Philosophy, Experiment, and the Creative Interface.

“When you meet another soul, you awaken something within your own soul.”

— John O’Donohue

This essay emerged from an enquiry as I prepared for a conversation with Layman Pascal (The Integral Stage podcast) about my book The Space Between Us. The book points to awakening not as an individual pursuit but as an arising between us that transforms both person and relationship: meeting beyond identity, where presence becomes a shared field that can help heal a fractured world.

Watching Layman—both as guest and host—I noticed his ease and fluency with metamodern and integral vocabularies: frameworks that map the cultural terrain beyond postmodernity and offer language for complexity and multiple vantage points. He doesn’t use them as dry abstractions; they serve as frameworks to hold complex ideas in relationship and to clarify debate. On The Integral Stage he holds a space where dialogue opens new horizons and where the emergence of the possible is the reason for meeting together.

As I prepared for our conversation, a worry surfaced: what if we get stuck in terminology—bogged down in concepts that block rather than facilitate flow? This wasn’t about Layman—who clearly lives the work in real time—but about my own preference to speak from immediacy rather than fit experience into a ready-made box. I know words try to contain the unknowable; still, the question clarified my aim.

At the Edge of the Known: