State of Emergence

Tim and Terry begin by revisiting fundamental philosophical questions of eros, entropy, telos, and consciousness itself. Then, they examine our current existential crisis in the context of history — considering the nature of “chaos” and the tendency for each generation to imagine it’s living in the “worst of times.” Tim especially points to how our personal awakenings draw us into a care and benevolence for everyone and everything, and how this may be our biggest evolutionary advantage.

They then explore the implications of “paralogical” (both/and) thinking, Tim’s concept of “unividualism,” and how joy and grief coexist at the knife-edge of emergence, knowing that everything we love might be both collapsing and evolving and emerging into sublimity. Ultimately, Tim suggests that the whole point is the miraculous process of evolutionary emergence, where something that has never existed before is birthed into being — again and again. If emergence is the nature of the Divine, then what is emerging is... God!

For more information on Tim Freke and Terry Patten, check out the following resources:

• Tim Freke’s Website
• Tim’s overview of Unividualism
• Books by Tim Freke
• Terry’s nonprofit website A New Republic of the Heart
• Terry’s book, A New Republic of the Heart: An Ethos for Revolutionaries
• Terry Patten’s website

Then, Terry and Jonathan explore a more personal and intimate relationship to the meta-crisis. What does it feel like for each of us to live amidst its various energies and aesthetics? How can we learn to “taste” ideas, practices, and possibilities for their beauty and transformative power? What’s it like to interact with different worldviews in more playful and paradoxical ways? And lastly, we discover inspiration in considering the larger cultural project of building viable “we’s” that are meaningful, coherent, and effective in serving the whole.

Jonathan Rowson is a philosopher, author, chess Grandmaster, sensemaking entrepreneur and the Director of Perspectiva, a research institute based in London seeking to highlight the important connections between systems, souls, and society amidst our complex crises. Jonathan previously Directed the Social Brain Centre at RSA, the Royal Society of Arts, Manufacture & Commerce. He is an applied philosopher with degrees from Oxford, Harvard and Bristol Universities. Jonathan is the author of multiple books including Spiritualise: Cultivating Spiritual Sensibility to Address 21st Century Challenges (2017) and The Moves that Matter – A Grandmaster on the Game of Life (2019). As mentioned above, Jonathan also very recently published a brilliant essay providing an overview of our civilizational predicament called "Tasting the Pickle: Ten flavors of meta-crisis and the appetite for a new civilization,” which you can find on our episode page on stateofemergence.org.

Here are some additional questions explored in the episode:

• How does our use of language in describing our meta-crisis shape our experience and response? How does Jonathan’s humorous use of “pickle” invite a different experience?
• As we attempt to understand our predicament, how can we “go meta” with our sensemaking in a way that also grounds us in direct experience and relationship?
• Which emotional, cognitive, and relational capacities can enable us to navigate the cultural dissonance of our time?
• How can we build more sophisticated and effective “we’s” at scale, and how might such work begin to impact our systems?

For more information on Jonathan Rowson and Terry Patten, check out the following resources:

• Jonathan’s recent essay, “Tasting the Pickle: Ten Flavours of Meta Crisis and the Appetite for a New Civilisation”
• Perspectiva, which Jonathan co-founded in 2016 with Tomas Björkman
• Jonathan’s book, The Moves that Matter
• Jonathan’s book, Spiritualise
• Jonathan’s 2020 essay, “An Open Letter to the Human Rights Movement”
• Jonathan’s 2019 essay, “Buildung in the 21st Century: Why Sustainable Prosperity Depends on Reimagining Education”
• Jonathan’s Aeon magazine article on Concentration
• State of Emergence podcast website
• Terry Patten’s nonprofit, A New Republic of the Heart
• Terry Patten’s personal website

Join Us for the Next Podcast Q&A EventWe will be exploring this episode with Jonathan Rowson in greater depth during our next live State of Emergence live Q&A on Tuesday, April 13, 2021 at 12 noon Pacific. If you haven’t already joined us, simply register as a Friend of State of Emergence...

Indra and Terry consider how our societal challenges provide an opportunity for “mutually waking up” through deep conversation and relating with those who do not share their worldviews and frameworks. Indra reflects on how her personal practice nurtures her agency and creativity, and she also shares many practical tactics and examples of how the organization and political platform she co-founded, The Alternative UK, is laying the groundwork for a “future politics that is both global and intensely local.”

Their conversation then moves on to how we can shift our collective attention from narratives of trauma, disconnection and collapse into the “miracle of our connection” and a radical, embodied certainty that our solutions are available.

Indra Adnan has been writing, consulting and network-building on the themes of future politics, soft power, conflict transformation, the role of the arts, and integral consciousness. She is Founder and Co-initiator of The Alternative UK political platform, which publishes The Daily Alternative, convenes new system actors and builds “cosmolocal community agency networks.” Indra is concurrently a psychosocial therapist, journalist and author. Through her work on international relations and soft power she has consulted to the World Economic Forum, Indian and Danish governments, NATO, the Scottish Executive and the Institute of Contemporary Arts amongst others. She is Co-Lead in the social enterprise network Bounce Beyond working to cohere the next global economies. Indra’s new book from Perspectiva Press is titled The Politics of Waking Up: Power & Possibility In The Fractal Age.

For more information on Indra Adnan and Terry Patten, check out the following resources:

• Indra Adnan’s Website (indraadnan.global)
• Indra’s new book, The Politics of Waking Up (for pre-order)
• The Alternative UK (thealternative.org.uk)
• Indra’s Writing on “Soft Power”
• Terry’s organization, A New Republic of the Heart
• Terry Patten’s personal website

Join us as a Friend of State of Emergence

We will be exploring this episode in greater depth during our next State of Emergence live Q&A (date and time to be announced soon). If you haven’t already joined us, we invite you to become a Friend of State of Emergence and join these monthly Q&A sessions with me and other listeners, as well as help the podcast become financially sustainable. A vibrant, intelligent, and caring community is already gathering around State of Emergence and we’d love for you to be part of it. Sign up at stateofemergence.org.

