The Meta-Crisis and Personal Transformation (1): How Deep is Enough?!
Is the ultimate cause of the metacrisis to be found 'in time'? If not, what are the implications for response-modes - including personal transformation?
5-minute Video Overview:
Introduction
I just watched a recent conversation [i] between three folks who’ve thought deeply, innovatively, and constructively, about the planetary-scale crisis humankind currently faces. Even at three hours, this dialogue could only scratch the surface of the participants’ respective works [ii]. But it was actually the condensed nature of the presentation that helped me tune into a common limitation in their thinking. These pioneers all seem to place the origin of our current crisis in time, and then look for solutions in the same place. The latter-looking is perhaps more defensible than the former-placing. After all we’ll look for solutions in the same place as we see the problem-origin. Concerning placing: conventional understanding of what it means to be human puts us totally within time – for example, as matter-made bodies. From there, it might be hard to see how we could undertake action that’s not in time. (Or even to understand what ‘out of time’ means!) If we can’t act outside time, we can’t solve problems there. So why look?
In-time looking-and-placing can be like the man searching for his keys at night, under the streetlamp. He didn’t drop them there. But it’s the only place he can see anything! However, I dispute that we can only witness time-based events, and that we can only act in time. With a bit of work, we can metaphorically ‘see in the dark’ – beyond the streetlamp’s shine, outside time.
This article (and this Substack) is then for those like me, who’ve also deeply reflected on the causes of current collective-and-personal challenges, and what can be done. It’s for those who find much to admire and ingest, in the explorations of people like McGilchrist, Schmachtenberger, and Vervaeke. And it’s particularly for those who are haunted by an intuitive sense: despite all the gifts of the current leading-edge, it seems to be neglecting certain depths.
In this article I’ll explore what that missing depth might be. At the same time, I’ll take seriously a skeptical stance: is yet more depth necessary? If not, it could be a distraction from the many initiatives already underway. And irrelevant distractions can make crises worse!
I don’t claim that existing responses are ‘wrong’. Or that prior work ‘should’ be extended or amended. Rather, the ideas tentatively advanced here might form a new, additional, and complementary initiative, perhaps necessary if humanity’s existential risk-management portfolio is to be basically complete. Put differently, the neglect of out-of-time scenarios might itself be risky, because we could then miss insights and actions required for survival.
Figure 1. Meta-Dynamics Underlying the Polycrisis: In-Time & Out-of-Time Views. Left panel: In-Time Causation. Schmachtenberger, Vervaeke, and McGilchrist [i, ii] point to developments at specific time periods, as initiating and contributing to meta-dynamics. (Respectively, and in a very simplified way: the development of stone tools; the loss of a two-world mythos [v]; and the rise of left-brain dominance.) Right panel: In- and Outside-Time Causation. This article points to an extension of in-time causation. Red arrows depict an outside-time causal factor (Section 2), acting before the Big Bang, and continuing in the behavior of matter-energy and spacetime. This factor may be the common cause behind Schmachtenberger/Vervaeke/McGilchrist-views (and so a unification of them). But out-of-time causation also has novel, incremental contributions to meta-dynamics, both directly (red arrow into the ‘Meta’ box) and indirectly, via matter (red-fading-to-black arrow, adding to Schmachtenberger/ Vervaeke/McGilchrist contributions to the in-time sub-category of the Meta box).
1. The Meta-Crisis: Definitions, Origins, Solutions
The term ‘metacrisis’ has several definitions. Here are three I find particularly useful.
The first is that humankind currently faces a set of related crises and risks, for example in ecological, socioeconomic, psychological, and technological domains. These crises are interlinked, e.g. in the sense that solutions in one domain can worsen problems in another [iii].They also pose existential threats, to the planetary ecosystem, the human species, or modern civilization. This multi-member collection of crises and risks is also called the ‘polycrisis’.
A second view of the metacrisis looks toward the potential resolution of the polycrisis in terms of what I sometimes call ‘the next great phase of human civilization’. This perspective looks constructively on our current radical uncertainty, as a birthing phase for something truly new.
