Theory and ritual artist Scoutleader Wiley talks to Brendan about metamodern magick, a post-postmodern psychotechnology of re-enchantment that utilizes ironic sincerity and informed naivete to (re)connect us with meaning and the Earth. How can we engage with ritual and mythos beyond superstition and gullibility? What ends does ritual accomplish that a purely rational and objective stance to experience cannot? How can laughing at ourselves help us take the sacred seriously? 0:00 Introduction 1:36 A Need for New Rituals: Personal and Communal Meaning-Making 9:05 Magic vs. Magick: Objective vs. Transjective Transformation 15:26 Acausal-Representational Systems (ARS) 18:52 Regenerative Reverence: An "As If" Spirituality 35:09 "Make Coffee Like You Give a Fuck": Creating Ritual and Living Mindfully 44:23 Spiritual Vulnerability and Ironic Sincerity 47:51 Necessary Subversion

Dr. Gregg Henriques talks to Brendan about his Unified Theory of Knowledge (UTOK) framework and how it promisingly contributes to the effort of articulating a sciency-friendly post-postmodern grand narrative for our confused and meaning-hungry times. Gregg helps clarify points of overlap as well as distinction between other post-postmodern maps, while zeroing in on the specific existential challenge of our day, which UTOK clarifies and contextualizes. Finally, the two consider how we might, through ironic sincerity, co-create a set of living symbols that can help teach the full "wisdom stack" we'll need to not only survive but thrive beyond the imminent transformations of the metaverse and the "digital identity problem." 0:00 Introduction 1:31 Overview of the Unified Theory of Knowledge (UTOK) 7:18 UTOK and Metamodernism 15:46 UTOK and Integral Theory 28:08 Mapping the Complexification Domains 38:09 Brendan: How the Metanarrative Answers the Crisis of Psychological Studies 39:17 UTOK and the Integrated Information Theory of Consciousness 49:57 The "God" Question 58:06 A Spiritual Omega Point or Posthumanist Singularity? The Need for a Wisdom Stack 1:03:44 The Need for a New Mythology: A New Meaning amidst the Meaning Crisis

Joe Lightfoot talks to Brendan about the "Liminal Web," a term he coined for an emerging online community of metatheorists, systems poets, and sensemakers. Discussion quickly moves from mapping this online subculture to exploring its possible futures for deepening connection and embodiment. What are the potentials of purely virtual communitas? Are there in-person communal structures into which this online momentum might be transferred? What are the ingredients of successful communities more generally? What makes this loose network different than other would-be changemakers of the past? Where is it all going, and what is its significance?   0:00 Introduction  2:01 The Liminal Web  4:55 Mapping Mapmakers: A Perspective on the Perspective-Takers  7:48 A Certain Kind of Engagement  9:45 Materializing the Meta-Tribe IRL  25:38 Charitability, Development, and Exclusion  35:57 Post-Postmodern Systems Change  42:22 The Importance of Being Earnest: Heroic Humility and the Dao of Service  56:26 Dancing Dialecticians and the Ever-Receding Absolute  1:01:25 Sacred Simplicity Beyond Complexity

Feeling stuck in his meditation practice and looking for guidance from a 4th Path adept, Brendan talks again to Roger Thisdell, someone who has attained a new default experience of mind as permanently centerless and without the sense of a singly, positioned epistemic agent (i.e., what in traditional language might be called "enlightenment"). Both thought it might be helpful to explore some instructional guidance in a podcast setting, where the process could be shared for others' benefit. In this context, Roger asks some probing questions and offers some helpful tips and suggestions for cultivating awakening.    0:00 Introduction  2:54 Brendan Describes His Path and Motivation towards Waking Up  9:12 (Clarifying Nonduality)  12:22 Brendan Tries to Describe His Phenomenological Sense of Self  16:47 Shifting Perspective through Thought  21:50 Symbolizing Awakened Consciousness 29:45 Beyond Equanimity: Zeroing in on the "Self"  40:54 The Uses of Conception to Change Perception  42:39 Building Motivation  48:07 Fire Kasina  50:45 Being vs. Striving  54:52 Building Metacognition  59:11 Naming Our Motivations

Brendan talks to Henry Andrews about the legacy of Clare Graves's work, which formed the basis of the Spiral Dynamics framework, which has in turn highly influenced the articulation of integral theory. After going over some of the history, the discussion then turns to the "Great Stage Theory Debate" (Henry's coinage) initiated by a comment by Nora Bateson on social media that re-ignited debate over long-standing critiques of stage theories in general.   0:00 Introduction  2:53 Stage 1: The Research of Clare Graves  12:53 Stage 2: Don Beck, Christopher Cowan, and Spiral Dynamics  20:01 Stage 3: Ken Wilber and SDi  24:46 Stage 4: Hanzi Freinacht and Political Metamodernism 28:11 The "Great Stage Theory Debate": Seeking a "Both/And" Approach  46:04 Debate in the Social Media Landscape 47:59 Transcending the Stage of Stage Theorization: Practice for Playing Jazz

