Nura Learning

10/27/2024

The inaugural session of "World Without Opposite" begins today at 9:30 am PT / 12:30 pm ET.

Lesson I, "Philosophies of Becoming: Ways of Thinking and Being in an Ecological World view" will help situate participants, locate for us not merely with a "where" but with a "when." Can we see our moment as a kairotic time, a time of the gods? What would that mean? It would mean to see how time can have what I suggest we call "kairotic knots," where the past as well as the future are creatively present. We need different pasts if we are to way find different, more habitable, more integral futures. This session helps us to reframe the last few hundred years from the attitude of a future culture, watching its genesis, perhaps shaping it -- we are, after all, tangled up in continuity with the past and the future.

See you in class!

Jeremy D Johnson, host of Mutations Podcast, author of Seeing Through the World proposes a five-week delve into themes of ecology, spiritual transparency and individuation in a time between worlds.

10/25/2024

Let us dare to imagine the future human, the human latent in us, in plastic continuity with the more-than-human.

Join us this weekend for the first of five classes on ecological thinking and the future human.

10/18/2024

I'm so looking forward to the launch of my new, five week course starting on October 27: "WORLD WITHOUT OPPOSITE." This class draws from some of my most recent--and soon to be published--writing that explores the connections between time, ecology, and a new world view. Stated succinctly, I believe we are already living in a new time. This new temporality is, everywhere, already present, although still largely unconscious--a "background feeling," as Charles Taylor might describe it.

How, then, can we attune to this new temporality? Can the disruptions and irruptions we face, which are like so many emissaries arriving from our planetary future, show us how to enact different ways of ecological thinking and being in our present?

The more-than-human world, if we learn to 'look again,' is always demonstrating to us what it means to inhabit a "world without opposite."

How do we develop way finding practices, and new stories, that help us to feel at home in this world, find our footing on this Gaian ground? How do we compost the narrative of progress and engage with other temporalities? How can we celebrate our humanity without falling into the all-too-common anthropocentrism?

Join me as we explore these living questions. See you in class.

Jeremy D Johnson, host of Mutations Podcast, author of Seeing Through the World proposes a five-week delve into themes of ecology, spiritual transparency and individuation in a time between worlds.

10/11/2024

Join me starting Oct. 27 for my new, five-week course, "WORLD WITHOUT OPPOSITE." We will be delving into the deep connections between time, ecology, and climate.

It could be argued that the greater portion of our present ecological crisis lies in our failure to recognize a fundamental insight: we are already living in a new time, demanding a whole new world view.

We are not consciously living this new time, but it is certainly living us.

How do we come to perceive this 'new' time, and the planetary realities that are, everywhere, arriving at our doorstep in the guise of one crisis after another? These emissaries from the future seem to be saying to us: "You must change your life."

Can we live this new time constructively, creatively, rather than merely destructively? What are the lessons we can begin to learn about this new time?

What kind of 'time' is ecological time? Why is it so important for a new 'world view?' How might a new consciousness of time help us get out from under "capitalist" and technocentric time, and find our way towards the regeneration of our world?

This course posits that we need a time beyond progress--a time of radical relation with the more than human world, which can be found nowhere but in our present. We will explore a view of time that embraces the present as an 'open time' of radical relation. We will come to familiarize ourselves with alternative histories which, in turn, show us pathways towards habitable futures. We will come to see how this radical, 'integral' time can help us to bring the human back into the middle of things, back into a "world without opposite," this world--'oikos'--which we call our home.

Jeremy D Johnson, host of Mutations Podcast, author of Seeing Through the World proposes a five-week delve into themes of ecology, spiritual transparency and individuation in a time between worlds.

10/08/2024

A brief reminder that my new online course, "WORLD WITHOUT OPPOSITE" is open for registration!

What does the life of Gaia teach us about our own lives?

What can we learn from the ‘metaphysics’ of the microcosm about existing as a self in radical relation?

How might the insect’s cocoon instruct us on the nature of our own multiplicity and becoming?

Finally, what does the blooming flower—with its exquisite, colorful folds and its multilayered, interspecies mutualism—teach us about time’s transparency?

We live in kaironic time - a moment of immense uncertainty and existential risk. It is a time of radical transition where our world is not only coming undone, but a new self--and world--is in the making.

Like many philosophers of becoming, this course asserts that it is everywhere apparent that we are already living in a new time, demanding a whole new world view.

The questions we will explore in this class are designed to help us approach this emerging 'ecological' world view. It is an invitation: let us learn to attune to the present. Let us come to know what it means to inhabit a world of radical relation, and in turn, to move with a ceaselessly moving world.

We start on October 27. The class runs every Sunday for five consecutive weeks.