The third definition of the metacrisis hypothesizes or perceives that the various sub-challenges in the polycrisis share some common drivers at a deeper level. A simplistic example: perhaps every collective system-dynamic that threatens the existence of humanity is simply the aggregate of Freudian death-drives in individual humans, amplified by the relatively-new milieu of an interconnected, planetary-scale society. According to theories like this, the relevant ‘meta-factor’ is the unmet human unconscious. Responses might then include effective psychotherapy, increased awareness of how death-drives collude and aggregate, promotion of counter-biocidal outlooks, and installation of breakers in planetary-scale flows. Naturally, none of these would be simple or easy! But even more challenging than execution-of-responses is identifying the actual meta-factors at play. For example, is this ‘death drive’ model accurate? Helpful? Complete?!
‘Metacrisis’ terminology presupposes causal factors behind the polycrisis, which may even be identifiable. Assuming this proposal is valid: what do people take to be those underlying common causes (Figure 1)? And what do their models of cause or origin suggest, in terms of effective response (Figure 2)?These are huge questions. Even limiting their scope to the works of McGilchrist, Schmachtenberger, and Vervaeke, a fair response could easily take up an entire book. (Or four!) So I apologize in advance to these pioneers and their co-workers for the extremely unfair caricatures of their ideas, that a brief article like this is forced to draw.
McGilchrist’s work [ii] is perhaps the easiest to summarize. He points to the distinct actions of the left and right hemispheres of the brain, and to a dysfunctional rise to prominence of left-brain style attending, perceiving, thinking, and acting [iv]. And he locates the origin of this rise to somewhere between the medieval era and the Renaissance.
Schmachtenberger [ii] frames the metacrisis in terms of an apex-predator (humanity!) that’s also wielding planetary-scale technology – unlike any other species. He points to many factors, including a mind which can develop that technology, while also being prone to the emergence of narcissistic/sociopathic tendencies, and vulnerable to their manipulation strategies. He locates the origin of technology-centric problems to the development of stone-tools, such as the axe.
Vervaeke’s primary professional focus [ii] isn’t the metacrisis per se, but rather what he calls ‘the meaning crisis’ – although that crisis itself may be intimately-entwined or even identical with the meta-level! He sees the meaning crisis in terms of a collapse from a two-world mythos [v] (e.g. ‘Heaven and Earth’) into a one-world, e.g. scientific/naturalistic, view. The problem is not so much the view we’re left with, but in the loss of a healthy ecology of meaning-supportive practices (including those that access what’s ‘really real’, such as meditation and psychedelics).
The preceding attempt to summarize what these three suggest as origins of the metacrisis, in a few paragraphs, is somewhat ridiculous. It’s perhaps even more ridiculous to attempt to precis their respective views of appropriate responses. But one shared view seems to emerge in [i]: cultivation or promotion of the sacredness of life, or of the significance of what we could call ‘real-Reality’ [vii], may act as an antidote to, and limit on, biocidal tendencies.
Figure 2. In-Time and Out-of-Time Metacrisis Responses. Left Panel: In a slightly-unfair caricature of the McGilchrist/Schmachtenberger/Vervaeke dialogue [1], their primary shared metacrisis-response mode is a return to a pre-disruption, vulnerable, connection to the sacred. Right Panel: The out-of-time causal-hypothesis claims an explanation for both the vulnerability of sacred connection, and why disruptions have power. Undoing or relinquishing the out-of-time cause can then lead to a new, invulnerable, civilization.
2. Time, Timelessness, Matter
The erudition, depth, and innovation of McGilchrist, Schmachtenberger, and Vervaeke are extraordinary, both individually and as a collective that can ‘think together’. Tentatively, and with great reverence for their collective work – I’d like to point to a possibility they don’t address. (Almost everyone else neglects this possibility too! I don’t mean to single them out …)
Every approach I’m aware of takes our local Universe to be effectively identical to the Cosmos (the totality of reality, or of the natural order) [vi]. And almost every approach [vii] looks for an origin of the meta-crisis (or of suffering!) within the temporal process of that Universe. For example, the Big Bang happens. (No problem there, allegedly.) ‘Life’ evolves on Earth. (Still OK.) Homo Sapiens arises. (OK, for a while.) Then at some time-point humanity does ‘something’ – which starts all the problems, ultimately coalescing into the metacrisis!
