On Saturday 23rd of May, Voicecraft will host the next Big Dinner. It welcomes , , Pamela von Sabljar, Carl Hayden Smith, and Jon Garner creating art on the evening.

The topic is Future Human, and we’re going to be following a somatic-symbolic sensory process that Simon has been developing, and which he recently deployed at the Mind-at-Large conference, hosted by the Center for Process Studies.

The Big Dinner is a hybrid event. Part online, part offline. It invites people to host dinners around the world, while tuning into a live podcast / conversation format hosted by The Voicecraft Network.

On this occasion, it’s dinner time for Asia / Australia and NZ, and late morning / lunch for EU. (6am for ET if I remember correctly.) This time we have a few locations in Melbourne and NZ participating, ranging from 3 to 15 people attending each venue.

You are also welcome to tune in like you would for any online event, whatever time, with or without others.

You can learn more about the speakers, format, and find out when this takes places in your timezone at https://www.voicecraft.io/online-events/the-big-dinner-future-human

There you will also find a basic hosting guide available as a PDF.

We are running this event on a gift economy ethos. The intention is for The Big Dinner to have no financial barrier to entry, with the long term aim to grow as a context that connects networks around the world in dialogues that matter to the people showing up. Over the many years of this work, Voicecraft has collaborated with hundreds and reached thousands of people who are sincerely engaged with life and creativity. People who share in many of the same aspirations for culture and community, with a similar appreciation for depth. The Big Dinner looks to serve as a place of reconnection for these people and others they’d like to invite in. There’s no network membership required to attend.

I think there is something in the search for the right distance, the right boundary, the right membrane, here, which could be an important unlock for increasing the connections in and affordances of the broader field this work touches. The Big Dinner looks to create an interior of sorts, yet with more of an openness. A festival, maybe, with your own tent to return to. And if you’d like to connect with people afterwards, The Big Dinner space inside the Voicecraft Mighty Network is free to join. It’s self contained and doesn’t require full membership access.

Moving forward, I have seen VC backed startups offer micro grants to people hosting dinners in a bid to create ‘community’. I wonder if something like the Big Dinner could find a model that crowd-funds the same sort of thing for dinner hosts. Perhaps the gift economy ethos at a sufficient scale could enable this. It is after all more economical to host events online than it is in person (which continue below).

Again, to learn more, and book tickets to attend the next Big Dinner, use the button below.

Attend The Big Dinner

Underground Philosophy: Fear and Beauty

The next Underground Philosophy takes place on Thursday 21st of May, on the topic of Fear an Beauty. Learn more @ https://www.voicecraft.io/events

I’ll keep this one short. It builds from conversation that developed in the after event conversation that followed the last event on Truth to Power (the first 20 minutes of which can be watched here.)

I love this venue and place to return to, and would love to see listeners in Melbourne step into participation…

Attend Underground Philosophy

Finally, today the Voicecraft Network channel released a dialogue on The Politics Of Movement, exploring the relation between art and violence. With Jurnee (), Corey, Bek and Jon (who created some beautiful live art in response to the dialogue, attached below as an example of what kind of thing may come through at The Big Dinner.

Discernment on the Way,

Jiang Xueqin is a unique character on the stage of attention. In a tremendously short period of time, he has become an influential commentator on geopolitics and power more broadly, catapulting to prominence thanks in part to his predictions and analysis on the Iran war. He has spoken with Tucker Carlson, , the famous Gen-Z streamer Sneako, Piers Morgan, Jimmy Dore, Dave Smith, , the crew of Breaking Points, the geopolitical commentator , Patrick-Bet David, Jack Neel, and many others. Voices across the ideological, geopolitical, and generational spectrum. Tens of millions reached through others’ platforms alone.

Nominally he is a Chinese high school teacher, though not a full citizen of China, who grew up in Canada and graduated from Yale with a bachelors degree in English literature. He is a widely read, tremendously effective communicator—at least as judged on the merit of the number of people tuning in.

He’s also something of an epistemic cowboy, and appears several steps ahead of most of the higher attention commentariat in describing patterns of power at play in the wild, wild world. He plays fast and loose. But he’s also ready to stand and deliver. Of course, I would like to see Jiang encounter more penetrating, challenging, genuine depth in conversation, but the lack of such is hardly a marker of his irrelevance as a figure of influence. In fact I believe Jiang has been one of the more interesting influences on popular currents of the zeitgeist; his image used for a shocking number of long form deepfakes in an uncanny, parasitical testament to his algorithmic-value.

Jiang’s prominence allows us to describe shifting dynamics of attention today, along with several ways by which the attentional field is subject to influence. My focus is here, and much less on the specifics of Jiang’s sometimes wild simplifications and contentious readings of science, philosophy and history. The content I have engaged most, in addition to his high profile guest appearances, is his ongoing series titled ‘Game Theory’, which focuses on current world events. Yes, Jiang’s philosophy and interpretation of life and history informs his current world analysis, and I have not ignored it in the development of what follows. But the genesis of this piece came out of preparation to host a Culture Lab session for the Voicecraft Network, which explicitly invites “a context for deepening understanding of critical, higher attention events, people, and dynamics in culture space and the world stage more generally.”

So what follows is necessarily more limited in scope than the content of Jiang’s lectures. I attempt to look into and through the medium of his influence itself in order to encourage a more critical and generative address of attention, education and mutual epistemic responsibility. I remain open to conversation with Jiang, as well as those who are profoundly critical of his commentary on specific domains or more broadly. This is not a hit piece. But the scope and relevance of the influence and attention in question demands critical address. In such cases where political interests, power, authority of interpretation, and the shadowed workings of each converge at scale, I realise that the very prospect of ‘good faith’ public conversation is something of a trojan unicorn—at least among those so embroiled in death grips of victory over wisdom more open to the anti-rivalrous value of trust and faith. Yet, as long as we’re honest that attempts to move toward authentic relation in such charged territories of public discrimination will be accompanied at least by some naivety and suspicion, we can come to have a measure of empathy for any who make the effort.

I - The Man and the Meme

Before looking into the dynamics of attention through the figure of Jiang more explicitly, there are a few things I find interesting about the challenge of approaching what’s really real here. Taken together, they function as a meta-reflection on epistemic responsibility, ethics, and engagement with the zeitgeist from the perspective of collaborative understanding. The core challenge is to do with navigating the tangle between what I often think about as the man and the meme. One might say the person and the idea. But really: the living history of who a person really is, what they really stand for, and the ways in which they are and are not open to relationship, in the intimate present of their being in the world. This, as distinct from but connected to the various ways that ideas, projections, interpretations etc., influence our perception of (in this case) a person, but also the context of relevance more broadly.

A good amount of engagement at the level of culture war tends to care little for the person, preferring for reasons of strategy and self-protection from real contact with others to take up battle in the domain of meme. Quick to turn men to straw. Quick to interpret voice as grift, or at least judge the person as indistinguishable from the ideology or thought-form they are seen to—and may in fact—play host to. For the sake of empathy and integrity I generally prefer to address the person rather than the meme alone. Empathy and integrity are far from soft and floppy morals; they have direct epistemic value. And how else to really participate in a more fully enriched context for understanding?

But if knowing people at all can be difficult, then in the era of mass attention, engaging both man and meme can be particularly challenging. But real relationship, authentic encounter, can be barred for reasons worth more and less respect. Virtue is implicated in the bearing, in the function of our membranes. And I see a great load of bullshit compromising federation between people and networks due to low quality gatekeeping, narrow self-interest, and poor discernment about the communicational field more generally—all of which ends up perverting the potential for positive-sum alignment.

But then of course there are also those who engage deceitfully, with wickedness of intent. In such cases it is perverse and foolish to cede memetic ground in hopes of first encountering something of more open, collaborative soul. Whether the bleeding heart to the intelligence operative, the credulous crowd to the sharp tongued mentalist, Celebrimbor (Smith of the many rings) to Sauron in the guise of Annatar who seeks control of the one and only: discounting or ignoring the memetic territory already influencing the conditions of possibility for mutual ‘good faith’ relating may as well be to step before the sorcerer with a pair of chopsticks for a wand, expecting noodles.

So in my view we cannot, if we care about increasing value for the commons—and particularly when venturing beyond already established bounds of trust—ignore the call of integrity that summons conscience to treat the person of address well. Nor can we ignore the memetic spells and ideologies influencing our perception. We must of course call them to question, for they influence the condition of possibility for deeper meeting. Nor indeed can we ignore the entangled field of relationality that more properly constitutes the basis for real receptivity to change, and which we influence whichsoever way we treat the man or the meme.

There’s a great mess to all of this. But there’s no way to become (or return) through real encounter with the edge of understanding without transformation that engages the messy. Risk is part of that way. And what we speak (meme), where we speak from (personhood), and the reception in which that meaning finds animation (field) all matter. The fact we come to recognise this long after the process has already begun, that we come to learn about the always-already meanings which shape the flowing, changing forms we take up in life—not from some isolated place of control, some view-from-nowhere, some disconnected sense of transcendence, but very much in the thick of things—seems to be a necessary condition for the quality of any drama: contingency. Surprise!1

II - Mass Attention: Brainwashing, Authority, and the Alien

One thing to notice about Jiang is the affect of authority with which he speaks. It is not a coincidence he is often called ‘Professor Jiang’, despite holding no university or college position. The title professor is apparently a term of respect in China irrespective of institutional formality, and it has become part of his titular character on the stage of attention. Personally I’m not one for university monopoly on epistemic authority. These are institutions of waning credibility (particularly as relates to the humanities) in so many ways. But I don’t say that triumphantly, and I see no sign that the number of views on a video confers any comparable credibility on the strength of this attentional-algorithmic achievement alone. And it is through YouTube, of course, on the channel, where Jiang shares his lectures on world affairs, literature and history to 2.3M+ subscribers—all of which are apparently recorded in the classroom of a Beijing high school.

I was initially skeptical of the truth of that setting, despite his calling on a few select students to occasionally take the mic and read select quotes. And yet, going back more than a decade, Jiang appears on videos speaking with passion on the subject of education during his time co-leading a unique and somewhat revolutionary schooling program in China, long before his commentary on any of the above. I perceive the discussion to be sincere and authentic.

