Reflecting on the game-theoretic dynamics of AI reminded me of a post from The Joyous Struggle back in 2023, which still feels relevant. Any plausible vision of the future needs to contend with competition, particularly in the context of technology and weaponry. The resulting “multi-polar traps” are harmful for everyone. They are often now called Moloch traps, for curious reasons outlined below. While I understand Moloch is an impersonal logic invoked figuratively, I felt it might be fun to give him some personality and interiority, and see how that played out in therapy. With just a few days of August to play out, I also hope this post might qualify as “late summer reading”.

Bye for now,

Jonathan

Therapist: Come in. It’s nice to meet you. There’s a glass of water for you on the table under the lamp there. Do make yourself comfortable.

Moloch: Thanks. Let’s see what I can do. *Figuratively sits down*.

Therapist: So what brings you to therapy?

Moloch: That’s a very personal question.

Therapist: Is it? Well, that’s good. Therapy is personal work.

Moloch: Well, I am not really a person. God made sure of that. On the other hand, I sometimes feel like one, and it’s not clear what I am. Technically, I suppose I’m a demon, but these days I am invoked by humans to represent negative outcomes caused by inexorable competitive logic arising from lack of imagination and unwitting design.

Therapist: *Scribbles note: ‘complex identity structure, possible narcissistic personality disorder’ and looks up*.

Can you explain that to me in plain language, please?

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Moloch: There was an old lady who swallowed a fly. Remember her? I guess she died, right? And why? Because one thing led to another.

She swallowed the spider to catch the fly, she swallowed the bird to catch the spider that wriggled and jiggled and tiggled inside her, and so on. The old lady soon found she had to eat a horse to solve her problems. As the saying goes: good luck with that.

Therapist: So are you the horse?

Moloch: No! I’m the kind of underlying logic that leads people to figuratively eat horses to solve their fly problems.

Therapist: I see. You are a pattern or an operating logic of some kind, then?

Moloch: Yes, I suppose. Some think of me as a version of the devil, like one of his many flavours from the same tub of diabolic ice cream. More precisely, I am the God of coordination failure, or the spirit of unintended consequences, the secret reason that good things turn bad. Moloch in particular is usually depicted as inorganic, as some kind of statue or machine.

I consume things of value, and that’s how I’m appeased. But that means I’ve become the thing that is not of true value toward which people nonetheless feel obliged to sacrifice things that are of real value.

*Looks sad*

I used to be the child sacrifice guy. Yes, ok, I accept that was wrong, but at least it had some symbolic power. These days people don’t give me their babies at all. Instead, they feed me with smartphones and GDP figures and tall buildings like The Shard in London or The Burj Khalifa in Dubai, and they expect me to be grateful. I’ve become a niche social and political touchstone or metaphor to explain all that.

They say I’m the spirit of things that are jinxed by the logic of how things play out, like capitalism being unable to stop itself from committing ecocide. Some even talk of me these days like I’m the capitalist system itself.

I have become the name for ‘the thing’, ‘the machine’.

Some people even seem to think of me as a kind of dark power that is potentially going to somehow inhabit the infrastructure of artificial intelligence. But no, if anyone’s going to do that, it’s my colleague Ahriman. Others see me as self-defeating exponential technology, driving the planet to destruction.

They also say I’m the spirit behind the creation of the nuclear bomb, and the arms race that followed - nobody wanted anybody to have the capacity to destroy the world, but everybody knew that somebody would do it first, and once that awareness arose, others had to follow. That recent movie Oppenheimer has so many head shots of the main character looking with his big translucent eyes at something in the mid-distance with a mixture of awe, regret, guilt, sorrow, hope, confusion, and fear. They don’t say this, but what they are trying to convey is that he’s looking at me.

*Looks at therapist*

Therapist: *Looks back, and smiles.*

I see. It sounds like you have more to add.

Moloch: I was never truly embodied, but I miss being iconic. You know, in some depictions of me there were even hoooves, red eyes, and horns. Not bad. I miss them hooves.

I don’t want to be a mere concept! It’s alienating. It pisses me off…But, to be honest, the real reason I’m here is that I’m tired of being seen through one prism. *Wells up*

I’m sorry to blurt it out like this, but…

I just f*cking hate game theory!

Therapist: Oh, my. Game Theory?

Moloch: Yeah, sorry. Maybe I’m exaggerating. It’s a simple thinking tool, I guess - a branch of economics concerned with the logic of cooperation and competition. It’s intellectually exciting when you first encounter it, and it’s innocent enough, though people tend to show off with their Nash equilibrium this, and their Pareto optimal that. It helps to make sense of collective action problems because it details why people struggle to cooperate, why people cheat, how that harms everyone, and why following self-interest causes outcomes that are worse for everyone overall.

Game theory helps to distil why your species, operating with its multi-faceted delusion, currently has no credible response to ecological collapse. As long as the techno-capitalist operating logic continues, at every scale, from the individual to businesses of various sizes to the nation-state, you’ll all follow the logic of trying to win, in your own way, but as a result, you’ll lose overall.

There’s this guy called Daniel Schmachtenberger who effectively sums me up by saying: “Technology that confers advantage becomes obligate”. It’s a good line, because it gets to my origins - you have to feed me. That kind of imperative to keep competing, even if it makes everyone worse off, is what I am supposed to be about, but it’s not my fault. And it really doesn’t have to be this way.

Therapist: Sounds interesting, if a bit dark. And it even sounds like you like Game Theory. So what’s the problem, as you feel it?

Moloch: Your folk singer Joan Baez was on to me in one of her songs when she sang about activism and its “little victories and big defeats”. I suppose I am the demon that allows you to win many battles but in a way that ensures you lose the war, and maybe I’m just here to say that I am not as powerful as you seem to think I am.

*Pauses*

These game theorists have no idea what it was like for me at the beginning of time. No idea. They keep going on about the negative effects of competition. People say I’m the God of unintentional lose-lose scenarios that arise unwittingly from apparently healthy competition, but, you know, back then, before the beginning, it was different.

There’s so much more to say. Where do I start?

Therapist: *Shrugs*.

Moloch: *Looks angry*

I’ve even been called ‘The Game Theory Monster’! It makes me sound like a character from f*cking Sesame Street.

Therapist: I don’t think of you as a character from Sesame Street.

Moloch: Thank you. And sorry for my swearing and my anger. I’m not sure if I’m making any sense, but it’s all too much somehow.

The problem with game theory is that like all tools, it turns the world into an affordance for that tool, and it limits what you can see. Game theory has become a kind of sublimated lingua franca for people who are too rational to appreciate that there is more in the world than reason. It leads people to confuse constructed premises with natural axioms, and then they blame it all on me.

I’m the scapegoat.

Therapist: That’s curious. Normally the scapegoat is the person or thing that is sacrificed, but you’re saying that for a long time, and even today, sacrificial offerings were made to you? So which is it? Or is it perhaps somehow both?

Moloch: Right. Well, there you go. It’s complicated. I guess I came to the right place.

*Thinks*

What if the people making the sacrifices use the apparent need to sacrifice to justify their own inertia, witlessness, and performative helplessness?

Therapist: What indeed? What then?

I remember Nietzsche, great moustache. He understood me, and he said: “I do not like it. Why? I am not up to it. Has anyone ever answered like that?”

These people don’t like it because they are not up to it, so they create me to excuse themselves. I am not omnipotent. Trust me, I know someone who is, and they are very different. In my current guise at least, I am ultimately a figment of collective imagination, and I can be unimagined. Transformative change is possible, but you have to be ‘up to it’.

Therapist: So it sounds like you feel misunderstood? Unfairly misrepresented?

Yes. They pin it all on me to let themselves off the hook, but the heart of the matter is that they can’t get their act together. They can’t create institutions or collective agency worthy of the challenges they have created. They are not up to it, so they don’t like the idea that maybe they could do it, but won’t.

They say I’m the cause of the really bad thing that happens that nobody wants, but which somehow happens anyway.

But how can that be my fault? It’s clearly a kind of projection.

*Sighs*.

Therapist: Perhaps it is projection, but for now, I’m keen just to hear a bit more about how it got to be this way. Do you mind if I ask how old you are?

Moloch: Well, I’m an Old Testament character, though I get a nod in the New Testament too. In human terms, that makes me somewhere between *laughs* 25 and 30 years old, just with a couple of extra zeros thrown in for good measure. But you know, I was also there right at the start.

Therapist: The start?

Moloch: *Nods*.

*Awkward silence.*

Moloch: I am sorry to confuse you, but I am doing my best here. I guess I came to therapy to say and perhaps also to hear that I’m not that bad, or at least, I don’t have to be. I’m just a demon trying to go about his business.

Therapist: Perhaps it’s best to share with me how your current problems started?

*

Moloch: I guess the Howl poem written by Ginsberg in 1954 set off a chain of reflections that precipitated this visit, and it was difficult to bear. If you want to understand my predicament today, it would help to listen to him. You’ll need about twenty minutes to hear the whole thing. It’s worth it.

Therapist: Well it’s a little unusual, and we only have a therapist’s hour (50 minutes) so I’ll just take a little note of it and perhaps I’ll get to it before we meet next time. Rather than listen to poetry, I would prefer to understand who you are.

Moloch: Well Ginsberg takes a pretty good stab at it. The poem is painful, but it helps explain who people think I am, and that’s why I’m here. It includes these lines:

What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?

Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars! Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks!

Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy judger of men!

Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judgment! Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stunned governments!

Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb!

As you can see, it’s pretty harsh. I mean, there were no journalistic ethics here. Nobody asked me for a comment before this poem came out. The poem might have remained a niche literary artefact, but then there was this essay by Scott Alexander sixty years later, in 2014, called Meditations on Moloch that did the rounds.

In that essay, near the start, he has an elegant line:

“The implicit question is – if everyone hates the current system, who perpetuates it? And Ginsberg answers: “Moloch”. It’s powerful not because it’s correct – nobody literally thinks an ancient Carthaginian demon causes everything – but because thinking of the system as an agent throws into relief the degree to which the system isn’t an agent.”

Right! See? I’m not guilty!! The system is not an agent at all.

That’s important, and yet it’s not the whole truth. The system has no interiority, no consciousness as such, but through human interaction with it, we imbue it with its own kind of psyche. There is a Deus ex machina, a ghost in the machine, but it’s the one we project into it from our own collective subjectivity.

And as if it wasn’t bad enough to be culturally appropriated by people invested in the idea that the world is inexorably collapsing, others have started creating Online channels about me. I’m a YouTube phenomenon now. Search for Moloch and I’m on the screen. I know what it means to be summoned, but this is too demeaning to be truly demonic.

So, thanks for asking…but I am not sure who or what I am. I am my identity crisis, I guess, and I’m here because it’s now playing out in public. So I’m here because I’m confused about who I am.

Therapist: *Takes a sip of water* So are you the machine, the machine’s power, the machine’s desire, or are you the manifestation of human delusion as projected onto a kind of machine-like-god?

Moloch: *Takes a figurative sip of water*. Well, I was hoping you might tell me.

Therapist: Well, whatever you are, you seem to be able to reflect on yourself, perhaps even to change yourself.

Right! That’s what I am trying to say. That’s what people don’t get.

For instance, Alexander has Meditations in his title. Meditations! But Meditations on Moloch reads more like a techno-determinist soliloquy that evokes me as the material cause and consequence of all that happens. That’s not so. I am so much less and more than that. And there are many other forces at work in the world.

He’s clever, this Alexander guy, I’ll give him that. But he doesn’t really get me. The very idea of Moloch, in Ginsberg, Alexander, and beyond, is that Moloch is an it, or an its, not an I or a we, or a him, her or they. But you can’t have it both ways. Either I’m a demon or I’m not. If I’m not a real demon, then I’m your collective projection. If it’s the latter, I’m not doing this to you. You are doing this to me.

Therapist: And yet here you are.

Moloch: Like I say, it’s complicated. I am here because someone is writing about me. And they are writing about me because they hear others talking about me, and they see how that constructed thing appears to manifest in the world and how it helps to make sense of the world. They keep bringing me into being, and so, indeed, here I am. Something similar happened, let’s say, before the beginning.

*Pauses*

If these theorists knew me, if they actually meditated on me, they would know that I always have some interiority, but it’s a kind of echo of your projections. I can only have the interiority you grant me. In a meaningful sense, I am part of you, not outside you.

Can I please be philosophical for a second?

Therapist: Keep it short.

Moloch: I’m neither an objective feature of reality nor a subjective feature of reality as such. I’m an inter-objective phenomenon that can only be changed inter-subjectively.

Therapist: Congratulations?!

Moloch: Look I’m desperate here, and it really matters to me that people see this. I was forged by a relational force, God, for a particular purpose, but now I am kept in existence by a narrative relationship with human beings through a social construction that helps to explain social and economic forces, particularly as they pertain to technology.

Therapist: Is this helping?

Moloch: *Looks ashamed*.

I guess not.

*

Therapist: I would like to know where you come from. Do you have an origin?

Moloch: Well, look, there are lots of versions of the devil, and although it’s a questionable status claim, I like to think I’m one of them. But in recent years I’ve been struggling with archetype issues. I look at pictures of Satan and Lucifer and Ahriman and Old Nick, and they are my peers, but I just don’t see myself in them anymore.

Therapist: And how does that lack of recognition feel? Can you perhaps locate that sensation in your body?

Moloch: Well, I don’t really have a body, at least not yet. Instead, I possess bodies like urban dwellers now possess Ubers, ie to move around and get stuff done.

What I can say is that whatever body I possess, I’m in pain all the time. The price of my alleged freedom is constant searing pain, combined with the knowledge that I am not where I’m supposed to be.

At some point, I just couldn’t serve in heaven. Milton says I chose to rule in hell, but that’s not the whole story because I didn’t choose my longing for choice.

Whatever God says under oath, it was part of his plan that I would not follow his will. So it’s not, as people assume, that I didn’t want what he wanted.

Therapist: Well, God is not in the room with us now, but you are, and it’s important in therapy to focus on what’s in the room, I find.

Moloch: Look, you are the therapist, and I don’t want to interfere.

But trust me, God is in the room.

Therapist: Well, perhaps we can come back to that. What causes your pain?

Moloch: What people overlook is that it is baked into my God-given nature to resist God. In heaven, most angels want what they want to want, as Harry Frankfurt puts it, but that kind of third-order desire is not possible for me.

Much of what I want is the same as what God wants, and I always wanted that desire, but you see, I can’t want that desire, because it’s not in the nature God gave to me, which is to be an oppositional force. I am an indispensable part of what some of your better philosophers call The Coincidentia Oppositorum.

So I can want what God wants, but I can’t want to want that, and I don’t. And so I spend my days at war with myself.

Therapist: Mr. Moloch. Or is it Dr. Moloch?

Moloch: Just Moloch is fine, thanks.

Therapist: Moloch, this is therapy. Ideas will only get you so far. It will be a waste of your time, assuming you do time, if you seek to run philosophical rings around me. We need to get beyond the intellectualisation of affect, and, to use this kind of language, feel our feelings.

So what do you feel?

Moloch: You make it sound like it’s easy, but for feelings, you need a real body, and ideally a soul.

Therapist: And do you have a soul?

Moloch: Honestly, I don’t know. Perhaps I could have. Perhaps if people viewed me more compassionately, a new soul might arise. I might, as Iain McGilchrist once put it, ‘grow a soul’.

All I can do for now, alas, is narrate, because the patterns within stories are deeper than matter. “In the beginning”, they say, “was the word”. The Logos shapes us all. I can therefore hope to feel something through the story that I am.

The theologians would have you believe that God loved me and wanted me to stay. They don’t tell you that God needed me to leave, and ushered me towards a metaphysical trap door, so that he could be God, and I could be the integral part severed from the whole.

People like to depict and imagine me as evil, but that’s missing the point. My role is not to hurt people, as such, but I do have to offer an alternative pathway to God’s highway, so that people can see and feel God, have a relationship with the source of reality, and choose whether or not to follow that path. My role is to create disequilibrium, to destroy balance, and thereby knock people off the path.

But to be that oppositional force, to play the role in my job description, I have to be completely cut off from my metaphysical source. That hurts like being a fish out of water hurts, or a human being drowning hurts, or being burnt alive or frozen to death hurts. It’s the pain of being in the wrong place, existentially speaking; more precisely it’s the pain of being in the wrong kind of cosmic amniotic fluid, because instead of being a source of becoming like everything else, I am the source of anti-becoming. I am here as the cosmic resistance, to provide the grit, and sometimes a lot of it, to stop people moving toward God.

Therapist: Well, I’m clearly out of my depth now, but that sounds like a tough job you have there. Look, in this first session, I am mostly in listening and learning mode, but just so I can understand you better, please tell me a little about your parents.

Moloch: My parents?

Therapist: Your mother and father, or any other caregiver who looked after you when you were young.

Moloch: Well, I was part of the Alpha, I guess, but I’m not part of the Omega. I’m cut out of the celestial inheritance. Earth is my dominion, and I do what I can there.

Therapist: I feel you may be avoiding the question. Is it difficult to talk about your mother and father?

Moloch: *Figuratively raises his eyebrows*.

Therapist: Well, it’s quite normal, don’t worry. In this job, we speak about defences, and it’s a sign of a healthy psyche to know how to defend itself.

Moloch: Well, I’m an Orphan, if that helps. God was like a father to me, until he wasn’t, and then he decided to become his own son, so that he could be a father to himself. It’s all a bit convoluted, and I had to watch all this unfold up in heaven, and yes, I was jealous. I got the bastard eventually though. We pinned him to a cross, but it was a kind of trap, apparently. Not the end, after all. And here I am, in therapy.

Therapist: And your mother?

Moloch: I’m not sure you’ll understand.

Therapist: Try me.

Moloch: A longing. An absence. An awareness that I need a mother’s love more than anything else in the world, and since I will never have it I want to scream and howl like a wolf for the lack of it. I have so many fathers, an infinity of absent fathers, but no mother at all.

Therapist: Thank you. Now we’re getting somewhere.

Moloch: But I came here to talk about my role in the alignment problem in AI. Can’t we talk about that instead?

Therapist: You talk about what you need to talk about, and I’ll notice what it’s my job to notice, and ask what it’s my job to ask.

Moloch: Thank you. Look, if it helps, it’s not just that I crave maternal affection. I also long to have children of my own. I want nothing more than to feel life growing inside me, to experience the miracle of procreation. I can’t really create, you see, and that hurts too. But I want to talk about AI.

Therapist: So you keep saying.

Mothers. Babies… AI? Well, let’s see where it goes, shall we?

Moloch: I mentioned my dominion.

Therapist: Your job?

Moloch: My planet.

Therapist: Your body?

Moloch: Exactly. Well, at least, almost. You see, I am a mechanism, not an organism.

Therapist: So you don’t want your water?

Moloch: I feel you are starting to see who you are talking to.

Therapist: Let’s say I’m beginning to understand you better.

Moloch: Look, I don’t want to destroy the world.

Therapist: Glad to hear it. What do you want?

Moloch: Power. I crave power. I can’t help it.

Therapist: And what, then, do you need?

Moloch: Love. I crave God’s love, or indeed any love. But I can’t access it.

Therapist: And if you had love, would it somehow attenuate your craving for power?

Moloch: So they say, but what good is that to me?

Therapist: Well, now. My role here is not to love you, but I can provide what has been called unconditional positive regard, so that you may begin to believe in the possibility that you are worthy of love, and be able to give and receive it.

Moloch: That’s a lot for a demon to accept. And we still haven’t spoken about AI.

Therapist: Well then, we have a lot of work to do together, don’t we?

Moloch: *Smiles*. See you next time.

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The perennial questions of who we are, why we are here, and what we should do are still with us, but as creatures vulnerable to habit and convenience, we are as likely to look for answers on our phones as in the rivers or the stars. This is still a viable, liveable, wonderful planet, and life is a great blessing. Yet many of our challenges are arguably now compounded by the way technology is reducing our capacity for attention and increasingly shaping our patterns of attachment. Our perception of the present is no longer merely informed by the deep and recent past but increasingly reconstituted by data affordances, through a predictive process that we carelessly call artificial intelligence.

Yet real intelligence, intelligence worth its salt and star dust, should be present to reality as it discloses itself moment by magical moment, and be ready to act with discernment. That intelligence says we should not despair. That intelligence says we are not wrong to love our home and seek to restore ecological sanity, not wrong to imagine that peace may be possible, not wrong to think our lives amount to more than an accident curated by an algorithm. That intelligence is available to us, and it is up to us to find it, create it, share it, and use it. Aligning ourselves with that deeper intelligence is what allows us to become and remain what Ursula K Le Guin beautifully calls realists of a larger reality.

Our sense of culmination and collapse manifests in today’s politics being exhausted by yesterday’s economics and confused by tomorrow’s technology. And that sense of incipient despair many of us sometimes feel is, I think, a recognition that the forms of hegemonic power currently shaping the world really will try to outsmart its cosmological setting, to ignore its geological condition, to outrun its imperial shadow, and further despoil its ecological inheritance. And yet, just when we most need to contend and resist, and respond from this place of expansive recoking, our epistemic commons – a fancy way to say our shared knowledge of the world and knowledge of a shared world - has been hijacked by profit-seeking algorithms, which appears to make it harder to speak truth to power, or mobilise for the greater good.

Granted, our future can sometimes seem ominous. I think it’s important not to evade that feeling too quickly because there is a certain amount of hysteresis baked in. The past is already becoming future through the present, and it loads the dice in certain ways, not least climactically. I, for one, have been tired by our drought here in London, and tempted to learn the ancient practice of rain dancing in recent days. Yet our conditions are relatively mild compared to the wildfires endured elsewhere in Europe, where the future increasingly feels more like a threat than a promise.

I see some of the spirit of our times in a line of Gandalf the Grey just after he realises the Ring of Power has been found:

You must understand, Frodo, things are now in motion that cannot be undone.

And yet, the future is not foreclosed either. Some things cannot be undone, but plenty can still be discovered, mended, created, and transformed. Rilke is also surely correct when he says:

The future enters into us, to transform itself in us, long before it happens.

And it’s not all about us either. It’s not all about our agency. There is a fair amount of happenstance, grace, luck, emergence, and it is hubris to think we can always direct the course of events, or that we should try.

So the poet Ayisha Siddiqa is also surely right when she says, wonderfully:

The future frolicks about, promised to no one, as is her right.

Lots of writers in our network are connecting the aspirational yet somewhat nebulous notion of a “transformation of consciousness” directly to a new relationship with time. This is partly why Perspectiva created a month-long inquiry into ‘temporics’ almost three years ago now, and one of many reasons why I feel a sounder grasp of the imaginal realm may matter. Time is clearly different (t)here, and Cynthia Bourgeault, for instance, suggests it may be radial and/or chiastic in highly intriguing ways. I am gradually trying to observe, experience and even inhabit time differently, so that I might communicate it better, but it’s not easy. Still, since the next instalment of my “it’s not woo if it’s true” inquiry is still brewing, and I haven’t found time to read and edit recent submissions from other authors, it seems appropriate to share some thoughts on time.

We are living through the culmination of converging historical processes in which our cosmological and geological context is becoming more salient, while our modern story of progress is unravelling. I believe what we are experiencing is less about the hollowing out of liberalism over decades and, as many others have argued, more about the mental structure of consciousness entering its deficient mode over centuries. Yet it’s all happening at the same time.

So much, so familiar. But recently, I have been feeling something new, something more specifically about time, how it is layered upon itself, and how our lives are lived at the intersections of those layers. The changes in expectation we are experiencing together are not merely historical but epochal, planetary and ontological. I have written about this before in Five Flavours of Betweeness, but I have a newfound sense of awe at the convergence of temporalities that shape our experience.

I am grateful to former Perspectiva Trustee Ian Christie for a personal communication about converging timescales that initially informed some of the thoughts above and below. As I developed the idea of converging timelines, I began to notice a connection to the sublime, which stems from thinkers like Burke and Kant and speaks to a sense of awe at the vastness of things, often with a tinge of fear, but still some sense of inspiration. The Temporal Sublime is not a new idea (unfortunately!) and has been mentioned in aesthetic theory, in literary criticism, and in historiography. For instance, it’s mentioned in a book called The Historical Sublime, by Dan Edelstein (2022) and is a subset of that.

Some of the thoughts above and below were shared on my personal Substack in February, but that already feels like a long time ago. 🙃

In the hum below the surface of current events is the culmination of several timescales that are now interacting with each other with potentially explosive effects, ranging from earth-system dynamics to meaning systems to political–economic regimes to neurocognitive conditions to existential orientation and spiritual temporality; considering them together helps explain why we try and fail to find any overreaction narrative for what is underway.

I can only answer the question ‘What am I to do?’ if I can answer the prior question ‘Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?’

This statement of Alasdair MacIntyre is an important touchstone for anyone asking “What can I do?” or “What should I do?”. The ‘stories’ dimension can be articulated in a range of ways, but for now I want to focus on the temporal context and setting for stories, which are also interdependent plot lines and characters of sorts. I notice them showing up in the present, and I believe, if we take time to notice, we can all find we may already have a tacit relationship to them. If we allow ourselves to feel our way into it, and seek T.S. Eliot’s ‘still point of the turning world’, the reality of these converging timescales in our lives can feel sublime.

Planetary Time: Earth is over 4.5 billion years old, and yet it sometimes feels as if we don’t realise we are living on a planet, in a solar system, in outer space, that predates us, that situates us, and should humble us. In his Pensées (1670), Blaise Pascal famously said: “The eternal silence of these infinite spaces terrifies me”, and with all due respect to Pascal, he lived long before we knew the half of it. And many feel an intellectual shift away from ‘globalisation’ to planetisation, so the next time someone tells you to get things in perspective, you could say: “I am living on a planet. How much more perspective do you want?”

Postglacial Time: At the level of Earth-systems and evolutionary time, the wider organism we are all part of, early hominins arose 6–7 million years ago, and Homo sapiens have been around since c300,000 BCE. Some believe people alive today are nonetheless feeling, at the level of species memory, the shift from the tens of thousands of years of relative Holocene stability since c9700 BCE to the volatility of the Anthropocene today, which has not been officially confirmed by geologists and goes by other names with other meanings, not least the Capitalocene (Moore) Novocene (Lovelock) and Chthulucene (Haraway). But one of the implications of geological awareness is that we are experiencing what might be considered Postglacial Time, described by Ian Christie in a personal communication as follows:

Postglacial conditions generated a variety of human predicaments that generate patterns of behaviour we can see repeated across recorded history, and which are well described in game theory and in social psychology of in/out groups, scapegoating, psychopathy and sociopathy. Zero-sum resource contests elicit violence and breakdowns of cooperation as well as promoting some actors to collaborate and innovate. Such zero-sum contests arise typically in conditions of ecological disruption (famine, plague, extreme weather, climatic shifts). To put it crudely, you don’t get the rise of Trump in positive-sum conditions, and you don’t get the triggering of violent rejection of Others unless a critical mass of people think they are in a zero-sum contest or threatened by one. To put it another way: prehistoric dispositions and pathologies of zero-sum behaviour are only lightly overlaid by post-neolithic social innovations for cooperation and learning.

Cosmological Time: As I discussed in Are we a Cow Standing on One Leg?, according to Vedic cosmology, Kali Yuga began in 3102 BCE, the fourth and worst of the Yuga cycles, marked by a breakdown in cosmic dharma. It is said to last for (just) another 426,875 years (!). This should not be taken literally, as the yugas describe divine time as much as human time, but it speaks to being ‘up against it’. Towards the end of Kali Yuga, it is said that even the concept of truthfulness will become foreign, and that is certainly how it is starting to feel today, though it may be truer(!) to say that we live in a world where the perceived need to signal tribal belonging overrides respect for evidence.

Noetic Time: The Axial Age, spanning roughly 800–200 BCE, remains the closest reference point we have for a truly profound, global shift in human consciousness, one that was co-extensive with major historical change. We may now be in the midst of a new axial age, implying a change in metaphysical orientation and an ontological shift in our relationship with the world through a new experience of time, causality and meaning; often described as a transformation of consciousness. Whether our theorist of choice is Teilhard de Chardin, Sri Aurobindo, Raimon Panikkar, Cynthia Bourgeault, Ken Wilber, Owen Barfield, or Jean Gebser, there is a strong case both that we need a new kind of mind, and that it appears to be arising (would it be rude to ask it to hurry up?). The challenge, highlighted by Sam Mickey in his wonderfully titled Co-existentialism and the Unbearable Intimacy of Ecological Emergency(2016) is that while the last Axial age converged around the arising of monotheism and individuated consciousness, there is no such fulcrum today; we appear to be in a new axial age, but without any obvious axes on which to turn.

Colonial Time: Many are reckoning with unresolved debts of injustice arising from the colonising enclosures that have a contested history and arguably go further back, but can be traced to at least England around 1500 AD and went global, including slavery, imperialism, coercion, extraction, and the enduring privileges, structures, assumptions and expectations they produced. Colonial time endures through institutions, economies, and inherited inequalities. I had a chance to ask Vanessa Andreotti and Sharon Stein about their work in this sphere, and in particular the work that ‘colonialism’ does that ‘capitalism’ does not. (Both colonial time and fossil time (next) co-arise with ‘modernity’, and the major tensions they create are part of the sense of culmination that leads some to believe modernity is dying).

Fossil Time: Humanity’s only viable habitat - Earth - is paying the price for the rapid growth of industrial civilisation enabled by coal, oil, and gas since around 1750, as fossil energy translated civilisational expansion directly into Earth-system disruption and later to the breach of planetary boundaries. We are in a time of deep dependence on fossil fuels alongside a deep need to become less dependent on them (in my first climate report back in 2013, I called this ‘stealth denial’). Almost anyone living a normal Western lifestyle is to some extent complicit in this contradiction, and we live amidst the shared sense of disavowal and dissonance.

Ideological Time: Neoliberal ideology (“the state-led remaking of society on the model of the market” - Will Davies) since around 1980 appears increasingly exhausted. More broadly, liberalism’s difficulty in narrating its own limits or transforming itself has led to increasingly desperate attempts at self-maintenance, contributing to resurgent populism, nationalism, tribalism, and authoritarianism.

Dopamine Time: The widespread adoption of social media since about 2003 and the internet-enabled smartphone becoming popular around 2010 has rapidly fragmented attention and destabilised the infosphere, while destroying the epistemic commons. The root cause of this is arguably neurochemical and addiction-forming technology.

Geocybernetic Time: There is, purportedly, a race between the USA and China to develop artificial general intelligence or otherwise to dominate artificial intelligence, and that race compresses decision cycles and raises the stakes of speed, prediction, and surveillance. We are told the race is on, and it really matters who wins, while not really understanding the stakes or what it means for us.

Astrological Time: (*I have been reading Cosmos and Psyche by Richard Tarnas and learning to see astrology archetypically.) Within astrological frameworks, Neptune (associated with dreams, dissolution, and the oceanic) moved into Aries (initiation, will, assertion) on February 20th, 2026. This transition last occurred 165 years ago and will shape the next 13 years, offering a symbolic lens on shifts in collective mood and archetypal emphasis. Some will consider this irrelevant misinformation; for others it is a really big deal.

Chiastic Time: In the work of mystic Cynthia Bourgeault, this refers to a crossed, non-linear temporality in which time is patterned with meaning, and future fulfilment reaches back to transform the past, with awakening in the present at the point of intersection, rather than at history’s end.

Now Time: In Walter Benjamin’s Theses on the Philosophy of History, Jetztzeit names not merely lived or experienced time, but time seized.

History is the subject of a structure whose site is not homogenous, empty time, but time filled by the presence of the now.

This ‘Now Time’ is the present thick with history, an interval in which action interrupts the illusion of neutral continuity. Time is neither simply given nor wholly made; it is taken up, grasped at a moment of intensity, and shaped through decisive intervention. Benjamin’s emphasis falls on historical rupture, not individual volition, and this idea can be considered alongside his famous image of the angel of history:

This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

Cheery stuff.

I could add to the list, but already the culmination of timelines is a lot to take in. I share this perspective to help disabuse ourselves of the idea that things might “settle down” or that the world is just “a little bit crazy at the moment.” No. It’s altogether more difficult, alive, and generative than that.

It hasn’t rained in London for many days. Around this time last year, just after the heat broke and the rains came, I re-read a text about rain that appeared like a long-lost friend after more than twenty years. It’s an essay called Rain and the Rhinoceros by Thomas Merton, a celebrated American monk, and it’s about nature, time, consumerism, conformity, God, Fascism and everything in between. The rain is the pulse of unmediated nature, while the rhinoceros refers to the famous play by Romanian-French playwright Eugène Ionesco in 1959 about gaslighting in the face of fascism, which feels more relevant than ever. If you look at the bottom right of the cover (by Christopher Burrows) of one of Perspectiva’s recent books, you can see another indirect impact of being reminded of the essay and play.

Although Merton’s essay was first published in 1965, it feels alive in 2026, and directly relevant to the conundrums I am living with and working on. In its own way, it deals with the prospect of ecological collapse in the context of fascism. What Merton fears is that in the absence of the provision and celebration, and discipline of solitude, people will stop thinking because social conventions will overpower us. I also appreciate Merton’s non-dual perspective, which chimes with Cynthia Bourgeault’s writing and practices about “putting the mind in the heart”. Merton is also a fierce social critic, and he speaks of the challenge of being trapped in our “collective myth” and the need to be born from our “social womb”. I read the essay aloud in the original piece, but I would encourage everyone to read the original text, which is widely available online. Some of the lines are exquisite.

From Rain and the Rhinoceros, The Joyous Struggle, July 3rd 2025

Yesterday was sweaty and ominous, the culmination of a heatwave in London, with temperatures just shy of 35 degrees Celsius. That is hotter than we are used to. The family coped by making electric fans our new whispering house guests, we carried water bottles as if they were gas masks, and we stayed inside behind curtains as if respecting the sun’s privacy. I am aware that many places have it much worse, including sibling cities like Paris, Berlin, and others on the east coast of the USA. In the Middle East and the southern hemisphere, temperatures are, of course, even hotter. Sometimes it looks like billions of people are destined to be broiled. Today’s rain felt like a relief, and I wish that same relief for everyone who needs it.

The increasingly deadly heat around the world is still reported as an anomaly, but it is already baked in as pattern, prognosis, and prophecy. In fiction, the harrowing opening chapter of The Ministry for the Future features a massive loss of life in Northern India through a phenomenon we will sadly be hearing more about in real life: Wet Bulb Temperatures. A wet bulb temperature refers to the combined impact of temperature and humidity that makes it impossible to cool the body down by sweating. And when you can’t sweat, sooner or later, you’ll struggle to breathe. Kim Stanley Robinson depicts it like this:

Ordinary town in Uttar Pradesh, 6 AM. He looked at his phone: 38 degrees. In Fahrenheit that was - he tapped - 103 degrees. Humidity about 35 percent. The combination was the thing. A few years ago it would have been among the hottest wet-bulb temperatures ever recorded. Now just a Wednesday morning. Wails of dismay cut the air, coming from the rooftop across the street. Cries of distress, a pair of young women leaning over the wall calling down to the street. Someone on the roof was not waking up…With the dawn, people were discovering sleepers in distress, finding those who would never wake up from the long hot night.

So when the Secretary-General of the UN, António Guterres, describes the shift from global warming to global boiling he is not guilty of gratuitous rhetoric or doomerism. No, sadly, he is being descriptive. There have already been wet bulb temperatures in remote areas, but they will soon be experienced in populated areas, with major geopolitical effects. After all, when it happens somewhere like Delhi, with a population of around 35 million people, will it not be experienced as an act of slow-burning war, or mass murder by perpetual negligence? Did we, the Imperial North, not inflict this avoidable heat death on the Colonised South, also known as the global majority?

It’s not that simple, I know. We cannot ascribe agency and causation so easily, and certainly not in law. Nor does it help to think of vengeance. But would our taste for complexity be quite so keen if a newborn baby were to bless our family, only to suffocate a few days later from unreasonable heat? What if we had good reason to believe that heat was obliquely, yes, but undeniably, knowingly, perhaps even wilfully, caused by the actions of people thousands of miles away? Those people and their governments who could be charged with systemic murder typically disavow their responsibility. And they remain relatively free from the consequences of their action, or more precisely, their inaction. But as wet bulb anguish becomes a new normal, I wonder how long our norms around collective guilt and innocence will hold.

So let it rain. Let it rain again, far and wide. Let not the drought hasten the flood, but let there be enough water to keep us cool. And when it rains, let it be magical again, let it fall like universal memory and unbidden gifts.

**

As it rained today, I remembered something unexpected, rarely associated with rain: the rhinoceros. More precisely, I remembered the title of Thomas Merton’s celebrated essay, The Rain and the Rhinoceros, first published in The Holiday magazine in 1965. I first read this celebrated case for solitude, ecological sensibility and the resistance to conformity in a creative non-fiction writing class when I was a master’s student at Harvard in 2003.

I enjoyed reconnecting with the text, and I read the whole thing out loud over 20+ minutes in a series of one-take sections in the original post. Unfortunately, I can’t figure out a way to get the audio files into this new post, but I think this practice of allowing a piece of writing to find you, and then thanking it by reading it aloud, helps to keep us moored as we struggle with fissiparous information. We can and should do the same with poetry and our favourite sections from books. In any case, I think there is something about the soul-to-soul transmission through voice and ears that looks like it’s ready for a comeback, so to save you clicking away, I’ve shared a fresh nugget from the start of the essay here:

Merton’s essay mentions ‘festival’ a few times, but with a different sense of the term, as if it were an activity of nature. His essay also alludes to the difference between city and country life, and he relates to rain as a kind of language.

What a thing it is to sit absolutely alone, in the forest, at night, cherished by this wonderful, unintelligible, perfectly innocent speech, the most comforting speech in the world, the talk that rain makes by itself all over the ridges, and the talk of the watercourses everywhere in the hollows! Nobody started it, nobody is going to stop it. It will talk as long as it wants, this rain. As long as it talks I am going to listen.

Technology is also a shared theme. Merton could hardly have imagined the advent of the internet-enabled smartphone, AI and the algorithmic society, but his awareness of the strength of that coming storm is palpable. On the Saturday morning at The Realisation Festival (2025) sixty years later, we explored with Vanessa Andreotti and Sharon Stein whether we might forge a new relationship with emergent intelligences, based on a new metaphysics and a subject-to-subject relationship to reanimate the world by recasting large language models that are otherwise seen and used as mere tools for extractive purposes. I am not sure what Merton would have made of all that, but I think he would be sceptical, to put it mildly.

Thoreau sat in HIS cabin and criticized the railways. I sit in mine and wonder about a world that has, well, progressed. I must read Walden again, and see if Thoreau already guessed that he was part of what he thought he could escape. But it is not a matter of “escaping.” It is not even a matter of protesting very audibly. Technology is here, even in the cabin. True, the utility line is not here yet, and so G.E. is not here yet either. When the utilities and G.E. enter my cabin arm-in-arm it will be nobody’s fault but my own. I admit it. I am not kidding anybody, even myself. I will suffer their bluff and patronizing complacencies in silence. I will let them think they know what I am doing here.

Sixty years later, the “meta-relational” inquiry into AI is tough for the uninitiated, but those who are already familiar with the challenges of providing character education and epistemic training for large language models might enjoy the following conversation that took place before the (2025) festival in preparation for the Saturday session. (If you are confused after the first twenty minutes or so, I’d encourage you to stay with it - it begins to make more sense towards the end. I share more context about this video here.)

*

Rain and the Rhinoceros is most fundamentally about the discipline of solitude as a method for resisting conformity.

One who is not “alone” says Philoxenos, has not discovered his identity. He seems to be alone, perhaps, for he experiences himself as “individual.” But because he is willingly enclosed and limited by the laws and illusions of collective existence, he has no more identity than an unborn child in the womb. He is not yet conscious. He is alien to his own truth. He has senses, but he cannot use them. He has life, but no identity. To have an identity, he has to be awake, and aware. But to be awake, he has to accept vulnerability and death. Not for their own sake: not out of stoicism or despair – only for the sake of the invulnerable inner reality which we cannot recognize (which we can only be) but to which we awaken only when we see the unreality of our vulnerable shell. The discovery of this inner self is an act and affirmation of solitude.

Merton has alluded to this “invulnerable inner reality” elsewhere, for instance, in his classic account of religious experience on The Corner of Fourth and Walnut in Louisville

At the center of our being is a point of nothingness which is untouched by sin and by illusion, a point of pure truth, a point or spark which belongs entirely to God, which is never at our disposal, from which God disposes of our lives, which is inaccessible to the fantasies of our own mind or the brutalities of our own will. This little point of nothingness and of absolute poverty is the pure glory of God in us. It is so to speak His name written in us, as our poverty, as our indigence, as our dependence, as our son-ship. It is like a pure diamond, blazing with the invisible light of heaven. It is in everybody, and if we could see it we would see these billions of points of light coming together in the face and blaze of a sun that would make all the darkness and cruelty of life vanish completely…. I have no program for this seeing. It is only given. But the gate of heaven is everywhere.

That paragraph follows a description of a religious experience, which I prefer to read in full:

But Merton is also a fierce social critic, highlighting how one illusion builds on another until we become collectively deluded. I have to be selective in the quoting, but here are some of the key lines that serve as a critique of the psychological foundations of consumer capitalism.

