Conversational Junk Food. It recently dawned on me, the need for a soapbox forum that aspires with the intention of accuracy of facts. Facebook started as a great place to keep in touch with long lost friends and family, to share pictures, and such.

For a primary source of news that is true, not so much! It's like "conversational junk food"! It may taste sweet, as one is enveloped in a self reinforced echo chamber of consensus, and the algorithms can  exacerbate  skewed perceptions, for the sake of continued engagement. Bots bait, antagonistically toward that same end, but this is not a nutritional information diet!

Upon an AI search query, I have been informed that a majority of users recognize a routine volume of misinformation appears regularly in the data feed, though a disturbing percentage of users, particularly younger people, trust such social media entities as their primary source of information!

Whenever I would take the bait, challenge the more absurd, the better I could dispute with well put  rational arguments, the greater the deafening silence! That became my measurement if success, never knowing for sure if it was that, or effective shadow banning, on controversial contentions!

Needless to say, I am compelled, and glad to be here, to check out something new, perhaps! It seems to aspire to discourse with better "nutritional value", so I am thankful for the opportunity to see if it can work, and I wish us all the best of luck, to the destination of "Further"! ✅😀

Introduce yourself (and say hi to others). What are you passionate about? Who do you love? What fires you up? What are some questions you don't know how to answer? What projects are you working on?

And if you like sharing the stuff like where are you from, and what do you do, and how many kids you have, we'd love to know that too!

Your Map of Me Is Out of Date. On the quiet failure of fixed people-maps -- and whose job it is to fix them

Ken Wilber, whose maps of human development have shaped a generation of facilitators, coaches, and practitioners, is emphatic about one thing: the map is not the territory. He writes it plainly — "AQAL is just a map, nothing more. It is not the territory." He even identifies the central problem with maps as the tendency to leave out the mapmaker. The map looks objective. It points outward. It rarely points back at the hand holding it.

This is fine when the territory is abstract — stages of development, quadrants of experience, lines of growth. Abstract territory doesn't change while you're not looking. But when the territory is a person, something important shifts. People change. Sometimes slowly, sometimes suddenly, sometimes in ways they haven't yet found words for. The territory is alive. It moves.

And yet a common practice among people (generally unconsciously) and facilitators (consciously) — including many who invoke Wilber's framework — is to build a working map of a someone, arrive at a rough assessment of where they are, and then essentially leave that map on the shelf until something forces a revision. The assessment becomes a fixed reference point. Future interactions are filtered through it. The map stops being a tool for navigating a living person and starts being a lens that selects for evidence of what it already believes.

This is understandable. Building a nuanced map of another person takes real effort — attention, presence, the willingness to hold complexity without collapsing it prematurely. Once that effort has been invested and a coherent picture has formed, there is a natural pull to let it stand. Updating feels like admitting the original was wrong. Sitting with a settled view feels like wisdom. The map becomes, quietly, a conclusion.

And conclusions, once formed, have a particular relationship to new information. They don't neutrally receive it. They assess it. They decide whether it fits. Evidence that confirms the existing map registers easily. Evidence that contradicts it tends to be explained away — this is a temporary state, a defensive reaction, not yet fully integrated, not quite what it appears to be. The map protects itself, and it does so without announcing that protection as its purpose.

What makes this especially worth examining in relational and mindfulness-oriented contexts is that the explicit commitment of these spaces is usually the opposite — presence, freshness of perception, meeting the person in front of you rather than the story about them. The aspiration is to see clearly. The actual practice, when it involves fixed assessments of where someone is developmentally or relationally, can quietly undermine that aspiration while feeling like sophisticated understanding.

There is a version of this that is even more telling: the implicit expectation that the person being mapped will notify the mapmaker when the map is wrong. That it is somehow the responsibility of the territory to flag its own changes to the cartographer. This has a certain logic to it — who knows better than the person themselves when they have shifted? — but it gets the fundamental relationship backwards. The map serves the mapmaker's navigation. The accuracy of the map is the mapmaker's concern. Expecting the territory to maintain the map is a bit like a navigator expecting the coastline to send updates.

It also places an invisible burden on the person being assessed. To correct someone's map of you, you first have to know they have one, then know what it says, then care enough to challenge it, and then successfully communicate the correction to someone who may be filtering your words through the very map you're trying to update. This is a significant ask, and it operates in a direction contrary to genuine openness — it puts the person being seen in the position of managing how they are seen, which is precisely the kind of relational labor that good facilitation is supposed to relieve.

Wilber's framework, used well, is a set of lenses for looking freshly — not a set of slots to sort people into. The distinction matters enormously in practice. Lenses are held lightly, adjusted when the view they produce stops making sense, set aside when they obscure more than they reveal. Slots, once filled, tend to stay filled.

