Cosmos Café: Season 2 [April–June, 2018]

Continuing the discussion from Cosmos Café – Season 1 [November, 2017 – March, 2018]:


Cosmos Café is a weekly virtual dialogue series that focuses on deep questions of cosmology, consciousness, and culture. Our conversations are designed (and intended) to be open-ended, inclusive, and creative—going nowhere in particular (or seemingly everywhere) yet arriving at the heart of the matter over time. These are performative experiments in cooperative intelligence, grounded in deep reading, mutual listening, embodied experience, and speaking our minds!

Each week, members of the Café crew put their minds together (if only, to take them apart) to discuss an organically chosen topic from the frothy ideas bubbling up on the Infinite Conversations forum. Sometimes we invite special guests, or try creative experiments in sense-making and conversational practice. If you’re following our sessions and would like to offer feedback or make a suggestion, we’re open to ideas. If you’d like to join the conversation, we’d love to hear from you! Please add your thoughts on any topic here on the forum—or message the @ccafe crew to get in touch.

We meet each Tuesday via ZOOM video conference at 1 p.m. Mountain Time (Denver, USA) [convert time zone]—unless otherwise indicated.

Each session is recorded (audio and video) and posted here on the forum for ongoing discussion, and can also be accessed via our global podcast feed and the archive page on Metapsychosis.com (coming soon, really).

ZOOM link: Launch Meeting - Zoom


Upcoming Events

  • 4/3: Discussing “The Evolution of Consciousness as a Planetary Imperative: An Integration of Integral Views"
  • 4/10: Part II: “The Evolution of Consciousness as a Planetary Imperative: An Integration of Integral Views"
  • 4/17
  • 4/24
  • 5/1
  • 5/8
  • 5/15
  • 5/22

Starting in June 2018

  • Journey to Supermind (working title) - collaborative reading of Sri Aurobindo’s The Live Divine

Suggested Topics and Reading List

Season 1 Leftovers:

Backstory & Context

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Dear @ccafe crew ~ please help flesh out the reading list, or add any items I’ve missed to the wiki list above. Thanks!

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Have we made a decision about next week? If we do Gidley it is a big text and maybe we should do an appendix as TJ suggested? But then again I imagine her take on Post human and Trans human and Ultra Human could be worth focusing attention on also. I would love to flesh out some of this Integral theory but am open to whatever others are interested in. Are there are other ideas about next weeks cafe? I would like to make a plan. Thanks everyone for the great cafe. Looking forward to the next one.

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I have been sitting on an essay by @ZacharyFeder, which has not yet been officially published in the journal, but is ready to go live anytime. Perhaps posting this could be an occasion to continue our friendly discussion on humanity, technology, and consciousness, if the author will join us?

This could lead us into something by Gidley next?

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I am liking Gidley right now… the posted video, the introduction to “The Evolution of Consciousness as a Planetary Imperative.” I read Appendix C (“Literacy Unveiled: Art as Language from a Palaeoaesthetic Perspective”) and feel this directly relates and supplements our “Grammatical Mirror” reading and discussion. If you, as @Geoffreyjen_Edwards mentioned during the Grammatical Mirror Cafe, found difficulty in relating to the significance or relevance of Gebser’s poetic micro-scale analysis, I think this short Appendix will help you to understand the macro-scale of Gebser’s (and Gidley’s) project.
From pg. 226:

The narrative that I have been presenting throughout this appendix and throughout the whole paper points towards an emergent reintegration of these key human faculties (eg: primal sound; mythic imagination) —through postformal-integral-planetary consciousness. The future indicated would be one where language again becomes artistic, yet also rich with the conceptual content, organization and clarity that may arise from the integration of aesthetic creativity and mental conceptualization.

Gidley is fluent in transdisciplinary discourse. Appendix C covers the ancient practices. Our resident techno-shamanic hippie-therapist dude @ZacharyFeder states that we are already in the midst of staring into the future…the internet…“it’s the mirror.” The Human Singularity may be nearer than it appearers.

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That has me really curious, Doug. I feel we have just started to scratch the surface. I have yet to read the appendix but I will get to it soon as I am reading the whole thing in order. I am really enjoying this reading and feel a lot of gaps are being filled. Perhaps we can do the appendix C and Zachary’s piece. That might be a good collaborative reading, since we are moving through the neo-shamanic range of the spectrum.

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i’m 67 pages into Gidley’s paper - love it.! However, she may have nailed it: herself as a “naive Romanticist.” (takes her 50 some pages to state that …). I will, Marco, however, try and behave, - i.e. listen/hear what you all have to say w/r/t “evolving planetary consciousness,” w/o interjection/interruption. See you all Tuesday, hopefully …

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Added Part II “The Evolution of Consciousness as a Planetary Imperative: An Integration of Integral Views" to the list of Upcoming Events. The final thoughts of 4/3’s Cafe navigated towards completing this work by Gidley. Looking forward to the next collection of deep thought.

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Doug has reminded me by hearting ‘this post’ from way back in June 2016, that at some point—I am only bookmarking it here—I would love to speak with this group about John Dewey, and specifically his 1939 essay, “Creative Democracy: The Task Before Us.”

This piece was on my mind at the very inception of the idea of “Cosmos Cooperative,” and I feel it may give us a chance for another go at the type of conversation we had on the Democracy.Earth project. However, instead of focusing on the technological implementation, Dewey focuses on social practice. And so we can perhaps reflect on what such a social practice would me to us (i.e., as a “cooperative”).

I suspect “the task before us” has something to do with bridging social praxis and technological design—but there also a radical dimension belonging to consciousness itself and immanent being in the world, which goes somewhat beyond these political notions.

So again, just bookmarking this here, for some future Tuesday.

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