FTP048: Jordan Greenhall – Sovereignty in Chaos

Euvie Ivanova: So, is it possible to hack [00:02:30] this kind of response and say… Let me use the example of Game of Thrones. So, there’s all this political games happening while this great ecological catastrophe, which just symbolizes the white walkers, is looming, threatening to destroy everything, much like, you know, the climate change is one of the biggest threats to us right now. Why can’t we all rally together? If we have to be against something, why aren’t we against that?

Jordan Greenhall:  Well, I think you’ve hit on a couple of very interesting things. So, the first is, Game of [00:03:00] Thrones is a really fucking good metaphor. If you think about how this sort of thing works, human beings don’t live long enough to actually be able to pass our wisdom down. Effectively, no human being alive has actually experienced a real, deep, large-scale systemic crisis. People who lived in, say, Rwanda during that Rwandan genocide experienced it in their local environment, but nobody’s actually felt a civilization-level threat because those don’t come around very often. But, our civilizations have, and we store that wisdom at the mythopoetic level. That’s why mythopoetics exists. That’s why we have big, [00:03:30] deep stories that are shared, and they live at a level of myth, not the level of narrative. The fact that a show like the Game of Thrones is coming up, that is telling exactly the right story and at mythopoetic level, I think is not random. I think that it is, you know, if you look at all the stories that have been circling around for the past several decades, they’re all kind of exploring this territory, and Game of Thrones has been selected for because all of us unconsciously recognized they we’re in that state. We are playing the Game of [00:04:00] Thrones, and winter is coming. Now, winter as a metaphor actually comes with two pieces, and it’s very important to hold both because on the one hand we have an ecological crisis, in the sense of winter is coming down and changing the state that we’re in. But in much deeper levels, the fact that this ecological crisis is actually carrying the essence of the white walkers, who represent death itself. I remember the last phrase from the last episode. Jon Snow, we’re all on the same team because we’re all breathing. [00:04:30] Extinction is something we all have in common, but it’s very, very difficult to grasp that. So, the problem that we’ve been seeing in the last couple of episodes of Game of Thrones is actually an excellent example of the problem that we’re running to in our civilization. How do I believe in the white walkers? How do I believe that winter is coming down? I’m living down in King’s Landing, where it’s bombing, and the present challenge is still the people want to poison me. Why would I spend a moment’s time worrying about this mythological constructive White Walkers, right? The same thing’s happening in the world. I’m sitting in Washington D. C., [00:05:00] where I’m engaging in survival conflict with other political operators who I’ve been ostensibly fighting with for decades. Why do I care about these sort of abstract distant threats? It’s hard for me to really grasp. Like, prove to me that the climate change is really going to have any impact that matters to me. Prove to me that asymmetric warfare is going to have an impact that matters to me. You know, we’re basically dealing with exactly the same metaphor that we talked about earlier, which is everything I know about how the world works and everything that I have built in my life and how to respond [00:05:30] to the world makes me almost incapable of actually perceiving the reality in which I live, and, thereby, responding to the actual fundamental threat that is coming at me. And, well, I think at this, we just have to pause because anybody who perceives what I just said as being true, really should be extremely afraid, almost possibly to the point of catastrophic paralysis. The reality is we’re probably all going to die. It’s very unlikely humanity has what it takes to get us through this. It’s [00:06:00] never happened before in the past, and novel things are novel. The kinds of things that we do as human beings, unfortunately, most of them are destructive to this characteristic. Now, there may be deep mythopoetic things that it’s difficult for us to get a handle on. There may be forces at play that help us. Certainly, we as humans have weathered serious problems in the past, and we have what is necessary. Like, we are the kinds of beings that are capable of coming together and navigating very new niches. We’re vastly better prepared for this than, say, chimpanzees or [00:06:30] elephants. But, God damn. This is a tough one. I mean, if you can’t grasp the level of uncertainty and the level of stake and the level of individual collective greatness that is required to have a chance, well, that’s all I can say. So, I’m actually delighted by the degree to which something like Game of Thrones is out there because it creates a nice, visceral sense. You know, the winter is upon us, and death [00:07:00] is literally at our door. I would not be at all surprised for us to be at a situation of actual serious people dying a lot in the next year. I would be shocked out of my mind if we didn’t see something like that in the next seven years. I’ve talked about something, which is vastly worse the World War II. So, we’re talking about a window, which is within the conceptual… You know, most people can grasp 7-year time horizons, and we’re in those time horizons.  And every variable was pointing in that direction. [00:07:30] So, first step, every single human being has to take personal responsibility for maximizing their individual sovereignty and helping other people accomplish that without pulling yourself out of your own grounding. Alright, so, if you see somebody who’s drowning, throw them a life preserve, but you can’t dive in because they might pull you under. Similarly, learn how to swim. Learn how to be able to really hold the magnitude of what we’re dealing with as deeply in yourself as you can, and still be able to respond every single day with the best that you can bring. And then learn how to collaborate [00:08:00] learn how to get into higher and higher communion with more and more people, and that’s it. Like, that is the only possible way we have of getting out of this.

