Sylvie Barbier & Rufus Pollock are the co-founders of Life Itself – a collective of pragmatic utopians committed to practical action for a radically wiser, weller world.

Sylvie is a French-Taiwanese ritual artist whose work synthesises Eastern and Western philosophies and aesthetics. Her performance art pieces are contemporary rituals, where the audience is invited to take an active and interactive role.

Rufus is an entrepreneur, activist, author, and long-term Zen practitioner who has founded several successful for-profit and nonprofit initiatives. His 2018 book Open Revolution is about making a radically freer and fairer information age, and has been translated into multiple languages.

Rufus and Sylvie's lives come together both as a couple and through the work they are doing with Life Itself, which includes creating practice hubs and developmental spaces, driving research on the meta-crisis and pathways towards a Second Renaissance, and building partnerships across disciplines by connecting thinkers, artists, communities, and organisations exploring post-conventional ways of life.

In this conversation, we explore how Sylvie and Rufus's inner work paths converged and led them to co-found the Life Itself collective. We get into the real difficulty and vulnerability of walking a post-conventional path and why shadow work remains criminally underrated. We dig into Game A vs Game B, two fundamentally different ways of seeing reality (Wisdom vs Power), and how framing the meta-crisis through the lens of symptoms, diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment might be our clearest map yet for navigating it. We also explore which seeds of culture we're choosing to nourish, what actually makes people change their minds, and the surprising role art may play in collective transformation.

🔗[Links & Resources]🔗

• Life Itself collective
• Life Itself YouTube channel
• Sylvie Barbier's personal site
• Follow Sylvie on Substack
• Rufus Pollock's personal site
• Follow Rufus on Substack
• Second Renaissance

🕰️[Time Stamps]🕰️

0:00 - Introduction
3:04 - How Sylvie and Rufus’s journeys came together
11:12 - Founding the Life Itself collective and the Second Renaissance movement
17:07 - Running transformational practice hubs
21:18 - The need for continuity and rootedness
25:18 - The difficulty and vulnerability of the post-conventional path
36:26 - Shadow work is still underrated, and a modernist in rehab
41:05 - Game A vs Game B
46:16 - What a Roman Watching Christians Die in the Colosseum can teach us
49:15 - The idea behind the Over the Mountains podcast
52:44 - Which seeds are we deciding to nourish? / Creating Pockets of Culture
57:40 - Two ways of seeing reality (Wisdom vs Power)
1:09:10 - The need for holistic development
1:17:52 - Creating more good faith dialogue and what makes people change their minds
1:24:40 - Framing Meta-crisis conversations through symptoms, diagnosis, prognosis, & treatment
1:34:16 - Art’s role in collective transformation

*Subscribe to my YouTube channel to watch the video versions of the Elevating Consciousness Podcast

*Subscribe to the Insighter Substack to get in-depth articles on the theory and practice of human transformation through a post-conventional

Stephen Zerfas is the CEO and Co-founder of Jhourney — a tech startup scaling transformative meditation through a data-driven lens, guiding complete beginners into deeply absorbed meditation states known as the Jhanas, in less than a week.

Stephen discovered the first three jhanas through his own practice and, upon learning of their profound history, made it his mission to bring them to as many people as possible. He has since trained with leading jhana teachers, including Leigh Brasington and Delson Armstrong.

Thus far, Jhourney has served over 1,300 alumni with a 60-70% success rate in helping participants access the jhanas on weeklong retreats.

Before founding Jhourney, Stephen worked as a software engineer at Lyft and a management consultant at Bridgespan, a Bain affiliate. A University of Notre Dame graduate, he lives in the Bay Area with his wife and daughter.

The following conversation was recorded live during Limicon - a digital conference for people in the liminal, game b, and metamodern adjacent spaces.

In it, we speak about what the Jhanas are, how Stephen discovered them through self-experimentation, and why he decided to found a tech-company that teaches them. Later, Stephen guides us through a towards Jhana meditation, and we close with a group discussion on whether morality is — or must be — part of such a meditation practice.

