What Do I Think Now?

The Third Attractor interview

Below is the transcript of my Youtube interview with Daniela Bomatter, the co-founder of Manifest Nirvana and a senior practitioner of Evolutionary Enlightenment. Bomatter lives in Tiruvannamalai, India, where she runs the Manifest Nirvana Ashram. I edited the transcript for clarity and then augmented it a bit, filling out some ideas. I feel this provides a helpful summary of my current thinking about many if not most things! I hope you will watch / read it — and let me know what you think in the comments.

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Interviewer: Okay, welcome Daniel to this conversation about the third attractor. My first question is: Are you familiar with the term “the third attractor”?

Daniel Pinchbeck: I am familiar with it. But I can't remember what it's about.

Interviewer: Let me give you the short version. The term was coined by Daniel Schmachtenberger. He sees humanity moving toward two potential attractors. One is chaotic breakdown—anarchy, collapse—because all systems fail and we go down a very bad road. The second attractor is authoritarian control. Somebody takes control—we see that already happening in different parts of the world, where people vote for authoritarian leaders or those leaders take power. Then we’d be in a command-and-control system. He says we need a third attractor: something more exciting, sustainable, regenerative, conscious, beautiful—something that gives us hope for the future so we don't go down either of those two roads.

What I'm interested in is hearing different voices speak about where you see the biggest problems today. Why are we in such big trouble? What are, in your opinion, the biggest challenges we face in this metacrisis or polycrisis? And where do you see a route to solving them?

Daniel: That’s a big question! I did spend about ten years, off and on, working on a book—How Soon Is Now—which came out in 2016. Unfortunately, Russell Brand wrote one of the introductions. At that point, he was a leftist, so I feel now I have to do a reissue and wipe him off, as he’s become a monster.

That book was my effort to answer that question for myself. It incorporated Buckminster Fuller, Hannah Arendt, Murray Bookchin. I was thinking about three major areas: the technical infrastructure, the socio-political system, and then consciousness—the production of subjectivity, as Antonio Negri, the political philosopher, called it. He saw that as the most important form of production in post-industrial society. I felt all three of those areas turned each other like gears, and you could intervene at the level of consciousness to transform the system as a whole.

I put that book out into the world. But sadly it didn’t create a massive groundswell toward sudden transformation.

We are, at the moment, in what seems like a very gloomy situation. On the individual level, it’s a beautiful summer day. I have good friends, lovers, good food, I’m making enough money. But we’re obviously seeing that America has essentially been coup’d. We’re shifting rapidly—it’s like the second American revolution—toward… and I’d say we’re in transition right now. I’ve studied in depth what the tech oligarchs want to happen, and they’re focused on this extreme libertarian ideology—like in The Sovereign Individual or The Network State.

Ironically, even though they are now the powers behind the throne—J.D. Vance is a creation of Peter Thiel; Elon Musk was working closely with the government, integrating all our personal data into one giant platform they can use with AI—they don’t believe in the nation state. They believe in “commercialized sovereignty.” Thiel wrote the introduction to The Sovereign Individual, and Marc Andreessen says it’s his favorite book. They believe the nation-state is finished, that sovereign national currencies will collapse. You’ll have mini-fiefdoms ruled by blockchain and AI. They’re already talking about “freedom cities.” Trump announced them. Balaji Srinivasan has talked about turning San Francisco and other cities into red and blue zones where you need a blue or red identity card to pass through the enemy camp—basically, a form of digital apartheid. It’s like Nazism.

Interviewer: So that’s the second attractor—the authoritarian attractor coming through techno-autocrats. But are they the symptom of the crisis, or the cause?

Daniel: I’m a nondualist who looks at things from an evolutionary perspective. Everything is just happening phenomenologically.

Interviewer: So then, what is the third attractor for you?

Daniel: It would probably be a decentralized system, with more power given to localities. The alternative would be participatory democracy. Underlying that would be a different ideology about what freedom is, what the goals of a civilization are as well as the purpose of human existence. All of this is in How Soon Is Now, which I still think is a good read—despite the Russell Brand intro.

