E128| Mythos After Progress | Jeremy D Johnson, Michael Garfield, Tim Adalin

Dialoguing with the meanings of progress, mythos, conceptions of time, and the becoming of identity and culture. Welcoming paleontologist-futurist Michael Garfield and integral philosopher Jeremy D Johnson, author of Seeing Through the World: Jean Gebser and Integral Consciousness and philosopher Tim Adalin.

• Shownotes

  The following show notes are generated by AI:
  
  Mythos After Progress - Podcast Timestamps

  00:00 - Introduction & Framing

  • Welcome to guests Jeremy Johnson and Michael Garfield

  • Introduction to "Mythos After Progress" theme

  • Setting up the conversation about progress, modernism, and individualistic redemption

  02:17 - Jeremy on Progress & Modernization

  • Historical context of progress in the last few hundred years

  • The shadow side of progress and evolutionary trade-offs

  • McLuhan's concept of extension and subtraction

  • Ecological context and Bruno Latour's Gaia perspective

  06:19 - Michael on Fitness Landscapes & Progress

  • Stuart Kauffman's NK fitness landscapes

  • Progress as relative optimization on evolutionary terrain

  • The problem of exclusion in optimization strategies

  • Co-creative dialogue between organism and environment

  11:12 - Evolution, Niche Construction & Mapping

  • Fitness landscapes as indefinitely dimensional and in flux

  • Progress as navigation through changing terrain

  • The myth of fitness landscapes as operational compression

  13:39 - Value, Story & Mythos

  • Stories of value and the cultivation of quality

  • Transition to discussing myth and mythos

  16:06 - Jeremy on Myth & Meaning-Making

  • William Irwin Thompson's influence on understanding myth

  • Science as suffused with mythological narratives

  • The Whole Earth image as planetary mythos

  • Gebser's mythic structure and thinking with images

  21:00 - Ancestral Time & Forward Reversals

  • Mexican ancestry and the myth of first people made from ancestor bones

  • Progress requiring "going back to go forward"

  • Charles Taylor's concept of the zigzag in becoming

  23:28 - Michael on Embodied Progress & Spatial Orientation

  • The horizontal spine versus vertical human orientation

  • Deeply embedded spatial metaphors (more is up, forward movement)

  • Evolution of surveillance and predator-prey dynamics

  • Cultural variations in temporal orientation

  30:17 - Temporal Landscapes & Complexity

  • Time as cone with layers of probable and improbable futures

  • Conservation of temporal structure across cultures

  32:00 - Jeremy on Hauntology & Digital Culture

  • McLuhan's "rearview mirror" concept

  • Digital culture's nostalgia orientation

  • William Gibson on attuning to the present's strangeness

  34:14 - Indigenous Time & Polyphythmic Cycles

  • Different temporal landscapes in nomadic versus modern cultures

  • Gebser's mythic time as rhythmicity

  • Time as acoustic chamber of resonance

  38:12 - Michael's Diagram of Cultural Time Concepts

  • Visual representation of Western, circular, and projected time

  • Interaction between different cultural temporalities

  • Movement from zero-structure to acoustic time

  40:40 - Psychedelic Time & Interference Patterns

  • Trip reports on acoustic time as interference between possibilities

  • Wave-particle duality of experienced moments

  • Mutual information between parallel possibilities

  42:57 - Choosing What We Give Life To

  • Participation in selecting what receives our attention

  • Multiple durations and life cycles across different scales

  • Cultural belonging and adaptation processes

  46:29 - Belonging & Masculine/Feminine Dynamics

  • Recognizing degrees of freedom in living and relating

  • The role of interior/exterior relationship

  • Masculine energy's boundary protection versus resource seeking

  50:36 - Jeremy on Finding Home in the World

  • Loss of belonging through agricultural civilization and modernization

  • Byung-Chul Han's "The Scent of Time"

