Thinking the Unthinkable

[This article has a 9.5/10 Woo Rating]

A silent revolution is unfolding that’s uniquely invisible to the intellectual elite. This means that those we’ve previously charged with explaining the world to us are suddenly the least able to understand it. It’s why every narrowly-focused think-piece either misses the bigger picture or offers empty diagnosis. This creeping dissonance is why our outdated political, economic and technological institutions are collapsing.

These are just the visible symptoms of a much deeper shift in the way we relate to the world as individuals and as a society. And it’s literally unthinkable for some people.

Part 1 quickly recaps some rather dry but necessary science. Part 2 explains why it’s directly relevant to you personally. In Part 3 we’ll take a full plunge into fresh, deep woo. Finally, I’ll illustrate how I think the bigger picture plays out from here.

Part 1: The Science

If you’ve been following my work for any period of time, you will have noticed that I believe that the combination of two ideas can change the world:

1. Our modern brains are imbalanced towards the left hemisphere, which keeps us disconnected from the world.
2. We are specifically disconnected from “the attractor”, a force that helps intelligently and benignly guide us into our unique niche in life.

These two ideas offer a unique lens on today’s chaotic world. In the last few years of discussion, I’ve found that most people grasp our left-brain imbalance far more easily than the concept of the attractor. And yet it’s this idea that holds the most revolutionary potential.

This piece discusses why.

There are three master keys to understanding today’s world: complexity science, McGilchrist’s hemisphere theory and Taoism.1 This is because they’re each excellent explanatory models that also point beyond their own limitations towards the attractor.

Complexity science argues that the universe is evolving towards a state of complexity: increasing differentiation and integration.2 My understanding of (currently heretical3) Integrated Information Theory (IIT) is that the more integrated a system is, the more conscious it becomes. An atom is a self-contained whole (a holon), a cell is a series of atoms and we are a series of cells. We embody a high level of integration, enhancing our consciousness or perhaps our capacity to ‘receive’ consciousness. The more interconnected the different parts of a system are, the more conscious it becomes.

The attractor is the force that is driving this evolution towards integration and complexity. It draws each of us into a niche where what only we can do (differentiation) meets what the world needs (integration). It’s a metaphorical magnetism directing our compasses to our own unique true north. Evolution also rewards complexification: so this force feels like love. The word love is probably the greatest linguistic limitation in Western culture.4 In the specific context of the attractor, you can redefine “love” as the felt-sense of increasing integration.

Why do intellectuals in particular have such a hard time grasping this concept?

In my insightful recent conversation with Brian Whetten,5 one of his arguments is that “the lower cannot see the higher.” He explains why in this three minute clip.

As I have written previously,6 I am uncomfortable with the terms higher and lower to describe consciousness, it makes far more sense to describe it as more or less integrated. It’s a “holarchy” not a hierarchy.7 So I would rephrase it as “the disconnected cannot see the connected.” As Whetten says, the body can’t see the mind, which can’t see the soul. In his model, the soul is integrated with the attractor force that guides us into our niche. But the mind isn’t aware of it. Why?

This is where McGilchrist’s hemisphere theory is most useful. The one word I would use to describe our left hemisphere is disconnected. The left currently dominates Western society and our overly-intellectual elites. The verbal and logical left can drown out the subtle and non-verbal right. And yet the emotional and somatic right is more connected to the integrated, intelligent attractor. The left is competitive with the right, but the right is cooperative with the left. The left lies when it doesn’t understand something, the right is totally truthful. The right needs to integrate the left.

The world is becoming increasingly bifurcated between those at these two different levels of integration. Disconnected and left hemisphere dominant, or integrated and led by the right. As it’s primarily a revolution in consciousness, the root cause of the current disruption is invisible. This isn’t a prediction it’s a description: there’s abundant evidence that it’s happening.8 The problem is that you cannot even explain this more integrated force to a disconnected intelligence. Despite their stratospheric IQ, you cannot explain “attractor intelligence” to a dogmatic scientific materialist any more than you can explain physics to your lungs. It’s primarily a feeling, not an idea. So it is, quite literally, unthinkable.9

