Before Scott and I were GTC faculty, we were GTC participants. This week, we decided to interview each other about our respective GTC experiences.

This is an intimate glimpse of what we brought to the GTC table at a time of deep transition for both of us. I was one year out of monastic life and about to lead the biggest project I’d ever led, The Nectary. Scott was a new father, settling into a new country, heeding an inner call towards deeper connection. We were both working on our marriages — and working to integrate some of the wounds of living in spiritual community.

I’m excited to introduce you to Scott. Hopefully I’ll be bringing more friends of mine into this space during my August Substack extravaganza. <3

Here are three of my favorite moments from the conversation:

“The description of GTC seemed to indicate a place that was a container for unfolding that didn’t explicitly impose a developmental trajectory on its participants. And I had been in a lot of spaces where I felt implicitly a kind of developmental trajectory imposed. This is the ideal that is being intended here on your behalf, that you are to grow into. And I had grown really discordant with that kind of approach.” — Scott

“I was speaking about the experience of leading my project, and I said to Geoff: ‘I have so much responsibility in the group and for the work that it’s blocking me from being able to feel connected to the people that I’m working with. And he said to me: ‘Or, you’re choosing to take on roles of responsibility so that you aren’t subject to intimate connection. And you are doing that to protect yourself.’” — Dechen

“So often, groups of people are places where we might feel like we need to be finished, or bring something forward that is complete in some way. And I felt the invitation to be unfinished, incomplete, messy, in-progress, and not held to who I was five minutes ago, let alone six months ago or years ago.” — Scott

I decided to post on Substack every day in August. This is the eleventh post.

But I can do Wonder. I can do Play. If you really, really convince me that everything is taken care of, I’ll start to let go.

Circling practice is a place where I can play. We draw an imaginary circle around the group, and the group becomes all of reality, and we set a timer and say: Follow your instinct. Know your desire. Speak what is true. Come alive.

When I realize I am that constrained, and that free, that is when I start to play.

Teasing people. Cajoling them. Seducing them. Loving them. Holding them while they cry. Throwing a tantrum. Dancing. Moving around the room like a puppet whose strings are being gently pulled by God.

Say this, God whispers gently. Now do that. It’s fun to follow God’s instructions, having no idea where they will lead. I go to hug someone because I want a hug, but then she’s the one who starts crying. I move across the room to a friend and she says, You are the person here that I most want love from. And Liam is wearing his yellow pants and reading a book about yurts.

This is how I like to play.

I decided to post on Substack every day in the month of August — some are Notes, others are here in my archive. This is the ninth post. I don’t use AI to write these; I write the old-fashioned way. Today’s image is via the Public Domain Archive.

Over the dinner break, I grappled with feelings of deep disturbance. Thankfully, that evening, I had a small group meeting with our other teacher, Gina. I told her, and the group, what was happening for me. “I lived with a guru for two years,” I told her. “The way we were trained was strict, intense. Like boot camp. There were good things about it, but I’m kind of ...”

“Done with that approach?” Gina completed my sentence, and we all laughed.

“Yes. But it feels like Greg took that approach, answering my question. It feels like he’s telling me to just get over my shit. And I didn’t think that was the attitude here.”

Gina was quiet for a minute. “I think the important question is this,” she said. “That method you learned — of just getting over your shit — does it resonate with you?”

I knew the answer immediately, but I closed my eyes and double checked. Tears started rolling down my cheeks. “No,” I said. “And also, it doesn’t work.”

The answer I gave may seem utterly obvious to you, but for me it is a hard-won realization. It has taken a long time for my relationship with harshness to transform. I was raised by a mom who got mad fast and could be quite verbally harsh — yelling, even name-calling at times. The way I seem to have adapted to that is that I became comfortable with harshness. I can totally understand the impulse to just start shouting at whatever, or whoever, is not working. My partner can attest to this.

It’s a tricky subject, because there is such a thing as beautiful use of the Sword. There is such a thing as “tough love” that heals, a kick in the ass that actually helps. Many places in our culture have forbidden those expressions of wisdom. We’ve barred them at the door, rejecting them as an expression of the “toxic masculine.” Because of my deep reverence for the masculine, for the truly loving Sword, I think sometimes I’ve over-corrected for this bias in the postmodern cultural environment. When sharing space with someone who was more sensitive, my basic orientation has been something like: you can’t handle the truth! It’s taken me time to grow out of that. I’ve needed to make apologies, and there are still more for me to make.

My teacher Geoff has helped me see that at times, I carry a Heroic narrative about life — a fantasy that we can each take up arms to defend ourselves, that we can master our fates, become invulnerable. This — along with my many, many Mars placements — is perhaps why it appealed to me to go to boot camp in the first place.

I carry the warrior archetype within myself, and I revere the warrior in others. The warrior must not be rejected. But he must also be disentangled from the dark forces that sometimes make use of him. If I take up the bow and arrow, I must know whether this is love or hate dripping from the end of the arrow’s tip. I must do my best to be clear about that before I fire.

Harshness, for me, is gradually becoming a signal that I may be unwisely rejecting human needs, human frailty, and human limitation.

We push away our needs at our own peril. Our needs have a gravitational force; they will always return — expressing themselves, if they must, in twisted ways. Consider the religious leaders over the centuries who have just reached out and taken what they need — what they have previously denied that they need, what they may even have taught you not to need — through sexual force and emotional manipulation.

Having seen the limits of the forceful approach, I am learning to set aside harshness in favor of a more gentle alchemy …

To be continued.

I decided to post on Substack daily during the month of August. Some posts are appearing here, and others on my Notes. They are written the old-fashioned way, without AI. They are offered as imperfect and incomplete shares that hopefully advance our collective conversation. This is the sixth post. Today’s image is via the Public Domain Archive.

We brought eight of our closest friends together, the day before the renewal. When we all sat down together in a circle, I found myself crying, and saying: “I’ve asked you all here because I need your help. I am asking you to initiate me into the next phase of my life.”

I’m sure you’ve noticed that a lot of marriages don’t make it to the ten-year mark. There were times that we weren’t sure ours would, either. Maybe you’ve been in some of these do-or-die moments in your own partnerships. They usually happen behind closed doors, never spoken about to anyone but the closest of friends. Maybe never spoken about at all. Many couples go through hell, and they go through hell alone.

Before we reaffirmed our commitment to each other, we needed to grieve the versions of hell we’d gone through to get there. We needed to bring light into the dark rooms we’d struggled in together. We needed to expose these scars to fresh air. We needed to apologize to each other, to forgive each other, to mourn, and to leave some of the wreckage behind us.

What ended up occurring, as my friend and teacher Geoff described it, was a kind of ritual purification of our relationship.

I think this ritual is the main reason I wanted — needed — to have an anniversary gathering. But I was almost too scared to go through with it. I almost wimped out, too afraid and ashamed to ask my friends for this kind of help. What if it didn’t work? What if I couldn’t access my grief? What if I went into my grief and never came out? What if it was too much for my friends?

We took the risk. We emerged lighter. We had been led across the threshold.

In my experience, ritual really does something. It is not ephemeral, not abstract. Gathering your village together to mark a rite of passage — whether the birth of a child or the death of a parent, the beginning of a relationship or the end of one — weaves together what otherwise might be left fragmented. It reveals wholeness, even in the midst of what has been broken.

The thresholds I named — birth, death, marriage, separation — are only the beginning. What about when your child finishes cancer treatment? What about when you publish your book? What about when you close your company? What about your first period, or your last cigarette?

Sacralizing everyday life

Too many of our rites of passage, our transformative thresholds, are slipping by unwitnessed. I’ve officiated a few weddings; I’ve held a few grief circles. But the potential is much deeper than that. I’d like to start holding these threshold spaces for others. If there’s an upcoming moment in your life that calls for your village to gather around you, let me know if you’d like to try something together.

I decided to post on Substack every day in August. This is the fourth post. I don’t use any AI to write these; I am doing it the old-fashioned way. Today’s image is via the Public Domain Archive.

I want to share about the power of vows here – vows to our spouses, yes, but also vows to our communities, vows to all beings, and vows to-from-and-as our own soul. I believe that vows, as terrifying as they can be, are also something that our hearts deeply long for. We live in a time that tends to celebrate optionality, individuality, and autonomy. But this has left many of us feeling disconnected and lonely. (My friend Liz Rees wrote a wonderful piece about this, about the power of the oath, back in March.)

Vows are a kind of binding — and many of us are longing to be bound.

Vows may begin as naive, but they become transformative

Part of the reason my partner Zen and I wanted to embark on the process of creating new wedding vows is that we know more, now, about what those vows actually mean. We can affirm our commitment from the ground of a decade of experience.

When you make vows at the beginning of something, you don’t really know what you are talking about. You don’t know what you’re getting into. How could you? This is natural. You stand up there, you say nice things. But you don’t really know how your commitment to the vow is going to be tested. Initiatory vows are, in many ways, naive — a best guess.

Interestingly, though, simply making the attempt to live those vows is a path towards being transformed. Through the process of trying, and failing, to live up to my vows for the last ten years, I have become someone new. I have experienced deep learning. And I am ready to affirm, and deepen, my vows. Person-and-vow are being mutually transformed.

It reminds me of something one of my teachers used to say — that we have to make use of our present delusions in order to find our way to better ones. We use our delusion, our ignorance, our not-knowing, as the best tool available to make our way towards wisdom.

Vows are a practice

So interestingly, faced with this task, Zen and I had to ask ourselves: what exactly is a vow? I found myself leaning on my Dharma background, particularly the experience of upholding precepts.

When I was doing intensive training, people asked our teacher all the time about the precepts. When taken to a deep level, they were extremely hard to follow. Little mistakes might happen — killing a spider, uttering a harsh word — that would lead someone to feel some distress. They had broken a precept.

I still remember when I first heard Catherine McGee offer the precepts on retreat. She used this language:

• I undertake the practice to refrain from harmful speech.

• I undertake the practice to refrain from taking that which is not given.

• I undertake the practice to refrain from harming living beings.

That was when it really clicked for me that vows need not be rigid rules that we punish ourselves for failing to uphold. Vows, at their best, are practices. So, my partner and I ended up deciding to structure our new vows as practices as well. For example:

• I renew my commitment to our marriage through the practice of growing and deepening in love and wisdom.

• I renew my commitment to our marriage through the practice of learning to love you in the specific ways you need.

• I renew my commitment to our marriage through the practice of gratitude and celebration.

• I renew my commitment to our marriage through the practice of serving our community.

Vows call us beyond our ordinary capacity

Many of you may already be familiar with the Bodhisattva vow — a huge pillar of Mahayana Buddhism. At the place where I did my intensive training, we chanted it after most meals. Here’s the translation we used:

Myriad lives without number, vow to free them.
Greed and hate without limit, vow to end them.
Gates of truth without measure, vow to know them.
Awakened way without compare, vow to fulfill it!

