[UNKNOWN]: music playing
[SPEAKER_02]: Welcome back to the coaches rising podcast today.
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm joined by my dear friend Eva Mensk and we're going to be exploring his body of work around the inner science of world making.
[SPEAKER_02]: A couple of quotes I think introduced this podcast really well, the David Grava quote, the ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it's something we make and could just as easily make differently.
[SPEAKER_02]: And the Frederick Jameson quote, it's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, that just brings true for me.
[SPEAKER_02]: So we're going to be exploring today how the world that we make is currently in many ways breaking down, I think that's kind of obvious to state.
[SPEAKER_02]: And why is this relevant for us as coaches and facilitators of transformation?
[SPEAKER_02]: I think as coaches were being invited to be on the edge to provocateurs in some way, not just to be coaching business as usual, but to be immersed in our own deep questioning of the world that we've inherited and what that affords and is what that closes down.
[SPEAKER_02]: And in a sense to be moving into a place of wonderments and deep sensing of what may be wanting to emerge.
[SPEAKER_02]: So this conversation is just really at the edge for me.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's really relevant for our work.
[SPEAKER_02]: I hope you enjoy it.
[SPEAKER_02]: A few more words about Eva.
[SPEAKER_02]: He is the Associate Director of Emergence and Insight at Perspectiva.
[SPEAKER_02]: His focus is mainly on spiritual innovation and course development.
[SPEAKER_02]: He's a published author and he's written on the inner developmental side of entrepreneurship.
[SPEAKER_02]: He worked over a decade as a journalist covering tech law and spirituality, and has been a student in the wisdom school of the diamond approach for over a decade.
[SPEAKER_02]: All right, let's dive in.
[SPEAKER_02]: Here's the podcast with Evo Mensk.
[SPEAKER_02]: So Evo, yeah, I'm really happy to be with you again, actually.
[SPEAKER_02]: I feel like a real brother in my life in terms of the journeys we've been on and
[SPEAKER_02]: When we met, I think, was it in a Game Parochie big mind retreat?
[SPEAKER_02]: The guide of the Game Parochie tree on all my land, was it?
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes, correct.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, the tiny island in the north of the Netherlands, gosh, that's what, I mean, it feels about like now twenty years ago or something, maybe a little less.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, we were really like young
[SPEAKER_02]: Young pubs back then weren't we in terms of like full of being full of, I mean, I speak for myself, like full of like ambition and bravado in a sense, you know, and yeah, life's some worked me since then.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, similar.
[SPEAKER_00]: It is interesting like that.
[SPEAKER_00]: We were this group of young seekers.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I still identify as a secret, but the nature of the search has kind of shifted.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think it was certainly more self-serving in the beginning.
[SPEAKER_00]: kind of, it's like, in my case, I think also a little bit of spiritual trophy hunting, wanting to experience not ordinary, ordinary states of consciousness.
[SPEAKER_00]: And yeah, we did that in the container of Zen.
[SPEAKER_00]: So for a long time in my case, so I think it was Zen for about ten years.
[SPEAKER_00]: And yeah, since then, since then, quite a bit has changed.
[SPEAKER_00]: The nature of search.
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, I think I also recognized the part of me that was seeking special states and in a sense like bypassing my bypassing parts of my experience that I found challenging.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I think our conversation today might actually reflect
[SPEAKER_02]: I journey towards some, to orienting towards something a bit different as we get older, like a different sense of what's meaningful on the path.
[SPEAKER_02]: And so maybe I could ask you to begin with, we're going to talk about what you've been thinking about recently.
[SPEAKER_02]: So could you give us a sense of like the Gestalt or the overarching view of your work and how it's a response?
[SPEAKER_02]: to the times we find ourselves in which, you know, have been labeled enough now, you know, a liminal space.
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, it's kind of blatantly obvious, I think, to many people listening that we're in extraordinary times of uncertainty and change.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I think your work is speaking into that in some beautiful way.
[SPEAKER_02]: So yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, that's a great question.
[SPEAKER_00]: And what comes to mind is really a process.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think that played out actually, you know, mostly over the time that we were talking about, like first, where the spiritual quest was a bit more like a private matter.
[SPEAKER_00]: while being always very interested in the world, but they were two parallel tracks.
[SPEAKER_00]: I was always had many many jobs that kept more things like I found myself having a different kind of job every five years, but around the time that I started studying Zen and I was just
[SPEAKER_00]: coming out of a career in IT, working for a big commercial law firm in a commercial district, an Amsterdam, and started studying journalism.
[SPEAKER_00]: And around the same time, I think it was in the early two thousands here, when I became serious about spiritual practice, and I went into Zen.
[SPEAKER_00]: And yeah, going forward in that practice, I will still very much had the intention to in some ways retreat from the world to actually not involve, be not involved with it.
[SPEAKER_00]: But at the same time, also finding myself quite fascinated.
[SPEAKER_00]: And eventually, after many years of practice and doing retreats that we shared, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: all the way up to monks' ordination.
[SPEAKER_00]: I also felt that the vows in some sense, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: Like as in Buddhism, in Zend they say, the Bodhisattva vows, the savals and the inpings.
[SPEAKER_00]: I did start to have quite a bit of doubts about how is my practice actually making a difference here.
[SPEAKER_00]: Also in a personal level, I didn't really feel that it was creating the kind of changes that I had hoped for.
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, there was lots of talk about the impact in the world spirituality and you know, we can certainly go into the metaphysics of why a monk meditating and a cave by himself or by himself for years, like makes it makes an actual difference.
[SPEAKER_00]: For me, it was always more like, no, I wanted it to be more pragmatic.
[SPEAKER_00]: I wanted to see this in a more direct way.
[SPEAKER_00]: And there was an inquiry that I sometimes helped with more intensity, but sometimes also a bit more with just loose.
[SPEAKER_00]: And at some point, I, when I was no longer a journalist, I had, you know, gotten interested in coaching.
[SPEAKER_00]: Again, a more pragmatic application of all the learnings that I had done.
[SPEAKER_00]: Also on the more insights into the nature of ego and its construction and behaviors.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that came when I shifted to the diamond approach that really gives a very good understanding of the function of the ego, the building up of it in the personal history.
[SPEAKER_00]: And yeah, that knowledge I also wanted to apply here in first by serving individuals.
[SPEAKER_00]: But again, I felt myself actually more and more pulled towards the understanding of the social reality.
[SPEAKER_00]: And partly also because of coaching, and I think many of you listeners' coaches understand this quite well, and they see, well, you can coach the individual, but once they enter back into the world,
[SPEAKER_00]: or even if you've just done a retreat, try the spiritual retreat and you enter back into the world.
[SPEAKER_00]: These forces of entrainment, the pressures of how to be in the world quickly make you lose any kind of realization that you may have had during retreats.
[SPEAKER_00]: I quickly learned that often
[SPEAKER_00]: the change is a transformation and individual goes through may not actually be sustainable in the wider context of daily life and after I moved to London in from Berlin
[SPEAKER_00]: to in two thousand eighteen.
[SPEAKER_00]: I got more and more involved with a community of change makers that we sometimes call them the Madame Modern Space sort of liminal web.
[SPEAKER_00]: This particularly was through the emerged network and a rebel wisdom, a YouTube channel that
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I also gave a lot of attention to this interplay of spirituality and cultural development, cultural, yeah, cultural phenomenon, specifically for example, the scent of Jordan Peterson, right, with both culture warrior and young and analyst.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so there was a real cultural moment.
