The Infinite Harmony Podcast

What happened when human beings first became aware that they were aware?

In Part II of our Genesis series, The Question, we explore the emergence of self-awareness, language, ego, and the strange separation between the observer and the world being observed. Beginning with the Garden of Eden and the serpent’s first question, we follow this transformation through Genesis, Taoism, Zen Buddhism, philosophy, psychology, mythology, and even the language of computer code.

We examine how language shapes human consciousness and our perception of reality; why words can both connect and divide us; how ego and identity emerge from reflective consciousness; why Taoist sages sought direct experience in nature; and how Zen koans use language itself to break through the limitations of language. Along the way, we encounter the Tao Te Ching, Zhuangzi, Ferdinand de Saussure, Wittgenstein, James P. Carse, Stephen Jenkinson, and the ancient myths that wrestled with humanity's dangerous gift of knowledge.

If language helped create the world we now inhabit, then perhaps the most important question is no longer how we learned to speak, but what we are speaking into existence.

The first question was never answered. It became us.

Discover the golden threads that weave us all together.
This episode is written and produced by Jackie Dragon.

Opening Theme by Kyotea

Closing Theme By AhziRa

Featuring samples of "Screenwriter's Blues" by Soul Coughing

Featuring "The Questions" by Common

Featuring "Greenfields" By Brock Hewitt

Featuring "Without Me" by Eminem

With quotes and references from Stephen Jenkinson’s Matrimony

Containing references to the work of Stephen Harrod Buhner

With references to Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of lived experience

Containing references to Søren Kierkegaard’s writings on anxiety and freedom

With references to anthropologist Nurit Bird-David’s work on animism and relational epistemology

Containing references to the plant research of Monica Gagliano, Suzanne Simard, and Barbara McClintock

With references to the biblical scholarship of Mark S. Smith and Michael Heiser

With references to Hans-Georg Gadamer’s Truth and Method

Containing references to Walter Ong’s work on orality and literacy

With references to Martin Heidegger’s philosophy of language and “enframing”

Containing references to Hegel’s philosophy of consciousness, immediacy, and dialectic

With references to John Francis and his seventeen-year practice of silence

Drawing from the Maya Popol Vuh

With references to the Upanishads

Drawing from Greek mythology and the story of Prometheus

With quotations and references from the Tao Te Ching

With quotations and references from the Zhuangzi

Drawing from the traditions and koans of Zen Buddhism

And of course, quotes from “The Book of Genesis,” the New International Version Bible

To learn more about the Church of Infinite Harmony please visit our website: https://www.infiniteharmony.org

To become a member of the Church of Infinite Harmony visit. We are supported by the tithing of our patrons. You can donate once a month, or as often as you like: https://www.infiniteharmony.org/membership

A transcript of this episode can be found here

Okay Friends,

I'm going to Europe for 3 months. I love you. More info inside this episode. Enjoy! 

Episode 2 and 3 of the Genesis series are likely 2 hours each. So when they drop, strap in. See ya in the fall.

To learn more about the Church of Infinite Harmony please visit our website: https://www.infiniteharmony.org

To become a member of the Church of Infinite Harmony visit. We are supported by the tithing of our patrons. You can donate once a month, or as often as you like: https://www.infiniteharmony.org/membership

As always. Headphone Recommended.

Welcome to the Infinite Harmony Podcast.

Before there was an answer, there was silence. Before the world was divided into subjects and objects, humans may have experienced themselves as participants in an animate world.

In Part I of Genesis, we explore animism, language, consciousness, silence and the Garden of Eden as different chapters in the same human story: the emergence of the reflective mind and the strange separation from the world that came with it.

Moving through Shinto and kami, Māori whakapapa, Lakota philosophy, indigenous animism, David Abram, Stephen Jenkinson, Byung-Chul Han, Hannah Arendt, Sara Maitland, Paul Kingsnorth, and the ancient Genesis story of Adam and Eve, we ask whether the Fall can be read not simply as sin and disobedience, but as the birth of self-awareness, judgment, abstraction and the questioning mind.

The serpent does not overpower Eve. It speaks.

And something changes.

