In the middle of the world, on top of a hill, there rises a temple. An unbroken circle, luminous as pearl. A kind of silver from before silver was ever named. At the very crown of the domed temple there is an opening. A circular wound of night through which the moon seeps down like liquid mercury.

At moonrise, the light tilts through the aperture and arrows down in kaleidoscopic veils of deep indigo, pearl ash, pastel violet. Within it, fine as spiders’ silk, filaments of illuminated ether thread the light shafts, splaying frequencies of delicate geometries. Moths and motes float in slow suspension, lit from within. The light breathes into the temple, and what it breathes into first is the wisteria.

The tree is ancient. The trunk is ten feet across, and grooved in dark strata. Its canopy rises to the dome above, and from every reaching branch fall thousands of long racemes of flowers, speckled pale violet and silver, cascading downward in release. A cool breeze drifts through the aperture and moves through the hanging blooms, and they sway all together in one slow undulation, as if the tree and its flowers are dreaming one dream.

Shadows spill across the colonnades that encircle the chamber, a sensorium of rippling silver orbs, shimmering and effervescent, bubbling across the pale marble like froth rising and evaporating in waves, diffuse indigo and lavender hues catching and releasing, alive in the night’s first light.

This ancient wisteria stands on a mound of wild earth. Pale lichen spreads thickly across as lush carpets of vines and nameless growths. Civilizations have risen and fallen around it. Each building its own temple to nourish it. Each, falling beneath the tides of decline. There the mound remains - untarnished, true, naked. A primal upwelling, untouched by the erosions of space, time, and empire.

Encircling the mound is a ring of dark silver water. The spring that feeds it is sourced from the planet’s deepest core, composted and clarified by intricate laceworks of salt and mineral. It arrives purified by the long intelligence of the underworld and spills upwards towards the center of the mound into a small burbling pond. With each slow, quiet gulp, pure potential releases from its surface - energy alchemizing on contact with the ether streaming down from the dome’s aperture.

To the left of the wisteria rises a pillar of raw obsidian twelve feet in height. Small against the tree, it pulls all energy into a single focal point, absorbing the room into its glassy black core. The surface is carved on all four faces from base to apex in dense, unbroken inscriptions. The paths of the stars on one side, an ancient notation of music on another, sacred geometry on the third. And on the fourth: the primal source-script from which every language is but an echo of. When the chamber ripens with energy, these carvings begin to glow, first faintly, then with mounting intensity, igniting in a cold silver-white fire, shimmering and pulsing against the black with a cold electric knowing. From the pillar’s tip, energy spins outward in a toroidal field. A revolving force that casts and recasts the dome in slow invisible revolutions.

At the base of the wisteria stands the altar. It is draped in blue-black velvet. Upon it rest four objects: A silver bowl of still water, its rim worn smooth by ten thousand fillings. A dark mirror, memory technology, harpooning a direct line into the past, the future, and the tissue between them. An iron serpent, coiled to swallow its own tail. An unbroken circle of endings and beginnings. And lastly, a scroll with markings blank to most, except to those whose perception has been initiated with clear seeing. The four objects sit in the silence of things that are complete.

Then the doors open.

The sound arrives as a long wooden groan that reverberates through the dome. For a moment there are murmurs, the shuffling of linen, and reed sandals brushing marble.

They enter first: seventy men in robes of slate grey.

Their garments are simple, but each is marked by subtle distinctions of lineage - turbans, wrapped scarves, and varying collars and veils. And they are not merely men. They are the custodians and keepers of all that is known. Scholars of truth from every compass point of the world. And to fall into the oceanic basin of their eyes is to glimpse timelessness itself: lifetimes layered behind the iris, disciplines kept across centuries, suffering alchemized into mercy, knowledge ripened into gentleness. Their faces are lined with kindness, precision, and with the solemnity of having seen too much to remain trivial. They vary in skin, stature, and ancestry, yet in their gaze flames the same ancient light.

In twos and threes they move to take their places along the marble colonnade encircling the water. Behind them, stretching from floor to dome are shelves upon shelves of scrolls. Manuscripts. Codices. Bound scriptures. Oral traditions made ink. Revelations translated. The attempted archive of humanity’s trembling contact with the Real, in every language and tradition.

Again the doors open.

One by one, without haste or spectacle, thirteen women move into the chamber clothed in hooded robes of deep violet velvet. With veiled faces, they take their places at equal intervals around the moat, forming a ring at the water’s edge. The tight circle they form is not characterized by proximity but of a bond that predates the choice to enter it. They come not only to witness, but to stand once more before a mystery already remembered and consecrated in flesh. A silence descends as the circle closes, viscous with the reverberations of veils parted, oaths sworn, and the fragrance of grief tenderized into devotion across lives.

As if on cue, the light changes.

The moonbeam, which until now had rested broadly through the dome, begins to narrow and draw itself into a single radiant corridor. It shifts from north toward west, condensing into a path only one body wide in diameter. It illuminates a path from the open doors, across the bridge that stoops over the moat, and through to the altar before the tree.

A woman steps into this light beam through ajar doors.

She is clothed entirely in velvet the blue-black of a raven’s wing. A dark star in a corridor of light. Upon her head rises a high ceremonial crown, and from its brim falls a circular veil of sheer dark silver silk, descending around her in all directions, her face hidden. Around her body, her cloak gathers and releases slowly in waves of dancing shadow.

From her left hand, gloved in dark silk, hangs a delicate crystalline chain. At its end swings a censer breathing out storax and spikenard in slow white spirals of smoke. The incense unfurls ahead of her, curling through the illuminated air like prophecy. Beneath the hem of the veil there is only the faintest glimpse of her mouth: lips painted the dark red of mulberry.

In her right hand she carries a round dark mirror.

She moves across the bridge over the dark water with deliberation. And at the farside of the bridge she pauses. The entire chamber stills around her as time furls inwards towards a stillpoint. In this suspension, the obsidian pillar suddenly ignites. All four faces ablaze at once. The paths of the stars, the notation of music, the sacred geometry, and the primordial script erupt in brilliant silver-white fire. The air grows sharper as every surface takes on a strange, lucid stillness, and a more concentrated order of reality descends. As if on cue, the wisteria begins to stir.

A thousand glimmering branches begin to move around her emerging presence, drawn toward her with the inevitability of a magnet finding its pole, no longer governed by the cyclical energies of the natural world. Waiting across centuries for the fulfillment of reunion and carrying the unmistakable force of an ancient fidelity renewed before all eyes. As the branches curve her figure in tenderness, the mound beneath the wisteria opens into its deeper office. Held within that living canopy, she comes before the altar and kneels.

In her right hand, she holds the dark mirror. Slowly, she lowers it before the mirror already resting on the altar, and the two glasses come to face one another across the thinnest glimmering margin.

She kneels there before the waiting mirrors, and the interval between them grows finer still. Then, suddenly, it becomes impossible to tell what is being reunited. Whether she has come before something that has awaited her since before her first breath, or whether the thing before her has always been the hidden face of her own arrival.

The mirrors remain before one another while she stays kneeling. Meanwhile, the wisteria holds its cradling repose. The obsidian burns in its silver knowing. And the whole sanctuary draws further inward beneath the surface of silence. Stone, water, branch, smoke, veil, flame, guardians, priestesses. All of it enters an exacting peace, as though the temple had slipped beneath appearance and come to rest against some deeper law in which nothing need move for everything to begin yielding.

And something does yield, though not outward, where the eye and mind might follow, but inward, where form grows permeable. The descending light narrows upon the glimmer between the two mirrors until it becomes almost unbearable to behold: a seam, a gate, the last lucid veil. And for one suspended instant, everything around it seems to falter at the edge of its own distinction. The altar, the wisteria, the black glass, the ring of bodies, each held in a stillness so total it begins to shudder. Nothing collapses, and yet everything seems on the verge of returning.

The gap closes - and where it closes, there is no seam. Only the smooth face of something that was never cut. Slowly, the entire scene dissolves into a widening silver. A seamless seam effacing itself. Bit by bit. Then, all at once.

Until once again,

a stillness

and then a gathering

and in the middle of the world

on top of a hill

rises a temple

an unbroken circle, luminous as pearl.

a kind of silver from before silver was ever named.

There’s something in my soul blueprint that loves to hold space. Particularly spaces that transition people from horizontal, sequential time, into vertical, liminal, no-time.

In this in-between, we have the opportunity to be with what is true, the ten thousand expressions of the all. Waiting for us to drop the show, in order to be shown what is just beyond the wispy veil. Between the threshold of stale scripts and aliveness, I’ve striven to take the vow of guardianship and fellow friend.

Over the past decade, I’ve held a variety of spaces in all kinds of shapes and sizes - from online philosophy salons to pluralistic dialogues, from rabbit hole transmissions to mystical sunday services, from retreat design to physical community spaces like The Commons.

Today i’m attempting to share a handful of the learnings i’ve accrued over the years, re-composting them back into the universe, from where they came.

These learnings are in no measure perfected and are still making their way through me, changing me. They come in both the aftermath of much failure and confusion, and also alongside experiences wherein heaven briefly flickers her perfection and knowing smile, before returning back to the froth.

Take what is useful, and leave the rest.

Here are 23 learnings about building community and holding space, with elaborations below:

1. You are not creating a community or holding a container from nothing: you are becoming a vessel for something that already wants to exist.

2. Your community will faithfully mirror your unexamined interior.

3. Coherence is the only qualification that actually matters.

4. You will become everyone’s mother and father whether you want to or not.

5. Community is a thousand one-on-ones, not one big warm room.

6. Your first 100 people are the community’s energetic constitution.

7. A scene is not a community: knowing the difference and designing accordingly.

8. Build concentric circles, not open doors: the architecture of belonging

9. The sacred balance: designing for masculine and feminine

10. You cannot ask for transcendence from a nervous system that hasn’t yet landed.

11. Prepare thoroughly, then throw away the map when you walk through the door.

12. Light structure is what makes deep emergence possible.

13. Beauty is not aesthetic: it’s a survival technology.

14. Opening is only half the ceremony: integration is the other half of the work.

15. The container is a mirror, not a destination: on deity yoga and the holder’s real job.

16. Some third thing is created, when the group cohere’s deeply enough.

17. Friendship is a byproduct of shared pursuit, never a goal in itself.

18. What you celebrate becomes what you are: choose with extraordinary care.

19. What your community doesn’t talk about shapes it as much as what it does.

20. The faustian bargain of manufactured intimacy and what the body remembers.

21. The most dangerous moment in a community’s life is after its first success.

22. Distributed leadership is biological necessity, not democratic ideal.

23. Putting yourself out there is half of the battle. Skillful “self-promotion” is in service to the most beautiful world your heart knows is possible and the people you’re meant to build it with.

the builder’s interior.

1. You are not creating a community or holding a container from nothing: you are becoming a vessel for something that already wants to exist.

Across the history of human thought, creation was often intuited less as invention than as discovery. Plato called it the eidos, the eternal Forms of which every material thing is an instantiation; the Vedic tradition called this the Akasha, the primordial field in which all possible forms exist as latent potential awaiting the conditions that will draw them into manifestation.

As such, the mathematician does not invent the theorem, she uncovers it; the poet does not manufacture beauty, he becomes transparent enough that beauty moves through him. And so the community builder is making themselves available to a social egregore that already wants to exist, waiting for a sufficiently coherent and willing vessel through which to enter the world.

Instead of words, paint, or mathematical proofs - the community builder communicates the transmission via energetic, somatic, and relational language. Essays can point, books can describe and platforms can distribute, but only lived human contact actually transmits wisdom, through limbic resonance, mirror-neuron empathy, and the quiet contagion of a regulated, inhabited body meeting another, which may be the oldest technology we have and the one we most need to remember now.

2. Your community will faithfully mirror your unexamined interior.

The field holder who hasn’t metabolized their need for approval will unconsciously build a culture where dissent feels dangerous; the holder who hasn’t made peace with their own authority will either over-assert or chronically under-lead, leaving the community perpetually anxious about who’s steering.

This is the nature of projection at scale, and what you create will faithfully be a map of your interior. The parts of yourself you haven’t visited will show up as the recurring conflicts you can’t seem to fix, no matter how many structural redesigns you attempt.

The invitation isn’t to be perfectly healed before you build (because no one is) and the building is itself part of the healing. The invitation is to maintain a practice of radical self-inquiry running parallel to the community work, always asking: what is this situation showing me about something unresolved in me?

Perhaps the most effective community builders aren’t the most charismatic or the most visionary, but rather the ones most willing to be genuinely disturbed by what their creation reveals about them, and to use it as a crucible for transformation.

3. Coherence is the only qualification that actually matters.

You can give someone the entire community playbook, the perfect event arc, the facilitation techniques, the best rituals, and none of it will matter as much as whether the person holding the container is actually in it, whether what they’re holding reflects their deepest truth, whether the thing they’re doing on Friday night is the same thing their soul is doing at 3am.

The ceiling of any community or container is set not by the format but by the internal coherence of the holder, and the deepest service you can offer is to keep doing your own work to be in alignment. Tend that first. People can feel it, whether unconsciously or consciously

4. You will become everyone’s mother and father whether you want to or not.

The moment you hold space for a group of people, you become a screen onto which they project everything they’ve ever felt about authority, belonging, and love.

Everyone’s first community was their family and those early imprints don’t disappear in adulthood so much as go underground, surfacing reliably every time someone enters a container that is being held by another.

The untrained holder collapses into this dynamic or hardens against it. Instead how might you see the projection clearly, not take it personally, and gently, persistently, return people to their own inner authority.

the foundation.

5. Community is a thousand one-on-ones, not one big warm room.

We often romanticize the crowd, imagining community as a buzzing, alive whole, a room full of people who belong to something together.

But what looks like community from the outside is almost always, on the inside, a web of one-on-one, two-to-one, three-to-three relationships. It starts with 1 person you genuinely want to see again, who pulls in someone they love, and those two find a third, and from that small constellation a culture begins to crystallize.

Which means your job as a space holder isn’t to engineer group cohesion but to create the conditions by which one-on-ones can crystallize, over and over, until the web holds itself.

6. Your first 100 people are the community’s energetic constitution.

A pendulum is an energy structure created by groups of people directing their thoughts and feelings toward the same idea - the more people feed it, the stronger it swings, until it develops a gravitational pull and attracts new participants almost on its own accord.

Every genuine community has an invisible pendulum at its center, a high ideal, a shared longing, a particular quality of aliveness, and your job in the early days is not to grow. Your job is to find the people who will charge that pendulum unconditionally, not because it benefits them, but because they are it.

They are not necessarily the loudest or the most networked. They're the ones who show up early and stay late, who feel the vision in their body not just their head, who would build this even if no one was watching. The early container's energetic signature comes almost entirely from this cohort, which is why who they are is what you're building.

7. A scene is not a community: knowing the difference and designing accordingly.

A scene is a collection of people who frequent the same spaces, share aesthetic sensibilities, and recognize each other at parties. It has genuine value as scenes have birthed some of the most important cultural movements in history, but it should not be confused with community.

The distinction is this: a scene is organized around identity and affiliation, while a community is organized around mutual commitment to something beyond individual identity. In a scene, you’re there because of who you are and who you’re seen to be. In a community, you’re there because of what you’re reaching for together and what you’ve agreed to offer each other in the reaching.

The practical difference is accountability: in a scene, there's no real mechanism by which anyone can hold anyone else to anything, because there's no shared covenant to appeal to, while in a community the shared commitments create the ground for genuine accountability, genuine repair, genuine growth

When you’re building, ask yourself honestly: am i building a community or a scene? The former requires covenant. The latter requires only aesthetics. Both are real but only one will produce the depth you probably actually want.

8. Build concentric circles, not open doors: the architecture of belonging

Many great wisdom institutions in human history solved the same problem the same way: not through a binary choice between open and closed, but through concentric rings, each with its own level of depth, commitment, and access.

The Eleusinian Mysteries of ancient Greece, the Sufi orders, the Catholic sacramental structure, the Benedictine novitiate, the medieval guilds - all of these were carefully tiered systems in which the outer rings were genuinely public while the inner teachings were reserved for those who had demonstrated, over time, the readiness to receive them.

Thus, the tension between openness and exclusivity is not a problem to be solved but a polarity to be held. A purely closed community calcifies, losing the vital influx of new perspectives that keeps any living system from becoming a museum of its own past, while a purely open community dilutes, the depth that made the community worth joining evaporating into pleasant but shallow sociality. The practical architecture looks more like this:

• outermost ring: genuine openness, public programming, the community’s gifts transmitted freely to the broader culture

• moving inward: increasing commitment, increasing depth, increasing selectivity based not on status or aesthetics but on demonstrated resonance with the community’s actual values.

• the innermost ring: the flame itself and “field holders” who most embody the community’s values, paired with skin in the game. Protecting this core is not elitism but rather stewardship of the thing that makes everything else possible.

9. The sacred balance: designing for masculine and feminine

Every community is a universe in miniature, and beneath the surface it is always negotiating the same primordial relationship that wisdom traditions have named again and again, not as a story about men and women, but as the two fundamental modes through which reality organizes itself.

Call them Masculine and Feminine, Yin and Yang, Logos and Eros, Shiva and Shakti, but what matters is the pattern: the masculine is structure, direction, clarity, initiation, boundaries, the focused beam and the container wall, while the feminine is receptivity, emergence, intuition, nurturance, the field that can hold contradiction, the womb-like darkness of potential.

These are not opposites negotiating a truce, but rather complements seeking wholeness, and every institution carries a signature ratio you can feel in its pathologies, because too much masculine may become rigidity, speed over depth and competition, while too much feminine may become drift, endless process, and conversations that never crystallize into decision or form.

The design challenge is not to pick a fixed balance but to build responsive balance, an internal immune system that senses when the energy has tipped too much in either direction and knows how to course-correct.

When these two principles are in genuine dialogue rather than suppressed or overrun, something alchemical happens, and the space becomes self-generative because it begins to function as a microcosm of the cosmos itself.

the craft of holding space.

10. You cannot ask for transcendence from a nervous system that hasn’t yet landed.

You can’t invite people into genuine collective depth if their nervous system is still scanning the room for threat, still asking if it is safe here and if it belongs. If you launch immediately into the beautiful and the profound without first helping people cross the threshold from out-there to in-here, you will be speaking to bodies that cannot yet root, in order to soar. Acknowledge the gap, help people move into their bodies, and design icebreakers that connect people first to themselves, then to one another.

11. Prepare thoroughly, then throw away the map when you walk through the door.

You memorize the arc, review the talking points, know the sequence so deeply it lives in your body rather than your mind, and then, when the first person walks through the door, you release all of it.

Not because it doesn’t matter but because the map is never the territory, and the territory is always more interesting than anything you planned at your desk the night before. The paradox of great facilitation is that the more thoroughly you’ve prepared, the more freely you can abandon the preparation, and the structure becomes scaffolding that holds the space while you disappear into genuine contact with the room.

People feel this distinction immediately, even when they can’t name it. They’re not, ultimately, trying to feel you: they’re trying to feel the transmission, the frequency, the quality of truth and aliveness that your presence is either conducting or blocking.

12. Light structure is what makes deep emergence possible.

Nature does not over-choreograph. A forest is not managed into beauty, it’s given conditions and then trusted, and the most alive things in existence arise from the exquisite tension between just enough structure and just enough freedom.

Many events err toward control, a schedule segmented into 15-minute blocks, a sharing circle that moves left to right with the reliability of a conveyor belt, an organizer who fills every silence before it’s finished breathing, and the result is a gathering that feels like a meeting.

Energetically, the sequential circle is a perfect example: when you know your turn is coming and you’re 3 people away from having to speak, you stop listening and start composing, and the presence that genuine sharing requires gets replaced by performance anxiety and rehearsal.

Try instead an energetic center: an open middle. This can be embodied as an invitation to speak when something genuinely moves you to speak. The genuine intelligence of the group finding itself in real time. This is emergence, and it’s almost always more beautiful than what you planned. Light structure is structure so well-designed it becomes invisible, a riverbank that gives the water somewhere to go without pretending to control how it moves and where it goes.

13. Beauty is not aesthetic: it’s a survival technology.

Beauty is nature’s mechanism for ensuring that what matters gets tended: we protect and adorn what we love, and we love what is beautiful.

When a space holder brings real beauty into their container that arises from deep care and intention for every detail, they’re activating an ancient human instinct that tells the nervous system it has arrived somewhere real. People feel that this was tended, that someone cared enough to make this beautiful, and therefore this matters, and therefore I matter here.

Elaine Scarry argues that beauty creates a condition of acute attention that is the prerequisite for both ethical life and genuine perception. In a community context, this means that the beauty of your space isn’t incidental to the depth of your programming - it’s structural.

14. Opening is only half the ceremony: integration is the other half of the work.

Most events pour everything into the opening, the arrival, the activation, the peak, and then let people trickle out into the night still buzzing and open.

The closing of a gathering deserves its own ritual gravity. This might look like a harvest circle, each person naming one thing that landed, one thread they’re carrying home, one question that opened in them that they didn’t have before, etc.

This transitions an event from a single experience into a process which communicates to people that what happened between them wasn’t entertainment but genuine inner work, and that the community exists not just for the peak but for the long, unglamorous, beautiful arc of becoming.

what emerges.

15. The container is a mirror, not a destination: on deity yoga and the holder’s real job.

In the many religious traditions, deity yoga is the practice of meditating on a teacher/symbol that acts as a conceptual overlay of a certain pattern of energy. It is not so much an all-powerful external being to worship, but a symbol of a particular quality of consciousness so the human mind can recognize it and eventually become it.

Every community or event holder is unconsciously doing a version of this when they build a space with enough coherence to emanate a certain pattern of energy. The point is that what people are recognizing in your field is themselves: their longing when they encounter what you’ve built is their own depth calling to them through the temporary mirror of your presence or field.

So the art is to hold the field strongly enough so that people can step into it and taste who they actually are. And then it is to turn them back towards themselves to stabilize the interior source of that phenomenological shift. A truly successful container is when its members can generate the field the container elicited from them without you, and without the container.

16. Some third thing is created when the group cohere’s deeply enough.

There is something that can happen in a gathering where the collective stops being a collection of individuals and becomes something else entirely. A third thing that feels like a presence that feels distinct from any single person in the room and yet is somehow composed of all of them.

Ancient traditions called this an egregore, a thoughtform, a living field of collective consciousness that arises when enough people direct their attention and intention toward the same frequency. The Collective Presencing tradition calls it the group “tuning,” a process of attentional convergence where the separate signals of individual minds begin to phase-lock into a shared field.

What emerges from that field are revelations and insights that seem to come from the middle of the room rather than from any particular mouth.

Your job as holder is to know this is possible, create the conditions for it, and not waver when it does arrive.

17. Friendship is a byproduct of shared pursuit, never a goal in itself.

Aristotle identified 3 forms of friendship, with the highest, philia, arising not from what people get from each other but from a shared orientation toward what is good, true, and beautiful.

What these traditions understood is that this quality of friendship cannot be manufactured directly: it’s always a byproduct of a shared pursuit of goodness, beauty, and truth, that is larger than the friendship itself. This is why “we’re here to make friends” is one of the least effective things a community or container can say.

The pressure to connect, named explicitly and frontloaded, creates exactly the kind of self-conscious social performance that genuine connection has trouble emerging from. Instead of orienting people toward one another, orient them towards the fire they are tending together. Building the community around a genuine shared pursuit, the exploration of the soul, the practice of a craft, the making and becoming of something together.

People who are reaching toward the same light inevitably find each other in the reaching.

the harder truths.

18. What you celebrate becomes what you are: choose with extraordinary care.

Every community has rituals of celebration, explicit or implicit, that function as a constant transmission of what the community actually values. What is praised, rewarded, highlighted, held up as exemplary is the community’s real value system regardless of what the stated values say.

Communities that celebrate transformation over performance, repair over perfection, consistency over brilliance, generosity over charisma. These are communities whose culture gradually comes to embody these values because the members are being shaped, through repeated ritual acknowledgment, toward them.

Think about what you mark and what you let pass unmarked. The things that go uncelebrated are the things the community will slowly stop doing.

The same goes for what and how you penalize.

19. What your community doesn’t talk about shapes it as much as what it does.

Every community has a shadow: a collection of topics and dynamics that are implicitly off-limits, that nobody explicitly forbids but everybody somehow knows not to raise.

Jung called this the personal shadow, and communities have collective shadows that operate by exactly the same mechanism: they organize in the field as an underground current, felt by everyone, named by no one, slowly shaping the community’s culture in directions nobody consciously chose.

The health of a community can be measured, with startling precision, by its capacity to name its own shadow, to bring into explicit conversation the things that are most uncomfortable to say.

20. The faustian bargain of manufactured intimacy and what the body remembers.

There is a particular kind of event that's proliferated in certain conscious community spaces: the vulnerability accelerator, the intimacy intensifier, the sharing circle designed to take strangers from zero to soul-exposed in 90 minutes. The intentions are almost always genuine, the experiences can feel profound, and yet something about the model reveals a subtle violence hidden inside its apparent care.

Human intimacy was not designed to be a straight shot: it’s a slow accumulation built through repeated small encounters, through the gradual discovery that someone is consistent, through the experience of being seen in ordinary moments before you risk being seen in your most tender ones. Trust is not an emotion you can manufacture through clever facilitation. It’s a biological read of pattern over time.

When we engineer rapid intimacy through vulnerability prompts and deep sharing circles with strangers, we’re asking the nervous system to conclude a process it hasn’t been allowed to run, and the nervous system, being honest, knows the difference. The intimacy feels real in the moment because the emotions are real, but the relational infrastructure to hold that intimacy doesn’t yet exist, so when the event ends and the group disperses and the connection doesn’t sustain, the body registers something it can only interpret one way: i opened, and then i was left.

This is the neurological aftertaste of what might be called intimacy porn, short-term intensity that mimics depth without building the underlying structure that makes depth sustainable.

21. The most dangerous moment in a community’s life is after its first success.

Before success, the community is held together by necessity and shared struggle, the energy lean and genuine; then something shifts, the community gets written about, reaches critical mass, and a new kind of person begins to arrive, not the pendulum holders who came to charge the field but the ones who come because the field is already charged and they want proximity to it. (See Geeks, MOPs, and sociopaths essay)

This changes the energetic composition in ways that, if unattended, will gradually dilute the very thing that made it worth joining. The antidote is to have, by the time success arrives, a cultural immune system strong enough to integrate new energy without losing the essential frequency.

These are values that are behavioral and specific, rituals robust enough that newcomers are shaped by them rather than the other way around, and an inner ring coherent enough that its energetic signature persists even as the outer rings expand. Success is the test of whether you built a culture or just a moment.

22. Distributed leadership is biological necessity, not democratic ideal.

Any system in which all intelligence flows through a single node is, by definition, fragile. One departure, burnout, or loss of coherence in that node and the whole system is compromised. Nature solved this long ago through healthy ecosystems characterized not by centralized control but by distributed intelligence, redundancy, and the capacity of each node to make local decisions in service of the whole without requiring permission from the center. This is the mycelial network, the murmuration of starlings, the immune system - all models of distributed intelligence that are more resilient, adaptive, and creative than any centralized hierarchy could be.

The community builder who understands this invests early and consistently in developing other holders who can genuinely carry and hold the frequency, making consequential decisions from alignment with the community’s deepest values.

This requires the founder to be genuinely willing to share power and credit, to tolerate others doing things differently than they would, to trust that the essential transmission is robust enough to survive multiple different expressions of it.

The communities that outlast their founders are the ones where, by the time the founder steps back, the field is being held by a whole ecosystem of carriers. The goal isn’t to become indispensable. The goal is to become increasingly unnecessary, and to experience that not as loss but as the deepest measure of what you built.

the most beautiful world your heart knows is possible.

23. Putting yourself out there is half of the battle. Skillful “self-promotion” is in service to the most beautiful world your heart knows is possible and the people you’re meant to build it with.

There is a space inside every human heart that knows something, not conceptually, not theoretically, but with the quiet unshakeable certainty of direct perception: it knows what the world could be. It holds a vision of human life lived at its fullest possible expression, of community, of beauty, of the quality of relationship and meaning that we sense is available to us even when every external condition argues otherwise. And it cannot be tarnished.

Every person has this, not a version of someone else’s vision but a unique configuration of the beautiful, shaped by the specific geometry of their particular soul, their particular wounds and gifts and longings, their particular angle of perception on what is missing and what wants to exist.

The diversity of these inner visions is not a problem to be resolved into consensus. It’s the means by which the whole becomes complete.

The purpose of blasting your truest vision into the world is not self-expression for its own sake. Rather, it is recruitment into a co-creation that is larger than any single person can accomplish.

The vision you carry is not yours in the possessive sense. It came through you because your particular instrument was tuned to receive it. However, it belongs to the collective becoming and larger story of what human civilization is trying to grow into. And it will only be fully realized through the convergence of multiple carriers, each bringing their piece, finding each other through the resonance of their shared frequency.

The small gathering matters as much as the large institution or world you’re hoping to channel into this one: the intimate dinner, the living room conversation, the recurring circle of 6 people. This is the transmission itself, happening at the scale that is currently possible, seeding the field with the frequency that will eventually draw in the others who are needed.

Say it clearly enough and the others will find you. They’ve been looking for you as long as you’ve been looking for them.

.

.

.

The Shambhala Warrior Prophecy - A Tibetan Legend

“There comes a time when all life on Earth is in danger. Barbarian powers have arisen. Although they waste their wealth in preparations to annihilate each other, they have much in common: weapons of unfathomable devastation and technologies that lay waste the world. It is now, when the future of all beings hangs by the frailest of threads, that the kingdom of Shambhala emerges.

You cannot go there, for it is not a place. It exists in the hearts and minds of the Shambhala warriors. But you cannot recognize a Shambhala warrior by sight, for there is no uniform or insignia, there are no banners. And there are no barricades from which to threaten the enemy, for the Shambhala warriors have no land of their own. Always they move on the terrain of the barbarians themselves.

Now comes the time when great courage is required of the Shambhala warriors, moral and physical courage. For they must go into the very heart of the barbarian power and dismantle the weapons. To remove these weapons, in every sense of the word, they must go into the corridors of power where the decisions are made.

The Shambhala warriors know they can do this because the weapons are manomaya, mind-made. This is very important to remember, Joanna. These weapons are made by the human mind. So they can be unmade by the human mind! The Shambhala warriors know that the dangers that threaten life on Earth do not come from evil deities or extraterrestrial powers. They arise from our own choices and relationships. So, now, the Shambhala warriors must go into training.

How do they train?” I asked.

“They train in the use of two weapons.”

The weapons are compassion and insight. Both are necessary. We need this first one,” he said, lifting his right hand, “because it provides us the fuel, it moves us out to act on behalf of other beings. But by itself it can burn us out. So we need the second as well, which is insight into the dependent co-arising of all things. It lets us see that the battle is not between good people and bad people, for the line between good and evil runs through every human heart. We realize that we are interconnected, as in a web, and that each act with pure motivation affects the entire web, bringing consequences we cannot measure or even see.

But insight alone,” he said, “can seem too cool to keep us going. So we need as well the heat of compassion, our openness to the world’s pain. Both weapons or tools are necessary to the Shambhala warrior.”

-- Joanna Macy

There is a particular kind of hunger moving through our cities right now, and it is not solved by more food.

It is the hunger for a place that can hold the long arc of becoming. One feels it in the strange choreography of modern seeking: the sanctuary buildings that once organized civic life sitting quiet and underused, while the people in those same neighborhoods stitch together fragmented experiences of meaning-making. A therapist on Tuesday. A breathwork circle on Thursday. A philosophy salon that briefly feels like home. A ceremony that cracks the sky open for a night, followed by the soft mute of Monday scaries.

We have more access to wisdom traditions than any generation in history, and yet fewer shared structures that can turn access into synthesis and a cast of elders and fellow seekers into consistent community.

In an earlier era, religion performed a function that is easy to critique and hard to replace. At its best, it did not merely offer beliefs. It offered binding. A rhythm of return. A moral ecology thick enough to shape character, to metabolize grief, to make devotion shared, to tether the individual to something larger than preference. But it often came with a cost: one authorized map that could hold coherence only by narrowing what was allowed to be true.

Modern pluralism reacted against that narrowing, and in doing so, created its own ache. Everything is permitted, but very little binds. We are free to explore, but left largely alone to integrate what we find. We wander through infinite worlds of meaning, but without a shared hearth, wandering becomes drift, and drift becomes a private form of despair dressed up as choice.

So the question i’d like to pose is not whether we need more spirituality or more third places. It is whether we can build a new kind of institution that does what the old ones did, without demanding what the old ones demanded. A place with a center strong enough to bind and a pluralism honest enough to include. A civic hearth where the deepest questions are not a private hobby, but a shared practice, and where the work of becoming is deeply witnessed.

To build such a hearth, we have to name what it is actually for, beneath the aesthetics and programming: what kind of human it is trying to shape.

The telos of the institution: helping individuals pursue their Dharma

I believe the telos of this kind of modern wisdom institution is to support human flourishing in a particular way. There are many ways to define what flourishing even is, but in my own conception it is proportional to how fully a person lives from their unique dharma in service to the whole.

Why use the word “dharma” rather than the widely popular “finding your purpose”?

Dharma, originating in ancient Indian religious and philosophical traditions, refers to the sustaining order of reality and, by extension, the right way of living: the duties, ethics, and life-path that keep a person and a society in integrity with what is true. It is less a destination than a practice of attunement: becoming someone who can reliably sense what is true in each unfolding moment, and act from it through repeated alignment

In that light, “finding your purpose” often turns life into a hunt for a fixed statement one discovers and then performs. Purpose often gets framed as identity, while dharma is about right relationship to people, place, community, and craft, not just self-expression.

Dharma also implies that individuation is not at the expense of collective service. It refuses the false choice between self-actualization as narcissism and self-sacrifice as moral performance. Rather, one’s unique expression actually strengthens collective harmony, and collective holding deepens individuation. In other words, the part becomes itself so the whole can become more whole, and the whole becomes more whole so the part can become more itself.