[SPEAKER_00]: And at least for Rebel Wisdom.
[SPEAKER_00]: For myself, I found myself part of this community who are more closely looking towards how our inner world actually shapes and influences the external systems.
[SPEAKER_00]: And particularly when I met Jonathan Rauson, he's the founder of Perspectiva.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's the charity I currently work for.
[SPEAKER_00]: which he gave the tagline system souls and society and the purpose of perspective is to improve the relationships between the system souls and society.
[SPEAKER_00]: So the individual in the world and how it functions and so yeah our aim is to actually
[SPEAKER_00]: find innovative means of civic education that can get us unstuck because arguably we're stuck in this mindset of modernity right that has a divorce from nature that arguably has the exhaust that itself spiritually and you know the big idea is that inform this this way of being that we're all collectively living
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, that has now proven to be on the road self-destruction, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: It's self-terminating, arguably.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so the big idea is here is like a gang calling back to spirituality and what can that offer us in terms of new insights, collective insights, new practices that can get us away from this collision course that we seem to be on.
[SPEAKER_00]: And yeah, so here I think this is a bit of, yeah, that gives you a
[SPEAKER_00]: The threat of unfolding of how my personal interests and practice now come together and formulate new approaches and practices under the normal spiritual innovation.
[SPEAKER_02]: So do you feel, because I can relate, you know, I think a lot of people listening can relate to how we go on retreat or even the coaching we do, you know, coaches, if it coaches the individual and then you go back into the world and back into the organization and then you hit with that kind of the weight of
[SPEAKER_02]: construction of that of society of the world and then, you know, whatever might have a reason is can be lost.
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, it's difficult to manifest anything new.
[SPEAKER_02]: Do you?
[SPEAKER_02]: So in a sense, I'm hearing, you kind of say, and I would really, you could say a bit more about, there's actually a need right now, maybe an even an opening up, a questioning of our social reality, I think you called it, or like the way we've constrict constructed,
[SPEAKER_02]: society and the beliefs held within that and that in our times I think maybe particularly right now we're seeing how it's become dysfunctional in some ways or outdated some ideas within modernity and so yeah could you say a bit about how you see that and
[SPEAKER_02]: you know what the invitation might be for people listening.
[SPEAKER_02]: Is it time to kind of really check where our spiritual practices still focused purely on individual optimization and move into different kinds of interactions?
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, absolutely.
[SPEAKER_00]: I do think it can be helpful to zoom out and also see how the wider culture has shaped the purpose in which many people now practice, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: And that can be as simple as mindfulness.
[SPEAKER_00]: That can also just, of course, be still awakening.
[SPEAKER_00]: If people think deeper transformations,
[SPEAKER_00]: But often it still fits within this larger idea of project self, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: It's for personal self realization.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think it still leaves out that larger context in which we find ourselves.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that was always the interest that I had because, for example, going back to Zen, you know, you practice a lot by yourself.
[SPEAKER_00]: There are innovations and changes, and you know, the teacher that we studied with, of course, had other approaches.
[SPEAKER_00]: So it became already a little bit more shift towards the field of practitioners.
[SPEAKER_00]: Mostly you're still practicing by yourself when you have a few moments with a teacher and it also comes out of a monastic tradition of course so you know like all the practice happened behind the monastery walls more or less and yeah and so
[SPEAKER_00]: the nature of the inter-subjective, like between people, that whole realm usually stayed out of focus.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think still, in many, many types of spiritual practice, we also tend to, you know, optimize ourselves, so we can cope better in the world, so we can calm ourselves down, we can regulate our nervous systems better.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, you know,
[SPEAKER_00]: But it's gotten to the point where I feel and I believe, uh, uh, Slava Gizek also made this point, you know, taking Buddhism as an example that, um, he called it, I believe something like the, the, the perfect companion to this, uh, to late state capitalism because, you know, it just helps us cope and in some way, stay calm.
[SPEAKER_00]: while the appropriate reaction should actually be feeling all the, all the, all the terror that it can bring in our bodies, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: Like to live in this extractive paradigm, we have a loneliness epidemic, we are, you know, in ecological crises, we have climate crisis.
[SPEAKER_00]: what comes to my right now is this maybe you know this meme this everything is fine dog right you sit in this burning house and uh and so yeah here you can wonder is this is this archetype of the calm Buddha you know is is that appropriate for these times or do we need something that actually spurs more into action
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think, therefore, we need to really take a look at how we internalized all these mechanisms of modernity, the deep beliefs I call them, social priors.
[SPEAKER_00]: some of the hyper priors, if they're like really strong shared beliefs that inform how we collectively behave, you know, and some of them are like anthropocentrism or species centrism.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's all about humans, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: The natural world, of course, sure important, but we still treat it as a resource to be extracted.
[SPEAKER_00]: The value of a tree sits not in the shadow and the animals that take life in it, but it's, you know, how can we chop it up into planks and make turn it into plywood?
[SPEAKER_00]: So, and there's some, some others like, uh, pre-will, uh, self-determination, uh, there's materialism.
[SPEAKER_00]: I would even argue a kind of optimism, right, that informs the notion of progress.
[SPEAKER_00]: This idea that the future is always going to be better than the past.
[SPEAKER_00]: And, yeah, there are other ones, like productivity, uh, being a rational individual, like all those, kind of our cornerstone ideas, you know, that, that, that inform,
[SPEAKER_00]: And they served as well for like a long time obviously, but I think that this has run its course more or less.
[SPEAKER_00]: It keeps us stuck in a certain kind of way of being in a view towards the world that is no longer tangible.
[SPEAKER_02]: So in a sense, I'm hearing you say that some spiritual practices can actually be used to
[SPEAKER_02]: maintain, you know, or support certain ideas about what it is to be human and what the world is that actually are perpetuating some of the struggles that we're having, you know, for example, that spiritual practices all about optimizing the self, you know, like, and that, yeah, you know, I find that interesting what you say about
[SPEAKER_02]: I've been questioning that recently because on the one hand, I really feel that if I am able to do integrated work with myself,
[SPEAKER_02]: healing work, trauma work, it's like I build a sense of capacity to meet the world and from an effective place, you know, to be a better father, a better husband, and there's value in that.
[SPEAKER_02]: And at the same time, I really see how
[SPEAKER_02]: There's a way I've been, you know, an inverted commerce for those of you that I've been trying to kind of be even killed, you know?
[SPEAKER_02]: Like it's a way of like remaining even killed when actually there are these emotions like screaming outside of me that are, you know, that are not feeling even killed and that actually a more mature.
[SPEAKER_02]: The orientation is to meet those emotions.
[SPEAKER_02]: And of course, it's not either or.
[SPEAKER_02]: They actually both come together.
[SPEAKER_02]: Those both approaches come together very nicely.
[SPEAKER_02]: But I think I just saw that layer of like how I was practicing in order to suit myself.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, for many people, this is true because you know, we feel like the world's changing so fast and now especially with AI, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: Like it almost feels like we feel we have less agency, we have less of a sense that we can actually influence the world and shape that and since the
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, I don't know where to put it in time, exactly, but probably it originated in somewhere in the eighties when it became more dominant in the culture, and that was just the ethos of neoliberalism, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: What we expected to be, this kind of entrepreneurial self, who is a genetic and remixed rational decisions and acts like that in the world.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think there is also a sense of retreat that the only place that people still feel like you have some sort of a sense of agency is in this self-mastery.
[SPEAKER_00]: Controlling your mind, doing breath work, maybe dopamine, maxing.
