Shane Hanlon

Have you read Ken Wilber's Sex, Ecology, Spirituality? If you have, how have you integrated his insights on the direction of evolution?

You will have to understand league of legends to get this. If you do then this is prime self deception. This extends to all parts of your life including moral compass, dietary choices, occupation, consumer choices, societal stockholm syndrome, and so much more. So much of our lives are driven by motivated reasoning.

Every spiritual circle I have been a part of always promises transcending your problems. How often is the focus on including and integrating your current and past beliefs, feelings, thoughts, actions, pain, love, relationships? It often seems like this is given no value or is the uglier cousin no one cares about in spiritual circles. It's all about realizing enlightenment, or god, or ending your suffering as fast and efficiently as possible - Totally missing the point of a human life and ultimately making for a more confusing, more shallow, and more painful journey. To include is to Love.

@toasty7718 Good share! Here is the written corrollary. https://civilizationemerging.com/dharma-inquiry-2/

Thank you for responding and engaging with me! You bring up some important nuances. Firstly I'd like to highlight that dismissing possibilities or perspectives as anothers self-deception does not make for constructive conversation or quality truth-seeking. I'd also like to say that I don't identify as or with the term "metacrisis community". To address your concerns about being too collectively underdeveloped and dependent on our macro structures. Society and other macro structures are not a linear output of the average of the humans that make it up. There are many relationships that inlfuence large structures and in a recursive way these structures influence everything else. You can work at changing culture through technology, economics, government, or by working directly within culture. Similarly, development can change non-linearly from many directions. We have to be honest and admit that we don't truly know if macro structures can change soon enough. We have to leave room for it's possibility. But ultimately, I agree with your sentiment that we are not in a great spot collectively. Quoting Ilya Priogine "When a system is far from equilibrium, small islands of coherence have the capacity to shift the entire system." In my view, it is irresponsible to give up on improving our macro structures only because it sometimes feels impossible. Amazing! We need people on board for this massive endeavor and everything it entails! I think researching physical limitations to energy could be a sobering reality check for this dream. Like peak oil and current material constraints of "green energy". It is conceivable that we solve nuclear fusion at scale and have a lot of energy. Although being a spacefaring civilization can seem beautiful, if we do not improve our fundamental collective orientation towards life including macro systems, then we are just spreading our virus across the universe.

If we take our coordination capabilities, economic system, governance model, and cultures as invariant then this is likely true. But, improving these macro structures is possible and worth the effort.

This is an incredibly hard question to answer in our current societies and contexts. It is also one of the most important we can ask. GDP and energy use have a 99.5% correlation globally. This means if you are adding to GDP you are increasing energy use. Energy use means more carbon in the atmosphere, more materials used, and generally more ecological destruction. So the question becomes "How can you make money without adding to GDP?" Or "How can you add to GDP in a way that doesn't contribute directly or indirectly to energy use/ecological destruction? Some answers could be by working with non-profits with missions to address real issues, working to lobby government to make systemic changes, or working in education and taking on the responsibility to educate people on our current disaster and how to make it through. Non-profits have their own traps. If you are truly successful in your non-profits mission then you are making yourself obsolete. You are incentivized to treat the problem rather than solve it. Ultimately the answer for you is different than the answer for me which is different than the answer for every other person reading this thread. We all have unique non-fungible perspectives, skills, and contributions to make. Read up on the metacrisis to profoundly understand how our interdependent systems wreack havoc. Once you get the gestalt of it you will much more skillfully be able to assess how you and your ambitions can best contribute to a better world. I'm sorry there is not a better answer. But unfortunately, a vast majority of occupations right now exacerbate all of our problems. This is tricky work. FYI - if anyone is interested in more deeply understanding our current contexts and how they can find work that aligns with their internal compass and benefit the world you can email me at shanehanlonwork@gmail.com. I do not charge for this. (I'm on thanksgiving vacation till Friday)

Ya, it is true. Leo often gets dragged through the mud for his aggressive blunt tone, but beyond that veneer is a depth of heart that drives a body of work that is bold, honest, and ringing with integrity.

@Da77en Yay!

@Da77en I am not talking about having more new experiences to let go of. In fact, I am not talking about letting go at all. I am talking about forever deepening the understanding, richness, Love, perception, interdependency, and complexity of the experiences that you do have and integrating that into the deepest well of your being.

