Art credit: Jim Campbell

We are a generation of bright, passionate, and creative makers. We seek meaningful community and deep, sustained engagement. Today’s culture of distraction may rob us of intimacy, but it has provided the tools for its own revolution. Acting on our values, we are building a rhizomatic web of creative philosophers and spiritual leaders. We pursue a whole-hearted life and are committed to living the meaningful questions.

LiveTheQuestions gains its name from Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, a book that sculpted my worldview. “Live the questions” is an active philosophy of openness before the great unknown. It is a practice of sustained engagement with what matters most. Our goal is not quick fixes or easily digestible answers, but rather the cultivation of an intentional spirit and a mindful life.

My broadest goal with this project is to form a community of radical inquiry, one that asks the most important questions about being a human alive today. If what we do is enact the story we tell ourselves about ourselves, then the power is ours to re-write and perform a more sustainable, humane, and loving story.

Our community is formed around creative projects. The first is Being & Death, a spiritual philosophy book being written transparently online and unfolding in real-time. This allows the book to be more than a text, since its readers play a part in its writing. We can call this “participatory pedagogy,” where each of us teaches all of us through collaboration. Not only does this form a unique community, but it also renders a new model of education in our new age.

Being & Death develops over five overlapping categories, each listed at the top of the main page.

• Inspiration: all ideas come from a community of knowledge. This section compiles and describes all the books and cultural productions that are meaningful to this project, allowing the community to dive deeper into the source material and to suggest new authors and ideas.
• Notebook: ideas flow from the unconscious in their own way. This section presents scans of my planning notebook, allowing the community to see ideas in their most raw state, and then propose new pathways of understanding.
• Outline: telling a story requires structure. This section details my outlining and planning process, allowing the community to have impact at the earliest stages of ideation.
• Chapters: the book must get written. This section unveils each chapter as it is written, allowing for community engagement and revision in real-time.
• The Open: community is based around intimacy. “The Open” is a series of discussions, presentations, and conversations about the questions that matter most. This section presents documentation of these live events.

My goals for Being & Death are threefold. First, it engages my own conscious / unconscious respiratory process of spiritual exploration and creative communication. Writing this book is my own work of spiritual and intellectual growth. Secondly, in this book I introduce the concept of “both, and yet neither” into our cultural discourse. The main thesis of this book lies within this concept and its healing power. Thirdly, my broadest goal is to save the world by telling a new story about ourselves to ourselves, so that we may enact it.

This is merely the beginning; Being & Death is but the first of many projects. From there we will grow organically, taking on new projects initiated and sustained by the community. Opening up to the future, as momentum grows and focus deepens, as projects multiply and relationships flourish, what is possible is limited only by our capacity to imagine, to communicate, and to enact.

If we desire a new society then let us build it together. If we desire a new world then let us live that world today.