From Eden we arrive in the modern information landscape: algorithms, propaganda, social media, political division and an endless torrent of language competing to tell us what reality is. Against that noise, silence becomes something more than absence. It becomes a way of recovering perception.

This episode asks what language gave us, what it may have taken from us, and whether occasionally becoming quiet enough to encounter the world before we name it might help us remember something we have forgotten.

Discover the golden threads that weave us all together.

This episode is written and produced by Jackie Dragon.

Opening Theme by Kyotea

Closing Theme By AhziRa

Featuring I hear the Silence by Matia Kalli

Featuring the song Created by Sound by Alexa Sunshine Rose

Featuring the Song Chidori No kyoku by Satomi Saeki and Alcvin Takegawa Ramos

Featuring the Song Green Fields by Brock Hewitt

Featuring the Song Fireflies by Ambient Boy

Featuring the Song Echoes of Time by AH NEE MAH

Live Handpan by Jackie Dragon

Quotes from Stephen Jenkinson’s Come of Age

Quotes by Ram Dass

References to Nurit Bird-David’s Animisn Revisited

References to James Frasier’s The Golden Bough

References from the Nihon Shoki and the Kojiki

References to Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s The Phenomenology of Perception

References th Grahan Harvey’s book Animism, Respecting the Living World

References to David Abram’s, The Spell of the Sensous 

References to Finite and Infinite Games by James Carse

References to Sara Maitland’s A book of Silence

References to Paul Kingsnorth’s blog “The Abbey of Misrule”

References to the movie “The Arrival” 

References to Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf’s ideas on Language

And of course, quotes from “The Book of Genesis,” the New International Version Bible

To learn more about the Church of Infinite Harmony please visit our website: https://www.infiniteharmony.org

To become a member of the Church of Infinite Harmony visit. We are supported by the tithing of our patrons. You can donate once a month, or as often as you like: https://www.infiniteharmony.org/membership

A transcript of this episode can be found here

As always. Headphone Recommended.

Welcome to the Infinite Harmony Podcast.

What if the feeling of life we experience in certain places is not merely a feeling?

In the final episode of our exploration of Christopher Alexander’s The Nature of Order, architecture gives way to one of the strangest and most ambitious questions in Alexander’s work: What is the universe actually made of?

In Book Four, The Luminous Ground, Alexander argues that the wholeness, beauty and aliveness we encounter in buildings, landscapes and living systems point toward something deeper than aesthetics. He challenges the modern conception of matter as fundamentally dead and consciousness as something that somehow appeared later inside biological organisms.

Drawing connections between Alexander, Robert Pirsig’s Metaphysics of Quality, quantum physics, systems theory, animism, the Upanishads, indigenous cosmologies and ancient religious traditions, we explore the possibility that value, consciousness and wholeness may belong more deeply to the structure of reality than the modern mechanical worldview allows.

Alexander eventually approaches a word modern intellectual culture has largely exiled from serious discussion: God. Not as doctrine or a supernatural being outside the universe, but as something encountered through the deepest structure of existence itself.

After four books devoted to buildings, patterns, centers and living structure, The Nature of Order ultimately arrives somewhere unexpected.

Not at a theory of architecture, but at a metaphysics of a living universe.

Discover the golden threads that weave us all together.

This episode is written and produced by Jackie Dragon.

Opening Theme by Kyotea
Closing Theme By AhziRa
Featuring lots of samples from a lot of places.
Featuring  the song "Mr Blue Sky" by Electric Light Orchestra

With quotes from the "The Luminous Ground" by Christopher Alexander

With quotes from "Finite and Infinite Games" by James Carse

With quotes from Daniel Schmachtenberger's talk at The Emergence Festival

To learn more about the Church of Infinite Harmony please visit our website: https://www.infiniteharmony.org

To become a member of the Church of Infinite Harmony visit. We are supported by the tithing of our patrons. You can donate once a month, or as often as you like: https://www.infiniteharmony.org/membership

A transcript of this episode can be found here

As always. Headphone Recommended.

Welcome to the Infinite Harmony Podcast.

IWhat would our homes, neighborhoods and cities look like if we designed them to become more alive?