Mike Gilliland: It’s interesting the scale of time that you’ve mentioned this. Are there any concrete things in the last, say, year that have really put up red flags for you?

Jordan Greenhall: So, let’s just kind of… I’ll take one, just one domain because every domain has its own red flags. This domain I think is pretty visceral, so all I have to do is look at the semantics of political discourse [00:08:30] in the west over the past year. It requires I think a nice historical sense, but if you have any historical sense at all, it’s pretty easy to see the semantics of political discourse in the west have accelerated away from wisdom, away from communication, and towards violence. Take that down to lower level levels of pragmatics, and look at the way that individual human beings frame [00:09:00] the conversation. Like, the way that a given person articulates the meaning of what’s happening anywhere. Take any event. The way that framing constrains the possibility of any form of communion occurring in either direction. Right, so, if I am in that frame, I’m not actually entering into communion. I’m actually entering into ideology. And if I’m out of that frame, there’s no possibility of me entering into that frame because now I’m ideologically positioned as being incapable of collaboration. This is happening in [00:09:30] every dimension, in every location that I can identify, and it’s accelerating not just at the level of, sort of classical politics, like, say, what we would call your government, but in every level. So, in universities, in media, probably even in families at this point.

Mike Gilliland:  So, to simplify, you’re basically saying the binary thinking or the us versus them, good versus evil kind of mentality that has become so prevalent lately, is that correct?

Jordan Greenhall:  Yeah, I’d say that’s a [00:10:00] very denatured position of sovereignty. Like, if you’re relating to people with that set of models and responses, you’re at a very low level of sovereignty, which means that you’re part of the problem because the way that you’ll act in the world decreases the capacity for communion in the environment around you. And by the way, again in accelerating fashion, go to another one. Map what’s happening in social media. And how social media, as a construct, [00:10:30] is separating us from sense making. First, because of its commitment to late stage capitalism, meaning it does not actually take responsibility for maintaining high integrity communication and coherence, but, instead, believes that it’s completely appropriate for it to optimize for cognitive attention hijacking and limbic system manipulation. Does that make sense what I just said?

Euvie Ivanova:  Yep.

Jordan Greenhall: It’s okay for it to fuck with us and lie to us. And then secondarily, that the way that [00:11:00] it goes about facilitating conversation is optimized for that kind of expression, so, the people who are very, very good at manipulating to us and lying to us are the most effective on this platform. And, so, it’s going in that direction as well. By the way, broadcast media is worse. I’m not saying that we should watch TV rather than go to Facebook. They’re both going to kill us. The only way to do it is direct human-to-human conversation.

Mike Gilliland: So, for someone like yourself who seems pretty solution-oriented and actually has a good awareness of what the state of the world is now, [00:11:30] and other people like yourself who are trying to run projects like decentralization, well, any number of things. I’m sure you can come with more examples. What is your day-to-day look like in actually trying to hijack the momentum that is already happening?