Many of his lectures receive millions of views within days, and the podcast circuit has taken note. He speaks from a basis which projects received / expert authority across many topics. These he presents in near all-encompassing pictures of how the world works. Many of the patterns he identifies are compelling, clearly presented, and often touch on topics and ‘home truths’ which sit on the very edge of the pre-covid Overton window. Too far for typical Western commentators who speak from similarly perceived institutional contexts—by which I mean the aesthetic of the classroom (at whatever level of education.) The context of this transmission must not be overlooked, and it’s a point we will return to.

Jiang professes many thoughts on education which I take to be meaningfully more progressive (in the sense of better) than traditional modern forms based on a human capital approach to schooling. But it’s his mode of delivery I draw to attention first. In his lectures, you will frequently hear theories advanced as “speculation”, yet presented as authoritative, delivered in a manner that is precisely akin to the mode of fact based learning that Jiang himself speaks critically of, and which most of us were conditioned from a young age to expect. Trivia, rote memorisation, ‘knowledge’ cramming. There is a contradiction here.

Jiang is highly capable (as evidenced by the scale of his audience) at presenting non-conventional ideas in conventional frequencies of expression. At the level of the idea, Jiang brings a generalist breadth to accompany his straightforward style of delivery which is uncommon to the surface level commentariat. But the delivery itself, an extension of his epistemic presence in the world, indicates he places less prioritisation on the quality of participation or metabolisation with the content he shares as compared to the broadcast impact of his perspective. That is the contradiction. On the one hand a denouncement of brainwash by broadcast; on the other, no meaningful movement beyond that mode, despite the declaration of aspiration to do so.

Put another way, and with respect to the medium of his lectures specifically, I perceive his contact with students and listeners, as an educator, to stay in the mode of propositional delivery. The ideas and contentions are often confrontational, impactful. But the presence of genuine receptivity on Jiang’s part seems to me lacking, like he doesn’t really want the contact in office hours (though he well might). My point is that the transmission conveys an affect of one-way projection. More akin to memetic spell-casting, rather than expression conveyed to stoke an atmosphere of mutual learning.2

This may not strike as an obvious critique. In one way it’s tremendously subtle, and I doubt it’s a standard that the majority of listeners or even Jiang himself would see as necessary to hold to—and honestly I would have loved him as a teacher at high school. Indeed, it’s mostly par for the course in terms of teaching style—and there is value there in terms of brute dissemination of perspective. But it remains a point that I hold has important implications for the general observations and contentions I share in this essay.

There are reasonable questions to ask in response: what would it mean to educate at the level of the idea in a mode more deeply rooted than propositional force alone?3 Can educators aspire to more than a battle of abstraction in the digital arena? For now I offer this perception on Jiang’s mode of delivery as an essential shade which helps us more accurately colour-in the contours of his sharp rise to attentional prominence. Mass attention wants content that lands again and again, with authority, with self-certainty, and with contextual through-lines that present the true alienness of that which lurks in the cracks or edges of our maps in a deceptively comforting way. A way which turns the salience of the potential ‘other’ into something formulaic, memetically nameable, category-safe. A story to stimulate the present context of perception, rather than something we must step into another world to see.

III - Mass Attention: Salience & Impotence-Making

Although the Iran war compounded mass interest in Jiang, he is perhaps most well known for the candour and boldness with which he voices salient, taboo ideas, in tandem with the societal contexts they implicate. Think Epstein, elite networks / secret societies, the corrosive, predatory nature of transnational finance and capital, trafficking, laundering, religious eschatology and its connection to politics—all of which are so in need of address in our time. Coupled with a general framing of his personal approach to game theory, these are matters which mostly sit a step or two removed from the surface level topics of pre-covid politics. Jiang provides historical narratives, lines of logic and news-cycle current media to contextualise these subjects, with the effect of building salient and often coherent frames of explanation. Frames which the zeitgeist is craving in a time of increasing narrative instability, uncertainty, disintegration, and breakdown of global order. By global order, I mean the norms, rules, interpretive structures, and general stability of power relations that hold expectations and material events in rhythm. All of these appear to be in flux. And there are tens of millions upon tens of millions who are noticing.

Good stories are in demand no matter the rocking of an age. And today the age rocks. So enter the next professor who tells compelling stories. Stories of people, plots and power that popular consciousness demands be told. What’s more, this particular profiteri (the latin root of professor), the one who ‘declares publicly’, appears to be sticking his neck out to do so. And in a time where courage to speak is in relatively short supply, despite the chatter. To re-emphasise, Jiang delivers his lines in ways that appeal to the authority transmissions that so many people are accustomed to accepting quite uncritically. The very same received authority signature which itself presides over the breakdown of the world. Despite the copious flaws of our authority structures, the signature of a passionate ‘professor’, marker in hand, is powerful. Comforting. Credible.

Jiang’s thought, and the affect that accompanies it is in some ways captivating, soothing, hilarious, dangerous, salacious, revelatory, ordering, and challenging to old structures and patterns while also being relatively simple in structure (when taken in slices). It’s chewed-for-you philosophy, explain like I’m five (or fifteen) thinking—or at least the presentation thereof—which I believe plays into the thumos-pacifiying patterns of content consumption loved by the late night algorithm. This may be the most concerning risk of Jiang’s transmission. It could still hang in the balance, but to the degree the affect of prophecy plays a role in Jiang’s public appointment to professorship, then the accompanying degree to which the transmission functions as pacifier and drainage for genuine spirited participation in culture and understanding is a great shame, and indeed a marker of impotence.

This has long been my greatest concern with any who integrate occult, conspiratorial, and generally shadowed topics of relevance into the medium of their influence: are you really calling spirit into participation? Or are you feeding the content mill fragments of truth for the grind? Good seed mixed with empty calories that make for impotence, even more so than ignorance. From this perspective, mass attention appears subject to ignorance-making, as well as impotence-making, basins of attraction.4

IV - Mass Attention: Images for the Fractured Spirit of Our Time

Yet in addition to these critical concerns, I also take Jiang to be a generative addition to the zeitgeist. His trajectory indicates—yet again—the ascending influence of those who captivate attention in the provision of ideas and information. As I have hinted, on the basis of his lectures alone I believe he is unlikely to be directly involved in the motivation of deeper participation in understanding. But he is another strong signal of the increasing impotence of legacy media paradigms and their grip on the hermeneutic (interpretive) bubbles of public consciousness. The ‘good opinion’ of experts credentialised by institutions of the 20th century (academia, government, journalism and so on) can no longer play absolute gatekeeper to narrative deployment. And what’s more, new entrants to the stage can draw on the vestiges of old aesthetics to boost their credibility to attention—as long as, I’d guess, they also fulfil something of the idealised projection of what (in this case) education can sometimes, just occasionally, promise itself to be. The revelatory, based professor. Someone finally telling you how the world works. With the emphasis, here at least, on tell.

Of course this anti mainstream-institutional line is the same one taken by ‘alternative’ media platforms for near enough 10 years. And at least on the measure of sheer audience quantity, the sphere of top 20 long form podcasts and YouTube media outlets are where today’s mainstream of listeners under 60(?) tune in. But I still maintain Jiang’s prominence has a certain unique signal to it because of twin factors that hang together: the ideas he contends, and the position / location he speaks from. He is a voice whose traction makes sense in the context of the present attentional era, one defined in terms of fracture, confusion, and shifting alliances that mirror the general de-globalising shifts in geopolitics. Eight to ten years ago, although the mass rise in the so called ‘alternative’ online was that bit more fresh—a rise which in the end paralleled Trump’s success in 2016 and worked to anoint him in 2024—it would be difficult to imagine a voice like Jiang’s, one that speaks to conspiracies, cracks and instabilities in the West so frankly, so matter-of-factly, gaining such traction.

Whatever the centre of English speaking, alternative popular discourse was online in 2016 to early 2020, there was a certain air, albeit unconscious, of some shared identity structure worth holding to. It seemed to have the binding sense that the threatened yet still beating culture-father ‘deep in the belly of the whale’ could be saved, if only the ‘post-modern-neo-marxist’ influence could be rooted out. But the rot was and is worse than that. The cracks running both deeper in history, system, and more immanent in the all-too-human embodiment of people, incentives, relations and leaders today. Jiang, speaking from China, so critical of the West and transnational capital, so authoritative in his prediction of an impending US civil war, implicating as he does various elite networks in destructive complicity in all manner of systems, would have been beyond the pale for the ‘rational discourse’ of the IDW. The attentional sphere above-the-fold today holds no such Overton restrictions. Jiang is not the progenitor of many of the salient ideas he shares, but he is a remarkable aggregator and medium for a set of ideas, tensions and energies which at least the chaotic neutral aspect of the algorithm finds consciousness hooked on today. Mass attention loves images that capture the spirit of our time.

V - Mass Attention: Epistemics and Encryption

Now, where I have said that Jiang provides multiple coherent frames for ‘explaining’, (and by his stated epistemology, predicting) global events, it is important to note I do not suggest these frames are presented in ways which are clearly consistent with each other, or consistently, rigorously coloured in themselves. In my view of Jiang’s world, connections between interpretive maps are sometimes vaguely sketched or ignored, while the colouring in of the maps themselves with supporting content isn’t really the primary epistemic interest. It is this lack of attention to consistency and rigour regarding the connections between maps or frames which I think is part of the appeal for attention. And while favouring completeness over consistency is a helpful tradeoff in many endeavours (it’s a key pole in the epistemic balance that allows for interpretations to attempt to factor anomalies), we must take note here. A basic epistemic point would be to recognise that both underfitting and overfitting to data / experience are natural pitfalls we can slip into. And I am suggesting that Jiang is something of a cowboy generalist that picks and chooses his specificities.

But the point I am most drawn to make pertains to cognitive dissonance. Specifically, Jiang’s capacity to adopt an air of certainty which minimises the experience of cognitive dissonance in the minds of his audience. As he moves through and from frame to frame, each as authoritative as the last, whether in lecture or in the dominant mode of Q&A style interview podcast—those which all too often surrender or grift their context to capture some attentionally prominent content—he rarely stops for rigorous dialogue with the contradictions and discontinuities that accompany the tremendous generalisations he makes. For critically, doing so would require more intellectual and energetic bandwidth than attention at scale wishes to expend. Too much pause for doubt breaks the spell, breaks the flow. And that simple observation is worth noting as we consider what attracts and compels attention to aggregate en-masse today.