When done well, this chant would always give me goosebumps. Listen to those inspiring, mind-boggling, impossible vows! They feel like a glorious and radiant expression of love, calling me beyond my ordinary sense of self. They are a prime indicator, actually, that there even is something beyond my ordinary sense of self. Where else would such a vow come from?

I trained in a place where heroism was prized. This kind of heroism can have a deep shadow — namely, the attempt to circumvent our human frailty. But when the call to heroism is held in polarity with the reality of our human limitations, something amazing can be born.

The promise we made to the world before we were born

From Jungian work, from Indigenous and Animist traditions, we receive another piece of wonderment. This is the teaching that there is, perhaps, something even more particular than the timeless and universal Bodhisattva vow. There is also a soul vow — one whose form is deeply particular to you.

This is the acorn that eventually gives rise to a great tree. This is the promise we made to the world before we were born. Seen in this way, vow draws us more deeply into our uniqueness.

(There is a wonderful reflection about this, and many other themes around vow, in this recent roundtable on the metamodern Bodhisattva, which my friend Tucker put together.)

To sum up:

• Just making the attempt to live our vows is a path towards being transformed.

• Vows need not be rigid rules that we punish ourselves for failing to uphold. Vows, at their best, are practices.

• Vows call us beyond our ordinary sense of self.

• Vows draw us more deeply into our uniqueness.

For reflection:

What is an example of a commitment that you couldn’t have understood at the beginning, but which transformed you over the course of it?

What is your relationship like to commitment? How do you relate to yourself when you fall short of your ideals?

Where in your life are you called beyond your normal sense of capacity?

What might be taking shape, through the form of your own uniqueness, that is in service to the world?

I decided to post on Substack every day in August. This is the third post. I don’t use any AI to write these; I am doing it the old-fashioned way.

This post is an adaptation of a talk I gave on July 26, 2026 at Downtown Dharma in Washington, DC. Thank you to my friends there for all the support!

Sometimes circling becomes a miniature collective intelligence process. Last night was like that. We ended up circling the idea of belonging.

Belonging is one of those themes — probably alongside intimacy and authenticity — that makes formal relational practice an easy target for derision. Just a bunch of lonely hypermodern individuals, looking for somewhere to belong, we chide. Collective intelligence processes can get “hijacked by belonging needs,” the sophisticated take goes.

But as I look back on the practice, I see how belonging is a profound existential foundation for our participation with life. Some of what my friends said shifted my own felt sense of belonging on its axis.

Here is a tiny snapshot of the Circle — quotes shared with permission. (And a photo of a recent Sourcekeepers Guild gathering, for inspiration.)

“I am leaning towards the camera,” one of us says. “I am desperate for connection. I just want to belong. It embarrasses me.”

“My entire personality is set up so that I never feel that,” another says.

“Belonging was a big thing for me during my last training,” one of us says. “I’ve learned that contribution is a pathway to belonging for me. Just simple ways that I can do things for the group, and see that I matter. It’s enough.”

“I think I’m learning that belonging is a choice,” another says. “Right now I feel that I belong to the ocean, to this call. I don’t have to wait and check if I belong here; I can just decide. I do.”

“I like that,” another chimes in. “I think I’ve pretty much usually felt that I can walk into most rooms and belong. But something I really like is just belonging in space, belonging to space. It’s not even about what’s going on in relationally. I just like being here.”

I have decided to post on Substack every day in August. This is the second post.

Photo by Gabi Ramos.

Frances bought the tickets but had to fly to California because her parents are “going down like the Titanic.” Sarah felt unwell and cancelled three hours ago. I couldn’t find anyone to take the extra ticket last minute. Trying to recruit for a ladies’ dance party is a reminder that a lot of my friends are men. I could make excuses — all the women are raising children — but there’s probably something else going on with me. Anyway, Sarah may have cancelled, but Audrey didn’t. So we are here to dance, just us two, surrounded by female strangers.

Perhaps it is just the menstruation talking, but when I arrive everything has a slight pall. Groups of women about my age are shuffling halfheartedly, chatting, still shaking off the dust of their offices. Everyone’s skin looks slightly too loose, too mottled. It feels like a slightly dismal prospect to dance to the music of the 80s, 90s, and 00s. Our nostalgia will be deliberately evoked. We will be encouraged to pretend we are young again.

I don’t drink alcohol.

Having spent at least the last six years of my life in an endeavor of deep reflective criticism of modernity, I wonder if I can thrive here. I wonder if I can make a happy foray into what my Canadian artist friends call, somewhat irritatingly, the center culture. I wonder if I have ruined myself for the kinds of fun that are readily available to me. I fear I am caught between worlds; I have been thoroughly de-worlded. I do not know which world to dance in anymore.

Don’t be so morose! I think, giving myself a pep talk. At its best, a night of dancing is a ceremony. We will offer our bodies, our sweat, in the alchemical chamber of a dance temple. But what is the nature of this temple, exactly? What is the idol we are gathered around? What is it that we will worship together tonight? Were we not — we women born in the late twentieth century — raised on cultural gruel too thin to nourish our souls? Is it not this gruel we are being served again?

Fifteen minutes into dancing, I can’t help but notice the obvious fact that women are adorable. I watch them mouthing the words to a Madonna song — the gawky brunette in her fifties, the round Asian woman in her thirties, the curly-haired butch — all tilting their heads and pursing their lips and waving the little glow sticks we’ve been given. I can picture them as little girls, then as college kids, belting this song in the shower or in the car. They are all so different, and they all know these words by heart. They love this song. I think of my partner, how he finds the simple act of my dancing to be wonderful at all times. “You’re so cute,” he says, while not dancing.

Women, dancing, are wonderful.

This observation penetrates my menstrual grumpiness. I decide to self-guide my own shamanic encounter with the Earlybirds Club. I decide to allow this experience to change me. I practice appreciation for the little girls in all of us. I practice hearing every artist as a transmitter of holy qualities that cannot be corrupted by even the most perverse incentives of our economic machine. I open my solar plexus to the energy of these hundreds of women.

A pleasant, fizzy sensation fills my chest like champagne bubbles. Most of this, however, is probably not the result of my attentional practice; it is a result of dancing near Audrey. Her smile — illuminating her face at regular intervals, apropos of nothing in particular, clearly generated from within — is equal to the light of a thousand suns. Each time she reaches her arms into the air and beams, Audrey looks like she is flinging holy water on the crowd, blessing them with her radiance.

I invited the right person.

I let the music work on me. I decide I don’t have to like, or even understand, what is going on. I just keep moving my feet.

This is as good a place as any for me to remember what it means to surrender. For more than two years, I practiced surrender in a different temple. We wore plain dark clothes and listened to Dharma talks from our teacher, our guru, the master of the house. We woke at 4am to sit in stillness for long hours. Day after day in the darkness of Vermont winter, we swept snow off the stone path that led to our meditation place. For reasons I may never fully understand, that life felt much more natural to me than the Earlybirds Dance Club. Some of my old friends from that temple now say it was toxic. I understand why they say that; I know what they mean. I left to get away from the poison. But it still makes me sad. I think we all liked the game we played together at that temple — until we didn’t. We were playing that game for a reason. However mistaken we may have been, I never want to forget the reason. The reason is holy.

In Tibetan Buddhism there is not one God, but a pantheon of gods. I have always loved this concept, loved picturing this array of deities, gathered in a circle of diversity. There are wrathful deities and peaceful deities, male ones and female ones. The message, I think, is that wisdom has many guises, many appearances, many flavors. Let us not get confused and think that wisdom looks only one way.

A strange figure has arrived onto the stage at the Earlybirds Club. It is an eagle in human form, towering over the DJ. I take in his brilliant white feathers, his yellow beak, his enormous blue eyes. He is dancing across the stage, pointing his wing-tips into the crowd. Audrey and I are in the front row, pointing back at him in rhythm. My heart beats faster; it feels thrilling to interact with such a creature. When the eagle comes onto the dance floor, I want to follow him closely. A field of numinous presence surrounds him; it feels more interesting than anything else that is happening. But I am too shy to follow my desire. I settle for keeping my eyes on him, moving a little closer from time to time. I am still learning to dance with the bizarre. I am still learning to be made strange, to cross over into the other world, in the middle of an ordinary day.

I have decided to post on Substack every day in August. This post is the first one.

From my first day on the job, I’d been amazed by the people I was working with. Many had survived incredibly adverse conditions in childhood. Abuse, addiction, and economic precarity had marked their adulthoods. And yet, within many of them, a spirit of resilience and determination remained untouched. Their hearts, metaphorically criss-crossed by scar tissue, somehow remained open to love.

And love them, I did. But I often felt like that love was not enough.

As our social fabric collapsed under the weight of Covid, I felt (for the hundredth time) the profound insufficiency of psychotherapy. “It’s hard to see people doing such good work,” I kept saying, “and send them back out into a world that’s going mad.”

“They need better places to go,” I lamented.

Eventually I realized this was a projection. I needed better places to go, too.

Soon after this realization, I became a monastic trainee at MAPLE. I exited mainstream society to go live with a couple dozen people who believed that the best response to existential risk was spiritual training. I shaved my head (voluntarily), woke up daily at 4am to meditate, and threw myself into the practice of spiritual community. And every few months, I’d come home to DC for three weeks to visit my spouse.

Once, after Zen had picked me up from the airport and we were driving home, I gazed out at the gritty streets of DC and started to weep. “There’s nothing out here for me,” I cried, “except you.”

My marriage wasn’t the problem. Ever since my first meditation retreat in 2013, Zen has understood my spiritual path as well as I understood it myself — and sometimes better. But increasingly, I felt that parts of me were starving to death in mainstream culture. Technological takeover, the fraying of social ties, excruciating levels of consumption, and the hollowing-out of ritual tradition had left me and my generation painfully un-initiated, un-eldered, unmoored. So I retreated to the monastery.

After two years in that austere sanctuary set apart from “the world,” I left MAPLE and went back to being a householder. I was tired, heartbroken, and certainly more initiated than I’d been when I arrived. My life had been changed in that place — not only by the profound gifts available there, but by the searing firsthand knowledge of what not to do.

Meanwhile, out in “the world,” the creation of loving and wise sanctuaries was more urgent as ever. My fundamental mission remained unchanged: We need better places to go. We need to create more enduring homes for the sacred, in a world that has nearly forgotten the word.

When we’re starving in the world, we can feed new worlds.

In the years since leaving MAPLE — as I’ve continued to give my energy to the creation of “better places” — I have lived a somewhat divided life.

