Each generation lives the dreams of those before. We enjoy rights and medicines our ancestors could only imagine. Now it’s our turn to dream. But what?
Moving from diagnosis to vision, Sylvie and Rufus engage in collective dreaming, sensing what wants to be born beyond modernity’s decline. Sylvie shares how observing wealthy but unhappy people, contrasted with her wise mother’s capacity for forgiveness and generosity, revealed that wisdom rather than wealth produces flourishing. Yet our culture rarely encourages its pursuit.
Key elements of the emerging paradigm include wisdom as a cultivated path, interbeingness extending to Earth and across generations, economy at the service of life, comfort with complexity and non-duality, return of the sacred in non-dogmatic forms, inner growth replacing material accumulation, integration of feminine power, and safeguards of non-dogmatism and non-oppression.
No perfect form exists. Every system has birth, growth, and decay. But dreaming is a muscle that shapes reality. These are the first rays of sun before full sunrise, an invitation to join the dreaming while remembering that pursuing tomorrow’s vision must not make today a nightmare.
This is episode #7 of a new sub-series Over the Mountains: Finding a Path to the Second Renaissance
Chapters
00:00:00 Emerging Paradigms: The Second Renaissance
00:05:08 The Role of Wisdom in Happiness
00:08:29 Interbeingness: Connection to All Life
00:15:17 Complexity and Non-Duality
00:28:34 The Return of the Sacred
00:39:03 Feminine Energy and Future Paradigms
Speakers
Sylvie Barbier is a co-founder of Life Itself, a performance artist, entrepreneur, and educator.
Rufus Pollock is a co-founder of Life Itself, an entrepreneur, activist, an author, as well as a long-term zen practitioner.
About Over the Mountains
Over The Mountains by Life Itself is a podcast and blog exploring the understandings and system shifts needed to bring forth a Second Renaissance, to live within a metamodern reality that works for everyone.
The title Over The Mountains is a metaphor for the long and often difficult journey humanity must take together. In a time when many seek shortcuts — especially through technology — this podcast reminds us that those shortcuts can lead to greater destruction. To truly reach the other side, we must climb over the mountain: facing the complexity of collective action, institutional change, and the reimagining of our shared reality.
Over the Mountains focuses on the societal, political, economic, and ontological transformations required for such a world to emerge. Featuring conversations with sensemakers and the builders of tomorrow such as Rufus Pollock, Liam Kavanagh, Sylvie Barbier, Jonah Wilberg and many others, this series shares knowledge from sociology, economics, political philosophy, history, neuroscience, and ideological science, making these insights accessible to a wider audience. The ideas that we will share with you set out some of the reasoning and ideas for the creation of Life Itself and the Second Renaissance initiatives.