In Part III of our exploration of Christopher Alexander’s The Nature of Order, the philosophy becomes practical. We move from identifying living structure to asking how human beings can actually create it.

At the center of Alexander’s method is the idea of unfolding: places should not be imposed upon the world as finished designs, but allowed to emerge gradually through a sequence of structure-preserving transformations. Each decision responds to what is already there, strengthening existing centers and allowing complexity, beauty and wholeness to develop over time.

Through examples including East Wahdat in Jordan, Village Homes in Davis, California, New York’s High Line, and Chicago’s 606, we explore an approach to architecture and urban design radically different from the standardized, top-down systems that shape much of the modern world.

This is Alexander’s A Vision of a Living World: architecture as an evolving relationship between people, place, nature and time.

And beneath it lies a larger question: if we know how to recognize what is alive, can we deliberately begin building a civilization that feels alive again?

Discover the golden threads that weave us all together.

This episode is written and produced by Jackie Dragon.

Opening Theme by Kyotea
Closing Theme By AhziRa
Featuring lots of samples from a lot of places.
Featuring  the song "Nectar of Devotion" by Matia Kalli

With quotes from the "A Vision of a Living World" by Christopher Alexander

To learn more about the Church of Infinite Harmony please visit our website: https://www.infiniteharmony.org

To become a member of the Church of Infinite Harmony visit. We are supported by the tithing of our patrons. You can donate once a month, or as often as you like: https://www.infiniteharmony.org/membership

A transcript of this episode can be found here

As always. Headphone Recommended.

Welcome to the Infinite Harmony Podcast.

We follow the Golden Threads into the tale of the Goddess of Everything Else, the opposing force that does not oppose, but merely bends the will of her sister, the Goddess of Cancer to a boundless future for all living beings. 

What if evolution has been telling two stories all along?

One is familiar: competition, survival, conquest and natural selection. The other is quieter—the story of cooperation, symbiosis, trust, integration and living things discovering that they can accomplish together what none could accomplish alone.

In Part II of The Great Reckoning, we look at this evolutionary struggle as the myth of two sisters: the Goddess of Cancer, whose command is Kill. Consume. Multiply. Conquer., and her younger sister, the Goddess of Everything Else.

Beginning with Charles Darwin and natural selection, we follow competition and cooperation from the earliest living cells through multicellular organisms, ecosystems, human societies, empires, global trade and the Internet. Along the way, the logic of Moloch and multipolar traps meets the equally powerful evolutionary forces of reciprocity, symbiosis and collective intelligence.

The journey eventually leads to J.R.R. Tolkien’s Arda Marred and Arda Healed, Taoist polarity, Gaia, coherence and co-emergence—and toward an idea larger than either optimism or pessimism.

Perhaps humanity cannot return to some imagined world before competition, violence and suffering. Perhaps our task is to create a third thing: a civilization that has passed through the struggle, learned from it, and consciously chooses cooperation without denying the competitive forces that made us.

The future may depend upon which goddess we learn to serve.

Discover the golden threads that weave us all together.

This episode is written and produced by Jackie Dragon.

Opening Theme by Kyotea
Closing Theme By AhziRa

Based on the essay "The Goddess of Everything Else" by Scott Alexander, with lines performed by Chantaia Soleil and Jackie Dragon

Featuring the the song "The Goddess of Everything Else," written by Jackie Dragon, performed by Madeleine Hamann

Featuring the poem "The Darkling Thrush" by Thomas Hardy, read by Phos Kolden

Featuring the poem "The Wandering Aengus" by William Bulter Yeats performed by an AI voice. (Trippy huh...)

To learn more about the Church of Infinite Harmony please visit our website: https://www.infiniteharmony.org

To become a member of the Church of Infinite Harmony visit. We are supported by the tithing of our patrons. You can donate once a month, or as often as you like: https://www.infiniteharmony.org/membership

Questions about this episode? Comments? Care to discuss the philosophies? Visit our Forum at : https://www.infiniteharmony.org/forum

A transcript of this episode can be found here

As always. Headphone Recommended.

Welcome to the Infinite Harmony Podcast.

