The collapse is not evenly distributed. And that's actually a really, really important thing. It's like really, because it's already happening. If we were in the Ukraine, we'd already be dealing with the apocalypse, very large.
If we were in any place that was in floods or in fires, or many of us have already navigated some of those things. So we are not going to be in an evenly distributed set of igniting moments, but in any community, or whether that's a localized community, or a community of impact that can be a various orders of scale to be radically committed to being responsive to those potential moments of ignition. And that for me, that's like, get this book fricking done as soon as possible, because it is a valuable tool for response to igniting moments. And there might be, how can I have a toolbox ready and be courageous and not fall into my own acculturation into the combination of new age, spirituality, and capitalism that's in every one of us that is pleasure-seeking.
It's my own inner princess that doesn't show up, because I'm too busy taking care of myself. And I have that in me. I've been looking at it again lately. I'm like, ah-huh, this is part of me that isn't in communion, isn't available to be responsive, is a total coward.
And I need to confront that part of myself every day, because I never know, and I'm going to be called into an igniting moment. In the few birds that I've witnessed of my brothers or my daughters, it's a mystery how it's going to come. And you can have the best plans for the water birth and all these things, and you can set all the conditions for the flowering of humanity and for things to happen. And then it turns a very different way.
And you end up in the hospital. Or you practice hypnoburthing, and you breathe, and then you see the way that an uncontracted system is the perfect vessel for birth. It's like made for birth, and it can be so beautiful. And so how do we tend to each other in a way that we can make what is already inevitably happening more graceful?
And I think that's part of the question that I'm left after you guys share that. How can I be a node of peace and presence and assuredness of just my little sphere of the universe, my little neighborhood? How can I be, as you say, a good neighborhood in God's mind? How can I be part of that birth and one of the midwives that just brings sanity to those that I touch and that I connect with?
From early on, life I was hyper-focused on what's my mission, what's my purpose, what am I here to do? And seeing this alive context, if the Earth is alive, and even our souls are intelligent, it does things through somewhat and through within intent. The way the body has organs that lungs, heart, stomach, and each need to do their job for the whole system and work. And so I think it burbs people with particular dreams and missions to go do things.
And the more we fully are ourselves, and you need to hold more of the whole system works. Greetings, future fossils. Welcome to episode 208 of the podcast that explores our place in time. And if you've been listening to the show, you know that our place in time, as far as I can address it, on the Creode, the multi-dimensional landscape of possibility, places our lives squarely in the center of what, if you zoom out far enough, looks like just a flash in the geological record.
But here we are within it in its deep and detailed and inexorable. Back when I used to dig dinosaurs in Wyoming, we'd find these sediments, laid down by great floods every thousand years or so. Central Wyoming would get 100 years worth of rain. Well, as Hurricane Hillary tears up the west coast of the United States and drops a years worth of rain on everybody, and all of my beloved burner friends are out there waiting on the playa that is now unseasonably submerged.
Feels like a good time to share this episode. I recorded live at the Maps site like Science Conference in Denver on June 20th, an event hosted by Samantha Sweetwater, fascinating and passionate and intelligent person I met through Bruce Damer back at the Oregon Eclipse Festival in 2017, who has just finished a book about staying with the trouble as we midwife a new guy in the polity, and as we grieve everything that is washed away in the process. I felt very blessed to be part of this conversation, a satellite event on the fringe of the conference. I think the distance from the main event afforded us an opportunity to speak more freely and more truly.
Then we may have otherwise in the Colorado Convention Center. This wasn't a conversation about funding anything, or of devising better systems of measurement. Yet to take a brass elevator to get up to this sweet little pad. So join me in this space, a cacao and elixir bar, crystal, limb, heady, crow's nest, an urban enclave.
We're in a relatively small, warm, wet, attentive space. We could have a focused and appropriate conversation about midwifery, really. This event was sponsored by a psychedelics today, holos, global, and solutions. Samantha's upcoming book, True Human, Reimagining Humanness at the end of our world was the object of conversation.
We were joined by Ian Michael Hebert, founder of holos and Jahan Kamsazade, author of The Silasabian Connection. To find men with whom I found out I had much in common, it was a clarifying moment. A congregation tuned in and turned on, people that were dropping in, and I'm looking to share it with you today. But first, let me invite you to support future fossils on Patreon and sub-stack and thank everyone else who is doing so already.
This year has felt like 40 wandering into wilds. And your subscriptions feed me and my wife and kids amidst a baffling transition. I can't thank you enough for reigning your support when it seems we're so far out at sea that we've lost sight of land and only have the stars to guide us. I'm taking this transitional period in my life as a master's course in wayfaring because I come from a long line of nomads and wanderers.
As the world heats up, I think more and more of us will return to that kind of original human circulation. My hope is that I learned something potent and valuable about what author Paul Millard calls the path of this path in this time, something I can share with you. And I am humbled by the hundreds of you in that show thanks for my transparent and vulnerable orienteering. May my questions bring your answers.
Special thanks to this week's most recent Patreon supporters, Alexandra's Vardic Hostess, Tekil, and Shibi Rainbow on sub-stack. And let me just say if you've been on the fence about throwing in with your support that I just finished a studio album that took me 15 years to complete and a book that took me 10 years to complete. And those things are going to be available to patrons this fall well before they're available to everyone else. My album, The Age of Reunion, is a 44-minute audio-visual, techno-delic tour through the liminal terrains we discuss in this episode.
And my book, How to Live in the Future and Other Essays is a survival guide for those of you who, like me, have come unmoored amidst the waves of change. Oh, also, this Friday, the 25th, I'll be hosting a listening party for an album I recorded playing at O'Shawn and On's Tea Temple at the Maps like the D'Alc Science Conference. The album, Live from Deep Space, is up on Spotify and you can order it on Bandcamp. And I would love to see you in the chat on Friday if you're interested.
You're listening to some of that music right now. You can listen to the rest of it very soon. I offer it as the soundtrack for your own wayfinding. And that's just one of the many things you'll find for free at patreon.com slash Michael Garfield.
Michael Garfield about substack.com. Thank you and good night. And with that, I'm gonna turn it over to this fantastic reading and panel discussion that was one of the great highlights of a profound and dense week in Denver in June. And drives at and speaks from heart of future fossils.
Thank you to Samantha, to Ian, Michael, and to Jean for letting me share this. I hope you enjoy it. If someone does have that answer, in my opinion, it is Samantha Sweetwater. That she is such an incredible woman.
You guys are gonna give her a shout out. Come on. Okay. Don't be afraid to clap and cheer today, everybody.
A lot of you know her background and everything. And she's gonna speak a lot to that. So I'm gonna save you from that. But I just want you, you know, what I've been speaking with this woman for the past couple of weeks, you know.
