November 3, 2026
Field Note #87
Avraham Cohen, PhD, RCC-ACS, CCC
(604) 313 8423
(In this time of AI, e-mail, and texting, talking to a real person is often hard to come by. If you want to speak with me directly, do phone, please. I will pick up and talk to you, unless I am in a session, or I am temporarily unavailable. Please leave a message. I will get back to you ASAP.
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THE FINAL FRONTIERS
By Avraham Cohen & Heesoon Bai
https://unsplash.com/photos/man-standing-in-a-beam-of-light–LLRxAoGzP4
Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage.
—Lao Tzu
For many of us the who grew up as part of the Star Trek world, particularly The Next Generation series, the very recent death of Patrick Stewart, who played Captain Picard, the leader of the Starship Enterprise, was a reminder of both great possibilities and of the contrasting current extreme states of the world. The world has certainly moved on from the days of ‘regular’ television to a very different present in which we now live.
I have been a Star Trek Fan from the very first black and white episode in 1966. Every week I eagerly looked forward to Thursday nights and a new episode. As much as my social life was important to me, I would not take calls on Thursday night during the Enterprise’s voyages with Captain Kirk at the helm and flying at warp speed to strange new frontiers.
As the years went on and new series’ emerged, I remained faithful. Eventually, Star Trek: The Next Generation showed up in 1987 with Captain Jean Luc Picard at the helm. He was certainly a symbolic captain of all adventures in life. As it turned out this series was part of the early bonding and discovery of common interests for Heesoon and I. We whiled away many evenings watching the Enterprise go where no ‘hu/man’ has gone before. Picard was played by Patrick Stewart, a Shakespearean actor with a powerful voice and a commanding presence. He was joined on the Enterprise by a powerful cast of characters; all participants in the great search for life beyond the boundaries and at a unique time in history when the Federation and earth had agreements about living in peace.
We were both fascinated with the alien civilizations, adventures in war and peace, warp speed, interactions between all manners of otherness, the interplay between the many characters that comprised the crew of the Enterprise and the discovery of teamwork amidst differences of culture, species, and personal histories, and the idea of going to territory and consciousness beyond the usual.
However, I did not become an astronomer, astronaut, or anything that remotely resembles space travel interest. Instead, I became—I would like to think—a different kind of intrepid explorer to encounter another kind of final frontier: the inner world of humanity. I believe that the exploration in this new world is just as strange as in the outer world of space, if not more. And thinking about the current world in seemingly deep trouble, I believe our search for new life and new civilization through inner work is urgent and singularly important. Our very viability may depend on such search. We have hopes that this will be the time of inner work and deep democracy, both inner and outer being integrally aligned.
My interest in new frontiers transitioned to the frontiers of consciousness and being, and this has certainly been a mutual interest for Heesoon and I. As years have gone by my work as a psychotherapist has been fertile ground for this exploration for me, my clients, and the relational field of Heesoon and I.
As the current world unfolds with extremes of politics, social change, and all manner of issues I am hard pressed to know how to best study all this. Certainly the inner and relational world is the most available for my ongoing research.
We are not alone in observing and concluding that our civilization has been externally focused rather in the extreme, especially in the direction of conquering, exploiting, building, producing . . .. Greed and aggression seem to be the main engine behind our civilization that is all about limitless growth, expansion, and profit making. But, as our philosophers and scientist alike remind us, in a closed system like ours, there can’t be limitless growth and expansion. Not only that, if we were to live as if such is the case, that’s a sure course of suicide for humanity as well as putting all other lifeforms on this planet to survival risk.
Thinking thusly, we say, the final frontier will have to be human interiority and the mission of exploring its strange interior landscape of human delusion, greed, and hatred, not to mention suffering.
As many of you are aware, the two of us have spent multiple decades, encouraging clients and students to do their inner, relational, and community work. If clients and students thought that they could lessen their suffering by making things happen in the outer world, I don’t think that they would have come to us, which is not at all to deny that much work is needed in the outer world. What we have focused on is ways of learning about the psychological dimension and the development of psychological mindedness in the service of learning to observe and understand what is going on in all dimensions of their worlds so that they may make the kind of changes that will positively affect their outer life and provide some light in the darkness.
Perhaps the next Star Trek series might feature exploration of human interiority, making that to be the ultimate exploration. “Interiority: The final Frontier . . . to boldly go where no one has gone before!”
Field Notes will now be on a break until February 1, 2027.
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Very best wishes to all of you for the upcoming holiday season, and for 2027…