Specifically, for Schmachtenberger that ‘something’ is developing stone tools. For McGilchrist, it’s allowing and encouraging the dysfunctional rise of left-hemisphere modes of attention. For Vervaeke it’s perhaps the loss of the two-world mythos of the Axial period.
Again, these specific caricatures are just that – over-simplistic caricatures. But they lead to an overall characterization of existing metacrisis-responses that I do hold to be both accurate and useful: all the approaches currently receiving energy and attention locate the origin of the metacrisis firmly within time.
Which leads at last to the unaddressed elephant-scale question: what would it mean for there to be a metacrisis-origin that’s not within time [viii]?!
First, note that modern views usually take time to begin at the Big Bang. Consider a hypothetical-something that went awry at the Big Bang, and is still going wrong (Fig 2). In a sense, that going-wrong would not be in time – not at a particular time. It would pervade all temporal instances up to and including the present moment. (Crucially, it needn’t pervade every future temporal instance, if one day our participation in it is collectively withdrawn …)
Second, we typically take our Universe (again) to be the same thing as the largest possible conception of reality. Perhaps we add some non-material dimensions, which could house a ‘subtle reality’. Maybe we take Heaven/Moksha/Nirvana to exist in these additional dimensions. More rarely, perhaps we recognize a formless, dimensionless, aspect of Reality. (And locate some aspect of Heaven – or Heaven-as-a-whole – ‘there’ …) Inverting all of that, let’s take a view of Reality in which the Formless [ix] is primary, and gives rise to an infinite Ocean of form-based Universes, within which our Universe is just one drop-like instance. Imagine a vast hyperdimensional ‘room’ that contains all these Universes, and their total temporal evolution. A cause or origin ‘not within time’ exists within that room, rather than ‘further within’ the detailed time-based account of our specific Universe. (The room itself ‘is’, or has the quality of, ‘timelessness’ – being ‘outside’ time-of-all-kinds.)
Again, say that something ‘goes wrong’ in the Formless domain, and this ‘wrong’ then affects the birth of a particular Universe. The first Purpose of such a Universe is then the righting of that wrong [viii]. Again, until that wrong is corrected, it pervades all time. It doesn’t ‘begin’ at a particular time – in apparent contradiction of McGilchrist, Schmachtenberger, and Vervaeke. (And many others.) But the emergence of this out-of-time wrong at a given scale can occur at a specific time. So it’s possible to see this out-of-time picture as a deeper, integrative, version of the in-time class (Figs. 1 and 2).
There are many kinds of time. There are the time-indexes in all those other Universes. In our Universe, micro-quantum-reality is computing one kind of time-question [x], and macro-relativistic-reality another [xi]. There’s another kind of time in the conscious-experience stream of each sentient being [xii], and a psychological variant on conscious-experiential time, for those beings who are caught within a ‘separative ego-process’ [xiii]. In fact, it’s the deep origin of this separative ego-process that ultimately lies outside time, in a very real sense.
Many approaches point to dysfunctional kinds of ego-process as a problem for humankind. Some point to a major role for them in the metacrisis. (Correctly, in my view.) But all of these locate the origin of ego-process inside time. For example, psychotherapeutic treatments of dysfunctional ego typically attribute its initiation to early-life events within an individual incarnation. (‘The parents did it!’. Or: ‘the parents and the prevailing cultural-context did it!’)