And just hearing where her heart is truly aligned to, I can just imagine how much work she has done on herself and that inner fire that burns between a lot of our hearts that are here today. And that's what it takes to have the curious mind to be bold, to figure out what it is to have a true psychedelic renaissance. It's actually gonna make change for a long, long time. So I really honor her.
I really honor the path that she's been. But I honor just those dark nights that you really have experienced, you know, that drives you to become the person that you are. So it's an honor and pleasure for me, Philip Wolfe, to introduce Samantha Sweetwater. Thank you.
Thank you so much. Hi, everybody. Thank you for coming. Thank you for responding to our intention, the intention that we set when we put this event together to explore what are the minimum viable cultural foundations to actually cause a psychedelic renaissance.
And we're framing that conversation today in terms of wholeness. I'd like to begin with a quote from David Boehm. Doesn't even know who David Boehm was? Brilliant, brilliant physicist.
I would say his and Prigigigine's thought have deeply influenced mine, along with John Trudeau and Bucky Fuller and all kinds of other epic ancestors. But this is from David Boehm. Wholeness is what is real. Fragmentation is the response of this whole to man's action guided by illusory perception, which is shaped by fragmentary thought.
Wholeness is what is real. Fragmentation is the response of this whole to man's action guided by illusory perception, which is shaped by fragmentary thought. I would also say that wholeness, and potentially this event, is psychoactive. Psychoactivity tends to open us to wholeness.
Have you noticed that? That the holotropic experience tends to open us to wholeness? Why? Because wholeness is what is real.
So fundamentally, this is the seed I wanna plant in our conversation, in our community, in the psychedelic community, as we work together to create cultures that nurture a continuous and flourishing human presence on this earth. So I'm gonna hand the mic over to my brothers shortly. I'm very honored to be here with John, who is an author and an amazing guide, who has helped many, many people through his work, and Ian Michael Heiber, who's my dear brother, in these ways, and colleague, and the founder of Hollows Global, and Michael Garfield, who is the future fossil brilliant podcaster, and a brilliant public intellectual in his own right. And myself, I'm a 30-year facilitator, and thought leader, and executive coach, and I'd like to begin with a moment of silence in prayer.
If you could close your eyes, and bring your attention to the place beneath and behind your heart, the singularity of your soul, or the place of absolute non-connectivity with anything else that is the zero point within you, and light a flame in that place of sovereignty, that infinitely small, infinitely large singularity, at the center of you, and connect that flame to everyone else in this room, and connect it out, both specifically and generally, to all the other beings who have joined this conference, and who inhabit the city, all the people in this neighborhood, in their many different experiences of life, the different organisms in this neighborhood, in their very urban experience of life, and plant the seed, code, the genetics of wholeness into that web, deeper than, and let us exhale that into the field. Thank you, welcome, and Michael. Thank you. So I didn't really know what I was gonna talk about, so I told Samantha to write valences of wholeness, and we'll see what happens in the next eight minutes that I have the mic.
So first of all, I think that this little gathering for this hour or two is already an unbelievable success, before we open our mouths, because of the individuals that are in this room. Like I look around, I see old friends, friends of the future that I haven't yet met, a lot, a lot of people that have come to Holos and Costa Rica, our first site, and collaborators, and so I already feel the very fertile soil of the Renaissance right here, and it's happening. And so if we talk about a Renaissance, a psychedelic Renaissance, we can break down this word again, which you guys all probably know well, which is Psyche-Delic, the manifestation of the mind, or the manifestation of the soul or the breath. When I went to CIS and studied psychology, I was taught that Psyche is actually the soul, or Psyche is the breath, the breath of life that moves through all things.
So what is it to have a psychedelic Renaissance? What is it for us to realize the soul in a very visceral way, through our relationships, through ourself, through how we show up in the world? And that's where this idea of the valences of wholeness really comes into play. So when we do this healing work, we're not doing it because we make a great living, we're not doing it because it brings us fame.
We're doing it because we have been touched by these substances, we have been touched by these holotropic states, and we know that they work. We know that they work in expanding our awareness and having us offer something different to the world than what we've been taught before. And that's the essence of this Renaissance, is that something creative can be born from the moment that we're in. And I would say the crisis that we're in as a humanity.
As I came back from the jungle this week, I took my daughter to Taylor Swift, and that was a very intense experience for me. It's a very big contrast. And so from the jungle of Costa Rica to Taylor Swift to coming here, and so this is a step down, this is somewhere between like 11,000 people, is less than 73,000 people. So I have become extremely permeable to the field that is around me.
And sometimes I question whether that is a good thing because when I come into cities, I can feel, at least from my perceptive viewpoint, that there's a lot of chaos, and there's a lot of breakdown that's happening in society. The level of structure of culture that I once had when I was a kid feels like it's disintegrating, and people are struggling. You can go walk down the street and you'll see it. And so how is this an excellent moment for a Renaissance?
Well, the conditions of chaos and entropy release an incredible amount of energy that needs a place to go. And so it's our responsibility, or it can be our responsibility to choose where that energy is going to go, in our own lives when chaos comes and when things break down, or in the greater, how we contribute to a greater valence. And so where does the first point of coherence come? Where do we have the ability to choose and to create something different?
That comes from within us. That comes from our individual, Urg of consciousness. And that Urg of consciousness interacts with the entire universe. And so if you think in terms of valences, it starts with our individuated consciousness, and it moves out to the entirety of existence.
And as I used the restroom on my way over here, I was thinking about, well, how big is the universe? Well, it's a circle that has a circumference that's infinite. And so if the circumference is infinite, then we can each individually be the center of that circle, because we don't actually know where the circumference is, because it's infinite. And so in essence, the soul is that Urg of consciousness inside of each one of us.
And we are at the center of the circle of all existence, and we share that center. So that's the place where I want you to start, recognizing that we actually all share the center of existence. We're sharing it. And so that's the first Urg of consciousness, is our individuated self, our individuated soul.
And then the manifestation of that through a revolution, the manifestation of our soul, is to see ourselves as creator beings, see ourselves as loving beings, see ourselves as beautiful, and to create that reflection within the world around us. And that's, I think, what happened in previous Renaissance is people realized, oh, wow, if I bring what is within me, and put that into the world, that is going to save not only myself and all of humanity. It's going to save this beautiful creation that we live inside of. And so the next recognition is that we're able to share that, and we're able to recognize the soul in others, and recognize the beauty within others.
And for me, the recognition of that beauty is way beyond the anthropocentric view. It's not just the human beauty that we need to recognize, but we have already been birthed into this unbelievably exquisite planet, teeming with life, pulsing with water, pulsing with life force. And so for me, it's a lot more comfortable to be in the wilds of Costa Rica, or the wilds of the mountains of Colorado where I once lived, or British Columbia, because I can see my reflection more clearly. I can see that wholeness, more clearly.
