EP 176: Resiliience During Culturally Challenging Times | Alexander Beiner.

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Hi, welcome to the Radical Responsibility podcast. This is your host, Fleet Ball, and I'm really thrilled today to share with you a conversation I had with my friend and colleague, Ali Byner. Ali Byner is the co host of Rebel Wisdom. He's an author and sense maker and really a thought leader in the interdisciplinary exploration of how we make sense of our lives. And we're going to talk about what many are calling the meta crisis, where there's a really fundamental breakdown in our information ecology, making it very difficult for any of us to have any external sources that we can rely on for making sense of our lives and making sense of the world. So how do we do that in this era? And that's what we're going to explore together. It's a brilliant conversation with a real thought leader in the area of sense making. Alexander Byner.

Welcome, Ali.

Thank you very much, Flea. It's great to be here again.

It's great to have you again. I'm really looking forward to our conversation. So I want to share a little bit of your bio with our audience so those who don't know you yet can get to know you a little bit. So Alexander Byner is a writer, facilitator and cultural commentator. In 2012, he co founded a meditation school, Open Meditation. He has also worked in some of the world's top events agencies, developing immersive live experiences. He's one of the organizers of Breaking Convention, Europe's largest conference on psychedelic culture. His work on psychedelic theory has been published in the 2016 book neurotransmissions as well as the Guardian. He also writes fiction and plays traditional Irish music. Alexander leads on Rebel Wisdom's written content and live events and is particularly focused in finding new ways of having in person conversations around the most essential and challenging ideas. Rebel Wisdom's live experiences are designed to engage more than just the intellect. They are places where the ideas explored in Rebel Wisdom's films can be integrated so that they can be lived out in the real world. For more information you can visit rebelwisdom.co.uk and people can also find the Rebel Wisdom channel on YouTube and I think on substack as well. Right?

That's right. Yeah.

Right, great. Okay. So again, welcome and thank you so much for again being part of our Global Resilience Summit. And let's just jump right in. So. And since we know each other, I'm going to call you Ali. You're best known as Ali. I think that's how you're known by a lot of the public world and certainly in your Rebel Wisdom community. So.

This has been another really challenging year with multiple waves of the pandemic. It appears like maybe it's starting to abate. You know, hard to get your hopes up, but it's still been another really challenging year, along with just the increasingly divisive, polarized landscape breakdown, the information ecology, which a lot of the work at Rebel Wisdom is about addressing. And now here we are in the midst of this Ukraine, this invasion of Ukraine, war in Ukraine.

Challenging times to say the least. I'm curious, to begin with, just how has this year past 12 months or so, been for you, for your family, for the Rebel Wisdom community? Just kind of, what's it been like? What have you learned?

Yeah, well, let's start there.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah. I think, I genuinely think the last two weeks, for me personally have been some of the most difficult with what's going on in Ukraine.

I think we all feel that to some degree. And I think the it touches on, I mean, it's incredibly complex and I'm not a political science person, but, you know, it does touch on a lot of the themes that we try and explore at Rebel Wisdom.

So, you know, I think in a way we found particularly easy to sort of say, diagnose or get a kind of quick view of what's going on in the world and what some of the challenges are through these three interlapping or overlapping crises. So at the top of it we have the meta crisis, which is climate change, ecological collapse, massive geopolitical issues like we're seeing now with Ukraine, and then underneath that, the meaning crisis, which is a term John Vervaeke has popularized, a sense that we don't quite know what we're doing anything for in the west in particular, the sense of looking for a sense of higher meaning and higher purpose that consumer culture just really doesn't.

Offer us or can't.

And then the sense making crisis, which is trying to figure out what on earth is true. How do I know that this particular Twitter feed or this particular paper is a trustworthy source?

How do we arrive at truth together? What are the different techniques we need? How do we manage this very chaotic information landscape that we have, where we have a lot of our news coming from social media, we have traditional media, we have the alternative media, of which We're a part of at Rebel Wisdom. So all of these things are happening at the same time. And it's overwhelming, certainly for me, I think for all of us. And.

A feeling of overwhelm is how I would classify certainly the last couple of weeks. But I think there's some sense of overwhelm as a theme maybe perhaps over the last year as well, a sense of deep uncertainty. And I think a lot of the wisdom traditions and the practices in them really help us sit with uncertainty. And I think they've been of great value to me, I think, over the last year, and I know to members of our community. We have regular practice sessions of which you were the most recent teacher coming in. And I think we, all of us have felt a sense of tension and pain at the depths of how. Just quite how uncertain the times are that we're living through.

At the same time, I feel a kind of.

Weird hopefulness as well. A sense of.

Yeah, a sense of. There's been a lot, you know, I've read a few analyses of what's happening right now in the Ukraine.

Looking at this, this kind of 30 year grace period we've had in the West. I'm 35, so it's like. All I know is like my entire life has been the 90s, growing up in the 90s when it was like, hey, we won the Cold War, we're the greatest. And then 9, 11 happened when I was about 13, and there was this real shock to the system of, hey, maybe we're not the greatest. Or at least not everyone thinks we're the greatest. And then, you know, this taps into this, this famous idea by Fukuyama, the end of history. This idea that Western liberal democracy is the end point of kind of political and social evolution. And that's really been challenged over the last 30 years and is being challenged right now. But I noticed that as it's being challenged, I'm feeling like, you know what, it's a hell of a lot better than what Putin's offering. So I really am. And I think that's been a really interesting thing to witness this resurgence of. And this word values actually is something I've been really interested in over the last year, looking at values. I'm doing a psychedelic value survey. So I've been really in the sociology and psychology of what values are and how people express them. I've had the privilege of speaking to people who've been working on it for decades and getting, getting kind of their take on, well, how do you actually measure values? So that's been something I've been really busy with as well, is, well, how do we.

Agree on or how do we authentically tap into a deep sense, almost transcendent sense of what is valuable? And that feels very kind of salient to me right now as we're recording this.

