Feeling the Future

On the opening of living time.

“They and they only can acquire the philosophic imagination, the sacred power of self-intuition, who within themselves can interpret and understand the symbol, that the wings of the air-sylph are forming within the skin of the caterpillar; those only, who feel in their own spirits the same instinct, which impels the chrysalis of the horned fly to leave room in the involucrum for antennae yet to come. They know and feel that potential works in them, even as the actual works on them!”

–Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria

“I am like a flag surrounded by distances.
I sense the winds that are coming, and must live them,
while the things down below don’t yet stir…”

–Rilke, Presentmient¹

I’ll start by echoing my own words from an old tweet.

A creative urge swells, something is expressed.

A critical faculty distrusts the impulse, thinking better of it. Resists. Restrains.

Later, when I let my guard down, creative energies start driving—as if of their own accord—in the exact same dreaded direction.

On one hand, the above words seem to describe the sort of creative lure that I’ll be exploring in this article’s content.

On the other, the description applies to my present experience of creating this entry at the level of process. I feel the familiar pressure of that critical resistance as I constructively witness this article growing right before me, suspecting I may think better of it and leave it unpublished.

Already, this act of writing is growing into a performative instance of the very thing it is aiming to elucidate—a curious convergence of content and process.

I would correct my prior statement on one point, however, in that I don’t actually think that “creative energies” drive, as if pushing from behind. Rather, they lure, they attract, they seduce.

I am often rather uncomfortable with the hidden whisperer’s angelic signals and their persuasive draw toward certain forms of creative expression, generating products that the secular rationalist in me, still compelled into allegiance to the common sense of our time, strongly scrutinizes. This inner voice regularly implores me not to press that publish button…

There is agency here, though. I do not have to follow the lure, crystallizing its subtle creative promptings into a public artifact. I can quite easily choose not to do so. Yet something in me, elusive, pays a price that is hard to articulate.

The current of creative Eros and the subtly sensed possibility toward which it flows—a latent potential that, here and now, is growing into form word by word—are not factors I can consciously choose.

The call to creation is something I assent to, something I follow, a living process in which I participate, beginning with an urge and, if I honor the call, ending in satisfaction.

I often find, when I ignore this sort of lure, that it simply goes on beckoning, nudging, disturbing the peace…

Does this mean that all lures ought to be followed? No. In fact, I suspect that refining our discernment regarding which allurements warrant our creative surrender is a crucial task of our time.

There are inner “pulls” that would lead us to deviate from the creative currents of our deeper vows. These are probably better resisted. Speaking from experience, this is all too often easier said than done.²

Back to the creative “pull” at hand—I find no reason to suspect that the latent creative totality unfolding into this article is absolutely predetermined right down to every particular detail. My experience of the underlying creative urge does, however, suggest that there is indeed some sort of dormant wholeness calling out its signal and awaiting my co-creative response.

For the sake of placating the skeptical secular rationalist in me, I’ll guard my premises and acknowledge that these words are carried on the wings of speculation. Ideally, this is a speculation that hearkens back to the word’s root meaning: specere, “to look.”

These speculations are born from looking at, and looking through, reports of phenomena that, at least in the context of the culture and mode of consciousness most of us inhabit today, appear “anomalous.” We’ll take a gander at a few of them and, perhaps, see through their surfaces to glimpse something deeper about the nature of time and creativity.

Following Jean Gebser’s intuition that we are presently living through mutative times, I suspect that these sorts of experiences may well become decreasingly anomalous, gradually traveling from the cultural margins toward the center.

With this, I entrust some errant seeds to the wind…

Powers of Presentiment

Gebser’s suggestion that the very structure of our consciousness is presently undergoing mutation is challenging enough. That this mutation necessarily entails a fundamental reordering of our understanding and experience of time is a still more demanding prospect.

For Gebser is not merely inviting us to see something; he is challenging us to participate in bringing forth what we are invited to see, to stretch our very thinking and perception beyond its present limits.

Yes, there is something different to see. Yet, recognizing it requires that we see differently—indeed, that we become new seers.

The emerging structure of consciousness capable of seeing in this way, what Gebser deemed the integral, is born through a deeply surrendered act. It isn’t purely passive, but it isn’t driven by conscious agency alone, either. Realizing this consciousness seems to require our most cultivated capacities, yet it also relies on grace—it can’t be individually willed or controlled.