While Jiang does remind the listener to challenge him—to be wary, again, of being “brainwashed” by him—he delivers even these messages in a way that conveys a propositional legitimacy and epistemic humility, without really supporting the praxis for undergoing such. Thus we can have lectures one week which centre the primacy of the causal, if vectoral, influence of eschatology delivered as if it bore an all encompassing force of explanatory value. Next we could receive an argument which has nothing at all to do with eschatology, yet which also claims a kind of explanatory dominance. Perhaps the game theoretic chess of resource control in a period of empire collapse. Then, narratives of inter-elite conflict and secret society / Epsteinian / elite network machinations designed to parasitically extract the maximum from a crumbling world. In another lecture we will get arguments as to great power conflict in an era of multi-polarity. Depending on the podcast, different explanatory hats tend to show up. Whatever is more or less on the legitimating, intriguing, or fantastical edge, depending on the stance of the interviewer or the audience at hand.

Now, the selection of loose narratives above aren’t mutually exclusive explanations, as Jiang would defend. In fact I take them (and many others) seriously, and advocate becoming accustomed to taking a parallax view in the effort to better make sense of patterns in the world. These subjects Jiang draws on which are generally less spoken of are absolutely worth contending with. But again, and for the final time, the mode of presentation does not support a spirit of integration, participation and critical thinking as a praxis. While there is consistency in the repetition of the end game (next 10-20 years) Jiang points toward—a US civil war, an acceleration into the geopolitics of an American technate, Israeli dominance of the middle east at the behest of transnational elites, world ending religious wars, the late stage piracy of a declining empire gradually reshaping geopolitical alliances, the implementation of AI surveillance—these strike me less as epistemically rigorous conclusions, and more as competing pitches for the plot of a mind-opening and influential fiction that includes resonant ideas from the zeitgeist writ large.

And there is value in that. In fact I think Jiang would contribute tremendously to the vision of high budget movies and series. He self-proclaims that core to his epistemology is “speculation” and “imagination” after all. But also, we are told, so too is he known for “predictive history”, which carries an altogether different flavour of analytic authority, enjoyed far too uncritically as some epistemic method—and which is itself of course an idea born of Asimov’s fiction! There isn’t an epistemics, an ontology, a treatment of complexity science, a metaphysics here that can hold the water of critical participation and mutual learning, though I believe the ideas Jiang shares have something to offer the fold.

As such we have something closer to the transmission of ideas for battle in the zeitgeist, via lectures which I don’t think can claim to prioritise the learning of his students. Off into the world with you, mind expanded or blown with a kaleidoscope of narratives. Fine! But no, the real priority is the audience behind the screen, and the real context of address is the collective imagination. There can be value in that, and where I say that Jiang bears a mark of generative influence on the zeitgeist today it is because a little more of the other-than-rational can be crucial for generativity in discourse, particularly if the context of receptivity is sufficiently capable of dialogic mediation in the wake. But the air of analytic certainty and explanatory authority which is so bound up with Jiang’s priming of audience receptivity should give us pause. The dual wielding influence of imagination and analysis, without a more participatory, rigorous, clear integration of these modes, should draw us to critical suspicion about what and why the this or that is included or excluded from transmission.

Nefarious intent is not a necessary conclusion here. But there is plenty of room for the all-too-human tendency toward bias, bullshit, and self-deception to shape the very conditions of possibility listeners absorb. As long as we stay bound to these dynamics of attention capture without rich participation in understanding, our sensemaking will stay brittle, manipulable, and continue to atrophy. Like the salience of heavy dose psychedelics without integration, reflection, meditation, and embodied contact with the world, shared and supported in relationship, the very keys to liberation will simply lock the prisms of perception to a different encryption. And mass attention loves the affect of an encryption being set free, even as the effect is just another confounding bind.

VI - Mass Attention: Cracks In The Trance

There is another dynamic in the Jiang phenomenon worth re-emphasising: his stated location in Beijing, China, from which he speaks to an English language audience around the world. I think there has been a gap in the Western / Empire zeitgeist for a Chinese perspective on world affairs. And we would expect that early voices to truly catch on at scale would need to seem, while not antagonistic toward core Chinese interests, not too clearly aligned either. And Jiang is critical of various Chinese negativities: mostly culturally and spiritually, while also expressing some geopolitical vulnerabilities at the level of resource scarcity and economic strategy that afflict China. But it should be noted, these criticisms are but a fraction in comparison to the negativities he points out further afield. And yet it is plausible why this must be the case, and as such, without evidence, I do not argue that Jiang is consciously an asset of or even a particular advocate for the CCP (although the formal question of such connection remains open to me). Still, this grey area he cannot but stand in reminds us of something about our current moment. The West is fracturing, the global order is becoming more chaotic, and the zeitgeist is calling in diversities of voice—both in the sense of where that voice speaks from, as well as the interpretive what it brings to the field.

Jiang is also well placed to appeal to Western and indeed English speaking voices from across the world because a great many things are becoming increasingly clear to more and more people. The manifest truth of Western (and global) elite corruption. The spiritually and culturally emaciating effects of consumerist individualism. Alienation from community and deep rooted collectivity, magnified by techno-capital and predatory finance which subject working populations all across the empire to function as precarious cattle-machines, increasingly divorced from place and participation in community level production of material and meaning. Our energy is all too easily captured by the corporation, the digital, the state, and siphoned by interests whose objective is control without care for the long term vitality of the contexts of Belonging they extract from.

There’s plenty more. The time to speak truth to power is very much upon us. Though you might have to open a support ticket to do so. Prove your humanity to a robot first. Navigate some bullshit until someone basically powerless, bound to more bullshit by their income and exhaustion gets back to you. They might even do so with a hint of resentful frustration at your bringing too much human into the coercive constraints of the machine they’d rather not admit to serving. Too much subject for the system, à la in Systems and Subjects. Or we could vote better, I guess? Hm. Not so sure about that.

Interestingly, it might be that Jiang’s very position in China protects him to speak a great deal of truth to power (though not, of course, to the Chinese). There is little doubt he too must tow the line, be careful about naming too many names, keep his influence focused outward. But is it not the case that more and more people in the so called West are waking up to just how much we tow the line with our speech? That there are only more and more stark instances of speech being conditioned? Lines we are conditioned and coerced to stay within? Lines we condition and coerce ourselves and each other to stay within?!

Western propaganda used to benefit from an advantage that for the majority voter base within its remit, the dream of a relatively prosperous life compared to others on the fringes of empire was genuinely something of a material possibility. As certain dimensions of this dream fade further and further away, and as even the man who played lead in The Pursuit Of Happiness himself slaps a clown for joking on stage, the ruling elites have a natural incentive to pervert the cultivation of an increase in revolutionary consciousness. Sadly, our culture in general is quite capable of cooperating in this endeavour, as political theorist describes well in many ways, and in particular by reference to his four F’s of Faith, Family, Fandoms and Futurism (see a recent podcast here.) But, at least at the level of intra-elite conflict à la , there appears to be a desire to propagate tales of the naked debaucheries of the Emperor and his cronies. Those other emperors, surely, not us or ours. Thus I think we can recognise that Jiang will find more than just political alignment with echelons across the aisles—for everyone can make an enemy of corruption and criminality when it suits them. There is also evidence, I think, at least at the level of increasingly salient narrative, a growing openness and attraction to the attentional value of revolutionary subjectivity in general.

I do not say that this is enough for deeply meaningful change. In fact I have said that Jiang may well prove another sink for this energy than a cultivator of more generative participatory understanding and activity. But I do think he is a sign that the zeitgeist is wanting to undergo some kind of solve et coagula at the level of interpretation. And he is, I think, something of a catalyst in that process. How captured that context of dissolution and recombination is, again, the natural question. It’s probably quite captured. But to my gut, only quite. Significantly, yes. But not totally. I do think there are cracks of potential opened by shifts in narrative and mass formations of attention. Whether those cracks are only to widen the gyre, and increasingly isolate reality and communication from itself in the turning, remains for me a question worth living a response to. Speculative prediction justified by some faux-denial of influence in the world is a shield from real contact. And there is something instructional in this, for mass attention loves to pause, though only just for a precious, fleeting moment, in the crack where frequency shifts, the trance breaks, and consciousness opens to creativity.

VII - Mass Attention: The Prospects Of Encounter

Before closing, there is a point to raise in Jiang’s favour. As Tom Lyons observed in a conversation two weeks ago (shared along with this essay) there is a sense in which Jiang does appear open to encounter. Or at least, in my view, a certain form of encounter. I believe there is sincerity in his testimony that seeking out and engaging ideas which are different from one’s own is important. I can go along and accept the story he tells of his developing understanding over the years: that he cares for the education and experience which afforded him that learning, that he wants to “ignite the divine spark” in people. As I said earlier: he is ready and willing to stand and deliver. To meet questions, including critical questions, head on. But I’ve also said there are likely important limitations to the kind of participation that Jiang evokes, despite his stated intentions. So there’s something to clarify here.

On the kind of willingness to stand and deliver in encounter, there is nothing revolutionary about this from the perspective of public intellectual voices interacting in the so-called marketplace of ideas since the long form revolution of the mid 2010s. Indeed, one of the trade-mark signs of attentional value today is precisely this sense that a speaker is willing and able to address almost all angles of any critical topic. This is both a strength and a weakness of the medium in general.

On the one hand, there is an attentional forcing function to keep the affect of epistemic authority flowing. This builds fragility into the context of shared understanding itself, as authoritative pronouncements across more domains than most listeners can validate, ground, or challenge, perpetuates a kind of in-bred narrative closure, or self-referentiality of map/s which are prone to obscure their epistemic weaknesses behind the additive experience of coherence that results from repetitions of apparent internal consistency plus completion, while eyes are bowed or distracted from genuine engagement with novelty, difference, otherness. This is a critical weakness. For a whole book’s worth of comprehensive philosophical exploration of this important context of thought, see the brilliant work of in general and The Map Is Indestructible in particular. (Here’s a podcast in which we dialogue on that very subject.)

