It's a Wrap (or a Fold): 2023

In 2024, Mutations becomes a zone for cultural transformation. Daring to imagine new futures in the vertiginous present.

Thank you, dear readers, for joining me in 2023 for the many Mutations events, talks, and online courses we hosted together.

J.F. Martel hosted some of his best courses yet (Macbeth being the most unique, I thought, while Reclaiming Art in the Age of A.I. being the most significant and culminative).

Michael Garfield

debuted his much-awaited philosophical mind-jazz meditation on “Jurassic Worlding.” I offered a Winter/Autumn duo: from the fifth annual Jean Gebser class (I can hardly believe it), “Seeing Through the World,” to the second iteration of “Fragments of an Integral Future,” co-hosted by myself and astrid montuclard.

All-in-all, it was a year for planetary wanderlust and philosophical contemplation on the nature and origins of modernity, asking two critical worldview questions:

How did we get here, and where might we go from here?

Both past and future, as I spoke about in my December 19th class, are twin horizons of the imagination. Entangled, like the rhizome. Certain histories shape and re-shape, render transparent or opaque, the habitable futures.

Finally, my online course platform was rebranded, now becoming “Mutations,” a sprawlingly rhizomic but nevertheless coherent name for what we’re exploring here together.

It’s worth quoting the description I crafted for the rebrand:

Mutations suggests a kind of metamorphic zone for cultural transformation, practice, and experimentation, bridging disciplines and finding connections between art, science, and spirituality. It is a place for creative seekers and misfits daring to imagine alternative futures to explore how they can embody such futures in our vertiginous present.

It is a call back to soul, to an intensification of creativity and consciousness at the craggy shoreline of one worldview and the quiet but assured presence of another already beneath our feet.

This other worldview is tentacular, arrayed with kin and relations distributed, diachronically, across the body of time-space. This ground rising to meet us is already present.

New Gebser Class

More courses, I’m delighted to say, are planned for 2024, starting with the now sixth annual deep-dive into Jean Gebser’s Ever-Present Origin, “Seeing Through the World: Jean Gebser & Integral Consciousness.” It starts February 13, 2023 and runs for seven sessions.

• Lesson I - Origin is Ever-Present: Reading Jean Gebser as Contemplative Practice

• Lesson II - The Transformation of our World: History Re-Visioned

• Lesson III - From Archaic Roots to Magic Entanglement

• Lesson IV - Time and the Image of the Soul in the Mythic Structure

• Lesson V - Thinking and Being in the Mental Structure

• Lesson VI - Diaphaneity, or Becoming Transparent in the Integral Structure

• Lesson VII - ‘Backleaps from the Ever-Present Future’ - Voices from the Aperspectival World

2024’s version of the course focus on three themes:

a) Diaphaneity, imagination, and spiritual perception and

b) what Gebser might contribute towards a “post-religious” integral spirituality¹

c) Oscillation as a form of integrative practice for what I’ve been calling “relational emergence”

If you need a discount, or a pay-what-you-can registration, let me know. No one will be turned away.

In-Person Events in 2024

For many years there has been ongoing interest in a Mutations symposium and a Gebser-themed retreat. I’m glad to say that both are on the table for 2024. I’m currently researching venue options, but if you happen to know one (preferably in the New England area) I’m all ears. Please reach out.

When it comes to conferences, I plan on attending and presenting at ICON (Integral Conference of North America) in Denver (May 16-19). ICON is fundraising their conference, so if you can, go ahead and offer your support here.

Mutations may have a presence there, too, depending on what I can coordinate with the conference organizers. Stay tuned.

Writing in 2023

2023 was a year that overflowed with major life changes, world travels, and moving from Florida to Vermont.

In November just about everything else found itself put on hold as my son’s birth, which happened early on Thanksgiving morning, took center-stage.

If you’re a paid subscriber you can read my admittedly sleep-deprived but nevertheless inspired reflection, “Speaking of Already Living in a New Time: One very tiny, yet momentous and precious update from life here in the Green Mountains.”

I remember the stars Wednesday night when my partner, astrid, went into labor. I remember looking at winter sky, crystalline clear, and thinking, Wow! So this is really it. This is how it will have happened. It made sense in the way that the logic of a dream makes sense. The sky was clear. You could see every star like a jeweled point. So, naturally, it was time for my son to arrive.