In practical terms, this reframes the job of a modern wisdom institution.

It is not here to hand over a meaning package, but to help you become the kind of person who can perceive what is already true for you, and then live it in an ongoing way. Meaning behaves less like a product one constructs and more like a signal one attunes to.

In fact, this is hardly a new claim. Most mystical and contemplative traditions, despite their differences in language and ritual, converge on some version of the same intuition: that beneath the surface churn of thought and identity there is a deeper source, and that wisdom is less invented than revealed through contact with it.

Even some contemporary thinking at the edge of physics has begun to circle a parallel move: that intelligence may be a non-local feature of reality, an informational substrate that sufficiently complex systems can tune into. What appears solid may be downstream of something subtler, and that the human mind may be less a factory of meaning than an instrument of reception.

In that view, genius is often less invention than unusually clean attunement. And the central work of a modern wisdom institution is not to manufacture meaning for people, but to help them refine their own reception to the source they already carry.

Two movements: becoming a clearer receiver

If this is true, then the question becomes: how do you refine reception?

There are two movements.

1. The horizontal movement: cleaning up

It is becoming more whole through “cleaning up” - the arduous inclusion of what we have pushed out of the self through shame, trauma, conditioning, and self-protection - first in our own lives, and then those of our ancestors and the broader unconscious collective of all human experience. These are the parts we’ve exiled which become static. They are feelings we’ve refused to feel calcifying into distortion. Integration of these parts is work of reclaiming lost bandwidth so reality can reach us without getting mangled by defense. Through widening the surface area for receptivity, a human being becomes a “fatter” antenna to pick up clear signal.

2. The vertical movement: waking up

The second movement is vertical. It is moving closer to the source of who we are, or “waking up” to our true nature. If the horizontal axis widens the antenna, the vertical axis changes what we recognize ourselves as beyond the ego self.

Waking up is the direct experience that every thought, sensation, and story is occurring within something already awake, warm, infinite, and loving. Humanity has many ways to glimpse this ground, from meditation to devotion to altered states. When the experience of this groundless ground stabilizes in all situations at all times, we begin to listen from the field itself in a constant stream of receptivity.

Through both widening horizontally and moving up vertically, we increase the surface area and proximity by which we can attune to this field of information to do our dharma. As more of us becomes available to reality, more information can actually reach us, not as abstract knowledge, but as a felt sense of what is ours to do.

Each one of us is a unique receiver by which source moves and expresses itself back into the world, shaped by our amalgamation of lived experience, temperament, and particular divine contours. Like the same light refracting through infinite textures of instruments and prisms, harmonizing into a grand composition of coherence. Our dharma, then, is less a purpose we declare and more a signal that becomes legible in proportion to how clearly we can receive it, and how beautifully we beam it back into the world.

What is the significance of this as it pertains to how we design a new wisdom institution for dharma?

Historically, many religious institutions were exquisite at the vertical move: cosmology, rhythm, devotion, practices that oriented the mind toward this transcendent field. However, they often lacked language around the horizontal, the slow metabolizing of shadow, trauma, and inherited defenses. So shadow was treated as sin more than psyche, and transcendence became, at times, a bypass. A modern wisdom institution cannot afford that split. It must braid the poetry of cleaning up, waking up, and honing one’s dharma into a continuous act of tuning.

If both “waking up” and “cleaning up” need to be included into the design of this new kind of wisdom institution, the question then becomes: how do you build a container that can hold both movements without prescribing one route to truth, when every person’s tuning is different?

Keeping the center, while letting people find their way

If dharma is something we learn to receive, then the wisdom institution’s real job is to hold a steady center while making room for many different paths of tuning, because people do not become clear through the same practices or in the same order.

When we accept the premise that dharma is revealed through attunement, we also have to accept its corollary: every receiver is different. Every nervous system has different histories and defenses. There are different conditions, seasons, wounds, gifts, and callings that tune each system. The frame that helps one person hear clearly can be the very frame that distorts another. As such, the institution we are pointing toward cannot be prescriptive in the way religion historically was. Rather, it must be coherent without being totalizing, and spacious without becoming vague.

This is where a modern institution has to learn a different kind of binding, one more like music than law. Traditional religions often operate as comprehensive doctrines: a single inherited package, one authorized map that tells you what reality is, what you are, and how to live. That structure can hold people, but it can also overfit, and it has done so traumatically as history has shown.

A modern wisdom institution needs something closer to an overlapping consensus: a shared telos and a shared set of vows that bind, paired with genuine freedom for each person to find the practices and frames that actually tune them.

In practice, it means we can still keep a real center, a rhythm you can return to, a moral seriousness that is not negotiable, while allowing plural routes of approach in the sacred work of unfolding dharma. Many shovels, one well. The middle way between relativism and absolutionism.

Beyond changing one paradigm for another is learning to stand in the arena of paradigms with a kind of lightness and ontological humility, to remember that no single frame is the whole, and to let that remembrance become liberation rather than dread. If no paradigm is finally right, then you are not condemned to meaninglessness. You are invited into discernment. You can ask what a frame is good for, where it breaks, what it makes visible, what it hides. You can choose what is most skillful and alive for you now, without turning that choice into an identity you must defend.

In the “religion stack” (pictured below), we stop binding through one authorized metaphysics, and start binding through shared telos, shared vows, and a shared culture of practice. Individuals can hold their own frames, languages, and symbols, while the community holds the deeper agreements that make a field coherent. This is what allows wisdom holders from different traditions to inhabit one institution without needing to crown one map as the truest, and without collapsing into anything-goes mush.

Applied to cleaning up and waking up, it means the institution does not prescribe a single route to integration or awakening. It makes room for many skillful means, while offering shared containers where people can metabolize what they are learning, compare notes, and be witnessed over time. And it means we can enact rituals of presencing the sacred together, even as the content that evokes that presence, the deity, the image, the language, remains uniquely personal. The binding is in the rhythm and the devotion, not in one compulsory explanation of what the sacred is.

I believe that a modern wisdom institution should train frame flexibility as a form of maturity, and then build a culture where lenses can be tried on, tested in lived experience, refined through dialogue, and released when they stop serving. The institution becomes coherent not by narrowing reality, but by teaching people how to walk through reality with more honesty and less grip, in deep communion with others.

Because pursuing dharma is not only a moral project. It is a perceptual one. It is an apprenticeship in learning to hear, and to keep hearing, beneath the noise of inherited scripts and fashionable certainty and the reflex to make an enemy of what we do not understand.

The remedy is not frame relativism, where everything is flattened into equivalence, and it is not frame absolutism, where one view claims totality. It is the mature ability to use a frame as a tool rather than a home, to take what clarifies and set down what constricts, and to keep returning, again and again, to the living question at the center of it all: what frames remove obfuscation to signal, what is true now, and what is mine to do?

In a sense, everything I’ve written here can be distilled into one wager: that the crisis of modern seeking is not a lack of sincerity, but a lack of institutions built for attunement and discernment. We do not need more practices in the abstract. We need containers that can hold the long arc of cleaning up and waking up to our dharma, without prescribing one route, and that can bind many paths around a shared telos through shared devotion, community, and ritual.

In the essays to come, I’ll move from epistemology into design as the questions become concrete: what rhythms keep a field coherent, what vows prevent drift, what kinds of programming cultivate frame flexibility without collapsing into relativism, what safeguards prevent charismatic capture, and what makes an institution durable enough to outlive its founding field.

If this resonates, I’d love to connect. If you’re in San Francisco, I’m running an early living prototype of this idea called The Commons, and i’d love to chat with you over tea. If you’re elsewhere, I’m eager to connect with people exploring parallel experiments, and to share what we’re learning as a replicable framework. Please feel free to reach out.

In 2024, Merriam-Webster aptly named ‘polarization’ as 2024’s word of the year as America heaved amidst social disunity and partisan politics. Defined as “division into two sharply distinct opposites”, polarization is the fracturing of unity, collapsing a once-nuanced spectrum into rigid poles. Instead of differences unfurling in a silky gradient, the energetic texture is staccato, heinous, and jagged.

Within all of us there is a deep inner knowing of what harmony within difference feels like (the “most beautiful world we know is possible”), but that knowing is matted by a heavy blanket of collective helplessness and exhaustion that recursively spins us in loops.

What if the most promising path towards this harmony we all intuit, is to not spiritually bypass into parallel utopias and communities of comfort, but to sit extensively in the repugnant staccato of difference that scares us? To really bathe in it, and feel the tendrils of shame and disgust boil and release into vapor within. Shall I suggest, even slightly enjoy it? Perhaps get off on it? And once the jagged edges are smoothed over - fully open and be ravished by it?

I often ponder about how strangeness, otherness, fragmentation, and dissonance can be treated as a deeply valuable as opposed to problematic aspect of public life. Something we yearn to engage with, rather than design our lives to escape.

In the therapeutic modality of internal family systems, in order to fully feel and and unburden an exiled part, one needs to first attune to and befriend the protector. To fully feel it’s anger, fear, shame, and numbness without any change agenda. In the same way - to materialize our hearts deeper knowing of harmony in difference, we must be fully present with the repulsion that “other” releases within us. To hold complexity without collapse.

I have written in the past about how one needs to come into inner-coherence in order to increasingly see, be, and manifest an external world that mirrors that same unity. In my experience, doing inner-work and healing directly reorganizes your external realms.

All therapy, bodywork, energetics, meditation, & healing containers are technologies that help reinforce the container in which you are ultimately holding yourself, to fully feel pain without suffering. As parts are felt and then integrated into the whole, suffering no longer gets projected onto the world around you, thereby demagnetizing the pull of situations and people that hold similar frequencies.

This same idea can be parlayed to the creation of group containers that enable the collective to fully feel disunity in a group field without closing. And in that opening, come into a sense of shared coherence which does not negate the expression of difference. Through the coherence of that collective field, neighboring fields will regoranize around it.

Many community containers either reify difference or subtly push consumerism. Social clubs and churches segment people based on status, belief, or vocation. Coffee shops, bars, and brands may tout community, but ultimatly are in service to the bottom line. Conferences and social events are often great bridging containers, yet are ephemeral and lack an explicit intention to enable people to play and be with difference.

I have been long obsessed with the idea of fourth places as a new typology of community space. One that creates the conditions for open-ended meaning-making around questions of ultimate concern, set against a backdrop of pluralism and open-handed curiosity. Like the nature of life’s big questions, the point is not to arrive at answers, reify identities, or convince others over to a perspective. Rather it’s to expand our shared human map of reality improvisationally and playfully - like a jazz composition of instruments, each unique and individuated, while harmoniously contributing to a transcendent composition. Where dissonance can be held without resolution, long enough for something richer to emerge: a kind of intersubjective coherence that doesn’t flatten difference, but braids it into beauty.

However, it’s not enough to just build physical community spaces with this intent. We need social infrastructure, programming, and rituals that continuously create the conditions in which intersubjectivity and transubjectivity can emerge.

(If subjectivity is a solo instrument, and intersubjectivity is a duet or orchestra in conversation, then transubjectivity is the music itself - something that flows through and beyond the players, arising from their coherence, yet not reducible to any one of them.)

I’d love to share two programmatic experiments i’ve co-created recently that have the potential to give rise to this state in groups:

i. A container to share opinions that will get you cancelled

The purpose of the workshop was to create a field where people could share charged truths and stay in embodied presence with difference. We wove music, meditation, and somatic grounding throughout the night - not as performative breaks, but as anchoring technologies to drop us beneath the mind and into the body.

Participants anonymously offered their most controversial or tender “hot takes,” things they rarely say aloud. The group then voted on which specific topics would be worth diving deep into and small discussion groups were formed. In these groups, the invitation was not to convince or negate others, but to share the life experiences, ancestral threads, and cultural conditioning that gave rise to each person's view.

The workshop schedule:

ii. Council of the Cosmos - Re-enchanting the Pursuit of Multiple Truths

Council of the Cosmos is a structured role-play workshop designed to help participants explore multiple, often conflicting, ways of knowing through embodied perspective-taking.

Each participant was assigned an archetype - such as the Scientist, Mystic, Artist, or Elder - and began by listening to a short audio meditation specific to their role (recorded by yours truly), accessed through QR codes and headphones. These archetypes were drawn from a custom deck that included guiding values, strengths, and blind spots.

From there, participants cosplayed and acted out a series of fictional cosmic events, first offering interpretations from their archetype’s perspective, and later navigating a shared crisis. Discussion prompts encouraged people to explain not just what they believed, but how their role might approach the unknown, what risks they perceived, and what actions they would take.

• Phase 1. Exploring the archetype's worldview and imagined the environment they inhabit.

• Phase 2. A fictional cosmic phenomenon is drawn from a deck of cards. Participants interpret it through their archetype’s lens, discuss perspectives, and decide whether intervention was needed.

• Phase 3. The phenomenon intensifies into a crisis, and participants proposed collective responses using symbolic tools.

• The workshop ended with a reflection on what aspects of the archetype and role play could be integrated into life.

The slides that guided and narrated the workshop.

Throughout, ambient music, lighting, and symbolic objects reinforced each role, while the goal of the workshop was to practice staying inside unfamiliar worldviews without collapsing into consensus. Rather than arriving at a right answer, participants engaged in collective meaning-making rooted in difference - highlighting the value of holding multiple truths in tension.

I’m Patricia and I write this newsletter in my free time every time an insight needs to be grappled with and birthed. If you want to support my writing, you can join me down the rabbit hole 🕳🐇 or subscribe to this newsletter.

In the Spring I took an amazing class at Harvard Divinity School taught by professor Raúl E. Zegarra on the meaning of secularization: Do greater modernization, education, and existential security lead to the decline of religious belief? Or is such a conclusion an ideological construct? How has the separation of church and state developed in different countries and what is their significance for religious faith and practice in our time?

I was particularly fascinated by the downstream impact of secularization on the growing American spiritual-but-not-religious population and how this group expressess similarities to what societies for millennia have characterized as “mystics”. That is, a mystic as one who possesses a direct experience of the divine, without the need for mediation. A personal and subjective form of religion that erred internal rather than external, individual rather than institutional, more experiential rather than scriptural.

If individiuals are relying less on churches, priests, and doctrine to help interpret their experience of the divine, what does this imply for the other elements of “religious life” that are deeply supportive in ones becoming: community, place-making, and rituals. And can we retain these “babies in the bathwater” within a backdrop of mystical pluralism?

What follows is a proposal I call a mystical commons: a civic and spiritual typology that outlines the social and physical infrastructure needed to weave kindred spirits together - without losing the immediacy, interiority, and plurality that define contemporary mystical life. It seeks to preserve what institutional religion once offered (ritual, place, community) while adapting these elements to a post-institutional, spiritually diverse landscape. The mystical commons is not a church, nor a retreat, but a new kind of sacred infrastructure: one that honors unmediated experience while supporting the shared interpretation, ethical integration, and communal flourishing that give such experience enduring depth and direction.

DISCLAIMER: it’s a long academic read. If you would like the more straight-forward and concise version of this paper please read The Future will be Mystical.

Abstract:

This essay explores the enduring significance of mystical experience in a secular age, reframing it not as a purely private or transcendent event but as a potential catalyst for shared meaning-making. Drawing on Friedrich Schleiermacher’s account of immediate feeling and William James’s psychology of religious experience, I examine how classical views have emphasized mysticism’s interior and ineffable nature. Yet, as Wayne Proudfoot and Ann Taves argue, experience is never epistemically “pure”; it is shaped by cultural scripts, interpretive frameworks, and social negotiation. Building on these critiques, Courtney Bender’s ethnographic work illustrates how contemporary spiritual seekers engage in communal meaning-making through informal networks, even in the absence of institutional religious structures. Together, these thinkers suggest that mystical experience gains coherence and durability through interpretive processes situated within broader cultural ecologies. In response, I offer a constructive proposal: the mystical commons. This is a pluralistic, participatory space designed to honor the immediacy of spiritual experience while supporting its interpretation through ritual, dialogue, and ethical service. Drawing on Charles Taylor’s notion of a “network of agape,” the mystical commons aims to create a symbolic and physical infrastructure to support seekers across traditions. It reimagines spiritual life as a shared civic project - one that nurtures interiority without privatization and cultivates pluralism without fragmentation. In doing so, the mystical commons offers a vision of public life in which the sacred can flourish collectively, even amid conditions of fragilized belief and disembedded modernity.

Introduction

Mystical experience has long been regarded as a direct encounter with ultimate reality, an unmediated touch of the divine. A mystic, as interpreted by the late theologian Ernst Troeltsch, was not necessarily someone who received miraculous visions or signs or supernatural experiences. Instead, mysticism signified a personal and subjective form of religion that erred internal rather than external, individual rather than institutional, more experiential rather than scriptural1. For the mystic, Troeltsch said, membership in church or sect is of no significance, rather it was the free personal experience that mattered the most. 2And perhaps most prophetically, Troeltsch believed that mysticism, with its emphasis on interiority and immediacy, would become “the most rapidly growing [type of spiritual group] in the future.”3

In Western contexts, especially where traditional religious institutions have waned, this emphasis on personal experience has only intensified. As Charles Taylor observes, Western religiosity over recent centuries has seen a steadily increasing emphasis on a religion of personal commitment and devotion, over against forms centered on collective ritual​.4 He describes this transformation as the emergence of “the Age of Authenticity,” an era marked by profound changes in the conditions of belief. “Something has happened in the last half-century,” Taylor writes, “which has profoundly altered the conditions of belief in our societies.” At its core, this cultural shift reflects “an individuating revolution” and the rise of “‘expressive’ individualism” not just among elites, but as a widespread and pervasive mass phenomenon.

In the American context, this turn toward experiential and self-authored spirituality has deep historical roots. As the scholar Leigh Eric Schmidt observes, “the American fascination with mountaintop mysticism and seeker spirituality goes much deeper than any generational fixation”.5 Prominent American thinkers, writers, and organizers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, and W. E. B. Du Bois played a pivotal role in elevating “mysticism” and “spirituality” from cultural obscurity to national prominence. As Schmidt notes, their work often centered on locating the essence of religion within the solitary individual, while also embracing a sympathetic openness to other religious traditions as sources of spiritual nourishment. The result is a distinctly American spiritual milieu that began to take shape in the nineteenth century through currents like Transcendentalism and religious liberalism, prioritizing individual experience and inward devotion as increasingly essential. Today, some argue that the nineteenth-century American fascination with mysticism and spirituality continues through the widespread adoption of the term "spiritual but not religious" (SBNR), which, as cultural commentator Laura Ingraham sharply notes, "has now become the favored way of describing America's metaphysical preoccupations".6 By the late 1990s, this orientation had gained sufficient cultural prominence that Gallup formally recognized it, reporting that "thirty-three percent identified as 'spiritual but not religious’7, suggesting that the SBNR designation encapsulates contemporary expressions of longstanding American themes of individualized spirituality outside of formalized religion. While the term “spiritual” is undeniably diffuse and may not always capture the depth of authentic mystical experience as Troeltsch conceived it, it nevertheless reflects a broader cultural turn toward individualized forms of mediation, interpretation, and meaning-making that take place outside the bounds of traditional religious institutions.

Such privileging of personal mystical experience carries both promise and tension. On one hand, it affirms the authenticity of the individual’s spiritual life. On the other, it raises critical questions about interpretation, integration, and community. Scholars have argued that mystical experiences do not occur in a vacuum; they carry meaning for the experient and, potentially, for a community of seekers. Others have argued that mystical experience carries a dual nature: it is at once immediate (felt as a direct, unmediated encounter) and interpreted (framed and made intelligible through concepts, narratives, and communities). This paper will explore the interplay between the immediacy and the interpretive framing of mystical experience and its implications for structures that can sustain, legitimize, and deepen such experiences without reverting to rigid institutionalism. First, we examine classical understandings of mystical immediacy in the work of Friedrich Schleiermacher and William James, for whom individual experience is paramount. Second, we consider the interpretive nature of all experience as argued by Wayne Proudfoot and evidenced in Ann Taves’s work on how extraordinary experiences are shaped into “religious” movements in recent American history. Third, we turn to the contemporary scene: how spiritual “seekers” today construct meaning without the scaffolding of traditional institutions, drawing on Courtney Bender’s ethnography of American spirituality.

Ultimately, I propose that if mystical experience serves as a generative source of faith, it requires interpretive, communal, and ritual frameworks to ensure its continuity, integration, and social relevance. Taking inspiration from Charles Taylor’s notion of “networks of agape,” this paper proposes a constructive vision of a “mystical commons”: a shared space that both honors the immediacy of personal revelation and sustains its integration through pluralistic interpretation, embodied ritual, and ethical service. The mystical commons is not merely a metaphorical container, but a physical place, a reflective programmatic ecosystem, and a civic orientation. In other words, a new form of spiritual infrastructure designed to support seekers across traditions in making meaning together. By rooting mystical experience in community, dialogue, and shared practice, the commons offers a participatory middle way between rigid institutions and isolated individualism. In an age characterized by profound spiritual hunger yet suspicion of religious authority, reimagining how mystical experience and individualized spirituality might flourish within intentional communities becomes not just a theological exercise, but a vital cultural task.

Mystical immediacy in classical perspective: Schleiermacher and James

The modern appreciation of religious experience as something immediate and prior to doctrine owes much to Friedrich Schleiermacher and William James. Writing at the turn of the nineteenth century, Schleiermacher famously located the essence of religion in a direct intuitive feeling, independent of all rational theory or moral practice. In his On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers, Schleiermacher implored his Enlightenment contemporaries to recognize in religion “a province of its own” – neither a form of metaphysical knowledge nor a system of ethics, but an experience rooted in “intuition and feeling.”8 “I entreat you to become familiar with this concept: intuition of the universe,” Schleiermacher writes. “It is the hinge of my whole speech; it is the highest and most universal formula of religion by means of which you may determine its essence and its limits.” True religion, he argues, is an immediate consciousness of the infinite within the finite, a preverbal intuition of the Whole that precedes any theological formulation. In Schleiermacher’s words, “religion is the sensibility and taste for the infinite”​. This denotes a kind of direct attentiveness to the cosmos: “It [religion] wishes to intuit the universe, ... longs to be grasped and filled by the universe’s immediate influences in childlike passivity”. Such language underscores that, for Schleiermacher, genuine spiritual life begins with an immediate consciousness of the Whole (the infinite, the eternal) manifesting within the self. The individual feels overwhelmed by the universe’s presence, prior to any intellectual mediation. In this move, Schleiermacher thus elevated personal, inward experience to the primary seat of religion, rather than in abstract dogma or institutional authority​. In other words, religion begins with a direct feeling of the Infinite stirring within the human soul, or what Schleiermacher would later call the “feeling of absolute dependence”, and only afterwards do we interpret it or codify it into doctrines. In other words, “real” religion is not a fixed set of doctrines or a unified system, but is a vast and wild realm of individual experiences of the Infinite, each one uniquely unrepeatable. For Schleiermacher, then, the mystical core of faith is immediate: a “living intuition of the universe” that wells up from our pre-conceptual depths, animating all genuine piety.

Nearly a century later, William James, in The Varieties of Religious Experience, offered a complementary and pragmatic perspective through a psychological and phenomenological lens. James likewise treated personal experience as the heart of religion, more fundamental than institutional dogmas. His oft-quoted definition of religion was “the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine.”9 Echoing Schleiermacher's bifurcation between experience and doctrine, James viewed organized churches and creeds as secondary attempts to socialize and intellectualize the original experiences of their founders. “Churches, when once established, live at second-hand upon tradition,” James observes, “but the founders of every church owed their power originally to the fact of their direct personal communion with the divine.” This view was supported by James’s study of many firsthand accounts of mystical states, leading him to identify them as a distinct type of religious experience characterized by two primary qualities: ineffability and a noetic quality. Mystical experiences, he found, “defy expression, that no adequate report of [their] contents can be given in words” – hence ineffable – and yet they also seem “to those who experience them to be states of knowledge. They are illuminations, revelations, full of significance… and as a rule they carry with them a curious sense of authority for after-time.” In short, even though the mystic cannot articulate the experience, he or she feels it has delivered some profound insight or truth, and the insight gained is conceived as powerfully real and authoritative, even if it cannot be fully communicated or justified to others. Furthermore, similar to Schleiermacher’s characterization of religion as “taste and intuition with the infinite”, James quotes testimonies of mystics who report “the overcoming of all the usual barriers between the individual and the Absolute”, a direct “unity of man with God” in which the sense of a separate self is dissolved​. Such descriptions reinforce the notion that what makes an experience “mystical” is precisely this immediate communion or merging with “the Infinite” or “the Absolute” in a moment. For James, then, the mystical experience stands as religion’s primal source: an unmediated moment of insight whose authority rests not in external validation but in the transformative conviction it leaves within the individual.

In summary, for both Schleiermacher and James, the central claim is that religion is grounded in an immediate experiential contact with the divine or infinite, prior to interpretation. Schleiermacher’s nineteenth-century Protestant liberalism and James’s early empirical psychology converged on this point as both challenged predominant paradigms their times: Schleiermacher against Enlightenment rationalism (reducing religion to metaphysics or morals) that ignored religion’s intuitive core, and James against a burgeoning scientific secularism which perhaps dismissed spiritual experiences as superstition or neurosis. By foregrounding the mystical and inward dimensions, they gave intellectual respectability to the idea that the essence of spirituality lies in immediate feeling and insight, accessible in the personal depths of any individual.

And yet, the very idea of isolating “religious experience” as a pure, universal essence was not always conceivable. Moments of ecstasy or vision, could be argued to not just be objective events, but deeply embedded in particular religious cultures. For example, before the eighteenth century, one would not speak of having a generic “mystical experience” at all, only of experiencing God’s grace in specifically Christian (or other traditional) terms.10 The contemporary religious scholar Wayne Proudfoot, observes, “the possibility of identifying one’s experience as mystical is only as recent as the availability of that term”.11 Schleiermacher and James were also aware, to a degree, that even the most personal experience is never wholly naked. Schleiermacher himself, though an advocate of the primacy of religious intuition, was keenly aware that such intuitions were never expressed in a vacuum. As he writes, “If thousands of you could have the same religious intuitions, each of you as an individual would certainly draw other outlines in order to portray how you viewed them alongside or in succession to one another; that would depend not on each mind but, rather, on an accidental condition, on a triviality.” In the same vein, James admitted that mystics inevitably use “the language of their community” to describe what happened, borrowing images and concepts from their religious upbringing (a Christian will speak of Christ, a Hindu of Brahman, when interpreting a similar feeling of unity).12 Both thinkers, however, often set aside these differences as less important, emphasizing instead the shared inner essence they saw in all mystics. This move left modern spirituality with an uplifting ideal: the pursuit of direct, unfiltered divine experience. It also left an ongoing theoretical dilemma: is any experience ever free from interpretation? It is in this critical vein that we turn to Wayne Proudfoot, who offered a philosophical critique on the notion of pure religious experience.

Experience as Interpreted: Proudfoot and Taves

If Schleiermacher and James represent the optimistic embrace of mystical immediacy, the work of Wayne Proudfoot serves as a pointed corrective, arguing that experience is never truly pure but is always filtered and formed by interpretive processes. Proudfoot, critiques that “religious experience” can be a self-evident datum independent of any conceptual framework. In his book Religious Experience, Proudfoot contends that when people claim an experience as “religious,” they are not reporting a raw sensation so much as making an interpretive attribution. He writes, “The logic that governs the concepts by which people interpret their experiences in different traditions shapes those experiences.” Any attempt to peel away the “interpretations” and find a core, uninterpreted mystical experience is, in Proudfoot’s view, misguided – “the interpretations are themselves constitutive of the experiences.”13​ Importantly, Proudfoot is not a skeptic dismissing mystical experiences as false, as he grants that people have profound experiences. His point is rather that these experiences are never epistemically naked, as they do not come to us with their meaning self-evident. In other words, one can fully acknowledge the authenticity of a person’s experience and still inquire into how that experience was shaped by the person’s religious upbringing, expectations, or situational triggers. Such inquiry doesn’t negate the experience; it situates it. The implication is that the very identification of an encounter as an encounter with God (vs. a psychotic break or burst of joy from dancing) involves one’s pre-established beliefs. If we are to change the pre-existing framework of interpretation, the same feeling might be labeled a mental pathology or simply be left undefined. “A difficulty arises,” he writes, “from the fact that these attitudes and beliefs are typically adopted prior to the experience rather than subsequent to it. The experience is shaped by a complex pattern of concepts, commitments, and expectations which the mystic brings to it. These beliefs and attitudes are formative of, rather than consequent upon, the experience. They define in advance what experiences are possible.” In other words, the very feel of the experience is intertwined with how it is understood. As Proudfoot succinctly puts it, “those in different traditions have different experiences”. In other words, echoing James’ assertion, communion with God for a Jewish mystic is not the same as nirvana for a Buddhist, precisely because each is constituted by a different matrix of belief and practice.​

Proudfoot asserts that what Schleiermacher and James considered a simple, primordial feeling is actually an amalgam of feeling-plus-interpretation. As such, a hermeneutic circularity is introduced where experience and interpretation co-create each other. In doing so, Proudfoot supplements earlier thinkers with more philosophical rigor around language and experience. As such, mystical experiences are not just self-authenticating truths that science or rational inquiry should not probe. Instead, much attention should be paid to the interpretive frameworks themselves and how communities and contexts enable people to have experiences or feelings they identify as “religious”. His critique reveals that religious experience is not passively received but actively constructed and articulated within the linguistic and conceptual traditions we inherit and continually negotiate. Far from diminishing the significance of mystical encounters, his interpretive turn elevates them into the sphere of collective meaning-making. Thus, Proudfoot reframes and shifts the loci of “the spiritual quest”: not as a solitary journey toward unmediated encounter, but as a process embedded in shared symbolic worlds where mystical experiences arise through shared contexts and are interpreted dialogically. This insight is crucial for understanding contemporary spirituality, especially among the growing demographic of spiritual-but-not-religious (SBNR) individuals. These seekers, often wary of institutional authority yet deeply engaged in personal spirituality, may rely on implicit or informal interpretive frameworks (cultural scripts, communal narratives, and shared practices) to give meaning and coherence to their mystical experiences.

Proudfoot’s critique thus lays the theoretical groundwork for subsequent empirical studies, notably from Taves and Bender, who analyze new spiritual movements and the “spiritual but not religious” through the lens of shared meaning-making practices. If Proudfoot argues that experiences are never raw these scholars illustrate how this plays out in concrete cases – shifting our focus from the isolated mystic to the interpretive ecosystems in which contemporary spiritual experiences occur. While Taves brings empirical depth to Proudfoot’s theory, showing how revelatory experiences become enduring religious paths through collaborative interpretation; Bender, in turn, explores how contemporary seekers, even in the absence of formal institutions, generate interpretive frameworks through informal communities and cultural scripts. Together, they extend Proudfoot’s insights into lived contexts, revealing how mystical experience continues to be socially mediated, negotiated, and ritualized in the modern landscape.

Taves & Bender: Interpretive Communities in Contemporary Times

Ann Taves, a historian of religion, introduces a significant methodological innovation with what she terms a “building block” approach to religious experience.14 Rather than treating complex religious phenomena, such as visions, voices, or sensed presences, as inherently religious, Taves conceptualizes them as assemblages of more basic psychological, social, and cultural components. These components, she argues, can be understood across both religious and non-religious contexts and are subsequently interpreted as religious by the individuals who experience them or by the communities around them. As she explains, “If we assume that such experiences are neither inherently pathological nor religious and therefore subject to a range of interpretations, then new questions emerge.15 In Revelatory Events, she examines three 20th-century instances in which an individual’s private “mystical” experiences gave rise to a new religious movement: the founding of Mormonism by Joseph Smith (based on visions and translations of golden plates), the creation of Alcoholics Anonymous by Bill Wilson and colleagues (sparked by Wilson’s spiritual awakening and “voice” experience), and the reception of A Course in Miracles by Helen Schucman (who heard an inner voice dictating teachings). In each case, Taves meticulously reconstructs how the initial extraordinary experiences were interpreted by both the experiencer and a small circle of others and how those interpretations evolved into a more stabilized religious path. For example, Joseph Smith (Mormonism’s founder) reported a series of unusual visionary experiences that were never self-evident in meaning. From the beginning, his family and early followers participated in a discernment process, collaboratively attributing divine significance to the visions. Over time, the community not only validated the events but actively shaped how they were remembered and interpreted: Smith and his colleagues revised accounts of the visions to reflect evolving theological needs and organizational priorities. As Ann Taves notes, these foundational experiences were “embedded in layers of interpretation,” with narrative retellings and doctrinal elaborations co-arising as the movement stabilized itself.16 Similarly, Bill Wilson’s 1934 “white light” experience (often cited as the mystical origin of AA) did not come with a self-evident meaning. Initially disoriented by the event, Wilson sought understanding through feedback from Dr. Silkworth and spiritual conversations within the Oxford Group. As Taves notes, a “period of instability and doubt ensued” until collaborative narrative work with early AA members stabilized the experience into a usable spiritual path. The white light was not a complete revelation, but the beginning of a process through which interpretation and practice co-formed over time. In both cases, Taves teaches us that mystical or revelatory experiences do not speak for themselves – rather, people must decide what they mean, and those decisions are often made in conversation with others, eventually solidifying into lasting religious structures.