Why does civilization keep accelerating toward outcomes that almost nobody actually wants?

In Part I of The Great Reckoning, we draw from Nate Hagens and Daniel Schmachtenberger to examine the relationship between energy, economic growth, fossil fuels, technology, ecology and the human superorganism.

Modern civilization has achieved extraordinary abundance, but beneath the symbols of money and markets lies a physical reality: an economic system powered by enormous flows of energy and material extracted from the living world. Hagens calls our brief era of fossil-fueled abundance the Carbon Pulse and argues that humanity has become dangerously “energy blind”—building economic models around money while largely ignoring the biophysical systems that make the economy possible.

From there, Daniel Schmachtenberger takes the problem further. Climate change, biodiversity loss, artificial intelligence, warfare and ecological destruction are not isolated crises. They emerge from systems of competition and coordination that repeatedly reward short-term advantage while externalizing long-term harm.

Drawing from The Great Simplification, Moloch, Kate Raworth’s Doughnut Economics, and the 2023 Stockholm Impact Week, we explore three possible stages of response: triage, transition and ultimately the transformation of civilization itself.

Because the question is no longer simply whether our civilization can continue growing.

It is whether a species powerful enough to transform an entire planet can become wise enough to survive its own power.

In Part 2 of this episode, we will discuss the nature of systems and how they evolve and what potential exists for the human species beyond the confines of our planet, assuming we can harmonize with our biosphere and sustain. Stay Tuned!

Discover the golden threads that weave us all together.

This episode is written and produced by Jackie Dragon.

Opening Theme by Kyotea
Closing Theme By AhziRa

Based on Daniel Schmachtenberger and Nate Hagens talks at the Stockholm Impact week.
Featuring lots of samples from a lot of places.
Featuring original vocals by Matia Kalli

Featuring the track Benbeint by Canton Becker

To learn more about the Church of Infinite Harmony please visit our website: https://www.infiniteharmony.org

To become a member of the Church of Infinite Harmony visit. We are supported by the tithing of our patrons. You can donate once a month, or as often as you like: https://www.infiniteharmony.org/membership

Questions about this episode? Comments? Care to discuss the philosophies? Visit our Forum at : https://www.infiniteharmony.org/forum

A transcript of this episode can be found here

As always. Headphone Recommended.

Welcome to the Infinite Harmony Podcast.

What if the quality we experience in a beautiful building, an ancient village, a forest or a handmade object is not merely subjective?

Part II of our exploration of Christopher Alexander’s The Nature of Order pushes beyond architecture and into metaphysics.

Here Alexander begins to converge with Robert Pirsig’s Metaphysics of Quality, along with ideas found in Taoism, animism, phenomenology and the work of Stephen Harrod Buhner. Both Alexander and Pirsig challenge one of the foundational assumptions of the modern worldview: the division between a supposedly objective external world and the subjective human beings observing it.

Instead, we explore the possibility that quality, beauty, wholeness and aliveness describe something real about the relationship between ourselves and the world.

This episode asks what happens when we stop treating matter as fundamentally dead and value as something humans simply project onto it.

Alexander’s architecture ultimately leads us toward a much larger question: What kind of universe would have to exist for some things to genuinely possess more life than others?

And what would it mean to learn how to perceive that life again?

Discover the golden threads that weave us all together.

This episode is written and produced by Jackie Dragon.

Opening Theme by Kyotea
Closing Theme By AhziRa
Featuring lots of samples from a lot of places.
Featuring  the song "Freedom" by Moze and Matia Kalli

Featuring the song "Build a Better world" by Sizzla
With quotes from the "The Process of Creating Life" by Christopher Alexander

With quotes from Robert Pirsig and Albert Camus

To learn more about the Church of Infinite Harmony please visit our website: https://www.infiniteharmony.org

To become a member of the Church of Infinite Harmony visit. We are supported by the tithing of our patrons. You can donate once a month, or as often as you like: https://www.infiniteharmony.org/membership

Questions about this episode? Comments? Care to discuss the philosophies? Visit our Forum at : https://www.infiniteharmony.org/forum

A transcript of this episode can be found here

As always. Headphone Recommended.