Wow. Well, that's a great frame. I think it's a great frame for our conversation today. This meta crisis, which could quickly be exacerbated tenfold, 100 fold with climate change, global warming, and then this crisis of meeting John Borbecki's idea, and then this breakdown in our capacity to make sense and create meaning. And a lot of the institutions and just cultural frameworks that have held meaning for us for a long time have all been deconstructing and falling apart and so forth. So, you know, we are really in a, in a, in a challenging landscape in so many ways. And you know, I agree with you. I think in recent decades, and kind of within the extremes of postmodernity, there tends to be a devaluation of liberal democracy and what's often referred to as the Enlightenment. But it's starting to look pretty good compared to some other things that are, that are going on. So maybe some people, folks will be willing to, to revisit that a bit. Not perfect, but maybe kind of the best we've come up with so far.

So our focus today is on sense making and on resilience systems, how to co create resilient systems. And you know, we are experiencing this deep breakdown in the information ecology which a lot of your work at Rebel Wisdom is about, and our ability to make sense of things. And.

It just seems.

That everything is weaponized today across this very divisive, polarized world. Things that might normally have brought us together here in the States. I would have thought maybe something like the Common Enemy, if you will, of COVID 19 might have brought us together, but it's actually divided us further with all this politicization of mask wearing and vaccination.

I feel very much at home. I have people within my own spheres of work who are on both sides of these things, you know, and I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about the efforts of Rebel Wisdom and maybe I know you've interviewed a lot of people involved in the Consilience project efforts to try to find our way to a new form of sense making or a signal that we can, because it's not going to come from our conventional institutions right now. And so it seems like we have to come together as individuals and communities to recreate it somehow. So maybe could you speak to where we are with that, how that's progressing, what your sense of that is?

Yeah, sure. I think there's a term that keeps coming up again and again as we look at this. That question you just asked, like how do we make sense more effectively and how do we make meaning more effectively as well. And that's the concept of flexibility. So cognitive or psychological flexibility. And I'm currently working on an essay and film about trauma. And one of the people I spoke to recently is George Bonanno, who's at Columbia. He runs a trauma clinic at Columbia. He's a professor there. And he's got a book out called the End of Trauma. And one of the things. One of the things he's arguing is that we're far more resilient than we're often given credit for and that the. And this is something I'm quite interested in, the narrative around trauma and culture has seen quite a big concept creep. So that's. I'll put a flag in that.

That's a whole big topic.

But what really struck me is that he spends a lot of the book talking about the fact that there isn't a one size fits all answer to being resilient in the face of trauma. But I think it also applies to in the face of a very complex, challenging environment. There's this we do best when we're fluid and flexible and we use what works when it works. And if it doesn't work, in that moment, we switch. And so this kind of flowing flexibility. It was really interesting to hear him talk about that because that's exactly what we've been trying to train in our online course. Sense making 101 is trying to give people and create an inquiry around these tools of cognitive flexibility and mindfulness and fluidity in the way we think. That for me, feels like one of the most important aspects of what's needed right now in sense making, because I think we all know what the other side, in a way, the other end of that spectrum is the problem, which is these very rigid, unmoving, ideologically fixed ways of thinking and seeing. That is the problem. And it's that opening and that loosening of that cognitive grip which I think opens up authentic conversations. It opens up compassion and empathy. And without that, we're kind of addicted to our ideologies. We're in this. What John Verveki, actually, I think it's Mark Lewis, is perhaps might have got that wrong, is the name of the neuroscientist who came up with this phrase, reciprocal narrowing, he's actually argued that addiction is this process of reciprocal narrowing where our frame of reference and frame of what we are able to do gets narrower and narrower and narrower until all we're able to do is whatever it is we're addicted to. And Vervaeke has kind of argued that practices, a good ecology of practices, which might include mindfulness, it might include psychedelics, might include Tai chi or circling or inquiry, or any number of practices can really lead us to a kind of space of reciprocal opening where it's that feeling of having that very deep sense of being met by someone and having a deep sense of flow, you know, or it's maybe a feeling you also get in playing sports, you know, in this deep sense of generative creative flow and presence that for me feels like the thing that is lacking the most in the cultural conversation. So that's one aspect of it. And then there's the very.

Fact based level of what Vervecki calls the propositional. It's kind of propositional knowing, knowing that.

That also has to be dealt with. Because if we're looking at say Covid and we're looking at okay, does ivermectin work? Are the vaccines actually making everyone infertile as some of the.

Some fringes have claimed? We have to be able to at the same time as all that kind of big meta framing be able to be like, that's not true. We can look at it and look at the facts and go, this is true, this isn't true. And so in that kind of, I think part of combating a post truth world, or combating is maybe a strong term, but navigating is to be able to be firm in saying, no, this is true enough that we can say that this is a false fact.

And we've noticed that mainly my colleague David at Rebel Wisdom, you know, because he's got more of the investigative journalistic background, he's been more sort of in the mud throughout the last year of the that kind of fact finding process. And it is slow and difficult. You know, it's really, really got to check lots of different things, lots of different people. Most of us don't have the time to do that. So we have to outsource our sense making somewhere. It's just inevitable. No matter who we are, we have to find who are those trusted sources. And that is just very difficult to do right now. And but then again, I think it comes back to the flexibility. It comes back to not holding anything too Tightly not investing too much in any given source or any given Twitter feed that you really trust. But maybe they start going off the rails and you have to notice, I think they've really lost the plot here. I think their sense making is poor with this particular issue. Might not know why, but I have to have that sense of personal agency to go. Something that feels off, something doesn't feel right, something's not adding up and they're not saying why. So I'm going to have to broaden out my.

Sources of information. So it's a lot to ask of any of us. It's pretty exhausting.

Well, again, absolutely. And again, that's very helpful framing. And I love that you went to, rather than talk about the mechanics of sense making or framework for sense making, what you first went to was our capacity for sense making. And I love that you're talking about that cognitive flexibility, psychological flexibility.

Which I did an interview recently with several psychologists for another summit.