[SPEAKER_00]: As you say, chilling yourself out.
[SPEAKER_00]: By the way, I don't want in any way say that this is bad, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: We need to function, we need to kind of learn how to do that, how to self-regulate, obviously.
[SPEAKER_00]: But we also, I believe, shouldn't turn away from actively being active citizens and finding ways to shape our world again.
[SPEAKER_00]: And of course, you know, we see many, many projects and people are trying to do that again, you know, reinvent community.
[SPEAKER_00]: But the trick there is that we need to unlearn this machine, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: This machine of modernity.
[SPEAKER_00]: We need to loosen up the imagination.
[SPEAKER_00]: The constraints are out of imagination.
[SPEAKER_00]: That kind of tells us that they have this external change.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's just becoming possible, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: So that I think is the real challenge here.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so there's quite a bit of unlearning to do.
[SPEAKER_00]: And here I think it's
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, when most of our work sits, and that is in learning to find what are these imaginal constraints, you know, these buildings list that I just went through are both something that enabled the creation of culture that we wanted, called modernity, but now we
[SPEAKER_00]: We also feel ourselves confined by it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Mark Fisher, he's a cultural critic.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't know if you familiar with his work.
[SPEAKER_00]: He wrote this book Capitalist Realism.
[SPEAKER_00]: And in this, it's a brilliant little book.
[SPEAKER_00]: So he basically says that capitalism has constrained our imagination so much that we can't even imagine a different way of being in the world.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is like the only system that is viable.
[SPEAKER_00]: So that is something that I want to challenge like through the practices that I do to get as out of this extractive mindset and mindset of transactionality.
[SPEAKER_00]: So we can maybe start to imagine different ways of being together.
[SPEAKER_00]: There are less zero sum where it's all wind-loosed dynamics.
[SPEAKER_00]: So that must be possible.
[SPEAKER_00]: But I do think that
[SPEAKER_00]: In order to be able to do that, yeah, we need to loosen the hold of how we are currently health.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's this wonderful phrase that's as individuals we have imagination.
[SPEAKER_00]: But if you look at the social imaginary, which is this background consensus of what we believe reality is,
[SPEAKER_00]: The imaginary has us.
[SPEAKER_00]: So we are subject to that, that wider context of meaning, like with, yeah, like I said, all these components that communicate to us like what reality is, by the way, which is very handy, because it allows us to cooperate, obviously, if we have a shared version of what reality is.
[SPEAKER_00]: But if we see new view stats, if we want to open up the possibility spaces, then we need to kind of down.
[SPEAKER_00]: lean into the liminal, lean into the unknown, and thereby take risks.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think that's why new kinds of practices, you know, practices and spiritual practices has done that.
[SPEAKER_00]: If you familiar with the whole framework of predictive processing, active inference, you know, researchers like Andy Clark, Thomas Metzinger,
[SPEAKER_00]: And you'll set, for example, basically say, yeah, no, we dream up our reality based on the contents of our past experiences.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so this predictive model of the brain gives us a lot of agency to actually start looking into how, how does this model of the world, all at the model of modernity, how does that live in us?
[SPEAKER_00]: And so we can start to look at this and find places in ourselves, like embodied places, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: So we can start to change this.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, and so here's what it worked like.
[SPEAKER_00]: I've formulated a few ideas.
[SPEAKER_00]: They're quite, well, I think still for many people.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, they make all crosses.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's quite experimental, but I think this is what is needed.
[SPEAKER_00]: If we are to truly get us out of the attractor pool of modernity of that mindset.
[SPEAKER_02]: Let me share what comes up for me because it's like I'm the one hand I feel as you speak about this both like incredibly dented but also the sense of possibility so like on the one hand it's like the dentedness is like oh my god because I can feel the weight of
[SPEAKER_02]: Medonity and me, you know, I can feel how ingrained it isn't me that I need to be productive in a certain way and that my value comes from being productive and that actually there is good things about that you know as well it's like you know so I don't want to reject it outright but at the same time I can feel how it binds me you know that like it is like you know it's still the case that if I have like a Friday off you know
[SPEAKER_02]: like I can feel in me there's a tension around it because it's like a Friday you know and I feel different on a Saturday and Sunday you know it's like that I something my being can fully relax you know that is to me the weight of this conditioning I've inherited so so it's complicated and it's complex and it's like I feel like
[SPEAKER_02]: Wow, I don't want to just become like a kind of revolutionary and like rejecting capitalism.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's the enemy of all, you know, it's the root of all our evils.
[SPEAKER_02]: And yet at the same time, it's so blatantly a problem in issue.
[SPEAKER_02]: And then part of the dauntedness is like, who are feeling the way of that collective conditioning is like,
[SPEAKER_02]: How could I make a change?
[SPEAKER_02]: How could I have a player part in this?
[SPEAKER_02]: Because right now, it seems like things are getting more kind of dense and more polarized.
[SPEAKER_02]: So I'm just paying that picture of that's one side that arises in me, because I can really relate to it.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's just certain things just don't feel like they're working in the way they're used to, which leads to this sense of possibility, because it's
[SPEAKER_02]: It's like confronting as hell, but somehow I feel, and this maybe goes back to our conversation earlier, it's like, I don't want it avoid.
[SPEAKER_02]: the terror in me, the pain in me, the grief in me.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's like, somehow now, it's like I just can't turn away from it.
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, even though I keep trying, it's like, it just feels like it's the way towards a midwifeing.
[SPEAKER_02]: And as you talk about this predictive processing, it's like, wow, as we become aware of these deeply ingrained beliefs,
[SPEAKER_02]: Of course, now there's a possibility and that we're creating them together that opens up a possibility for us to start to create new worlds.
[SPEAKER_02]: And that feels thrilling and I can feel the sense of expansion inside of me as I orient what's that.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, it's... I think this is something we really share on a collective level, this unheim力 guy, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: When... That's a German term for when things no longer feel like home, you know, because this was, you know, we left the whole O scene, which was the stable period of climate in which, like so much was possible, the world as we know it.
[SPEAKER_02]: And now we've entered the Anthropocene with all its kind of turbulence and just say what you mean by that term Anthropocene because I think that's an interesting way to kind of name our current times or
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, so the whole scene, it's a term that is not only used for like the geological forces that shape the earth and before, you know, human started to have like a real impact on well climate and of course the surface of the earth.
[SPEAKER_00]: So we've basically taken that over, that reworking of the earth as a system.
[SPEAKER_00]: And therefore we call it the entropy scene.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the other is many interesting thinkers in that tradition who are, you know, both trying to also articulate some of what I've shared.
[SPEAKER_00]: and finding alternative way of beings.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, some accepting this reality that is coming towards us, you know, that we can call collapse.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's a quite a strong term, you know, to the folks that drew fierce bonds in people.
[SPEAKER_00]: some nice of terms or de-complexification of our society because collapse can also just play out over like literally like hundreds and hundreds of years and so it's like a slow process but it can also go quite rapidly.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think that is
[SPEAKER_00]: That is what most people are afraid of.
[SPEAKER_00]: Look at Netflix these days.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, it's filled with dystopian content.
[SPEAKER_00]: They're post-apocalyptic movies and sometimes somehow we get off on that in some ways, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: It's almost as if we're already priming ourselves for this moment because like deep down and a bond, we seem to know that something is off and you know, and often these films are of course about finding agency and new meaning in the ruins and
[SPEAKER_00]: And so that may be the environment for which these types of practices are actually useful, how to reorganize in smaller communities of practice and to find these create islands of sanity as some people have called it in which we
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm not subject so much to the pressures of the out-of-out world, which should be coming hard to stand, especially with so much disinformation, echo chambers, online social pathologies like rampant conspiracy thinking people don't know what is true anymore.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so there's very, yeah, there's like a true difficulty there for a lot of people.