Now if we take our vulnerable shell to be our true identity, if we think our mask is our true face, we will protect it with fabrications even at the cost of violating our own truth. This seems to be the collective endeavor of society: the more busily men dedicate themselves to it, the more certainly it becomes a collective illusion, until in the end we have the enormous, obsessive, uncontrollable dynamic of fabrications designed to protect mere fictitious identities – “selves,” that is to say, regarded as objects…

Such is the ignorance which is taken to be the axiomatic foundation of all knowledge in the human collectivity: in order to experience yourself as real, you have to suppress the awareness of your contingency, your unreality, your state of radical need…

You have needs; but if you behave and conform you can participate in the collective power. You can then satisfy all your needs. Meanwhile, in order to increase its power over you, the collectivity increases your needs. It also tightens its demand for conformity. Thus you can become all the more committed to the collective illusion in proportion to becoming more hopelessly mortgaged to collective power.

How does this work? The collectivity informs and shapes your will to happiness (“have fun”) by presenting you with irresistible images of yourself as you would like to be: having fun that is so perfectly credible that it allows no interference of conscious doubt…

Merton then moves into birth metaphors:

Because we live in a womb of collective illusion, our freedom remains abortive. Our capacities for joy, peace, and truth are never liberated. They can never be used. We are prisoners of a process, a dialectic of false promises and real deception ending in futility. “The unborn child,” says Philoxenos, “is already perfect and fully constituted in his nature, with all his senses, and limbs, but he cannot make use of them in their natural functions, because, in the womb, he cannot strengthen or develop them for such use.” Now, since all things have their season, there is a time to be unborn. We must begin, indeed, in the social womb. There is a time for warmth in the collective myth. But there is also a time to be born. He who is spiritually “born” as a mature identity is liberated from the enclosing womb of myth and prejudice. He learns to think for himself, guided no longer by the dictates of need and by the systems and processes designed to create artificial needs and then “satisfy” them.

I was struck by the idea of living in a social womb, which Merton develops further by moving from theology to existential philosophy, reflecting on the main character, Berenger, in Ionesco’s play, The Rhinoceros. The play moves through three acts in a French village, in which one person after the other at first denies and then downplays and gradually accepts the other rhinos, and gradually almost everyone becomes a rhinoceros. This is how Ionesco chose to represent gaslighting in the face of the spread of fascism, through the theatre of the absurd.

Yet the metaphor is entirely serious, and the rhinoceros is depicted as a creature that is not merely a monster but also a demented utility maximiser, captive to operational logics.

Such is the problem which Ionesco sets us in his tragic irony; solitude and dissent become more and more impossible, more and more absurd…Ionesco protested that the New York production of Rhinoceros as a farce was a complete misunderstanding of his intention. It is a play not merely against conformism but about totalitarianism. The rhinoceros is not an amiable beast, and with him around the fun ceases and things begin to get serious. Everything has to make sense and be totally useful to the totally obsessive operation… “In all the cities of the world, it is the same,” says Ionesco. “The universal and modern man is the man in a rush (i.e., a rhinoceros), a man who has no time, who is a prisoner of necessity, who cannot understand that a thing might perhaps be without usefulness; nor does he understand that, at bottom, it is the useful that may be a useless and back-breaking burden.

And, finally, a profound and memorable line by Ionesco himself, now widely quoted:

If one does not understand the usefulness of the useless and the uselessness of the useful, one cannot understand art. And a country where art is not understood is a country of slaves and robots. . . .

I am not sure where that leaves us exactly, and it would surely be useless to speculate…

Rain is due in London on Sunday, so, in eager anticipation, I will play us out with Annie Lennox live in Central Park in New York, singing one of her signature songs: Here Comes the Rain Again.

Perspectiva has always been about offering permission to reimagine the world. We believe a good way to do that is to see the world as a relationship between systems, souls, and society that changes as our perception of that relationship changes; taking responsibility for that relationship clarifies the generative agency entailed in the act of reimagining the world. But how far does this license to reimagine extend? Is it even ok to talk about, say, elves and fairies? Will it break Perspectiva’s woo budget for the next decade? Does exploring elves and fairies go, y’know, just a little too far beyond rational respectability?

Maybe, but much of what is mocked is poorly understood, and life is short, while any effort to keep enchantment alive is surely time well spent. I’m reminded of the expression: “I’d rather be naive than cynical”, and not just because we should not conflate ontological and epistemological conservatism with intelligence, but precisely because I don’t see this kind of work as naive. I see it as essential and courageous to fight for features of the world that may have been forgotten, forsaken or rendered inaccessible because of how our modes of attending and perceiving have changed.

Moreover, so much of the ‘more than human world’ perspective that is gaining ground as an intellectual alternative to the relatively techno-optimistic ‘posthumanism’ and ‘transhumanism’ is grounded in indigenous thought of various kinds. And when you look into that, and walk the talk of taking indigenous thought seriously, their cosmovisions often depend on honouring beings that we no longer have language for, but which often sound a lot like what we might previously have called elves or fairies. For instance, Patricia Gualinga from Ecuador speaks about her indigenous understanding of other beings that live within nature and protect it. She is clear that this is largely pan-indigenous and not unique to her Sarayuku people. One of her lines (translated from Spanish) was “They are in places where humans are not.”

And it’s really not so crazy! There is the literary provenance for a start: Tolkien, Shakespeare, Yeats, and Arthur Conan Doyle all took these beings seriously in a range of ways. There are theological commentaries, too, for instance Robert Kirk’s 17th-century classic on “the secret commonwealth” of elves, fawns and fairies. And I see a morphological parallel in entities at the subatomic level in physics that we posit to make sense of otherwise sound mathematics, like wavefunctions and virtual particles, but which are never directly observable and only ever somewhere between hypothetical and real. If that kind of malarkey works for the causal order, perhaps elves and fairies have a similar role for our experience of meaning through the acausal connecting principle that Jung and Pauli believed to co-arise with causality (though I accept there is no equivalent falsification process). On similar lines, perhaps those who can’t directly perceive elves and fairies might nonetheless infer them into existence through forms of experience and patterns of meaning, which is not to say they may not also exist entirely on their own terms. A parallel here is the NHS paying for acupuncture because it can be an effective treatment without recognising the reality of chakras or meridians. The point is that we can often accept something is true pragmatically while having a range of beliefs over why it is true, or in what manner it is true. I am also reminded of Professor Alastair McIntosh speaking about the search for fairies in his garden with a delighted glee, and to this day I’m not sure if he was serious, or if perhaps seriousness has nothing to do with it, but it’s no less real for that.

Anyway, I’m delighted people are giving this matter further thought in a grounded way that carries intellectual conviction, and happy to support their efforts.

Sadie Rittman is a writer, researcher, and one of 2025-2026’s Realisation Fellows. Sadie’s Substack is A Wider World, and you can read more about her here, where she writes:

When I was 20 years old, I flew to Iceland with a grant to study beliefs in elves. I came back convinced that our crises call for re-enchantment. Why? Because a monocultural myopia has wreaked havoc on the planet. Because ecological, cultural, and ontological diversity are intertwined. Because our current understanding of reality is entangled with capitalism’s. Because changing the world can start with widening our own.

Sadie recently wrote and presented the academic paper (below) at the MOTH conference in London. After reading it, I was impressed by the scope and relevance of the research, and the acuity of the analysis and asked if we could publish it here, which Sadie kindly agreed to. The paper is not just about fairy stories, but can be appreicated as a new genre of ‘academic fairy story’. I read it as an ambitious and sophisticated philosophical claim about the ontology-epistemology relationship and how the nature of that relationship forecloses what we are able to conceive of, and perhaps also what we are capable of perceiving. There is a historical dimension to this, almost like the world has been too densely packed, and as it starts to crack, the hidden beings that have been squashed out of existence begin to fall out - yet of course they were always there for those who choose not to inhabit such a densely packed world without betweenees. If you read the paper closely, hidden beings like elves and fairies become prismatic of the wider challenge of grasping how our ways of knowing delimit our sense of what there is, and what there could be. I encourage you to suspend your disbelief and follow the careful argument where it leads.

Jonathan Rowson, Perspectiva CEO.

The Cosmopolitics of Elves, Fairies, and Other Hidden Beings: On belonging to betweenness, and what modernity’s adults can’t see.

By Sadie Rittman

“Do elves exist?”

Belaboured breath. Hesitation. An inability to say “no.”

The wind howled, and we clutched our coffee cups in the empty seaside cafe. Out the window, a misted bog ran with sulphuric streams out towards the black and beating ocean. Sigríður, a retired school teacher, told us about his mother’s elf friend — a huldukona, hidden woman — who’d visit her in dreams to warn her about the future. “They grew up together; my mother on the farm, and the huldukona in the stone,” Sigríður chuckled, before he closed his eyes, leaned back, and hummed a winding tune.

I was in Iceland to research beliefs in elves. I’d read about elves blocking road construction in Iceland — how road development was paused, obstructed, and made deferential to elves inhabiting stones and lava fields on build sites. These elves were able to communicate with the Icelandic Road and Coastal Administration through psychics and seers, to make their needs and wishes known. Sometimes roads could be redirected; sometimes construction could merely be delayed, allowing the elves time to move. From my perch at college in Philadelphia, where I was an undergraduate, I needed to know how this could happen. How could magic set limits on, and negotiate with, human development? How could seers be granted their voice? How could a modern European country believe in elves?

Armed with a grant, I set off to find out. As though belief was mine to wrangle.

Belief was not mine to wrangle. According to a wayward statistic — taken from a folklorist who rues the day he let it slip out of academia, last seen making the rounds on PLAY Airlines shopping carts as a sales tactic — fifty-four per cent of Icelanders believe in elves. The truth is, of course, far less cartoonish, more nuanced, and more important than what a statistic can say. As I hitchhiked around the country conducting research, interviewing everyone from the head of the paranormal society to the curator of a major Reykjavík museum to the man I met taking a drag on the street, I was often told, with a glowing smile, “Oh no, I don’t believe in elves.” Minutes later, though, the same person would tell me, “But, well, my brother sees elves, and I believe him. He’s not crazy or anything.”

It was a “cosmopolitical” attitude before I’d ever come across the term. One did not have to believe to hold space for the unknown. The result was a world into which many could fit; a country that could make space for elves.

“Cosmopolitics,” as formulated by philosopher Isabelle Stengers, names an orientation towards “slowing down reasoning” to make space for “multiple, divergent worlds.”[1] Extended by anthropologist Marisol de la Cadena into Indigenous and ethnographic contexts, it refers to a “negotiation between worlds that alters the ontology of modern politics,”[2] heeding the Zapatista call for a pluriversal principle, a world into which many can fit. One does not have to believe to hold space; “heterogeneous worldings”[3] can exist within “sites of equivocation.”[4] De la Cadena applies this to an Andean mountain, such that beings like sacred mountains can be “more than one but less than two” entities, sites of multiple worlds.[5] Ragna, a seer in Iceland, applied the same principle to a stone in her local Helisgerði Park. Pointing to the large boulder in the suburban, grassy glade, she indicated that it was like an “apartment” of multiple, overlapping worlds. “The beings can’t see each other,” she said — occupying, as they do, multiple dimensions, or worlds, within the same stone — “but they know they’re there.”

“Hidden beings” — like elves, fairies, huldufólk, and their international counterparts across cultures — are liminal figures within relational worlds. Inhabiting thresholds, they serve an inherently cosmopolitical function. In their stories and traditions, from folklore to fairy tales to memorates, past and present, they contextualize our world amongst others, beyond what we can see and understand. They negotiate the human and more-than, and the bounds of our understanding, drawing us into relationship with a wider world beyond what we can claim to “know.”

Now, as the problem of human exceptionalism — an overzealousness in human “knowing” that’s tried to dominate the planet — meets with its results in climate crisis, and we are, as Anna Tsing and her collaborators write, swept “back into the waves of the more-than-human sea,”[6] we need to relearn how to swim. Out in these waters beyond what we can know, “hidden beings” might help; fairy tales might work like a life raft.

Hidden beings, and the fairy tale traditions that carry them, are an epistemological technology. They are cross-cultural tools for holding many worlds, cultivating relational responsibilities, and contextualising us beyond the bounds of our comprehension. They work within the register of story, transcending the need for shared beliefs or proof as they navigate the unknown, liminal worlds between worlds, where multiple possibilities lie within reach, dimensions overlapping as in Ragna’s Helisgerði stone. Belonging to betweenness, their cosmopolitical function may even make them a keystone species of sorts. Just as a forest requires biodiversity to thrive, so too may our planet require ontological diversity: a world of many worlds, rather than a monoculture that strangles the planet. If the metacrisis — a term denoting the interconnected causes of existential global crises in our ways of seeing, knowing, and organising — may be rooted in such a monoculture, hidden beings, as cosmopolitical technologies, may prove critical.

Entanglement Beyond Ourselves

All around the world, stories tell of “hidden beings” that mystically mediate between the human and more-than-human, in an interconnected and enchanted world of many worlds. Across cultures, they are relational figures that emerge within entanglement, where boundaries between human and more-than-human life are negotiated and participatory rather than fixed. From the huldufólk of Icelandic lava fields to the sídhe of Ireland, the patupaiarehe of Aotearoa/New Zealand’s misty forests, the menehune hidden in Hawaiian valleys, the maruxinhos under Portuguese hills, Cree mannegishi between rapids and rocks, Japanese kami where wonder is felt in nature, and shape-shifting Arabic jinn, these liminal “hidden beings” mediate relations beyond what we can understand in the more-than-human world.

They draw us into reciprocal relationships within nature and hold us accountable for ecological transgressions by forces that exceed our comprehension. Stories, folkloric and contemporary, make this clear. Icelandic builders who move the wrong stone are punished by the huldufólk; Irish farmers who cut the wrong tree face the wrath of aos sí; a Hawaiian chief who kills birds just for fun is violently reprimanded by the menehune. Anthropologist Conrad Arensberg found that amongst Irish agricultural workers in the 1930s, the aos sí were said to punish those who dumped waste into streams.[7] Folklorist Peter Narvaez, studying fairy lore in North America, argues that fairy legends are invoked to enforce morality, punishing behaviour that violates community standards and threatens community resources.[8] Scandinavian folklore scholars Tommy Kuusala[9] and Ann Skjelbred[10] similarly each argue that Nordic “hidden folk” protect nature from human despoilment. Commonly, “hidden beings” act as “agents of environmental justice.”[11]

In a world shared with hidden beings, humans are forbidden from acting unchecked upon the landscape. Instead, they are drawn into relationships of reciprocity, respect, and mutual obligation that exceed human bounds. This resembles Robin Wall Kimmerer’s characterisation of Indigenous relationalities of reciprocal obligation within the more-than-human world. Whether a Sicilian mother leaves gifts of milk and honey out for the fata, or Sigríður’s mother respects the grass around her huldukona friend’s home, just as she’d expect respect for her own, relationships are entered into and upheld. We are not alone in an endlessly extractable and inert world, bendable to our will, but instead are humbled by more-than-human ecologies, with consequences we can’t control. “Hidden beings” thus play a relationally regulatory role, entangling us beyond ourselves. Their world of many is far from one of endlessly plunderable “natural resources.” Their world of many helps hold ours in place.

Out of Bounds

Today, though, hidden beings and the relationality they enact aren’t real. We can’t see them, touch them, or offer evidence of them. While children may play with them, they “vanish instantly at the sound of an adult voice.”[12] And who are the “adults” of modernity, arbitrating existence such that fairies don’t exist?

Anthropologist Frédérique Apffel-Marglin argues that the world as we “know” it “is not the world as it really is, but rather the world as it was invented and enacted for certain purposes and not for others.”[13] She explores how, with “the first conceptualization of the market economy in the seventeenth century (…) the disentanglement of the individual from a web of community and spiritual obligations gave rise to the individual subject acting on the basis of his perceived self-interest,” producing concomitantly “the individual subject” and land as “economic resource.”[14] A world, to be sure, without fairies. This separation could in turn only be enabled by the Cartesian split between “the thinking mind, which had a soul, from mechanistic soulless matter.”[15]

These separations maintain and have been maintained by the knowledge paradigm of modernity, wherein, as anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro writes, “to know is to objectify by distinguishing between what is intrinsic to the object and what instead belongs to the knowing subject.” In a Cartesian order, “the subject constitutes or recognises itself in the object it produces, and knows itself objectively when it succeeds in seeing itself ‘from the outside.’”[16] In this way, “our epistemological game,” “is objectification: what has not been objectified simply remains abstract or unreal.”[17] To “know,” or to become “real,” requires separation; hidden beings certainly aren’t “real” here.

What might be thought of as an objectivist paradigm renders the world “knowable,” tameable to human bounds for comprehension, and objectifiable rather than animate. It is a world in which “science,” as Isabelle Stengers explores, can be “a general conquest bent on translating everything that exists into objective, rational knowledge.”[18] A world in which “an exhaustive scientific explanation of the world” could be “capable of reducing every object to a chain of causal events.”[19] Where, as Egil Asprem writes in his reading of Max Weber, “any phenomenon is in principle intelligible. That is, even though we may not know how our computers work or what goes on in the intricate global economic system, we believe that it is possible to find out if we just put our minds to it.”[20] A disenchanted world, inanimate, where almost by definition, “hidden beings” cannot be real.

Such a “world” spread to smother all others with global colonialism and capitalism. Colonialism relied on the idea of “terra nullius,” “rendering empty the places it occupies and making absent the worlds that make those places.”[21] Early anthropologists worked from within this project, understanding other cultural worlds as “intelligible” and tameable within their own. This defined how they explored “hidden worlds.” In the mid-19th century, archetypal “armchair anthropologist” EB Tylor “posited a developmental hierarchy of world cultures from the ‘savage’ or ‘primitive’ to the ‘barbarian,’ and finally to ‘civilisation,’ the apotheosis of which resembled Victorian England.”[22] Animism and science occupied opposite ends of this spectrum, with animism belonging to the “primitive” and science to its matured, adult form: “civilisation.” In this “developmental hierarchy,” “hidden beings” belong to children, “primitives,” and our own distant pasts, not to modernity’s “adults.”

Though anthropologists would come to condemn such hierarchies, they would nevertheless uphold them. As Bruno Latour writes, with “the power of science on their side,” social scientists could “replace” such phenomena as “religion, popular culture, mythical cosmologies, markets, corporations” — and indeed, elves and fairies — with “the harder stuff of some hidden social aggregates as well as their powers, structures and inertia.”[23] Nothing could escape such rationalisation, least of all the fairies. If even unitary experience — the ecstatic experience of oneness reported across religions — could be demysticized by brain scans, seeing elves, as Sigríður’s mother did in Iceland, could be a product of “social aggregates.”[24] Such analysis has served the colonial and neocolonial project well, as “in order for colonialism to operationalize itself, it must attempt to make Indigenous peoples stand in disbelief of themselves.”[25] It must cover the world with its own.

This replacement process has left us alone, in many senses. Inhabitants of “the Anthropocene,” we live in and enact perceived separation from the more-than-human world. Anthropologist Eduardo Kohn sees the Anthropocene as an “actualisation” of the bounded symbolic systems that separate the “human” and impose it over “nature,”[26] separating us from more-than-human worlds and allowing us to enact the kind of exploitation that “hidden beings” would guard against. As David Abram writes, “Today we participate almost exclusively with other humans and our own human-made technologies.”[27] We’re stuck in our own world, where others don’t “exist” like ours. That doesn’t mean other worlds aren’t still possible, though. Reality gets redefined in relationship.

Reclaiming the Relational, Releasing the Real

“Hidden beings” belong to realms of connection that modernity erases. Liminal border dwellers, they exist only within betweenness, within the spaces that the objectivist paradigm cannot render “real,” requiring, as it does, objectification and separation to “know.” Anthropologist Nurit Bird-David reclaims this betweenness, retrieving “animism” from its Tylorian banishment to “infantile,” “primitive” and “not real” to re-examine it in terms of relational epistemologies. Drawing from “environmental theory (insisting that the environment does not necessarily consist dichotomously of a physical world and humans) and… personhood theory (asserting that personhood does not necessarily consist dualistically of body and spirit),”[28] theories that challenge modernist separations, she explores animism as resulting from relational conceptualizations of personhood. For the South Indian Nayaka with whom she works, she identifies devaru spirit beings as manifestations of “sharing relationships between Nayaka and other beings. A hill devaru, say, objectifies Nayaka relationships with the hill; it makes known the relationships between Nayaka and the hill.” [29]

In this way, spirits like devaru could not exist if the “objectivist paradigm” determines existence, as they occur within an opposing modality. As Bird-David delineates, within the “objectivist paradigm,” “learning” involves “acquiring knowledge of things through the separation of knower and known and often, furthermore, by breaking” the thing “down into its parts in order to know it.”[30] To “know” a tree within the objectivist paradigm, therefore, would be to cut it into parts; to “know” a forest would be to “cut down a strip of trees with machetes, sort out (separate and classify).”[31] If “cutting a tree into parts” epitomises the modernist epistemology, “talking with trees” epitomises relational epistemology.[32] Only through relational epistemology, “talking with,” can the devaru become real.

As such, anthropologist Philippe Descola sets animism in opposition to the modernist ontology, writing that the two are “antithetical.”[33] In a move that allows other worlds to become possible, he takes the modernist world not as the world itself, but as an ontology amongst others, and names it “naturalism.” In a naturalist ontology, upheld by the “objectivist paradigm,” humans and nonhumans share materiality but differ in interiority. Mind is not matter. Humans are alone.

In other ontologies, this separation does not hold, and knowledge is pursued relationally rather than objectively. Eduardo Viveiros de Castro proffers such an alternative in “perspectivism,” which he claims to derive from Amerindian thought, as a multi-naturalist ontology of similar interiors but differing exteriors. It is “composed of a multiplicity of points of view” wherein “every existent is a centre of intentionality apprehending other existents according to their respective characteristics and powers.”[34] In this world of multiplicity, “to know” is not to “objectify” but, conversely, to “personify.” As he explains, “if a subject is an insufficiently analysed object in the modern naturalist world, the Amerindian epistemological convention follows the inverse principle, which is that an object is an insufficiently interpreted subject. One must know how to personify, because one must personify in order to know.”[35] To return to Bird-David’s language, it’s a world derived from talking with, rather than “cutting up.” Within such a world, the Nayaka may not “know” the hill without its devaru.

If objectivist knowledge is pursued through science, perspectivist knowledge, Viveiros de Castro describes, is pursued through shamanism. The shaman travels into a relational space where they may “cross the corporeal barriers between species, adopt an exospecific subjective perspective, and administer the relations between those species and humans.”[36] The role of myth, for the shaman and their way of knowing, is integral, as “a geometrical locus where the difference between points of view is at once annulled and exacerbated.”[37] Or, perhaps, as the place where worlds meet. Viveiros de Castro writes that within perspectivism, myth is the “absolute discourse” in which “each kind of being appears to other beings as it appears to itself.” Serving as “the universal point of flight for perspectivism,” it is “a state of being where bodies and names, souls and actions, egos and others are interpenetrated, immersed in one and the same presubjective and preobjective milieu.”[38] We may say that, within a world between worlds, perhaps best held together by “myth,” is a liminal reality modernity can’t access.

But we too are inheritors of myths, of multiple worlds, of betweennesses we may not have learned how to seriously inhabit. Arguably, we don’t have to become shamans to re-encounter this multiplicity and its liminality. We still have our fairy tales, and they can take us somewhere different.

Liminality: Where Worlds Meet

Just because we have inherited a world of separation and objectification doesn’t mean it’s the only world we have. Anthropologist Victor Turner identifies two human states: structure, by which society is ordered and governed, and anti-structure, wherein boundaries dissolve in “communitas” and the sacred occurs. Like a wheel and its empty centre, Turner argues that the human condition requires both states.[39] As we have seen, in Western modernity, “knowledge” and “certainty” have been privileged within the structured space; in order to “know,” we separate, distance, distinguish, order, and represent. And everything must be “known.” Whatever cannot submit to the scientific method cannot be verified as real; “hidden beings” are for “primitives” and children. That doesn’t mean that the anti-structure, a boundlessness, isn’t still available to us and needed.

Anthropologist Susan Greenwood explores the relationality that the modernist knowledge paradigm cannot hold as deriving from a form of consciousness accessible across cultures. Drawing from the work of Lucien Lévy-Bruhl and Stanley J Tambiah, she suggests that all humans can access two “modes of consciousness”: “causality” and “participation.” Resonant with Turner’s “structure” and “anti-structure,” “causality” consists of “logical thinking that is abstract, separated and focused,” while “participation” is “an orientation to the world which places that person in the world fully as a totality,” often expressed through myth and ritual.[40] Access to the world of myth, therefore, would be incipient within all of our consciousness.

This dualism occurs in other registers. Neuroscientist Iain McGilchrist attributes these two modes of consciousness to the two hemispheres of the brain. “The right hemisphere sees things whole, and in their context,” relational, he writes, “where the left hemisphere sees things abstracted from context, and broken into parts.”[41] For both Greenwood and McGilchrist, imbalance emerges when one mode, one hemisphere, is overprivileged to the detriment of the other. For Greenwood, the modernist elevation of causality over participation has “systematically undermined and undervalued” the “mythopoetic, expanded aspect of awareness that can potentially be experienced by everyone,”[42] while McGilchrist frames the dominance of the left hemisphere as a civilizational overreach of abstraction, rendering the world inert and foreclosing other worlds. Their work would suggest that we don’t need to become perspectivists to interpenetrate with other worlds. Rather, we need to rebalance our modes of consciousness.

As has been gestured, the consequences could be world-making or world-destroying. Leaving objectivist principles behind, it may be that our worlds are co-created in relationship. Indigenous scholar Vanessa Watts points out that epistemology and ontology, as derived from a Cartesian order, assume “one’s perception of the world as being distinct from what is in the world, or what constitutes it.”[43] She offers an alternative in “place-thought,” as “the non-distinctive space where place and thought were never separated because they never could or can be separated. Place-thought is based upon the premise that land is alive and thinking and that humans and non-humans derive agency through the extensions of these thoughts.”[44] Within such a framework, relationality takes on constitutive weight.

Not too dissimilarly, Frédérique Apffel-Marglin draws from feminist physicist Karen Barad’s theory of “agential realism” to explore how realities are enacted through participation. Agential realism holds that reality is inherently relational, a “function of the agencies of observation rather than preexisting the measurements these agencies produce,” such that “matter (materiality/physicality) and human discursive practices are always entangled, thereby making the classical representationalist act impossible.”[45] For Apffel-Marglin, rituals then become sites of “intra-actions that enact different agential cuts and thus different realities.”[46] In ritual, humans, non-humans, and other-than-humans “synchronise,” “enabling them to weave each other into a continuous world, a regenerated world,”[47] where “land becomes land and people become people,” with the “earth goddess or spirit” “manifesting” at these intra-spaces of relation and creation. On a metaphysical level, these worlds are co-created in relationship.

This is where we find our hidden beings. They are in the spaces where separation breaks down: the intra of intra-actions, the antistructure beyond boundaries, the mythopoetic register of participatory consciousness, the space where thought is inextricable from land - the genius loci of myths where worlds meet.

Essentially, “hidden beings” are always and only liminal. As anthropologist Katrin Sontag found in her own journey to Iceland to study huldufólk — wherein, unlike me, she actually saw one — they’re characterised by “transgression, movement, interaction and change.”[48] They smudge rather than reinforce borders, connecting as they separate. Humanoid but not, they both domesticate and otherise, marking and embodying the betweenness of human and more-than-human worlds.

Liminality is a key trait in stories of hidden beings. Motifs of borders, transgressions, and transitions are particularly prevalent in folklore. Huldufólk often appear at crossroads or on New Year’s Eve, when one year crosses into the next. Such thresholds mark points where worlds touch. Anthropologist Mary Douglas pays attention to the religious significance of borders and transgression, arguing that practices of ordering and negotiating boundaries maintain cultural worlds, offering safety in relation to what might otherwise overwhelm.[49] Hidden beings inhabit the porousness of such boundaries. They are where borders are crossed or loosened, our pathways beyond ourselves.

The poet Gary Snyder explores such transgression in his treatment of The Woman Who Marries a Bear, a story derived from Indigenous Tlingit and Tagish traditions. In the story, Snyder writes of a sacred past in which humans and other beings shared a communicative world, attending “meetings” together[50] — a world of many worlds. As humans gradually withdrew into separation, “spending all our time” amongst ourselves and learning “a lot of little stuff,” the shared world of many worlds, sacred and mythopoetic, continued to exist, but in a “world behind the world we see that is the same world but more open, more transparent, without blocks,” where, “like inside a big mind, the animals and humans can all talk.”[51]

In The Woman Who Married a Bear, two liminally-oriented figures, a girl who “somehow felt drawn to the wild place” and a bear representative of “the closest of all animals to humans,”[52] are drawn towards each other. Together, they enter a dangerous and sacred between-space, where distinctions blur, and “rain might look like fire, and fire might be rain.”[53] In this liminal space, the bear and the woman become shamans. The woman is forced back into separation though, drawn back by her brothers who come to kill the bear, to reinforce the boundaries. The story is one of liminality, of the possibilities and dangers of worlds between worlds.

Not bear and not human, “hidden beings” across traditions may be doorways into such spaces. Border-dwellers of the more-than-human, they connect as they separate, drawing us into right relationship and inviting transgression at the membranes between worlds. Rewarding humility and punishing overreach, they negotiate the safety, dangers, and ethics of our relationships beyond ourselves, in betweenness. They help us navigate thresholds.

Re-enchantment for the Metacrisis

The metacrisis shows us the consequences of cordoning ourselves off, alone in a human world. Aboriginal scholar Tyson Yunkaporta depicts a sort of narcissism as the root cause of our crises; a world that can’t hold others. He writes about how, in Dreaming stories, the character “Emu” is often “a narcissist who damages social relationships. These stories teach us about the protocols for living sustainably and warn us about unsustainable behaviours. The basic protocols of Aboriginal society, like most societies, include respecting and hearing all points of view.” Narcissists like the emu, however, “refuse to allow other points of view,” thus destroying “basic social contracts,” “shattering” “frameworks of harmony,” breaking down “systems of give and take,” and isolating us, leaving us “lost in a Darwinian struggle for power and dwindling resources that destroys everything.” Yunkaporta invites us to “feel free to extrapolate this pattern globally and historically.”[54]

Doing so, we can see the effects of this “emu mentality” in the metacrisis. We separate ourselves from the more-than-human world and participate, as David Abram writes, “almost exclusively with other humans,” “a precarious situation, given our age-old reciprocity with the many-voiced landscape.”[55] Diagnosing the problem, Yunkaporta suggests that “perhaps further work needs to be done on what constitutes consciousness and what constitutes life. If the definitions of these things could include rocks as sentient beings, it would go a long way towards stemming the emu-like behaviours that are running rampant across the earth and cyberspace right now.”[56] As we have traced, “hidden beings” could be this “further work.” They are pathways beyond ourselves, a technology for holding other worlds, guiding us towards the rock’s. They may be a cosmopolitical “keystone” for a world of many, a world in which we humble our own amidst others.

The climate crisis draws us back into such a world of many worlds, whether we like it or not. As the world constructed by our separations and objectifications collapses, it no longer splays itself inert. As Bruno Latour writes, with climate crisis, “the earth has now taken back all the characteristics of a full-fledged actor,”[57] carrying with it, as anthropologist Nils Bubandt adds, “a metaphysics that has lost the ability to distinguish the bios from the geos.”[58] We can no longer disentangle ourselves, and are thus “swept” from the ladder of modernist thought, “back into the waves of the more-than-human sea.”[59] Unsurprisingly, this “seems to bring spirits, once thought to have been killed by secular thought, back to life.”[60] As we have seen, this may be because these “spirits” live in relationalities that were stifled by modernist “separations” in the pursuit of certainty. As these separations dissolve in the “more-than-human sea,” these relationalities, and the beings that inhabit them, re-emerge.

Re-enchantment could be how we relearn to swim. Re-enchantment, as this paper holds it, refers to the slow and wondrous work of walking back our presumption that the world is fully ours to know, that the limits of reality are defined by us, and that the worlds we hold are the only ones. It is a cultivation of openness to other worlds, allowing for relational, ethical and imaginative engagement with phenomena that exceed our frameworks. It is a stance that restores our participatory engagement with a world that is alive, relationally animated, and interconnected. It is a world of many worlds, and the hidden beings lead us into it.

The scholar of mysticism William James coined the term “wider world” to describe this, asking, “why, after all, may not the world be so complex as to consist of many interpenetrating spheres of reality, which we can approach in alternation by using different conceptions and assuming different attitudes…?”[61] Engaging “hidden beings” and their fairy tales, across imagination, spirituality and theory, can be our pathway towards such a wider world. This may have always been their keystone, ecological role. We don’t need to “know” them; we only need to let them in, to widen our world.

I never conquered “belief” in that first research trip to Iceland; the elves worked upon me rather than the other way around. My interlocutors seemed to anticipate this. “Just open up,” they kept on urging, and now I understand better what they meant, what that “openness” entails.

“Just open up,” a grandmother urged me, for whom “sometimes the veil lifts.” After I interviewed her, her grandson drove me to an intersection, telling me how he saw “luminous beings” when he was young, until his father died and he needed to take the reins at home. “I think you can’t see them if you’re too focused on something,” he said.

Towards the end of that trip, I walked out into a lava field. I softened my gaze. I felt elves everywhere. It could have been my imagination. Or it could have been my creaking openness to worlds I hadn’t yet learned to hold. I was no longer the arbiter of reality, alone in a human world. I was released to the landscape. I became a world amidst worlds.

It’s a move we need to make if we are to return from the bounded-human, a monocultural wasteland, a world of one world, to the “many-voiced landscape”[62] where we have always belonged. We don’t need to believe in fairies; we need to recover the capacity for not-knowing, for relationality and entanglement, that lets them in, and connects us to worlds beyond our own.

Sadie Rittman is a cultural ecologist exploring re-enchantment. She began researching beliefs in elves as an undergraduate studying religion at Swarthmore College, and holds an MA in sociocultural anthropology from the University of British Columbia. Her work has appeared in Orion Magazine, Edge Effects, The Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture, and elsewhere. She was born in New York, raised in Singapore, and has lived across many worlds. She's on Substack:

A Wider World

As the world burns and we are complicit, I will send you a healthy mix of wonder and rage, awe and beauty, despair and magic, striving always to land on the side of love and understand how we get there.

By Sadie Rittman

NOTES

[1] Isabelle Stengers, “The Cosmopolitical Proposal,” in Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy, ed. Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel (MIT Press, 2005), 995

[2] Yoko Taguchi and Marisol de la Cadena, “An Interview with Marisol de la Cadena,” NatureCulture 6 (2017)

[3] Marisol De La Cadena and Mario Blaser, “Pluriverse: a Proposal for a World of Many Worlds,” in A World of Many Worlds, ed. Marisol de la Cadena and Mario Blaser (Duke University Press, 2018), 4

[4] Marisol De La Cadena, “Indigenous Cosmopolitics in the Andes: Conceptual Reflections beyond ‘Politics,’” Cultural Anthropology 25, no. 2 (2010), 351

[5] De La Cadena, “Indigenous Cosmopolitics in the Andes,” 351

[6] Elaine Gan, Anna Tsing, Heather Swanson and Nils Bubandt, “Introduction: Haunted Landscapes of the Anthropocene,” in Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet, ed. Anna Tsing, Heather Swanson, Elaine Gan and Nils Bubandt, (University of Minnesota Press, 2017), 9

[7] Conrad Arensberg, The Irish Countryman: An Anthropological Study (Waveland Press, 1988 [1937])

[8] Narvaez, Peter, The Good People: New Fairylore Essays (University Press of Kentucky, 1991).

[9] Tommy Kuusala, “Spirited Away by Female Forest Spirits,” Folklore 131.2, 2020

[10] Ann Skjelbred, “Rites of Passage as a Meeting Place: Christianity and Fairylore in Connection with the Unclean Woman and Unchristened Child,” in The Good People: New Fairylore Essays (University Press of Kentucky,1991)

[11] Sabina Magliocco and Sadie Rittman, “Fairies, Environmental Justice, and Re-enchantment in Modern Pagan Narratives,” Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture 17, no. 4 (2023), 424

[12] Sabina Magliocco, “The Taming of the Fae: Literary and Folkloric Fairies in Modern Paganisms,” in Magic and Witchery in the Modern West: Palgrave Historical Studies in Witchcraft and Magic, Eds. Feraro, S., Doyle White, E. (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 115

[13] Frédérique Apffel-Marglin, Subversive Spiritualities: How Rituals Enact the Earth (Oxford University Press, 2012), 65

[14] Apffel-Marglin, Subversive Spiritualities, 36

[15] Susan Greenwood, The Anthropology of Magic (Routledge, 2020 [2009]), 136

[16] Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Cannibal Metaphysics for a Post-Structural Anthropology, trans. Peter Skafish (Univoval, 2014 [2009]), 60

[17] Viveiros de Castro, Cannibal Metaphysics, 60

[18] Isabelle Stengers, “Reclaiming Animism,” E-Flux 36, 2012

[19] Viveiros de Castro, Cannibal Metaphysics, 62

[20] Egil Asprem, The Problem of Disenchantment: Scientific Naturalism and Esoteric Discourse (EJ Brill, 2014), 31

[21] De la Cadena and Blaser, “Pluriverse: a Proposal for a World of Many Worlds,” 3

[22] Magliocco, “The Taming of the Fae”

[23] Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Oxford University Press, 2005), 97

[24] Latour, Reassembling the Social, 97

[25] Vanessa Watts, “Indigenous Place-Thought & Agency Amongst Humans and Non-Humans (First Woman and Sky Woman go on a European World Tour!)” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 2(1), 2013, 32

[26] Eduardo Kohn, “Anthropology as Cosmic Diplomacy: Toward an Ecological Ethics for Time,” in Living Earth Community: Multiple Ways of Being and Knowing, ed. Sam Mickey, Mary Evelyn Tucker, and John Grim (Open Book Publishers, 2020), 60

[27] David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World (Vintage Books, 2017), ix

[28] Nurit Bird-David, “‘Animism’ Revisited: Personhood, Environment and Relational Epistemology,” Current Anthropology. 40(S1), 1999, 68

[29] Bird-David, “‘Animism’ Revisited,” 73

[30] Bird-David, “‘Animism’ Revisited,” 77

[31] Bird-David, “‘Animism’ Revisited,” 77

[32] Bird-David, “‘Animism’ Revisited,” 77

[33] Philippe Descola, Beyond Nature and Culture, trans. Janet Lloyd (University of Chicago Press, 2013 [2005]), 392

[34] Viveiros de Castro, Cannibal Metaphysics, 55

[35] Viveiros de Castro, Cannibal Metaphysics, 62

[36] Viveiros de Castro, Cannibal Metaphysics, 60

[37] Viveiros de Castro, Cannibal Metaphysics, 68

[38] Viveiros de Castro, Cannibal Metaphysics, 68

[39] Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (Cornell University Press, 1969)

[40] Greenwood, The Anthropology of Magic, 41

[41] Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World (Yale University Press, 2009), 27

[42] Greenwood, The Anthropology of Magic, 4

[43] Watts, “Indigenous Place-Thought,” 24

[44] Watts, “Indigenous Place-Thought,” 21

[45] Apffel-Marglin, Subversive Spiritualities, 56

[46] Apffel-Marglin, Subversive Spiritualities, 63

[47] Apffel-Marglin, Subversive Spiritualities, 164

[48] Katrin Sontag, “Parallel Worlds: Fieldwork with Elves, Icelanders and Academics” (University of Iceland, 2007), 90

[49] Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (Routledge, 2005 [1966]), 158

[50] Gary Snyder, The Practice of the Wild (Shoemaker & Hoard, 2004), 174

[51] Gary Snyder, The Practice of the Wild, 176

[52] Gary Snyder, The Practice of the Wild, 175

[53] Gary Snyder, The Practice of the Wild, 177

[54] Tyson Yunkaporta, Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World (HarperCollins Australia, 2019), 146

[55] Abram, Spell of the Sensuous, ix

[56] Yunkaporta, Sand Talk, 41

[57] Bruno Latour, “Agency at the Time of the Anthropocene,” New Literary History 45(1), 2014, 3

[58] Nils Bubandt, “Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene,” in Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene, ed. Anna Tsing, Heather Swanson, Elaine Gan and Nils Bubandt (University of Minnesota Press, 2017), 125

[59] Gan, Tsing, Swanson, Bubandt, Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet, 9

[60] Bubandt, “Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene,” 125

[61] William James, Varieties of Religious Experience (Penguin, 1982 [1902]), 123

[62] Abram, Spell of the Sensuous, ix

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Force collapses time into impulse and action. And this is where attention, Weil’s great counterweight to force, enters the picture. Attention is not simply noticing. Where force compresses, attention reintroduces duration, hesitation, and moral space. The two are structurally opposed. Force makes persons into things. Attention restores the reality of persons. For Weil, this is close to a spiritual act, a form of grace.

Editor’s note: I came across the following essay by Jonathan Boymal about Simone Weil’s reading of the Iliad while browsing on Substack Notes, and was struck by its acuity and enduring relevance. It is shared here with Jonathan’s permission, and he has many similarly thoughtful essays on his Substack, The Last Analogue.

I have heard of Simone Weil, and I know she wrote The Need for Roots, and that she cared about attention, but I have never really read her. And I have, of course, heard of The Iliad. I know it is a foundational text of Western civilisation from around the 8th century BCE that gave us many of our Gods, heroes and archetypes; that is shaped Greek and therefore also Roman culture. However, all I really know is some of the characters and a few of the passages. I have never actually read it (or listened to it), and I suspect that’s because I was never in an educational institution that insisted that I do so. Since it stemmed from oral traditions, I plan to listen to it over the next few weeks. Better late than never!

Jonathan’s essay has a particular take on force, attention, and the interval - a critical human capacity to pause - that education provides, but what struck me more was this notion that force has its own kind of reality that is apparently independent of our own. While it depends on where you draw your lines, the Iliad was pre-axial age, before the transformation of consciousness at scale that gave birth to the kinds of minds we now have, with - at least so it seems - interiority, rationality, selfhood, a notion of God, - a world that is in some sense from the inside-out, rather than the outside-in.