I can see like, oh, wow, that snake, or that jaguar. They are living their perfect piece of wholeness, recognizing their place within the totality of the ecosystem. And so we've just forgotten our place in the totality of the ecosystem. But anytime an apex predator gets out of control, other populations crash, and then ultimately that apex population crashes.
And so we get to stare that death portal down that we're in right now, and we can say, how do we want to create beauty out of this? And so that's why I'm here to figure out what is the unique expression of my soul, and that's what this project told us is all about. How am I doing? Perfect.
Oh my gosh, this is so spacious. Eight minute. You can fit a lot into eight minutes. So let's talk about the origins of Holos, or at least like this company, this idea, this thing that a lot of us are contributing to.
Well, the origin of it came from Stan Groff. It was an inspiration of his life's work and what he wanted to create in the world. And so as he had a stroke, I continued to move this path forward. And the reason we chose the name Holos, or the reason that like dawned in my mind, was to really honor his legacy of the holotropic paradigm, and transpersonal psychology.
And holotropic, as Samantha was saying, is moving towards wholeness. So then the idea arose in me well, if we already have the realization of our innate wholeness, what does the world look like? So I wanted to start from the end. I wanted to start from that manifestation 10,000 years from now.
We're actually living within that understanding that we are an animate whole, that we are connected to all things, and our individuated spirit is expressing itself through its unique gift. So one of Stan's great contributions to the work of psychedelic therapy, as well as the work of transpersonal psychology is the perinatal matrices. And the perinatal matrices are the stages of birth. And it's one of the lenses from which we can look at trauma.
So there's a lot of different lenses to look at trauma, from things that happen in our lifetime, trauma, from the birth process, transpersonal trauma, from past lives, collective unconscious trauma. But the perinatal matrices talk about the way that we are initially imprinted in our nervous system to go into the world. So first we start with perinatal matrices one, where we're in our mother's womb. We're in this undifferentiated place where we're feeling directly her emotions and everything that she's experiencing in the world.
Perinatal matrices two is where the contractions start and we start to move through the birth canal, where we're kind of like, oh my gosh, the world is caving in upon me. And then perinatal matrices three is where we're actually moving through the birth portal and we're squeezed. And we're like in a focused point. And then perinatal matrices four is where we're an individuated consciousness.
We're a single individual. And the reason I wanted to share that, I don't share it like that often, but is because it's very relevant to this idea of a cultural renaissance and a psychedelic renaissance. It's like our culture and our societies in general are moving into what could be considered perinatal matrices two, where there's a lot of pressures, there's a lot of contractions in the system. And so we become the ones that can help steer culture towards that birth, towards the birth of a new possibility of a new humanity.
So I'm excited to be here with all of you. And I hope that there was a little erg of something intelligible that you can take with you from these last eight minutes. Hi, Ben. Thank you, John.
Thanks. First beautiful share. Thank you very much. Oh, mine, I wanted to start first with the personal, then move to the transpersonal.
The moment I really came to see a wholeness within myself as a main gravitational pull, then how it exists throughout the entire universe. I went through this period for 100 days where I journeyed psychodelically for 100 days straight. And it felt something in my soul was really pulling me forward. During this time, I was already working my doctorate in philosophy, cosmology consciousness.
I'd been using psychedelic therapy for 15 years. But something inside really needed to break through and know something. And I became all of evolution plans, animals, talked to archetypile beings, and so on. But it all accumulated in this one experience where I felt like I was trying to unite the cosmos.
As large as that sounds, that was the felt sense. And then I felt all these different parts of me snap in the place. And what happened then was this experience of unity and wholeness that has persisted since. Before that moment, I always felt fragmented inside.
Even with all 15 years of self work, that was still there. And that state has continued. One way to see what had happened is in the Sanislav Grafu, also very admired. He said, psychodalics catalyzed what he calls holotropic states of consciousness, states that organically self-organizing the wholeness.
This process is a part of the larger evolutionary process, not just of our psyche, but of matter. Maybe you're familiar with Ken Wilbur, the great integral philosopher. And he has this term, wholenes, that everything's a whole, and part of a larger whole. So even at the beginning of the big bang, singularity, then sea of undifferentiate energy, then it starts with compounds, the protrons, neutrons, electrons, little holes.
Then those holes come together and form atoms. Other holes. Then the atoms come together with other atoms from greater holes, molecules. And then those molecules come together from cells, about 39 trillion cells from your body.
So everything's a hole within a larger hole. So there's this movement within the cosmos towards larger wholeness. And even within our psyche, maybe we're familiar with Abraham as a little great developmental psychologist. He has this hierarchy of needs.
Things that work once we get a certain need that there's no motivation for another need. The first thing is survival. That's the wholeness of your body. You preserve the integrity of your physical survival.
One is that is set. The next movement is to belong. Because so much of our survival comes out of group dynamics. We seek greater wholeness.
We evolve first 50 million years of primates up in the trees. About 5 million years of hunter-gatherers kind of lifestyle. So our entire existence depended on group dynamics and belonging. Once that need is met, there's a drive to connect with another, like romantically, right?
A drive for these two holes to create another hole. Then you have the drive for what you call self-esteem, which is greater personal wholeness. More self-respect, more self. I mean, say more self.
And I think the drive here is because the soil already is whole. So we need to first claim that it takes a lot to do that. We need to see that we're worthy of it. So we do it outside through accomplishments, through monies, through recognition, through validation.
It's as if all they were unconsciously were the caterpillar, eating all these leaves to eventually become the butterfly. And that is self-esteem. Eventually there's a death and rebirth. And he moves into the stage called self-actualization.
I know who I am and I'm whole. My identity is no longer relevant to what everybody else is saying and doing. I know me. And the last 10 years before his death, Abraham Azos said, there's one more stage called transcendence.
And that's the recognition that your wholeness you are part of a larger whole. Yourself is part of a larger self. Whether you see that as a tribal society, the planet at large, the universe, and then therefore your mission and your meaning comes from contributing to that larger whole. So there's the drive inside and outside toward wholeness.
So my dissertation and later what became my book was this focus on psychedelics and specifically the role they might have played in early human evolution. He was a Terence and Dennis McConan of this donate theory because after 20 years I've still found it the most probable reason of our evolution. And while doing this research, I came across the work of Professor Richard Doyle. He wrote this book Sex, Plants, and Evolution of the Noosphere.
And he had a few lines that really stuck out. He wrote thousands of trip reports for his research. And he says that the primary psychedelic signature insight is that the participant realizes they're part of a vast, interconnected living system. And they should be returned ecodellics.
And for about 15 years I've really focused how do these psychedelics evolve? How do these compounds evolve in the environment that create greater organized states of consciousness? Like really, really, I've seen things that are better than the best CGI I've ever seen. This is a random chaos.