[SPEAKER_00]: We feel continuously unstable.
[SPEAKER_00]: And here I think this is why the depth at which this work needs to be done is called for because
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, the one stable social structures are dissolving, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: We are furious like Zigman Bauman who is this whole series on liquid modernity.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, that was what was once felt as solid our house stable and in which we could predict the future more or less and act in it is now liquifying.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it feels we are just being taken more and more for a ride, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: Like we're in constant process.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think this shift and here I want to call attention to the work of Steve March, who you both know.
[SPEAKER_00]: He also makes this case saying that this stability that also allows for fixed identities will find ourselves more and more in the flow of life, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: And when things are constantly on the move, this has already felt for many people because they have to constantly lead a life of reactivity in which we have to reinvent ourselves
[SPEAKER_00]: ever faster, and especially now with AI, that'll be the point where people are just going to give up on the process.
[SPEAKER_00]: Therefore, also, we need to look at the deeper mechanisms.
[SPEAKER_00]: Here, I want to point to the work of Margaret Archer, for example, and Roy Boscar.
[SPEAKER_00]: Margaret Archer is a sociologist that
[SPEAKER_00]: speaks of morphostasis for versus morphogenesis and this morphogenesis is that process where the unfolding of culture, you know, the social structure get, get, get rearranged continuously.
[SPEAKER_00]: through cycles of reflexivity.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so what I want to do is actually not wait until it's there, but we can actually enter consciously in that process of looking what are these stable agreements, these repeating patterns that we find ourselves in.
[SPEAKER_00]: And can we now align ourselves already with this unfolding?
[SPEAKER_00]: It's term that Steve also uses, and that is a common term also in the diamond approach, because we can unfold
[SPEAKER_00]: you know, as individuals into deeper states of realization and actualization, but we can also unfold collectively.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so it is these types of practices that I believe that can align us with deeper patterns that come from spiritual nature.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, it's right to cut your flow.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, you want to add something.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I think there's certainly things that we can double click on here, but this maybe is getting into a little bit into the weeds, but
[SPEAKER_00]: The more we get into the depth, the more we also connect to what is more fundamentally real, that is less virtual, that is less made up, that is less just the magnetic contents of culture, the ideologies, all the ideas floating around.
[SPEAKER_00]: So in this deeper embodiment, we also feel when we go past the structures of ego, you know, where we can come to find these
[SPEAKER_00]: qualities like will power, peace, strength, love, compassion to name a few.
[SPEAKER_00]: And this is this is heavily influenced by a diamond approach work.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, this is the essences as they call it.
[SPEAKER_00]: So indeed, it's actually
[SPEAKER_00]: foreground themselves in consciousness and as consciousness actually, to reveal themselves like, yeah, these are the ontological primes, the building blocks that sit downstream from our conscious experience.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, we can, we can, you could into that as you know, from experience, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: let's let's unpack what you're saying because I think you dropped some big you know you dropped some big ideas here and so in a sense we're moving into the perhaps the part of the invitation you know so if I reflect back what I'm hearing is like perhaps we could say one of the invitations in our times is because things are uncertain and very fluid and
[SPEAKER_02]: you know this sense of fluid differences or process is become more acute and there's actually an aliveness in that so you know like the ones to more fixed identities we're seeing how actually they're much more fluid and open and that can be you know for example the liberation of
[SPEAKER_02]: like roles within the home, or gender identities.
[SPEAKER_02]: So there can be a kind of maybe more an alignment with the way life is.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's in flow, constant change.
[SPEAKER_02]: And so what I want to bring in is, and that can become fronting, perhaps, to the more surface parts of us that are identified with
[SPEAKER_02]: things remaining fixed or being in control.
[SPEAKER_02]: So what I'm hearing in what you're sharing is like, and I think I've heard Steve March say this part of the invitation is into a deeper depth of our experience, where we can hold that sense of uncertainty and process and flow.
[SPEAKER_02]: That there's an essence of container within which that occurs.
[SPEAKER_02]: And we might call that deeper depth presence.
[SPEAKER_02]: There's a kind of certain
[SPEAKER_02]: kind of, you know, kind of feeling of presence and inside that feeling of presence, there's a response, you know, an intelligent response, these qualities that you describe like will or strength or love.
[SPEAKER_02]: And so I'm just reflecting that back to people listening because it feels like we're articulating part of the invitation for us right now is, you know, to explore what is it to be human and in these times and
[SPEAKER_02]: How could we resolve ourselves?
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm not as many ways to go from here.
[SPEAKER_00]: First, I maybe want to address this sense of, you know, because flow, we tend to, we tend to see it as quite positive.
[SPEAKER_00]: And as you said, it can be really exhilarating.
[SPEAKER_00]: But at the same time, what I'm gesturing to, and maybe this is the part that gets experienced negatively, this constant updating, this constant having to optimize, this constant having to respond to the fear of possibly being
[SPEAKER_00]: made redundant by AI, you know, taking your job with stuff, but also just this pace of social change, you know, that social just heart would rose.
[SPEAKER_00]: written about and is book social acceleration because this also produces what he calls a muted relationship to the world in which there's much less resonance because you know the pure speed at which life then happens doesn't allow for the kind of presence that we also actually wanted that we're talking about which demands slowing down
[SPEAKER_00]: But as you well know, you already mentioned it, like when you feel kind of a little bit unproductive on a Friday off, when you try to shift gears, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: It's like, yeah, it's hard to kind of take yourself out of this constant tempo of modernity, you know, to this ever accelerating, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: We have now a whole new ideology that is mostly, you know, it's quite popular in Techno circles around the Elon Musk's and
[SPEAKER_00]: and friends of accelerationism.
[SPEAKER_00]: But basically says like, well, let's just throw our hands up in the air and just roll with this.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is like, let's let's just drive it to the max.
[SPEAKER_00]: Let's take all the guard rails off and let it run its course as fast as possible.
[SPEAKER_00]: So we can you know, scale up civilization and live in this techno utopia.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, this is
[SPEAKER_00]: arguably, you know, an attractor that we should be questioning.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, technology, I see is like important.
[SPEAKER_00]: And by no means I want to, you know, be a lotite and be anti-AI, but
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I think we need to re-attune to the good, the true and beautiful, you know, to name some of these, the big ones that make up much of what is makes life worth living.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, if we lose touch with that, I think we're in big trouble.
[SPEAKER_02]: do you think I mean because that resonates with me and that I meet more people who actually are interested in unplugging you know and it's almost like and this is why I wonder about AI and we can get we can get to you talk you said some things that I underlined you know about we can unfold collectively so I'm curious to ask you about those kinds of experiences and practices but my sense is that
[SPEAKER_02]: with the pace of change, with something like AI as well, is actually only going to exacerbate this feeling of like, if I try to keep up with that accelerating pace, it's just going
[SPEAKER_02]: you know it's just going to burn me out or it's going to be impossible so I see more people now actually becoming interested in unplugging and actually asking deeper questions you know like and maybe this is also true of modernity kind of getting louder in the ways that it's not quite serving as it's like we're all sort of going well what the hell are we doing and
[SPEAKER_02]: what's actually meaningful to me, what's important to me and I feel more drawn to like being in the simple moments, you know, like just being with my beloved, my loved ones, my neighbors, you know, one of the most wholesome experiences I had recently was being in the school end of summer fair where all the families brought food to share together and
[SPEAKER_02]: I was so touched, I mean, it makes me a bit emotional now, thinking about it.
