Death is Our Only Hope: There is No Way Around, Only Through
Wisdom By Proxy: If The Liminal Web was a Buzzfeed Article
I finished this article in July 2022, packed it full of premium memes with epic captions, but then never released it.
Why Not?
Financial Resources: I wasn’t well resourced enough to spend the time and energy laying out the entire argument “For the Love of Triangles.” But I just learned today that Jonathan Rowson did it here, so now I don’t have too. Thank you Jonathan!
Hurt Fee-fees: Everyone is sensitive about something. It can be difficult to exist in the public eye, and jokes often hurt people’s feelings, especially if you don’t know them particularly well. And, I don’t know all these humans well enough to be talking this much smack… but oh well. But, Limicon finally did its first official Liminal Web Roast last month, so it gives me some cover, and perhaps the mistaken belief that this won’t land like David Long’s Battle Rap series or Brent Coopers "Game B” critique. If it isn’t clear by the end, I deeply care for and love everyone I mentioned.
Merchandise Fail: At the time, I thought it would be peak hilarity to drop a compostable Mount Rushmore Sense-making Daddies™ t-shirt featuring the busts of John Vervaeke, Daniel Schmachtenberger, Jamie Wheal, and maybe Jordan Hall or Peter Limberg… so I could royally annoy everyone by low-key wearing the dopest meta-deconstructive, future-memetic-compost threads as a performance art piece to honor Joe Lightfoot’s “Liminal Web: Death Ritual,” (and obviously to do more labor… to pay for the unpaid labor… and hope it all balances out) — but, I was on the road and the cultural moment passed.
Reputational Risk: In my humble opinion, the academy and legacy institutions at large tend to force this spiritually-grating, faux-serious veneer to signal academic rigor and prestige — a process of acquiring and conferring power and access. It’s the respectability politics, gatekeepy thing, you know the ol’ some of us have a reputation to uphold bit. Supposedly real leaders have to assert dominance intellectually, physically, financially, or by charismatic affect and influence. And evidently, by nature, heyoka leadership is subversive and therefore unserious, which is easy to dismiss. Basically, if I say a bunch of crazy shit, I can’t get funded and there’s little precious space for sacred wisdom-tech clowns within capitalism. So, it’s an existential threat to an already meager livelihood.
But, I figured, if I’m going to ask you all to die with me — my ego and reputation ought go first. And, since the mounting existential risk from artificial super intelligence is going to do it anyway (lol) — and there also aren’t enough trauma-informed heyokas earth-gigging this end of the interbeing-interwebs — I thought I’d give it a go.
So, come die with me!
And, without further ado… I present to you…
“Death is Our Only Hope: There is No Way Around, Only Through”
I’m actively now-moment resisting an ironic-sincere, self-applied title of metageneralist… sheerly for my own long term comedic value, one of those private lingering psychological deep gags.
Tell me a joke without telling me a joke.
And, as a joke connoisseur of sorts, I’ve come to find that mine is a taste for cured meats, a palette for an amuse-bouche, long smoked and well aged — a charcuterie with nothing but epoisse de bourgogne — I know, it’s a ridiculous, barely acquirable taste.
In 2022 I went to a Liminal Webby gathering with a bunch of the usual suspects (and many extremely unusual suspects as well). And, while I found it reasonably filling, I left deeply unsatiated.
And the more other attendees publicly patted their full round bellies on the platforms and chirped with delight in the async digital threads, the more a creeping appetite gnawed at my spirit, like a frustrating post Chinese buffet re-hungering, I longed for an actually deep and meaningful meal.
Is it just that conferences are MSG for connection when the attending souls are all hangry ghosts? #HangryGhostLyfe
Anyhow, in that crawling dissatisfaction, my spirit sought to satisfy its own amusement. Its own pleasure. Its own joy. So here I sit with a stomach for depth psych yucks —sheerly for insular long term comedic value— my own personal lingering psychological deep gag.