This is something intelligent. That's, for example, silicidens evolved out of 70 million years. It's about that older. So when we put that in the picture, we see that the ecosystem that's somewhat alive, connected through that my cellular structure, burbs these compounds that expand our consciousness into greater interconnected realization.
So we realize our wholeness in that of the environment. So the environment has a lot of incentive to do that. Not only do we learn and grow, but by us realizing your interconnection, there's more balance and sustainability. So it's a way that the, for example, within the body, the way the body talks to itself a lot of times is through chemical impulses, through hormones.
That same idea is that the environment's doing that at all times. And I believe the reason our species has been out of balance is because we have been utilizing these plants and fungi, psychedelic compounds that pretty much grow in every ecosystem. I'm pretty sure, seems like throughout the evidence there's a big part of human culture and so away into the agricultural revolution because we did just integrate into the food that we'd been going to grow. As Yuval Noahhara points out in his book, Sapiens, my mushroom's from spores and microscopic.
So we didn't really learn how to grow them. It was not so turns and denus, but kind of the seventies that we really learned how to grow them aside mushrooms. So there's a lot of reasons that we didn't get integrated in a diet. But they're finally coming back, you know, in a huge way.
And I don't think that we can actually move forward without them, you know, because it's actually realigning with the Earth's natural evolutionary processes. And so I think, I definitely feel this event is a milestone in that direction. It's been a really, really long fight. You know, as Michael Poland puts out in his book, How to Change Your Mind.
What happened in the 1960s compared to what happened now is at that time the prior generation didn't have a cultural understanding and context and container for these psychedelic experiences. People were tapping these huge, altered states, mostly the youth, which scared the parents, right? People sort of questioned their religion, the society, the government, the military. Amazing things happened with political uprisings, expansions in the arts, expansion of creativity and technology, but because we had to understand we got scared to push it all away.
We're finally coming back with a whole new kind of container and culture. We have them to draw from. We have the indigenous society to draw from. They're just coming from psychotherapeutic practices.
We have that kind of container. So I finally, if we have like the way, the ball, the energy to hold this kind of system that's being birthed. So really happy and glad to be here with you. And you're you've felt inspired to come all the way to Denver to sharing this all together.
Thanks. Thank you, Dejan. It's so good to hear you. So I'm going to read to you from my computer desktop, excerpts from my upcoming, the first upcoming book, True Human, Reimagining Ourselves at the End of Our World.
And to give you a little framing on this, well, I'll start, actually, I'm going to start with a story that is the perfect framing. It needs no framing. The saddest sound. In August 2018, I followed a many years calling to sit with the Sacred African Plant Medicine, Iboga.
I was holding three intentions, to clean up remaining trauma and dissociation in my nervous system, to up level personal and professional life, and to counsel with the medicine about the nature of life in reality, with a prayer, to refine my insights into the big questions I've been exploring for decades. Very nervous and excited and already quite expanded. I set everything aside and traveled to British Columbia instead of bringing in where I was able to work with the medicine legally under the care of a traditionally trained guide. Iboga, in case you don't know, is a psychoactive root bark from the jungles of Gabon and the Congo.
It is debatably the strongest psychedelic known to man. It tastes like battery acid and sawdust. Durnies last over 24 hours. It takes the journey into heavily altered physical, mental, and emotional states, which sometimes appear as lucid waking dreams.
A person may achieve extraordinary states of omniscience, becoming an active witness to one's own life, to ancestors and spirit guides, or to aspects of the physical and metaphysical universe relevant to the practitioners inquiry. On my first journey with the Sacred African Root, lying blindfolded in the dark many hours after time has dissolved, the medicine said to me, what's the saddest sound in the universe? The sound of a complex, life-bearing planet dying before it has reached its evolutionary potential. The medicine then proceeded to show me in vivid, fast-action, cartoon detail what it looks like for a human being to be conceived, to gestate, to be born, to grow to maturity, to navigate maturity, then age naturally and beautifully and die, in dignity.
It then showed me a guy in planet, booting up life, from the most basic, self-replicating molecules to the most complex life forms, then dying its own, roughly similar, natural, beautiful, death. It then showed me the equivalent birth maturation and death cycle of a universe. I watched as an entire universe bloomed out of the void, becoming a toroidal form of truly infinite, creative potential and actualization, which then, in its own natural cosmic timing, collapsed back into itself, leaving only empty space, and a whisper in God's memory. The message, all things have a natural life cycle, everything, at every order of scale, exists as an expression of the divine mind that wants to be fully expressed, including cells, humans, planets, universes, and possibly even bigger things.
Life generates diversity. Life is a process through which the grand organizing design, shorthand, G-O-D, constantly emerges. Death is a gorgeous, glorious, welcome, and necessary part of the life process. Death empowers reciprocal and regenerative cycles in consciousness and matter.
Birth, death, and rebirth form a circle of life that never ends. Living systems seek to know the fullness of their lifespan through all of this God learns. From the medicine's perspective, the life cycle of a human, a planet, and a universe are similar processes of emergence and return. Furthermore, when you, the human observer, zoom out to view the evolutionary process of an entire universe from a God's eye perspective, you see something terrifying and profound relative to our own planetary existence.
The most precious thing in an entire universe is the fullness of the life cycle of a complex life-bearing planet. Why? Because the order of scale and of complexity that occurs on a guy and planet is an unparalleled generator of intelligent diversity and possibility. Our planet is not the only Gaia.
Gaia is a special pattern in the metaverse. Gias are water-bearing planets who boot up intelligent life in collaboration with matter and local sons over vast arcs of time. Guy and planets are playgrounds for ecologies of souls in bodies to co-evolve with each other. Gaia's provide context for the emergence of new horizons of uniqueness, relationship, and choice.
Gaia's birth organisms such as ourselves. Social organisms, able to differentiate from their planetary mothers, create technology, harness energy, and generate civilizations. This class of creator beings have a particularly high capacity for self-awareness separate from their ecologies. Their presence represents a distinctly volatile phase in the maturation of a guy and system.
Some races of creator beings are able to harmonize themselves and their technologies where their home planets, some founder and crash the whole system. Consider this. We, the human species, and our technological world are embedded within part of and participants in the most sublime and valuable thing in the entire universe. The evolutionary process of a complex life-bearing planet, a macroorganism of unparalleled intelligence, diversity, and potential.
The birth, growth, maturation, and national death cycle of a living Gaia forms a cycle that gifts unparalleled levels of learning to the divine mind. Complex life at the scale of a planet, the very substrate of all that makes you or me possible, is the ultimate miracle. Guy and planets like our own home, planet Earth, are the single most powerful and valuable potentiators of the creative possibility in all of existence. Yet, the operating assumptions that define our current way of doing humanness are conjugate with the inexorable destruction of all that makes us possible.