[SPEAKER_02]: I was just so touched to see all these people together sharing food and delighting in each other's company and all the children playing.
[SPEAKER_02]: So I feel that that might be part of the gift of what's unfolding with things speeding up.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's like crazy making.
[SPEAKER_02]: So yeah, let me see, I'll pause there and just see if anything comes up.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, you know, it's somewhere as you could argue here, what you say, we're being forced into presence here and like me discovering what is what is valuable.
[SPEAKER_00]: Um, yeah, I don't know if we should go this way, but, you know, other, some, some humans will choose another path, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, choose to actually unfold with this, uh, the trends of acceleration and merge with technology and, uh, you know, what I'd rather deal with the perfect beings that I can kind of, you know, mold through a series of prompts into, you know, the perfect canvas for my idealizing projections and choose to live like, uh, choose to live in relationship with that.
[SPEAKER_00]: We have some choices to make.
[SPEAKER_00]: That is absolutely true.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think Ford
[SPEAKER_00]: the reality that you described enjoying so much, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: That place is much more emphasis on being good human being, character development, less skills development, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: I think that is, there's a lot of questions marks there to just, you know, get your sense of value from your productivity.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think we have to reorient, possibly, you know, we're starting to reorient towards that relationship of,
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, whole value and productivity.
[SPEAKER_00]: But yeah, character development, you know, being virtuous, I think that will certainly get much, much more emphasis and especially because there's also this really interesting, again, in living in community, you know, like I'm living in one right now, we're building it up since about seven months now and this is intended to become one of those.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I want the sanity hopefully in which we can collectively start sensing and seeing the future, you know, the kind of futures that we want.
[SPEAKER_00]: I believe these places will become attractors because if we can model the kind of sanity and interrelational health that we seek then yeah that I think we'll just have a critical mass and and become potentially and this is envisioned to be a place like that to
[SPEAKER_00]: become the, yeah, these places from which different types of societies can unfold.
[SPEAKER_02]: As a precursor to as a exploring islands of sanity and you know, collective unfolding practices, I just want to, you know, someone we've spoken about in, you know, in our personal conversations and who I've mentioned a lot on the podcast is Dave Snowden.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yes.
[SPEAKER_02]: And the reason why I bring him in now is because
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, like one of the things that I appreciate learning from Dave was this, you know, the way he talks about emergence and complexity and adjacent possible which I've forgotten.
[SPEAKER_02]: I've forgotten off the top of my head.
[SPEAKER_02]: Stuart Kaufman's notion of like how, you know, life begins to emerge and adapt.
[SPEAKER_02]: And as opposed to what can happen, which is,
[SPEAKER_02]: We create an idealised version of a future state and then we try to make that happen to force away there.
[SPEAKER_02]: I've seen that change in the coaching industry where we've mentioned Steve March, the approaches to coaching now, which I think are much more about being fully where we are.
[SPEAKER_02]: in a way that allows our experience to unfold.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I think that's Dave would be resonant with that, you know?
[SPEAKER_02]: It's like we need to meet and probe, meet our experience and probe, and it's fully participate with the world as it is, rather than, you know, kind of come from a polarized place and say,
[SPEAKER_02]: Everything's wrong right now and, you know, this is how it should be.
[SPEAKER_02]: This is better.
[SPEAKER_02]: This is utopia.
[SPEAKER_02]: So could you, could you, you know, what comes up for you as I share this in terms of how islands of sanity or collectives might begin to relate to the world and and and kind of into attune to what might want to come through as new, you know, what replaces modernity in a sense.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, great question.
[SPEAKER_00]: And this is one that, well, keep you up at night here.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the answer is aren't fully clear, but I think it's important what you did by
[SPEAKER_00]: referencing Dave Snowden and you know that we need to in some ways reorient to the present moment with a different kind of mind but what he calls you know seeing the evolutionary potential of the present moment rather than having some sort of
[SPEAKER_00]: idea of linear progress.
[SPEAKER_00]: To find the ideal state, break down the path and just execute the strategy and getting there.
[SPEAKER_00]: He's pointed out that that doesn't work, especially in environments that are just highly unstable and unpredictable.
[SPEAKER_00]: The whole action logics need to change.
[SPEAKER_00]: And, you know, that mind of modernity that we've been kind of talking about was founded on this idea of a linear time, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: We could just plan for in that way the whole idea of progress is arguably built on that.
[SPEAKER_00]: So now
[SPEAKER_00]: There's a shift in questions and here I attribute my friend and mentor Bonita Roy who also had in the podcast I believe.
[SPEAKER_00]: She says, we need to start looking at what she calls the complex potential state.
[SPEAKER_00]: What is present here in the moment?
[SPEAKER_00]: And the question then becomes not so much, what do we do?
[SPEAKER_00]: But the question becomes more what is possible from here, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: Which is
[SPEAKER_00]: quite subtle.
[SPEAKER_00]: But again, it's an invitation, just like stay with truly what is.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it also needs, it drives the need for a deeper self understanding that all the models that we use, you know, like in the coaching world, obviously we love models, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: Because they give us a map, they give the coaching map stages that we can potentially go through, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: And Dave's also very critical of these as our others.
[SPEAKER_00]: But it asks us to also come from like a perspective that has to recognize the assumptions inherent in the models, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: Like as an overlay on reality, like what do the models allow us to see?
[SPEAKER_00]: And more importantly, you know, how do the models actually shape us?
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, you're probably familiar with this too, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: Like when when you discover a model like the anyagram or something like that, you know, you you get into it, you start learning it and
[SPEAKER_00]: all of a sudden you find yourself living in a world of people who are in peacemakers and challengers and sixes and nines and and that's all you see right currently working on you know changing my attachment strategy and so I see my see people now you know through the lens of attachment theory so the capacity to hold
[SPEAKER_00]: those models and see how they are actually lenses on reality and being able to shift between them.
[SPEAKER_00]: For example, what I argue is like a vital skill in navigating the sense of possibility and also understand the imaginable constraints that these models also are because they offer as a partial view of reality's never complete, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: Some models try to do that, of course, and they have a bigger reach.
[SPEAKER_00]: Not necessarily better fit.
[SPEAKER_00]: So what do we apply on what kind of reality and from what then do we decide what our actions are?
[SPEAKER_00]: And so yeah, this is just the core, you know, here it gets very, very
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, we can go deep through the weeds and many of the practices or the frameworks at least through which I want to design the practices and I am designing these practices, take that into account, you know, like down to the level of the very words that we use, right, because
[SPEAKER_00]: arguably words have directionality too.
[SPEAKER_00]: We put them into our system, they ingress in us.
[SPEAKER_00]: And you know how to say it's like in a community, you know, there's a certain kind of vernacular that goes around and terminology and all of a sudden you've created the boundary, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: You've created an in group and it's exclusive and there's power dynamics through information asymmetries.
[SPEAKER_00]: So here, I actually want to start a stand-up routine kind of challenge, constantly challenging this language.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, one that kind of gets me is, for example, I joke that you can't have a normal conversation with a person anymore because everybody is speaking in the language of parts work, you know?
[SPEAKER_00]: It's like, yeah, part of me feels like this and should be doing it should be doing it.
[SPEAKER_00]: But another part of me feels like, you know, so you always feel, okay, so what is it, you know?