  • Revolutionary time versus relational presence

  • Need for new temporality to address ecological crisis

  55:28 - The Intensified Present

  • Starting with new relationship to intensified present

  • Discerning relational configurations

  • Cultural interest in contemplative presence

  57:55 - Pragmatic Challenges of Slowing Down

  • Energy constraints on contemplative processes

  • Experiments in creating contemplative contexts

  • Strategy of doing less to achieve more quality

  01:00:15 - Michael on Ruptures & Context Windows

  • Fragmentation of attention in networked society

  • Technological singularity as event horizon

  • Maintaining narrative cohesion requires large context windows

  01:02:41 - Belonging & Giving/Receiving Life

  • Awareness of dependencies and causal vectors

  • Lingering in place versus durational lingering

  • Wrathful Buddhas and swift action from presence

  01:05:04 - Meta-Systematic Thinking & Midlife Development

  • David Chapman on stage five psychological development

  • Seeing rhymes in life and spiral patterns

  • Signal-to-noise ratio flip in midlife learning

  01:07:28 - Steering Civilization

  • Metaphor of steering versus braking when approaching cliff

  • Acceleration orthogonal to direction of motion

  • Scale and axis considerations in cultural change

  01:09:19 - Wise Discernment & Mutual Orientation

  • Moments of congruence and clarity without interpretation

  • Choir example of tuning to resonance frequency

  • Creating contexts for shared attunement and orientation

  01:13:57 - Embassy & Cultural Shamanism

  • Embassy as framework for creating relational contexts

  • Interiority and exteriority in belonging

  • Pop culture reminders about remembering origins

  01:17:17 - Jeremy's Closing: Future as Present

  • Future as present in the present moment

  • Walter Benjamin's productive melancholy

  • Mourning future catastrophe to enable different choices

  • Practice of becoming present individually and socially

  01:19:40 - Belonging Through Hearing

  • Gebser's connection between hearing (Hören) and belonging (Gehören)

  • Acoustic space as resonant and relational

  • Isabel Stengers on "making sense in common"

  • We don't know what a society is capable of

  01:22:02 - Emissaries from the Future

  • Raising noise into consciousness for generative purposes

  • Living from the future latent in the present

  • Future as overturning, not just catastrophe

  • Radical relational time of the present
    

  Keywords

  Keywords

  mythos, progress, consciousness, technology, evolution, narrative, ecological reality, human motivation, cultural perspectives, time, belonging, cultural identity, ecological time, slowing down, future, capitalism, relationality, interiority, community, progress

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• Michael Garfield

  Paleontologist-Futurist Michael Garfield is devoted to helping navigate our age of accelerating weirdness and helping cultivate the curiosity and play we'll need to thrive in it. As host and producer of both Future Fossils Podcast & Humans On The Loop, Michael acts as interlocutor for a worldwide community of artists, scientists, and philosophers — a practice that feeds his synthetic and transdisciplinary "mind-jazz" performances in the form of essay, music, and fine art. Standard-bearer for a new generation of boundary-defying scholars, Michael refuses to be enslaved by a single perspective, creative medium, or intellectual community, walking through the walls between academia and festival culture, theory and practice — speaking and performing everywhere from Moogfest to Burning Man, SXSW to Boom Festival, the Commonwealth Bank of Australia to Long Now's Ignite Talks to The Chapel of Sacred Mirrors.
  
  Connect with Michael on X @ https://twitter.com/michaelgarfield
  
  And comprehensively using his Linktree here: https://linktr.ee/michaelgarfield

• Jeremy D Johnson

  Jeremy Johnson, MA, is a scholar, writer, and editor for Revelore Press and founder of Nura Learning. He received his masters in Consciousness Studies from Goddard College, where he studied the intersections of media ecology, the structures of consciousness and depth psychology. He is the author of Seeing Through the World: Jean Gebser and Integral Consciousness (2018) and an editor for Mutations: Art, Consciousness and the Anthropocene (2019). Jeremy is the current president of the International Jean Gebser Society. His writing has been featured in OMNI, Conscious Lifestyle Magazine, Kosmos Journal, Integral Leadership Review, Evolve Magazine, and Evolve and Ascend. Find out more on his website, Twitter, or Patreon pages.

  Find Jeremy’s work on Substack @ https://jeremydjohnson.substack.com/

• Tim Adalin

  Tim is the founder of Voicecraft and a philosopher with a focus on the relation between participation and transformation. You can connect with Tim individually @ https://www.timadalin.xyz

• About Voicecraft

  Voicecraft conversations deepen how the world is known across themes of psyche, culture and nature.

  The Voicecraft Project is comprised of a media & events platform, academy, and participatory membership network.

• Intro Music - 'The Big Break' by Cantrips

  Listen on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/embed/Qaj-stBL4W0

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