Watching the mists float over the mountains on many a Vermont morning, I found myself returning to Cloud-Hidden, Whereabouts Unknown (1973) a lesser known text by Alan Watts.

Meeting the ancient mountains of Vermont as my partner and I acclimated to a new climate and new community had me ruminating on the nature of place, which you can read about in “Cloud-Hidden in the Green Mountains.”

“Place is part of what we are,” writes Gary Snyder in The Practice of the Wild, it

“has a kind of fluidity: it passes through space and time… A place will have been grasslands, then conifers, then beech and elm… but each is only for a while… The whole earth is a great tablet holding the multiple overlaid new and ancient traces of the swirl of forces. Each place is its own place, forever (eventually) wild.”

My notion of “doing philosophy in the wild” has continued to surprise me, because my writing, and my own path in life, has continued to turn towards the contemplative, the soulful, the poetic, in response perhaps to all the hidden ways that place continuse to work on me.

I find myself drawn to a practice of contemplative writing in order to complete Fragments as a book. It feels less like a book, though, and more like a way of living and being that has deep roots, and in which, as a writer, I am needing to transform, to “grow down” into in order to write.

That is why, I think, I describe Mutations project as a “public commonplace notebook for a time between worlds.”

I am just beginning to understand that doing philosophy is a spiritual practice of wissenkunst, the making of knowledge-art: where thinking is in service to the silence of unthought, and creativity welcomed as the expression of ourselves in relation to, and for the sake of, the whole.

In a poetic fragment from four years ago, I described “wild being” as a kind of archaic wholeness at the root of ourselves and the world, and, these days, wildness has inched closer to becoming a synonym for wholeness.

Snyder would seem to concur when he writes that,

“to speak of wilderness is to speak of wholeness. Human beings came out of that wholeness, and to consider the possibility of reactivating membership in the Assembly of All Beings is in no way regressive.”

Perhaps that also sums up what I’m interested in unpacking:

• Coming from and returning to wholeness: how do we come full circle?

• To what end does the sense of self-separation from each other, let alone from the more-than-human world, serve?

• What happens when the dream of separation ends? How do we tell new stories of human unfoldment and becoming that are not ensared in that dreadful, deadly seduction that is the myth of progress?

• If we’ve always been and expressed wholeness and complexity throughout human history, how do we re-vision the meta-narrative of civilizational unfoldment and planetary homecoming?

From wild being to wild being, our innate integrality shines through—how wondrous, how strange.²

Mutations in 2024

To wrap up this email, here’s what you can expect in the new year:

• Mutations podcast will be returning in the new year, I’m glad to say, with new episodes already in the queue.

• Many folks have requested both shorter classes and pre-recorded ones, so I’ll be making Re-Visioning History available for download and will continue to offer one-off seminars. Possibly monthly. Stay tuned.

• Monthly themes calls and discussions for paid subscribers and Patrons.

• Fragments of an Integral Future is getting closer to completion, but still needs a little more time: I’m aiming to complete the book by the end of this winter.

• Mutations has its own brilliant anthology (via Integral Imprint) and is just about finished. Expect imminent announcements on that soon.

That’s it for now. Thanks, everyone, for your support. It means a lot to receive it, especially in these new days of fatherhood.

I’ll see you in the New Year.

1. Probably one of the most requested questions I get concerning Gebser is how his insights can contribute to new forms of spirituality and spiritual practice, or how Gebser helps us move beyond modernity’s secular impasse. I appreciated

Paul Kingsnorth

’s new writing on the subject in his recent article, “Atheists in Space: Or, Why the Future is Religious” and feel that it’s hitting a resonant theme.

2. I’ve found myself circling back to Terence McKenna’s famous “archaic revival” idea, albeit with a lot more caveats. Those of you who participated in Re-Visioning, or read the chapter excerpts from Fragments, may already be familiar with the zig-zag nature of cultural transformation: to back is to go forward, so to speak. I’m interested in articulating ways we can do this without falling into Ken Wilber’s “Pre-Trans Fallacy.”