Yet on the other hand there is a strength. Namely, that if audience perception is astute, we are able to attend to how less well-supported domains of knowledge are employed in service of the various (grander) narratives and provocations being made. There is an opportunity in attending to these areas of comparative epistemic lack: we can gain insight into the contours of influence a voice brings to the zeitgeist. An example of this can be found in ’s analysis of the relationship between , , and Jordan Peterson in his powerful book Real Speculations (which we also explore comprehensively in a podcast here.) In this, Last applies a Hegelian lens to the various movements and fixities of spirit through the registers of reason, spirit, and religion—Dawkins, Harris and Peterson respectively. And I do think these kind of encounters support movement in the cultivation of collective perception. But it takes a great collective effort of work to cultivate the networks and contexts of learning and communication to more directly engage such movements with sufficient, sustained, intentional attention—to engage the real as well as speculation.

But can we realistically expect or ask any more of Jiang than this in the present era of attention? He is already a voice for ideas which are stimulating above-the-fold attentional discourse. And the humbling, sobering—even humiliating thing—is that although the algorithm can to some degree be hacked, the elements of its bias and chaotic neutrality (partially) gamed, and collective attention itself variously primed and conditioned, spirit pacified, there is also a certain reality, a measure of our own complicity, some conflux of unmet need, desire and drive which animates the subject behind the retention curve. So for the sake of our own emancipatory spirit, as well as biologic connection to the brute swipe of every thumb, we must recognise that we, collectively, enact some genuine preference which the algorithm is bound to follow (for it seeks at least to maximise engagement in service of capital.) I don’t think that’s all that’s going on. But whatever is going on, we are involved.

Nevertheless, where we might wish to challenge and invite Jiang to attend is the following—for he, as a being, is also a participatory influence, somewhere amidst the reificatory, more or less deifying, demonising, dehumanising functions of mass attentional prominence. That is, to encourage his partners in discourse to attend to the very desire they have and share in arriving at the conversation, to bring into address the very context of attention for which they are selecting content, in addition to the kind of speech they are optimising for. I am not talking about basic self-narrative, justification of story, or positioning of the game board. I am speaking about a sincere encounter with the pressures and tensions of truth and question that appear in our desire for becoming and relationship, beyond the superegoic constraints on thinking as ordinarily imposed by the social / institutional or audience / group captured mind. From what I’ve seen, the depth psychological and psychoanalytic is a notable lack in Jiang’s teaching. But there might be hope for a basic humility and authenticity of truth-seeking which, for a time, may add value to the attentional commons. Now, I think it’s fair to say that doing such, at least today, would be unlikely to sustain the scale of collective attention which is the principle factor of admission to the stage above-the-fold—the content you scroll less to find— but nevertheless.

Additionally, I do not suggest that the comprehensiveness and integrity of encounter worth cultivating today will be attained in the mere voicing of conditioning factors that colour and tone the attentional medium—although I have more to report from my own work on this than I can speak to here. For a start, the quality of participation in encounter we need more of is a matter as much of field cultivation as it is the work of a more vigilante style cowboy. However, even within the frame where we imagine what influence the so-called ‘individual’ actor may have on the attentional stage—without asking for said actor to draw awareness to the hulking elephant that is the medium’s effect on the context of communication itself—there remain more aspirational modes of engagement we might hope to see more of.

One such mode is simply the contribution of a relatively pure presentation of (at least elements of) the zeitgeist to itself. Perhaps there remains a genuine authenticity, sincerity, purity—however coloured in modes of delivery which might in their own way be problematic or lacking—that does still help us see more of the evolving reality we inhabit. This is, in a way, a very simple point, and of course the value of such ‘authentic speech’ can encounter a quick limit on its shine as the pressure of grift, political handling, audience capture, and zero-sum debate identity-needs start to catch. The more captured a culture warrior or grifter, the more undead, repetitive, pressure-building influence gets added to discourse.

We can track contributions to the zeitgeist from such types as much or more-so by what content they occlude than they include. And as intimated earlier, we’d be prudent to apply the same concern for what goes unspoken, hidden or ignored in Jiang’s discourse. But I do think the contours of more personal confessions to the zeitgeist, especially when they appear to be called forth by the zeitgeist itself,5 allow us an angle of perception into shifts in collective consciousness today, or at least the movement of narrative. In contrast, I see the impulse to grift as more of a recursion to or capitalisation on already energised narratives in the zeitgeist, rather than an embodiment of something closer to the crystallisation of a coherence vector in the field of collective thought.

So if Jiang is in fact open to encounter, at least in the altogether minimal sense of a sincere and authentic meeting in the marketplace, then he will likely prove a meaningful signal to track in terms of understanding the short-medium term evolution of narrative in the zeitgeist. And, in making the observations he does, he is radically increasing the absolute number of observations on the more shadowed elements of the system we participate in. Can those observations enact of themselves some semblance of systemic perturbation? The algorithm in the context of digital attention is one mechanism through which they might do something (risks to ignorance and impotence-making notwithstanding). Jiang’s hook on attention will be reenforced by this mechanism for the time in which his voice resonates, or until such time as the observations he makes are no longer effectual in nudging new material—or at least material that is newly constellated with the salience of the revelatory, into zeitgeist ready consumption. Naturally he could also fall prey to grift, intentionally or unintentionally. So I hope he has good friends, for these reasons and more, as mass attention loves conflict, kayfabe, and a kind of self-reflection or self-mirroring that tends toward progress through implosion, yes, but also the collapse of those who stay too long constellating some novelty of awareness within the storm’s eye.

VIII - Onward Questions

I close with questions that circle beneath this essay. They are questions which Voicecraft and my work in general take seriously. How does all of the above condition the prospects for, constraints on, and capacities to genuinely participate in the Becoming and Return6 of psyche, culture and nature? And secondly, as relates to the invocation of encounter: I often reserve this term for a particular metaphysical meaning as it relates to the presentation of anomaly in the field of awareness.7 That is, the very predicament for orientation which at some level of aesthetic and ethical awareness I call Discernment on the Way, and which more systematically (I endeavour) shows up with the Modes of Orientation we adopt in contact with Other as an occasion of onto-epistemic contact. (These are breadcrumbs to previous conversations or onward thinking for anyone interested enough to be reading at the end, but I offer them to clarify the depth to which I at least feel obligated to ground the meaning of encounter.)

Nevertheless, in the context of this essay I ask, how might we better approach encounters with each other and the various cracks and fractures in the rocking of our age, so that thought can be up to the task of understanding? How might we alter states of conversation to support the sharing of more meaning, more context, more story, more art, more rigour, more voice, more presence, more purpose, more receptivity, more reality, more of what matters, in the process of understanding? And with a lot less loft than all of that, what may be in the adjacent possible for above-the-fold attention today that could inspire more genuine participation?

Discernment on the Way,

—

The Voicecraft Network session below features a dialogue between myself and Tom Lyons.8

My hope is that, especially for new listeners, this refreshed framing of the channel will offer a hint of poetic description of what you might expect to encounter. A bit of permission, perhaps, to move from confused to intrigued.

It also brings a new chapter of clarity in terms of where different threads of The Voicecraft Project in general can grow onward.

As long time listeners, collaborators and network participants have known for several years, an important thread of Voicecraft is the activity of group conversation, network learning and contribution, and a dedication to developing the voices and threads of interest that are held and surfaced by contributors other than myself. That this is integral to the cultivation of the field and broader endeavour of the work as a whole.

The Voicecraft Network YouTube channel is I think a more natural home for many network collaborations. In general it will feature a wider scope of media, including interviews, clips, films, group sessions of various experimental kinds, including synthesis sessions, Big Dinners, live events, collaborations between Voicecraft members and guests across threads which I may or may not also participate in.

A look through the history of both channels will give you every indication of what’s to come, and I look forward to seeing growth in the VC Network channel as a platform that can include more voices in the field with a slightly different sense of constraint, membrane and potential. At a level of spirit there is little difference between the two. Altered states of conversation (ASOC) are as much of interest to the VC Network channel as they are to the ASOC channel itself, as is the praxis of engagement which Voicecraft has endeavoured to cultivate in general. Both channels are of importance to The Voicecraft Project as a whole.

So with that said!

Today there are conversations across both to share, as well as invitations to participate offline at the next Underground Philosophy in Melbourne, as well as online at the next Big Dinner.

—

The first release on ASOC this year featured the return of complexity practitioner and generalist thinker . I always receive engaged feedback for these dialogues with Dave, and I found this, as with the others, to be tremendously generative. How can we respond with wisdom, at scale, to our entanglements?

Shownotes at https://www.voicecraft.io/content/e142-anthro-complexity-entanglement-wayshaping-and-addressing-existential-threat-w/-dave-snowden

—

The most recent release features a dialogue with political theorist , philosopher Daniel Garner of , and Commons / Civilisation theorist . I found our dialogue on the revolutionary subject very valuable last year, as I did with this. The new ASOC channel intro debuts here as well..

On geopolitical shifts, civilisational cycles, and the potential for new social coordination mechanisms in an increasingly frenetic world…

Show notes at https://www.voicecraft.io/content/e143-what-are-we-accelerating-towards-w/-benjamin-studebaker-michel-bauwens-og-rose-and-tim-adalin

—

In between these the Voicecraft Network channel published the beginning of an inquiry into the relationship between movement and philosophy. This was inspired by Jurn, a member of the network and martial arts and breaking (dance) practitioner / performance artist. It welcomes , a Feldenkreis practitioner who regularly engages in dialogue with long time members and voices on Voicecraft O.G. Rose and . It also welcomes Corey Karuna-Manuwa, a practitioner taking on the lineage of Ido Portal.

There have been several hundred sessions in the network since 2020, and I hope with a little more frequency, they can serve to connect members with guests, friends, teachers, collaborators, listeners throughout the broader ecology. Perhaps the network channel is the right structure to serve as a coordination point of sorts for that extended field which Voicecraft has endeavoured to contribute to and connect over the years.

Separately, today I recorded a session with Tom Lyons on prof Jiang Xueqin and am thinking of releasing that on the network channel too. Let me know if you’re interested..

Finally, on invitations:

On Thursday 23rd of April Underground Philosophy returns to Caz Reitops. (Next week!) There were several learnings from last time’s gathering on Totalitarianism, and I look forward to iterating on the structure in aid of cultivating an energy of vital, insightful, dynamic engagement that bridges the intimacy of real thinking and connection with civic discourse.

The topic is Truth to Power. I’ve heard that’s a bit opaque. To me it’s a brilliantly glowing sign that points directly toward the opportunity to bring to voice what matters today. Perhaps you need to care about that already to find that in any way clarifying.

