Time Entanglement [Video]
My interview with Katie Teague for the "In the Making" documentary project.
Dear readers,
Happy 2024! I’m deeply humbled, honored, and excited to share my interview with Katie Teague for “In the Making: Becoming Human in the Time Between Worlds” documentary series.
Katie and her friend, Marie, kindly made the trip to visit our rural home here in southern Vermont. Watching the lighting and cameras go up in my living room was a little surreal, and I was concerned that my sleep-deprived brain was too enmeshed, too far gone in the daily realities of newborn care to really show up for the interview. Thankfully I had nothing to worry about. Katie was a brilliant interviewer, the words flowed, and ultimately, as you’ll see, her filmmaking artistry truly made my words sing.
My interview is the next in a series following
( ), () and Joanna Macy.I feel quite humbled to be included in such an esteemed lineup.
After my segment, I highly recommend that you view Rowson’s “Living in the Meta-Crisis,” Roy’s “The Wicked Mush of the In-Between,” and finally Macy’s “The Great Turning.” You can support Katie’s project here on Patreon.
Between all of us I sense there is a there there concerning how we might start cohering the ‘maelstrom’ of civilizational transition while also taking up the admittedly daunting work of intuiting new paradigms.
The latter activity is no mere idle revery.
One great theme that I see recurring again and again has to do with reversals, or what C.G. Jung called enantiodromia. What was once considered utopian daydreaming—imagining and building towards alternative futures, a ‘more beautiful world’—has now become a highly pragmatic, if existential, new ground.
Meanwhile, the ‘hyperculture’ of globalized capital has become an utterly ungrounded, out-of-this-world fever dream. The globe of global capital may be insubstantial, but the momentum of the previous worldview (call it ‘zombie’ modernity) rages on and on, a “red round globe hot burning.”
Meanwhile, our Gaian reality, the reality of the planetary, becomes more ever more transparent and present, more real for us each day.
The latter may be unreal, but the former must learn to be realized.
Whatever else we may become in the next few decades, we need to start championing the role of imagination in shaping (and re-shaping) habitable futures. We need to start saying ‘yes’ to imagining and then experimentally embodying habitable, Gaian futures in the present. Micro-utopias of bioregional thinking and learning where place, presence, and planet are the background of our thinking and the foreground of our actions. When say ‘yes’ to the world—not to the globe, but the world—we are saying yes to ourselves. It is an act of primordial trust: each time we take a step, however tentative, we are affirming the reality of this new ground, entrusting ourselves to a life only lived through our entanglement as beings as who inhabit the ‘thick present’ of the planetary.
Next Month’s Online Class
The timing of Katie’s video perfectly acts like a ‘trailer’ for the forthcoming online class I’m hosting on the Mutations network.
On February 13th, you are invited to join myself and our cohorts for Seeing Through the World: Jean Gebser and Integral Consciousness.
The subject matter I explored with Katie in my video are precisely what we will be exploring together in this course.
If you’ve been looking for a place to start, not only with Gebser, but a more lived and experiential understanding of integral spirituality and philosophy, and its application and import for our time between worlds and worldviews, then this class would be it.
No prior reading is necessary, and assigned readings will be recommended (excerpts from Gebser’s Ever-Present Origin, my own book, and other selected texts), but not required, to participate.
This is the kind of course for everyone.
Need-based tuition is available, just send me an email requesting the link.
Paid subscribers can still receive a discount registration link (save $25). Read on below for that link, as well more ‘commonplace book’ notes on planetary thinking and being, my manuscript writing, and more.
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