Courtney Bender, a sociologist of religion, approaches the interpretive process at a more grassroots level, focusing on contemporary Americans who identify as “spiritual but not religious.” In her ethnography The New Metaphysicals: Spirituality and the American Religious Imagination, Bender immersed herself in the spiritual subcultures of Cambridge, Massachusetts by attending meditation circles, channeling groups, healing sessions, and informal gatherings where individuals share and discuss their spiritual experiences. Far from finding “spiritual seekers as cultural and theological orphans adrift in fragmented, post-religious worlds.”17, her research revealed “various networks and internal distinctions within the spiritual networks”18 that connected people​. They create, in effect, mini-institutions or ad hoc communities - what Bender terms an “emergent network” or “shadow culture” of spirituality​. These networks are “weakly organized” compared to churches, as Bender notes, but they are nonetheless real channels through which ideas and interpretations circulate​. Individuals who might on a survey report “no religious affiliation” were in fact participating in yoga classes at a church, meditation circles at a Theosophical society, lectures at a Spiritualist temple, and reading groups at a metaphysical bookstore​.19 Bender observed that the people in these circles spent a great deal of time talking about their experiences with one another - interpreting them, comparing them, validating or occasionally critiquing them. In describing one mystics’ discussion group Bender writes, “Their stories were dense with detail and presented occasions for extended, changing, and conflicting interpretations.”20 In these conversations, interpretation is not a solitary act but a social one. Participants frequently drew upon whatever frameworks were at hand - perhaps Jungian psychology to interpret a dream, or Theosophical concepts to explain an energy feeling. Through such dialogue, the group effectively trained its members in how to experience and articulate the mystical. Bender notes that they even “worked together to elicit felicitous circumstances for future experiences”.21 For instance, creating a certain ambiance for meditation or encouraging each other to attend particular workshops, thus actively shaping what experiences would likely occur next. As they interpreted their individual experiences, these practitioners were also situating themselves in relation to traditions. Bender observes, “they likewise shaped their relations to the past in ways that refigured the traditions of which they were part.” In other words, by continually re-telling and re-evaluating their experiences, they were selectively drawing on elements of older religious traditions and remixing them into a contemporary spiritual synthesis. In sum, even in a setting where people proudly reject “organized religion” and stress personal experience, we see that an invisible organizing is still happening through stories, books, and informal mentors that provide the interpretive scaffolding. Yet Bender also notes the fragility and ambiguity in this process: interpretations were “extended, changing, and conflicting,” rarely settling into firm doctrine. Without an authoritative institution, the meaning-making remains dynamic and at times contentious. One person’s profound vision might be met with skepticism by another, or reinterpreted over time by the experiencer themselves. In effect, this openness offers advantages such as flexibility and pluralism, but it also carries disadvantages, notably a lack of stability and a shared moral direction.

Bringing together the insights of Proudfoot, Taves, and Bender, a picture emerges of contemporary mystical experience as vibrant but deeply interpretive. Immediate in its felt intensity, yet inseparable from the cultural, communal, and conceptual frameworks that shape it. Schleiermacher and James celebrated the primacy of religious feeling, but even they acknowledged that the mystic must draw on the “language of their community” to name what occurred. Proudfoot nuances this claim, showing that mystical experiences are shaped in advance by beliefs, concepts, and expectations that render certain experiences possible and intelligible. Taves and Bender extend this insight by documenting how contemporary seekers, even outside traditional institutions, generate interpretive cultures through storytelling, ritual practice, and informal networks of syncretic meaning.

A Proposition: A Mystical Commons

The preceding thinkers - Troeltsch, Schleiermacher, James, Proudfoot, Taves, and Bender - paint a textured picture of mystical experience as both profoundly immediate and inevitably interpretive. While Troeltsch and James emphasized the solitary and inward dimensions of the mystical, Taves and Bender have shown that such experiences become spiritually generative only when they are stabilized within a community of interpretation. What emerges is a paradox at the heart of modern spiritual life: mystical experiences are often born in solitude, but they only endure and mature when held communally.

In prior generations, institutional religion offered the primary containers for this process. Churches, fellowships, and sects provided more than doctrine; they offered shared symbols, collective rituals, interpretive frameworks, and memory structures that anchored the ephemeral in communal life. But today, as Courtney Bender documents, many seekers operate within fluid and decentralized spiritual networks marked by fragility, high turnover, and resistance to formalization. These emergent networks reflect a deep hunger for authenticity and transcendence, but they often lack the stability and shared language necessary for long-term spiritual integration.

This shift reflects what Charles Taylor has called the “great disembedding” or a cultural transformation in which individuals become unmoored from the cosmic and social sacred that once embedded belief within a broader metaphysical framework. In its place, individuals now navigate optional relationships to the divine on their own terms.22 Taylor names this moment both a gain and a loss: a liberation into expressive individualism, but also a fragmentation of the shared symbolic worlds that once held spiritual life in common. The resulting condition, as he puts it, is one of “fragile belief.”23

What this moment demands is not a return to rigid orthodoxy or institutional revivalism, but the imaginative articulation of new forms of spiritual infrastructure. These must be spaces capable of holding mystical experience without domesticating it—places that can honor immediacy while enabling interpretation, embodiment, and ethical action. Drawing inspiration from Taylor’s notion of a “network of agape,” spaces not organized by rigid orthodoxy, but by love, trust, and the shared task of mutual discernment, I propose the idea of a “mystical commons”: a participatory, pluralistic space in which seekers can share, hold, and deepen their experiences of the sacred in community.

The mystical commons is not merely a metaphor but a civic and spiritual design proposal: a new typology of sacred space that combines the contemplative intensity of the monastery with the dialogical openness of the agora. It serves as a container where mystical experience can be ritualized, interpreted, and lived, both individually but relationally. Imbued within a context of trust which makes ripe the conditions by which love and fellowship can naturally arise. In a disembedded age, it offers a holding structure for spiritual depth, co-constructed by those who gather to listen, discern, and dwell together in the presence of mystery. While the mystical commons is envisioned primarily for the growing spiritual-but-not-religious population in the United States, its pluralistic design invites participation from seekers across traditions. As patterns of religious affiliation shift and global interconnection accelerates, the need for spaces that can sustain shared spiritual life without rigid boundaries is likely to become increasingly relevant across diverse cultural contexts.

Physical Place

First, a mystical commons begins as a physical place as an embodied environment that invites people to return regularly and form an ongoing community. This means creating physical and ritual environments that help personal experiences “stick” and gain depth. As Proudfoot observes, myths and rituals are not superfluous; they “serve as an interpretation of the experience of a community,” dramatizing meaning in tangible form. Likewise, William James notes that mystical states are often fleeting “brief duration” peaks that fade if left unintegrated. While digital apps, online forums, sporadic circles across numerous spaces, and private gatherings can supplement spiritual life, they cannot replace the relationship formation which supports integration through consistent face-to-face encounters in a dedicated space. Anthropologist Courtney Bender affirms this through her fieldwork in Cambridge, observing that what we call “the spiritual” is not disembodied or unstructured, but rather rooted in relationships with built environments and adjacent institutions. She writes, “many [spiritual leaders] do so in religious settings and not only in the Theosophical Society and the Swedenborgian Chapel, but also in the Old Cambridge Baptist Church, which… opened its doors to the local neo-pagan group; the Friends Meetinghouse, which hosted shamans; and the Congregational Church, which hosted ecstatic drumming and dancing groups.”24 These insights suggest that even the most decentralized spiritual movements continue to seek sacred containers where rituals unfold, where legitimacy is granted, and where meaning is held across time.

What Bender’s ethnography makes plain is that people do not simply want to meet - they want to gather in spaces that resonate, architecturally and atmospherically, with a sense of the sacred. The desire for spiritual depth is matched by a longing for environments that feel holy, set apart, or gently consecrated. Not just any neutral or utilitarian space, but ones that carry the aesthetic and symbolic weight of sanctity, even if reframed for pluralist use. While the mystical commons would not be housed in an existing church per se, it would learn from the architecture of sacred presence that churches and religious buildings have long cultivated. It would be a new typology of physical place that stands as its own and signals reverence, beauty, and continuity, without the exclusivity or theological fixity that often accompanies traditional religious spaces. In this spirit, the design of the mystical commons would signal sacredness not through enforced doctrine or exclusion, but through aesthetic intentionality and an ethic of presence. In practical terms, this might mean a beautiful, calming environment with symbols from multiple traditions or ones that are universally resonant and open to subjective interpretation (such as nature motifs or archetypal shapes). There might be quiet alcoves, a larger hall for shared presence (meditation, prayer, or contemplation), a wisdom hall for salons and lectures from pluralistic traditions, intimate rooms for interpretive circles, pathways for circumambulation, or altars void of any one God. The key is continuity and embodiment: a place that becomes spiritually resonant through repeated presence. Such a place anchors spiritual practice in the rhythms of real life and encourages an experiential knowledge that mystical insight and interpretation is not just a heady flash but something that takes root and ripens in community and place.

An Embodied Value of Pluralism

Culturally, the mystical commons embodies a commitment to pluralism, inclusivity, and individual freedom.Not only as mere liberal tolerance, but as a ritualized practice of engaging difference. As Cohen notes in The Symbolic Construction of Community, “the sharing of the symbol is not necessarily the sharing of the meaning”; thus, community can be sustained not by uniform belief, but by a collective agreement to “incorporate and enclose difference” through a common ideal.25 While traditional religious communities often cohere through shared dogmas, rituals, or theological claims, the mystical commons coheres through pluralism itself as a shared symbolic commitment and ideal. Rather than enforcing doctrinal unity, the commons affirms that ultimate reality may be approached from many directions, and that each person’s sincere experience holds interpretive weight. People of different backgrounds, beliefs, and cosmologies could thus co-inhabit the commons without having to water down their truths or collapse their distinct experiences into a single consensus. As Bender observes in her studies of the spiritual scene in Cambridge, many participants identify as “a yogi, and an artist, and a singer and a writer, and a mystic” all at once, refusing fixed labels and inhabiting a fluid spiritual identity.26 In this environment, pluralism is not simply tolerated but ritually practiced: theological difference is welcomed and made fruitful through, for example, interspiritual meditations, multi-tradition festivals, scriptural reasoning dialogues, and collaborative discernment circles.

This kind of pluralistic communion reflects a long standing pattern observed in mystically-oriented individuals. As Ernst Troeltsch observed in Public Religions in the Modern World, “those ‘born-again’ souls who have ‘experienced’ individually the redeeming power of the ‘new light’ have always tended to feel closest fellowship with kindred spirits in other denominations than with ‘old lights’ in their own.”27 What unites these individuals, he writes, is not institutional allegiance but “a parallelism of spontaneous religious personalities, whose only bond of union is their common Divine origin, their common spirit of love, and their union in God, which is the free and invisible work of the Divine Spirit.”28 The mystical commons echoes this vision: a space where people gather not because they agree on theological propositions, but because they are kindred spirits each drawn by the gravity of lived experience, and each committed to interpreting the sacred with humility and openness. Schleiermacher likewise critiques rigid ecclesiastical institutions and instead offers a vision of the church as a fluid, open spiritual fellowship, one rooted in shared intuition rather than dogma or hierarchy. He distinguishes sharply between the institutional church and the living communion of those who genuinely possess religion, insisting that “the external society of religion will be brought closer to the universal freedom and the majestic unity of the true church only by becoming a flowing mass where there are no outlines.”29 For Schleiermacher, the “church” is healthiest when it fosters uncoerced participation, spiritual individuality, and mutual edification. Taken together, these thinkers point to a form of spiritual community that is not defined by what members must believe, but by how they relate: through shared longing, intuitive resonance, and a common commitment to exploring the divine as it discloses itself in different lives. The mystical commons echoes this ideal: it is not a church in the conventional sense, but a spiritual commons where kindred seekers gather, not to be shaped by creed, but to deepen through presence, conversation, and the lived immediacy of spiritual encounter.

Ultimately these forms may support what Bender calls “religious and secular freethinkers, progressives, and experimenters,” creating an ecosystem where novel religious expressions are not only allowed but honored as meaningful contributions to the common quest.⁵ This creates the conditions by which a mystical commons can function not as a rigid sect but as a living “ecology of spiritual exploration”, bound together by mutual respect, dialogical practice, and a shared commitment to experiential depth. Critically, this exposure to multiple symbolic repertoires before mystical experience occurs also becomes spiritually generative. Echoing Proudfoot: “the experience is shaped by a complex pattern of concepts, commitments, and expectations which the mystic brings to it”; these beliefs are not added afterward, but are “formative of, rather than consequent upon, the experience.”30 In other words, the conceptual and cultural frameworks available to a seeker in advance help determine not only how an experience is interpreted, but even what can be experienced at all. The more a seeker is immersed in a range of spiritual languages and metaphors, the more capacious their imagination or modes of experience becomes. The more likely that a future insight will find resonance, interpretation, and ethical application. The mystical commons, in this sense, does not merely accommodate plurality, rather, it seeds the conditions for spiritual experience to take root, expand, and be understood across traditions.

Importantly, this model does not negate the value of traditional religious institutions. For many, churches, synagogues, temples, or mosques remain vital spaces to deepen within a single lineage. In fact, the mystical commons may function as a threshold space, surfacing multiple traditions in a way that helps individuals discern which path they may want to root more firmly in. At the same time, for others, formal affiliation with a particular tradition may feel constraining. Entering a church may imply that one’s personal experiences must be interpreted exclusively through that tradition’s metaphysical and moral filters. For such individuals, a more fluid and dialogical matrix for meaning-making, in which diverse frameworks are held in proximity but not in hierarchy, offers a more honest and expansive spiritual home. The rise of this need is evident in the broader social trend: for the first time in U.S. history, church membership fell below 50% in 2020, according to Gallup, signaling not necessarily a rejection of spirituality but a shift in the institutions people trust to steward it.31

Programming: Practices, Facilitation, and Ritual

As aforementioned, rather than a fixed program, the mystical commons cultivates an “ecology of spiritual exploration”. Its activities would emerge organically from the evolving needs and inspirations of the community, more like a garden than a curriculum. Participants would collectively curate rituals and dialogues that speak to them: periods of silent meditation, interfaith prayer, spiritual text book clubs, dream interpretation circles, journaling workshops, or storytelling evenings. Interpretive discussions would likely follow any profound individual experience: for example, after someone shares a mystical insight or vision, the group might engage in communal discernment by listening and reflecting together on what the experience might signify. Such interpretive circles allow multiple perspectives (psychological, theological, symbolic) to be offered. In this collective reflection, personal experiences are neither automatically validated as universal truth nor dismissed as delusion; rather, they are lovingly tested and refined in the crucible of shared inquiry and mirroring. As such integrating personal insights into communal dialogue guards against the spiritual narcissism or solipsism that sometimes plagues purely individualist paths. It fosters a form of mutual responsibility, in which individual revelations are not isolated events but become occasions for shared discernment, ethical reflection, and the slow formation of communal wisdom. Crucially, akin to the “informal mentors” that Bender notes in Cambridge spiritual circles, those who guide these kinds of activities would be facilitators and “garden-tenders”, not gurus. Rather than authoritative prophets or priests interpreting truths, facilitators focus on holding space, tending the container, protecting the process, and infusing it with loving presence. For example, a facilitator might simply open the gathering with a poem, ensure that everyone has a chance to speak in a circle, or maintain an atmosphere of respect. This approach guards against hierarchy while still providing structure. It acknowledges, in line with Schleiermacher, that genuine spiritual community thrives through freedom and mutual exchange, not through “proselytizing” or coercion. In the mystical commons, everyone is both a student and a potential teacher as wisdom is shared horizontally.

In addition to these kinds of interpretative practices, ritual is a foundational modality of the mystical commons. Far from being a vestige of archaic religiosity, ritual constitutes a primary technology of human meaning-making. As Émile Durkheim argued in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, the sacred does not necessarily originate in metaphysical content but in the collective effervescence generated when individuals gather and act in synchrony. Sacredness, in this view, is not a property of doctrines or deities, but an emergent quality of coordinated presence: “The sacred is the effect of a momentary uniting of individuals into a jointly acting collective.” These moments act as liminal spaces where inner experience is externalized, reshaped, and received in a shared field of attention by turning feeling into form, and form into meaning. In the context of a mystical commons, we can thus reposition ritual not as the remnant of fading religious traditions, but as a generative force in communal life capable of shaping shared attention, anchoring spiritual experience, and cultivating new forms of collective sanctity. Within the mystical commons, such ritual technologies can be intentionally repurposed: not to restore the structures of the past, but to open symbolic containers for presence, transformation, and meaning in a pluralistic world. Such rituals might include communal meditation, rites of passage, grief circles, seasonal observances, or silent processions. Each of these experiences would be intentionally crafted not around theological consensus but symbolic resonance. Indeed, what binds these acts is not shared dogma but the mutual willingness to enter into symbolic space together: to make solitude porous to solidarity, and contemplation receptive to communion. As Hans Joas underscores in The Power of the Sacred: rituals “create a controlled environment that temporarily suspends the mechanisms of everyday life,” enabling participants to inhabit ideal states not merely as ideas but as lived experiences. In the context of a mystical commons, these states may not revolve around doctrinal certainties but around ethical and existential qualities like reverence, presence, gratitude, or collective mourning. Their sacrality lies not in orthodoxy but in their capacity to convene difference into a shared moment of transcendence. In this sense, ritual performs a double movement: affirming spiritual autonomy while inviting individuals into freely chosen, embodied togetherness. It does not restore religion-as-institution but reimagines sacred practice as a civic and spiritual commons where meaning arises not from divine decree but from the intersubjective space between humans, in acts of shared attention and reverent presence.

Orientation Towards Service

To ensure that the mystical commons does not devolve into a purely individualistic or therapeutic enterprise, it must also cultivate a structural and cultural orientation toward service through translating inner transformation into outer contribution. As William James argued, the true test of mystical insight lies not in its affective intensity alone but in its moral and social fruits. James characterized the mystic as one who, having touched a deeper order, returns not with passive repose but with an energized “moral fighting shape” that carries readiness to act, to serve, and to create.32 This principle shaped a lineage of liberal religious thinkers who saw mysticism as inseparable from ethical passion. The Quaker mystic Rufus Jones, who followed in James’s footsteps to became one of the most prolific American writers on mysticism, saw mystics not as passive contemplatives but as “tremendous transmitters of energy”33, exemplified by his own lifelong dedication to international relief work. Likewise, the Swedenborgian tradition, which was highly influential in the development of American spiritual liberalism34, taught that spiritual growth entails becoming “divinely useful,” and that true love of the divine is revealed through actions that embody care, charity, and attentiveness to others in daily life.35

In this spirit, the mystical commons must imagine programming not only as a means for deepening inner experience but also as a framework for discerning and embodying one’s actions in the world. Ritual and interpretive circles should not simply provide spaces for self-exploration but should also be oriented toward attunement with life’s inherent meaning and directionality. Meaning, in this context, is not manufactured but disclosed - uncovered through contemplative presence and enacted through service. Accordingly, cultural attitudes within the commons might center on the belief that mystical experience carries an implicit call: to become a transmitter of one’s unique gifts for the benefit of others. Programming might include vocational discernment workshops that explore the intersection between personal insight and social needs; service-oriented rituals that ritually bind contemplation to action; or seasonal festivals where participants collectively offer projects or intentions for the benefit of their community. These public-facing dimensions would embody what Hans Joas identifies as the creative and reconstructive force of the sacred in collective life. He writes that a society cannot remake itself without ideals, and that rituals, as containers for those ideals, help constitute a society’s vision of itself.36

Thus, rather than positioning mysticism as an escape from the world, the mystical commons invites a return to the world with renewed vision and responsibility. Through its pluralistic, symbolic, and participatory frameworks, the commons offers not only contemplative depth but ethical formation - a setting in which spiritual autonomy and social solidarity are held together. In doing so, it affirms that mystical experience is not the endpoint of the spiritual path but a generative moment that demands enactment. True insight, in this view, is inseparable from ethical expression; it culminates not in private enlightenment but in the cultivation of lives that are attuned to mystery and devoted to service.

Conclusion

Mystical experience, long cherished as the heart of religious life, is today both more accessible and more fragile. As seekers reach toward the ineffable in a secular age, the theological challenge is not only to affirm the reality of such experiences, but to offer interpretive and communal forms that nurture them without domesticating their wildness. This essay has traced the contours of that challenge - from Schleiermacher and James’s celebration of immediacy, to Proudfoot, Taves, and Bender’s insistence on interpretation, to the contemporary quest for meaning outside traditional institutions. What emerges is a clear insight: that mystical experience is neither reducible to pure immediacy nor to cultural construction, but lives in the generative tension between the two. Its power lies in its capacity to rupture the ordinary, and its promise in the slow work of communal discernment.

The mystical commons, as proposed here, seeks to hold that tension as a sacred task. It is not a blueprint for a new orthodoxy, but a possibility for a new typology of spiritual infrastructure: embodied, pluralistic, dialogical, and attuned to service. It is a container for the sacred that holds difference without collapsing it, that invites personal insight into communal dialogue, and that reclaims ritual not as a performance of conformity but as a shared act of attention and reverence. As such, it recognizes that no single framework can contain the full truth of the mystical, and thus it turns toward pluralism not as a dilution of faith, but as an expansion of its horizon. Within it, individual insight is honored within shared practice, and spiritual autonomy is deepened through presence with others. Such a space reimagines what sacred community can be in a post-institutional age: instead of a system of control, a commons of care; rather than a return to dogma, a turn toward discerning together what the sacred asks of us now. Most importantly, it affirms that mysticism is not a private escape, but a call to re-enter the world with clearer eyes, an open heart, and a commitment to serve others in tandem with the unfolding undulations of our insights and gifts.

In this vision, mystical experience is not merely a personal high or private revelation, but as a seed. And like all seeds, it needs soil. Physical and social infrastructure like the mystical commons offers that ground: a place where insight can be rooted, interpreted, ritualized, and made to flower in one’s life. What we need now is not another church, nor a vague escape from institutions altogether, but something in between: a holding structure for mystery, made by many hands, creeds, and co-existing truths. We need, in short, a new ecology of the sacred, where the divine is not only glimpsed through numerous lenses, but cultivated together in community

Thus, the future of theology may not lie primarily in sermons, creeds, or texts, but in spatial and communal imagination. In envisioning something like a mystical commons, theology takes on the creative and constructive work of reimagining spiritual infrastructure both physically and programmatically. This move is not a turn away from tradition, but a rediscovery of theology’s deeper vocation: to hold open the conditions in which wonder, transcendence, and spiritual transformation can meaningfully thrive. Theology, in short, becomes an art of communal design - creating the spaces, structures, and conditions by which the infinite might once again speak clearly, compellingly, and collectively.

Ultimately, the deeper provocation of a mystical commons is not a final answer, but a shared question: How might we live, and what institutions might we create together, if the sacred were not distant or confined within orthodoxy, but alive right here - between us, among us, arising through us?

“There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.” —Leonard Cohen

In my current explorations as a grad student, i’ve been circling back to a few core questions: how can the spaces we create also become spaces that transform us? How can architecture, interiors, and designed environments help people encounter moments of transcendence, where something within them softens, stirs, or quietly shifts? I’ve been especially drawn to how these kinds of transformative spaces might emerge in secular contexts, where there may be no formal spiritual practice, yet the longing for meaning, presence, and personal evolution is still alive.

This curiosity led me to explore the rich and layered world of Buddhist architecture and art. Across centuries, Buddhist communities have crafted material, visual, and ritual technologies to mark the threshold between the ordinary and the sacred. They understood something essential about the human experience: that we long to touch what feels beyond us, but we also need tangible ways to approach it.

My curated exhibition for one of my classes, Thresholds of the Sacred: Buddhist Interfaces Between Worlds, is a meditation on these questions. Through eighteen carefully selected objects and an explanatory essay, I explore how Buddhist traditions have used trees, relics, images, and embodied practices to create portals between worlds. These thresholds are not just boundaries; they are invitations. And as I reflect on them, I wonder how we, today, might design spaces that carry that same potential for personal transmutation. How might we craft environments that make space for the sacred, whether we name it directly or not?

thresholds of the sacred: buddhist interfaces between worlds

Throughout Buddhist history, devotional practice has hinged upon the dynamic interaction between two realms: the ordinary, profane world of daily life and the exalted realm of awakening, liberation, or sacred presence. Yet rather than treating these realms as fully separate, Buddhist traditions devised a variety of material, visual, and ritual technologies to mediate their relationship. What we might call thresholds of the sacred. These thresholds, whether manifest as trees, relics, mandalas, or ritual implements, served not only as points of contact but as active sites of transformation, allowing practitioners to approach, imagine, or even temporarily embody the sacred within their own worldly existence. In other words, they blur the line between human and divine, here and beyond, making the Buddha’s presence accessible without erasing the mystery of transcendence.

This exhibition explores eighteen Buddhist artifacts spanning from the second century BCE to the present, grouped thematically rather than chronologically into three categories: Nature and Relic Shrines, Visionary Interfaces, and Ritual and Embodied Interfaces. Through these categories, the exhibition reveals how Buddhist communities across history have continually reimagined the vocabularies and media through which the sacred is accessed, while retaining a shared impulse: to blur the line between the human and the transcendent, the worldly and the awakened.

I. Nature and Relic Shrines

The earliest Buddhist threshold technologies arose in the immediate aftermath of the historical Buddha’s parinirvāṇa (final nirvana in death), when the Buddha's physical body was no longer present in the world. In response, early Buddhist communities turned to natural forms and relic shrines as proxies for direct contact with the sacred. As Buddhist scholar John Strong writes, “There is no distinction between a living Buddha and a collection of relics.

Objects in this section demonstrate how early practitioners localized sanctity through physical landmarks and relics. The Bodhi Tree Shrine Relief from Bharhut (2nd c. BCE) transforms the Bodhi Tree of Enlightenment into a portable sacred site: its depiction allows pilgrims to "visit" Bodh Gayā symbolically, even if they remained geographically distant. Similarly, the Railing Fragment with Stupa Worship from Bharhut showcases circumambulation and bodily gestures as essential acts that brought practitioners into the ritual orbit of the Buddha’s relics. In The Bodhi Tree at Mahābodhi Temple (5th–6th c. CE) of Bodh Gayā, a living descendant of the original, offers a vivid example of the natural world becoming an axis mundi - a material bridge between earthly devotion and cosmic awakening. It seems to be neither merely symbolic nor fully identical with the Buddha, but a vital point of access. The Great Stupa at Sanchi (3rd–1st c. BCE) reinforces this early paradigm as its architecture centers on containment and orientation: pilgrims never entered the stupa itself but ritually encircled it, performing physical acts of devotion that brought them near to sacred presence without breaching its ultimate mystery. Finally, The Sacred Footprint at Adam’s Peak (Sri Pada) extends this threshold logic into landscape itself. A single "footprint" pressed into the mountaintop condenses the Buddha’s cosmic journey into a tangible “relic”, while the arduous pilgrimage route mirrors the vertical effort required for spiritual ascent. Here, the natural world becomes an interface, mediating the sacred through physical endurance and geographical marking.

In all these examples, the sacred remains distinct yet accessible through a powerful, luminous absence anchored into relics, trees, stupas, and summit stones, and approached through bodily acts of devotion. Such symbols invited devotees to imagine the Buddha in the very emptiness, suggesting that the divide between the seen and unseen was porous and alive with meaning.

II. Visionary Interfaces

If early reliquaries and stupas served as static monuments of presence, with the rise of Mahāyāna Buddhism around 1st century BCE to 1st century CE, devotional practice expanded beyond relics and sites to encompass visionary realms accessed through image and imagination. As Mahāyāna cosmologies envisioned infinite Buddhas and pure lands beyond the reach of physical pilgrimage, visualization and mental inhabitation became crucial modes of devotional contact. The shift toward universal salvation also made sacred presence more accessible to lay practitioners, who engaged through visionary and emotional encounter rather than monastic relic veneration alone. Sacred presence became not just something to physically approach, but something to see, visualize, and mentally inhabit.

The Raigō of Amida and the Twenty-Five Bodhisattvas (14th c.) exemplifies this shift. Designed for the deathbed, the scroll functions as a visual portal, bringing Amida’s Pure Land into immediate proximity for the dying practitioner. Salvation is envisioned as a crossing from this life into a paradise made visible through pigment, silk, and meditative focus.Similarly, the mural of Padmapani at Ajanta (5th c.) transforms a cave into an immersive theater of sacred presence. Padmapani’s compassionate gaze invites the viewer into contemplation; the lamplights theatrical flicker animates the painted bodhisattva within the walls of the Ajanta caves, making vision the active threshold through which compassion is accessed. The Jowo Rinpoche statue in Lhasa (7th c.) further blurs the line between representation and real presence. For Tibetan pilgrims, the Jowo is not simply an icon; it is the living Buddha, embodying the sacred within a tangible, human-made form. Here, devotion is performed through recognition: to see the Jowo is to encounter the Buddha. The Taima Mandala (Edo period) also exemplifies how visionary interfaces also mapped pathways into the sacred. Through meticulous imagery, it invites practitioners to visualize their own progress into Amida’s Western Paradise, collapsing spatial and spiritual distances into an unfolding contemplative landscape. Furthermore, The Tamamushi Shrine (c. 650 CE) miniaturized sacred architecture into a portable shrine, combining painted narrative panels with architectural symbolism. Its portability signals a profound shift: the sacred need not be tied to grand stupas or remote groves but can now be encountered through careful, intimate visual inspection. Finally, the Portable Zushi Shrine with Fudō Myōō compresses the sacred into a palm-sized format, making the threshold between worldly travel and divine protection instantly accessible. By opening its doors, the practitioner transforms any space into a site of sacred presence.

In all these visionary interfaces, sight, imagination, and contemplation replace physical proximity as the primary medium of sacred encounter. The boundary remains, but it is now mediated through vision, collapsing distance while maintaining reverent differentiation.

III. Ritual and Embodied Interfaces

In the Tantric (Vajrayāna) traditions that emerged from the 6th century onward, the thresholds between human and sacred realms were no longer merely approached. Instead, they were inhabited and collapsed through ritual performance, visualization, and embodied transformation. Rather than positioning the sacred as a distant realm to be approached or even imagined, Tantric traditions emphasized direct identification with it through ritual performance, visualization, and the transformation of identity. Embodied interfaces such as mandalas, consecrated implements, and choreographed rituals became vehicles not just for contact with the divine, but for temporarily becoming it, thereby enacting a profound ontological shift that redefined the nature of devotional engagement.

The thangka of Chakrasamvara and Vajravarahi (Central Tibet, 15th century) captures this shift. Intended for advanced deity yoga practices, the painting invites practitioners to visualize themselves as the deities, dissolving the boundary between human and divine. Here, sacred presence is not witnessed from afar but realized internally through imaginative embodiment. In the same vein, The Dharmadhātu Vāgīśvara Mandala (Tibet, ca. 1550–1575) offers another ritual interface: once ritually consecrated through the visualization of deities and the sealing of sacred syllables on its reverse, it becomes an activated sacred field for meditation and visualization, enabling the practitioner to mentally traverse the mandalic cosmos. In contrast, the Kalachakra Sand Mandala (Leh, 2014) is constructed for temporary use; after extensive ritual engagement, it is dismantled, symbolizing the impermanence of all phenomena.

Architecture also becomes a ritual interface. Borobudur (Java, 8th–9th century) leads pilgrims physically upward through the realms of desire, form, and formlessness, enacting spiritual ascent through bodily movement. Similarly, the Vajradhātu Maṇḍala at Tabo Monastery (India, 996 CE) also transforms sacred geometry into a walkable, life-sized mandala, immersing practitioners within a cosmological structure that is both visual and spatial.

Ritual implements further collapse the sacred-profane divide. The Vajracharya Priest’s Crown (Nepal, 13th century) adorns the tantric priest as a living mandala, aligning his body with cosmic principles. In ritual acts of consecration, the crown functions not merely as ornament but as a transformational device enacting sacred presence through embodied ritual authority.

Across these examples, Buddhist ritual practice transforms the body, space, and material form into living interfaces. The sacred is no longer distant; it is temporarily enacted within the practitioner, collapsing dualities and affirming the possibility of realization in this very world.

Conclusion: continuity and transformation across thresholds

Together, these three categories - Nature and Relic Shrines, Visionary Interfaces, and Ritual and Embodied Interfaces - reveal a dynamic history of Buddhist devotional technologies. Across centuries and cultures, Buddhists have continuously reimagined the threshold between human and sacred, devising ever more intimate, portable, and embodied ways to traverse it.

Yet at the heart of every object in this exhibition lies the same paradox: the sacred is both present and absent, both near and far, both distinct and permeable. Thresholds, whether encountered through pilgrimage, sight, or ritual action, never eliminate this tension. Instead, they creatively inhabit it, forging spaces where transformation becomes possible. Through these objects, we are reminded that the path to nirvana has always run right through the heart of the ordinary world, illuminated by the didactic, transmutation, and embodiment that emanates from these threshold places where realities touch. The sacred is both here and beyond. And it is in the between, at the threshold, that such tension is momentarily transformed.

I. Nature and Relic Shrines

Bodhi Tree Shrine Relief

Bharhut (2nd century BCE)

Carved in red sandstone, this Śuṅga‑period panel (c. 100 BCE) transplants Bodh Gayā’s bodhi shrine to central India. Two women kneel before an unoccupied vajrāsana, the seat where the ancient Buddha Konāgamana is believed to have awakened. Above them rises a luxuriant Indian fig whose bulbous fruit and oval leaves identify it as the wisdom‑giving bodhi. Bharhut’s sculptors repeated such tree‑and‑throne ensembles five times along the stupa’s inner railing - each dedicated to a different past Buddha and positioned so every circumambulating pilgrim would encounter the scene. The panel served as a proxy pilgrimage, letting worshippers “visit” Bodh Gayā through sight and movement. Without depicting the Buddha, the emblems (the tree and throne) stand in for his enlightenment, inviting pilgrims circling the stupa to encounter the sacred moment visually. The relief typifies early Buddhist “threshold technology”: by replacing the absent body with relic and landscape, it turns the Bodhi Tree into an axis mundi where earthly devotion brushes nirvana, collapsing the sacred‑profane divide after parinirvāṇa.