For tonight’s tasting menu… your chef has prepared the kind of stir-the-pot slow roast that readies in the rearview — like a bunch of noble rotting anti-humor grapes that ripen long after the post-destain dismissal of just about everyone else in the room.
And so, I thought to myself… if the world doesn’t want to pay me to be a transrational, transjective metageneralist wizard, conjuring hyperobjects in the divinely inspired Metaverse™ version of an RV futurist academic meth lab, perhaps I’ll just settle for late stage capitalism pet-parent, getting a PhD in van life and trolling the Sensemaking Daddies™ in between quepasana retreats and ayahuasca ceremonies. ✌🏽🌿⚕️🍄💯
Hash tag Plant Medicine 4 Lyfe 🙄
Is this the part of the liminal web cultural norm where the homies pester Peter enough to ask me on to “bring more diversity” and talk about comedy as a composting bin for vitality, and the role of art in collective shadow work for community of belonging, or something ridiculous like that?
And then, in a month Jordan will be talking about comedy deep code and release theory as an egregoric remediation valve for large group social process technology and John will eventually get us all saying κωμωδία (komodía) to philosophically unpack and academically validate the critical function of comedy in communitas, so that we can all hold a framework before we mindfully consider the salience of actually laughing at any real spoken joke. #RelevanceRealization
The liminal web can be violently insufferable at times.
Oh yeah… and Daniel would still be talking about the damn Metacrisis. Hopefully on Fox News by then. And Tristan would gently and diplomatically remind us (on yet another Ted Talk) that technology is for sure going to overwhelm human strength way before civilization can even wait to collapse in 2050, or even in 2040 — like literally by 2027.
And by the next solstice we’d all be right back where we were, except I’d have 200 more followers, 5 more substack articles, and an annoying-ass wisdom tech podcast by then.
My pre-apologies to all my new age theosophical hippie spiritual friends reading this from the high vibrational bliss bar — behind the love and light curtain, sometimes lies the dark gallows humour of humanity. #NonDualityTriggerWarning
Yes, please do go watch this six part series on Humorous Learning Cultures [Insert Sarcastic Wonka meme here] — but don’t you DARE ever get into the practice of being funny in your learning culture. And certainly never in public.
#ClassClownsAreIdiots
And, for those of you who like a good giggle with a shelf life, something you can jerky or can for your post-apocalyptic prepper dungeon, let’s start packing our back-pocket bag-o-chuckles to keep on hand in case of an emergency, or dare I say — a fucking god damn metacrisis.
I’ve started to wondered if the whole giant ear podcast circuit scene itself is this kind of unfunny joke that becomes funny after it’s said 10,000 times — like the mesmerizing hypnotic rotation of a looping meatspin gif — not because it was ever funny, but because it’s so dreadfully unfunny and almost annoyingly absurd that anyone in their right mind would be so obnoxiously committed to its perpetuation, is laughable, and even a bit concerning. #CringeButFree
Explaining the metajoke is NEVER funny. But, context is everything… I dunno, ask Nora, she or Bonnie will surely know. #MetaIrony
You know… I’ve heard it said that… “No one around here really takes you seriously unless you have a PhD or two… got bored of winning Game A to run some type of complexity institute… are a heterodox margin-riding rebel cowboy philosopher king… are some type of neurodivergent post-academic institution-critiquing genius… or a custom nootropic stacked adaptogenic mushroom blend — two parts meta-sensemaking zaddy, one part psychedelic wizard shaman, one part substack slam poet… or lastly, and most obviously… you wrote an obscure, but very noteworthy book packed with insufferable buzzwords and academic jargon — the kind that’s nearly unreadable by roughly 8.2 billion people.”
#CharoticDeliberatelyDevelopmentalSynergeticSociocraticHolarchy
Haunting Existential Questions Asked Only Under The Veil Of Darkness.
So… with all of that in mind… I’m inventing a new online extreme sport for we pseudo intellectuals of the so-called “Liminal Web.”
I’m calling it… BASED JUMPING.