Dick Schwartz of Internal Family Systems and David Rico and some others. And they were talking a lot about this whole notion of psychological flexibility and that collapsing. Dan Siegel sometimes says, if you look in the DSM 5, the diagnostic manual for Psychological Disorders, they're all disorders of either rigidity or chaos. And so when we get outside of that bandwidth of that flow, that psychological flu, we go into that rigidity you were talking about, or we can go into chaos and aggression and so forth. And yes, any kind of addiction, whether it's addiction to ideas or ideologies or a substance, collapses us down, really collapses that bandwidth where we can respond with some kind of psychological fluidity, flexibility and so forth. And then when you talked about we still have this issue of facts, right, and how to sift our way through it. And that seems to be the, the goal of the Consilience project somewhat to try to. The little bit I understand about it, they're trying to involve different people at different levels. But there's some notion that we all have, I mean, none of us have the time to go deep, right? Like David. And David Fly watched a lot of his films recently. He really has been in the mud with that, your colleague, to go really deep. But still, we all have to engage at some level. We have to take some ownership, right, for our participation. So I guess they're trying to create a tiered level of that and using some very sophisticated ways of working with logic and fact finding and sifting through the information to try to create a better signal. But we'll still have to, you know, we can't There really is no signal. We'll just be able to say, okay, that's it. I can trust that. Like, you know, the way we used to just trust the Huntley and Brinkley show back way before, before you were born probably. Right. But you turn on the evening news and they're telling us the truth and you know, they weren't spinning like they do today, but still it was a truth within a narrow framework of what's acceptable to talk about on national tv.

Right, yeah.

So I think that that's all really helpful and I wonder if you could just give us another big subject. But do you have any sense of how that the Consilience project is moving forward? Is it something that's going to get traction that will help us do that? Sifting through the facts? I just haven't, you know, I know there's some brilliant people involved like Daniel Smocktenberger and others, but is it starting to show up at all yet or is it.

Yeah, I think there, I think it's been. It's a very ambitious thing they've taken on of trying.

Really ambitious.

Yeah, yeah. And so I think, I mean I've really, I've enjoyed what they've put out and they do these really great sort of in depth analyses of kind of big topics and those take a while to put out. And I think one of the challenges for all of us is that everything is moving so incredibly fast and.

The demands on trying to make sense of stuff are.

It's like a military situation. And actually one of the models that's also often used in sense making is the OODA loop, which is from military strategies, which is observe, orient, decide and act.

So. Or I think, sorry, I think it's orient first and that, that. So you do this kind of, it's something like situational awareness, the way the military teach mindfulness. So something about situational awareness. Figure out what's going on, make a provisional plan based on the information you have and then act on that and then do the whole process again perhaps 10 minutes later. So again it comes to this kind of space of flexibility. So as far as I know right now the Consilience project is. I think they are sort of in the process of figuring out where they want to sit in the ecosystem of that. And like you mentioned, got absolutely brilliant genius thinkers like Daniel Schmachtenberger who if people aren't familiar with, they should definitely check them out who are involved. And. Yeah, so right now I think they're in that period of like any new entity figuring Out. Okay. Where are they best going to serve the ecosystem? And that's. So I think, I imagine that we'll.

Be certainly hearing more from them soon.

Great, great. And I just want to circle back for a minute to. You brought up the whole issue around trauma and actually we're going to have Dr. Bonanno on this summit. So I'm looking forward to interviewing him actually. Yeah. And I'm really, I want to read his book, the End of Trauma. It's fascinating. And you know, like anything, it's been a, you know, it's been absolutely wonderful the level of awareness that's arisen around trauma, individual trauma, historical trauma, ancestral trauma, collective trauma. I love Thomas Hubel's work around that. Who's also on the summit. And like anything, the pendulum tends to go too far. Right. And I saw an article in the New York Times, like trauma is so broadly defined now. Does it have any meaning? Right, right. So. And I had a discussion with a colleague this morning about that because the work we do in the criminal justice system, we talk about it being trauma informed, but we're also into anti fragility work, training people, you know, to have that psychological flexibility and not to try to create a bubble and put the blame on, you know, on some external circumstances. So, you know, we're all, we're always kind of working and it seems to be a human need that drives that latching on to the latest thing and turning that into another ideology, another belief system. And it, and it marginalizes everything else and centers that. And it's almost like that process of addiction that you described that. That reciprocal collapse, did you call it, or something like that?

Narrowing.

Yeah, narrowing. Reciprocal narrowing. Yeah. It seems to happen around all these things as we go back and forth with these pendulum changes.

Yeah, Just on that briefly because my wife is training as a clinical psychologist at the moment, so we've been having this conversation with her a lot as well. And we don't have the DSM here, we have a different system, but we have a similar thing to the dsm.

I should have referenced that to America. Yes, it's an American system.

Yeah, yeah, but that's fine. I think most people know what it is. But yeah, I think apart my sense from talking to George Bonanno and looking into this so far, because I'm on an inquiry with this, is that part of the problem is that we're using the same word for different things. So I think a lot of people in George's world, for them, trauma is what we would call big T. Trauma. So car accident, you know, something really, really traumatic happening to you in a single moment. The traumatic incident, which is in the dsm, and then any number of symptoms that come around that. Nightmares, flashbacks, et cetera. So I think things like collective trauma, ancestral trauma, other things like that are pointing to something real. But we have this kind of. Which is. Yeah, we have this kind of communication breakdown between people who are using the word in one way and saying, like, that's not a thing. Trauma is this particular thing. There's an incident. How are you even deciding where the collective trauma started and how it's being expressed, et cetera. But we're obviously pointing to something real. And the best term that I've come up with so far is something around, like, sensitivity. Like my own counseling training is trauma informed. And as I've been thinking about it, I've been thinking, well, really, that's also a sensitivity to the way people process difficult experiences and challenge, instead of trying to do what happened in the 70s of like, push people through it or force them through it to a catharsis, which doesn't really work. Being sensitive to the way people need to process that in a very compassionate and gentle way at their own pace. Now, that I think is revolutionarily important in everything in psychology, in the meditative practices. But at the same time, like you were talking to the overstretch of anything bad that happens to me, as trauma is perhaps predictable and I think unhelpful, because as Bernardo points out, that means people who have had genuinely traumatic experiences are being lumped together with a teenager whose mother shouted at them that morning, and they're saying it was. It was trauma. Right. So it's a. It's a very interesting. Yeah, it's a bit of a tangent from our conversation, but I do find it a very, very interesting topic.

