Rational Ritual and Pragmatic Mysticism with Sarah
Description:
Join Sarah McManus on discussing robust and resilient systems to help us navigate the challenges that face humanity, in ways that steer between the rocky shoals of nihilistic meaninglessness and the treacherous whirlpools of self-delusion.
In 2016, Sarah McManus was hired to be a research director at an ayahuasca center in Peru... and then fired for being too rational. She has a BA in Ecology from New College of Florida, a school that explicitly values ecstatic wonder. She was in a PhD program for Integrative Conservation, but left after realizing that humanity’s socioecological crises won't be solved by data alone: we need better tools for looking at hard problems with self-compassion, and for communicating and coordinating to co-create solutions. She writes about these topics, as well as psychedelic integration, at pricklesandgoo.com.
These places where reason and spirituality come into conflict can provide fertile ground for cultivating new ways of understanding and relating. If we can turn towards the tensions that arise when our existing belief structures are not able to meet our needs, we can find opportunities to help those frameworks grow and expand. I want to make spaces where we can allow our sense of the sacred to encompass the deep and beautiful metaphors that science has discovered, and where we can allow our need for analytical understanding to take in the complexity and uncertainty of the world in all its rich variety.