Often, where this consciousness is glimpsed, time opens out beyond its experiential presentation as a sequence of discrete events, flowing in linear fashion from past to future, divisible into the quantifiable units measured by the clock.

Time begins breaking into our lives as something else, something active, something alive, something whole. Time as we’ve known it, Gebser ventures, “is at an end.”

“It is this [integral] structure, after all, that also encompasses what is to come: the future, which even today is our co-constituent. For not only we form it; it shapes us as well, and in this sense the future, too, is present…

…we shall include the future as latently existent and already present in us.”³

Thrown into a world that is obviously in desperate need of a dramatic reordering [read: metacrisis], it is understandable that, for many of us, an intensifying sense of urgency is coming to a boil. Time is bearing down on us. “We must do something!”

Gebser challenges us to assume the almost unbearably counterintuitive stance of releasing our effortful grasping toward a hoped-for future that we must make happen, marshaling every fix or solution we can muster.

Instead, we are invited to tune into the latent future, practicing a posture of radical presence capable of feeling down into the roots of existence from which time itself blossoms: “what is of immediate importance is not the future in its temporal and external aspect, but its presence in us.”⁴

Jung, observing phenomena such as “anticipatory dreams,” also concluded that the psyche is not restricted to the linear-progressive sense of temporality that Gebser ascribed to the presently dominant mental-rational structure of consciousness, as he alludes to in the one-minute clip below:

Many people who pay close attention to their dream lives will, sooner or later, encounter instances where they seem to dream ahead of time.

Dreams, however, aren’t the only arena where presentimental glimmers may appear. I’ll point here to a few examples of temporally transgressive experiences, starting with reports from two friends of mine.

David: Time as Living Rootscape

Just as the COVID-19 pandemic was ramping up, my friend David was in Peru for his second time embarking on intensive work with Ayahuasca. Panic and alarm were rapidly spreading, and soon the human social fabric was contracting all across the world as lockdowns were put in place.

David soon found himself essentially stuck in the remote jungle, in a state of suspended uncertainty. While I was quite worried about him, he seemed surprisingly at ease with the situation—at least it came off that way to me. Given the circumstances, he had the unexpected occasion to go much deeper with Ayahuasca than originally planned—engaging in fifty or so sessions.

Many months later, after his return, we met up in Oakland for some kava and conversation. At one point, he recounted a curious experience of time opening up for him during his time in Peru.

As he described it, both past and future were gathered into the field of his experience with specific reference to the web of relationships comprising the group he was with at the time. It was as if time was shaped like a system of roots, extending both forward and backward, becoming more available to him in its wholeness.

He experienced the intelligence medicine as a companion, also intimately aware of the this temporal connective tissue. Through its own time-distributed intelligence, it illuminated certain latent relational patterns that could potentially unfold through conversations that “wanted” to happen—as if for the sake of some kind of karmic metabolic process moving between the individuals congregated there, transmuting and liberating psychic energy, impacting the unfolding of each person in light of the relational weave. At times, it was as if the plant was asking him to engage in certain interactions in order to assist it in its work.

David also emphasized that there was no sense of these future possibilities being foregone—there was, rather, a sense of choice in the matter. The medicine illuminated certain presentiments of relational possibilities, often with surprising specificity, but their coming to pass required assent and active participation.

The picture here was not of bounded psyches engaged in their own individual healing in parallel silos, but rather of a rootbound system of entangled souls in mutual unfoldment, stretching out through time-tendrils made out of potentials that were somehow radically present even in their multiemporality.

Talking with David about this again more recently, I was struck by the way his use of the image of roots to describe this temporal phenomenology closely mirrors what I have mused on elsewhere as “radical time.”

Of course, alterations in the phenomenology of time are by no means unheard of when it comes to plant medicines and other psychedelics. But these are not the only contexts from which these reports are finding their way into the light…

Cheryl: Choosing a Future That Has Already Happened

Seated in meditation on the morning of February 4th, 2022, my friend Cheryl Hsu experienced a curious incursion of time. She later gave a public presentation, incorporating a voice memo she sent to Nick Shore directly following the experience.

I have timestamped the video below highlighting a section, roughly 10 minutes in length, where Cheryl quite artfully illustrates the presentimental glimmers she encountered that morning (7:38-17:40). In parallel with the recorded voice memo, she flashes photos capturing events that, from the orientation of the moment when the recording was being created, remained latent as future potential.