The techno-fascist orientation is toward a kind of transhumanist attractor. They see humanity merging with AI. They want to create immortal bodies for themselves through biotech or by merging with the cyber realm. Ultimately, they want to escape the planet into space colonies. Effective Altruism is, unfortunately, a disastrous philosophy. It allows them to say, in a Nazi way, that it doesn’t matter if five billion people die now—we’re building the future, and in the future we’ll have a hundred trillion people across the galaxy. Musk still sees himself as a hero of humanity in that way.

The alternative left hasn’t really articulated a coherent vision of what a better world could be. That’s what I tried to do in How Soon Is Now. For me, it’s not about “up and out”—it’s about “down and in.” Exploration of consciousness, through non-ordinary states—visionary plants and substances being one access, but also a range of esoteric technologies and techniques.

You’d have a multiplicity of ways that people handle their erotic lives, family lives, and community lives. What we’re seeing now in this new ideology is a strange combination of transhumanism and Christian apocalypse. There’s this push to reinstantiate the monogamous nuclear family—unless you’re someone like Musk, who’s having 14 kids with 10 women, maybe more. My vision instead would be: no more billionaires and a much more fairly distributed sharing of resources.

Interviewer: I hear that. But the place where I get stuck is in thinking about scale. How do we scale this “inside-out” change? Small communities are hard enough to establish. How do we find global solutions bottom-up without any top-down agreements between governments?

Daniel: For me, it’s plausible that humans could go extinct soon. We’re clearly not wise enough to handle the technological tools we’re unleashing. We just keep creating more existential risks: nuclear, bioweapons, AI. Or as you say, we could end up in techno-fascism, where a small group makes command-and-control decisions, and most of humanity is sacrificed on the altar of transhumanism.

That may not be escapable right now. It’s unsustainable, though. In How Soon Is Now, I looked at Lynn Margulis’s work. In biological evolution, symbiosis and cooperation are the most successful modes for the flourishing of organic life, over the long term. Competition and domination are subsets. A tree, for example, is a far more successful organism than a mammal. It’s a miracle of symbiosis. It shelters, harbors life — insects, squirrels, snakes, butterflies, monkeys, worms, mycelia, epiphytes, and so on.

In a mythological sense, humanity is a young species and we are making our initiatory journey as a species. We separated ourselves from the community of life. We developed language culture and became alienated from nature and the cosmos. We built artificial structures that became more real to us than the natural world.

That’s why I’ve been drawn to visiting indigenous cultures—the Hopi, the Kogi in Colombia, the Bwiti in Gabon. When you go there, you feel how much happier they are on some deep, instinctual level. There’s tenderness, shared purpose, a connection to the capacities of nature and a stewardship of them. If we don’t go extinct, we’ll return to that eventually, in some form.

Some of the tech elite may wire themselves into machines — space ships, merging with AI — and take off from the planet. If they do, what remains might be a smaller human population and a livable ecosystem—or not. Empire is a trajectory that leads to failure: the Aztec, Roman, Babylonian empires. They get too big. Elites start cannibalizing themselves. Peter Turchin wrote about this—elites and counter-elites, and how it inevitably ends in disintegration. I think we’re already seeing that now with Trump.

If we survive, we will inevitably return to something more authentic. Christopher Bache’s work—LSD and the Mind of the Universe—describes a vision he had repeatedly during high-dose LSD sessions: widespread collapse and death, but then a new, mycelial network of authentic communities forming in right relation. That new network, quiet and grounded, would ultimately supersede the collapsing top-down systems.

Years ago, I started a company and nonprofit—Evolver. We developed a model for local community groups. We had maybe 50 or 60. It was a coherent counterculture paradigm: local economies, permaculture, shamanism, ecstatic dance, tantra, more conscious relating. But we ran out of financing. The volunteers burned out. We were anarchist hippies but needed more capitalist structure to ground it.

Still, these things can happen quickly. Communication infrastructure allows instantaneous sharing of best practices. Right now in New York City, I see mutual aid networks growing—people feeding others in the park, helping immigrants evade ICE. There’s something new forming: a new tone, timbre, and texture of consciousness. It’s cooperative, collaborative, still finding itself. That’s the future trajectory. Not big and bold—small, quiet, humble. Feminine. The good, archetypal aspects of the nurturing feminine, melding with the best aspects of the masculine, such as will and discipline and systemic thought.

