Love it. What kind of support are you looking for in developing and putting to life the H2plus curriculum?
I think I saw you were reading Kingsley’s Catafalque, how do you think about the H2plus curriculum and his thesis that ‘salvation’, i.e. saving the world, must occur through a chosen inner suffering in order to reclaim the sacred? To quote Jung: "Man doesn't become enlightened by imagining figures of light but by making the darkness conscious"
On p. 299 he says "… our only business now as true humans is to give up all our reasoning and rationalizing and go searching, instead, for magic. I's to sacrifice our cravings for comfort, to abandon our illusions of science and submit to the incomprehen-sible, to become Christs by letting ourselves be crucified all alone. It's to face the need to return, in full consciousness, to the primordial point of origin where our own will is suddenly suspended and the mind stops still; to accept the unbearable tension of being transformed, inside the thoughtless awareness of this present moment, into what we always have been… ‘the task is to give birth to the old in a new time.’"
I think he is very much aligned with your H2plus point of going beyond systems change, but he might be very much on the spiritual-only end of the axis on your point of goiing beyond spiritual bypassing.
The number 132 just struck me as THE number: as well as being 11x12 (the asymmetric eminently divisible multiplied by the symmetric eminently indivisible), in a different light it's 123 out of order.
Finally made it through this journey with Threeness!...and relished the final transcendentally fundamental moments.! And the next day I came across an interview with Jeremy Johnson (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xuaE-xGe3K0)... that echoes the concluding inclusions in Jonathan's piece here about system-architecting. It is a rich joy to feel the flavor of the True be showing itself: Here's how Jeremy describes some ways to view this:
He thinks "the biggest difference (is Gebser's vs Ken Wilber's approach) is that Gebser appears on the surface to be this very dense difficult thinker, very precise, very meticulous. He's looking at language and etymology etc. He has these structures of consciousness. On the surface he seems kind of like Wilber in many ways, in that he's kind of creating this system. But I think Gebser’s ultimate orientation is not to construct a system. It's to allow thinking and concepts to move much more freely…... to go beyond system, to allow thinking to be friendly to that which is beyond system-building. So Gebser is not a system builder per se. He wants his work, if we were imagining theory construction to be like architecture, Gebser is very much interested in a kind of Frank Lloyd Wright way, "let's open it up and connect in a dynamic way with what we're in relationship with."
"And I would say, and this is my (Jeremy's) own discernment with Wilber, there’s a sense with Wilber that there's a kind of all-encompassing theory of everything, that there's a sort of maximum explanatory potential that this system can offer, or can explain everything, at least conceptually. And you won't find that in Gebser. You won't find a compulsion towards that in Gebser…... the way he's using system construction and concepts is for very different purposes, it is to open us up to, to help us land in, the world again, and engage with the present in a more concrete sense. "
Thank you Jonathan for this series, and for all of the many references and resources!
For me, one of the best sources for achieving the H2Plus project that gives due weight to systems, souls, and society is the work of the sadly under-appreciated Peter Pogany. Primarily from his two books ("Rethinking the World" and "Havoc: Thy Name is Twenty-First Century!"), but also his paper submissions to the Jean Gebser Society from 2009 to 2013.
For Systems, he saw the world through a thermodynamic lens (cultural evolution as deterministic chaos, ala Ilya Prigogine) and identified 2 Global Systems so far, with a forthcoming Global System 3 to come, after a chaotic transition (a "time between worlds" that we've already entered).
For Souls, he saw that this new Global System 3 would require Gebser's integral structure of consciousness as a necessary manifestation for individuals.
For Society, he saw that the integral structure would have to manifest at this level at the same time, where the "Saga" (story) will have to be transnationally, transcocially, and transgenerationally altruistic.
He understood the problem of the H2Minus Vortex well in his own way, as he understood the need and the challenge of changing systems, souls, and society altogether at the same time.
