For methodological reasons, I prefer to ground discussions such as this in experience, so in outline, here’s how it all played out for me:
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circa 2022 I felt the need to explore new values and new theoretical frameworks. Capitalist acquisition wasn’t cutting it any more.
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still in late-COVID, and because I’m technical anyway, YouTube played a big part in that exploration. (Here was an early landing spot: https://scienceandnonduality.com/)
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coupled with that, I starting reading some of my books from the 1990’s before I went down the Internet rabbit-hole full-time, consuming one computer language after the other. My prior reading list included quite a few titles on philosophy of consciousness, so it’s not like I showed up in “liminal web” spaces ice cold to the sort of content often found there.
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somewhere along the line, links to Ken Wilber started popping up. I’d read SES and Grace and Grit back in the day, so I joined Integral Life to see what was new in that world. From there others pointed me to Hanzi Freinacht and metamodernism in general.
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all of that felt completely disconnected from my lifeworld, however. No one face-to-face spoke any of this vocabulary or cared much about such ideas. I realized for any of this to really matter, I’d need to have a local culture and local community that practiced at least some of it.
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(Lots of experiments and initiatives … skipping over here in the interests of space).
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As of today, my Facing the Future content for my last computer science lesson of the year (very 2R heavy) got at least one heartfelt response from a student who shared that the content furnished from the likes of Nate Hagens and John Vervaeke made her feel “less alone” as she faces career uncertainties after graduation.
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Search engines just now reminded me that “liminal” is used in the context of rites of passage. So I’m now using liminal web content to devise a pragmatic rite of passage for technical students in a public college. That feels a bit like full circle. Maybe my own rite of passage is now complete.