2021 is a time for creating the new
Gebser course launch, Integral Imprint books, ILR and Perspectiva offerings.
 |
Dear friends, readers.
2021 is at last here. Does it feel any different for you? In my case, at least, it feels like this is a year for making things.
First of all, I am pleased to announce the launch of the annual 2021 Gebser course: Seeing Through the World: Integral Consciousness and The Ever-Present Origin.
This is the third consecutive year I’ve offered the online class on Nura Learning. Hard to believe. We go for 9 live Zoom calls and there’s 10 pre-recorded modules, plus a syllabus that you get, right off the bat. If you’ve been looking for an excuse to pick up Jean Gebser’s The Ever-Present Origin (1949) / Ursprung und Gegenwart and read it, this is as good a reason as you’re likely to get.
As I’ve always said, EPO is a foundational text in the “integral milieu” in addition to being a powerful, even “catalytic” read.
Over the past three years I’ve had some brilliant students, from all walks of life, take the course — artists, writers, painters, healers, coaches, academics, etc. — and it seems that just about everyone takes something unique from the reading experience into their lives and practices.
It starts February 21st and goes through June. You can read about it and register here.
Integral Imprint
Next up, I’m very pleased to announce the 2021 launch of Integral Imprint at Revelore Press
I think I already summed it up best when I wrote,
Recognizing that we are a unique constellation of mystics, consciousness scholars, artists, philosophers, esotericists, and activists, living and writing in the present, Revelore’s Integral Imprint seeks to bring forth novel combinations of thinking and enacting “planetary culture” – an intellectual, literary community – which has more recently been described as “transformational” or “visionary culture.” We believe the most important activity we can do is to establish a network of publishing and writing – a media ecosystem– to allow maximum exchange and synergy between who we feel are the most exciting writers in this line of thinking.
The books we publish aim to be inspiring, intellectually and aesthetically, and most of all generative – further instances of planetary thinking in a time that needs a consciousness culture that is already leaping into the future, lit up and electrified by the magical re-working and re-mixing of ideas for tomorrow.
There are already a few irons in the fire, and some are looking at an imminent launch date.
Sean Kelly’s Becoming Gaia: On the Threshold of Planetary Initiation (2021) is first up. Sean’s book idea sprung to life after Revelore published the well received e-book, Living in End Times: Beyond Hope and Despair, which made its way in edited form into Becoming Gaia.
Guided by the ideal of Gaia as “concrete universal,” Kelly offers compelling insights on the nature of an emerging world spirituality that some describe as a second Axial Age; on the elements of a complex-integral ethics for the Planetary Era; and on the role of the death/rebirth archetype for understanding the charged field of contemporary climate activism. The book culminates with an inspiring meditation on the possibility, in these end times, of a third way beyond both hope and despair. In contrast to the restrictive anthropocentrism and technocentrism of mainstream discourse around the Anthropocene, Kelly speaks instead of the Gaianthropoceneas our new geological epoch.
You can watch Jem Bendell talk with Sean about Becoming Gaia over at the Deep Adaptation community.
And there’s more!
Mutations: Issue Zero - Art, Consciousness and the Anthropocene (2021) is Integral Imprint’s first annual periodical, featuring writers like Barbara Karlsen, Brandt Stickley, Sam Mickey, AnaLouise Keating, Matthew Segall, and Debashish B Banerji. If you are interested to learn more, read about it here.
My own book, Fragments of an Integral Futurism (2021) is due out this year, and I’m finally coming back around to the writing process. To say that 2020 was transformative would be an understatement; the dialogues and readings from last year have significantly helped to shape, and reshape the book. My description still stands, however… “In this philosophical manifesto, Jeremy reclaims the notion of “futurism” from the techno-utopian dreams of exponential progress. In the process, an “integral futurism,” however incipient, gleans forth, promising a new phenomenology of time and a new, seductive ontology of tomorrow; one where symbiosis and planetary thinking might thrive.”
More irons in the fire for later this year: Adam Robbert’s Askēsis and Perception: Philosophy as a Way of Life (2021) and Matthew Segall’s Crossing the Threshold: Etheric Imagination in the Post-Kantian Process Philosophy of Schelling and Whitehead (2021).
Perspectiva
With the new year and their new website launch, I’m honored to officially announce my association with Perspectiva.
As a “Senior Research Associate,” I’ll be writing a series of essays starting with my Planetary piece (Patreon members will have seen a draft of it already), and offering editorial support for Perspectiva Press.
Speaking of which, you’ll read in their newsletter that I have a book in the works for Perspectiva, tentatively titled Planetary Mythopoetics. Over the next few months I’ll have a clearer sense of what that book will entail (if only I could write more than one book simultaneously!) but my conversations with Ivo Mensch and Jonathan Rowson have been creatively energizing.
Read the newsletter to learn more about the brilliant cohort of “expert generalists” Perspectiva has assembled.
Closing Notes
As many of you know, the latest issue of Integral Leadership Review has launched (on December solstice). I’ve been honored to work with Eric and Natasha on this project and, suffice to say (for now), there are a lot of exciting developments we’re working on together.
For this issue, check out our opening notes for the issue, my reflective “Notes from the Field” piece on integral cosmopolitanism, and Eric’s wonderful coda.
Please also see Cynthia Bourgeault’s wonderful and brilliant review of my book, “Seeing Through the World: An Invitation to Begin the Healing Work.” Cynthia also has a spiritually rich conversation over at Northeast Wisdom, “Advent Coming Towards Us” further reflecting on the series of Gebser lessons she has been offering.
There are new Mutations episodes lined up, but I’ll leave it here for now and wait til’ next week.
Grateful to be here with you in 2021.
- Jeremy
Twitter
Support through the Patreon Community
Join the Mutations Discord
Two details of a responsible intellectual, the young don’t read books and, a complex language does not communicate well to the layman majority, nor does it gather the motivation needed for topical shifts of the 3.5%.
I am curious if any remember frustration of childhood times, when the voices of intellectual security, were totally ignored and play was demanded more than words, communication is play, presence is play, intellectuals did not stop the dissolution of Rome, the ensuing violence, the destruction, or the hate of empire and all it stood for, even today the marble pieces of privileges are trampled under the feet of the citizen, and it is forbidden to touch many of these remnants of war.