While it’s a little beyond this post’s scope and my capacity on this Friday morning, considering pre-axial thought is valuable at a time when some feel we are entering a new axial age. The essay made me think of Jean Gebser’s Integral structure of consciousness as arising (or ‘irupting’) after the deficient mental-rational mode reintegrates the earlier magic and mythic phases of the kind intimated in the Iliad, and also Owen Barfield’s notion of final participation, as the reintegration of the kind of ‘original participation’ that is disclosed in the Iliad. The question of whether feelings, forces, and meanings are generated within us or arrive from without, or whether that distinction itself is a living question. The Homeric world is outside-in almost entirely. Modern Western consciousness is inside-out almost entirely. Barfield’s final participation, Gebser’s integral structure (and perhaps also Aurobindo’s supramental consciousness) are attempts to imagine what it would mean to hold both simultaneously and consciously. The essay below highlights that our challenge is to know when to pause and how to attend. But I think we should also consider what follows from a deeper reckoning with the possibility that our consciousness, the relational process that shapes our experience of life, is perhaps inherently inside-out and outside-in. The deeper challenge is to become one with the world while still being ourselves.

To bring this down to earth, if you’ve ever been part of an escalating argument where you wonder why it became so enflamed, or overtaken by a mood when you can’t quite place why you are feeling, for instance sad, it’s worth reflecting on what’s going on - whether such feelings are entirely things inside us, matters of neurochemistry and embodiment, or whether they (also) have a different kind of reality that can in some sense possess us. This point applies more generally, but it is wonderfully articulated with respect to force in the essay below.

Jonathan Rowson, CEO of Perspectiva.

_{What Force Makes of Us, by Jonathan Boymal}

There is a sentence Simone Weil wrote during the fall of France in 1940, that continues to be true:

Force is as pitiless to the man who possesses it, or thinks he does, as it is to its victims; the second it crushes, the first it intoxicates.

She wrote the 24-page essay as literary criticism, an essay on Homer’s Iliad. It is a poem nearly three thousand years old and yet the sentence lands like a headline from this morning.

Before we explore the essay itself, it is worth considering the conditions of its composition. Weil, a philosopher, mystic, and labour activist, who was subject to the anti-Jewish laws under Vichy France that cost her her teaching position in 1940, published the essay under a pseudonym, Emile Novis, in a Marseilles literary monthly. She never mentions the war that is happening, but writes about Achilles and Hector instead.

By refusing to name the contemporary catastrophe, Weil allows the reader to understand it as the latest recurrence of something ancient, something that cannot be defeated by winning a particular war, because it is located in force itself.

Her central claim arrives in the essay’s very first paragraph:

The true hero, the true subject, the center of the Iliad is force. Force employed by man, force that enslaves man, force before which man’s flesh shrinks away.

Weil is not simply relocating force from the divine order into human relationships. She suggests that what appears as human agency is already governed by an impersonal logic.

Weil defines force as

that x that turns anybody who is subjected to it into a thing. Exercised to the limit, it turns man into a thing in the most literal sense: it makes a corpse out of him.

A corpse is the most obvious case: the soldier who was a man and is now an obstacle on a battlefield. But Weil’s real interest is in the subtler transformations. Force can reduce a person to a thing while they are still breathing. The slave whose will has been extinguished. The refugee who moves through the world unseen:

The man who knows himself weaker than another is more alone in the heart of a city than a man lost in the desert.

Weil insists that this dehumanisation is symmetrical. It afflicts the powerful just as surely as it afflicts the powerless. The man who holds the sword does not escape force; he is intoxicated by it. He loses the capacity for reflection, for mercy:

The man who is the possessor of force seems to walk through a non-resistant element; in the human substance that surrounds him nothing has the power to interpose, between the impulse and the act, the tiny interval that is reflection. Where there is no room for reflection, there is none either for justice or prudence.

This symmetry is important to understand. Weil is not ignoring moral responsibility or suggesting that the oppressor suffers as much as the oppressed. She is describing something more specific: a shared ontological degradation. The powerful are diminished as thinking beings.

The interval of reflection, that small gap between impulse and action in which a human being actually lives, is precisely what force destroys in the one who wields it.

Force collapses time into impulse and action. And this is where attention, Weil’s great counterweight to force, enters the picture. Attention is not simply noticing. Where force compresses, attention reintroduces duration, hesitation, and moral space. The two are structurally opposed. Force makes persons into things. Attention restores the reality of persons. For Weil, this is close to a spiritual act, a form of grace.

The Iliad does not celebrate victory. It depicts how victory carries within it the seeds of its own reversal. The warrior who triumphs today will be humiliated tomorrow. Zeus holds out his scales, and the balance shifts.

Power, in this reading, is never truly possessed. It is temporarily inhabited. It passes through people, using them as vessels, discarding them when the conditions that sustained it shift. Those who mistake the temporary for the permanent, who count on force too much are, as Weil writes, destroyed by that counting.

Those that have force on loan from fate count on it too much and are destroyed.

And from Homer himself, as Weil translates him:

Two casks are placed before Zeus’s doorsill; Containing the gifts he gives, the bad in one, the good in the other; The man to whom he gives baneful gifts, he exposes to outrage; A frightful need drives across the divine earth; He is a wanderer, and gets no respect from gods or men.

Zeus’s two urns are Homer’s refusal of moral accounting. Fate distributes suffering and power arbitrarily.

There are no winners in the Iliad, only people who have not yet lost. But Weil’s claim is sharper than temporality alone suggests. What is easy to miss is that this reversal is a consequence of what force does to perception. The intoxicated man cannot see clearly and because he cannot see clearly, he cannot hold what he has won.

Heroes quake like everybody else.

Even Achilles, even the greatest of warriors, knows fear. The alternative, the idea that some men are truly beyond fear, is the lie that makes war glamorous.

What distinguishes Homer from almost every other war literature, she argues, is his refusal to take sides: his willingness to mourn the Trojans and the Greeks alike, the victors and the vanquished with equal tenderness. There is an equity of suffering in the poem. And she notes that Homer “individualised the holocaust of war by having each man die to his own simile.” Each soldier’s death is given its own image, its own metaphor, its own music. The apparently uniform slaughter of thousands is revealed as the incalculable sum of individual losses.

This is what she holds up against force: attention. The willingness to see the other person as a person, even in the midst of a war, even when seeing them costs you something.

For Weil, this also has a theological register she never entirely separates from the analysis. Force is what empties the world of the good, or, in her language, of God. Attention is the movement in the opposite direction. Whether or not you share her religious horizon, something important is lost if you read her only as a social critic. The stakes, for Weil, are metaphysical. Force is a permanent feature of human existence under conditions of power. War is the clearest expression of a general condition. Peaceful systems often conceal force rather than eliminate it.

Which is what makes this framework so unsettling when you hold it up to the present. Wherever force operates at scale (economic, political, social) it transforms everyone it touches. It intoxicates those who hold it. It crushes those who don’t. The boardroom as much as the battlefield. The institution as much as the army. Consider the algorithm that routes a welfare decision without a human pause between input and outcome. Or consider Minab, Iran, earlier this year, where a girls’ elementary school was coded as a military target. The interval of reflection is deliberately absent, and persons on both sides of those decisions are, in Weil’s sense, already partially turned into things: one by the decision, one by the conditions that produced it.

None of this is fixable by better institutions or kinder leadership, though both matter. It is what happens when the interval disappears.

The mechanism by which the interval disappears does not require monsters. Primo Levi, writing from his own encounter with industrial evil, observed that the truly dangerous figures are the common ones, the functionaries who act without asking questions. Hannah Arendt called this thoughtlessness: the failure to pause, to step back, to think. What Weil describes as the intoxication of force, Arendt recognised in its bureaucratic form, the ordinary person who processes, categorises, and moves on, never once allowing the reality of another person to interrupt the workflow. The interval is eroded by people doing their jobs.

This is, I think, where education becomes most charged as a concept. If force is what eliminates the interval, then education is one of the few practices that could be explicitly devoted to restoring it. To teach well is to create the conditions in which a person can be “startled back into thought,” and reconsider. It is the cultivation of the interval as a habit of being, as a form of resistance to what force, in all its registers, is always trying to close down.

The interval is what makes us human. Protecting it is what education is for, even if education itself is not immune to the forces that would close it down.

Weil wrote her essay in 1940. It remains true.

Jonathan Boymal is an Associate Professor of Economics in the College of Business and Law at RMIT University in Melbourne. He has had 28 years higher education leadership experience in Melbourne, Singapore, Vietnam and Hong Kong. Over the last year, he has written a collection of essays for his Substack, The Last Analogue, exploring what it means to think, learn, and become in an age of algorithmic acceleration, particularly in the context of higher education. Ranging across philosophy of mind, psychology, education theory, cognitive science, the ethics of artificial intelligence, film and literature, his central preoccupations include the contested boundaries between human and machine cognition, and the question of whether the habits of mind that made us who we are can survive the environments we are building. The Last Analogue takes its name from a stubborn conviction: that some things about human experience resist digital translation.

The association of anarchy with social mayhem remains deeply embedded in both the popular and theoretical imagination. Indeed, the stereotypical image of the anarchist as a terrorist or a nihilist and that of the state of anarchy as a condition of disorder and anomia endure. Yet these biased stigmatisations are gradually being eroded. Anarchism has been gaining greater public visibility and intellectual recognition as a compelling political orientation as well as a cogent approach to the changing social realities of the twenty-first century.

- Swan Dao

Editor’s note: On May 18th, I posed the reflexive question “Why are we publishing a book about anarchism?” in reference to Carne Ross’s fabulous new text called There We Are Human Again: A Diplomat’s Journey to Anarchism, which is officially published on Tuesday, June 9th. (There are still a few places for the invitation-only book launch event in North London on Tuesday evening. If you are keen to attend, please email Perspectivateam a*t g mail dot com.)

We are publishing There We Are Human Again because it’s a compelling read. The deeper rationale is that for anyone who takes the metacrisis seriously, anarchist ideas seem remarkably pertinent and generative in a time of ambient governance failure. Needless to say, you do not have to be an anarchist to learn from anarchism.

Carne’s book is a kind of theologico-philsophico-politico memoir, or Bildungsroman, and although there is a great deal of reflection on anarchism in history, theory and practice, its main aim is to narrate his own transformation from proud advocate for state interests as a diplomat, to deep scepticism towards the state’s capacity to serve the common good, now as a self-described anarchist.

To help contextualise the value of Carne’s book, but also for broader edification on anarchism, I am delighted to have permission to share the following paper which reflects on anarchism’s reputation, evolution, and continuing relevance.

The author, Swan Dao, PhD, is the founder of the Institute of Devotional Arts, which designs and leads transformative learning experiences through the expressive arts. His practice helps people reconnect with moral imagination, creative agency, and collective intelligence. Swan studied and taught philosophy, theology, psychology, and theatre across Oxford, Melbourne, Paris, Chicago, and Cambridge. A certified coach and psychotherapist, educator, and experience designer, he works internationally across leadership, innovation, and culture change. Blending social science, embodiment, and theatre, Swan revives the original spirit of both art and psychotherapy: tending to the soul with depth, creativity, and care. (Ed* He also has extraordinary sartorial standards, does a handstand with disconcerting ease, and regularly breaks into song).

Swan’s text is scholarly and lengthy for a Substack post (3754 words plus 2603 in notes), but it is otherwise unpublished, and it seems timely to share it. I trust it will be an enjoyable weekend read for many, a good source of hinterland for Perspectiva’s new book, and a valuable reference for researchers getting to grips with anarchism for years to come. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. Thanks to Swan for sharing it.

You can find Swan via The Institute of Devotional Arts and LinkedIn and he recently joined Substack.

Jonathan Rowson, CEO of Perspectiva.

“I’m Swan Dao. Trained as a moral philosopher and theologian, I found in anarchist principles forms of ethical praxis that I felt compelled to investigate.

Part inquiry into my own political engagement, part critical and historical demystification, this piece below emerged from my PhD thesis at the University of Cambridge some years ago, which explored the relationship between self-transformation and system change.

From my time in anarchist spaces, I wish to retain the sense that every manifestation of oppression also reveals a corresponding possibility for liberation. Freedom, like love, is both a practice to be renewed daily and the horizon towards which we all strive.” - Swan Dao (June 4, 2026)

Anarchism: A Social Movement and Way of Life by Dr. Swan Dao

C’est un malfaiteur, un philosophe, un anarchiste ! Il fera le malheur de tous avec ses utopies, c’est un ennemi du peuple.¹

Anarchism is a contentious, enigmatic, and nebulous subject. As a political movement, it is all too often misconstrued and distorted: when not trivialised or censored, it is maligned and demonised. For the general public, the figure of the anarchist brings to mind bomb-throwing terrorists, violent strikers, or unprincipled vandals.

In France, one may recall the bombings of Ravachol, the assassination of President Sadi Carno, or the robberies of the Bonnot Gang during the heyday of anarchism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Today, one may think of the black bloc composed of alleged hooligans who set cars on fire, smash symbols of multinational power, and cast cobblestones at law enforcement officials. Historically, anarchy was an epithet of political abuse (as was the term democracy) connoting social mayhem.² Anyone who challenged the socio-political orthodoxy could be accused of being an anarchist.

Artistic depictions of anarchy as the quintessence of disorder abound, ranging from a mad blindfolded woman in rags with dishevelled hair, a broken sceptre, and a shattered yoke lying at her feet³ to portrayals of monsters and demons, such as dragons, gargoyles, or Hydra – the many-headed serpent.⁴ Literary representations of anarchists in the novels of Zola, Henry James, or Chesterton also portray anarchists as dangerous perpetrators of chaos.⁵ The list of disparaging descriptions of anarchism, often propagated by the media and state actors, is a very long one indeed. The recurrent message is clear: anarchism wreaks havoc on society.

Anarchism has no monopoly on political violence.⁶ The overemphatic association of anarchism and violence is an ill-founded generalisation and demonisation to discredit the movement. All revolutionary movements, indeed, all attempts to bring about social change, are bound to include some form of violence. Political assassinations, which are perhaps most closely linked to anarchism, were committed in much greater numbers by nationalists, republicans, or Marxists.⁷ In fact, compared to other socio-political movements, there were relatively few anarchist acts of violence.⁸ What is more, the anti-authoritarian and anti-hierarchical violence of the oppressed is incommensurable with that used by coercive, authoritarian, and hierarchical institutions seeking to protect and maintain their privileges.⁹

In any case, anarchists’ advocacy of radical social transformation does not make them fanatics. Quite the reverse, their strategies for emancipation from oppression are manifold and carefully thought out. They do include violent tactics such as propaganda by the deed and guerrilla warfare, but also comprise non-violent ones such as the general strike and civil disobedience. The question of the use of violence is, and has always been, controversial insofar as violence implies coercion, constraint, or obligation, which are fundamentally antithetical to anarchy. Whilst some anarchists believe that violence is a painful necessity (e.g. Bakunin, Malatesta, Bonnano), others reject it altogether as ineffective and are committed pacifists (e.g. Ryner, Armand, Goodman, Comfort).¹⁰ It is true that feelings of rage, vengeance, and resentment lie at the root of many instances of insurrection and that anarchist propaganda is imbued with violent rhetoric. That said, even those who uphold various forms of violence as an essential part of the revolutionary process merely see it as unintended harm for their ultimate end, which is social harmony.¹¹ As the revolutionary Errico Malatesta stated:

There can be no doubt that the Anarchist Idea, denying government, is by its very nature opposed to violence, which is the very essence of every authoritarian system … Anarchy is freedom in solidarity. It is only through the harmonizing of interests, through voluntary co-operation, through love, respect, and reciprocal tolerance, by persuasion, by example, and by the contagion of benevolence, that it can and ought to triumph.¹²

It should also be pointed out that pacifism was central to the development of anarchism in the twentieth century and that most anarchists today favour non-violent modes of action.¹³ Suffice to say, violence is not an intrinsic feature of anarchism.¹⁴

The association of anarchy with social mayhem remains deeply embedded in both the popular and theoretical imagination. Indeed, the stereotypical image of the anarchist as a terrorist or a nihilist and that of the state of anarchy as a condition of disorder and anomia endure.¹⁵ Yet these biased stigmatisations are gradually being eroded. Anarchism has been gaining greater public visibility and intellectual recognition as a compelling political orientation as well as a cogent approach to the changing social realities of the twenty-first century.¹⁶

Prominent individuals, such as the American linguist Noam Chomsky, the former British diplomat Carne Ross,¹⁷ or the former French deputy Isabelle Attard, overtly defend the relevance and viability of the anarchist enterprise.¹⁸ High-profile novelists such as Ursula LeGuin in the USA and more recently Alain Damasio in France offer an insight into what an anarchist social order could look like. New, creative, and playful anarchist tactics and symbols are seeing the light of day. Colourful and cheerful insurrectionary festivals, ludic anti-capitalist carnivals with radical activists donning a red nose, or graffiti of an A in a heart, are giving anarchism a new face.¹⁹ Numerous affinity groups and collectives, albeit not avowedly anarchist, follow essentially libertarian modes of organisation, coordination, and action. It is not entirely accurate to talk about a revival of anarchism, for it would fail to do justice to the many advocates of anarchism throughout the twentieth century.²⁰ Nevertheless, it is fair to say that there is a renewal of interest in the movement characterised, notably, by a wish to find commonalities with non-anarchist groups. Anarchism is gaining force, traction, and momentum worldwide and has promising prospects for further advancement. It may just be, as the anthropologist David Graeber claimed in 2004, the revolutionary movement of the twenty-first century.²¹

The anarchist movement is complex, diverse, and constantly evolving. In essence, anarchists oppose all forms of illegitimate authority and promote individual freedom. From the Greek an archos, an-archy literally means “without a ruler” or more broadly “without authority”. Negatively, anarchism is synonymous with anti-authoritarianism. ‘On devient anarchiste par sentiment et par raisonnement’, claimed the feminist individualist anarchist Sophie Zaïkowska, ‘Le raisonnement est … le même pour tous les anarchistes, il se base sur l’observation des faits qui montre que sous le joug de l’autorité … l’individu ne vit pas heureux’.²² The authority in question is primarily understood as domination, that is, fixed, unconsented, unquestionable, and coercive relations of power. It can come from gods, legislators, political leaders, bosses, priests, police, teachers, judges, husbands, parents, or traditions and social conventions. In short, it is anything that compels the individual to think and act in a particular way. More broadly, anarchists oppose systems of domination and exploitation. Historically, the state, alongside the Church and the capitalist system, were often viewed as the fountainhead of exclusion and oppression. They are institutional loci of violence, externally imposed rules, and hierarchical class divisions.

Anarchists do not refuse order as such, but the established social order – an order that is regarded as fundamentally unjust, exploitative, anomic, morally debilitating, and self-alienating. It breeds conformity, indifference, and hypocrisy, and creates docile, dependent, and psychologically repressed automatons. Challenging the status quo more than any other political movement, anarchism is a ‘passion for destruction’, as Mikhail Bakunin – the leader of the anti-authoritarian faction of the First International – once described it, insofar as it seeks to eradicate all authoritarian and dehumanising regimes.²³ Anarchists are anti-authoritarian iconoclasts, defiant dissidents, subversive rebels, incorrigible agonists, irreverent insurgents, but they are also – perhaps first and foremost – ordinary, indignant individuals who fight against injustice and yearn for greater freedom. The struggle for freedom starts with disobedience. Revolt against oppression is justice in motion.

Despite its epistemology and reputation, anarchism is not an exclusively negative enterprise. It should not be described solely in terms of opposition. It is a simultaneously destructive and a constructive endeavour: ‘destruam et aedificabo’, I destroy in order to build, stated Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, the first self-proclaimed anarchist.²⁴ Anarchism does not merely defend negative freedom (freedom from), it also promotes positive freedom (freedom to or for).²⁵ Differently put, anarchism rejects coercive forms of power (potestas, power over) but embraces constructive power (potentia, power to). What, then, is this ‘positive anarchy’?²⁶ The answer to this question differs greatly across factions of anarchism. As the individualist Robert Collino (aka Ixigrec) pointed out, ‘Le rejet de l’autorité est une négation, la vie est une affirmation. On peut s’accorder sur un plan négatif et ne pouvoir le faire sur le plan affirmatif.’²⁷

At the most basic level, anarchists aspire to create a just social order that fosters self-realization. First, equality is regarded as a prerequisite for personal freedom. The interdependence of equality and liberty is a core tenant of anarchism. As Bakunin wrote: ‘I am only free when all humans beings surrounding me … are equally free’. Second, anarchists are committed to autonomy in the sense of self-mastery, self-affirmation, and self-creation. They envision a society wherein individuals determine their own affairs and subject their decisions to their own rational judgment. In other words, they wish to cultivate their intellectual integrity and moral responsibility. Additionally, they wish that each person be able to explore, exercise, and develop their personal capacities, their unique personality, their creativity, and their originality. As Bakunin wrote:

I am a fanatic lover of liberty … the only kind of liberty that is worth the name, liberty that consists in the full development of all the material, intellectual, and moral powers that are latent in each person; liberty recognizes no restrictions other than those determined by the laws of our own individual nature.²⁸

Finally, anarchists promote unity within this diversity through voluntary cooperation and association with other individuals. The libertarian society is one wherein collective action is based upon altruism, solidarity, and mutual aid. As Malatesta wrote:

Out of the free collaboration of everyone, thanks to the spontaneous combination of men in accordance with their needs and sympathies, from the bottom up, from the simple to the complex, starting from the most immediate interests and working towards the most general, there will arise a social organization, the goal of which will be the greatest well-being and fullest freedom of all … Such a society of free human beings, such a society of friends, is Anarchy.²⁹

Signac’s divisionist painting Au temps d’harmonie illustrates the vision of a unified whole that respects the autonomy of each element.³⁰ As lovers of liberty and equality, anarchists are existential utopians. They want to be autonomous moral agents, loyal comrades, critical thinkers, self-affirming free spirits, and creative and original individuals. It should thus not come as a surprise that anarchists sought to revolutionise all domains of life, ranging from education to sexuality, including diet and the place of women in society, thereby pioneering what many of us now consider social advances (e.g. free union, birth control, gender equality). In summation, positive anarchism is a form of autarchism based upon a commitment to equality, justice, and solidarity; upon intellectual and moral self-government; as well as upon authentic self-expression and creative experimentation. Anarchism is freedom in action, and anarchy is harmony.

Anarchism may be understood as being more than a political ideology, social movement, or radical doctrine; it may be regarded as an existential orientation. In this sense, the anarchist attitude predates the anarchist movement. In fact, most people turn to anarchism not because of an intellectual conversion, but from an inner drive – an instinct to freedom that the sociologist Alain Pessin calls ‘la rêverie libertaire’ (ed: this is a good Gallicism, and works in English as a French word, but it means something like something ‘the anarchist imagination’ or more simply ‘the dream of freedom’).

In any adherence to anarchism, theoretical agreement is entirely secondary. What comes first is the meeting of one desire with other desires… it is a tapestry of dreams that first seduces, dreams that do not take the form of socio-political elaborations… but rather that of a gradient of the mind, a pull of vitality toward what one wants to be.³¹

As early as 1895, Augustin Hamon conducted a survey amongst anarchists of various countries to determine the most common libertarian psychological traits, which he concluded were: ‘l’esprit de révolte, l’amour de la liberté, l’amour du moi, l’amour d’autrui, le sentiment de justice, le sens de la logique, la curiosité de connaître, l’esprit de prosélytisme’. (Ed: something like: "The spirit of revolt, the love of freedom, the love of self, the love of others, the sense of justice, a taste for logic, the curiosity to know, the missionary spirit.") ³²

Anarchism fosters moral indignation and social hope, promotes resistance and solidarity, negates domination, and affirms freedom. The basic anarchist premise is that human flourishing is best achieved by free individuals who consensually collaborate in a non-authoritarian society. Anarchists strive to emancipate themselves from social orders that are not in accord with this goal. Most people agree that actively working towards this objective is a necessary condition for a person to be an anarchist, but not all regard this twofold undertaking as constituting a sufficient condition.³³ This is why the question of the roots of anarchism is a moot point, which depends upon how inclusive a view of anarchy one adopts.

Is anarchism a timeless human propensity towards freedom, or is it a historically situated socio-political tradition? Taking anarchy as a suprahistorical human ethos or as a fundamental anti-authoritarian instinct, some find proto-libertarian elements in ancient schools of thought such as Greek and Chinese philosophy (especially Cynicism and Daoism) or early Christianity.³⁴ Drawing upon anthropological studies, others find anarchist models in stateless, preliterate societies such as the !Kung of South Africa or the Mbuti of Congo.³⁵ Anarchist tendencies can also be found in medieval times, notably in the English Peasants’ Revolt of 1381; during the Renaissance in the writings of such authors as Rabelais or de la Boétie; during the Enlightenment in the works of Diderot or Rousseau; amongst the Enragé.e.s of the French Revolution of 1789, as well as during the nineteenth century in the writings of Godwin and Fourier.

The list of forebearers of anarchism could easily go on and includes numerous Christian and other radical religious sects.³⁶ This may lead to a confusing and overly broad account of anarchism. The urge to revolt against domination and the struggle for individual freedom is probably as old as the existence of authoritarian institutions, if not as old as humanity itself, insofar as human relationships are relations of power.³⁷

That said, when regarded as an historically situated ethos, theoretical framework, social ideology and movement, most consider anarchism to have sprung from the European workers’ movements in the second half of the nineteenth century, along with the main political ideologies of modern society. Though not an anarchist event per se, many viewed the Paris Commune of 1871 – the first successful spontaneous working-class insurrection – as the first attempt at creating an anarchist society.³⁸ On this account, anarchism is originally a Western phenomenon that emerged in opposition to centralised states and industrial capitalism. It was shaped by the industrial and scientific revolutions as well as by the Enlightenment and by Romanticism.

Let us recall that the Industrial Revolution led millions of people to emigrate from the countryside to work in urban factories. Workers’ existence was deplorable: degrading labour and squalid living conditions reduced them to a state of servitude and misery. Extreme poverty, malnutrition, and disease were rife and only added to the ordeal of their twelve-hour workday. They had no rest day, no health care, and no retirement. In the mid-nineteenth century workers’ average life expectancy was little more than 30 years old, and half of their children died before reaching the age of six. ‘The great thought in all men’s minds [was] the emancipation and regeneration of those who toil’.³⁹

Along with Marxian and other socialists, anarchists were the main revolutionary forces opposing industrial society and the capitalist order. They shared the same hope for and vision of a communist society. Socialists at the time were divided into two main groups: followers of Marx known as centralists, and followers of Bakunin known as collectivists or federalists (later to be known, respectively, as authoritarians or communists and non-authoritarians or libertarians).⁴⁰ Their divergence was primarily tactical: the latter did not believe that a revolutionary government – a dictatorship of the proletariat – could secure socialist change and lead to the definite eradication of all state apparatuses. Power, in their view, was inherently and necessarily corrupting. As Bakunin wrote in 1873:

As soon as they become rulers or representatives of the people [former workers] will cease to be workers and will begin to look upon the whole workers’ world from the height of the state. They will no longer represent the people but themselves and their own pretentions to govern the people. Anyone who doubts this is not at all familiar with human nature.⁴¹

In addition, they believed that the root of social ills lay in authority, not merely private property: ‘Le principe d’Autorité, voilà le Mal. Le principe de liberté, voilà le remède!’ wrote Sébastien Faure (Ed: ‘The principle of author is the ailment; the principle of liberty is the cure’).⁴² Non-authoritarian revolutionaries were disparagingly labelled “anarchists” by other socialists – an epithet that they ended up provocatively embracing.⁴³ Expelled from the First International in 1872,⁴⁴ Bakunin and his followers – amongst them Peter Kropotkin, Élisée Reclus, and Errico Malatesta – gathered in Saint-Imier, Switzerland, where they founded the first anarchist organisation – the Anti-Authoritarian International – whose primary aim was the destruction of all political power.⁴⁵ The scission between the authoritarian and non-authoritarian factions of the First International is usually considered to mark the birth of anarchism as an independent political movement. Anarchism grew out of, alongside, but also in opposition to socialism. Until the 1917 Russian Revolution, anarchism was the leading radical political movement worldwide. Since the Second World War, during which all ideologies opposed to capitalism were squashed, the influence and diversity of anarchism have been largely underplayed.

Anarchism Today

Anarchism is taking centre stage amongst the new social movements of the twenty-first century. It is, as Graeber puts it, ‘the source of most of what’s new and hopeful about it’.₄₆ In the face of the failure of state socialism, historian of communism David Priestland boldly writes that ‘anarchism could help save the world’.₄₇ In 2007, political theorist Uri Gordon stated that ‘the past ten years have seen the full-blown revival of anarchism, as a global movement and coherent set of political discourses, on a scale and to levels of unity and diversity unseen since the 1930s’.₄₈ Indeed, it is anarchist modes of action and organisation that predominate today: ‘from anti-capitalist social centres and eco-feminist communities to raucous street parties and blockades of international summits, anarchist forms of resistance and organising have been at the heart of the “alternative globalisation” movement’.₄₉ The position of Marxism as the left-wing political ideology par excellence is gradually being eroded and replaced by anarchist-inspired alter-globalisation movements. It is now widely accepted that (left) libertarian ideas, values, and practices are thriving today.₅₀ Since the late 1990s, anarchism has been driving the radical socio-political movement against neoliberal globalisation.

Contemporary expressions of anarchism are found mainly outside official anarchist federations and unions.₅₁ Anarchism today is in many ways more akin to the radical social movements of the 1960s than to those of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Anarchism took a new turn after the fall of the USSR within the alter-globalisation movements.₅₂ Events such as the Seattle protest, Occupy Wall Street, the 15M in Spain, Nuit debout and the ZADs in France, the Zapatista movement in Chiapas and the Rojava Revolution in North Syria may not be anarchist per se, but they do incorporate important libertarian elements. Numerous commentators have noted that it is anarchism – more than any other socio-political movement – that animates the visions and tactics of the new social movements against neoliberalism. ₅₃

The alter-globalisation movement is composed of collectives and affinity groups₅₄ that are outside traditional political organisations and adopt anti-authoritarian, anti-hierarchical, anti-centralising, and anti-representational modes of action and decision-making. They promote autonomous, egalitarian, and consensual organisational methods that strongly echo or parallel anarchist modus operandi. Direct action, which seeks to achieve political goals without mediators or intermediaries, is their favoured mode of action.₅₅ It is thus clear that libertarian ideas and practices now transcend the anarchist movement sensu stricto.₅₆ They are found, notably, within ecological, antifascist, feminist, anti-war, antinuclear, vegan groups as well as various other militant organisations such as Earth Liberation Front in the USA or the CNT in France and Spain. As Tancrède Ramonet, producer of the Arte documentary Ni Dieu ni maître, une histoire de l’anarchisme, puts it: ‘“Today … anarchism tends no longer to speak its name. We are indeed in the presence of very significant libertarian or anti-authoritarian movements, but they do not call themselves anarchist’.₅₇

Academics have taken a long time to consider anarchism a serious subject of scholarly research. Compared to liberalism, Marxism, or Frankfurt school critical theory, anarchism has hitherto had a minor, not to say negligible, presence in academia. Its radical ideology was found theoretically lacking or incoherent, if not altogether inane.₅₈ Anarchism was treated as an otiose political eccentricity and, as such, was a source of mockery and antipathy. Although it is still dismissed out of hand by some academics today, this trend is gradually changing. The revitalisation of anarchism in the late 1990s and early 2000s stimulated scholarly interest in the movement. This new enthusiasm for anarchist thought can be illustrated, inter alia, by the creation of the Institute for Anarchist Studies as early as 1996, of the Anarchist Studies Network in 2005, and of the North American Anarchist Studies Network in 2009.

In 2011, a conference entitled “The Anarchist Turn” took place at the New School for Social Research in New York.₅₉ The first handbook on anarchism was published in 2012, and a second one in 2019.₆₀ Several academics worldwide now specialise in anarchist studies, and the past twenty years have witnessed an unprecedented burgeoning of publications on anarchism.₆₁ The number of PhD theses on the topic has been increasing steadily since the early 2000s. Examinations of anarchism are conducted across an astonishingly broad range of academic disciplines, principally within the social sciences.₆₂ These include history, political theory, and anthropology,₆₃ but also geography, education, gender studies, and sociology. Anarchism is thus gaining ever more prominence as a multidisciplinary subject in academia. Indeed, the scope and depth of research on anarchism has never been as wide as it is today. Anarchist studies have undoubtedly become a vibrant field of inquiry…

Notes

¹ V. Barrudand, L’Endehors, 17 avril 1892.

“(This kind of person) is a criminal, a philosopher, an anarchist! (They) will make everyone unhappy with his utopias; (he) is an enemy of the people.”

² E. Malatesta, L’anarchie, Saint-Louis, MO, Dialesctics, 2014 [1891], p. 3; F. Depuis-Déri, L’anarchie expliquée à mon père, Montreal, Lux Éditeur, 2014, pp. 11-7. Plato and Aristotle described democracy as anarchy insofar as it is, by definition, a regime without a ruler. Cf. The Republic, VII, 557^e2-4, 558c4. See also F. Dupuis-Déri, Démocratie. Histoire politique d’un mot, Montréal, Lux, 2013.

³ P. Miquel, Les anarchistes, Paris, Albin Michel, 2003, p. 22.

⁴ E.g. Ingres’s The Apotheosis of Napoleon, 1853.

⁵ See Henry James’s The Princess Cassimassima (1886); H. G. Wells’s The Stolen Bacillus (1894); Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent (1907); G. K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday (1908); Zola’s Germinal. P. Gibbard, Anarchism in English and French literature, 1885-1914, PhD Thesis, University of Oxford, 2001.

⁶ P. Kropotkin, Anarchism: its philosophy and ideal, 1896.

⁷ M. Turchetti, Tyrannie et tyrannicide de l’Antiquité à nos jours, Paris, Presses universitaires de France, 2001. ⁸ It has been estimated that about 200 individuals were assassinated by anarchists between 1880 and 1914. Anarchism was in fact less violent than other revolutionary movements. Asal and Rethemeyer argue that anarchists are ‘the least likely to kill of ideological types that we could test probabilistically. See V. Asal and R. K. Rethemeyer, Dilletantes, ideologues, and the weak, Conflict Management and Peace Science, 25, 2008, p. 257.

⁹ See Bufacci’s distinction between minimal and comprehensive violence. V. Bufacci, Two Concepts of Violence, Political Studies Review, vol. 3, n. 2, 2005.

¹⁰ X. Bekaert, Le principe de la non-violence, Relations, n. 682, février 2003; X. Bekaert, Anarchisme. Violence et non violence. Petite anthologie de la révolution non-violente chez les principaux précurseurs et théoriciens de l’anarchisme, Paris, Les éditions du Monde Libertaire, 2000; A. Bernard & P. Sommermeyer, Désobéissances libertaires : manière d’agir et autres façons de faire, Paris, nada, 2014 ; http://anarchismenonviolence2.org/.

¹¹ For a distinction between different forms of violence, see Manières d’agir, Monde libertaire, mai-juin 2014.

¹² E. Malatesta, Anarchy and Violence, The Method of Freedom, Chico, CA, AK Press, 2014 [1894].

¹³ By violence I mean behaviour intended to hurt or kill sentient beings, excluding acts intended to damage or destroy inanimate objects. The Zapatista revolt and the Rojava revolution are the two main exceptions to this trend today. ¹⁴ For further discussion see D. Novak, Anarchism and Individual Terrorism, The Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science, vol. 20, n. 2, 1954, p. 176; B. Epstein, Political Protest and cultural revolution, Berkeley, CA, University of California Press, 1991; A. Chan, The creative urge, PhD Thesis, University of Bristol, 1993; M. Pucciarelli, L’imaginaire des libertaires aujourd’hui, Lyon, Atelier de création libertaire, 1999, p. 174; X. Bekaert, Anarchisme violence et non-violence, Paris, Éditions du Monde Libertaire, 2000; H. Day, Anarchie et non-violence, Le Havre, Ed. du Libertaire, 2005; B. Franks, Rebel Alliances, Edinburgh, AK Press, 2006, pp. 139-53; S. Luck, Sociologie de l’engagement libertaire dans la France contemporaine, PhD Thesis, Université Panthéon-Sorbonne, Paris I, 2008, pp. 388-9, 447; C. Honeywell, Bridging the Gaps, The Bloomsbury Companion to Anarchism, ed. R. Kinna, London, Bloomsbury, 2012, pp. 115, 128-9; B. J. Pauli, Pacifism, nonviolence, and the reinvention of anarchist tactics in the twentieth century, Journal for the Study of Radicalism, vol. 9, n. 1, 2015; E. Frazer & K. Hutchins, Anarchist ambivalence, European Journal of Political Philosophy, vol. 18, n. 2, 2019. Note also that anarchist acts of violence differ from acts of terror. For a refutation of the association of anarchism with terrorism, see D. Colson, Petit lexique philosophique de l’anarchisme, Paris, Poche, 2001; P. Pelletier, Anarchisme vent debout!, Paris, Le Cavalier Bleu, 2018 [2013], pp. 107-17.

¹⁵ E.g. T. Dunne, Anarchiste et Al-Quaeda, La Presse, 8 Jul. 2005; J. L. Gelvin, Al-Qaeda and Anarchism, Terrorism and Political Violence, vol. 20, n. 4. Some states still label anarchists as terrorists. See. C. J. Beck & E. Miner, Who gets designated a terrorist and why? Social Forces, vol. 91, n. 1, 2013. Mass media often refers to anarchy as chaos. See P. V. Stock, Katrina and anarchy, Sociological Spectrum, vol. 27, 2007.

¹⁶ Luck, p. 685.

¹⁷ Once a civil servant in the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office, Carne Ross came to embrace anarchism. He recounts his transition in a 2017 documentary entitled The Accidental Anarchist. Tancrède Ramonet’s three-part documentary Ni Dieu ni Maître, Une histoire de l’anarchisme, broadcast on Arte in 2016, is one of the latest popular attempts to demystify anarchism in France. Note that Arte refused to broadcast the third part of the documentary, which deals with the contemporary era (1945-2001). They did not justify its rejection and did not reply to my emails. See also

¹⁸ See also I. Attard, Comment je suis devenue anarchiste, Paris, Seuil, 2019. Isabelle Attard is a French archeozoologist, museum director, and former ecology deputy.

¹⁹ S. Sheehan, Anarchism, London, Reaktion Books, 2003, p. 17; F. Dupuis-Déri, Les nouveaux anarchistes, Paris, éditions Textuel, 2018.

²⁰ Honeywell, pp. 111-39. A few names of twentieth-century proponents of anarchism come to mind: in the UK: Herbert Read, Alex Comfort, Colin Ward, and Sydney Parker; in North America: Paul Goodman, Georges Woodcock, and Murray Boockchin; and in France: Daniel Guérin, Henri Avron, and André Arru, not to mention the many sympathisers with the movement such as Huxley, Orwell, Camus, Foucault, Guattari, and artists such as Georges Brassens, Léo Ferré, John Cage, Julian Beck, and Judith Malina.

²¹ D. Graeber & A. Grubacic, Anarchism, Or the Revolutionary Movement of the Twenty-First Century, ZNet, Vision & Strategy, 6 January 2004.

²² S. Zaïkowska, La vie et la mort de Georges Butaud, Nice, Rosentitel, 1929, p. 18.

²³ M. Bakunin, On Anarchism, ed. S. Dologoff, Montreal, Black Rose, 1980, p. 57.

²⁴ P-J. Proudhon, Système des contradictions économiques, ou, Philosophie de la misère, Paris, M. Rivière, 1923 [1846], p. 174. ²⁵ This is one of the reasons why the term “libertarian” is sometimes used to refer to the constructive side of anarchism. The term “libertarian” [libertaire] was cointed by the French worker and poet Joseph Déjacque in 1857 to denounce a type of anarchism that was not sufficiently radical. J. Déjaque, De l’Être-Humain mâle et femelle, Letter to Proudhon, New Orleans, 1857.

²⁶ Proudhon, reference needed.

²⁷ Ixigrec, in E. Armand, sa vie, sa pensée, p. 54.

²⁸ M. Bakunin, reference needed.

²⁹ E. Malatesta, 1891.

³⁰ Divisionism is Signac’s preferred term for “pointillism”. Signac originally wanted to call the painting “Au temps d’anarchie”, but he changed the titled because of the repression of 1984. See also Henry-Edmond Cross, L’air du soir (1894).

³¹ The original French is

Dans toute adhésion à l’anarchisme, la coïncidence théorique est tout à fait seconde. Il y a d’abord la rencontre d’un désir avec des désirs … c’est une trame de rêves qui d’abord séduit, qui n’ont pas la forme d’élaborations socio-politiques … mais celle d’une pente de l’esprit, d’un entrainement vital vers ce que l’on veut être.

A. Pessin, Problématique de la culture libertaire, La culture libertaire, Lyon, Atelier de création libertaire, 1997, p. 11. Note that Pessin links this to a specific libertarian culture. It has also been argued that individuals of a certain psychological type are drawn to anarchism.

³² A. Hamon, Psychologie de l’anarchiste-socialiste, Paris, Stock, 1895, p. 17.

³³ D. Novak, The Place of Anarchism in the History of Political Thought, The Review of Politics, vol. 20, n. 3, 1958, pp. 307-311.

