Anna Riedl
Thanks to Anna Riedl for her rich and complex inquiry. She covered so much in such a short time — and a few reflections and queries of my own came forward.
Reflection 1: Relevance Realisation,
in Vervaekean terms, he tells us that cognition is always filtering — attuning to what matters. What is salient.
But we must also ask:
Relevant to whom?
From which worldview?
If relevance rests on colonial logics, extractive attention, and epistemic supremacy, our “realisation” may simply reaffirm what we already believe — a map that never leaves the castle.
That seems close to Anna’s small-world/big-world split — but the implications of that didn’t seem to be fully taken into account with her later comments.
If we are sovereign in our small-world, building smarter tools will only reinforce our blindness…
- sovereignty without humility is delusion
- intelligence without relationship is danger
- generativity without listening is still extraction
This isn’t a rejection of relevance realisation — but a call to root it deeper: in planetary awareness, in more-than-human listening, in perspectives we haven’t yet learned to honour.
We need to be mindful that when complex and nuanced work enters the public sphere, there’s a tension between depth and drift.
Without care, nuance is hijacked, or plain misunderstood — becoming pop psychology, slogans, dogma, or weapons for the powerful.
Ideas don’t just inform — we need to project how they will travel.
What will they do in stressed, under-resourced, or wounded fields of reception? This really matters. It affects how the majority will form their relevance realisation. Without attention to how messages are received, interpreted, and used, even the most luminous insights can become complicit in systems they aimed to heal.
That’s why contextual sensitivity matters so much: we must guard the relational integrity of our work — watching not just what is said, but what it does in the field, among human beings whose agency is mentally curtailed.
Reflection 2: Anna spoke of centering the first person.
That can be grounding — but also risks becoming a hiding place. Again without a relational compass, and context sensitivity it can slide into exceptionalism or bypass.
We need a language that holds the I, the We, and the It — all at once.
Perhaps:
- sovereignty as responsible self-authorship
- vs. selfism as unconscious centrality
I see a familiar polarity emerge:
- Effective Altruism — risks self-erasure, burnout, spiritual desaturation
- Radical First-Person Sovereignty — can drift into narcissism and disconnection
But instead of a tug-of-war, could there be a third way?
Integral Resonance — a form of care that honours both the self and the field.
Not altruism…not individualism…
Coherence. A felt alignment across I–We–World.
Reflection 3: I offer resonance as the highest form of love
— not sentimental or altruistic, nor even anthropomorphic, but the structural felt-sense of mutual affordance. ( not Wilber’s intentional force either)
A love that includes trees, time, silence, predator and prey. The universe that loves itself. The true universal love.
Reflection 4: When engaging thinkers like Jordan Peterson, we must do so with full awareness of the fields we enter.
Dialogue has huge value — but platforming has consequences.
Vervaeke’s hope — to build bridges across divides — is honourable, but I believe he has made a gross error in partnering with Jordan Peterson.
When we engage with those who hold great influence through harmful framing, grievance, hierarchy, or culture-war rhetoric, we aren’t just dialoguing. We’re helping to normalize and validate a field of thought that has done real harm.
Dialogue too easily becomes appeasement.
Tone is not truth. Charm and civility is not coherence.
We must discern when thinkers serve systems of repression — knowingly or not. Even luminous insight can be absorbed, diverted and weaponized by control systems.
Abstracted theory, without embodied and relational discernment, can feed domination. Since I studied with Hilary Bradbury some years ago, I have applied her ART framework of Action Research, which ensures we keep in contact with the ecology and felt sense of the world, as we research. I’m now less inclined create a citation patchwork of other’s ideas, and more to personally think and feel, listen to non-academic stakeholders, read and write poetry and try to “big world” into a research question.
Without inner resonance, I think our work is at risk of just being stitched from borrowed cloth.
Ideas should be held open and we should do what we can to protect the emergent field from collapsing backwards. That is why I’m not so fond of the name Second Renaissance, despite the pleasant buzz of hope for a new age of humanity. I feel the our civilization is in an over-saturated recycling dump. Building sites full of mock, mock tudor cardboard houses, New Age that is not new, but appropriated, hollowed and flattened folk-lore, new “druids”, new “shamans”, Facebook philosophy shorts, trite psychology hacks, everything a rehash. Verveake is absolutely right that we are up the creek without a paddle. I suspect it’s time to get out and walk. Barefoot.
Would you like to try this resonance experiment:
Watch a video of Jordan Peterson. Mute the sound.
Set aside opinions. Breathe slowly. Hand to heart. Watch.
Attend to his micro-expressions. Let his being wash over you. How does your body respond?
When I do this, I sense pain, brittleness, internal conflict. I sense a man exercising extraordinary levels of intellectual self-domination.
Try the same experiment with Robert Sapolsky, Bernardo Kastrup, and Rupert Sheldrake. I’m not suggesting you judge their theories on this alone, but it gives you additional information about them, and their research, that you cannot get otherwise, something you may not even be able to put into words.