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, who are you?
[SPEAKER_00]: Which one are you?
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, exactly.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, what is it?
[SPEAKER_00]: Can we please come through any kind of, you know, it's great that you have internalized this internal family system stuff, but, you know, who's there?
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, it is a little side.
[SPEAKER_02]: No, so what I'm hearing is, in a sense,
[SPEAKER_02]: What was, you know, to take the terminology of Robert Keegan, like we were subject to some of these core beliefs of modernity, and perhaps now we're seeing them as objects, you know?
[SPEAKER_02]: And that gives us the chance to kind of question them in the way that we couldn't before, because they were like the water we're swimming in.
[SPEAKER_02]: And in the same sense of that, I hear you saying, yeah, we actually want to be
[SPEAKER_02]: It's almost like systemically aware of the practices that we hold so that we can be appropriate.
[SPEAKER_02]: We can not just be captured by one lens.
[SPEAKER_02]: But actually, we can take on lenses as appropriate as they feel needed rather than, you know, like the hammer one hammer to kind of, you know, is that you've got to hammer on and nail and that's it.
[SPEAKER_02]: Everything's a nail now.
[SPEAKER_02]: Anyway, you get my point.
[SPEAKER_02]: So yeah.
[SPEAKER_02]: What have you been, maybe it's a good place to ask like, what have you been doing?
[SPEAKER_02]: What are you noticing with groups and islands of sanity about how they come together and practice?
[SPEAKER_02]: What brings them together and what communities are out there and what are they up to?
[SPEAKER_02]: And what have you been doing yourself?
[SPEAKER_02]: I just threw five or six questions at you.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, for sure.
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, I think
[SPEAKER_00]: The coming together is certainly of the understanding that we're in trouble and that we need to do things differently and that we need a, you know, forms of collective intelligence to figure out like what the next steps can be.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I think that's what binds the people here, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: It's called it metacrisisware and obviously there's a focus on doing the inner work.
[SPEAKER_00]: So it's not just acting on the world but being and being a
[SPEAKER_00]: integral part of it and yeah and
[SPEAKER_00]: Personally, I think the direction I'm taking it in is in trying to develop that meta cognition in some of which I just shared, you know, what are the stories that we consciously bring in when we come together to make sense at the present moment and to determine where we go.
[SPEAKER_00]: So we don't bring in what, again, Bonita is called like modern malware, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: That basically keeps us stuck in the,
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, in the ways of modernity.
[SPEAKER_00]: So that's what I'm trying to do.
[SPEAKER_00]: Work on these deep structures of consciousness and bring awareness to them, so they loosen their hold.
[SPEAKER_00]: To give an example, I already mentioned linear time, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, throughout human evolution and there were different kinds of consciousness.
[SPEAKER_00]: They had a different time conscious and different experience of time, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, before
[SPEAKER_00]: the age of modernity began.
[SPEAKER_00]: We organized life much more around a circular way of experiencing time.
[SPEAKER_00]: We just move with the seasons, you know.
[SPEAKER_00]: And there was no such thing as social mobility.
[SPEAKER_00]: So this idea of progress was largely absent.
[SPEAKER_00]: And since we got invented clocks, all of a sudden, time became measurable.
[SPEAKER_00]: There was more social mobility, and it was a sense of progress, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: Like life got better.
[SPEAKER_00]: So our conception of time is now that it unfold linearly through a past present future structure.
[SPEAKER_00]: which also found its way in physics, obviously, and like Newtonian physics.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, this is only to say that the depth at which I would like to practice and, you know, be conscious about bringing these units of meaning, you know, these big ideas that structure the unfoldment, the direction of unfoldment.
[SPEAKER_00]: in terms of what Snowden calls like, you know, his vector theory of change, which he calls a narrative assemblages for giving me day if I misrepresent this.
[SPEAKER_00]: But, you know, where he basically selects
[SPEAKER_00]: more stories like this and less stories like that and that's kind of like how you steer the system towards a new place and so again this kind of consciousness all the way down by the way not just like what lives in the imaginal you know the where we're talking more about like myth and poetry and archetype and metaphors right that's the language of the heart
[SPEAKER_00]: And this is where we, yeah, which is not yet the fully differentiated world in which we do the parts work, which is much more like the part of the cognitive, the coconut center ground where just ideas, facts.
[SPEAKER_00]: systems that kind of poke.
[SPEAKER_00]: So dropping down and you know the depth of told you that I've developed to articulate some of these domains go all the way down to
[SPEAKER_00]: to the processes of where the first patterns, the first ideas start to kind of take shape.
[SPEAKER_00]: Some listeners, spiritually informed, may be familiar with the non-dual depths, but in Diamond Approach, there's also a non-dual dimension that is called the logos dimension.
[SPEAKER_00]: And Hamid Ali, founder of the Diamond Approach, says, this is the place where creative dynamism happens and arguably also the place where whole spiritual paths actually originate.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so, you know, the logos of a teaching connects to this place as its genesis.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so here I want to say spirituality, the way I now think of spirituality and a spiritual path is just a particular mediated relation to reality, almost quite simple, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: particular way that a spiritual path orient us to reality through its practices, its designs, the languages, the concepts, the teaching, the dormant, whatever.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, death determines how reality actually shows up because you know, we're humans.
[SPEAKER_00]: We don't perceive reality directly as it is.
[SPEAKER_00]: No, we have to have mediated
[SPEAKER_00]: We have to have a mediated relationship with reality.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, I mean, because we're humans.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so, yeah, the conscious construction, and I call it logoic engineering, and this is what I want to invite people to kind of practice with me.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, in the fall, I'm going to have
[SPEAKER_00]: An online residency in which we'll drill down on some of these practices and try to weave that into the social field through practices of resonance and the sense of possibility.
[SPEAKER_00]: And see if we can unfold into place where we start to have a Bonita called Transparenic Medic Insight.
[SPEAKER_00]: That doesn't come from our conditioning, the modern mindset again.
[SPEAKER_00]: But actually, the more adjacent possible that you are your reference, you know, Peter Sanji and Otto Sharmer, you know, that work is all about that, that pooling in of the
[SPEAKER_00]: the near future.
[SPEAKER_00]: But I argue, I think we can be more refined.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think that it needs updating.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think we can develop the body minds that are capable of doing that.
[SPEAKER_00]: And here I lean heavily for example on the work of the diamond approach again.
[SPEAKER_00]: But also that of Cynthia Bourjo in developing three centred awareness is what you call it building on the work of Guru Gief.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, where we perceive, have the centers of perceptions, sometimes called intelligences of the head, the heart, and the gut.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, that could offer us, yeah, you know, picture picture terms, many applied, but action inside residents.
[SPEAKER_00]: Those are some of the I like to use, you know, that we can kind of learn to attune to when we start practicing together and we're in a room.
[SPEAKER_00]: And yeah, practice collective unfolding.
[SPEAKER_02]: Again, you just said a lot there, I think that's worth unpacking.
[SPEAKER_02]: Can you go in a bit longer?
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_02]: So in a sense, like I'm hearing you say that, I don't want to check this, like that we've constructed reality.
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, even where, I think there's a phrase I've had, a quote I've seen you put ways.
[SPEAKER_02]: Like it's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.
[SPEAKER_02]: Which, you know, I feel like shit, that's kind of true for me.
[SPEAKER_02]: That's it.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, I would point to these like,
[SPEAKER_02]: And that's kind of crazy when you actually put that on the table.