Here's a one paragraph example:
"For GS3 socioeconomic behavior (along with the new global system's epiphenomena) to emerge, individuals will be challenged to cross a cultural evolutionary barrier as significant as going from four to two legs was in biological evolution. There too, judgment as to which one was better had to be suspended until the transition was well on its way and irreversible. Without 'keeping an open mind,' allowing operational circumstances to prompt standing on the two hind legs, the transition would have never occurred. Natural selection acting on individual adaptations accumulated the evidence., but successive generations of organisms still had to live in a 'no-man's land' between the conservative past approach and the incomparably more advantageous new one. An analogue situation is seen in the transition to GS3 consciousness and collective orientation, the psychological completion of the indicated decisive moment in visibly obvious biological evolution. Being able to draw on hitherto untapped potential of Fitzgeraldian Intelligence* will become a vital selection criterion for the species."
*Fitzgeraldian Intelligence: "...the faculty of leaving certain competing ideas...nonconflated and unbrokered; the readiness to tolerate a conundrum without dialectical resolution or relegation of the whole problem to the waste basket."
My Substack (still sadly just a single post so far) is attempting to revive interest in Peter Pogany.
While respecting your hesitations about clarity, for me this is your clearest piece yet. Okay, if you don't want to be Cartesian, preferring 4-en autopoesis, there's Descartes' claimed split between our perceptions of the inner world (soul) and the outer world (systems; I don't recall he cared about society). His inner world, he claimed, is without "extension." Yet we only perceive the "outer" world by projection of our expectations; e.g. to perceive a dog is to expect dog-like behavior and properties, a rock, likewise. All worldly perceptual recognition is imagination, expectation of what we sense -- projection (although very close to the bone in interioception). Is "inner" space then other than projection of our own possibilities -- including of speech -- into this perceived world? The British psychologist Max Velmans has long argued this is all in the same space. So, is our "inward" recognition of ourselves but our reflection in our forward projection of our prospects into the single experienced world we perceive?
Three is a two dimensional structure, with 3 places and 3 relationships. When another dimension is created, there are now 4 places, 6 binary relationships and 4 trinities. Four is not necessarily a better representation but certainly more complicated. I have wondered if you have considered geometric models as you have written about three. Thanks for your work.
Macro-poesis (systems), meso-poesis (society), micro-poesis (souls), and meta-poesis (and on potentially to the Flip).
I'm a fanatic of Thinking, and an admirer of your good self and some others I find in the free access current field. It's almost enough to encourage one to demur from thinking oneself! A small conundrum. Derivative and original. To disseminate or not to disseminate, when one cannot readily 'speak back in'. And with what impunity to presume one could or should. All on pedestals or none. Each on, to others, but more, to one another. A dynamic of mutual elevation. But there must be mutuality. And so again, what is the actual shape of the space of thinking one engages with from outside the influential sphere? Can the circle be realistically considered closed through the meta-poetic lens, (open in time yet closed constitutively)?
Thanks for sharing your 'words next to each other'.
This is a beautiful meditation. Almost symphonic in how it plays with forms of threeness: conceptual, historical, experiential, and symbolic.
I wanted to gently offer a contribution from my own work, one that’s deeply resonant with the spirit of this piece.
In my framework called Synthesis, I propose that threeness isn’t just psychologically satisfying or mythologically durable, it’s structurally necessary for any coherent account of value, action, and persistence.
I call the foundational triad The Trifecta:
Vita Sentit - Life perceives.
Without life, there is no value. No perspective, no meaning.
Vita Aedificat - Life builds.
Continuity demands structure. Order resists entropy.
Vita Affirmat - Life affirms itself.
A system that does not regard itself as good cannot persist.
It’s not mystical or moral, it’s ontological. "Good" becomes structurally defined as what enables life's ongoing expression. From that, you get a clean and universal metric for coherence, emergence, and transformation.
You speak of threeness evolving into fourness. I love that. In Synthesis terms, it’s the Trifecta becoming action, value becoming trajectory. Systems that hold this triad tend to evolve. Those that don’t, fragment.
Your reflections reminded me that this isn’t just conceptual, it's existential. Thank you for holding that space so gracefully.
Love it. What kind of support are you looking for in developing and putting to life the H2plus curriculum?