Jordan Greenhall: Like I said earlier, at the very beginning, one of the things that I seem to be holding is strategy. So, for me, a lot of this has to do with questions of strategic approaches to solving the problem. Different people are definitely doing it differently. A lot of my collaborators [00:12:00] look at it from the point of view of principles or design, but, you know, strategy’s my gig. So, when I look at it, I say, “Okay, for us to have any chance of pulling this thing off, we need to be able to tap into forces of their own nature, under their own intrinsic dynamics are already growing rapidly, and also have exponential potential. And, so, we can only solve this problem if we’re actually writing waves that are big and growing, and are growing rapidly enough to be able to have enough impact to [00:12:30] be meaningful in the timeframe that we have. Hence, my interest in the blockchain space. If you take a very, very close look at the way the blockchain space has evolved since inception, and you map that to every single form of cultural technical development in history, what you see is something that has the right characteristics. It’s very bottoms-up. If there was a single intense moment of top-down design at the creation of the first Satoshi white paper, almost all of the activity after that has been autochthonous, [00:13:00] bottoms-up, self-organizing. It has solved problems that are extraordinarily difficult. I mean, it’s astounding the degree to which, say, Bitcoin is actually really solving problems of doing money on a global basis, in spite of the fact that that idea, that concept is at the absolute dead center of the totality of game A, and that, you know, even something, say, as intense as PayPal barely even got off the starting blocks. Now, the Bitcoin right now is about 100 times more effective than [00:13:30] PayPal has ever been using an entirely new modality of coordination and thinking, and then if I look at the arc, the number of people who are attending to it, the amount of energy they’re putting into it, and the growth rate, both in terms of capacity and potential, is growing at a hyper exponential rate. So, strategically, that’s a good place to focus. That’s the kind of thing that if we can get in there now, where it is still very, very nascent to initial conditions, as it expands and the potential realizes itself into actuality, [00:14:00] we get a lot for free. You know, we get to be in designing now when something is very, very small, relatively. And that whatever things happen in terms of how we design it, does get carried through as it expands, and that creates a whole bunch of brand-defying consequences down the road. And it’s exactly the sweet spot.

Mike Gilliland: Yeah, exactly. It’s the same kind of advice people give about starting business. You know, follow market waves, don’t try and build something from scratch that there is not already a market demand for.

Jordan Greenhall:  Yeah, that’s right. That’s one. And then the other one is you’ll be very, very [00:14:30] mindful about the fundamentals of what you’re doing. Like, the founders effect. Because a lot of what gets baked into the beginning when you’re building something is going to be what it grows into. So, Google is what it is now because of the specific kind of mindfulness, particularly that Larry and Sergey put into it during the first five or six years. And by the time Eric got involved, Google largely was what it was going to be, and when something like that has reached a certain level of intrinsic momentum, you’re not going to change it. So, you’ve got both, on the one [00:15:00] hand, catch a wave that is going on its own, and on the other hand, be very mindful about the things that are the most fundamental, and get that right, and then allow that to become the thing that generates the rest. So, the fact that the blockchain space is right now smack dab in the middle of its own self-awareness of the necessity of solving the problem of decentralized governance is one of the best things happening to the world.

Mike Gilliland: Yep, on the same page with you on that. What about the other two?

Jordan Greenhall:  Number two is the degree to [00:15:30] which women, or more specifically, the feminine, is coming into awareness of its fundamental power, that throwing away ideological frameworks that are holding it back, and is establishing itself in the position that it needs to be. I can go into a lot more detail on that. Most of it right now is showing up as error, but it’s not. It’s exploration and learning, but I can guarantee you, we don’t make it if the feminine does not establish itself in its fullest form.

Mike Gilliland: And number one.

Jordan Greenhall: Well, number one is the thing we talked about in terms of Game of Thrones. [00:16:00] Number one is the ability of human beings to completely melt down their paradigmatic models, and connect with the mythopoetic channel. Begin to be able to operate at the lowest level of raw intuition, and build the capacity to cohere around that.

Mike Gilliland: And you’re seeing that a lot with younger generations now.

Jordan Greenhall: Yeah, yeah, thank God. It’s almost the inverse consequence of the travesty of our educational institutions because as education sucks. It’s actually not that hard for the younger generations to simply ignore it, and deal with things directly out [00:16:30] of their own intrinsics.

Mike Gilliland: Yeah, it’s like the problem is breeding the perfect set of solutions. Interesting.