I highly recommend watching the whole presentation—or, for that matter, the full Stoa series of which this presentation stands as one part of three. In my own work, feel I am grasping at something rather similar to what I interpret Cheryl to be reaching for, albeit from somewhat different angles and refracted through alternative images and conceptual frameworks.

I particularly want to highlight how Cheryl consistently surfs the edge between feeling the particular contours of latent potential, while also expressly remaining open to a range of ways that potential may be crystallized.

On the one hand, there is a deep fidelity to the felt contours of what is being subtly glimpsed. On the other, a profound surrender to the innumerable factors and conditions upon which the nourishment of that potential depends.

Falling in love with the future means falling into devotion to a sweetly seductive potential that you can neither control nor personally identify with. The catalyzing vision of the latent creative totality may well transform radically along the way, defy your personal wishes, or die before coming to fruition.

It is not the particular product, not the end state, that seems to be essential, but the alluring resonance of presently latent relevance.

Increasingly, I trust that our most deeply aligned futures can bleed airily into the present if we make ourselves appropriately available to them, gently luring those of us to leap into the pathways of surrendered fidelity leading toward co-creative processes beyond control or calculation.

Brandt Stickley: Nondual Somatic Chinese Medicine

My mind was quite blown when I first listened to this interview with Brandt Stickley.

In particular, I want to call attention a particular segment in Brandt’s description of how he practices Nondual Psychosomatic Chinese Medicine, transcribed below:

“Every time you you’re able to drop down to that point where you are directly in contact with the source of change, you’re not creating anything, you’re not doing anything—you’re doing absolutely nothing—but there’s a potential that emerges from that that has a kind of plenipotentiality⁵ that could transform into other ways of being. And that is to say, every time I engage with a patient, it is as if I am inviting their future self, free of whatever it is they are complaining of, to come into contact with this present moment and to transform it.

And that is as simple as, if you have a common cold, we want to make contact with the post-common cold [person] and invite that post-common cold [person] to come and make contact with currently sniffling [person], and lead the way for that symptom to disappear and go back to the void as you emerge as a completely new, and potentially transformed, person.”⁶

Extracting this excerpt from its place in the living whole of the interview is, I grant, a disservice. I highly recommend listening to whole conversation.

However, I feel strongly called to highlight this portion because it beautifully illustrates the subtle agency of intentional time-attunement. There is a dropping down to source in service of contacting latent future potential that is then invited to effect its agency on the unfolding present.

I have been gently experimenting with whether imaginal practice may function this way, particularly in the context of Communal Reverie—which was a central subject of my previous conversation with Rosa Lewis.

Where is the agency here, exactly?

We might say the agency is polycentric, flowing from a multiplicity of centers distributed through both space and time. We alternatively might say it is acentric, existing nowhere in particular.

Brandt’s account is profoundly resonant with Gebser’s challenging description of originary presence. This presence is both “ego-free” and “time-free,” apparently “effecting” the living whole from no-where and no-when. Originary presence is a profoundly surrendered actless action, both unwaveringly still and dynamically generative,⁷ wherein individual presence becomes indistinguishable from the presence of Source, or origin:

“It is rather that his or her being present is in itself sufficient to effect new … crystallizations which could be nowhere manifest without his or her presence.

It is the coming-to-manifestation itself which is effectual. With the manifestation, with the presence, the effect is always indirectly evident.

The new consciousness structure has nothing to do with might, rule, and overpowering. Thus it cannot be striven for, only elicited or awakened. Anyone who strives for it, intending to attain it mentally, is condemned to failure at the outset.

What is needed is care; a great deal of patience; and the laying aside of many preconceived opinions, wishful dreams, and the blind sway of demands. There is a need for a certain detachment toward oneself and the world…”⁸

Retrocausal Organs of Temporoception

I adore the quote by Coleridge chosen as the first epigraph of this article. The imagery vibrates with multi-apt meanings.

Life is undergoing metamorphosis.

Seen from one angle, it is utter breakdown.

Seen from another, it is growth toward a more mature form.

Antennae, new organs of perception, are in the process of assembly.

The latent effects of these yet-unformed organs upon the present are already evident.

The dissolving and reconfiguring whole anticipates and makes room for these organs, as if impelled by the guidance of their retrocausal influence.

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What if, in the midst of what looks like utter breakdown, latent organs of subtle perception are already growing in us?

What if these subtle organs, from their latently-future vantage of post-metamorphosis, are presently lending back to us their already-achieved capacity for sensing time as an ever-present organic whole?

