We're Already Living in a New Time - III

Part III of this article series, plus two new talks for November and December.

We’re nearly through November, and I owe my readers the third installation of “We’re Already Living in a New Time.”

Read Part III (see below) and join me for a short talk followed by an open discussion next Tuesday, November 28th on Zoom.

I’m hosting two events between November and December.

We’re Already Living in a New Time (Zoom) on Tuesday, November 28 @ 12:30 pm ET / 11:30 AM PT.

This will be a free event, a talk exploring some of the beats laid out in my recent writing series (Parts I and II here).

Next, on December 19th, I’ll be hosting a one-off paid seminar called “Re-Visioning History: Groundwork for New Models of Consciousness Unfoldment.” I’m truly excited about sharing this one with you. It draws heavily from all the theorycrafting I’ve been laboring towards for my forthcoming book, Fragments of an Integral Future (2024). This class, and your invaluable student feedback, will give me a chance to field test some of the philosophical groundwork in the book.

Re-Visioning History: Groundwork for New Models of Consciousness Unfoldment

Jeremy Johnson, host of Mutations podcast and author of Seeing Through the World (2019), proposes a philosophical and mythmaking exercise. We need a new history of consciousness freed from the trappings of Enlightenment era narratives concerned with progress and development. What happens when we walk away from those narratives? Isn’t it high time that we did? Could we still talk about unfoldment, emergence, and becoming without progress? In order to answer these questions, Jeremy will invite participants to join him in a series of philosophical and mythopoetic meditations exploring time, human origins, and history. Through 11 theses, the philosophical groundwork for new models of consciousness unfoldment crystallize. These re-visionings of history offer us new ways of understanding the civilizational crisis of our present. How we imagine the past dramatically shapes what we believe is possible in the present, so what are the stories about human origins that open, rather than close, more beautiful futures? When we imagine a time beyond progress, new stories of planetary homecoming can not only begin to be told, but start to be lived.

The class will be hosted through Zoom on Tuesday, December 19 @ 9:30 AM PT / 12:30 PM ET, and conclude at 11:30 AM PT / 2:30 PM ET.

Plenty of time will be allotted for breakout room discussion and Q&A.

Even though this will be a single event, I’d love to make it as enriching and valuable an experience as I can. So, I will provide a ‘field’ syllabus with an overview of the lesson, additional links, and more recommended reading.

Onto the next installment. Hope to see you next week, and next month.

We’re Already Living in a New Time III - Temporal Imaginaries

Author’s midjourney prompt.

The claim I’ve been making in this series is that we can’t talk about the “meta-crisis” without a new time.

The good news? We’re already living in the new time. Its characteristics are showing up everywhere like the gloomy ambience of an Anthropocene track. Think of words like solastalgia or climate melancholia, both of which speak an anticipatory grief for the future.

Gloom need not spell doom, however, and if we can ‘stay with the trouble’ as Haraway suggests, other facets of this new worldview might come into focus. So much of the ‘integral mutation,’ as the philosopher Jean Gebser pointed out and as Ivo Mensch, Bonnita Roy and myself have recently discussed, has to do with a new consciousness of time.

By a new time, I don’t just mean a new physics, although I’m certainly not discounting that. It does have something to do with a new cosmology (see Brian Swimme’s recent Cosmogenesis). On that note, I don’t necessarily mean that it is a new, philosophical approach to time (as in Henri Bergson’s or Alfred North Whitehead’s respective works), although it involves them too. I mean something that includes all of these disciplines as they describe the emergence of a new worldview or civilizational mentality that is presently coalescing. That is living us more than we are presently living it.

I end up needing to describe it as a kind of ‘poetics’ of time that, by definition, is transdisciplinary: artistic, mathematical, metaphysical, and perhaps the greatest of all ecological.

It is a kind of planetary mentality and imagination that weaves a more complex relationship between past and future, ancestors and unborn, living systems that are of course not just systems, and the human and more-than-human. It articulates a different sense of self and agency that fluctuates between the irreducible singularity of an individual organism and the ways in which that individual’s agency is, at the same time, always other.