Jordan Greenhall: Yeah. I mean, if I had my best, every single kid above the age of 12 would immediately drop out of school and immediately start self-organizing.

Euvie Ivanova: Amazing. Now, how do we enter that state as adults? I don’t know. I’m about to dive into weird stuff. Maybe we should save it for another episode?

Mike Gilliland:  I kind of wanted to dive back into [00:17:00] the feminine part.

Euvie Ivanova: Alright, maybe we can talk about consciousness hacking tools at a later time, but based on the language that you have used, I suspect that that’s a fairly big part of what you’re doing.

Jordan Greenhall:  Yeah, that’s true. Let’s put it this way. We’re going to need at least two things that would otherwise be perceived as magic to pull this off. Now, what I don’t mean is things that are actually obviously naturally supernatural, but we don’t know that much about the nature of reality. And I can [00:17:30] guarantee you that the toolkit of reality we have right now is inadequate, so, diving through what appears to be weird to try to find something that is in fact actually real and helpful is a part of the process.

Mike Gilliland: Okay, I see where you’re going with that. That’s pretty interesting.

Euvie Ivanova: So, Mike didn’t know.  Okay.

Mike Gilliland: Yeah, I wasn’t sure where you’re going.

Euvie Ivanova: Yeah, it was about magic. So, maybe we can save that for another episode. What did you mean about the feminine coming into a new modality or new way of operating in the [00:18:00] world?

Jordan Greenhall: Okay, so this is really, really tough, and by that I mean certainly in the west. This is actually not such a big deal in the rest of the world, but in the west, this conversation is almost always going to melt down. So, let’s just all be aware of that fact and maybe hark it back to the previous notion of sovereignty, and recognize that the conversation we’re having right now is likely going to have broadcast modality. What I mean is, I’m not talking to the two of you. We are collectively having a conversation that a lot of people are going to be listening [00:18:30] to,  and broadcast has a really hard time with sovereignty because there’s no way for people to check in and be heard. So, if you’re having this conversation in broadcast, we’re all trying to do our best and try and not to create harm, and if something causes you to feel a very strong sense of being attacked or a very strong sense of pain, if you’re listening, the only thing that you could do is recognize that, notice it. Try to have a sense [00:19:00] of curiosity about it, and then, if necessary, you know, turn it off and recohere, but do your absolute level best not to operate out of a level of decreased sovereignty.

Mike Gilliland: It’s probably one of the best-put scientific sensitivity disclaimers I’ve ever heard.

Jordan Greenhall: Well, okay, so I’ll give you the second one. I am absolutely certain that I do not have the level of wisdom, discernment and sensitivity to do this well. I can have [00:19:30] this conversation among people who are coming with an enormous amount of sovereignty, but, you know, my gig is, well, first of all, very masculine. I grew up in Texas in the 1970s in America, so suck it up. Do not have emotional responses, walk it off. That’s just part of my developmental environment. So, I actually have a very humorous relationship with a lot of my millennial friends who have a vastly higher level of sensitivity in, both, the negative and positive sense, so, please [00:20:00] just recognize that as a caveat. I mean you know harm.

Okay, so given all of that, let’s start at the top. One of the most important things for human beings to recognize is that evolution has given women fundamental power at the biological level. Power in homosapiens is anchored on women. Now, since it happens to be the case that, broadly speaking, women are also the [00:20:30] stewards of and most elegant users of the feminine. Broadly speaking, not exclusively. The feminine also is at the foundation of how homosapiens use and deploy power. Now, this may feel wrong, I imagine, to most women because they don’t experience themselves as having fundamental power. But that’s because the large arc of civilization has been swimming against that tide with very sophisticated tools for separating women from their power and separating the feminine from its [00:21:00] power. Nonetheless, it is in fact actually the case. This is very important because as the paradigmatic models and the social institutional frameworks by which we go about doing what we do begin to fail and begin to fall apart, we will intrinsically move into deeper and deeper locations. The mythopoetic is what we just talked about, and the mythopoetic sits on top of the biological, which means that the mythopoetic sits on top of women and the feminine as the [00:21:30] foundation of power.