The Bodhi Tree, Mahābodhi Temple Complex
5th–6th c. CE, Bodh Gayā

The Bodhi Tree at Bodh Gayā marks the ground where Prince Siddhārtha attained enlightenment and became the Buddha. A living descendant of the original ficus religiosa, the tree stands behind the Mahābodhi Temple, rebuilt in brick during the Gupta period (5th–6th c. CE) over earlier Mauryan foundations. Emperor Aśoka, during his pilgrimage in the 3rd century BCE, commemorated this spot by installing the Vajrāsana (a polished sandstone “Diamond Throne”) beneath the tree and encircling it with a sculpted balustrade, remnants of which survive today. Pilgrims circumambulate the tree, meditate beneath its canopy, and may collect fallen leaves as sacred tokens. In this exhibition, the Bodhi Tree is framed as an early “threshold technology”: a natural relic that collapses the distance between human devotion and cosmic awakening. As one of Buddhism’s four holy sites, the Mahabodhi Temple embodies early Buddhist dualism: the exact spot of Enlightenment is marked and venerated, separating it from ordinary ground. Yet by visiting and meditating there, devotees symbolically partake in the sacred moment, bridging human spiritual effort with the Buddha’s transcendence.

Railing Fragment with Stupa Worship, Bharhut Stupa
2nd century BCE

Carved from reddish sandstone, this fragment lined the inner vedikā of the Bharhut Stupa, guiding pilgrims around the monument’s sacred circuit. A male and female devotee appear three times in progressive poses—approaching, circumambulating, then kneeling—as they walk around the stupa. The domed stupa they venerate is crowned by a triple chatra, garlanded by airborne celestials, and marked with carved handprints at the base which indicate the act of worship through intimate touching. The vivid portrayal of lay worship and divine attendants demonstrates how early Buddhist communities fashioned “threshold technologies”: visual‑spatial interfaces that turned ordinary acts (walking, touching, offering) into transformative encounters with the sacred. Mounted on the railing, the panel demarcates the boundary between worldly space and the Buddha’s relics. By crossing this threshold, devotees were brought into the domain of the Buddha’s relics. By highlighting circumambulation and offering, it seems to show how ordinary acts of devotion transform into a transcendent encounter at the stupa’s threshold.

Great Stupa at Sanchi
3rd c. BCE original, enlarged 1st c. BCE, India

A hemispherical monument of earth and masonry, Sanchi’s Great Stupa was built by the Mauryan emperor Ashoka and is believed to house the ashes of the Buddha. It stands 16 meters high, its dome symbolizing the vault of heaven enclosing the earth. At the summit, a square railing (harmikā) and central pillar with triple umbrellas represent the world-axis and the Three Jewels of Buddhism. Four stone gateways (toranas) richly carved with Jātaka tales of his prior births, vignettes of the early Buddhist community, and auspicious motifs punctuate the cardinal directions. A broad, elevated walkway wraps around the stupa’s base, reached by stairways and intended for ritual circling at a higher level. Below it, a second path at ground level allows devotees to perform a similar procession, bordered by intricately carved stone railings that define the sacred route. Early visitors did not enter the stupa, but walked around its terrace in ritual clockwise procession, enabling a spatial practice which created a sacred experience while keeping the relics enclosed.

​Sacred Footprint at Adam’s Peak (Sri Pada), Sri Lanka

A single 1.8-m “foot” pressed into the summit rock anchors one of Asia’s oldest multi-religious pilgrimages. As a 2010 UNESCO survey notes, “The Sri Pada is a pilgrimage site that has been held sacred by the devotees of four religions namely Buddhists, Hindus, Christians and Islamists.” According to Buddhist chronicles, the Buddha imprinted his foot upon the summit during his third visit to the island at the request of Prince Suman.

The site’s sanctity is further emphasized by its challenging pilgrimage routes, which physically and symbolically separate the sacred summit from the secular world below. Here, vertical effort becomes a ritual interface, separating the sacred summit from profane daily life. Thus, the mountain’s cone seemingly becomes a gigantic natural reliquary, while the single footprint concentrates sacred presence into a precise point. The singular footprint, locked into stone and framed by gates, reinforced early Buddhist strategies for localizing sacredness in nature through bodily engagement, arduous pilgrimage, and relic demarcation.

II. Visionary Interfaces

Raigō of Amida and Twenty-Five Attendants
Amida Nijūgo Bosatsu Hayaraigō-zu
Japan, 14th c. (Kamakura–early Muromachi), hanging scroll, color on silk, Chion-in / Kyoto National Museum, National Treasure

Amida Buddha descends on racing clouds, flanked by twenty-five bodhisattvas who play celestial music and extend welcoming hands. Their purpose is to greet the newly deceased figure shown at the lower right and escort that soul to paradise. Known as a haya raigō (early descent), this painting was meant to be displayed at the bedside of the dying, allowing them to recognize Amida and be received into the Pure Land. The scene signals the most exalted Pure Land rebirth, jōbon jōshō (first-class, upper grade): the departed sits upright before a sutra text while, above, a miniature pagoda hovers as a celestial beacon.

Unlike earlier shrines where sanctity resided in relics or nature, this scroll is a visionary interface. Sacred power is accessed through image as pigment and silk form a portal activated by contemplation. Unbound to temples or pilgrimage sites, it made sacred encounter mobile and intimate, bringing the Pure Land into daily life. This marks the shift from relic-based devotion to sacred presence mediated through sight and imagination.

Bodhisattva Padmapani (Avalokiteśvara)
Late 5th c. CE, natural pigments on lime plaster, Cave 1, Ajanta, Maharashtra

This mural of Padmapani, also known as Avalokiteśvara (the bodhisattva of infinite compassionis one of the most celebrated works from the Ajanta Caves, carved into the cliffs of western India between the 2nd century BCE and 7th century CE. Created during the Gupta period, it reflects the era’s refined aesthetics and deep devotional culture. The bodhisattva gazes downward in meditative calm, holding a lotus flower while adorned with a lavish crown and jeweled ornaments. Painted in green, black, and red pigments on lime plaster, the mural is renowned for its delicate shading and emotional realism. Its idealized yet human portrayal of divinity evokes both serenity and intimacy, inviting inner reflection rather than ritual participation.

Though Padmapani is fixed in pigment and plaster, the cave becomes a visionar stage. Ajanta’s murals transform the space into an immersive visual theater, where sacred presence is accessed not through relics but through image and atmosphere. Padmapani’s gaze and the flicker of lamplight make vision the threshold to transcendence.

Jowo Rinpoche (Shakyamuni as Youth)
7th century CE, gilded copper with semiprecious inlay
Jokhang Temple, Lhasa, Tibet

This life-sized statue of the Buddha Shakyamuni as a princely youth, adorned with gold, brocade, and precious stones, is the most venerated image in Tibetan Buddhism. Known as the Jowo (“Precious Lord”), it is traditionally believed to have been created by the divine craftsman Vishvakarma at the Buddha’s request and brought to Tibet by Princess Wencheng in 641 CE. Not merely a representation, the Jowo is considered a living Buddha—pilgrims prostrate before it, offer gold, and gaze into its eyes seeking spiritual presence.

As a visionary interface, the Jowo collapses historical and divine realms: its face evokes the Buddha at age twelve, its material presence stands in for the absent body. Tibetans engage with the Jowo not through relics or ritual alone, but through visual recognition, a form of intimate, reciprocal devotion that activates sacred presence in sight. This image becomes both mirror and portal as seeing it is a form of encounter.

Taima Mandala
Japan, Edo period (1750)
Hanging scroll; ink, color, and gold on silk

This luminous scroll visualizes Amida Buddha’s Western Paradise, Sukhāvatī, as a vast palace realm filled with jeweled pavilions, music-playing bodhisattvas, and lotus ponds from which reborn devotees emerge. The central figure of Amida sits serenely surrounded by celestial beings, while narrative vignettes around the border recount Queen Vaidehī’s journey through sixteen meditations taught by Amida. At the scroll’s base, nine levels of possible rebirth unfold in structured sequence.

“In the case of the Pure Land mandara, pilgrims journey into transcendent palatial worlds. In the Taima mandara, the outer courts portray events that take place in the everyday world but that lead to the crossing of the threshold into a sacred world.” As a visionary interface, the Taima Mandala presents salvation as spatial progression. Through concentrated visualization, the viewer enters the sacred realm not through relics or ritual, but through sight. The image becomes a portal that enables mental crossing between this world and the next.

Tamamushi Shrine
Japan, c. 650 CE · Cypress and camphor wood with lacquer, paint, and gilt metal · Hōryū-ji Treasure House

The Tamamushi Shrine is one of the oldest and most complete surviving examples of Japanese Buddhist architecture and painting in miniature form. Measuring just under eight feet tall, it replicates a temple’s Buddha hall at small scale, with a hip-and-gable roof, bronze fittings, and architectural precision. As scholar Akiko Walley explains, it is “designed in imitation of a Buddha hall,” but in a format that made it suitable for private worship.

Its painted surfaces function as visionary interfaces with carefully composed narrative panels that invite viewers to contemplate Buddhist virtues through image alone. Walley notes the shrine’s “intimacy between the shrine and the worshippers” and the expectation of “close inspection” of its surfaces.

Instead of an object for ritual enactment or relic veneration, the Tamamushi is a physical representation of a visual cosmos. The shrine mediates sacred presence through painted storytelling and iconographic density. As a Buddha-world in miniature, it allows sacred geography and moral instruction to become visible, portable, and mentally traversable through vision.

Portable Shrine (Zushi) with Fudō Myōō, the Immovable Wisdom King
Japan, Edo period (1615–1868) · Lacquered wood, metal, and pigment

This small, palm-sized lacquer shrine contains a fierce miniature image of Fudō Myōō, the "Immovable Wisdom King," a wrathful deity who conquers ignorance and guards the path to enlightenment. Originally owned by famed sumo wrestler Hitachiyama Taniemon (1874–1922), who carried it across the globe during his travels, the shrine exemplifies how sacred presence was made personally portable.

Zushi like this one were common from the medieval period onward, crafted as compact wooden cabinets with opening doors that revealed powerful Buddhist icons. In ritual use, simply opening the doors transformed any space into a consecrated site of devotion. As a visionary interface, this zushi collapses the boundary between sacred and profane not through relic or ritual, but through the presence of an image. Its scale invites intimate visual engagement, enabling lay practitioners to carry the sacred threshold with them in daily life. Rather than journeying to a distant temple, the practitioner brings the sacred home—a shift made possible through image-based vision rather than relic-bound presence.

Interior Composition of a Jōdo Shinshū Butsudan
Japan, modern diagram (adapted from Edo–Meiji traditions)
Based on Butsudan Butsugu Gaidansu (BKSSK 2015)

This diagram illustrates the symbolic architecture of a Jōdo Shinshū home altar, arranged in three tiers: Amida Buddha and flanking bodhisattvas preside above ancestral tablets, which in turn rest above offerings of food, incense, and ritual implements. Each component is precisely positioned, enacting a doctrinal map of the cosmos through domestic ritual space. The form is not only visual but also affective. As Hannah Gould writes, “the sensational form of butsudan has implications for the embodied practice of being with the dead,” shaping how practitioners kneel, offer incense, and gaze upward toward the Buddha.

Unlike relic-based or temple-bound worship, this structure brings sacred presence into the intimacy of the home. The diagram reveals how visionary interfaces are not always painted or sculpted. They are assembled, lived with, and activated through sensory ritual. Vision, touch, scent, and space converge to mediate a sacred threshold between worlds.

III. Ritual and Embodied Interfaces

Chakrasamvara with His Consort Vajravarahi
Central Tibet, 1450–1500 Pigment on cloth · The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

This vibrant thangka portrays Chakrasamvara, the "Circle of Bliss," in intimate union with his consort Vajravarahi. Together they represent the tantric fusion of compassion, embodied by Chakrasamvara, and wisdom, embodied by Vajravarahi. Chakrasamvara’s dynamic form, adorned with multiple arms and symbolic ornaments, evokes the radical transformation of passions into awakened qualities. Vajravarahi’s luminous presence conveys the realization of innate wisdom. Likely created for advanced tantric practitioners, this painting was not intended for passive viewing but for immersive deity yoga, where practitioners visualize themselves as the deity.

Sacred presence is no longer something to approach from a distance; it is something to become. This thangka acts as a visionary interface, collapsing the boundary between devotee and divinity through ritual visualization, meditation, and imaginative embodiment. Within Vajrayāna practice, seeing becomes a transformative act, drawing the practitioner into the heart of awakened being.

Dharmadhātu Vāgīśvara Mandala

Tibet, ca. 1550–1575 · Pigments on cloth (thangka) · Virginia Museum of Fine Arts

At the center of this mandala, seated in the Realm of Truth (Dharmadhātu), is the Lord of Speech (Vāgīśvara), a peaceful form of the bodhisattva Manjushri. With four faces and eight arms, he radiates wisdom and eloquence while the four quadrants of the cosmos unfold around him in blue, yellow, red, and green. This is not merely a static painting but a sacred space. During consecration, a lama ritually visualizes the deities entering the mandala and then seals them inside by inscribing the syllables “om, ah, and hum” which symbolize body, speech, and mind, onto the reverse. One of the most complex mandalas in Vajrayāna Buddhism, it reflects a cosmological totality. According to Newar tradition, its variants contain between 216 and 252 deities, each meticulously positioned within the palace’s architecture.

The result is a mandala that is ritually activated and inhabited. It serves not only as an object of contemplation but as a ritual interface, where the practitioner enacts a visual and mental journey into sacred space. Through visualization and mantra, the viewer becomes a participant in the mandala’s divine architecture.

Completed Kalachakra Sand Mandala
Leh, Ladakh, India · Constructed in July 2014 · Sand and ritual performance

This intricate mandala, completed during the 33rd Kalachakra Empowerment led by His Holiness the Dalai Lama, depicts the divine palace of Shri Kalachakra, the Wheel of Time. Composed of colored sand, it represents a perfected cosmos with hundreds of deities arranged within concentric walls, gates, and quadrants. According to tantric ritual, the mandala is not merely symbolic—it is ritually inhabited. Lamas visualize the deities entering the palace, and practitioners are initiated to visualize themselves as Kalachakra, progressing toward enlightenment through embodiment.

The Kalachakra system belongs to Unexcelled Yoga Tantra, where sacred reality is not approached from afar but actualized within the body. This mandala is a ritual interface, constructed for participants to walk through mentally and spiritually, collapsing the divide between human and divine. Its architecture trains the practitioner in divine identity through visualization, mantra, and ritual gesture, manifesting a fully immersive path to awakening.

Borobudur
Central Java, Indonesia · 8th–9th century · Volcanic stone and narrative reliefs

Borobudur is a colossal mandalic monument composed of over 1,400 narrative reliefs and more than 500 Buddha statues. Designed as a walkable cosmogram, its structure allegedly leads pilgrims upward through three realms—desire (kāmadhātu), form (rūpadhātu), and formlessness (arūpadhātu)—mirroring the Buddhist path to enlightenment. The visitor’s journey physically embodies this spiritual ascent.

Unlike relic shrines, Borobudur does not enshrine the Buddha’s remains. Its sanctity emerges from ritual movement and narrative immersion, particularly through the Lalitavistara and Gandavyuha reliefs that guide the practitioner through the lives of the Buddha and the spiritual quest of Sudhana. Borobudur is not a site to observe at a distance. It is a ritual interface that activates sacred presence through bodily engagement, offering an early example of architecture designed to embody the Dharma in space, movement, and visual contemplation.

Vajradhātu Maṇḍala, Tabo Monastery

India, ca. 996 CE · Life-size clay sculpture and wall painting · Tsug Lhakhang, Tabo, Spiti Valley

Tabo’s Assembly Hall is designed as a three-dimensional mandala, designed not only as sacred image but as sacred space. Commissioned in the 11th century, the hall enshrines Mahāvairocana, surrounded by 32 life-sized clay deities embedded into the walls in directional alignment. Together they form a mandalic cosmos meant to be entered, not merely observed. Narrative murals of Sudhana’s pilgrimage and the Life of the Buddha run below the sculptures, transforming the ritual act of circumambulation into a symbolic ascent through realms of realization. As Klimburg-Salter explains, the practitioner progresses through the Three Bodies (trikāya) of the Buddha, moving from form to enjoyment to ultimate truth. This immersive environment turns the temple into a ritual interface, where devotion is enacted through movement, gaze, and spatial intimacy. Presence here is not visualized from afar, but walked through and momentarily embodied.

Vajracharya Priest’s Crown
Nepal, ca. 13th century · Copper, gold, crystal, turquoise · The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

This ornate crown, crafted from fire-gilded copper and set with crystal and turquoise, is a ritual object worn by Vajracharya priests during esoteric tantric ceremonies in Nepal. It visually enacts the mandala of the Five Cosmic Buddhas, with four directional deities arranged around the base and Vairochana, symbolized by the half-vajra finial, enthroned at the apex. The structure itself is modeled on Mount Meru, the cosmic axis of the universe, transforming the priest’s body into a mandalic field of power.

More than regalia, this crown is a three-dimensional interface through which the priest ritually aligns with Vairochana, channeling sacred presence during acts of consecration. Its intricate repoussé detailing exemplifies the tantric Buddhist belief that enlightenment is not distant, but enacted—worn, seen, and embodied. As the crown rests on the head, it becomes a point of transformation, collapsing the boundary between the sacred and lived ritual identity.

I’m Patricia and I write this newsletter in my free time every time an insight needs to be grappled with and birthed. If you want to support my writing, you can join me down the rabbit hole 🕳🐇

159 years ago, a German theologian named Ernst Troeltsch had a prediction: “The most rapidly growing [type of spiritual group] in the future will be mysticism.”

At some point in humanity’s future, I believe everyone in society will become a mystic. And if that were the case - I’ve been thinking about a lot about what kind of infrastructure would usher in that world and sustain it in its becoming.

DISCLAIMER: If you would like to read the scholarly and long version of this essay please check out the paper here.

You may already be a mystic. A mystic in Troeltsch’s eyes was not necessarily someone who received miraculous visions or signs or supernatural experiences. Instead, mysticism signified a personal and subjective form of religion that erred internal rather than external, individual rather than institutional, more experiential rather than scriptural. For the mystic, Troeltsch said, membership in church or sect is of no significance—it was the free personal experience that mattered the most.

The West, and America in particular, has been in bed with mysticism since the early founding of the nation. The philosopher, Charles Taylor, notes that Western religiosity over recent centuries has seen “a steadily increasing emphasis on a religion of personal commitment and devotion, over against forms centered on collective ritual”​. Particularly in America, scholar Leigh Schmidt remarks “the American fascination with mountaintop mysticism and seeker spirituality goes much deeper than any generational fixation”. The result is an emerging spiritual milieu that arches towards prizing individual experience and inward devotion, often suspicious of external authority or dogma.

You might have read the words of these folks in a bout of existentialism on a Sunday afternoon: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, W. E. B. Du Bois, and William James. This diverse group of thinkers, writers, and organizers were at the helm of transforming “mysticism” and “spirituality” from obscurity to prominence in America. In much of their work, the locating of religion’s essence in the solitary individual was of prominence, as well as the sympathetic capacity to appreciate and appropriate other religious traditions as spiritual resources.

Among this group, it was William James in 1902, a Harvard philosophy professor, who treated personal experience as the heart of religion, more fundamental than institutional dogmas, in his famous book The Varieties of Religious Experience. His oft-quoted definition of religion was “the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine.” He viewed organized churches and creeds as secondary attempts to socialize and intellectualize the original experiences of their founders: “Churches, when once established, live at second-hand upon tradition,” James observes, “but the founders of every church owed their power originally to the fact of their direct personal communion with the divine.” For James, the mystical experience stands as religion’s primal source—an unmediated moment of insight whose authority rests not in external validation, but in the transformative conviction it leaves within the individual. It challenged burgeoning scientific secularism at that time, which dismissed spiritual experiences as superstition or neurosis. By foregrounding the mystical and inward dimensions, he gave intellectual respectability to the idea that the essence of spirituality lies in immediate feeling and insight, accessible in the personal depths of any individual.

mysticism is just the “spiritual but not religious” of today

If the definition of mysticism is a personal and experiential relationship with the divine, often independent of institutional religion, and the contemporary definition of spiritual but not religious (SBNR) is a person who identifies with spiritual beliefs or practices but rejects or distances themselves from formal religious institutions, then there is strong probability that today’s SBNR population includes many modern mystics.

In effect, mysticism in the 1900s has been transformed—recast under the contemporary banner of the spiritual but not religious. These individuals, like the mystics of Troeltsch’s and James’s time, prize inward experience, intuitive knowing, and personal meaning over external dogma or collective ritual. Rather than disappearing, mysticism may simply be changing form—less about monasteries or mountaintops, and more about meditation apps, solo pilgrimages, and the quiet, contemplative moments in ordinary life.

Courtney Bender, a sociologist of religion, is a deep researcher of the practices of the Spiritual But Not Religious in contemporary society. In her ethnography The New Metaphysicals: Spirituality and the American Religious Imagination, Bender immersed herself in the spiritual subcultures of Cambridge, Massachusetts – attending meditation circles, channeling groups, healing sessions, and informal gatherings where individuals share and discuss their spiritual experiences. Far from finding “spiritual seekers as cultural and theological orphans adrift in fragmented, post-religious worlds”, her research revealed “various networks and internal distinctions within the spiritual networks” that connected people​. They create, in effect, mini-institutions or ad hoc communities – what Bender terms an “emergent network” or “shadow culture” of spirituality​. These networks are “weakly organized” compared to churches, as Bender notes, but they are nonetheless real channels through which ideas and interpretations circulate​.

Individuals who might on a survey report “no religious affiliation” were in fact participating in yoga classes at a church, meditation circles at a Theosophical society, lectures at a Spiritualist temple, and reading groups at a metaphysical bookstore​. Bender observed that the people in these circles spent a great deal of time talking about their experiences with one another – interpreting them, comparing them, validating or occasionally critiquing them. In describing one mystics’ discussion group Bender writes, “Their stories were dense with detail and presented occasions for extended, changing, and conflicting interpretations.” In these conversations, interpretation is not a solitary act but a social one. Participants frequently drew upon whatever frameworks were at hand – perhaps Jungian psychology to interpret a dream, or Theosophical concepts to explain an energy feeling. Through such dialogue, the group effectively trained its members in how to experience and articulate the mystical.

Through Bender’s account we can see how contemporary seekers, even outside traditional institutions, generate interpretive cultures through storytelling, ritual practice, and informal networks of syncretic meaning. And yet, what seems most lacking in these contemporary ecosystems is not experience itself, but the enduring structures that support and deepen it. In previous eras, religious communities served this role -offering not only doctrines but also place, language, memory, and a shared symbolic world in which to situate the ineffable.

Charles Taylor’s account of modern secularity sharpens this diagnosis, tracing how religion in the West has undergone a long arc of “disembedding” - a detachment from both the cosmic and social sacred, which once held individual belief within a larger moral and metaphysical framework. In modernity, he writes, this “revolution disembeds us from the cosmic sacred altogether, and even disembeds us from the social sacred, and posits a new relation to God as designer” - a relation that each person must now navigate alone. The result is what Taylor famously terms the “Age of Authenticity,” where individuals increasingly pursue “self-defined spiritualities” as part of an “individuating revolution,” even as they lament the “break-up” of community and shared belief.

As Taylor observes, many now experience this cultural shift as both gain and loss: unprecedented freedom to craft meaning, yet a spiritual landscape marked by fragmentation, drift, and what he calls “fragile conditions of belief”. This paradox - deep longing for spiritual encounter, paired with weak interpretive infrastructure—calls for a renewed theological imagination. What Taylor gestures toward in his vision of the early Christian ethos as a “network of agape” invites contemporary re-articulation: spaces not organized by rigid orthodoxy, but by love, trust, and the shared task of discernment. A “network of agape” refers to early Christian communities loosely bound not by uniform doctrine, but by mutual care, ethical commitment, and the felt presence of divine love expressed through human relationship. It was a relational and affective infrastructure, where spiritual belonging arose from embodied connection rather than institutional allegiance.

What kind of infrastructure could create the conditions by which a “network of agape” could both emerge and be sustained for the modern mystic?

For lack of a better word, I’d like to create the normative proposal for a “Mystical Commons”: a communal, pluralistic, and participatory space where seekers can come together to hold, interpret, and deepen their encounters with the sacred.

Such a space would not only offer communal meaning-making after the personal experiences of the sacred, but also expose individuals to multiple symbolic repertoires beforehand - expanding what experiences are possible, intelligible, and spiritually generative in our disembedded age.

The main starting attributes for a Mystical Commons are:

• Physical place

• An embodied value of pluralism

• Facilitators not intermedieries

• Non-dogmatic rituals that give rise to collective effervescence

physical place.

First, a mystical commons begins as a physical place - an embodied environment that invites people to return regularly and form an ongoing community. This means creating physical and ritual environments that help personal experiences “stick” and gain depth. While digital apps, online forums, sporadic circles across numerous spaces, and private gatherings can supplement spiritual life, they cannot replace the relationship formation which supports integration through consistent face-to-face encounters in a dedicated space.

Anthropologist Courtney Bender affirms this through her fieldwork in Cambridge, observing that what we call “the spiritual” is not disembodied or unstructured, but rather rooted in relationships with built environments and adjacent institutions. She writes, “many [spiritual leaders] do so in religious settings - and not only in the Theosophical Society and the Swedenborgian Chapel, but also in the Old Cambridge Baptist Church, which… opened its doors to the local neo-pagan group; the Friends Meetinghouse, which hosted shamans; and the Congregational Church, which hosted ecstatic drumming and dancing groups.” What Bender’s ethnography makes plain is that people do not simply want to meet—they want to gather in spaces that resonate, architecturally and atmospherically, with a sense of the sacred.

The desire for spiritual depth is matched by a longing for environments that feel holy, set apart, or gently consecrated. Not just any neutral or utilitarian space, but ones that carry the aesthetic and symbolic weight of sanctity, even if reframed for pluralist use. While the mystical commons would not be housed in an existing church per se, it would learn from the architecture of sacred presence that churches and religious buildings have long cultivated. It would be a new typology of physical place that stands as its own and signals reverence, beauty, and continuity, without the exclusivity or theological fixity that often accompanies traditional religious spaces.

In practical terms, this might mean a beautiful, calming environment with symbols from multiple traditions or ones that are universally resonant and open to subjective interpretation (such as nature motifs or archetypal shapes). There might be quiet alcoves, a larger hall for shared presence (meditation, prayer, or contemplation), a wisdom hall for salons and lectures from pluralistic traditions, intimate rooms for interpretive circles, pathways for circumambulation, or altars void of any one God. The key is continuity and embodiment: a place that becomes spiritually resonant through repeated presence. Such a place anchors spiritual practice in the rhythms of real life and encourages an experiential knowledge that mystical insight and interpretation is not just a heady flash but something that takes root and ripens in community and place.

an embodied value of pluralism.

Culturally, the mystical commons embodies a commitment to pluralism, inclusivity, and individual freedom—not as mere liberal tolerance, but as a ritualized practice of engaging difference. As Cohen notes in The Symbolic Construction of Community, “the sharing of the symbol is not necessarily the sharing of the meaning”; thus, community can be sustained not by uniform belief, but by a collective agreement to “incorporate and enclose difference” through a common ideal. While traditional religious communities often cohere through shared dogmas, rituals, or theological claims, the mystical commons coheres through pluralism itself as a shared symbolic commitment and ideal. Rather than enforcing doctrinal unity, the commons affirms that ultimate reality may be approached from many directions, and that each person’s sincere experience holds interpretive weight. People of different backgrounds, beliefs, and cosmologies could thus co-inhabit the commons without having to water down their truths or collapse their distinct experiences into a single consensus. As Bender observes in her studies of the spiritual scene in Cambridge, many participants identify as “a yogi, and an artist, and a singer and a writer, and a mystic” all at once—refusing fixed labels and inhabiting a fluid spiritual identity. In this environment, pluralism is not simply tolerated but ritually practiced: theological difference is welcomed and made fruitful through interspiritual meditations, multi-tradition festivals, scriptural reasoning dialogues, and collaborative discernment circles.

This model reflects a longstanding spiritual pattern. As Ernst Troeltsch observed in Public Religions in the Modern World, “those ‘born-again’ souls who have ‘experienced’ individually the redeeming power of the ‘new light’ have always tended to feel closest fellowship with kindred spirits in other denominations than with ‘old lights’ in their own.” What unites these individuals, he writes, is not institutional allegiance but “a parallelism of spontaneous religious personalities, whose only bond of union is their common Divine origin, their common spirit of love, and their union in God, which is the free and invisible work of the Divine Spirit.” The mystical commons echoes this vision: a space where people gather not because they agree on theological propositions, but because they are kindred spirits - each drawn by the gravity of lived experience, and each committed to interpreting the sacred with humility and openness. This points to a form of spiritual community that is not defined by what members must believe, but by how they relate: through shared longing, intuitive resonance, and a common commitment to exploring the divine as it discloses itself in different lives. The mystical commons echoes this ideal: it is not a church in the conventional sense, but a spiritual commons—a space where kindred seekers gather, not to be shaped by creed, but to deepen through presence, conversation, and the lived immediacy of spiritual encounter.

Importantly, this model does not negate the value of traditional religious institutions. For many, churches, synagogues, temples, or mosques remain vital spaces to deepen within a single lineage - offering continuity, depth, and theological coherence. In fact, the mystical commons may function as a threshold space, surfacing multiple traditions in a way that helps individuals discern which path they may want to root more firmly in. At the same time, for others, formal affiliation with a particular tradition may feel constraining. Entering a church may imply that one’s personal experiences must be interpreted exclusively through that tradition’s metaphysical and moral filters. For such individuals, a more fluid and dialogical matrix for meaning-making -where diverse frameworks are held in proximity but not in hierarchy - offers a more honest and expansive spiritual home. The rise of this need is evident in the broader social trend: for the first time in U.S. history, church membership fell below 50% in 2020, according to Gallup, signaling not necessarily a rejection of spirituality but a shift in the institutions people trust to steward it.

“An ecology of spiritual exploration” nourished by gardeners, not gurus

Rather than a fixed program, a mystical commons would an “ecology of spiritual exploration”. Its activities would emerge organically from the evolving needs and inspirations of the community, more like a garden than a curriculum. Participants would collectively curate rituals and dialogues that speak to them: periods of silent meditation, interfaith prayer, spiritual text book clubs, dream interpretation circles, journaling workshops, or storytelling evenings. Interpretive discussions would likely follow any profound individual experience: for example, after someone shares a mystical insight or vision, the group might engage in communal discernment - listening and reflecting together on what the experience might signify. Such interpretive circles allow multiple perspectives (psychological, theological, symbolic) to be offered. In this collective reflection, personal experiences are neither automatically validated as universal truth nor dismissed as delusion; rather, they are lovingly tested and refined in the crucible of shared inquiry and mirroring.

As such, integrating personal insights into communal dialogue guards against the spiritual narcissism or solipsism that sometimes plagues purely individualist paths. It fosters a form of mutual responsibility, in which individual revelations are not isolated events but become occasions for shared discernment, ethical reflection, and the slow formation of communal wisdom. Crucially, those who guide these kinds of activities would be facilitators and “garden-tenders”, not gurus. Rather than authoritative prophets or priests interpreting truths, facilitators focus on holding space, tending the container, protecting the process, and infusing it with loving presence. For example, a facilitator might simply open the gathering with a poem, ensure that everyone has a chance to speak in a circle, or maintain an atmosphere of respect. This approach guards against hierarchy while still providing structure.

ritual as collective effervescence, not dogma.

In addition to these kinds of interpretative practices, ritual is a foundational modality of the mystical commons. Far from being a vestige of archaic religiosity, ritual constitutes a primary technology of human meaning-making. As Émile Durkheim argued in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, the sacred does not necessarily originate in metaphysical content but in the collective effervescence generated when individuals gather and act in synchrony. Sacredness, in this view, is not a property of doctrines or deities, but an emergent quality of coordinated presence: “The sacred is the effect of a momentary uniting of individuals into a jointly acting collective.” These moments act as liminal spaces where inner experience is externalized, reshaped, and received in a shared field of attention by turning feeling into form, and form into meaning.

In the context of a mystical commons, we can thus reposition ritual not as the remnant of fading religious traditions, but as a generative force in communal life—one capable of shaping shared attention, anchoring spiritual experience, and cultivating new forms of collective sanctity. Within the mystical commons, such ritual technologies can be intentionally repurposed: not to restore the structures of the past, but to open symbolic containers for presence, transformation, and meaning in a pluralistic world. Such rituals might include communal meditation, rites of passage, grief circles, seasonal observances, or silent processions. Each of these experiences would be intentionally crafted not around theological consensus but symbolic resonance. Indeed, what binds these acts is not shared dogma but the mutual willingness to enter into symbolic space together: to make solitude porous to solidarity, and contemplation receptive to communion.

As Hans Joas underscores in The Power of the Sacred: rituals “create a controlled environment that temporarily suspends the mechanisms of everyday life,” enabling participants to inhabit ideal states not merely as ideas but as lived experiences. In the context of a mystical commons, these states may not revolve around doctrinal certainties but around ethical and existential qualities like reverence, presence, gratitude, or collective mourning. Their sacrality lies not in orthodoxy but in their capacity to convene difference into a shared moment of transcendence. In this sense, ritual performs a double movement: affirming spiritual autonomy while inviting individuals into freely chosen, embodied togetherness. It does not restore religion-as-institution but reimagines sacred practice as a civic and spiritual commons—where meaning arises not from divine decree but from the intersubjective space between us, in acts of shared attention and reverent presence.

a provocation.

Perhaps mysticism was never meant to stay cloistered in monasteries, hidden in footnotes, or relegated to the confines of our privatized lives. Perhaps it was always meant to overflow - into the cities, into the commons, into the ordinary rhythms of life. Perhaps the continual downfall and distrust of our institutions, political and religious alike, was never a bug, but a triumphant prelude to a future in which meaning is mediated through our own discernment. Morals derived from experience derived from first principles.

