My dialogue with Mary Adams felt like sitting down with someone who is able to hold both the immense beauty of our human potential and the stark truth of our civilizational crisis without collapsing into either idealism or despair. After more than twenty conversations on co-creating the Third Attractor, this one touched a deep chord in me.
What stayed with me first was Mary’s clarity that the first two attractors Daniel Schmachtenberger describes are not real options. They are the automatic outcomes of a civilization that refuses to examine the roots of how we got here. One is the path of unraveling. The other is the path of authoritarian control. Neither is an attractor. They are drift currents. They are what happens when we do nothing. She named this with a quiet precision that I felt in my whole body.
For Mary, the work of the Third Attractor does not begin with building new models or new systems. It begins with a civilizational reckoning. A profound and honest look into the philosophical, historical, and spiritual assumptions that shaped Western culture. She insisted that unless this deeper seeing becomes part of our shared consciousness, everything we create will rest on the same ground that produced the crisis in the first place. I felt the truth of this. It is uncomfortable. It is necessary.
At the same time, Mary does not see deep reflection as separate from action. She does not fall into the trap of contemplation that waits. She sees these two movements as simultaneous. The prototypes and communities that so many of us are building matter. They are essential. They show what is possible. They make the future visible. But she challenged me by asking whether we have really let in the enormity of our disconnection from the whole. Whether our optimism sometimes veils the deeper spiritual rupture that must be faced before a new culture can take root.
This landed in me like a question that will continue to work for a long time: are we creating from wholeness or from a subtle continuation of the modern worldview that split us from the world in the first place?
Mary’s invitation was not to abandon the prototypes. It was to infuse them with a deeper consciousness, one that begins with an embodied knowing of our interdependence with the living planet, with the cosmos, and with each other. A consciousness that naturally brings forth care, responsibility, and simplicity. A consciousness that feels the cost of our privilege and wants to live differently, not from moral pressure but from awakened sensitivity.
Her perspective reminded me why the Third Attractor is not a project. It is a transformation. It is a shift in the center from which we live. And it asks something from each of us. A deeper honesty. A deeper humility. A deeper willingness to see the world as it is and still participate wholeheartedly in creating a more life-aligned future.
I left the conversation with Mary touched by her warmth, her rigor, and her unwavering commitment to truth. It felt like an essential piece of the mosaic that is forming across all these dialogues. She helped me see once again that co-creating the Third Attractor does not start with a blueprint. It starts with who we are becoming.
And that may be the most radical work of all.
