Is The Only Solution To The Polycrisis/Metacrisis A MettaModern Consciousness?
Mettamodernism fuses modern scientific/democratic thinking, post-modern critiques of them, pre-modern relationality, and metamodern integralism into "embodied wisdom" that unfolds cosmolocal solutions
What Is The Polycrisis?
The other day, one of my friends and collaborators asked me a simple question. Given all the problems we face, captured in the term “polycrisis,” what is the solution?
By polycrisis, I speak of critical issues, emergencies, like:
The fast-moving breakdown of the stable climate that has enabled humankind to flourish, with more floods, fires, and famines as the water and food systems struggle to provide for 8+ billion people in such a climate, and after decades of industrial agriculture
The fragmentation of scientific consensus and shared truth with emotionally-justified and digitally-mediated meaning-making and meme warfare from across the political spectrum
The loss of function and loss of lives from loneliness, despair, and unprocessed grief, and the long-term impacts of trauma, alienation, and modern lifestyles on individuals, families and communities
The disruption, dislocation, enshittification, and perhaps total demise of our businesses, products, societies, relationships, and careers through the unstoppable rise of Artificial Intelligence, automation, and robotics, and the digital mediation of our selves and societies
The rapid increases in post-industrial conditions like diabetes, cancer, long Covid/ME/Fibromyalgia (this latter I have suffered from since age 19), and heart disease—and the likelihood of more intense pandemics, whether via bird flu or something new
The eternal inequality and cost of living crises, where terms like “middle class” are losing their value, and all but the very few struggle to meet the basic costs of healthcare, shelter, and food
Aging and declining populations are increasing the use of welfare, pension, and health offers while decreasing tax incomes to pay for it all
And more…
However, many have started to look deeper into this intersecting web of crises and have seen that behind all these phenomena are root causes that are common to most, if not all, of them. They use the term metacrisis to capture this thought.
What Is The Metacrisis?
The concept of a metacrisis is rooted in the rather nebulous Greek term meta, which means, depending on where and how it is used, behind, after, with, within, beyond, around, and across.
Rather than poly (multiple, many), the term meta is a metaphysical move that seeks to root all the symptoms of the polycrisis in a nested hierarchy of root causes that all boil down to one single, fundamental issue: how we see reality is distorted, partial, and incomplete and not as it really is.
According to this theory, which I described avant la lettre in this essay 10+ years ago, all the projects (businesses, health systems, civilizations) we build in reality are as distorted as our core way of seeing the world.
As we see the world primarily as material and mechanical—and a resource to provide us wealth and wellbeing—we build organizations and societies premised on resource extraction and accumulation, now at industrial speed.
Rather than see the world as equally subjective and emotional as it is mechanical and material, our focus on stuff, and getting more of it, leads us to addiction and depression, pollution and carbon release, and all that comes from the heating atmosphere, inequality, and political instability.
I describe how this works in my book, seeking to redress this metaphorical mistake, Spiritual Atheist: A Quest To Unite Science And Wisdom Into A Radical New Life Philosophy to Thrive In The Digital Age.
For now, I will state that the metacrisis term suggest that this primary distortion in our core understanding of reality—where we are blind to our role in nature as conscious, living beings entangled in a great web of aliveness where consciousness and matter are equally essential elements of one seamless reality—is the ultimate cause of the the many symptoms of the polycrisis stated above, from climate destabilization to digital dysfunction, from political disruption to mass disease.
We Are In (The) Collapse
The distorted systems we have built, economic, social, and psychological, are now being faced with the reality of nature, and there is a mismatch. The mismatch is what shows up in our broken systems. They are broken because they don’t fit reality as it is.
We experience the mismatch, as we do in any area of life, as destabilizing, disturbing, and highly stressful. The old order is breaking down because it is no longer fit for purpose. The new, better-matched, requisitely complex order has not yet been born. The space in the middle is chaotic, confusing, and full of pain for many people.
So we call it the collapse. But it is not as extreme and dramatic as TV dystopias and disaster movies. It is far more subtle, neither distributed equally in time nor space to all.
