Alchemy of Change’s New Focus

After putting this website into sleep mode in the spring of 2013, I’m now resuscitating Alchemy of Change with a new focus on exploring the Soul. It’s a significant change, so let me tell you why I’m making it and what to expect here going forward.

Why the Change?

I started Alchemy of Change in 2010 with only a very loose idea for its focus. After three years, I decided to tighten that focus and move my writing to a new site called the Vital Edge, focused on technology, organizations and the future of human experience in an era of machine intelligence.

Over the last several years, I’ve also begun exploring a range of spiritual practices, including daily meditation, core shamanism, and Western esotericism. This work has led to new ways of seeing the world as a complement to the normal, analytical perspective with which I’ve been trained most of my life.

Greater SelfOver the past few years one of the core insights I’ve come to is that, in the coming era of machine intelligence, we must learn to see humanity in very different terms than the ways we assess the capabilities of machines. We will still need reasoning and empirical approaches to knowledge, but will increasingly outsource these functions to machines. As that happens, we will be forced to understand what it is to be truly human. And by that, I mean a bigger understanding of what we actually are.

There are lots of ways to describe what that bigger something is. For the sake of simplicity, I’m just going to call it Soul. Over the last thousand years, we humans have come to forget the Soul. Religious dogmatism and scientific materialism pull us a part and away from a unifying whole. The Soul is the great bridge between Body and Spirit. It is us in our deepest, greatest sense. It is the quarterback astounding us with power and grace on the field, the artist touching our hearts with slivers of imagination, and the philosopher who helps us to see the world anew.  It is us in Love.

The Soul is what makes Humanity most great. We cannot afford to set it aside or somehow forget about it in the future that lies before us. For in the partnership with Machines that is to come, we must remember our Greatness. It is what most differentiates Humanity from Machine. The Soul is a source of wisdom and strength that is most unlike the qualities of the Machine. In the acceleration of intelligence that is about to unfold, the Soul is our basis for a partnership of equals.

We have learned to forget the Soul, and I am rededicating Alchemy of Change to helping us remember.

What to Expect

At this point, I see four areas of focus for the site:

  1. Experience: our modern, predominantly intellectual, understanding of reality is just one of many potential modes of experience. I plan to share what I am learning from others – and from myself – about these other modes of experience.
  2. Mythos: the Soul likes to speak through a highly imaginative, mythical means of communication. I’ve loved myth since I was a young boy and am now gaining an even fuller appreciation. I’ll be sharing lots from the mythic perspective.
  3. Consciousness: one way of describing this exploration is the evolution of consciousness. I’ll be sharing what I’m learning about how human consciousness has changed over time and where I sense that it is now headed.
  4. Life: There is remarkable wisdom embedded in life, just as there is unspeakable beauty. I’ll be covering life in the biological sense, as well as various sources of wisdom about what it means to be alive.

gideon-at-desk-2016I will be writing Alchemy of Change as a complement to the Vital Edge. Alchemy of Change is the sister site and the Vital Edge the brother. Here, the focus on Soul is more personal and intuitive, while the Vital Edge will continue its focus on technology, organizations and the future of the human experience in an era of machine intelligence. Over time, I will begin to knit the two together to more fully explain the synergy that links these two perspectives together.

I hope that you enjoy the new direction.