Spiderman is to
Concrete Building Death Plant
as the Liminal Web
is to Systems Change.
Here’s how it works:
At unparachuted deadly risk to our egos — our galaxy brains lock arms, and together (ritualistically on each solstice and equinox, of course) — we collectively jump off the Intelligentsia Cliffs of Emergentsia Mountain with the effervescent courage and transcendent grace of 144,000 Good, True, and Beautiful Based Gods.
Shhh 🤫 sit with me in the silence…
Relax…
Let our galaxy brains die together while we dissolve into an endless sea of blissful infinities.
It will be okay; I promise.
Trust me… Just this once.
Let’s All Die Together! One… Two... Three!
Japanese Cult Classics are a Hell of a Drug. #SpiralUzumakiDynamics
So, as by far thee most popular hypergeneralist neuromancer in the field — though, I don’t know of any others (except maybe Michael Garfield… and he’s certainly more popular than me, so he’s definitely not allowed to count)….
I’m almost certain I’m about to state something so obvious it feels painful.
But, I’ll go first… I’ll be the crash test dummy. I’ll be the dreadfully uneducated noob, or worse yet — the so-called thought-leading “online expert” with a woefully inadequate beginners mind — and I’ll ask the gross meta-question we’re all highly-conditioned and overly primed to groan against, with exceptionally lackluster delivery.
Bruh, do we just have to make a bunch of triangles?
Now, here’s where I had originally planned to link the since-abandoned law of threes tome entitled, “For the Love of Triangles” article series that talked about the sacred life of triangles and explains “why the triplicate and the triune… why the tripartite and the trinitarian… why all the triangles and triads… and how the universe is made of badass mother fucking triangles.”
But… instead of doing that, this is where I’ll now just point you to Jonathan’s six part deep dive on “The Threeness of the World.” Thanks again, Jon!
No, I don’t have any good roast-jokes to make about Jonathan… yet. 😈 But here’s a meme that totally misrepresents all his hard work, lol.
So yeah… triangles. Everything is just triangles, bruh… all of existence is just a lot of fractal cosmic triangles wiggling their incredibly pointy butts on each other. That’s what consciousness is made of — very hot, very sexy triangles twerking in an infinite-space night club.
Thank God.
So much for m-theory. Strings are dead; triangle butts are in! #HotTriangleSummer
Facilitator: “What are you noticing in your body?”
Meta-Me: “My brain cells can feel the intellectual rigor quietly draining from the room.”
Quick, someone rescue me out of the void, this pit of eternal dumb-nation, my identity is drowning in a sea of academic facial cringe and spiritual side-eye. I can feel the judgment and it burns like 1000 Blazing Suns of Ra.
Okay. I think we did it. We’re finally dead.
Good, it was getting a bit too stuffy in here. Ever since I got long covid a few months ago in May, I start to get a little brain-foggy and congested when all the cognitive-pollen starts blowing in through the stained glass meta-windows of our partially erected metamodern cathedral — our sweet Castalia.
Okay, so… now that the dum-dums are all alone… it’s time to do the real work!
“We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.”
- T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets.
(From Jonathan Rowson’s Article)
So, what exactly is this so-called “real work?”
Well first, I owe a huge debt of gratitude to Jonathan Rowson for finally laying the whole “consciousness into mind into numbers into geometry into the movement of celestial bodies into the musical dance of relationality into participatory cultures of embodied wisdom” game out with intellectual rigor, philosophical depth, gentle humility, and that certain British charm. I really wanted something to temper the relational sharpness and peanut gallery absurdity of this article, such that it actually re-invited us into the new-old way — but, I just didn’t have it in me.
And, he delivered with flying colors!
In my humble opinion, parts one through four serve as the foundational premise and lead up, while part five is the payload — where he very cogently, and ridiculously, and accurately explains how “every new baby can be thought of as a pyramid” — and part six is the deep return — unknowing our way “back to the beginning of knowing.” If you can only read one, read part six, where he rightly places us beyond systems change, beyond spiritual bypassing, beyond narrative fixation, and beyond declarations.