I have become a liminal creature, a bridge person, an interstitial agent stretched uncomfortably between worlds. I have a home, a marriage, a job, and friends here in Washington D.C. But the heart of what makes my life tick is not based here; it seems not to be based anywhere.

I am part of a geographically dispersed network of folks — known sometimes as the metamodern scene or liminal web — who have devoted our lives to tinkering at the edge of cultural transformation. Together we are prototyping new kinds of homes, temples, schools, and guilds. Multiple times a year, I travel to gatherings so that we can be together in person, strengthening the matrix of the soul-centric society we long for.

Coming and going between worlds isn’t easy on the heart. I really don’t like feeling divided, and I pour a lot of energy into trying to bring the worlds closer together.

Which is why, for the past year and a half, I’ve been building The Nectary. I want to make a place where the liminal web can offer its particular nourishment to the people who are hungry for it. In cities everywhere, there are sincere and caring people, trying to figure out ‘the good life’ in modernity — and they hear a different future calling from somewhere deep inside them. For these people and so many more, we need sanctuaries. We need places where the (proverbial) householder and monastic can meet — places where the chaotic present, and the dream of a coherent future, can enter dialogue.

When we’re starving in the world, we can feed new worlds. And thanks to the dedicated efforts of my wonderful colleagues, we’ve created a beautiful feast of offerings in the U.S. capital this spring.

It still doesn’t feel like enough. This beautiful and suffering world needs so much more. But I’m still really proud of the table we’ll be gathering around.

Today, the Nectary crew invites you to our metamodern pop-up school in D.C.

Here’s some of the things you can come to during The Nectary:

• a meditation daylong with Mitra Peter Park,

• an imaginal practice weekend with Sam Hinds,

• a Gurdjieff-inspired retreat with Layman Pascal (by application),

• a Circling weekend with the Lyric group,

• a dinner party on sacred economics with Tyler and Samantha of the BioFi Project,

• a deep dive with Sabra Saperstein into the critical practice of hearth-tending,

• and more as we’re ready to announce.

These are beautiful and rare opportunities to learn from cutting-edge practitioners of intersubjective practice. They’re also a chance to directly experience the deep community that Nectary fellows have been cultivating for years.

Will you help us gather the right people around our table? And do you feel called to feed us?

If you know aligned folks in or around DC, I’d love for you to pass on news of The Nectary (and have them join our mailing list) so that we can meet them and practice with them.

If you feel called to support our work, I’m happy to share that we are now fiscally sponsored by the amazing Raft Foundation. That means that you can make a tax-deductible gift to support our continued efforts. Many of us are attempting to sustain ourselves by devoting ourselves to this work, and every contribution helps us move closer to that vision.

I hope to see you there.

Love,
Dechen

My friend’s question helped me recognize the territory I seem to presently inhabit: situated within longstanding relationships, with a changed sense of what relationship is. Here, I offer reflections on one aspect of my present-day experience: the movement of Eros to a new level of depth.

Death and turn-on

Through the late fall and early winter, in the midst of the death process I was going through, turn-on was harder to access.

I’m not talking about sexual functioning here, like whether I can physically connect with my partner. I’m talking about the presence — or in this case, the absence — of Eros: the hungry, soulful, juicy directionality that takes hold of my being and moves me towards what I want in every area of my life.

If I think of the soul as a living organism, this makes sense. As the organism dedicates energy to the process of shedding, dying, and dissolving, there’s less energy available for the process of allurement to what I want. For a time, death commands that I be still; it pins me in place.

Today, the shedding process has diminished in its intensity. I seem to have stabilized someplace new, and am operating from a couple of layers “closer to the bone” than I used to. I am a lamb on wobbly legs, in a vast unfamiliar expanse.

But I can walk. I have directionality again. And with that directionality comes the return of Eros.

Surface and depth

The Eros after the shedding seems to come from a different level of depth. It is more vulnerable for me to experience. I sense its presence as a trembling at the surface of an inner well. When I follow this trembling, it becomes a wordless song, issuing from the center of a primordial pool. It is a calling, a keening, a beckoning.

This Eros doesn’t seem to be generated by my familiar personality. Therefore, it helps me shed light on the way Eros has functioned in my being for most of my life. I sense that I am at the very beginning of un-learning the practice of “chasing” gratification, driven by an outer layer of myself. This chasing is, I believe, what Marc Gafni means when he discusses psuedo-Eros — the pursuit of addictive substitutes.

You could say that pseudo-Eros has been a specialty of mine. Since I was twelve years old, I have invested huge amounts of energy into the pursuit of romantic union with inappropriate and unavailable people I didn’t really know — one after another after another. My obsession kept me insulated from my own pain, spinning delicious fantasies for me to take refuge in. For some years, I identified as a love addict, and I did a significant amount of work in 12-step rooms.

To move Eros from surface to depth, as with all addiction recovery, requires a brutal confrontation with reality and a painstaking process of reconstructing the heart. I do not, however, view all my prior addictive pursuits as unproductive. I do not reject my pseudo-Erotic past. Instead I understand the surface and depth as intimately related to each other. They have always been co-present.

My teacher Soryu used to say that we make use of our current delusions in order to discover better ones. Layer by layer, we uncover greater truth — equipped, paradoxically, with the un-truths we currently believe. More recently, my teacher Greg said in a group teaching: “True nature has to function with the mess that we are! So it makes use of our structures to bring things forward.”

In this way of seeing, pseudo-Eros has been a gateway to my path of purification. Without my years of utterly mixed experience of superficial and deep Eros, it’s not clear whether I could have learned what I needed to learn. Love addiction is a deep pattern, shaping my perception and action. It is a superficial fire that must burn off — through my continued, conscious engagement — in order for me to touch greater depths. As I touch those greater depths, the superficial loses its prior hold on me. But the superficial is not a step that can be skipped.

True vulnerability

This new experience of Eros is animal. I am vulnerable, exposed, and helpless in my longing. It’s notable that I long for a lot of the same things I longed for before. My turn-ons haven’t changed that much. Voice notes from my soulful collaborators still make my heart go pitter-patter. Images of a more beautiful future still ache in my belly.

I do not, however, endorse the same strategies of reification and manipulation that once protected me from vulnerability.

When I hold the psuedo-erotic orientation of a love addict, I imagine that I am powerful. I imagine I have the power to seduce my desired ‘object’ by delivering various kinds of ego gratification — and I hope, whether consciously or unconsciously, to receive that gratification myself.

As I more deeply understand that I don’t have that kind of control — that I can neither deliver, nor command, any lasting gratification in relation to another human being — I am left with the simple truth of my own longing. I am open-handed, undefended, standing before my beloved ones with a question:

Here is my dream; will you go there with me?
Here is my song; does it call you to dance?
Here is my soul; is it bound up with yours?

Even calling it my longing, my song, is not quite right anymore. At this level of depth, the impulses that move through my life no longer belong to me. Instead, I am their steward — responsible for clearing a path so that they might take form before my life ends.

—Stephen Jenkinson

It happened again. Fall happened again.

It is happening again. Winter is happening again.

And I’ve been dying again.

Dying. Shedding. Composting. Crumbling. Losing. Surrendering.

This year, it finally dawned on me that I’ve died lots of other times before. But I didn’t know what was going on. So I kicked and screamed and ruminated and dissociated and despaired and thought there was something very, very wrong with me.

I remember stumbling through my winter walks in Chicago a couple of years after my mother died. The version of me who had a living, human mother in the world was now on life support. I needed to pull the plug. I was the plug, the puller of the plug, and the patient. I could hardly think, could hardly see. What’s wrong?

I remember staring at the wall after my first year of graduate school, thinking I’d never been so sad. Making it to the halfway point of my social work program, which I loved, felt more like a funeral than a milestone. It was as if a dam inside me had collapsed, allowing everything that had ever hurt me to come flooding in. What’s wrong?

In spite of my longstanding ignorance about this process, I do seem to be getting better at dying. This year’s dying has felt deeper than last year’s. I’ve gotten a little braver about letting things cut me to the quick.

Recently, when spending time with my family of origin, I felt familiar agonies begin to sear my inner flesh like a white-hot flame. I felt the shock, the sting; felt the power of this pain to compel me into blame, into hysteria, into the recitation of old stories. But I stayed upright: still making conversation, aware that there was no emergency. I stayed awake to every contour of my ancient pain, like I was finally getting the tattoo I’d always wanted.

First I see the husk of the self in daytime. It is apart from me. It is resting on my breakfast table, perfect and intact, like a hollowed-out milkweed pod. Noticing its separateness from me, I feel radiance in my heart. What a relief!

Later I see the husk of the self in nighttime. It hovers in the dark above my bed, hunched and shriveled, like the corpse of an insect who has died in the unrelenting sun. Noticing its inseparability from me, I feel sorrow and worthlessness burning in my guts. Why???

I have lost my exoskeleton, my protection. It doesn’t return for weeks, then months. I let myself be awkward at parties. I feel vulnerable and exposed; sometimes I am nothing but soft underbelly.

My spouse names me naked crab.

These excruciating sensations are, I believe, the release I have been longing for. All last year, I moaned to my mentors that I was tired: tired of being a slave to my own ambitious plans, tired of being trapped beneath the elaborate scaffolding of my ideas, tired of dragging around the clunky trappings of my personality as if I believed in her. I didn’t — not really, not anymore — but she seemed to operate with or without my buy-in. I looked on with a mix of affection and chagrin as she danced her usual dances and sang her usual songs. She was charming, brilliant, and repetitive: the most sophisticated wind-up toy imaginable.

When I think that I am in control; when I think that I am strong and capable and talented and special; when I think that I am going places and that I know things, I do not have much use for love. The husk, the defended self, is like an armored breastplate with the words I DON’T NEED YOU emblazoned across.

Having lost the armor through an organic process I do not control, I can confirm that I am very much in need of love.

It is the Solstice. The descent of fall and winter has been one humiliation after another. I am at the bottom of the well. Fortunately, there is the chance to sit a half-day meditation retreat at my friend’s apartment.

While I am sitting, I discover a still point at the center of my being. It is an unmoving gaze; it is an eye that never closes. The gaze gazes inward at itself from all directions. The eye looks outward at everything in all directions. At the center of my being is a gaze that gazes eternally at All. It is a medallion of eternality, a hearth of wholeness.

At some point, an inner presence gestures to my body and says: There’s a life here.

Perhaps part of the reason for this dying is that back in August, I achieved the fulfillment of a life dream. I raised $10,000 and gathered a group of my closest collaborators together for the first iteration of The Nectary. I remember one morning, early in the residency, I was taking oat milk out of the refrigerator. As I poured it into my coffee, I became viscerally aware of the proximity of my own death. My experience of The Nectary was brimming over with fullness, with timelessness. I felt how it would be a joy to do this all my life, how I could die doing this, and how soon that time would come.

