The Parallax Forge - First Cycle
The FORGE will beginn Sunday, May 3rd, at 6 pm CET, and end Sun, May 24th
Bring the Future into Being
with Layman Pascal
PARALLAX FORGE is not a course in the traditional sense. It is a four-week future-crafting event. This is the first wave of a new ongoing feature of the Parallax network. A participatory transformation space that goes beyond lectures, hangouts and interesting explorations. This first four-week process begins a journey in which perception, narrative, and future possibilities are actively reshaped.
We are the people we have been waiting for. To catalyze that into a reality, we must show up more completely, increase our multidimensional capacities, and start activating creating futures worth inhabiting. And we have to do this together. The Forge is a narrative transformation engine altering what futures become possible. It's not a hub, container, or incubator. It´s the Forge.
Hosted for a cohort of 40 participants, the Forge brings intellectual inquiry, ritualized reflection, and collective sense-making within a consciously held liminal field. Each cycle is guided by mythotechnician Layman Pascal, acting less as lecturer and more as shamanic elicitor of change, helping participants read the deeper patterns beneath their personal and collective stories and align them to possible collective futures.
This is not about acquiring information. Across four weeks, participants engage in:
Guided provocations and framing impulses
Live dialogues and collective inquiry
Narrative reframing and future-oriented sense-making
A shared field in which new perspectives can crystallize
Spontaneous invocations of futures
The Forge is designed for those who sense that the future is not something we wait for, but something we participate in creating—through attention, language, and imagination. Each iteration of Parallax Forge is unique. The content will shift. The questions will evolve. What remains constant is the intention: to bring the future into being.
Course Orientation
You have about 1 billion seconds left in your life. Will it be worth it?
The core goal of this four-week encounter is bring the future into being while becoming the beings who can inhabit the future together. We are forging realities. In the process, we also are being forged -- into better weapons, tools, organisms, teammates, and systems. Accelerating this process for an accelerating world requires three key principle:
Firstly, we must be able to become a deeper group quickly. We must take risks to become rapidly entangled in a deeply human way.
Secondly, we must take real steps in clarifying our experience of the current and emerging world & articulating our most desired futures with a precision that persuades us. From there we become proactive futurists using all dimensions of human experience to build and nudge worthwhile worlds into being
Thirdly, we must undertake practices to grow our general capacity, antifragility, existential satisfaction, inner integration, will-power, creativity, and our full spectrum of human capacities to give and receive energy.
Do this together:
Deepen Connection + Clarify Exciting Visions + Become More Awesome
This initial cycle of the Parallax Forge course includes four intensive sessions, homework assignments & digital community building.
“Philosophy will not save you. Your opinions will not transform you. The “news” will not inform you. And your societies and algorithms will not magically figure out how to achieve secure thriving. They still run on if you are lonely, unfulfilled, and unstable in a dystopian landscape. So we have to make value-laden change for ourselves -- and each other. That takes clear desire, strong will, deep meditation, ongoing growth, and real connections.
For this, we need new kinds of gymnasiums in which we can figure out our personal and shared impressions of our actual life and world. On the basis of this more reliable sensemaking, we can forge exciting new visions of plausible or miraculous futures that are worth fighting for. In this process, we can start immediately practicing to be a network of people who are smarter, deeper, stronger, healthier, more existentially satisfied, and more mutually capable of trusting and being trustworthy for each other.
Although we are very interested in Tarot, the Post-Tragic, the Network Civilization, Developmental Theory, etc., this “topics” have been a prextet to gather with the right kind of people, clarify our involvement in the world, grow in inner and shared power, and to contribute to a wise world worth living in. Let’s now make that the explicit premise our gatherings.
Forget about leaving a course more “informed.” Start expecting to leave a course with more clarity about your life, deeper relationships, a stronger will, and more capacity to show up with joy, virtue, strength, in all kinds of realities.”
- Layman Pascal
Course Content
Class I – OUR WORLDS
First Encounter: Sunday, May 3rd, 10 am PST (Los Angeles), 1 pm EST (New York), 7 pm CET (Paris)
Focus: Clarifying and sharing your understanding of the words you inhabit -- planet, culture, and your personal life. What is our real condition? Surfacing our needs, weakness, and desires for the broader world and our privates lives is the first step to building an exciting vision.
Key inquiries:
What is our living story about what’s happening on this planet right now?
What are our strategies for handling ontological flooding?
What are the possible futures that morally and viscerally turn you on?
Class II – OUR HEALTH & RELATIONSHIPS
Second Encounter: Sunday, May 10, 10 am PST (Los Angeles), 1 pm EST (New York), 7 pm CET (Paris)
Focus: Holding each other accountable for both objective & subjective health. Let’s really figure out what kind of bodily experience we want for the rest of our lives. e and what kind of embodiment do we need you to have? These bodies and their hearts are in relatioships that should be meaningful, practical and pleasurable as they work together to make the day after tomorrow worth havig.
Key inquiries:
How should your embodiment feel between now and your death?
Are you taking your health seriously -- and what would that even mean?
What is your & our version of a satisfying relational life like?
Class III – THE FORCE OF DECISIONS
Third Encounter: Sunday, May 17, 10 am PST (Los Angeles), 1 pm EST (New York), 7 pm CET (Paris)
Focus: Gaining fluency in how individuals make complex decisions that they can live with in integrity and how smartgroups can make more powerful collective decisions. While avoiding fixation and learning to live in ambiguity, we still must become more powerful deciders.
Key inquiries:
Do I ever really conclude anything?
Do I have the moral force to gamble on the best possible future?
Can this cohort of people make decisions that are smarter than any of us?
Class IV – DREAMS, MADNESS & OBSESSIONS
Final Encounter: Sunday, May 24, 10 am PST (Los Angeles), 1 pm EST (New York), 7 pm CET (Paris)
Focus: Gaining fluency in our irrational capacities and cultivating a worthwhile, subtle, and inner life for the future. Making allies of the things that haunts us and power us.
Key inquiries:
How can I get better at the non-rational aspects of real community?
How can my obsessions help create the futures we desire?
What will I dream about in the world that I am dreaming towards?
About your facilitator
Layman is an author, public speaker & retreat leader specializing in metamodern spirituality, nondualist theology, integral religion, and metashamanics. He is the host of the popular podcast THE INTEGRAL STAGE (and the more elite SOULMAKERS series).
He works with Endemic, ICON, the Metamodern Spirituality Lab, the Foundation for Integral Religion & Spirituality, Emerge/Perspectiva, RESPOND, Limicon, the Transdisciplinary Leadership Review, Beyond Interfaith, and other leading-edge projects. His book “Gurdjieff for Time Between Worlds” was recently published as the first book from Sky Meadow Press