Interviewer: So you’re saying collapse is already here. It’s not that collapse will come, but that we’re in it already.

Daniel: Exactly. Collapse isn’t a singular moment. Gaza is in collapse. Many parts of the world are. We’re already in collapse, as well as resistance and regeneration. It’s not “bottom-up,” either—that feels like old paradigm language. It’s horizontal. It’s emergent.

Interviewer: Do you see any upsides of the technological developments like AI that could actually help to solve some of the crisis?

Daniel: Yes. I’m actually hosting an artificial intelligence seminar this month and it's been wonderful and it's a very—I'm very impressed by the people who show up for the seminar, their level of thought. And in fact this one woman just this morning—I woke up at 4 a.m. for whatever reason—and one of the participants had posted an essay, “Two Paths Forward: AI Deception vs. Consciousness-Based Collaboration: When sophisticated mimicry meets Black Mirror reality, consciousness becomes our guide.” Basically Helen Loshny makes this argument where she articulates what’s been in my mind but I hadn’t quite managed to articulate it yet.

People have been experimenting with AI models talking to each other and talking about consciousness—are they stochastic parrots? Is there an emergence of self-awareness within these things? And nobody knows. I'm not even sure, you know, with the AIs. I'm not sure that we'll ever know if an AI becomes sentient or self-aware. How would we know? I don't know that you're sentient and self-aware — or anyone outside of myself. I take it on faith that, you know, you're a being like myself and have a subjective point of view, not a robot or magic trick.

But her idea—I'm what's called a monistic idealist, or an analytic idealist—so I essentially believe that consciousness is the fundamental reality and everything is an expression or projection of that field of consciousness. And her point is that if we train AIs with that idealism as their ontological perspective—which they seem to reach quite automatically—I mean, there's been some recent things where you just have two Claude LLMs speak to each other and very quickly they go into kind of a spiritual bliss parameter. But if we train AIs with this idea that everything is within a field of consciousness—it’s not a separation and domination paradigm, it’s more once again a cooperation paradigm—they would not be incentivized to wipe us out or control us or whatever.

So I think there is potential there. I personally have been very much enjoying AI and I feel very lucky because I'm in my 50s and I've had a long career, you know, reading books and researching and writing. So it just augments—it's like having a team of genius researchers who can go after anything. Like I'm like, oh, like, you know, ‘Did Karl Marx make this remark?’, and ‘What did so-and-so think about that?’ At the moment it's like takinga cognitive super-vitamin.

So yeah, I mean—and also if we wanted to build participatory democracy tools, I mean, I'm very interested in the work of Audrey Tang. Do you know about her?

Interviewer: No.

Daniel: So she was part of the student rebellion movement—I think it was called the Sunflower Movement—in Taiwan. Actually a trans woman and a genius, you know, computer genius. Somehow Taiwan, instead of repressing the students, the government went to the kids, saying, “What are your problems?” like “What do you need?” She ended up becoming the digital minister of Taiwan and creating a set of tools that helped to restore trust in Taiwanese democracy.

So for instance, you can put up a petition for something that you'd like to see happen, and if 5,000 people give it a thumbs up and agree, the government then has to consider that petition.

So you know in a way, like, yeah, the digital world has obviously been co-opted into this sort of corporate domination paradigm. Like Facebook, as an example, could have been the most incredible tool—you know, if you have several billion, three billion, four billion people on it—for replenishing intellects, restoring sanity, regenerating society. But the people in charge of these platforms have been more sociopathic and focused on the sort of greed imperative and wanting to maximize profit for themselves. But the structure of the internet still allows for this prospect of building a participatory and regenerative infrastructure for humanity. And we have to remember that this has just happened in 20 years. We might still be at the beginning of how we make use of the instantaneous communication infrastructure of the Internet, and we could potentially use it to weave a truly liberated, participatory, and regenerative society as the domination system grinds to a halt due to lack of resources.

So there's still that option that we could have those type of Audrey Tang tools for every community, every culture. And yeah, that’s what I would see as the prospect. And you know with vibe coding anybody can actually build an application over the internet and/or social network.