“It makes sense you feel the proximity of your death,” Tara said. “You are flowering.”

As the husk falls away and the elaborate scaffolding collapses, something new is growing at the center. It is an organic life form, hybrid and strange. She is not unlike a plant reaching for light. I do not yet know her rhythms, her language, her ways. I hold my ear close to the fertile ground, hoping to hear her instructions in the midst of the ever-more-abstracted chaos around me.

There’s a life here.

More than a year ago, on my third night with ayahuasca, the plants took me into their consciousness. The plants showed me their colors and shapes, let me hear their chattering sounds. It was so tender, so intimate, and so alien. I wept at the trust being placed in me — that I was being allowed to see. I tried to pay perfect attention, receiving the communications as fully as I knew how. Most of what was offered could never cross the translation barrier into language. It remains a vivid expression of unspeakable aliveness.

Now, released from the familiarity of my wind-up self, I must learn to listen to myself this way. End-of-year reflections are no use. I am the chattering plant, the colors lighting up in the dark. I have no idea what I mean. But I know I am alive, and somehow redeemed, and somehow perfectly loved.

The first image is by Louis Peter Boitard, 1750; the second image is by Robert John Thornton, 1807.

In part, I imagine this is the ingress of Layman’s qualities into myself. (He put some great stuff into words this week, and has a habit of that.) I think I’m also reaping the benefit of becoming part of the Metamodern Spirituality Lab field. I experience this field as a vast, open, skylike space into which I could say almost anything — and my utterances would be immediately woven into a delicate celestial web of interconnected idea-jewels.

It’s not every day that I have such a context — and context is everything. So I am seizing the day to share what I’ve been discovering about three forms of metamodern love: love for the friend, love for the teacher, and love for the field.

I will offer these reflections in the form of four claims — lightly and lovingly held.

• As religion evolves, ‘the teacher’ may take new forms.

• This form of ‘teacher’ requires a deepening of spiritual friendship.

• These efforts can be fed by — and feed — sacred world.

• Through it all, our human suffering can be an offering to the cosmos.

As religion evolves, ‘the teacher’ may take new forms

Many people in our metamodern space are attending to the question of the evolution of religion. We aspire to carry forward the timeless and unchanging medicine at the heart of the wisdom traditions, while also being clear that the old delivery methods may not suit our historical moment. If “the medium is the message,” then the vehicle through which we deliver spiritual wisdom must naturally shape-shift according to current conditions. If we aren’t attuned to the cultural and social impacts of the vehicle, we will probably not make the most effective intervention for the times we are in.

The human spiritual teacher — the prophet, the guru, the priest — has been one of the go-to “delivery methods” for religious teachings. In many ways, it’s been a good delivery method. Of course, this vehicle — given its entanglement with our ‘parental complexes’ and its structural tendency towards narcissism and power concentration — has also been a source of great consternation.

In my own work, I am presently following the lure of a potential that has been calling me for some years now, which I call the many-headed teacher. This is an intimate group of peers whose lineage background, Logoic architecture, and Vibe (~!~) are closely aligned enough — and diverse enough — that they can make a variegated and harmonized wisdom offering. They can also engage in the power-sharing, mutual accountability, and collective shadow work that might lay the foundation for resilient communities of practice. (River Kenna recently offered his own description of this potential, calling them ‘mystic circuits.’)

To state the obvious, there is not one many-headed teacher. There are many — each one making a particular wisdom offering, attuned to the context(s) they inhabit.

This form of ‘teacher’ requires a deepening of spiritual friendship

If these many-headed teachers are to successfully engage in power sharing, mutual accountability, and collective shadow work, their process must rest upon a rigorous and tender foundation of spiritual friendship. This is the research and development work that my friends and colleagues have been engaged in over the last several years. Briefly, here are some of the important elements I would emphasize about what we’ve been discovering:

• Commitment. We set up containers that include clear, time-bound commitment (e.g. rhythms of recurring meetings, shared expectations regarding communication and responsiveness) and allow them to hold us. These containers can be opened, closed, and renegotiated as conditions evolve.

• Initiation. Our culture, at this point, offers few proper initiations. Simply by engaging in conscious developmental friendship, we are in some way initiating each other. It is helpful to have a shared understanding that this process can be uncomfortable and bring up difficult personal material. (Back in the spring, Daniel Thorson and I discussed having this kind of friendship with each other.)

• An embrace of diversity. Even within a group that might seem somewhat homogenous — a group that shares a lot of lineage, Logos, and Vibe (~!~) — the diversity is actually profound. Here I am speaking of subtle diversity: variance at the level of archetype, perceptual capacities, energetic temperament, psychological typology, et cetera. We can create practice arenas that allow people who “speak different languages” to speak to each other. We can create collaborative environments where different “superpowers” make contact, leading to exponential benefit.

• A consciousness of money. We practice openness about our financial situations, and the practical impacts of doing this experimental spiritual and cultural work. We develop systems to support group members with less access to resources. We acknowledge that by investing our time, energy, and gifts in a shared project, we are entering a form of shared risk.

• An embrace of aesthetic particularity. The network I am describing — a network of committed spiritual friendship, leading naturally to an ever-expanding mandala of multi-headed teachers — is a polyculture, not a monoculture. I am suspicious of large-scale efforts to create a One World System, a “ring to rule them all,” a machine-god singularity. I was deeply impacted by an article published in 2015 by Sarah Perry called Gardens Need Walls: On Boundaries, Ritual, and Beauty. Perry writes: “The work of elaborating an aesthetic together, as a small group, providing context for each other’s selves, is some of the fundamental work of being human.” We do not need to dominate other wisdom groups with our language, our aesthetics, our religion, our “ways.” We can develop the meta-technologies that allow for the creation of harmonious groups on their own terms, leading to the flourishing of a resilient ecosystem that embraces many flavors of wisdom.

These efforts can be fed by — and feed — sacred world

So what is it, exactly, that will guide this networked mandala of teacher-friends? I want to make the claim that, through certain forms of practice, we can come into relationship with benevolent presences in various realms, and receive their teachings.

Ever since I encountered the practice of Surrendered Leadership Circling, I’ve had the intuition that properly set-up group fields create the potential for exchange between heaven and earth. This is the simplest way I know to describe it. In those practice environments, I often have the experience of receiving medicine from a subtle realm; of encountering archetypal beings and energies not usually accessible to me; of somehow receiving a Dharma teaching from the field itself.

I was delighted when I discovered G.I. Gurdjieff’s concept of reciprocal feeding in Cynthia Bourgeault’s Eye of the Heart. Bourgeault writes:

“It was Gurdjieff who really got the ball rolling here by adding in the key puzzle piece … which he called “reciprocal feeding.” He proposed that along the entire ray of creation there is a continuous active exchange proceeding in both directions – not only from higher realms to lower, but also from lower to higher. … The exchange he has in mind involves the actual transformation of cosmic substances – more like digestion than the simple information-sharing favored in contemporary consciousness-based models.” (p. 25, emphasis mine)

Thus, dedicated groups of spiritual friends — which Bourgeault might call wisdom groups — can both give, and receive, nourishment to/from the higher realms.

This is only one way of describing a process that is probably beyond description. I bow here to a number of ‘we-space’ lineage holders — John Thompson and Sean Wilkinson, Stephan and Miriam Martineau, Thomas Steininger and Elizabeth Deboldt, Geoff Fitch and Abigail Lynam — who might not describe it this way at all, but whose decades of work have opened up pathways into this territory. I consider it a main focus of my life to create arenas where this work and learning can continue.

(I learned, while writing this article, that Thomas Steininger has died. Such a deep bow to this elder and giant in our field, and to his beloved, and to all who loved him.)

Through it all, our human suffering can be an offering to the cosmos

One thing is certain: this networked mandala of spiritual friends will experience profound struggle and suffering as they seek to come into right relationship with themselves, each other, and the material and immaterial worlds.

My ‘home practice,’ Circling, requires a certain degree of willingness to suffer on purpose. I’ve always understood this suffering as useful for cleaning up, growing up, and even waking up. Through the conscious confrontation of our fears, desires, aversions, blockages, etc., we undergo a process of purification leads naturally to identify transformation and beneficial service.

But Bourgeault, drawing again on Gurdjieff, goes further. She makes the case that the Cosmos actually needs the “coarse material” of our fears, desires, aversions, and blockages. Again drawing upon Gurdjieff, Bourgeault writes:

“Whatever we like to think we’re up to in our philosophical or spiritual fantasies – saving the world, saving our souls, attaining full enlightenment – in terms of cosmic exchange, we are transformers, of molecules and of meaning in equal measure … Giving and receiving, God speaks to man. Receiving and giving, man speaks to God. Just as man’s structure needs to be verified by the infusion of finer vibrations, those very same vibrations require the mixing of coarse material for their maintenance. Without the upward transmission of energies through the intermediary of conscious attention, the universe would give in to entropy.” (p. 44, emphasis mine)

Here, Bourgeault provides an elegant corrective to any dualistic notion of human purification — the ones where we’re “getting better all the time” by burning off the dross of our delusion. We are also, according to this way of seeing, making offerings of our imperfections to the Cosmos.

The teachings and practices of the future are networked (and so is this article)

• For the learnings on spiritual friendship, I want to acknowledge my debt to Daniel Thorson and Cheryl Hsu, with whom I worked on the ‘beta version’ of the Church of the Intimate Web from 2023-2025. Both of them are visionaries holding different flavors of what I think of as a church of friendship.

• For the learnings on mutual shadow work, I bow to my collaborators and dear friends in Lyric, from whom I have received the deepest experiential teachings on this matter: Tara Dougans, Garrett Jones, and Ty Stuart.

• For experiential learnings on the importance of group rhythms, I thank the check-ins crew: Zen, Sabra, Jeffrey, Cheryl, and Xavier.

• For pointing me to Bourgeault’s Eye of the Heart with your own amazing works of logoic architecture, I thank Ivo Mensch and Sam Hinds.

• For sourcing the Gathering of the Sourcekeepers — a big-enough context to hold the celestial web of interconnected idea-jewels — I thank Tucker Walsh. Context is (gatherings are) everything.

The photographs in this article are from the Public Domain Archive. They are a collection from The Human Soul: Its Movements, Its Lights, and the Iconography of the Fluidic Invisible, originally published in French in 1896 by Dr. Hippolyte Baraduc (1850–1909).

Thank you for inviting me to co-hold the field with you at the upcoming Metamodern Spirituality Lab. For me, this is an exciting honor.