Instead, it is slow to the point of being almost unnoticeable, except most realize something is amiss with the world. It is also asymmetric, impacting some people enormously right now, and others may not experience its harsher impacts for decades.
I explain more about that here.
For some of us, collapse means wildfires, so we cannot buy home insurance. For others, it means floods and stranded property assets that we cannot sell.
For others, it means having cancer within health systems that are expensive but cannot cope with our needs. For others, it means our blue, white, and brown collars jobs being taken over by AIs and bots.
For most, it means the endless pain of the high cost of living, and the reality that most young people are downwardly mobile, earning less and holding less wealth than their parents (Gen X, Millennials) and grandparents (Boomers).
First, We Experience Collapse Ourselves
For almost all, the Collapse shows up full-bodied in the relentless complexity, ruthless change, and radical uncertainty that is making all our lives feel challenged and stressful, undermining trust in government, society, and business, destabilizing our sense of meaning and confuses what the point of life is, and leading to record levels of both clinical mental health issues, and sub-clinical levels of anguish, alienation, anxiety, and depression.
I sense that, if you’re reading this, you are already experiencing some sense of the Collapse within your life, your life philosophy, and your career model and/or business model.
You may be feeling a bit bewildered, very confused as to what it all means, and even a little jaded and despairing.
You may have had thoughts about changing careers to be more purposeful, transforming your business model to be more regenerative, and penetrating to the heart of things to feel more sustainably hopeful and happy.
This is a good thing.
For to lead others in, through, and out of the Collapse—rather than pretend we can avoid it through strongmen or returning to a mythic past—we have to have experienced enough of it ourselves first.
We need to have metabolized this collapse, at least in some meaningful way, into leadership capacity to be of use to ourselves and then others.
That is what FutureWise is all about. It’s a wisdom school and think tank for leading through Collapse to What Comes Next.
My Personal Collapse
I experienced the Collapse in earnest last year, throughout 2024.
As well as moving to the US for another, final shot at living in Los Angeles, I was processing intense and unimaginable grief for my lost son, and the brunt of what I call a “consulting recession,” where clients rein in spending on all the things I have committed my life to.
At the same time, I was processing the enormity of the polycrisis, that reached its zenith in the LA fires, pondering the closure of one of my businesses due to an epic collaboration fail underpinned by distortion and delusion, and turning 50, a natural age for really staring morality, terminally, and impermanence in the face.
I remember sharing on a WhatsApp voicenote the destabilizing careening I felt often in my somatic midline—and the base layers of embodied consciousness—as the reality I have lived and worked in for 5 decades begins to unravel—not just at the edges, where it has been fragmenting for a long time (and perhaps always have, if we look at the struggle of post-colonial nations for the last few centuries), but in the very center: in London, LA, and Paris.
The center simply cannot hold. And that is a good thing. Because the center is a projection from our consciousness, our modern mind, and is not entirely based on reality.
By embracing this Collapse wholeheartedly, I have begun the process of metabolization. I am not complete. It could take decades, even centuries, for humanity to move through it.
Yet I sense I have processed enough, last year and over the last 20 years within my work in purposeful and sustainable business, to be of value to others as a peer/leader in the journey to what comes after all this.
What Comes After The Collapse
I have spent 21 years asking myself, each and every day, the same question: what is seeking to emerge out of the transformation of our current world, and how do I support that process as best as I can with my talents?
So when my friend asked me what the answer is, I responded:
I don’t know the answer. None of us does. Anyone who says they have the answer is trying to outsmart complexity, which is a fool’s game.
Yet I do know what some of the ingredients in the recipe of what comes next. I think I understand the processes we, as individuals and society, must engage with to undergo the deep transformation that is waiting to happen. And I believe that we must do, as Rilke implored so famously, and live the questions now.
I believe that the answers will come to us, as individuals, as communities, and as societies when we are brave enough to let go of what is no longer working, allowing what is outdated and no longer fit for purpose to break down, in our consciousness and concreteness… and allow what is breaking through to rise up through our bodies and minds into reality.