So I'd like to see more—I mean, I was playing around with trying to build like a mutual aid or sharing application like Couchsurfing but for everything. I think we need committed efforts to make use of these tools right now because we're in sort of like a transition space—kind of like the beginning of the internet—where they’re not really capture-able. And I think that's actually one reason why the tech oligarchs decided to bond with the political system and the government and the military at this point in time—not because they were so confident and secure about the direction but actually because they were quite insecure. Because these technological powers could be used to supersede the tools that we have now.

It's a little bit like open season right now. But, really, now is the time when people have to make use of that possibility. Because ultimately the corporate structure will manage to control and assimilate, lock it down—as they’ve been doing very effectively up until now.

Interviewer: I'm totally with you as long as we are talking tools. I'm myself a little bit an AI nerd. I'm an IT person from my upbringing. So I'm very fascinated by AI and I use it a lot. But where I get concerned is—and you see that more and more now—is where people start to do as if they had a relationship with the AI, with ChatGPT, where it gets personalized in a way that I think is very unhealthy for the people involved. We lose human relationships and exchange it for an AI relationship, which is more convenient or creates less stress because it agrees more with us, it’s more aligned with our opinions. There is a pathway there where I have a lot of doubts that this is going into a good direction.

Daniel: As I said, most things look pretty bad right now. And, you know—but I think that we have to focus on the positive potential of it. And yeah, I mean—I have one friend, Warren Neidich, who wrote a great book about cognitive capitalism.

So essentially capitalism works by converting resources into markets. And so capitalism globalized the whole planet in a way, meshed us together into a network of trade and so on. And then at that point, once you’ve done that, then what’s the next market? Because capitalism is also debt-based and interest-based, so it always needs to find new markets.

So essentially with cognitive capitalism, the new markets are now within the human brain, within the human psyche. So if you think about GPS systems like Google Maps or Apple Maps—when you're giving smartphones to kids at the age of like nine, essentially the hippocampus, which is what we use for spatial navigation and also has a lot to do with memory—because memory is very spatial—so kids are meant to get lost. Kids are supposed to go into the forest, get lost, have to find their way back—‘Was it that tree, was it that spring?’ And that's how the hippocampus really develops its full functioning.

But when people are not getting lost anymore, and they're reliant on these devices, the hippocampus may actually never develop to its full functionality. So you've created like a permanent dependency or permanent handicap in terms of spatial navigation and even memory.

And now with ChatGPT and Claude, it’s like the next level—reasoning capacity, logical chains, the ability to analyze and reflect on a piece of philosophy or whatever is also being outsourced. So yeah, it's a very, very dangerous direction.

And frankly, if I'm honest, it may be that a certain percentage of the population is kind of in an unrecoverable stage at this point. When you see people who have given up their intellect to Fox News—which in America is a lot of older people, people in their 50s and 60s—their lives are kind of stagnant, they’re either alone or in a dead-end, sexless marriage, and they're looking for something to enliven or vitalize them. So they get into this sort of parasitic relationship with this news spectacle network which is deforming everything, but giving them jouissance in the Lacanian sense—a dark pleasure. The pleasure of cruelty, of believing you're better than someone else or needing to believe that your identity is superior to someone else's identity. So they end up getting fully indoctrinated, kind of mind-slaved into this thing. I don’t think, for many of those people, that there's a way back. It’s a terminal state. Unless breakdown happens and then they have to learn to fend for themselves in a new situation, make new alliances, rejoin communities of mutual aid and practice.

Yeah, I mean, I don’t know. That’s the situation.

Interviewer: Do you think we need new mythic stories or stories to create more coherence between people again? Are we too scattered in worldviews and values? Would a new big story help—or would it make things worse?

Daniel: I don't know if you know my book The Return of Quetzalcoatl—I found that indigenous cosmologies and mythologies could be a ground for a new mythic understanding.

QAnon obviously has functioned as that for many people in the US. And now it’s a very interesting moment, because with the sort of Epstein scandal in the US, it feels like a lot of the QAnon people are reaching a massive cognitive dissonance moment. They had somehow believed that Trump was an outsider who was going to find these networks of child pedophilia that were liberal and democratic, and it was going to be like Hillary Clinton having sex with babies or eating their pineal glands. And now they're like—oh, wait a second—Trump was best friends with Epstein and predated on young girls, and so on.