🔗[Links & Resources]🔗

• Jhourney's website
• Subscribe to Stephen on Substack
• 90 second video capturing the intensity of the jhanas from people recorded on retreat
• A Jhourney retreat reflection
• Meditation safety podcast
• How to cry on cue
• The Mind Illuminated by Culadasa

🕰️[Time Stamps]🕰️

0:00 - Introduction
2:49 - The contemplative corner of the liminal web
6:12 - How Stephen discovered the Jhanas on his own
12:22 - The guesswork problem of meditation and starting Jhourney
17:23 - What are the Jhanas?
20:26 - Are these universally discovered states?
22:44 - What do the Jhanas feel like?
24:15 - Super well-being and taking the technology of meditation seriously
27:07 - Main barriers to accessing the Jhanas
34:50 - Orienting to the meditation: Reflect like a scientist, play like a child
38:10 - Towards Jhana guided meditation
1:18:19 - What role does morality play in meditation?
1:28:09 - The biggest concerns of Jhana meditation practice

*Subscribe to my YouTube channel to watch the video versions of the Elevating Consciousness Podcast

*Subscribe to the Insighter Substack to get in-depth articles on the theory and practice of human transformation through a post-conventional

Daniel Garner is a writer, philosopher, and one-half of O.G. Rose – the philosophical and literary voice he shares with his wife, Michelle Garner.

Their work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize as well as the Uno Press lab prize and has been featured in literary publications such as The Iowa Review, The William and Mary Review, and Broken Pencil.

Daniel has been involved in the writing of over a dozen books, including The Conflict of Mind, The Map is Indestructible, the Belonging Again series, and a creative fiction work, Under the Wing.

When not writing or thinking on the deepest questions of our times, he manages the Mead Lake Lodge wedding venue, teaches piano using visuals from the DLG Pattern Method, and raises four children.

The following conversation was recorded live during Limicon - a digital conference for people in the liminal, game b, and metamodern adjacent spaces.

In it, we explore how belonging can be created beyond conformity or isolationism in a pluralistic and hyper-fragmented world — and what it asks of us across different scales, from the local to the national to the global. We highlight the importance of lack and negativity, forces so often overlooked in spiritual spaces; examine weak versus costly perennialism and the limits of any single system, model, or medium; and sit with the difference between talking about belonging and living it.

🔗[Links & Resources]🔗

• O.G. Rose’s personal site
• Subscribe to O.G. Rose’s Substack
• Watch O.G. Rose’s YouTube channel
• Belonging Again: An Explanation by O.G. Rose
• Belonging Again: An Address by O.G. Rose
• Triumph of the Therapeutic by Phillip Rieff

🕰️[Time Stamps]🕰️
0:00 - Intro
2:45 - The central problem of belonging
12:27 - Regressive forms of Belonging
16:37 - How belonging differs on a local, national, and global level
21:15 - Cheap Vs Costly Perennialism and evolving structures
30:18 - Negativity, lack, and radical difference
37:29 - The limits of any one system, model, or medium
41:51 - Hegel's absolute knower, the Deleuzian individual, the Nietzschean child, and the debate between Freud and Jung
46:10 - The irony of not belonging in a conversation about belonging and the importance of intelligibility
57:24 - The social coordination mechanism
1:03:01 - Somewheres and anywheres
1:06:41 - Democratizing media
1:11:41 - Racism as the problem of givens and releases
1:20:06 - Nature as a pathway to diversity and belonging
1:25:18 - The pros and cons of digital history
1:30:11 - The difference between talking about belonging and living it
1:35:37 - Finding belonging in different mediums and structures
1:41:45 - Daniel’s insights from running Eunoia, an in-person gathering space
1:49:03 - We are all doomed without adequate social coordination

*Subscribe to my YouTube channel to watch the video versions of the Elevating Consciousness Podcast

*Subscribe to the Insighter Substack to get in-depth articles on the theory and practice of human transformation through a post-conventional