Please understand, I intend neither to over-literalize Colreidge’s image nor reify these “subtle organs.” I am attempting to call attention to signals of a potential transformation in the phenomenology of time, and a corresponding metamorphosis in the way vital creative processes are experienced.

While there are, indeed, moments when time’s radical openness floods into view, such experiences are not what I am fundamentally aiming to foreground here. Rather, I wish to point to the way that time’s wholeness emanates through the subtle lure to authentic creative process—which can often feel quite ordinary. This is encountered in what brings you most fully alive, imbuing you with a torrent of free energy.

I want to consider that our bodies are resonators for flows of aliveness not merely our own. That, in the zone where we make contact with the deepest and truest streams of creative Eros, the latent future entices us onward to partake in the ever-complexifying ritual dance of cosmogenesis.

For all this talk of future, this has really been all about presence—about attunement to the deep present, and the deeper callings to which we may sensitize ourselves. While learning to listen for that deep alignment within ourselves is a profound task in itself, I see this capacity as a prelude and prerequisite to a still-deeper calling of our time: learning to listen to what more truly beckons us onward, whoever “we” may be at a given time.

This perspective rests on a view of nature and cosmos that links our own deepest creative impulses to the vital processes at work in the generation and maintenance of organic life. From this standpoint, neither are impelled by efficient causation (e.g., mechanistic “billiard ball” cause-and-effect) but by something more closely resembling formal and final causality (e.g., latent and present wholes holding “soft power” in relationship to their constituent parts, co-calibrating an intrinsic and collective field of Eros toward persuasive lures that call multiplicities into channels of aligned synergy capable of sustaining what David J. Temple calls “configurations intimacy”).

Interestingly, a recent dialogue between Michael Levin and Iain McGilchrist has suggested something very much like this—that creative solutions in a given problem space may actively call cooperating agents forward. See the timestamped clip below (7:59-10:41):

I suspect that the evident locus of human creativity will progressively decenter itself from the individual, increasingly shining forth among mycelial flows coursing through creative communities who can successfully⁹ tune to the call of mutually enticing lures, co-enacting the growth of those more-relevant latent futures presently beckoning back to us.

I will conclude with one more quote from Gebser who, at this point in my own unfolding, I cannot seem to get away from. The creative lure insists on his inclusion. So, as I gently welcome my secular rationalist’s doubts and annoyances, I choose to offer my conscious assent and lend my aligned co-creative response to what is beckoning me onward here.

In doing so, it appears this article will land on one final performative instance where content and process converge:

“The future will ultimately establish itself, our role being at the very most that of participants.”¹⁰

1. Rainer Maria Rilke, The Book of Images, translated by Edward Snow

2. Given that desire for pleasure and resistance to pain often tug us around and keep us anchored at shallower depths, refining our sense for detecting and choosing wiser onward-leading signals goes hand-in-hand with a willingess to lovingly bear witness to our own suffering. This brings to mind Gebser’s vividly expressed intuition of voluntary sufferings as a pathway to clarified vow:

“All work, the genuine work which we must achieve, is that which is most difficult and painful: the work on ourselves. If we do not freely take upon ourselves this pre-acceptance of the pain and torment, they will be visited upon us in an otherwise necessary individual and universal collapse. Anyone disassociated from his origin and his spiritually sensed task acts against origin.”

Jean Gebser, The Ever-Present Origin, pg. 532.

3. Gebser, The Ever-Present Origin, pgs. 42, 296.

4. Gebser, The Ever-Present Origin, pg. 297.

5. Included among the connotations connected with the Latin root pleni- are “abundance,” “wholeness,” “fullness,” “clearness,” “entirety,” “completeness,” “wideness”, “thickness,” “generosity.”

6. Nondual Psychosomatic Chinese Medicine, with Brandt Stickley. Blue Beryl: Buddhism, Asian Medicine, Embodied Spirituality Podcast.

Elsewhere, Brandt elaborates upon his discovery of Jean Gebser through the work of Aaron Cheak, as well as his personal recognition of what Gebser calls time freedom in his own approach to, and experience of, practicing Chinese medicine.

7. "So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.”
–T.S. Eliot, East Coker

8. Gebser, The Ever-Present Origin, pg. 300.

9. I say “successfully” because I regard this as an achievement that, despite not ultimately being up to us, paradoxically requires a refinement in our capacity for skillful mutual presence that remains quite challenging and rare.

10. Gebser, The Ever-Present Origin, pg. 297.