Deconstruction and Spiritual Growth: Reflections on Metamodern Spirituality

A 2021 talk I was invited to give on the Integral Stage, pehaps even more relevant right now...

"What paths lie ahead for religion and spirituality in the 21st Century? How might the insights of modernity and post-modernity impact and inform humanity's ancient wisdom traditions? How are we to enact, together, new spiritual visions – independently, or within our respective traditions – that can respond adequately to the challenges of our times?"

0:00 Meta-Crisis from a Meaning Crisis
9:42 Correcting a False Dichotomy
13:05 Losing Our (Traditional) Religion
18:06 Grieving the Loss of Naive Traditionalism
22:00 Disillusionment: The Chaos between Worlds
27:48 Insights of Modernity
32:37 Insights of Postmodernity
36:36 Failures of Modernity and Postmodernity
40:46 Integration and Development
42:56 Reconstructing Religion
55:40 Conclusion

*The original video can be found on The Integral Stage @theintegralstage8140 podcast:

[arebrandedlife]

I deeply appreciate what you are sharing and building. Thank you.

[Jonathan_Robillard]

Beautiful video, and its clarity helps me resolve the details of my own project more clearly. Thank you for posting and doing the work of reconstruction.

[DaestrumManitz]

The irony of your sarcasm wasn’t lost on me, sharing an affinity with past experiences (and possibly similar scars from collapsing coercive exegetical paradigms). Ah yes, disillusionment, “hello darkness my old friend”. Escaping the nihilistic malaise may be more akin to Nietzsche’s “eternal recurrence” than previously anticipated. But some of us still feel an inherent need to lean heavily on the crutch of a scientific model while trying to elude the siren call of panpsychism, but willing to embrace some form of medium between the two. The prospect of adopting the recycled, regurgitated, reinvented myth or religious experience of the past, in hopes of making a metamodern reality seem daunting in the least. But try we must. Wonderful discourse here, as you touch on all of the basics, with the background music adding the much needed sentimental touch. I shall recommend it to a friend, after all, isn’t that the way to share the light. 🫶🏻

[LesterRapaport]

Thank you…. Real Profound Truths often become poetic. Thank you for your poetry/truth. I’m beginning to think of myself as a 77 year young metamodern abstract painter just beginning to ripen some six years ago when not long after beginning a series of paintings- my Waking Up series that then has flowed into my Into the Mystery paintings….both ongoing…..

[ninaallchurch]

" poets of the sacred" - yes!

[cameronsmith]

This is the first video I’ve seen of yours Brenden Dempsey, and I thank you for making it. I wonder if you have read Salman Rushdie’s essay from 1990 titled “Is Nothing Sacred?” It’s a quick read, but well worth while. Even in 1990, he was grasping metamodernism.

[ninaallchurch]

truly marvellous, brendan. at once deeply serious and whimsically light. your ever-present luminous soul reflects the detail of your precious life's work. your insights are life-changing, educational and inviting ... i hope you find outlet to share your message more widely....

[KalebPeters]

This was a great distillation of the metamodern project, Brendan!

A strong follow-up for me to share with people after they've seen your "Metamodernism 101"

Thanks again for your efforts! 🙏❤️

[arktseytlin]

Beautiful! What has lead me to the similar thinking was being born into atheism, and then learning about history, nature and space, and things like Drake equation. But I feel that creating metamodern myths from scratch will be very chaotic, in this age of splintered media, its harder to notice good things behind all the noise. Like this channel - won't stumble on this by accident :) So going back to the Bible and illuminating the allegory, and combining it with scientific fields like cosmology, may be a good "Bridge" for many people. Also not all religions read the Bible "literally". Judaism in fact is very comfortable with science and using the Torah as a "moral" compass that is not to be taken literally in its descriptions of creation of the universe, for example.

[joshsy]

Decadence of the wooing young witch's trinkets faded like dew in the dissolution of dopamine currency, integral of instinct under the fig of time where the wavering wake of Nietzsche comes to center- mechanized to degree of suffering. And may the pleasure of destruction to idolatry sway in the transformative light of dissolution. So much I can learn from your realized journey, knowledge and quest!!!?

[newtonfinn]

I really like a lot of what you say, although I am a product of liberal Xianity who built his personal form of faith piece by piece from childhood and thus never felt the need to deconstruct. Let me ask you a question. If, as did mainstream journalist Leslie Kean in the presence of physical medium Stewart Alexander, you found yourself seeing and talking with deceased loved ones, or like millions of people from all walks of life, you had a near death experience along what have now come to be considered "classic" lines--out-of-body vision and hearing, traveling through a tunnel toward a being of light, meeting deceased relatives and friends, experiencing a vivid life review of all of your actions and their impacts on others, etc.--how would such experience influence your thinking about how best to assimilate AND transcend the traditional, modern, and postmodern worldviews? Would you be dwelling so much on metaphor as the key to moving forward? IMHO, we deny the reality of such supernormal phenomena at our peril, the peril of reverting to just another modernist/postmodernist stance, albeit dressed up somewhat in warm and fuzzy mystical or mythical language.

[jerrypeters]

I'm hoping the mundanity of A.I. art will challenge/inspire artists to bring in the new (the Neo?) creations for our collective future.

[alykathryn]

Thank you for anotherextreamly well written, great video. ❤
Have you read VALIS by P. K. Dick. And the second and third books( Divine Invation, and The Trasmigration of Timothy Archer)
I would love to hear your take on his theology and if you feel like there is a place for Dickian gnostisism in metamodernism spirituality?

[TimStorey-optg]

I’ve listened to several hours of Brendan’s talks and just finished this one. For me, there’s nothing much to argue with, and I know he likes poetic expression, but somehow putting it all together that way made me more skeptical of his project instead of less. I’m a Joneser from the days of 70’s gurus, too young to be enthralled but old enough to detect a disturbing pattern of rhetoric.

[GreenManorite]

Three things:
1) You have a viseral reaction to creed and given your path I get it. I think a conversation should happen about the proper role of creeds. My sense is that they are models + common language about perceived reality, but also a process to "move on" from thinking to living in unity. (way more here, but I'll stop)
2) I wrote a short story on such things. I'll probably write another. I'm not a poet but one page allegories are fruitful for processing. In the realm of popular myth makers, Stephanson is my favorite but perhaps to on the nose.
3) I view Christianity as the incorporation and grounding narrative (for me/many). Christianity done well incorporates and synthesizes alongside philosophy and science. Vested in literalism and walled it is brittle. The new narrative should I capsulate the old (and arguably has done so though the ages). Reading Teihard; promising bridge.

[artifica]

So were going for a iterative recursive processes towards the ultimate truth i cant get behind that

[CrowMagnum]

How about Medicine Wheel teaching in North American schools?

[josephcamosy]

This would make Jung's "Red Book" a proto metamodern text.

[williambranch]

There is a telos to deconstruction, it isnt an end in itself, that is nihilism.

[CrowMagnum]

Always grouping everything pre-modern as traditional doesn't do justice to our magical past.