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We live in fascinating times, where all this global political turmoil motivates various new ways of thinking and solving problems. There is a growing acknowledgement that our technology and
economy got us far and helped us to achieve unprecedented levels of progress and wellbeing, but more of the same will not get us through the bottleneck of dozens of existential risks that
threaten the survival of humanity past 21st century. This Emerge podcast episode with Bonnita Roy explains six different ways to go meta and their pros and cons if taken too far individually
and not being accompanied by others: 1. META-SYNTHESIS — transcending and integrating various theories — but this can get too abstract and overwhelming quickly. 2. DECONSTRUCTION —
pioneered in the West by some postmodernists and applied to texts, but being present in Eastern thinking for a long and in a more embodied way- analyzing and taking things apart until one
arrives at nothingness or empty form — the drawback is navel-gazing, nihilism and inaction. 3. META-COGNITION by role-playing (deep play) or taking outside view by e.g. looking at Earth from
space (overview effect). Since not everyone can travel to space we might need more “psychonauts” (see point 6). 4. ORTHOGONAL APPROACHES — kind of meta-metaphysics — creating new
metaphysics by tweaking some aspects — e.g. viewing people as processes and not as objects or instruments, “new animism” (coffee makes millions of people move each day). 5. SIMPLEXITY — this
is my favorite area of current explorations — here are approaches in *mapping* or searching for a source code of civilizations and various simple heuristics (all-win solutions) and
generator functions (rivalry) (Daniel Schmachtenberger — Civilization Emerging, Jordan Hall — Deep Code); *sensing* (Dave Snowden and his Cynefin framework and tools for weak signals
detection); and *hacking* (Bonnita Roy puts herself in both mapping and hacking area). 6. HOLISTIC PARTICIPATION — more embodied practices where one tries to gain new energy, inspiration and
mental capacity by embodied training, e.g. meditation, breathing techniques, creating new micro-habits and discarding old ones. Here the work of John Vervaeke fits (Awakening from the
Meaning Crisis series) — combining cutting edge neuroscience with liberal arts education and ancient wisdom. Or various “group flow” projects and biohackers — e.g. Jamie Wheal and Flow
Genome Project. ………………………………….. In another article, I also tried to divide four modes of thinking in the context of “cause prioritization” in effective altruism and came up with combining
*synthetic thinking* vs *analytical thinking* on vertical axis, and *cluster thinking* versus *sequence thinking* on horizontal axis. I guess this can be expanded and reconciled with Bonnita
Roy’s work. _You can support my __writing__ and __videos__ on these topics and my small podcasting project __Between Ideas & Subcultures__ through __Patreon__ or __PayPal__._