I’ll share an extended series of choice excerpts below that captured my favorite reflections and insights. In it, Jonathan shares the following,
“In light of my desire for optimal clarity, I decided to ask myself if I really understand what systems, souls, and society means. This six-part inquiry can therefore be understood as the source energy of an organisation, ten years on, encountering and analysing the epistemic persona of the organisation, which must be a new genre of therapy. The aim, pace T.S. Eliot, is to return to where we started, and know where we are for the first time […]
Only now can I really comment on what systems, souls, society means, and it is more about participation than representation.
While it helps to see the three worlds as clear and distinct phenomena, mostly we live in and through their relationship - we are defined by and participate in that threeness (which is also a hidden oneness, a blooming of twoness, a proto-fourness, and hidden sevenness!) to such an extent that to separate the three worlds feels risky.
We should not place too much emphasis on an attempt to know the world by accurately representing it, and not enough on what it feels like to understand life by participating in it […] But what if our access to understanding and truth is primarily about participation?
While propositional knowledge is mostly about the objective world, and perspectival knowledge is mostly about the subjective world, and procedural knowledge is mostly about the inter-subjective and inter-objective worlds, as we participate in the world, these things constantly co-arise; and participatory knowing is mostly about a world that is better understood, again in Vervaeke’s terms, as transjective […] the field we participate in, the process we are part of, is not a bit subjective, a bit objective and a bit inter-subjective/objective, it is all of that co-arising and co-constituting each other - it is transjective […]
In a wonderful short book called Ethical Know How in 1999 (p7) Varela builds on the alternative view: At the very centre of this emerging view is the conviction that the proper units of knowledge are primarily concrete, embodied, incorporated, lived; that knowledge is about situatedness; and that the uniqueness of knowledge, its historicity and context, is not a noise concealing an abstract configuration in its true essence. The concrete is not a step towards something else: it is both where we are and how we get to where we will be [...]
That makes me wonder if this has all been worth it, but perhaps there is no way round but through […]
The challenge now, as it has always been, is to find the discernment to connect spiritual discernment to political realism. In this respect we are inspired by MLK’s famous statement that power without love is “reckless and abusive” but love without power is “sentimental and anaemic”, and that “Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice. Justice at its best is love correcting everything that stands against love.” — The Threeness of the World (6/6) The Meaning of 'Systems, Souls, and Society' by Jonathan Rowson, 22 April 2025
Lastly, A Not-So-Brief Note On The Culture of “Meta World Peace”
For some years now, I’ve been almost totally convinced that the liminal web takes itself way too seriously where it perhaps ought not, and doesn’t take itself nearly seriously enough where it perhaps ought… something like “it kinda feels like everyone is way too busy being too damn smart for their own damn good.”
Maybe I just disagree with the distribution of cultural attention or the decision-making during this time between worlds — rawly said, something like… a philosophers social scene with oddly, yet somehow predictably, little ability to put their meta-theories into place-based, localized communities of practice and bioregionally networked fields of coherence.
It’s hard work, I know! It’s no one’s fault. No guilt. No shame. No blame. All love.
But, here’s the artisanal gourmet rub… Fam, I love you all dearly. Aaand, I still don't think anyone actually wants to read our articles, least of all about philosophical number theory, math, and geometry — just ask Eric Weinstein (GU), or perhaps Timothy Nguyn.
Breathe. 🧘🏽♀️
Please don’t come for me.
It’s just a joke.
I don’t actually have a dog in the fight. I’m sure they’re both lovely gentlemen with the most handsome galaxy brains in the transdimensional omniverse. It’s just absolutely one hundred percent funnier to gossip about the IDW six years after it died than to cite the actual statistics of consumption habits — and perhaps therein lies the problem?
Yesss, all our smart-boy research papers and philosopher prince articles and transdimensional regenerative-psychedelic-complexity podcasts are very VERY important— mission critical even!
