1. You ask: “But I guess the thing I really struggle with is, does everyone have to go through some sort of transcendent death and rebirth experience to come back in service? Or is this something we can just incept into society over a very long period of time at a mass scale?” JV replies that it’s an open question and ponders if we can assess if a person would be better suited for big experience or longer, slower one.
My experience is that this is not a binary. Everyone needs both. Those who have big transcendent experiences take a longtime to integrate. See Chris Bache's LSD and the Mind of the Universe. It took him 20 years of no LSD to integrate 20 years of intentional high-dose LSD sessions. And those who go the slow road must eventually have these big experiences in order to have a felt sense for what is meant by transcendence, spirit, and awakening, etc. So we always need both. We should therefore be thinking of how to build containers/institutions that can hold both. One can never do without the other.
2. You and JV seem to believe that culture still spreads from the top down (your “inception” concept and JV’s 10% elite idea) but if COVID and Trump show us anything it’s that culture no longer moves top down (if it ever did). Social media selects for conspiracy, outrage, and polarization. I think we need a totally different way to think about spreading cultural ideas. It may not be possible any longer to intentionally spread ideas. We might do best focusing on building things for people who have already moved into psychological developmental stages with the capacity and interest to use JV’s ecology of practices. Perhaps the best we can do is serve the small market that’s already there.
Great interview, Tom. A few comments:
1. You ask: “But I guess the thing I really struggle with is, does everyone have to go through some sort of transcendent death and rebirth experience to come back in service? Or is this something we can just incept into society over a very long period of time at a mass scale?” JV replies that it’s an open question and ponders if we can assess if a person would be better suited for big experience or longer, slower one.
My experience is that this is not a binary. Everyone needs both. Those who have big transcendent experiences take a longtime to integrate. See Chris Bache's LSD and the Mind of the Universe. It took him 20 years of no LSD to integrate 20 years of intentional high-dose LSD sessions. And those who go the slow road must eventually have these big experiences in order to have a felt sense for what is meant by transcendence, spirit, and awakening, etc. So we always need both. We should therefore be thinking of how to build containers/institutions that can hold both. One can never do without the other.
2. You and JV seem to believe that culture still spreads from the top down (your “inception” concept and JV’s 10% elite idea) but if COVID and Trump show us anything it’s that culture no longer moves top down (if it ever did). Social media selects for conspiracy, outrage, and polarization. I think we need a totally different way to think about spreading cultural ideas. It may not be possible any longer to intentionally spread ideas. We might do best focusing on building things for people who have already moved into psychological developmental stages with the capacity and interest to use JV’s ecology of practices. Perhaps the best we can do is serve the small market that’s already there.
My comments at https://johnstokdijk538.substack.com/p/top-down-or-bottom-up.