I think I saw you were reading Kingsley’s Catafalque, how do you think about the H2plus curriculum and his thesis that ‘salvation’, i.e. saving the world, must occur through a chosen inner suffering in order to reclaim the sacred? To quote Jung: "Man doesn't become enlightened by imagining figures of light but by making the darkness conscious"
On p. 299 he says "… our only business now as true humans is to give up all our reasoning and rationalizing and go searching, instead, for magic. I's to sacrifice our cravings for comfort, to abandon our illusions of science and submit to the incomprehen-sible, to become Christs by letting ourselves be crucified all alone. It's to face the need to return, in full consciousness, to the primordial point of origin where our own will is suddenly suspended and the mind stops still; to accept the unbearable tension of being transformed, inside the thoughtless awareness of this present moment, into what we always have been… ‘the task is to give birth to the old in a new time.’"
I think he is very much aligned with your H2plus point of going beyond systems change, but he might be very much on the spiritual-only end of the axis on your point of goiing beyond spiritual bypassing.
The number 132 just struck me as THE number: as well as being 11x12 (the asymmetric eminently divisible multiplied by the symmetric eminently indivisible), in a different light it's 123 out of order.
Finally made it through this journey with Threeness!...and relished the final transcendentally fundamental moments.! And the next day I came across an interview with Jeremy Johnson (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xuaE-xGe3K0)... that echoes the concluding inclusions in Jonathan's piece here about system-architecting. It is a rich joy to feel the flavor of the True be showing itself: Here's how Jeremy describes some ways to view this:
He thinks "the biggest difference (is Gebser's vs Ken Wilber's approach) is that Gebser appears on the surface to be this very dense difficult thinker, very precise, very meticulous. He's looking at language and etymology etc. He has these structures of consciousness. On the surface he seems kind of like Wilber in many ways, in that he's kind of creating this system. But I think Gebser’s ultimate orientation is not to construct a system. It's to allow thinking and concepts to move much more freely…... to go beyond system, to allow thinking to be friendly to that which is beyond system-building. So Gebser is not a system builder per se. He wants his work, if we were imagining theory construction to be like architecture, Gebser is very much interested in a kind of Frank Lloyd Wright way, "let's open it up and connect in a dynamic way with what we're in relationship with."
"And I would say, and this is my (Jeremy's) own discernment with Wilber, there’s a sense with Wilber that there's a kind of all-encompassing theory of everything, that there's a sort of maximum explanatory potential that this system can offer, or can explain everything, at least conceptually. And you won't find that in Gebser. You won't find a compulsion towards that in Gebser…... the way he's using system construction and concepts is for very different purposes, it is to open us up to, to help us land in, the world again, and engage with the present in a more concrete sense. "
Thank you Jonathan for this series, and for all of the many references and resources!
For me, one of the best sources for achieving the H2Plus project that gives due weight to systems, souls, and society is the work of the sadly under-appreciated Peter Pogany. Primarily from his two books ("Rethinking the World" and "Havoc: Thy Name is Twenty-First Century!"), but also his paper submissions to the Jean Gebser Society from 2009 to 2013.
For Systems, he saw the world through a thermodynamic lens (cultural evolution as deterministic chaos, ala Ilya Prigogine) and identified 2 Global Systems so far, with a forthcoming Global System 3 to come, after a chaotic transition (a "time between worlds" that we've already entered).
For Souls, he saw that this new Global System 3 would require Gebser's integral structure of consciousness as a necessary manifestation for individuals.
For Society, he saw that the integral structure would have to manifest at this level at the same time, where the "Saga" (story) will have to be transnationally, transcocially, and transgenerationally altruistic.
He understood the problem of the H2Minus Vortex well in his own way, as he understood the need and the challenge of changing systems, souls, and society altogether at the same time.
Here's a one paragraph example:
"For GS3 socioeconomic behavior (along with the new global system's epiphenomena) to emerge, individuals will be challenged to cross a cultural evolutionary barrier as significant as going from four to two legs was in biological evolution. There too, judgment as to which one was better had to be suspended until the transition was well on its way and irreversible. Without 'keeping an open mind,' allowing operational circumstances to prompt standing on the two hind legs, the transition would have never occurred. Natural selection acting on individual adaptations accumulated the evidence., but successive generations of organisms still had to live in a 'no-man's land' between the conservative past approach and the incomparably more advantageous new one. An analogue situation is seen in the transition to GS3 consciousness and collective orientation, the psychological completion of the indicated decisive moment in visibly obvious biological evolution. Being able to draw on hitherto untapped potential of Fitzgeraldian Intelligence* will become a vital selection criterion for the species."