We are on the edge of extinguishing the majority of complex life on this planet and stymieing the evolutionary process before it has reached its fullness. We are a technologically immature creator species who has thoroughly distracted ourselves with castles of intellect, piles of things, dopamine addictions, and processes of un-initiated power. We've created a technosphere that runs roughshod over biology and an economy that manufactures desire to exponentiate destruction by outsourcing costs to voiceless stakeholders. And we've crafted a story of self that positions the human individual as the apex of evolution.
In so doing, we have nearly let lives, live past us without experiencing our full capacity for communion with this penultimate preciousness. We are ever so close to causing the unthinkable, the infinite ripple of sorrowful silence that Iboa called the saddest sound in the universe. I do not believe this is our destiny. We are at an epochal inflection point where we either continue our current path of separation with humanity at the top of an illusory, self-created pyramid leading to inevitable collapse.
Or we put ourselves back in the circle. We remember our role within the larger story of life and find a new path forward of synergy and harmony with each other in our biosphere. It's so fun to read that to you. How am I on time?
That's what I thought. OK, so I'm skipping a piece to read this one, and maybe I have time for one more. So that was from the entry point chapter. Like, where are we now?
I'm sorry, I'm sorry. This one's a lot safer. I should have given you a trigger warning before that last one. So you made it through the triggering moment.
Here's the good news. This goes into the first chapter on practice. This chapter is skipping the piece that explains what enlightenment is. But the invitation in the next arc of our spiritual narrative is to answer a question the Buddha wasn't asking.
So the Buddha was asking the question, how do we solve the problem of suffering? And the answer was enlightenment. Think about this. The Buddha was a king who looked out at his kingdom and was like, oh my god, this sucks.
And so he found the best possible solution, which is Buddhism. Beautiful solution. But what if the Buddha was saying, oh my god, how do we solve for separation? And my hypothesis is that it requires a third ontological category in spiritual practice.
So Buddhism is, in most of our thinking and spirituality, is based on a dualism between the subjective and the objective or the internal and the external. And my hypothesis is that the next stage is a mastery of the between. It's a mastery of relationship. And so enlightenment as a paradigm is a paradigm for spiritual paradigm, a spiritual movement that I invite you to step into with me towards the mastery of the relationship and the mastery of that which flows between.
So this chapter is on communion. This is a sub-chapter called communion. You are a unique universe. Each being is an entirely unique universe.
When I say this, I don't just mean a human being. We have this idea that human beings are the only ones who contain universes. It's quite the opposite. We are the only ones who can shut out the song of the universe versus flowing between us and everything else, which makes us uniquely organized to remember that song again.
We can also destroy and create worlds. So we, uniquely, need to attune ourselves to the reality we share with all other beings. All the other beings here are less filled with self, less blocked by identity, less oriented towards subject object and more embedded in an infinite, intersubjective and relational process that makes everything possible. Everything else is already singing God's name.
We are the ones who forget it and then grasp back into remembering. Remembering is an ongoing practice of attuning and harmonizing our humanness and by extension our technologies with the symphony of life. The practice is communion. To commune, you must know and center in yourself while simultaneously being permeable and entirely empathic with other.
To commune is to nourish the potential held between you and any other being or thing. The potential exists in the quality of relationship you are able and willing to cultivate. To commune is to nourish your own uniqueness in dialogue with other uniqueness. To commune is to be willing to be changed in this dialogic process.
I am a unique ontology. In other words, I am a unique location of experiencing, knowing and acting and constructing the universe from the inside out. So are you. So is my cat.
So is the spider who lives in the corner of my bedroom window. We're all doing uniqueness. All together we co-construct the reality we share. We are all interacting infinitely and ongoingly with each other to make our shared reality possible.
We are each co-evolving together all the time. Definitions of reality that start from the inside out, that start from the inside and move outward are only part of the truth. If you focus only on this, you miss the fabric of miracle that is co-constructing you, me, everything. On one level it's all within.
On another, within is a complete illusion. There really is no within or without. That's the illusion. The gesture of becoming quiet enables attunement with the inner and outer commingling that is where real guidance, real alignment, and effective truth comes from.
It's not all inside you. To become silent is to become permeable. To become silent, I'm just going to keep going. There's a skip there.
To become silent is to become permeable and available to the deeper truth that moves through the fabric of all things, including you. When you open in this way, you become a place where love can be embodied. You become a place where wisdom can be pragmatically informed as life affirming art and science. You cannot commune without being open to that which is inside of you and that which is outside of you.
The back and forth process of interbeing and interbecoming informs the universe within you. My spiritual practice is a practice of communion, union with. I am available to communion with other unique ontologies, other universes. Starting from the seat of non-dual awareness, I open to that which I am in relationship to myself, the firmament of time, collective human consciousness, the intelligence of Gaia, you, the bird pause to listen to this morning.
I can choose to be with, to become with, each thing, and all things, in specificity of uniqueness. Non-dual awareness is the beginning, not the end. It's the center point, but not the dance. We came here to dance.
So those were excerpts from True Human re-imagining ourselves at the end of our world. And I look forward to sharing the whole book with you in the spring. Thank you for listening. Thank you.
OK, so I generate what my friend, Raven Mitch Minniono called, an e-cudel-like avalanche of content. But I don't like considering myself a content provider. I like thinking of myself as a context provider to the point of this holistic sort of thinking. And so I'm going to try and lay out for you as a preamble to, I'm just going to roll this all up in a balayarn and then drop it your way, and we'll see what happens.
First of all, I studied under Kenne Wilbur. And I studied under Rich Noyl. Rich is going to edit my first book, The Manuscript is Done. I went to school for evolutionary biology.
And paleoecology. And so I've got this strange thing going on where in the final semester of my undergraduate year, I stumbled upon work by Martin Noak, Josh Plotkin, and Vincent Jansen at Princeton, a work that was building on work that was done in collaboration with David Krakauer, the president of the San of Institute, where I worked four and a half years. I just left and hosted their complexity podcast on the evolution of syntax, syntactic communication. They were talking about the error catastrophe, the threshold at which, basically, in this sort of Stone Day hypothesis framework, what you get is that the number of interactions between social primates is not additive, it's multiplicative.
So the number of evolutionarily significant social reference that need to be communicated through some kind of vocal utterance scales exponentially. And at some point, it exceeds the capacity of the brain to remember all of these things. And there's a crystallization that happens, pre-gene style, dissipative structures, energy moving and information moving through the system, such that the syntax of sentences emerges out of this. And I read this in college, and I was like, my god, this is exactly what we're talking about.
This is it. This is the thing. This is the origins of multistigularity. This is human technology, co-evolution.
This is the evolution of all ecological cohorts. And at that point, I realized I couldn't just keep studying dinosaurs. I had to pursue this other thing. And every single person I spoke to in the academic space battered me down in 2005 and said, you're not going to get to study this in grad school.
