Yes and I feel the archetypal masculine pattern to come to the rescue…and I wonder if that is appropriate? Perhaps we get stuck in these archetypal patterns?
I have great confidence in you and your generation, Carolyn!
3 Likes
And watching the video again, I heard TJ say, " we are building a culture." This is obvious, perhaps, but also rather bizarre. How many of our ancestors or even our contemporaries could admit that they were engaged in something as outrageous as building a culture? Can we do this consciously? How do we do this? I just want to note how odd this is in human events. What a privilege to live in such interesting times!
I hope we can generate some warm data. The first Axial Age appeared in 500 BCE and the human population was 250 million with 60,000 political organizations, mostly tribal. Currently, the human population is 7 billion and rising. We probably have 2 billion expected to arrive soon. And we have about 190 nation states. And what does any of this mean? Are we moving in a direction?
Although I don’t register an end as a grand finale, I do sense that a direction is emerging, perhaps, beyond the current anarchic nation states ensemble. Touching possibility in a phase space with different kinds of logic can enter us into the alreadiness of the Imaginal realms.
And what kind of culture are we building?
And does that culture we are building have a size or shape?
And where is that culture?
And what does that culture we are building want to have happen?
Something wants to live…and something wants to die…we can open ourselves to this odd life we are given in our own odd ways. So, give us your tired, your poor and your loony…
7 Likes
We may be building a culture, consciously, indeed! Meta-consciously… “designing” a “scene,” or cultivating conditions for “scenius”… has that ever been done before? I wonder! If it has, maybe it was so successful we never noticed… the Illuminati … 
Are we the illuminati? LOL. I do believe we are intentionally shaping culture, only not for “world domination” as people presume the Illuminati to be after… so much as for “world integration,” or “worlds harmonization” “worlds meshing”… “dream synthesis”…?
I’d love to have a reading group read “The Patterning Instinct” by Jeremy Lent, it’s a historical excavation of the “cognitive structures”–the core metaphors for “how and what the world is”–that evolved in human collective sense-making processes since the advent of language. The metaphors we hold for the world shape our actions on the world, which shapes the world in return… I am fascinated indeed by the idea that we could apply our intelligences to sculpting a desired culture, one that “feeds back” certain holistically generative potentials, in perpetuity…
Hard to express the heart-stuck-in-the-throat elation that these open inquisitive spaces afford me… thanks for all the co-generation!
7 Likes
The Patterning Instinct would be a wonderful book to hold a Cafe around!
Some of the more-than-human clans have, indeed, been so successful that we “moderns” never noticed. So much to learn from them. And from those human clans who DID notice and do.
I feel especially the entheogens have been/are helping us to “shape culture” toward “world integration” as you say…
4 Likes
I started feeling some of that “elation” you mentione when I read two big articles today on Reforesting Earth finally being seen as the cheapest and most powerful way to address climate chaos, pollution, drought and more, one in Science Magazine and one in the Guardian. The weavers of breath finally being
Tree of Life. Lungs of the Planet. … “The metaphors we hold for the world shape our actions on the world, which shapes the world in return” TreeS of Life recognized as essential to survival? Pulitzer goes to The Overstory, about the long symbiosis of trees and humans…
" heart-in-the-throat" I love that way of saying it.
5 Likes