Part 2: What This Means For You

What does more integrated intelligence look like? Funnily enough, ancient Taoism is most helpful in understanding this modern transition. We advance our consciousness through greater integration, not intellect. The Tao is literally translated as “the way” or “the path.” It implies a degree of agency. One compelling interpretation is that the path is that same pursuit of what we love (differentiation, using the left hemisphere), in service of love (integration, using the right hemisphere). The Tao is the path of integration and complexity. Love is the felt-sense of a meaningful life that’s the result of integrating our consciousness with the flow, or the Tao. Acting from the right-hemisphere, means surrendering some of our narrow left hemispheric egoic agency to the more integrated intelligence we are connecting to.

This creates the almost paradoxical feeling of “trying not to try.” Successful alignment with the Tao brings effortless action or “wu-wei”. Someone in wu-wei gains a charismatic power called “de”, as explained by Ed Slingerland:

The result is an easy oneness with things, a state of going along with whatever presents itself, with no expectations and no calculation. Such perfect relaxation brings with it incredible efficacy in the world as well as social success, as we would expect from the connection between wu-wei and de. The state of true de- the “highest Virtue, that doesn’t think itself virtuous”- represents a perfect harmony with Heaven and the Way, which gives the Laozian sage remarkable powers over man, woman, and beast. Because he thinks nothing of himself, he is valued by others; because he wants nothing, everything is given to him.

The sage is highly integrated, so sees exactly where things fit together and acts in perfect harmony.10 This discerning openness also allows them to benefit from the life-giving energy, the “syntropy” of the whole system.11

Understanding integration also illustrates why Internal Family Systems seems to be emerging as one of the more effective therapeutic modalities. By identifying, loving and integrating our own individual parts we become more conscious.12

The concept of integration also provides further support for the foundational ideas of responsive reality and synchronicities.13 What better way could integrated intelligence reveal itself to us than in moments of meaningful connection and coincidence? Taoism also emphasizes that alignment brings a positive response from the world around you. Disconnected intelligence generally can’t grasp this concept, or even see their own synchronicities. It’s one reason why left hemisphere-locked people tend to get stuck in life.

The 11 different tools and practices that emerged from the experts in this year’s Accelerating Wisdom Series are all about enhancing this deep energetic connection to the world. As Taoism understood, this integration brings subtle powers, maybe even “unthinkable” superpowers beyond our current materialist paradigm.

Part 3: Speculative Superpowers

Now let’s really earn that 9.5/10 woo rating.

One of the magical features of emergence is that traits appear at each new level of integration that weren’t present at the prior level. If the world is currently moving to reintegrate the left hemisphere into the right (and there are many signs that it is),14 we would expert to see the emergence of new abilities defined by greater integration of consciousness.

I have recently encountered the podcast The Telepathy Tapes.15 After a few years of digging into fringe phenomena, this is the first time I have gone from suspecting psi abilities exist, to believing they do. Assuming it holds up to subsequent scrutiny, the series claims that some non-speaking autistic children exhibit close to 100% accuracy on telepathic tests. Usually the effect sizes in psi are statistically significant, but subtle. So this is a huge claim.

Even more radically, as their interviews progressed, the researchers claimed that some children have a much more comprehensive range of psi abilities. These included non-local communication (especially with other non-speakers at a place called The Hill), precognition and mediumship.

The researchers believe this supports the claim is that consciousness is primary; the foundation of everything.16 The podcast argues that some non-speakers can access this unified field, also known as the collective unconscious or Akashic records.

As the left hemisphere is associated with language centers, both non-speaking autism and savant syndrome have been argued to be caused by compensation of the right hemisphere. A related hypothesis is that we all have savants-like skills but they’re dormant because of the dominance of the left hemisphere.17

This means I can’t resist making a wildly speculative connection: can individuals with powerful right hemispheres exhibit the superhuman traits usually associated with spiritual masters?

