Emerge: Making Sense of What's Next

Circling Europe co-founder Sean Wilkinson and I explore what it's like to practice across paradigms, the limits and transformational potential of circling, and the interplay between mediation, circling, and trauma work. Sean shares from his experience about the problems with static orientations to practice, subtle grasping to personal growth, and the orientation of trust.
Sean Wilkinson is a Circling Europe co-founder with an enduring passion for self-awareness, human potential, wisdom traditions and an ongoing inquiry into life. His focus includes extensive academic research, spiritual and psychological practice, coaching, and therapeutic training.

[0:02:53] Introducing Sean

[0:06:00] What is at the edge of meditation, circling, and trauma work?

[0:10:00] Discovering the limits of circling

[0:16:55] Exhausting an Orientation to Practice

[0:33:50] Scale Invariance

[0:39:10] Eclecticism to Integration

[0:49:10] The Orientation of Trust

[1:05:10] The Feeling Process

[1:25:20] A short guided meditation

[1:41:20] Metamodernism and the Meta-Crisis (mesa crisis?)

[1:42:42] The Paradigm of Leadership

If you'd like to explore the practice of Circling MAPLE is hosting the SAS 6-month Circling Training starting in June.

This week I'm speaking with Daniel Schmachtenberger.

Daniel is a founding member of The Consilience Project, aimed at improving public sensemaking and dialogue.
The throughline of his interests has to do with ways of improving the health and development of individuals and society, with a virtuous relationship between the two as a goal.
Towards these ends, he’s had particular interest in the topics of catastrophic and existential risk, civilization and institutional decay and collapse as well as progress, collective action problems, social organization theories, and the relevant domains in philosophy and science.
Motivated by the belief that advancing collective intelligence and capacity is foundational to the integrity of any civilization, and necessary to address the unique risks we currently face given the intersection of globalization and exponential technology, he has spoken publicly on many of these topics, hoping to popularize and deepen important conversations and engage more people in working towards their solutions. Many of these can be found here.

We talk about the current state of the phase shift, whether we are past the point of no return for social collapse, Daniel’s three generator functions of existential risk, the definition of an adequate social architecture that avoids existential risk, how technology creates asymmetric advantage that debases the planetary life support system, why we need to create technology that leads to ‘metastability’, the pollution of the epistemic commons, why we need to define problems in a comprehensive way where the solutions don’t create worse problems, the vows Daniel made as a teenager, what progress is being made at solving the generator functions of existential risk, the auto-poetic nature of trauma, and the necessity of a mature relationship between certainty and uncertainty.

In this conversation, John, Bonnie, and Thomas discuss various frameworks on what wisdom is, how it functions, and the different types and scales of complexity in which wisdom may arise. The conversation explores themes of wisdom and complexity with both depth and breadth, navigating the topic philosophically and pragmatically, and ultimately arriving at wisdom's relationship with the "It" beyond all relationship.

This conversation is brought to us by the Respond Network. The Respond Network is a distributed research network focused on addressing the meta-crisis by researching and cultivating wisdom.

Respond Network Practitioners taking place August 7th – 12th, 2023 in Bergerac, France

Daniel's Patreon

Timestamps

0:00 - Intro

5:59 - Virtue Reactivation

8:19 - Wisdom vs. Development & Complexity vs. Rootedness

12:47 - Wisdom as a function of Domains of Complexity

17:48 - Wisdom as a function of Relationship

20:30 - Wisdom as the Interplay between Sophia & Phronesis

25:35 - Moving between Scales of Sophia & Phronesis

30:37 - Vertical and Horizontal Axes of Wisdom & Complexity

35:41 - Letting Go of Complexity into New Emergence

38:35 - Receptivity to Spontaneity

40:20 - Reorientation Towards Rootedness

42:50 - Accessing What is Fundamental Through Rootedness

49:59 - John Explicating Bonita's Demonstration of the Topic

51:22 - Mindfulness Mirroring

56:27 - Recognizing the Exemplification of the Sacred as a Function of Wisdom

1:02:34 - The World as a grounding agent for Wisdom

1:05:24 - When and How did 'It' show up?

1:12:10 - The 'It' is Beyond Relationship

1:24:14 - In Story'ing

1:26:14 - Mindfulness Mirroring II

In this episode fellow Monastic Academy resident Ellen McSweeney and I explore the relationship between Circling and Soulmaking in an attempt to make sense of the experience we shared co-facilitating the Anti-Fragile Heart retreat in March. Towards the end there is a Q+A with retreat participants.

If you'd like to explore the practice of Circling MAPLE is hosting the SAS 6-month Circling Training starting in June.

This conversation was recorded in the meditation hall at the Monastic Academy, and the audio is a little wonky...

A conversation about how emergence can be the foundation a new society. We talk about how societies can create containers for healthy decision making. And how sacred containers can allow for the emergence of the planetary movement we’re longing for.

David Sauvage asks, how do we create the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible? In my first episode after returning from the Emerge gathering in Austin, we discuss the future of collective decision-making, reflect on our shared past with Occupy Wallstreet, and consider the role of participatory democracy in what is emerging. David puts preliminary words to a vision originating from the gathering this summer.

https://www.davidsauvage.com

[00:00:00] Introducing David

[00:05:24] David’s Vision from the Emerge gathering.

[00:10:35] Occupy Wallstreet

[00:29:30] The future of politics.

[00:44:55] The Third Attractor.