Carter Phipps explores how psychedelics, postmodern values, and the reawakening of consciousness are reshaping the cultural landscape and laying the groundwork for an integral future. Arguing that we must embrace — and responsibly guide — the weirdness of this transitional moment, he calls for a worldview that integrates science, spirituality, and the deep interior dimensions of human experience.

Picture this: You’re at a cozy integral conference with maybe 200 thoughtful souls discussing consciousness and cultural evolution. Then you hear about the MAPS psychedelic conference in Denver—12,000 people, actual governors in attendance, and the unmistakable feeling that something has shifted in the cultural waters.

Suddenly, your intimate gathering feels a bit like the beat poets in 1952, scribbling brilliant insights while completely unaware that postmodernism is about to explode across the cultural landscape.

This is exactly the moment Carter Phipps captured in his provocative talk about cultural evolution, consciousness, and why the integral community might need to stop playing it safe and start “riding the tiger” of postmodern transformation.

The Modernist Bargain: Heaven and Hell in One Package

Here’s the thing about modernity: it’s simultaneously the best and worst thing that ever happened to us. Every morning, we should probably say a little prayer of gratitude for modernism’s incredible gifts—health, wealth, prosperity, progress, and pragmatism. Without it, most of us would be dead from diseases that are now easily treatable, living in conditions that would make a medieval peasant weep.

But the same worldview that gave us antibiotics and smartphones also gave us what Carter calls “the detritus of a disenchanted universe.” Science, for all its breathtaking beauty and power, has been trapped in a philosophical straitjacket for centuries, barely recognizing that consciousness, life, or meaning might actually be real.

It’s like having the most brilliant friend who can solve every practical problem in your life but has the emotional intelligence of a coffee table. Eventually, you start wondering if there’s more to existence than efficiency and material progress.

Three Faces of the Revolution

When the 1960s hit, something cracked open in the cultural psyche. Carter identifies three streams of postmodern consciousness that emerged like tributaries of the same underground river:

• The social justice movement—which, let’s be honest, has given us both necessary wake-up calls and some spectacularly counterproductive identity politics.
• The environmental movement—because apparently it took a few centuries for humans to notice that poisoning your own habitat might be a bad long-term strategy.
• And the consciousness movement—the most underappreciated of the three, focused on inner exploration and the recognition that reality might be far stranger and more meaningful than materialist science suggests.

The Psychedelic Renaissance: Not Your Grandmother’s Spiritual Awakening

This is where things get interesting. We’re not talking about a few hippies experimenting with mushrooms in the woods. We’re talking about millions of people systematically exploring expanded states of consciousness, with institutional support, scientific validation, and—here’s the kicker—mainstream cultural acceptance.

When that many people start accessing non-ordinary states of consciousness, something shifts in what Don Beck called “the waters of culture”, or the invisible assumptions and possibilities that shape collective reality. It’s like modernity built a protective veil over the world to keep out the “demon-haunted” superstitions of the past. Now that veil is being carefully lowered, and older, deeper streams of consciousness are rushing back in.

As Carter puts it, “It’s gonna get weird.”

The Culture War Nobody Wins

Right now, we’re stuck in what Carter calls a “to-the-death” culture war between modernism and postmodernism. On one side, you have brilliant rationalists who can solve complex problems but don’t “get” consciousness. On the other side, you have consciousness explorers who sometimes throw the baby of rational progress out with the bathwater of materialism.

The result? A cultural battle that serves no one and prevents the kind of alliance-building that actually creates positive change. Think about it: after World War II, traditional and modern worldviews found ways to work together productively. We need something similar between modern and postmodern perspectives.

Embracing the Weird and Wild

Here’s Carter’s most provocative insight: the integral community needs to stop trying to transcend postmodernism and start helping it succeed. Not because postmodernism is perfect—it’s got serious shadow issues that can “fuck up civilization” if left unchecked—but because consciousness expansion is the bridge to integral awareness.

You can’t leapfrog from materialism to integral consciousness without doing the messy work of recognizing that consciousness is real, that inner subjectivity matters, and that reality is far richer than our current scientific paradigms suggest.

This means embracing a period where culture gets genuinely strange. We’re talking about a time when psychedelic experiences become normalized, when ancient wisdom traditions blend with cutting-edge neuroscience, when the boundaries between inner and outer reality become more fluid.

The Multidimensional Species

Carter’s vision is ultimately hopeful: humanity on the verge of realizing its “birth as a multidimensional species that can traverse both the inner and outer cosmos.” A world that becomes “rich and bountiful on the inside as well as the outside.”

But getting there requires navigating the turbulence ahead with skill, not resistance. It means supporting healthy expressions of postmodern consciousness while guarding against its shadow manifestations. It means building bridges between worldviews instead of defending territorial positions.

The truth is, we are at a historical inflection point. We can either ride the tiger of consciousness expansion consciously, helping to steer it toward integration and wisdom, or we can resist it and watch it unfold without our guidance.

The psychedelic renaissance is happening whether we like it or not. Millions of people are going to explore expanded states of consciousness in the coming decades. The question isn’t whether this transformation will occur—it’s whether we’ll help it unfold in ways that serve human flourishing rather than cultural chaos.

As Carter suggests, this might be our moment to stop being spectators of cultural evolution and start being conscious participants in humanity’s next great adventure.

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