It’s important to note that this attention risks bringing false hope to a vulnerable population. Even if it’s real, there seems to be no solid indication how widespread these abilities are. It may still prove to be a hoax. But even if it isn’t, it will probably still be dismissed as woo nonsense by a disconnected rationalist intelligence, rather than a possible emergent property of more integrated consciousness. I would be much more skeptical myself, if I hadn’t had first-hand experience after my brief “awakening” in 2017. When I was right-hemisphere-dominant, I felt bathed in transcendent, unconditional love. I could feel the emotions of anyone who passed within about twelve feet of me. Whenever my head said something my heart disagreed with my chest physically hurt. Indeed- the children talk about how these powers disappear if you lie. I even felt like I had become precognitive and had a general sense of how the next few years of my life would play out. It has proven accurate.

This one remarkable example aside, it still seems like (what I’m calling) the woo-verton window is opening.18 As these stories spread, this could help create a self-fulfilling prophecy. Psi abilities improve with the belief they are possible. And apparently some of the non-speaking children have had their abilities enhanced just in the last month or so since the podcast was released: because they are finally being believed.

Whether it’s near-death experiences or telepathy, a universal feature of these emergent phenomena is accessing a more “integrated” consciousness that transcends the physical body. This link also tends to be more pronounced between people who love each other: people who are integrated. The non-speakers seem to have the strongest telepathic connections with their mothers. Dr. Julia Mossbridge has claimed that performance on pre-cognitive tasks improves in a state of unconditional love.19 This is precisely what the next level of emergent consciousness would predict.

If you want to know what your own emergent superpower might be: ask what your gifts are and how would they best be deployed solely in service of love. This is your connection to the attractor.

Finally: Earth In Two Minds

Whoever is soft and yielding is a disciple of life.
The hard and stiff will be broken.
The soft and supple will prevail.

-Lao Tzu

This article is already a 9.5/10 woo, so let’s go all the way to 10/10. There are monumental societal implications that emerge from a wider understanding of integration.

The first is that “the Tao is smarter than the market.” What if the freedom to pursue your life path isn’t primarily determined by economic privilege.20 If you can find the right path, abundance follows. In my experience, very few ideas are more offensive to disconnected intelligence that simply cannot see beyond THE MARKET and zero-sum outcomes. It also triggers those of us that know that truth would force us to make some radically different life choices. This process can be very painful, especially when it comes with a profound shock to our worldview. As we realise that consciousness is primary, and may even outlive the body, both scientific materialism and consumer materialism lose a lot of appeal.

Whether it’s war, poverty or environmental destruction, it’s pretty hard to find a problem that can’t be solved with better global coordination. The optimistic take is that zero-sum games seem pointless in a state of greater integration where positive-sum games are possible. The primary obstacle to human cooperation has been the cognitive constraint on the number of people we can know and trust. But imagine how quickly the prisoner’s dilemma would break if all participants are increasingly telepathic.21 More generally, greater integration brings an increased sense of unity, but it also brings more subtle individual power. A true win-win. Throughout human history, the winners have been those who can cooperate at greater scale than the losers.

Scientific materialism isn’t suppressing this revolution as much as it’s simply been ignoring the evidence. And yet almost everyone I know has had a mystical or psi experience that implies non-local consciousness. So this is now a common knowledge game. What’s different right now is that information can spread far faster.22 This means that, for better and worse, people with historically unprecedented technological and financial resources are being exposed to these ideas. The left hemisphere is returning to the guidance of the right from a position of greater strength and agency than ever before. Some people have argued that this was the point all along.23

I’ll end with a crazy story somebody recently told me about a group from the Kogi tribe attending a conference in New York. They noticed people charging their iPhones and asked what they were for. When they were told they were for communicating with other people the Kogi laughed incredulously: "You guys realise you're all telepathic like us right?"

Whether or not it’s true, there's an “unthinkable” idea here. We keep looking for technological solutions to consciousness problems. Maybe the answer to the Fermi Paradox is that most truly advanced species have transcended beyond three dimensions. If consciousness isn't as bound by time or space as we currently think, it makes interstellar travel look a lot different. Then the obsession with getting off of Earth using cool rockets is absurd. Those other planets are ludicrously inhospitable to 3D life. If we can reintegrate our consciousness we not only open up our frontiers beyond our imagination, but we'll also stop destroying the best habitat we've found among billions of other planets. Rocketry and iPhones are cool, and probably necessary. But we need to start thinking beyond engineering solutions to consciousness problems.

