Making Sense of a New Reality: NonOrdinary and The Edge of Novelty
A cutting-edge new course with Trish Blain
Imagine a grandfather clock full of bees. The thousands of bees in the hive create a complex intelligence that’s more than the sum of its parts. The clock is made of hundreds of intricate elements, but as they tick away, they don’t create anything other than what they are. The hive can adapt to change, the clock can’t. Take one bee out of the hive and it will keep going; take a single cog out of the clock and it stops dead.
The clock and the hive represent two different kinds of systems we encounter every day: complicated systems and complex systems respectively. When we’re trying to make sense of the world, we are making sense while embedded in something vastly complex, mysterious and beautiful. An ever-changing reality that has within it countless complicated systems, from political and economic structures to the machines we use every day. A world of overlapping hives and clocks, filled with billions of people with their own desires and motivations.
Much of my work over the last few years has been based on the insight that the cognitive and emotional tools we use to make sense of each of these different types of systems, one alive and adaptive, the other closed and mechanical, are not the same. And yet, as Daniel Schmachtenberger and others have pointed out, we’re often trying to solve complex problems as if they’re complicated. A lot of the crises we’re facing collectively, and our inability to build the kind of social systems that can help us move forward, are powered by that confusion.
This is the idea behind sensemaking: the process of figuring out what’s going on as these systems interact, and learning the skills needed to do that. But having run sensemaking courses for thousands of people around the world, I’ve found there’s always something essential missing; some deeper level of understanding we need to connect with for a broader picture of what’s really going on.
Imagine we could zoom in on one bee crawling up the face of the clock, so close that we could see the individual atoms vibrating inside it. If we kept zooming in, we would enter a very different reality, made of subatomic particles existing in a sea of ever-shifting probabilities. We don’t yet understand that reality, or how it creates the world we’re part of. And that’s the tip of the iceberg of where our current sensemaking can’t take us.
We can’t really understand the mysteries of the hive, or the clock, unless we look beyond the physical and the ordinary. The mystery of existence invites us to question the deepest foundations of reality, to ask what may be happening underneath the appearance of things, whether a social interaction or the universe itself. What roles does your consciousness play in the reality you’re perceiving? What lies beyond what you can perceive - the unknown unknowns’ and what does it really take to enter new perceptual territory to find out?
For those of us who care about finding a way out of the metacrisis and building a new kind of world, these questions are essential. They also take us beyond the ordinary, and into the NonOrdinary. This is Trish Blain’s term (and approach) for this new reality many of us are sensing over the horizon. To get there, we need to develop nonordinary skills.
This is the inspiration for NonOrdinary Sensemaking, a new online course Trish and I are offering. We’ve crafted a deep, rich and participatory experience full of practical exercises, models and practices to help you move beyond your ordinary perception and give you cognitive, emotional and intuitive skills you won’t find anywhere else.
This course is about bringing together Trish’s work and mine to offer a new approach to how we navigate and thrive in a new reality.
Trish brings three decades of experience working with nonordinary states, as well as a dynamic map and compass that provides a new framework and tools for navigating and creating new realities in our lives. When we’re stuck in an old pattern, we’re stuck in the ordinary. To move forward, we need a way to recognise and then live on the edge of what we know, and what we’ve learned to expect.
This is as true in our personal lives and relationships as it is collectively. Many of us are concerned with the state of the world, and whether we’re involved in environmental campaigning, systems change, Game B, metamodernism or other communities focused on building something new, the first stage is understanding how to recognise and navigate the new in the first place.
This is why I’m collaborating with Trish, because her NonOrdinary approach goes further than any model I’ve found in doing this. It recognises that an understanding of human desire, different states of consciousness and intuition is essential for any meaningful change in how we live and any lasting cultural progress. Above all, this process about recognising that the ordinary isn’t working any more. It invites us to include and then move beyond it, into new territory that’s fresh and alive.
Why This, Why Now?
I’ve been working with Trish for the last three years to make sense of my own life, deepen my intuition and expand my awareness. I hesitate to call her a coach as it doesn’t do justice to her work, but certainly she has helped me make significant changes in my life, as well as providing much deeper psycho-spiritual guidance using her NonOrdinary framework.
When I signed up for the DMT extended state trial, arguably the most intense altered state a human can experience, I asked her if she’d help me prepare for and integrate it. The skills I learned were invaluable, not just for the trial, but in my relationships and my overall sensemaking. Her models, including the Four Forces that I introduced in this piece a few weeks ago, are so useful because they embrace the realities of culture and politics, while also being complex enough to include the metaphysical.
About Trish
Trish Blain is a positive impact entrepreneur, international facilitator, and expert in nonordinary skills and states of consciousness. An explorer at the evolving edge of what it means to be human, Trish is deeply committed to creating a world where we all thrive. She is passionate about helping change-makers, leaders, and lovers of life amplify their pleasure and impact. She is the Founder of NonOrdinary, which offers community and training for paradigm shifters using a unique framework called The Four Forces, developed over 30 years of experimentation, research, and teaching. She uses this framework in combination with other modalities, a method she calls EdgesWork, in her individual coaching and in group settings in retreats, workshops and conferences. Learn more here.
How the Course Came About
Something Trish and I both share is the belief that we’re all living in nonordinary times, and that we need nonordinary skills to make sense of them. Many of us now spend much of our waking lives on the internet, a realm more similar to the otherworlds and underworlds of folklore and altered states than real life. Generative AI has the potential to change not just our economies, but our conception of consciousness.
