The Edge Of The Horizon
A workshop for Good Chaos exploring paths toward a more beautiful world where humanity is free.
In this one-day immersive session, Good Chaos will explore the exquisite vision for humanity in Island, Aldous Huxley's forgotten masterpiece, using the book as a lens to visualize a transformed world.
At the heart of the workshop is the study of Island's seven pathways of transformation - upstream interventions that yield a wiser people and more caring world.
The Seven Pathways
The Seven Pathways
The Offering
The workshop begins with the Good Chaos team choosing their most resonant Pathway as the focus of the session. David Alder & Jesse Elliott will then design a bespoke curriculum exploring the strategic, creative, and practical potential of this Pathway, and guide the team in envisioning how they might wield it to bring new forms of beauty into existence and create a more compassionate, caring world.
Value Proposition
By exclusively tailoring the experience for Good Chaos, the exploration of the Pathways becomes deeply relevant to the organization’s context, community, and impact objectives.
Custom Curriculum
Storyteller David Alder and systems-mapper Jesse Elliott deliver a workshop that is enchanting, riveting, and deep, offering strategic insight and practical applications for the R&D studio's work.
Expert Facilitation
A passion for story anchors this offering, from the study of Huxley's utopia to the experience design, ensuring the workshop is unforgettable and engaging.
Powered By Story
Timeline:
  • September 2024 - Contract and Scope of Work Finalization
  • October 2024 - First Phase Workshop Design (Alder & Elliott)
  • October 2024 - Initial Group Prioritization (Good Chaos)
  • November 2024 - Second Phase Workshop Design (Alder & Elliott)
  • November 2024 - Finalize Banquet Design + Invites (Alder & Elliott + GC)
  • December 2024 - Co-Creative Feedback Round (Good Chaos)
  • January 2025 - Workshop Finalization (Alder & Elliott + Good Chaos)
  • February 2025 - On-Site Workshop, Chicago (Alder & Elliott + Good Chaos)
session two
Further Horizons
In a second workshop day, Good Chaos steps into sacred hospitality, creating a community event around their chosen pathway
Hands In Change
This add-on to the Edge of the Horizon activation brings the Good Chaos team into the practice of sacred hospitality—a hands-on, co-creative experience designed to deepen the connection between the Pathway you’ve explored and the dynamic community leaders engaged in these transformational practices.

A Co-Created, Experiential Event
In this extension of your one-day deep dive, your team will step into the role of facilitators and hosts, co-creating an experience designed around the chosen Pathway. This event will bring a group of community members—practitioners, thought leaders, and allies—into a shared banquet produced by the whole Good Chaos team. At the dinner, team members will host intimate conversations with guests rooted in their stories and learnings from working within the Pathway.

Value Proposition
  1. Leap From Learner To Leader: When participants know they will become leaders, the experience gets charged with a sense of relevance and immediacy while deepening participant's understanding of the material and connecting the team around a shared goal.
  2. Hone The Craft Of Community: Experimenting in sacred hospitality will equip the team with practical tools for facilitating conversations and creating meaningful, intentional gatherings, building "R&D studio" experience for the whole team.
  3. Sink In Deeper Roots: By celebrating local practitioners and thought leaders, honoring their work and breaking bread together, this event further solidifies Good Chaos's connection to those leading change in the local community while growing the organization's reputation as a unique force for good.
Sacred Hospitality
Co-Creating a Transformative Experience
Further Horizons
Top-shelf creative strategist and gifted air traffic controller Jesse Elliott lends his skills to the seamless and exquisite production of The Edge Of The Horizon. For 24 years, Jesse has co-founded and led Rock & Roll bands, non-profits, for-profits, barely-for-profits, state and city strategies, community physical spaces, artist exchange programs, and philanthropic and impact R&D sandboxes.

RIYL: co-creativity + creative placemaking/knowing/keeping + collaborative storytelling. REF: The Music District + Creative Class Group + Colorado Music Strategy + CACHE + The Medium + These United States + Center for Music Ecosystems.
Meet your hosts
The Edge Of The Horizon is led by artist and viral storyteller David Alder. After first encountering Island in 2018, David directed his work toward making some version of it real. Over six years and eleven readings of the book, he distilled Huxley's seven pillars of flourishing, each an upstream intervention to create a wiser people and a more caring world.