Yeah, well, it does come up and all, of course, what's going on in Ukraine now, you know, we can really look at that through the. The lens of. Of collective trauma and conditioning and suffering and so forth.

So you wrote a piece a year ago, and I realize that's by today's standards, that's a long time ago, but it's called the age of breach, GameStop, wokeism and the Capitol Riot. And, you know, we don't have the ability to give people the opportunity to read that. So I don't want to get too deep into something people need context for. But, you know, you've also recently spoken about the emergence of kind of a new religious age. And, you know, I'm Going to take me a little while to set up this next piece of our conversation, so bear with me for just a minute. But, you know, I get where you're going with that. And yet for me, it feels more like what we're seeing is the emergence of these kind of pseudo religious movements that are arising in kind of in the extreme edges of the postmodernist wave that's been dominant for quite a long time. And, you know, unfortunately, one of the through lines of that, it has its benefits, but deconstructionism. But it kind of deconstructs ultimately down into a kind of nihilistic materialism, at least in my view, whereas some of the contemplative traditions help us deconstruct into a ground reality, something like Buddha nature, or some kind of sacredness or some kind of ground of being. Right. But it seems like postmodernism doesn't have a framework for that, so it just ultimately deconstructs into some kind of nihilistic materialism. And that's kind of the framework we're in where there's not much for people to belong to or believe in. Our trusted institutions that have been around for centuries and millennia are falling apart and dissolving, and everybody's online, which is just a landscape that's really challenging to find meaning or belonging or anything really, you know, and so, you know, that. That's my sense that what we're seeing is an eruption of these, you know, like on the left, you've got wokeism to the extent that it's become kind of a religion of the left. And then you've got things like QAnon and other kinds of extremism that take on a religious characteristic. And, you know, these things are meeting people's needs, I guess. You know, again, like trauma religion maybe is. Is too. We're using it too broadly here because, you know, our mainstream religions, for better or worse, a lot of corruption, a lot of human problems, but also kept alive more morals and goodness and. And the transcendent for centuries or millennia. And then we have the deep contemplative. You talked about the wisdom traditions, right? And how you've been relying on that in the last year. You know, we have a great depth there, and I think there's been a lot of throwing out the baby with the bathwater in the extremes of postmodernity. And I think what we're seeing is kind of pseudo replacement to meet people's kind of really basic needs, because these things aren't providing wisdom, right. They're just Providing identity and belonging. So I'm just curious about your thoughts about that whole landscape of where we are and how to use these terms and make sense of all that.

Yeah, that's a great topic. What I really love, at least, so I'll try. And there's a few things you mentioned I think were really important. One was post modernity, and then the other. And then the other was the concept I've been exploring with the Age of Breach. I'll start with post modernity, because I think that's a good place to start. So I think it's really useful to remember that postmodernism was an art movement first, an aesthetic and conceptual movement around how we. How we make art and how we perceive. And then, of course, there's a lot of, kind of linguistics that came into it with, like, Derrida. And that was post structuralism. And it was all kind of. Now it's all kind of called postmodernism. It's sort of depending who you speak to. But some of the early posts, people who were later called postmodernist thinkers, like Leotard, said, hey, in this whole process of deconstructing everything down to nothing.

That'S kind of where Madden like, that's just chaos. That's just pure chaos after a while. And that's just pure. By the way, I love the Dan Siegel chaos and rigidity dynamic you mentioned earlier. That's fantastic. I hadn't heard that before, but. So if we deconstruct everything down to nothing, we're just going to have these endless language games and identity games and that. That are just going to go nowhere, which is kind of what we're seeing in culture. He was right. He was absolutely right. And he pointed out that one of the ways that you can get around that is the sublime. And the sublime is sort of the sacred. The sublime is in. In Romantic poetry, for example, Romantic art, the sublime is the moment where the perceiver, the artist, encountered something so overwhelmingly beautiful and sacred that language failed them, that they couldn't make language games because it was transcendently gist of itself, like a kind of isness. And so they had this kind of, I think, early understanding that you have to ground in something that, like, if we don't have the transcendent at the core of things, then we'd just have the mad kind of status identity, chaotic games, and deep, deep narcissism and nihilism. Depending which way it goes. It can go. I think it can swing either way. But we. I think we have epidemic levels of narcissism and celebrate narcissists in a way that I don't know we've ever done in history to that degree. Maybe we have, and I'm not aware. But so that. So that idea that there is a sacred core to things that lies at the heart of reality that we can tap into, that's something that I personally have experienced and believe. So. So that informs a lot of my thinking around this. And for some people, that's not the case. Some people might be more materialist and they don't think there's that underlying reality.

But.

So I'll pause there on that. So then we have the situation that I've been arguing, or I argued in the Age of Breach, where I'm suggesting that what we're seeing now is all these proto religions, and I actually call them simulated religions because they're not religions like you pointed out. They don't tap into this deeper. They have meaning and identity benefits for people, but they don't tap into something that transcends the ego, really. They just kind of deepen this. They can't. They give people kind of a version of that. It's a simulation. It's a kind of a version of that. But it actually ultimately, like Jesus said, like, by, you know, you know, by their works, you'll know that, you know, if something's good, you'll know it by its works. Like, what impact does it have in the world? QANON has had a terrible impact in the world.

Right.

Like we saw with the Capitol riots. So the arguments that I made in that particular essay that I've been kind of exploring actually over the last year is that the Internet itself is sort of like a collective unconscious, which is not my idea, but it's one I really ascribe to. And in that collective unconscious, we're seeing this blending together of symbols and meaning and belonging, needs, and there's a meaning crisis. So people don't know, you know, that they're looking for this meaning and the mystical and the sort of mythic, symbolic, this idea that the world is not as it seems, very Gnostic in the sense that this is idea that the world as you see it is an illusion. And there's a way that we can, if only we could wake everyone up, then we would have this kind of moment where everything was clear. So it has all these trappings of religion. But what happens is that these things breach into the real world. The capital riots being perhaps the most.

Intense example of it yet. One of the things that really Struck me and actually inspired the essay was the look of shock on the faces of a lot of the people in the Capitol building of like, oh my God.

