A laboratory is where we’d expect to find a safe space of discovery and purpose; an environment that supports experimenting with diverse ideas and mysteries in the search for truth. Add in an atmosphere of mutual trust and acceptance, and now we’ve created an ecology that invites something even deeper — a God lab.

Imagine a God lab as an intensified spiritual retreat, a gathering of like-minded and like-souled individuals seeking new understanding and experience with the divine. In this conversation, we are invited to appreciate a metamodern God lab as a community, created through the shared exploration of the sacred by people who each represent a unique expression of universal possibility.

In a metamodern God lab, every person is recognized and accepted as they experiment with creating and evolving their own vision, practices and art; an ecology where people find the inner balance that allows them to embody more fully at the spiritual leading edge of themselves.

We get to explore in this conversation the nature and possibilities of emergent metamodern spirituality with two metamodern leaders, Layman Pascal and Brendan Graham Dempsey. (This is the latest in a series of conversations sensing deeper into metamodern spirituality.) Layman and Brendan discuss with Aviv Shahar the recently completed Metamodern God Lab at the Sky Meadow retreat in Vermont.

Among their discoveries and ongoing ponders:

• The problems of today’s meaning crisis and the fractured nature of the late modern world require a different kind of human being; a deeper, more fully human character we can opt to create out of ourselves.
• The metamodern God emerges from the broadening of one's horizons to intuit the direct impacts you have on the world. Your actions are no longer prescribed by external injunctions; they come from within.
• We can draw meaningful parallels between what is newly emerging and many traditional lineages; we are continuing an ancient story of humanity developing its relationship with the sacred.
• This should not be an occasional, rare thing, but the everyday condition of our lives. Normalize the extraordinary, and from the shared metamodern spirit produce new rituals, artifacts, and ways of imagining God.
• We have to collectively generate a field of meaning that brings apotheosis to human beings; the sacred is something we co-generate, co- presence and co-enact together. We can’t do it alone.
• After God is the Goddess; how does this show up in a richer, more feminine mode? How do cycles, embodiments, and the material we associate with Yin do it differently or the same?

This conversation is part of the continuing Portals discovery into what is emerging on the frontiers of human experience in this time of profound change. Information about upcoming special events can be found on the Events page. Also visit and subscribe to our YouTube channel.