[SPEAKER_02]: So what I'm hearing you say is that in a sense we can become aware of these
[SPEAKER_02]: deep imaginary constructs, you know, around modernity that we have.
[SPEAKER_02]: And then we can actually, maybe deconstruct those.
[SPEAKER_02]: And what's important is that we can, you know, there's these territories we can begin to access of kind of potential or logos, use that word, logos where
[SPEAKER_02]: you know, through our own inner work as well, which expands our capacity to sense and attune with our hearts and our bodies and our minds, not just with our rational minds, which maybe we could say maybe that's another feature of modernity, which maybe we could say a privileged analysis and rationalism and not to say that's bad, but if that's all there is, then
[SPEAKER_02]: It's a limited slice.
[SPEAKER_02]: So through the expansion of our bandwidth of where we sense from, we can actually begin to tune to the kind of that sense of potentiality.
[SPEAKER_02]: And there's a kind of way, and that we need to do that collectively.
[SPEAKER_02]: you know, and that collectively we can begin to resonate with, you know, with it.
[SPEAKER_02]: I can, I don't know what to call it.
[SPEAKER_02]: So now this is where I'd ask you like a new idea or a new, a new way of organizing ourselves, a new level, something we might privilege value to.
[SPEAKER_02]: Do I have that kind of, you know, yeah?
[SPEAKER_00]: Or sure.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think the, the ask here is to be continuously in this cycle of, um,
[SPEAKER_00]: Learning and unlearning, knowing when to create structure and knowing when to let go of structure in order to create communities of coherence in which you mentioned world building.
[SPEAKER_00]: This I see is the work of world building in which we can create micro imaginary.
[SPEAKER_00]: If we have the social imaginary that we kind of the big background, I think,
[SPEAKER_00]: for communities, it is the task to start, yeah, have these micro imaginaries in which this recognition of potential is explored.
[SPEAKER_00]: And in which we, because you said it beautifully, you got this quite beautiful in which we, you know, gradually loosen these imaginal constraints.
[SPEAKER_00]: And in order to open our possibility spaces, yeah, that I think is the work.
[SPEAKER_02]: Could we sort of explore like, so you mentioned time earlier, you know, and I think that's an interesting one because, you know, of the time we find ourselves in, you know, our relationship to time and you mentioned it.
[SPEAKER_02]: In other times, people felt time was more circular, you know, with the seasons.
[SPEAKER_02]: I feel like this, you know, time is an interesting one because it's like time is speeding up.
[SPEAKER_02]: It feels like, you know, this idea of like money is time.
[SPEAKER_02]: There's all kinds of ideas around time.
[SPEAKER_02]: And, you know, even the notion of singularity, you know, like this point where everything comes together.
[SPEAKER_02]: So, like, what have you, what explorations have you done around time?
[SPEAKER_02]: in us because you know this we want it to be practical as well don't we it's like how do you see something like that happening where we we explore collectively our relationship to time and then actually we tune into something around the way we relate to time that opens up a new possibility for us to be together in wholesome ways or you know sustainable ways yeah
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, that's a great question, you know.
[SPEAKER_00]: But yeah, it is.
[SPEAKER_00]: It is.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's a beautiful rabbit hole.
[SPEAKER_00]: And this is, again, one that I think we need many approaches approach.
[SPEAKER_00]: And because if you research time, it's funny because, you know, it's a bit of a mess still because it's a big topic, obviously, but there's so many different avenues of inquiry that
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, you know, that people have gone down to without really arriving at something that I found very practical in many instances.
[SPEAKER_00]: But one, there's one exception, and that is, yeah, there's a, I don't know what to, how to label him, John Gabsor.
[SPEAKER_00]: He is certainly one of the integral theories, but a kind of a different integral theorist than the more well-known Ken Wilber who came up with integral theory.
[SPEAKER_00]: But Gepser was what I call maybe a psychocultural historian and he started looking at art artifacts and from that
[SPEAKER_00]: historical artifacts and from that he managed to discern structures of consciousness that we have arguably lived through in our evolutionary history as humans and so he also managed to discern this different relationship and experience of time
[SPEAKER_00]: that humans went through.
[SPEAKER_00]: And we already mentioned that linear times is like one of the bedrock kind of organizing principles of modernity as well as a synchronization, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, clocks like the whole world, we used to have many, many different time zones and ways of
[SPEAKER_00]: making sense of time.
[SPEAKER_00]: But in the last, when is it?
[SPEAKER_00]: Three hundred years, the world has become increasingly synchronized, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: And what he noticed that he predicted that this speeding up, this acceleration, would result in what he called the eruption of time.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, it would kind of build up such a critical mass, such a pressure in our current structure of consciousness, which he calls perspective.
[SPEAKER_00]: And by that it's, you know, like this nucleated sense of ego, self, like looks into the world from this particular vantage point.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's just like a slice of reality.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's, it's, it's three-dimensional.
[SPEAKER_00]: And he says that time in its true essence actually cannot be captured in this way.
[SPEAKER_00]: And in previous structures of consciousness, in the modern one, he says that we have mastered space, but that in the next unfolding of this consciousness, we are about to master time.
[SPEAKER_00]: And by mastering, he mentions that time no longer has us, but it becomes like an object just as he referenced Kegan subject objects moves.
[SPEAKER_00]: Right?
[SPEAKER_00]: Time can then become a
[SPEAKER_00]: a creative force that is his way I believe, he puts it.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so, what does that mean?
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, like, yeah, well, he's truly not, he won't give us, actually won't give us like real clear answers other than he would call it that we are free from time.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like he calls it the acronym, you know, Kronos is a term we sometimes use to use this notion of clock time, linear time.
[SPEAKER_00]: So he calls it the acronym TIME freedom.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's a consciousness that, well, we may see that as ascended, you know, it gets quite mystical here.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is also why I believe the work
[SPEAKER_00]: Like the innovation is perturb practices, like would point towards those more non-jewel ways of experiencing the world because time and the way we experience life is also intimately tied to having a sense of identity.
[SPEAKER_00]: So whenever we start to, you know, kind of mess around with the self-model and identity level, our sense of time also radically changes.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think it's just to bring a little bit more home.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm still quite vague, I think.
[SPEAKER_00]: But this expanded sense of time is what I certainly want to explore under the name of Temporix.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is the term that John Gabs are used, all efforts to concretize time that in his words.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, you know, this is, I think, you know, one of those foundational pieces that we can start to inquire into and, well, there's more here.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think there's some really practical researchers now that let's start using this like Sarah Walker, Sarah Emery Walker, is like someone who is, you know, getting very practical, how, um,
[SPEAKER_00]: how a different notion of time can inform this different structure of consciousness and are unfolding, you know, are incremental unfolding of into new realities.
[SPEAKER_00]: But she's obsessed and yeah, so she focuses on a different
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes, he has a different focus, but I think if you look at a work, you can start to discern this new time consciousness is going to make it into culture.
[SPEAKER_00]: So look at Sarah Walker's work work.
[SPEAKER_02]: What she's saying?
[SPEAKER_02]: I've got a reflection in a moment, but what do you take from what she's saying?
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, I hope I'm doing this justice, but
[SPEAKER_00]: She looks at these processes of construction.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so she would argue that the more complex an object is, it has gone through many iterations of moments of construction.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so, you know, where do you find in the in the course most like the most complex objects?
[SPEAKER_00]: And that is earth arguably as far as we know human beings are brain right massively complex objects compared to what we find elsewhere.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then maybe we're not seeing like because our consciousness doesn't allow us to see everything of course.
