070 - A Conversation with Layman Pascal Part 1 - Protecting the Sacred

Portals of Perception

At a time when cultural and existential crises threaten the wellbeing of our global community, shouldn’t the search for wisdom and a more enlightened path forward embrace all sources of insight and new intelligence? Twenty-first century technology, side by side with ancient and sacred traditions? The intuitive, and the scientific?

There is growing awareness that real transformation, personal and collective, needs a fuller integration of many approaches, including the ancient shamanic, and more mystical or contemplative spiritual practices and personal development. Right alongside the speed and computational power of artificial intelligence.

So how do we get even deeper tethered in the natural human capacities that help create the space and receive the impulses of new evolutionary energy feeling its way into humanity, and integrate newly emerging technologies and sources of knowledge? How do we facilitate this integration in a meta-modern global landscape that is constantly evolving? In this special Portals conversation, Aviv Shahar is joined by Layman Pascal, a leader in integral thinking and teaching, and a prominent voice on the Integral Stage YouTube channel and podcast.

Among their considerations:

• There is an enormous appetite among people to create rituals, to create beauty, to come together in the kinds of events that tell our subconscious we're part of a community that's worth fighting for, worth working together for.
• There's no way to change the world without including people we don't like. There needs to be an anti-fragile attitude of how to make use of the people we feel are problematic, not just the people we think are pure.
• The risks of a YouTube channel and podcast are that we begin to believe that talking heads and words are a sufficient pathway to an enlightened future. What about embodiment work, community, purpose and friendship?
• If you can fall in love with the unique spirit of special people — thinkers, writers, saints — that you feel have depth and brilliance, then you can see the same in versions of yourself.
• Other sources of intelligence, such as the subconscious, collective consciousness and AI, are where we're likely to see breakthroughs that our conscious minds are not going to figure out.

This conversation is part of the continuing Portals discovery into what is emerging on the frontiers of human experience in this time of profound change. Information about upcoming special events can be found on the Events page. Also visit and subscribe to our YouTube channel.

TWEETABLE QUOTES

“I think more fundamentally, it's the exploration of and refinement of our capacity to consecrate things. And different groups of people in different styles might do that consecration in different ways. For some people, it's the evolutionary process. For some people, it's a magical hill, or an image or historical events. And we need to be thinking very broadly about how different people perform this in different cultural contexts and through different languages.” (Layman)

“Culturally, I'm looking at an overlapping series of communities or networks where they aren't all exemplary cases, but where you get a higher concentration of people who exhibit these competencies. And I would throw into that competencies list humor, and also the willingness to go into what seemed like negative aspects, right, the ability to explore our shadow.” (Layman)

“I'm a little bit biased by my own temperaments. But it seems to me there are a lot of people asking how do we break out of the personal and collective discussion circles and play in a wider skill set? Right, the people who are in high level metacognitive construct aware integrally informed mindsets have a tendency to feel like they've included different forms of intelligence, but not practice those different forms of intelligence.” (Layman)

“I think we constantly are at risk of having the most dynamic aspects of cultural and individual transformation subtly replaced and sabotaged by things that sound good and look good, that the superficial mechanisms of our culture, our media, our economy, the gossipy part of our own minds, our allegiances, our symbolism, all this sort of social architecture has the tendency to enter and replace the sacred.” (Layman)

“I think there's a problem in getting different aspects of these networks linked up to each other. The people who are interested in ecology don't necessarily know what the crypto people are doing, who don't necessarily know what the psycho spiritual people are doing. They all in general recognize the same problem and want to work on it, but they don't understand each other's areas well enough to take action on them and generate projects on that basis. And so leaders need to be able to see and cause people to challenge the limiting boundaries that have traditionally surrounded change communities.” (Layman)

RESOURCES MENTIONED

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A Conversation with Layman Pascal Part 1 - Protecting the Sacred