The Liminal Web

Q: What is the “Liminal Web” ?

THE LIMINAL WEB is a beautiful phrase crafted by Joe Lightfoot to capture the efflorescent spirit of overlapping communities such as Game B, Integral Theory, Metamodernism, the Stoa, Future Thinkers, the Intellectual Deep Web, etc. As soon as I heard this term, I began to use it instinctively. Yes, of course, this is partly because it saves me from constantly invoking the long, incomplete list of “metatribe” flavors and spaces — but that is not all. It also has a gorgeous intrinsic meaning.

Liminal experience pertains to thresholds of beings & events.

It is beside (next to) and just about to happen (next). Liminality is on the tip of our collective tongues and tempting us into every in-between. And emergence is bubbling forth where opposites almost merge…

Think of those curious tentacles tracing their patterns in the occult spaces between the knowable and that strange range of untrackable interactive complexities that Nora Bateson calls aphanipoiesis. Think of receiving Dispatches from a Time Between Worlds or really seeing into the Parallax effect. In classical Buddhism we speak of subtly resonant bardo realms that lurk wherever worlds cross each other. And worlds are constantly crossing, combining and branching…

So my affection for this new term will come as no surprise to anyone who is even half-aware of my efforts to host & guest in metatribal networks and my ongoing philosophical idee fixe — the idea that a Metaphysics of Adjacency is necessary in order to inclusively describe the common operational features of postmodern, integrative & complex nondual worldviews. Liminal competence is analogous to the cognitive, embodied and interpersonal skills of practical and theoretical adjacency.

And this is where my reasonable, if fanciful, speech segues into indulgent poetics, outdated grandiose litany & a juvenile spirit of quasi-manifesto. Unless you want to simply play within the identity resonance of the liminal web, do not continue any further…

We are liminal.

We who have hesitated long enough on doorsteps and thresholds to discover therein a new, previously concealed homeland,

We who have learned to agree-without-ceasing-to-disagree and now wish to speak openly of that fact,

We haunters of beaches and bardos, migrants of presence & attempters of emergence, the spiritually ambidextrous, dissolvers & inventors of distinctions who find the serious roots of all play,

We are free-range meta-ideological dialecticians, advaitans of scientific integrative pluralism, amateur & professional transpersonal bio-psycho-sociologists — whether we have ever heard these words or not,

We are those for whom tragedy & hope can no longer be separated,

We are optimal grippers in reciprocally-nuanced adaptive fractal niches of task-demand,

We are the trans-everything people who leave nothing behind,

We are the beyonders & inbetweeners who harvest the interstitial and plant the living cathedrals of tomorrow,

We are premonitory women & men born posthumously, inter-networked in a rose-and orchid scented sweetness of unexpectedly deep resonances,

We are citizens of the Border Crossing whose affected and half-ecstatic ideations describe the hills and valleys of archaically faithful futurism,

We are inventors of community,

We are the secret and not-so-secret hyperpersonal agents of intersubjective sacrifice in the unhooked places of trans-doom,

We are the eaters of Big Picture & Big History, advance scouts for a legion of new generalists — and new generals for armies of new specialists,

Watch us gather closely and kneel down around the many faces of the hyperdimensional object at the end of Time,

Listen, as we do, for the thrumming wings of the iridescent hummingbird who thrives just beyond each moment,

We are scavengers and adorers taking back both science & transcendence,

We are both the “both/and” & the “either/or” — we good citizens of the slashmark,

We Escherites and Mobius strippers already half-undressed on a trans-disciplinary stage,

We fine-finger’d gropers and splashers-about in the Turquoise sea,

We collectors and inspectors of rare jewels found in every kind of plain sight, who climb or stumble into the apocalypse beyond polarization,

We are the choiceless, sensuous & senseless new sensemakers, the prophesized trans-valuers of all values,

We are connoisseurs of any secret alliance and all strange interweavings, portrait painters of field & gradient, steering hopefully toward a planetary wisdom-civilization while preparing our broken hearts for the dark renaissance,

We are the timeless developmentalists who both can & cannot tease apart height from depth, the devisers of new ranks among partial truths,

We are the many-limbed goddesses of liminality, the one-many people, the updated Shamballa warriors, ancient sleeper agents call’d awake into the kaleidoscope of reality-tunnels,

We are the neurosomatic mutants & mainstreaming metaprogrammers armed with expanded cognitive science and luminous simplexities,

We are the walking and grinning wounded, pre-traumatized by the confluence of the metacrises, seduced into permanent initiatory ordeal,

We are the cosmopolitan ruralists of an omnipresent new crossroads

We are participatory hypersubjects for the Aeon of Hyperobjects, avatars of the growth mindset & worshippers of our own relationships.

We are a people.

Let our will say, “We are a people.”

And we would love for you to join us…

Set that to an electronic beat.