Lakefront

Inner Shift for Outer Change?

I was at Emerge Lakefront this weekend, a new - well, what exactly is it?

It’s a huge building, a nature sanctuary, an ecosystem, a community, a venue, a headquarters with lots of quarters but no head, a playground for grown-ups, a liminal hostel, a womb for the laptop class, a refuge for burnout recovery, a metamodern monastery, a soon-to-be institute, maybe, a lovely place to take a dog for a walk, or even a cat for a walk (I saw it) and for many it’s simply home.

Lakefront is about 20 minutes south of central Stockholm and used to be a training centre for deacons; now it is being repurposed for spiritual training for social service, reimagined in a 21st-century context. The recently renovated place has abundant internal and external space, and the capacity to host around seventy people living there. This is a significant new resource for our network, which I hope will go from strength to strength. The lake, the sauna, the restaurant, the forest, the abiding peace… I am not a vibes mechanic, nor a vibes connoisseur, but the vibes are sweet.

I felt a little weary before I got there, but I emerged after three days renewed by all the serendipities that happen when you open yourself to new experiences and allow the pattern of your life to find you again.

Tomas Bjorkman - international man of mystery with a fondness for San Pellegrino sparkling water and round tables with a specified diameter - had invited a small cluster of organisations and initiatives in Sweden, Germany and the UK that he had some role in helping to create, including Perspectiva and The Inner Development Goals. We were there to reconnect, share our joys, sorrows, and burnout stories, reflect on the last decade and look forward to what’s next, through mutual aid and joint initiatives.

Tomas Bjorkman and your scribe in a restaurant in Notting Hill, London, in the early summer of 2015. That mint tea looks good, and we had just come up with ‘systems, souls and society’ as our source code.

On Friday, the group and a few Lakefront residents began with an antidebate, which has matured as a process. The statement chosen by the group was suitably intense: Only a new religion will save the world.

I was strongly against the statement at first, mostly due to its implicit ‘one worlding’ and messianic properties. However, it is possible to see religion as something more like ‘practices informed by a worldview’ or ‘the sacred canopy’ or even as ‘capitalism’, in which case the statement means: only something other than capitalism can save the world, which I would tend to agree with. Propositionally speaking, a great deal depends on what we mean by ‘religion’, ‘save’, ‘world’, ‘new’ and ‘only’, and those things all came up, but the antidebate is mostly a form of embodied, relational and participatory knowing where we acknowledge such ambiguities but don’t get stuck in them. The subsequent “taking a stand” phase of the process proved a remarkably generative mixture of tears and laughter. We were all left unsettled, but in a good way. We are still trying to figure out how best to close the closing circle, because the antidebate does not seek resolution as such. The latest suggestion is to ask the whole group to think of their five favourite vegetables, to shift the frame of reference and allow for some levity and collective release.

Courgette. Red Cabbage. Carrots. Leeks. White asparagus.

There was one antidebate participant who came from outside, called Eric. He is a philosophy PhD student in Stockholm, and he gave me perhaps the best compliment a writer can receive. He said he sometimes browses The Joyous Struggle not for any particular information, but just to feel at home. The praise that touches us most is always specific in that kind of way.

The workshop group shared convivial times that evening, and we enjoyed soft cheese and spicy green tomato pickle (with crunchy breadsticks) for dessert. The next morning, we were inside, giving five-minute commentaries on our work predicament, and we shared some nostalgic photographs from the inception of our projects. After that, most of our discussions took place under a large maple tree on a hill rolling down to the lake. Frederik Livheim from the Karolinska Institute joined us by paddling from his home across the lake and leaving his small boat next to the tree. I could not quite believe what I was seeing at the time, and it felt like something out of the children’s classic, The Wind in the Willows, but maybe it’s how we are meant to live.

We looked like an unlikely bunch to save the world from itself, but it was good to be together with others who try. I had an emotional and physical crash on the afternoon of the first day, and fell asleep on the grass while the group conversation was underway. This might have seemed rude in other contexts, but in a forgiving group of fellow travellers, it was received more like a sign that I felt welcome. I was woken by the sound of someone, I think Swan Dao, saying: “Jonathan, we’re going for a walk. You can stay here but you might want to move because you’re in the sun.” Then I overheard Steffen Stauber from Germany saying: “Yeah, we don’t want him to get one of those English sun tans!” I was sleepy, but I smiled subversively and muttered: “I’m Scottish” before shuffling myself under the shade of the tree and dozing some more.

I won’t get into the details of the discussions, but there were some highlights where I felt critical questions arose as patterns that connected our different initiatives.

I have written and spoken widely now about the flip, the formation, and the fun. Roughly, that means a transformation in consciousness, a planetary praxis of lifelong education, and a regenerative political economy, respectively. My life and work have taught me that these are the fundamental contours of three interrelated things that have to happen for the 21st century to unfold as something other than a catastrophe. We need to wake up and know what it means to be awake, we need to learn as if life depended on it, and we need to throw a better party, by which I mean offer a political vision informed by a sensibility that gradually attracts billions towards it.