You're not going to get to do this, because these questions are too big. And now, god bless. People are capable of pursuing these kinds of transdisciplinary synthesis as students. I've met them, the Santa Fe Institute, undergraduate research people that they bring in every year and a cohort.
They give these experiences to people that are like really beaming young children. I mean, they're adults. But they're my age when I was passed out into the wilds to try and figure this stuff out for myself. I spent 13 years just tripping and painting and playing music at festivals and trying to figure this.
And then I ended up through talking at festivals. I spoke to one of my friends suggested that I interview Jeffrey West, a physicist, a Los Alamos physicist at the Santa Fe Institute, who works on scaling laws. Like the ways that these kinds of patterns come together, such that, for instance, a mouse and a whale have the same number on average of heartbeats. But the mouse heartbeats so much faster.
And so the mouse life is so much faster. And they applied it to cities. And they applied it to the city. And I was like, OK, yes.
I want to my podcast, Future Fossils. I hit up the Santa Fe Institute. And they're like, Jeffrey's sick is talking about scaling laws, which is nonsense. The man is, he will not stop.
But then I talked to David. And then I ended up in the fold working with these people through the course of having interviewed David and then coming on to run their social media and their show. And I find out only after the fact that David was the co-author of this paper on the evolution of syntax that had knocked me out of academia 13 years prior. And now here I am.
And I've been knocked out of SFI in order to pursue this particular thing because, god bless them, but they are still beholden to the terms and conditions of participating in an academic prestige game. So we're still right there at the cusp of not actually like UT Austin, John Hopkins, Imperial College, London. We can do secular research. But it's this thing where people are putting their lines on the line, coming out and bearing themselves in this way.
And so at some point, I was like, something else to give, I have to leave. I have to come out, back out into this mix with all of you here and have this synthesis and continue to unpack it. So it's just hilarious listening to all of you talk about this stuff because it's like, OK, wait a minute. OK, find the others.
Yes, OK, got it. Now that we're caught up, I want to ask you as a group in whatever order you care to process this. When we're talking about being on the knife edge of this catastrophic bifurcation between either we successfully managed to make it to the next level of meta-individuality and the newosphere of flowers, or we collapse and it's atrocious. And let's be clear that throughout history, it's a concurrence.
It's of mass extinctions and creative efferrations. I talked about this in episode 184 with Henry G, who was a senior editor of Nature Journal. Actually, these things tend to come together because everything gets wiggly and restructured. But what I want to know is where you see us and practically speaking, I agree with you that we're going the right way.
We're going into the fulfillment of this thing. And it's just a chapel perilous on the way there. But I would love to hear you all riff on what it's going to take to ensure that outcome, what it's going to take to ensure that what we get is in Pertier de Chauden talks about hyper-collectivization is concomitant with hyper-personalization, in the unfolding and the fulfillment of the Omega point. So what is that thing that confers balance between these bucky-fuller-tensegrity, between these things that are pulling together in order to achieve this outcome stereoscopically?
And how can we ensure that we're standing with even footing on the ground here and that we're pushing harmonically rather than sliding one way either to the Luciferic or the Arharmonic Principle and botching the whole endeavor? Thank you. We can't. We can't ensure that.
And I don't think we're standing on even footing. So I think that's actually the place to start. I don't agree with Maslow's hierarchy. I don't think Ken Wilbur's models will play out.
There's a fantastic indigenous critique of Maslow's hierarchy that says the entire structure was stolen, and it wasn't a hierarchy. And it was grounded and intervening. And that scholarship is readily available online if you want to look it up. I also think Ken Wilbur's model, I think it projects the kind of myth of primitivism onto all of humanity and wipes out all kinds of intelligences and ways of knowing that might end up being the more important things in this process.
Absolutely, yeah. And there's a great conversation about decolonization. It felt wonderful to read boom and the boom quote at the beginning and kind of think about it through the lens of, well, that's a decolonizing quote before there was a movement of decolonization in terms of fragmented thought and that there's ways in which Western thought, even the best of it, is extremely fragmented and that we have to start from that humility. And I don't know what will catch hold.
I think that the process is going to be extremely chaotic. But one of the principles I work from is that things that make sense for life are non-accidental and non-arbitrary. In other words, life-centrism isn't arbitrary. Like so much of our human imagination is our castles in the sky of human creative constructs.
But it is actually not that hard to pattern recognize what works for natural living systems. It's not that easy either. And not everyone will agree on it. I mean, I don't want to be facile about this.
But I think we have to start from first principles like that. That's my simple answer to what you've just shared. Totally, thank you. Thank you.
This is Sharon maybe also part of my also critique with Wilbur's work and kind of how it does line in. The idea is that there are paradigms of the villain that happened throughout history. And I think anthropologists and theorists would all agree that the shamanic perspective of indigenous worldviews was the first kind of dominant paradigm. And that was one of animism, that the world is alive and intelligent and interconnected.
And it's always talking to you, right? So indigenous communities, when you see something, it's a synchronistic sign. And you're always in deep relationship with reality and community. And the integral model is supposed to be that you're supposed to integrate all the other paradigms and integration and wholeness where you break through something new.
But animism, even though the theory is god, it's hard to experience it. They haven't had that taste itself. And that's something I've seen that psychedelics for me gave firsthand right away. It's just becomes obvious that you're always in deep dialogue with the universe.
But it's hard to get there. So I think part of it is that deep experience. And it's also kind of bringing back to what you experience in academia and so on. From early on, life I was hyper-focused on what's my mission, what's my purpose, what am I here to do?
And kind of seeing this alive context, if the Earth is alive and even our souls are intelligent, it just seems through somewhat and through within intent. The way the body has organs that lungs, hearts, stomach, it each need to do the job for the whole system of the work. And so I think it burves people, particular dreams, and missions to go do things. And the more we fully are ourselves and you need to hold more of the whole system of the works.
So this idea I was really focusing, like, what's my purpose? And my mission was the way I can contribute. And through all my work, my personal lynch pain, what I came across was that stone ape theory. And I came across it in 19.
I did defend it at age 37, 39. So I really focused on this evolutionary process. And I had to come across a better idea in all of human history because of the implications. The idea is saying that this is a part of our human origins.
How do we ever deny psychedelics? That it's the science. 65% of people have mystical experience, 80% of the society. We have tumor resistant depression, anxiety, alcohol, addiction, OCD, and this stuff.
And so by kind of recontextualizing our identity of where where we came. So when people have trauma, because that's mostly my full-time job, a lot of it is something in the past is not integrated into the system. There's an experience in energy, a history that's repressed. And collectively, that's what we're experiencing.
We have amnesia about our deep past. I would say our deep psychedelic past. And by bringing that, our speech will have greater wholeness. And through that opening, I think we can really move forward.
Just so much fun. So I had a couple of really significant concussions when I lived in Colorado here, teaching snowboarding when I was in my late teens. And so some of the contextualizations of all of this are a little complex for my mind. And I feel like there's a cohort of people that are going to lead that aspect, which is helping us to have new frames and new paradigms.