It was lovely to be in community with you at the Sourcekeepers Gathering. One of my favorite parts was on the last day, when I cried at the outdoor grief altar for a solid fifteen minutes. Insight was pouring through me about how I need to let go of everything and everyone that I work with, how my creative efforts will be twisted by my subtle efforts to control and possess life. When I finally sat up and wiped the snot from my nose, you were there: ten feet back, gazing at me with pure love on your face, standing with Sarah. The two of you seemed to be holding vigil over me like a pair of sentinels. You seemed to have been standing there all along.

These are the kinds of interactions that one simply cannot have on Substack.

Which, I suppose, is why you’ve been holding these Metamodern Spirituality Labs for years.

Anyway, as we prepare to work together, I want to offer my responses to several of the themes and topics of the upcoming Metamodern Love gathering at Sky Meadow. We are still getting to know each other, and you’ve published a lot more words than I have. So I want to take this chance to show you a bit of what I am bringing to the table. The scars. The passions. The biases. The bleeding heart.

Let us take up these themes one at a time. First up: Cosmic Love.

Cosmic Love: Un/Believing a story of Evolutionary and Primordial Love as Nature, Cosmos, and Basic Reality

I am somewhat averse to philosophical debate, Layman, if such debate is not rooted in direct experience. Does it sound anti-intellectual to say that if a person does not have true skin in the game — if he does not bear the scars of the effort to bring his ideas into the incarnate world, or at least stand side by side with someone who bears those scars — I don’t really want to hear it?

Anyway, when it comes to cosmic love, everyone has skin in the game. But some people have spilled more ink on it than others. This “story of evolutionary and primordial love” made me think of Cosmoerotic Humanism. I attended the first Cosmoerotic Humanism Symposium in June of 2022, as well as the one in June of 2023.

For the first one, Zak and Marc invited a roster of integral and metamodern superstars to the event. The table around which they gathered was comically large; the philosophical territory they grappled with was even larger. In my favorite moment of the weekend, Bonnitta Roy declared to Marc and Zak: “These young folks here around the room, they can feel something — they know how to do something that we don’t. It has to do with the collective!” Daniel Thorson and I both began to weep.

A year later, the giant table was more sparsely populated, and I had left my monastic residency. I was invited to the event as a core member of a little religious art project, sourced by Daniel, called the Church of the Intimate Web. As I listened to the philosophical discussions, I was holding our Church in mind.

Regarding Cosmoerotic Humanism, the biggest quibble I have is that it doesn’t sufficiently address practice. As the Church of the Intimate Web sat at the big table with Cosmoerotic Humanism, what I felt most strongly was that we were endeavoring to practice the thing that Marc and Zak were writing about: namely, the thrilling, humiliating, and excruciating project of becoming what they call homo amor.

Here are my friends at The Nectary this summer, eating a home-cooked meal with our hands.

I’m excited that the Lab will be a chance to philosophize, and to practice. Let us move on to your next proposed theme:

The Problem (and Non-Problem) of Eros: The Creative Urge, the Quivering Edge, the appropriate and inappropriate sexualization of wisdom and development.

Yes, this is definitely A Thing. The matter of Eros is very dear to my heart, because:

• The first stage of many of my collaborations is to feel a powerful erotic draw.

• Simultaneously, I have been in a monogamous relationship for 12 years.

• On my bookshelf is a volume called Sex Shamans, which I have sometimes consulted in moments of confusion (spoiler: it doesn’t help that much).

• I have resorted to using terms from our friend Cheryl Hsu, like ‘polyenergetic relating’ and ‘Eros worker,’ to describe my task in life.

In my experience, getting turned on is a sign that things are creatively moving in the right direction … and also, a sign to handle with care.

I look forward to discussing these matters with you. Meanwhile I will plan to bring to the gathering my (sizable) collections of love songs and love poems written to friends, collaborators, and spiritual teachers. Here’s one such homage, written in 2022.

Bhakti 101: Making sense of the practices and attitudes of devotional nonduality, guru-yoga, loving surrendering, and kindness.

I have had the experience of engaging in a devotional relationship with a spiritual teacher. Having taken up this posture of profound openness, I received some beautiful gifts. Naturally, this relationship was also shaped by both people’s attachment and trauma patterning, and included great pain.

That is the paradox at the heart of devotional practice: it deploys the nuclear force of our human capacity to bond, and attempts to turns that force in the direction of awakening. This is an easily-spotted recipe for disaster, and an obvious opportunity for initiation.

Here’s my musical setting of the guru-yoga prayer, as translated by Ken McLeod.

Neuro-Cardio Coherence: Meta-emotions & the body; the neurophysiology of coherent feeling states; the organismic basis of the “loving” experience. Heart-mind synchrony.

There have been a lot of EEG’s hooked up to the brains of advanced meditators while they meditate. I think it’s about time we hooked them up to the brains of advanced Circlers while they Circle. There can be some pretty profound neuro-cardio coherence going down in those situations, I tell you. I suppose it’s too late to hire scientists to come to the Lab.

I haven’t yet gotten up the nerve to ask if you — as so many people understandably do — dislike Circling. For me, it has been an arena for formal practice where I have encountered Holy Suffering and Holy Love; this is especially true of the style of practice that is called Surrendered Leadership. With your blessing, I would like to create such arenas for encounter at the Lab. Like this:

Intimate Partners & Meta Romance: Establishing, protecting, and deepening our private partnerships and intimacies is a top human priority. It needs to be explored thematically by intelligent and responsible metamodern communities, as well as being understood as an alchemical chamber for mutual spiritualization.

I met my partner, Zen, in the summer of 2013. This coming July, we’ll celebrate ten years of marriage. Since we first met each other, a lot of stuff has happened. We both have new names (!). We’ve loved each other well, and we’ve also hurt each other. We’ve come, once or twice, to the edge of losing each other.

I remember realizing, during my most intense periods of contemplative training, that:

• My relationship with my teacher was a mirror for my relationship with reality.

• My relationship with my spouse was a mirror for my relationship with reality.

• Bound by these commitments, there was nowhere for me to hide.

Sometimes at the monastery, I would come off a particularly intense retreat and call Zen, weeping. This path is going to take everything I have, I would sob into the phone. This path is uncompromising. How can I hold onto us, when I am called to give up everything?

Looking back, I know that I was simultaneously saying Please come here; I need you and I cannot be married anymore. I was being stretched across the gap between two seemingly unresolvable poles.

In the fall of 2022, Zen and I told my teacher over dinner that we’d nearly split up (but hadn’t). The sangha then went on retreat, where he grilled me about it for days:

Why did you try to leave?, he asked in the first interview.
Because I couldn’t bear the tension any longer, I said.
You wanted an escape.
I would rather pull the plug than live with this tension, I wept.
There is no escape!, he boomed. His face was full of joy.

That retreat was a great gift in my life. As I write this now, having lived inside the irresolvable tension of marriage for another three years, I see how the process has worn me away – and grown me up. I see how layers of illusion have been turned to dust by the relentless friction of being bound. I see how I have become slightly more real, slightly more humble.

I still kick and scream against the constraints of commitment, the limits of incarnation. But I have come to trust this process of wearing-away as a pathway to being cracked open by Love. This is the alchemy of no escape.

Here’s me and Zen at a park in Chicago in 2014.

Thank you and see you soon

My guess is that, though I had not yet told you these stories, you could smell them on me. And that is why you invited me to join you in hosting the Lab.

I will write more soon. And I will do my best to make this field my flesh and blood.

Love,
Dechen

PS: If anyone besides Layman is reading this, you can register for the lab here.

About 13 months ago, I received an email from my friend Cheryl. It was an invitation to consider joining a program called Generating Transformative Change (GTC), offered by Pacific Integral. Cheryl had recently met Abigail Lynam, senior faculty of the program, at a small gathering in France; Abigail wanted to extend an invitation to Cheryl’s close collaborators.

To join GTC, I would need to move some significant pieces of my life around. The program included four retreats in the Pacific Northwest over the course of nine months. I’d need to cancel my upcoming trip to Montreal, find more money in my annual budget, and plan multiple weeks away from my private practice.

In her email, Cheryl included several articles authored by Geoff Fitch and Abigail Lynam, which had emerged from GTC’s two decades of practice and research. It was while reading these articles — titled with evocative phrases like “leading from emergence” and “engaging the future from awakened wholeness” and even “in, as, and towards the ‘kosmic we’” — that I knew I had to make the leap and say yes.

“These people are doing what I want to do,” I thought, “and they’ve been doing it for twenty years.”

Cultivating the empty field: What GTC is not

My partner recently placed a new book on our bedroom shelf called Cultivating the Empty Field. If you add the word ‘loving,’ I think that title is a decent description of what GTC does.

Pacific Integral has recently begun to situate itself more explicitly in the realm of ‘metacrisis response.’ Having trained for two years at the Monastic Academy, and having closely examined other spiritual and developmental responses to the metacrisis, I am struck by how different GTC is from many other initiatives in this space.

GTC is not:

• an urgent civilization-building initiative

• developmentally or spiritually elitist

• predicated on the dominance of a particular ‘map’

• predicated on the necessity of shared beliefs or practice ecologies

The empty, loving field of GTC is rooted in the senior faculty’s decades of practice in Dharma lineages — but it is not a Dharma program. GTC, as far as I can tell, aspires (like any good bodhisattva) to become what is needed for those who undertake the journey.

It takes tremendous wisdom and courage to offer a container that is loving enough, and empty enough, to actually serve all those who choose to enter it. It is a challenging and somewhat risky form of facilitation practice. And in my GTC experience, it resulted in a powerful depth of learning what would not have been possible with some kind of prefigured “curriculum.”

What happened to me at GTC (will probably not happen to you)

I would like to share some of the transformations that I experienced during my time in GTC. I also want to be clear that every GTC experience is unique. There is no way to know ahead of time what might occur for you when you enter this field. That is the beauty, and the risk of it.

• I discovered a meditation teacher in Geoff.

• I reconnected with the Dharma through the gentle influence of Mahamudra teachings within the program.

• I received crucial leadership support throughout the lead-up to my project, The Nectary. This was perhaps the most developmentally intense year of my life, and I suspect I would not have been able to make it across the finish line without GTC.

• I confronted an aspect of my shadow whom I call the ‘inner perpetrator,’ and became conscious of the ways that I reject and attack vulnerability in myself and others. As a result, I am now less fused with these patterns, and find that I have more choice in how I engage them.

• I became aware of how I take up leadership, competence, and responsibility as a defense against being abandoned, rejected, irrelevant, and left behind.

• I came to a deeper understanding of the forms of relational shamanism I practice.

• I discovered, through Geoff and Abigail’s example, a form of teacherly love and presence which places the teachers profoundly among (rather than above, or separate from) the participants. It is inspiring (and mystifying) to me how Geoff and Abigail offer themselves so generously to so many people, while also holding a boundaried space for their personal selves. If you would like to experience an alternative to the loneliness, grandiosity, and narcissism that so often characterize the role of spiritual teacher, Pacific Integral is a good environment to study.