If you click on through the flow on this page here and eventually find your way to the Humanitix ticketing page, I hope you’ll find all you need. Having a bit of a journey between the call to attend and the act of booking a ticket isn’t really conversion rate best practice. But somehow I’ve always felt it’s necessary.

What of great importance goes unsaid today? How can we understand the situation of truth and its relation to power?

Learn more and book tickets via https://www.voicecraft.io/events

—

And then there is the next Big Dinner on the topic of the Future Human. I’ll be sharing that on the website soon.. though it’s already up for members of The Big Dinner space which is connected to the Voicecraft Network, without requiring full membership to join.

It will welcome Voicecraft member hosting a session attended by myself, , , and others..

It’s on May 23rd. Roughly around midday for Europeans (11AM UK), and evening time for Aus / NZ. It’s a unique experience to dialogue with a zoom room full of people gathered at home for dinners around the world.

This will be a session much closer to working with altered states induced image and sensation brought into group process. In that regard it connects both Simon’s work as a neo-shamanic practitioner, Carl’s interest in Hyperhumanism (plenty of Voicecraft material on that featuring and Cameron Duffy), Sarah’s exploration and knowledge of the dreaming mysteries (also featured on the Voicecraft podcast at the end of last year) and the general approach, interests, and field cultivated in Voicecraft over many years. In general I consider the Voicecraft dialogic context an epitome of the kind of philosophical engagement that supports the exploration and integration of material brought up in altered states.

If you are interested in tuning into this or hosting a dinner, then for the time being the best thing to do is leave a comment or reach out. I am redeveloping the whole digital structure for how openish events like The Big Dinner, as well as offerings made by the Voicecraft network in general can connect with interested participants throughout the field. But for now, reading this will have to do!

I would also like to thank for joining the last Voicecraft Big Dinner at the end of January, as well as to all of those who attended, gathering their family and friends. That was a beautiful session and a context of genuine open hearted renewal for me personally. It wasn’t recorded. Layman did join Simon and Tom for a dialogue exploring the topic of Meta-Shamanism earlier on which was however recorded for the Voicecraft Network channel, shared below. You can read Layman’s substack article which prompted the dialogue here. Layman, in showing up and sharing your time and energy with the network for TBD I am tremendously grateful. Legend!

Finally, as a personal update I rarely include in these Voicecraft Dispatches, I have been developing a lot more written thought over the last 10 months. I intend to publish a book before too long. Likely 12-18 months. One by-product is slightly more openness to share writing I usually keep private. So there’s a good chance you can expect more kinds of mail in addition to these dispatches. That might not suit everyone on the list, but for the time being I do not have the bandwidth to segment the audience. I do keep a local events mailing list which has already received invitations to the next Underground Philosophy. If you aren’t on that and would like to be, please let me know.

And please subscribe to the VC network channel. Almost everyone on this list isn’t! It will help create more value for more people.

Discernment on the Way,

Money, power, inequality, AI, religion, the dynamics of attention and the digital, all in the context of cultivating relationship and capacity for resilience and generative communication in this network age.

Minutes ago I released the following dialogue with philosopher and master craftsman . If any of you caught the recent Diary of a CEO podcast with Tristan Harris, in many respects this conversation goes a few steps deeper, and is a profound compliment to that.

To my perception, Forrest’s thinking has been an influence on the formulation of some of Harris’ key public communication — which he does brilliantly as a clear voice seriously worth attending to on topics of AI, attention, technology and power.

You may notice how much promotional effort goes into Steven Bartlett’s DOAC. I wonder what the influence to public discourse might be if a small fraction of the several million who tuned into Harris on DOAC encountered the openings to Forrest’s perspective on the topic. Who knows…

Previous to the dialogue with Landry, I was honoured to finally sit down with after initially reaching out nearly 8 years ago.

I felt this one managed to bridge ordinary viewing expectations with a good bit of dialogic creativity. In particular, the last 20-30 minutes open into some critical territory, present across the project since inception: the deep tensions of relating with ultimacy, spirit and power in the context of change, in the shadow of various authority contexts (of which religion is an example.)

I’m not defining religion reductively as such, but to the degree religion shows up as an authority construct which shapes perceptions of value, normativity, ultimacy etc, then it’s well worth considering just what kind of communication is possible in the shadow of a cathedral.

Next up is the public recording component of the Voicecraft Network’s recent BIG DINNER on the Adjacent Possible. This was the first event of its kind. A hybrid event connecting people hosting dinners around the world with those tuning in online, as well as those invited to dialogue. I really enjoyed the energy in the space. And I think there’s something beautifully innovative potential when it comes to the membranes operating here.

For those who are interested to watch what I found to be a highly engaging and generative dialogue, it will mostly come across like a podcast. It’s shared on the Voicecraft Network YT as a collab with the VC channel. Please do subscribe to it, it will help me create more value for the field. Featuring and Tom Lyons. With a critical question from Charity part way through.

INVITATIONS

This Sunday is the final Underground Philosophy of the year, live in Melbourne. It’s called..

BEYOND PSYCHEDELICS.

If you haven’t heard about it yet and are based in Melbourne, there are a couple tickets still available. You can read about it and send a message through over at https://www.voicecraft.io/events

Psychedelics, and all of the complexity they entail, have also been a core part of the journey of this work. And we have an awesome context coming together.

Finally, in late January, there is..

THE BIG DINNER

The topic will emerge over the course of forthcoming Voicecraft Network sessions, including tomorrow’s Synthesis session with , Kyle Lawrence, Tom and Simon. It’ll be held at a US friendly timezone for dinner. You can learn more about the next Big Dinner here.

.

Discernment on the Way,

One is to a local event in Melbourne (the final Underground Philosophy of the year.)

The other is an online / offline event hybrid and a beautiful initiative, I think.

The Big Dinner

Taking place on November 22 (AU/NZ/Asia + EU/Africa)
(The next will be late January for a US dinner time.)

The Big Dinner is like pirate radio, but with dinners hosted at homes around the world, in participation with a live podcast hosted by the Voicecraft Network.

The Big Dinner invites members of the Voicecraft Network and anyone else who would like to apply, to host a dinner.

Our theme for this event is The Adjacent Possible, and invites dialogue on the personal and systemic limitations we encounter today, in relation with the glimmers and potentials for creativity and movement in our lives we can sense, intuit and, maybe come to articulate.

Thus far, voices in dialogue online include , and Tom Lyons.

To apply to join the space you’ll need to head to the The Voicecraft Network, or by using the form on the first link which shares much more here.

Then there is..

Underground Philosophy:
BEYOND PSYCHEDELICS.

Better than Ted. Realer than Ted.

https://www.voicecraft.io/events

Live in Melbourne.. Sunday December 7th.

Featuring live talks, philosophical dialogue, and conversation over dinner, we will explore the theme... Beyond Psychedelics

Have we been too reductionistic about what understanding psychedelics really entails? Beyond the reductionism of certain metaphysical positions and scientific methodologies, what of the contexts which inform what we see and communicate? Are there blindspots in the zeitgeist worth drawing attention to? And what does a maturing relationship with psychedelics really ask of us?

Across a series of talks, dinner, and dialogues, Underground Philosophy will ask these questions and more. What role can psychedelics play in the future of culture? What does it mean to think about psychedelics from the perspective of ethics and cultural transformation? Finally, we will look to the future and ask: can psychedelics contribute to an expansion and clarification of our horizons as persons and participants in the lifeworld?

So far, the speakers on the evening include Dr Nigel Strauss - Psychiatrist, Psychedelic Psychotherapist, Philosopher; Cameron Duffy - Philosopher and Counsellor; and myself. But there are plenty more voices in attendance too.

Underground Philosophy is where thought comes to life. Here we resist the capture of algorithms and dissociating ideology. When we come to Underground Philosophy, we come to connect and experience thinking you can feel—philosophy with soul.

Please share this on to those you would like to participate with.

https://www.voicecraft.io/events

Discernment on the Way,

Up next on the Voicecraft podcast is a dialogue with Iain McGilchrist, and an interview with Elder Les Spencer here in Melbourne.

Share

The most recent release asked: what are the prospects of social and political revolution? How can we understand revolutionary subjectivity today? Who, what, when, and where is the revolutionary subject?

The dialogue was inspired by a Philosophy Portal conversation between and Michel Bauwens, this dialogue welcomes political theorist , philosopher , and Commons / Civilisation theorist .

Previously, Voicecraft hosted an Underground Philosophy event in Melbourne with a long time collaborator of the project, the hyperhuman theorist, psychonaut, and founder of The Museum of Consciousness Carl Hayden Smith. It was filmed at the start of an evening of transformative sonic experience with The Museum of Consciousness at Underground Philosophy, live in Melbourne. In it we begin to explore the question: are we human yet? It only just begins to scratch the surface, but in its own way, it shines a light on the possibility for education, embodiment and becoming which bears intimately on the project of revolutionary subjectivity.

Next is a reflective conversation about that evening of collaboration between Underground Philosophy and The Museum of Consciousness. We began by asking: what are the challenges and prospects of integrating transformative sound with philosophy? As the dialogue progressed, I enjoyed asking Carl to reflect on his philosophy across questions of religion, friendship, and the cultivation of community in general.

Tomorrow’s release features a dialogue on presence with , , and Anna Gyllenklev, which shows another side to this question. It considers presence in relation to the machine, inoculating against coercion, and the revolutionary subject more broadly. It’s held in the more contemplative, improvisational mode of Voicecraft Network sessions, and I look forward to sharing it.

More to follow,

Discernment on the Way,

Over dinner, philosophical conversation, and intentional listening to transformative sonic experiences, we invite you to participate with the question: are we human yet?

Building on dialogues with Carl on the Voicecraft podcast, we will explore this question through multiple frames of reference, including the notion of Hyperhumanism.

Hyperhumanism can be seen as an alternative to transhumanism. It asks us to consider how we can deepen and enrich experience through the mindful use of technology. Whereas, on the other hand, transhumanism appears to promise 'transcendence' as an escape from the lack in humanity.

Learn more @ https://www.voicecraft.io/events

It’s been more than six years since my last collaboration with Carl when he was in Melbourne in 2019, and I look forward to many other long time collaborators travelling to Australia for events in the future.

Here are some previous dialogues on the Voicecraft podcast featuring Carl, and Cam Duffy.