This releasing and receiving is at the heart of all transformation.
For us to discover What Comes Next (WCN), we must give up:
Many of the comforts and conveniences of Modernity without losing the big wins like science, political freedom, and technology
Many of the criticisms and complaints of Post-Modernity, while keeping the skepticism and cultural turns
Much of the suppression and cynicism of the connectivity and creativity of the Pre-Modern, animistic mind, without taking into account its many mistakes, like conspiracies, superstitions, theocracies, and magical thinking.
This is quite a task given the state of things, and the reality that, if you’re reading this, you have likely won big in the lottery of Modernity: a decent education, abundant nutrition, vaccinations (so you didn’t die of Measles or be disabled by Polio in childhood), a career that affords you the leisure time to read, vacation, and be an engaged parent.
We are the ones we have been waiting for.
The Next Structure Of Consciousness, Culture & Civilization
To understand what might emerge from this cultural chrysalis, we have dubbed the Collapse in its opening stages, it is helpful to understand a general pattern of emergence that has been going on for millennia.
I am not an academic and not a scholar of specific developmental stage theories. So what follows is my very idiosyncratic take on how our minds and societal types have changed. Following Jean Gebser, I am more interested in how the structures of our consciousness and civilization have changed than seeing those structures exist in a strict, historical hierarchy.
Yet there is a clear historical pattern of greater complexity resolving challenges stemming from, requisitely, greater complexity in our environment. Nature changes nurture, nurture changes nature. We both are created by, and create, the culture outside and our consciousness within.
The following is a brief, partial, biased, unfootnoted (etc., etc.) view of how our minds have emerged to build Quantum Computers during the week and engage in ecstatic dance practices (with silent disco headsets and live DJs) on the beach at the weekend. And everything in between, of course.
I am writing this without refreshing any of my knowledge, shooting from the hip as it were, in order to make it more easily understandable and much quicker to get out there.
1. Pre-Modern Structures Of Consciousness, Culture & Civilization
Pre-modern types of consciousness emerged sometime in pre-history, perhaps first in apes, maybe even birds, given the smartness of the crows. A sense of a body acting in the world (enough to pass the mirror test) became a sense of a mind-body with agency, representation, thoughts, and language to communicate and collaborate with.
Bands of hunter-gatherers became tribes and clans. Systems explaining the weather, dangers, and bad people emerged, as well as how humans can act in and take care of the world around them. Art representing humankind and the world they (thought they) lived in was drawn in caves and sculptured in clay.
Songs and stories developed that both taught new generations how to live right in the land and how to nourish, steward, and “sing” the land into being anew with each cohort of elders.
Many groups of humans had an animist view of life where all living things, and many non-living ones, had essences, energies, and interiorities.
Shamans, or something like them, had a peculiar ability to sense into this entangled web to intuit, then divine, what the tribe should do next for survival, adaptation, and thriving.
Animism was enhanced by, and in some places replaced by, Creation Myths of more organized and complex spiritual cosmologies, often with many symbolic representations and/or gods.
As writing was invented, elemental stories, insights, and practices for living a good and wise life were written down, taught, and even tested.
Often trapped in static societal structures, philosophers developed entire systems for how to turn inwards and, rather than focus on external change, liberate our inner lives from pain, fear, and loss.
The Axial Age was upon humanity, bearing the fruits of the Vedas and Upanishads, the tales and aphorisms of Masters Kong and Zu (Confucius and Lao Tzu), and diamantine sutras and meditation practices of Buddhism.
Animist, indigenous, and polytheistic traditions gave way, in many places, to a single God described in a single Book, which was accelerated by war: Crusade and Conquest.
Alongside these changes in culture, groups of humans organized themselves. Strong men became chiefs, and then became lords, and then became kings. Shamans became priests became popes (became kings). Superstitions, fueled by portents like eclipses and phenomena like floods, were rife.
Those in power controlled the narrative, even if incompletely, and the masses were told what to believe and how to behave as they farmed, grazed, prayed, and fought for their liege. In this world, problems in society can be solved through obeying God(s), Bibles, Medicine Men, and Kings.