An absolutely-crucial aspect of the hypothesis I’m suggesting here [viii] is that matter itself contains (or ‘is’!) the bulk of the energetic consequences of ‘what went wrong’ outside of time-in-our-Universe. (And what is still ‘going wrong’, right now.) In psychotherapeutic terms, we could say the early-life parenting of our Universe [viii] was less than optimal! This view can reframe and expand on currently-fashionable panpsychist, pantheistic, and panentheistic viewpoints [xiv], by giving a positive and concrete account of what ‘the conscious experience of matter’ is. And, more practically, it yields a host of other insights about time, matter, and wisdom-intelligence …
Figure 3. Personal Transformation and the Metacrisis. Left Panel: Conventional transformational moves involve shifting from identification with separative ego-process, towards realization of a ‘One Being’ identity-aspect (variously a True Self, Buddha-nature etc.). Right Panel: More nuanced transformational maps [viii] see the out-of-time cause of the metacrisis as a specific relational dysfunction between the Ground-of-Being and one or more Individuated Spirits (or ‘Souls’). (The Ground here is not the same as the One Being, contradicting most traditional non-dual approaches. But neither is the Ground separate from the One [viii].) Some of the energetic consequences of this dysfunction then get repackaged as ‘matter’, which becomes part of the fabric of the illusion-of-separation. These maps then suggest practices targeting the relational dysfunction, and its specific downstream consequences. Such neglected practices could be powerful ways to defuse the metacrisis. (And may be required for its complete ending).
3. Getting Real: A New Wisdom-Tradition that Constrains Technology – and Directs It!
As this Substack progresses, I’ll expand on ‘what went wrong outside time’ [vi], what the consequent ‘conscious experience of matter is’ [vi, xiv] – and what the implications of all that are for the metacrisis, and for humankind, individually and collectively.
Right now, let’s preview some features of the journey back, from the far-flung and much-overlooked edge-of-time we’ve just touched on, and into the metacrisis and our responses to it.
Importantly, I should acknowledge the McGilchrist-Schmachtenberger-Vervaeke conversation that provoked this article does indirectly appeal to the timeless [i]. (Without ever mentioning that word, or explicitly discussing the relationship between time and timelessness!) There’s welcome discussion about new kinds of spiritual community, and about a sense of the sacredness of life, as things that might constrain or redirect humanity’s apparent collective-deathwish. True religion seeks a restored connection with that timeless room Beyond, but not separate from, all form-based Universes. The actual Sacred includes, but it is not limited to, that same timelessness.
However, there’s a crucial distinction between acknowledging a reconnection with timelessness as an indirect part of the solution, and locating the fundamental problem-origin itself at-the-edge-of-time. McGilchrist et al. seem to see the origin in time (Fig. 1), and craft their primary responses accordingly (Fig. 2). This is limiting – perhaps fatally so. It’s a bit like seeing the origin of infection in terms of the absence of antibiotic drugs. In this blinkered view, antibiotics can then be seen as the only solution to infection. In fact, the prior and primary ways to prevent disease are promoting the immune-system, and avoiding contact with infectious-agents.
To get concrete and focused: in [i], Schmachtenberger asks a poignant and beautiful question, asking how ‘a new wisdom-tradition’ might corral dangerous applications of technologies. (Stone axes. Left-brain–directed worldviews. Two-world disruptive thought-systems.)
As this Substack unfolds, I’ll answer that question comprehensively, for ‘outside time’ approaches. For now, I’ll give brief examples of three channels in which these approaches can respond to the ‘corral’ call. First, ‘outside time’ reality-views of specific kinds (Figure 3) can suggest novel targets for spiritual practice and personal transformation, as responses to the meta-crisis. I’ll expand a little more on this point in the next section.
Second, as I’ve already mentioned, outside-time reality-views point to a Universal Purpose: the righting of the pre-Big-Bang ‘wrong’. This can be expressed as a ‘Total Awakening’ imperative [viii] – the awakening of both sentient beings, and matter itself. (As strange as the latter may seem!) In turn, this Purpose can (and must, eventually) become the guiding star for the next great phase of civilization. (Recall the second definition of metacrisis in section 1.) This common direction will then align science, spirituality, ethics, economy, and education. (And other domains!) Not because I say so. Or any authority says so. But because we all ultimately come to recognize this star [xv].