Finally, I'd also like to remind you of Cantrips' gig this coming Friday as well as an event I am hosting on the topic: Just War or Just Peace? for Conversation at the Crossroads on Friday 12th here.

Discernment on the Way,

Tim

It’s been a little while since the last dispatch.

What follows are the four most recent conversations on the Voicecraft podcast, followed by two publicly shared dialogues on the Voicecraft Network channel (one of which is a synthesis and reflection session on the previous 3 months of material.)

Following that are invitations to events in Melbourne, and a note to save the date for the late afternoon / evening of Sunday September 21st, where Voicecraft’s Underground Philosophy series will be collaborating with Carl Hayden Smith’s Museum of Consciousness for what should be an awesome evening.

Discernment on the Way,

Voicecraft dialogues

Welcoming political theorist , author of Legitimacy In Liberal Democracies and The Chronic Crisis of American Democracy: The Way Is Shut. We dialogue on the crises of trust and legitimacy in politics and institutions; the impact of technofeudalism on communication; power, intractable disagreement, civil war, violence and cultural shamanism; and pathways toward authentic political change—even if the way is shut.

joins for a dialogue working with core themes from Last's new book: Real Speculations: Thought Foundations, Drive Myths, and Social Analysis. This is a comprehensive journey into core philosophy and psychoanalysis, intended for a network of networks engaging in common effort to understand and participate in the becoming of our time.

An exploration of AI, human intelligence, dangers of cognitive atrophy, and lines of flight in response to territorialisation. Welcoming the creator of the Cynefin Framework and iconoclastic generalist thinker Dave Snowden, who argues that AI represents artificial or algorithmic inference rather than true intelligence.

Exploring the tensions between ideology and reality, or ‘indestructible maps’ and participation in mystery and incompleteness, welcoming the philosopher, Voicecraft Network contributor and author of The Map is Indestructible, in the form of Daniel Garner. This conversation continues the Cultural Shamanism series and begins with an explication of global pluralism.

Publicly shared Voicecraft Network dialogues

Exploring recent themes on the ‪@Voicecraft‬ podcast. Welcome to the Voicecraft Network: a home for conversational alchemy. This dialogue features , Tom Lyons (hosting), Jon Garner, Kyle Lawrence and Cam Duffy.

Exploring critical questions of psychopathy in our time. Welcome to the Voicecraft Network: a home for conversational alchemy. This dialogue features , (clinical psychologist), (shamanic practitioner and microbiology PhD), Tom Lyons (community builder and co-founder of Ecofo), Cam Duffy (philosopher of psychedelic therapy), also joined by Kai and Charity part way through.

Event Invitations

• On Friday 5th September at Northcote Social Club in Melbourne, Cantrips, the artist behind the VC intro song is headlining this music gig. Pat makes beautiful music and if music gigs are your thing, this one will be a good time. Find Cantrips' music on Bandcamp here.
  

• Then on Friday September 12th, I am once again hosting a dialogue for Dr Joseph Camilleri's initiative Conversation at the Crossroads. The theme is Just War or Just Peace?
  You can learn more and find tickets here @ https://www.crossroadsconversation.com.au/events/just-war-or-just-peace

Other bits

• You can work with me one and one here: https://www.timadalin.xyz/one-and-one
  

• If you value the creations of Voicecraft from a distance, please consider becoming a patron at https://www.patreon.com/voicecraft

The first is with and titled Mythos After Progress and the second is the recent release with Michael Levin, Influence, Value & Transhumanism: Questions for the frontier of techno biology.

Plus, there’s a 30 minute part 2 follow up to Mythos & Progress with the Voicecraft Network, shared on the VC Network channel.

If you’re here for tickets to Underground Philosophy: Technofeudalism, please follow this link. More on that below.

What does progress mean? How do our stories about progress influence consciousness and our perceptions of value, quality and emerging mythos? Can we think beyond it? Welcoming paleontologist-futurist Michael Garfield and integral philosopher Jeremy D Johnson, author of ‘Seeing Through the World: Jean Gebser and Integral Consciousness.’

I find both Michael and Jeremy to be outstandingly generative voices to dialogue with and I look forward to them returning to the context.

To watch the reflections segment, go to Mythos After Progress PART TWO. Spotify version of the full convo below.

E129 | Influence, Value and Transhumanism: Questions for the frontier of techno-biology

Dr Michael Levin's pioneering research on bioelectricity, morphogenesis, and cognition is reshaping our understanding of how living systems self-organize and regenerate. He explores how cells and tissues communicate through bioelectrical signals, guiding the formation of complex structures without relying solely on genetic instructions. He is a Distinguished Professor in Biology at Tufts University, working at the intersection of biology, computer science, and cognitive science.

This dialogue may be most interesting to those already familiar with Levin’s work. It’s not that it requires any more knowledge in advance relative to other Voicecraft dialogues. It is just that, with only one hour (and it was a 2.5 year process for that hour!) I felt there wasn’t time to spare on a recapitulation of some of the concepts and advances that really situate Levin in the zone of maximum public interest. There are a number of interviews on ’s TOE channel that do this very well which I recommend. And then there’s this Lex Fridman podcast which is a broad and solid overview.

I was hoping to get to the Levin Lab’s key research on bioelectricity and the notion of cognitive glue, and in from there, given the basis we established, into some terrain connecting questions of participation across multiple ‘levels’ of reality, in relation to evolution, perenialism, platonic forms, orientation, and more on the 2nd person relation, which was only noted briefly. Whack in questions of goodness, truth, beauty, and additional concerns about reductionism in there.. and there’s a bit more on the table to work with.

Michael has explored much of this with in several places. I enjoyed this dialogue titled Taming the Technological Dragon and Re-Minding the Universe as well as here on Third Eye Drops. And for some additional high quality reflection on Levin’s work with Tim Jackson, check this one out.

In fact, as Tim Jackson is a guest for next week’s Voicecraft event in Melbourne, that brings us on to Underground Philosophy: Technofeudalism. We’ve had a few dialogues on this topic in the Voicecraft Network recently, one of which may be shared publicly on the VC Network YT channel soon. And if the tech permits we’ll be sharing some clips at the event to try and connect the worlds a little bit, too.

Book Tickets to Underground Philosophy

Popularized by economist Yanis Varoufakis, technofeudalism describes a world where tech giants like Amazon, Google, and Meta act as digital overlords, extracting "rent" from users’ data and attention, replacing capitalism’s markets and profits with platform dominance and behavioural control.

But to understand the implications of technofeudalism more comprehensively, we need to integrate more than Varoufakis’ focus on economics and power—crucial though it is. We also need to understand how power and technology are effecting changes to our social and moral imaginations, our relation to value, and indeed our very contexts for belonging with each other and the world.

What creative potential can we discern in our own lives and relations that can support a meaningful, empowered response?

For more on the invitation of Underground Philosophy, this post has the first 20 minutes of May’s event on the topic of Future Melbourne.

Book Tickets to Underground Philosophy

Finally, one upcoming podcast in the calendar will be with on his recent release of the powerful work Real Speculations: Thought Foundations, Drive Myths, Social Analysis. I recommend this recent dialogue with for some excellent engagement with that work.

As always, thank you to everyone who makes this context what it is. And at least one theme linking all of the above, really, is a question which came through in the dialogue with Michael and Jeremy: what are we choosing to give life to?

Discernment on the Way,
Tim

Underground Philosophy returns to Melbourne Thursday 12 June. Our orienting theme is Technofeudalism. Learn more @ https://www.voicecraft.io/events

If you’re from elsewhere in the world with a network in Melbourne, this event is a great opportunity to connect with some remarkable people and build relational value.

You know, an embodiment of the thing that seems to go viral on Substack Notes engagement farming lamentations about the absence of relational contexts for deep engagement, social connection and thinking you can feel…

Please consider sharing it on. You can watch the first 20 minutes through the following link.

But I mean.. don’t you know I’d love to read your stack if you comment on the thread below with the other 400 people who bought into the farm. Then we’ll be in real community. Not much of a chance we’ll get the algorithms sharing on real invitations the same way, of course. We’ll just amplify the memes, hollow out the meaning, and call it business!

I usually delete those paragraphs.

Book Tickets to Underground Philosophy

On the podcast side, we’ve had two releases since our last dispatch. A return of neo-Jungian and cognitive scientist Anderson Todd. Another awesome and in my opinion critical context for understanding.

And most recently, the live podcast recording with the philosopher Cam Duffy and hyperhuman theorist Carl Hayden Smith. It explores similar themes, and in its own way makes a really interesting contribution to present threads of exploration at Voicecraft on the relationship between humanity, technology and nature.

Up next on the podcast is a dialogue recorded live with some of the Voicecraft Network in attendance with and , titled Mythos After Progress.

Moving forward we’ll be opening up participation to Voicecraft Network online sessions for friends of friends and subscribers to the Substack. Supporting Voicecraft on Patreon or by taking up a subscription here on Substack will help make that possible. And as always, the network itself is open for application. We’ve been developing the threads in the podcasts above for years. Our most recent session turned out to be on Technofeudalism and Magic. You can learn more here.

That link to Underground Philosophy on June 12 again is here.

Thank you to everyone who makes this context what it is.

Discernment on the Way,
Tim

If you’re in Melbourne for the 12th of June, our next event is on the critical topic of Technofeudalism. You can learn more and book tickets here.

We’ll be at The Castle again, and that means dinner, conversation, and creating connections in the field.

For those who can make it, I hope to see you there. I think there’s something special emerging.

Discernment on the Way,
Tim

If you’re from elsewhere in the world with a network in Melbourne, this event is a great opportunity to connect with some remarkable people. Please consider sharing this on!

Share

The next Voicecraft release is a follow up to last year’s Cultural Shamanism dialogue with , this time welcoming fellow member of the Voicecraft Network .

Subscribe now

Last week I also shared an offering for some one-and-one philosophical mentoring / guidance / coaching. You can read about that here.

Next up this Friday on the podcast is a foray into the world of magic, aliens and collective possession with Anderson Todd.

Discernment on the Way,
Tim

Book For Underground Philosophy

We’re almost in May.

Time rolls. Sometimes slowly near the threshold of a crest. Then it tumbles.

All of a sudden my beard is going grey.

And my Dad died at 61.

.