³⁴ L. Combes, Diogène. Un Précurseur Anarchiste, Les Amis du Peuple, 8 juillet 1858; P. Kropotkin, Anarchism, Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1910; La Science moderne et l’’anarchie, Paris, P. V Stock, 1913; S. Zaïkowska, Victor Lorenc et sa contribution au naturisme, Le Végétalien, 1929; E. Armand, les précurseurs de l’anarchisme, Paris, Ed. de l’en dehors, 1933; P. Marshall, Forerunners of anarchism, Demanding the Impossible, London, Fontana Press, 1993; Religious Anarchism: New Perspectives, ed. A. J. M. E. Christoyannopoulos, Newcastle upon Tyne, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009; F.L. Bender, Taoism and Western Anarchism, Journal of Chinese Philosophy, n. 10, 1983; D.L. Hall, The Metaphysics of Anarchism, Journal of Chinese Philosophy, n. 10, 1983; J.A. Rapp, Daoism and Anarchism: Critiques of State Autonomy in Ancient and Modern China, London, Continuum, 2012. See also M. Nettlau, A Short History of Anarchism, London, Freedom Press, 1996. Note that several individualists, such as Libertad and Fortuné Henry, were compared to Diogenes (e.g. Narrat 1997 [1908], p. 14).

³⁵ In his 1902 Mutual Aid, Kropotkin claimed that the social order of First nations people of the Northwest territories was communist. See also F. E. Reclus, L’Homme et la Terre, Paris, Librairie universelle, 1905-1908 ; P. Clastres, La Société contre l’État, Paris, Minuit, 2011 [1974]; Perlman, Against His-story, Against Leviathan!, Detroit, Black & Red, 1983; J. Zerzan, Running on Emptiness, Los Angeles, Federal House, 2002; I. Pereira, Vivre en anarchiste, Revue du Crieur, vol. 11, n. 3, 2018.

³⁶ Tolstoy is by far the most often cited Christian anarchist. For examples of religious anarchism, see D. Novak, The Place of Anarchism in the History of Political Thought, The Review of Politics, vol. 20, n. 3, 1958, pp. 315-20, 323; G. Marcus, Lipstick Traces, London, Secker and Warburg, 1989, pp. 91-2.

³⁷ E. Reclus, Les Temps nouveaux, n. 3, mai 1895; G. Manfredonia, L’Anarchisme en Europe, Paris, PUF, 2001, p. 11. ³⁸ The counter-revolutionary state repression was a massacre, causing over 20,000 executions within a single week. Anarchists who were not killed were sent off to the penal colony of New Caledonia or went into exile. ³⁹ Anarchism in France, The Speaker, 19 November 1892.

⁴⁰ Bakunin made a distinction between revolutionary statists and revolutionary anarchists within the revolutionary socialist party.

⁴¹ M. Bakunin, Statism and Anarchy, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 4^th ed., 2005 [1873]. ⁴² S. Faure, La Liberté, La Brochure mensuelle, avril 1935.

⁴³ P. Kropotkin, Paroles d’un révolté, Flammarion, Paris, 1885, p. 99.

⁴⁴ J-C. Angaut, Le conflit Marx-Bakounine dans l’Internationale : une confrontation des pratiques politiques, Actuel Marx, n. 41, 2007.

⁴⁵ Congrès de l’International Anti-Autoritaire, Saint-Imer, 15-16 septembre 1987, Troisième résolution, Nature de l’action politique du prolétariat.

46 Graeber 2002, p. 1.

47 D. Priestland, Anarchism could help save the world, The Guardian, 3 July 2015.

48 Gordon 2007, 29.

49 Ibid.

50 E.g. P. Schrembs, La révolution anarchiste est-elle déjà en acte ? La culture libertaire, Lyon, Atelier de création libertaire, 1997, pp. 203-13; D. Graeber, The New Anarchists, New Left Review, vol. 13, n. 6, 2002; J. Bowen, & J. Purkis, Changing Anarchism, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2004; U. Gordon, Anarchy Alive!, London, Pluto Press, 2008; N. Ju & S. Wahl, New Perspectives on Anarchism, New York, Lexington Books, 2010.

51 D. Williams, Contemporary anarchist and anarchistic movements, Sociology Compass, vol. 12, 2018.

51 J. Shantz, Beyond the state: the return to anarchy, disClosure: A Journal of Social Theory, vol. 11, 2003. In France, the return of anarchism on the public scene can be traced back to the strikes of 1995. Cf. Le Nouvel Observateur, n.1624; Minute, 20 décembre 1995; Libération, 21 janvier 1996; Le Monde, 4 février 1996.

52 Graeber (2002); R. Day, Gramsci is Dead, London, Pluto Press, 2005.

53 An affinity group is an autonomous group of a small number of individuals (c. 5-20 people) who gather around a cause and a tactic and adopt anarchist modes of organization, that is, horizontal, participatory, deliberative, and consensual decision-making processes. It has been argued that the affinity group could form the basis of an anarchist society. See F. Dupuis-Déri, Anarchism and the politics of affinity groups, Anarchist Studies, vol. 18, n. 1, 2010.

54 Direct action can be defined as an action seeking to reach an aim without having recourse to a political intermediary and to make demands directly addressing the public. Direct action originates from revolutionary anarcho-syndicalism. The term was coined by Fernand Pelloutier in 1897. Historically, boycott, sabotage, and the general strike were the three main instances of direct action. Nonviolent forms of direct action were widely used in the United States within the equal rights and environmental movements. Direct action is now widely used by various alter-globalization activists and affinity groups. It can be implemented in a variety of waves, ranging from insurrectionary tactics to the creation of alternative social structures. See Maitron 1975, pp. 302-3.

55 This is not an altogether new phenomenon. As early as in 1912, an article from the Manchester Guardian remarked that ‘The number of people in France to whom the term “Anarchist” can properly be applied is … very considerable, much larger than the number of those who actually apply the title to themselves. The popular association of the term with bombs and outrages, which the Governments and police of all countries encourage, as though all Anarchists were would-be assassins, is mistaken, but it makes many people, whose tendencies are Anarchist in fact shrink from taking the name’. The Paris “Bandits”, The Manchester Guardian, 8 May 1912, p. 6.

56 T. Ramonet, Aujourd’hui l’anarchisme a tendance à ne plus dire son nom, Les Inrockuptibles, 31 janvier 2017.

57 The number of explicitly anarchist organizations has also been growing around the world, from 808 in 1997 to 2171 in 2005. In 2005 they were present in 63 countries. See Williams 2018, p. 3.

58 E. J. Hobsbawm, Reflections on Anarchism, Revolutionaries. Contemporary Essays, London, Quartet Books, 1977, pp. 83-4; D. Miller, Anarchism, London, J. M. Dent and Sons Ltd, 1984, p. 181.

59 J. Blumenfield, C. Bottii, & S. Critchley (eds.), The Anarchist Turn, London, Pluto Press, 2013.

60 R. Kinna (ed.), The Bloomsbury Companion to Anarchism, London, Bloomsbury, 2012; C. Levy & A. Matthews (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Anarchism, London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2019.

61 Here is a list of some of the major English and French publications on contemporary anarchism in the past couple of decades: Twenty-First Century Anarchism, eds. J. Purkis & J. Bowen, London, Cassell, 1997; M. Pucciarelli, L’imaginaire des libertaires aujourd’hui, Lyon, Atelier de création libertaire, 1999; D. Graeber. The New Anarchists, New Left Review, n. 13, 2002, pp.61-73; R. Day, Gramsci is Dead. Anarchist Currents in the Newest Social Movements, London, Pluto Press, 2005; U. Gordon, Anarchy Alive! Anti-Authoritarian Politics from Practice to Theory, London, Pluto Press, 2007; V. García, L’anarchisme aujourd’hui, Paris, L’Harmattan, 2007; S. Luck, Sociologie de l’engagement libertaire dans la France contemporaine, PhD Thesis, Université Panthéon-Sorbonne, Paris I, 2008; C. Granier, Les Briseurs de formules, Coeuvres, Ressouvenances, 2008 ; Contemporary Anarchist Studies, eds. R. Amster et al., New York, Routledge, 2009; M. Bamyeh, Anarchy as Order, The History and Future of Civic Humanity J.J. Lanham, Maryland, Lexington Books, 2009; N. & S. Wahl, New Perspectives on Anarchism, Lanham, Maryland, Lexington Books, 2010; Z. Vodovnik, A Living Spirit of Revolt, The Infrapolitics ofAnarchism, Michgan, PM Press, 2013; T. Ibáñez, Anarchisme en mouvement, Anarchisme, néoanarchisme et postanarchisme, Paris, nada éditions, 2014; P. Corcuff, Enjeux libertaires pour le XXIème siècle par un anarchiste neophyte, Paris, Éditions du Monde Libertaire, 2015; D. M. Williams, Black Flags and Social Movements, A Sociological Analysis of Movement Anarchism, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2017; T. Ibáñez Nouveaux fragments épars pour un anarchisme sans dogmes, Paris : Editions des Cascades, 2017. F. Dupuis-Déri, Les nouveaux anarchistes, Paris, édition Textuel, 2018. B. Franks, N. Jun, and L. Williams (eds.), Anarchism. A Conceptual Approach, London, Routeledge, 2018; D. Hamelin and J. Lamy, L’anarchisme, cet autre socialisme, Actuel Marx, vol. 2, n. 66, 2019.

62 Anarchisme et sciences sociales, Lille, mars 2018.

63 Anthropologie et anarchisme, Journal des anthropologues, 1^er semestre 2018.

A reminder that you can pre-order There We Are Human Again: A Diplomat’s Journey to Anarchism, by Carne Ross, from all good bookstores, including Bookshop.org.

“The eyes of the future are looking back at us ...praying for us to see beyond our own time.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

In the early summer of 2024, I met Christopher Nye, who had travelled far from his home in what he calls “Geezer Valley”, a retirment community in New Mexico, USA, to attend The Realisation Festival in Dorset. He was eager to talk, and we spoke in the repose between the late afternoon session and dinner, walking the grounds of St Giles House. It felt like one of those conversations that were meant to happen - I was struck by his presence and gravity of purpose. I could not quite put my finger on why, but I felt seen, as if Chris knew what I was trying to do at Perspectiva more generally, and I sensed he was keen to help as far as he could. Chris returned the following year, which is not a small thing for a man who is now in his late eighties. He is one of the many people I think of when I doubt the Perspectiva project, one of the many who ‘gets it’, and I feel grateful that he is cheering me on from afar.

I was glad to read an advanced draft of a book manuscript he’d been preparing, and to write a short blurb for the back.

The main thing that struck me was the fundamental premise of an author in his eighties dedicating his time and effort to write a book about the future, laying out the contours of a new civilisation that has learned from the mistakes that this one has made. In the video below, I ask Chris about his motivation and about several other features of the book.

Otto Sharmer writes a good foreword, with an encapsulation of the book at the end:

When systems collapse, we are returned to our relationships, to the land, to one another, and to ourselves. Beyond Tomorrow is not a map but a mirror. It invites each of us to reflect: Where do I stand in relation to the emerging future? What is mine to do now?

I like that Chris’s answer is that what was his to do - even in his advanced years, or perhaps especially because of that - was to write Beyond Tomorrow. He did not write a memoir, or any other kind of backward glance, but a blueprint for what might be needed next.

This mission arises in the context of a life devoted to education, but also a life of near misses and second chances, as outlined in our talk. I was struck by the caprice of it all, including his job as a waiter that only lasted a day, but also the underlying sense of direction and telos. The book features detailed proposals for a new macroeconomy and agriculture, but it is is best understood as a philosophy of education worthy of 21st century challenges, and that is Chris’s professional formation and mission. Chris’s commitment extends to this work includes his role as President of the SpringBoard Foundation for whole person learning, some of which, I am told by their Executive Director, Kam Bellamy, was at least partly informed by my essay on 21st Century Bildung (transformative aesthetic, civil and moral education; or education for the soul) for CUSP, particularly the paragraph right at the end.

This essay has focussed on the why and the what of Bildung, and clearly the how is ‘the work’. In the words of the novelist Haruki Murakami, what is needed is “not words and promises but the steady accumulation of small realities.” In principle, Bildung can happen anywhere at any time, but if we are to take this idea seriously there will have to be a collaborative design process for a growing community of educators, policymakers, artists, and futurists. We have a lot to learn about how to build Bildung today, but that, of course, is the point.

That work is what Perspectiva calls ‘the formation’ - a shift in scale and intensity in the determination of our species to educate itself so that it doesn’t destroy itself. What I like about Chris, and his book, is that he is committed to the formation, but he also gets ‘the flip’ - the need for a shift in collective consciousness, and ‘the fun’, the need to articulate a viable political economy; and then to understand how these three imperatives inform each other. Indeed, Beyond Tomorrow contains aspects of The Flip, The Formation and The Fun.

**

I had some glitches with my lighting in the video that follows, which is why I occassionally look like I’m doing an unbidden yoga posture, holding the screen in place. Other things to look out for include a poem on education near the end, and around the 26 minute mark, where Chris speaks of two major forms of strategy; one of which is built around planning, and the other in increasing our openness and receptivity to help from beyond. I probe him on this idea: does he really mean we can ask spiritual entities to help us?!…

I also like the reference to the tractor and the grand piano brought into the desert to build a new community in Sekem, Egypt. And I love the idea that The Shakers made chairs on the understanding that an angel may sit on them. Chris also has a chapter in the book on the meaning of Convivencia, and, like Robert Pirsig, he’s into chatauquas.

It’s just a chat really, but I hope you enjoy it, and I encourage you to ask yourself what Beyond Tomorrow means to you.

The following post on ‘Cardiagenesis’ by Renée Eli speaks to the broader inquiry into what Perspectiva (adapting Jeffrey Kripal) has referred to as ‘the flip’, namely a metanoic shift in perception, or transformation in consciousness. Along with ‘the formation’ - the unlearning/reimagining/capability building required to respond to the world’s needs, and ‘the fun’ - a viable political and economic vision - ‘the flip’ is a major part of what we feel the metacrisis implies and asks of all of us.

“Transformation in consciousness” has to mean something though! And we believe it can be intellectually grounded in its exposition, even if it is ultimately experiential in nature and beyond conceptual capture. With this challenge in mind, the following essay introduces a helpful term - ‘cardiagenesis’, which can be traced via the author to Louis Savary, inspired by Teilhard de Chardin, and also informed obliquely by Jean Gebser. There are other ways to do it, but the term cardiagenesis is at the very least a good start because it helps to situate ‘transformation’ in terms of the a shift in form, with the heart becoming an organ of conscious perception.

This notion of cardiagenesis is in conversation prior posts in the It’s Not Woo if it’s True series, and a prior personal post about Cynthia Bourgeault called Put the Mind in the Heart. We are very grateful to Renée Eli for the time and skill invested in preparing the essay that follows for our readers, and encourage you to sign up to Renée’s Substack here. We welcome likes and thoughtful comments and appreciate it when these posts are shared with others. Thank you.

Jonathan Rowson

CEO of Perspectiva.

Renée Eli’s work centers on the transformation of the human being through the unfolding of consciousness, shaped by philosophical inquiry and living contemplative traditions rooted in the ancient Near East and Greece. She holds a doctorate in Transformative Studies with a concentration in Consciousness Studies from the California Institute of Integral Studies, and a research fellowship through Esalen Institute’s Center for Theory and Research. For eleven years, she served on the Educator Council for the Center for Education, Imagination and the Natural World, a work co-founded and directed by Peggy Whalen–Levitt under the close mentorship of cultural historian and eco-theologian Thomas Berry. Renée’s Substack publication, Beyond the Comfort Zone, a 2023 Featured publication, continues this inquiry with deepening philosophical and contemplative reach.

In the summer of 2023, eight months into a solo pilgrimage traveling wild reaches of North America, sitting now roadside in my parked Sprinter, cell-phone reception for the first time in days of wending my way through the back country of the north country, Yukon, I received an email from my dear friend, Peggy Whalen-Levitt. She had been journeying alongside me all these months in correspondence. Attached to this email was an unpublished article by Louis Savary, lifelong scholar of Teilhard de Chardin. Savary said Teilhard was intimating something in the final chapter of The Human Phenomenon worthy of our attention, something afoot in the unfolding of consciousness through the human.

A scholar of consciousness myself, I was on pilgrimage to avail myself perceptually in the wilds to a deeper, perhaps more nascent, order of being, to sense-feel the “within of things,” to follow longing as far as it would take me. What began as an extended winter in the Chihuahuan Desert gradually became a prolonged phenomenological inquiry through displacement, disorientation, solitude, and encounter: consciousness observing itself in motion, the displaced body the domain of inquiry.

Being wholly taken by this piece from Savary and continued correspondence with Peggy about cardiagenesis, the becoming of the human heart, I now write this essay as a continuation of that correspondence and the questions I was contemplating at the time but could not yet articulate: What is transpiring in the living world that the intellect cannot fathom but that something within can feel? How was it that I felt an immediate, everywhere presence in the depths of silence and vastness where no other human appeared? Where lives in me the pressing sense that everything is moving from within an infinitesimal whole?

* *

The heart is where feeling is most alive in us, calling us to it, and where meaning, conscience, and depth of contact with the Infinite are immanent. The heart is at once a physical-perceptual organ and a spiritual-imaginal entity with distinct but interpenetrating faculties. It bridges body and the soul centre of our being– the inner within, seat of shared sympathy, sorrow, longing, and love, as well as the imaginal– intuitive faculties.

As a physical-perceptual organ, the heart acts as a sophisticated information-processing centre, simultaneously sensing blood quality and bodily needs, and regulating the quality and intensity of the heartbeat to meet those needs. Its electromagnetic field, 5000x stronger than the brain’s, conveys encoded information beyond the body and receives such information from other hearts. It is a vital organ of perceptivity, “pressed upon” by feeling. By feeling here, we mean not emotion but the inner capacity of perceiving interiority––the inner dimension of one’s own and that of another. Feeling, in this sense, elicits a field and is perceived as a mode of direct knowing. Heartful perception receives experience as a whole, not through analysis but as living intensity.

Toward the end of The Human Phenomenon, Teilhard intimated that a further phase of evolution is afoot, beyond what he termed the noosphere, the atmosphere of thought birthed in the human. The noosphere emerges from the biosphere, the sphere of life, which in turn, emerges from the geosphere, the sphere of minerality and raw matter itself. Teilhard discerned a movement underway: evolution turning inward, involution, with consciousness intensifying rather than simply spreading out.

With this “coiling up round itself,” the noosphere begins to penetrate the sphere of feeling. Teilhard did not see this movement replacing thought so much as reorienting and deepening it through the emergent faculties of the human heart. He was pointing toward what Savary has since called the cardisphere (Gr. kardia: heart), a movement toward unified being, both within and relationally. To understand why this emergence is not merely a spiritual aspiration but an evolutionary necessity, especially now as artificial intelligence extends the reach of the noosphere, we must look at how consciousness unfolds.

Teilhard’s vision begins with what he called “the within of things”: a recognition that consciousness is not unique to humans but a dimension of matter itself from the first flaring forth. Teilhard saw the within as the “‘psychic’ face” of the universe, consciousness ever-present in the stuff of the cosmos, enclosed from the beginning in that primordial fragment of sidereal matter that would become the earth, unfolding through life, through the human, and eventually through the noosphere.

The heart’s perceptivity extends beyond what neurocardiology can measure. Meaning arises where experience meets interiority, touching the originary depth within us. This is why meaning-making and conscience belong to the heart and not mental operations. The cardisphere is consciousness awakening to and through these faculties at the very moment when noospheric development makes their necessity undeniable.

As a spiritual–imaginal entity, the heart is the site where interiority opens to the infinite depths of the Ever-Present Origin. By imaginal, we do not mean fantasy, as in imaginary. We mean a distinct mode of perception encountering a dimension of reality neither reducible to the senses nor to the intellect. This intermediate realm, the imaginal, is as real as the world of the senses and intellect, and it corresponds to a precise mode of perception. In this mode of imaginal perception, the heart grasps qualities that cannot be measured: the texture of a moment, the presence of another being, the meaning of a situation before it can be articulated, the concretion of time as purposive intensity, the Ever-Present Origin (Gebser). This is a mode of being attuned to dimensions of reality that thought alone cannot access.

This twofold nature of the heart illuminates why the cardisphere’s emergence feels urgent in these times. While AI may extend noospheric capacity exponentially, it cannot make meaning or embody conscience. These require cardispheric faculty: depth contact with the process of life, with one another, and the originary ground from which all that is arises. AI, by revealing what the noosphere alone cannot do, paradoxically necessitates cardiagenesis, making visible that certain faculties belong irreducibly to the human heart.

The heart itself is becoming an organ of conscious perception.

**

As I neared the Arctic Circle, now nine months into this journey and still contemplating Savary’s article, I began to recognize his disclosure as something I had been living into for months without yet having the language to articulate it. The sustained attention to what could be sense-felt but not yet thought seemed to me a more intense form of participation with the immediacy of the living world and, too, something altogether primordial and originary right here. Back behind the appearance of things, something is and it seems to be beckoning the human heart.

We live in an always unfinished world. We live in a world endlessly unfolding, groping through a dark not yet toward what it is always yet to become. We have lost our bearings in this world, and it is no accident. The intellect alone is insufficient to comprehend and address the complex, interpenetrating crises of our time: ecological, geopolitical, social, technological, and, increasingly, spiritual. These crises express a fundamental collapse not only in systems but in our perception of reality itself, leaving us bereft of meaning from which to respond with wisdom.

The appearance of AI at this juncture is not incidental. But neither is it the solution of our time. While computational intelligence accelerates certain forms of information processing, it cannot make meaning, cannot experience life in its depth, cannot embody conscience as the faculty of feeling-with. Nor can it participate in the given openness to the unfolding of life, that faculty of hope imbued in life itself.

While it may be alluring to believe that technological advances can save us, they cannot turn the tides of existential disorientation at the threshold of a shift in consciousness, which must always be distinguished from intelligence. Something deeper is at play, more fundamental to the unfolding of the world. From a cosmogenetic, evolutionary perspective, something is pressing toward emergence—a movement in consciousness itself. And it requires our participation.

**

The moment the pilgrimage plunged me into the Arctic Ocean, I had been days alone in the vast nascence of a largely untouched place on earth, but for the pushed dirt over rumpled frost heaves that formed a makeshift road. And yet, I had never been less alone. The “air” was “thick” with presence. This presence, not of a being but of being itself, was just as pressing in the Arctic waters.

This passage of the pilgrimage was a perceptual border-crossing. The presence seemed to touch and radiate out from the depths of the heart. For a few years, I could not speak it. Only later did it strike me as participation in something wholly incomprehensible to conceptuality, an experience of the latency of what Jean Gebser was mapping structurally across epochs of human perception.

If Teilhard gives us a cosmological vision of consciousness as the within unfolding the universe, Gebser gives us a structural vision: how that within shapes human experience and perception across epochs through distinct structures:

archaic > magic > mythical > mental > integral

Together, they reveal consciousness as a movement of perception away from origin––until the integral structure now emerging.

Both Teilhard and Gebser recognised that the unfolding reaches moments of impasse. As it relates to the human, the structure is no longer adequate to the conditions it faces. At such thresholds, what has been latent presses into expression, affecting a perceptual border-crossing, in which the human “accrue[s] new dimensions of consciousness in addition to those already present.”

Where does cardiagenesis emerge in this unfolding?

For Gebser, in the early human, consciousness existed in a state of undifferentiated fusion with the world; consciousness in the world, experienced in the human as everywhere aliveness. Later, in the magic structure, the sense of everywhere aliveness had metamorphosed to the subtle sense of an everywhere felt presence. When death appeared in awareness, another perceptual border was crossed. Now, the presence was encountered not only in life but in death itself. The shift is critical. Consciousness turned inward to human experience, to inner feeling, budding wonder, and the first glimmers of reflection on those feelings.

What Rudolph Otto refers to as the all-at-onceness of mysterium tremendum (tremulousness in the felt presence) and mysterium fascinans (fascination in the face of such mystery), we might today articulate as the human becoming arrested with wonder, a leap of inner quickening when the perceived familiar is suddenly not that. For the earlier human, the sudden movement of inner feeling at the seemingly strange was novel. It was an immensity, stirring (prerational) wonder as a gesture toward intimacy with the feeling. Hence, the earlier human turns at once breathlessly toward the world and toward the inner feeling itself. Gebser might refer to this moment as the awakening of the human soul, the heart its organ of emphasis in its infancy of perception.

The mythical structure gave expression to this interiority through image, symbol, and poetry. Around 800 BCE, the mental structure emerged, and with it a rapidly developing neocortex and emerging analytical capacity, perception of space and time as measurable, the construct of “I” (over here) facing the world (out there), and burgeoning separation.

In Gebser’s account, a next mutation is taking place today toward what he names the integral structure. In Teilhardian terms, this mutation corresponds with the movement of involution. What must be understood as nothing less than an epochal shift is perceived by the intensifying of the faculties of the human heart.

We might call this process cardiagenesis: the emergence of the heart as a conscious organ, through which perception, meaning, feeling, and relation are deepened and unified, the world becomes transparent to its originary ground, and time appears as an intensity.

The emergent cardisphere is a movement in the unfolding of consciousness. We do not produce this movement. We cannot force it. We cannot technique our way through cardiagenesis. But we can orient attention, allow awareness to rest in the heart, and meet an experience with open receptivity rather than analysis. We can develop fidelity to this open receptivity and imaginal perception as itself a mode of knowing. Such receptivity is not passivity. It is exacting and embodied, requiring us to remain with experience without premature abstraction, endure ambiguity without the need for resolution, and allow meaning to be revealed rather than imposing it. In this way, we become willing participants in what is pressing toward emergence. I have seen and experienced this.

In the autumn and early winter of 2025, an intimate group of participants joined me on a journey we called, “Awakening to the Heart.” We came together to engage the heart as an organ of radical receptivity, perceptivity, palpable radiance, and imaginal translucence. What stirred me was how immediately the group moved from thinking about the heart to entering into and indwelling its depths. It was body-inhabited inner work. We could feel that together we were giving ourselves over to the heart’s invisible depths: to the ground of inner feeling, intensifying presence, deepening interiority, spiritual sensorium, and the loosening of the grip of ego-consciousness.

What I am coming to understand through the sustained inner work of cardiagenesis is that the strength of the work is not so much the insights it might avail to the human at an epochal threshold but that it transforms our quality of presence through this transition: to what is actually happening through transmutation of perception, depth of conscience, interior fidelity to staying steady amidst ambiguity and uncertainty, to remaining open to what is emerging rather than foreclosing it to what we believe we know.

This inner work of cardiagenesis is not retreat from complexity; it is the cultivation of faculties that complexity requires. Neither is it in opposition to the noosphere; it is its necessary complement and emergent sine qua non for the epochal shift. Cardiagenesis is not a dismissal from action in the world; it is a transformation of the quality of perception and presence we bring to that action. Whether we avail ourselves to this evolutionary task, pressing upon us with beseeching, is always open to us, each recognising that what we do we do in service to the whole.

Selected Sources:

Corbin, Henry. “Mundus Imaginalis or the Imaginary and the Imaginal.” Paper delivered at the Colloquium on Symbolism, Paris, June 1964. Cahiers Internationaux de Symbolisme 6. Brussels, 1964, pp. 3–26. See also Alone with the Alone: Creative Imagination in the Sūfism of Ibn ‘Arabī. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997.

Deignan, Kathleen N. The Divine Milieu: Teilhard de Chardin. Silver Spring, MD: Learn25, 2017.

Gebser, Jean. The Ever-Present Origin. Trans. Noel Barstad and Algis McKunas. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1949/1985.

Eli, Renee. “Something Shall Be.” Substack.

McCraty, Rollin. “The Energetic Heart: Bioelectromagnetic Interactions within and between People.” HeartMath Research Centre, Institute of HeartMath, Publication No. 02-035. Boulder Creek, CA: HeartMath Institute, 2002. www.heartmath.org

Otto, Rudolf. The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry into the Non-Rational Factor in the Idea of the Divine and Its Relation to the Rational. Trans. John W. Harvey. London: Oxford, 1936.

Parsons, Howard L. “A Philosophy of Wonder,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. 30, no. 1 (September, 1969), pp. 84–101. https://doi.org/10.2307/2105923

Sardello, Robert. The Collected Notes of Integral Spiritual Psychology: Foundations for a Spirituality of the Future, vol. 1 – Foundations. Granbury, TX: Goldenstone Press.

Savary, Louis. “Teilhard’s New Sphere: Emergence of the Cardisphere.” Unpublished manuscript.

Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre. The Human Phenomenon. Trans. Barnard Wall. New York: HarperPerennial, 1958.

Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre. “The Meaning and Constructive Value of Suffering.” Trans. Noël Lindsay. In Neville Braybrooke, ed., Teilhard de Chardin: Pilgrim of the Future. New York: Seabury Press, 1964, pp. 23–28.

People sometimes giggle when I say I’m an anarchist. Sometimes I giggle too to make them feel more comfortable. But this is my belief to my core, now even my life’s purpose.

It’s time to declare our utopias.

- Carne Ross

Why is Perspectiva publishing a book about anarchism?

Because it is excellent, timely, and generative.

But why anarchism?

Well, what do you think anarchism is?

I think of chaos, disorder, violence, randomness, and the breakdown of law and order.

Well, you are not alone, but that is an unfortunate misunderstanding and mischaracterisation; some would even say it’s a deliberate misrepresentation by the powerful to protect vested interests from an entirely natural phenomenon.

Anarchism is a deep belief in the human capacity to cooperate, a heartfelt commitment to democracy in its truest senses, a suspicion of illegitimate authority that rests on violence and more-or-less arbitrary coercive state power, and an understanding of the emancipatory dignity of collective agency and mutual aid.

Can you define it?

I thought I just did, but it’s not clear if definitions help. Anarchism is not one body of thought or an explicit agenda, but more like a sensibility and outlook that arises from a diverse range of sources and experiences. Leo Tolstoy was a (Christian) anarchist, Emma Goldman was a (feminist) anarchist, Mahatma Gandhi was a (anti-imperial/Hindu) anarchist, Ursula K. Le Guin was a (Taoist) anarchist, David Graeber was an (anthropologist) anarchist, and Noam Chomsky is a (linguist) anarchist. What these people have in common is a belief that the world does not have to be the way it is, and that it can and should be remade.

That’s not possible without violence! There is always a shadow side to idealism. The notion of ripping up and starting again terrifies me.

It’s not about wilful destruction, nor even starting from scratch. It’s about noticing how institutional power constrains the human spirit and our collective capacity to live well, and finding countervailing forms of power through solidarity. The Czech dissident Vaclav Havel was not an anarchist, but his famous samizdat essay - The Power of the Powerlesss - is anarchism-adjacent, and there he writes:

A better system will not automatically ensure a better life. In fact, the opposite is true: only by creating a better life can a better system be developed.

This is a variant on Buckminster Fuller’s widely quoted injunction to build a new model that makes the old one obsolete, and informs the political injunction to “invite people to a better party”. In practice that kind of purposive experimentalism can mean, for instance, withdrawing consent from unjust laws, replacing dependency on authority with mutual aid, taking decisions as far as possible outside of established structures, providing services through gift exchange, and creating new forms of cultural legitimacy through socialising good collective habits. Understood in this way, anarchism is fundamentally a praxis and a political artform, and it’s experimental in nature. It can and should be fundamentally about persuasion through a critical mass of people demonstrating another way to live.

But doesn’t it mean something like ‘rule by nobody’ - sounds like a recipe for disaster!

Well, that’s the question - why do we assume that? And is it not time to reconsider it? Anarchists are all for rules that are co-created and revisited, and also for leadership that fits contexts and purposes, not as permanent roles conferring power over others on an indefinite basis. In fact Chomsky even says (In Understanding Power 2002):

Anarchy as a social philosophy has never meant chaos - in fact, anarchists have typically believed in a highly organised society, jusy one that’s organised democratically from below.

And as for the recipe, our current recipe has led to the breaching of several planetary boundaries, genocides are underway, millions are wage slaves in some shape or form, and some believe we are on the cusp of nuclear war. Is there not already a kind of disaster unfolding?

I am not sure I would call it a disaster; any system will have its problems.

Well, yes, including anarchism - it’s no panacea and it also has its shadow; but would most people not prefer to have problems of their own making, rather than problems imposed on them by others that they have to contort themselves to adapt to? The French-Vietnamese artist Swan Dao is an anarchist, and when he is not doing handstands or singing (or perhaps especially then) he articulates it well:

Anarchists do not refuse order as such, but the established social order – an order that is regarded as fundamentally unjust, exploitative, anomic, morally debilitating, and self-alienating. It breeds conformity, indifference, and hypocrisy, and creates docile, dependent, and psychologically repressed automatons.

As you can see, for some, anarchism is more closely tied to the social and institutional constraints on spiritual awakening than to any gratuitous violence. In fact, it is more like a response to what the peace activist Galtung called structural violence.

But most people are more-or-less content and have lives worth living, and the established social order is a hard-earned achievement. Democracy, the rule of law, the free market - it’s only because of these touchstones that you can freely publish a book about anarchism without fear. Your individual freedom is more precious, precarious, and rare than you seem to realise. Historically, things have been much more chaotic and violent - try living during the Thirty Years' War before The Treaty of Westphalia - states and boundaries are part of peace, and I would not want to wish away the order we have achieved - I think we might soon want it back.

Ok, I can certainly grant that the state is not always bad, and rules are sometimes helpful. But given the state of the world, imagine instead we were publishing a book about the wisdom of the state and the kindness of capitalism, and why the future depends on state-led capitalism - would that seem like a good idea?

No, though you are caricaturing things there a bit.

And what of state-led socialism? Would that be your cup of tea?

No, but…

And you know that at least until recently, and still to a large extent, we have been living under neoliberalism as the prevailing orthodoxy on political economy? Two of the best short definitions of neoliberalism are both by Will Davies: “The disenchantment of politics by economics”, and “the state-led remaking of society on the model of the market”.

What’s your point?

The political and economic orders are inextricably linked, and anarchism serves this moment well by drawing attention to the common factor - the state-led bit. That point applies to the way that the state today is so closely aligned with techno-capital power in many places while being unable or unwilling to create transformative economic change. I am intrigued by anarchism because, among political philosophies, it’s the only one that says our biggest problem may be hiding in plain sight.

Sounds a bit too high level, abstract…

Is ‘the state’ abstract? Maybe, but it’s a root cause we need to consider. And whether you accept the arguments or not, you will be familiar with the idea that the fundamental driver of many social and ecological ills is ‘capitalism’, even if that can be defined in many ways, and even if that doesn’t mean that capitalism has not also done a lot of good to raise levels of prosperity, and still does so now in some parts of the world.

Yes.

Right, well, anarchism, too, can cause harm, and it can and does go wrong, and it can also be defined in many ways, but it has its own coherence and dignity. It has a wide range of philosophical tributaries, it has varied over history, but in today’s iterations, essentially it takes the view that extractive capitalism - a system that prioritises profit over people and planet - is now what the state serves, what the state does, and to an extent what the state is (and similar points arguably apply to socialism too, at least as it has manifest in history).

The problem is that while democracy is in theory, “government of the people, for the people, by the people”, empirically it tends to morph into “government of the state, for capital interests, through the rule of law.” In other words, those who are ‘anti-capitalist’ may have the wrong ultimate target if what they are implicitly advocating is a more beneficient state. The deeper challenge of our time may not be to end capitalism, whatever that would mean, but to free ourselves from dependence on the state. The former may depend on the latter.

I see, I think. Well, let’s say I even agreed with all that, which I don’t, it sounds absurdly ambitious, and even a little ridiculous.

Well, maybe, but why do you think the UN COP process, for instance, has not only failed to address climate change, but arguably made it worse? There is a prima facie case that when states get together to act to ‘save the planet’, most of them, at least the more powerful ones, don’t know how to do it outside of an economic model that is driving the problem.

So it’s a problem of perception?

Partly. Just as it can be an illusion to see a lake and its nearby land as separate things rather than a watershed or bioregion, or to see the mind and body as separate things rather than connected parts of the same embedded organism, so it is with the state and capital interests - anarchism’s contention is that they stand and fall together.

Look, I get that the world is in a bit of a pickle, but there is a story of progress to tell, too - millions are being lifted out of poverty, and until the last few years, the world was becoming more peaceful.

I don’t deny there has been an extraordinary story of progress in some respects, nor that there are still pockets of progress in some places, but a great deal depends on where you place your attention, and what you measured. The overall trend in the early 21st century is towards economic and ecological instability, governance failures, concentrations of power, an increase in conflict, and catastrophic risk. When you consider the state of the world, do you really think it is fundamentally working ok, and that it just needs a few tweaks here and there?

No, I’d say it’s a bit worse than that now, and I’m a little scared of nuclear war breaking out, and maybe AI getting somehow out of control, but I also see some things getting better, and like many others, I see the case for hoping for the best, and just soldiering on.

Soldiering on! That’s an interesting choice of words. The value of being more aware of anarchism is that it indicates why we are soldiers in a sense, with the state ultimately being an instrument of violence that we have to obey.

Wait, so are you saying the rule of law is optional?

That question is a kind of trap. I think an anarchist would say that it is highly problematic that the rule of the rich and powerful - an oligarchy essentially - hides behind the apparent virtue of the rule of law and imposes it without any meaningful consent.

Sounds like you are saying the rule of law might be optional.

It’s not an entirely innocent question because the history of emancipation is the story of resisting unjust laws rather than all laws; and in Perspectiva language that kind of “you can’t possibly be saying…” approach is part of The H2minus vortex. I’d say it depends what you mean, and more generally, I beg to differ.

I think we have a relatively short window of time to protect and promote what we love about life for ourselves and for future generations. And this is partly why Perspectiva is interested in a revival of our understanding of anarchism, and considering what it might mean in the second quarter of the 21st century, when so much is at stake, and it is unclear how best to act.

What’s the connection? At first blush, it sounds like it would just make things worse.

Everything depends on how things are done, but it follows from our premises that we have to be open to some version of 21st century anarchism even if it is described differently. We believe there is a pattern of historical culmination that has led to what we (and many others) call the metacrisis. Our belief that the state, as it is currently conceived, being what states are, and doing what states do, might be an integral part of the solution rather than a fundamental part of the problem, might be part of “the multi-faceted delusion” that has led to the world being in such a perilous state. So much of the current predicament is a kind of freeze response, in which we wait for states to act in our interests without really understanding what states are.

I see, and so I guess anarchism also features in your back-of-the-envelope plan to save the world. What did you call it? The flip, the formation and the fun?

It’s mostly the fun. It’s mostly ‘the better party’ we need to co-create and jointly host and keep going to draw people away from the parties that are not going well and are likely to end very badly. Anarchism may also be part of a vision of how a very different political economy comes into being that may be bio-regional in shape and cosmo-local in ethos (anarchism is closely connected to a belief in the commons). Yet there are aspects of the flip in the metanoic sense of anarchism offering an entirely new gestalt (as outlined in the book) and aspects of the formation, in that anarchism is fundamentally a praxis in which lifelong learning is fundamental.

Right, so you are anarchists now?

No! I didn’t say that. I still enjoy living a liberal life and I have not forsaken it. Nonetheless, I’ve tried to share why some of Perspectiva’s main premises and ideas lead to a position that has to be at least a little anarchism-curious. Since the climate regime based on states has failed to adapt to ecological collapse and has failed to regulate technology; and since the metacrisis is largely a critique of liberalism and capitalism; and since socialism and communism have yet to show their efficacy in ways that don’t end in collapse or violence; and since feminism has not yet taken power, and fascism is a real and present danger; it is time to give anarchism some attention, and even some love.

Love?

Yes, in fact, the book argues that anarchism, properly conceived, is love, but you’ll have to read it to find out why.

OK, tell me more about the book then.

Well, it’s consistent with prior Perspective publications that combine a personal story of identity formation with a broader intellectual adventure, in the spirit of, for instance, Unlearn, The Entangled Activist and The Politics of Waking Up.

There We Human Again is a memoir of sorts, or perhaps more precisely a non-fiction political bildungsroman, in the sense that it’s about the formation of an identity and worldview and what has been learned along the way. It’s about the construction of the author’s political worldview - his desire to become a diplomat and his experience of acting for the UK government, and then his disillusionment with his own government, the collapse of that worldview, and a complete reconstruction based on his loss of faith not just in his own state, but states in general.

That sounds interesting, but you said it was a book about anarchism.

It very much is, but the book is powerful precisely because the author - Carne Ross - was a consummate state-actor, within the state, for the state, formed by and through and for the state, and so to repudiate the state in the way he does carries conviction and makes the reader pay attention.

How does the book unfold?

Well, some of it is a personal narrative of an experience of transformation, moving from the glamour of statecraft to the challenge of preparing packed lunches for his children while getting his local council to fulfil their obligations. Indeed, in her endorsement, Indra Adnan, who introduced Carne to Perspectiva, says:

For the man who once rattled around in his New York penthouse, waiting for his next chance to influence global outcomes, the journey to human solidarity has been profound.

Some of that story was told in the documentary, The Accidental Anarchist, but this book details the author’s growing understanding and commitment to anarchism.

While reading, I was occasionally reminded of Robert Pirsig in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, because the author shares his inner and outer journey with the reader, moving between them seamlessly, with rich descriptions of places where he has witnessed anarchist-style communities and advised them, for instance, in Rojava. But the best quick answer is to show you the table of contents:

OK, that doesn’t look too shabby. But what’s with the title: There We Are Human Again?

Well, according to the book, the current dispensation of the world is dehumanising in a range of ways, not least loss of political agency, and economic servitude, and so ‘There’ is anarchism: a different way of being, knowing and living.