Jeremy D Johnson, host of Mutations Podcast, author of Seeing Through the World proposes a five-week delve into themes of ecology, spiritual transparency and individuation in a time between worlds.

10/03/2024

The modern world may yet fulfill its promise, for everywhere we turn there are those ‘mutant’ individuals and communities that dare to imagine otherwise, that perceive themselves in living continuity with the Earth. Their perception is catalytic. It spills over, like horizontal gene transfer in the microcosm, permitting us to perceive the world in kind. This is the ‘good news’! We are not so ‘buffered,’ so islanded, as to never come into contact with new ways of being.

We—despite ourselves—are porous things. Things of the middle.

So much of this work then, is not a matter of building up something new, something in addition to what we already are, as it is a matter of uncovering our nature. Spinoza knew this when he asked: what is the body capable of? We should clear away the obfuscations, polish the mirrors, and w**d the gardens.
We are already in the right place to grow wild with the Earth.

09/29/2024

Join me next month for "World Without Opposite: Ecology, Becoming & the Makings of the New 'Self.'"

Making connections between ecological insight and modernist art, moving from philosophical reflection to indigenous knowledge, this course encourages its participants to perceive the world in which we live as a “world without opposite.”

When we learn to ‘look again’ at nature, when our perception strives to becoming transparent, we find there are as many emissaries of the “open world” as there are faces of the self-same life.

Register and read more about my course in the link below.

We start October 27. Student registrations are also available. No one will be turned away.

Jeremy D Johnson, host of Mutations Podcast, author of Seeing Through the World proposes a five-week delve into themes of ecology, spiritual transparency and individuation in a time between worlds.

09/25/2024

In case you missed the new course announcement: October 27, join me for "WORLD WITHOUT OPPOSITE," a new online class exploring time, ecology and spiritual transparency. We'll go for five weeks. All classes are live and hosted on Sundays. Hope to see you there.

Jeremy D Johnson, host of Mutations Podcast, author of Seeing Through the World proposes a five-week delve into themes of ecology, spiritual transparency and individuation in a time between worlds.

08/22/2024

"The aim [of this chapter] has been to radically de-center the human back into everything. When this happens, we do not lose our identity, we gain it, arguably for the first time. It is only when we overcome ourselves, seeing our nature reflected back in the many faces of the non-human, that we begin to appreciate what is uniquely ours to give back to this world."
- Excerpt from Fragments manuscript draft

08/14/2024

"This cycling of the human back into the larger world ensures that the other forms of experience we encounter, whether ants, or willow trees, or clouds, are never absolutely alien to ourselves. Despite the very obvious differences in shape, ability, and style of being, they remain at least distantly familiar, even familial. It is, paradoxically, this perceived kinship or consanguinity that renders the difference, or otherness, so eerily potent."
- David Abram

04/26/2024

Today is the day: join me for "Integral Reality," a three-part weekend intensive. It starts today at 9:30 am PT / 12:30 pm ET. Each lesson runs for 90 minutes, with some time afforded for Q&A.

We will be taking a deep dive into Part II of Ever-Present Origin with respect to the themes, concepts, and spiritual import of Jean Gebser's insights.

Delighted that there is so much interest in exploring this text.

See you in a few hours.

In this deep-dive seminar, author Jeremy Johnson guides participants through the key themes, concepts and spiritual import of Part Two of Jean Gebser's Ever-Present Origin.

04/25/2024

The task of the writer is self-authorship, but we err -- fantastically err -- when we imagine self-authorship to be an individualized and isolated affair.

To become ourselves is to be in relation, and we are always in the flows of our relations.

It might be more reflective, then, to say that the spiritual task of the writer today is to come to better consciousness of their ongoing and inherent relational nature. Being is relation.

The task, then, is this: the writer writes themselves back into relation with the world.

And this is the paradox that blooms in us like a heirophany: every "I" is a "we," a plurality, a polytheism of the self--yes, fantastically yes!--but in spite of this, or rather because of all this, every "I" is an irreducible, irreplaceable singularity.

Every "I" is a teeming singularity, every self an i
rreducible and unrepeatable coalescence of multitudinous flows.

The author of our new times is one who writes themselves back into an appreciation of this relational ontology. We learn to write from this, and to this world.

The writer who does this has found a crack within the ossified shell of the Cartesian ego and the imprisoning maps of lattitude-longitude and has leapt through them. They become more themselves than the extracted and extractive ego could ever be, and they world themselves, find themselves at home in ways the Cartesian ego longs for and is ever haunted by.

This, then, is the task of the writer. To write ourselves into relation is a spiritual practice, and endless vocation. Writing ourselves into relation means always coming home.