The future arrives through strange reversals

An excerpt from my forthcoming book, Fragments of an Integral Future, and a call for supporting this project.

‘Rhizome’ by @Klarh_dk.

Fragments of an Integral Future is the title-in-progress of my forthcoming book of essays on nature, time, and ecology (Integral Imprint/Revelore Press). It is, in part, a philosophical manifesto which argues for ‘reclaiming time’ from the dream of progress.

We need a new time, a time beyond progress that emboldens our creative agency to refashion not only ourselves but our world and worldview.

The book explores an emerging worldview, and it is written, as it were, as poetic seeds cast on the kaironic winds of change. You could call it a work of science fiction. It is intended to work on the reader (as it has worked on me) like a psychoactive or ‘catalytic’ text, enacting the very metamorphic and creative principles it attempts to describe. It arrives like an emissary from the future. It shapes you as you read it (just as it shapes me as I write it) and, in doing so, already teaches us a lesson in reciprocity and mutual becoming. So, handle the book with care.

Subscribers can read more after the excerpt.

This will be the first in a series of excerpts documenting the book’s creative process, in addition to my own intellectual and spiritual journey I’m undergoing in order to ‘finish’ the book. Your support and patronage is especially appreciated in this time.

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Time Beyond Progress

If transformations of consciousness involve the wild path of reversals and turnings, rhizomes and retrievals, then a re-visioning of the history of consciousness with that mycelial shape in mind is a welcome move. What unique insights would such a re-visioning demonstrate? What emergent forms of narrative might be ascertained if the history of consciousness unfoldment were told according to rhizome and root? We have already been thinking with the root, as it were, so a re-telling is in order.

Revision, from the French word revoir (“again” + “seeing”) indicates a gesturing-towards something that we may have missed upon first glance. It is the act of looking again. This essay asks the reader to participate in an exercise, a seeing history again through the imagination. It is also a response to the wealth of new anthropological and indigenous scholarship accrued in recent years, which have already taken predominant Eurocentric tales of progress to task.

Re-visioning invites us re-mind the past in search of other stories that reach different conclusions. “There’s nothing new under the sun,” Octavia Butler wrote, “but there are new suns.”

So, too, are there ‘new’ histories. Look again.

What if we were altogether not interested in progressive, directive mythologies of time but reveled in the sheer variegation of cultural complexity? What would an exercise in non-linear history—which would not reject or fixate on linear or progressive movements, but simply recognize them in certain relative contexts, like the flows of a watershed, a root reaching for nutrients, or the patient and patterned flows of geological strata—tell us about the aforementioned big questions (who am I, where did I come from, and where am I going)?

What if we entered history like the rhizome? Could we still arrive at a big picture, scry the patterns of meaning in emergent, macro-historical stories? And finally, what could we learn about our shared planetary futures this way?

We might, according to Gebser, engage with a mode of doing history “divested of its mere temporality and sequential nature… not the history of dates but of the dateless.” An integral approach to history means something like thinking and visualizing history as an interactive and pliable body of past-future relations, complex loops, and intersecting scales and rhythms. Altogether, it offers a new gestalt, an overall shape for a planetary temporics.

What if we entered history like the rhizome? Could we still arrive at a big picture, scry the patterns of meaning in emergent, macro-historical stories? And finally, what could we learn about our shared planetary futures this way?

...To talk about the future, we begin with a new relationship with the past. The two are bound up in each other. We enter the future sideways, orthogonally, moving through strange reversals. We enter that cultural horizon of imagination and myth—especially those myths concerning our origins—where back-leaps into tomorrow spring into the realm of possibility. Where time is grasped beyond the comprehension of the waking mind: an unthinkable continuity of the dead, the living, and the unborn.