So, what I’ve been saying is, first and foremost, if you are a woman, what that means is increasingly overtime, your capacity to wield power will become more obviously true. But then, therefore, also your responsibility for wielding it honorably is increasing as well. One of the big challenges that we’re running into right now in the west is the rapid collapse of the civilization frameworks that at least [00:22:00] operated based upon a very masculine approach to power, while, simultaneously, the feminine, and here I don’t mean specifically women but the feminine, has not yet reached the capacity to really take responsibility for its power in a truly honorable way. That phrase explains much of what we’re actually observing in the west. I should mention, by the way, that while feminism was definitely necessary, a large part of it fell into ideological traps that separated the feminine from its [00:22:30] fundamental power, and it requires a substantial amount of really deep connection to self and fundamental reality to get past those ideological tools on the part of both men and women, which in some sense isn’t that complicated. It’s the same thing that I said earlier, which is shit is getting real, and almost everything that we’ve ever figured out on how to do stuff is no longer valid. It’s all obsolete, including those tools. And that means that each of us has to be able to go into a deeper level of process and a much deeper level of individual [00:23:00] sovereignty, and deeper level of connection to who we are and how we relate to reality, and entering in with the level of curiosity and a level of, like, deep noticing and presence with other people. And just recognizing the responsibility frankly to go all the way down to root, down to base, and then collaboratively and slowly and gently learning how to recreate authentic human relationship without being limited, bounded or driven by [00:23:30] the totality of the ideological sense-making and institutional frameworks that brought us to where we are.

Euvie Ivanova: It sounds like you’re talking about deconditioning ourselves from what we perceive to be parts of self, when actually they have very little to do with self. They’re just conditioning that was placed on to us by society or other structures, and recognizing things that are deeper and operating from that place.

Jordan Greenhall: Yes, that is exactly right. Thank you.

[00:24:00] Euvie Ivanova: Can you elaborate a bit more on what you see as feminine power versus masculine power? Or not versus, but as opposed to masculine power.

Jordan Greenhall: I would say “as distinct from” because one can be distinct without being opposed, and that creates a nice sense of clarity.

Euvie Ivanova: That’s right.

Jordan Greenhall: Okay. I’ll give you… I’ll give you two. The first is I think something that is not very well understood, and that is that the feminine is fundamentally invulnerable. And this is something that I think comes as a shock largely to men, but the degree to which a [00:24:30] woman has the capacity to undergo anything and yet still hold her resolve is awe-inspiring. If she chooses to ride in her power, at the end is a power that can simply hold. It’s a… I don’t know why that is, I haven’t got a good answer for it. I think I could collaborate with folks on understanding why that is but because her power comes from the sense of within, very deeply, like a really deep attunement. I mean, the phrase… In some of the communities, they talk about these things as just a sense of deep knowing because that [00:25:00] deep knowing is just so very deep. You know, if you have a deep relationship with a female partner, and you have an ability to enter into a relationship that is appropriately balanced and has a lot of respect built into it, as a man you will find that she can hold the integrity of the relationship in a way that you, broadly speaking, can’t. And there’s lots of good reasons for that. Like, if we just go back to the notion of evolutionary history, you just think about the division of labor that has happened for 2.5 [00:25:30] million years, that men who, again broadly speaking, tend to hold the masculine have a more responsibility for experimentation, more responsibility for risk taking, more responsibility for exposing themselves to the possibility of harm and threat. For very obvious reasons, right? It doesn’t take that many of us to reproduce the species, and its actually healthier for the species if we expose ourselves to high challenge so that the versions of [00:26:00] us that work are the ones that reproduce, and the versions of us that fail don’t reproduce. Whereas, by contrast, most females have to reproduce in order for the species to reproduce effectively, and, so, there’s just a whole lot more pressure on the part of the female to take responsibility for maintaining the quality and integrity of the whole because that’s what is being selected for. Does that make sense?

Mike Gilliland: Yeah.

Jordan Greenhall: And, so, that’s an explanation for why what I just said earlier might be the case. [00:26:30] But, think about that in terms of superpowers. This has been selected for among humans, homosapiens, for 2.5 million years, but it’s actually been selected for among mammals for 150 million years, and it’s probably even deeper in this underlying dynamics that that particular allocation of responsibility for the fitness of the species is super, super deep. And it’s very powerful and meaningful, and being able to understand that and take advantage of it is… Well, it’s fundamental. If we don’t do that well, we’re [00:27:00] making bad choices, and so what that means then is there are certain things that are just going to be in attunement, differentially held between the males and the females, and between the masculine and the feminine, that speaks to this kind of a sounding. So, that’s some difference. Now, how does that show up? So, first of all, take what I just said and make that an axiom, so we can now start engaging in some games on what that implies. So, if that’s an axiom… Now, let’s take some things that are characteristically understood to be part of the feminine. Let’s just use a simple [00:27:30] example like invitation and nurturing under the framework of a masculine-dominated civilization model. So, everything from the Bronze Age to now, certainly and probably all the way back to the agricultural revolution. Nurturing and invitation feel weak. They feel soft. They feel like a distraction. They feel like they’re not effective. But, are actually a mattock just said that the feminine is fundamentally responsible for maintaining the integrity of the whole, [00:28:00] and is where the basis and the foundation of coherence lives, and that’s true. And what that means is the only way that we can possibly be effective as a group is if we’re in coherence, is if we hang together in a very trusting way. Trust has to be at the foundation, but trust doesn’t come cognitively. I can’t choose to trust you. I have to actually really trust you authentically. And the channel, the thing that… Remember the generator function concept earlier?

Mike Gilliland/Euvie Ivanova: Mm-hmm.

Jordan Greenhall: The generator function, from which things like nurturing an [00:28:30] invitation come from, is actually the place from which real authentic deep comprehensive committed trust comes from. And, so, the feminine is the steward of trust at the gut level, like at the base. Like all the way to the back of the heart and below the stomach, which is the thing that allows you to actually make existential commitment, deeper than the one that allows men to come together in bands to fight. That’s also real, but that lives in a different place. And it’s only really by tapping into [00:29:00] that and allowing that to do what it’s supposed to do, and allowing it to actually play the role that evolution selected for it for millions of years, do we have the ability to actually come into the kind of coherence and communion we’ve been talking about for the past hour, is necessary for us to have the capacity to be able to respond to the world that we’re living in. So, it’s a pretty decent example, I think, of the question you were asking.

Euvie Ivanova: Can we talk a bit about the consciousness hacking tools? Because that seems to be pretty [00:29:30] necessary thing that people are going to have to start getting into if they are to upgrade their capacity to deal with the world.