I was on my keyboard yesterday and now I'm here. And this sense of these kind of proto religious energies breaching into the consciousness. And I would actually argue that what we're seeing in the Ukraine is also a breach event, because there is. We've just actually put out a film on rebel wisdom with Gary Lackman, who's written a book about Russia and the sort of mysticism of Russian nationalism. And a huge part of it, by many analysts reckoning, is this kind of semi mystical belief that Putin has that the Russian Empire needs to return to its former glory. And Hitler, of course, had that same outlook.

One of the first things Hitler did when he took over Vienna was find this sort of. Can't remember the exact name of it, but it was just Nordic.

Staff.

The Spear of Longinus, which was supposed to be the spear that the Roman soldier used to pierce Christ during the crucifixion. And it was supposedly.

Constantine had carried it into battle and so forth. It's supposed to have magical powers.

Yes, yes. So we have this real deep sense of the occult and the mystical running through this dictators, basically. So I think part of what's going on, and this is another thing, is that we can't ever. I think we can't ever explain everything by one particular level of analysis. It's the level of analysis I'm best at, so I'm most interested in it. But there's so many other levels of what's going on, of course. But one of the arguments that I make is that we're living in essentially religious times in the sense that people.

Are.

Grasping at.

Or we need the religious. Like G.K. chesterton said, once a man stops believing in God, he'll believe in anything. I think that's sort of, for me, like the quote that explains a lot of what we're seeing. And so these. We're having these breach events into the real world and they look totally inexplicable and bizarre, like we could. That's what we're all saying now about the Ukraine is like, this is unbelievable. Especially as a European. It's like this is almost like a dream. Could never have imagined a ground war in Europe now. It's unthinkable. So was the capital riot.

Yeah, absolutely. And it's amazing how these things pierce the consciousness. 911 could have been another. Very much a breach event. And so I want to explore A couple threads there. So I know in your article, I mean here you reference kind of mysticism and gnosis and things like this. And, and you know, obviously the way some of these dictators like have grasped onto that as some kind of justification. I mean, Hitler even evidently sent some people to Tibet to try to connect with some of that. And of course the swastika from the Nazi system is a mystical symbol that was used in Tibetan Buddhism. So. But you know, in the term, in your article, the breach, you use the term irrationality. And so I'm wondering, you know, are we just collapsing mysticism and irrationality and all in the one thing? Because there is a genuine mysticism which, you know, sometimes that word is conflated with the contemplative. And contemplative seems much more reasonable and legitimate. Sometimes mysticism seems a little more of a leap. But they're, but they're certainly on a continuum there. And then there is that level of mysticism that goes into irrationality. Right? And, or it depends how we use irrationality. Are we talking about rationality and just in terms of getting on a conceptual mind or you know, and open the creativity beyond the conceptual mind, or are we talking about irrationality and a kind of sense of madness almost? Right, so it seems like necessary to tease apart a few of those ideas there.

Yeah, I think that's a really, really good point and really important because I don't think irrationality is a bad thing in the way that we understand reason at this, in this particular era right now.

There is an over focus on a particular type of knowing of the world and a complete forgetting of deeper or different levels of knowing. So that I think that's a really important split to make.

And then at the same time, I think I at least perceive this kind of the way these proto religions are expressing themselves in the world as chaotic, to use a word that you've used before, used earlier, chaotic in the sense that there's no like the traditions, the wisdom traditions have a sense of container and groundedness to big experiences and to experiences where we tap into deeper levels of ourselves and deeper levels of reality. They help us contextualize them. And what's happening now is that it's almost like we gave everyone LSD and just see what happens. Right? And I think it's that chaotic sort of like you may well tap into some deeper truths, but we have no way of integrating or making sense of them. And then what happens is this very chaotic jumble of, for example, conspiracy theory, apophenia is a word that's been used a lot, which is seeing patterns where there are none. And all of these things are. If contained, well, I think can be real ways of deepening wisdom and if uncontained, can be totally destructive and chaotic. So I think we're. Yeah, I think it's an important distinction to make.

And I'm quite Jungian in this area. Like Jung sort of argued that once we got rid of the. Once we got rid of all the angels and demons and the sprites and the kind of the rocks that could talk in the natural environment, they had to go somewhere. And so they went into our machines. These new things we don't understand. Like, we know. None of us know how our phone works and we would be hopeless at building one on a desert island.

We just wouldn't.

I mean, aside from the fact we wouldn't have the expertise, but. So his argument was like, in these things we don't understand, we start projecting all of that psychic material which has to go somewhere. And it's not the sort of that just upper level, straight down the line. Rational. We are inherently.

Creative, messy unconscious beings as well as we're conscious and rational and measured. So I think we're seeing this eruption of the unconscious in a lot of ways and this. This kind of boundary being breached.

Yeah.

Which is inevitable, perhaps, but also potentially very destructive.

Yeah. Well, again, I think we're talking about this bandwidth of fluidity and flexibility where things are some workable territory for us to work through our challenges as individuals and collectively as humanity. And then there's the. Clearly, there's the limitations of rationality on one of those, and there's the dangers of irrationality on the other. But I like the way you're talking about it because, you know, I sometimes tend to use the word irrational to really associate it with kind of the more extreme side of it. But what you're saying, when these breaches happen, you know, maybe the. The irrational is kind of poking its head through and. And that even if it may be manifesting in a way that's. That's, you know, highly irrational, really associated on with madness and potential destructiveness, that it's still part of a signal that's coming from a shared ground of some kind of. That is the collective unconscious or the larger world beyond reason, and that it's important for us to pay attention to. I mean, there's a work that was done around.

Stan Grof and his wife Christina Grof, around spiritual emergence, that sometimes spiritual emergence is misidentified as madness and mental illness. And people get overmedicated when actually they're having a spiritual opening, Right? So very interesting territory. I'd like to bring it back maybe a little bit to the practical though, because when I think about how to work with these things, I mean, personally I feel. I mean, although I see a lot of dangers in QAnon and we actually saw the Capitol riot, right? Incredibly dangerous phenomena, which was.

