Dear mutants,
I’m reaching out to let you know about a new course offering:
“The Future Arrives Through Strange Reversals: Realizing Time Beyond the Clock”
Alumni receive a $25 discount. You can read the course description above, and register via the alumni link, which I’ve also included here (you must be signed in to view).
We will convene over four consecutive sessions, starting on Wednesday, July 22 at 5 pm PT / 8 pm ET.
To accommodate different time zones, our four office hours/discussion sessions convene on Fridays at 9:30 am PT / 12:30 pm ET.
One of the central questions facing the present civilizational crisis concerns our relationship with time.
How do we practice other forms of futuring—forms which do not march with the progressive clocks and calendars of modern time? What does futuring look like without an exclusive emphasis on the ‘mental’ consciousness structure (in Gebser’s terminology)?
Cynthia Bourgeault suggests that “attention is the new time.”
And indeed, with Gebser, futuring has to do with attending to the present in such a way that time opens up, becomes transparent.
I love the root meaning of attention. Ad implies some degree of mental alertness and directing (I’ve grown accustomed in my family to the French ‘atteint!” - which is something like “be careful,” “watch out/look out/look at this” in English), but could also suggest a ‘turning towards.’
Then there is *ten-, which means “to stretch.”
Stretching, bending, folding—there is a suggestion of suppleness, an awareness capable of bending and wending—words that have their archaic connections with hedgerows and wicker work.
Atteint! The word arrives like a sudden electric jolt, a disruption that in our mental culture implies an urgency of thought-action response. But attention is also an opening for what Bergson calls ‘hesitation’ (l’hésitation), such that we attend to what is present and not merely what is ‘ready-at-hand.’ “Time is... hesitation,” Bergson writes, “or it is nothing at all.”
Work with time as you would a hedgrow, a wicker basket, or ecotone - bend and stretch and fold time. Tend to the specificities of relation.
Integral consciousness practices a tending-towards the relational present.
Time comes to presence, but this is a time that bends, stretches and folds. It is the open and undivided time of relation.
In this open time, we become vast and free, and what is future in us ripens. It is in this time of relation that our bodies take on new and impossible shapes, and we acquire what Hufeland calls “the new strength of spirit.”
STRANGE REVERSALS draws its ideas from two key chapters in my new manuscript (Chapter 12, ‘Reclaiming Time’ and Chapter 13, ‘Integral Futuring’) and expounds on them further.
If you’ve taken this year’s Gebser course (Jan 2026) or last year’s Integral Futuring seminar (Dec 2025), there will be much more to explore together here.
Please do reach out if you have any questions, or are looking for a pay-what-you-can registration link.
See you in class next month!
Warm regards,
Jeremy
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