February - December 2026
The Art of Transformation // Immersion
Awakening our capacity for deep transformative agency and impact.
The Immersion has two main parts.
The first part is intended to activate a process of attunement--an awakening to a way of seeing things that discloses new, unprecedented possibilities for understanding and being in the world.
The second part is intended to unfold--to teach us, if you will--a way of interacting with others, in a mutual and deliberate manner, which discloses new, unprecedented possibilities for, and with others.
Another way of saying this…
In the first part, we set about to open ourselves up to new ways of seeing, and being in, the world…
… while in the second part we develop skills and practices with which we might deliberately interact with others in creating similar openings for them (and, as such, ongoingly re-activating and deepening our own ever-unfolding awakening).
The focus of the Immersion is human transformation: what it is and how to effect its unfolding.
In this Immersion, we inquire deeply, and artfully, into the question at the heart of this investigation:
“What is the nature of human being and how might we facilitate its becoming, its transformation?”
The question is deliberately posed as a philosophical question. Not in the sense of dry, speculative abstraction, or as a disembodied intellectual study.
Rather, philosophy as Socrates practiced it. Philosophy as in the liberatory philosophy of a Wittgenstein… of a Heidegger. A ‘second-person’ philosophy that impacts how we live, how we work, how we love.
Framed as such a philosophy, the prime objective of the Immersion is
To unconceal our inherited understanding of what it is to be human—an understanding that informs all that we think, and are, as human beings, while all the while keeping itself concealed in that very manner of thinking and being.
To disclose for ourselves the nature of human transformation, which the unconcealing of our understanding of human being makes possible.
To grow a set of deliberate practices and ontological distinctions by which we might deliberately effect such transformations for, and with, others.
The Immersion activates an ontological (concerned with being) and intellectual discovery of who and what we fundamentally are as human beings. At the same time, it reveals an actionable body of practices and distinctions which uncover the nature of human transformation, and how we might deliberately bring about its unfolding.
It is a deep program for those who are committed to bringing a new quality of impact as human beings within a world of massive transition.
The next Immersion starts February 17, 2026, and goes until early December.
Or, read on….
…Detailed Course Description…
Part I: Tuning
The first part is intended to tune us to a way of seeing things anew, to awaken us to a new way of encountering the world, in the very worlding which characterizes our moment-by-moment encounter in, and with, an ever-unfolding, ever-evolving reality.
I call this part of the Immersion ‘Tuning’ to draw a metaphoric parallel with a musical instrument: when you change the running of a guitar—say, from normal tuning to an ‘open’ tuning—you dramatically alter the nature of the music, and the technical manner of its performance. The guitar shows up as a different instrument.
In a metaphorically parallel fashion, when we tune ourselves to a different way of interpreting and understanding the world around us, we dramatically alter the nature of the world, and of the manner in which we might act within it. The world, in this case, shows up as a different world.
The tuning which we intend to cultivate here is one which seeks to disclose—and as such bring about a deliberate unravelling of—that fundamental understanding of ourselves and the world given by the tradition of modernity, and by the modes of thinking about and experiencing the world that it most naturally—even organically—yields.
…. The ideas, the vocabularies, the distinctions, the practices, the habits that we encounter daily, hourly, minute-by-minute—those which furnish our 'house of being', that render the world as that which we have come to understand.
All of these are given by that mode of understanding that we always and already are—that by which we automatically come to understand ourselves and our world, most fundamentally.
Now here’s the kicker…
Such a mode of understanding is not one which we have; rather, it is one that has us. It is that in which we dwell, ontologically.
The world always shows us something, and that something is always a product of the manner in which we dwell. And the possibilities for being and action which disclose themselves for us (that is, which show themselves as viably actionable actions) are given by that in which we dwell.
To disclose the manner of that dwelling, of that by which modernity’s understanding of the nature of reality and being has us…. This is the main work of this first part.
How will this work, practically speaking?
Dwelling and Attuning.
We will dwell in a collection of readings, videos, and other works which challenge and stretch us. That expose us to angularities of thinking that defy that in which the current dominant tradition plies its trade.
And, Yes… we will be challenged here. Challenged ontologically (in our very mode of being). And challenged intellectually (in our customary manner of thinking).
It is my belief that to evolve consciousness includes ipso facto evolving ourselves not just emotionally, and not only ontologically… but also intellectually.
Now, in recent years (and decades), ‘intellect’ has gotten a bad wrap—and, in many ways, rightfully so. But I believe this sentiment arises from the conflation of intellect with the primary way to which it has been put to use within modernity’s understanding of it.
In this course, I want to reinstate the dignity, and importance, of the intellect. To me, clear thinking is key if we are no longer to be consigned to that which is given by the inherited understanding, and its ten thousand idioms (which all always amount to a single idiom: I'm right and you're wrong, and that's that!).
Meanwhile, we attune ourselves to a world when we can begin to understand it musically, polyphonically, paratactically (look it up)—to be emotionally attuned to the sheer miracle and almost unbearable beauty of the very fact of being, of reality. To develop our capacity to become poetic visionaries and even ecstatics is the beginning of that magnificent grace that is our very attention itself.
Beauty itself, as we will discover, may be the deepest purpose of the cosmos. To attune ourselves to the very nature of beauty—as that to which we are present, as that to which we are most deeply attentive—is key the manner of tuning that is at the heart of this work.
Finally, such an attunement includes attunement to our own manner of being. What are the ways in which that tradition of inherited understanding which, in this part of the Immersion, we seek to deconstruct, makes who and what we are ourselves, without our fully seeing it? This fundamental question will be at work here, as we seek toward the origin of what it is to be human.