Zak Stein is a writer and educator with a doctorate in human development and education from Harvard University. Working with Kurt Fischer, he helped further hone and nuance developmental stage theories as part of the neo-Piagetian consensus. Deeply influenced by integral philosophy, he has also articulated many crucial critiques of the movement in an attempt to emphasize the dynamical and contextual nature of stage assessments. Here Zak and Brendan discuss just what the science tells us about the reality of stages; the problems around their simplification, reification, and misapplication; the question of how well they map onto socio-cultural development; the importance of processual vs. categorical thinking; and what development can and can't do as part of a metamodern spiritual metanarrative.   0:00 Introduction  1:12 Static Stages or Dynamic Processes? A Metapsychological Clarification  10:18 Being "at" a Stage? Development as an Ecology of Skillsets  19:23 Non-Linear Growth and Ranges of Operation: Fractal Skill-Chunking across Domains  24:05 The Car Mechanic and the Quantum Mechanic: Transferable Skills and the Importance of Embodiment  28:55 Roots of Cognitive Complexity  1:57 The Recapitulation Theory: Does Phylogeny Map Ontogeny?  36:50 The Growth to Goodness Issue: Complexification and Pathology  41:31 Better Heuristics than Stages? Learning Processes, Capacity Asymmetries, and Dynamics of Teacherly Authority  48:18 Theory vs. (Mis)Application: Are Stage Theories Just "B.S. and Colonial as Hell"?  59:41 Generalizing Developmental Space  1:05:30 Development as Metanarrative? Stage Theories and the Religion that's not a Religion

This is Part 2 of the series (Part 3 will be on Layman's channel), in which the three of us wrestle deeply within dialogos about how to implement the religion that is not a religion in a way that is both viable and honourable.    0:00 Introduction  6:14 Stages of Faith? Development, Adjacency, and Trustworthiness  11:36 Mechanisms of Change vs. Maps of Change: Problematizing the Narrative Uses of Development  17:15 Traditional (concrete) vs. Modern (formal) Signs of Trustworthiness  20:35 Sequence, Movement, and Attraction: Trusting One's Future Self  24:38 The Normativity Problem  30:39 Complexification as Mechanism: Ecologies of Practice Give us Perspective  34:34 Religious Levels as Relevance Realization at the Scale of Distributed Cognition  49:39 Trust the Process: Organizing by Models of Successful Processing, not Pre-Determined Plan   LINKS  Part 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rAnLbaFHYWQ

Writer Sophie Strand discusses re-enchantment, the animist revival, ecological storytelling, and the meaning of death and change. They explore topics such as the connection between social strife and the split between matter and spirit, the conflicting views on the internet and technology, the role of the transcendent in the cycle of decay and renewal, and the importance of effective communication and storytelling.

Daniel Thorson and Brendan discuss the work of John Vervaeke, creator of the "Awakening from the Meaning Crisis" series, comparing and contrasting it to Daniel's own pioneering efforts to develop a framework and set of practices for training agents of healing and transformation in our disintegrating world. They also reflect on both the importance and the problem of creating "ontologically neutral" practices stripped of highly context-bound terminology and ideas, whether that be for a "religion that's not a religion" or the kind of framework Daniel is developing. 0:00 Introduction 1:50 On Entering Vervaekeland 5:49 Transformation: Virtue as a Leverage Point for Meaning 10:44 Vervaeke's Perennial Problems and His Proposed Ecology of Practices 18:35 Thorson's Framework of Five Aspects (1. Energy System, 2. Psyche, 3. Relationship, 4. Ethics, 5. Perception) 30:10 Thorson's Ecology of Practices: 1. Samadhi and Healthy Living; 2. "Focusing," Bio-Emotive Work, Internal Family Systems; 3. Circling and Intentional Community; 4. Human Systems; 5. Emptiness Insight 36:29 A Vervaeke-Thorson Synthesis? 39:12 Disenchanting Ecologies of Practice? The Challenge and Promise of Sacred Containers 46:44 A Missing Metanarrative? Connecting Myth and Praxis 50:39 An Ecology of Ecologies of Practices: Modular Methods, Local Color? 54:27 Wisdom's Scaling Constraints: Seeking Integration in a Disintegrating World Emerge podcast: https://www.whatisemerging.com/emergepodcast The Monastic Academy: https://www.monasticacademy.com/ www.BrendanGrahamDempsey.com

After detailing the twists and turns of his rich spiritual journey through numerous religious traditions, Bruce Alderman discusses the many promises and challenges of trans-religious engagement. Bruce and Brendan discuss the difficulty of bridging divides, not just between different religious traditions, but also between different worldviews and value systems that appear within those traditions. Bruce talks about some of the promising groundwork he's helped lay to establish new interlineage institutions, and reflects on what remains to be done in the field of integral pluralism and the articulation of a meta-religious framework. 0:00 Introduction 1:46 Bruce's Journey through Multiple Spiritual Lineages 20:47 Seeking the Thread that Binds 25:40 Picking up the Pieces: Reconciling across Traditions and Worldviews 37:25 Relating across Worldviews: Strategies for Integrating  44:16 Building an Infrastructure for Integral, Interlineage Spirituality 53:51 Translineage Spirituality or Meta-Religion? 1:10:52 A Translineage Lineage: Adepts and Initates Doing the Work The Integral Stage podcast: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCaA4... www.BrendanGrahamDempsey.com