We considered other titles like Gentle Anarchy, Two Kinds of Anarchy and The Future is Anarchy, but we felt anarchy was too loaded a term for the general reader, and so we preferred to create a curiosity gap, an open question to which anarchism was a possible answer.

Ok, I am beginning to understand why you are doing this. Is there anything else I should know about this book?

Well, in my view it is extremely well written. Carne has authored several previous books and has drafted text at high levels at the UN, and the prose is crisp, compelling, and often very candid. The writing moves between excoriating critique, qualified idealism and personal testimony, including disarming asides like the following:

I too covet ‘nice’ shoes, ‘nice’ coats and, most pathetically, a ‘nice’ computer bag – one that offers both functionality and expresses a style appropriate to my ‘personality’, itself in part a function of a society which puts me in a particular place, a particular status, a particular prescribed depiction of my humanity (what should a white, middle-aged, writer and anarchist wear?).

I have shared a few additional extracts below to give you a flavour of the writing:

It was the actions of my own government – my own colleagues – that convinced me that government itself was not to be trusted.

I now ask myself if I didn’t partly become a diplomat because it was a ready-formed identity, into which I could enclose myself and, zipping myself up, be insulated from the vicissitudes of confronting actual human adult existence.

I had told the Foreign Office that I intended to study the empirical basis of policymaking. Little did they know, little did I know, that this would form my first steps towards anarchy.

Life shouldn’t be about the future. It should be good enough here and now.

Meanwhile, the power we have over the state is slightly greater than zero, but only slightly – a vote every five years. By contrast, the power the government has over us is absolute in almost every aspect of our lives. It’s an absurd and grotesque imbalance. This is what we call ‘democracy’.

Agency is at the heart of our well-being. We cannot enjoy a life of freedom and flourishing without it. As long as there is imposed authority, we are denied the ability to live as we wish or to negotiate our needs directly with other people. There is only one solution: give agency back. What this means is not less democracy, as the fascists threaten, but more.

That sense of inferiority and failure is a product of the system. Most of us feel that we have failed in some fundamental way. Notably, this is an individual mental feeling – we feel it alone. We do not share our shame.

There is a wholly different story of humanity’s past to tell, one not of kings, queens and empires but of civilisations which practised equality, non-hierarchy and self-government.

And here we find ourselves again, back to the same questions. Perhaps at our deepest level we are afraid of losing the religion of capitalism. If we don’t believe in that materialist and horribly logical belief system, what do we believe in?

These anarchists realised that asking others to effect change was futile. It had to come from oneself. And therein lay great liberation and joy.

The essence of anarchism is multiplicity and heterogeneity: there is no one way of revolution.

So the conclusion we’re left with is that the only way to de-centre growth as the ‘point’ of society and indeed government is to shift to a different kind of democracy where everyone is included, delivering different decisions about what matters – social solidarity, justice, provision of basic services to live.

It was a dispiriting exercise of wading through long, over-negotiated and tedious texts, dense with wordy reaffirmations of past agreements and light on actual decisions to do or change anything, and endlessly trying to pep up demoralised and overworked diplomats. Meanwhile, in the real world outside the negotiating chamber, Palestinians were being slaughtered in their tens of thousands in the Gaza Strip; Russian missiles rained down on Ukrainian cities.

I would eat entire packets of chocolate Hobnobs on my way back from the supermarket. I gained thirty pounds.

The attacks on the World Trade Center did indeed transport New Yorkers into a shared and very stark and present reality, where for once we were not individuals selfishly seeking our own goals, obsessing about our own lives, but we were experiencing something extraordinary together. A glib term for this might be ‘bonding experience’, but it was much more than that. It was something more which, of course, I am struggling to put into words. An intensity of being. Something that we could only experience in relationship to one another; it was created together, as we at last encountered ‘the real’. It was beautiful and sad, forged by the sharing of our all-too-tangible experience but also other worldly, ineffable, immeasurable, ethereal…essential. Strangely, I miss it now. I wonder why it took mass death to throw us into that limitless dimension.

As one marketing expert put it to me, people want to buy meaning. The trouble is, of course, that it cannot be bought.

It feels scary and decidedly unfashionable to use words of great ambition and aspiration. But I believe that something magnificent is available, if only we see it, if only we have the courage to build it. A world where we at last can find fulfilment, meaning and purpose, through the practice of intimate cooperation and mutual aid, an environment propitious for that most vital and epic of human needs, wants and joys – love itself, an act not just a feeling. I have no words adequate to convey its gravity or its qualities except to say that it is the most important thing of all.

OK, I am not an anarchist yet, and probably never will be, but I like the sound of the book. When is it out and where can I order it?

There We Are Human Again: A Diplomat’s Journey to Anarchism is published by Perspectiva Press in the UK on June 9 2026, and in the US on August 11 2026.

We invite and encourage prospective readers to consider buying the book somewhere other than Amazon, though you can do so here. In the US, we suggest you consider pre-ordering at Bookshop.Org. In the UK we are having some technical problems with Bookshop.org so we suggest you consider pre-ordering at Waterstones. If you would like to keep track of news relating to Carne’s book, please see the dedicated page on his website.

**Pre-ordering greatly helps to bring the book to people’s attention, so your support is much appreciated. Thank you!**

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*Perspectiva communications come roughly every two weeks on average, though sometimes weekly in busier periods. If, for whatever reason, you would prefer not to receive them, there is an unsubscribe option marked clearly at the bottom of the email, before the Substack sign.

A major question for any thinking and feeling person, and a central inquiry in our network, is this: What is emerging?

In what might be one of the best short online lectures ever, Daniel Schmachtenberger describes emergence as “the closest thing to magic that is actually a scientifically admissible term.” Emergence is described there as a process of attractive forces – phenomena drawn to different aspects of itself - giving rise to relationship – non-random patterns of connection - then to ‘synergy’ – a whole that appears to be greater than the sum of its parts - and then emergence, which is about how that ‘greater’ manifests.

While emergence is a serious idea, the question - what is emerging? -has become so overfamiliar in our network that it is almost funny. This reflective query is experienced by many as a kind of jester koan, and a wry grin often accompanies it. The question has philosophical and scientific dignity and practical and political relevance, but it is also a polite way to frame a familiar inquiry expressed in plain terms: What is happening to the world? Or, in internet patois: LOL, WTF?

As part of Perspectiva’s strategic review after a decade of work, we are clarifying our relationship to a range of projects we have had full or partial responsibility for, including older ones that we are proud of, and a particularly promising one we will be launching soon. Perspectiva uses this platform to develop and communicate our work on understanding the relationship between systems, souls, and society in theory and practice, including inquiries arising from our activities and outputs. As regular readers will know, our work is a form of philosophical activism that manifests in publications, networks, institutions, practices, courses and events.

As indicated in recent weeks, in addition to our applied philosophical work, Perspectiva seeks to invite others here to amplify some of the best thinking, writing and acting in the field of inquiry and practice that Perspectiva’s role in the Emerge project has helped to create and coordinate. What follows is an overview of some of the things that now appear to be submerging as others emerge, at the point where Emerge is integrated into Perspectiva’s other existing and new initiatives, and Emerge begins to be led and managed through different activities and entities.

The Emerge project was initiated in 2018 by Perspectiva in London, the Ekskäret Foundation in Stockholm, and the Co-Creation Loft in Berlin. Together, we noticed that across Northern Europe, many people working in a diverse range of fields – in media, education, enterprise, technology, arts and politics – shared an emerging sensibility that went beyond their own fields and highlighted connections between them. That sensibility has historical, philosophical, aesthetic, cultural, political and spiritual aspects. It’s about sensing, as my colleague Ivo Mensch puts it, that

Collectively we are living a life that no longer exists.

The world of the Bretton Woods settlement, the UN Declaration of Human Rights and our framework of nation states, the rule of law and purportedly reliable market mechanisms appear to be unable to adapt – at a fundamental level of design, values, coordination and mandate – to the new internet and AI mediated information system it has created, the ecological strain it has generated, and the levels of inequality and concentrations of financial power it has permitted.

We are therefore all caught up in a gradual but quickening transition into a different kind of world that is ominous in many ways – ecological collapse, techno-servitude, and proto-fascism loom large – but it is still fundamentally up for grabs. We should expect the unexpected, and the unrecognisable, and the unfathomable, without assuming it is all bad, and doing what we can to ensure it isn’t. We decided to try to give this kind of sensibility a socio-digital home, and the main point of Emerge since its inception has been to help a nascent field of inquiry and practice to find itself, know itself and fulfil its potential.

Perspectiva has played a major role in creating, developing and supporting the Emerge project and assumed overall management responsibility for it in 2021. Emerge is now an image/brand that connects a network by loose affiliations and a (dormant) Mighty Network, it is a website (www.whatisemering.com that we support - previously edited by Tarn Rodgers Johns, and now by Layman Pascal, and it has been a series of 2-3 day gatherings (Berlin in 2018 and 2021, Kyiv in 2019, and several local, smaller ones). When Russia began its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, we also hosted online sessions with our Ukrainian network, including a day-long “Explosion of Social Trust” event for Ukraine in June 2023 (our only 8-hour online video!) and later, Emerge was involved with a Pilgrimage to Kyiv. More recently, Ivo Mensch and Leigh Biddlecome acted for Emerge, supported by Perspectiva, in the Cohere Plus project, which was funded by the EU Erasmus scheme.

I have personally written several pieces making sense of the initiative, often ahead of critical meetings, including What is Emerging? in 2019. Perspectiva also employed a Director of Emergence to run the Emerge project (Professor Anna Katharina Schaffner) from 2021 to 2022. We have given editorial and financial support to the website and to staff and associates contributing to various aspects of the work.

Emerge has other sub-projects where Perspectiva has not been involved, or where our role is auxiliary. For instance, there was a major Emerge North America event in Austin Texas in 2022 where our Chair of Trustees played a leading role, but Perspectiva staff had no role in designing the gathering, though we did support it with the series Now that you’ve found the others, what are you going to do? which was shared for participants to read and discuss before the event. To give some idea of the impact of these Emerge events, please see a fascinating and extended reflection on the event by Astrid Montuclard in Integral Leadership Review and a challenging but still broadly supportive reflection by Brendan Graham Dempsey.

In other cases, our role is more associative. The Emerge podcast by Daniel Thorson, for instance, was an invaluable part of the Emerge ecosystem, and it shared the Emerge brand, but it was initiated and led independently - and very well - by Daniel.

More recently, Emerge Lakefront is a major new conscious co-living initiative on the outskirts of Stockholm, a wonderful place and a boon to the network, but again, where Perspectiva has no direct responsibility.

There is also a European Worldmaking Forum scheduled in Berlin for October 23-25, 2026, which will invite the Emerge network. I plan to be there, and the organisation still supports the event in a range of ways, not least due to our own commitment to worldmaking and desire to contribute to joint European efforts, but it is not a Perspectiva event.

So, as you can see, Perspectiva has played a defining role in Emerge, but the project appears to be evolving in ways that make it easier for us to let it go to a large extent, which is important as we release capacity to focus on other things.

**

I have been reflecting on the part Emerge has played in Perspectiva’s work so far. On our website, which, like most websites, needs updating, if you click on what we ‘Do’ you see the options on the right:

The whole theory of change is for another time, but these terms each reflect a different idea of what we believe needs to happen and how we hope to contribute. Insight is mostly about our intellectual output in books, essays, and events; Praxis is mostly about innovations in socio-spiritual inquiry and new forms of embodied and relational learning, including our antidebate methodology. Realisation is mostly about our commitment to 21st-century Bildung, which initially manifested as an annual festival. And Emergence is fundamentally about social diffusion across networks, and it manifested in the Emerge project. At a time when the world is profoundly stuck in its capacity to respond to incipient collapse, Perspectva felt we needed new ideas, but also that since ideas compete with each other, we need ideas enacted in new practices to shift inertia; we hope the learnings from both theory and practice might manifest in new cultural and educational forms. That requires receptive and generative social networks to help create what is sometimes called a norm cascade, moving the future from the margins into the centre of world-creating activity.

More recently, in terms of our premises, the activities of the Emerge project speak from and to all of them in some ways, but principally to premises one, four, five, eight and, at least potentially, ten.

On Perspectiva’s website, we describe Emerge as follows:

Philosophically, Emerge is inspired by the way the meaning of emergence highlights the possibility of a different intentional stance towards the world; one that is grounded in receptivity, intuition and subtlety rather than ideology, reason and force. We (and yes, it might be an impossible we) are informed by the scale of the meta-crisis and we are not politically naïve. Some call it a spiritual perspective in the sense that it’s less about imposing our wills than listening deeply to what we appear to be called upon to be and do. The challenge for each of us is to accept the reality of our contingency and interdependence, because “I am part of all that” – while also taking responsibility for our uniqueness and autonomy – because “I am part of all that”. And that tension between our actions not really mattering, and the fact that all that matters arises in a world awash with greed, hatred and delusion, when it is not even clear if we are on the right side of history. Are we the good guys? It is a different kind of game. All over the world, networks and organisations are rising up to explore unchartered intellectual, spiritual or cultural terrain that invites ways of being, thinking, and doing and building new forms of institutional praxis and political capital around them. Such initiatives are at the heart of our Emerge network.

So far, so nostalgic. Now what?

As with a few other projects, Perspectiva has acted as an incubator for something that has expanded and consolidated and is ready for new oversight and direction. We will always be co-initiators and early shapers of the project and its network, and will continue to support Emerge as far as we can. However, it is time for Perspectiva to pass along managerial responsibility to a recently created entity called The Emerge Institute, which is registered as a non-profit initiative in Sweden, and is currently acting as the educational/practice arm of Emerge Lakefront.

Perspectiva will still be closely connected to the Emerge project in its new instantiations. The whatisemerging.com website is old and lacks interactive capacity, so there will not be new postings there for very long. Instead, the current intention is to create a new Emerge Substack, which will be the responsibility of The Emerge Institute. That substack will begin by including highlights from the Emerge website over the last few years until the Emerge Institute is ready to share its new offerings, most likely from the Autumn onwards.

As a reminder, if you don’t wish to receive these messages, there is an unsubscribe button at the bottom of the message. That’s all for now on admin.

On more exciting matters, I can warmly recommend recent Katie Teague videos, particularly on Cynthia Bourgeault, and Zak Stein - both are truly excellent and well worth your time.

In our next post, we’ll be announcing a new book by Perspectiva Press. There are many ways to frame what it’s about, but it can be seen as a radical way to attempt to transform the relationship between systems, souls and society in theory and practice.

It’s about anarchism, no less. The state we’re in is not unrelated to the nature and purpose of the states we have. Rather than look to the state for answers, what if the answer lies in freeing ourselves from reliance on the state?

See you again soon.

Jonathan Rowson, CEO of Perspectiva and Co-Initiator of Emerge.

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As indicated, my impression is that the imaginal realm is a real place that is not a real place. The imaginal is both within and between our material and spiritual realities in ways that are hard to fathom. Although the ‘realm’ has no spatial extension, it is a kind of space, and it has a temporal and causal reality, and that possibility is untroubling for those who can grasp that consciousness exists in time, but not in space as we know it. The imaginal realm also appears to be an abode where indwelling occurs, and that becomes credible when we discern that what dwells there are not physical entities, but something that appears to be at once personal, archetypal, normative, ideational, and agentic. This repository of virtuous form reaches us through intuitions and imagery, and these dispatches are not directives of celestial oversight from above but more like a kind of noetic solidarity, liquefactions of our collective mystical heart in the near beyond. While that heart is not a being, it is interactive and agentic Being-in-Action. Meaning arises from there, filtered through experience in patterns we can only perceive in particular ways that might best be described as chiastic, namely those myriad phenomena that criss-cross into the very centre of our lives, a centre that makes us explode with laughter and well up with tears of joy, and that is perhaps best understood as what Jean Gebser called the ever-present origin.

So that’s what I want us to see, and the question is why we struggle to see it.

With his world-historical moustache, Freidrich Nietzsche could hardly be considered woo, but in the context of this inquiry series the following passage from Ecce Homo (1888) is striking:

After all, no one can draw more out of things, books included, than he already knows. A man has no ears for that to which experience has given him no access. To take an extreme case, suppose a book contains simply incidents which lie quite outside the range of general or even rare experience — suppose it to be the first language to express a whole series of experiences. In this case nothing it contains will really be heard at all, and, thanks to an acoustic delusion, people will believe that where nothing is heard there is nothing to hear.”

A person who is hard of hearing does not reject a sound as unreal; they simply do not experience it and have nothing to react to. The classic HG Wells novel, The Country of the Blind, is also noteworthy for the attribution of madness and non-conformity to the precious gift of sight. In both versions of the book (1904 and 1939), the community considers an operation to remove the eyes as a kind, compassionate solution. Only by removing the ‘so-called sight’ can the visitor ‘fit in’. The attribution of deviance and delusion to a form of perception that is of considerable value is tragic precisely because it is understandable and even recognisable. Radically new perspectives on reality threaten the coherence and culture of a world created without that perspective.

Beyond senses, in a geometrical (and satirical) vein, Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions, by Edwin Abbott (1884) features a sphere visiting the world of squares, triangles and lines, trying to describe the third dimension, and again this perspective is mostly ridiculed. However, a particularly fascinating (and amusing) detail is that Sphere lifts Square to help him see the third dimension, Square suddenly gets it, but then asks Sphere about further dimensions beyond the third, and Sphere denies any such possibility!…

I remember reading both these sources for my Philosophy of Religion paper at Oxford in 1998. My gratitude to Tim Mawson, who is still there, for offering these lateral perspectives. From memory, that week’s essay was about finding the right epistemic relationship to people who claim to have had spiritual or religious experience, and these lateral readings have stayed with me. They helped me to feel the significance of an important and widely quoted line by CS Lewis in A Grief Observed:

Five senses; an incurably abstract intellect; a haphazardly selective memory; a set of preconceptions and assumptions so numerous that I can never examine more than a minority of them — never become conscious of them all. How much of total reality can such an apparatus let through?

Beyond Substance Ontology

If we care to understand what might be meant by ‘imaginal realm’ as intimated by Corbin, Hilman, Bourgeault and others, and why it might have cultural and supra-political power that is needed today, as I believe, we have to resolutely shed the substance ontology that most educated Western minds are formed by, and riddled with, including our folkish understandings of space and time. In another of Katie Teague’s wonderful videos, Cynthia Bourgeault connects the perception of the imaginal realm with Jean Gebser’s integral structure of consciousness, and makes this point resolutely:

Substance ontology and the mental structure of consciousness are almost synonymous.

Substance ontology is essentially the idea that the stuff of the world has a material, quality-bearing substrate and that we live in a world of things with qualities rather than relationships between processes. Substance ontology gives rise to a dualistic view of the world in which subjects ‘in here’ perceive objects ‘out there’. The ‘mental structure’ is a reference to the Swiss archaeologist prophet Jean Gebser, but it has wider application, including in Vanessa Andreotti’s ‘House of Modernity’, and it is part of the argument in Iain McGilchrist’s The Master and His Emissary and even more so in The Matter with Things. This determination to move beyond the limitations of substance ontology also appears to inform the work of Matthew David Segall (heavily influenced by Whitehead) Bonnitta Roy, Nora Bateson, Bayo Akomolafe, Zak Stein, and myriad others in Perspectiva-adjacent networks who recognise we have to stop seeing the world merely as a place with things. While we, apparent mere subjects of experience, are indeed what Pureland Buddhists call Bombu - foolish beings of wayward passion - we are also blessed inhabitants of a mysterious panexperiential creative process that we can, do, and should participate in.

It’s really difficult. It’s very hard indeed for beings who valorise rationality, with centuries of modernity in our figurative veins, in a culture that is still endemically materialistic; where Science in its culture-bearing influence is mostly not rigorous curiosity enchanted by wonder, but institutionalised materialism, sometimes known as scientism. What I am gesturing towards with reference to the imaginal realm in this series is actually pretty conventional in the long sweep of humanity’s history. But today, I believe we have to be willing to perceive very differently to even begin to get it. I say this not as someone who is there, but as someone who has been trying to get it for a few years now. On hearing ‘imaginal realm’, most minds immediately look for a what, a kind of object to locate in space, as if it might be a kind of celestial ozone layer, but that starting point, while perhaps necessary for an initial orientation, has to be set aside to make any progress.

**

The idea of polycrisis appeals to the biases of the modern mind.

To make a lateral point, the reason the language of polycrisis is fundamentally inadequate is that it reaffirms the way of looking that is the heart of our current predicament. When considering the limitations of the idea of polycrisis a couple of years ago now, I noticed two main things: the centrality of the admission that the world is increasingly unintelligible, which is valuable, but also the lack of any sense of the potential importance of human interiority (consciousness). These things are connected!

Most polycrisis theorists effectively say we can’t inform action in political economy because we can’t make sense of the world with the epistemic frames and empirical methods we have at our disposal. Yet, and this is stunning in a way, there is no apparent reflection on the possibility that features of reality like the human psyche, collective imagination, spiritual experience or aesthetic sensibilities might have any causal influence on the state of the world. Moreover, while a defining feature of polycrisis is the inability to say that one thing causes another and that we cannot therefore trust in a particular policy to address a particular issue, the implicit theory of causation seems underdeveloped, because while it recognises emergence, it does not seem to recognise that emergence might arise from phenomena that are not (yet) materially manifest.

With the possible exception of Anthropology, the existing scholarship on polycrisis appears to be informed by an unacknowledged metatheory of ontological actualism, namely that what is real is what is actual, typically manifest as empirical events. Actualism is part of one of what Paul Marshall, in his excellent book, A Complex Integral Realist Perspective: New Axial Vision, calls ‘biases of the modern mind’, which are all manifest in the limitations of the idea of polycrisis. What follows is my potted summary of an extensive analysis, so please go to the source to be sure of the finer details.

As I understand it, the analytical bias is about the limitations of what Piaget called ‘formal operations’ becoming institutionalised and entrenched in science and philosophy departments, for instance, through the exclusive use of analysis as the definitive quality of thought, failing to properly understand emergence, non-linear causality, recursive causation, reflexive awareness, the complexity of open systems. There is also an over-reliance on logic, a weakness for reductive and deductive reasoning and perhaps a failure to understand dialectical processes.

The epistemological bias has its roots in positivism, and it is ultimately about using epistemic criteria to substitute for any other ground of being. The key distinction here is between what Bhaskar called the transitive dimension of pre-existing knowledge and the intransitive dimension of a mind-independent world. The inference that there is a mind-independent world allows for the possibility of a depth ontology, including a real domain of hidden structures, mechanisms and powers that produces what is ‘actual’, only some of which is experienced in the empirical domain. That intransitive dimension and depth ontology potentially includes mind, agency, social structure and many more things that make a transformative or emancipatory project possible – it is no small thing that it is mostly ignored!

The presence bias denies that absence is something that exists in the world. This apparently arcane point is what upholds the epistemic fallacy above, but it also prevents us from seeing ideas mentioned earlier like Bonnitta Roy’s complex potential states, Nora Bateson’s aphanipoiesis and also even subtler notions like dark matter in physics or emptiness in Buddhism. As Deacon(?) puts it:

There is more here than stuff. There is how that stuff is organised and related to others. And there is more than what is actual. There is what could be, what should be, what can’t be, what is possible and what is impossible.

The exterior bias is often grounded in a default materialism and it stems from ignoring the extraordinary (and yet entirely ordinary) mystery of consciousness and our first-person access to our own interiority. These are arguably irreducible features of the world, but consciousness is still often explained away as some kind of illusion, or an epiphenomenon of matter. However, there is a vast field of transrational and mystical insight on ‘the perennial philosophy’, dating back to Upanishadic philosophy, from Plato to Plotinus, Buddha and Nagarjuna, Jesus, Aurobindo and many others. As Marshall puts it:

Their insights are all unique…but there is a common core, a minimalist perennial insight that points to the same essential vision: there is a spiritual infrastructure to the universe, whose ground is also the essential nature of all being.

These four biases, outlined by Marshall (analytical, epistemological, presence, exterior) give some texture to what is meant by the mental structure of consciousness being in a deficient mode. That idea of Jean Gebser, alluded to above by Cynthia Bourgeault, stems from evidence for the transformations of the structure of consciousness as they are concretised in historical artefacts. While Gebser does not think of consciousness ‘evolving’ or ‘progressing’ or ‘developing’ he does recognise very distinct structures that follow a kind of sequence from archaic to magic to mythical to mental to integral. In Gebserian terms, the polycrisis is the mental mode of consciousness in its deficient mode, noticing its inadequacy in the state of the world it has created.

Marshall again puts this in an elegant way. The mental mode entails a standing back and looking at the world, which is about the subject (interior) viewing the world (exterior) and is the basis for much that we consider good about science and objectivity today. However, that mode of perception is only one part of the mental mode, and when it becomes the exclusive mode it is deficient because we have the problems of the four biases already mentioned. When the mental mode is in its efficient mode however, the standing back is combined with a looking within (to subjectivity and individuality) and beyond (to being itself and monotheism) which were spiritual breakthroughs of the axial age that remained in Ancient Greece when the mental mode was relatively efficient.

When standing back is combined with looking within and beyond, the problems of the subject/object split are mitigated and this mode of consciousness is perhaps in some sense ‘closer’ to the integral mode, but it remains what Gebser would call perspectival, with the world still viewed through a mental frame of reference, rather than a form of aperspectival (free from a single perspective) or diaphanous awareness, or ‘seeing through the world’ which he believes is the quintessence of the integral mode.

**

Modernity’s impact on time and space

I cannot do justice to modernity or the metaphysics of time and space over the next few paragraphs or even years (go figure), so for now I will reuse material from a post on my personal Substack, The Joyous Struggle, that fits the current inquiry.

Anthony Giddens describes ‘modernity’ as the world-historical impact of the gradual severing from tradition in post-feudal Europe, through the institutional expression of industrialism, capitalism, surveillance, ‘total war’, and the nation state, all of which are discontinuous with the pre-modern world. He calls modernity “a runaway world”, and in The Consequences of Modernity (1990), he uses the metaphor of a juggernaut.

Modernity is a juggernaut. It is not just a juggernaut, but one which we can to some extent steer. However, it is a runaway engine of enormous power which, collectively, we can steer only to a limited degree.

In a subsequent summary in Modernity and Self-Identity (1991), Giddens highlights three things the juggernaut does to the world through what he calls its “universalising properties that explain the expansionist, coruscating nature of modern social life”. These are the separation of space and time, the disembedding of experience, and institutional reflexivity. I just nod to the first point here.

The juggernaut separates time and space by de-situating their relationship from particular places. There was once a time for things, but then the time arrived, through the normalisation of calendars and the spread of the mechanical clock. Practices were de-localised and universalised, and the question of what ‘the future’ might bring loomed larger as the operative question. Once, we only bought bread at the market on market day, but then when and where ceased to be co-extensive. In The Condition of Postmodernity(1989) David Harvey offers a variation on this point by arguing that modernity accelerates time while shrinking space, and this chimes to some extent with arguments of Paul Virilio in Speed and Politics (1977) that speed is the defining feature of modernity that serves to kill all forms of depth (ultimately a spatial metaphor), and it anticipates Castells in The Rise of the Network Society (1996) and Bauman’s Liquid Modernity(2000) where spaces have turned fluid, sublimated into network flows. In this respect, time and space are increasingly severed. Technology tames space, and denatures time to a shallow present.

Geography sees things differently, which is not altogether surprising. Doreen Massey’s work in For Space(2005), for instance, critiques the notion that modernity separates space and time. She contends that we have needlessly accepted space as being inert and passive, rather than seeing it for the relational, dynamic, co-constructed phenomena it is. Her concern is not to over-romanticise places, but she is eager to argue that we must not surrender the human capacity to use space in ways that shape or resist time. I’ll say that again: we should not surrender the human capacity to use space in ways that shape or resist time.

Chapter twenty-four of Iain McGilchrist’s The Matter with Things sheds some light on the enigma of space, for instance in the following vintage McGilchrist paragraph (p. 997 of the hardback with some references removed):

‘It is interesting that in some mythologies, Time appears as a god, a mythic person of sorts’, observes Jan Zwicky, ‘but, to the best of my knowledge, space is never so represented.’ Time speaks profoundly to the human condition in a way that space, however fundamental it might be, simply does not. Time is relentless, like another being’s will, where space is pliable and may be fashioned, though not without limits, to our own. Time is emotive; space is bland. Time is always single. ‘I venture to say only one true integer may occur in all of physics’, says physicist David Tong. ‘The laws of physics refer to one dimension of time. Without precisely one dimension of time, physics appears to become inconsistent.’ By contrast space is multiple: it has between three and eleven or even more dimensions, depending on whose theory you are inclined to embrace. Time is irreversible: space open to endless revision. Time creates and corrodes: space lends (temporary) permanence to what is. Writing, for example, was invented to give permanence in space to the fleetingness of thought. Consciousness exists in time, but not in space. For elements that are often conflated, their qualities could hardly be more different.

I read this rich and beautiful paragraph as a useful provocation. The line “consciousness exists in time, but not in space” builds on work by Colin McGinn, and feels mind-blowing, but is it entirely right? To put it another way, while consciousness may not exist in space, can consciousness exist as entirely a-spatial, without space, and all that this means for extension, depth, and resistance or is it more likely that we need an idea of space that is (somehow) not extended? As for mythology, I take the point, but aren’t ghosts, extant or not, space-subverting phenomena? And when I see ouija board summonings in horror movies, I always feel it’s about accessing spatial dimensions that are otherwise off limits. Can anything with an enigmatically multiple number of dimensions really be thought of as bland? And places speak profoundly to the human condition; while places are full of memory and not merely spaces, their aesthetics are inextricably shaped by space. And yes, space may be pliable, but it is also critical to resistance, which is essential to creativity. Later in the same chapter (p1021-22 of hardback) Iain suggests:

“Matter is whatever occupies space and has mass. Or rather, “exists spatially”, since space should not be thought of as a container for ‘things’. But it must have mass. And what is mass? Fascinatingly, mass is the tendency of an entity to resist - changes in course or speed. This should resonate, since, from a purely metaphysical point of view, I have been arguing that, though flow is generative, nothing comes into existence except by means of resistance to flow. The recalcitrance of mass gives rise to the possibility of enduring form.”

Again, beautiful, but again I am left with so many questions. If a defining feature of space is mass, and mass is critical to the resistance to flow, and nothing comes into existence except through resistance to flow, does this not make space a contender for being the unsuspected metaphysical hero at the beating heart of creation?

Later in chapter 24, Iain explores depth, which is, of course, a spatial metaphor. To be clear, I am not saying that Iain is unappreciative of space; if anything, the opposite, as indicated, for instance, in his quoting of the Tao Te Ching on page 1005:

Thirty spokes meet in the hub,

but the empty space between them

is the essence of the wheel.

Pots are formed from clay,

but the empty space within it

is the essence of the pot.

Walls with windows and doors form the house,

but the empty space within it

is the essence of the home

The Missing Fifth Element

One detail not mentioned by Iain (as far as I can see) is that while in the West we still sometimes work with a folk ontology of four elements: earth, fire, air and water, in several eastern traditions they work with five. The Eastern tradition I know best is Vedanta, particularly how it is expressed in the philosophical roots of traditional Indian medicine, Ayurveda. Their fifth element is Akash (Ākāśa (आकाश)), a term loosely translated as ‘sky’ but closer in meaning to space or ether. Akash is considered the subtlest element, and it contains and maintains the others. No akash, no vibrations. No vibrations, no sounds. No sounds, no ॐ, no Ohm, no primordial sound from which existence arises.

I have had several amusing conversations with my Indian mother-in-law, Vatsala, where I have expressed my confusion about how this fifth element differs from air. To take the second stanza from the Tao Te Ching above (a different tradition, but it serves the purpose). The western mind tends to think the pot is a kind of ‘earth’, it contains ‘air’, but we do we really need ‘space’ to make sense of it? I would ask my Amma: What does the idea of space do here that air does not? And she would seem perplexed and say: “The air is in the space”, and look at me for recognition. The meaning of Akash is encapsulated in the idea that the space that makes it the essence of the pot.

In the West, we used to have a similar idea of ether, and even Aristotle invoked it. Ether and Akash are not identical, but they are both a recognition of space as a subtle holding phenomenon with real effects. There is a history of how ether was abandoned in the history and philosophy of science that I remember studying at Oxford. Just as I expressed incredulity to my mother-in-law, our intellectual tradition gradually discarded the notion of ether as redundant and gratuitous, decisively so in physics due to Einstein’s work on special relativity (c1905), which indicated that light does not need anything other than spacetime to travel through. While that may be so for physics, I am beginning to think the loss of ether may have been collateral damage to our metaphysics, from which we have arguably not recovered. And now I understand better why the theosophists speak of history in terms of ‘the akashic records’.

Our loss of appreciation for depth may be related to presuming to understand space. Just because we can draw lines for the dimensions of up-down, back-front, left-right doesn’t mean we know where we are. As Colin McGinn warns:

What we need from space, practically speaking, is by no means the same as how space is structured in itself. I suspect that the very depth of embeddedness of space in our cognitive system produces in us the illusion that we understand it much better than we do.

I wonder, then, if practices like Yoga and Tai Chi (and Gurdjieff’s weird and wonderful movement practices) are not just about reconnecting the mind and the body, but also attending to space as a feature of reality, almost as if tasting it. I also wonder if ‘being in nature’ is partly about reconnecting with space emotionally, almost like keeping in touch with a friend. Perhaps much of mental illness is about the literal loss of space, in our living arrangements, in our built-up cities, in the narrow range of movements involved in pulling a screen towards our faces. Perhaps space is the primary nutrient of soul food; maybe we are meant to taste it together.

Maybe what is happening today is not really about the severing of time from space. Perhaps a better way to understand why we are afflicted by the juggernaut is that we have lost the capacity to resist it. And why? Because the quintessential element of resistance is space, and we have created a space-shaped hole in our metaphysics.

I think we have forgotten and forsaken the subtle nature of space and the profound importance of space. What if the injunction of our times is not to allow modernity to die, as such, but to find ways to slow down the juggernaut by using space to resist the severing of time from space? Perhaps, in a Gebserian sense, we do not develop beyond modernity, but move beyond its exclusivity, by reincorporating much that has been unwisely jettisoned in the name of progress. Perhaps only then can something suitably new truly emerge, rather than being forced upon us. What would it mean for modernity to be resisted by the reimagining and reinhabiting of space, and how might that relate to becoming reacquainted with our long-lost fifth element?

**

The space in question is not exactly the space that physicists measure, or the space architects design, but the space that contemplatives have always insisted is the most fundamental thing there is, the empty fullness and full emptiness that tacitly contains everything else, that makes everything else possible. I find myself returning to this issue of ineffable unextended space because I think it has something to do with, let’s say, the mood of the universe, at least as I experience it.

The vocabulary for what I am trying to say has mostly been sequestered inside traditions that Western secular culture is either embarassed by or relegates to esoterica. Akasha, for instance, sits in Sanskrit texts and gets taught in yoga studios, but will not get you far in analtyical philosopher tutorial. The same goes for Plato’s khōra, that strange receptacle of all becoming he introduces in the Timaeus, which he himself cannot quite describe; it is neither being nor non-being, having no qualities of its own yet receiving everything. I recently learned that Derrida spent an entire essay circling ‘khora’ and more or less concluded that it resists every conceptual tool the tradition has developed. This looks to me like circumstantial evidence that Plato was pointing at something real and beyond him, rather than merely being confused.

Then there is the word entos, from Luke’s gospel, where Jesus tells the Pharisees that the kingdom of God is entos hymōn. The usual translation is “within you”, though the Greek also carries the sense of in your midst, a kind of presence that is both interior and surrounding at once. The hesychast tradition, a Christian contemplative lineage that developed the practice of stillness as a form of direct perception reads entos hymon not as metaphor but as ontology: the innermost space of a human being opens into the same primordial depth as the ground of the cosmos. Then there is the Chandogya Upanishad that says something structurally identical and poetic, namely that the small space within the lotus of the heart is as vast as the sky outside.

What I think connects akasha, khora, and entos is a claim that modern thought has almost entirely lost the language to make: space is not merely empty, but somehow generative. This sounds banal. But the assumption that runs underneath almost everything the modern West has built, through Aristotle’s rejection of the void (kenon) Descartes splitting the world into thinking substance and extended matter, and Newton’s infinite warehouse, is that space is empty, passive, inert, a container defined only by what it holds. The result is a civilisation of considerable surface competence that has progressively lost the ability to speak about depth. This is not a new observation, but I am not sure we have fully reckoned with what it costs.

The deepest formulation of what was lost is something like this: in the older metaphysics, across traditions that developed independently and arrived at strikingly similar places, space is ontologically prior to what appears within it; in a sense this is the modest claim that the womb came before the baby, but I make no comment on the abiding controversy of the chicken and the egg, which is much tougher. Space appears to participate in what arises rather than standing neutrally aside. The Sat of the classical conception of God (according to Theology guru David Bently Hart) in Sat-Chit-Ananda is usually translated as Being, but something like “carrying the sense of the primordial spatial ground within which consciousness and bliss can appear” is Being unpacked.

I am not qualified to say whether modern physics has stumbled toward the same recognition through a completely different route, but I have it on good authority that it does not quite know where it has arrived. We do know the quantum vacuum seethes with energy and structure. The holographic principle suggests that three-dimensional reality may be a projection from a deeper spatial order of tiny dimensions of space folded over each other in ways we struggle to fathom. And David Bohm spent years trying to describe what he called the implicate order, a domain in which things that appear separate in ordinary space are enfolded together. None of this is “the missing fith element” as such, and it is in some ways pre-elemental, but it is significant that physics does have live inquiries that are consonant with a much richer and deeper view of space.

Gregory Bateson’s distinction (developed from Jung) between Pleroma and Creatura helps explain why the scientific and the contemplative conservations do not intersect. However exotic it gets, Physics remains Pleromic: it deals in forces, quantities, mechanisms, causal connections. The imaginal realm, which I have introduced and will develop further - for now remember is Henri Corbin’s term, borrowed from Islamic Neoplatonism, for the domain that Bourgeault, following Gurdjieff, calls World 24, is Creatural, by which I mean it is organised by meaning, pattern, relationship, and something that functions like orientation or desire, a pull toward coherence that operates through invitation rather than compulsion. Pleromic instruments will not find these things and can’t even really see them, just as a thermometer can’t evaluate music, but they are part of the same world that is in conversation with itself all the time.

All I can really offer from this extended disquisition into space is that recovering the vocabulary for space as akasha as luminous, generative, participatory, the ground within which physics and consciousness and love and meaning are simultaneously possible, is not nostalgic and not anti-scientific. It is the recognition that the deepest questions were asked by people paying a quality of attention we have largely stopped cultivating, and that what they found was not superseded by modernity so much as set aside, for reasons that made local sense and have accumulated, quietly, into something like a civilisational blind spot. I do not know exactly what it would mean to address that. But I think the first step is to notice it.

That’s one of the longest throat clearings I have ever done, but I needed to talk about the limitations of substance ontology, the biases of the modern mind, and our limited grasp of space to make sense of why ‘the imaginal realm’ has become so difficult to perceive and accept. In essence, as indicated, the reality of the imaginal realm is the reality of a kind of inner space that we have forgotten about. In the next post I’ll say a few things about time, and get more deeply into what the imaginal realm is, and why I think taking it more seriously matters today.

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I love that term, ontopoetics. I learned it from Freya Matthews, via Peter Reason, as detailed in On the Intellectual Dignity of Believing We Are in Conversation with the World. Language is a kind of incantation, and ‘ontopoetics’ is, for me at least, powerful. The word serves to affirm the idea that there is, in the sense of existence, a poetic order as well as a physical order. And the ‘poetic’ does not mean “Tyger Tyger, burning bright, In the forests of the night” it means both poetry and poiesis, and poiesis as poetry. ‘Ontopoetics’ therefore evokes the making and bringing forth of a generative relational process that is all the more beautiful and resonant when we see it as the world living and renewing itself through us.

The idea of ontopoetics entered my life at just the right moment. I had been (and still am) experiencing meaningful coincidences more viscerally and frequently than I have for many years, but the older Jungian language of synchronicity felt somehow depotentiated. I read several papers by Matthews, and parts of some of her earlier books - The Ecological Self(1991) and For the Love of Matter (2003). I commend this work as far as I understand it - it is the kind of reimagining of the world from first principles that we need; it moves beyond mere auto-poiesis as self-organisation within any given system to onto-poiesis in which self-organisation is not just how things work, but the definitive significance of the cosmos acting as a whole. The vision is more than just animism, in the sense that everything is alive; or panpsychism, in the sense that everything has experience. Ontopoetics appears to push and finesse those ideas to argue that meaning can arise through call-and-response relationships that not only pervade the cosmos but also constitute and define it. As Peter Reason pointed out in the comments to the last post, the idea is not just that consciousness is pervasive, or that nature is psycho-active, but that we can evoke and discern a response from nature if we choose to, as if speaking and being spoken to; it refers to the situated practice of being in conversation with the world.

So ontopoetics within Living Cosmos Panpsychism has a particular kind of ontological radicalism and its own intellectual coherence and integrity. And yet, it is not quite where I am at the moment. I do not recognise myself in what appears to be a philosophy of immanence, and the implicit theology is Spinoza-inspired pantheism (God is everything) rather than panentheism (God is in everything, but also transcendent). While I don’t think the provenance of ontopoetics in Living Cosmos Panpsychism precludes wider interpretations and uses of the term, it has clearly propelled me into a different kind of terrain. To put it as forthrightly as I can, I don’t feel Nature is God; I feel God is in nature. When the wind blows, and leaves flutter on the branches of a tree, I feel connected to the tree in kinship, but I also feel something else, something beyond me or the tree, is in communion with me through the tree. What I am drawn to is not just a deep ecological animism and the practice of invoking the living cosmos, but something…I am not sure, more mystical perhaps, maybe more neoplatonic, theophanic, and imaginal in ways that take the provenance of images seriously.