Finally (and relatedly!), the outside-time theory-complex leads to novel, precise, scientific experiments [xvi], concerning the relationship between conventional-matter and phenomenal consciousness [xvii]. Complementing the overall direction of [i], but as a dramatic contrast to its qualitative, conversational approach, these experiments can establish data showing that left-brain views of its own adequacy are mistaken. These experiments are intimately related to Schmachtenberger’s poignant observation [i] that Godel-like results [xviii] in several domains can point the left-brain towards a kind of ‘self-transcendence’ [xvi]. And – when and if humanity gets round to executing these experiments – they will synergistically support the personal-transformational and collective-cultural impacts, discussed in preceding paragraphs.
Figure 4. Risk-Management: ‘Polycrisis Plus’! This article points to the possibility that ‘outside time’ dynamics may play a major part in the initiation and perpetuation of the Polycrisis. Here, the ‘Polycrisis+’ is a polycrisis-version that actively denies the existence and/or relevance of outside-time effects. The additional (‘+’!) risk then is that outside-time causes are in fact significant, in which case their denial can only intensify the polycrisis, perhaps fatally.
4. Getting Even More Real: Varieties of Personal Transformation
One conceptual possibility is that we might successfully navigate the metacrisis without widespread personal transformation. Perhaps we could nudge values and behaviors, within the existing psychological/psychospiritual configurations of humanity. Another possibility is that our survival requires some specific transformational breadth (the number of people shifting) and depth (the degree to which those people shift). (Of course, here I should say something about what I mean by ‘transformation’. For now, roughly, I’m using that word in the same sense as the remarkable psychospiritual psychotherapist Richard Harvey. He uses it refer to major, irreversible, structural shifts in the actuality of lived-identity, of specific kinds [xix].)
I believe that a certain minimal set of personal transformations will be required. Although they don’t explicitly address the point in these terms, McGilchrist-Schmachtenberger-Vervaeke do appeal to a greater connection to the sacred. The connection they envision may then call for change, for transformation, or for something else …
The class of ‘out of time’ causal-models sketched out here (Fig. 3) point both to very specific kinds of personal transformation, and to equally-specific reality-aspects that can support and facilitate those shifts. Notably, both causal-models and transformational-practices/resources are related to, but often distinct-from, the kinds of ‘Eastern’ [xx] non-duality traditions to which Schmachtenberger and Vervaeke seem to appeal [i, ii]. Interestingly, out-of-time hypotheses here are also strongly related to, but radically-different from, the kinds of panentheistic view that McGilchrist appears to favor [i, ii].
As this Substack proceeds, I’ll have a lot to say about metacrisis-related transformation, and feminine and masculine principles [xxi]. Clearly we have a lot to do culturally, collectively, about masculine/feminine relating. Equally, radical collective shifts often land first in personal transformations.
Briefly in relation to the out-of-time view, consider just one unique gift of the feminine – what’s been called ‘feminine intuition’. Some authentic versions of this gift call on outside-time computations. Put differently, general neglect of the out-of-time view may correlate with the demotion, suppression, and denial of the validity-and-significance of feminine input. Given that this intuition can guide our understanding of the metacrisis, and responses to it, we must liberate it from suppression.
Alongside this uplifting of the feminine, I’ll have a lot to say about the mis-construal of the masculine and its gifts. Of course, we have to recognize and undo the extraordinarily-damaging contributions of patriarchy. But we must also recognize and support uniquely-masculine contributions to meeting and unwinding the metacrisis. I’ll suggest that collectively, culturally, we currently understand and honor these contributions even less than we recognize and celebrate uniquely-feminine capacities. This masculine-focused commentary, too, will have a lot to do with Reality-beyond-time.
Finally (for now!), what does this out-of-time/metacrisis enquiry have to do with the ‘Money and God’ title of this Substack?! Does the metacrisis-salient personal transformation I have in mind lead to poverty and faith, or to wealth and atheism?! [Spoiler alert: none of the above!]