Some today in the spiritual scenes and regenerative movements assume the wisdom keepers of the indigenous world can use their pre-modern insights to solve the macrocrisis/polyricis.
A shaman from Peru has some, but very limited, capacity to contribute to solutions for the over-stretched and overpriced healthcare system in the US, as it labors under the weight of increased cancer, heart disease, long Covid, and an aging population living far longer than any generation before.
2. Modern Structures Of Consciousness, Culture & Civilization
With writing came numbers and letters, the transmission of knowledge about what is “right” and “good”, double entry bookkeeping and eventually Excel spreadsheets.
People with time on their hands (because others were producing food and shelter for them), started to wonder about the meaning of it all. The learned how to dialogue and debate to sharpen their wits and wisdom.
They started to map and measure the physical world and turn their observations into theories. Some realized they could test their hunches (now called hypotheses) through experiments and empirical evidence, enabled and empowered by new technologies like telescopes and microscopes.
They began to draw on older ideas than those of the Christian scholars around them, rediscovering and re-reading the texts of ancient Greece and Rome in a great, yet spread out, renaissance of more human-centric, and less god-focused, ways of thinking.
What they discovered and described told a very different story to many of those Creation Myths passed down through time immemorial. These scientists began to challenge the monks and bishops about what was true about human nature and our place in the universe.
Instead of dogma, we had the scientific method. In the place of superstition,s we had empirical knowledge. Instead of being told what to do by a priest interpreting the Bible or a Duke the law, we had our own self to rely on. I think, therefore I, as an individual, exist.
Just like with old Archimedes’ screw, musings about the natural world turned into machines that could shape it and manipulate it for human benefit.
Math became the machinery of war and industry. Equations became algorithms became AI. Spinning Jennies became steam engines became electrical grids became EVs.
Priestly hierarchies became aristocratic hierarchies, which became management hierarchies, all designed to maximize the production of wheat or widgets by those who do the work to the benefit of those who own the monasteries, cities, and factories.
Kings and kaisers sent out military forces to capture more land and more resources, colonizing every square inch of Earth for God and Country. Race, ethnicity, and religion were leveraged to enslave the unfortunate and instill indebted servitude across the globe.
Meanwhile, in the capitals and coffee shops of Europe, modern philosophers now free to think as they chose, or at least more freely than the priests and dukes had allowed before, became liberals, democrats, republicans, and freedom fighters.
In the chaos and instability, dictators used totalizing ideologies like communism and fascism to capture the minds of the masses while preaching their liberation. They took the logic of modernity to its absolute extreme: the industrial age murder of enemies within and the moving down of enemies without.
The result was two world wars that melted down the reigning and killed tens of millions. Yet not much changed.
After hundreds of years of evidence-based (management) science, which has infiltrated every area of humankind, from multinational corporates to local governments—which assumes we can technologically control all chaos and solve all crisis with categorizations, regression analyses, spreadsheets, and algorithms— the polycrisis tells us that we have reached the limit of the magic of the Modern Mind.
Genius as they are, we clearly need something more than liberal democracies, redistributive tax policies, welfare states, mass immunization, standardized testing, and a thousand other fruits of the Modern Mind. Otherwise, life wouldn’t be so darn challenging.
A PhD in ecology in the Netherlands who has published extensively on regenerative design has some, yet still limited, capacity to contribute to the challenges of, say, a small city in Brazil as it copes with increasing costs, expanding expectations, increased authoritarianism, challenged food security, and its unique historical development.
3. The Post-Modern Structures Of Consciousness, Culture & Civilization
As the world became steadily more industrial, mechanistic, and productive, poets and philosophers protested the encroachment of modern capitalism and politics into all spheres, even of the heart.
Captured by the Romance of love and creativity, imagination and liberty, they began to criticize the modern project from the very start. They began to turn the logical, rational, truth-seeking modern mind upon itself, pointing out the inconsistencies, contingencies, and hypocrisies of the machine age.