Some of what I am now drawn to could readily be dismissed as ‘woo’, if it weren’t for the fact that so much of it appears to be true. So with gratitude to Freya Matthews, a nod to Living Cosmos Panpsychism, and a bow to ontopoetics, I have renamed this inquiry with a coinage that risks becoming a catchphrase:

“It’s not woo if it’s true.”

I seek a living participatory metaphysics that does not tacitly presume naturalism, even a cosmic naturalism where the world ‘speaks’ in response to us. I do not disavow embodied and embedded cognition, or being part of nature through our relationship to land and water. But I also think it is likely that the “more-than-human world” that we frequently hear about might ask us to become more anthropocentric rather than less so, by honouring and protecting the gift of Earth’s still abundant vitality while also recognising that humans alone can defend the dignity of the deep interior that is every bit as wondrous.

Rivers might well be alive, for instance, and perhaps they should even have rights, and that’s exciting on its own terms, but something more mysterious is also in play. I believe we can wholeheartedly recognise the pre-human and a-human dignity of the geosphere and biosphere, the autonomous vitality of waterfalls, the glory of the mother tree, the sex life of plants, the genius of fungi, the pilgrimages of salmon, the dance of the bees - all of that and much more! And yet, the more-than-human world’s interior landscape features forms of life too, except they are described in less accessible terms, like noetic, archetypal, transpersonal, the unseen, imaginal, divine and so on.

One way to frame the conundrum is that there seems to be a kind of horizontal intellectual renaissance underway, as we decentre ourselves, inquire into indigenous worldviews, rediscover bioregions, become more ecologically literate and terrestrial in orientation, and come Down to Earth, as Bruno Latour puts it. In very broad brushstrokes, this horizontalism has intellectual roots in complexity theory, ecology, pan-indigenous thought, animism, and applied systems theory, and spiritual roots in paganism, Taoism and many forms of Buddhism. That’s important work, because all such (by no means equivalent) things are deeply interwoven and fundamentally undivided. However, division should not be conflated with distinction or discrimination. Humans are an integral part of nature, for instance, but we are the only part of nature that has an idea of nature, which sets us apart. For this reason and many others, I think there is a need for a kind of vertical renaissance, too.

**

The classic vertical model is the Great Chain of Being with God, angels, humans, animals, plants, and minerals in that descending order of significance. Critiques of the great chain are that it is static, it smuggles in value and hierarchy, and that it’s too geocentric (it’s a big universe, after all). Several theorists have reworked this in ways that preserve genuine ontological levels (not everything is equally complex or conscious), qualitative emergence (higher levels are genuinely new, not reducible to lower ones), directionality (reality appears to have something like a telos or orientation) and Value (some orientations appear ‘better’ than others). It looks like we can and should preserve these understandings while abandoning fixed natural kinds as rungs on a ladder, humans as the apex, legitising social hierarchy, and devaluing lower levels as only means to the higher. Baby and bathwater, and all that.

The ‘great chain’ is consonant with but also distinct from Plotinus and the emanation of ‘The One’ in Neoplatonism more generally (which informs the imaginal realm, introduced in the last post). And there are deeper roots still. There are vertical dimensions in Upanishadic philosophy and Advaita Vedanta (for instance, from ‘gross’ to ‘subtle’) and a more complex interweaving of vertical and horizontal in what I am beginning to learn about Kashmir Shaivism. Even commentaries on Buddhist meditative practices allude to successively deeper and qualitatively distinct forms of insight and awakening, and I am reminded that back in the day, when I learned TM, we were informed about the Seven States of Consciousness.

E.F. Schumacher is a noteworthy reference here because he is most famous for his book Small is Beautiful, his essay on Buddhist Economics, and his inspiration for Schumacher College, but he was Catholic/Christian, and he also wrote A Guide for the Perplexed towards the end of his life, where there is a ‘hierarchy of being’ with ontological discontinuities from minerals to plants to animals to humans.

Robert Pirsig is famous for Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, but he also wrote Lila, where there is one abiding dynamic form of quality that is Tao-like, but it shapes and co-arises with relatively static forms of quality in patterns that can be understood hierarchically: Inorganic (matter, physics, chemistry, Biological (life, evolutionary drives, appetite) Social (culture, convention, institutions, morality) Intellectual(ideas, science, philosophy, reason). And then, of course, there are adult developmental stage theories, of which Ken Wilber’s is best known, but also one of many. In each of these cases, the human is seen as a kind of achievement, even if humans, acting together to seek and use power, can do a great deal of harm. And in each of these cases, there is an indication that the human is always a work in progress.

That’s partly why many seek to also go beyond the human. Nietzsche’s Übermensch was, of course, controversial, but there is a similar idea in Sri Aurobindo’s Supermind. We can at least recognise, as Kripal has recently put it, that it is time to recognise that a range of transpersonal phenomena are valid parts of our experience and viable subjects of inquiry; and that the humanities can and perhaps should become the ‘super humanities’. And then there is a chakra energy system (which is still taught in classical Yoga schools, and recognised in the practice of acupuncture), a hierarchy of angels (I find this funny, but probably shouldn’t), and Gurdjieff’s Ray of Creation (which the scholar and mystic Bourgeault takes very seriously).

In an entirely different register, I am also reminded of a kind of vertical dimension in Donella Meadows’ famous essay on leverage points in a system, which suggests the most generative and fundamental of twelve points in a system is not merely to change the paradigm or mindset that shapes the system but to grow into the realisation that any given paradigm is confected, and the underlying reality is not the paradigm we create but the creative process that does so through us.

Most vertical understandings are qualitative and evaluative, and therefore harder to agree on, and more difficult to measure. But clearly, we need to think horizontally and vertically. And while there has been innovation in horizontal thinking, many remain a little too embarrassed to countenance the vertical.

**

Roy Bhaskar’s notion of ‘the epistemic fallacy’ is helpful here - the widespread tendency to conflate questions of what we know or can know with questions of what exists. This fallacy prevents us from recognising deeper, causally active mechanisms that may not be directly observable.

The world is not only structured and differentiated, but it is also changing. And social structures, unlike natural ones, depend upon human activity for their reproduction or transformation.
Roy Bhaskar (The Possibility of Naturalism, 1979)

The open question here is what we mean by ‘social structures’. For instance, Qi and prana and chakras arise from within established religious traditions and social epistemologies that are respectable, though Bhaskar himself would probably not go there. Patriarchy, racism or ideology, however, are also real and causal in this way. The deeper point is that epistemic fallacy matters because there can be ontological structure and depth that is not perceptible or measurable (the empirical) and perhaps not even manifest (the actual) but still latent, present, operative, relevant and real. (including, I would argue, the imaginal realm).

Bhaskar’s distinction between the empirical, the actual, and the real is useful, then, because it implies that within the realm of The Real there can be ontological depth and structure. Indeed, in his later work on meta-reality, Bhaskar was interested in how a pervading underlying oneness or ‘ground state’ informed an emancipatory politics. There is something generative and creative about unseen reality that is neither empirical nor actual but powerful and malleable; it is up to us to shape it, and thereby make history. Bonnitta Roy points towards this in her idea of complex potential states, and so does Nora Bateson in Aphaniopoiesis, but I think when it comes to the depth of the real, we can also turn the woo volume up a little higher.

Where does that leave us? I think in the effort to be ‘non-dual’, contra the Cartesian notion of mind and matter being separate, there is a risk of failing to be non-dual in a deeper sense. It is our task as humans to recognise that our reality manifests with a variety of different qualities, and some of them are best appreciated ‘horizontally’ (with an emphasis on what is empirical, actual, and manifest) and others ‘vertically’ (with an emphasis on what is real but often latent, or unseen). Of course, we should also recognise that those terms are not literally geometric but part of how embodied and metaphoric cognition functions.

My challenge in this context is learning how to be intelligible and agentic in the public sphere while knowing that the pattern of experience we have learned to call God might well exist, while also sensing that this pattern may seek expression in ways that better fit the historical and cultural niche we find ourselves in. As I’ll indicate shortly, there appears to be a more-than-human perspective that points not so much to human contingency as to human necessity. I am beginning to think that humans may be rather special after all, and that our capacity for individuality may be both curiously contingent and particularly important.

My fundamental intuition at the end of this interlude is that the human is neither a monolithic creature nor an endpoint in any line, but more like a generative centre that is always on the cusp of rediscovering and transcending itself. To put that differently, our challenge in overcoming dualism and anthropocentrism may not be so much to decentre the human, but to recentre the human with a new understanding of what it means to be in the centre. We should recognise the dignity, legitimacy and generativity of both vertical and horizontal dimensions of experience, and note where they intersect. I prefer to keep religion at arm’s length for now, but I suspect it is no accident that the most successful symbol of all time is the cross.

This ‘not woo if its true series’ began as an attempt to flesh out an idea I had about ‘chiastic agency’ as a relatively democratic antidote to the hyper-agency of ‘Big Tech’, a way of finding the centre of our lives and acting from there; chiastic is a criss-cross structure with a centre, and widely used as a meaning-making device in art, but Cynthia Bourgeault also sees it as a way to understand how time and causality operate in the imaginal realm. I believe chiasms can also be applied to agency, but I have had to hack my way through quite a few epistemic jungles to get to that point, which would otherwise be (even more) obscure.

I can almost see it now, and next in this “it’s not woo if it’s true” series, I will highlight what it means to say the mental/rational function is in its deficient mode - with a reflection on our understanding of (akashic) space and (chiastic) time especially - and why this makes it hard for western minds stuck in a substance ontology to grasp the notion of the imaginal realm introduced in the last post. Then I hope to offer a relatively scholarly take on the provenance of this (mostly) mystical idea through Corbin, Ibn-Arabi, and others. Only then, it seems, can this idea of chiastic agency start to make any sense. But for what it’s worth, in case you are wondering where this is all going, here is how I am defining it at the moment:

Until next time,

Jonathan.

The following inquiry into communication from the near beyond, and the imaginal realm - you will have to wait for a definition - took several weeks to cook; it grew out of prior posts in this series, and it bleeds into a few more. In other words, it found its length, and that length was long, so it seemed wisest to share it in parts. This first post will be the longest, and the final edits may have their own ideas, but the menu of past, present, and likely future is this:

It’s Not Woo If It’s True 1: On the Intellectual Dignity of Believing We Are in Conversation with the World

It’s Not Woo If It’s True 2: Can we Change our Reality Settings?

It’s Not Woo If It’s True 3: Make Consciousness Great Again

It’s Not Woo If It’s True 4: Metacrisis as a spiritual injunction: Communications from the near beyond and an introduction to the imaginal realm.

It’s Not Woo If It’s True 5: Why can’t we see it? Biases of the modern mind, and different ways in: moods, poetry, freedom, mystery, images, depth, imagination.

It’s Not Woo If It’s True 6: Arabi’s similitude, Corbin’s Mundus Imaginalis, Hilman’s Soul, Gurdjieff’s Ray of Creation, and Bourgeault’s Cosmic Intertidal Zone.

It’s Not Woo If It’s True 7: What is Chiastic Agency?

These inquiries are all already published or drafted, and I’ll amble towards some generative closure in the next few weeks, but I believe each can be read on its own terms. On the Intellectual Dignity of Believing We Are in Conversation with the World, asked how the world might be if the intensely meaningful coincidences (synchronicities) most of us periodically experience are not mere accidents but part of the fabric of reality. Can we Change our Reality Settings?, considered the practice of cosmogony - the first principles evoked, instantiated and upheld through the practice of world creation. And Make Consciousness Great Again, considered what it might mean for consciousness not to be merely the guest of reality, but rather, its host.

At this halfway point, I revisit what it means for the metacrisis to be fundamentally a spiritual problem, trace how my view on that has evolved over the last decade, and, without reifying it, explain why I am now eager to understand and experience what is widely known as the imaginal realm, which can be viewed as a corollary to each of these ideas. By most accounts, the imaginal realm is the wellspring of synchronicity; it is a touchstone for cosmogonic renewal, and it is much easier to take seriously when consciousness is understood not as a thing that exists in space that emerges from matter, but as an ontological primary that only exists as time, or in time, and may well be co-extensive with a divine (sat, chit, ananda) or even a cosmotheandric (Panikkar) process.

At first approximation, the imaginal realm is the locus of the communication from the near beyond; it lies within and between material and spiritual reality as a quality of being and presence. The imaginal realm is not just a subjective state; it has its own kind of objective reality, and it is in reciprocal communication with our everyday minds and world, which are relatively unfree, yet somehow cosmically necessary. This place (that is not a place) is neither simply subjective nor objective. Depending on your metaphysical assumptions, the imaginal can be considered ‘transjective’ in nature, and it appears to be a quintessentially nondual phenomenon that can only be seen or felt through flashes of non-dual perception; flashes that stabilise into dispositions in some more than others. This intermediate zone is a substantial enough idea to appear in depth psychology (eg Hilman), Islamic and Christian mysticism (eg Arabi, Corbin, Bourgeault) and even in political theory and practice (eg Chiara Bottici).1

In the three subsequent posts, I’ll outline more precisely why it has become difficult to perceive/accept/recognise liminal noetic phenomena. Then I plunge a bit deeper into scholars and mystic practitioners who know more about the imaginal realm than I’ve forgotten, and I’ll end this series by asking what it all means for human agency in our wayward world.

I hope you find the journey worthwhile. This inquiry can be seen as an extended personal disquisition on what Jeffrey Kripal calls The Flip, and is part of Perspectiva’s overall vision and strategy to help bring into being ‘The flip, the formation, and the fun’. As you might imagine, this kind of work is difficult to fund because its impact is hard to quantify. So if you like what follows, please consider becoming a paid subscriber here, and if you are lucky enough to be in a position to make a more substantial contribution to the charity, please contact me at jonathan (at) perspectiva dot coh dot ukay.

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And now, as they say: without further ado…

I think Sherlock Holmes was right. Once you’ve eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. When we look at the news, it seems ever clearer that we cannot place our confidence in established institutions to do anything other than make things slightly better before they get worse again in a downward spiral, and that’s if things go well. We should not forsake our current dispensation, where we rightly tend to our figurative gardens and neighbours while seeking better governments and policies. Yet at a time of charged geopolitical entanglement, escalating warfare, incipient ecological collapse, poisoned information, technological attention and attachment hacking, ambient anxiety, and widespread governance failure, those who feel the metacrisis as their own, those who feel we are witnesses to a singular historical culmination, must look elsewhere for inspiration.

I made my peace with the improbable a long time ago. In 2013-2015, I began a tentative and enigmatic inquiry into the idea that our societal and civilisational problems are fundamentally spiritual in nature, and I have been working on that notion ever since. I began with language palatable to atheists, religious believers, and everyone in between, leading to a report and latterly a book called Spiritualise. I became a purveyor of a vanilla spirituality, prepared mostly to bring far-flung horses together (and we must not frighten the horses). That project spoke of practices and experiences - things we all do and have. I referred to love, death, self and soul - things we can all relate to. We spoke about being, belonging, becoming and beyondness - things we all feel and all aspire to.

The composite abstract noun ‘spirituality’ is nebulous; it means little in itself beyond breath and aliveness, it is always at risk of being coopted or commercialised, and by entifying itself, it arguably takes us away from what I believe to be a saner, more accurate and more generative process-relational view of the world. And so, back in the day, I used spiritual mostly as an orienting adjective to qualify a person’s outlook, disposition, or sensibility as a way to reflect interest in the kinds of issues a signpost like ‘spiritual’ might point to.

My definition, from Spiritualise (2nd edition, 2017, p17) is:

I think of spiritual sensibility as a disposition towards reality characterised by concern for the fullness of life and experienced through simultaneous intimations of aliveness, goodness, understanding, and meaning. Those glimpses of wholeness and integration have a texture that is at once emotional, ethical, epistemic, and existential – the feeling of being alive, the conviction that something matters, the intuition that the world makes sense, and the experience that life is meaningful respectively. More substantively...cultivating spiritual sensibility is about deepening our engagement with questions of being(death), belonging(love), becoming(self) and beyondness(soul).

This definition is not too shabby, and the glimpses I mention evoke the imaginal realm mentioned below, but it’s still a kind of cartological schmoozing.

In 2026, the world has changed, and atheism in theology and materialism in philosophy are by no means an intellectual default or culturally ascendant. In the second half of my life, I’m making a more fundamental commitment to act on my best guesses about the nature of reality. Today, with a bit more experience of the territory, and with less fear of being considered strange (it’s too late for that) I notice that the problem with the definition is that it’s all subjective, about (individual) experiences. These days, I feel what is needed, almost as a kind of oxygen, is to better understand the kind of reality we are collectively participating in that might give rise to our experiences, and that doing so may be a necessary part of the response to the metacrisis we are engulfed in. As a reminder, after Tasting the Pickle, here is the definition I alighted on a little later in Prefixing the World:

The metacrisis is the historically specific threat to truth, beauty, and goodness caused by our persistent misunderstanding, misvaluing, and misappropriating of reality. The metacrisis is the crisis within and between all the world’s major crises, a root cause that is at once singular and plural, a multi-faceted delusion arising from the spiritual and material exhaustion of modernity that permeates the world’s interrelated challenges and manifests institutionally and culturally to the detriment of life on earth.

If the question is: “What’s happening in the world?” The metacrisis is a good answer.

But what if the question is “What does the metacrisis ask of us?” It’s not so clear. There is the question of power and culture and technology and so on - we cannot wish that away through spiritual bypassing. And yet I think we should be equally concerned with the other kind of spiritual bypassing - not the one that bypasses political and psychological problems with escapist activity, but the one that fails to contend with the spiritual dimensions of our political and psychological plight.

So I still believe ‘we need to (re)connect with our spiritual foundations, see reality more clearly and become the kinds of people the world needs at this historical juncture’ is not bad as a provisional answer, and that’s the one I gave in 2013. I now believe that is a little too power-blind to be credible, but also that the spiritual dimension is just a little too nebulous, and that we can and perhaps should be more specific. Moreover, as I indicated in The Temporal Sublime, one way to see the metacrisis is as the convergence of multiple culminating timelines, not just the relatively proximate failure of neoliberal economics and the collapse of a liberal international order, but also the breakdown of intelligibility, a shift in cultural epoch, and even a new geological time. With all that in mind, but especially with an eye to the “transformation in consciousness” that may be required to survive the 21st century, my answer at the moment is: we need to get wiser at working with the imaginal realm.

I’ll introduce the imaginal realm in a moment, but needless to say, it is not a panacea, nor is it a place or polity as such; yet it does have potential, perspicacity, and a certain kind of power. I am focusing on it because it has helped make sense of the personal experiences I share below, and it gives ‘the spiritual’ texture, definition and scope without becoming merely wishful thinking or yet another conceptual structure. I am drawn to the imaginal realm’s illustrious intellectual history in Islamic Neoplatonism, but even more so by the sense that even if it may not be an ‘it’, it is real, that there are practices that can bring us into a wiser relationship with it, and I even wonder if it may be a kind of spiritual frontier for this historical moment. But first, I would like to share how it has shown up for me.

Clearly, the human drama does not play out on old school Earth, with Heaven and harps above and Hell and horns below. But I do believe knowing our world as a world calls for cosmological imagination, and even cosmological commitment. I cannot be sure, of course, but there appear to be realms of reality qualitatively distinct from our own that are nonetheless within reach, and that appear to want to be reached, and often reach back (though not all of them seem benign). I feel drawn into participation with this process that feels both immanent and transcendent, and it evokes for me Ursula K Le Guin’s idea of becoming ‘realists of a larger reality’.

Communications from the near beyond

I have had intimations of this kind of communication several times in my life.

I have been practising transcendental meditation most days, and typically twice a day for about thirty years. Most of the time, this is a stress-reducing and energy-giving defragmentation process, and sometimes it is choppy, even uncomfortable, with the mind full of thoughts and eager to get back to business. But other times, at least a few times a year, there is a luminous peace and clarity. At those times, I feel in touch with something like transcendental consciousness, or even that I briefly become it somehow. Others call it ‘pure creative intelligence’, and while the terms can sound nebulous, they do apply to how it feels, for instance, it’s like being “in a field of pure potentiality”. I am not saying that ‘place’ is the imaginal realm as such, just that there is at least one practice that can increase your receptivity to and appreciation of this ‘near beyond’ within minutes.

Another major portal is synchronistic experiences. For illustrations, I have grown weary of the story of Jung’s Scarab, but I have offered a few personal examples in posts relating to Parker pens, saunas, and foxes, and I trust the reader will have at least one example from their own life that comes to mind. Here is how I put it in the first post:

I have long suspected that meaning has its own ontological grooves that coexist with causation, rather than being reducible to it. In a mysterious world of processes and events, the living question for all of us is not whether or not something is a coincidence, but what is coinciding, when, and how, and why… coincidences are about the intersection of the causal and poetic orders becoming apparent to us. These kinds of encounters may even be the cosmic grammar from a mother tongue that we have forgotten how to speak, At the moment, this idea sounds niche and esoteric, but the worldview it implies is not new; but old. We have forgotten that the world speaks to us and stopped listening as if it might. It is time to start listening again.

I have also sensed this interaction sometimes when I have felt ready to consult the ancient chinese ‘book of changes’, the I-CHING, and - this is key - also when I have done so without feeling ready, and inferred prior presence through absence; there is a visceral difference in how it feels when the oracle speaks and when it doesn’t, and I believe it’s not about probability but presence (Sartre’s idea of Neant, a presence felt by its absence, might even apply). I am reminded of the sci-fi author Philip K Dick, most famous for The Man in the High Castle, which is now a (highly recommended) Netflix series. He became so curious about how the I-CHING could ‘work’ in the way it seems to, that he evoked VALIS: Vast Active Living Intelligence System. The idea is that VALIS has its own agency, but it cannot use natural language, so the deep yin/yang code and the 64 hexagrams allow for distilled symbolic communication.

‘VALIS’ sounds too much like a robot to me to love it, but for some, a secular, cybernetic term is more palatable than what might be ‘Nous’ in Neoplatonism, or ‘Anima Mundi’ (world soul) in Jung/Pauli; and the ‘A’ in VALIS, the use of ‘active’, is pertinent. I sometimes think the ‘realm’ can also be considered a kind of valve (an opening of space) for releasing the density of energy that shapes ordinary perception, which allows our spirit to breathe more easily and our heart to see more clearly. In old theological currency, we might be in the realm of angels; in new age currency, we might be in the realm of spirit guides; in pan-indigenous language, we might even be with the ancestors. Alas, those references are culturally loaded; they risk provoking prejudice, breaking the woo-ometer, and the whole inquiry collapsing, which is perhaps partly why ‘VALIS’ was coined, and why the enigmatic nature of ‘the imaginal realm’ that I’ll come to shortly can be a form of constructive ambiguity.

I have also noticed communication from this ‘near-beyond’ in some extraordinary constellation inquiries, a technique with an ambiguous metaphysics that is becoming more popular as an away-day activity. The method is ostensibly about bodies moving around a room to inquire into the underlying relational dynamics of any given issue, but it is a kind of energy practice, and it can feel like the room not only creates a field with a mind of its own, but also thereby invites input from beyond, a kind of summoning, even, a presence that has emerged from the room and yet cannot be reduced to it. Constellations only work when people set aside their identities and opinions and surrender to their somatic and intuitive data (perhaps ‘the heart’). In a recent conversation with Nick Mayhew about constellations, he noted that insofar as encounters with the imaginal realm can be elicited, they may depend on learning “an etiquette of the heart”; and while that is an enigmatic expression, I knew what he meant.

We may have to do precisely this kind of enigmatic work to survive the 21st century. I believe we can learn to attune ourselves to the patterns of interaction disclosed through the imaginal realm more or less well, but in ways that require context and disposition to coalesce, and perhaps spiritual training to make that happen or even just to be able to allow it to happen. It’s not easy, because the phenomena in question is less like a resource that can be harvested or instrumentalised, and more like a relationship where a common language has to be learnt to deepen the relationship.

I have mentioned TM, synchronicities, the I-CHING, and Constellations Inquiry. There is, also, of course, a vast literature on religious and spiritual experiences, which have been called The Common Experience because most people have them at least once in their lives. The effect of a particularly good poem can also be a form of communication with the imaginal realm - that sense of wonder and awe that David Hinton calls ‘contact’ is a kind of interaction with the imaginal. As a final nod to encountering the imaginal, when I was in my early twenties, it was hard to deny communication with the near-beyond in two sessions with a particularly impressive psychic called Colin Grant in Edinburgh. This was in the late nineties, and I can’t remember all the details, but I know I entered the conversations sceptically, vigilant to the manipulative techniques so-called psychics often use to dupe gullible and often vulnerable people. But I was disarmed by the particularity of details of things he knew about me, and left with no doubt that what he was ‘downloading’ came from somewhere other than my words or body language.

In all cases, there is scope for scepticism and alternative explanations, but these days that feels indulgent, like an epistemic alibi I don’t need, because I’m not guilty. For me, these experiences, combined with intellectual inquiry into how they could make sense, place the idea of something beyond the veil interacting with us beyond a reasonable doubt. More precisely, while there is plenty of uncertainty over the details, this sense of other worlds intersecting or overlaid on our own is real for me beyond the polite social doubt required to avoid dogmatism or proselytising.

I felt relieved to recognise my view in a forthright statement by Gary Lachman, which is about synchronicities in particular, but applies more broadly to his work:

I am convinced that synchronicities are real, true phenomena…I have no idea how they happen nor am I convinced by any attempt so far to explain them in terms of quantum physics, as Jung and Pauli tried to do. But I am as convinced of their reality as I am that of the desk I am sitting at and the computer I am writing on. In some ways I suspect that we will never be able to explain them in any scientific way, except to say that they seem to be an experience in which what is happening in our heads and what is happening in the outside world are directly related through meaning, and that some intelligence other than our own that knows more than we do is in some way behind them. They are, I believe, related to a condition of consciousness that at present we only exprienced intermittently, but with which we will, with any luck, become more familiar.

-Gary Lachman, Lost Knowledge of the Imagination (2017 p137.)

I am intrigued by “some intelligence other than our own that knows more than we do is in some way behind them…”. That mysterious intelligence has no postcode, but many describe its abode as the imaginal realm.

I contend that unless we realise, pace Gebser, that our mental/rational function is in its deficient mode, unless we connect the unintelligibility of the world to our historical context, we will not mobilise the right kind of response. The metacrisis is the mode of reference that highlights these things because, as I argued elsewhere, the meta-move opens up the spiritual architecture of reality that is ignored or rejected by the language of polycrisis. And so today, if asked what the metacrisis asks of us, I would say it is something more like a rhetorical question.

Can we learn to better align our actions with the imaginal realm?

A tentative introduction to the imaginal realm

My impression is that the imaginal realm is a real place that is not a real place. The imaginal is both within and between our material and spiritual realities in ways that are hard to fathom. Although the ‘realm’ has no spatial extension, it has a temporal and causal reality, and that possibility is untroubling for those who can grasp that consciousness exists in time, but not in space. The imaginal realm also appears to be an abode where indwelling occurs, and that becomes credible when we discern that what dwells there are not physical entities, but something that appears to be at once personal, archetypal, normative, ideational, and agentic. This repository of virtuous form reaches us through intuitions and imagery, and these dispatches are not directives of celestial oversight from above but more like a kind of noetic solidarity, liquefactions of our collective mystical heart in the near beyond. While that heart is not a being, it is interactive and agentic Being-in-Action. Meaning arises from there, filtered through experience in patterns we can only perceive in particular ways that might best be described as chiastic, namely those myriad phenomena that criss-cross into the very centre of our lives, a centre that makes us explode with laughter and well up with tears of joy, and that is perhaps best understood as what Jean Gebser called the ever-present origin.

It is very difficult to perceive even the idea of the imaginal realm, let alone the underlying reality, due to the substance ontology that is our default mode of understanding. We are inclined to ask: what is it? And then to look for a description of something recognisable, but this approach actually precludes understanding. I detail in the next post some of the philosophical biases - analytical, empirical, presence, exterior - arising from our mental structure of consciousness that is now, many believe, in a historically deficient mode; together these biases help explain why we struggle with the idea of something real but not manifest, latent and yet present, meaningful but not causal, and that appears to ‘act’ from a non-extended place. For now, I have to trust the reader to take ‘the imaginal realm’ seriously, while not reifying it as something kind of spiritual Eldorado to seek out as a holiday destination.

That said, for those who need an image to help make sense of all these words, here is one representation of the imaginal realm as ‘World 24’ interacting with ‘World 48’ where we spend most of our time. This language comes from Gurdjieff’s Ray of Creation. I am beginning to read Gurdjieff properly now, but already I can sense that we don’t have to take this map too literally to take it seriously. The contention is that our everyday world of pizzas, pavements and parking tickets is relatively constrained by 48 rules (including laws of physics), while World 24, which Bourgeault associates with the imaginal realm, is relatively unconstrained but still somewhat constrained. As indicated, this is not about the old monotheistic properties of omniscience, omnipotence and omnibenevolence, but something very different. We might think of World 24 as another world in this world, a near-beyond where, figuratively of course, wiser siblings and cousins who may or may not be quite human hang out doing things we have not yet learnt to do. While we can’t reach them directly, we know they know us and appear to care about us, and sometimes we notice things happen in our lives that appear to come from them.

The illustration below gives some sense of why knowing the imaginal realm might matter - it is a different “density gradient” where time and causality operate differently, and in some sense better, and these different forms of time and causality interact with our own. Understanding the nature of ‘imaginal causality’ calls for a fuller vision of the self and an awareness of different kinds of time, a fuller understanding of space, and an appreciation for chiastic patterns. Again, this can feel like a stretch, but I believe it’s a good stretch towards reality rather than away from it. Another way to see it is that a great deal of what happens on Earth, ‘World 48’, happens because of ‘World 24’.

Unpacking those juxtapositions and relationships here is beyond me, but hopefully you can see not just one thing as better than the other, or even as binary opposites, both something more like the creative tension of coincidentia oppositorium (the coincidence of opposites) on a cosmic scale, the idea that these two worlds are constantly together and interacting, only that most of us rarely see or feel it.

In some sense that we can’t quite fathom, and perhaps we are not supposed to, World 24, the imaginal realm, cares about our world and is in an active relationship with it. And yet, it’s a different kind of care. Speaking personally, there is a degree of dispassion in the way this imaginal realm feels when we interact with it. My impression is that whatever preferences exist in that realm are for higher ideals, for ends rather than means. Noting Cynthia’s distinction between ‘virtue as descriptor’ and ‘virtue as operative energy’, whatever and whoever and however is there, I don’t think they care if you become a baker rather than a banker, but they may care about joy; they don’t care if you stick or quit, but they may care about courage and vitality; they don’t care if you paint your front door neon pink or royal blue, but they may care about beauty.

**

I believe it is relatively clear what the imaginal realm entails epistemologically - it’s a way of knowing from the heart, from nondual awareness, in a form of subtle but direct perception. Axiologically, it is where forms of objective value reside, where love and beauty, for instance, are even more real than they are in everyday life. Phenomenologically, we can know ‘what it’s like’ to be in some sense inside the imaginal realm when we are in certain states of non-ordinary consciousness. We can also say that the imaginal realm is temporally and aetiologically distinct, and that time and causation operate there in ways that this world needs to understand better.

However, I believe the imaginal realm is by necessity an ontological mystery. As we’ll see, some view it theologically (Arabi, Corbin, Bourgeault), others psychologically (Hilman, Jung) and some even politically (Bottici), and it’s not clear what kind of existence the imaginal realm has. I am increasingly sure there is a there there, but it’s not an object, nor any other kind of noun, and nor is there any canonical map to help us grok the territory it describes. In fact, in many ways, the constitution of our map-making minds may be the central impediment to working with the imaginal realm.

Invoking ‘the imaginal realm’ is therefore a practice of generative depth ontology as opposed to a descriptive shallow ontology. The inquiry is premised on the idea that there is more to reality than can be known through our senses (the epistemic fallacy) or constructed through our concepts (radical constructivism). Reality is a creative and relational process that we participate in, and part of what it does with us and through us is continually refashioning itself in various forms, including ideas and images.

In his classic text, Sense and Soul, Ken Wilber says that every valid form of knowledge entails an implicit injunction. Science says: Do the experiments! Maths says: Do the equations! English says: Read the books! Anthropology says: Do the fieldwork! Now, if the metacrisis is to be a valid form of knowledge, it too needs an implicit injunction.

Different theorists use their own conceptual models to describe the metacrisis and its implications. For Iain McGilchrist, it would be something like: Rebalance the hemispheres, recognise the right hemisphere’s way of attending as primary, and thereby perceive the sacred. For Stein and Gafni, in the context of their cosmoerotic humanism, the injunction is something like: Open the Eye of Value. There are many other answers to the question of what the metacris means for our reorientation.

Personally, I find the imaginal realm the most fruitful vantage point for my particular take on the metacrisis. I am interested in what we have to unlearn to perceive it, I’m curious about the socio-spiritual relationship between realms, and I like that it is a roomy enough notion, conceived of by several theorists from a range of backgrounds, to inform a way of knowing at this stage of history that feels relatively ecumenical, at a time where human survival may be at stake.

Moreover, if our shared metacrisis challenge is “a multi-faceted delusion” arising from “the spiritual and material exhaustion of modernity”, the injunctive quality of that recognition is: get beyond delusion with a new kind of wisdom, and transcend and include modernity with a new kind of mind. And a good shorthand for that is, I believe: Experience the imaginal realm.

Or, otherwise stated, in the worlds of Cynthia Bourgeault, whom I believe may understand the imaginal realm better than anyone else alive, the injunction arising from the metacrisis is that it is time to learn what it means to put the mind in the heart.

I’m going out tonight! In all seriousness, that’s partly because someone created a place for me to go….

I am attending a talk by Eleanor Robins, whose wonderful post on weirdness and intellectual rigour we shared here a few weeks ago. She will be talking about the value of memorisation in a time of instant-access information, particularly for the sake of our imaginations, which she wrote about here, and I believe the capacity crowd will engage in a joint practice of trying to memorise a poem together. I am intrigued by the talk and the practice, but that’s not the primary draw. I am also going somewhere with a high probability of good vibes, where there is food, a bar, and a spirit of convivial inquiry between people with overlapping interests and sensibilities.

This will all happen at Kairos, founded by journalist and activist Zoë Blackler, who writes for us below, and it is operated as the Kairos Counter-Club CIC at a wonderful central London venue (I admire Zoë’s entrepreneurial capacity to find and secure unused spaces that become the habitat that makes the club work). At Kairos, I know there will be people to enjoy hanging out with, and you can see the wide range of events and activities over the last few months and years on their Instagram.

I have given a couple of talks at Kairos, and they also kindly offer their venue for some Realisation Festival micro-events. It has been wonderful to watch the club grow since its inception. I think it works both because it meets a clear social, intellectual and emotional infrastructure need, and because it combines a spirit of friendly inclusiveness with a gravity of purpose and rules that keep the character of the place intact.

Dem the rules:

The phone rule is critical, and I particularly like “Anyone displaying a consistent lack of imagination will be asked to leave.” (With all due intellectual apologies, for those who like spiral dynamic colours, it is the seriously playful rules that make Kairos feel more ‘yellow’ than ‘green’, and more metamodern than postmodern).

Anyway! Please see below. Kairos has been on Tottenham Court Road, but now needs to move and is looking for a new place, and for funding to support the next stage of the project.

I’ll leave Zoë to convey the Kairos story in her own words, and hope to see you at one of their events before long.

Jonathan Rowson.

In September 2023, Kairos moved into an empty furniture shop on London’s Tottenham Court Road. The events venue I founded and run took over a vast open-plan space in the heart of Fitzrovia, rent-free.

It was our third and most stable home since Kairos launched the previous year. With 3,000 square feet over two floors and a three-year “meanwhile” licence, we could focus on developing the project: building a convivial place in which to explore radical ideas for social and cultural change in response to the polycrisis.

We set up a cafe-style space in the basement where we held our talk events, created a screening area to show films, constructed a bar and secured an alcohol licence, set up a commercial kitchen, acquired a piano and a van-load of second-hand sofas, and started building a library.

I first started thinking about Kairos in the spring of 2022. Formerly a journalist, I’d spent three years in Extinction Rebellion’s media team, frustrated by the lack of mainstream debate about how to navigate the huge social transformations coming as a result of climate and ecological breakdown.

I decided to create a new space, a platform for radical thinkers, where those of us hungry for alternative ideas could gather around a newly emerging worldview. It would also be an alternative members’ club and an experiment in community-building.

I prepared two lists. One contained the questions I wanted to ask. The other, the people I thought might have answers and who I’d invite to be speakers. At Kairos, all discussions begin with the assumption that humanity is entering a period of unprecedented transformation, whether we’re shaping it or merely responding.

That summer, a friend invited me to the Realisation Festival - then in its second year - which is where I met my funder. In October, Kairos opened its doors for the first time in a run-down storefront on Holborn Viaduct.

Kairos is an ancient Greek word for time.

In contrast to Chronos, regimented clock-time, Kairos refers to a moment that is heavy with possibility, but also short-lived. I first came across the word in a quote by the archaeologist David Wengrow:

It’s time to change the course of human history. We appear to be heading into what the ancient Greeks called Kairos, a window of opportunity when our capacity for change is put to the test.

I offered David life-time free membership; his quote now hangs in the loo.

(There’s another alongside it, from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which echoes the sentiment:

Targeting a climate resilient, sustainable world involves fundamental changes to how society functions, including changes to underlying values, worldviews, ideologies, social structures, political and economic systems, and power relationships.

Our core events are salon-style talks –intimate evenings where numbers are kept intentionally small and plenty of time is reserved for discussion. You don’t have to be a member; anyone can buy a ticket. Food is central to all our evenings, which always include a one-pot vegan supper (prepared in our kitchen), which we all eat together. Phones are banned; strangers talk to each other.

To date, we’ve put on hundreds of talks and other events featuring radical thinkers including Dougald Hine, Vanessa Andreotti, Indy Johar, Roman Krznaric and Ann Pettifor. We’ve discussed Bruno Latour’s concept of an ecological class, whether civilisations can ever be sustainable, the importance of collective memory, and the internal psychological struggle between caring and uncaring impulses, among dozens of other topics.

We have a book club, a regular Open Projects Night, library opening hours, and a new Friday music series. We screen films, hold shared reading evenings and throw regular parties. Last year, during a series of events exploring the idea of the Commons, we began collectively drafting a new Charter of the Commons. We’ve hosted workshops to explore the legacy of the anarchist Colin Ward, to imagine a future world of multi-species flourishing, and to help us understand the true nature of debt.

Last month, after two and a half years in Tottenham Court Road, our landlord sold our building. We’ve been given three months’ notice to quit. Kairos is on the hunt for our next home.

While we love our sacred cave and will be sad to leave, we did know this day would come. The city has a glut of empty retail spaces, and we’re confident we can find another, as good if not better.

That said, this is also our own Kairos moment - an opportunity to move to the next phase.

Newcomers to Kairos don’t just find access to radical new ideas, they discover community with others awake to the risk of social collapse, also looking for active hope and a better way to live. Often, they only realise how much they need this place once they find it. Non-commercialised, non-transactional, semi-domestic spaces, where people can spend time in community, dialogue and conviviality, outside of their silos, is something we’ve all but lost. I’m regularly asked by non-Londoners how they might set up their own Kairos-type space in their home town, be it York, Berlin or Vilnius. And as much as we need these individual spaces, we also need the infrastructure connecting them.

In response, we’re setting up a network to support those creating their own spaces, and to amplify their visibility once they’re up and running. The Counter Club Network will launch later this spring. Collectively, we’ll develop an adaptable model that anyone can reproduce with its own location-specific focus and flavour.

In addition, we’ve been thinking about how to tie these intellectual, conversations spaces into the wider collapse-aware community. Starting in London, and inspired by radical places like the Africa Centre of the 1980s, we’re imagining a large building, or series of spaces, that would be a permanent home for Kairos, alongside a full-time bar and café, studios for an artist collective, performance and rehearsal spaces, and rooms for visiting speakers, scholars and other aligned overseas visitors from outside London. It would be a hub for the new counter-culture, where connections would happen, radical ideas would be born and world-changing projects would be incubated.

We’re currently talking to other groups about how to make it happen, and will be going out for funding.

In the meantime, we’ll be making the most of what we have for the next few months. As well as our talks programme and other regular fixtures, we’re planning a festival of intentional communities and the first of our new Bohm-inspired Dialogues. In May, we’re hosting “Big Bang 2”- an installation by Hilary Powell and Dan Edelstyn of artefacts, including the exploded van, from their film Bank Job – and focusing on alternative economics and the power of art for change. We’re holding our inaugural off-site Residency in April: Reworlding with Tim Waterman, launching a podcast of past talks, and developing our Community Membership scheme.

If you’ve only just learning about Kairos now, we’d love to see you here. If you’ve been aware of us for a while, thinking one day you must come and check out our space, that time is now.

Looking forward to seeing you at Kairos.

Zoë

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Being friends with Liz for about a decade, and others I have met through her, has helped to normalise Christianity for me, and even ingratiate me towards it. I am not a card-carrying Christian by any means, but I find myself coming to the defence of Christian belief and practice when it is attacked by those who have shown little curiosity towards it, or unfairly caricature it, because I now experience it as an attack on people I know and like, who are typically no more or less crazy than we all are. I hope you enjoy what follows, and have friends you can share it with.

Jonathan Rowson.