If you haven’t already listened to last week’s episode with David — episode 069, titled “A Human Superorganism — The Higher Potentials of Cooperation” — we encourage you to begin there for a more concise and concentrated overview of his ideas. In this separate unedited conversation (which took place beforehand) David and Terry go into the practical application of his ideas at greater length and explored many nuanced distinctions, principles, and practices — it gives us valuable insight into some of the design principles and practices that can enable social experiments and cooperative communities to succeed and grow.

They consider the virtues and exploitations of competition, multiple layers of competition, genetic vs. cultural steams of evolution, the role of symbols in evolving our cultural narratives, and the Nobel laureate and political economist Elinor Ostrom’s eight principles for “managing a commons.”)

If you belong to and participate in a community of any kind, we hope this deep dive into the dynamics of cooperation serves you and inspires a new level of practice and efficacy in your group’s efforts.

For more information on David Sloan Wilson and Terry Patten, check out the following resources:

• David’s new novel, Atlas Hugged is gifted, not sold, for whatever the reader wishes to give in return, with all proceeds going to Prosocial World. For this reason, it is available only on its website: www.AtlasHugged.world.
• David’s nonprofit organization, Prosocial World
• David’s book, This View of Life: Completing the Darwinian Revolution
• David’s book, Does Altruism Exist?: Culture, Genes and the Welfare of Others
• David’s book, Darwin’s Cathedral: Evolution, Religion and the Nature of Society
• Terry Patten’s nonprofit, A New Republic of the Heart
• Terry Patten’s personal website

Join us as a Friend of State of Emergence

We will be exploring this episode in greater depth during our next State of Emergence live Q&A (date and time to be announced soon). If you haven’t already joined us, we invite you to become a Friend of State of Emergence and join these monthly Q&A sessions with me and other listeners episodes, as well as help the podcast become financially sustainable. A vibrant, intelligent, and caring community is already gathering around State of Emergence and we’d love for you to be part of it. Sign up here.

Sean Esbjörn-Hargens is a leader in the application of integrative thinking to leader development and organizational design, and has made significant contributions to the fields of integral ecology, integral business, integral education, and integral research. Sean created and hosted the four Integral Theory Conferences and founded MetaIntegral — a social impact network that supports change leaders around the world in applying integrative principles. Most recently, in 2018, he founded the Exo Studies Institute, pioneering an integral approach to anomalous phenomena including UFOs/ETs. Sean has been a long-term practitioner of Tibetan Buddhism, A. H. Almaas' Diamond Heart, and Celtic Christianity. He has published and edited numerous articles and books, and his recent article on non-human intelligences is titled Our Wild Kosmos! Currently, Sean is the Dean of Integral Education at the California Institute for Human Science where he also serves as Program Director for two integral PhD programs.

Here are some of the questions Sean and Terry explore in this episode:

• What are Sean’s 16 ways of practicing wise responses to conspiracy theories and those who believe them?
• What emotional and cognitive capacities does it take to “hang out in the unknown” instead of jumping to conclusions?
• What exactly are “exo studies?” Why are they important? Can they catalyze a major shift in human consciousness and the practice of science?
• Which 10 recent events — from New York Times bombshell articles to Pentagon admissions — have led to a new widespread legitimization of UFO and ET studies?
• What are the 3 major “ontological realms” of anomalous phenomena? Can they be experienced and understood in our ordinary waking state of consciousness, or do we have to open to different modes of knowing in order to experience them fully?
• Can spiritual practitioners explore and integrate exo realities without becoming fascinated and distracted from the conscious divine reality from which they arise?

Sean’s 16 Guidelines for Practicing with Conspiracy Theories

1. REALIZE THAT WE ALL ARE CONSPIRACY THEORISTS: Keep in mind that we are all are conspiracy theorists of one strip or another – we have strong biological, cognitive, and social-cultural tendencies that predispose us towards conspiracy thinking. No one is really is immune. We are all in this together. It is psychologically commonplace – though it gets magnified or distorted under certain circumstances.
2. CLAIM YOUR SOVEREIGNTY: Stay in our own sovereignty and energy management around the content. – it can be intense and disorienting.
3. DON’T BELITTLE CTs or CTers: Avoid belittling them and encourage others not to – as it encourages an environment that is not conducive to engaging them.
4. DETERMINE WHAT KIND OF CT IS IT? Determine if it is a rational or irrational CT (or an evidence-based CT vs a speculative CT) – how much evidence and what kinds does it have supporting it.
5. DIFFERENTIATE BETWEEN GOOD DATA POINTS vs NARRATIVE: Keep in mind that CTs often are based on good data points and insights and are pointing to “gaps” we ignore at our own peril. Differentiate the data points from the narrative. Acknowledge the “facts” (if they are solid/verifiable) but don’t blindly accept the “links”.
6. ACKNOWLEDGE THE “DEEP MEMETIC FRAME” INVOLVED: Identify the deep memetic frame being presented and connect with that w/o affirming the content of the CT. CTs tend to resonate with our deepest sense of how the world is (i.e., our worldview).
7. HANGOUT IN THE GAP: Acknowledge that the official story doesn’t add up but refrain from committing to a CT – allow for multiple possible non-official stories to contain potential explanations. Allow yourself to “reject” the official story but holdback from identifying with a single CT narrative.
8. TALK ABOUT CTs & SEEK...