There might be something revolutionary to be gained from harnessing the power of love; the field of consciousness itself. Our relationship with the world would shift from entropic to syntropic. Rather than the zero-sum destruction of natural resources we might be able to access an unlimited resource much more powerful and aligned with deep reality. We can certainly do it as individuals, so why would the collective be any different?

Unthinkable.

“Someday, after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love, and then, for a second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire.”

-Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

1 Jeremy Lent’s book The Web of Meaning really helped deepen my understanding of integration: “Ultimately, the crucial success factor for cooperation at increasing levels of scale is integration – a state of unity with differentiation. In a fully integrated system, each part maintains its unique identity while operating in coordination with other parts of the system. To do so, the parts must remain in intimate feedback loops of communication with a large number of related parts. Each of the systems we’ve been looking at – cells, organisms, ecosystems and Gaia – is a paragon of this type of integration. In fact, integration is a defining characteristic of any purposive, self-organized entity.”

2 Discussed in more detail here with Ulisse Di Corpo and Ervin Laszlo.

3 As I wrote last year, I’ve found the tag “pseudoscience” is the ultimate Streisand effect. More than 120 “scientists” signed a letter declaring IIT to be pseudoscience; even worse “scientific misinformation.”

4 I am fond of the claim that Sanskrit has 96 words for love.

5 The full masterclass is here. “There's this fundamental law at the base of reality that the higher can see the lower, the lower cannot see the higher. Your mind can see your body. Your body cannot see your mind. Biology, can see chemistry, can see physics. You've got all of these materialist physicists who think that they understand everything of the universe and they don't understand why the laws of physics can't predict anything higher than physics. Well, that's the way the game is wired at its core. Chemistry can see physics, but physics can't see chemistry. It's a new emergent level of complexity. The higher can see the lower, the lower can't see the higher.”

6 See: Test Your Network.

7 There are loads of these hierarchies/holarchies. Ken Wilber and David R. Hawkins have 2 popular ones. I’ve also seen Suzanne Cook-Greuter’s Ego Development Theory mentioned a lot. This is a good summary from Sloww.

8 Richard Tarnas’ evidence for the return of the right hemisphere: “The crisis of modern man is an essentially masculine crisis, and I believe that its resolution is already now occurring in the tremendous emergence of the feminine in our culture: visible not only in the rise of feminism, the growing empowerment of women, and the widespread opening up to feminine values by both men and women, and not only in the rapid burgeoning of women's scholarship and gender-sensitive perspectives in virtually every intellectual discipline, but also in the increasing sense of unity with the planet and all forms of nature on it, in the increasing awareness of the ecological and the growing reaction against political and corporate policies supporting the domination and exploitation of the environment, in the growing embrace of the human community, in the accelerating collapse of long-standing political and ideological barriers separating the world's peoples, in the deepening recognition of the value and necessity of partnership, pluralism, and the interplay of many perspectives. It is visible also in the widespread urge to reconnect with the body, the emotions, the unconscious, the imagination and intuition, in the new concern with the mystery of childbirth and the dignity of the maternal, in the growing recognition of an immanent intelligence in nature, in the broad popularity of the Gaia hypothesis. It can be seen in the increasing appreciation of indigenous and archaic cultural perspectives such as the Native American, African, and ancient European, in the new awareness of feminine perspectives of the divine, in the archaeological recovery of the Goddess tradition and the contemporary reemergence of Goddess worship, in the rise of Sophianic Judaeo-Christian theology and the papal declaration of the Assumptio Mariae, in the widely noted spontaneous upsurge of feminine archetypal phenomena in individual dreams and psychotherapy. And it is evident as well in the great wave of interest in the mythological perspective, in esoteric disciplines, in Eastern mysticism, in shamanism, in archetypal and transpersonal psychology, in hermeneutics and other non-objectivist epistemologies, in scientific theories of the holonomic universe, morphogenetic fields, dissipative structures, chaos theory, systems theory, the ecology of mind, the participatory universe--the list could go on and on. As Jung prophesied, an epochal shift is taking place in the contemporary psyche, a reconciliation between the two great polarities, a union of opposites: a hieros gamos (sacred marriage) between the long-dominant but now alienated masculine and the long-suppressed but now ascending feminine.”