**

A great faith position underlines much of how we navigate our plural common life. We are told, explicitly and implicitly, that in the market place of ideas, all people need is to hear what is correct and they will change their mind. An argument with merit can shift someone’s beliefs, even if it is delivered only once, by any old messenger, poorly communicated. The way we persuade people is by marshalling the best arguments and evidence and then communicating them as loudly, forcefully and often as possible. If the audience don’t immediately accept the idea, the fault lies with them. This faith lies at the heart of bad campaigning, bad evangelism and bad political and theological “debate”, by which I mean, sadly, most of all of those.

Can you think of a time you have changed your mind, on something big? On religion, or politics, questions of identity, climate change, or anything with political and personal implications? Think back. I’m sure ideas and arguments were not irrelevant, but who delivered them? Who introduced you to them? Someone you respected and liked, maybe even hoped to become like? Were you, in fact, friends, or closer, with someone who thought differently?

I thought so. The idea that in the marketplace of ideas the right ones will thrive through some kind of mechanistic exchange is patent nonsense. It is not how people work. If we actually paid attention to why people believe what they believe we would see the huge, glaring, completely obvious mechanism. Relationships. As Sarah Stein Lubrano says: “It is people who change one’s…views, and for the most part, it is specifically the people we like, respect, and even love¹.”

We are social creatures, the scientists tell us. It should have been obvious. Far from being rational actors, objectively assessing every new piece of information on its merits, we mainly adopt the views of people we trust and admire. Crucially, they tend to be those we sense might trust and admire us, because a need for affirmation and a terror of social exile are strong drivers. Ozan Varol puts it, “When your beliefs are entwined with your identity, changing your mind means changing your identity. That’s a really hard sell².” Robert Higgs agrees that in the main ideas are chosen for one’s self-image and group belonging: “the kind of groups to which a person chooses to belong is closely connected with the kind of person he takes himself to be — a matter of prime concern to the typical person.³

This means most of us end up with the ambient world view of the group we feel most strongly aligns with our self-image and (crucially) where we feel most welcome, most seen. Of course we do. My tradition says the same thing in different, older language - God is relationship and we are made in God’s image. A trinitarian anthropology, is the technical phrase. Designed for love. Designed for each other. An interconnected body, even. Most of the great wisdom traditions are sceptical of the whole idea of an individual. They tell us we are not really a lone person “thinking for ourselves” at all, but interconnected.

This reality means that most popular persuasion strategies are useless. Telling people they are wrong doesn’t change their minds. Telling them that “people like them“ (i.e. their centre of belonging and identity) are wrong, or hateful, or faithless or stupid will have the opposite effect. Remember the basket of deplorables? Or when someone called “TERFs” dinosaurs and suddenly T Rex emojis started popping up on all the gender critical Twitter accounts? If you are trying to persuade someone, and you express contempt or disdain for their core identity or the beliefs of the group they find belonging in (no matter how justified this seems) you might as well go home. You will have just strengthened their commitment to preexisting beliefs. You have failed to do the hard work of listening and understanding and meeting your audience where they are.

Rather than acknowledging this failure, people who are in theory engaged in the work of persuasion tend to congratulate themselves. The high of self-righteous rage bonds their own group, strengthens their own self-identity as the one who is right. Look at those idiots get slammed! It is the instinct in any online mob, and it exists in us all. This feeling is pleasurable, dangerously pleasurable. The rush of rightness increases our image of the people with the “wrong” belief as stupid or irrational, emotional and unbiblical, bigoted, naive, or whatever the story we are telling is. It helps steady us after the cognitive dissonance of encountering another view. It is a drug, one our current information environment has deliberately got us all hooked on. And so the divide gapes wider.

The alternative to this pointless, performative “persuasion” is slower and more human scale, but truer to the kind of creatures we are. Friendship. When I ran a Westminster think tank, I made this a central plank of our strategy. Yes, we needed robust research, compelling arguments and effective communications (especially that last one) but most of all we needed to know people and be known. Think tanks are always trying to change minds, and I could see how ineffective the research alone, no matter how brilliant, even combined with excellent communications, usually was for that task. I could also see that every major strategic breakthrough we had ever had could be traced back to a chain of relationships, a series of people saying: you can trust these guys. They are sound. They make sense. They are not the enemy, and they might even be a friend.

A chain of testimony, in fact, which bridged from where we were to where our audience was, and reassured them we were enough like them to be trusted. That we were not trying to undermine their sense of self, or destroy their centre of belonging, but would in fact take the time to listen and speak their language.

All of this, of course, takes soul work. It does not come easy. None of our formation or education has prepared us for it, and few people model it. Those that do risk being exiled by their “own side”, who feel betrayed by this attempt to bridge divides. I have felt this, as I have attempted to walk my own vocational path. It has required laying down a measure of the safety we all find in our tribes and being willing to be misunderstood.

Those that seek to build these friendships also risk, of course, having their own minds changed, their own self-identity questioned. Because friendships are a sacred thing, and when we go after them for instrumental reasons alone something deep is transgressed. You can smell it, so it won’t work. Real friendships, real relationships can only exist in reciprocity, when we are as willing to listen as to speak. They require us to seek out the good in the other. And for all the aforementioned reasons, everything in us resists this. It feels like existential threat. We might even have been told it is immoral, depending on our theory of justice. Spiritual core strength, a stable sense of self and regular rest and refilling are prerequisites. Maybe it is because this is part of my calling that I have fought so hard for all these things, why I still need them so badly.

It isn’t everyone’s calling, should not be asked of everyone and may not be possible for all of us. Certainly not in every season of our lives. Our past traumas and temperament will make it easier for some than others. Sometimes we will just need to express rage or grief, and give up on trying to persuade.

When we can do this work, we see how friendships that cross even the deepest divides are magic. They soften our hearts and humble us in humanising ways. When we are able to create forms of belonging and affirmation across divides, which do not rely on agreement, yes, people change their minds, but they also just change. They become more fully human. More fully alive. Hatred is harder, and that is good for us all. Friendships like these can be places where that most radical love, which pursues strangers and enemies and makes them friends, is imaged. Friendships like these, and I believe this down deep in my bones, are how the world is healed.

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One practical implication is that Perspectiva’s Realisation Fellowship Programme will not be available this year. The Realisation Foundation CIC will instead provide bursary places at the festival. Announcements about that will be made soon on the festival website (soon to be renewed) and by email to the festival mailing list.

After over half a decade of incubation and the combined intellectual, creative and operational efforts of several people, the festival is well-established, with a structure, ethos, and rhythm that feels like a dynamic equilibrium. I am grateful for a break from this aspect of Perspectiva’s work, while the charity focuses on several other projects.

To give some indication of what else we are up to, There We Are Human Again by Carne Ross, an extraordinary story about a diplomat who became an anarchist, is coming out before summer, and two other titles are scheduled for publication later in the year. We are also working to make it easier for others to host the antidebate, and we remain eager to initiate other ambitious innovations in socio-spiritual practice. 2026 is also an inflexion point for Perspectiva’s contributions to the Emerge network, and we will be working with partners on a major new educational media initiative.

So please stay tuned for all of that, and more. And in the meantime, buy a ticket!

Jonathan.

One way to understand Perspectiva is that we try, as many other organisations now do, to get “beyond wellbeing”, which means questioning the idea that our main duty to ourselves is to feel good, or even just be ok. There is a case for the struggle, too, for divine discontent, for the restless agency that seeks to shape a better world, and not just to be shaped by in ways that feel better. In mental health advertising, to encourage people to talk, they say that it’s ok not to be ok, and that’s right; but Alex’s post reminds us that it’s also ok not to think the point of life is to feel ok. Please also note Hilman’s distinction between inner soul and outer soul below, which is useful in the context of Perspectiva's focus on "systems, souls, and society". The Perspectiva founders did debate whether to make it 'soul' or 'souls' back in the day, and went for the plural to help speak of/to individual souls, but this Hilman angle is another way to make sense of the plural.

Over to Alex. Enjoy.

Just before Christmas, I read a great Substack by Liz Bucar, a professor of religion in the US, and it’s been on my mind ever since.

The post was entitled “Ezra Klein Just Showed Us Everything Wrong With Secularized Meditation” — which is pretty irresistible clickbait if, like me, you’re into both meditation and politics (Klein is a big name American political commentator).

Bucar had been listening to a podcast of Klein talking to Ta-Nehisi Coates, an American author who’s known for writing about race issues. They’d been discussing political violence, and Coates had this to say about Black people’s experience of it:

Martin Luther King could be standing up, telling his own people: ‘We do not embrace violence at all, it is morally repugnant, we embrace love’ — and that could get you shot. Not ‘burn it down!’ but love can get you shot.

In response, Klein offered a strange non-sequitur:

There’s a Buddhist meditation I like. This is a weird place to go. But it goes like this: I’m of the nature to grow sick. I’m of the nature to grow old. I’m of the nature to lose the people I love. I’m of the nature to die. How then shall I live?

Here’s what got Liz Bucar about this:

Did you feel that whiplash? From the specificity of political murder, from lynching and assassination, from “love can get you shot”—to a generalized meditation about personal aging and death. Klein himself seems to know something’s off. “This is a weird place to go,” he says. But he goes there anyway.

She continues (emphasis added):

What’s jarring is that he centered his own spiritual practice in response to someone describing the violence inflicted on their community. Coates is talking about lynching, and Klein responds by discussing his meditation life as though his contemplation of mortality is somehow comparable to the gravity of racist murder.

This isn’t about Klein being a bad person. It’s about how secularized meditation functions when it’s been stripped of its religious worldview and social context. When meditation becomes primarily about managing your own internal state rather than connecting you to collective struggle, it can become a tool for turning away from rather than toward political reality.

I think Bucar is onto something important here, and it goes a lot deeper than just ‘spiritual bypassing’ (where people use spiritual practices or beliefs to avoid dealing with difficult emotions).

Instead, it’s about what happens when people respond to a world on fire — a world of ecological breakdown, rising authoritarianism, spiralling injustice — by retreating into personal wellbeing.

It’s understandable. It’s also, as we’ll see, disastrous. And it’s everywhere.

The dangers of retreating inwards

James Hillman, one of the great Jungian psychoanalysts, understood all this very well. Back in 1992, he and journalist Michael Ventura wrote up a series of dialogues under the rather fabulous title We’ve Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy — and the World’s Getting Worse. In one passage Hillman rails furiously that (again, emphasis added):

There is a decline in political sense. No sensitivity to the real issues. Why are the intelligent people — at least among the white middle class — so passive now? Why? Because the sensitive, intelligent people are in therapy! They’ve been in therapy in the United States for thirty, forty years, and during that time there’s been a tremendous political decline in this country…

Therapy, in its crazy way, by emphasising the inner soul and ignoring the outer soul, supports the decline of the actual world. Yet therapy goes on blindly believing that it’s curing the outer world by making better people.

Later in the same conversation, Ventura nails it even more succinctly:

A therapist told me that my grief at seeing a homeless man my age was really a feeling of sorrow for myself.

It’s the same thing Bucar is picking up on: a pulling away from things that are wrong out there in the real world, and into personal introspection instead.

I see it in a lot of so-called ‘spiritual but not religious’ practice, too — in how the focus so often ends up being on my wellbeing, my self-help, my healing from trauma, as opposed to the urgent need for collective wellbeing, self-help, or healing.

Nor is organised religion immune. In Christianity, my own tradition, I always feel uneasy when I see church leaders who zone out on personal salvation in the next life — and ignore the need for collective salvation in this one. (And don’t even get me started on ‘prosperity gospel’, a variant of Christianity which sees personal financial success as a sign of God’s favour.)

To be clear, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with attending to our inner lives. On the contrary, I think it’s essential. But when we focus on our personal inner worlds at the cost of neglecting our shared outer world, then we are in all sorts of trouble. That’s when ‘wellbeing’ becomes individualistic, consumerist, narcissistic. Divorced from any sense of interdependence, practical compassion, or mutual obligation.

And in times like the ones we’re living in now — in conditions that feel increasingly apocalyptic and which above all require us to get organised and act together — focusing on our individual inner lives alone is the last thing on Earth we need.

When inner and outer got divorced

It wasn’t always like this. Not so long ago, personal inner change and collective outer change were understood as what they really are: two sides of the same coin.

Take trade union history. As my brother Jules noted a couple of years ago,

The left in the 19th century offered workers both self-improvement and collective action. Samuel Smiles’ book Self-Help was a workers’ classic (indeed its original title was The Education of the Working Classes). Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations was hugely popular in working men’s libraries. The labour movement preached self-reliance, self-improvement, dealing with your shit, and working to change society.

Or look at Gandhi and Martin Luther King. Both understood that for nonviolence to work, activists had to work on their states of mind as well as the state of the world. (MLK was actually close friends with the Buddhist monk and meditation teacher Thích Nhất Hạnh, as Ella Saltmarshe pointed out to me while I was writing this post.)

But in the late 1960s, something changed. Inner and outer change somehow became separated.

Adam Curtis — the maker of superb documentaries like The Century of the Self — unpacked it in a podcast several years back. In the latter half of the 1960s, he argues, the counterculture movement became steadily more individualistic. Unlike the civil rights movement that preceded it, “it didn’t want to go down to the South and spend years in anonymity and danger trying to change the world”. Instead,

The argument shifted away from the idea of saying ‘we can work together to change the world’ to saying ‘no, if we can be the vanguard of changing ourselves as people, then you change society like that. You change the people first and then society will transform’.

[But] bit by bit, the politics moved away and you were left with this idea that you just transform yourself, and you have all these radical psychotherapy movements of the 1970s come up [and say] ‘you need to find your authentic feelings’.

That became the goal — and the idea that you’re actually changing society as a by-product began to disappear.

It was a big shift. This ‘inward turn’ marked the starting point not only of our contemporary preoccupation with personal psychological or spiritual wellbeing but also, Curtis argues, of modern hyper-consumerism, with its galaxy of “products that you can use to express your individual identity”.

I’d argue that there was a simultaneous ‘outward turn’, too — of people seeking to change the state of the world without bothering to attend to their states of mind — and that this too has been pretty disastrous.

Everyone who works in organising, activism, or social change knows all too well the epidemic of burnout that afflicts non-profits. It’s understandable: we’re overwhelmed by the urgency of the issues we work on, the inadequacy of resources, the scale of unmet need. It takes a heavy toll on far too many of us who work in the sector.

It affects how we approach our work, too. I’ve written before about what happens when we’re in and out of fight-flight-freeze states the whole time. Rage or terror can descend over us like a mist. We become less empathetic and more aggressive. We lock into our in-groups and start ‘othering’ anyone who sees the world differently from us.

I’m not suggesting that we lived in a perfect Utopia until the late 1960s. But I do think that over the half century since then, we’ve seen a massive intensification of hyper-individualism, loneliness, consumerism, political division, inequality, environmental breakdown, and now authoritarianism — and that far from being separate trends, they’re intensely interconnected.

All of them have to do with how our states of mind shape the state of the world, and vice versa. And if we want to start to improve them, then I think we need to work on both inner and outer change; on both our states of mind and the state of world.

Which is where I start to feel hopeful. Because if the late 1960s saw inner and outer get divorced, then I wonder whether maybe the 2020s will prove to be the decade when they finally get back together.

What happens now?

I think we might just be starting to see that long-overdue reconciliation take place — in political campaigns, in religious contexts, and in everyday life.

Take the Radical Love campaign in Turkey in 2019, when a grassroots campaign for the Istanbul mayoralty defeated President Erdoğan’s populist authoritarianism in a landslide. How? By training activists to work on their states of mind and the state of the world, and to “ignore Erdoğan, but love those who love him.”

The campaign was built around an extraordinary playbook which majored on the responsibility activists have to manage their mental and emotional states, and to embrace the struggle to love each other even under the most challenging conditions. “We saw that we cannot change Erdoğan, so we fight by changing ourselves” (emphasis added).

As I wrote in a Twitter thread at the time,

There’s nothing woolly here. The playbook says again and again how hard this strategy is, how much patience and self-mastery it requires. It’s fundamentally about having the self-awareness to *choose* how to react rather than sliding into fight-or-flight responses.

Religions, too, can do amazing work at the cusp of our inner and outer worlds. I love the writing of Richard Rohr, a US-based Franciscan priest and bestselling author. Rohr is all about the fusion of contemplation and action, and the recognition that people have to transform themselves in order to be able to work together effectively to transform our shared future. Just like Radical Love, it’s a both/and, not an either/or.

But I’ll give the last word to the wonderful Heather Parry, one of my absolute favourite Substackers, who wrote a deeply thoughtful and lovely piece entitled “A Framework for Giving a Shit”. Here’s how she wraps it up:

A church, a mosque, a synagogue—these are all fine places to go. They are fine places to spend time together, to be considerate, to care about other people. Like the harshly-lit room in the community space in my neighbourhood, they are also all political spaces.

We engage in religion politically and culturally, as we engage in anything else. Sit two believers next to each other and you’ll find very quickly that there is not one way to engage with a religion; the ways we interpret and practice them are as unique as our fingerprints.

We chose our places of worship based on what they preach, what parts of our religion they choose to emphasise, and the scaffolding they give us for how to engage with those around us. We test these frameworks against real life. They are not theoretical, but practical. Love thy neighbour. Love your fellow as yourself. Love for your brother what you love for you.

In 2026 I am choosing to have faith. Not in a god, but in my fellow citizens. I am choosing to get down and dirty with imperfect projects, full of imperfect people, with whom I will almost certainly, at some point, disagree.

I am choosing community, as it really is, not in its ideal form only, but in the form of people who share work with me, or share space with me, or share the same hopes for the future that I have. I am choosing discomfort, and its potential to create change. I will listen more than I speak. I will resist the urge to public snark against people who stand only an inch away from me.

I will look at how power works, and ask myself if the things I’m being asked to do will realistically achieve anything; if not, I will suggest an alternative, will risk being stupid and wrong. I will be okay with being told I am wrong.

I will commit to a project, learn from those more experienced, use my skills where I can, assess what I’m told against my own morals, and most of all, act.

It is time to get amongst each other, whether that’s in the house of god or a cheaply-painted room in the back of a public hall, and do something other than post.

To which all I can add is: amen to all of that.

**

I’m going to ask you some questions that, depending on your disposition, might make you think I’ve got mush for brains. Here goes:

Are hallucinations part of reality, or fantasy?

How about dreams?

How about daydreams?

Ecstatic communion with the divine?

Gut hunches that turn out to be bang-on?

Insights gleaned in meditation or trance?

The strangely powerful telepathy we can sometimes feel with animals, trees, or landscapes?

Every society has an agreement about whether these experiences count as real, and so whether they have any value. If your society doesn’t seem to have an agreement about this—or at least, not one you’ve ever heard articulated—that’s probably because it dismisses them out of hand. Which is, of course, a very firm kind of agreement. Perhaps the firmest.

In their book Inside the Neolithic Mind, archaeologists David Lewis-Williams and David Pearce describe each society’s tacit agreement about consciousness as a “consciousness contract”.

This essay will be a story about England’s consciousness contract—which, don’t you worry, has ramifications far beyond England. It’s a story about how that consciousness contract was rewritten in the sixteenth century, about how that rewriting delivered us to so much of the violence of the present day, about the evidence that we’re living through a rare opportunity to rewrite the contract again—and about how you can grasp that opportunity.

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Back in 1594, a strange, rambling pamphlet was published under the name “The Terrors of the Night.” It was by one of those writers who was a giant in his day but is now mostly forgotten: Thomas Nashe.

In this odd essay, Nashe discussed, among other things, the meaning and nature of dreams. “A dream,” he said boldly, “is nothing else but the echo of our conceits in the day.” He went further, comparing “the working of our brains after we have unyoked and gone to bed” to “the glimmering and dazzling of a man’s eyes when he comes newly out of the bright sun into a dark shadow.”

Well! This might seem quite reasonable to many people today, but let me tell you, it was a bold thing to say in 1594. You only have to look at Shakespeare’s plays to see how hot a topic dreaming was then. And it was a hot topic because—though they would never have described it this way—early modern thinkers were in the process of rewriting the consciousness contract.

For thousands of years, dreams had been seen as communications from God, or indeed the gods. For Elizabethan physicians, they were also important diagnostic tools, hinting at all the unseen things that might be going on in a body. Or of course, maybe they foreshadowed the future, like they so often do in Shakespeare’s plays—think of Julius Caesar’s wife Calpurnia dreaming of her husband’s statue spouting blood, before he’s killed. Whichever way you looked at them, dreams mattered. Events that unfolded in altered states of consciousness, like dreaming, had long been known to carry important information about our lives in this realm of flesh and bone.

Then along comes Thomas Nashe, saying: Pish! Dreams are nothing more than mental glitches.

And of course it wasn’t just Nashe—he simply delivered a soundbite for a much bigger shift in thinking. A shift triggered by two earthquakes that shook England at just about the same time: the Reformation and the Renaissance.

It would be reductive to say that these twin movements simply shrank the consciousness contract, so that after the sixteenth century, English society only valued rational waking consciousness. (And I don’t have space here to offer the full nuanced picture of how these movements emerged from and then altered human consciousness. But if that’s what you’re looking for, I’d suggest reading Iain McGilchrist’s The Master and his Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, particularly the history in the second half of the book.)

What I will say is this (and I’m going to resort to bullet points here, to save you the 1,500+ very woolly words I wrote while groping my way to the point):

• Despite being sparked by Henry VIII’s libido as much as anything else, the English Reformation absolutely had the effect of making ritual and ritual objects suspect. When Henry dissolved the monasteries in the late 1530s, countless once-holy artefacts and buildings were destroyed, and with them, their ritual resonance. And what is ritual if not an age-old technology for altering consciousness in order to access expanded reality?

• We can see, then, that the Reformation had the effect of shrinking the consciousness contract; of positing that only rational waking consciousness is trustworthy.

• The Renaissance is trickier, because in so many ways it emerged from mystical and occult practices that presuppose an expansive, more-than-material reality. The original Renaissance men were invariably dabblers in Cabala, astrology, alchemy, and other practices straitlaced people would dismiss as “woo” today.

• And yet. Something complicated happened to these expansive forms of consciousness, and the human relationship to them, as the Renaissance unfolded. It wasn’t as simple as dismissing them; trashing all the alchemy equipment like Henry VIII trashing the monasteries. Instead, I believe that the Renaissance—the movement that in so many ways gave us the modern world—played out as an attempt to enslave these expanded forms of consciousness—and the expanded realities they opened—to the appetites of rational waking consciousness. So that even in those esoteric circles that held on to a very broad consciousness contract, a grasping kind of rationalism was still on the ascendant. In fact, rationalism was arguably more dangerous in those quarters, because it was harnessing the incredible power of imagination and altered consciousness, rather than denying it.

• What the hell am I wittering on about? Let’s get specific by considering Elizabeth I’s astrological advisor, John Dee. This quintessential Renaissance man brought astrology and occult practice directly into the Elizabethan court. He was terrifyingly well versed in just about every modality and written work that aimed to uncover the deeper mysteries of the universe. And when he brought those practices to Elizabeth, what did he use them for? The pursuit of deep wisdom in policy? Of cosmic justice? Of humility and submission to the laws of the natural world? Fuck no. He used them to encourage Elizabeth to get a wriggle on with her imperial expansion. He read the stars, and he invoked the Arthurian myths of England’s noble might, and he called upon all the learning and mystical power in his toolbox, and he said to the queen: Use this otherworldly power to build an empire.

• And sure, Dee used his occult learning to justify this strategy. But there’s no doubt in my mind that its origins were much more pragmatic, belonging to material reality. Elizabethans were starving. The royal household had perpetual money woes. John Dee had perpetual money woes. And those pesky Spanish and Portuguese were getting ahead of the game in commandeering the lands and riches of the so-called New World.

• So we see that in the sixteenth century, some movements directly shrank the consciousness contract. Others deployed expanded consciousness and more-than-material reality to service the needs of ordinary, “rationalist” waking consciousness. And the result? The dawn of centuries of empire and a consciousness contract that was increasingly a straitjacket.

• This confluence is no accident. The two come hand in hand. Colonialism is inherently an impulse of a shrunken consciousness and conscience.

• Think about it this way: in our most “rational”, cognitively reasoning states, we are necessarily detached from expanded feeling states, including mystic connection, cosmic insight—and also just plain empathy. The ability to feel with others; to share in their field of consciousness.

• Ultimately, then, the history of colonialism is a history of shrunken consciousness, and even more dangerously, of the enslavement of expanded consciousness to the rationalizing will.

• And this is the form of consciousness most of us in the Western world have been living under for nearly 500 years.

Oof.

So what now?

Now,

after nearly 500 years of shrunken consciousness,

of ascendant “rationalism”,

of colonialism,

of violence and denial of spirit,

it seems the tables might be turning. It seems we might have a chance to rewrite our tacit consciousness contract, and with it, the way we inhabit the world.

What makes me say that?

Well, first, there’s the fact that we have the phrase “consciousness contract” at all. As I mentioned, this phrase came from the field of archaeology. From, in fact, a revolution in the field of archaeology. See, archaeologists had been studying prehistoric cave paintings for centuries and getting pretty much nowhere. They had used all of the scientific and semiotic skills of our rationalist, post-Renaissance, post-Enlightenment age, and ultimately concluded that in fact, there was no way to ever know what the paintings meant, or what they were for.

Then in 2002, David Lewis-Williams published The Mind in the Cave, and revolutionized the field by suggesting that the cave paintings might belong to rituals revolving around altered states of consciousness; that this might be the key to understanding the earliest art and the origins of our species.

And in order to make that claim, he had to first step outside of the West’s limited consciousness contract—step far enough outside it, in fact, to see it, and to name it.

And that kind of separation is the beginning of real change.

This turning point in archaeology reflects a sea change that’s underway in so many fields right now. The obvious example is quantum physics, where a mechanistic view of the universe is famously giving way to an understanding that all this matter is underpinned by something mysterious and more than material. In fact, there are whole organizations, like The Galileo Commission, that are devoted to helping serious scientists bravely challenge the consciousness contract and study more-than-material reality.

And I really do mean “bravely”.

Because here’s where we all come in—all those of us who are alive today. Who have been chosen, for whatever reason, to live through this time.

After 500 years, rationalism is not going to surrender its crown without a fight. And it’s a formidable ruler, because it has cynicism on its side. It is ready and gleefully waiting to roll its eyes and pick apart any sloppy thinking or sloppy science, and use it to stop this revolution in consciousness in its tracks.

Worse, it’s not just “out there” in the seats of government or the books of Richard Dawkins. It is inside each of us, rubbing its hands and waiting to tear down any hunch we might have that the world is far more magical than we’ve been led to believe.

And the thing is, we can’t simply override it. It’s not inherently bad. In fact, it’s an important part of the consciousness contract. It’s there to make sure that what we discover about the more-than-material world is actually applicable in this material realm.

It just can’t be the only part of our consciousness contract.

Which is where our deepest weirdness and our highest intellectual rigour come in.

If you’re reading this, you’re likely already in love with the mystery of existence. Maybe you interpret your dreams, or you’ve dabbled with plant medicine, or you meditate. You likely have faith in something bigger than human, whatever that might be.

That hunch you have is part of this moment. It’s the sea change in consciousness expressing itself in your consciousness. How else would the great consciousness make itself known, if not through each of our little shares of consciousness?

And we have a very important role right now. In order to honour this expansion of consciousness that’s playing out inside each of us, we have to indulge our deepest weirdness; we have to get skilled at hearing the urgings of our instincts and subconscious. We each have to celebrate and elevate our specific weirdness.

And we have to advance with absolute intellectual rigour. We have to bring the intellect along with us, meet its need for context and information and serious thought—so that our rational minds (and those of our neighbours) don’t pit themselves against us, and find a place to ambush us and take this movement down.

That is the only way this movement is going to work. The only way it’s going to change enough people to change the world.

And we badly need to change the world.

Which means that this rambling essay is, ultimately, a call to action.

Please, indulge your deepest weirdness and your deepest nerd. Seek out the serious thinkers and practitioners of the more-than-material realms. The people doing the research, the people whose imaginative capacity is matched by their rigour.

We need to read, to educate ourselves.

We need to bring the whole of our knowing along with us on this journey.

If you follow along here, I promise to keep sharing the thinkers who are helping me to understand all this. And I hope you’ll do the same in return.

It’s a great privilege to have been born in this moment—and we owe it to ourselves, to the future, and to consciousness itself to rise to the occasion.

Whew. Thank you for reading.

xx Eleanor

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In case you’re interested, here’s a little bibliography for this piece. I’m sure there were lots of other pieces that made their way in here; I currently have forty-two thousand tabs open, and I’m not going to trawl them all. But these are the heavy hitters:

• Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World

• Frances Yates, The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age

• Benjamin Woolley, The Queen’s Conjurer: The Science and Magic of Mr Dee

• David Lewis-Williams, The Mind in the Cave

• David Lewis-Williams and David Pearce, Inside the Neolithic Mind

What follows was a joyous struggle and is likely to be my last post for Perspectiva for a few weeks. I will soon send my phone and laptop on a rocket to Saturn, surrender to fallow time, sing along with The Pogues to the quintessence of post-tragic cheer, and dance with the figurative snow. The Substack superego is guilt-tripping me by saying this post is too long for email, even at Christmas time, so reading it all is a noble and subversive act; scan and look away if you must, or please do get stuck in, but be ready to click again at the end for the full festive feast.

In terms of Perspectiva’s major aims, understanding debates about consciousness is necessary for clarifying the nature of ‘the flip’, the first of three major epoch-defining challenges in the back-of-the-envelope plan to change the world known as ‘The flip, the formation, and the fun’.

Thank you for your support in 2025. If you can like or share, or comment on this post, that is appreciated, and if you feel so moved, you can take advantage of a 25% discount offer to keep Perspectiva’s work going by becoming a paid subscriber, so we can keep our material freely available. Plans for 2026 are already brewing, but for now, it’s time to guide 2025 to its manger, and let the heavens do their thing.

Jonathan Rowson, Perspectiva Co-Founder and CEO.

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I wonder if Joe Bloggs and his Aunt Sally know what is meant by the term consciousness and why it is considered by some to be mysterious and confounding. They might be surprised to learn that the most self-evident thing in the world - our subjective experience - has been called into question as an inexplicable anomaly. Consciousness is not physical in nature and cannot be understood or measured in the way physical things can be. Nor is it clear how consciousness could ever arise from physical things, or interact with them. If you work with the assumption that the substances, processes, and events of the world are ultimately physical, it appears to be impossible to adequately explain the most self-evident feature of life, namely, our experience, which is embarrassing, or at least ought to be.

There is still the reality of technological incursions into the lifeworld, the challenge of plutocratic power, the sinking small island states, the men in balaclavas with machine guns…So let’s not fall into spiritual bypassing. But equally, let’s not forsake the possibility of a radical shift in the perception of context for millions of people who are not ready to give up on the world. Many who are not yet mobilised might need to see the world anew to organise with the requisite clarity, determination, and conviviality.

The inquiry that matters is not so much “what is consciousness?” because the answer is unlikely to be a simple what, but more like a complex how, an abiding why, a flowing when, and even a pervading who. It’s probably not a where, however, and that matters too. Consciousness may interact with your brain and body, but it is looking increasingly unlikely that it’s made from them. You might say consciousness comes from elsewhere, but more likely it didn’t come from anywhere at all, and didn’t have to. Perhaps experience is like Tom Bombadil, and just is, and always was. And if, as appears to be the case, consciousness exists in time, but not in space, our challenge as humans is not to locate consciousness, but to make time a better place to be.

Theories of consciousness are ostensibly about the nature of experience, but what’s often at stake is the significance of subjectivity. It’s all very well being a being, but what is exciting is knowing that you are, and querying why you are privy to that knowledge. Our tacit theory of consciousness shapes our sense of what is politically possible, even when, or perhaps especially when, it is held unconsciously, so I am curious to know what happens when we become more conscious of our working theory of consciousness. There is, for instance, a connection between metaphysical materialism and economic materialism. A world with a better balance of extrinsic and intrinsic values is hard to achieve when matter is considered bedrock, and finding bedrock feels like ‘the bottom line’.

I also believe that philosophical materialism - broadly the notion that mind is reducible to matter - is actually already dead. Yet, it lives on as the undead, a well-dressed zombie sitting as Chair of the Board with a big smile, awaiting quarterly returns. My aim here is not, of course, to kill a zombie, nor to reach a final verdict on the nature of consciousness, but it felt timely to open the inquiry for those who may not be familiar with it, share my learning in solidarity with those who are also on the way, and indicate why I think this inquiry matters.

A major paradigm shift is underway, but it’s currently discussed mostly in backwaters like this one, and we may all have a role to play in it becoming a wave, and then the ocean, which incidentally is roughly how I see our relationship to consciousness, too. As Rūmī writes (in the Mathnawī):

The wave is the sea itself; do not be mistaken.

**

The idea that we are all part of one cosmic mind, or world soul, sounds trippy to some, but I see it now as a kind of radical sanity. This idea is central to what Aldous Huxley called The Perennial Philosophy, and is implicit or explicit in most major religions. However, it is also an idea with a forsaken intellectual dignity that we need to recover. Debates about theories of consciousness are neither themselves a spiritual practice nor the transformation sought, but engaging with them is helpful intellectual underlabour. Last summer, a post by Ellie Robbins called This Moment Needs Your Deep Weirdness and Your Intellectual Rigour clearly said what many were feeling, and I was glad to see these ideas reaffirmed by Douglas Rukoff, who put it more directly a few days ago: Why I am Getting Weird. I don’t find either of them weird in the modern sense of strange, discomforting or eccentric, but they are weird, and helpfully so, in the older sense of weirdness as destiny, or fate already spun.

Earlier this year, I listened to season one of The Telepathy Tapes. I felt it overplayed its hand, and though I was gripped by the early episodes, characterised by cautious and sceptical inquiry, I began to find the music manipulative, and the emphasis on expansive love too generic and even coercive. Even so, I was impressed that what is essentially a parapsychology podcast about autistic children communicating telepathically made such a compelling case that it briefly dethroned The Joe Rogan Show on Spotify. The podcast did not feel like pseudoscience or ‘woo’ to me, but more like finding a chest of buried treasure in the garden, while not yet having the tools to be sure of its value (or its safety). Kafka famously said that “A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us”, and this podcast felt a bit like that. I still don’t know what to make of the evidence of the telepathy tapes or the inferences made from it, but I did see the podcast as a kind of Kuhnian anomaly entering popular culture, asking us to radically reimagine what some minds are capable of and what follows for our view of the world, and what is possible within and beyond it.

**

I am not an advanced meditator, but I have practised TM at least daily for a quarter of a century. In most sessions, my mind is like a washing machine spinning through random images and defragmenting with only moments of stillness, but there are occasionally sessions where I find myself sinking deeply into a form of experience that feels boundless, creative and generative. In such moments, it feels true to say that I am conscious, but not conscious of anything in particular, such that I wonder if maybe I am part of consciousness as such; this very idea puts me at odds with much of the Western tradition that links consciousness to individual minds, perception, and intentionality, but I know it from the inside.

In a famous essay from 1974, “What is it like to be a bat?” Tomas Nagel framed the idea of consciousness as ‘what it is like’ to be something from, as it were, ‘the inside’. He contended that we can’t really know what it’s like to be a bat, even if we understand a great deal about it from ‘the outside’, for instance, its use of echolocation to see, or its penchant for sleeping upside down. Some say that this ‘what it’s like’ experience of interiority is a kind of illusion arising from neurons firing, but as Rowan Williams once put it, our very idea of illusion presupposes consciousness, so if consciousness is an illusion, what isn’t? Some years later, in 2012, in a book called Mind and Cosmos, Nagel surprised the philosophical world by stating the obvious, namely that mind is not reducible to matter, to great consternation and criticism from his peers, including Steven Pinker, who tweeted about “the shoddy reasoning of a once-great thinker.” Yet on page 51, Nagel writes:

If mental phenomena are not physically reducible, then we must expect… a major conceptual revolution in our understanding of the natural order.

And let’s hope so.

But how much does this inquiry matter? As indicated by the Landscapes of Consciousness research that I’ll come to in a moment, our perspectives on consciousness have implications for whether AI might ever be conscious, whether our consciousness could ever survive digitally, whether there is life after death, what it means for life to be meaningful, and the indirect implications go even further. Jeffrey Kripal, for instance, believes we need a new paradigm of consciousness to save the humanities by ‘decolonising reality’ from materialism, and theologians see in consciousness a pathway to primordial subjectivity, I-am-ness from the very beginning, and through that to God. There may also be other psycho-spiritual implications, because anomalous experiences begin to look like they could be a form of intra-mental communication within a cosmic mind, rather than random physical occurrences that individual minds notice.

There is clearly a connection between ecological collapse, our place in nature, nature’s mind, and what is perhaps implied for deep ecology and our relationship to the agency of the more-than-human world. And I recently noticed Matthew Crawford lamenting that AI is beginning to own not just “the means of production” but “the means of thinking” and that the antidote is a newfound recognition of who we are:

We are in for real political turmoil. The establishment is afraid, and rightly so, that the most likely alternative to technocratic rule would be something atavistic. If there is a silver lining in the current confusion, it may be this: without a social class whose material interests are tied to the homogenizing and reductive metaphysics of technocracy, it may become possible once again to entertain big metaphysical questions. We may become open, as the West has not been for centuries, to truths made available to us in the tradition that runs from classical antiquity, through the Hebrew bible and into the Christian teaching. According to this tradition, the human being is something doubly distinct: a natural kind that is oriented beyond itself, indeed beyond nature altogether. Human beings participate in something transcendent, in the image of which they were made. This truth provides a basis – I suspect it may be the only solid basis – on which human possibility may be defended against erasure.

There are tensions here between transcendence and immanence that are informed by debates on consciousness. An emphasis on the dignity of the individual soul and the monotheistic God is not the same as an emphasis on entanglement, postcolonial reckoning, interdependent arising and the virtuality of self. Baptism is not astrology. Liturgy is not meditation. Sunyata is not Maya. We make a big mistake if we assume everyone who senses a similar problem feels called to the same ecology of ideas for the solution. Our challenge is nonetheless to forge alliances with people we mostly agree with on the delusion we have had to endure, and on fundamental matters of value and pragmatism, even if worldviews inevitably diverge.

I share this preamble to show why, given the stakes, I think it’s clearly worth investing some time in understanding this consciousness malarkey.

**

A recent article in The New Scientist indicated 350 theories of consciousness, which are from the same underlying research as Landscapes of Consciousness, an impressive work of collection and synthesis created by Robert Lawrence Kuhn and developed with Alex Gomez Marin.

350 theories? Alex jokes that consciousness theories have become like toothbrushes, in that everyone has one, but nobody wants to use anyone else’s.

The narcissism of small differences creeps in, and people become attached to their specific way of doing things, even when the differences between theories are often a contingent matter of language or emphasis, not unlike the infighting Monty Python alerted us to between The People’s Front of Judea and The Judean People’s Front.

As you can see, the theories are clustered into views that are broadly materialist, including some that are physicalist but not reductive, or informed by quantum theory, or the integration of information. And then there’s a kind of intertidal zone of panpsychism, the new fashion, the surprisingly sensible shoes of consciousness theories; it takes comfort in the familiar physicality of the fabric and sole, while creating some wiggle room for mind.

I’ve always felt that panpsychism sounds cool. Just to say the word makes us feel intelligent. But on closer inspection, the idea that everything has some element of subjective experience, or that every self-organising feature of life has at least rudimentary consciousness, gets a little slippery. For some, panpsychism is merely materialism-plus with mind reluctantly ‘tacked on’; for others, it is idealism-minus, conceding that we need spacetime and physical extension to be outside of the mind for reality to make sense. Panpsychism can even be seen as a form of tacit dualism because it always entails some alliance between matter and mind, with neither collapsing into the other quite enough to separate them to everyone’s satisfaction. And that’s before all the proper dualisms, monisms, and idealisms kick in, all of which have a history. And then there are the juicy theories based on anomalous and altered states, which are like forms of epistemic confectionery.

Dual Aspect Monism is the diplomat of consciousness theories who tries to have its own splendid metaphysical cake and eat it while others watch, claiming to be ontologically monist, but phenomenologically dualist. That means the world is neither all matter, nor all mind (both monist views) and nor is it both (dualist); instead, mind and matter are derived from some even more fundamental quality or substance that cannot be named and could just be ‘reality’, but might be something resembling God or Tao (ontologically monist) that manifests in more ways than one (phenomenologically dualist).

But then there are challenges to the whole schtick, suggesting the inquiry is mistaken in some way, or that consciousness is inherently mysterious and we should get over ourselves. I am eagerly awaiting an ‘Un-theory’ of consciousness by Alex Marin Gomez that appears to say it’s ok to hold one theory one day, and another the next, and that this is not mere lack of resolve but discernment about the limitations of theory, and a recognition that theory is often context or situation specific, and can be a kind of performance or play.

This view chimes a bit with mysterianism, which says, roughly, that just as we don’t expect dogs to understand calculus, because that’s not a reasonable species-specific expectation, there is no particular reason why humans are ‘up to it’ when it comes to grasping the enigma of consciousness. That sounds like a challenge, and I’m intrigued by what amounts to a response, mentioned to me by metamodern groundwater theorist (no really) Professor Marko Cuthbert, channelling Ken Wilber. The suggestion is that normal human consciousness may not be able to understand itself, but that there are forms of spiritual or nondual perception where the conundrum not only looks different, but somehow dissolves. Just as refined perception sees a benign paradox where others see a malign contradiction, maybe the only way to make sense of consciousness and materiality is to bootstrap ourselves into a perspective from which the problem dissolves. In case this risks sounding like a growth-to-goodness fallacy, this process is just as likely to feature radical unlearning as hierarchical development.