@Da77en I can't help but feel like when we are talking about inclusion/integration, we are not talking about the same thing. How are you getting to including/integration and a tiger in your room? What am I not addressing that you are feeling is missing? In my interpretation inclusion/integration is generally active. This second part though there is something here where I feel like we are talking about different things. Or talking differently about the same thing.

@Da77en It seems you are referencing this! Hmmmmmm. let me think. Because reality is so fractally, infinity exists at every scale and every perspective. Each moment of our life is infinite in every direction. Inner, outer. I could spend my whole life contemplating a single game of soccer or chess or league of legends. I could contemplate film or Love or the relationship I have with my sisters dog. This is relevant because just how "you can see the universe in a single grain of sand" so too can you see the universe in soccer, chess, league of legends, film, Love, or the relationship I have with my sisters dog. Infinite complexity is embedded in everything. This means that there is an infinite amount to include/integrate. I also sense that you feel I am excluding discernment from the integration process. And I understand why. I haven't mentioned it. To me, discernment is built right into the integration/including process. How does one simultaneously integrate being seperate organisms with different internal qualia and yet entirely depend on each other with our lives with no clear distinction between me and my environment? Through discernment. I don't hear that chemtrails are being used to manipulate the weather by our government and climate change is increasing the rate of natural disasters and the include them and integrate them with equal weight, truth, and importance. If that was the case then you'd be right to call it useless. Is this starting to get at what you are communicating?

"Beware: if you become a political actor you will take your eye off the ball of pure understanding and you will thereby never really understand politics, you will be a pawn within the game. Your mind will get so corrupted by human agenda, by survival, that you will not have the purity and objectivity necessary to understand what's really going on. You have a basic loyalty test before you now: will you be loyal to pure understanding and truth, or will you be loyal to human activity and survival goodies? You can have one or the other. Choose carefully." Humanity and the planet desperately need people with a grounded epistemic understanding actively participating in politics. I do understand that just by participating in the game you cannot have a perfect epistemic grounding. Such is the nature of subjectivity. However, is there not a dialectic between active participation and understanding in truth? Something that would lead to a higher order sythesis that resolves this contradiction? Surely, there is a way to participate in something without becoming an agent for whichever game you are participating in. Choose carefully to me sounds like an opportunity to dive into this tension and work with the relationship between these two seemingly opposing forces. Any ideas on how to resolve this tension?

Thank you for saying that <3 That made an impact on me.

Ok! let's dive into that! What does discernment mean to you in this context?

It is like trying to define cold and hot. Yes, they are ultimately the same thing, but they can be seperated or defined differently to facilitate communication and make distinctions. If we want to truly be holistic and correct then we just don't speak or I guess in this case type.

LOL

More Love. Specifically, this means enabling trustworthy cooperation between powers, aligning incentives with the well-being of all life in perpetuity, catalyzing a cultural awakening into Love and connection with Nature and each other, Educating the public and key decision makers on the metacrisis, and much more. But honestly, I don't know how to get to these ends or even what most of them might look like. Reality is far too complex for my puny human brain to make sense of. I am leaning a lot on my intuition to figure out what my actions should be. My skills are in Film, 3D art, and programming and I feel called to help. I have started building a non-profit where I am planning to make the best possible films educating others on the metacrisis and imbuing them with a sense of sacredness for all life. The non-profit is called Your Local Planet. I am in a transition period in my life and am just now doing the very beginnings of this work. I have built a website yourlocalplanet.com that only works on mobile for now. Since I haven't made films yet, the website is dedicated to sharing resources that have helped me make sense of the world and the metacrisis.

We may have little control, but we have a lot of impact.

Beautiful.

Given our current contexts, I believe it is a difficult undertaking worth the risk. Daniel Schmachtenberger seems like a reasonable example of attempting to weave this thread with some success.

I think a majority of the grievances and disconnections within this discussion arise from everyone having a different understanding of what integration/inclusion is. This makes sense since everyone is integrating/including different things in different ways. Why don't we try to create a comprehensive working definition together? I'll start with something and encourage everyone to change or add what they feel is inaccurate or missing. "Weaving together the different aspects of who you are—your emotions, insights, experiences, shadow, and past identities—so that they become a coherent and valued part of your overall being. This process often leads to a rich inner complexity, a deepening of being, and a profound sense of wholeness." Keep in mind we are not trying to define or relate it to transcendence in this definition.