David is best known for his graphic novel We Will Call It Pala, one of the most-read works of fiction in psychedelics, described by Tim Ferriss as "Required reading" for the psychedelic field. REF: Here & Now Studios + The North Star Ethics Pledge + Linestone + Parables Of Change + Philanthropist Parent Cohorts
David Alder
Jesse Elliott
Toward a future where children
never lose the brightness in their eyes
Toward a future where children never lose the brightness in their eyes
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In Island, the society's leaders focus the State's resources on making childbirth beautiful, safe, and as painless as possible. The policy is a triumph, changing not only how life is brought into the world, but creating an appetite for more reforms by focusing on something that leaps across partisan divides. This practice becomes a gleaming doorway to more life.

The cohort will study the role of birth in creating unity in a deeply divided time; learn and share stories of what beautiful birth can mean; meet with an iconic indigenous midwife who has stewarded hundreds of births; and workshop how the culture might reimagine birth and the impact that this might have.
Practice Beautiful Birth
Among the many lessons in school in Island is a whole curriculum on anger. Children learn to locate their anger in their bodies and to see it as something separate from themselves. They learn a dozen ways to let it go, and do this with every feeling. They are wise beyond belief by the time they are nine years old.

The cohort will study how education might be aimed at sharpening young people's feelings as much as sharpening their minds; meet with a world-class innovator and preschool teacher; study and share practices that create mind-body connections, hone intuitions, and yield the power to discern; and workshop how such curriculum could become common core.
Teach Children How To Feel
In Island, the final rite of passage from adolescence to adulthood involves climbing a sheer cliff in pairs. Young people train for more than a year for the rite, seeking mentorship from elders and guidance from older peers, strengthening their bodies, and practicing collaboration when the stakes are high.

The cohort will study the role of rites of passage in creating wise, empowered, service-minded young people; welcome a leader wielding rites of passage to break cycles of trauma in his community; imagine how this social technology could fill voids of connection and meaning; and workshop how they might be made available to communities everywhere.
Hold Rites Of Passage
A foundational practice in the society of Island is ceremonial use of psychedelics, helping young people come of age with wisdom, adults turn toward beauty throughout their lives, and old people transcend their fear of death. Ceremony is seen as a social technology for building connection and making meaning.

The cohort will study the role of ritual and ceremony in treating purposelessness and disconnection; explore cycles of years and lives as anchor points for ceremony; meet with iconic leaders of a Lakota Sundance; and workshop how these technologies may be applied to society, especially in light of the re-emergence of psychedelics.
Wield Ritual & Ceremony
The people in Island make an art form out of what Huxley calls, "The Yoga Of Love," cultivating lovemaking as if it were a craft. The society sizzles with aliveness as the uninhibited feminine flows forth, filling life with sensuality and beauty. The society eliminates sexual shame, creating a tantric, ecstatic utopia.

The cohort will study the role of healthy sexuality in creating a richer sense of aliveness, connectedness, and presence; meet with a world-class creator of a community that embraces eros; learn how such places are created; and workshopping how this culture could become more authentically embodied and less possessed by lust.
Cultivate Sacred Sexuality
The greatest triumph of the society in Island could be the caliber of men that it creates. This is exemplified by the character of Vijaya, a mountain of a man, six foot eight and pure muscle who is not inhibited in his power but instead taught to wield it with grace while embracing his sensitive side.

The cohort will study the craft of raising healthy men; explore how this might create safety for all; examine the role of the feminine principle in creating beauty; meet with a leader who has helped hundreds of men find gentle yet unyielding power; and workshop ways this society could approach raising generations of healthy men.
Raise Healthy Men
The society in Island turns dying into an act of beauty — the final ritual in the glorious lives they lead. The fact of death is not avoided, and dying is not hidden out of sight. Young people witness to death as they grow up, watching older generations leave the world in peace.

The cohort will study the role of beautiful death in transcending fear and supporting a culture of slowness, calm, and peace; meet a remarkably graceful steward of death; examine the tools and practices that lead to exquisite death; and workshop ways to help this society could reimagine what death can be.
Create Exquisite Death
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