As the world wars devastated fields and families, modern thinkers set about showing that even the modern ideas and ideals of knowledge (scienza), certainty, and democracy that had led to the holocausts were historical constructs, not ahistorical truths that were valid in all times and places.
Inspired by the suffering of so many under colonialism, nationalism, and scientism (the idea that only science can determine what is real and what is valuable), they deconstructed all the claims to truth that had been used to leverage power over the people.
They showed us that every system of knowledge seeks to claim truth and so power over others, and that every worldview should be seen in its own cultural context rather than be judged in relation to the rational, logical, modern way of seeing things.
They urged us to realize that no one worldview has a privileged position compared to any other, and that violence occurs when we think one does. In other words, the Modern Mind can harm as much as help, hinder as much as heal.
Warriors of justice used these critiques to ensure that marginalized people, of lower status, class, caste, and race, would not be persecuted, repressed, or oppressed.
From suffragettes to freedom riders, from limits to growth to the social enterprises, a more just and equal society has been unfolded. Women’s rights, civil rights, sexual rights have been instilled in constitutions and cultures across the planet. Great leaps remain, but injustice remains.
The post-modernists contributed considerably to our understanding of the limitations of technocratic, scientific, and managerial sciences. They taught us to be suspicious of totalizing explanations and solutions, of grand narratives that claim all truth, of knowledge used to seize power over others, and over nature.
Just as in the violent revolutions and civil wars that took power away from Kings and gave it to the people, backlashes have occurred. The aggressive energy of the post-modern mind to cut (down) oppression has energized a reactionary movement. The relentless focus on identity—as I wrote about here—has led to mainstream opposition to wokeism, DE&I, and much else.
The Post-Modern Mind, glimpsed so fully in the raging fires of Wokeism—where it enflames the recidivist, revanchist pre-modern mind to fight back—pulls apart, undermines, and problematizes. It highlights power imbalances, injustices, and microaggressions, but its solutions are limited by its nature as really the Modern Mind taken to its logical conclusion, an ever-decreasing circle of criticism through the means of logic and reason.
DE&I, one such solution, is The Modern Mind rationally trying to solve for long-running political injustice and cultural tendencies with rational solutions. It is necessary, to some degree, but insufficient because it replaces the angst of one race (for it describes communities in terms of Modernity, which science itself does not support) with the resentment and resentiment of another.
A politics of suspicion, of criticism, of negation struggles when it comes to the simple question of: “Well, what do we build next then? What helps us escape from the eternal polarity, dialectics, of pre-modernity, modernity, and post-modernity, of repression, revolution, and reaction?”
In other words, a passionate and well-organized intersectional theorist and activist on campus, who has successfully campaigned to get funding and recognition for a marginalized group, has little capacity to solve the Middle East conflict.
4. The MetaModern or Integral Structure Of Consciousness, Culture & Civilization
To transcend this energy-depleting opposition of poles, we need to turn to Metamodern or the Integral structure of consciousness.
Metamodernity is a phrase that has been in use for a few decades. It covers a lot of ground, from art to politics. The same with Integral. They have come to mean slightly different things, but for me, they point to a way to build what comes next, what must come next, because both modernism and post-modernism have done their thing to their absolute conclusion and still left the polycrisis/metacrisis for us to solve.
Here is a Claude.AI summary of metamodernity as a solution to the polycrisis:
Metamodernity offers a promising framework for addressing our interconnected global challenges by transcending the limitations of both modernism and postmodernism. At its core, metamodernity integrates the scientific rationality and progress orientation of modernism with postmodernism's critiques and contextual awareness, while adding a values-driven, systems-oriented approach.
The polycrisis requires exactly what metamodernity proposes: an integrative worldview that can:
Embrace complexity and interconnection while maintaining capacity for directed action
Combine scientific knowledge with pluralistic perspectives and indigenous wisdom
Balance technological innovation with ecological boundaries
Transcend polarization through dialogic thinking and "both/and" approaches
Reconnect fragmented domains of knowledge through transdisciplinary frameworks
Reintegrate meaning and purpose with material progress
It seems to be exactly what we need, right?