Roughly speaking, ‘God’ is a placeholder for pivotal out-of-time aspects of a not-timebound model (a model I haven’t begun to flesh out yet, in any kind of detail!). But this is not the God e.g. of traditional Christianity [xxii]. (Nor the ‘non-God’ of Vervaeke! [xxii])
At the other end of the spectrum, ‘Money’ anchors in-time aspects of the same model. It certainly represents the economic aspect of the metacrisis. But more generally, it stands for every metacrisis aspect that can be quantified or measured, from global temperature, to subjective well-being (to the extent that can be quantified), to the actual sentience-coupling (or otherwise!) of artificial so-called ‘intelligence’ [xxiii] …
Figure 5. The Metacrisis: How Deep is Enough? Left Panel: Analyses of the McGilchrist-Schmachtenberger-Vervaeke kind (e.g. from Fig. 1) are termed ‘Level-1, In-Time’ Metafactors, in this Figure. ‘Out of time’ models (e.g. Figure 3) are called ‘Level-2’ approaches, here. Red arrows connecting Level-2 to Level-1, and Level-1 to the Polycrisis, suggest that out-of-time factors underpin in-time events and trends, which are in turn proximal causal-factors for the Polycrisis. (Notably, Level-1 and Level-2 analyses need not compete, or conflict.) Right Panel: Say we only need to respond to the Polycrisis from Level-1, but we actually spend resources on Level-1-plus-2 activities (upper-left, orange quadrant). Then we might create a disaster, by unnecessary diversion of scarce resources, to Level-2 responding. On the other hand, say we actually need to respond from Level-1-and-2, but limit ourselves to Level-1-style action (lower-right, red quadrant). This will definitely lead to disaster. Asymmetry of risks across Level-1-responsive action (green-and-red row) and Level-1-plus-2-response (orange-and-green-row) suggests 1-plus-2 action is prudent, all else equal.
5. Summary
McGilchrist, Schmachtenberger, and Vervaeke together arguably represent one leading-edge of humankind’s responses to the metacrisis. In this article, I’ve hinted at a novel ‘not-timebound’ causal-model of the metacrisis – arguably, deeper than any extant or preceding view. And I’ve pointed to just a select few of the concrete, differentiated, implications from that model. (Although I haven’t yet unfolded or justified those implications, in any detail.)
Given the coherent plausibility of the central model [viii], its potential status as the founding reality-narrative for the next great phase of civilization, [viii], the scientific falsifiability of pivotal ideas [xvi], and the asymmetric risks associated with neglecting the out-of-time possibility (Figures 4 and 5), I suggest that we need to add the not-timebound model to humanity’s portfolio of responses to the meta-crisis.
In subsequent articles, I’ll expand on this model, its implications, and their risk-management significance. In this forthcoming expansion, ‘Money’ will stand for quantified, terrestrial, dimensions of problem-and-solution, including financial/economic measures, and ‘God’ [xxii] for its qualitative, spiritual, aspects – without appealing to any specific religion. (And definitely denying any invocation to a white-haired patriarch-in-the-sky, who uses alleged-Hell as a threat!)
These articles, and the hypothesis they’re based on, aren’t meant to contradict or falsify the McGilchrist-Schmachtenberger-Vervaeke class. Ultimately, I’m looking to connect with other people who intuitively sense the significance of not-timebound approaches, so we can develop a community of enquiry-based action, as a synergistic complement to existing initiatives.
6. Coming Up …
“The Metacrisis and Personal Transformation (2): Psychosis, Meta-Psychosis, and Reality-Limitation”
Because I’ve been completely cooked in the modern scientific worldview (in my family-of-origin, and at Cambridge, UCSD, and elsewhere), I totally understand how the ‘out-of-time causality’ talk in this article might seem insane! ‘Psychosis’ refers to a loss-of-contact with reality. But how do we know ‘what reality is’?!
