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