Enlightening and awakening because personally I tended to write off the extreme right as being kind of inept. And I mean, there's a part of the right that's very apt, you know, and they keep getting control of the political system in our country. They're very smart and very apt to. But then there's the extreme. Extreme that's always been there, but I can't imagine them becoming a real force, right? But maybe they can do more than I was aware of with that capital. Right? But then when I think of the left and what some people call wokeism and that extreme form of the extreme waves of postmodernity, which is not to demonize post modernity, it's a very natural and natural evolutionary movement in human history, but that's actually moved into the mainstream. That has become kind of the mainstream religion of the so called progressive left, which dominates our media and everything become a mainstream phenomenon. It's not on the margins at all. In fact, what you're seeing in many ways, at least here in the US is these things that have always been out there on the margins in extreme are coming in, they're collapsing the middle, so there's almost no middle landscape. So within that kind of frame.

What do we do? Do we fight the good fight? Like I sometimes think of, like somebody like John McWhorter who, you know, just put out his book called Woke Racism. He seems to be in there fighting a good fight around facts like, this is true, this is not true, this is good, this is not good. This is going to lead. This is not. You know, even this form of anti racism work is actually not helping black people. From his perspective and things like that, or in your article the Breach.

You named these four kind of strategies of holding, grounding, flipping and blending. And it seemed like that was more about, rather than fighting the good fight, kind of go along and ride the wave of this emergence of irrationality. And so I'm wondering, I know it's not necessarily either or, but which do we. Do we stand and fight the good fight against something we see as destructive? Or do we kind of use strategies like that to kind of ride the Wave. And again, those strategies also, they could be another form of the integral approach of transcendent include as well. So I find it really interesting that you were talking about taking that approach, and I find myself struggling with that. There's places, even in things, very real to my own communities I participate in. There's times I feel like, no, I need to stand and create some boundaries and fight this thing. And other times it just seems like, well, maybe I better learn to surf these waves.

So.

Yeah, that's a big question. And I think, as you pointed out, I mean, I owe, like, a massive debt to Integral and to Ken and to Diane and to so many other thinkers in the Integral scene, because it was very formative on me and has been very formative on Rebel wisdom. Actually, one of the first things David and I connected over in this particular area of sort of cultural sense making was Trump in the Post Truth World by Ken Wilber, which was sort of like a small book he wrote at the time Trump got elected, which just really helped to kind of.

Make sense of everything. So I think currently that.

As you kind of pointed out, there are times where we have to have a firm boundary, but there are, I think, overall, a sense of riding the wave and in particular, riding it in such a way where we don't.

Don't try and rationalize, or let's say we meet phenomena at the level that they're coming from. So John Vervaeke, actually, we had. Was over in London last week, and we did an event with him, and he said something that really stuck with me, which was he said that trying to argue someone out of a conspiracy theory is like trying to argue someone into being your friend. It's like, fleet, you've got to be my friend. You and I have to be best friends. Right? It doesn't work. But what he was pointing to is that what works much better is meeting the underlying need at a place of empathy and understanding what's the need and the need for meaning and whatever other needs that are driving this. And then again, it comes back to that flexibility and fluidity of, okay, what's a creative way that I can simultaneously put a boundary in place and say, hey, that's not true. However, I notice what seems to be really important to you, and that's also very important to me. This is something I think Diane Mitchell Hamilton does incredibly well. It's the sameness and difference model she talks about. But what I notice is that you really care about fairness in society, and so do I. And I think it also means that we have to be very conscious of what are the good things of, let's say, the postmodern woke worldview. I think for me personally, one of the things that is absolutely right is that there is systemic inequality and the world is determined in large part by power dynamics. I'm a big fan of Foucault or some of his work, and I think that's a very useful frame. And I think it's actually very important. It's when it becomes so narrow that everything becomes that of course, it becomes not useful anymore. But I think it's about finding the signal and going, hey, yeah. And on the other side of being like, hey, you know what? The world. I don't think the world is run by a cabal of pedophilic elites. In fact, I could almost certainly say to you that there's proof that that's not the case. However, you noticing that the mainstream political establishments and media establishments don't necessarily have everyone's best interests at heart and are captured by. There's regulatory capture. There's a lot of corruption in our system. That's true. Okay, so there's some signal there. So I think being able to say yes and I mean, it's a very integral view, I guess, being able to say yes and to all of those things. And then being. And again, coming back to flexibility, being able to the blending bit of the flipping, grounding, holding, blending is accepting the weirdness of the times as well. Like just not trying to resist it and just going, do you know what? Like, it's kind of a psychedelic for me that. That's one of my frames of reference. It's kind of a psychedelic acceptance of like, yeah, the walls are melting. Yes, everything's flipped upside down. Yes, that's happening right now. And it won't always be happening, but it's certainly happening right now. And if I resist it, it's going to be painful. And so having this sort of fluidity with it, I think is very important because we live in times which are often so inexplicable that if we get caught trying to make sense of them, we're already lost. And so there's a certain level of like in a dream, sort of in a dream, we just sort of accept, yeah, there's, of course, there's a small elephant in this room that's very normal, you know, and so it's something like that. I think that's. That's what I'm. At least what I find most helpful so far.

Well, that's incredibly helpful. And as you were speaking, I was remembering Marshall Rosenberg's works, which I've been deeply involved in in the past of nonviolent communication. You were practically textbook describing his approach that ultimately we need to connect around needs. And when we can get below the noise and drop into, you know, what, what are these things are expressions of unmet needs. And when we value that in each other, we can find our way back into, into communication and relationship, or first relationship and then empathic relationship and then communication, then effective communication. So you may have already kind of answered this, but I was going to ask you if, if you see any signs, given the landscape we're in with this so called post truth era and the breakdown of the information ecology, everything we've been talking about, that there is a pathway towards a post postmodernist world and second tier integral world, you know, bigger mind, bigger view world. Or if we're. No, it's really the signs aren't there yet. We're just still kind of in this chaotic landscape and we just have to be good swimmers, as the Hopi prophecy says.

Yeah, I kind of leaning with the Hopi at the moment. I think we're, I feel like we're peaking. I don't know who knows if we're peaking, but like, I feel like we're still very much in it. Especially now that geopolitically, the entire system, the entire game has changed, but also with that change of what's happening in Ukraine and this is moving so fast, of course, when people watch this, God knows what the situation will be. But.