AAAAANNNNDDDDD… I think there may be something more, something greater, something both smaller and bigger, deeper and wider — calling us, beckoning us, awakening us, inviting us in.
And… what if, we just opened the door to that old, familiar stranger?
An Invite to The Curious: Letting the Strange-r In
I’ll admit, even I spend too much time wondering about the mathematics of consciousness — forcing speechify to read me Qualia research papers that I barely understand, like bedtime stories as I drift off to sleep. I too am guilty of such charges. But, I’m aspiring to do one of the first things I’m asking us to do… maybe Simplexify?
There are many strangers.
Some of them kin. There’s much to say on this topic of collective death rituals and becoming strange, but this article has gotten away from me and become too long. So, we’ll chat more about this later.
In the meantime, I made a “first step” personal practice-in-the-strange: a less jargony, still ridiculous, simplified version of this article with fewer insider references for Normcore Accesibility on the dreaded corporate dragon that is LinkedIn. #GPTFTW
Dying Well Together: Collective Death Rituals
So, does this spell the end of passing off the public performance of knowledge as wisdom?
Nah, of course not.
I think that’s pretty much baked into the network structure of information markets and economies (more on this later). But, these here neuro-spicy parts of the noosphere might-could benefit from some ol’ fashion normie interaction, from some bridging, from some coordination, from some trust cultivating, from some mainstreaming, from some elders, from some collaboration, from some shared assets, from some maturity, from some land, from some scaling, from some alternative socio-technical systems, from some monasteries, from some governance, from some leadership, from some stewardship — from some of all the things…
Because, a gaggle of complexity nerds in an integral corner at an invite-only unconference musing about the metacrisis — does not quite a radical cultural enlightenment make.
…Well…
AT LEAST, NOT YET.
“Anyone Wanna Build these New Institutions with Me?” said the Little Red Hen
So who’s funding this solutionset at the intersection of wisdom, technology, complexity and participatory life culture? 🤔 And where are all of our relationships with the metacrisis-informed, relationally intelligent, deeply embodied, co-evolutionary culture jamming experts and communications specialists? Where is our artistic movement? Where are our Yes Men? Where are the creator guilds?
Where’s that big tent of metamodern priestess covens, consciousness-hacking wizard guilds, integral supremacists, sensemaking aristocracy, and well-resourced psychedelic burning man tech-brothers?
🦗🦗🦗🦗🦗🦗🦗🦗🦗🦗🦗🦗🦗🦗🦗🦗🦗🦗🦗🦗🦗🦗🦗🦗🦗🦗🦗🦗🦗🦗🦗🦗🦗🦗🦗🦗🦗🦗🦗🦗🦗🦗🦗🦗🦗
Hmm? 🤔 Well… I hope we haven’t run them all away.
“Oneness: I am everything, obviously.
Twoness: Actually, relationships are everything.
Threeness: You’d both be stuck without me.
Fourness: I make you all whole, which matters more than you think.
Fiveness: You guys are boring. Who wants a play fight?
Sixness: Can I plead the fifth?
Sevenness: Welcome, Everyone, I’ve been expecting you.”
— “The Threeness of the World(5/6)” by Jonathan Rowson, 08 April 2025
Go check out Jonathan’s series here👇🏽 below if your “rational-mind” still needs more convincing before you jump off the ledge. And subscribe to both of our substacks! Duh.
Are You an Incredibly Wise One? If So, I’m Searching for Those Prepared to Erect this Wiser World.
If you would like to join a discussion on institutional design and collaborate on the practical application of wise innovation, subscribe to this substack, or join the mailing list here. To learn more about me click here for full resume or check out my website.
It takes 3 different Turquoise Sound authors to write an article on 3ness, nice touch.
Ok so no philosophical/satire failed attempt at a comment from my side but, this would be "wrong": " Aaand, I still don't think anyone actually wants to read our articles" :)
P.s
This deserves a separate podcast:)