Jordan Greenhall: Yeah, so, I’ll give you two. They’re certainly true and good examples of the path. So, the first is the easiest, and that has to do with emotional resilience. The ability to respond to challenge while maintaining a presence in your prefrontal cortex, not limbic. You don’t have a fight or flight amygdala hijack response, but to [00:30:00] be able to hold your sovereignty comprehensively. You know, one of the things that happens is we’ve got pretty good training regimes for, say, like, firefighters to be able to keep their head in the game under duress in a fire, but those same individuals, if they get into a fight with their wife, completely drop out of sovereignty. So, it’s actually a much deeper work to be able to hold your personal integrity under all possible dress. That is a big piece of the work of consciousness hacking, it’s that. Boy, I tell you what? That is a serious, serious path. You [00:30:30] know, everybody has deeply vulnerable blind spots. You might have unbelievably high degree of emotional resilience in general, and still have these deeply vulnerable blind spots, and still… It’s like, you know, a kid being willing to go into the crucible, no matter where you are, and having the ability to just… And by the way, the support, you know, the love, and the ability to kind of fall back on somebody who you really trust take care of you, to go to those spaces, is integral. Nobody can make the right kind of progress on their own. I guess that’s the first. [00:31:00] And I think everybody should be very aware that, in fact, that is actually deep consciousness hacking. Super deep. It’s really hard to get there using any kind of normal practices. And given the timeframe we’ve got, I really do agree that without use of medicin e, that I wish I knew drugs, I don’t think we can pull it off, except for very rare circumstances. Second, transparadigmatic or transperspect title mind. So, we’ve been talking about this notion of getting outside of the paradigmatic mind, and, you all know of generation omega, this is something that they may be able to actually [00:31:30] just do developmentally, but the process of being able to get very fluid wi th that as grown-ups is going to have to happen, too. You know, people over the age of 18 have a role to play in this thing. And learning how to actually build a kind of consciousness that is able to use paradigmatic models without being of paradigmatic models. It’s real, it can be done, and is, again, a certain necessity. It is necessary to be effective in the world. That’s very, very much a consciousness hacking thing. [00:32:00] Like, if you can get to the recognition that you are not your ego mind, you are not your sense-making paradgimatic framework… You are, in fact, the author of that, and, therefore, have the capacity to step beyond it and witness it, and even author other ones, and then use them, but from a place that is not driven by them… I guess many people who are hearing that may think that sounds like nonsense, and that’s kind of the point. As another deep practice that is certainly within the domain of consciousness hacking. Then [00:32:30] once you’ve done both of those, once you’ve built the capacity to maintain an extremely high degree of sovereignty under arbitrary, unpredictable and uncertain crisis, and have built the capacity to be able to hold and build paradigms without becoming of them, you then have the capacity to begin delving into the deeply mysterious. If you haven’t done both of those, delving into the deep and mysterious is quite likely going to lead you to come back with monsters, to come back with things that [00:33:00] are either being driven by bad emotional responses, like the defense mechanisms clothed in sense, or to bring back rationalizations that are derivatives of paradigms, not novel or just straight out nonsense. But, if you have those two capacities in place, then you can start submerging yourself into deeply mysterious things and beginning to grasp stuff that is not yet well understood, without falling [00:33:30] into trying to make sense too quickly, or simply allowing nonsense to take over the liminal space between sense and nonsense. Where I sit right now, I kind of think of it… I’m going to think of it generationally. There’s also a cultural and geographic piece that’s hard to hold, but I can do it generationally pretty well because you’ll each cohort. Each group of people who lived through similar developmental environments has a different set of challenges and a [00:34:00] different set of rules to play. So, for example, the oldest cohorts, the people who are in their 60s, 70s and 80s, although those are different, they have the challenge of acknowledging the fact that their experience is no longer particularly helpful, and yet their power is very high, right? They effectively control everything right now, and, yet, they are almost completely separated from the capacity of making good choices because almost [00:34:30] all the models that worked so well are precisely the things that are becoming obsolete. And, so, moving into a space of learning how to actually have wisdom as opposed to having authority is their challenge. That’s going to be a heck of a challenge, and I think the only way to really do that is to really, deeply fundamentally, all the way down, accept the fact that they’re going to die soon, and that the world that they are leaving behind is certainly fucked. If they can take that kind of responsibility, [00:35:00] and from that point completely go away from ego and drop into a level of wisdom, that’s really helpful.

Mike Gilliland: Yeah.