A living map of a living person requires returning to the territory. It requires the willingness to be surprised — not once, at the beginning, but repeatedly. It requires noticing when your interactions with someone feel smooth and confirming, and asking whether that smoothness reflects genuine understanding or a well-defended model. It requires the kind of epistemic humility that Wilber's framework nominally promotes but that the practice of developmental assessment can quietly erode.

The person in front of you has almost certainly moved since you last looked carefully. The only question is whether your map has.

You're cordially invited to ROAR. Jordan here,

You're cordially invited to submit a paper for the inaugural issue of ROAR, the new Research in Applied Relatefulness Journal.

This is a powerful endeavor to

• build our communal body of knowledge
• cross-pollinate new insights, failures, and best practices
• celebrate all the incredible practitioners, innovations, and generally showcase the community

We believe relatefulness has a lot to contribute to civilizational knowledge and inquiry about intersubjective awareness, communication, group facilitation, and the strengths and limitations of our how these practices interface and apply to other fields of study. 

What kinds of papers?

(1)  Cross-modal integration: what happens when relatefulness meets other frameworks in practice? eg: IFS & relatefulness, functional medicine and relatefulness (coming in the first issue)

(2) Practitioner Case Reports: internal relatefulness experiments and best practices. eg: a particular exercise, event flow, or structure 

(3) Field notes / failure reports. failures and lessons learned. eg: 

(4) Theoretical & philosophical contributions exploring the conceptual foundations of relatefulness and advancing new frameworks. eg: I'll be publishing an article version of my Relateful Camp 2024 talk "How Not to Start a Cult"

This is meant to help us see all of our play and exploration as research (because it is) and take part in the larger, ongoing human conversation by being more visible, citable, and propagating what we're doing, what works, and what doesn't, so everyone can learn from everyone and iteration can happen faster. 

Why you?

You get to be a founding contributor to a new field, your work becomes citable, you build credibility as a practitioner-researcher, and you get visibility within a growing community.

If you're not sure, post an abstract to the ROAR UpTrust group and people will weigh in and give you feedback.

Why now?

I'm just really excited for the experiential knowledge interchange for the sake of itself. That said...

We're in an era where our globe's biggest problems require coordinating across wildly different perspectives with very distinct values and desires. 

Relatefulness can be a key contributor to emerging social-psychotechnology (consciously created intersubjective infrastructure) to help people communicate, and find internal peace and sanity amidst unprecedented pace of transformation.

Submission Deadline 

Track 1: March 15th. Your article will be ready for the Camp Preview; a physical artifact at the chow hall at camp that proves the concept and inspires people to submit.

Track 2: May 15th. Full Founding Issue This gives the broader community a real runway to write something worth publishing. The full issue goes up on relateful.com, gets a downloadable PDF, and is available on Amazon.

Details

Formats:
Practitioner case reports (1,000-2,000 words), cross-modal integration papers (2,000-4,000 words), Field notes / failure reports (500-1,500 words); Theoretical / philosophical contributions (2,000–5,000 words)

Review/editorial process.
Submission:
1) Submit draft to a private UpTrust group, anytime starting day of announcement
2) Get community feedback (this is not quality control and you should not assume that all comments are good, it just helps the community get involved in our style) Editorial review proceeds on its own timeline and does not depend on community response. 
3) Editorial review: v1 at least Jordan Myska Allen will review, whether or not you get comments before approval depends largely on the number of submissions; we may expand to a founding editorial board (TBA)
4) Accepted articles will be published in the following:

Distribution/format.
- announced on TTT email list
- announced on Substack
- a linkable, indexable page on relateful.com
- a downloadable PDF
- A printed copy that people can order through amazon (this may not be ready by Relateful camp. But we will have at least one printed copy at the chow hall)

Guidelines:

• Abstract (150-300 words) (unless field notes/failures- (50–150 word abstract is fine)
• Author info: name, relevant background (facilitation credentials, affiliation with Relateful Company, professional practice, academic training, whatever establishes your credibility in the domain you're writing about, and contact email (for editorial use only, not published))
• Originality statement (A line confirming the work hasn't been published elsewhere and is the author's own)
• Conflicts of interest / disclosure: (any relevant personal/financial stakes)
• Permissions (If you reference specific client work/sessions in a practice that emphasizes confidentiality, this confirms you have consent or have sufficiently anonymized)
• Voice: first, second, and third person are all welcome (I, we, it) but no need to label them; use whatever constructs enact the experience you're hoping to communicate, including shifting views if needed. We can't study the relational while pretending there's no I or we. (Drawing from Integral Methodology Pluralism).
• References/citations: We're not imposing APA formatting on practitioners bc we think it'll kill submissions. if you reference someone's work, name them and link to it. 
• Co-authored pieces should list all contributors with individual author info. Designate one corresponding author for editorial communication.
• Authors retain copyright; Relateful Company has permission to publish, distribute, and reprint

(Skipping for V1: Detailed style guides, structured heading requirements, blinded review formatting, cover letters, IRB approval documentation, etc.)

