"IT'S COMPLICATED AND IT DEPENDS," says Jamie Wheal -- repeatedly -- in his interview with Nate Hagens on The Great Simplification. Everything from geopolitics to the optimal balance of neurotransmitters is met with this same basic stance.  Good.  

Our emergent communities are a rallying point for nuanced, complex, sensitive, big-picture, inter-picture & post-picture thinkers.  We appreciate it when people admit complications.  And although we seek certain kinds of clarity and simplicity, we also tend to trust those who are open about the context-dependence of their conclusions.  

At the very least, this means they are not simply selling us on their own idiosyncratic, self-aggrandizing oversimplification.  It's complicated.

Jamie Wheal has always been a complicated figure in the community -- from his work with the Flow Genome Project to books like Stealing Fire and Recapture the Rapture, to his recent engagement with flexible Expeditionary Leadership.  He provides many intriguing lines of thought and gives many of us the mixed feels. 

His simultaneous embrace & dismissal of integral thinkers, his affirmations & critiques of the emerging state of psychedelics, his performative combination of nuanced sensitivity & assertive challenge -- these all combine to generate a unique mood of provocative offerings.   

Yet the value of his work to us is not based on his mere acknowledgment of complicatedness.  The most important thing is not even the useful way in which he represents, for some of us, the triggering and intriguing themes of masculinity and sovereignty.  There is another and arguably more important element to emphasize about Jamie Wheal's participation:

The importance of physical realities as the key battlefield in cultural & psychological transformation. 

In the interview mentioned above, you will hear Jamie asking rhetorically how many of our transformational issues are specifically human?  That's a good question.  

The transformation of consciousness involves -- to an unknown & massive degree -- things like hormones, diet, exercise, brain states, physical flow, anciety survival dynamics, etc.  In many ways, the principles we need to harness come from basic evolutionary psychology that is not limited to socialized homo sapiens.

Biology appears to be upstream of both culture & politics. So if we want to change the world then maybe that's where we should be looking more often?    

At the very least, this counterbalances the pronounced tendency for developmental and transformational communities to be overpopulated by folks who enter from spirituality, therapy, sociology -- disciplines that frequently perpetuate our inherited cultural dissociation from practical physical wisdom.  

So when you're thinking of Jamie Wheal, don't just limit yourself to your personal reaction.  Don't just identify him according his catchy themes in regard to how  Prometheans, Peak Performance, Ethical Cults & Meaning 3.0 help construct an inspiring, healing and collaborative blockchain for consciousness and culture.  There's another issue here.  A deep issue.  

The body. 

"The hour is late," says Wheal to Nate Hagens, "and the stakes are high."