“Nature loves courage. You make the commitment and nature will respond to that commitment by removing impossible obstacles. Dream the impossible dream and the world will not grind you under, it will lift you up. This is the trick. This is what all these teachers and philosophers who really counted, who really touched the alchemical gold, this is what they understood. This is the shamanic dance in the waterfall. This is how magic is done. By hurling yourself into the abyss and discovering it's a feather bed.”
– Terence McKenna
This week I meet our guest Tom Morgan (LinkedIn, Twitter) in mid-leap as we both make giant bids to meet our destiny and better serve the world. Tom Morgan, who calls himself a “curiosity sherpa” and writes the superb blog What’s Important, worked for years in finance while he grew increasingly compelled by transcendental mysteries. His blog reflects a rare appreciation for the edges of our knowledge and his reputation is for getting high-performing businesspeople to ask deeper questions. In this conversation we discuss complexity and higher intelligences, the heroic metamyth, the alchemy of money, love as an organizing principle in transrational cognition, and holding other people through their personal encounters with the so-called “meaning crisis.”
If this discussion does it for you, look below to find scores more potentially life-changing (certainly mind-altering) talks and essays we discussed therein…
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✨ Mentioned Media
Looking Over The Edge – Tom Morgan
For The Person Who Has Everything – Tom Morgan
Adventure Capital: An Interview with Jim O'Shaughnessy – Tom Morgan
Heresies of The Heart – Tom Morgan
The Great Betrayal – Tom Morgan
Tom’s recent five-minute talk at the Sohn Investment Conference
Toward A New Evolutionary Paradigm 1.0 – Michael at SFI in 2019
Intimations Of A New Worldview – Brett Andersen
The Master and His Emissary – Iain McGilchrist
Cognition All The Way Down – Michael Levin and Daniel Dennett at Aeon Magazine
Animism Is Normative Consciousness – Josh Schrei on The Emerald Podcast
The Passion of The Western Mind – Richard Tarnas
Tech Ethics As Psychedelic Parenting – Michael at CBA Innovation Lab
Exodus as Revolution – William Irwin Thompson at the Lindisfarne Association
Picbreeder
Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned – Kenneth Stanley and Joel Lehman
Proof of Spiritual Phenomena – Mona Sobhani
The Phenomenon: Control System, or Developmental Driver? – Stuart Davis
Meditations on Moloch – Slate Star Codex
Studies on Slack – Slate Star Codex
Alison Gopnik on Child Development, Elderhood, Caregiving, and A.I. – Michael for Complexity Podcast
✨ Related Episodes:
212 - Manfred Laubichler & Geoffrey West on Life In The Anthropocene & Living Inside The Technosphere
202 - Caveat Magister on Psychomagic, Amusement Parks, & Turning Your Life Into Art
196 - Robert Poynton on Improvisation As A Way of Life
191 - Roland Harwood on Learning To Be Liminal
186 - A Manifesto for Weird Science
161 - On Play & Innovation with Michael Phillip: Hermes, EvoBio, Bitcoin, and Good Noise
150 - A Unifying Meta-Theory of UFOs & The Weird with Sean Esbjörn-Hargens
125 - Stuart Kauffman on Physics, Life, and The Adjacent Possible
60 - Sean Esbjörn-Hargens Goes Meta on Everything: Integral Ecology & Impact
45 - Kerri Welch (Fractal Synchronicity & The Future of Time)
3 - Tony Vigorito (Synchronicity)
✨ Other Mentions:
William Irwin Thompson
Carl Jung
Joseph Campbell
Bill Plotkin
Dave Snowden & The Cynefin Framework
Stafford Beer
Frozen 2 (film)
The Matrix (films)
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