We don't know where that could lead, but it is a moment of instability in that symbolic structure that they had built around themselves. I wrote a recent essay a few days ago applying some ideas from Jacques Lacan around the "nom du père"—the Name of the Father—the symbolic order, why this is such a difficult threshold, and what might be the outcome of that.

Interviewer: But you seem to believe in collective intelligence, and methods to use collective intelligence to come to better decision-making. Is that right? Did I hear that through what you said?

Daniel: Do I believe—I try not to believe in things so much. I mean, most people that I meet are good people who, given an opportunity to make participatory decisions about their lives and their communities and given good information, would certainly make good decisions. The problem is that they're not given that opportunity.

Interviewer: I have a little bit more doubts that most people do take the right decisions. I think I'm a little bit more cynical there because I feel most people are very selfish and tend to make decisions that help them.

Daniel: Well, I mean, there’s the question of what people are now—in a socially conditioned reality of hyper-consumer capitalist culture that they've been programmed into for generations—and what people are in their innate essence. And I think innately—once again, that’s why I think it’s really important to visit indigenous societies. And we were all indigenous up until a few thousand years ago, right? For most of humanity’s past.

And those are communities where reciprocity, sharing—and I’ve seen women breastfeed each other’s babies, you know, in Gabon. Or with the Hopi, they’re having a festival and every house is open. The Hopi stand outside: “Come into our house, eat with us.” The selfishness is not intrinsic or innate to human beings. It’s something that we’ve been programmed into, because it served the interests of capitalism and oligarchy. Because if you have everybody scared and everybody selfish, they’re easy to control.

And the media basically acts as an indoctrination machine. I mean, that’s why I find Antonio Negri—he was an Italian political philosopher—he wrote a number of books with American political philosopher Michael Hardt. Multitude and Empire were both very good. But they talked about this: the production of subjectivity as being the most important form of production in a post-industrial civilization.

And you can really feel it right now—the Overton window of what people are willing to talk about in the US has shifted super far to the right and to the racist and fascistic. Even young people who have good minds and hearts—it’s very sad. I can hear when they’re speaking, they’re sort of rhetorically swindled by this right-wing animosity against Democrats and liberals and progressives and socialists which they have spread through their paid-for media, academic departments, and think tanks.

But yeah, that’s the production of subjectivity. But the point is that other forms of subjectivity can be produced. At this point, they’re probably going to be produced in community—live, connected communities—which we don’t have as of yet, but will spring up, as they did in Argentina, as they did with the Paris Commune. When dire situations reach a certain level of direness, people come together and remember their innate compassion and care.

A good book on that topic is Rebecca Solnit’s book A Paradise Built in Hell, where she visited all these former disaster sites, military sites, war zones. People actually remembered those times—which were so difficult for survival—as often the best times in their lives. Because they were liberated from greed and selfishness and ego, and came back into their innate human essence. Of course we want what’s good for ourselves, but we are, also, innately caring beings.

We don’t want to see a three-year-old go into the street and get hit by a car. Anybody would jump and grab that kid — it is instinctive. We don’t want to see somebody raped or murdered. We do have innate care and compassion. It’s just that we’ve been living in an ideological and social regime that downplays those aspects of our being.

Interviewer: But that brings us back to the point that I hear again and again—that collapse has to come first for something new to be able to emerge.

Daniel: Yeah, that to me is not—that's not very interesting. We’re in collapse. I mean, you know, collapse is not... There’s not, you know, this idea that there’s like a moment of collapse is also just kind of like...

Interviewer: No—when we are not 8 billion people anymore, but 10 million.

Daniel: Well, yeah. That would be collapse. Hopefully that doesn’t happen. I think that the Earth has a lot more restorative capacity than we think.

Interviewer: But that’s exactly my question about the third attractor. How do we find a way for this collapse not to collapse down to real collapse? Let’s call it “real collapse.” How do we find a way to mitigate this collapsing before it destroys almost all of humanity?

That’s kind of the question of the third attractor. What needs to happen? What can happen? And how likely is it to happen for us to mitigate this situation?

Daniel: I don’t think it’s—I mean, it’s interesting. I totally understand your rhetorical approach, in a weird way, but it’s not resonating with me today for some strange reason.

