Transformative Philosophy
An invitation to invest in how you touch the world, relate to others, and craft your soul.
From the heart — to those for whom this calls,
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Wild thing to share words hey.
This is a special letter to write. And almost too challenging, like squeezing the last bit of toothpaste out the tube when there ain’t a spare left in the cupboard.
It’s an invitation to participate in a course titled Transformative Philosophy, and it brings together an outstanding crew: Cadell Last, O.G. Rose, Layman Pascal, Christopher Mastropietro & Jonny Miller.
You can read about the faculty and the course in detail here. I’ll be back with another letter or two that’ll share more.
But for now…
This video is an aesthetic narration of the words below. Perhaps you’d like to read them along with, or separate to the listen.
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I wrote the words that follow to unveil and develop an energy, desire, or drive toward creating a course: a course titled ‘Transformative Philosophy’. It was written in a spirit of address to myself and others, but in a private way. Like the work one might do with oneself, from which an authentic re-presentation of that understanding could draw from and hopefully be conveyed with more clarity. It’s partly for that reason now I’m choosing to share it, because there are lines here that were early in the genesis of articulating what this course intends itself to be, and therefore offers an interesting perspective on the spirit with which it is invited. There are parts which are intended finely, with precision, and others more like broad strokes that gesture at a territory open to interpretation.
Chapter I
I appreciate the importance of scholarship and knowledge of facts. But there is something lacking in the mode of doing philosophy if it becomes a singular pursuit of knowledge in terms of content, knowledge expressed only in terms that reproduce the fixed. This course in transformative philosophy is a submersion in something uncommon to philosophy inside the institution. It addresses a virtue of philosophy as creative articulation of understanding, at the levels content and context. In this way, it seeks to reveal truths of transformation, truths of process, truths of transcendence and return, in addition to conceptual scaffolds helpful to structure thinking on the way.
It’s not that content and its transmission cannot be valuable, critical, essential. And besides: packets of information are, must be, transferred in exchange. That is crucial to reality’s way, so it seems to me.
A point is just that so much content is a variant of the shifting same. There are many ideas in the world, many packets of information. Many maps to the territory denoting partial truths of more or less pragmatic value, relative to our indigenous stance as territory—a stance that values, an always already involved stance: crafting itself in the sands of time as maps of where we think we are, where we think we’ve been, and where we think we’re going. All manner of delusion finds expression in these maps, all arising quite ironically in relation to the truth these maps conceal. But delusions themselves are delightful forms of truth, knowable by virtue of return to a stance that may subsequently come to see the given dynamics of delusion by another light: recast now in the role of another map in the sand, beheld by an eye that’s wiser.
We swim in an ocean of knowledge, these maps in the sand. And among them exist ideas wearing different costumes, disguising the same essence, the same challenges, the same treasure. Or, if you prefer, in their costumes laying bare, just as the persona so often betrays the very complex it desires to protect or conceal. The mask as map, emissary of the ocean, in a drop.
Chapter II
All this material, all these ideas, all these maps, masks, and influences. All of this content. What of our processes of encountering, navigating, and metabolising? Our processes of confronting, being moved by, and moving in response to the content we encounter? From passive reception to active engagement—participating in transformation, participating in relationship as and with change—and coming to witness the evolving relationship between content and context: this is near to the heart of philosophy as praxis. Philosophy alive, through the ashes, and thereby a praxis through which to understand our role, our essence, our creativity as transformation.
And so, I have this idea that philosophy courses often contain more content than absolutely necessary for the purpose of developing real capacity to be philosophers and to philosophise. In a sense, what I am identifying is that no matter how great the content, no matter how articulately arranged the material is: the praxis by which content relates to and metabolises with the context of self remains key to the craft of philosophy—philosophy as a transformative means of being and becoming in the world. Transformative philosophy.
Chapter III
This course in transformative philosophy is for beings who have heard the call toward deepening their conscious relationship to themselves, others, and the world. It is not essential to have a deep history of engagement with philosophy as a subject taught in universities. But it is essential to enter this course with a sense, however slight, aspiring, or well known, that you are worthy of participating in the process of seeking and sharing in an exchange of understanding with peers: to notice and unearth what really matters.
Selves that will find a high value of address here, are selves who recognise, or may come to recognise, the teacher within, the teacher in the other, and the teacher that is the 2nd person relationship between self and other. The teacher shares commonality to the healer in this regard: a natural impulse to re-member loving forms in a change process—where potential and actual touch. And, crucially, shares the commonality that the present state lives in relation to becoming something other, that we live as and in patterns of energetic expenditure and nourishment. Conditioned and constrained, but open to creative mediation with the beyond.
Chapter IV
The course thus seeks to invite a praxis of strengthening connection to the mode of re-acquaintance (one meaning of know thyself), as situated in the art of crafting voice in real address with others. In so doing we will come to notice with more acuity, name with more dexterity, give way to silence with more grace and humility, and think, feel, and respond with more adaptability to the living context of what is, as well as what could be.
There will be theory to help point, and there will be knowledge exchanged. But there will also be knowing in a sense perhaps deeper. Knowing as a cycle of participation in the mystery of relation between 1st, 2nd, and 3rd person; knowing as the seeking understanding which breaks into parts to analyse the unknown, and knowing as the return to centre of one’s vantage as witness, from which incomplete yet perfecting orientation as participant in the whole-making of creation may be known again: the inexhaustible courage of love.
To zoom out a bit, an intention of this course is to generate a context in which participants may come to cultivate the capacity to do and live philosophy in their lives, such that in addition to traditional philosophic material, one’s experiences in life itself will come to serve as an arena for philosophy—an awareness, then, that peers, teachers, and students live all around us, and additionally that we ourselves consist in a mutual learning relationship: the inner tuition of intuition, awaiting the craft of intellection.
Chapter V
The course includes modules that will share knowledge and practices centred on the body, mind, heart, and soul — philosophy is understood here as rooted in the desire to appreciate more fully the whole of the energetic context that exchanges content in dialogical process of understanding and transforming.
From the nervous system and the strengthening of conscious, technical capacity to regulate it, to the subtleties of intention and invitation that welcome philosophy to unfold. From the intricacies of dialectic and our relation to trading propositions, learning and applying theories, to meeting each other in deep address and crafting voice at the edge of understanding. From the personal through the transpersonal, and relating to life, death, and other energies as they take shape through the course of interaction. And, finally, the course will look beyond itself, and invite response to the real we face as participants in culture, as part of a hyper-conversation and evolving context of digitally mediated ideas, archetypes and energies which comprise and influence the lifeworld of love and power, locally and globally.
Epilogue
This course features an outstanding set of teachers that will impart content for the sake of transmitting historical, conceptual, and technical knowledge. But its knowledge that’s lived and worked with, incorporated into ongoing processes of contextual understanding. How does this insight, this perception, this mode of thinking or this quality of feeling, relate to the context of self, in its relation to others and the world? In taking this course, you will learn with Cadell Last, Layman Pascal, Christopher Mastropietro, Jonny Miller, O.G. Rose, and myself Tim Adalin, alongside several guides and facilitators who regularly contribute and participate in the Voicecraft Network.
Together, we will create an environment of learning and contribution dedicated to increasing your capacity to participate in transformative philosophy, and enable a context affordant of know thyself as process of becoming and return, in a community of peers, some of whom may become friends and fellows you will go on to craft voice with in real response to the dynamics of cultural transformation upon us.
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You can learn more about the course here.
Discernment on the Way,
Tim