What we need now is not another church, nor a vague escape from institutions altogether, but something in between: a holding structure for mystery, made by many hands, creeds, and co-existing truths. A mystical commons offers not a final answer, but a shared question: How might we live if the sacred was not somewhere else, but right here - between us, among us, arising through us?

“There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.”
—Leonard Cohen

Bibliography

Bender, Courtney. The New Metaphysicals: Spirituality and the American Religious Imagination. University of Chicago Press, 2010.

Cohen, Anthony P. The Symbolic Construction of Community. Routledge, 1985.

Durkheim, Émile. The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Translated by Karen E. Fields. Free Press, 1995.

Flammarion, Camille. L’atmosphère: météorologie populaire. Hachette, 1888.

James, William. The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature. Longmans, Green, and Co., 1902.

Joas, Hans. The Power of the Sacred: An Alternative to the Narrative of Disenchantment. Oxford University Press, 2021.

Schmidt, Leigh Eric. Restless Souls: The Making of American Spirituality. University of California Press, 2005.

Taylor, Charles. A Secular Age. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007.

Troeltsch, Ernst. The Social Teaching of the Christian Churches. Translated by Olive Wyon. Westminster John Knox Press, 1992.

I’m Patricia and I write this newsletter in my free time every time an insight needs to be grappled with and birthed. If you want to support my writing, you can join me down the rabbit hole 🕳🐇

Its been 4 months since I went back to school to give the questions that have been riving inside of me the spaciousness to express and unfurl. Taking some time to do my master’s while concurrently running The Commons was a difficult decision, but the right one - as its given me a clearing to reflect and reconstruct its premises from first principles. And also to do some personal soul searching. Just as The Commons aspired to be a place between stimulus and response, where one could play, explore, and question existing scripts to grapple for truer premises - I needed to do the same.

The learning process is still ongoing, yet I’ve already gotten in touch with what feels essential: the world needs more places for people to simply be—together, in dialogue, in reflection, in honoring, and in the messy, beautiful process of becoming. In The Republic, Plato says, 'all of this state has existed solely because we have been able to talk with each other’. These spaces should be available to all and serve to unite vs. divide. They should enhance life vs. silo it - in all its shadow and light, multi-dimensionality, and pluralism. A place where self-connection and community connection co-exists. A place that enables not only the critical examination of one’s existing paradigms but also the capacity to hold multiple, often conflicting frames. And to do that within a frequency of emergence, playfulness, and love.

Upon coming back from school during winter break, I had to honestly assess how close or far we strayed from this deeper aspiration. It was back to the drawing board. I know the next evolution of the Commons is a small becoming step towards this direction. And I also know it certainly won’t be the last one.

The original post is crossposted from The Commons Substack:

The next evolution of The Commons 🏛️

Where we’ve been 🔮

It’s been nearly three years since The Commons opened its doors in San Francisco. What began as a brainstorm amongst 50 friends for a community living room in the Hayes-Alamo area quickly evolved into a GoFundMe campaign, securing a space at 540/550 Laguna St, and a collective effort by hundreds of friends who built furniture, painted murals, and seeded their hopes for a new kind of community third space.

Together, we co-created a place that harkened back to the feeling of unbounded exploration and curiosity in our formative years: volleying deep questions in a college common room until 2am, mind-melding on beautiful futures that haven’t quite arrived, and communing with diverse, pluralistic, and contradicting perspectives with authentic openness and curiosity. One that could address the growing void in America’s social and "meaning-making" infrastructure left by the decline of churches, clubs, and community spaces.

Thousands of community-created book clubs, juntos, discussion circles, jams, philosophy salons, and workshops later, it's become evident there’s a deeper nexus of phenomena underlying the growth of the space.

The desire to make friends: an effort to mend a fragmented social fabric as urbanites.

The diverse discussions: a need to bring coherence to a dizzying world devoid of overarching order.

From paint nights to writing clubs — a thirst to nurture seedlings of our most authentic selves.

The plethora of co-created programming across the spiritual, intellectual, and emotional — a primordial yearning for wholeness.

The invitation to show up as humans unsure of much — the antidote to all the places in adult life that insist on firm identities.

Not quite a traditional third space, networking social club, secular church, or recreation center — what we are is still emergent and a constantly evolving community experiment (that we’ve loosely defined as a “fourth place”).

Nonetheless, our mission has remained constant: to support people in the process of becoming more fully themselves, rooted in the belief that community is essential to that journey. And to do that in a space infused with playfulness, aliveness, agency, earnestness, abundance, and kindness.

Our next iteration 🔭

Stepping into the new year, we’re excited to share our latest evolution in The Commons’ unfolding toward realizing our mission.

TL;DR: The Commons is evolving from an intimate experimental community into a true “Commons”— a playful co-working space by day that transforms into a vibrant community meeting house by night.

• 🏛️ We’re moving towards more public programming and inclusive membership

• ☀️ By day (9am-5pm), we’re creating a new category of playful co-working that is pro-social, serendipitous, and nourishing

• 🌔 By evening (5-10pm), we’re transforming the space into a Community Meeting House, retaining the heart of our member-created programming while welcoming in more public programming and broader community leaders

• 🍵 We’ll be experimenting with new forms of “conscious night life” beyond the societal conventions of alcohol and partying

• Join us in this new chapter 🎉

🏛️ We’re moving towards more public programming and inclusive membership

They're so intimate. At small parties there isn't any privacy.” - F. Scott Fitzgerald

To date, The Commons has functioned more as an intimate community than a porous or open one — an intentional choice. However, going forward we’re hoping to increasingly materialize a true “Commons.”

In their early stages, new communities and institutions are inherently fragile, and we prioritized cultivating our culture at a thoughtful, measured pace. This approach allowed us to experiment with programming formats and find the balance between our vision for the space and the emergent, dynamic needs of the community through each iteration.

Today, we believe the reputation and values The Commons represents have grown robust enough to stand independently. Our experiments with programming have also provided valuable insights into the infrastructure and experiments we’d like to run to fully and continuously realize those values.

As an aspiring pluralistic space for self and communal meaning-making, we also want to increasingly invite diverse life experiences, ages, life stages, political views, and ways of being and becoming. Due to the initial network effect of some of our founding cohorts, we veered towards millennial / gen-z age groups in tech and tech-adjacent industries.

Going forward, we’d like to increasingly move towards a true “town square” and more open institution where San Francisco citizens can commune across dichotomies. In today’s climate of dogmatism and division, what’s needed are less private social clubs (the direction we were going down via inertia) and more spaces that cohere people across differences while uniting under core humanistic values.

Here are the changes we’re implementing:

• Broadening membership acceptance: We’ll be accepting more applicants to The Commons given the institutional stability the Commons has created in the last 3 years. With more members, we’ll be ensuring each member still embodies our core values of abundance, agency, kindness, earnestness, and play.

• Expanding public and centrally organized programming in the evenings: In our first 3 years of operations, most of our events were hosted by members for members. Going forward, we’re ramping up on organizing centrally run experiences and expanding our in-space team to create our evening Community Meeting House atmosphere. We’ll also be increasing our evening public programming featuring values-aligned practitioners, writers, creators, and builders across domains who are pushing the boundaries of spiritual, emotional, intellectual, creative, and civic development. Members will receive prioritized access and discounted tickets to these events.

The Commons membership experience:
☀️ By day, we’re creating a new category of playful co-working
🌔 By evening, we’re transforming the space into a Community Meeting House

“An old friend of mine, a journalist, once said that paradise on earth was to work all day in anticipation of an evening in interesting company.” ― Ian McEwan

With this quote as inspiration, we thought to ourselves: How do we create more of these kinds of days at The Commons?

By day, we will be a vibrant neighborhood hub of creative and playful co-working with new and old friends, where the lines blur between “doing” work, mind-melding with others, and simply “being.” We’re for the days where you may have fewer calls, want more creative stimulation, have IRL coffee chats in one of our cozy nooks, or want to take walking calls around the heart of Hayes Valley. At the same time, if you’re looking to be heads down and focused, you are always welcome to carve out your own flow. We’re not here to force serendipity—just to make sure it has a home for those who want it. If some days you want deep focus, The Commons still fully supports that, with plenty of spaces to settle in and immerse yourself in your craft.

The kind of “work days” that are pro-social, serendipitous, and nourishing: meditating mid work-day in our Moroccan lounge, perusing a book for inspiration in our community library, doodling at our art supply station, or striking up a serendipitous conversation while making tea. This is an intentional departure away from the grind-set, remote, and white-knuckled hustle culture that pervades American work culture. At the same time, we also recognize that not every day is the same. Some days are for head-down execution, and others are for spontaneous creativity. The Commons is designed to hold both—so that whether you’re here to laser-focus on a deadline or open yourself up to unexpected encounters, you have the space to do so with intention.

In essence, we want to bring back and reinvent the “watercooler culture” that made work connective and human. In that vein, we’re ushering in a new era of healing and re-defining our relationship to work — one that is flowy, expansive, and holistic.

By night, we transition into an enlivening community meeting house. “Work” as defined by being an artist and doing our art (in the broadest sense) then evolves into communal sense-making. Where the conversations we have in community become mirrors and edifices for self-reflection and expansion, allowing us to show up more authentically in our creations and worldly endeavors. The Commons, by night, is about expansion in whatever form that takes—whether it's engaging in a lively discussion or quietly sketching ideas sparked by the energy around you.

The evening will be enlivened with numerous members only and public events running all at once; for members, we’ll continue to have philosophy salons, board game nights, recurring social rituals, potlucks, and numerous ways to reflect, commune, and explore as a community.

For more public programming: What would it mean to invert the “retreat model”? Instead of going out of town or to disparate institutions to seek wisdom, The Commons becomes a nexus for “elders” to share ideas. A top of funnel function where intros to spiritual traditions, civic matters, philosophical ideas, forms of art, etc. can be shared with the public in a buffet-like fashion. If the intros warrant deeper inquiry, people can then go directly to that elder or institution afterwards. In other words, a node that aggregates energy and then disperses it. Rather than a place of passive consumption, The Commons can be a generative threshold.

In the Fall, we did a v1 of this by hosting over 30+ salons featuring people like Mayor London Breed, Noah Smith, Joe Hudson, Paul Millerd, Gena Gorlin, and Luna Ray. In 2025, we’re hoping to curate a fantastic lineup of new elders embodying “novel ways of being and doing,” offering fresh perspectives on how we live, work, and connect.

Here are the changes we’re implementing:

• Enhancing our co-working spaces: We’re adding a new tea station, an art-making area, and space affordances designed to spark serendipitous conversations along with other playful upgrades.

• Experimenting with playful work affordances: We’ll be experimenting with novel forms of social infrastructure to encourage serendipity and connection during co-working days (i.e. informal lunch squads, “watercooler” prompts, activity breaks, playful stand-ups, etc)

• Balancing member-led and organizational programming: While we’ll continue to support members with resources and space for their events, we’re ramping up on organizing centrally run experiences and expanding our in-space team to support more public events to create our Community Meeting House atmosphere.

🍵 We’ll be experimenting with new forms of “conscious night life” beyond the societal conventions of alcohol and partying

There’s been a subtle but steady shift in the public consciousness towards desiring new forms of evening activities that go beyond the typical excursion to a restaurant, bar, movie night, or club to meet others or convene with loved ones. With a recent warning put out by the US Surgeon General that even small amounts of alcohol can cause cancer, the current alcohol-driven culture of nightlife is rife to go through a huge upending.

What kinds of evening social and physical infrastructure will be created in the wake of this? How can we use different means to meet the same needs for self-connection and connection with others?

We believe now is the time to experiment with novel forms of evening activities: from late night decaf tea houses, evening bathhouses, no-alch dance parties, reading parties, game board parlors to cozy cafes that close at 2am. The Commons is hoping to be at the forefront of this experimentation, opening our space for evening programming that is connective, conscious, and wholesome (with the aims of opening a late night tea house sometime in the future 😉🤫).

Here are the changes we’re implementing:

• More non-alch evening activity experimentation: Expect more experimental evening programming like silent reading nights, analog write-a-thons, powerpoint parties, and rabbit-hole-a-thons.

• Keeping our doors open until 10pm: Most coffee shops close at 5pm and non-alch spaces that are open late are far and wide in between. We plan on keeping our doors open after public / member events end until 10pm so you can continue the discussions into the night.

We’re excited to usher in this new evolution of The Commons’ journey and hope you’ll join us for the ride.

• We’ll be opening our member applications to join our space in Febuary: apply by Wednesday, Febuary 5th, 2025

• Check out our public programming calendar (new events are still in process of being announced & will drop in Feb) + subscribe to our Substack to get updates

• Follow us on Twitter for more updates and good vibes

Warmly,

The Commons Team

This is a paper I wrote for a course on expanding the architectural / urban planning canon. It’s a meaty read at 25 minutes but if you get through it fully we should probably chat and mind meld (hit me up).

I wrote this paper to gnaw at the following questions:

• How can we redefine utopian thinking in urban planning to avoid the pitfalls of past rigid, top-down models while still inspiring transformative change?

• How has the concept of utopia evolved in the last 20 years? How can new conceptions of utopia, like pre-figurative utopianism, apply to urban planning today?

• What do examples like Auroville and Bhutan teach us about balancing utopian ideals with iterative, flexible, and practical experimentation?

• How can cities reclaim utopian ideals to foster human-centered, resilient urban environments that align with long-term social and cultural aspirations?

Reclaiming the utopian vision

History of Utopia

Utopian ideals have always influenced urban planning. The sociologist G. Simmel is supposed to have said that ‘there is no utopia without a design of a utopian space’. Utopia, in its phenomenal dimension, encompasses two distinct areas: the place and the promise. It is the manifestation of an ideal place, not only in physical terms, but also in social, economic, and political terms, effectively defining a non-place that does not exist immanently, but is strived for. In other words, cities are intentionally constructed environments, embodying humanity's most aspirational ideas about how societies should cohabitate and interact within shared spaces. In the east, Confucius depicted the ideal city and society in a book called “World of Great Harmony”, and mandala-inspired layouts espousing a universal order have shaped ancient cities like Ankor Thom, Lhasa, and Jaipur. In the West, Plato and his predecessors imagined the ideal polis as one that enabled the conditions for civic engagement and politics and in 1516 Sir Thomas More critiqued 16th century Europe though writing the first depiction of utopia as a detailed social and urban blueprint. At the turn of the 20th century, radical proposals for Modernity like the Garden City Movement sought to create social and commonwealth-oriented cities as an alternative to overcrowded industrial cities, while Le Corbusier’s ‘functional city’ of the Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne aspired to be ‘a city of salvation’.

However, in recent times, sentiment towards utopic thinking has garnered considerable criticism and skepticism, especially in its application to urbanism. The commentator Joachim Fest contends that the 'failure of socialism' in particular marks the end of the 'over two hundred years old belief that the world can be radically changed through an imaginary image’. A sentiment also echoed in urbanism by David Harvey: “No one believes any more that we can build that city on a hill, that gleaming edifice that has fascinated every Utopian thinker since Plato and St Augustine. Utopian visions have too often turned sour for that sort of thinking to go far.” Much of this sentiment stems from the overall contentious project of Modernist planning and architecture which has been criticized for being overly idealistic in its authoritarian execution, rigid functionalism, and exacerbation of social inequalities. This is echoed in Jane Jacobs' influential critique that the sweeping directives of grand modernist utopian visions caused ‘the downfall of thriving American cities’ and resulted in numerous 'great planning disasters' in urban areas around the world. By the 1990s critics proclaimed ‘The End of Utopia’ and the ‘death of urban visions’. Planning became more at ease with accommodating the ‘normalized “today”’ rather than pursuing ‘the transformation of reality’ . Noting a popular view, sociologist Elizabeth Wilson comments: “Then, utopians, planners, and architecture believed that the only solution was to scrap the existing unplanned, irrational cities and build new, planned ones. Today, by contrast, planning, planners and architects are blamed for having caused the current state of our cities by their overweening interference”.

In reaction, some of the ‘postmodern urbanism’ in the 1970s was ‘understood from the beginning as anti-utopian’ with philosophical roots that emerged ‘from the modest, anti-utopian impulse, and a belief in incremental movement rather than cataclysmic change’. The subsequent ‘Disneyfication’ of urbanism, (or commercialization, standardization, and spectacle of the built environment) has become characterized by ‘the projection of a muzzy and spurious past authenticated by putative links to local tradition’, rendering ‘visionary roles [as being] coopted or renounced’. Utopian ideals are redefined in terms of the global market and capitalism, where the ideal city is envisioned as one of seamless free exchange, consumer satisfaction, and the unimpeded flow of money, all driven by commercialized desires. Like Disneyland, ‘utopias of social space could no longer be taken seriously; they are commercial ventures, nothing more’ . The retreat from utopian ideals in modernist planning sparked a backlash, leading to a call for more organic, participatory approaches. Thinkers like Christopher Alexander and Jane Jacobs championed adaptive, bottom-up urbanism, advocating for cities that evolve naturally and reflect the spontaneous intermingling of communities.

Re-thinking Utopia

The evident decline of utopian urbanism in recent times invites a critical reassessment of its relevance for contemporary urban planning: can utopian ideals still serve as valuable frameworks for addressing the multifaceted challenges of modern cities? On one hand, their waning loosens the hold of fixed ideals and teleological notions of historical progress that are imposed from above, welcoming critical and potentially emancipatory approaches to thinking about urbanism from diverse canons. At the same time, entirely dismissing utopian thinking risks stifling imaginative and bold explorations of alternative futures, potentially leading to reactionary complacency and fragmented, short-term urban development. While modernist utopianism has lost its appeal, some argue ‘the Utopian impulse’ has remained ‘an irrepressible part of human spirit’. Critical social theory has long incorporated an anticipatory-utopian dimension, essential for envisioning more humane and equitable societies. If this dimension is diminished or lost in urban studies, the field’s very raison d'être risks becoming constrained and fundamentally altered. Echoed by Pinder, “There is a need for forms of utopian urbanism that work to challenge, to estrange taken-for-granted assumptions about the organisation of space and time to open up unrealised possibilities in the present”, In this way, utopian planning is differentiated from just visioning, as the latter is often rooted in incremental improvements that are realistic given current constraints, whereas the former invokes a radical reconception and transformation of those very constraints. This is not to suggest that socially just planners lack inspiration from visions of a better future. Like conventional planners, they often engage with visioning and future scenarios. However, they seldom adopt the same critical perspective on time that more imaginative visioning exercises demand—what Lefebvre advocates for, where planning begins by envisioning the future and works backward to inform the present, rather than being limited by it.

The evolving answer to the question of utopianism’s relevance in urbanism emerges in the enduring presence of its contemporary forms. While the grand, modernist visions of utopian cities may have declined, the orientation of utopian driven urbanism remain alive in eco-cities (Masdar City, Songdo, Copenhagen), intentional communities (Auroville, Findhorn), alternative modernities (Curitiba, Bhutan) and participatory and tactical urbanism projects (superblocks, community land trusts, pop-ups) that emphasize sustainability, equity, and community well-being as the primary telos. Specifically, utopian projects like Auroville and Bhutan's urban application of its Gross National Happiness framework are pioneering a fundamentally new conception of utopian urbanism that emphasizes process over destination. Rather than the classic, closed, fixed form or blueprint to be realised, [utopia] becomes ‘an approach toward, a movement beyond set limits into the realm of the not-yet-set’ and a social project concerned with ‘living together in difference’ that is open to dialogue, change and contestation. It’s reflected in Harvey’s notions of a ‘dialectical utopianism’ that is ‘rooted in present possibilities at the same time as it points towards different trajectories’ where ‘emancipatory politics calls for a living utopianism of process as opposed to the dead utopianism of spatialized urban form’.

This spirit can perhaps be best captured in the recent revival of political prefiguration practices and its potential application to urbanism. Prefigurative politics refers to a range of social experiments that critique the status quo, while at the same time pursuing future ‘alternative or utopic social relations in the present’. In other words, the collective emulates in the present the attitudes, social relations, culture and organization it envisions for the future through ‘experimental and experiential’ means. In 1977, the term ‘prefiguration’ was first used to define ‘the embodiment within the political practice of a movement, of those forms of social relations, decision-making, culture, and human experience that are [its] ultimate goal’ Since the post-2008 social movements, such as Occupy, it has gained a growing currency in a wide range of literature from politics, psychology, and more recently, planning. The utopias of prefigurative planning are praxis-oriented and take shape through experimental projects which begin with critiquing the present, rather than affirmation of a predefined and predetermined future. Ernst Bloch writes that while abstract utopia is a ready-made utopia, concrete utopia is of an anticipatory kind that rejects both abstract utopian dreaminess and immature utopian socialism and critiques the existing situation by prefiguring a different, not-yet reality. Advocating for prefiguration in planning is a call for the revival of a ‘philosophy of the possible’ in planning. It is a reconceptualization of utopia on the basis of the Blochian ‘ontology of not-yet’ from "The Principle of Hope” - a philosophical concept that envisions utopia as an open-ended, evolving possibility rather than a fixed outcome. The discovery, through the creation of concrete utopias, is praxis oriented. Unlike the command and control approaches of modernist planning, prefigurative planning resists stage-managed closures and operates within the democratic bounds of agonistic pluralism in which dissenting voices are not muffled by the pressure to achieve consensus. Its focus is not always on problem-solving, but on what Paulo Freire calls ‘problemposing’ by which he means seeing ‘the world not as a static reality but as a reality in the process of transformation.’ Thus, unlike the predetermined and static utopia of modernist planning, the utopia envisioned in prefigurative planning is one of continual becoming, where ongoing evolution, learning, and the inevitable failures in interpreting utopian ideals are not just integral to the process but the essential point. In other words prefiguration in urbanism refers to the practice of building and organizing urban spaces in ways that embody the social relations, values, and ideals a community envisions for the future. Rather than merely planning for a distant goal, prefigurative urbanism creates small-scale, real-time experiments in the present that reflect these future aspirations, such as inclusive decision-making, ecological sustainability, or community self-governance. This approach allows for the testing and adaptation of these ideals within the urban environment, bringing imagined possibilities into lived reality as an ongoing, participatory process.

The concept of prefigurative planning gestures toward a middle way between, on one hand, rigid utopian idealism, and on the other, bottom-up and emergent processes. How can we conceive of the city as an organic, living system that evolves over time, while remaining anchored in foundational guiding principles? How do we shift systems thinking beyond the management of existing complexity to the intentional design of both emergent possibilities and structured control? How can physical and social infrastructures remain adaptable and interpretive while being embedded within an inter-generational framework of utopian ideals? Furthermore, how can a long-term strategic vision that decisively guides urban evolution coexist with emergent, flexible development processes? Although recent scholarship has addressed these questions from both extremes, there remains an open provocation on how planning can integrate the rigor of top-down planning with the dynamism of bottom-up urbanism. Approaches like complex adaptive systems theory provide a lens through which to understand how cities evolve through decentralized processes, which can lead to spontaneous development, but often lacks a unified, future-oriented perspective. Similarly, resilience and sustainability planning emphasize adaptability to environmental shocks, yet focus predominantly on ecological resilience rather than the socio-cultural evolution of cities over generations. Participatory planning and emergent urbanism, while empowering local communities, risk fragmentation and lack the strategic coherence necessary for guiding cities toward a shared long-term vision. Theories like tactical or incremental urbanism often prioritize short-term, localized interventions without integrating them into a broader generational framework. As such, while these approaches offer valuable insights, they do not fully resolve the challenge of balancing structured control under utopic objectives with emergent possibilities, leaving prefigurative planning as a provocational, yet tactically underexplored and underdeveloped, synthesis. To advance this discourse, we can examine two case studies of prefigurative planning that are actively navigating this integration: Auroville, an experimental township project in India, and Bhutan’s application of the Gross National Happiness framework to urban planning and development.

Auroville as a Prefigured Utopia

Auroville was founded in Tamil Nadu in South India in 1968, based on the utopian vision of Mira Alfassa, or “The Mother”, and the Integral Yoga philosophy of Sri Aurobindo. Now, over five decades since its founding, Auroville's sustained existence offers valuable longitudinal insights, especially considering that 80% of intentional communities fail within their first two years. With a current population of 3,500 people from at least 60 different nationalities it hopes to eventually become a city of 50,0000. Its residents include a mix of Indians and foreigners from the Sri Aurobindo Ashram in nearby Pondicherry, Westerners seeking alternative lifestyles, and local Tamil families attracted by work opportunities. Although there was no rigid societal blueprint for Auroville's realization, The Mother outlined her vision of an ideal society in A Dream (1954). She later provided a brief, four-point framework in The Auroville Charter (1968) and a guiding document for individuals, To Be a True Aurovilian (1970). Amongst the principles for social organization contained in the charter are the notion that Auroville belongs to humanity as a whole rather than anybody in particular, that Auroville is a site of material and spiritual research toward a living embodiment of human unity, and that it is a place for “unending education” that draws on diverse sources of knowledge to “spring towards future realisations.” The intentional absence of a defined approach to realizing Auroville’s ideals and exhortation that Auroville be a place of research has fostered a plural and experimental environment that seeks to prefigure these ideals. As such, prefiguration is central to utopian practice in the Auroville context, as it is a radical, embodied exercise in redefining society according to alternative values, both of the present and for the future. In other words, the premise of the Auroville project is to evolve into a spiritualized society through the transformational practice of informing everyday life and activities with spiritually enlightened ideals, values and consciousness. Auroville's prefigured interpretation of utopia is grounded in practice and process rather than a fixed ideal of perfection, with ongoing experimentation and adaptation serving as central tenets of its evolution. Furthermore, while utopian communities were historically based on ideal blueprints that predetermined how society should be organized, Auroville was to be a prefigurative polity, destined to develop in tandem with the progressive spiritualization of its members as echoed by The Mother: “Men must become conscious of their psychic being and organise themselves spontaneously, without fixed rules and laws – that is the ideal”.

The absence of a fixed societal blueprint, combined with the clarity of its utopian and spiritual aspirations as outlined by its founders, facilitated the practice of prefiguration, allowing for a process-oriented approach to take root, particularly evident in the domains of governance and urban planning. During its foundational phase (1968-1980s), Auroville prioritized establishing basic infrastructure and regenerating the landscape through extensive reforestation efforts, fostering collective stewardship among residents in an experimental environment without a strict urban plan. In the 1990s, as the population grew, the Galaxy Plan, a flexible framework symbolizing unity, was introduced, envisioning a city for 50,000 people organized around a central "Peace Area" and various functional zones which was specifically created for adaptive development. The Perspective 2025 Master Plan, adopted in the early 2000s built on the principles of the Galaxy Plan, but was reinterpreted by the current generations' belief that sustainability and community-driven planning were key to actualizing Auroville’s charter. This materialized into substantial sustainability initiatives (Auroville Earth Institute, Sustainable Lifelihood Institute, etc.), green belt development, energy efficient housing projects, and governance structures to enable participatory planning where “policies are proposed, criticized, protested, ignored, reworked and amended by overlapping groupings of community members virtually continuously”.

Across all sectors, from urban planning and housing to governance and social development, Auroville fosters a grassroots approach to experimentation, primarily through resident-led working groups and community-driven projects. The Town Development Council (TDC), a key working group within Auroville, played a pivotal role in facilitating urban planning initiatives by incorporating resident input and ensuring that development plans aligned with the broader objectives of the community. Monthly community meetings and gatherings, known as Residents’ Assemblies, are held to discuss ongoing urban planning decisions. Furthermore, resident created committees like the Sustainable Architecture Group, Water Group, Waste Management Team, and Forest Group address specific infrastructure needs and environmental challenges. Another group, known as The Dreamcatchers, established a more informal space for visioning, conceptual sketches, and "heart-storming" sessions aimed at translating the philosophical aspirations of the Galaxy Plan into open-source planning initiatives that embodied the collective consciousness of the community’s residents. This bottom-up process is balanced by the oversight of the Auroville Foundation, the city’s overarching administrative body, and the Future of Auroville working group, amongst others, all of which ensure that new developments and initiatives remain aligned with Auroville’s founding principles and adhere to the vision articulated in Mother’s charter. The inherent adaptability, continuous experimentation, and inter-generational reinterpretation of the Auroville Project not just coexist with pre-established utopian principles but are also bolstered, unified, and guided by them, offering a durable yet flexible foundation for each urban initiative, while remaining open to reinterpretation across generations. Indeed, over many decades, Auroville has not remained immune to conflict, controversy, and upheavals, but with the lens of prefigurative utopianism this becomes a feature, not a bug, in the process of continual becoming to continuously refine and materially embody the charter of the Auroville experiment.

Bhutan as a Prefigured Utopia

Bhutan offers another potential example of a prefigured utopia; however, unlike Auroville, which operates largely outside formal governmental structures, Bhutan has institutionalized its utopian ideals directly within its governance framework, as exemplified by its Gross National Happiness policy, which reflects a systemic embedding of utopian values into national governance, making it an institutionalized form of prefiguration. This is an important contrast to other nations, which largely abstract away idealistic visions from their governance models. The GNH policy was instituted shortly after Bhutan began its modernization and gradual opening to the world in the early 1960s as one of the last nations in the world to embrace modernity . In the mid 1970s, the fourth king, Jigme Singye Wangchuk, “proclaimed” that GDP is less important than GNH because “GDP alone could not deliver happiness and well-being”. In doing so, he mandated that the framework be the foundational ethos to all domains of governance, and produced 33 measures of happiness that would help the government measure its ability to balance material prosperity with spiritual attainment through four pillars: equitable economic development, conservation of the environment, preservation of culture, and good governance. Although definitions of “happiness” vary, it’s important to understand that the Bhutanese conception of it is fundamentally intertwined with Buddhist beliefs that happiness means creating the conditions for the enlightenment of all beings. As former Prime Minister Thinley specified in 1998: “In the Bhutanese context, development meant enlightenment of the individual and not solely an object of religious activity. Enlightenment is the blossoming of happiness. It is made more probable by consciously creating a harmonious psychological, social, and economic environment.” However, in line with prefiguration percepts, how this objective goal gets translated into governance is subject to the interpretation of each generation and regime. In 2010, Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse Rimpoche advocated finding ‘the need to initially consciously and carefully select ‘the true core values and principles in our ancient traditions that are timeless and genuinely contribute to our well-being’ and then discard or adapt ‘forms, traditions and practices’ that are no longer serviceable or responsive to current needs. To facilitate this process, The Gross National Happiness Commission continuously evaluates, solicits citizen feedback, and reinterprets the framework through various urban planning initiatives to ensure its principles are integrated into national policies and development plans like Bhutan’s Five-Year Plan.

Two prominent manifestations of Bhutan's prefigurative approach to the built environment can be seen in the conceptualization and ongoing implementation of the Thimphu City Structure Plan, which seeks to harmonize modernization with the core principles of Gross National Happiness, and the ambitious Mindfulness City Project in Gelephu, representing a novel experiment in integrating spiritual values into urban development. In 2002, the Bhutanese government wanted to create a development plan to turn Thimpu into “a capital city of our dreams”. A prominent Indian architect, Christopher Charles Benninger, was chosen to integrate his philosophy of “intelligent urbanism” with the principles of GNC through the Thimphu Structural Plan (2002-2027). For Benninger, Thimphu represented a unique opportunity—a 'clean slate'—to apply principles that were considered ambitious, if not utopian, for the time. The Thimphu Structure Plan was one of the earliest large-scale attempts to integrate the Principles of Intelligent Urbanism (PIU), which had not yet been widely implemented, particularly in the context of rapid urbanization in developing countries during the 2000s. He wrote in his preamble to the plan: ‘This is surely one of the most ecologically fragile areas under urbanization, as well as one of the richest treasure troves of cultural artifacts! To me, this would be the appropriate testing ground for the Principles of Intelligent Urbanism!’. The result was a charter that established foundational values intended to endure across generations, rather than overly focusing on tactical plans. It begins with the statement: 'This Structure Plan of Thimphu proposes that a unique set of civil principles, guiding urban growth, planning, and management over the coming century, be rooted in approaches we may call Intelligent Urbanism.’ It goes on to emphasize the goal of the city as an equalizer and matrix for opportunities through “free time to develop one’s own human resources, to pursue business, gainful employment.. the arts, community work, politics and social work.’ Central to the plan are principles of balance—with nature, tradition, and community. It advocates for the preservation of the valley as an eco-corridor protected by chortens, prayer wheels, and monasteries. The urban core is seen as an ‘convivial society’ in which a nested system of fractal spaces comprise an ‘urban village’ and reflect the harmonious interconnection between self, friendship, communities, and serendipitous public domains. Furthermore, human scale buildings, mixed-use settlements, and efficient transportation are recommended to reduce the need for cars and ‘enhance the ‘health of the city as a living organism’. Relative to other rapidly developing cities in South East Asia at the time, Benninger envisioned Thimpu as a model for a more humane, resilient, and balanced form of urban development.

Much like Auroville’s Charter, the Thimphu Structure Plan reads as a manifesto guided by 'north star' principles, allowing room for interpretation, failure, and ongoing learning in its execution. While the plan set a utopian framework, key elements remained either delayed or unrealized over time. As noted by The Druk Journal in its 2020 issue on urban planning: “The vision for our capital did, indeed, sound like a dream. After two decades of neglect... the Thimphu dream is now more of a Thimphu nightmare.” By 2023, the need for a revised plan became evident due to challenges such as inadequate data, lack of review mechanisms, and poor coordination among agencies. The resulting Thimphu Structure Plan 2023-2047 sought to address these tactical issues while retaining the original principles, this time incorporating Doughnut Economics—a framework that, like the Principles of Intelligent Urbanism, emphasizes development that prioritizes sustainability, equity, and human well-being over short-term growth. This same vision is reflected in Bhutan’s new urban initiative, the Mindfulness City in Gelephu, which is described as a 'new translation' of Gross National Happiness into urban planning and economic strategies. The project aims to create a vibrant economic hub that attracts foreign investment while establishing major infrastructure and urban centers within a framework of mindful living, sustainability, and cultural preservation. Although still in early stages, Prime Minister, Tshering Tobgay, asserts it “will not only reflect Bhutanese cultural values but also offer a model for the world—demonstrating how urban living can be harmonized with spiritual and environmental consciousness.” Although substantial work on the city has yet to commence, and critiques persist that it risks devolving into a Special Economic Zone dominated by capitalist imperatives, Bhutan’s approach to its planning so far demonstrates a deliberate and thoughtful integration of economic priorities with the principles of Gross National Happiness. This approach also embodies the utopian philosophical foundations initially articulated in Benninger’s vision for Thimphu—emphasizing cultural preservation, community conviviality, and sustainability as core tenets. Whether in Thimpu or Gelephu, Bhutan’s planning efforts remain grounded in an iterative commitment to translating its core values and “dream city” into built form, thereby embedding the values of Mahayana Buddhism into the fabric of everyday life. While not scholastically framed as prefigurative practice, Bhutan's approach exhibits significant affinities with this ethos. Its aim to realize 'utopian' ideals in the present is reflected in an approach defined by formalizing and prefiguring that vision into governance and civic projects overtly, setting up governance models for intergenerational interpretation and accountability, and a commitment to process and evolution over fixed blueprints.