To tune ourselves to such a manner of dwelling and attunement—to deliberately Stand in such a manner, and in a cosmos that comes about from such a Standing—this is the intention of this first part of the Immersion.
Part II: Praxis
In the first part of the Immersion, we endeavor to tune ourselves to a way of seeing, of thinking, and of being in relation to the world, that reveals a new possibility for what it means to be human. Key to this tuning is ontological unfoldment—or ontological disclosure, by which, in revealing a new possibility for being human, we also disclose new possibilities for being for ourselves in our own lives and work.
In the second part, called Praxis, we step back from our being subject to such a manner of ontological unfoldment, so that we might begin to examine what it is that is happening when such unfoldment is manifesting.
By such an examination, we reverse-engineer, if you will, the actions, the modes of interaction, the manner of languaging, and the qualities of presence and being that have the effect of catalyzing moments of ontological insight.
The terms ‘ontology’, ‘ontological unfoldment’, and ‘ontological insight’ are key terms in this course. And though these terms will receive full treatment in Part I (as well as elsewhere, such as on my Substack blog), a few words now are in order.
The term ‘ontology’ refers to being. In this course—and in this work more generally—the term ‘ontology’ is used in a very particular way, inspired primarily by Martin Heidegger (and his many successors) to refer to the being of human beings.
As we will see in this course ‘being’ is not the same thing (at all) as ‘beings’. Being refers to that—as yet unnamable (but which we will endeavor to name in the Immersion)—’quality’, ‘essence’, ‘vast emptiness’ which gives rise to the entities we call beings.
When we say “She is….” or “They (or We) are….” or “It is….” or “I am….”…. the word ‘is’ points to some quality that constitutes, and in a way emanates from, these people and things. It is this quality which points to their being.
So, being refers to how people, in a sense, show up in the world. But it also refers to how the world shows up for people—how the situations, events, people, and things occur for them such that they 'are’ the way they are in their experience.
Now, the problem is—and, if you’ve been reading this stuff or hearing me speak about it, you’ll note that I’ve been harping on this quite a bit—that, unlike most things in our world, being is not something we can point to and say “Look—there it is!”
Being, as we understand it here, is elusive—it is at once hidden and utterly familiar. In fact, you could say that it is in its very familiarity that it so successfully conceals itself.
So, to come back to the main thread… in the first part of the Immersion, we uncover the nature of being, from the perspective of ontological philosophy and from the perspective of our own process of self-examination.
In this second part, we leverage insights garnered in the first part to inform a process by which ask the question that is in many ways the very heart of this course:
What is the nature of human ontological transformation, and what is happening such that such transformations can be deliberately unfolded?
We will engage in this part of the course in a manner similar to a graduate seminar…. We will examine a series of texts, transcripts, and video (or audio) recordings—moments of evidenced ontological unfoldment—in order to extrapolate patterns of interaction, linguistic practice, presence, and affect, as exercised by an ontological ‘facilitator’ over the course of a given conversational interaction.
In this endeavor, we will incorporate the ideas and practices of ontological inquiry—a specific body of distinctions and practices recently drawn together by Drew Kopp and others concerned with the application of ontological philosophy and rhetoric to the field of transformative education and learning.
What we expect to emerge over the course of this series of examinations will be a kind of ‘pattern language’ for the deliberate facilitation of ontological unfoldment. Such a pattern language will, unlike many other ‘pattern languages’ we encounter, be one of upmost subtlety and effect, and will involve the distinguishing of nuanced manners of languaging and interaction.
Such a pattern language exercises itself as a deliberate mode of dialogical (ontological) engagement. One which is founded upon the skillful unfolding of a body of linguistic distinctions and actions, given by a particular manner of presence and attentiveness, and energized through the deliberate activation of a particular quality of social space…. all of which we will observe and highlight over the course of this study.
As we engage in our study, the elements of this pattern language—and its component elements—will become clearer and clearer to us. Such that, at some point, we ourselves are inspired and empowered to bring them into our own way of working with people.
Our ability to appreciate, comprehend, and even critique the samples we will study in this part of the Immersion will turn back toward, and, ultimately, rely upon the manners of dwelling and attunement disclosed in Part I. But, now finding a home within such a pattern language, and the body of distinctions and practices for the catalyzing of moments of transformative insight which that pattern language embodies.
It is in this integration of Tuning and Praxis that will show us the art and science which we can now finally name. And that name is poieses—the art and science of bringing forth that which did not exist before.
In this case, that which we are bringing forth is a reinvention, if you will, of human being itself—of the possibility of what it is to be human.
It is the deep study of, and encounter with, this art and this science, which is the primary work taken in Part II.
Structure of The Immersion
The Art of Transformation Immersion is a 10 month program, which includes a 1-month break for rest and integration.
The course breaks down into two main parts: Part I: Tuning; Part II: Praxis
01
Tuning
The first part is intended to tune us to a way of seeing things anew, to awaken us to a new way of encountering the world, in the very worlding which characterizes our moment-by-moment encounter in, and with, an ever-unfolding, ever-evolving reality.
February 17 - June 16, 2026*
02
Praxis
The second part acts something like a graduate seminar, in which we will study transcripts and recordings, from a variety of courses and programs, which feature moments of deliberately facilitated transformative learning (what we will call ‘ontological unfolding’), in order to extrapolate a ‘pattern language’ for deliberate ontological facilitation.
August 4 - December 15, 2026*
( * ) These are approximate dates. Final dates to be set in January 2026.
Break
Take a rest, and refresh for a month.
July, 2026*
To register for the next Immersion (From February to December 2026) please provide the following information.
I will then contact you to set up a time for a pre-Immersion conversation.
The purpose of this conversation is to make clear the requirements of the course, and to address any questions or considerations you might have regarding the Immersion.