NEWS WAYS OF KNOWING (from Alexander Beiner) is imminent.  Dec 13 2023 to Feb 28 2024.  Price: £485 / $590.  Content-only: £285 / $350.  Apply for a scholarship here.

The course's premise is that the current complexity of our world is pressing at the edges of what most of us can tolerate or comprehend.  We need help from each other and from new experts in order to navigate the great decisions (“crisis") that characterize this strange inflection point in world history. 

Most importantly -- and this is where Beiner shines -- our capacity to work with accelerating complexity has to be more than just intellectual.  We do not simply need more ways of knowing about our systems.  Instead, we need to build an embodied competence that is more intuitive about making visceral sense of the heuristic patterns that optimize our participation in what is both ancient and newly emerging. 

That means things like complexity tolerance, parts work, embodied systems thinking, the deep feel of pluralistic perspectives, mythopoetics, new systemic tools & more just ways of living in-and-beyond our structural inequalities. 

Beiner's tactic for this, as he points out in his substack article about the course, is to arrange specially curated multi-teacher sessions including practical pedagogical instruction from luminaries like Nora Bateson, John Vervaeke, Sophie Stran, Jim Rutt, Trish Blain, Jonathan Rowson & Minna Salami.

New Ways of Knowing extends the work of the  Sensemaking 101 course and combines it with Beiner's research into Lost Ways of Knowing and the other experimental forrays he has been making since the end of Rebel Wisdom.

He says:

>>> You'll have the choice to decide which of the many practices, theories and materials are most relevant to you, and create your own personalised journey. Every aspect of New Ways of Knowing is designed to be applied directly to your life, work or projects. In this way, the complexity of the world is your teacher, while the faculty and your fellow participants act as guides and inspirations to help you apply what you're learning to real-life situations and problems. There are three main ways you'll learn and experiment in New Ways of Knowing. The first is in our live sessions with the faculty, which happen on Wednesdays at 8pm UK time (3pm New York and 12pm Los Angeles). The second is through weekly sessions with your 'pod' of four people, where you'll be given dialogue practices and other techniques to help deepen your inquiry together. The third is the resources, practices, workshops and reading lists you can explore in your own way throughout the process.

But if we're smart, we'll eventually work out better ways to fund each other and start providing all this stuff for free -- so that it can scale up dramatically.  Ultimately you should get paid for attending courses, workshops & retreats.  The existing model (i.e. selling people their developmental practices, transformational worldviews and advanced socializing) is fundamentally misguided. Yet we are all still deeply embedded in the practicalities of the old system.  That's the situation for now.

Our guides and our experimental wisdom-synthesizers need to eat, use expensive technology, fly to events and (perhaps above all) they must remain incentivized to keep researching, connecting, innovating & sharing insight streams from the leading edge of personal unfoldment and collective crisis management.  So, okay, maybe you should take Alexander Beiner's new course.