I am very fond of the people I spent time with at Lakefront, and everyone there has significant qualities, but over the years, I have noticed certain patterns in what might be called Northern European Consciousness Culture, and I don’t always feel at ease with them. My experience of Swedish culture especially, is that it is intelligent, warm, playful and wonderfully hospitable, but sometimes it is also a little self-conscious, earnest, and painfully secular. I sometimes feel the search for meaning in these groups makes religious longing - the thirst for God - conspicuous by its absence. The language of ‘inner shift for outer change’ encapsulates this problem. It just feels so insipid to me, and lacking in the depth of risk and commitment our existential predicament and historical moment call for. I don’t want inner development, values, and pickled herring. I want God and enlightened anarchy, with a stiff single malt.

To put it another way, I was growing restless and uncomfortable in some discussions because there was too much talk of formation (‘inner development’) and not enough of the flip (metanoia) or the fun (political vision, perhaps even anarchism). Most of the initiatives share a belief that meaningful change in the outside world requires some kind of inner work, and everyone assembled agrees with that. But while that message was radical a decade ago, and informed my work on Spiritualise, I feel it is depotentiated and underspecified today in a world of surveillance capitalism and incipient technofascism.

Lakefront’s motto, “Inner Shift for Outer Change”, is not wrong, and I understand it has been kept generic to attract larger audiences; for me, however, it is the starting point of a conversation that rapidly needs to move on. So one night, after a timely glass of Cabernet Sauvignon from one of those cardboard box wines you get at parties, I started to ask people what for them is the flip, and what for them is the fun. Everyone played along, and I’m glad. Because if you can’t specify that, I fear our success might amount to becoming increasingly well adjusted to a deluded and dysfunctional world.

In light of the problems with philanthropy and the power of capital, I also tried to focus our discussion on what role civil society might play in changing the relationship between the for-profit and not-for-profit worlds. To operationalise this point further: should charities refuse donations that feel inadequate to their needs, to signal to donors that they are not willing to be complicit in merely performing change while struggling to survive any more? What can a venture capitalist who understands the metacrisis do to move the world in the right direction? If any of us woke up with a billion pounds to spend to follow our vision, what would we do with it and why? It seems to me we have to keep asking these questions. There can be no paradigmatic change without transformation in our relationship to money.

**

There are a few more things to share. There was a conversation about men and women in the sauna that led me to offer an Irish goodbye (when you leave without telling anyone). There is too much context to share to properly explain what happened, but in essence, I joined in on a conversation between two guys who were unsuspectingly dominating the conversational space in a sauna for eight people. I think the conversation lasted between five and ten minutes, and it might have seemed insignificant, but it was recast as a microcosm of the world going awry because men can’t stop themselves from bloviating.

We were indeed prattling on, I think about whether businesses could serve the greater good in the context of an extractive economy, without any great awareness of who else was in the (small) room or emotional sensitivity of the topic, and the spatial dynamics were such that it seemed everyone had to endure it. I had tuned into the substance of the conversation but not the social context, and I piped up while squeezed into the top corner with my knees up. Later, I was told I became part of the problem and should instead have redirected the conversation so that everyone was introduced and felt included. I agreed that I had been complicit in a misplaced conversation and apologised, and I accepted the wider validity of the point, but I also felt a little persecuted and bemused. I imagined how comical this scenario would seem to people on the political right, and I was reminded that progressive groups often undermine themselves with this kind of righteous socio-introspection.

I woke earlier that day at 4.30am for my flight. The sauna was my first downtime of the day, and I hoped I might be forgiven for lapsing into a kind of habit energy, but maybe not. Maybe that sauna was indeed a prefigurative arena. Maybe we can only change the world one conversation at a time, maybe these teachable moments truly are worthy of analysis? But that’s an exacting curriculum, and it feels like a kind of stasis.

In any case, with care not to excuse myself, I took the risk of asking the two women who made this observation: Are you really without agency here? Are you sure you couldn’t have interrupted the guys who got talking, or joined in somehow? Was it really my responsibility to steer the sauna conversation for the greater good? This inquiry was mostly friendly, but it was also laced with pain and memory. Then the women who had been most insistent that I take responsibility said I just didn’t get it, and it hurt, because I do try.

I told her she may well be right, but I was getting poached, and I had to go and jump in the lake, so I did. Afterwards, wounded and enjoying the cool air as a kind of tonic, I did not feel like returning to the sauna to say goodnight.

The view from inside the sauna that overlooks the lake.

I won’t share the details of the last thing I want to share, because it’s precious and needs a little husbanding, but I am grateful to Mila Aliana, an indigenous elder, for mentioning two powerful words near the end of our time together. Those two words - an adjective and a noun - felt eerily relevant, and they were received as a kind of enchantment that made me reconceive an issue that had felt stuck for several months. Those words are also an image, a scientific fact, and an evocative metaphor, and I believe they might be the name for a new project. But I’m going to keep them to myself for a while, so that their magic can work on me a little longer, and so that I might protect them and only share them when the time is right.

I went home with a tired mind and a happy soul. I had a middle seat on the flight back to London, and my head flopped around like a balloon on a short lead as I tried to sleep, but when I woke two hours later for landing, there was a bottle of water and a shortbread biscuit on my table, and it felt like someone was looking out for me.

I might have taken a taxi home, but I didn’t want the adventure to end so soon. It was dark outside, but I took a scenic route nonetheless, a wayward urban safari from Heathrow to Putney, via the Elizabeth line to Paddington, the Circle Line to South Kensington, the 14 bus to Putney station, and then, finally, a fifteen-minute pilgrimage home, to stretch out the wonderful Lakefront feeling just a little bit longer.