[SPEAKER_00]: But she didn't argue that because we are so complex that the steps unfolding in time actually we are the oldest objects.
[SPEAKER_00]: Because we've had so many of these constructor moments that eventually are us planet earth even.
[SPEAKER_00]: So she would argue that earth in that view is the oldest one.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so I think also when we, you know,
[SPEAKER_00]: This is maybe what we can kind of look towards the process metaphisions like white head and some heart and heart's horn and burks and others who have really drilled down into time.
[SPEAKER_00]: Something I still I'm still finding my way through.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, the nitty gritty of how unfolding happens, I think is what we need to get literate in.
[SPEAKER_00]: And here I also want to say that, for example, Michael Leven, who's looking at other spaces, more for genetic space through which organisms evolve
[SPEAKER_00]: and how he sees that we draw in the patterns, you know, from what he now calls botonic space, the building blocks the ideas, the patterns, they're being drawn into reality, you know, from, I don't know what you would call it,
[SPEAKER_00]: So we can do that in our tuning to this in following present moment by also like looking what is actually here, our disposition, our complex potential state, plus all the ideas and frameworks that we invoke to make sense of this unfolding reality.
[SPEAKER_00]: we can learn to be discerning in how we do that and actually what makes it into reality.
[SPEAKER_00]: So this is kind of like a applied metaphysics, but it certainly undergirds the design of the practices that I hope to invite people in and experiment together with.
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm glad you mentioned Michael Levin as well, he's awesome.
[SPEAKER_02]: Because what I was thought with was
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, because I think people listening is like, well, yeah, what does it mean, you know, practically?
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, yeah.
[SPEAKER_02]: I think what I was sat with was like, first of all, if I think of that example I shared, which was like feeling bounded by the sense of being productive on a Friday and feeling how that patterns, my embodied experience of not feeling fully relaxed.
[SPEAKER_02]: And so,
[SPEAKER_02]: There's a weird like becoming aware of that patterning.
[SPEAKER_02]: And what opened up for me in my reflection as you spoke was like this sense of unfolding.
[SPEAKER_02]: So I, you know, in one mode, it's like I'm striving to get to that linear future state because it's better.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I want to improve myself.
[SPEAKER_02]: in this different mode and have been influenced here by Steve March.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's like it's a tuning to a tunement itself.
[SPEAKER_02]: And that seems to, so that in a simple way of saying that, it's like becoming present and kind of being with what's here and including it in a way that I'm not trying to control that process and then it feels like something opens up and then it feels like
[SPEAKER_02]: That's non-linear.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's like, there's a feeling of accessing a kind of intelligence that comes online.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I think of moments of creativity too.
[SPEAKER_02]: If I access that state of present, I'm immersed in this sense of nowness.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's suddenly things I get created
[SPEAKER_02]: that from another place, from that more kind of striving place, I'm like, whoa, it would take a lot of effort and work to make that thing happen a lot of time, and suddenly I did something in a kind of timeless way.
[SPEAKER_02]: It wasn't bounded by the usual constraints of time and effort.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, this is what comes up for me.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's like this mode of perception and mode of relating to experience where I'm, I'm accessing a different way of creation, a way of creating.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, and this again, you know, ties back to what I mentioned before, or this logos I mentioned, there is,
[SPEAKER_00]: intelligence that we can trust.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like previously, I'm going back.
[SPEAKER_00]: Humans came at some point and lived into rationality, which was appropriate for that kind of time.
[SPEAKER_00]: We've unfolded into becoming individuals, at least maybe a little bit too much here in the West.
[SPEAKER_00]: But so there are latent forms and ways of being that we haven't yet unfolded into, you know, that afford very different ways of relating to reality.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so the invitation is here to trust that patterning to trust that intelligence and to not, you know, hold their own wishes and needs to rigidly but to, yeah, to
[SPEAKER_00]: to lean into that.
[SPEAKER_00]: And as you mentioned beautifully, it's like a tune to a tune in itself.
[SPEAKER_00]: And here you, you know, like another part of the, you know, the whole complex of practices, the ecology of practices and some of its elements is to develop this teleological consciousness, you know, I call it teleogenesis.
[SPEAKER_00]: So also discerning, you know, where the direction of where we're going.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, where do we point to with our intentions or our imagination, or liberated imagination, not the one that is constrained by capitalism, as per this quote?
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, so, you know, that I think is the true job.
[SPEAKER_00]: It sounds all quite radical, but I think that's also why we need to do it together because if you do it by yourself, you just really run the risk of going off the rails and I don't advise anybody do that.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think I've experimented way too much on myself and paid software prices here, but in terms of socialization, but yeah, it's certainly worth exploring.
[SPEAKER_00]: if we know that what we have is the wrong direction.
[SPEAKER_02]: We have to draw to a close now and I want to name that
[SPEAKER_02]: In part two, if we could explore more about that tealog, tealogical kind of clarity on knowing, how do we recognize that?
[SPEAKER_02]: I think instinctively we kind of know, like I've seen in my clients and my coaching work is like,
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, there's just a feeling of truth, beauty and goodness.
[SPEAKER_02]: But anyway, part two is like we could explore that and go a bit more deeply into some of the practices, the collective unfolding practices that you've been exploring.
[SPEAKER_02]: But yeah, I just want to thank you for being with us.
[SPEAKER_02]: Is there anything you want to share in order to feel complete?
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I sense we have so much here, but just maybe touching on the last point, I think, you know, coming out of this
[SPEAKER_00]: Newtonian metaphysics in which everything is random and chants and little atoms colliding and there is no purpose.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think that recognition which you said, the people on an individual level feel that their life is about something.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like that their soul is a logos and has a direction of unfolding that it wants to go towards.
[SPEAKER_00]: So does the collective and I think
[SPEAKER_00]: If we can tune to that thread and find out what that is and connect it at purposeiveness, then a lot will become possible in a lot of our issues.
[SPEAKER_00]: We'll start to become solved.
[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you, Joel, which is great to work on.
[SPEAKER_02]: We'll just find out more about your work.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, you can go to Perspectiva.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's easy to Google.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's just the word Perspective, but then instead of an E at the end, put an A. The URL is Systems, Hyphen, Souls, Hyphen, Society, Hyphen.com.
[SPEAKER_00]: You'll find some of my writings and I also have a sub-stack called Increasing Life.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I need to publish a bit more.
[SPEAKER_00]: I promised to be more productive and give more output.
[SPEAKER_00]: But there you find some of the stuff that a word perspective are also up to and some of my more personal, you know, explorations.
[SPEAKER_00]: So that's where people can go.
[SPEAKER_00]: or come to Stockholm, like emerge lakefront.org that is the URL of the community that I currently live in and yeah, where we're prototyping many, many ways of practice.
[SPEAKER_00]: So that's also a way to find me and come join in Stockholm.
[SPEAKER_00]: So to practice.
[SPEAKER_02]: Nice one.
[SPEAKER_02]: Thanks Eva.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_02]: Thank you.
[SPEAKER_02]: Here we are.
[SPEAKER_02]: We're at the end of the podcast.
[SPEAKER_02]: Just do a heads up again.
[SPEAKER_02]: If you're not on our mailing list and you want to stay in the loop about other things we create, then head to coaches rising.com.
[SPEAKER_02]: Put your name in the sign up box there.
[SPEAKER_02]: You'll also find some of our other offerings online trainings for coaches there.
[SPEAKER_02]: And just want to end by wishing you well and I'll see you again next time.