Beams and Struts is an experiment in collective intelligence. We're seven writers who've come together to pool and share our knowledge. Each person is the head of a site domain appropriate to their emerging field of expertise.  Each writer intends to one day be a leader in their respective field, and we see the site as a place to hone and develop our crafts together. The long form essays are at the heart of the site. We did this in order to explore topics with appropriate depth and nuance; we also wanted to counter some of the tendencies of the internet world that slide too far towards the rapid and the superficial. The essays are written over a two month period and go through an extensive internal editing process before they are published. The Nuts and Bolt Editorial Blog is where we’ll be writing ongoing short pieces. Here again writers will be exploring topics and issues that intersect with their field of expertise.

We at Beams and Struts are interested in creating the future. This site is about trying to understand the complexity of our world so that we can transform it. With each writer adding a few beams and a couple of struts to the picture, we hope to slowly build an edifice that reveals the world at once understandable, glorious and precious. Soon, a section for Guest Articles will open where practitioners like you can contribute ideas from a wide range of fields. With the accumulation of articles and with your considered commentary, we'll create a picture of this changing world that none of us alone could've painted.  Together we can struggle in joy to birth the newest phase in humanity’s long evolutionary journey.

Most of us here have been powerfully moved by integral theory and practice. We’ll all be letting the integral map guide us in our investigations of the world; however, no previous knowledge of integral is necessary here. If we use terms or concepts, they'll be defined. Instead, we are confident that we can show in our work the important intelligence that's contained in an integral worldview. For a more technical yet delicate unpacking of our website’s subtitle, please see the piece below written by our Chris Dierkes. Thanks for being with us; we look forward to the ongoing journey together.

 

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The subtitle of the website is: An Integral Inquiry Into The Post-Postmodern World.

The site takes the form of inquiry, an intellectual, moral, and spiritual search in which our intention is to hold to a space of creativity allowing emergent wisdom to arise.

It is an inquiry into the post-postmodern world.  It is not the only or final inquiry into post-postmodernity.

It is integral.  Integral refers to the practice and theory known as integral theory, commonly held by all of us.  Integral, however, also points to the integration we seek through collective meditation on each other’s work.  First we seek to bring integration to our domains and then (meta)integrate those integrations through connection with each other.

Into suggests exploration and immersion, like going into the water or into the unknown, a place on the edge of being and becoming.

While this is an inquiry, it is the post-postmodern world.  The ‘the’ in the post-postmodern world suggests a certain reality, a solid “there-ness” to this whole endeavor, preventing it from disappearing into the mists.

The post-postmodern world is the world (coming to be) at the end of postmodernity.  For here, it is sufficient to say that the post-postmodern world is a rising culture, a coming worldview, a new bodily and technological way of being alive, and constitutes a different felt experience of life.

Our way is one of inquiry guided by the insights of integral into that arising worldspace. At this point, it is simply The Beams and The Struts of this being built post-postmodern world.

 

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