OUR ANCESTORS WERE NOT IDIOTS.  They invented civilization.  They developed all the great methods and psychotechnologies.  So there were probably many good reasons that their spirituality, religion and imaginal cosmologies were so relentlessly focused on energetic polarities -- especially on the contrast and complementarity between what we call masculine and feminine. 

Today we are not naïve about these categories. 

It is obvious that they can (and should) be critiqued.  We understand that symbolic notions of masculine and feminine are relative, socially-conditioned as well as genetic & surrounded on all sides by many non-binary, asexual and transformative possibilities. 

And yet if we are serious about rebuilding spirituality (in a metamodern and integrative sense adapted to the emerging bio-informational network society that is living through the metacrisis) we need to find intelligent, useful ways to continue to harness this potent mythic simplification of YIN and YANG.

Layman Pascal's new online course from the Parallax Academy will commence that serious play on April 2.  It picks up on his two previous offerings (Re-Building Spirituality & Nonduality in the Network Age) with a daring leap into the highly ambiguous world of sexualized metaphors. 

Many of our contemporary problems can be framed as a failure to adequately appreciate, and systemically integrate, the feminine aspects of reality.  Yet this must be done in ways that both positively clarify the role of the masculine AND evade the simplistic social dogmas that hold back the diverse thriving of human beings.

But this course, of course, is also a story about technology:

The tools that we create also create us.  The way we feel about male/female, sacredness & depth has changed as our technology has adjusted the balances of our brains and tweaked the facets of reality that we are able to explore.  The Divine Feminine and Masculine -- if we allow ourselves the ancient poetic terminology that was used to project our coherent overflows of empowerment and shared meaning into the form of gods and goddesses -- are always accompanied by Divine Tech.

The notorious German philosopher Martin Heidegger suggested that the technical framing of the world has predominated in Western (now global) Civilization since the ancient Greeks.  It has left us, he claimed, in a world full of resources and tactics instead of living beings.  A world that symbolically masculine at the expense of the complex, intuitive and organic dimension.  Yet Heidegger did not live to clearly see fractal complexity coming alive as the radiant, interactive and enticing interiority of computer hardware. 

Leonard Shlain, author of The Alphabet Versus the Goddess, suggested what Iain McGilchrist would later double down upon.  He felt that the basic technologies of writing and mechanistic reductionism created a patriarchal left-brain exaggeration that is now proving ineffective against the accumulating side-effects of its own successes.  True.  Yet Schlain was not attending closely the world of physics in which mechanistic reduction, abstract formal languages and (mostly male) technicians have announced that the physical world is implicitly fluid, multifarious and relational.

Anthropos, Gyne & Techne. 

If we are to collaboratively participate in the unfolding of a new wisdom culture and a new spirituality then we must newly appreciate the complex interplay of Yang, Yin and Technology. 

Over the course of human history, these forces have traded places, reframed each other & co-evoked each other in many different ways.  If we, today, wish to become conscious participants in the sacralization of the emerging world then we need to more deeply understand the richness, complexity, utility and transformational history of this triad. 



DETAILS

The course consists of:

4 intense video lectures describing the theoretical background of the concepts. 

4 live online sessions in which Layman Pascal will guide participants through individual & intersubjective psychotechnologies while eliciting collective sensemaking around a wise, contemporary holding of masculine, feminine, sacredness and technology.  The primary subthemes will be History & Society, Brain Hemispheres, Humanity & Nature, and the interplay between Solid Containers & Subtle Flow in spiritual praxis.

4 special campfire sessions in which the role of leadership and instruction is deconstructed in favor of free inquiry, mutual exploration and heart-sharing. 


* You don't need to have taken the previous course and you but although you can subscribe to the recording, the live spots are limited in order to provide enough time for participants to undertake and response to the guided practices.