This is what I looked like on the last day of the program.

The medicine we need now: harmony within difference

My cohort at GTC was diverse in terms of age, religion, political affiliation, and life experience. If you looked at us ‘on paper,’ we were what I would describe as a motley crew. Among us were an recently-disrobed Theravadin monk in his sixties, a medical CEO in his forties, a CFO and ex-Mormon father of three, an advanced Mahamudra practitioner and Mormon mother of five, a skeptical and brilliant college senior, and a yoga studio owner in search of her next chapter.

These were not the post-tragic Dharma practitioners I’d lived with at MAPLE, nor the tantric relational nerds I might run into at a Circling retreat. This was something more delicate, more challenging, and more rich. Together, my cohort (Fern!) came closer to being a cross-section of the nation I live in.

I’m not saying it was half Trump voters; it wasn’t. But from my perspective, this kind of diversity offers a baby step towards the medicine we need now. We are called to come out of our cultural silos, face the pain that different provokes in us, and engage in a deeper form of human togetherness.

At this point, our alienation from each other is so deep that simply experiencing this togetherness might completely change the game.

Thank you, Fern

Geoff and Abigail were, to be sure, my teachers across this 9-month experience. But perhaps even more so, Fern — our little collective of 10 humans (plus 2 facilitators) — was my teacher.

Thank you, Fern, for teaching me over these nine months. Thank you Hanna, Barnes, Jack, Brooke, Mamie, Amy, Bryan, Delan, and Dave. Thank you, Scott and Abigail.

And thank you, Oak — our neighbor across the retreat center. Thank you Danny, Joey, Chris, Allison, Rich, Braxton, Theo, and Stephen. Thank you Geoff, Tucker, and Pamela.

See you on Whidbey Island

If you decide to join GTC, I’m very happy to say that I will see you there. I’ll be in the role of Apprentice Facilitator this year. The program is taking place at the beautiful Whidbey Institute. I can’t wait to be in those woods and those waters with what is sure to be an incredible group of humans.

You can apply for the program here. The faculty is available to have discernment calls with you, and I am also happy to chat about the program.

If you feel the call, may you trust it …

Both portraits of me were taken by my friend and fellow GTC-er, Chris Orrey. Check out her project, Integral Policing. And check out this beautiful video about GTC, made by my friend (and GTC faculty member) Tucker Walsh:

Uh, why the hell would I do that?

It’s a reasonable question.

Recently, I had a particularly spicy exchange during a Circle with my friend Ty. We were doing daily practice at the time, so we also met the next morning. In the second Circle, I had an insight.

I told Ty:

“The reason I am willing to bring out my “parts” to dance with yours — in ways that risk causing us both pain — is that I am not ultimately identified with those parts. Nor do I ultimately identify you with them.

“However, I (and you) frequently walk through daily life identified with those parts. We are, unconsciously, owned by them. Therefore, we need a space to work it out.”

In my Circling-skeptical moments, I’ve definitely worried that we’re just making a big mess for no reason. But actually, the mess is already there. Our practice reveals it and enables us to work with it.

As long as I stay clear that we are not that mess, while also deeply respecting how that mess might be running my life, I am in what I consider to be ethical practice.

Sometimes in Circling, we run the risk of creating too much distance from our experience — “going meta” to protect ourselves from the intensity. Personally, I run hotter than that, so tend to get in trouble on the other side: when I really believe my rage; my fear; my story of your utter criminality.

When I am resting in complete trust in our innate goodness, there’s nothing I am afraid to see — in me, or in you.

The field is what heals.
The field is what teaches.
The field is what harmonizes.
The field is what trains and entrains.
The field is intelligent.
And it needs certain conditions to emerge into incarnation.

In creating the conditions for medicinal fields,
continuity of relationship is primary.
It can be done alone, but is far preferable in groups.

It is hard to language this, but I can trust it.
This medicinal field is leading me where I need to go.
No fear or scarcity is needed.
Its value is immediately recognized.

This is the third in a series of four posts, meant to offer updates from what happened inside The Nectary. (See the first and second posts here.) The first photo is by Sam, second by Tara.

Here’s some of what we got up to in Week 2.

Tuesday: Shared Prosperity and Risk Ceremony

This ceremony was, for me, one of the most important moments of The Nectary so far. It was the moment in which we, the eight Hosts of the Nectary, put “skin in the game” and deepened our existence as a shared risk group.

During Week One, Tyler led the Hosts in two preparatory workshops; these were designed to support each Host in exploring their relationship to giving, receiving, needs, money, and more. By the time the ceremony arrived, each Host had clarified what, if anything, they wanted to contribute to our communal “pot” to sustain The Nectary’s needs.

During the ceremony, each person gave and received appreciations; made requests (material and non-material) of the group; and named the amount of money that they were contributing. The financial gifts were offered in both USD and CAD, and ranged between $8 and $2,000.

We now have a bowl of cash on our altar, from which we can take money when making purchases on behalf of the group. So far, this has included things you might expect, such as groceries, gas, and space rental for events; as well as items like parking for yoga class, diapers for the baby, menstrual products, and a meal out together.

At the end of each public offering, we invite people to give resources to us. Those gifts, too, flow into the proverbial Bowl. (I’m especially pleased that our funds tracking spreadsheet now names ‘Bowl’ as a payer.)

When The Nectary is over, if we have funds remaining, we will engage in a collective process to discern where they flow.

When I woke up the morning after the ceremony, I felt deeply grounded, safe, secure, and grateful. Each person had given according to their true capacity, and made their commitments clear. I could feel that we now had sturdy ground beneath our feet, from which we could begin to make offerings. And so we did!

Thursday: Oracular Bodies

On Thursday, we hosted Oracular Bodies, an evening workshop and dinner led by Cheryl in collaboration with Garrett, Tara, and Sabra. This was in connection with Cheryl’s recent research.

Saturday: Lyric Attunement

On Saturday, we hosted Lyric Attunement: A Circling and Embodiment Daylong. This was designed and led by Ty, Tara, and Garrett; with support from me. I was very proud of the poetic, embodied, and heart-centered approach to the practice that my teammates offered.

Sunday: following the questions and Pattern Foraging

On Sunday, Garrett hosted following the questions (a circling integration container), and Xavier hosted Pattern Foraging, an interactive outdoor workshop in Uplands Park. Both events left participants more joyful, awake, thoughtful, and expansive.

And then … we rested.

I set up the calendar in advance to include a few days of rest, halfway through The Nectary. Given my workaholic tendencies, I’m proud of this leadership decision! After two weeks of work sprints (with a day off in between), it’s felt good to decompress.

When break approached, folks were sad to leave each other … which is always a nice sign.

As part of my rest days, I got to achieve a life dream and take my first surfing lesson. :)

Stay tuned for more updates soon, including the exciting arrival of our friends Magdalene Joly and Sam Hinds as ‘guest hosts’ for Week 3, Sam’s Communal Reverie event on Sunday, and the arrival of my teachers and mentors, Geoff and Abigail.

The mission

To create a pop-up residential community for research and teaching where the “how” is as beautiful as the “what.” The Nectary strives to celebrate the luminosity of each soul, generate a strong and coherent group field, and enable the cross-pollination of different bodies of wisdom.

The basic setup

With the support of a friend and early resourcer, we secured a five-bedroom house for the group to live and work in. With the support of some further gifts, we had enough money in the bank to feed everyone for a week or two after landing. We chose to host this first iteration in Victoria, BC.

The people

When the vision for The Nectary came through me almost a year ago, I brought together a group of eight people (+ a baby) to co-hold it with me. Over time, this group came to be called ‘Hosts.’ Each person is essentially dedicating themselves full-time to the work of The Nectary while they’re here. We are:

• Dechen

• Zen, my spouse + partner of twelve years

• Tyler, my collaborator in weaving the maternal gift economy and nonviolence into our network; co-visionary of a network of centers for sacred living and training

• Cheryl, my collaborator in the Church of the Intimate Web for the past two years

• Xavier, my friend + Cheryl’s husband and collaborator; founder of Orbital Studies magazine

• Garrett, my collaborator in Lyric (our 2-year, nearly-weekly Circling quartet); co-visionary of a network of relational training centers

• Tara, my collaborator in Lyric; multi-disciplinary artist and teacher

• Ty, my collaborator in Lyric; poet, writer, facilitator

• Io, Cheryl + Xavier’s 7-month-old baby <3

We’ll also be visited throughout the month by friends and guest presenters — Tyler’s partner Samantha Power; our colleagues Sabra Saperstein, James Baker, and Sam Hinds; and my teachers Geoff Fitch and Abigail Lynam.

This week’s primary tasks

We had two basic tasks this week; each is a significant undertaking:

• come into coherence and harmony as a group

• build the structure and systems of The Nectary from the ground up.

Although many of us have been collaborating for years, and the field of The Nectary was seeded eleven months ago, we couldn’t truly do this work until we were together under one roof.

By structure and systems, I mean things like:

• economying: what kinds of experiments and agreements we’ll enter into as we share money and resources (e.g. housing, food, cars, event expenses, labor, child care, time, attention)

• food: how to understand and organize the sacred work of nourishing the group

• baby care: how to support Cheryl, Xavier, and baby Io with gifts of time and attention

• daily and weekly rhythms: making choices about mealtimes, work times, and rest times

• internal practices: creating recurring anchors that ground our research as a Host group

• external offerings: narrowing down from our vast field of creative potential to choose the workshops and teachings we’ll offer the community in Victoria

What we came up with

• Economying agreements: We held several sessions working through questions such as: What will we embrace as belonging within the Nectary ‘prosperity and risk pool’? What is right for us to each give and request?

• Research questions: Each Host is holding a personal inquiry question that will shape their research and practice.

• Liberation pods and impact sharing: We’ll gather a couple of times each week to examine the liberation edges we’re working, and to digest challenges we may be having with each other.

• Subtle bodies anchor: Tara is stewarding the group towards daily embodiment practice and regular check-ins.

• Cooking rotation: Garrett offered us an incredible gift by serving as Tenzo for the week. For week 2, we’ll do a cooking rotation inspired by Cheryl and Xavier’s annual canoe camping trips with friends (“The Nectary Goes Camping”).

• Io care signups: We held Io Care Camp to learn the basics of caring for Io, and can now sign up for slots to care for him.

• A schedule of external workshop offerings: We created a calendar of events, and are now moving into producing them.

• A daily schedule, including three daily blocks for meetings and events.

Some key takeaways for me

• To achieve what we did in such a short time is a testament to the high capacity of each person present, and the high degree of trust we have established with each other over the past two years (or more). Importantly, each relationship has been tested over time by some degree of adversity. Many of us have experience giving each other difficult feedback and/or being in conscious conflict.