9 Attractor intelligence is discussed in more detail here with Ulisse Di Corpo and Ervin Laszlo. If you want a recently example of this, just listen to Richard Dawkins’ excruciating conversation with Jordan Peterson where Dawkins simply cannot get past the idea of if the Bible stories are literally true, in order to appreciate the symbolic metaphors they contain.

10 In contrast to the above, if you want to hear what 2 modern-day sages in conversation sounds like, try listening to poet David Whyte in conversation with music producer Rick Rubin.

11 See my interview on Syntropy with Ulisse Di Corpo.

12 As  Justin Wilford writes in his excellent recent piece on IFS:“In one of my first IFS trainings, I remember the lead trainer, an older man who’d been a therapist for over 30 years and trained in IFS for 20 years, telling a group of 30 therapists: “I know this is going to sound strange to many of you. But if you treat parts as if they are sacred beings—that’s right, sacred beings—then you’ll be able to go so much faster and deeper in your practice with IFS.””

13 See Episode 7 of the Accelerating Wisdom Series.

14 See Our Unspoken Future.

15 For people short on time, I’d recommend starting with Episode 6 (scientific foundations) then Episode 7 (a full reveal of the children’s capabilities, if true, one of the wildest podcasts I’ve ever heard).

16 The practical considerations of the “consciousness is primary” claim was tackled with Mona Sobhani, PhD in Episode 8 of the Accelerating Wisdom Series.

17 See: The Left-Hemisphere Hypothesis for Autism

18 It’s not just Joe Rogan, popular mainstream podcaster Tim Ferriss recently interviewed Dr Bruce Greyson on the topic of his 50 years researching near death experiences (NDEs). The first 20 minutes are worth listening to, especially the anecdote about his tie. The difference I’m seeing is that these are largely credible people talking about these issues from an scientific perspective, if one that violates the materialist paradigm.

19 Source.

20 See my piece The Great Betrayal.

21 The unthinkable societal impact of emergent psi abilities was articulated in a quote by Reza Jorjani in a piece by Peter Limberg:"This is another reason why the Spectral Revolution, unlike say the Copernican Revolution or the Darwinian Revolution, has been resisted for so long. The data have been there for over 120 years, and yet unconsciously, I think, people have resisted coming face to face with the reality of these phenomena, because they pose such fundamental challenges to the way society is organized. Who wants to live in a world where your neighbor can become a well-trained telepath and read your intentions better than your spouse, or where people can clairvoyantly view what you do in your most intimate moments inside your home, or where the patents of corporations are not secure from remote viewing, where the stock market could be predicted in advance by precognition. So, there’s a tremendous potential for social destabilization, even for the disintegration of society there.”

22 See: The Emperor is Naked. There was an interesting theory shared this week by Bobby Azarian in Big Think. “To summarize the theory in a sentence: Psychedelics, as “worldview shifters,” can create a cognitive phase transition whose spread creates a social phase transition — a shift in culture. It’s that simple!”

23 In the Epilogue to The Passion of The Western Mind, Richard Tarnas argues this prodigal return may have been the entire point: And this dramatic development is not just a compensation, not just a return of the repressed, as I believe this has all along been the underlying goal of Western intellectual and spiritual evolution. For the deepest passion of the Western mind has been to reunite with the ground of its being. The driving impulse of the West's masculine consciousness has been its dialectical quest not only to realize itself, to forge its own autonomy, but also, finally, to recover its connection with the whole, to come to terms with the great feminine principle in life: to differentiate itself from but then rediscover and reunite with the feminine, with the mystery of life, of nature, of soul. And that reunion can now occur on a new and profoundly different level from that of the primordial unconscious unity, for the long evolution of human consciousness has prepared it to be capable at last of embracing the ground and matrix of its own being freely and consciously. The telos, the inner direction and goal, of the Western mind has been to reconnect with the cosmos in a mature participation mystique, to surrender itself freely and consciously in the embrace of a larger unity that preserves human autonomy while also transcending human alienation.”