IT HAS BECOME CUSTOMARY for the Metamodern Spirituality Lab to convene in Vermont each Spring and Autumn.  Our official goal is to unfold something that is both

(a) legitimately part of the transformational, developmental and regenerative ethos of coherent pluralism, and

(b) authentically religious in its aspirations and practices. 

What does that mean on the ground?  It means a combination of collaborative ritual building, collective multi-perspectival deep dives into particular chunks of religion & spirituality, inner practices, story-sharing, immersive field building, relentless and beautiful conversations, permacultural service work, intersubjective experiments, sacred readings, ecological mysticism, emergent ceremonies, and distributed guided practices.  And, on the side, continue with culture building, relationship deepening, and pushing the main developmental metatheories toward their next mutation. 

I call all my work the Serious Playground but this definitely fits the name. 

This Spring, our theme was SUBTLE.  And what could be less “subtle" than yelling that at you in all-caps letters?  That gets to the first problem.  What does this word mean?  It could point to anything tricky, delicate, under-emphasized, refined or hard-to-see.  It might also point, as it does in Terri O'Fallon's models, to certain ranges of cognitive complexity that respond to abstract and interior objects.  But we were using it in the sense of Gross, Subtle, Causal and Nondual states.  How do we make collective and useful sense of all that using a transrational, developmental and interpersonal lens?

After the intensive week of “pre-retreat," the larger weekend group was structured around the following 5 group inquiries:

-subtle state vs subtle realm
-the subtle body
-subtle entities
-subtle energy
-subtle knowledge & perception

In addition we shared personal stories, undertook practices of subtle discernment, explored exercises of “tingling" and “magnetism," evaluated the role of the Imaginal, and evaluated the results of acting on data that appeared to come from intuitive, disembodied and nonlinear sources.

Our goal was not to formulate a UTOsK.  (I joked about a Unified Theory of subtle Knowledge because Greg Henriques was present and attempting, among other things, to situate this material within the UTOK and Extended Naturalism frames.) 

Instead, our goal was to surface shared data and mutual harvest any recurring contours that might describe of a metamodern collective take on this classic part of human spiritual and religious experience.  Basically, I wanted everyone to soak in the field and leave 10% better at playing with, and sensemaking around, the kind of experiences that human beings often call subtle. 

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

So what kept coming up for us?  Here are seven general conclusions:

Firstly, everyone in the field seemed to have a dedicated subtle practice.  This goes a long way towards the hypothesis that the metamodern stage of culture &  cognitive complexity is enabled by (or enables) the kind of participatory sensemaking that is traditionally ascribed to subtle capacities. 

Secondly, that much of what we are pointing towards involves imagination-mediated experience of an organism's bio-electromagnetic fields and their related informational flows.  Subjective and objective experimentation in this area continues to be crucial -- despite the philosophical possibility of drawing a distinction between a true “massless/qualitative" subtle energy and the ordinary physics (sic) of bio-electromagnetic fields.

Thirdly, that qualitative affects are essential to map-making in this area.  Whether or not we treat the subtle (and its occupants) as ontologically real, our ability to track valences seems crucial to either projecting or detecting these things.

Fourthly, that we may need to draw a distinction between phenomenology that belongs directly to the Subtle class, and other types of experiences that are distinguished specifically by their failure to belong to, or remain consistently within, any single ontological category.

Fifthly, that certain ranges of experience (e.g. connecting to deep ecology, healing from trauma, integrating the “karma" of our successes and failures) may be impossible to fully complete, to move on from with integrity, without processing them through additional sets of imaginal and somatic-sensational information.

Sixthly, that metamodernity depends, in part, upon intersubjective field effects that in turn require something analogous to subtle-sensing.

Seventh,that the general human population, especially in a time of turbulent overload, degraded information landscapes, egregores, virtualism, etc., may require subtle specialists who can access subtle allies, apex subtle valences (i.e. love) and apex subtle forms (i.e. the Lord, the Goddess) in order to help deal with dangerous, unsettling and even “demonic" variants of personal and collective subtle experience.  And we would very much want these people exhibit postformal cognition, transperspectival philosophy, and metamodern cultural sensibilities.

Okay, seven is probably enough for a summary report!

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

As usual, a huge part of the value of these events resides in the mutual cultivation of a rich intersubjective spirit and the general cross-pollination of understanding -- even while we are engaged in building up some kind of organic lore around the convergence of metamodernity and spirituality.  It is a way of deepening culture with “your people," outside of a conference (or even unconference) format. 

The slogan I suggested to Brendan Graham Dempsey, and which we might use in the future was:

“Live the Conversation."   

Along those lines, there was an interesting moment for me -- while I was in the deep woods, praying and hauling huge slabs of wood decorated with deities from previous retreats.  I paused to hydrate and considered the old phrase “street cred."  It points to an extra quality of reputation or verification that comes from shared experience on the ground. 

Here, I thought to myself, was a situation in which liminal, integral, metamodern, game B, metacrisis, permaculture, parametricism, process-relational, etc. folks could come to get forest cred.

I like that phrase. 

Maybe we'll see you in the Fall.