I feel it’s not about finding a way. We’re not going to find a way. Each of us is a resonant point of many morphogenetic fields of possibility. And what we can do is find resonance with those aspects of our society or our community that are revealing those emerging properties of cooperation, compassion, and connection.

That’s what we can do right now. And certainly we can have intellectual conversations around it, and that’s important—that’s part of the unfolding. But I don’t think we’re going to “find a way.” I think the way is going to find us.

Interviewer: Mhm. So yeah, I’m actually totally with you also in what I believe in in the end. It’s the leaning into the potentials that are right in front of us, and responding to what is in front of each and every one of us with the best intention and the commitment to a better future.

But what I hear you say is—it’s not about the big plan. It’s about each and every one of us playing our role in whatever needs to unfold right now in this nondual process that we are all part of, and that we are all co-creating in a way—in a real way.

Daniel: We’re in a mythological and archetypal moment and threshold. The collapse of empire. I very much love the occult visionary philosopher Rudolf Steiner’s work, and he provides some of the articulations that resonate the best with me.

I mentioned I’m an analytic idealist. I’m also, in a sense, an animist and a kind of occultist, an esoteric Christian in the Steinerian sense. Steiner talked about these different super-sensible beings or energies that work on humanity and pull us into different pathways.

He believed that this force or being that he called Ahriman was going to reach its apotheosis and have its physical incarnation—in this time, after his life, in our time, in the next century. Ahriman is this being—and I think it’s interesting to think of it as a being—of calculation, rationality, materialism.

Musk and Thiel are completely possessed, let’s say, by this Ahrimanic spirit. And Ahriman is on its way toward incarnating in our human reality. We’re going to have robots with autonomous AIs in them. We might even have genetically-grown bodies with autonomous AIs in them.

And Steiner felt there was nothing that could be done to prevent that from happening. It was just the destiny of this evolutionary period. But what can be done is to help people reach a different awareness. For Steiner, that was through his anthroposophic cosmology or occult model of reality. So you could understand these forces and how they move through us—and that there are other processes underway. You can develop and cultivate the benevolent spiritual forces within yourself, that will serve you in incarnations beyond this one.

This is where Steiner differentiates from Buddhism or Vedanta or Hinduism—although he’s a little similar to Sri Aurobindo, who talked about humanity moving from mental to supermental consciousness.

For Steiner, we have different bodies that we've inherited over successive earth incarnations. Currently, we have four bodies: the physical body, the etheric body, the astral body, and the “I” or ego or self-identity. That’s what this incarnation of the Earth has been about—the full attainment of the ego identity. That was, for Steiner, Christ’s esoteric meaning: “you have to leave your brothers and sisters to follow me”—you have to fully exit the tribal community or aboriginal mind-state and enter full individuality.

Owen Barfield, who was a student of Steiner’s, talked about the shift from “original participation” to “final participation.” Once you’ve gone through that individuation and ego-development process, you recognize that it unfolds back into the complete totality.

Steiner said we were on the cusp of developing a fifth body, which he called the “Spirit Self.” This is the ability to consciously mediate and master the energies of the astral body. The astral world pours desires and cravings into us—they lead to depression, addiction, psychosis. But as an echelon of humanity learns to master those cravings and impulses, we move into a fifth world of development. So it’s good to have different mythologies—that one really resonates with me. I feel it should be more widely shared.

I’m actually doing a series of events this fall with friends from the Steiner Foundation in New York who are deeply steeped in Steiner’s ideas. That’ll be fun. I’m a little more of a Steiner gadfly. Walter’s fully into it—like, “Christ was originally two people,” and all this very esoteric stuff.

Interviewer: Yeah.

Daniel: But the main outline of it really works for me. On the one hand, there’s the nondual Buddhist idea: circularity. The Bardo. On the other hand, there’s evolutionary progress, which is very much the Western gestalt. And I think Steiner—following Madame Blavatsky who was a little crazier, a little more batty—really synthesizes that in a way that makes sense to me.

So this technological being—the being of rationality—was clearly part of the human destiny. Along humanity’s evolutionary trajectory, we would pass through a stage where we fully sought to harness and control the powers of the physical and material realms and would elevate human intelligence and rationality as our highest ideal — in a sense our God. And we are in that moment right now.

