The Liminal Web: Mapping An Emergent Subculture Of Sensemakers, Meta-Theorists & Systems Poets

Whether it refers to people, places, or societies, liminality provides a playground for transformation, a game with no rules we’re all invited to join, a sandbox for liminal creativity.

3. Liminality as a re-structuring of consciousness and culture in the fragmentation and regeneration of worldview, and we (if we were to identify a role for ourselves, called to speak to these times) as healers, mediators, and threshold crossers, realizing fragments of integral futures in the present.

Liminality (from the Latin word līmen, “threshold”) is the ambiguity that emerges in the middle of a fundamental transition. Liminality is the “in-between”, where the space and the participants no longer hold their past status, but have not yet fully transformed to their post-transition self.

We need individuals and communities that serve these liminal times by calling them into being with the fullness of their senses and with a compassionate dedication to realizing instances of these new futures in the present. Transforming fragmentation into cohering fragments of integral futures. Doing the difficult work that is both material and spi... See more

Liminal creativity can help carve a path from disorientation to discovery, from uncertainty to curiosity, from fear to innovation. It can turn scary situations into transformational experiences of self-discovery and self-authorship. In fact, life itself is a liminal space between birth and death.

We need a philosophy we can smell, a pheromonal philosophy that draws us into the liminal and gives us the tools to navigate it. And it will not be the intellectuals who get us there. It will not be the autistic machinations of Silicon Valley, or the frothy mouthed proclamations of activists. It will be the artists, the shamans, those who go deeply... See more

Venturing out of the mind’s perimeter of comfort, in a constant quest for the unknown, liminal creators keep on fueling their imagination by exploring the gray areas that live outside of established categories.