Is this sort of.

You know, Wilbur talks about this and systems theorists talk about this, like systems go back to the last thing that worked very often. And that some, some people argue that Trump was that for a lot of people it was like, let's have a fifth 1950s style strongman. And now as we're faced with an evil dictator again in Europe and the threat of nuclear war, we're like, hey, let's go back to liberal democracy and the kind of unity of all these different nations. And it's like, oh, that's, that's a beautiful aspect of it. Like, that's, that's a very important thing. So I bring that up because I do wonder whether.

I don't know, like, you know, one model of change is that we kind of transcend and include until we.

Sort it all out somehow. Right. Another model is that we revisit things we've lost from the past and we reintegrate them in. And maybe those two are the Same thing. In fact, there might be some integral thinkers out there thinking that is the point, right? So maybe that is the point now. And you know, Terence McKenna, one of the greats in my view, who kind of who's thinking influenced me an awful lot, he had a whole book called the Archaic Revival. The idea being revisiting our prehistory and not going back to the Stone Age, or not going back away from technological complex society, but seeing what are the things that we had that we needed, that we've now lost. Things like ritual, things like a connection to the environment, a connection to the sacred, a connection to one another which is more important than profit or status, etc. So all of those things are essential, I think. And I think one of the things we've seen with post modernity and consumer culture, what some people call late stage capitalism, is the profound emptiness of it. The profound spiritual wasteland that is the price of continuous progress. The cancerous, continuous, never ending progress. Right. And a certain kind of read, I think a certain kind of revisiting of especially the sacred, what is sacred to us. And one thing I've been looking at a lot over the last couple of months is the work of some sociologists who look at the sacred, including guy called Jeffrey Alexander who argues that we never lost the sacred, we but we put the sacred into different play, we put them into our institutions. Like free speech is sacred, the courts are sacred, the flag is sacred. There's certain things that we have decided or human life is sacred. Right? We still have that, but I think at the same time we've also made all the wrong things sacred. We're like, status is sacred, money is sacred, achievement is sacred. So I think there's some kind of re evaluation of the sacred. And that's a very old thing. It's almost like we're not looking ahead, but we're looking back into what have we lost. And I think that, and key to that, I think is a connection to the divinity of the planet and the divinity of nature. And I think one of our. This is one of the maddest things I say and I say it anyway. I think one of our best hopes would be a worldwide sort of decentralized nature religion that everyone could get on board with and that transcended cultures and stages of development because we have to reconnect to our environment, otherwise we're going to die. And also what I love about any kind of sort of nature style worship is that nature can hold all of our projections. We don't have a guru we don't have a sort of institution that's going to have weird power games. Nature itself takes our projections and just goes, yeah, thanks for that. Look at the tree. We just get into the. Into the moment. I think we get. We kind of. I think it helps us to connect to reality. So I have no idea what that looks like. And knowing human beings, we'd probably try it and create something awful. But that's always been my. My kind of out there dream is like, I would love to see that. I would love to see that arising.

Well, it's interesting one sort of associating the sacred with Gaia. Gaia principle or something like that. Or actually going into a more animus nature of religion, which is been around before.

Yeah.

Or both.

Yeah. And I think it would be something we've never seen before. You know, it would be something that's fit for the times in a way. Yeah. So. So who knows?

Well, it's been incredibly rich. I'd like to just leave a few through lines, create a. Possibly a couple of through lines for audience. You know. One, when I asked you about sense making these very challenging times, you started off with our capacity. I think that's really about how do we create our capacity for sense making. You talked about the wisdom traditions and psychological and cognitive fluidity. How do we develop that through practices like mindfulness and other contemplative disciplines from the wisdom traditions that we can actually develop the ability to be better swimmers in this chaotic landscape. Right. And you know, I loved even what you were talking about, you know, how that, you know, the irrational poking its head up. You know, it depends on how we frame that in our dreams. It seems completely normal. And from your experience and part of the psychedelic movement, I mean, back in the 70s, I was close. I did a few psychedelics back then. And the one really bad, bad trip I had, I was. I was, you know, I was at a gathering and. And suddenly everyone's heads were floating off their shoulders and floating around independent of the bodies. And that just went beyond the framework that I could handle. And instead of sitting back and going, okay, the heads are floating around and enjoying that. I. And they're trying to grab onto a reference point which when you're in a psychedelic journey is a prescription for a bad trip. So. So maybe we need, you know, just expanding our capacity to be with that. So, you know, I love what you said there. It's just, you know, building that capacity and there are things we can rely on. And you know, at one point you also mentioned even in the fact finding part of sense making, you know, to be able to recognize truth. I think we all do have some. It's a little dangerous to assert it, but would you agree that we all have some place in us that kind of recognizes truth? And I don't mean surface conditional ideological truth, but some recognizes some ground that's representative of what's healthy and sacred as opposed to. And also that within that we can tend to recognize things that are real. Attempts to manipulate our sense making.

Yeah, I do, I do think truth is a transcendent value in that way. At the same time.

This is something John Vervaeke points out and it's really been a useful frame for us at rebelism. Is that the same thing, the same cognitive capacities that make us intelligent as human beings.

Which is partly our ability to decide what's relevant from everything that's salient, everything that's calling for our attention. That's what, you know, he argues that's very difficult to do with AI to be like, what's important here? Like that's something that humans do. We zoom in. Like right now this conversation is more important to us than what's happening outside. That same machinery that makes us intelligent also makes us prone to error. So it's. We have this double edged sword because it also means we go down these rabbit holes of foolishness, as he would want to call it. Like this kind of.

Get ourselves all tangled up. And this is something that I think the wisdom traditions really, really understand. I think the Buddha really was pointing to this in so many ways. It's like we cause ourselves the suffering and. But it's the same person who is.

In a sense meeting that, leaning into it and then flipping it around into a different kind of awareness. And so, yeah, so I think that's an important, like a very important aspect of it. And I got lost in that a little bit. So could you remind me what the original question was? Because I want to come back to it.