To be is to be transparent: transparent to the chimeric, to the multiple.

To become, to emerge, is always relational.

It does this by recognizing the temporal nature of beings, the flow of history behind us, ceaselessly being born and reborn in the present in and through us, and the way in which future becomings live in us now. We know that we ourselves are present to the future in the way that the past is present and alive to us now.

The oscillation of identity is also the fluctuation of scale (the transition from spatial thinking to relational thinking), identifying in the microcosm of bacterial mats the macrocosm of Gaia.

Relational thinking is necessarily always temporal, a tangle of past-present-future.

The emergent planetary mentality or temporal imaginary must, first and foremost, do all this at an intuitivel level. Here is where Charles Taylor’s ‘background experience’ becomes so useful. It nearly scratches the theoretical itch, but not quite. ‘Social imaginary,’ another one of Taylor’s concepts referred to often in my circles, comes close. It’s a good way of bundling together a characteristic attitude that shows up across art and philosophy, religion and science in the midst of a cultural transformation. Except you don’t just need the intellgentsia or ivory tower theorycrafting to articulate it. Cultural transformations belong to everyone. It belongs, first and last, to our collective dreaming and mythmaking.

It’s frequently necessary to invent terms to refer to such complex realities, so I’m just calling it the ‘temporal imaginary.’ The temporal imaginary is the way in which we relate to, imagine, and embody time.

Our temporal imaginaries, particularly the ones that have come out from Western Europe’s enlightenment narratives and, generally, modernity, have all become undone, or at the very least have recently been revealed to be ungrounded.

There is no more there, there.

No world to substantiate dreams of development and progress. There is no Earth that can support globalization.

“Something,” as Bruno Latour wrote, has “come to twist the arrow of time.” Faith in the future has been all but lost, as myths of progress become replaced by solastalgia, grief for the future.

So we need a new temporal imaginary, one that challenges us to reclaim time and becoming from the lost narratives of progress.

That, ironically, might be only way we can save the future.

This is what Gebser mean when he wrote about modernity’s complicated history, and ultimate failure, to recognize a time beyond clock-time. The “irruption” of time describes a sort of history of modern consciousness: of time breaking into modern awareness in new and complete ways. The problem of time—according to Gebser, and which I’m inclined to agree—underlies the civilizational crisis we find ourselves in.

The irruption of time can’t become the realization of an integral time, of ‘time freedom,’ without a new time beyond progress.

So, to summarize: this new consciousness of time, or temporal imaginary, is helping us come back down to our “thick present” of living relationships. It gives us some of the conceptual and imaginative faculties—capacities, too—that we need to start embodying these relationships in creative and constructive (see Daniel Christian Wahl’s Designing Regenerative Cultures, Nora Bateson’s Combining, or Bruce Clarke’s Gaian Systems), rather than merely implosive and destructive ways.

The relational self, and the relational world, is not the cartographer’s globe but the biologists critical zone. We call beings in relationship ecologies, where bodies and organisms exist in the flux of temporal relations. Here comes Gebser’s “aperspectival world.” Maybe a future series can unpack more about that term and what I mean.

The move from the cartographer’s globe to the relational zone, we might call the transition from globalization as a historical process to planetization (Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s term, although I am using it here with some caveats).

Planetization is not, as some might imagine, the triumph of the progress narrative describing technological innovation and human evolution. It looks very different.

In fact, it’s full of stories of people who were able to walk away, come back down to Earth. It’s about the revification of lost histories that, in turn, help us to enact different and habitable futures.

Time is not so much a line as it is a zig-zag, a constellation, a bundle of medicine in our bags.

The myths and narratives of this new temporal imaginary involve something we might call ‘integral time’ or ‘rhizome time,’ where past and future exist in a state of living interrelationship.

For those who know how to navigate this weird, relational, and temporal ‘thick’ present, these bundles of time might just become medicine bundles. We reach a hand into them, bringing forth constellations of the past that we’re only now discovering were involved in helping us arrive at shared planetary tomorrows, always helping us come home.