Comparative Analysis: Bhutan and Auroville

Both Bhutan and Auroville present compelling models for understanding how prefigurative utopian ideals can be actualized. Both are grounded in strong spiritual mandates articulated through a charter or manifesto, which are continually reinterpreted by successive generations. In Auroville, The Charter and the original Galaxy Plan serve as guiding frameworks, providing a "north star" for subsequent generations to embody its ideals through built form and governance. Similarly, in Bhutan, the Thimphu Structure Plan developed by Christopher Benninger and the principles of enlightenment within Mahayana Buddhism—formalized through the directive of Gross National Happiness—fulfill a parallel role. These frameworks derive their enduring relevance from their foundation in universal, humanist, and spiritual principles. They articulate aspirational ends without prescribing rigid means, thereby avoiding the pitfalls of dogmatic modernist planning. In this sense, utopia is not to be interpreted literally, but rather symbolically. Through grokking the underlying, metaphorical, or abstract meanings that words represent, this essence is then translated through the lens of contemporary political and cultural paradigms. This dynamic process allows utopia to remain “alive” rather than “dead”, guiding interpreters towards self-discovery, insight, and realization of its fruition, rather than imposed through caracasses long outdated.

The vitality of these utopian visions is further sustained by institutionalized governance structures that (in the case of Bhutan) measure their embodiment (qualitatively and quantitatively) and foster grassroots experimentation (in the case of Auroville). For instance, Bhutan’s measurement of Gross National Happiness evaluates lived experience as an indicator of societal well-being, while Auroville’s Town Development Council facilitates local stewardship and adaptive experimentation. Moreover, prefigurative utopian projects maintain longevity by integrating with, rather than isolating themselves from, the larger world. Whereas 80% of utopias and intentional communities fail within their first 2 years, Auroville has sustained for over 50 years. This longevity can, in part, be attributed to the Indian government's support, which includes grants allocated through the Ministry of Education and legal protections established by the Auroville Foundation Act of 1988. Similarly, Bhutan’s codification of Gross National Happiness as a unifying principle within its governance solidifies its longevity by aligning spiritual values with the nation’s overarching administrative structures.

Furthermore, prefiguring utopia practices in urban form is most possible when urban planning and architecture are seen as important vessels by which society can realize utopia’s aims. As David Wachsmuth articulates, the city can be conceived not as a "real object" but as a "thought object," a "category of practice" rather than a "category of analysis". This perspective shifts focus from static analyses of urban form to the experiences, interpretations, and performances of what the city symbolizes as a horizon of possibility. For Aurovillians then, architectural discourse and planning rationality are the performative enactment of Auroville's promise, its futurity. For the Bhutanese, this is evident through the strategic national prioritization of the Gelephu Mindfulness City as proclaimed by King Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuck’s speech during the 116th National Day celebration in 2023. In this way, urban planning and architecture become iterative platforms for societal transformation, not as static blueprints but as living frameworks that evolve alongside the aspirations of their inhabitants.

Finally, the realization of prefigured utopias depends on urban planning and architectural practices that embrace temporality, adaptation, and experimentation. Building materials, zoning policies, and usage laws must prioritize flexibility, ensuring that the built environment evolves alongside the ideals it seeks to embody. Modular building techniques, as seen in some of Auroville’s sustainable housing projects, allow for physical spaces to expand, contract, or be reconfigured based on changing societal needs, while Bhutan’s emphasis on maintaining eco-corridors and integrating traditional architectural styles with modern infrastructure in the Thimphu Structure Plan reflects its commitment to harmonizing cultural preservation with sustainable urban growth.

Conclusion

Reflecting on the historical influence of utopian thinking in urban planning, it becomes evident that while past models frequently failed due to rigid, top-down implementation, we should not abandon utopian orientations towards planning altogether. Instead, there is a growing need for discourse that embraces new forms of synthesis, balancing visionary ideals with the adaptability of emergent, flexible, and participatory processes. Rather than perceiving utopias as static, predefined endpoints, recent scholarly discourse reframes utopia not as the realization of perfection, but as a dynamic process where ideals inform ongoing experimentation and gradual societal transformation, as exemplified by the case studies of Auroville and Bhutan. In this context, it attributes to utopianism a heuristic function, one that enables us to discover new methods for interpreting and transforming the world as we know it. That is, instead of exclusively formulating final goals, social dreaming involves the creation of diverse methods for better comprehending and changing the status quo.

However, the critical question confronting cities today is: What is that social dream? Who gets to dream it? And what fundamental values inform it? In the vacuum left by modernity, that dream is increasingly co-opted and fragmented by capitalistic, short-term, and privatized interests. In this context, the imperative for cities to reclaim a compelling and cohesive vision of the future becomes clear. As innovation and economic growth have not only a rate but also a direction, the role of the public sector in this market co-creation process is to create public value through providing public purpose. However, the visions articulated in the majority of contemporary city plans tend to prioritize practical and infrastructural concerns over genuinely utopian, visionary, or transformative ideals. When such aspirations are mentioned, they often remain superficial and abstracted away from the underlying systems that drive and quantify urban development, rendering them disconnected from the mechanisms needed to meaningfully implement and measure their impact. In the absence of a compelling or impactful vision, it becomes crucial to initiate discussions across all spatial scales, shifting the focus from purely economic and growth-oriented rationales toward the more fundamental question of ends: what is all this growth ultimately for?

Establishing a clear, humanist—if not spiritual—answer to this question, one that emphasizes sustainability, equity, happiness, pluralism, and well-being, as seen in the case studies of Auroville and Bhutan, represents a reorientation that challenges the dominant telos of western urban development. Embedding iterative feedback mechanisms and systems for citizen engagement further ensures that these ideals are continuously translated into the built environment, fostering a dynamic, didactic process oriented toward evolving, adaptive forms of urban actualization. Furthermore, the articulation of such visions not only encourages long-term outlooks in planning, capable of addressing systemic issues over generations, but also confers a continuous process of reinterpretation of an evolving ideal, rather than a directionless or short-sighted rejection of the present.

In The Symbolic Construction of Community, Cohen argues that while a repertoire of symbols held in common is what enables members to construct and maintain a sense of community, ‘the sharing of the symbol is not necessarily the sharing of the meaning’. Thus, a community could contain a diversity of interpretations and relationships to communal symbols, so that it effectively ‘incorporates and encloses difference,’ while espousing common ideals. An interpretation of this reading could suggest that balancing utopian ideals with bottom-up emergence, especially in increasingly pluralistic cities, is not an inherently contradictory endeavor. While detailed expounding on the tactical implementation of this balance lies beyond the scope of this paper, it is evident that history often operates like a pendulum, swinging between extremes. Our current shift towards predominantly capitalistic paradigms and anti-utopian approaches to urban planning may be approaching its zenith. In this liminal period, between paradigms, it is crucial to reconceive a synthesis that harmonizes utopian imaginaries, with economic growth and emergent bottoms-up development, paving the way for a more holistic, humanist, and emergent urbanism.

Provocations

• What if cities created utopian objectives and manifestos based on humanist principles? Cities like New York, Dubai, and Mexico City, while incorporating some high-level goals, tend to emphasize practical, tactical solutions for infrastructure and development needs. Meanwhile cities like Copenhagen, Singapore, Bhutan (Thimphu), and Barcelona often incorporate deeper values and utopian visions in their master plans, focusing on sustainability, equity, happiness, and well-being.

• What if these utopian frameworks were reassessed and interpreted every generation? Instead of one master plan, the city would be guided by evolving interpretations of a utopian vision. Utopia here isn’t a fixed blueprint but rather a set of high-level guiding principles (e.g., equity, sustainability, community well-being, spiritual growth). Each generation, based on its needs, technological advancements, and social structures, reinterprets how these principles should manifest physically (through architecture, zoning, public spaces) and socially (through institutions and interactions).This framework ensures that cities can adapt, evolve, and experiment while always pointing toward an ideal, shared future vision.

• What if we created Generational Councils for re-interpretation? These Councils are formed every 10-20 years, tasked with reinterpreting the core principles for their era. They could include architects, urban planners, sociologists, environmental scientists, and community representatives. These councils would examine new technological, ecological, and social conditions and update the physical interpretation of the utopian principles. Furthermore, the establishment of an urban lab or research body can continuously evaluate emergent trends and technologies, and advise the Generational Utopia Council on how the top-down framework can be refined to stay relevant and future-proof.

• What if we created utopian benchmarking metrics? where urban planners set long-term goals tied to foundational principles (e.g. Bhutan’s Gross National Happiness measure). These benchmarks would act as the overarching guideposts for any new urban development but would be adaptable based on emergent needs. The city would periodically assess whether new developments, policies, or community-driven projects align with these benchmarks. Each project would be evaluated through a flexible feedback loop, allowing for course correction while staying true to the core vision.

• What if Utopian visions could co-exist with increasingly pluralistic societies? What if utopian visions focused on the why and underlying universal values vs. being overly-prescriptive? To embrace pluralism, what if we designated parts of the city as "cultural crossroads" where different community groups experiment with cross-cultural exchanges, blending architectural styles, public art, and food markets. These areas could reflect evolving, pluralistic interpretations of utopian principles, encouraging mutual learning and collaboration among different communities. Furthermore, what if we had rotating community-curated public spaces maintained by different community groups? These groups could re-envision and redesign spaces like parks or town squares based on the needs of their communities at different times, ensuring public spaces are continually responsive to changing societal dynamics.

• What if vision and modularity could co-exist? City master plans should outline macro-level goals (e.g., a 50-year sustainability target, green energy infrastructure, decentralized communities), but leave flexibility at the neighborhood or district level. Each module (e.g., eco-districts, pedestrian zones) should have flexible zoning laws that allow for community-driven changes over time, so new developments can be added or modified without compromising the overarching vision.

• What if there were zones of utopic experimentation? The built environment would not be created in one fell swoop. Instead, you’d establish "zones of experimentation" or "flexible districts" where smaller-scale experimental designs that embody aspects of the utopian vision can be implemented. Like Copenhagen’s Nordhavn or Auroville’s zones of experimentation, where communities, architects, and urban designers can trial small-scale innovations in housing, public spaces, or green infrastructure. These can be evaluated and scaled into longer-term infrastructure.

• What if we enabled micro-community utopias? Instead of focusing utopian ideals on entire cities, create micro-community utopias—self-contained neighborhoods designed around specific values (e.g., sustainability, creativity, social equity) that operate semi-autonomously but remain connected to the larger city. For example, each micro-community could experiment with different forms of governance, sustainable technologies, or social structures while being interconnected through shared infrastructure like transport, digital services, or energy systems. These districts would serve as test beds for various utopian ideals, with successes scaled city-wide.

• What if zoning was dynamic and architecture / space was adaptable? What if we used dynamic zoning that allows buildings or neighborhoods to change use over time? These dynamic zoning regulations encourage adaptability in function—allowing spaces to shift between residential, commercial, or community purposes as needs evolve. These zones should receive feedback from residents to determine if they continue or change direction. This could include adaptive architecture - structures designed to change or grow with shifting needs. Furthermore, we could implement multi-purpose spaces that can be easily repurposed without significant construction, allowing generations to reinterpret their functions (e.g., a building might serve as a market today, a tech hub tomorrow, and a community center in 20 years). Buildings and public spaces could be designed with modular or flexible components that can shift functions over time based on needs, allowing for continual reconfiguration

• What if data collection informed emergence and vision? Build real-time feedback loops that connect local experiments with the overarching masterplan. This ensures that emergent patterns from the grassroots level can influence and refine the broader vision. Set up urban sensors, surveys, and community reporting tools that collect data on traffic patterns, energy usage, air quality, public health, and social well-being. Data from local experiments should be aggregated and reported to Generational Utopia Councils every 5-10 years. This allows the council to update the guiding principles and adjust the masterplan based on what’s working or failing at the grassroots level.

One question i’ve been asking myself and will keep asking myself as I go through graduate school is: What is the Public? What purpose should it serve?

Today i’ll be sharing the beginning of a unfolding provocation I have that Publics should serve our sense of being-ness, and that this is deeply underserved in society today.

Embarking on a journey to dissect, explore, expand, or create a concept of “Publics” inevitably begs the question: “What is the purpose of the city?” It is through this filter that a “public” can begin to mirror and materialize that purpose to shape and be shaped by bodies in space outside of “I”. To this question, an infinite amount of answers can be given, all of them valid and dynamic through the prisms of constructs they shine through. The question then becomes: “What do I believe is the purpose of the city that I want to grapple with through my work in Publics?” Various discourses and historical typologies contend that the purpose of a city is a place for physical shelter and social security, economic growth, justice and social change, distribution of information, self-discovery or positive sum opportunity. City, considered man’s greatest political creation, formed the basis for Plato’s discussion of justice (Snyder, 1959), while in Aristides’ philosophy, the chief aim of the polis is happiness (Morrison, 2017, p. 11). The key thread that unifies these different conceptions is that they are interpretations to what we believe is a meaningful human life and the numerous ways in which our built environments and social infrastructures can propagate that belief. 

The conception of the city that I'm most excited to translate into the public sphere is the one which helps people pursue their purpose. To become more of who they are. Through that lens, the city becomes an opportunity matrix which enables citizens to come in contact with and live out their truth, transmuting that essence into art, expression, and service in accordance with their evolving capabilities. Though people are born equal, their contexts cause them to grow inequitably. Cities should be a corrective antidote by which each individual can chart their own path, as opposed to reifying, degrading, or sanctioning lines of development.

Echoed by Unger and Fainstein: “It is a place of becoming, and the fulfillment of social potential, of democratic experimentation through the efforts of citizens themselves, as free and socialized agents. We see the city, more specifically its institutions, providing the opportunity for citizens to become something else and for mutuality to be strengthened.” Implicit in this ideal is that every individual should have access to resources which enrich their capabilities to fulfill their potential. “Human capabilities constitute an important ingredient of our quality of life. The richer the capabilities, the greater the freedom to achieve and to be.” (Sen, 1999). Though there are numerous capabilities that a city can provide and equalize access to - from educational resources, healthcare access and economic prospects - I believe the capability “to be” is one that is underserved by our public realms.

What does it mean “to be”?

“To be” is to exist in the space between stimulus and response before one “does”. To pause, contemplate, philosophize, grapple, and dream. To ask questions of ultimate concern: Who am I? What is meaningful? Why is it this way? What is good, beautiful, and true? What systems and conditions dictate my values and actions? Are there better and truer premises to live from? If we do not have the space to consistently ask these kinds of questions amidst the default machinery of life, truly knowing ourselves and acting from that knowing, will continue to evade us.  And though these are deeply Individualized questions, their explorations are often enriched when done so in dialogue amidst a social fabric.

As such, if our cities and public spheres are to enable people to pursue their purpose, providing capabilities and equalizing access to spaces where one can engage in this state of “being” is quintessential. Churches, online forums, civic forums, educational institutions, private clubs, third spaces, bars after work and the private terrains of our inner circles are places where we may grapple with these questions. However, each of these mediums has limitations: some may require us to flatten our identities or choose a 'side', insulate us to homogeneous perspectives, or lack the social infrastructure needed to engender the trust required for deeper engagement. Across all of these “public spheres” there may be a sense of inner and outer, “self” and “other”.

Take for example the civic forum as a “publics for being”. The german philosopher, Jurgen Habermas, conceptualizes the public sphere as a place for rational-critical discourse between citizens that can influence political action or legitimize power. Sociologist Nancy Fraser expands on this by conceptualizing “subaltern counterpublics” as spheres for marginalized groups to challenge dominant power structures. Though the discussions that unfold in these forums are articulations of multiple groups’ conceptions of what is meaningful, good and true - they are embedded within a dualistic context or “we” vs “them”.

What would it be like to create a “publics for being” from a frame of non-dualistic pluralism instead? Non-duality, in this context, is a perspective that transcends the traditional separation between opposing forces or identities, such as "I" and "other" or "we" and "them” and motions at our underlying shared humanity. Pluralism creates openness to diverse ways of being from that common ground, where differing beliefs and values are not just tolerated but seen as integral to the collective exploration of meaning. It is not focused on conflict, opposition, or a change agenda between individuals and groups, however subtle. Rather it’s closer to political theorist Chantal Mouffe's concept of agonistic pluralism, where opponents respect each other's right to differ and perpetual negotiation of a dynamic center is a feature, not a bug, of deliberative democracy. 

Like the nature of questions of ultimate concern, the point is not to arrive at answers, reify identities, or convince others over to a perspective. Instead, this “publics of being” is one where a mindset of cosmopolitanism and breadth of pluralistic perspectives not only co-exist but co-enhance one another. A container which can hold emergent, inconclusive, and often contradicting insights and truths between individuals and groups. And where big questions are unspooled together improvisationally and playfully - like a jazz set where each instrument is unique yet harmoniously contributing to a transcendent composition.

In this way, individuals are able to hold more and more complexity without collapsing into ideology or “retreating away from public life due to the need to reconcile identities and beliefs” (Sennet, 1977). A non-dualistic “publics of being” is a spatial personification of the premise that meaning-making is not a luxury, but a core human right, a public rather than private endeavor, and one that can be enhanced from a pluralism of diverging perspectives. We are both fundamentally alone and inter-connected on our unique journeys towards purpose. Communing with fellow travelers to dialogue, celebrate, meaning-making, and mirror one another, enables us to more consciously and nimbly navigate the soul-tides we tread. Cities, and our public spheres as a result, should create the conditions of emergence and civic spaces by which this unfolding can take place. 

As such one current (and evolving) definition for a “Publics of Being” is as follows:

They are dynamic shared spaces where individuals gather to engage in reflective, pluralistic meaning-making. Transcending dualities like “I” versus “other” or “we” versus “them”, these spaces imply a baseline of inherent non-duality and oneness of humanity, while not denying the myriad of unique and pluralistic expressions that can co-exist from that truth. These emergent collectives are supported by designed environments that facilitate open-ended dialogue around life's fundamental questions, without seeking consensus or definitive answers. By fostering intentional, continuous interactions, “publics” become crucial spaces for individual and collective self-actualization, allowing participants to explore their unique evolving identities and perspectives, while deepening community bonds in that individuation. 

The city and its public spaces serve as an optimal entrypoint for seeding this vision. Professor of Architecture, Starvros Starides, writes that common spaces “are a living laboratory where utopic ideas can be explored in real-world contexts”. In an era where our work, relationships, and dialogues are increasingly abstracted from the physical locations we inhabit, a sense of disorientation and disconnection naturally arises. This disjunction often fosters tribalism and flattening of 'the other.' Moreover, major cities are evolving into transient hubs of opportunity rather than long-term homes where people lay down roots for decades, further reinforcing our sense of incoherence. Meanwhile, our pre-existing places of sense-making have either been dwindling (50% of Americans are disconnected from a local congregation), privatized, capitalized, or further abstracted into the digital world. If cities, as Harvey (1973) suggests, are ‘socially constructed spaces’ born out of human imagination and agency, and inherently tied to politics and power, then they are not static. They can, and must, evolve in response to our shifting paradigms on politics, power, and the necessity of “publics for being”. The challenge before us is to build cities and public spheres that mirror the emergent edges of our collective consciousness, rather than propagating the dualistic mindset of pre-existing economic and socio-political imperatives. As such, we need to build public realms which can hold people amidst the surmounting complexity, increase their capabilities to hold and connect to themselves, and re-tether them to a place of meaning-making that is human scale and embedded amidst a rich community fabric.

What form factors will this take on? What physical qualities personify it? What social and programmatic infrastructures enliven it? What policy, governance, and financial instruments sustain it? These are the questions I’ll be exploring during my time at graduate school and beyond it~

I’m Patricia and I write this newsletter in my free time every time an insight needs to be grappled with and birthed. If you want to support my writing, you can join me down the rabbit hole 🕳🐇 or subscribe to this newsletter.

Subscribe now

These days we talk a lot about building more social infrastructure to ease disconnection. Though this is a good directive, it is incomplete. It is my belief that we don’t necessarily need more cafes and social clubs to feel less lonely. What we need are more spaces that can help us feel fundamentally okay and seen in our deep aloneness. It is only from authentic individuation, can we begin to feel a true sense of non-separateness with one another and solve our sense of dis-ease at its root.

We are all fundamentally alone and inter-connected on this journey. Following the telos of our unique unfolding purpose is ultimately our own cross to bear, but is enriched amidst a social fabric. Meeting fellow travelers along the way to dialogue, celebrate, meaning-making, and mirror to us that which we already are, makes the journey all the more nimble and rich. As we come deeply into our truths from a base of deep security, we can begin to celebrate others for who they authentically are vs. seeing them as resources to help fill our void.

However, the majority of our social spaces tend to collapse our identities and disregard our unique purpose in exchange for safety and connection with the herd. We seek connection with others, at the expense of connection to ourselves, in all of our fiery uniqueness and unfolding multitudes. Unconsciously, joining these kinds of social spaces serve to reinforce our sense of separateness.

I believe we need more community spaces where plurality is not only the common denominator, but sense-making our unique paths, alongside others, is the predominant activity. A place to ask and answer deep, fundamental questions about the world, the self, and society.

If first place is home, second place is work, third places are public spaces like parks, cafes, bars, etc., then a fourth place is:

Fourth Place (n)

a physical space that facilitates meaning-making through intentional programming and pluralistic discussion, where individuals explore questions of ultimate concern without seeking conclusive answers. It honors the authenticity and uniqueness of each person's path while fostering deeper bonds through consistent encounters in a supportive holding environment.

1. A place where the primary activity is meaning-making - the continuous process of interpreting, understanding, and making sense of life's complex patterns through the lens of evolving personal assumptions and values.

2. Intentional programming - the biggest difference between a 3rd space and a 4th place is that there is an intention to commune in pluralistic discussion. Often times there is programming and an individual who orchestrates prompts within a container.

3. Exploring questions of ultimate concern - who am I? how did I get here? why am I here? what is good, beauty, and truth? what is meaningful? what is my relationship to self, community, and the world? the nature of questions asked in a fourth place ultimately all lead to these more fundamental inquiries.

4. Being in the questions vs. reaching conclusive answers - in these containers, one leaves with more questions than answers. The goal is not to reach an answer or convert others to your point of view, but to grapple and explore the emergence of whatever arises together. Not to define the map, but to enlarge it.

5. Honors the authenticity and uniqueness of each individuals path - who we are is both emergent and primordially unchanging. It rests below our past and current narratives that are shaped by memetic forces, trauma, and societal conditioning. The journey back to self-trust and authenticity is one we can only take on our own. Fourth places feature a culture that deeply honors this as there is no change agenda amongst its participants. We are here to witness, challenge, and mirror with the understanding that it can be taken or left.

6. A bridging space that results in deeper bonds - Bridging spaces bring diverse people together to co-inhabit space. Bonding spaces aid similar individuals to meet and reinforce ties. A fourth place doesn’t see these as mutually exclusive. In fact, bonding is enhanced through the differences that bridging brings.

7. Not a cult, but a holding environment - cults, in their broadest definition, seek to give people meaning and identity. Fourth Places are places where identity and world views are questioned and one’s sense of meaning is self-constructed from first principles. They are a container / canvas / holding environment by which people can feel supported and seen in their unique process of being and becoming.

8. Consistency of encounter - any meet-up or internet salon can host a one-off meaning-making event. People get deep together and then splinter off into their own lives, with little likelihood of re-encounter. Fourth places create the conditions by which people see one another consistently. This creates the kind of friendships Aristotle extolls as its highest form: a “virtuous friendship” - a communion between souls exploring and understanding their place in the universe in tandem. 

9. Must be a physical place - though digital or async encounter can be an aspect, being physically together is paramount. Meaning-making is not only the exchange of ideas via the mind, but also physical and subtle energy from the heart and gut. The latter of which is diluted in virtual settings.

The concept of a “fourth place” isn’t necessarily new. We have grappled with “questions of ultimate concern” in community for millennia. The archetypal “Church” and “Town Squares” have been places rife with dialectic discourse, spiritual exchange, and scholastic discussion. Throughout history it has shown up in the spirit of Athenian Agoras, Roman Stoas, Indian “Sabhas”, French Salons, American Juntos, and Viennese Coffee Houses. Today we are seeing wafts of its interpretations in spaces like liberal arts universities, The Commons, Socratica, Manny’s, Reading Rhythms, pop-up cities, internet salons, & behind many closed doors housing private discussions.

What I hope to understand is how fourth places will emerge in our current era from behind closed doors, and into ever more public and physical spheres. Their re-design derived from first principles to accommodate the meaning-making needs of the modern person.

In a country that is only becoming more polarized, secularized, and ideologically rigid - we need civic institutions that can honor the intelligence of our pluralistic individuation, without sacrificing the wisdom and role of community in that process. It is only through this synthesis that true connection can engender.

If this resonates with you..

I’m looking to gather a community of “fourth place” builders or people generally interested in this topic for consistent salons. If you’re interested indicate so in this form.

I’m Patricia and I write this newsletter in my free time every time an insight needs to be grappled with and birthed. If you want to support my writing, you can join me down the rabbit hole 🕳🐇 or subscribe to this newsletter.

Subscribe now

If American cities could whisper a message, what would they convey?

In his essay on Cities and Ambition, Graham posits cities whisper covert messages about success: New York beckons you to amass wealth, Boston invites you to deepen your intellect, Los Angeles allures with the promise of fame, and Silicon Valley tempts with the lure of power. Other cities may whisper for more hipness, beauty, social prestige, or political clout. 

I’ve always felt a bit put off by these messages. In the sense that these “aims” should be more so the byproduct of following one’s own authentic purpose, rather than ends in themselves. Those who strive to help raise the aspirations, conditions, and consciousness of others through their authentic expressions, may naturally secure fame and fortune - but it is a lagging indicator, not a leading one. And whether these things are secured or not, is not of real importance in the end. 

If purpose is the fountainhead from which all else springs, imagine a city whispering: “you should be more authentic”. In this pursuit, purpose spontaneously emerges from the journey of living one’s truth, a path devoid of pre-existing templates. Along this path, virtues like altruism and a sense of duty to the collective good naturally surface. As the great polymath Rabindranath Tagore said: “I slept and dreamt that life was joy. I awoke and saw that life was service. I acted and behold, service was joy”. This city whispers not of some result that must be obtained, but ignites an inner drive for you to be the most you possible. As such, when the “highest status person” is the one who is the most themselves, social hierarchies become moot, because there would be no way to truly verify the magnitude of authenticity of another, nor would anyone really care to.

Contrasting with Graham’s inclination to categorize cities, this city's essence transcends all labels. Here, the ongoing journey of self-exploration prevents any one stereotype from calcifying. Citizens in this city might find themselves maneuvering the financial markets in one chapter of life, embracing artistry in another, or stepping into the role of a technologist in yet another. Each experiment expresses one’s evolving purpose through a new medium. Or the same medium can be deepened.

The point is that in this city, the medium is not the message. The mechanism is. That is, the unfolding of one’s truth. 

“You should be more authentic”, it whispers. 

In an ideal world, no single city would monopolize this whisper. Rather, it would become the primary message of every city. And a slew of novel policies, public goods, and infrastructure would arise to magnify the perennial journey of the human spirit.

I believe the process of uncovering one’s authentic purpose is a cyclical process of continuous experimentation, meaning-making, and re-engagement with the world. This process necessitates periods of deep solitude to rest into what is true, as well as communion with others as mirrors to ourselves and portals into unknown unknowns. Without pausing, we lose access to the deep wisdom within us. Without communion, we can get stuck at a local maxima, running on prior scripts that have turned stale. As noted author Ian McEwan aptly puts it, “Paradise on earth is to work all day alone in anticipation of an evening in interesting company.”

In modern society, we are good at cycling through this process largely alone. For most, college was the last container that embodied meaning-making in communion to such a holistic extent. The late Richard Dober, who designed and consulted for a majority of colleges in America wrote: “Campus design is a civic art that resonates with meaning and significance for our culture. The Greeks had their agora, the Romans their Forum, the Middle Ages their cathedral and town square, the Renaissance their palaces and enclaves for the privileged, and the 19th century their centers of commerce, transportation and government. The campus is uniquely our generation’s contribution to communal placemaking.” When designed well, it should “promote community, allegiance, and civility, while at the same time encouraging diversity in discourse and vision.”

In order to design cities that amplify the pursuit of authentic purpose, “the American Campus” is a good blueprint to take inspiration from. Unlike the monastic model of campus design that influenced European institutions, American campuses were designed to be deeply social places, where knowledge from different fields circulated freely. While social infrastructure provided the physical containers for this alchemy, intentional social programming was equally, if not more important, in amplifying the rate of cohesion and meaning-making. Relative to physical containers, social programming represents the intentional design of energetic containers which engender exploration, connection, and expansion of the human soul. 

Reflecting on our college days, we may marvel at the beautiful libraries and student halls, but our nostalgia runs deep for the social programming that animated them: the frenzied participation of well-run clubs, myriad of social schelling points planned by college heads, heaps of philosophical debates and discussions, racket of stories exchanged to the backdrop of a bustling cafeteria, and the ceaseless parade of parties, music, and seasonal celebrations that unified us in collective effervescence. Life felt like a verb as opposed to a noun - never quite arriving, always in relationship, fertile in curiosity, and budding in purpose. 

Our cities, as modern-day adult campuses, whisper something else entirely: pick a purpose, be a somebody, do your job efficiently, smile mildly at the barista, enjoy some recreation, buy things to keep up with the joneses, eat at the trending restaurant of the week, and commune behind closed doors and private partifuls. 

Is it no wonder something feels off?

When Tocqueville visited America in the late 1820s, he marveled at Americans’ political do-it-yourself spirit that was in service to their community. “They do more honor to their philosophy than to themselves,” he wrote.

Unlike fellow Frenchmen, who were passively acquiescent to a centralized aristocratic order, Americans readily gathered in local settings to solve problems. They were largely indifferent to the distant central government, which exercised relatively few powers back then. Local township government, Tocqueville wrote, was the “schoolhouse of democracy,” and he praised the commitment of citizens to secure the goods of common life not only for the ends they achieved but for the habits of communion and civic duty that they wrought to the citizens themselves.

If we are to enliven our cities to be as spirited as our campuses or ancestral “schoolhouses of democracy”, we don’t necessarily need another park renovation, public square, expanded retail corridor, utopic library, or commercial space masking capitalism as community. We don’t need more white papers or philosophical manifesto’s that point to how civic and community life has faltered, isolation and mental disorders are up, and things are only getting worse. 

What we really need is to do something about it. To empower and resource people who care. People who want to create social institutions and vitalize them with programming at a public level, not just behind closed doors. People who want to start bookstores, coffee shops, and tea houses which double as book clubs and art classes at night. People who want to turn town square into an athenian agora, where ideas, not just goods, are exchanged in jest. People who want to create co-working spaces that feel more like medieval guilds than a marketplace for exchanging favors. People who want to create gyms with real social accountability through community wellness events. People who want to start restaurants that feel like communal cafeterias, rife with socio-economic and intergenerational mixing. People who want to open community centers that engender friendship not collaborations, infused with the energy of Xerox Parc and the coziness of a Hogwarts common room. People who want to open retail stores as fronts for community organizing meetings and mahjong nights in the back. People who want to open contemplative spaces that welcome all backgrounds for discussions around grief, love, purpose, and death. The list goes on and on.

What is common across these examples is the mutually reinforcing combination of “physical place” and “intentional programming” that is led by community, for community. In other words, these initiatives are not just about creating spaces but about crafting experiences that bind people together. Cities may be able to give us spaces top-down, but we have to meet this with heart to enrich them from the bottom-up.

If cities are to become places that engender self–actualization, authenticity, and purpose - we need to increase the probability that in a given day, one can engage with new perspectives that stretch or challenge their own from those beyond their inner circle. That a gander in one’s neighborhood can be filled with conversations that inspire authentic connection, heart-centered expansion, and philosophical contemplation. That basic utilities like health, food, and shelter can be imbued with social connection that give rise to the feeling of being part of a greater whole. Because when the social safety net is strong, we can pursue our dreams and truth with more reckless abandon. And find that in the upper echelons of our ascent lay the belly of a primordial desire to dive back into the tapestry from which we spawned - bolstering, expanding, and enriching it to become the edifice by which others may soar. 

In the words of political theorist, Patrick J. Deneen, “What’s needed now is not to perfect our philosophy any further but to do more honor to ourselves. Out of the fostering of new and better selves, porously invested in the fate of other selves—through the cultivation of cultures of community, care, self-sacrifice, and small-scale democracy—a better [world] might arise from it.”

If our cities whispered this, how far could we go, together?

In the coming issues, I’ll be sharing a project I’m working on with a few others to bring more social infrastructure to San Francisco. Stay tuned! 

yours,

Patricia

Thank you for being part of The Wellness Wisdom newsletter today.

I’m Patricia and I write this newsletter in my free time every time an insight needs to be grappled with and birthed. If you want to support my writing, you can join me down the rabbit hole 🕳🐇.

