Life Itself 101: A common core curriculum for Life Itself-ers (& more generally for meta-crisis & second renaissance)

[rufuspollock]

Note

This is a preliminary brainstorm with @shiweiart. Comments, questions, suggestions welcome!

Preliminary brainstorm and motivation (where we started)

What are the "fundamentals: that it would be useful for people to know¹ when they come to a residency, an event or a dialog?

Brainstorm:

• Buddhist psychology
  • Attachment to views: why is that at the core of politics and conflicts.
  • Nature of suffering: (not materialistic and not pain). 4NT.
  • Buddhist psychology (of mind): seeds metaphor etc.
• Wilber 101
  • GUTO: grand unified theory of ontology (integral psychology)
  • GUTH: grand unified theory of history aka cultural evolution, spiral dynamics etc
• Modernity and its blindspots: materialism, capitalism, secularism etc
  • Shadows of the enlightenment
  • Equality complex
  • Securalism and shadow of religion

Aside: Also really hard to talk about 2nd Renaissance without covering this stuff.

Conclusion: this is basically a "Life Itself 101" aka an "Introduction to key 'views' at Life Itself"

⏭️ Next steps in shaping:

• Motivation for doing this ✅ in SCQA below
• Description
• Skeleton
• Appetite

Subject: Life Itself 101 course

Situation: What's happening ...

• People come to residencies or life itself community
  • NB: all of this is o/c a micro-cosm of something broader. however focus on LI here (see higher level version below for the macrocosm)
• Heard via of word of mouth or online
• We see overlapping "groupings" of views and background reading
  • Some integralists, some vervaek-ites, some mcgilchristers, some shamanists, Harawites (Donna Haraway) etc - see diagram below
• There's no common "core" curriculum that people have consistently
  • The thing closest to common core we see is around integral - but even there quite variable and many people have not heard at all)
• The commonalities that are there are ...
  • Feel something is deeply wrong
  • Seeking a sense of community and belonging
• We (e.g. LI core) don't know of one work (or even several works) that efficiently provide a foundational (world)views and analysis

Complication: What's not working about it

• Have a "tower of babel" of competing frames and analyses => inability to "build the tower" (i.e. build the new paradigm)
• We can't just say to someone: read X, Y, Z and see what you think so that we can efficiently a) filter b) start from a common base
  • Spend most of time trying to get to a common base
  • Spend time on people who aren't actually ultimately that aligned (wastes their time and ours)
  • Conversations are often unproductive ...
  • People aren't aligned
• We aren't clear on where Life Itself are similar / distinct from others
  • People often think Life Itself and community are something we are not ... leads to confusion and false +ves and -ves (+ves who become disillusioned are especially important)
• We aren't sure where people are at - we don't even know if they are aligned or not
• Huge amount of repetition going through the basics ...

Question

What is a Life Itself 101 course including assessment of its effectiveness such that there is (increasingly) a shared understanding of what Life Itself "believes" (foundational views in X, Y, Z way) by a) "core team" (v important. course is prerequisite) b) residents (e.g. course during a residency) c) amongst broader community

Hypothesis

Brainstorm of potential questions and topics

• Paradigms: onto-social-techno paradigms. aka cultures, institutions and technologies.
• Spiral dynamics color scheme and GUTHs (grand unified theories of history)
• Distinction of waking up, cleaning up, growing up, showing up. i.e. inner development is multi-dimensional.
• What is the source of suffering (e.g. in buddhism): distinguishing pain and suffering etc etc
• Buddhist psychology: e.g. Heart of Buddha's teaching
• Idea of worldviews and that they are surprisingly deep (e.g. changing how visual perception works)
• Modernity: what are the key beliefs of modernity (rationality, individuality, progress, securalism)
• Blindspots: https://lifeitself.org/initiatives/blind-spot-series
• Primacy of being - https://lifeitself.org/primacy-of-being
• Need for action and especially collection action - e.g. intro to basic game theory, political theory (+ve version of the state),
  • Role of "religion", shared norms and views etc.

Notes

• 2h a week of watching a video for 2 months = 8 weeks
• 1h a week of dialog a week
• ~24h course
• Before a residency: watch a 2h introduction

---

Appendix: Higher level analysis

Situation: What is happening to the world ...

• Earth is crumbling under our feet
• Deep sense something is going wrong
• Without understanding why
• An era is coming to an end
• To create, we need to understand what is this era dying of and create a common understanding/sensemaking
• Example: this person is into their EA thing, this person is into their "green" indigenous thing (both are valuable ... but ...)
  • Everyone is talking past each other
  • There's not a real sense of why are we suffering from polarization and loneliness.
• Summarize: depression, loneliness, polarization. This surface ... (we agree on) but there a million different reasons they think this is going on.

Complication

• Need a correct diagnosis to have a correct healing.
• V hard to engage in a conversation when there isn't a common understanding of the why
  • It creates a dispersion of energy.
  • If people can really see the why we'd get our shxx together and deal with stuff
  • Would make a big difference to have a common understanding / thread to our actions even if people focus on different issues (e.g. this person wants to engage with AI risk or this person with indigenous people and regeneration)
• Deep sensemaking (is necessary) for coherent action

Hypothesis

• Deep sensemaking for people who want deep, rigorous understanding and who get that it isn't a simple explanation or a quick fix.
• "Explaining the [source of the] metacrisis"

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Appendix: Different meta-crisis tribes of and the tower of babel of the second renaissance (paradigmatic changemakers)

A crude unfinished sketch ...

Footnotes

1. this is about classic "knowing" rather than about practices or competences - the latter are v important, just not focus here. ↩

[omri]

I would add SCQA to the curriculum as I've seen it used at the primary way to scope ideas and projects at Life Itself.

[rufuspollock]

@omri good point though this is more about the "tao" style way of doing things rather than contextual knowledge about how to make sense of the metacrisis - see https://scqa.lifeitself.org and https://datopian.com/playbook/scqh/

[laurenwigmore]

@rufuspollock you could share this with the individuals in the current residency for review and comment, it might be a good collective conversation point one evening. Along with maybe distilling this down into some opening questions that could be emailed out, that could lead into more reflections and/or follow up conversations/comments.

Personally, I feel a 101 type course would be extremely useful and make a lot of the content more digestible for people and highlight what may be getting lost in the message in a more coherent way.