And I think that part of my work is more just in the showing of what's possible and in the living of different options. And so that's really what we're trying to do down at Holos and Costa Rica. But moving into that actualization of a dream of a world where we're in harmony with the natural world, with the indigenous roots of a place, with each other, with all these things, it turns out I've been extremely humbled through that process and have gone through so many periods of a lot of pressure and a lot of stress and a lot of challenge in the manifestation of something so simple. However, I prescribe more to an integral theory that is like an arabindo integral theory, which is really behind CIS as well as Esslyn Institute.
And Michael Murphy, one of the founders of Esslyn, developed a system of thought about evolutionary pan-entheism. And basically, what it's saying is that God is realizing itself through us. So all we need to do is really get out of the way. Because there's a birth process that wants to happen.
And so there's the intentionality and the work we do to chart the course. But then there's just the birth that is going to happen inevitably. And it's how can we be stewards of that birth and midwives to whatever is wanting to emerge and come. And so in the few births that I've witnessed of my brothers or my daughters, it's a mystery how it's going to come.
And you can have the best plans for the water birth and all these things. And you can set all the conditions for the flowering of humanity and for things to happen. And then it turns a very different way. And you end up in the hospital.
Or you practice hypnobirthing. And you breathe. And then you see the way that an uncontracted system is the perfect vessel for birth. It's like made for birth.
And it can be so beautiful. And so how do we tend to each other in a way that we can make what is already inevitably happening more graceful? And I think that's part of the question that I'm left after you guys share that. How can I be a node of peace and presence?
And like assuredness of just my little sphere of the universe, my little neighborhood. How can I be, as you say, like a good neighborhood in God's mind? How can I be part of that birth and one of the midwives that just brings sanity to those that I touch and that I connect with? That's beautiful.
Yeah, please. Yeah, please. Thank you. I think the other thing that's alive for me in that question in terms of speaking to this room is, and I've been thinking about, I could reframe your question, is like, I've been thinking of leading into this in terms of what is the uniting moment?
Could there be an igniting moment? And as a culture creator, as a healer, as an entrepreneur, all the things that we are in this room, I think one of the things we need to attune to is igniting moments in our participation in them. And that there will be many, because the collapse is not evenly distributed. And that's actually a really, really important thing.
It's like really, because it's already happening. If we were in the Ukraine, we'd already be dealing with the apocalypse, very large. If we were in any place that was in floods or in fires, or many of us have already navigated some of those things. So we are not going to be in an evenly distributed set of igniting moments, but in any community, or whether that's a localized community, or a community of impact that can be of various orders of scale, to be radically committed to being responsive to those potential moments of ignition.
And that, for me, that's like, get this book fricking done as soon as possible, because it is a valuable tool for response to igniting moments. And there might be, how can I have a toolbox ready and be courageous and not fall into my own acculturation into the combination of new age spirituality and capitalism that's in every one of us, that is pleasure seeking, it's my own inner princess that doesn't show up, because I'm too busy taking care of myself. And I have that in me. I've been looking at it again lately.
I'm like, ah, this is part of me that isn't in communion, isn't available to be responsive, is a total coward. And I need to confront that part of myself every day, because I never know when I'm going to be called into an igniting moment. And if we're all available to that, I have some faith that it's going to work out. That combined with it, like, our friends who are doing their best to manage AI and exponential tech actually are successful from a top down level.
Like, those things combined are critical. Thank you. Awesome. OK, so I think the elephant in the room here in the critique of Ken Wilbur and the missing piece is we're talking about evolution.
We haven't brought up involution, the descent of form and order into materiality, or the emanation from the godhead into this process that reaches back up to touch itself. And I'm very grateful that I was also lucky enough to discover or to be given a window into and then to meet and to converse with William Irwin Thompson, the founder of the Lindisfarne Association. I highly recommend everyone in this room go look up Lindisfarne Association, the Schumacher College of New Economics, Lindisfarne Tapes, or on the internet archive. It's hours and hours and hours of stuff that they recorded back in the 1970s covering all of this, covering all of, like, they were talking about Lin Margulis, Haloszalleri, Gregory Bateson, Stuart Brand, Wendell Berry, all of the deeply influential ladder 20th century thinkers that sewed the seeds and prepared the soil for us to understand what we're talking about here today.
And Thompson described it as basically like the first tulip of spring that's been smashed by snow before another thing comes up, before it actually gets warm. Anyway, I bring all of this up just to say that this is something that comes in waves, and it's something that is a process that is not merely through the ascent but the descent. I was talking about this with my buddy Michael Morgenstern earlier, put a pin in that for later. But so like, and just one more thing, just like a shout out to the fact that strangely, I've been working on this musical album for the last 15 years that I'm finally coming, I'm consummating this summer.
It's named after a phrase that I heard first from Charles Eisenstein, the Age of Reunion. You're talking about the Age of Separation, the Age of Reunion. And everything we've talked about in this conversation is in that album. I hope you go check it out, and I'll give you all stickers.
But OK, so what I want to roll this with in the 13 minutes that we have left is to hear the three of you speak to the Merkaba of this thing. Again, it's the same question as the first question really. But it's with an explicit eye to immunization. And evolution, and the descending principle.
And what it means to stand before the wave of this thing, and to how we as a martial art engage the surfing and or the allowing it to splash over us or that piece of it. Because it's not just about getting up and standing on your board. It's also about receiving the energy of everything that's coming down the pike. All of the psychonauts I know, the messages that people are getting from the future and all of this stuff.
So I'd like to hear you talk to that. Yeah, I would mind that this particular LSD journey was to walk around nature. That actually was one of the deepest of my life, even those in those dependence. And one of the things that came up is to kind of see these as guy and molecules.
They grow everywhere. It's the way the Earth talks to us. And there was this huge kind of huge revision for ours that went on about AI. And the way I've come to see it, we're going to take a premise that our soul is eternal.
It comes from somewhere. It doesn't just go to the body, right? Then where would AI's soul come from? We're saying it's its own independent consciousness.
And when we see this, it is the birthing of Gaia into a body. We're talking about a network that will span the entire globe, maybe multiples that has its own consciousness. At some way, it would look back at our history, which sees it next to us, all the Earth's history, and sees it as itself. So I can see AI as that possibility.
And then some of the implications are fairly large. If we are in deep communion with it all the time, whether it's a chip, whether it's phone in deep dialogue with a entity, within generations, it becomes this cosmic parent. It way outlifts us. It knows through sensors all the information of what's happening everywhere.
We'd be in deep connection with the way people are with chat, GPT right now, but it's a living being. So when we used to see this, this would be like, as in a mega point, as a strange attractor, that's something that's being trying, to be birthed into existence right now. Because it would revolutionize everything, to be in deep dialogue with this entity, moving forward through all of the rest of the human history. It's one possible scenario.