How to submit: Post to here in this ROAR UpTrust group.

Fix Sales Problems. What do you see as the biggest sales problems companies have today that they need to fix?

Looking for bridges in views about the second Trump administration. I'm currently aware of four views:

• This is the worst thing ever, I'm terrified
• This is the best thing ever, I'm thrilled
• I don't pay attention to politics, so far my life feels exactly the same
• Some of the changes seem pretty cool so far, but we'll see

Where are the middle grounds? I want to know how to build bridges in my personal connections when politics comes up these days.

Looking for bridges in views about the second Trump administration. I'm currently aware of four views:

• This is the worst thing ever, I'm terrified
• This is the best thing ever, I'm thrilled
• I don't pay attention to politics, so far my life feels exactly the same
• Some of the changes seem pretty cool so far, but we'll see

Where are the middle grounds? I want to know how to build bridges in my personal connections when politics comes up these days.

Engage or Enrage. It is likely that we have family members or friends that we differ with greatly when it comes to politics, healthcare, etc.  I am no different.  When the inevitable hot topic arises, do you recommend flight or fight, engage or enrage?  How do you respond when this occurs?

Engage or Enrage. It is likely that we have family members or friends that we differ with greatly when it comes to politics, healthcare, etc.  I am no different.  When the inevitable hot topic arises, do you recommend flight or fight, engage or enrage?  How do you respond when this occurs?

Relational Tech Project. Just found out about this initiative and (without having had more than a skim so far) was reminded of my recently created UpTrust account, so this will be my first post. Hi to all who may see this!

https://relationaltechproject.org/

"We can build what we need

Many of us wish our neighborhoods were more connected. We want to live in neighborhoods where we learn from the creativity, care, and skills of our neighbors — and share our gifts too.

We've been told a perfect app or platform would help us, but that hasn't panned out. The hard truth is that no one is coming to save us.

The good news: we can build what we need!"

It appears there is very strong opinion these days about issues like corruption and misconduct. Either people are 100% sure it's happening on a large scale, or they refuse to believe the possibility even exists. Is it strictly a belief system thing, maybe just creating divide,... Any insight or ideas about this? 

Like is different than trust. I think Jordan said at an uptrust session that he misses the like button. I’m having the same feeling lately, there are posts I like that I wouldn’t necessarily say I trust. Or I want to give it some sort of that was cool but I don’t want that statement in my trust algorithm.

But maybe that’s all for the best? Surely some not-insignificant portion of my trust isn’t in my conscious awareness, maybe feeling a sense of yes to something is functionally the same as trust.

Like is different than trust. I think Jordan said at an uptrust session that he misses the like button. I’m having the same feeling lately, there are posts I like that I wouldn’t necessarily say I trust. Or I want to give it some sort of that was cool but I don’t want that statement in my trust algorithm.

But maybe that’s all for the best? Surely some not-insignificant portion of my trust isn’t in my conscious awareness, maybe feeling a sense of yes to something is functionally the same as trust.

hello world, testing

Is this gonna be another Ello? I like the mission statement of this platform, but I'm always wary when a new social media site comes along — because I know there's every chance it won't be here in six months.

Maybe UpTrust will prove me wrong. I hope so. How is your experience so far?

Introduction to who I am. My name is Paul Leverich.

I’ve lived enough life to know that most people only show you the highlight reel. The clean parts. The filtered parts. The “I’ve got it all together” parts.

That’s never been me.

I’ve walked through loss, pressure, mistakes, reinvention, faith, doubt, rebuilding, and starting over more times than I can count. I’ve learned that growth is rarely pretty. It’s loud. It’s lonely. It’s sacred. It’s stubborn.

I’m a thinker. A builder. A question-asker. A man who refuses to stay small just to make other people comfortable.

I believe truth matters. Integrity matters. Discipline matters. Healing matters. Legacy matters.

I’m here to talk about real life. Business. Spirit. Strategy. Pain. Purpose. Systems. Survival. Becoming.

No masks. No fake perfection. No borrowed personalities.

Just perspective, progress, and honest conversation.

If you’re here to grow, rebuild, and think deeper than the surface, you’re in the right place.

Welcome.