Origins and Ongoingness
A new season of the Origins Podcast
Hello friends, a new season of The Origins Podcast is coming NEXT WEEK.
I love a line from the poet Tracy K Smith. The poem is called "Willed in Autumn" and the sentence is, "Go for awhile into your own life." That is where I have been in the few weeks since the end of Season Six, if a bit longer than planned due to things unforeseen and unforeseeable that ironically seem so characteristic of life. But they were also weeks of thought, rethinking, beginnings and endings, all of which have influenced the show.
The great Chilean biologist, philosopher, cybernetician, neuroscientist, and contemplative researcher Francisco Varela once lectured on the science of mind and transcendence that it is not about the content, but the process, that the key to the notion of suspending judgment in order to wholly understand an experience, is to move from content to process. To shift one level up.
Last season of this show was a season of flourishing. And taking Varela seriously, we will shift one level up in the episodes to come, not towards a season of something in particular but a movement toward process, toward open-endedness, toward unsettledness; of discipline, of intellect, of being. Great scientific breakthroughs are discoveries of process, and the great discoveries of society and our own lives will be the same.
So, what will this mean? The format of the show will be unchanged, interviews with thought-leaders across an eclectic mix of disciplines drawing out the pivotal moments across their lives, but it will be augmented by explorations of new structures of conversation and potentially new ways of asking, always moving toward generativity and generosity. Indeed, the notion of Great Asking, which we introduced at the conclusion of last season in the brilliant conversation with Krista Tippett and Sara Hendren, has deeply and will continue to affect my thinking and evolve the way that I draw out our guests. We will continue that series of Great Asking with a new episode this season and we're organizing an event to take place in Washington DC with the National Academy of Sciences that would bring this to an even bigger stage.
Brian Eno has this remarkable idea that some things are too momentous for the medium assigned to record them. And I think that is true across many levels, and it means our communication needs to expand across media and scales and structures. So, I'll continue to explore different formats on this show with panel conversations, asynchronous discussions, and salons and rely on feedback from you to determine the affect, what to keep doing, what to move on from.
These Flourishing Commons, the forum that complements Origins episodes and where we cultivate a community of listening and living, will be a place for this wider exploration of media and forum.
The guests in the season ahead also reflect this shift toward process and ongoingness. An anthropologist and activist exploring cooperation, creativity, and belief; a poet and Zen buddhist wise and winsome about the world and the change in it, a pioneer of complexity science and groundbreaking network scientist, one of the world's foremost space scientists, an individual redefining what science is in the age of artificial intelligence, are but a few of the growing edges of thought and being the season ahead holds.
On Origins our discourse is always driven towards the immense questions,
What does it mean to flourish?
Who are we to and with each other?
What does science and poetry and different ways of knowing work in us?
These are threshold and civilizational questions and they create answers in their likeness. The season ahead, like those before, will be explorations in how to hold these questions collectively, generously. I believe that is the function of democracy, still our most capable system for holding things collectively, things too immense for any one person. We'll heed Courtney Martin's (@courtney) words, channeling Hannah Arendt, in fusing themes of intergenerationality and plurality with the season ahead,
Let’s stop strengthening democracy this year. Let’s start weakening delusions about the human condition, which will then help us reimagine democracy for a country, a people, as we really are—young and old and everything in between, and temporarily well and often sick, and sometimes abled bodied and sometimes not, sometimes broken hearted and sometimes full of joy and optimism, and tangled in relationships that hold us up through it all.
Teju Cole writes that to be conscious is to be in a state of 'hmm' or confusion, a quiet state of sorrow knowing there are things we cannot solve. This season, as Origins in general, is meant to be a space for this, a structure for collectively holding in ways that are, in the words of Parker Palmer, neither invasive of the mystery nor evasive of the suffering.
Finally, a note about something emerging from Origins and the Flourishing Commons. We have started to synthesize and crystallize what we've been learning into something we are calling Flourishing Studies, an attempt to bring the notion of flourishing into the realm of scholarship and creating the curriculum, tools, and communities capable of studying what it means to flourish--something that emerged notably in a conversation with philosopher C Thi Nguyen on Origins and his clarion call that, "We need a more robust conception of well-being."
Flourishing is a living process, ever unfinished and evolving. There is no end point, no state of rest, for flourishing. And so we're back with this soaring new season to draw out the stories of human beings across science, engineering, art, and design and the story of humanity that exists within them.
And here is my commitment to you.
That this show actively resists derivation, that it seeks originality even at the expense of commercial success or widespread recognition. It is not for those purposes, and I create each show and curate each season resisting those allures. I adopt a principle of 'meaning over popularity' in creating each show and Origins at large. These conversations are for those who value nuance and subtlety and complexity, those who seek narratives outside of the mainstream, even as they may be unfamiliar and thus uncomfortable. Why I do it is I believe there is a hunger for these qualities in the denizens of the world and an imperative in our society to embrace them.
I commit to nourish this hunger by making each episode from a place of deep engagement and consideration, from the selection of the guests, to the crafting of the questions, to the language I place around each. I pour myself into them so you can pull yourself, and humanity, out.
So in the months ahead you are going to hear from unparalleled imaginations, found amongst space physicists, anthropologists, poets, community leaders and activists, ecologists, philosophers, biologists, engineers, writers, and, as always, those who utterly defy categorization.
Thank you for listening and I'm excited to explore together each of the coming guests, and the exhilarating glimpses they provide into ourselves and our society along the way.