Subscribe now

At the heart of The Commons’ vision, there’s always been one question:

How can we create a lively culture dedicated to our collective inner development, personal meaning-making, and fullest expression in the world? 

In other words, can we create a place where we can find out and develop who we actually are, so that we may show up fully for the world? 

The northstar is clear, but the “how” has been a process of continual experimentation and renewal. Over the last year, we’ve been alive in this question with our entire community, understanding that this vision can only be made possible with co-creation at its heart. 

“[T]owns and buildings will not be able to come alive unless they are made by all people in society, and unless these people share a common pattern language, within which to make these buildings.” - Christopher Alexander, A Pattern Language 

The impact of getting this right is also clear. In our own personal journeys, dialoguing with friends, and in joining various communities, we have yet to find a continual home to learn, connect, question, grow, and explore our own questions, place in the world, all the while being in community.

As we look to become this kind of fourth place for communal meaning-making and flourishing, we’ve asked ourselves: what is the common pattern language by which people can create their own worlds of exploration, insight, and integration? How do we design not just a place, but the social infrastructure needed to animate a physical sphere of sense-making?

To do that in the modern world requires a combination of tradition and pluralism – drawing from a variety of the strongest traditions of human flourishing, to create a cohesive yet diverse set of paths for each of us to become more fully ourselves. It requires sufficient structure around our inner development, meaning-making and expression, so that we can help one another out along the way, while also maintaining individuation.

These inquiries serves as the inspiration for the next iteration of Campus 🏛️- the core experience at The Commons. 

Up until now, Campus has consisted of dozens of free-ranging salons and classes hosted by the community. Taking a nod to the collegiate quarter system, Campus has renewed itself every 2-3 months with a new curriculum co-created by members. 

Going forward, however, we will establish a core curriculum for Campus dedicated to holistic adult development: the process of inner development, meaning-making, spiritual growth, and personal expression.

In devising this curriculum, we take inspiration after various unified theories of development: From Ken Wilbur’s Integral Framework (typified as grow up, wake up, clean up, show up), to the Zen/Taoist tenets of stillness clearing murkiness so that life can evolve from life, to karma yoga’s path of unselfish action, to Joseph Campbell’s characterization of the Hero’s Journey. Whether secular or non-secular, what underlies these processes is directionally similar: finding out who we actually are, in order to fully express ourselves from that place. Our core curriculum will explicitly draw from varying traditions and feature experienced practitioners from outside our community to bolster our offerings.

Each one of our members can embark on a journey across four mediums: 

1. 🏰 Guild & ⭕ Circles - At the start of every Campus term, every Commons member picks a single guild they most resonate with: explorer, builder, seeker, citizen, or artist. Each guild meets weekly as a Circle, focusing on one another’s meaning-making and personal expression. 

2. 🏫 Practicums - Outside of Circles, will be practicum: prescribed curricula open to all Guilds around the following topics: 

   1. self & inner world (self to self)

   2. holistic wellness (self to physical self)

   3. making sense of outer world (self to world)

   4. relationships (self to others)

   5. wisdom (transcending self)

   6. creativity (self-expression)

3. 🌱 Free-form Experiences - Outside of our core curriculum (Circles & Practicum), members can still host additional Campus courses and one-off events & experiences. We’ll also continue hosting community-wide events for play and connection like field trips, celebrations, retreats, and potlucks. 

4. ✨ Unstructured Time -  our community living room will always be a place for unstructured work, reflection and play. 

In order to make this happen, we’ll be instituting The Campus Council - a loose governing body of members, deeply alive in their expression and processes of becoming, who co-conspire with us in dreaming up and executing our curriculum each quarter.

Council leaders balance autonomy with co-creation: having range to enact their visions for guilds & practicums, and abundant support and budget from The Commons, while working closely with us, external practitioners, and the rest of the Council to cohere a pluralistic curriculum. This council will form a tighter knit community  - connecting over retreats and dinners whilst being accomplices to one another in co-creation and personal growth throughout the quarter.

So how does this all come together? 

In reality, we all contain multitudes and carry each archetype within us. However, there are times when a particular archetype becomes the predominant lens by which we desire to understand the world and ourselves. 

As such, members stick to one Guild per quarter to deeply nurture that form of expression (in guild circles), while also allowing ourselves to explore other lenses and ways of relating (in practicums). 

At other points in our journey, we may feel compelled to grow and express ourselves through the medium of nurturing others and/or creating a curriculum we feel excited by - thereby joining Campus Council as a leader. Every season (or quarter) of life calls for a refreshed assessment and exploration of what’s most alive in us, eventually leading us to ever-evolving truer versions of ourselves. 

A multi-quarter journey at The Commons could look like the following:

Now to dive into each building block - what do these guilds, circles, and practicums actually entail? 

🏰 Guilds &  ⭕ Circles

As we traverse the troughs and peaks of our individual journeys, it’s not only important to be in community - but to be in the company of those who understand. We’ve learned that in order for relationships to deepen, shared interests and shared context are required. Guilds are the means by which shared context can deepen within the already shared context of the Commons community. At The Commons, we’ve identified 5 primary archetypes: 

These will be our guilds and members can only join one each quarter. By doing so, they’ll be committing themself to a weekly support circle consisting of check-ins, mastermind discussions, practice sessions, and resourcing harvests. 

A north star for our Guild Circles is their ultimate development towards the likes of collaborative circles. Collaborative circles like The Impressionists, J.R.R. Tolkien’s Inklings, Susan B. Anthony’s women's movement circle has fueled inventions, masterpieces, cultural movements, and hastened the process of individual actualization.  

Historically collaborative circles formed through the curation of 1-2 charismatic leaders, bringing together peers to challenge and elaborate upon the status quo in one's field. However, building collaborative circles is difficult and often not accessible in lieu of these super-connectors.

We believe that Guild Circles can engender the conditions, like trust-building and serendipity, from which collaborative circles can organically evolve out of. 

🏫 Practicums 

Practicums are a more in-depth curriculum dedicated to some aspect of inner development, meaning-making, spirituality, or self-expression. They serve every guild in their actualization & expression and as such are open to anyone from any guild.  With roughly 4 sessions spread across a quarter - they will be either tailored to the abilities and capacities of our Council leads or taught by external facilitators that have mastery over difficult or sensitive material. 

Here are our Practicums at a glance: 

🧭  Inner World Practicum (self to self)

A practicum that serves as a foundational introduction to language and experiences about our inner world. The practicum will specifically explore attachment theory, emotions & feelings, internal feeling-beliefs – and all of their impacts on our lives.

🌌 Outer World Practicum (self to world)

In this Practicum we will explore our specific meaning, visions, values, and dreams as they relate to our outer world. The most intellectually-focused of our practicums, we will spend time personally drafting a vision for a better world and the specific ways we fit into it. This practicum will welcome discussions on theories of change + impact, foundational beliefs about “the good”, and comparative studies on value.

👪 Relationships Practicum (self to others)

In the Relationships Practicum we will break down our desires & conflicts within relationships to understand the dynamics underlying our relationships; question and dissect those underlying desires and beliefs, explore how we can show up more authentically, and offer tools to do so.

🧘 Holistic Wellness Practicum (self to physical self)

The Holistic Wellness explores wellness on a physical and energetic level. Part theory, mostly practice, this practicum will offer experiences and tools to understand and take care of our energetic and physical bodies. We recognize that taking care of these foundational aspects of ourselves, enables a strong foundation for our daily lives. We’ll talk about topics on the physical plane like fitness, nutrition, and sleep. As well as topics on the energetic plane like vitality, somatics, and sexual health.

🦉 Wisdom Practicum (transcending self)

The Wisdom Practicum combines the practices of various insight and spiritual traditions alongside theory to understand the limits and texture of human experience while also providing experiential glimpses. Meditation and other insight practices will be a predominant part of this practicum.

👩‍🎤Creative Practicum (self-expression)

In the Creative Expression Practicum your entire being, expression, and creative power are fully welcome. In this practicum we will focus on the 4 foundational creative mediums: voice, movement, craft, and imagination. Each person will be invited to take each medium in the direction most natural to them, while exploring and pushing your personal edge.

Overall, we believe this new iteration of Campus will enable us to get closer to our vision for The Commons and support its members along their journey of becoming their truest selves. The new core curriculum balances tradition, plurality, and depth so that we may all share a common “pattern language” while having the freedom to go our own ways.

And in parallel, we hope to hasten a cultural shift towards the creation of new kinds of places; fourth places for a new kind of meaning-making that is communal, dynamic, and holistic. We see a time and place where every city across America has safe spaces that don't prescribe meaning or fixed identities, but become the edifice by which people can create their own meaning.

Where a group of disparate humans finds equilibrium not through homogeneity but in existing with difference and celebration of collective plurality. Where people, communities, and places are increasingly defined by a holistic and continual kind of development that values each and every one of our fullest expressions in the world. For it is when we show up fully in the world that we show up for the world in the way it needs us most.

”Don't ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive, and go do that, because what the world needs is people who have come alive.” - Howard Thurman

 “Making art is not selfish; it's for the rest of us. If you don't do your thing, you are cheating us.” - Kevin Kelly

If this vision sounds inspiring to you, apply to be a member of The Commons. We’d love to see you on the other side 👋

For more context on our thinking check-out these previous essays:

• a manifesto: the next era of third spaces as crucibles for meaning-making

• introducing "the fourth place" & why "third places" have fallen short on their promise

Subscribe now

I’m Patricia and I write this newsletter in my free time every time an insight needs to be grappled with and birthed. If you want to support my writing, you can join me down the rabbit hole 🕳🐇

I was once a “third space enthusiast”. However, if the original spirit of the phrase was that of a physical place, outside of home and work, where authentic community thrived and social fabric intertwined - than the majority of today’s third spaces have fallen short of this noble ideal. 

The spirit is not present in cafes brimmed with the clicking and clacking of laptops beneath hunched shoulders. Nor does it reside in a social or vocational club where favors are transacted and peacock feathers are unfurled. It is also not a bookstore, public space, library, gym, or bathhouse - where one bobbles in and out, amidst a sea of transient faces. Like empty calories, these interactions convey the veneer of community - yet ultimately leave us unsatisfied. 

Spaces of this kind have their place in our lives, but we must be honest about what they are: a means to get one's needs met, against a backdrop of anonymous humans (with some occasional small talk speckled in). Unfortunately, Oldenburg’s vision for “the great good third place”, is only a shell of its original intention. 

And maybe that’s okay. Perhaps third places like cafes, bars, salons, and the public spaces aforementioned, can continue existing as spaces with lite community vibes. But to illuminate a new category of community third spaces that strive to go deeper, we’ll need to create with more intention and concoct a new name. 

Let’s call it the “fourth place.”

We have homes as first place, work as second place, public spaces as third place, and communities for meaning-making, as fourth place. 

Why “place” and not “space”? Space is about objective geography. It only becomes a “place” when it is overlaid with emotional attachment and subjective meaning. A meaning that is crystallized through webs of rich social relationships by which collective memories are forged. Why “fourth”? Well, four comes after three. 

Fourth places, or communities for meaning-making, parallel the role that churches serve, but with no dogma and strings attached. As secularism becomes more predominant, church attendance dwindles, and meaning-making becomes privatized - places that engender collective sense-making of ourselves, the world, and how we fit in it - are more important than ever.

As such, meaning-making in a supportive and consistent community is crucial. One wherein friendships are engendered in what Aristotle extolls as their highest form - a virtuous communion between souls exploring and understanding their place in the universe in tandem. 

Unlike community spaces like social clubs or churches, a place for meaning-making rests on its non-prescriptiveness. There are no required rites to perform, nor cloaks of identities to don. Rather, it’s a safe container to be illegible, know nothing for certain, and question everything. To fumble, experiment, and channel ourselves in the messy process of becoming.

Instead of giving people meaning, a fourth place incites the conditions by which people find their own meaning, together and alone.

Taking a step back from the drone of daily routines, we can finally connect to the yearnings and musings of the soul, a truer and more primary experience of ourselves than what ordinary consciousness can offer.

A journey that’s only becoming more prevalent as we become increasingly resourced to detangle our social conditioning and trauma, explore various philosophies & schools of thought for living, and craft our lives as an authentic expression of who we really are. 

And so the question remains, how do we actually create more “fourth places”?

When Adi and I asked ourselves this question 1 year into building a “fourth place” in SF called The Commons, the answers still felt unclear. What started out as just wanting a community living room to vibe in with friends, quickly escalated into something more nuanced. 

The influx of thousands of member applications, hundreds of community-led events via Campus, and a loyal foundation of members, signaled that a nerve had clearly been struck. 

Whether it was getting at the loneliness epidemic, the rise in secular meaning-making, a desire for intellectual and emotional playfulness, a safe space to share burgeoning questions and curiosities, or just a place to co-work and vibe with interesting people - we weren’t quite sure. The most recurring feedback we’d get would be somewhere along the lines of “I feel like I'm in college again” and “I don’t have to be anyone here, that’s refreshing”. 

However, we picked up a plethora of clues and learnings on fourth-place building along the way: 

1. You need shared contexts and shared interests. The reason why it’s difficult to make friends as an adult is because where there's shared context (seeing the same people over many months daily i.e. workplaces), there's a lack of shared interests. Where there's shared interest (hobby groups, bookclubs, etc), there's a lack of shared context. A place like the Commons creates both shared context and a container for shared interests, over a large body of time

2. Friendships grow strong across varying topologies when aided by readily available knobs. The evolution of our friendships often get pigeonholed in the context from which they first emerged. Work friends stay work friends, intellectual friends stay within that realm, emotional support friends stay out of the work realm, etc. Friendships that are multi-dimensional tend to be stronger. Putting relationships through both light and deep interactions, across different realms of human experience, enables the emergence of knobs both parties can metaphorically latch onto - thereby, swinging relationships into new territorial trajectories. Having a space that produces many ready-made knobs, makes that process a bit more frictionless. For eg. a deep intellectual salon, followed by light-hearted dancing, and then a stand-up comedy event. 

3. Campus provides a low-stakes way to “try on a new way of being”, learn with social accountability, and experiment without hard committing. Each quarter we ask our members for classes, events, bookclubs, or circles they want to host. Many use this opportunity as a chance to engage with an interest more deeply - both as a leader, constructing the curriculum, and as a participant, consuming new intrigues. This safe container has the benefit of being shielded from the outside world of “being x” or “knowing y”, and also allows for meaning-making to be done within a feedback loop of mirroring humans, as opposed to in isolation.

4. Spaces that allow for all parts of ourselves, feel more human. One of our values is “holistic curiosity”. Which means being curious about the whole spectrum of experience – from the emotional and spiritual, to the technical and rational. We believe that the alignment of our mind, heart, and intuition enables us to embody our individual values at the truest level possible. How that translates in the space is through the plethora of events that range from research paper reading to emotional attunement workshops, meditation nights to Shakespearen book clubs. Naturally, this brings an aura of humanism to the space as all parts of ourselves are celebrated. 

5. Good spaces provide bonding and bridging mechanisms. The field of urban planning first introduced the concept of public spaces that bond or bridge. The former serves to aid similar individuals to meet and reinforce ties. The latter bridges diverse people together to coexist and broaden one another’s perspectives. What seems to be working for us is to have aspects of both. During the weekdays we are a member-only space (bonding), followed by Sundays that are open to the public (bridging). Within our programming we have events based on specific interests (bonding), as well as events like potlucks, picnics, or unconferences, where everyone comes together (bridging).  

6. Creating high density of not only people, but ideas and energy = serendipity and aliveness. Lewis Mumford writes that the primary purpose of the city is “to permit—indeed, to encourage—the greatest possible number of meetings, encounters, challenges, between varied persons and groups, providing as it were a stage upon which the drama of social life may be enacted.” If we see fourth places as a microcosm of a city, how could we design encounters and programming in a space to, frankly, induce organized chaos. In the early stages of Campus we spaced out our events to be back to back, but quickly realized that the space becomes more alive when we have differing types of events all occurring simultaneously. More organized randomness increases the chances that novel experiences and insights may alchemize. It’s also how nature tends to work.

7. Programming that reflects the process of inward exploration, external meaning-making, and informed self-expression. After hundreds of organic community-created events, we’ve noticed that they all seem to fall in one of these three categories. “Inward exploration” could be weekly reviews, going through the artists way together, authentic relating or meditation practice. “External meaning-making” involves discussing books and essays, reading research papers, or running salons on ethics, civics, human flourishing, etc. “Informed self-expression” could mean group pomodoros, hackathons, paint-nights, or morning writing clubs. Unsurprisingly, these categories map to the hero’s journey as well. Often times, varying parts of your life go through the process of inward reflection, meaning-making, and outward expression at different rates and stages. We learned that meaning-making is not a stagnant process, but a helicoid of action bolstered by sweltering plateaus of insight. Round and round we go in the process of self-actualization.

To be honest, the first year of The Commons was characterized by a lot of guesses, throwing a bit of everything at the wall, and seeing how things organically evolved. What stayed constant was the guidance of our old fashioned values and a cast of willing experimenters who came along for the ride.

We still have a ways to go in fulfilling the truest potential of what a fourth place can be, but we are grateful to have a bright north-star to follow and an opportunity to figure out “the hows” at our own pace and in our own style (not VC-backed, yay!).

In the next semester of Campus (you can apply here), we’re going to take our learnings after a year to completely restructure the curriculum in service of our mission that still remains steadfast:

Gathering the earnest, playful, abundant, and curious, to explore, express, and create together. Believing that when we meaning-make whilst in community, collective flourishing and self-actualization is the inevitable by-product 🌱🪄

What will that new Campus structure look like? I’ll share more in the next essay. Onwards!

Thank you for taking the time to read this essay 🙏 

I’m currently seeking to connect with co-conspirators, advisors, and anyone who is very interested in furthering this work. If this is you please feel free to DM me on Twitter or get in touch via my website. 

I’m Patricia and I write this newsletter in my free time every time an insight needs to be grappled with and birthed. If you want to support my writing, you can join me down the rabbit hole 🕳🐇

Subscribe now

As more people transition from survival to self-actualization and face crises of meaning, it becomes vital to create spaces that can meet them where they are. In adulthood, we often find ourselves in spaces defined by fixed identities and values, yet we yearn for spaces where we can experiment, wonder, and play with unbridled curiosity. 

I believe that the next era of secular third spaces will fulfill the sense-making traditionally provided by religious congregations in society, without the prerequisite of supernatural or predefined canons of beliefs. To the creators of scenes, operators of spaces, and leaders of communities, I pose this question: What if pure communal meaning-making becomes the foundational ethos of our endeavors? 

To grasp how third spaces can nourish meaning-making, we must understand meaning-making in American society today: less tethered to religious dogmas, yet ever yearning for spiritual sustenance.

Meaning-making is the art of construing, understanding, or making sense of life’s intricate patterns through lenses of novel or deep-rooted assumptions. As the developmental psychologist Robert Kegan wrote: “Human being is meaning making. For the human, what evolving amounts to is the evolving of systems of meaning; the business of organisms is to organize”. 

Throughout history, religious institutions have served as portals for meaning-making, offering blueprints for one's values, rituals, and sense of belonging. However, for a growing segment of the population, the functions of religion has been unbundled and re-bundled into new skins: The “not religious” has soared from 5% to 30% since The Cold War, 1 in 3 Americans under 30 identify as a “none”,  50% of Americans are disconnected from a local congregation.

People may introspect through meditation apps, find moments of ecstatic connection at concerts, seek solace in nature to experience something greater, encounter the divine through relationship. We create quilts of values stitched together by resonant philosophers, spiritual guides, and luminous minds. Moreover, we collect fragments of different "religions" through ideological tribes, each resonating with the values of our current life stage. 

Undoubtedly, the fundamental needs of introspection, ecstatic experiences, beauty, and the desire to merge with the cosmic symphony have echoed through the eons. Though religiosity may wane, the spiritual fire within remains undimmed. For some, spirituality finds its sanctuary within the halls of institutional religion. Yet for a multitude, it blossoms as a dynamic and personal voyage through the kaleidoscope of existence. We embark on this journey, traversing diverse landscapes of human experience, continually redefining what it means to live the "good life”. The spiritual path is a sacred pilgrimage of meaning-making, continuously unraveling.

This path we tread is fraught with paradoxes, luring us into the honeyed traps of self-delusion, beckoning us toward uncharted territories, and often leaving us with a lingering sense of isolation. Nevertheless, we embrace this sacred quest, for we long to express and know our ourselves authentically.

We yearn for guidance without the shackles of dogma, structures that inspire without rigidity, and a connection to the numinous that transcends gatekeepers. We see our spiritual lives as organic and emergent, responding to the people around us, unbound by dogmatic categories of belief and identity.

But the path of secular spirituality can be a solitary one 

Despite the liberation found in unraveling traditions and remixing them into our personal melodies, we find ourselves increasingly adrift, even when communion with others tops the list of our most spiritually meaningful practices.  

For our moments of spiritual resonance are fragmented across numerous social groups, all at varying levels of intimacy - from the affection we have with our close friends and family, to the wordless presence of others at yoga and fitness classes, to the pockets of deep resonance exchanged at book clubs and community service events.  Yet, the splintering of these connections leaves us feeling incomplete, yearning for an integrality that eludes us. Some of these affiliations are looser, more provisional, and ad hoc, and also more ephemeral than those of the religiously affiliated. Perhaps this fragmentation kindles our sense of loneliness, which would be less potent amidst a congregation where all social needs are met, and predetermined value systems guide our way. 

Or perhaps, our sense of isolation stems from the communities we join, staunch in their identities. Whether it’s crossfit, effective altruism, or our jobs - these affiliations present pre-defined canons of values and rites. Our sense of isolation arises from the fact that pure meaning-making is often performed in solitude. We take the threads of our novel experiences and carefully weave them into a tapestry of assumptions and values, by ourselves. For those who don’t attend a church, meaning-making is done through private conversations with loved ones, in salons and bookclubs, or perhaps the last vestige of it - college life.

There are few non-denominational communities that place a core emphasis on sense-making, on playfully embracing the unknown. The adult world brims with spaces where we are expected to arrive, knowing our place, our purpose, and the tasks at hand. In the words of Kegan, we are human doings rather than human beings. 

The interconnectedness of third spaces, community, and meaning-making throughout history.

History illustrates that this was not always the case. Churches stand as magnificent metaphors and physical edifices, where inner contemplation and divine communion unfold. Where meaning-making was done through small groups, sermons, and individually, amongst light-drenched pews. Chinese laborers during the Gold Rush often gathered at Joss houses to pray to ancestors and find solace amidst the unjust social context. In the first three centuries of Christianity, faithful souls gathered in house-churches, evading persecution and engaging in heartfelt discussion on faith. And for the non-religious - Vienna Coffeehouses, Parisian Salons, Athenian Agoras, Roman Stoas, Turkish bathhouses, Chinese tea houses, and countless others provided spaces where citizens from all walks of life could converge and contemplate philosophy, civic affairs, and the mysteries of existence. These were the archetypal "third spaces" — places that are neither home (1st space) nor work (2nd space), but rather informal public gathering places where mediation and meaning-making flow between individuals and society at large.

What binds these examples together is the sacred bond between physical place and the souls who grace them. Brueggemann, a prominent theologian, contends that “the sense of being lost, displaced, and homeless is pervasive in contemporary culture. The yearning to belong somewhere, to have a home, to be in a safe place, is a deep and moving pursuit.” Our spiritual experiences take root in tangible locations, infusing our encounters with a sense of groundedness. Its sacred nature is constituted through the connection between space and soul(s) - an alchemy that can neither be manufactured or reproduced. Within these spaces, felt intimacy between others also unravels more fluidly. As we can intuit places where sacred interactions have unfolded at a subconscious level, adjusting our orientation appropriately. “Vibes”, so to speak. Indeed, spaces offer shelter not just to our bodies, but to the totality of our being. 

Third spaces today: a surplus of identity-focused programming or a lack of programming altogether.

In contemporary America, there’s been rekindling of interest in third spaces. The pandemic, the shift towards remote work, and the relentless march of digital existence have reawakened our yearning for the tactile exchange of ideas and the electric energy of face-to-face encounters.

Casper ter Kulie, a Harvard Divinity School professor, notes: “One of the things that really strikes me is that we’re all drowning in content, but what we need are containers for connection”. However, most of these containers fall into two categories: exclusive and narrowly focused, demanding specific identities, interests, or demographics for admission, or public spaces devoid of structured programming, where each encounter introduces us to new faces, leaving an aftertaste of shallowness. There are few spaces that bridge the chasm between public and private realms, spaces that intentionally cultivate curriculum centered around secular meaning-making. 

So it becomes evident that the mere existence of physical spaces is insufficient to engender encounters with self and others that broach sense-making and deeper depths. What we require are physical containers infused with purposeful programming to animate the souls within to follow their whys, before their hows. 

The Commons, which I co-founded in 2022, is a live experiment with such aims. Within this SF “community living room”, we hold hundreds of community-created salons, juntos, reflection, workshops & support circles. The topics range across the intellectual, spiritual, technical, emotional, and artistic - all in service to authentic expression and meaning-making, amidst a social web of shared intentionality and a consistent cast of faces: 

My dream is to see hundreds of new and existing spaces converge upon a similar charter, with programming inspired by the culture and dreams of the local inhabitants. Indeed, I believe the majority of public and private third spaces are, in essence, already places of connection and meaning-making - disguised in different garbs.

We join these various physical communities and find solace in the embrace of coffee shops not only to read and sip, but to forge friendships and commune with kindred spirits. We seek refuge in these spaces, yearning for the mirroring of other souls as we navigate the intricate dance of existence. At the end of the day, we’re all on this spinning rock in the universe, with hardly a clue of what’s going on. 

Thirds space in the future: Crucibles for communal meaning-making. 

And so, let's not evade what’s at the core. The wondrous fusion of physical space and purposeful programming, dedicated to overt meaning-making, should not only occupy a prominent presence in our community spaces but seep into their very essence.

Imagine a sanctuary where individuals can step away from the mechanized routines of their lives, to reflect, play, discuss, and explore their curiosities in the company of earnest and kind community. A space that recognizes our shared essence, the interconnected threads that bind us all, manifesting in myriad expressions of the universe. And where that expression is not just tolerated, but passionately celebrated. A place where we are open to grappling with the complexity and contradiction of life through engaging with diverse others, which therein reveals the always partial, always provisional, and often contested reality we share.

“You will find parts of the truth everywhere and the whole truth nowhere,” ethics philosopher Kwame Appiah writes. “The deepest mistake is to think that your little shard of mirror can reflect the whole.” As the spiritual journey unfolds, we evolve, ever questioning, ever seeking. The efforts of our third spaces should mirror this journey, a crucible to support our continuous unraveling.

And if third spaces and their communities were to embody this vision, why should we doubt their potency to transform society? Social scientists have conceptualized “the city” for generations as a mirror of the society in which it exists. During Vienna’s golden age, the entire city united in the theater, a playful spectacle that mirrored the multifaceted tapestry of life. The ancient Greeks understood that the universe is fractal, with the macrocosm reflecting the microcosm and vice versa, so above, so below. And so, why can’t third spaces for meaning-making be a reflection of the evolving state of spirituality today at the grassroots level? Especially when policies and urban planners struggle to keep pace. From the ground up, we can imbue society with the celebration of ideological plurality, the embrace of our ceaseless curiosity, and the normalization of model-making and deconstruction - a helicoid of pain and ecstasy, spiraling into infinity as we continuously morph into truer versions of ourselves, never quite arriving. How might we rebuild spaces to nurture the dance of meaning-making and human flourishing? How about cities? Countries? The world? What novel policies would be penned, what visionary leaders would arise? If we transformed culture from supporting that of a human doing, to that of a human being. 

I’m Patricia and I write this newsletter in my free time every time an insight needs to be grappled with and birthed. If you want to support my writing, you can join me down the rabbit hole 🕳🐇

In many digital containers, every button, piece of copy, and intentional negative or white space lends itself to a specific goal. It has a job-to-be-done, so to speak. Yes, we may design UX for human values and engagement, but the elephant lurking around the corner - perhaps even abstracted under the banner of a glorious mission statement - is “business impact”. This is the not-so-secret secret that every for-profit digital architect senses, whether subconsciously or overtly.

I’ve found the reprieve of designing physical space to be a welcomed antidote. What if the job-to-be-done for a container is highly abstract? How can one design a space for connection, solitude, beauty, contemplation, belonging or creativity? Does the placement of a stack of books or half-used candle have a quantifiable impact to the bottom line? Traversing beyond the mind, these jobs find footing in the realm of heart and soul. The success of a physical space is not a/b testable, it’s intuited in the subconscious. It is beyond words. It is felt at the level of energy.

I suspect physical spaces with these kinds of abstract ideals are akin to how the natural world works. The emphasis being on the ecosystem and whole, as opposed to the individuating ROI of one specific component. Designing for the whole is more effortless. More tender. Less quantifiable justifications are needed. It’s not about cost-benefitting the half-used candle. One surrenders to the enveloping vibe, and the details flow from there. The mind is a useful sidekick, measuring sq. ft, extrapolating budgets, analyzing placement and curvature - but ultimately, the heart leads. Its intention, directed towards a holistic system, as opposed to justifying the being-ness of its parts.

Perhaps we ought to suspend our defense of our mind and really try something different. Let go and stop the struggle to figure everything out. Lay down the need to comprehend from your limited perspective, and allow true understanding to reveal itself.

Open your heart, again and again.

Take all of the mental perspective and put it into the inner flow and use it as fuel to create a more permanent place of openness within yourself. By doing this we expand our awareness back into higher Consciousness. The mind and ego get absorbed back into their source, where there is no separation. This is how liberation takes place.

What if we designed our lives from the seat of the heart, as opposed to the calculative whims of the mind? What if we focused on our macro “why”, drawn from our achiest depths, and let the universe take care of the details? What if?

Enjoy the before & after pictures below of The Commons below 😄

Entrance Mural

Community Living Room / Solarpunk Library

Cafe area

Cozy Moroccan Lounge

Wabi-Sabi Lounge

The “Hogwarts” Study

Modular Philosophy Salon x Concert hall x Yoga/Meditation Studio

And of course, a space wouldn’t be complete without its wonderful humans:

If you’re interested in renting out The Commons for your event you can let us know here.

Thank you for being part of The Wellness Wisdom newsletter today.

I’m Patricia and I write this newsletter in my free time every time an insight needs to be grappled with and birthed. If you want to support my writing, you can join me down the rabbit hole 🕳🐇.

Join

I’ve had a love affair with interior design and architecture from the beginning of time. And with this new influx of design activity, i’ve recently paused to reflect on why exactly that is.

Each one of us has, somewhere in his heart, the dream to make a living world, a universe. — Christopher Alexander

Everywhere we look - from the digital space we’re scrolling in now, to the bodega down the street, to the public restroom at the park - houses someones soul and craft. An expression of their ideals. Yes, perhaps that fire hydrant is 1 of a million hydrants manufactured in China, but behind its design, sat a human that thought about it and dedicated a chunk of their life to bring about its fruition.

We literally live amidst cities awash with passion projects and visions for the future. It is the same in nature. Every tree, valley, and brook whispers expressions of the universe’s ideals.

So at its essence, architecture and interior design are just material manifestations of the values we hold dear. A concentrated visual dose of the virtues we already deeply embody or seek to emulate. Their inherent beauty lies not in symmetrical lines or ornate edges - but rather, the felt density of intention and spirit that imbues their atmosphere.

We value certain interiors or buildings for their ability to reshape our natures, eliciting emotions our predominant default states force us to sacrifice. Spaces shape the kinds of thoughts we can think within them. They nudge us towards the interactions we may have with others.

We are, very literally, different people in different places. We step into coffee shops to ward off hues of existential loneliness. We wander into minimal museums, with their cascading planes of white space, to merge with art and beauty. We bow our heads under heaven-bound arches and kaleidoscopic alters of light, in order to forget ourselves.

In essence, what works of design and architecture talk to us about is the kind of life that would most appropriately unfold within and around them.

They tell us of certain moods that they seek to encourage and sustain in their inhabitants. While keeping us warm and helping us in mechanical ways, they simultaneously hold out an invitation for us to be specific sorts of people.

They speak of visions of happiness.

A feeling of beauty is a sign that we have come upon a material articulation of certain of our ideas of a good life. - Emmanuel Quartey

We shape our tools, then they shape us. We construct our narratives, then they construct us. We consume information, then they consume us. We curate our physical space, then they curate our internal states. Life is an endless reverberation of mirrors spanning into the infinite.

Some mirrors are at the level of the astral energy body and harder to construe. Other mirrors, like the physical spaces we choose to rest, work, contemplate, and play in, are quite a bit more perceptible. What surrounds us, we internalize. What we focus on, we become. If we can design these spaces to reflect our visions of happiness and eudaemonia, we have at least captured low-hanging fruit at the precipice of a longer spiritual unfolding.

But the main point I want to drive home is this.

It’s not enough to just design and purchase a space. We must do the ego-wrenching work of practice, reflection, and integration within these spaces to live up to the values they espouse. Modern capitalism sells us visions of inner peace in the form of beautiful airbnbs, mid-century modern living rooms, and the perfect morning coffee set-up. By not falling for this deception, we recognize it for what it is: a simple container that makes the harder work of personal transcendence a bit more frictionless.

happy world building,

Patricia Mou

Some of my muses in architecture and space design that I keep updated here:

Thank you for being part of The Wellness Wisdom newsletter today.

I’m Patricia and have a full-time job but curate this newsletter in my free time as a labor of love.

This newsletter is free because I believe everyone deserves to have access to wellness resources. If you want to support this publication, join me down the rabbit hole 🕳🐇.

Join

Support this publication by joining me down the rabbit hole🕳🐇

Hi lovely humans,

The past few months since my last issue has been filled with serendipity, connection, and ideation. I wanted to finally share what i’ve been up to.