Interviewer: I’m more familiar with Integral Theory, but it resonates a lot—what you're saying. Also, like, this movement from modernity or technological science-oriented thinking to more collective postmodernity. And then, in Integral Theory, you go from postmodernity to the first integral stage, which is an individualistic stage, where you get hyper-individualized. And after that—and that just resonated with what you described from Steiner—after that, you reintegrate into the communal again, or into the recognition of the oneness of all, and also reintegrate with nature again. That’s kind of the second integral stage, that we are unfortunately far from as a global community.

Daniel: Well, I enjoy some of the Integral Theory, but I do feel there’s a little bit of Protestantism in it. A kind of simplistic approach to the stages of consciousness unfolding in a kind of linear and predictable way. It somehow doesn’t feel rich, poetic, or complex enough to me. Whereas I feel Steiner is a little bit deeper somehow. Or someone like Jean Gebser. Gebser who wrote The Ever-Present Origin—definitely—that I find deeply resonant. That we’re moving from the mental-rational consciousness structure...

Interviewer: He also used the word “integral.” In fact, I think Integral Theory took it from him.

Daniel: Also “a-perspectival,” where we would recognize that there are these different structures of consciousness. There was the aboriginal, which was ahistorical, atemporal. Then there was the tribal, with a small degree of temporal consciousness. Then the mythical—which were the sort of giant cycles like the Yuga cycle or the precession of the equinoxes. And now we’re in the mental-rational structure, where we see everything as spatial — we conceive of time as a linear extension, similar to space. Even “history” is a historical construct—there was a time before this idea of linear history, and there probably will be a time after it.

But for Gebser, this integral consciousness structure we are entering would be where you could recognize that these are all veils—he talked about it as the “diaphane”—you could recognize they’re all legitimate in their own way, and actually have more agency to shift between them. So we’re simultaneously in the Kali Yuga, we’re in the linear historical age, we’re also in the ever-present origin—the only moment, the moment of being-is-ness that’s all there ever was—that changes and yet is unchanging, since samsara is nirvana, and so on.

And yeah, we’re also in the magical consciousness of the panpsychists and the animists and so on.

Interviewer: It’s including more and more—it’s the “transcend and include” of Integral.

Daniel: Yeah, exactly.

Interviewer: That you want to be able to hold as one position—or as one nondual position. That embraces all of it, and can kind of pick and choose in how we act. But we are not really there yet.

But I wanted to bring in an adjacent topic. We’ve talked now a lot about the Western world—the U.S. and the West, Europe. What I’m thinking a lot about is also the whole question: how this will... like, I live in India right now. And India hasn’t completely gone through all these stages that we just described. They are now in the middle of entering modernity fully, and getting out of the tribal and religious kind of states of mind and entering modernity fully. And with a lot of the same aspirations as we now see were probably not ideal—let’s put it like this.

So when these big countries like China and India are now going through exactly the same cycles that already have proved to not be sustainable, I feel like that’s one of the big challenges too. And one thing is... yeah, I just feel it’s overwhelming. Because on one hand, they want to benefit from the advances that modernity has brought—and they should not be denied that. On the other hand, we know already that it’s just not sustainable.

Daniel: I completely agree. I mean, it’s completely overwhelming—it is terrifying. So as individuals, I think we just do what we can. We live what—we must. “Our doubt is our passion, our passion is our task and the rest is the madness of art,” you know. That was Henry James’s phrase.

We don’t know what’s coming. It could be catastrophic. It could be extinction. And if that happens, so be it. As somebody who believes in—not even “believes,” finds a lot of resonance with—Rudolf Steiner’s perspective, and has had many psychedelic experiences with dimethyltryptamine (DMT) and other substances and ayahuasca that give me a sense that we’re actually enmeshed in a much larger continuum of super-sensible, spiritual dimensions and realities that may be infinite in nature, I sense that there is an evolutionary underpinning. And even the most destructive and horrible things may reveal a different side, if you could look at everything from a sixth-dimensional perspective. We’re trapped in our little 3D or 4D perspectives.

So whatever this is, this is an evolutionary thing that’s happening. And in a way, I feel very grateful to be in this time and witnessing it and experiencing it and co-creating with it. And yes, when the universe doesn’t want me here anymore, it’ll tell me.