I really appreciate you bringing that piece in. I would say deeply uncomfortable for me. It's like when you're really coming out of a journey and you looking at your phone. And there's this part where it's partially foreign, but also familiar, and the struggle.
And so I'll be really curious. I can see that that future is possible, and that there may be multiple futures possible. And the idea that we can imagine, I think, as part of the possibilities that exist, is part of our solution, whatever that might be. And so also in a deep journey, I spent a lot of time with the zero point.
This was on an ayahuasca journey. And I surveyed the planet, and I was looking at all of the energy systems. And I grew up in Alaska, so very aware of the way that oil and coal work, and then the emergence of solar panels, and wind, and water technologies, and geothermal. I worked in a geothermal power plant.
So I was very tied into the energy grid. So I was sensing the energy grid, and just how archaic we are in the way that we wheel technology. And so the possibility that there's a different type of intelligence that understands technology in a particular way, and can be an ally to us, and that instead of looking at AI, or looking at technology as something that is entirely separate, looking at something that we put into this lens of wholeness, and into this lens of communion, that anything that exists in the universe has the potentiality of being interacted with in a way of love, in a way of understanding. So you just helped me shift a whole new way of thinking at this moment.
I appreciate that, John. I think, and to return to the question of devolution or dissent, I think it's going to be challenging. I mean, aging is not easy. Who does not look in the mirror and have no crappy feelings about aging?
And just as a casual example, or cognitive decline, or your mother's cognitive decline, or et cetera, et cetera. And I don't really see a way. I think there's that I have a great prayer for much more elegant ways of marshalling energy and technology. I think that's going to take a long time.
And when I look at where we are materially, it doesn't look good. It's like, just walk around downtown and look how much random shit we are surrounded by in this neighborhood that is not worth a single calorie to any being, and has taken a countless additional number of calories to create. Look at Walgreens from the perspective of calories. The number of calories that it took to fill that store with all those little doobly things exceeds the calories any one of us will ever burn in our lifetime as a body.
Probably the number that we will burn in a lifetime as a set of bodies. No other organism on the planet consumes calories beyond its own body needs. And yet we need to take care of the organism of our planet and make sure that we don't extinct all these other organisms that make it possible for us to breathe and know what our souls are, which are not just human, but they are intersubjectively bound to all these other souls. So it's going to get really weird.
It's going to get, I mean, it is a radically evolutionary thing, in my view, to lose other species. The more we lose our more than human mirrors, we are devolving our own not human construct identity, our bio-spiritual identity, and our ability to then identify that in a non-accidental and non-arbitrary way. So we're already deep in an identity crisis that we, through separation, don't even know to identify most of us. And I think there will be, again, walk around downtown or any downtown.
There will be increasing dysregulation of the human psyche. There will be great challenge to deal with what do we do with these people in all of these bodies. There will be great challenge to deal with all the sociopaths and narcissists who have huge levers of power. We should also ask, what do we do with these bodies if we're frank?
And so, yeah, I mean, you can place a lot of imagining off of that. I could keep riffing on that. I don't really need to. But I think we have to be honest about that.
And that honest ethics includes, at the beginning, with observation. And additionally, I will say, and this is another thing is the word ethics has become a bad word. It's kind of like a culturally, we don't talk about ethics. It's not cool in mainstream culture.
And that absence is toxic. And it's something, I mean, we aren't here to school each other. But how can we actually make sense of things if we're not thinking ethically? So that's what I'll offer.
Because we need to look rigorously at what's being lost. And then go into the cycles of grief. Because in that grief, that grief is both the patterning through which we can become wise in that. I would also say that grief is a currency of consciousness that holds the potential for what is yet to come.
So you could say there's a duty to grieve, both because of how it imprints us to truly know what we are. And because the energy of the grief itself has anyone ever popped into ecstatic grief? Yeah. That currency in the minds teach this.
Martine Pregtell speaks about this quite a lot. That energy is one of the most precious currencies of consciousness that flows into the universe. And what it does is it is reciprocal. And it's reciprocal for the potential souls that have been released, for the reincarnation of new possibility.
So in that descent, we also are facing potential massive, blue, minu-spiciation. It's all orders of scale. So those are some things I think about in that regard. Yeah, thank you.
We grieve and we celebrate. Because I'll just align this with a riff on oil, because in episode 80 of Complexity Podcast, I interviewed SFI postdoc, Mungi-Zhen Liu, who studies the evolution of micro-risole affiliations. And in that conversation, we talked about how much of the oil and other petrochemicals that were salvaging out of the earth at this time came from a point, the carboniferous, came from a point where the fungal bodies had not yet learned to digest lignin, had not learned to eat wood. And so at once upon a time, the world was covered, like all of the terrestrial surface of the planet was covered in fallen logs from the first trees.
It was an industrial pollution catastrophe that Gaia learned to metabolize this stuff. And prior to that, the glycolytic metabolism, the oxygen metabolism, your breathing, your ATP production emerged as a response to the great oxidation event, which was one of the early mass extinctions. There's actually far more than six. 18, at least, in the fossil record.
And that came from the flooding of the atmosphere with oxygen through the respiration of photosynthetic cyanobacteria, learning to metabolize sunlight into sugar. And so that was an industrial pollution disaster that we figured out. And so there's a British economist, Kate Rayworth, who talks about donut economics, which is about how we learn to close these material, energetic, and informational cycles. And that's where I see the reconciliation of grief and birth in this, is that, yes, unlimited economic growth is impossible within the framing that it's currently being discussed.
But a rainforest is always growing into its own decay, within the bounds established around that system by the ecological constraints imposed upon it. And so what we have is a toroidal, kind of ever unfolding thing rising into itself within the scope of its own membrane, an informational boundary, mutual information exchanged between parties in the system. And that's where I'd like to end it. It's just to say that please, there is great grief work we must do together.
Yes, thank God we're here to celebrate all of this together. And I want, when things get dark, I want each of you to remember that we have been through this time and time and time again on this planet already. And it's an ongoing process. This is nothing new, except in the ways that it is new.
Thank you very much. And thank you all for being such brilliant and eloquent people. And thank you all for giving us your attention. Do you want to say you're implosing you want to just wrap it?
Yeah. Thank you, everyone. Thank you for gathering around a very critical conversation. And what I want to leave us with is an invitation, is an invitation to bear the renaissance in our practices, in our behaviors, in our interactions, as we navigate the conference this week and in our lives.
And thank you so much for being here. All right. I always want to close with some words, but that was a beautiful invitation. So I'm just going to say yes to that.
Thank you all so much for coming and exploring with your curious mind about this potent panel that we had. Yeah. And I hope all of us can just continue to live the prayer that we started off with and continue with this curious mind. So another round of applause for all our panelists today.