Welcome to the Infinite Harmony Podcast.

Why do some buildings, rooms, gardens and cities feel deeply alive while others leave us strangely empty?

In this episode, Jackie Dragon begins an exploration of architect and philosopher Christopher Alexander’s Magnum Opus, The Nature of Order, and its radical challenge to the modern mechanical worldview.

Beginning with Book One: The Phenomenon of Life, we explore Alexander’s claim that “life” is not limited to biological organisms. Buildings, landscapes, objects and places can possess different degrees of aliveness, wholeness and coherence—qualities that human beings can perceive more reliably than modern culture generally admits.

Through Alexander’s 15 fundamental properties, including levels of scale, strong centers, boundaries, positive space, local symmetries, deep interlock, contrast, gradients, roughness, echoes, simplicity and not-separateness, we begin constructing a vocabulary for something most of us already intuitively recognize.

Along the way, Alexander’s work intersects with Robert Pirsig, Taoism, phenomenology, animism, architecture and the Metaphysics of Quality.

What if beauty, aliveness and quality are not merely matters of personal taste, but properties woven into the structure of reality itself?

Discover the golden threads that weave us all together.

This episode is written and produced by Jackie Dragon.

Opening Theme by Kyotea
Closing Theme By AhziRa
Featuring lots of samples from a lot of places.
Featuring  the song "Inside of me" by Dustin Valentine
With quotes from the "The Phenomenon of Life" by Christopher Alexander

With quotes from "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" by Robert Pirsig

To learn more about the Church of Infinite Harmony please visit our website: https://www.infiniteharmony.org

To donate to our Sacred Waters Project : click here

To become a member of the Church of Infinite Harmony visit. We are supported by the tithing of our patrons. You can donate once a month, or as often as you like: https://www.infiniteharmony.org/membership

Questions about this episode? Comments? Care to discuss the philosophies? Visit our Forum at : https://www.infiniteharmony.org/forum

A transcript of this episode can be found here

As always. Headphone Recommended.

Welcome to the Infinite Harmony Podcast and BOI! How about that election!

How do you know that what you believe is true?

In an age of algorithms, political polarization, social media, propaganda and competing realities, simply making sense of the world has become increasingly difficult.

Drawing heavily from Daniel Schmachtenberger’s The War on Sensemaking, this episode explores sensemaking, confirmation bias, cognitive bias, information ecology, groupthink, tribalism, memes, virtue signaling, media incentives and narrative warfare—and asks how much of what we call our own worldview actually originated in our own minds.

Why do intelligent people reach radically different conclusions from the same information? Why do our identities become attached to beliefs? And how can we search for truth without simply gathering evidence for what we already believe?

Unravelling the Twin Serpents ultimately moves beyond the battle over who is right. Through dialectic, myth, animism, Taoism, paradox and sovereign thinking, we explore the possibility that understanding requires something more difficult than defeating opposing ideas: learning to hold contradiction, acknowledge uncertainty, seek consensus reality, and recognize the partial truths carried by perspectives other than our own.

Because sometimes the enemy is carrying a piece of the map.

Featuring a whole lotta Hip Hop Vibes.

 
Discover the golden threads that weave us all together.

This episode is written and produced by Jackie Dragon.

Opening Theme by Kyotea
Closing Theme By AhziRa
Featuring lots of samples from a lot of places.
Featuring "Sold Me" and "Suicide Logic" (Both Unreleased) by Armando Perez (Thanks Fam)
With quotes from the Tao Te Ching
With Cool stories about the Buddha, Gilgamesh, and Eshu
This episode draws primarily from "The War on Sensemaking" episode 1 and 2. Please watch them.

To learn more about the Church of Infinite Harmony please visit our website: https://www.infiniteharmony.org

To become a member of the Church of Infinite Harmony visit. We are supported by the tithing of our patrons. You can donate once a month, or as often as you like: https://www.infiniteharmony.org/membership

Questions about this episode? Comments? Care to discuss the philosophies? Visit our Forum at : https://www.infiniteharmony.org/forum

A transcript of this episode can be found here