Yesterday in the SPACE
an extra edition
I was up at five this morning, had my two cups of coffee, looked at my Substack Inbox and began reading. My mind is now flooded. I will do some writing which will help me clear my head so I can turn my attention to other matters.
Claudia Dommaschk had shared her article, Connecting with Our Galaxy Heart, with me earlier when it was in the draft stage. This morning I read it for the second time and I want to add my perspective. I am one of her trusted friends and the trust is mutual.
…I have formed a meta-team with five trusted friends around cultivating wisdom through difficult yet compassionate conversations.
She quotes Jonathan Rowson who we both follow and trust.
While I am deeply grateful for the galaxy brains occupying this liminal space, I sense it is time to welcome our galaxy heart into her fullest expression.
WE (Wisdom Exchange) use the term galaxy brains, who are mostly men, with great respect and perhaps even affection. But WE sense something is missing. Where are the women and what can they bring? WE are on a journey with Claudia to answer this and other questions. We are learning about and living with more galaxy heart.
And a door is opening.
To midwife the emergence of our galaxy heart, I will be exploring how to help establish other meta-teams and then work towards connecting them. This could mean including others in my Wisdom Exchange community. I will be sharing more about this stage of the project soon.
Jessica Böhme asks What if We Are Not in a Crises?
I remember that in a previous article she reframed the metacrisis as a relationship crisis. Frames are useful tools but they are not reality. Living with awareness of how and why we frame anything, particularly the times in which we live, seems important.
How then can we describe the predicament we are in in a way that acknowledges that things are challenging while also expressing that this is the nature of change?
One way to express this predicament is the idea of metamorphosis… The word "metamorphosis" originates from the Greek term "metamorphōsis," which means "transformation" or "change of shape." …Metamorphosis refers to a profound change in form, structure, or substance, especially seen in biology where it describes the transition stages in an organism's lifecycle. The most used analogy I have found is the metamorphosis of a butterfly. When ready, the caterpillar forms a chrysalis, entering the pupal stage where the caterpillar's body structure breaks down and reorganizes, eventually emerging as a fully developed adult butterfly with wings, ready to begin the cycle anew.
Most of us in the metamodern SPACE sense we are living in a liminal time between two worlds. Perhaps the space between will be a crisis, perhaps not. What if Game A is like a caterpillar and Game B is like a butterfly. Perhaps the space between can be like a pupa or, using a more beautiful word, a chrysalis.
We wouldn’t say that the caterpillar is in a crisis when it becomes a butterfly. It’s in a state of deep transformation.
Metamorphosis doesn’t just happen within a species; it happens across species and time.
And perhaps crisis is a word that captures galaxy brains and perhaps chrysalis is a word that captures galaxy hearts.
I do not know who The Honest Sorcerer is but he is a galaxy brain I follow. He asks, Has Peak Oil Become Self-Evident Yet? The article content is interesting but I want to focus on a possibility it raises.
What? Oil production would peak around 2035? …The global economy simply cannot function without cheap oil… a steady decrease in oil production would certainly spell doom to the globalized world economy.
Much as Nate Hagens explains as The Great Simplification, we could have a prolonged period of painful adjustment.
The Honest Sorcerer understands, along with many of us in the SPACE, what needs to be done during such a period.
Instead of a material transformation — or continuing ecocide by different means — we need a spiritual, mental and psychological transformation more than ever.
Tom Morgan is playing his part in that transformation as he explains in "Accelerating Wisdom" Episode 4: Mapping Your Transformation.
If there’s a core theme in the pursuit of wisdom, it's the need for constant “rebirths.” This applies for all scales and timeframes… Applied to a lifelong timeline, midlife often requires a complete reversal in the way we have operated. We ideally transition from left hemispheric, narrow and egocentric, to right hemispheric and open to attractors (Episode 2). This can be a horrendously difficult process. This week’s episode discusses frameworks and tools to help you navigate this treacherous path.
…the Western world doesn’t have a map for understanding or facilitating midlife transitions.
Very rarely do I disagree with Tom. But I will share a little bit about my own very serious midlife crisis many years ago. And I will share the map I found which helped me make sense of that difficult period in my life.
My worldview had collapsed, my career had plateaued and my marriage was at risk of failing. That is a crisis and I had no one to turn to for help. And as I often do I found some help in a book which is still on my shelf today, untouched for a long time.
THE MALE MID-LIFE CRISIS - Fresh Starts After Forty by Nancy Mayer was published in 1978. There are pages and pages of Notes and Bibliography. Research? Plenty! But I understand Tom’s point.
We lack a means of collecting the wisdom of the lived experience of people like me, of everyone, and passing it along to others.
And scanning my feed of Notes, I picked up something interesting that I do not have the time (and perhaps not the intellectual capacity) to dig into more deeply. Bonnitta Roy posted a Note, to which Brendan Graham Dempsey replied, discussing an article by Matthew David Segall. Here are three metamodern galaxy brians wanting to have a discussion.
I have offered an altnernative theory of cosmic "growth" with my (albeit naive stab) at A Theory of Complex Potential States, which can simply be understood as the entropic universe and the Darwinian attitude both stem from the fact (as Whitehead complained) we only count actuals and not potentials.
In my book (forthcoming) I will argue that when we look into the past, either with cosmological or biological-evolutionary orientation, the potentials that were in play (the potential field as a whole) gets substracted out of the calculations and observations.
My sense is that there is something of value here but these ideas need to be made more accessible to average and ordinary people like me.
Lastly, for now, a chart from Nate Sliver that is going viral. I am also watching Trump drop in the prediction markets. But these are matters that I want to discuss only with trusted friends, so no comments please.