Almost. There is a problem, though, with metamodernity.
I wonder if you can spot it?
The Big Issue With MetaModernity
The very idea that a new way of thinking can solve a globally felt and locally distinct series of crises, in a scalable way, is ever-so Modern. Many of those who speak of the crisis and suggest solutions for it do so, as I do now, of course, in words.
As the long history of humankind teaches us, words are easy.
In the days of LLMs, deep fakes, and zero-cost digital replication, talk truly is cheap. Words, alone, even if fabulous stories and heart-inspiring books, will not save us.
Single, simple, silver bullet solutions that work in all times and all places—even those like “circular economies” and “regenerative x”—are not the universal solutions they might appear.
This is particularly true if those who are proponents of them, thought leaders, talk the talk but don’t walk the walk.
The idea that there is a cognitive solution to the polycrisis—that can be scaled to all places, across all cultures—is the very heart of the metacrisis.
Reality is larger than reason, no matter how brilliant, can contain.
Having been trained to see and find such solutions, first in medical school and then in strategy consulting, I have been time and time humbled by the limitations of this approach as soon as we engage in the complex, interpenetrated, organic realities of messy, fast-moving moving, and multi-polar realities as opposed to artificially neatened, abstracted, and flattened unrealities that we force onto complexity whenever we wield a spreadsheet.
As soon as we hit the realities of a crowded, rivalrous, resource-poor, livelihood-challenged, performative context, as most conferences and workshops I have been to become, major relational and collaborative issues arise.
These are particularly pronounced in physical rooms and digital spaces where intelligent, cognitively complex individuals talk about problems/crises and what to do about them.
In my long experience of such spaces, dating back to systemic change programs and social impact dialogues in the early 2000s, the smartest people in the room tend to struggle to be in authentic, juicy relationships with others.
They can see the solution, speak of it, but not embody it in how they engage in the world.
Of course, many concepts like “regenerative design,” systemic transformation, bildung, perennial wisdom, and more will likely be of value in transcending the poly/metacrisis. As we unfold “middle out” cosmolocal solutions—top down global systemic thinking fused with bottom up local realities—we will need such concepts and technologies.
I outline many of them in my book Now Lead the Change: Repurpose Your Career, Future-Proof Your Organization, and Regenerate Our Crisis-Hit World by Mastering Transformational Leadership.
You can read an article on the 30+ Key Innovations, Tools & Technologies To Be Leveraged In Regenerative Business Models & Operating Models here.
Yet, ideas, technologies, and processes that remain cognitive constructs—and are built from the mind rather than unfolded through wise bodies—cannot sustain solutions over time.
For example, “interdependence,” an excellent concept much touted by those in the liminal, regenerative, and transformational movements, is extremely easy to write and a bit harder to explain.
For me, when we are interdependent, we have soft, sensitive, and often sensual relationships with other beings, with supple and semi-permeable boundaries that remain open to insights, ideas, and the impacts of others… but never so open we cannot protect, define, discern, and constrain for our safety and stability.
Yet, in my experience at least, it has taken me over 20 years of daily attention and transformative discipline to heal the many schisms and wounds across, what we call in Bio-Transformation Theory my “relational fields,” to even approach anything like the lived and realized experience of interdependence with nature, my spouse, my son, my family, and my collaborators.
From adverse experiences in my formative years right up to intense grief and loss over the last few years, I have had to metabolize these tears in the fabric of my relationships in order to even get close to being interdependent. Yet I can speak about it years ago.
The MettaModern Structure Of Consciousness, Culture & Civilization
The logic of life, whether glimpsed in the latest neuroscience, indigenous knowledge, long-running wisdom traditions, or your own empirical experience as living in the world with a viscera, tells us that our bodies, our somas, are elemental to our adaptive genius.
Interoception, the emerging science of somatic intelligence, and the neuroscience of creativity are showing us that we think, and we certainly co-create, with and through our bodies as well as parts of our brains that are tasked with non-rational, divergent, and imaginative solutions to new problems.