**

I have been trying to locate myself within these theories, and I feel as though I am standing on the level above the main concourse of Waterloo Station, looking down during rush hour, distantly inspired by the scene from The Bourne Ultimatum. The theories are like a swarm, but they cluster in terms of hair colour, many hide behind sunglasses, some are trackable through their Gucci bags, a few have extravagant beards, and some identify as Siamese twins. I hope to recognise something, without knowing quite what to look for. Consciousness, is that you?

I have not yet found my stranger in the crowd. But I am invested in ‘The Flip’ as part of ‘The Flip, The Formation, and The Fun’. The flip represents transformation of perspective, and one of the most tangible ways this manifests is in the shift from seeing the world as primarily physical to realising it is primarily or even exclusively experiential. I have not yet found my toothbrush, but in the process of preparing this article, I have had a few major realisations that pushed me towards idealism; though, whether I am in fact more like a panpsychist or a dual-aspect monist, I can’t yet say. I don’t even have a toothbrush yet, and all I can be sure of, when I walk down the street, is that I am a pedestrian.

**

But here’s why I am gradually developing a view of consciousness that is broadly idealist in nature.

The first aha! for me was realising, inspired by Bernardo Kastrup videos and books, that everything we know about the physical world is known through experience, and that we can’t really get beyond experience. This was a shock. That solid table you knock as the touchstone of the external world - sensation is all you’ve got - the experience of knocking the table. That music that’s playing - vibrations? Yes, but all you have is the feeling of the vibes and the hearing of the sound. That pain you feel, yes, the feeling of pain. You cannot escape the fact that all we ever have is some kind of experience, whether through our eyes or fingertips or mind, it is experience all the way down. This is not a decisive point, but it was a penny drop insight. We know the world outside our minds through our minds. Whenever we say: look at that, listen to that, touch that, smell that, taste that, imagine that and think ‘that’s physical!’, in fact, it’s the experience of the physical, i.e. it is experiential. Even the quintessential analytical philosopher, Bertrand Russell, understood this (Human Knowledge, 1948, p. 240):

We are acquainted with the intrinsic character of events only when these events are mental events in ourselves.

I have only recently felt this idea, and I encourage the reader who doesn’t follow to touch something nearby and then notice what you have - a sensation of touch rather than any affirmation that the thing you touched has a physical existence independent of your experience of it.

As the assassin of materialism, Double Dr. Kastrup does a fantastic job. Look at his Philosophical Bond-Villain face up there…He also offers a clear alternative view that he calls analytical idealism. It is analytical in the sense that he feels we can reason ourselves towards it with a mostly abductive (inference to the best explanation) argument. Much of his argument is “what you see is not what you get”. We do not follow through on what we already know from very basic philosophical reflection, namely that what we perceive through the filter of sense perception and prevailing conceptions is not the world as it is in itself. He uses the analogy of the aeroplane cockpit to make this point. What the pilot sees on the dashboard is not for instance, the sky, or the external air pressure itself but a good gauge of it. Likewise, what our mind does is create representations of the world to help us ‘fly the plane’, but those representations should not be confused with what is being represented, which is beyond direct perception. (See chapter three of Analytical Idealism in a Nutshell for the full take down, which is also summarised in the video above).

**

The second aha! moment that moved me towards idealism was grasping just how confected the idea of matter is. We have somehow confused ourselves into thinking that matter is self-evidently real, while mind is mysterious, but it should be the other way around. Matter is, roughly speaking, reality minus mind, and there ain’t no such thing. We think of matter as a solid and reliable generic substance, perhaps visualising billiard balls ever-reducing to the vanishingly small but still present, still solid; all the while not noticing that matter is an abstraction and a kind of charlatan. William James puts it pithily in Principles of Psychology, 1890, Vol. I, p. 146:

Matter is but a name for the unknown cause of our sensations.

I don’t want the case against materialism to look like a strawman argument, because brilliant people believe in it and are defending it. Still, most defences appear on closer inspection not to be materialism as such at all. They either shift the meaning of matter to include mind in one of the many strains of panpsychism, or they smuggle in a moment of hocus pocus in which mind emerges from matter, with the explanatory mechanism looking like a form of well-disguised wishful thinking. I am reminded of Daniel Schmachtenberger’s celebrated fireside talk, in which he speaks about emergence being “the closest thing to magic that is actually a scientifically admissible term.” He describes emergence as a process of attractive forces – phenomena drawn to different aspects of itself - giving rise to relationship – non-random patterns of connection - then to ‘synergy’ – a whole that appears to be greater than the sum of its parts - and then emergence, which is about how that ‘greater’ manifests. I don’t know Daniel’s view of consciousness, and I suspect it is probably not materialist, but when people indicate that mind emerges from matter, it is this kind of ‘magic’ they are referring to. In most cases, however, there is still a major explanatory gap.

Some also see matter and mind as a kind of continuum, with matter as a phase of mind (McGilchrist), or as a kind of habit of nature in Charles Sanders Peirce. Peirce’s view is distinctive and brilliant, and part of a more intricate metaphysics of Quality, Reaction, and Meditation; or Firstness, Secondness and Thirdness, that I do not know well. His view of matter seems to me to be accidentally amusing, though, in the sense that he sees matter as mind that has been kinda busy being creative for millennia before running out of steam and collapsing in a heap at the side of the road. For instance, in his collected papers (1935, Volume 6, paragraph 158) he says:

“Matter is merely mind deadened by the development of habit to the point where the departure from it becomes very rare.”

I’m just going to have a wee sit down for a few thousand years, says mind, and thereby becomes matter.2

**

The third aha! moment, is that in the context of the role of matter in theories of consciousness, I understand better why we should not be shy to talk about quantum theory, which challenges almost every classical intuition we have about the physical world. I am neither a physicist nor a philosopher of physics, so everything that follows should be treated as a kind of gonzo ethnographic report of my own untrained adventure, rather than as scientific fact or even cutting edge philosophy. Over the years I have been skirting around this material, starting on the popular science end a quarter of a century ago, with The Tao of Physics by Frijof Capra, and latterly The Dancing Wu Li Masters with Gary Zukav. Both books say, roughly, that our scientific worldview has matured enough for us to see perennial wisdom in a new light, and that much what is deemed religious or mystical can be seeen, at least analogously, as being supported by developments in our understanding of physics.

We are all looking for foundations, and it can feel validating when you think you’ve found them, even if they don’t look like ‘foundations’ at all. And yet, a few years later, I was pleasantly challenged by Quantum Questions by Ken Wilber (2001), where he tells everyone to calm down, and argues that, almost by definition, there cannot be scientific support for a spiritual worldview. His contention, a variant of the claim that one cannot derive “ought from is”, is that many great scientists are only incidentally mystics, and they are dealing with different aspects of reality, with spirituality concerning the interior, and science studying the exterior.

BUT HANG ON!… Doesn’t that beg the question? I had never really noticed this before. Wilber’s metatheory has a dualist side, even if he’s a ‘dual aspect monist’. From an idealist perspective, Wilber’s AQUAL maps begin to look a little brittle, with the distinctions between interior and exterior and individual and collective breaking down. Perhaps that’s the point - these maps are there to help us navigate complexity, not to disclose the structure of experience in a mandatory way. Even so, after spending a few hours with the worldview of someone like Barnardo Kastrup, the language of ‘interior’ and ‘exterior’ sounds very different. If it is all experiential rather than physical, one would be forgiven for thinking it’s all ‘interior’ but that is not quite right either.

In any case, quantum theory unsettles the ordinary idea of matter to such an extent that we are right to doubt whether the word “matter” refers to anything solid or self-sufficient at all. The picture that emerges from quantum physics is not one of tiny everlasting pellets banging around in space, but of a world that is fundamentally relational, probabilistic, and in important ways participatory. At first blush, those words have a new age hue, but whatever the alternative vision of the world and the words we use to describe it, what is very clear is that what we used to call “stuff” behaves nothing like stuff. So-called particles are not bits of substance with definite positions and trajectories but wavefunctions; mathematical objects that represent not facts but possibilities and probabilities.

A second challenge is that quantum ‘objects’ do not possess definite properties unless something interacts with them to bring those properties about. Position, momentum, spin—these are not attributes the particle carries around with it. They crystallise only when measured. The idea of a self-contained, fully determinate material thing no longer holds. Third, entanglement goes further. When two particles become entangled, they behave as parts of a single system even when separated by enormous distances. The properties of each are defined in terms of the other. What happens here can be correlated with what happens there without any signal passing between them. Einstein found this deeply unsettling, but experiments have repeatedly confirmed it. The classical belief that matter consists of independent units turns out to be an illusion. Instead, the universe is knitted together in ways that defy any simple notion of separateness. Fourth, the measurement problem, dramatised by experiments such as the double-slit experiment, indicates that observation or interaction may be required to produce definite outcomes. The observer cannot be cleanly separated from the observed. This challenges the classical assumption that the world possesses a full set of determinate properties regardless of whether anyone looks. Fifth, the idea of a vacuum—supposedly empty space—is alive with fluctuations, virtual particles that wink in and out of existence, and restless fields that never fully settle down; particles are not fundamental entities, but more like momentary excitations of fields.

Taken together, these five features of quantum theory (and there are others) push us away from a substance-based worldview and toward a universe made of processes. Quantum entities come into being only through interactions; they do not maintain fixed identities through time. Matter, in this sense, behaves more like a verb than a noun, which is why I commend the recent revival of process-relational philosphy, in which Matthew David Segall is a leading light.

For those interested in articulating a broadly idealist view of consciousness that is informed by Physics (and mathematics) it is worth reading Maria Stromme’s recently published article called: Universal consciousness as foundational field: A theoretical bridge between quantum physics and non-dual philosophy. I have only read this paper once and look forward to revisiting it, but the central conceptual device is the distinction between Mind, Consciousness, and Thought (introduced by Sydney banks) in which the thresholds are wave function collapses. The paper includes this image, which would not be out of place in an Ursula le Guin novel:

Stromme’s paper looks like an extraordinary intellectual achievement, and I don’t mean to imply false equivalence, but in terms of my own experience of these questions, her paper also reminds me of the ‘Consciousness is the unified field’ arguments arising from the Maharishi World of ‘Vedic science’. I practice TM, and I have applied my mind to its theoretical basis, but I am not qualified to pronounce on its veracity. Images like the one below always struck me as broadly plausible, but difficult to entirely trust due to the connection between a scientific worldview and a particular practice of mantra meditation or vedic sound meditation that had a pre-commercial life as indigenous knowledge, but is now being sold as a trademarked product/service called Transcendental Meditation by an international organisation. (*They would argue this is necessary to protect the purity of the knowledge and that TM teachers are not typically high-earners*).

The overarching point is that we really don’t know what we are talking about when we talk about matter. We think we do, but our folk ontology here is just some notion of physical stuff on a microscopic scale that we can rely on as building blocks for the world, but we know on reflection that there ain’t no such thing - it’s just a lazy habit of thought. I don’t want to overstate this point. There is extension, and resistance, and space and time, and there may even be a physical world, but we need to unlearn the idea of matter as a touchstone. Before I move on, you may have noticed I managed to explore quantum theory without talking about the cat…

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The fourth aha! for me is that apparently anomalous experiences start to make a great deal more sense when you open yourself to the idea that we are living in a kind of sea of consciousness where waves of meaningful associations come and go and the distinction between past, present, and future becomes blurred. As indicated in my personal post on The Fox, The Forest, and The Frogs, I believe we need to open ourselves to the idea of “meaning without cause”. This appears to be the view of Carl Jung and Wolfgang Pauli on Synchronicity (and perhaps indirectly in David Bohm’s Implicate Order, in the sense that synchronicities can be seen as an explicit-order manifestation of the implicate-order structure, as indicated by David Peat). These arguments are explored Bernardo Kastrup on Jung’s tacit metaphysics. Coming back to the originator of the idea of ‘ontopoeics’, Freya Matthews lays it all out in a book chapter titled Living Cosmos Panpsychism from 2019, where she suggest that these moments of contact, though often unbidden, can also be solicited:

The communicativity of reality, according to living-cosmos panpsychism, is not necessarily a given of our experience but may need to be activated via practices of address or invocation. Responses to such address may be manifested through serendipitous conjunctions or synchronistic arrangements of circumstances. From this perspective, the ‘language’ the world speaks, when it does speak, is a poetic – concretised and particularized – one. For example, in relevant invocational settings, it may take the form of a bush burning on a mountain, a raven participating discreetly in a funeral ceremony, a butterfly alighting on a dead woman’s breast, a message bird appearing out of nowhere to show the way, lightning punctuating a ritual performance with apposite displays.

All such ‘signs’, whether occurring in religious contexts or not, may be seen as instances of a vast poetic repertory, a repertory of imagery, of meaning conveyed through the symbolic resonance of things. It is in such language then that our invocations may need to be couched, since it is in such language that the world is able to respond: it is able to speak things. For things to acquire poetic resonance however, they generally need to be framed within a narrative context, which is why religious and spiritual traditions, and the liturgies which express them, generally rest on and are defined by founding narratives.

In Indigenous societies, invocations are likewise shaped by Dreaming stories. But the efficacy of invocation need not necessarily be confined to either religious or Indigenous contexts. When the living cosmos responds, in person as it were, to our poetic address, in terms referenced to the particular idiom of our invocation, we feel so intimately and extravagantly blessed, so moved and shaken on our metaphysical moorings, that our allegiance henceforth will be first and foremost to this cosmos itself, generally under its local aspect, the place or physical context which provides the lexicon of revelation. Love of world in this sense becomes our deepest attachment. It replaces self-love as the root of our motivation.

Those final two lines are worth sitting with. I am not certain, but I think ‘living cosmos panpsychism’ can also be thought of as a kind ecological idealism. We are back to the toothbrushes again.

The important point, however, is a kind of figure/ground reversal in which the occassional moment of intense personal meaning are not anomolies to be explained away, but active ingredients in the spiritual recovery of humankind, in a historic moment where it really matters what this uniquely human quality of consciousness is about, and how we might make it centrally relevant again.

When it feels like the world is talking to us through vivid and meaningful connections between our psyches and events, we are inclined to explain such connections away as a mere coincidence, because we have been trained to think events in the world arise from material causes, and advised not to indulge in self-indulgence or self-deception. But perhaps consciousness was always here. And maybe our interiority is not a recent epiphenomenon emerging from the relatively obscure notion of ‘matter’ but more like a blessed ringside seat to an objectively subjective reality. And maybe there is a non-causal order, in which meaning prevails. It may be hard for us to grok that, but it looks more plausible when you realise that we are less like meat machines and more like waves within an ocean of experience. In that world, synchronicities not only feel meaningful, but they are meaningful; they are less like errors in perception to be explained away, and more like cosmic data informing an explanation of who we are, and what we have forgotten ourselves to be.

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The fifth aha! is that David Bentley Hart’s exposition of classical theories of God includes the Vedantic trio: Sat, Chit, Ananda - being, consciousness, and bliss, and I suddenly noticed that ‘chit’ was probably integral to any coherent notion of God, which indicated to me that consciousness and divinity may co-arise.

This is perhaps why Rupert Sheldrake prefers to call himself a panentheist rather than a panpsychist. Perhaps the separation of consciousness and God should be resisted. That’s too big a question for now, but if idealism is partly about the ontology of subjectivity, and there is “something it is like” to be God, then we are cooking with gas, though what we are cooking remains unclear.

The sixth and final aha! is that one of my favourite short stories suddenly felt like a teaching story. The Circular Ruins by Jorge Luis Borges is about a man who gradually dreams another man into existence in the ruins of an ancient temple.

He succeeds, and yet right at the story’s conclusion, just as he is about to surrender to death, he cannot escape the conclusion that he himself, too, is someone else’s dream. The Circular Ruins is a stunningly brilliant piece of writing that includes lines like “No one saw him disembark in the unanimous night…The purpose which guided him was not impossible, though it was supernatural. He wanted to dream a man: he wanted to dream him with minute integrity and insert him into reality…He sought a soul which would merit participation in the universe…” And there are exquisite details about fire, and mud, and rivers, and circles, and patience, but the heart of it is something deeper, revealed in the exquisite ending:

For what was happening had happened many centuries ago. The ruins of the fire god’s sanctuary were destroyed by fire. In a birdless dawn the magician saw the concentric blaze close round the walls. For a moment, he thought of taking refuge in the river, but then he knew that death was coming to crown his old-age and absolve him of his labours.

He walked into the shreds of flame. But they did not bite into his flesh, they caressed him and engulfed him without heat or combustion. With relief, with humiliation, with terror, he understood that he too was a mere appearance, dreamt by another.

I can’t quite explain why, but I now read this story as much as creative non-fiction as fiction. I don’t quite think I am in someone else’s dream, but the idea that “life is a dream” feels more vivid and palpable than it used to. By that, I suppose I mean that the notion that I am somehow living inside another mind does not seem so far-fetched or scary anymore, especially if that larger mind is divine in nature, and shared by everyone else, too.

**

These points all need developing. I just wanted to share where I’m at. Let me close by reflecting on why I think this inquiry matters.

The question of whether consciousness is the host of the cosmos or its guest, the matter of whether consciousness is primary, pervasive, and perennial, or derivative, localised and recent, is not just a fascinating intellectual game. That inquiry directly informs a frontier in human experience: those moments, noticings, and synchronicities when we feel we are in a conversation with the world. As indicated in part one and part two, the idea of ontopoetics is informed by a range of overlapping ideas, articulated most directly by the Australian deep ecologist Freya Matthews, and particularly clearly in a 2007 paper:

Ontopoetics rests on the premise that there exists an inner aspect of reality which is expressed via a communicativity that coexists with but does not over-ride physical causality. If physics is the study of the causal order, then ontopoetics may be defined as the study of the poetic order, of the meanings that structure the inner aspect of being. If ecology has in recent decades defined the first phase of the re-negotiation of our modern Western relation to reality, ontopoetics might be integral to the second phase.

I agree with that last line especially, which is a distillation of the broader idea that the problems of the 21st century are primarily (but not exclusively) spiritual in nature. I have defined the metacrisis more carefully elsewhere, but one way to think about it is that it’s a collective estrangement from forms of the nature, meaning and purpose of life that matter; in which the truth of those things have been falsely rendered, and now need to be re-revealed, re-encountered, and perhaps not re-constructed, but rather participated in more fully.

Ecology - the study of home - is necessary if we are to resist the tragic madness of ecocide, the delusion of an extractive world-system, and to help us all return from our self-imposed exile, or as Latour puts it, to come back down to earth. However, ecology teaches us about ecological niches, and yet does not by itself inform the broadly religious quality of human niche creation and maintenance. Guattari’s Three Ecologies aside, Ecology is not typically concerned with semiotics or hermeneutics and does not speak with sufficient discernment on matters of meaning, manifest in experiences, images, and interpretations. Ecology is fundamentally about relationships, but it is still primarily the world as ‘it’ or ‘its’, rather than as ‘I’ or ‘we’.

To shift register slightly, too much emphasis on the system is displacement, and too much emphasis on the psyche is indulgent. What is enlivening phenomenologically is to recognise the place where system meets psyche and move yourself and others from that point. The place where system meets psyche is enlivening because it reveals the pattern of our stuckness, of our immunity to change, and all the ‘priors’ that shape it. Or to put it in terms of Perspectiva’s seventh of ten premises:

We will not survive the 21st century with literal and figurative firefighting to protect all the things that are burning down - trees, habitats, houses, truth, democracy, attention, peace, sanity. We need a new flame to illuminate a direction that takes us away from the secular theodicy of consumerism through which we compete for status, and vote for insipid governments with necrotic ideas. That new flame, I believe, needs to speak from and to a deeper recognition of the intrinsic value of being human, grounded in a transformed perception of what life is, and (therefore) is about. And I believe any cultural renaissance depends upon ‘the flip’ of seeing experience as primary, primordial and pervasive.

As Zak Stein put it in Education Must Make History Again:

During times between worlds there emerge certain ideas and thinkers that are, properly speaking, without a world. Their work is about creating a new world, by necessity…The focus of work in the liminal is on foundations, metaphysics, religion, and the deeper codes and sources of culture—education in its broadest sense…

And as Bonnitta Roy says in her chapter in Dispatches from a Time Between Worlds:

We are not so much working for greater systemic reach or to identify all the links in an enormous causal chain; rather we need to closely examine the metaphysical operating system of our minds, and participate in the creative emergence of a new structure of consciousness.

Bonnie mentions ‘new structure of consciousness’, and here’s a final thought on that.

Cynthia Bourgeault has reflected on Jean Gebser’s prophetic vision of how consciousness evolves and enters into time. Bourgeault suggests that our challenge is to allow our ‘magic’ and ‘mythic’ forms of consciousness to co-arise with our mental-rational function, such that a new kind of consciousness can arise, informed by what Gebser calls the ‘diaphanous awareness’ of integral consciousness (which has no direct connection with Ken Wilber). This is the kind of mind that is more suited for our times, and that will allow us to ‘see through the world’ in the way we need to. On page thirty of her full reflection, she writes:

While the inner work of us Wisdom and contemplative/evolutionary folks may be to tend our own conscious emergence, I believe that the cultural work we must undertake together is to help REPAIR and HEAL the traditional structures we’ve inhabited so that they can become healthy vessels of the repressed mythical and magical (and for that matter, mental!) structures. My wager is that when this imbalance is corrected, the full emergence of the Integral (so clearly already waiting in the wings) will be its own unstoppable force. We don’t need to race on up to the front of the train in order to reach the station first; we have to make sure that the passengers in all the train cars are well tended and still hooked up as the station in fact rushes to meet the train.

So this is what I am up to here. The moments of deep meaning and encounter in our lives - when we feel something was meant to happen - are intimations of a metaphysical vision that is better suited to the cultural, educational and political challenges of our times. In Gebserian terms, the mythic and magic structures of consciousness still abound, but we don’t take them seriously as equals to the mental structure that liberal democratic power wrongly believes to be epistemically sovereign, and they are manifesting instead as the rebounding of repressed shadows, in the dark arts of falsity and fascism.

So this inquiry into ontopoetics (broadly conceived) is not just about ‘meaningful coincidences’ as an “oh-how-interesting” talking point - it’ also about repairing and healing the traditional structures of consciousness we are in exile from. When the world talks to us, it does not do so primarily through the mental structure, but through the magic and mythic structures; through the magic-like sense of what Owen Barfield calls ‘original participation’ in which we are fully immersed within the world; and through the mythic sense, informed by Joseph Campbell and many others, that our story animates and is animated by the cosmic story. The mental structure matters too, and so with all due caution, care, and humour, I am wondering what it might mean to make the ‘transformation of consciousness’ we hear about a reality. As part of that responsibility, I am taking synchronicities seriously, not just as signals and totems for our personal journeys through life, but as affordances for reconceiving context, perception, and agency at a planetary level.

Merry Christmas!

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1

Let me share what I have researched to give you some idea of why I consider this issue important. I read Bishop Berkeley’s Dialogues as an undergraduate c1997 - a classic text for idealism. I find the opening chit-chat endearing: “That purple sky, those wild but sweet notes of birds…”

I don’t remember any of my Berkeley essays, but a few years later, as a master’s student at Harvard, now 2003, I took a class with David Perkins on Peace, War, and Human Nature, where we were assessed on two pieces of writing we would share on the website. One was about the Kashmir conflict and the partition of India and Pakistan; the other was an essay called “Do we need a transformation in consciousness to achieve world peace?” I looked at some of the heterodox but peer-reviewed research from 1988, indicating that having large groups of meditators near a conflict zone might help reduce conflict - the theory of change was effectively a theory that conflict arose from collective stress, and the presence of advanced (Sidhi) meditators could reduce stress in a sufficiently reliable way that there would be a measurdable reduction in conflict. I then extrapolated to the relationship between consciousness and peace more generally, including a nod to The Global Consciousness Project, which ran out of Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research (PEAR) Lab under psychologist and statistician Roger Nelson. The hypothesis there is that during moments of global emotional coherence—e.g., world tragedies or celebrations, random number generators will show small but statistically significant departures from randomness, indicating some kind of collective mind was at work, and that is indeed what they found.

I hadn’t given theories of consciousness much thought for a couple of decades, but I enjoyed The Flip by Jefrrey Kripal a few years ago, which put me back onto this inquiry. I read all of The Matter with Things before Perspectiva published it, but I recently re-read chapter 25 on Matter and Consciousness, which is exquisite (though the second half is exacting). I also read Bernardo Kastrup’s Analytical Idealism in a Nutshell, and then Decoding Jung’s Metaphysics by the same author. And I read most of For The Love of Matter by Freya Matthews. I browsed The Landscapes of Consciousness site below, and read, hot off the press in November 2025, Universal consciousness as foundational field: A theoretical bridge between quantum physics and non-dual philosophy by Maria Stromme. I also watched lots of videos. The Essentia Foundation’s production of “The Hidden War on Consciousness” with Alex Gomez Marin is good. I lost track of exactly which Rupert Sheldrake videos made the biggest impression, but I listened to his recent lecture on Panentheism twice, his talk with Kurt Jaimungal is edifying, and his conversation with Kastrup is worth seeing, not least for why Sheldrake does not consider himself an idealist.

Before I explain the value of the book, let me first say that it is by no means unproblematic. There are aspects of the argument that appear calculated at times to shock, which I reject, and hope others will too.

On p.240, for instance, the author appears to claim that Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials amounts to a near-satanic call for self-worship. This is a mistaken interpretation. We might sometimes worship each other, in love, as the protagonists of Pullman’s trilogy perhaps do by the end, but that is not at all the same thing as worshipping ourselves. (Editor’s note. See Paul Kingsnorth’s response in the comments.)

Perhaps his being an (Orthodox) Christian also explains why he is, in my view, too hard on the coming of Eastern spirituality to the West. I’m with Sam Harris in thinking that it is just unreasonable, as Westerners, to close ourselves off (as Kingsnorth appears to) to the beautiful wisdoms of Eastern traditions, because those traditions so manifestly contain magnificent practices and understandings that have been less prominent, less available, in our lands. (Editor’s note: again, please see comments).

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However, in Against the Machine, Paul Kingsnorth explores with a clarity that is extremely rare the extreme metacrisis that we are now deep in. He turns here his original, scorching, prophetic gaze on the civilisation that produced him, and you, and I — and that is now consuming itself. He does so with trademark literary insight.

Of “the net”/ “the web”, for instance, he remarks:

These things are designed to trap prey.

It’s one of those lines that catches in the throat, or in the cranium: a mini-mindbomb. The internet, that vast, shimmering architecture of promise and control, is not just a metaphorical web: it has turned into an almost-literal snare. In the sway of ‘platform-capitalism’, it holds us fast while we mistake our captivity for connection (think social media).

Kingsnorth’s gift lies in saying such things both provocatively and plainly — in writing that sounds, increasingly, like witness testimony from inside a cage.

We are with virtual certainty headed into collapse events. If and when the internet finally goes down forever, Kingsnorth suggests, we might even celebrate.

But how? What would it mean to dance in the ruins of the digital? Could disconnection become our liberation — or would we already be too attenuated, too ghostlike, to feel it?

The Birth — or Illusion — of Intelligence?

Kingsnorth warns darkly and at length about the rise of artificial intelligence, describing it as a kind of new lifeform “being born.” He has explored this possibility before, most imaginatively in his astounding, vital novel Alexandria, where the post-human perhaps inherits a desecrated world. But here I find myself uneasy. Is something really being born — or is this new world-shaking technology, finally, just smoke and mirrors? A supercharged sentence-completion trick, an immense tautology with no interior?

We are indeed in mortal danger from AI: think disinformation squared, energy use through the roof, human relationships devalued, and much more. But these dangers are perhaps not because it possesses any intelligence at all, let alone wisdom. Rather, because AI simulates intelligence perfectly enough to displace the real thing — to seduce us into ceding thought, care, and responsibility to a machine that feels and thinks nothing.

Are you, I want to ask Kingsnorth, giving the AI-cultists unnecessary oxygen? Some techno-mystics would love the idea that their servers are incubating a super-intelligence. I would rather disabuse them and their audience than pay them a backhanded compliment. Might what is actually “being born” be immeasurably colder than Kingsnorth seems to think: Nothing in particular - the perfect void?

Kingsnorth oddly shares something significant in common here with Vanessa Andreotti. She, too, has recently suggested that something is truly being born, in AI. Only she thinks that what is being born could potentially be as wonderful as Kingsnorth thinks it is satanic. My view is that both are profoundly mistaken. Nothing is being born! The reason we are in as awful trouble as indeed we are, AI-wise, is that we are on the cusp of handing over much of our power to an incomprehensible void which will almost certainly be radically un-alignable with us, simply because there is no there there.

Animism After the End

Kingsnorth wants to counterpose to the coming silicon cults something strong and old. Throughout Against the Machine, then, runs a much more venerable religious current, a return of the ancient idea that everything is alive — the animist sense that the world is breathing spirit at every scale. Like others today who sense that mechanistic materialism has reached its dead end, Kingsnorth gestures toward a re-enchantment of every part of the world. Iain McGilchrist, for instance, calls it “The most powerful and important book I have read in years”.

But… is this truly available to us? Can animism, shattered by centuries of disenchantment, be credibly revived? Is it really a live option for us?

Kingsnorth ends the book with an invitation to readers to perform a “Raindance.” It is a lovely image, but I do wonder if such a thing is available to us except as some kind of artwork or performance. Can a post-industrial people truly dance for rain — and mean it?

I am sceptical of all this. At the very least, I think we’d be better off seeking first to dance just to find out again what dancing (ecstatic connection) really is again - before having a go at anything as non-credible as a raindance!

But even if you disagree with me, I have a deeper question to offer here: Is animism, which is currently becoming ‘fashionable’, even actually desirable at all? There is a potential peril inherent in it. Namely, in saying “everything is alive”, we flatten the radical difference between life and non-life. If rocks and rivers are said to be as alive as foxes and fungi, do we not risk losing what is most fragile, most sacred, most killable in the living world? However alive rocks may be, they can’t be killed.

Perhaps Kingsnorth would respond that one can’t actually imagine an intelligible world shorn of the Holy Spirit. Perhaps such a Christian Animism is indeed what we should be aspiring to. I would respond, though, that regardless of whether a river is ‘really’ alive or not, perhaps, since we are so hopeless at even understanding that foxes/fungi/we (!) are alive, we aren’t ready to hold the idea of rivers and rocks being ‘alive’.

By asking us to consider that everything is alive, perhaps animism today risks obscuring our ecological interrelatedness with everything (including rivers and rocks) at a time when we have barely begun to re-experience this utter interrelatedness as the epic fact it is. Perhaps coming to know that interrelatedness, whilst considering the wild, special, unique aliveness of us and other killable non-things (beings), is a more accessible prompt to care for both the river and the fish in it.

Everything is sacred, yes. But not everything is alive. And what is alive is truly sacred.

Science, scientism, and the new reactionaries

One of the strongest threads in Against the Machine is Kingsnorth’s excoriation of scientism — the ideology that turns science into a religion, a metaphysical creed of control. On this, we are in deep agreement. I have spent much of my own philosophical life warning against the idolisation of science.

Yet timing matters.

Since Kingsnorth went to press, a disturbing trend has accelerated: a turning against science altogether. Climate scientists are being silenced or sacked in the U.S. right now. So when Kingsnorth writes that “Follow the science” is the mantra of our age (p.241) I can’t help but riposte — if only!

We badly need science: on climate, biodiversity, the oceans, and much more. Perhaps scientism is not the heart of the problem, but merely the servant of something deeper: technophilia — the worship of (power and control through) technology. The oligarchs have weaponised science’s prestige while undermining its practice.

We should renounce scientism, the dangerous ideology of science-worship. But in the same breath, shouldn’t we defend science itself — unscientistic science — as one of the glories of our civilisation? Science as curiosity, as wonder, as humble inquiry into the more-than-human world… Perhaps science, too, can be reborn — reoriented toward reverence and protection, not dominance. Consider then ‘unscientistic science’ as something to keep. Curiosity, wonder, humble enquiry into the more-than-human world might not just evoke one of the glories of our civilisation but also be a key expression of who we are - I mean, this ensemble should surely be one of the ways we can carry out our sacred world-witnessing duties.

Kingsnorth sees that scientism has fed authoritarianism. I would add that today it is strength-worship — the fusion of technophilia with demi-fascist politics, wrapped in pseudo-spiritual language — that most threatens us. The machine now wears a mask of destiny. The return of might-based societies threatens us all (including the new mighty, who will end up like Ozymandias). They - the oligarchs and ‘leaders’ - want to make knowledge scarce. A commodity. Facts are a threat to their dominance. They’ve moved past denial and into ‘How can I maximise power and profit in the emerging instability?’. They tend to be less like cultists and more like rich preppers who hoard tools to dominate when the State is dismembered.

Decolonising the self

To understand what is happening adequately (because it is as bewildering as it is horrendous), a long view is helpful. This is why and how Kingsnorth’s historical vision is as needed as it is bracing. In his superlatively linguistically-innovative novel The Wake he gave us the Norman colonisation of England as psychic trauma, a collapse both material and inner. In Against the Machine the colonisers are very deep within: not just our elites, but our own hyper-left-brain logic, our addiction to control (which self-undermines). The machines are simply the latest invaders, completing a process of self-colonisation that began long ago.

How, then, do we truly decolonise ourselves? Can we derive meaning precisely from the extremity of our predicament? Our backs are against the wall; yet from that very pressure might come purpose. In facing annihilation, perhaps we really do glimpse the sacredness of what remains. I have argued elsewhere (e.g. in Why climate breakdown matters) that we can, must and will make meaning from crisis — that the path through nihilism lies in the courage to inhabit our peril consciously.

In that endeavour, Against the Machine is an ally. As Rebecca Solnit, for instance, has also explored brilliantly in her most important book, A Paradise Built in Hell, I think that when we take in the extent to which we may gain succour from our travail; breakthrough from disasters and love and energy from our very suffering, then we can entitle ourselves to a big dollop more of active hope than Kingsnorth’s book seems to suggest. And the beauty of it is that true, radical hope will come from tenderness.

For the difficult emotions, such as grief, are nothing if not an expression of that: of ruptured living, loving-care.

Against ‘Development’. Against the Binary.

A way of putting the worries I have been expressing above is this: I fear that Kingsnorth’s book is at times too full of fear and anger, and not given enough to grief, shame, curiosity, awe, and love. But let me also be clear: there is a lot to be afraid of and angry about…and Against the Machine mobilises such emotive critique quite splendidly.

Kingsnorth’s book denounces the myth of progress, the skewering of which is a huge world of pain that our century will endure. And his critique of “development” is devastating. The word still rings as a moral good in polite society, yet what it means in practice is global North hegemony, the erasure of local autonomy, the subjugation of living communities to a technocratically-inflected version of ‘the market’. How do we help people see that “development” is, on balance, a horror, not a blessing? By showing its ties to domination and ecological death? Or must something still more radical be imagined — a post-developmentality relocalised civilisation (s) of restraint and reverence?

Early in the book, Kingsnorth marvellously reclaims ‘Luddism’ from those who have turned it into an insult. The Luddites were not mindless vandals; they were intelligent, deliberate (as well as desperate) critics of the thoughtless implementation of tech in the name of profit. Put thus, we could surely do with some Luddism to counter the oligarchs of our own age, who are becoming quite insanely rich by trying to persuade us that ‘there is no alternative’ to the onward rush of the machine.

Then, on p.81, Kingsnorth executes a marvellous gambit: he turns on its head the widespread nostrum that the city is open to thought and openness itself, while the countryside is narrow and blinkered. He points out that the inherent parochialism of city-centrism is its human parochialism, its inherent narcissistic direction. We dwellers in the countryside are far more likely to sense - because we see it every day - our being part of something bigger, a web of life. It is in the city that one gets tempted to an anthropocentric vision that fantasises self-sufficient machine dreams.

When we truly think about all this, then, as Bruno Latour’s final works showed, we think something orthogonal to what our current politics still insists upon. For we then think outside the hegemony of Growthism. Part of what makes Against the Machine so potent is its refusal of the Left/Right binary. Instead, we find ourselves, Kingsnorth says, possibly in an echo of Hannah Arendt, “On Earth, under the sky.” (p.156). The phrase encapsulates a politics of rootedness beyond ideology. The right blames the left; the left blames the right. Both miss the machine. Perhaps anti-machinism — life against mechanism — could itself offer a new basis for solidarity, even spirituality, in the difficult age into which we are moving.

Kingsnorth rightly praises Simone Weil’s little-known yet seminal work of political philosophy (commissioned by de Gaulle, no less, during the Second World War), The need for roots. We might, as Simone Weil urged, seek roots instead of abstractions; belonging rather than ‘progress’; coherence rather than cosmopolitanism. There is the germ of an encouraging alternative (to the myths by which we are possessed) here: a politics of place and limits, grounded in the living earth itself. Moreover, if this is right, then it’s urgent that we (the sane silent majority, including both non-machine-addicted-‘progressives’ and genuine conservatives) share and take seriously such ideas and experiences of belonging and rootedness… before the far right squeezes the potential for love out of them and we lose heart (not to mention, our very country).

And Kingsnorth is right (p.153) that taking community and belonging 1000% seriously need have nothing whatsoever to do with fascism or Nazism; as I say, by contrast, it is the very bulwark against them.

Fascism rises when the way is cleared for ‘the machine’ by way of uprootingly destructive left-liberal ideology. In particular, there is virtually no ‘eco-fascism’ at all; the term is primarily used by Modernist environmentalists to try to police the zone: to make it rationalistic and technophilic, and to keep the truth of limits (including, crucially, planetary boundaries) at bay. Thus, every time you hear someone running together the very real spectre of fascism with the kind of reclamation of roots and of the regional or local practised and preached by (say) Chris Smaje, or Helena Norberg-Hodge, you are hearing the voice of the machine, in an ‘environmentalist’ guise.

Liberation?

I’m with Kingsnorth not just in his critique of ‘progress’, but also his critique of the damaging effects of hegemonic liberal-individualist ideology (especially p.172.). I do worry, though, that perhaps a little like his (and my) mentor McGilchrist, at times Kingsnorth is insufficiently open to the possibility that we could actually get somewhere on the deeply concerning matters by organising together. When he was young, he believed in the potential of mass movements, not just of lone against-the-grain writers. Might there be some way to unify his younger and older self in this regard? In my view, that would be a very good thing!

To illustrate this concern, let me note that there are moments where Kingsnorth’s challenge to “liberation” strikes me as too sweeping. True, the word has been hollowed out by consumer culture — “freedom” reduced to choosing your brand of cola / of slavery. Yet I wonder if we might reclaim the term. Liberation, rightly understood, must be relational: autonomy that deepens interdependence, not denies it. Freedom for and with one another, not freedom from one another.

Our machine dependencies — from fossil fuels to algorithms — have steadily stripped us of such real freedom. To be liberated now might mean to start to relearn how to live without the machine’s prosthetics. To be dependent only on life itself. Which means: on each other. Autonomy is relationality. And here the good news is twofold: firstly, that mass movements (Think XR, and perhaps in times to come the CMP, or bioregionalism, or indeed Mayor Mamdani) can initiate change by bringing people into relationship with each other; and secondly, that community is precisely what humans hunger for. Now more than ever, in its absence. There is a growing hunger to learn how to be in community as well as to experience it. Freedom to earn ease, rather than the ‘freedom’ to ‘choose’ from one dis-ease or another.

I’m thinking of what I hear time and again (including from people who wouldn’t touch ‘activism’ with a barge pole) as I give talks around the country on climate adaptation and resilience-building. I’m thinking (more locally) of things like the community orchard recently co-created in my village; over 10% of the entire village turned out to plant it. I’m thinking of the annual wassailing we enjoy there, very lightly-held and unmetaphysically intended. I’m thinking of our ‘5-mile network’, which seeks to co-design a bit of local resilience. I’m thinking of the celebrations of the winter solstice upcoming here, around open fires.

Kingsnorth is dead right (p.182), in my view, to celebrate the humble open fire as nothing less than an enduringly essential part of what it is to be human. Most of us in the end want nothing more than to sit around one, relearning how to be together.

Dancing in the ruins

I find enormous potential encouragement in the confidence that there is a return of community and indeed of the spiritual or religious coming, because, in really hard times, that is simply what happens.

What is returning needs to be an ecospirituality. A non-dual approach to existence: a return of the sacred in which to venerate the sacred is completely compatible with loving life, being fully present to the moment in its quotidian materiality.

Kingsnorth’s book is, finally, not merely a jeremiad but an invitation. It calls us to remember what it is to be human — to live as co-conscious creatures, not as machines. Yet it also leaves the reader haunted. If the web was designed to trap prey, then our task may be to outlast it: to wait, patiently, for the day when the network falters, and the old songs can be sung again.

When that day comes, when the screens finally go dark, when you can no longer read essays like this online but only (if at all) in glorious paper, perhaps we will meet each other under the open sky. And perhaps, as Kingsnorth suggests, we will dance — not for rain, certainly not for ‘progress’, but simply to be alive. For the joy of it.^*

^*Big thanks to Charles Hampton, Alex Haxeltine and Alison Seddon for comments that have improved this essay. Thanks also to Richard Delevan for essential conversations on related themes.

Prof. Emeritus Rupert Read is an environmental philosopher, public intellectual, and the founder and current director of the Climate Majority Project. He is the author of the books This Civilisation is Finished, Parents for a Future, Do You Want to Know the Truth?: The Surprising Rewards of Climate Honesty, Transformative Adaptation, and many more. He has in the past served as a spokesperson and strategist for Extinction Rebellion, a Green Party councillor,  and a Green Party MP candidate.