Well, just trying to come up with a through line and maybe I could also frame it. I know a through line in your work has been this idea of personal sovereignty. Right. And so how we exercise that. And as I was listening, I was even thinking maybe getting a little more comfortable with the irrational, if we want to use that term, a little more comfortable when we're outside of the bounds of our conditioned mind and conceptual mind and rational mind, you know, get comfortable without going mad in the process. But getting a little more comfortable gives us a better capacity to tune into that signal. That's coming from the sacred, that's coming from the ground. But it is up to each one of us to do the work to make meaning and find meaning in our lives. And that sense of personal agency, personal sovereignty around that.

Yeah, yeah. And that is perhaps a really good through line, because I think.

So. Yeah. So sovereignty as a word is something that people always. You know, we use it a lot in our online course, and it's one of the first things we defined multiple times because it's got all these different connotations to it. But to define it as simply as possible, I would say it's our capacity to think and act for ourselves as best we can.

Right.

And so sovereignty is this sense of being intimate and connected with who we are and where we're going, receptive to the outside, but ultimately making the decisions ourselves. And, you know, there's the. There's a book about. We run men's workshops and we talk about this a bit called Warrior, King, Magician, Lover, which you might have come across about the book.

Yeah, quite a lot.

So. And I find it very, very useful. And the king archetype, in essence, is the sovereign and listens to all of his subjects, or the queen also listens to all of her subjects, brings them all in, feels them all, sees the world through their eyes, but then ultimately makes his or her own decision. And I think that, for me, really encapsulates sovereignty, especially in an age where the information landscape is pulling us in a thousand directions. And we're effectively. Every time we go on Twitter, every time we go on Facebook, we're stepping into, effectively, a narrative war zone of people trying to vie for narrative control consciously or unconsciously. And it's just chaotic landscape. And then we have the same conversations that a dinner party and someone mentions, you know, a certain fact that I might think, oh, I don't think that's true. How am I going to. How am I going to approach this and how, you know, how do I feel about this? How am I going to be true to myself in this conversation? All of this stuff kind of brings us into this question of what am I going to do? Who am I going to be in relation to this? And that. That, for me, I think, is. Is how I define sovereignty. And one of the things that's being taxed so much right now is our sovereignty. Because it's so much easier after a while to just give in and go, oh, okay. I mean, I'm just going to take that ideology.

I'll join that club. Right.

That seems to have it all figured out. That's a lot easier than thinking for myself. So that's why I think sovereignty is so important.

Yeah. And building our capacity to do that work. So building our resilience, which, you know, this, the first day of this summit was all about how do we become more fluid, flexible resilience as individuals, using all the wonderful wisdom, tradition, technologies we have and modern psychology and all the ways that we have that we can build the sort of capacity and strength to exercise that kind of sovereignty. Otherwise it just becomes overwhelming. And we're just going to jump on one boat or another. Right. Because the tendency is going to be to do that. I wonder, you know, you are a meditation teacher as well as being involved in all this kind of work we've been talking about. And I wonder if you could leave us. And I know you do kind of a sovereignty meditation, guided prayer. I wonder if you could lead us in a brief version of that just to finish our time together today.

Yeah, sure. I wondered if we might do the salience meditation, which is a new one I've developed. Just because the sovereignty meditation involves some. Some breath work at the beginning, which might be a little bit, a lot, I think.

Okay. All right.

But I'm very happy to share it.

Share, absolutely, please. Yeah.

And so, just as some context, this meditation is one developed from the work of John Verbecki and others. Looking at a lot of the stuff we've been talking about, about.

How do we parse the signal from the noise.

I just invite everyone to maybe just shift from the talking mode that we've been in into just to a being.

Mode and just really maybe noticing your.

Feet on the ground and the chair beneath you.

And beginning by taking three nice, slow, deep breaths, really letting your belly expand with the in breath.

The out breath just falling out.

Then just really curiously, there's some focus, but also holding it lightly, just noticing.

What you can perceive right now in your environment.

So what is salient to you?

What's calling for your attention?

You might notice some sounds or some sensations. Your body.

You might notice.

Thoughts, feelings.

Physical sensations coming and going. And all we're doing now is just really waking up to what is my salience landscape? What's really calling for my attention through my senses right now?

Perceiving with a kind of openness and a curiosity.

Seeing just how much of what's going on we can become aware of.

And now going to explore of all.

Of.

These sensations.

Sensory input, thoughts, feelings, everything that's going on that's salient, what's really relevant to you right now.

Even.

Ask what's really relevant to me, what really matters to me right now?

Maybe it's a particular thought, particular feeling or a sound.

A little bit different to some mindfulness practices. We're not going to just observe what's relevant, going to try and really engage with it. Be really interested in why is it so relevant to me?

Why is that thought or that feeling or that sound so relevant right now?

All the different things that could have mattered, why this one.

Just invite you to, if you'd like to take that curiosity with you into the rest of your day, maybe waking up wherever you can, to what's really relevant in all the noise and why is it relevant, really honoring whatever you're busy with, so to speak.

So we can just end this short meditation by taking another three deep breaths right down to the belly.

Whenever you feel ready to do so, open your eyes and move your body and look around the room.

Wow. Thank you so much. And what a practical tool for everything we've been talking about. Practical tool for personal sovereignty, for sense making. This really, really, really helpful. Yeah, thank you so much, Alexander Byner of Rebel Wisdom and many other engagements. And so great to be with you today. I just have to mention in case we have any nautical people or boat lovers, that people are getting the perception that, yes, Ali is actually being interviewed on a boat and lives on a boat. This is a friend's boat, but he lives on a boat. And I just love it because I just love everything nautical and so it's great. Thank you for visiting us in this maritime way today.

Thank you. Thank you, Flea, for having me. It's always a real honor and just also really enjoyable to talk to you. So thank you and thanks everyone for checking out the summit and for watching. And yeah, I probably should have mentioned the boat right early on, but thank you, thank you for explaining it and yeah, look, look forward to connecting again soon.

Great. Thank you so much. And, you know, find out more about Rebel Wisdom. Really important work. I'm a big fan at either YouTube channel or substack or, or the rebelwisdom.co.uk so thank you so much. Be well.

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