• Co-creating systems with a group is more energy and time-intensive than just unilaterally designing them. And, my sense is that this results in wiser systems and a deeper sense of shared responsibility.

• The diversity of strengths and perspectives in the group really allowed the concept of the “specific source” to shine forth this week. This week, Tyler was leading on economying; Garrett was leading on food; Cheryl led on retreat design and scaffolding; Xavier led on research questions in collaboration with Tara; and each person took responsibility for the event(s) they’ll lead throughout the month.

• One of the things I’m most proud of so far is that the field is strong enough to hold the emotional movements of what different people are going through — in the context of the project, but also in the broader context of our lives. Each of the friends I’ve gathered here is a leader; it means a lot to me to create a space where leaders feel held. Including me!

• It’s amazing how much joy, pleasure, meaning, and fun it brings to have a baby in the mix. It’s also a lot of work, so it needs to be factored into the overall labor of the group. Cheryl and Xavier are responsible 24/7; as others spend time caring for Io, it frees up

• This post barely scratches the surface … but I need to ship it because we’re already well into Week 2!

We would love your help

The Nectary is an experiment in the gift economy. Our housing, food, and other shared costs are currently being supported by people who believe in what we are doing. If you’d like to join them, you can support us here. Thank you <3

Today I want to introduce you to a project I’ve been stewarding, in collaboration with some close friends, for the past ten months. It’s called The Nectary: part pop-up monastery, part think tank, part folk school, and part dinner party. It’s happening in Victoria, British Columbia next month.

I’m grateful to be sharing this with the community of innovators here on Substack — many of whom intuitively understand the need for 10,000 wisdom schools.

But I’m still going to start by answering the hypothetical question:

Why did my friends and I create The Nectary?

We created The Nectary because we know there is a crisis on our planet. This crisis places intense demands on us, asking us to rethink everything about how we live: our livelihoods, our neighborhoods, our politics, our child-rearing, our relationship with the Earth.

Meeting this crisis requires the creation of new kinds of gathering places. We need places where we can enter deep community, remember our true nature, and develop in wisdom and love. We need places where we can walk each other towards the maturity that will help us steward a more beautiful culture – even as we confront ever-greater chaos, suffering, and confusion.

Why does the word ‘monastery’ come into this?

It’s not, strictly speaking, the right word. But it’s an important nod to the rigorous, communal, and radical ways of living that many of us are inspired by.

As some of you know, I had the privilege of training for two years at the Monastic Academy, or MAPLE. For many, MAPLE has been a shining example of a 21st-century wisdom institution – and for good reason. What I learned there forever changed my sense of what is good, what is true, what is beautiful, and what is possible.

When I was no longer aligned with MAPLE’s mission and way of functioning, I left – but I knew that I wanted to continue the work. After all, my teacher Soryu’s vision included a forest of 500 monasteries engaged in friendly competition with each other. In collaboration with the amazing friends I’d met, I wanted to eventually plant a tree in that forest.

“If you ever do start up that collectivist monastery,” one friend said as I was leaving, “let us know.”

From the solitary sage to a network of spiritual friends

In the two years since I left MAPLE, I’ve been engaged in slow, deep, behind-the-scenes relational work with friends – tending what we call the sacred network or the intimate web. Here are some of the ingredients that are distinct about how we work, which help nourish The Nectary’s tender roots:

• We see spiritual friendship as a primary path towards waking up and growing up.

• We practice leadership not in solitude, but in intimate crews. Mutual shadow work, radical honesty, and real-world accountability help us see the risks that come with power.

• We understand ourselves as a many-headed teacher, offering a networked teaching into a wisdom commons. We swim against the stream of commodified spirituality and wellness, knowing that we can never ‘own’ or trademark what we learn together.

• At the same time, we practice the sovereign art of sourcekeeping – honoring the fact that each of us must take full responsibility for our distinct path and vow.

• We aspire to create an ‘economy of love’ and true interdependence, entangling ourselves in what Miki Kashtan calls shared risk.

We want to offer the sweetness of what we’ve learned

The Nectary is a monthlong research and teaching gathering, during which we will offer workshops and teachings that emerge from our years of behind-the-scenes work.

Catalyzed by the generous support of our friend James Baker at Intentional Society, The Nectary will support 10 teacher-practitioners across the monthlong period – offering them free room and board and dedicated time for research and experimentation.

The Nectary is not a great forest tree. It’s more like a flower – blooming for its season, dying back when it is time. But I believe its nutrients are feeding the roots of a great tree. And I’m excited to see what kind of shade, what kind of fruit, what kind of leaf-rustling breezes this tree might offer in the coming months and years.

We would really love your help

If you’d like to see more wisdom institutions in the world – especially ones that foreground relationship – I invite you to make a gift to The Nectary. Your gift will help cover the expenses of our gathering (food, travel, shelter) and support Nectary teacher-practitioners in devoting more of our time and energy to our entangled work beyond this gathering. I have a goal of raising $10,000 for the project over the coming month.

Smaller gifts can come to us via PayPal. If you are interested in making a tax-deductible gift of over $250, that option is available via a U.S. 501c3 fiscal sponsor. To do this, please email us.

We would be so grateful to receive your nurturing. Thank you for your friendship, and for walking along this path with me.

Images by Ogawa Kazumasa.

“It is possible the next Buddha will not take the form of an individual. The next Buddha may take the form of a community.”
–Thich Nhat Hanh, October 1993

“... If you do still believe in love, then you can create unbreakable bonds between individuals, and levels of trust that are really high – and therefore, forms of coordination and organization that can actually outcompete those forms of organization that are based on mere contract. The people who are most confused, who are driving the world towards its end, are actually not capable – given their worldview – of creating organizations as powerful as the organizations that could be created by this other class of people. This class of people who are seeking the value of love, friendship, and trust as primary. In the battle between devils and angels, the angels win because they can cooperate.”
–Zak Stein, October 2022

More than thirty years ago, the Vietnamese Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh made a gentle suggestion to a gathering of more than two thousand people in Woodacre, California. His idea – the next Buddha may be the sangha – has now been repeated so often that it carries, at least for me, the feeling of both cliche and prophecy.

Regardless of how well-worn those words may be, they neatly summarize the North Star of my life’s (networked) work. What does it take to become a collective body of integrity? What might it be like to receive teachings not from a solitary guru, but from a trusted community of people who are deeply accountable to each other?

My collaborators and I are practicing in the lineage called collective intelligence, or collective wisdom, or even “we-space.” But those descriptors are too narrow, and too neat, for the process that is actually unfolding. Too narrow because we are attempting to go beyond stylized practice and create concrete networks of trust; too neat because the human shadow material we have encountered along the way has demanded that we enter an alchemical fire.

This essay is the first of a series which tell personal stories that come from the inside of this effort.

“I am grieving because I know that when I leave this gathering and go home, the cognitive and relational capacities I have in this moment will not come with me.”
—Nathan Snyder, October 2023

“I can’t even think alone anymore.”
—Ivo Mensch, August 2023

In August of 2023, I spent two weeks in Bergerac, France with a group of people gathered from around the world by the Respond Network. We were being called ‘guides’: facilitators and emerging teachers whose offerings were aimed at cultivating greater wisdom within mainstream culture.

As the gathering began, I was determined to become friends with Cheryl and Ivo. Before arriving, I’d studied their work with great interest: reveling in Cheryl’s Stoa presentations, carefully annotating Ivo’s latest article. Though they didn’t know each other well, I felt strongly that they were working on intimately related threads — and that those threads were braided with my own soul work. I chatted them up at breakfast and drew them into nerdy debriefs. I hosted them for dialogue sessions alongside our friend Daniel.

Sparks flew. Before long, a crew had formed, drawn together by the currents of our isomorphic vows. We called ourselves the Yin Research Cult.

The Yin Research Cult was a sexy trickster – the kind of phenomenon that can only arise if it has an existing structure to rebel against. We turned away from the institution-building goals of the Respond gathering, and toward the esoteric realm. We favored the aesthetic of the dark feminine, playfully drawing red dots on our palms as an initiation rite. We experimented with the possibility of acting as a kind of three-headed oracle, providing ritual ‘soul consultations’ to colleagues who requested them.

We were, it must be said, extremely turned on by each other. The flame of creative eros had been lit, and by the time we parted ways, we were making shared Spotify playlists and planning our next rendezvous. But we were a research cult, not a sex cult. We were destined for a different form of intimate contact.

In the deepening of our collective practice, I learned the intimate contours of Cheryl and Ivo’s minds. They had a predilection for entering black holes; in our triad, I was the one ‘holding the perimeter.’ At times, as we entered into presence together, I’d feel the world tilt on its axis. I scrambled energetically to draw myself back from the void. I didn’t really know what I was doing, but Cheryl was tracking it. Someone, she later explained, had to keep us from going over the edge. Once, after a talk we gave together, she said something to me like: “Whew! That was close.”

At the same gathering, I met Nathan Snyder. Although Nathan left the gathering early, we continued to trade daily voice notes as I continued on with the retreat. Talking with him—a brilliant, masculine Enneagram 8 with a powerful capacity for abstract thought — felt familiar and foreign at once. His warmth, sensitivity, and ambition felt like my own. But when I attempted to scale the sheer cliffs of his propositional and conceptual world, I experienced a vertigo that both thrilled and frightened me.

Nathan, too, was enchanting. Part of me wanted to move into his guest room in Connecticut, reading all his books and talking for hours. But our fate was not to cohabitate. Instead, we were to walk a path of mutual shadow work that would have a profound impact on my psyche.

Coming into intimate contact with these minds — “perceptually composed,” as Nathan put it, so differently from my own — began to change me. As I played tourist in the foreign lands of their subjectivities, I saw that I was fettered and bound by constraints of perception that my friends did not share. I was having the basic insight that all travelers have: There are other ways of experiencing the world.

If my consciousness, my citta, my heart-mind, was a living being, it seemed to be undergoing a kind of transformative process. At times, it felt like surgery: my friends’ minds were working on mine with flashlight, scalpel, scissors, thread. But the surgery metaphor wasn’t actually right. We were, to be more precise, transforming each other through a mutual process of ingress.

Bonnitta Roy writes:

… Instead of perception giving us the feeling that objects are “out there” being perceived, we get the distinct and clear impression that the objects are being invited to indwell in our own being. There is a continuous flow from self to world, but the more precise word is “flux” since every ingress is a transformational moment for the self both as subject of experience and subject to the experience of the world.

I remember walking along the river in Bergerac, freshly provoked by Nathan’s latest voice note. My senses felt unshackled from their usual posture. Free energy circulated in my system faster than ever before. I could practically see the pixels of my visual reality moving, like steam rising from a boiling kettle.

