlds, or energetic sheaths of the planet.
In modernity and postmodernity we stopped believing in these dimensions, and therefore stopped tending them. As a result, the “tissues” of the planetary field have accumulated more and more psychic debris.
This cosmological insight introduces a radically new vector:
The Third Attractor is not only cultural, psychological, or systemic—it is also energetic, subtle, and spiritual-ecological.
This was entirely absent from earlier conversations.
5. Attraction Requires Magical Charge
If authoritarianism and chaos are powerful attractors today, it is not only because of social conditions—it is because those worlds are imaginally fed. They are charged with fear, energy, archetypes, narratives, villains, heroes.
The Third Attractor, John insists, cannot simply be correct; it must be magnetically alive.
This invites a new question none of my other guests directly posed:
What imagery, beauty, mythic resonance, and cosmological depth must the Third Attractor embody so that human beings actually feel drawn toward it?
This is not propaganda. It is sacred aesthetics. It is the artistry of the future.
6. Allowing Descent, Not Only Ascent
Many past conversations emphasized awakening, perspective-taking, identity evolution, or moral growth. John brings in the countercurrent:
awakening must descend into matter, not just rise above it.
This descent is how cosmology re-enters culture, how the subtle and gross integrate, and how the vertical axis of meaning is re-enchanted.
This fundamentally reframes what cultural evolution looks like.
7. The Third Attractor as the Soul’s Project
Where earlier interviews spoke of:
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integral development (Robb, Bruce, Benjamin)
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regenerative culture (Said, Catherine)
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political transformation (Jon)
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grief and nondual wholeness (Diane, Elizabeth)
John brings the language of soul, not just self, system, or stage.
And he implies that:
The Third Attractor is not a project of ego, not even a project of the authentic self. It is a project of the planetary soul unfolding through us.
That is a different order of responsibility.
Why This Conversation Matters
John’s contribution activates a completely missing layer of the Third Attractor exploration:
the esoteric, imaginal, cosmological, energy-charged dimension of cultural evolution.
If the earlier interviews mapped the architecture of the future,
John illuminated the interior electricity that makes a future come alive.
It is not enough to be correct.
Not enough to be ethical.
Not enough to be developmental.
Not enough to be regenerative.
The Third Attractor must also be beautiful, mythic, emotionally magnetic, cosmologically coherent, and energetically alive.
This is the new frontier.
And perhaps the real turning point in our series.
