Tools for Enacting Planetary Futures
Join me for a new seminar starting Friday, April 26.
Join me on the weekend of April 26 for a three-part online course:"Integral Reality: Tools for Enacting Planetary Futures."
Integral Reality is intended to be a clarifying and contextualizing deep-dive into the themes, concepts, and spiritual import of Book Two of Jean Gebser’s Ever-Present Origin.
Ever-Present Origin remains a remarkably prescient text that, translated and brought into a ‘conversation’ with our own cultural moment, can become a powerfully orienting lode star.
Please note: you won’t need to have taken the class for Book One (which just finished last month), nor have read the book, prior to taking this class.
Although some familiarity with Gebser’s philosophy is quite welcome, I try to teach all my courses in the spirit of the rhizome: you can enter them backwards, forwards, or from any and all sides. For example, one could easily take this class as a primer for reading Ever-Present Origin in your own time (whether it’s later this year or many years from now). No matter. Those taking this class will find the subjects we explore to be deeply relevant for our present cultural moment in all its complexity, especially those tracking discussions on the ‘polycrisis’ or ‘meta-crisis.’
The intention is to offer those especially interested and engaged in this sort of discourse — on crises, poly-, meta- or otherwise — a ‘senseful’ toolkit for wayfinding planetary futures.
Students will come away from the class with a sense of how many of the tools and methods Gebser presents help us remain ‘grounded’ in a relational ontology while still navigating today’s complexities—and all without getting obfuscated in top-heavy abstractions (there is more than one way to ‘go meta’).
These tools and methods are intended to be applied to the unique challenges we face today in 2024.
The thesis of Ever-Present Origin, stated succinctly, is that we are already living in a new time, demanding a new worldview.
What happens when we turn towards this challenge and start taking it seriously?
What conceptual and perceptual tools help us to creatively overturn culturally entrained habits and fixations?
We hear so much about how things are unraveling — and they are of course — but how do we make a constructive turn: towards emerging modes of relational thinking, planetary thinking, and, most importantly as I will argue, a spiritual sensibility and strength founded in ‘primordial trust?’
Explore these questions over the course of the seminar with like-minded explorers of the future-possible.
Integral Reality will consist of three lessons:
Lecture I - The Interim World: A Brief History of Consciousness
Lecture II - Tools for Enacting the Integral World
Lecture III - Primordial Trust and the Spiritual Import
On Saturday, April 27, we will also host an open dialogue call, utilizing the practice of collective presencing, to further explore the perceptual tools introduced in the lessons.
As mentioned, this time around we’re doing something altogether different than previous classes. Since it’s happening over three days, starting April 26, it will be more like an event. I’m hoping that will bring something unique—a certain ‘energy’ if you will—to the class in terms of the sense and feeling surrounding it.
You can read more about the course on the registration page.
Discounts are available for Patreon and Substack subscribers (thank you). Pay-what-you-can registration is also available — please reach out and let me know if you need the latter. No one will be turned away.'
As always, I’m honored and delighted to be able to offer this class to you. Many of you have encouraged me to offer this class, and so I’m especially grateful for your ongoing support and enthusiasm.
New Video: Planetary Imaginary
Speaking of planetary futures, I am humbled to share another segment of my interview for Katie Teague’s ‘In the Making’ docu-series. In this segment, “The Planetary Imaginary: Coming Back Home to the Living Earth,” I introduce the concept of the planetary imaginary and how it’s already at work in our culture wherever we are learning to think-, relate-, and become-with the more than human world.
Katie is ever the artful filmmaker and I am so grateful for how she helps my words sing.
Although the new course, Integral Reality, won’t be explicitly about the planetary imaginary, I will certainly be making connections with the overall concept, bringing Gebser’s writings into conversation with present-day scholarship concerning the so-called posthuman (It means ‘after-humanism’ essentially, but I don’t particularly like that term. As Donna Haraway sincerely jests, it should be called ‘composting’). The ‘aperspectival’ world as Gebser describes certainly finds itself quite at home with contemporary scholarship exploring the posthuman ‘turn’ towards an ecological, or regenerative, worldview. The aperspectival showing up in our culture is marked by the supersession of anthropocentric identity and thinking.
The aperspectival is a turn towards relationality. That dynamic relation between things opens up to us, becomes important—it becomes, it is, our integral reality.
There will be more writing about these connections through near-future Mutations writings series (posted here on Substack, of course).
That’s it for now.
My endless thanks for your readership and your patronage. Until next time!
I recently finished the course on Part 1 of Gebser's "Ever Present Origin" and am looking forward to the upcoming course.