What if we paraphrase a popular saying about the devil* and think “The greatest trick the modern world ever pulled was getting humanity to believe there aren’t any options”?
As cultural and ecological crises deepen around the world, there are visionaries taking steps to demonstrate that, yes, we have options in how we choose to live and the future we imagine for ourselves and the planet.
This emerging and powerful sense of new possibility is transforming, among many other endeavors, how we think about and create a sense of community — the ways we work, live and engage with one another and our environment. Intentional neighborhoods, “metamodern monasteries”, and virtually connected global networks are all part of an expanding vision for a collective human experience.
Of course, no one is saying it’s going to be an easy transformation. For example, a cultural undercurrent we all share in our collective imagination is for a superhero to come and save the day; always an individual, never a group of people talking through their differences
We talk through many visions and ideas for a new approach to community in the second part of our conversation among Aviv Shahar and Sylvie Barbier, French-Taiwanese artist, entrepreneur and educator, and Rufus Pollock, entrepreneur, researcher and technologist. Among their many projects and passions, Sylvie and Rufus co-founded Life Itself, dedicated to wiser living and social transformation. Part 1 explored the emerging, new second Renaissance.
From their conversation:
This conversation is part of the continuing Portals discovery into what is emerging on the frontiers of human experience in this time of profound change. Information about upcoming special events can be found on the Events page. Also visit and subscribe to our YouTube channel.
“So some of the practice hubs is that, is like having a space for the modern animal to rediscover, in this awkward reengineering, how to be together again - and do it at a pace that we can process it, that we can integrate it - versus just having a rupture, and another breakdown, and another trauma about the collective.” (Sylvie)
“If you go and study their life, in my view, about a month or six months later some people there is something that shifts, but it's a very small minority. We do a month workshop and we have conflict, they have fights with other people in the community. And we're like, that's the best thing. They may not like that as much, but that's when the growth happened. If you can go through conflict, if you can transform that, if you can start seeing your own shadow. And believe me, Sylvie and I have seen a lot of it shatter living community, all the things that you haven't dealt with in yourself, or the ways that you're this way or that way, or reactive or, you know, dominating or whatever else there is about you. I mean, you keep being shown that.” (Rufus)
“In my personal journey, a whole part of growing up was to deal with the sense of disappointment because I thought that life was supposed to happen a certain way - from the media and the narrative I was given. And I think in reclaiming a different narrative, which is saying there is difficulty, and there is light and liberation and solace when you embrace the difficulty on the other side. Life is not about trying to not have problems or not have difficulties, but most of the depiction of what people tell you is all they're trying to do is get rid of problems.” (Sylvie)
“People are coming, what we're interested particularly in was what we call sustained ontological development, fancy term, but what I mean is the other thing we're interested in is what is the growth people need to go through and want to go through and how does it sustain? One of the things that intrigued us was, I've gone on a retreat, you know, you come back after a week, it's like, Oh my God, I've seen it, I need to change my life. And then three weeks later, you're back doing zero meditation, whatever. How do people sustain it? (Rufus)