*Fitzgeraldian Intelligence: "...the faculty of leaving certain competing ideas...nonconflated and unbrokered; the readiness to tolerate a conundrum without dialectical resolution or relegation of the whole problem to the waste basket."
My Substack (still sadly just a single post so far) is attempting to revive interest in Peter Pogany.
https://daviddmacleod.substack.com/p/drifting-toward-a-new-form-of-self
My older Wordpress blog has a lot more on him.
https://integralpermaculture.wordpress.com/peter-pogany/
While respecting your hesitations about clarity, for me this is your clearest piece yet. Okay, if you don't want to be Cartesian, preferring 4-en autopoesis, there's Descartes' claimed split between our perceptions of the inner world (soul) and the outer world (systems; I don't recall he cared about society). His inner world, he claimed, is without "extension." Yet we only perceive the "outer" world by projection of our expectations; e.g. to perceive a dog is to expect dog-like behavior and properties, a rock, likewise. All worldly perceptual recognition is imagination, expectation of what we sense -- projection (although very close to the bone in interioception). Is "inner" space then other than projection of our own possibilities -- including of speech -- into this perceived world? The British psychologist Max Velmans has long argued this is all in the same space. So, is our "inward" recognition of ourselves but our reflection in our forward projection of our prospects into the single experienced world we perceive?
Thanks for this. The nature of reality is truly ineffable it's true. But it's ours to play with!
Three is a two dimensional structure, with 3 places and 3 relationships. When another dimension is created, there are now 4 places, 6 binary relationships and 4 trinities. Four is not necessarily a better representation but certainly more complicated. I have wondered if you have considered geometric models as you have written about three. Thanks for your work.
Is it "What happens when you paint everything into a corner?" Merv?
Macro-poesis (systems), meso-poesis (society), micro-poesis (souls), and meta-poesis (and on potentially to the Flip).
I'm a fanatic of Thinking, and an admirer of your good self and some others I find in the free access current field. It's almost enough to encourage one to demur from thinking oneself! A small conundrum. Derivative and original. To disseminate or not to disseminate, when one cannot readily 'speak back in'. And with what impunity to presume one could or should. All on pedestals or none. Each on, to others, but more, to one another. A dynamic of mutual elevation. But there must be mutuality. And so again, what is the actual shape of the space of thinking one engages with from outside the influential sphere? Can the circle be realistically considered closed through the meta-poetic lens, (open in time yet closed constitutively)?
Thanks for sharing your 'words next to each other'.
This is a beautiful meditation. Almost symphonic in how it plays with forms of threeness: conceptual, historical, experiential, and symbolic.
I wanted to gently offer a contribution from my own work, one that’s deeply resonant with the spirit of this piece.
In my framework called Synthesis, I propose that threeness isn’t just psychologically satisfying or mythologically durable, it’s structurally necessary for any coherent account of value, action, and persistence.
I call the foundational triad The Trifecta:
Vita Sentit - Life perceives.
Without life, there is no value. No perspective, no meaning.
Vita Aedificat - Life builds.
Continuity demands structure. Order resists entropy.
Vita Affirmat - Life affirms itself.
A system that does not regard itself as good cannot persist.
It’s not mystical or moral, it’s ontological. "Good" becomes structurally defined as what enables life's ongoing expression. From that, you get a clean and universal metric for coherence, emergence, and transformation.
You speak of threeness evolving into fourness. I love that. In Synthesis terms, it’s the Trifecta becoming action, value becoming trajectory. Systems that hold this triad tend to evolve. Those that don’t, fragment.
Your reflections reminded me that this isn’t just conceptual, it's existential. Thank you for holding that space so gracefully.
https://synnthesis.substack.com/p/synthesis-the-axiom-of-life