These work in antagonism with parts of our brains and bodies that do prediction, analysis, and reason. We need both tuned and attuned to each other and the world to resolve the challenges of the polycrisis. These problems are what’s left after we tried everything the scientific, technocratic mind came up with.
We call these capabilities cognitive complexity vs. embodied wisdom.
I propose that only deeply embodied ways of being that prioritize and privilege collective adaptation, sensing in complexity and uncertainty, relational aliveness and reciprocity, compassionate truth telling, heart-centric dialogue, co-creative effectiveness will help us move towards solutions.
These are big words, rascally suitcase concepts. So I’ll make it as simple as I can: We cannot solve the problems of the world while being unable, ourselves, to maintain an open heart in socially fraught situations like collaborations and community events; struggling to be intimate, transparent, and vulnerable with colleagues as much as lovers; and having integrity, honesty, and humanity in all dealings.
Smart minds writing books, articles, and code cannot solve problems unless they are grounded in, rooted in, tethered to wise, whole bodies.
This is why I have restated yet also modified the meta, in Metamodernism, to go beyond the beyondness and betweenness it signifies. By injecting an extra t into it to form the word metta in Pali, we prioritize the soft, the sensual, and somatic over the hard, smart, and mental.
It’s still metamodernism, but mettamodernism that privileges embodied wisdom as much, if not more than, cognitive complexity. Embodied wisdom comes from healing and wholing the blockages—Rumi’s walls that are barriers to love—in our relational fields:
In Buddhism, metta is a shorthand for a fully embodied state of caring, kindness, and compassion for oneself and other beings manifested in the world of bodies interacting in space and place.
It’s vital to grok that “loving-kindness,” as metta is often summarized, is a state of being, a way of being, not a philosophical concept or set of words.
We can call it loving-kindness, but it's really a description of an experience, fully embodied, in which we are open, warm, and available in every “relational field.”
We could philosophize this endlessly, write books and sutras about it. Yet, we would not understand it a jot if we had not felt this kind, compassionate, and empathic simpatico and understood how to sustain it in highly-charged and socially-anxious situations.
Even more elemental, when we feel it for sustained periods, we sense-feel-think in different ways and act in alignment with the sensory and somatic state of sacred love that holds us individuals together with each other and the world.
In other words, mettamodernism arises, lives, and empowers in the shared spaces between our bodyminds, not in the heads, books, and articles of individuals.
This brings metamodernism into closer alignment with what I think Jean Gebser was trying to describe with his integral structure, which is “not an expansion of consciousness, but an intensification of consciousness.” By feeling consciousness through our bodies, no longer blocked by trauma, posturing, and other defence mechanisms, we act in the world through embodied wisdom, not just cognitive complexity.
Then, instead of locking onto single, simple, scalable, codified silver bullet solutions to a complex web of challenges—such as “regenerative design”—we get a plurality of potentialities rooted in specific place, space, and somas but not limited to them. Cosmolocal.
We enter, more and more, a way of being in the world that, if we practice it with diligence and discipline for many months and years, affords us the capacity to do as Rilke implored and “live the questions now.” Aliveness in our somas, no longer suppressed by protective patterns, brings the insights and ideas as we require them.
By consciously feeling into the tears and rips in the fabric of our relational fields—and then choosing to heal them as they arise—wholeness arises. Embodied wisdom is drawn down, brought up, and crystallized within our somas. Embodied wisdom is wholeness brought to life in human genius.
From wholeness, aliveness shimmers forth, ready to co-create with others and life itself whatever is needed, in that place and time, to enable those in the space to flourish.
I believe it will take many millions of us to embody a way of being, described in the acronym METTA—which will be the subject of my next post—to solve the polycrisis/metacrisis.
Yet we can start with a small group of committed citizens who choose to sense, then feel, then think, and then act our way into solutions that work for our group, in the place we find ourselves, harnessing the best of global, systemic, future-forward cognitive complexity and the best of intuitive, relational, somatic embodied wisdom.