Episode 25: The Future of Transformation

In this episode, Dr. Sally Adnams Jones and Dr. Jen Peer Rich deep dive into possibilities for the future of transformation.
2:22 Sally says this episode discusses the ‘future’ of transformation. The word, trans-form-ation itself is key, describing forms- that are ever trans-forming - as the future arrives, nano-second to nano-second. It’s a one word metaphor, that we've decoded, deconstructed and celebrated over 26 episodes, which have been rooted in science. This episode will be more speculative. We don't know what the future will look like. There is an event horizon - evolution has a veil. We can’t see the future even as we try to bring it down. What we can do is point to some evolutionary mechanisms, or principles. Many teachers right now are looking at the future as a binary - either dystopian, or utopian. We say it possibly be a bit of both. We feel the anxiety of the creeping dystopia, and we also know that something positive is going on in the background. There are several ways to look at the future, one of which is to be a doomer, the other a dreamer. Jen and I will integrate this binary. We need to adapt or die, as Darwin said. Giving birth to anything includes birth pangs, a mess, bodily liquids, screaming, and agony. So we're going to trust in that process. So be discriminating with both the Messianic utopianism, and the Doomer dystopianism. Let’s take the middle path, and integrate them. Einstein said, we cannot solve our problems with the same level of consciousness that we used to create them. We need to change our mindset, which has been a form of modernism - hyper-individualism, hyper-masculinity, pro constant growth, pro constant work, so that the hyper Yang moved out of balance with the yin. Modernism is a patriarchal outlook, which devalues all things yin, and this has led us to a crisis. This podcast aims to resurrect the feminine - thus ‘changing the mindset’, like Einstein said we need to do. Left brain chauvinism took over the world, turned it into an object, stripped all the resources, ignoring living systems, the vulnerable, women, the body and its feelings. Resurrecting these values IS changing the mindset. The embodied philosophy of Integral Taoism takes us there. Sally then discusses the provenance of polarity teachings, and the Greek philosopher Heraclitus, and his “Doctrine of Flux”. He described life as a river process, and enjoyed using trans-rational paradox 2500 years ago. He said that underlying all of reality, there is the connection of vacillating opposites. Whereas Hegel later spoke about the opposition of opposites, and their synthesis. Vernon Dixon spoke about di-unital thinking. We've included these thinkers - and added gender. None of these philosophers spoke about the power-over politics of these opposites. How modernity and patriarchy decided to value the one opposite over the other. Sally ends by citing some of Heraclitus paradoxes, and says the podcast is in a deep lineage, that they are connecting for the first time.
15:08 Jen agrees that one of the paradox’s we are confronting is the tension between a dystopian or utopian future, and how that tension has brought birthing pains, and an uncertainty about what will be born. Another paradox is the developmental trends in our personal lives and our collective lives? This podcast is about striking a balance between being both a healthy unique individual, and also being in a healthy, participatory, relationship within the collective - of humanity, our animal kinfolk, our Earth, home and the universe. This requires further integration and a tolerance of that paradox, which is a meta-model. Transformation is always happening, you can't avoid or stop it - we are being transformed by transformation, and at the same time, we are transforming transformation, influencing the flow with our beliefs, behaviors, choices and our ways of being in the world. So the future of transformation is trending towards more transformation on every level - personal, social, ecological, and cosmological. Yet people and structures of power are often resistant to that flow of transformation, because it impacts their status quo. So as much as we open to it, there is also going to be a force at play that rejects that transformation. There's a tension there. And so our work is to be bridge builders between those points of tension, so that we can create generative change, on all levels. We will experience Super Transformations, that will impact economies, political structures and shift global balances of power, much like the printing press, or the Internet has changed us.
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