“The Metacrisis and Personal Transformation (3): A Systems-Thinking Approach, Based on Four-Factor Deep-Reality”
Systemic-thinking is big (as it should be!), in the alternative/complementary/ transformational world. It often claims to be ‘holistic’. But what is the ‘whole’ that’s being addressed? In this article I use an unusual ‘Four-Factor Deep Reality’ hypothesis for the largest ‘whole’, as the basis for a novel, systems-thinking model of the Metacrisis – and our responses!
To connect with me on the topics discussed here, please leave a comment, or DM or email me.
If you’re interested in my life experience, as a background to these metacrisis musings, check out https://www.liveyourdeepestself.com/about-nicholas.
My 1-1 transformational coaching work both informs and is informed by the topics discussed in this Substack. To find out more, please visit www.liveyourdeepestself.com.
End Notes
[i] ‘The Psychological Drivers of the Metacrisis’: a conversation between Iain McGilchrist, Daniel Schmachtenberger, and John Vervaeke.
[ii] For more on McGilchrist’s work, please visit https://channelmcgilchrist.com/
For more on Schmachtenberger’s work, please visit https://civilizationemerging.com/
For more on Vervaeke’s work, please visit https://johnvervaeke.com/
[iii] The simplest example: making everyone better off economically (by increasing production and income) can make everyone worse off ecologically (by depleting resources and increasing pollution).
[iv] Very roughly, right-brain attention is expansive, comprehensive, holistic; left-brain attention is narrow, focused, goal-oriented. See the link in [ii] to McGilchrist’s work, for more detail.
[v] In this context, ‘mythos’ means a sort of background set of reality-beliefs a culture adopts, often with accompanying narrative tales. (See the link in [ii] to Vervaeke’s work, for more detail.)
Examples of ‘two world’ mythoi include ‘Gods and Men’ (Graeco-Roman), ‘Awakened/Enlightened Reality and Sleeping/Ignorant Dream-Illusion’ (Buddhist/Vedic), and ‘Heaven and Earth’ (Christian). (Of course, there is a three-domain ‘Heaven, Earth. Hell’ version of Christianity, too. Uses and origins of two- and three-world monotheisms will be a topic for another time.)
[vi] As the ‘exception that proves the rule’, consider the ‘Kosmos’ of Wilber’s Integral Theory (https://integrallife.com/). This includes many aspects over and above those included in a conventional scientific account of our local Universe. Nevertheless, Wilber typically gives an unquestioning primacy to mainstream science in its current form, as something with which every hypothesis must rigidly conform. (See for example, his Religion of Tomorrow, which roughly equates to ‘Buddhism plus science-as-it-is-now’!) Undoubtedly, there are major shifts in the future of science, not least concerning the nature and relationship of matter and mind. Giving as-is science a dominant place, without taking these shifts into account, the totality of our effective Cosmos can only be Universe, because as-is science (roughly) says the only thing that can affect our material locale in an orderly way is … our material locale!
[vii] The dialogue between Krishnamurti and Bohm in The Ending of Time is almost an exception to in-time crisis-causation. Krishnamurti seems to want to go to the edge of time, but Bohm repeatedly relocates the origin of humanity’s problems to somewhere in the last 10,000 years. I should acknowledge Krishnamurti’s persistent enquiry into timeless action as a major inspiration for the approach described in this article.
[viii] The most expansive account of out-of-time action and its relevance to personal- and-collective challenges-and-crises can be found in the podcast www.veilstothesoul.com. A shorter, video-based, introduction can be found on the Center for Dialogue in Science’s YouTube channel. These accounts offer a new kind of depth, beyond either modern science or modern/traditional spiritualities, based around a contrast between ‘real-Reality’ and a Dream of separation. (This structural contrast is not new. But many dimensions and details are.)
Both audio and video treatments outline a new way to interface science and spirituality, and discuss how this novel reality-theory can become the foundation of the next great phase of civilization. I.e., how it can provide an exit-point from the metacrisis!
These treatments also give a novel account of the origin of matter, asking and answering a question that panpsychist, panexperientialist and pantheist philosophies never pose: what is the content or character of matter’s conscious experience [xiv]?