On May 8th I am hosting a new social occasion for Voicecraft in Melbourne.

If you’re called to make it, I hope you do.

https://www.voicecraft.io/events

Dinner, conversation, a centre, life.

Thought beyond war, shirking nothing.

Come be free to play.

Come feel thought move the body.

.

The last podcast release was a deep inquiry on ‘thinking influence beyond causation’, titled Designing for Synchronicity.

.

I am dialoguing at a day festival called People Eat Soul next Saturday. This link gives Voicecraft listeners a discount.

Spirit and soil seeking each other at this one, I think.

Discernment on the Way,

Usually, podcasts are structured something like an interview, where the purpose is to provide the context for a guest to broadcast their content.

Instead, Voicecraft invites participation in conversational alchemy. Here, the core focus is on expression that supports the insight and capacity of the conversation itself. This is the ideal basis from which VC then wants to broadcast into the public commons: in the mode of mutual participation in understanding. This mode of participation is contrasted with the mode of consumption, and runs in rough analogy to Fromm’s having and being mode distinction, wherein to ‘have’ is to acquire, consume, grasp at the external, rather than to relate with, be with, deepen into becoming and participation with.

Therefore, Voicecraft prioritises the art of connecting and relating (while at the same time differentiating) in the process of conversation. The intention is to encourage unique contribution from participants and the field as a whole, rather than collapse into a kind of flatness of ‘agreement’ or ‘disagreement’ that fails to deepen into understanding.)

From the perspective of broadcast success, there are consequences to pursuing this mode of discourse. It’s not what the algorithm wants (which means it’s not what we’re clicking and staying with.) Take Piers Morgan’s Uncensored, a popular forum for platforming different opinions on zeitgeist subjects. Imagine truly participating as an audience member with the energetic exchanges and ‘debate’ that takes place there. That would be the wrong mode to meet what’s on the menu. Despite great shows of rage and passion, differences in perspective are always kept beyond arms length between participants, far from the heart. Nothing is taken onboard. Little is heard apart from points of vulnerability to exploit.

From a viewer’s perspective, Piers Morgan works because you don’t need to open your heart or mind in order to receive its transmission, don’t need to commit much energy to follow along. It’s a cultural product to consume, for which you pay your sacred tuppence of attentional coin. But the exchange is predictable, your chances of leaving transformed are low. At best, maybe you come to map, judge, hear talking points, watch the unfolding of a peculiar yet standard, banal yet powerful, contradiction-ridden cultural game that’s not a game, or maybe it is. At worst, you get a kick, the activation you were craving, see who gets triggered, or click away, I don’t know. It’s a spectacle for the culture war and a map-maker for consummatory attentionalism. It’s low cost bliss point empty calorie corrosion. It’s par for the course.

The kind of conversational alchemy Voicecraft aspires to is quite different. While it can in principle cover the same content, its mode of expression communicates a different signature, frequency, or affect. To stay with it, the listener might need to do some chewing too. It might open up more uncertainty than usual, might invite an authenticity of response for which there is, quite naturally, no script.

Aspirationally, conversational alchemy opens space for anyone participating in the conversation (including the ‘host’) to share what’s necessary in order to orient themselves in the conversation. Practically, this could mean voicing that one feels like they do not presently have content to contribute, even if they are deeply engaged in receiving (and thereby influencing) the conversational flow.1 To many people it is surprising just how generative this simple expression can be.

It could also mean engaging in exploratory associations with the intention to crystallise a question or orientation for seeking. Sometimes this involves trading off clarity for the introduction of an as yet untrodden or still-metabolising complexity. This can ask more energy from the listener than they might usually expect. That is, particularly if they are operating in a mode used to quick and clean consumption, explanation2 or mapping, and the provisioning of answers from the expert, teacher, or guru.

From another angle, participating in conversational alchemy can involve the unique process of opening space for the emergent feeling and emotion (quality and intensity)3 that colours perception (very often without our knowing.) By doing this, we open a channel of attunement to the mystery, and make way for an additional path by which the novel can enter conversation. It also happens to be part of the process that supports the intuition and the intellect to function in conversation—allowing perception to deepen, increasing receptivity to the appearance of energy and information not necessarily graspable or mappable according to pre-loaded thought-structures.

To be clear, this is not to de-value the importance of thinking and more linear processes of rendering visible thought-structures to communication, nor to diminish their challenge. Voicecraft welcomes and honours disagreement and explanation, which can of course contribute to generativity. In fact, coming to sufficient clarity in order to recognise interesting difference is a natural eventuation of good conversation.4 But in general, cultural and intellectual exchange often fails to participate in the clarification together. Disagreement without clarity is prone to miss the other, and either strawman, or otherwise perform an overly lossy reduction of the relevant meaning. This itself can be of great value, but only if there is sufficient time, energy, trust and relational capacity in the conversation to address it (or otherwise it can be interesting as an artefact for others to view, reflect on, or perhaps mob / polarise over.) Hence the emphasis on tending to the process of mutual learning through connecting and relating to the subtle qualities, intensities, as well as conditioning thought-structures already present.

From here, the conversational field has the opportunity to draw inspiration from this as yet un-clarified potential, and ‘pick up’ on some of the coordinates gestured at by the expression so far, drawing others further along the journey of understanding, in support of a mutual ‘landing.'5 In other words, opening loops and closing them, or weaving threads of insight in coherent cycles of return-to-the-one that add to the collective understanding can be masterful contributions. But opening loops that others later help to close can sometimes be even more helpful for the collective intelligence of the total process, and is itself part of the mastery of crafting voice together. Put another way, guitar solos that sing unique, expansive and unexpected notes and progressions while managing to bring the divergent back home to convergence are worth aspiring to. But in conversational alchemy, even if we do not nail the landing ourselves, we give others the opportunity to pick up the thread, or introduce and re-introduce others so as to take the journey onward: enriching the context, re-calibrating the return, adjusting the orbit, contributing to the craft of voice.

Really these are just guidelines, pointers toward artfulness, and far from exhaustive of what comprises true mastery in conversation.6 Here we are speaking to the potential of conversation mostly from a 2nd person perspective, treating as vague and implicit a great many 3rd person factors that condition our speech and the possibility for connection in many of the actual realities we encounter in day to day life. Furthermore, the 1st person capacities of, for example, processing the encounter with difference, or re-sourcing orientation for expression through consultation with one’s more internal relational processes, are not much emphasised above, even though they are instrumental in the total process. Voicecraft cares to be in relation with the 1st, 2nd and 3rd person dynamics influencing conversation, and most who are in close relation to this project will have heard me say on many occasions that most of the magic of conversation happens before the conversation even begins, whether that be through more individual intentional preparation, or the cultivation of trust, or in the design of the context itself (to name a few elements). Part of me would prefer to sit on this than leave things half of half said. But maybe on this occasion, less than half said might be instructive toward the kind of invitation that’s on offer here and through the Voicecraft Network.

Anyway,

Below are some recent publications of Voicecraft media where different flavours of the aspiration toward conversational alchemy play out. In particular, the following conversation with , Pamela von Sabljar and exhibits a quality of generative exchange I am proud to share. It explores the primal, cultural, and psychological dimensions of war through the interplay of masculine and feminine energies.

The next conversation explores the deep philosophy of technology and design, in consideration of the needs of vitality and life. It’s for those with serious interest in thinking through the creation of structures that support thriving—and who want to incorporate more than just thinking in that process.

It welcomes Eric Harris-Braun, pioneering co-founder of Holochain and other software technologies, alongside Forrest Landry, philosopher and master craftsman. They’re joined by Voicecraft members Tom Lyons in the opening position, and the philosopher Daniel Garner of O.G. Rose. Eric’s previous appearance where we explored his philosophy of grammatics is here.

The previous main channel release to Transcendent Design welcomed Pamela von Sabljar into the Voicecraft field to explore the question, ‘What makes Men & Women Different’?

Preceding that, this conversation between Voicecraft Network members , Simon van der Els and Tom Lyons was shared to the Voicecraft Network channel. It was invited with the light framing of conversational alchemy in mind, and each of the gentlemen involved here embody elements of that process with great artfulness, in my opinion.

Finally, for those in Melbourne, I’ll be reaching out privately in the next few days to those who have attended a local VC event before. But I thought I’d mention here that some people very close to the Voicecraft context are hosting a festival at the end of April. I’ll be speaking in dialogue with a mystery philosopher there, and other Voicecraft members are involved too. I trust it will be a deeply enriching day. I have been given a discount code to use, which you can access with this link. (It shows once you go to purchase a ticket.)

Discernment on the Way,

It’s been over four months since the last Voicecraft Dispatch. You can expect these to return monthly as move into the new year.

Since then the main Voicecraft channel has published the following dialogues with guests and members including , , , , , Sean Kelly, Peter Sjosjedt-Hughes, Bernardo Kastrup, , Tom Lyons, Jess Vozel, Aspasia Karageorge, .

You can find the dialogues in rough chronological order underneath a selection of Network event invitations for January, followed by two public dialogues from the Voicecraft Network channel.

Upcoming Voicecraft Network Events In January (Online)

Freeform Session | Inner & Outer Development (EU / AU)

13th January

Culture Lab | Civilisation & Barbarity (US / AU)

22/23 January

Earth Session | (US / AU)

15/16 January

The Master & His Emissary | Book Club Freeform on Chapters 3-5 (US/AU)

12/13 January

Freeform | Origins of a Healer II (EU/AU)

TBA

Alchemising Consciousness

TBA

An updated VC Network landing page is coming soon, but for now you can still go to https://www.voicecraft.network to apply to become a member for 2025.

*Local events in Melbourne will return in 2025. Please respond to this email if you are interested to attend. The public invitations will be posted here, but there is also a separate email list for past local attendees.

Voicecraft Media Published Oct-Dec 2024

And on the Voicecraft Network YT channel, the public releases were:

And:

There were another 6-8 dialogues shared privately for members of the VC network across topics of Healing, Cultural Shamanism, Systems Innovation, Worship, Technology, AI.. and further sessions that were not recorded.

With tremendous gratitude to everyone who took part.

Discernment on the Way,

Underground Philosophy | Cultural Shamanism - Friday 13 September

As Underground Philosophy wraps up its fourth and final event in this series at The Motley Bauhaus, this one is for those who are interested to open up, with rigour and depth, to the tensions of our social world.

