Beginners Mind
Jordan Greenhall talks with David Fuller (Rebel Wisdom)
David Fuller (Rebel Wisdom): What advice would you give to people to navigate this new world?
Jordan: The first is free your mind. Be aware of the fact that the habits of the Blue Church (the established forms of media) and how it works don’t work anymore. Recognize that your way of making sense in the world that used to work don’t work and you really, really need to set yourself free to begin learning anew. Child’s mind. Beginner’s mind.
Second. This, by nature, must in fact be exploratory, so swim. Do not make sense prematurely. In spite of the fact that the world feels dangerous, in spite of the fact that you may want to protect yourself in this dangerous world, doing so too quickly does not allow the natural exploratory approach to do what it needs to do.
Really, just listen and learn. Go all the way back to human base.
Turn inward. Learn how fear shows up in you.
Learn how not to allow fear to drive the choices that you make.
Learn how to listen to the whole way that all of you perceives what’s going on.
Become more integrated with your own body.
Go out into nature, spend a lot of time not connected to the chaos that’s going on and a lot of time reconnecting yourself with your fundamental capacity to perceive reality in all the different modalities that human beings have the capacity to do.
Then relearn how to use other human beings as allies in figuring out how to make sense of the world.
I mean that, really relearn.
We have been abused and constrained by institutional frameworks that remove us from our own native capabilities. So relearn that.
Understand how to be a friend and an ally, how to have a conversation with somebody where you’re really listening closely to get a sense of what their perspective brings to you. While you’re not obligated to agree with them, you’re not obligated to move out of what you feel is right to form some new consensus reality, but where you’re actually authentically recognizing that their perspective has some capacity to bring richness to your perspective, just by the way it’s almost exclusively possible in person.
What we’re doing right now is an okay version of it, but we need to be very mindful of the fact that a linear broadcast is bad and even interactive bandwidth like this is not good enough. You’ve got to learn from raw, physical, and get yourself into places where your consensus reality and your habits are willfully destroyed.
Get into human to human conversations and get as far away from ideology as you can. Your job is not to know what the fuck is going on. Your job has to be absolutely certain that you have no idea what the fuck is going on and learn how to feel from raw chaos, from raw uncertainty up. Then, and only then, are you finally able to begin the journey of beginning to form a collective intelligence in this new environment.
That’s my advice.