Jordan Greenhall: Going on the other side… So, I’m skipping my cohort for the moment because obviously I’ll have a lot of blind spots. The millennial cohort needs to take responsibility. That’s… That’s it, all right? That’s the key. Yeah, the millennial cohort has been separated from responsibility developmentally. It’s been playing society’s game in both senses, like the good and the bad sense of [00:35:30] responsibility. Meaning, on the one hand, it’s been playing somebody else’s game, and, therefore, hasn’t been able to do the things that it wants to do, shape the world the way that it wants, except at the margins and within its own sort of private spaces. But then, secondarily, the millennial cohort has been insulated from having to actually suffer the consequences of bad choices, broadly. This is not obviously individually true, and this happens all the time, but broadly speaking. And, so, particularly the female millennials, because that’s where the power lives in that [00:36:00] cohort, really, really, really deeply stepping into responsibility… Wow, that’s so hard because it’s different than stepping into agency, and it’s different from stepping into wanting to make the world look the way they want to, but it’s actually stepping into basically the moral analog of wisdom, but here wisdom, knowing that it’s not wise, right? It’s the level of wisdom that recognizes precisely the fact that there is much to learn, and yet [00:36:30] doing is yours to do. And then there’s, you know, my cohort, which is in between. And then there’s obviously many, many gradiations. We should never be too narrow. The characteristic of my cohort is that we have kids. Generally, now, we’re going to have kids that are in that generation omega age frame, so we’ve lived through a lot of stuff that requires a certain degree of responsibility, and yet we haven’t developed deep wisdom. We have, simultaneously, the capacity to not have [00:37:00] attachment to much of what the world is, and we don’t really feel a sense of ownership or connection to most of social or institutional frameworks. And, yet, we have a developmental environment that is connected to a lot of the wisdom that was part of that older world. If you lived in the 60s, 70s and 80s as a kid, you were alive in a timeframe when things at least kind of worked. And, so, your body feels little bit of what it feels like for things to kind of work, as opposed to people who are raised after that when things really did not [00:37:30] work. We’re in a position to, kind of like, be the stewards.  And, you know, we also seem to have a real capacity to be desperate. Like, I think a lot of us were raised in an environment where there was an expectation that only a few of us would be able to be successful, and that you had a lot of necessity for taking care of yourself. Now, that generally showed up as “I’ll take care of mine”, but being able to actually extend and trust. Yeah. So, for [00:38:00] us really being able to get past cynicism, it being able to take this position of that liminal space between sense and nonsense in a space of trust… So, stepping back from paradigms, but not losing them. Yeah, I think you said something like transcending the ego, but it’s very important to recognize that the ego is the thing we use to do stuff in the world. So, not dispensing with it, but not being attached to it. Recognizing and honoring the things that we know how to do, while simultaneously recognizing the [00:38:30] necessity of stepping into a liberal space at mystery. And, oh man… And actually being able to have a relationship with the millennials, that’s healthy. And the relationship with the older generation, that’s healthy. You know, we don’t have that. It’s amazing the degree to which millennials and their parents have great relationships. My cohort in the middle has resentment against both.

Mike Gilliland: Well…

Euvie Ivanova:  That seems to be a theme that relates to what you were talking about earlier. That more and more people have less capacity to understand different [00:39:00] perspectives, maybe because they’re overwhelmed.

Mike Gilliland: If you have to choose what you’re going to focus on, what your attention is going to be put on, you’re not going to do history lessons of the generation that came before you. It doesn’t make sense to focus on that. So, there’s a lot of ignorance in younger generations looking backwards to what the wisdom is that older generations could provide, but then there’s a lot of ignorance of their current state, and, like you said, responsibility is a big thing that is lacking in, I think, generation omega and generation X.

Jordan Greenhall: Yeah.

Mike Gilliland: Generation Y.

[00:39:30] Jordan Greenhall: Generation Y.

Mike Gilliland: Yeah.

Jordan Greenhall: Yeah, I think… I think one of the big things for generation Y is to… Actually, I think this is actually very liberating, but it also might create some real fear, which is the culture wars in the west were being fought fully during the [inaudible] environment, and, as a consequence, a big chunk of the stuff that was taught, that was downloaded into their ego minds, is malware. It was deliberately [00:40:00] designed bad code. And, so, on the one hand, I would offer the ability to liberate yourselves from all of that. That which you were taught cannot be trusted. Ok, well, now what? Well, we’re gonna have to take responsibility. I’m reimagining everything quickly and authentically and very carefully.

Mike Gilliland: Yeah.

Euvie Ivanova: That is a huge responsibility.

Jordan Greenhall: Well, otherwise we’re all going to die, so let’s [00:40:30] just do what we got to do to be able to take the responsibility that is ours to do, and step into it. It’ll be fun.  

Mike Gilliland: Jordan, this has been a lot of fun. Thanks for joining us, and sharing so many different fields of wisdom with us and our audience.

Euvie Ivanova:  And very much looking forward to talking to you again, and unraveling some of these things even deeper.

Mike Gilliland: Yeah, especially the esoteric stuff. It’s going to be fun.

Jordan Greenhall: Great. Well, I’ve got to say, I really appreciate what you guys are doing. And I really enjoyed being able to share with you because it felt like you’ve actually prepared yourselves and [00:41:00] the people with whom you are communicating to do this thing well. That’s beautiful. Thank you.