This will be an evening of dialogue on themes of culture war, speech, freedom and constraint, as we seek to bridge conversation across paradigms and connect participatory networks in Melbourne.

In opening up these living realities, we will dialogue with meanings of peace, healing, difference and potential, in consideration of power, identity, existential need, and the nature of emerging paradigms of technology, mediums of communication, and social / tribal patterns of reactivity.

We’ll build on themes explored so far in Underground Philosophy, and welcome the flow to audience participation as with before.

Learn more and book your tickets here.

Watch the first part of August’s Underground Philosophy on Consciousness below.

Upcoming Voicecraft Network Events (Online)

There are a few more sessions in the works which will be shared privately. But here’s a baseline orientation for September.

Freeform Session | The Shadow of Technology (EU Mornings / AU Evenings)

2 September

Expedition Session | The Shadow of Technology

4/5 September

Earth Session (US / AU) | hosted by Tom Lyons 

11/12 September

Freeform Session | Outsiders & Anomalies (EU Mornings / AU Evenings)

16 September

Earth Session (AU Mornings / US Afternoon - Evenings)

25/26 September

Alchemising Consciousness

28 September

Learn more about the Voicecraft Network and how to apply here.

Voicecraft Podcast Releases in August

In addition to the Underground Philosophy release on Consciousness above, public Voicecraft releases included dialogues with Jordan Hall, Forrest Landry, Joey Robinson, , Ferananda Ibarra, and Josh Field. Find them below.

Find the show notes for this podcast here.

Find the show notes for this podcast here.

There were also private recordings shared post live podcast recording, Scaling Mysticism and Underground Philosophy: The Mystery of Consciousness.

Discernment on the Way,

There are also dialogues to come with of Future Fossils and Humans On The Loop, whom I had the pleasure of meeting this week. A real highlight.

And while we’re still a few days away and anything could yet happen, I’ve been looking forward to a rare conversation with Jordan Hall, John Vervaeke, and Forrest Landry — thanks to a nudge back in that direction by Joey Robinson, who will also be joining the context. It’s been three years now since I recorded a series of dialogues between John and Forrest, with this one in particular in truly rare company of intellectually powerful dialogic compressions of many of the social and existential dynamics facing civilisation.

Back to the present, the latest Voicecraft podcast welcomes on the politics, psychology and philosophy of the Overton window: the present limits of socially acceptable policy and opinion.

The second half of this is philosophy in the lab, connecting Alex’s thinking on metaphysics, limits and frequency to the political dimension. You will find some of Alex’s related thinking on ’s The Net conversations and inside ’s Philosophy Portal.

The release prior featured the aforementioned O.G. Rose and Matt Segall, which you can listen to below. Across audio and YT platforms it has been received with great interest, and it was a pleasure to connect Daniel and Matt. I’d also like to thank Tom Lyons for his graciousness in participating in a constrained collective intelligence role in this dialogue. The Voicecraft Network will be increasing its experimentation with enabling constraints of role based participation in some, but by no means all, session types.

Upcoming invitations…

The Voicecraft Network remains open to expressions of interest to join. But the principle invitation today may well be one of the last few public facing local Voicecraft events of the year: Underground Philosophy: Consciousness.

As you may be able to tell from the work shared above, there is a tremendous amount of value in cultivation and expression across the Voicecraft context as a whole. There are organisations funded to the tune of 6 and 7 figures that are not able to offer pathways into the genuine depth of process-relational philosophical praxis that Voicecraft does. It doesn’t feed those pathways by spoon, because they are real.

And so the next Underground Philosophy, which I introduced in the video below back in June, hasn’t been shouting from the rooftops to convince anyone of the value on offer. Last time I advertised a guest (though most tickets were bought already), they didn’t arrive.

In my personal experience of living here in Melbourne since 2016, I haven’t encountered an open event on this topic which has opened to the depth I once hoped for, and which will be welcome on Friday August 16. I’ll be joined by the philosopher, counsellor and independent researcher Cam Duffy for the first part of the evening.

You can learn more about Underground Philosophy and purchase your tickets here.

My sense is of all the local public events so far, this one is closest to the wilderness that the Voicecraft context is most capable of slowing down time with.

You could be a student or professor of the philosophy of mind at a top academic institution, allergic to academia but sincere in your care for participation in life and understanding, or early through mature in meditative or contemplative spiritual practices.. I believe there is an equal chance this event is worth attending if you care about the mystery of consciousness and contributing to contexts that can genuinely share space with its significance.

The catch is, you probably will have had to engage with the resonance across multiple Voicecraft public or private contexts to know that.

For the rest, it’s an additional step through uncertainty.

Discernment on the Way,

Get An Underground Pass

Underground Philosophy | Consciousness - Friday 16 August

What does it mean to be conscious? What is the relationship between consciousness and the unconscious? What is the connection between consciousness and conscience? In relating with these questions we will explore themes of memory, forgetfulness, and gnosis. In so doing, we will seek a vital connection with mystery, and metabolise the mess of what it means for identity to participate in transformation. As has been the case with Underground Philosophy, you are invited to slow down and cultivate trust in the process of feeling lost and found again.

Learn more and book your tickets here.

Underground Philosophy | Friday September 13

Book your ticket in advance here.

Upcoming Voicecraft Network Events (Online)

Live Podcast Recording | w/ &

31 July / 1 August

Culture Lab | Scaling Mysticism

August 4/5

Freeform Session | (EU Mornings / AU Evenings)

August 5

Live Podcast Recording | w/ , Ibarra , and TBA

August 7/8

Earth Session (AU Mornings / US Afternoon - Evenings)

August 14/15

Earth Session (EU Mornings / AU Evenings)

August 19

Alchemising Consciousness

August 31

Learn more about the Voicecraft Network and how to apply here.

The most recent Voicecraft Podcast was recorded at a Freeform Session w/ , Simon van der Els, Valeria Ferreira, and Jurnee Manu.

Before that was a rich dialogue with Guy Sengstock, founder of Circling and a real dialogic master.

Discernment on the Way,

.

Last week saw two waypoint pieces of Voicecraft media make it into the world. One with John Vervaeke, a unique public intellectual, outstanding philosopher and cognitive scientist. It was important for a few reasons. The main ones I think the conversation itself should speak for. But it was also important because of the history of connection between John and Voicecraft, and additionally given the respect with which I hold John’s work and projects in the world.

I first recorded with John in 2018, and there have been followups, including with Nora Bateson and a few with Forrest Landry. But otherwise not much contact for a good few years, and that made for a valuable dialogue which began with reflection on the evolution and self-correction of John’s work in that period of time.

From there it moved into an articulation of various distinctions I think are critical to relating with the evolving ecology of network philosophy, social process and the cultivation of culture.

Learn more in the show notes.

—

The second piece of waypoint media is cut from June’s live event in Melbourne: Underground Philosophy. It wasn’t a straightforward decision to publish. But on balance, it still feels like there’s some worthwhile signal to share here — to collaborators and those who care overseas, as well as for those more locally who might appreciate hearing the signal. Listeners may notice shoutouts to and an unfortunately average invocation of ’s FreQ theory. Might need to brush up on my terms there.

The next Underground Philosophy will circle themes of indigeneity, the sacred, and socio-technological evolution. A core part of the evening will feature dialogue with Tyson Yunkaporta, author of Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World, and the more recent Right Story, Wrong Story: Adventures in Indigenous Thinking.

Tyson is a uniquely generative voice that bridges liminal worlds and many bases of knowledge. I recently had a chance to reconnect with Tyson, spurring this invitation, and it’s an honour to sit down with him next Friday 12th July in the intimate new home of Underground Philosophy at The Motley Bauhaus. An intention crystallised in 2020, playing out 4 years later.

The brilliant Will Tait will be returning to play keyboard intermittently throughout the evening, and as with last time out, will offer a short improvisational response to the dialogue before we go to interlude.

There were some wonderful connections made last time out, and I’m looking forward to strengthening those new and returning.

Book your tickets

Discernment on the Way,

Learn more and get tickets here. Read more in the previous post here.

—

Recent VC podcasts include the following with Zak Stein, which was broken up into two parts.

This one began what I believe to be an essential grapple with the tensions of participating in the well treatment and evolution of lineage traditions and religious worldviews. For the astute, one key dynamic at stake here is the ethics of teacherly authority embodied in praxis (rather than proselytised by mere theory). The dialogue began to open this up well, but I felt where it needed to go wasn’t somewhere I felt appropriate to share publicly in pure broadcast. If you feel piqued or interested by that, perhaps you might consider that a call to step closer into participation. If you don’t, then that is a partial but relevant factor that contributes to my choosing not to share publicly, and that’s all good.

—

The next release was a dialogue recorded May 24 in the VC Network for a session titled Real Violence: Israel, Palestine, Justice & Justification.

It invited a deep process of relating and understanding with the intensities of this context. If you seek to slow down for some mindful processing of the reality and cultural milieu of this context you might find something here you haven’t found anywhere else. I am immensely grateful to everyone who showed up to contribute and receive. You will find reflection on dynamics apparent in recent Piers Morgan ‘debates’ between the son of a Hamas founder, Mosab Hassan Yousef and ‘left-wing’ counterparts Rahma Zein and Abby Martin.

For those who listen: there’s a 15 minute stretch just before halfway through that was personally valuable for processing, but which ultimately comes through as a stretch on the speculative / hopeful side that is probably misleading (though harmless) for most, but I hope remains valuable for those following closely. While my sense of the merest glimmer of non-performative and non-instrumentalising care on the part of Rahma Zein regarding the context of Yousef’s expression is likely just that — the very merest of glimmers at best — I do still think it’s profoundly interesting to consider a sense of the ‘real’ intimated in interaction between the two through the lens of a longing for the manifestation of genuine, mutual receptivity and response to the context of tragedy and value implicit in the perspective of those involved. In our session, Tyler in particular gives important voice to the ideological / identity / social commitments that render genuine receptivity between Zein and Yousef highly unlikely. But this does not discount the value in the inquiry as to ‘what’ might call us deeper into attention and energetic investment / hope here. These sessions are shared, at least in meaningful part, with hope to connect to those seeking a maturity and slowness of process in service of psychological and social health. Thank you to VC members , and everyone else (without Substacks and locatable in the show notes) for your contributions.

Discernment on the Way,
Tim