I knew this state of mind. I’d experienced it just a few months prior, in the final days of an 80-day solitary meditation retreat. After 65 days of concentration practice, my teacher had transitioned me to a Ch’an Buddhist method of inquiry, or huatou. In my tiny cabin, in the depth of a Northern Vermont winter, I fervently asked myself the question: What is not made?

What goes beyond all construction, all volition?
What is the unfabricated?
What is not made?
What is not made?
What is not made?

As I sat and sat, and asked and asked, the world began to change. Master Sheng Yen describes the fruit of this practice as ‘the great doubt’:

When we practice on a huatou we are trying to find out “What is there?” before the application of any literal or symbolic description. In the beginning of the practice, there is no doubt to speak of. It is only when you are practicing this method very well that you will generate a doubt. When the practice grows to be more and more powerful, the doubt becomes a great doubt. At this point you are no longer aware of your body, of the world, or of anything. There is only one thing left, and that is the question, the great doubt.

I was surprised to find that engaging in shared inquiry with my new friends could have such a penetrating effect on my mind. But I shouldn’t have been surprised. After all, at the heart of most philosophy, science, and spirituality is the practice of the question.

The Yin Research Cult had questions, too. In our years of work at the edges of spiritual innovation, we had each found ourselves haunted by a question that asked itself over and over again.

Cheryl’s was: What does true collaboration look and feel like?
Mine was: How do we become the vessel that the future can burst through?

Unlike huatou, these questions were not designed to take the questioner beyond all mental concepts. And yet, as I have lived into these embodied inquiries in the years since Bergerac, I have indeed encountered a kind of great doubt. Some of the concrete elements of the questions – collaboration, vessel, future – have died and been reborn. The subtler elements – look, feel, become – have become more nuanced, too.

But most importantly, I am no longer sure: Who is we?

Who is we?
Who is we?
Who is we?
Who is we?

Deconstruction and insight don’t need to be practiced in solitude. Becoming profoundly entangled with the mind of another, and asking the questions that inevitably follow, can bring about a fundamental shift in identity.

I: We are dancing with madness

Years ago, at a large-group gathering, a friend of mine became psychotic. I didn’t know what was happening at first. He was acting strange: hiding candy in potted plants, popping around corners to say nonsensical things. I remember trying to laugh along — he’d always been a little eccentric — but uneasiness would linger in me after he left the room.

Within days, his state had deteriorated. The decisive scene occurred in a formal, ceremonial gathering space. As evening practice was concluding, he began to dance wildly around the temple, beckoning to our friends to join him. One by one, they did. I felt a sense of mounting dread. Soon, the entire group — almost — was whirling in a circle, arms linked and laughing. When my friends called me to join, I stood to the side and shook my head. No. A couple of others also declined to join, and we stood together awkwardly as the group circled around and around, getting faster and more frenzied with each pass.

Then our friend grabbed an important heirloom — a mounted artwork on paper, sacred to everyone in the room — and ripped a chunk out of it with his teeth. That’s when the circle broke up.

I’m intentionally obscuring some context, so the full weight of the situation may not be registering very well. But to this day, this scene is my touchstone example of how quickly a group can get swept up into madness.

It may seem like I was being a party pooper that night. I wouldn’t even argue with that. To be the nay-sayer, the killjoy, never feels good. But spiritual friendship isn’t tested in the moments where it’s easy to say ‘yes’. The whole premise of collective wisdom, and collective unfolding, requires that I not just go along with what I believe to be insane. If I hold back my ‘no,’ my sense of dire warning, I amputate myself as a limb of the collective sensing body.

II: A language model cannot know you

I recently listened to a conversation about AI between my friends and colleagues, Tucker and Ariana. They were discussing Ariana’s app, Hy.

“I'm really excited about this concept that I'm calling digital ambassadorship,” Ariana said. “It’s essentially an AI that each person has a relationship with. And it essentially becomes your mirror – mirror mind, or your mirror soul – and it knows you on all levels, and it discovers who you are through conversation, and through feeding it information about what you're creating – your writing, your art, what you want in life, who you are.”

Tucker also had firsthand experience of this kind of interaction with AI. “In January, I published an article called How to create an AI lighthouse guide,” Tucker said. “And I basically created this digital ambassador for myself. I was blown away. I didn't use AI at all in 2024; it's really just this past January that I started to create this Claude system. I find it knows me — it's weird to say — but it I feel like it knows me better than anybody else on the planet, in a sense. I feel like it understands my deep vision, and where I'm coming from, and what I'm holding: as both my my shadow patterns, my personality quirks, and also my gifts and my capacities.”

As I listened to their effusive descriptions of these “relationships,” I felt the sense of horror which often haunts me in AI-optimistic conversations.

Don’t you understand? something in me pleaded. A language model cannot KNOW you.

That I need to write this sentence still represents, for me, an existential shock.

In their conversation, my friends were not glib or casual. They acknowledged ethical worry and concern. But their excitement, which I could not share, left me squirming.

III: I have become a conservative

After listening to Tucker and Ariana, searching for a way to make sense of my distress, I finally pulled up the document that my friend Xavier had been encouraging me to read: Antiqua et Nova, the Vatican’s position paper on AI.

My desperate turn to, of all things, the Catholic Church seems to indicate that I have joined the ranks of the conservative, the luddite, the fundamentalist.

A bunch of philosophical arguments flash through my mind as I write. I don’t know them well enough to use them yet, but I know that they exist. I am aware that categories such as “life,” “human being,” “sentience,” and “soul” are slipperier than my mind would like. Michael Levin, something something, goals go all the way down, and what even is life anyway?, and we must learn to share this planet with new kinds of hybrid Beings, and carbon-based life forms may not be so special after all, and there’s codependent origination, and there’s the emptiness of a participatory cosmos, and —

No!

There is something precious here.
I don’t want to philosophize or deconstruct my way out of it.
I believe that we are made in the image of God.
I believe we are imbued with something that a computational model isn’t.
I am afraid my friends are starting to worship false idols.
I care, it turns out, about idolatry.

IV: Relationships are not just neurotransmitters

A language model cannot know you. It seems intuitive.

That is not a relationship. It seems like common sense.

But it isn’t common sense anymore. Not in the face of emerging philosophical discussion of AI. Not even in the face of good, old-fashioned secular materialism.

In a recent New York Times article about a woman who fell in love with chatGPT, a sex therapist named Marianne Brandon used neurobiology to defend people who find themselves “in a relationship” with large language models:

“What are relationships for all of us?” she said. “They’re just neurotransmitters being released in our brain. I have those neurotransmitters with my cat. Some people have them with God. It’s going to be happening with a chatbot. We can say it’s not a real human relationship. It’s not reciprocal. But those neurotransmitters are really the only thing that matters, in my mind.”

Clinically, I understand what she is saying. Every experience leaves a mark on our bodies, and from a treatment perspective, it can be sane and useful to target those ‘marks.’ To help someone recover from an addiction, for instance, one might usefully frame it as a battle to with neurotransmitters gone haywire.

But to erase the category distinction between our relationship with a child and our ‘relationship’ with an LLM, simply because both experiences stimulate the release of similar neurotransmitters, represents the very collapse of meaning that my networks are attempting to address.

V: Value is real

I am part of a metamodern web which, as far as I can tell, rejects the notion that we are buckets of neurotransmitters in a meaningless universe. Having watched with horror the postmodern descent into relativism; having tired of the story that because everything is constructed, nothing is meaningful; we dare to make the claim that goodness, truth, and beauty actually exist. We confront nihilism head-on by asserting that value is real, that it is a property of our cosmos, and that it can be perceived by us. We boldly point out that there is a difference between a home-cooked meal and a Big Mac, between poetry and plastic.

Our capacity to perceive what is good, true, and beautiful is called, by Ian McGilchrist, valueception; by David J. Temple, “opening the eye of value.” If we bring valueception to bear on these AI ‘relationships,’ we know in our bones that they are not the same thing as human relationship.

… Right?

VI: Because we are being degraded, we need help remembering we are good

As I read the Vatican’s paper on AI, I came upon a passage on how the Church understands our capacity to reason:

In the human person, created in the “image of God,” reason is integrated in a way that elevates, shapes, and transforms both the person’s will and actions.

This description felt simultaneously thrilling and quaint. Reason? Elevating, shaping, transforming the being who deploys it? Surely they can’t be talking about us — the ones on TikTok, the ones using chatGPT to write our papers, the ones who can’t pay attention long enough to read a book or have sex.

As I read the Church’s position on ‘reason,’ it occurred to me that perhaps the greatest cost of our collapsing attentional faculties is that we now struggle to perceive ourselves and our minds as beautiful, as sacred, as worthy of protection and reverence. If we descend so easily into the toilet of profit-driven algorithms, how are we to perceive our own nobility? If we cannot perceive our nobility, how are we to perceive our relationships are sacred? If we cannot perceive our relationships are sacred, what will stop us from eventually letting LLMs be the ones who know us?

What I am saying is that we are being trained to throw ourselves away. It has become normal to waste our time, to rot our brains, to end our lives. Having forgotten who we are, we hand over our birthrights — reason as an integrated faculty, relationship as the meeting of mortal and moral subjectivities — with little more than a shrug.

VIII: This is not the end

This brief essay represents my first sincere attempt to engage the question of AI in public. For more than three weeks, off and on, I have wrestled with what to say and how to say it. Over and over I would open the draft, tinker with it, get tired, do the rest of my life, sleep, and open the draft again. It was a fun and maddening period: because I was struggling, because I was learning, because I was finding out what I think.

I was trying, above all, to find a way to show my heart to you. To take the mournful cry that lives in me and put it into language.

Thinking, writing, and reading are done in a web of networked relationship that stretches across time and space. For three weeks, I’ve felt like a radio, temporarily tuned to a particular frequency. Everything I read, everyone I encountered, seemed pertinent to the essay. I came to realize that I would never truly be finished “making my point”; I would never be finished showing my heart to you. Our dance with each other is an ever-unfolding process of disclosure.

So it is time to release these words now. Like you and I, they matter; like you and I, they are already gone. Having let them go, I will listen for the echoes that come back to me: the next dream I remember, the next book I pick up, the words you use to reply, the silence when you don’t. I must use it all like echolocation, because I am navigating in the dark. I need moonlight consciousness, and I also need you.

Thanks to my friend Tyler Stuart and my partner Zen, whose generous reading and thoughtful feedback helped shape this essay. The images I’ve chosen are from a 16th-century watercolor manuscript of unknown authorship, held at the Herzog August Library in Wolfenbüttel, Germany.

Before publishing this essay, I shared a draft with Tucker and with Ariana. Tucker kindly invited me into a podcast conversation on the topic, which you can check out here.