Feeling for the Path: Reflections on Navigating the Hyperconversation & Intuitive Podcasting [June 20th 2021]

Over the past 18 months, I’ve been on a self-led and intuitive learning journey during a pretty powerful period of personal transformation. During this exciting and intense time, I’ve continually returned to deep dialogic explorations with luminaries of our time through my channel SenseSpace. In these conversations, I’ve found insight for my own process and sought to chart what’s emerging at the edge of the ‘Hyperconversation’; including new understandings of Wisdom, Nature, Meaning and Metacrisis. I’m going to share in this piece what I’ve been gleaning about navigating the Hyperconversation: a growing and interconnected living landscape of books, (podcast) dialogues, and attractive new avenues of enquiry. The possibilities of discovery and cultivating a unique learning path have never been greater. However, in equal measure, there is far too much terrain today for any single person to traverse no matter how curious.  How are we to know what to give our attention to? Our time is limited; the terrain is vast. 

My growing sense is that intuition must guide us. In grappling with navigation, I’ve discovered that there isn’t a final answer or place to stand. What’s called for is a kind of continual balancing, an ongoing realisation of what’s relevant. This process of intuitive journeying through unknown terrain has become my life.

Approaching Conversation

The explosion of long-form dialogues brought by podcasting is changing our culture. My work right now is exploring the transformative potential of dialogue. I published a paper on the emergent flow states available in emergent dialogue known as Dialogos. However, I wish here to reflect on the process that I’ve developed around the conversations themselves.

From the outset of SenseSpace, I found myself already embedded within a conversational landscape. In that wide landscape of conversations there were a number of figures who—for whatever reason—particularly resonated with me. I am drawn to such figures and, as a result, I gradually begin to hold them as a kind of avatar in my mind. As I engage with them, for whatever period of time, I also have a kind of dialogue with that avatar. The avatars become points on a constellational map of the mind; around which ideas, thoughts, and questions can gather. Over time, these maps gradually mature as new material and connections are introduced. The constellation of conversations is continually in movement as I continually re-imagine the maps. One person can very quickly shift to the centre of attention, while others fade to the periphery. 

Many podcasters take some semblance of this approach, identifying who they’d like to speak with and undergoing a research of their work in preparation. My practice, however, seeks to go beyond just studying the work & conversations of a potential dialogue partner. I want to feel into their work in such a way that the sum of my learning about them is beyond the parts. I want to learn their way of thinking and listen closely to the rhythm of their thought, such that I can begin to inhabit it. In this way, I prepare myself not for a set interview around the speaker’s topics of concern but rather a live conversational dance in which novel insight can emerge. 

Intuition & Timing

In conversation, as in life, timing is all important. In navigating the hyperconversation timing is both important and deeply intuitive. This timing is knowing when the conversational connection has been sufficiently developed and marinated. When you listen for it, there is a moment of optimal intention that arises; a kind of Kairos. Led by such intuition, it becomes possible to develop an integrity of action that is made scarce by a culture incapable of slowing down or letting go.

When I act from right intuition (and right timing), action is relatively effortless; and if the constellation is aligned, more often than not the proposal is received and leads to something meaningful.

I want to contrast this intuitive approach with another kind of intention that gives rise to action—what I call the ‘strategic impulse’. Its flavour is action that arises from a place of lack or a place of ‘I should’. It is choosing to speak, not because it feels most deeply resonant, but because it would appear to give social standing or a sense of being a ‘player’ by the measure of others. When I’ve acted from that place it doesn’t feel good and it doesn’t bear fruit. I feel wary of the strategic impulse in part because I believe it’s a perennial challenge for us. The commercial/market forces that always keep us moving also seek to corral us into being ‘about’ a particular thing; to constrain ourselves to a box we then live out of. Navigating that subtle boxing-in as a podcaster is unavoidable because the first question people will inevitably ask is, ‘what’s your podcast about?’. Responding to such questions in a way which opens rather than closes the space is no easy task.

Listening for the Path

Beyond podcasting, the intuitive approach to life leads to broader questions like: What is mine to pay attention to? 

I recollect during my early university years taking a rather strategic approach to reading. That is to say I sought out the books that I ‘should’ read: the books that people talked about and the books that I had to read should I wish to take part. In the ensuing years this changed when I began to develop a different kind of listening. This listening was deeply connected with my own curiosity and began attuning me to some audible thread that called me through the world. As I was being called forth by the world, I was also calling the world in.

I see this participatory quality of listening as the foundation for an ongoing relevance realisation (the process of realising what’s relevant). In other words, it is the basis for an ongoing discovery of paths. These paths, though winding and esoteric, feel different for those who walk them. They have a palpability and driving curiosity that lead down branches and ravines toward something—something resonating just beyond the horizon. 

Here, we find clues that lead us toward our future becoming. 

We come into deeper relationship with not-knowing, which in turn discloses more of the world.

And we discover new-found agency in surrender.

Balancing on the Path

Some of the most meaningful experiences on my intuitive path are moment of joyous synchronicity. In one instance, I recollect being called to read William James’ The Varieties of Religious Experience. It kept popping up in different places and I felt there might be something there for me. The slowing down during lockdown had enabled me some deep and necessary psychic shifts and I was taking time each morning to read after breakfast while staying with my parents in Athens. Turning the chapter that day I found words that spoke with such emotive force that they flowed through and illuminated some of my deepest existential concerns. Such events in relationship with books (and conversations) have been an ongoing point of enriching contact with meaningfulness which have repeatedly broken me free from stuckness. These moments feel like symbolic signposts of being on a path.

Staying on this kind of path is not at all easy. For the curiously minded, the Hyperconversation today is overwhelmingly rich, now so more than ever. Time and time again I’ve found the magnitude of it stretching me as if the ambition of my curiosity wants to hold more conversations, more enquiries, more books and so on. These exhilarating flights of the mind can soon lead me into a state of imbalance which shows up first in my gut. I’ve learned that this signal means the mind is reaching too fast while the body is saying slow down. Symptomatically these signs of imbalance are similar to those experienced in connection with boundaries. I’ve begun to realise that just as we need (evolving) emotional boundaries in order to manifest well, we also need informational boundaries.

A great deal of human potential is lost by an incapacity to discern and exercise emotional boundaries. If you take on more than what is yours to hold emotionally you become out of balance and likely suffer for it. Worse still, your capacity to be of service to others is diminished. For some, however, it is not emotional boundaries but informational boundaries that can become the source of imbalance. In a landscape as informationally saturated as ours it has become all the more essential to find a discerning and intuitive balance.

I want to conclude by remembering the dialectical nature of such paths. For all the importance of an intuitive approach here, it must also be (necessarily) one of not-knowing. I’ve heard it said that the most beautiful paths are the ones which appear as well as disappear. In a great conversation we often seem to lose the thread for a stretch only to rediscover it again all the more enriched. Not-knowing enables us not to be too presumptuous or dogmatic about what we listen for. It provokes us to let go of assumptions about what is worth paying attention to and return to the ineffable source of all learning: experience. There is much information to be found in books, but plenty, too, in the forests amidst dances of sunlight under trees and the scintillating songs of birds flying above.