As we try to navigate these technological advances, on the social level we’re struggling to share our realities with one another as culture war rages. We’re all trying to get different desires met, and coming from different states of consciousness that mean we often see the world in radically different ways.
But what if we could learn how to navigate these different states effectively? To translate between them, choose when and how we explore our inner worlds, and find new ways to build exciting new realities together? The more we dialogued around this, the more it became clear to me that these questions invite us to go somewhere new, and develop a new
And it’s a process which is far more fruitful, fun and enlivening when we do it together. Sensemaking isn’t some abstract activity. It’s something we live and breathe. It’s a qualitative, subjective activity that can’t be separated from you, your environment, your history and your unique perspective. When we make sense together in a new way, encompassing a deeper understanding of states of consciousness, human desire and metaphysics, we really start to enter new territory together.
Why States Matter
One of the key ideas in the course is that how we make sense is determined by the state of consciousness we’re in. Different states give us access to different aspects of reality, and whole different realities. To find new ways to collaborate to build the kind of world we want to live in, we have to become competent at moving in and out of these different states. But what is a state? It’s a temporary way of being that changes your perception. Your emotions can be seen as states. Being in love is a state. Some states can also take us far beyond our ordinary perception, in spiritual practices like deep meditation, psychedelic exploration or breathwork. The flow state can bring us into deep immersion with the world around us. Others are more subtle, like tapping into our intuition, or becoming mindful and tracking your bodily sensations.
In NonOrdinary Sensemaking, we’ll explore how you can move between these states, and apply information and ways of perceiving from them to your day to day life. Trish’s work is founded on nonordinary experiences that don’t involve psychedelics, and the idea is that these states can be developed and we can learn how to pull the ‘levers’ that allow us to tap into them on demand. So this isn’t a course about psychedelics, though we will delve deeply into the topics I explore in my book, and why what we’re learning from psychedelic science is so important. Instead, we will offer bonus sessions on breathwork, meditation, dialogue practices and process work so you can have the experience of going beyond yourself.
Paying subscribers get 10% off the course, while Community Members get 20% off
How NonOrdinary Sensemaking works
This will be a participatory experience, with live sessions each week alongside further exercises you can choose to do with others on the course. All sessions are recorded, so you can also access it in your own time if you prefer.
We’ve divided the experience into three sections of three weeks each. We begin on July 18 and run for 9 weeks with a break every three weeks. In these break weeks, you’ll have the option to participate in a state-practice like breathwork or group process work. You’ll also have access to dozens of films, articles and meditations to help you design your own state-training regime with our support. For example, you may decide to keep a ‘Flow Diary’ to start gaining competence in flow states, and applying what you learn in them to making changes in your life.
You’ll learn how to apply the NonOrdinary framework to your day to day life, as well as gaining a wider lens on what’s happening in politics and culture. We’ll also explore how you can use it to make sense of topics that normal sensemaking practices often struggle with, like UAP’s or AI consciousness, that too often get confused by New Age woo or strange internet myth making. Throughout, you’ll have a chance to share with, learn from and get to know others on the course in a collective journey into novelty.
Part I: Introducing the Map and the Compass
In part one, we bridge the ordinary and the nonordinary. We explore the shifts in perspectives and skills needed to begin sensemaking in nonordinary ways. How do you navigate in unknown territory? What does it mean to live in a new paradigm in practical terms? What are the new skills and levers that allow you to experience and impact the world around you with more choices and ease?
You’ll learn the key components of Trish’s NonOrdinary approach, including the Edges Map - a map for the unknown territory of human experience - and the Four Forces which is the compass that helps us explore that map. This approach is additive, meaning that we’ll also combine these approaches with the cognitive, emotional and cultural sensemaking tools I’ve been developing and teaching over the last five years. However, the synergy between our approaches will give these techniques an exciting new twist. For example, instead of learning how to practice ‘Steelmanning’, the technique where we argue from an opponent’s point of view to show we understand their position, we’re going to go a step further to also feel their position, and the underlying desires driving it. Moving beyond the intellectual and cognitive and toward a broader model that includes it but also adds in the real human motivations underlying our ideas.
Part II: Mapping Culture & Possibility
In part two, we start to apply these frameworks and skills to making sense of culture. However, making sense is just the first step. Many of us also have a desire to contribute to culture, engage with it deeply, consciously evolve and transform it. In this three week section, we’ll be mapping out real-world issues using different ways of nonordinary sensemaking that not only add layers of insight but also open new options for how to move forward.
Part III: Expanding & Emerging Realities
In our final three sessions, we expand our concept of reality and our place in it. What other forms of consciousness are there? How do we as humans fit into the vast ecosystem of consciousness, from the plant and animal domains to growing possibility of conscious AI impacting our lives? How can we take our place as conscious agents of life and embrace our ability to actively craft our shared reality?
Conclusion
The best experiences and courses have a life of their own. They begin as one thing, maybe a comment or an idea, and then start to evolve based on what they want to be. NonOrdinary Sensemaking has been the result of that emergent process, and the more it’s grown the more excited I’ve become to share it, and Trish’s wider body of work which she’s been developing under the radar for years and is now ready to launch.
If you’re inspired, like many of us, by a deep desire to see the world move toward what Charles Eisenstein calls ‘the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible’, this course is for you. We aren’t going to all change the world together in nine weeks, but we will go on a deep process of learning new skills, perspectives and techniques that can transform how we navigate new territory and build something new. If you’re tired of the ordinary, step into this process to see what’s past the edge of the new.