That is a great point! In typical western society there is essentially no emphasis on transcending. It is almost entirely absent. My experience has been spiritual circles (maybe in backlash towards societal norms) obsessing over transcendence. I would also add here that accepting and loving LGBT people requires just as much if not more integration and inclusion as it does transcendence. I know many people who may never have had a peak experience in their lives who care for all people and in many cases care for those who are vulnerable more. Firstly, I want to say that there are a lot of really good thoughts here. To anyone reading this thread, I'd recommend reading @Brittany full post. Secondly - just for the record - I don't personally identify as part of any subsection or group within spirituality. You're right, you cannot bypass the human experience. That is one of the points embedded in what I am trying to communicate. I find spiritual circles tend to glamorize or idealize transcendence/enlightenment/"non-human" states of consciousness. This leads to people striving to reach other states of consciousness always thinking their current reality isn't enlightened enough. Meanwhile right in front of there face is a million opportunities for deepening your soul and Love. For me bringing Love to my darkest moments brought the most brightness and depth to my essence. Often the most profound moments of growth aren't in peak experience, but in every average moment or even in your darkest ones. But you have to embrace your humanness and suffering in order to grow. Avoiding them or tolerating them won't provide such depth. To lean into humanity is powerful and ultimately as a human being is what we are here to do. Now to address your default state concerns. I'd like to note that my criticism is limited to serious non-dual spiritual circles. You're right to point out that many beautiful beings are on autopilot. To me they are neither transcending nor including. You are also right to point out that larger systems and structures are often at fault here. Perverse economic incentive, externalization of harm, coordination problems, naive exponential growth, and many more large misalignments lead to a depressing world to live in. I find it hard to blame those who are apathetic towards their life. As for monks, if being a monk is integrated into your civilization like it was in tibet before china invaded, that sounds like a valid way to integrate and include while spending a lot of time moving toward transcendence. But in most modern contexts, becoming a monk means leaving humanity as a conglomerate behind. I don't know what I am talking about as I have never become a monk - I've only done retreats - but I'd imagine you would have less opportunities for integration and inclusion due to less complexity in your days. I don't think everyone should become a monk. But could be good for the right person in the right context I suppose. I really love your point on many teachers for many topics. I think that is beautiful. No one teacher is God to do everything perfectly. Still, I think generally there is too much emphasis on trancsendence. I think very few spiritually literate or otherwise people realize how deeply profound and beautiful inclusion and integration is. I fundamentally agree with what is being said here. Service and giving is deeply related to human actualization as it is deeply related to Love. With that being said (and admittedly I am not familiar with this man nor his community) when I hear the king and queen framing, I can't help but cringe. Why can't we leave it at deepening our Love in service to others? Maybe it is just more viral and we are slaves to our economic incentives.

I appreciate you following up! thank you! While I see transcendence and inclusion as interrelated, I don't see them as identical. I do believe you can have transcendence without integration/inclusion. I don't believe you can have healthy transcendence without integration/inclusion. Think about it like this. Your legs are only useful because of the relationship between them. No leg on their own does much for you. But lets say you're told all the amazing things about the right leg and all of the mysteries and beauties it can provide you. So you spend years focusing on training your right leg. You rarely hear or see the benefits of the left leg so you tend to neglect it. After a couple years your right leg is sculpted like a greek god and has olympic level athleticism. But your left leg is small and weak. Yes it is cool that your right leg is so beautiful but when it comes to being human, all of the benefits of becoming stronger and athletic are lost on you. Because it is only valuable in relationship to the other leg. You can't walk better. You can't swim better. You can't play football better. You may be worse off than if you hadn't done the training at all because of such an asymmetry or out of harmony relationship. Transcendence and inclusion are like this. They require different exercises for both and most of their value comes from the relationship between them. When we focus on one and not the other, we lose our way. Seperation and Oneness are both true simultaneously. I think it can start to be confusing to call one a total illusion. It is the relationship between the two that catalyzes creation. I think you are bringing inclusion and integration into a transcendence world where it doesn't belong. You can include and integrate all normal human experiences like relationships and tending the Earth and flavor and art, meanwhile have no idea of different states of consciousness. You would likely have a loving grounded respect for the world and yourself yet know nothing of transcendence. They do not necessarily lead to each other. In the same way transcendence is seemingly infinite, so too is inclusion and integration. You can always include/integrate deeper and wider. Fear/negativity is often a symptom of serious schisms, but happiness, self esteem, and Love are symptoms of deep integration and inclusion. You can always deepen it. Let me know if I'm still not communicating this well