To do so fully, i’d like to share why it means so much to me.

Some of my best friends growing up were old dead men from 500 BC. As an only child born to a philosophy professor and history grad student, I often escaped into my parents’ library to find friends. There I met many visions on how to live across history’s topographies of meaning (not as a baby of course, i couldn’t read then - but increasingly so over the years.) My parents’ dedication to learning and love for self-knowledge have informed my values immensely today.

In college, this thread of inquisitivity unraveled through weekly philosophy essay clubs with 10 of my most curious friends. We formalized this through starting the first TEDx talk at our school, focused on how tradition could inform innovation.

This inspired me to spend summers interning at The Commonwealth Club, at the expense of coveted consulting and banking internships. There I was a scribe and greeter for over 35 salons on everything from philosophy to climate change, falling in love with the format in the process. 

After graduating, I had to make a living - so though my intellect was relegated to the world of “strategy, business-y, and technical decisioning”, my soul found solace in my environment and creations on nights and weekends.

I found that SF group houses were fertile grounds to continue the salon tradition more intimately. In living with budding builders, artists, technologists, and writers - I not only got to engage directly with their visions of fulfillment and theories of change, but also witnessed their embodiment and fruition.

After living in 5 group houses over the last 5 years, (and what felt like a 24/7 salon) (lol it’s not as intense as it sounds), my modus operandi evolved from “surrounding myself with smart people” to ”surrounding myself with people who are free and curious in ways I am not”.

Throughout the loneliness that pervaded the pandemic, I wanted to bring the spirit of group houses and salons to the digital realm. I launched this newsletter, which grappled with topics on meaning, identity, and consciousness. And through that, was able to attract a community of thoughtful people to host philosophy essay clubs and digital cafe experiences with (thank you for being here 🙏). I also launched a curation-as-a-service business called Rabbit Holes , which gathered internet rabbit holes across philosophy and art - in other words, an amalgamation of digital portals into what it means to live a life of meaning and beauty. 

This year of digital experiments has shown me that there is a clear need for communities founded on curiosity and meaning-making. However, there is still nothing that surpasses the energetic dance of souls and kinetic exchange of ideas in-person.

Despite the evolution of our technologies, our bodies have not kept up. We need physical forums to play with our neighbors in the realm of ideas.

After doing in-depth research on the history of third spaces, I learned that America has lost half of casual gathering places, or “third spaces”, that existed at midcentury — places that hosted the easy and informal, yet socially binding, association that is the bedrock of community life.

Additionally, these meta trends at large further illustrate the need for 3rd spaces: 

• More people are moving into cities.  75% of the population will be living in cities by 2050.

• However loneliness is at an all-time high. A recent survey found that nearly half of Americans always or sometimes feel alone (46%) or left out (47%). Over half—54%—feel that no one knows them well. 

• Religion's role in American society is shrinking. 1 in 4 millennials are not religious. As organized religion's role in society declines, we will need new institutions to meet the very real human needs for connection, meaning, and belonging that religion has traditionally met.

• The rise in remote work increases loneliness and location optionality. People not only need a place to work outside of their homes, but also find social opportunities that can replace the traditional social networks born from in-person work. 

• Little daily errands we used to run IRL are now completed with a click of a button - we bank online, instead of going to the local branch; we get our groceries delivered in one-click instead of shopping among our neighbors at the grocery store; we even get diagnosed and prescribed online instead of seeing a doctor.

Safe to say, I red-pilled down the third space rabbit hole, launched a blog reviewing third spaces that exist in the present, and more recently, hosted a brainstorm with members of The Neighborhood, on what an ideal third space would look like in SF. 

At this brainstorm, I met my lovely co-creator Adi Melamed, who ran communities at Interact and salons at Brown University, and the rest was history.

The Commons is our dream of revitalizing cities by creating new community spaces designed for belonging, serendipity, and intellectual / emotional nourishment.

It is our antidote against larger macros forces that are propagating loneliness and fragmented discourse. We are inspired by the Juntos, Enlightenment Cafes, Philosophy Salons, Vienna Coffeehouses, Asian teahouses, and Main Street’s of America. And seek to bring their spirit of inquisitivty and connection to our home here in San Francisco.

It is the brainchild of not just Adi and I, but an entire SF community.

In talking to hundreds of friends and strangers about what was missing in SF, we too often heard the yearning for:

1. A sense of belonging, familiarity, and serendipity in both intimate and wide-reaching scenes.

2. An intellectually and emotionally stimulating environment to consistently return to.

3. A supportive community that shares their values of exploration, growth, creativity, and innovation.

The kind that blooms in places like college campuses and small close-knit towns. The kind in which an inordinate amount of social progress is alchemized through the opportune combination of values-aligned humans, and the spaces that housed them.

So instead of complaining or jumping ship - we’re doing something about it.

The Commons  is a community space rekindling thoughtful dialogue, playful curiosity, & community, in the heart of SF.

We’re building a multi-purpose space in Hayes Valley that will feature a co-working cafe, communal library, philosophy event space, and a meditation/yoga studio. Cozy reading nooks and conversation cushions will fill all liminal spaces.

Every piece of decor and furniture in the space will be specially curated to evoke a sense coziness, warmth, and vitality (plants galore!). It’ll also be a place you can go on a Friday night to listen to jazz and thumb through a book, as opposed to partying or drinking at a bar.

Our mood board for the space:

Along with being a warm and serendipitous place for you to converse with friends or go deep in reflection, we’re filling this space with an abundance of events to nourish playful curiosity and exploration.

These include group junto dinners, salon talks, essay clubs, contemplative reflections, maker nights, game nights, meditations, creativity workshops, communal art, and much more. The topics will range from tools for thought to urbanism, solar punk futures to philosophy canons, and creative writing to personal flourishing modalities.

Just as the spirit of play is dynamic - our events will be malleable, shifting and molding to the needs of our community. The Commons will be a haven where connection to self & others through mind & body catalyzes personal & communal transformation.

Right now, we’re raising money to build and design our space in Hayes Valley and we’d love to invite you to become a patron.

Become a Patron

The proceeds will cover real estate, furnishing, plumbing + heating fixtures, and light renovations to bring our vision to life. Furthermore, we are all doing this work part-time, so proceeds will create more leverage for us to allocate time towards the important stuff - serving our community.

All of our patrons will be invited to a launch party upon our opening – and any amount helps. We’ll also be launching The Commons with both a membership program and public, open hours.

This allows us to both cultivate a more intimate, regular, and connected community that can easily build shared context, while also remaining accessible to anyone interested in our space and events. Patrons are welcome to all our public hours and events, and everyone is more than welcome to inquire about our membership program.

We’re excited to be coming together to build a one-of-a-kind third space in San Francisco. If you want to stay in touch follow our journey through our Twitter , website, and our newsletter. Thank you for support 🙏

To building social rails for the next renaissance - yours,

Patricia

Thank you for being part of The Wellness Wisdom newsletter today.

I’m Patricia and have a full-time job but curate this newsletter in my free time as a labor of love.

This newsletter is free because I believe everyone deserves to have access to wellness resources. If you want to support this publication, join me down the rabbit hole 🕳🐇.

Join

Subscribe now

Support this publication by joining me down the rabbit hole🕳🐇

Hello thoughtful humans!

It’s been a while since I sent out a newsletter. To be honest, I had the largest writing block to date with regards to getting the 3rd part finished for the Third Place Series. A month ago I sat down to put together the outline for the piece, and no matter how many ways I combined the ideas, it just didn’t click. So I put the pieces down and gave it time.

In that period I tried to “do less”. Aside from Rabbit Holes, I pretty much focused 100% of my energy into my projects at Calm, reading spiritually focused books, and taking in all the sights and sounds in NYC. Just as food fasts are good for our bodies, productivity fasts are good for our soul.

We’re all under this pressure all the time—to constantly be working, doing something productive, or making stuff. This is tied to our ability to live and survive. However, the issue is that this feeling persists even when we have enough to live and survive. If we don’t take our feet off the gas pedal, we begin to merge our identity with this need. We never question it.

I hope that as we all transition into a post-COVID world, you take the time to let your soul recharge. Smell the flowers. Let that side project sit. Don’t ship. Laugh with friends. Inhale the sultry street air. And watch many, many sunsets.

Onto today’s newsletter:

• The future of virtual and physical third spaces

• Live this year as if it was your last

• Doing a “universe has my back” audit

This is Part 3 of “The Third Place” series. Checkout part 1 and part 2. 

As a refresher, “The third place” is a concept which identifies places that are not home (1st place) or work (2nd place).

Third places can be churches, coffee shops, gyms, hair salons, post offices, main streets, bars, beer gardens, bookstores, parks, and community centers. 

However, in America, studies suggests that we’ve lost more than 1/2 of the casual gathering places that existed at midcentury.

Why? After World War II, cities built more and more private suburbs.

• The 1948 Housing Bill freed up billions of dollars in credit for new homeowners. 

• Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956 led to the creation of 41,000 miles of interstate over a 10-year period, making it easier for people to live farther from work.

• By 2010, more than half of the U.S. population lived in suburbs.

Communities were increasingly replaced by separate, quieter, and often homogenous neighborhoods. Mixed-use spaces were increasingly zoned away in favor of strictly commercial or residential uses. The upshot of all this was an increase in personal space at the expense of daily conversations and serendipitous interactions with people from varying backgrounds.

As the building of highways enabled many Americans to move into suburbs from the 1950s and onwards, there were other highways being built concurrently. In the digital realm.

E-mail discussion lists, chat rooms, BBSs, Usenet groups and more all played a role in the development of online communities and social networks that sprouted in 1994+. 

As our physical environments became more isolating, we released our reliance on them to entertain or connect us as they once did.

We could build our ideal communities and cities virtually.

Yahoo’s GeoCities was an online community of user-created Web pages from the early days of the Internet. Their main selling point was: 

• Ease of use: Users were offered a worldwide audience, and the ability to say things any way they wanted to. 

• Community: You weren't just getting a Web page; you were joining a community of users

With its user profiles and pages organized by topic, the service was a precursor to online networks like Facebook, MySpace, Xanga,  Blogger and WordPress.

Many influences were abreast in the rising of online communities in the 80s+, however, one can perhaps intuitively contend that the general decrease of civic space and increase in isolation was a material one.

Increasingly, debates that once took place face-to-face happened on the internet, on Facebook, Twitter and countless other digital forums and platforms.

We collectively shied away from public civic discussion in the physical world, preferring to instead engage behind the warm glow of a screen. 

Has it ever occurred to us that perhaps this tendency is not what comes naturally. Rather, that we are a product of our environment? 

Architectural determinism is a theory employed in urbanism, sociology and environmental psychology which claims the built environment is the chief or even sole determinant of social behaviour.

Winston Churchill famously said:

“We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us.”

Followed by Marshall McLuhan:

“We shape our tools; thereafter our tools shape us.”  

The rise of American suburbs, the decline of civic public space, and the construction of digital communities in their place - all equate to a probability that perhaps our collective tendencies to be an online-first nation are not abnormal.

They are a perfectly normal response to macro trends in the last 50 years. 

In understanding how physical space might shape civic engagement, there’s no other better place to look than the birthplace of democracy: ancient Greece. 

Yes, new philosophical ideas, scientific discoveries and technological advances, were all imminent. However, physical spaces played a huge role in rich civic life.

Citizens debated everything in-person, from current events to business to the nature of the universe. It’s where they voted for politicians, preserved the law and participated collectively in making decisions for civic matters.

One notable example is the Athenian Agora: An open square that served as a place for political gatherings, the buying and selling of goods, religious services, athletic events, philosophical discussions, educational events and art displays.

Another examples is a stoa: covered walkways or porticos that existed for philosophical discussions and debates. Here, speakers and politicians would converse with the Athenian people from a pedestal called the bema.

In the past, one might strap on their sandals and head to the stoa, floating from huddle to huddle of intense discussion. Today one opens their laptop and scrolls through Twitter or Reddit.

“The piazza, in fact, is ‘un-American’. Americans feel uncomfortable sitting in a square: they should be working at the office or home with family looking at the television.” - Robert Venturi

Like many swinging pendulums throughout history, there are signs that the swing of community into the digital realm has reached its apex.

Today, IRL Connection is in the zeitgeist: 

• Religion's role in American society is shrinking

• Remote work is on the rise

• Surveys show that nearly half of Americans always or sometimes feel lonely. 

How We Gather, written by Angie Thurston and Casper Kuile while at Harvard Divinity School, points to the rise of non-secular institutions that serve some of functions that organized religion once served: community, personal transformation, social transformation, purpose finding, creativity, and accountability. 

Since the release of their landmark research, IRL Member Communities focused on community building have exploded. 

In effect, the Athenian agora has become unbundled by America’s private sector. 

Identity-based clubs focus on bringing together groups based on shared demographics.

• For women: The Wing,  Chief, The Riveter, Revel

• For people of color: Ethel’s Club

• For 45+ and up: Joss Collective

• For parents: The Wonder

Interest-based clubs focus on creating a shared space for people who share particular passions. 

• For creatives: Soho House, NeueHouse, Spring Place, Norwood Club, H Club

• For techies: South Park Commons, betaworks studios

• For writers: Center for Fiction

• For wellness-seekers: The Assembly, The Well, Wana

General clubs bring together people across identities and interests (although generally within the same socioeconomic range)

• Union Social Club in Durham, NC, Fitler Club in Philly, PA, Switchyards in Atlanta, GA, The Battery in SF

Though computers, telephones, and television have technically eliminated the need for face-to-face encounters, they have not done so in practice.

The core of city life - exchanges of goods, information, and ideas - still pulsates strongly in the rise of IRL member communities and existing quintessential American third spaces: university campuses, school yards, marketplaces, sports stadiums, parks, and public squares. 

With the Covid-19 crisis largely (fingers crossed) behind us, its occurrence has largely heightened our human urge to gather in groups.

Periods of stability interrupted by sudden breaks with rapid change (Thomas Kuhn conceptualizes these changes as paradigm shifts) are opportunities to embark on radically new and bold projects.

Planners, designers, architects, landscape managers and journalists are already writing about how this crisis will transform our relationship with public space (Alter 2020, Florida 2020, Roberts 2020). 

Acknowledging their critical community-building role, many cities recently launched economic rescue plans to save this imperiled social infrastructure. A few examples: 

• Researchers in the United States are building a database of cities that have implemented cycling and pedestrianization projects in response to COVID-19.

• Cleveland’s ReStart CLE program offered specific funds to businesses, such as grants to help restaurants winterize their outdoor spaces. 

• In Philadelphia, a citywide effort dubbed Ready. Set. Philly! promotes a return to work, recreational activities, and spending in downtown corridors. 

• A new program in Chicago, Chicago Alfresco, will encourage community gathering in artfully designed outdoor spaces.

• The Washington State nonprofit Washington Trust for Historic Preservation recently created a grant supporting the preservation of third places.

On the other hand, our Internet communities will become increasingly authentic, conducive to civil discourse, and blended with IRL components. 

The next decade of social media will move from:

• open → exclusive/semi-private/niche

• many connections → fewer, deeper connections

• curated by algorithms → curated by trusted connections

• ad-driven → community-owned

• designed to collect data → designed for privacy

• growth as key success metric → trust as key success metric

In the summer of COVID-19, Terra Incognita NYC mapped how local communities in NYC’s five boroughs maintained social ties and interaction despite social-distancing mandates; how these interactions and spaces were mediated by technologies.

What they found was that the digital city actually reinforced the physical city. 

Whilst technical infrastructure became more important, the physical infrastructure of the “real place” did not lose significance. Some “real places” were severely affected by the financial impact of the pandemic. It was the digital practice of the community that then focused on mobilizing resources to maintain the physical infrastructure.

As such, we’ll begin to see the blurring of our IRL and online communities in a cycle of reinforcement. Members can and will use technology to keep in touch with each other and the larger community when they're not able to meet in person. Technology can also provide the connective tissue that keeps relationships forged in-person going even when members aren't together in the space.

Furthermore, as digital and physical communities become more integrated, online identities will begin to translate to offline interactions (hopefully eliminating the negative behavior of trolls). Bailenson and Yee at Stanford recently coined the Proteus effect, which contended that our online personas actually influence the development of our offline ones, and vice versa.

On the other side of the spectrum, some online communities will prefer to stay predominately or completely online. In these cases, the role of community managers/moderators and blockchain technology will police bad actors and encourage positive-sum behaviors.

Anna Gat’s The Interintellect has taken off as a global community of intellectuals that host frequent salons on philosophy and science, art and technology, finance and history, religion and music.

The strong adherence to the II’s code of honor is deeply respected by the community and enforced by its moderators. One-off meet-ups are routinely organized by its members which serve to further enrich discussions online.

Furthermore, Web3 will better allow creators and their communities to capture and exchange value, forming robust digital economies, and creating a decentralized metaverse.

With the goals of removing intermediaries and giving users power and ownership over their data, identity, security, and transactions, Web 3.0’s predominant guiding principle is verifiability and trust - an antidote to the lawless and identity-less wild west of Web 1.0 and 2.0.

Verifiability makes it easy to hold promises via social contracts to consumers through computable law. In a way, the Internet is becoming a nation by taking what Bitcoin did to money and applying it to all types of programs. 

One example of this is a concept recently put forward by Balaji. Cloud Countries or reverse diaspora is a community that forms first on the internet, builds a culture online, and only then comes together in person to build dwellings and structures.

Though it will look very different from an Athenian Stoa, the future of public and civic space in America is bright.

In summary:

• We learned about the definition of third spaces today and in the past.

• What led to the loss of third spaces in America today.

• And how they will transpire into the future.

Phew! that was a lot. Thanks for traveling with me across 3 issues to dig deeper into third spaces.

I encourage you take my views with a grain of thought (ha) and read the primary literature if you can (as urban planning is not my area of expertise). Check-out Rethinking Third Spaces and The Good Great Place from the OGs.

P.S. In order to continue my investigation on Third Spaces, I recently launched The Third Space - a monthly newsletter where my friends and I review third spaces we love.

We rate third spaces on these criteria: Scent, Vibes, Texture, Lighting, Noise, and Inclusivity.

Can’t wait to continue this conversation there.

If there’s a particular third space in NYC you’d recommend or want me to write about, hit reply and lmk. (We recently all moved to NYC so will be reviewing tons of third spaces in the coming months :D)

As always -

Yours, 

Patricia

[ESSAY] The Productivity Tip No One Wants to Hear

Here’s the advice any ambitious person loves to hear:

“I get to the library and all set-up by around 5:30AM. I spend a few minutes in prayer and meditation, followed by a 5–10 minute session in my journal. The purpose of this journal session is get clarity and focus for my day.”

— productivity guru Benjamin P. Hardy

And here’s what we don’t want to hear:

“I don’t get up in the morning until I know exactly what I’m going to do. Sometimes, I stay in bed until about three in the afternoon, without any breakfast.”

— minimalist painter Agnes Martin

Sometimes we crave the feeling of productivity, just to avoid the not knowing. The beauty of Agnes Martin’s approach is that she sat with the pain of not knowing. Instead of running from it, she faced it. And by facing not knowing, it gradually became knowing again, on a deeper, more stable, more honest, more inspired level

⭐ [ESSAY] Rick and Morty and the Meaning of Life

At the heart of “Rick and Morty” is a choice: Will you crumple in despair knowing the terrifying truth that life is totally meaningless or will you saddle up the universe and strike out for a life of fun and adventure?

When Beth (his daughter) leaves her marriage, Rick suggests she get out there and do something. Saddle up and take the universe for a ride.

Beth refuses the call.

That’s what most of us do. When we’re offered an adventure we say no fucking way. Just like Beth we mumble excuses about family, obligations, work and “as much as I hate to admit it ABC’s ‘The Bachelor’” and go right back to pretending everything is fine.

We don’t ask questions, accept whatever “meaning” is passed down to us from our family, culture, society, school, religion and work. We choke it down and go right back to worrying about whatever trivial distraction has us tangled up at the moment like this famous skit from Monty Python’s “The Meaning of Life.”

The search for ultimate meaning is not about meditation and doing nothing and staying right where you were all along.

It’s about going somewhere, exploring everything and going through profound and painful self-exploration, where you strip away what’s not real layer by layer, like eating yourself alive.

What is the meaning of life is not the question you should ask.

The proper question is: What does it mean to you?

Only you can answer that. And the point of life is to find out your answer to that prompt.

⭐ [ESSAY] Why I Quit Tech and Became a Therapist

Glen Chiacchieri landed his dream job after the MIT media lab, to do research at Dynamicland with the visionary Bret Victor. He got to use his skills in engineering, programming, and user interface design to invent innovative media. He had no deadlines, no boss, and no expectations about what he would produce. It was up to him to work on what he thought was worthwhile.

Over he began to realize that his work wouldn't help people be happier in ways that felt meaningful to him. Slowly, depression crept in and took root.

Looking back from a place of greater perspective, I'd say that having freedom from external meaning-making systems caused me to look inward. With no one telling me what to work on I had to decide for myself what was meaningful in this life.

So Michael set out looking for clues: 

Even before I left my job, I began to treat my life like a science experiment, trying lots of things, reading lots of things, discussing lots of things. I intently observed my reactions to these things in an empirical way, seeing what resonated and what didn't in order discover a deeper pattern, if there was one.

Eventually he collected enough clues to pivot his life into becoming a therapist. 

I especially love his disclaimer towards the end about his windy path towards meaning:

In the telling of this story, I realize it may sound like it was a clear and direct path toward more meaningful work. I assure you, it was not.

I tried many, many things I didn't mention in the story and often felt lost, frustrated, anxious, and depressed. I also regularly had no idea what I was doing or if my scrambled searching would lead anywhere at all — the process was very non-linear, like picking a small collection of stars from the vast night sky and trying to draw lines connecting them

[BOOK] A Year to Live: How to Live This Year as If It Were Your Last. In this new book I recently picked up, Stephen Levine, teaches us how to live each moment, each hour, each day mindfully--as if it were all that was left. On his deathbed, Socrates exhorted his followers to practice dying as the highest form of wisdom. Levine decided to live this way himself for a whole year, and now he shares with us how such immediacy radically changes our view of the world and forces us to examine our priorities.

🧠 some musings:

With the worst (fingers crossed) of the pandemic behind us, death and how to make the most out of the precious life we have, has been on my mind. A goal I’ve been aspiring towards is: how can I live daily life in my 20s, with the wisdom of an 80 year old? 

If I do this, will I in effect live longer? Why should I chase external goals? Instead, why not go straight to the bone marrow of life, and build a life with what many older generations state as what truly matters: relationships, helping others, and being authentic. Is a prerequisite for wisdom that I have had to personally suffer from my own mistakes? What is the minimum viable suffering needed to reap the 80/20 of wisdom to live a life of deep peace and meaning? 

[NEW WORD] Pronoia [pro-noi-uh] n.

The opposite of paranoia. The belief that the universe is conspiring in your favor.

I love this ✨

During a particularly difficult and uncertain time, I did an audit of all the times in which the universe had my back. Basically the times where I either let go of complete control or wanted a particular outcome and got another. Every time, the outcome was 10x better for me in retrospect. Highly recommend this audit.

💌 For more pieces like the ones above, I curate the most thoughtful pieces on the Internet at Rabbit Holes with Patty.

Consider joining if you want to support me as a writer and curator.

[VIDEO] Who Am I? - The Mysterious Thing You Always Are

A short fiction story about a man's journey through continual, massive changes of his body and mind, undergoing bionic augmentations and brain-machine implants throughout the mid 2100s. At what point, Jack wonders, will he no longer be him? 

We are not human beings having a spiritual experience; we are spiritual beings having a human experience.

Thought-provoking video. 

[VIDEO] A beautiful rural mansion in the Shanghai countryside

In 2016, Xing Yongheng rented four homesteads in Kunshan and moved there with his wife and three children from the western suburb of Shanghai.

Now the family of 5 get up at 5 o’clock every morning, hang out in the fields and then drink tea, meditate, and go hiking.

Thank you for being part of The Wellness Wisdom newsletter today.

I’m Patricia and have a full-time job but curate this newsletter in my free time as a labor of love.

This newsletter is free because I believe everyone deserves to have access to wellness resources. If you want to support this publication, join me down the rabbit hole 🕳🐇.

Join

Subscribe now

Support this publication by joining me down the rabbit hole🕳🐇

Hello thoughtful humans!

I’ve been enjoying the slower pace of life back in Berkeley. One thing i’ve been doing is taking nature walks around places I used to frequent as a child and logging my findings in a digital journal.

In the past coming back to my childhood city gave me ambivalent feelings. I was a restless and bored teenager that preferred the dynamism of Oakland and San Francisco nearby.

However, coming back this time feels different. Calm, nostalgic, and brimmed with appreciation for my roots. Can’t help but think that the “place” has always been the same, yet I’ve been the variant. The shifting prism by which experience fractures through. Given that our cells completely regenerate every 7 years, i’m not surprised that I feel like a completely different person now. One who can actually be still and marinate in the beauty of Berkeley’s quaint vibes.

If you’re ever in this part of town, these are my favorite spots: Indian Rock with a 360 view of the bay, 4th Street with the most aesthetic shops, Berkeley bowl with its 50 types of granola, Ranch 99 / Pacific East Mall the unofficial third space for asian-americans, and Albany Bulb a shoreline park scattered with beautiful sculptures and glassy eyed hippies.

Onto today’s newsletter:

• how third spaces in America came to be

• lindy libraries

• beauty in solitude

This is Part 2 of “The Third Place” series. You can read Part 1 here.

As a refresher, “The third place” is a concept which identifies places that are not home (1st place) or work (2nd place).

Third places can be churches, coffee shops, gyms, hair salons, post offices, main streets, bars, beer gardens, bookstores, parks, and community centers—

In other words, third places are a community’s living room 🛋️

I’m excited about third spaces because they bolster the mental health and well-being of individuals and communities. Research has shown that they are critical to social connection.

Given 75% of the population will be living in cities by 2050, there is a critical need to revisit third places as a possible contribution to easing increasing levels of anxiety and loneliness.

However, in America, studies suggests that we’ve lost more than half of the casual gathering places that existed at midcentury.

🤔 Naturally, I had just one question: how in the world did this happen? 

My search led me to a man named Ebenezer Howard.

Howard was an English parliament man at the height of industrial expansion and population growth in 1850s London. Noise, traffic jams, slums, air pollution, and sanitation and health problems were all commonplace.

In the face of harrowing living circumstances, Howard sought social reform and mingled with free thinkers and anarchists, whose revolutionary ideas greatly influenced him. Among them were Walt Whitman and Ralph Waldo Emerson - leading thinkers in the Transcendentalist Movement.

They advocated for the inherent goodness of people and nature and believed that while society and its institutions have corrupted the purity of the individual, people are at their best when truly "self-reliant" and independent.

Taking this philosophy to heart, Howard penned To-Morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform.  The book advocated for “Garden Cities” where people lived harmoniously with nature - away from the city, and on their own plot of land. 

A Garden City combined the best of town and country in order to provide the working class an alternative to working on farms or in ‘crowded, unhealthy cities.

Structurally, garden cities were self-contained communities surrounded by "greenbelts", containing proportionate areas of residences, industry, and agriculture.

Garden cities would be self-sufficient, though once one reached max capacity, another garden city would be developed nearby.

Howard envisaged a cluster of several garden cities as satellites of a central city of 58,000 people, linked by road and rail. 

This movement caught steam and travelled across seas to eventually influence the great American architect Frank Lloyd Wright.  In 1932 he created a utopian “anti-city” called the Broadacre City which encapsulated many philosophies from the Garden City Movement. 

Though he died before Broadacre City could be realized, his city influenced many subsequent American architects and urban planners..

One such person was William Levitt.  

In 1946, Levitt returned to the US from World War II and had the idea to create the first ”Garden City” in America. He had tried to build similar communities in the past but failed. Now, he was reinvigorated by the Garden Cities he saw in Europe and Wright’s Broadacre City efforts.

He established Levitt & Son’s and the company soon became “the General Motors of the housing industry”. At its peak, a house was built every 16 minutes. Using efficient construction technology and GM-esque production line practices, homes became wildly affordable (the first homes sold for $7,990, about $80,000 today).

In 1952, a “Levittown” city was built in New Jersey.

It was the 1st American suburb.

Many macro trends supported the further proliferation of suburbs.

World War II marked the historical juncture after which informal public life began to decline in the United States. People retreated into their homes on a scale not seen before. This advent of key technology advances and government incentives helped: 

• Paired with the growing use of the motor car, The Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956 led to the creation of 41,000 miles of highways, making it easier for people to live farther from work.

• The 1948 Housing Bill gave billions of dollars of credit to returning war veterans possible to transition to home ownership. 

• Radio, telephone, and TV all became ubiquitous. 

• In a period of relative prosperity, individualism and consumer culture skyrocketed.

Catalyzed by the tides of shifting culture, cities built more and more private suburbs.

Communities were increasingly replaced by separate, quieter, and often homogenous neighborhoods. Mixed-use spaces were increasingly zoned away in favor of strictly commercial or residential uses. 

The upshot of all this was an increase in personal space at the expense of daily conversations and serendipitous interactions with people from varying backgrounds. Architected and zoned away from one other, a social price was paid.

By 2010, more than half of the U.S. population lived in suburbs.

Where do we go from here?

And that is very brief primer on the history of the American suburb, its ploy devised a century before its enactment. Its propagation fueled by a line of opinionated urban architects throughout the arteries of history. Its ramifications poignant to this day.

Just as humans create tools that ultimately shape them. Prior cultures influence built environments that ultimately impact our behaviors today.

Nonetheless, do not feel disheartened. History is a pendulum oscillating between utopia and hell. As we will see in the next issue, a new world of community living rooms, both built and virtual, are reinvigorating civic life.

See you in Part 3.

Yours, 

Patricia

📚 [concept] Lindy Library

An annex of content that has stood the test of time (say, more than 3 years old and still extremely relevant).

• The Lindy Effect observes that things that have been around for a while tend to live longer than things that haven't. 

• Social media biases us towards consuming extremely new content that becomes irrelevant the next day.

• A Lindy Library corrects this bias by helping us spend our time on things we are likely to remember and use, thus compounding our knowledge from reading.  By sharing our Lindy Library we extend this benefit to our friends.

🧘 [experience] Medicha

Medicha is a 80-minute meditation experience that goes back and forth between a minimalist space and a dark space, guided meditation, and japanese tea meditation.

Tune in & Open up - Experience going back and forth between a minimalist space and a dark space that is wrapped in the starry sky while immersing yourself in sound and lighting.

Shift - is the main guided meditation carried out in a bamboo dome. 6 types of audio guidance, which help you build inner skills to change how you feel, behave and think in your daily life.

Align - drink Sencha tea culture in a modern tea room, with utensils and surroundings crafted by local artists. During this time, gather the vivid emotions and thoughts you felt during the program.

um, sign me up 🙋‍♀️

🧠 [essay] 30 Years Ago, Romania deprived thousands of babies of human contact. Here’s what’s become of them.

This essay seriously moved me (read until the end).

It also gave me perspective on questions that have long intrigued me:

• Are there sensitive periods in neural development, after which the brain of a deprived child cannot make full use of the mental, emotional, and physical stimulation later offered?

• If an institutionalized child is transferred into a family setting, can he or she recoup undeveloped capacities?

• Implicitly, poignantly: Can a person unloved in childhood learn to love?

📖 [mobile app] Read With Me

Lisa VanDamme started Read With Me to help adults engage with classic literature deeply.

I love this idea and its one I tried to reproduce with my Philosophy Essay Club experiment. imo, adults should have the equivalent of a college discussion groups for the rest of their lives.

Lisa: I know so many people – thoughtful, intelligent, motivated people – who avoid reading the classics. And for understandable reasons: they’re busy, they don’t know what to read, they’ve never been taught how to enjoy it, they have unpleasant memories of tedious discussions in high school English…

At Read With Me, I will guide you through timelessly important and stirringly beautiful works of literature, in a manner that allows you to grasp them intellectually, connect with them emotionally, and, ultimately, learn better how to live.

🔮 [presentation] Omidyar’s Portals to Beautiful Futures

Featuring a series of provocations

• What if shared well-being became the standard of success for our nations?

• Are we ready to move from an era that rewards extraction to one that prioritizes regeneration?

• How will we move from a crisis of destabilizing information into an age of trusted wisdom?

• Can we dismantle industrial-age silos between work, home, education, play, and community?

📈 [essay] The Tyranny of Numbers

When a measure becomes a target it ceases to be a good measure.

Once you are longer tyrannised by numbers you will find that intuition, discernment and the appreciation of the intangible, the ephemeral and the beautiful will grow in their place. And cultivating these will lead to more happiness than can be inputted into any spreadsheet or plotted on any graph.

✨ [research] The yearning for something is sometimes more enjoyable than actually obtaining it

This research surveyed 1,530 Dutch individuals and found that vacationers reported a higher degree of pre-trip happiness, compared to non-vacationers, possibly because they are anticipating their holiday. Only a very relaxed holiday trip boosts vacationers’ happiness further after return.

💌 I curate the most thoughtful pieces on the Internet at Rabbit Holes with Patty. Consider joining if you want to support me as a writer and curator.

🎵 a dark academia playlist to read to ☕️🍁🌙

been reading to this lately

♥️ Living alone in Hangzhou & Shangdong

These videos normalize a solitary life that is still filled with beauty and happiness.

Li Yu, a graduate student at the China Academy of Art, lives in 4-story villa on the outskirts of Hangzhou. He says that instead of toiling for money, he now focuses on the quality of life through his artistic expression.

Hu Shunxiang from Shandong spent all her savings renting a small studio in suburban Chengdu. She has been living there for 7 years on her own.

Thank you for being part of The Wellness Wisdom newsletter today.

I’m Patricia and have a full-time job but curate this newsletter in my free time as a labor of love.

This newsletter is free because I believe everyone deserves to have access to wellness resources. If you want to support this publication, join me down the rabbit hole 🕳🐇.

Join