They also explore ‘Total Awakening’ as the ‘first Purpose’ of our Universe. ‘Awakening’ is a term used in non-dual spirituality, to describe the leaving behind of a Dream of separation. ‘Total’ Awakening points to the fact that it’s not just sentient beings who need Awakening. (As traditional non-dual spiritualities suggest.) Additionally there’s a Being in (or behind) matter, who needs the help of sentient beings to Awaken.
[ix] ‘Formlessness’ is a category that appears in many mystical approaches. One way towards an initial conceptual understanding of the term is to imagine a realm devoid of any particular object (or ‘form’), but with the potential to birth any (or all) of them. (A related idea is ‘no-thing-ness’, e.g. as discussed by Krishnamurti and Bohm [vii].) From a modern scientific perspective, a related topic is the vacuum energy (although it’s important to avoid superficial reductionism – either way!). This is ‘no particular particle’ (as far as we know), but has the capacity to birth any particle (together with its anti-particle, if it has one).
[x] For a wonderful account of quantum action as an attempt by Nature to calculate ‘what time is it now?’, see Feynmann’s QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter. Most of the popular interpretations of quantum theory (notably, ‘many worlds’) completely obscure this elegant picture.
[xi] Curiously, there’s a lot less discussion in physics of what relativity means for time, than of what quantum-theory means for reality. Arguably, this is upside down. (As are many things, currently!). While it’s somewhat generally-understood that relatively-moving clocks advance at different rates, there’s shockingly-little enquiry into the ‘deep why’ of this, and whether relativistic frames have any sort of objective existence. That is, relativity offers at least as much challenge for conventional views of time as quantum theories do for conventional views of reality.
[xii] As a simple example of the divergence between physical times (quantum [x] and relativistic [xi]) and conscious experiential time, consider the neural processing delay between photons impinging on retinae (when visual processing begins) and the completion of feedforward and feedback processing in the brain (when the neural information-basis for conscious experience is complete). This means that the visual scene is delayed by 50 to 250 milliseconds, relative to the physical reality it represents.
[xiii] Beyond what we could call ‘sensory experiential time’ [xii] (based on neural information-processing), there is a psychological time-indexing associated with the separated self-image. Krishnamurti and Bohm explore this temporal dimension at length in The Ending of Time.
[xiv] Consider panexperientialism (the view that ‘everything has conscious experience’), as the precursor to panpsychism (‘everything has a mind’ – or a soul), pantheism (‘God is everything’) and panentheism (‘God is in everything’). In the human case, it’s clear that a good portion of conscious experience is based on neural information-processing, in the brain. But trees and quarks don’t have brains. What is their conscious experience based on?! [viii]
[xv] This isn’t a call for a mono-culture or a mono-religion, any more than asking people to ‘recognize the numerical structure of a single local law of gravity’ is. Of course, ‘a single shared first-Purpose for our Universe’ spans spiritual and scientific domains. (Which upsets people on both sides of an often-fanatical ideological divide.) And many people don’t like teleological hypotheses. But there either is or isn’t such a Purpose. The suggestion here is that the metacrisis may in part be a call to a renewed engagement with this question.
[xvi] For a relatively brief introduction to this experiment, see One Experiment to Start Them All: The Missing Foundation of Consciousness Science. For a comprehensive treatment, please refer to From Godel to Trump: A Three-Step Resolution to Science’s Emergent Crisis. The latter work established Godel-like theorems for the physical science of phenomenal consciousness [xviii].
[xvii] ‘Phenomenal consciousness’ is philosophy’s name for conscious experience – for example the sights and sounds you are experiencing right now. Importantly, the conscious experience of a tree, a table, or a computer screen is not identical to the tree/table/computer-screen, as a matter-object studied by mainstream science. Precise treatment of these kind of technical nuances is a crucial part of the out-of-time, science-spirituality, reality-model [viii].
[xviii] Loosely speaking, Godel analysed conventional, algorithmic, approaches to proving results in mathematics. Even more loosely, he showed that certain mathematical systems contain theorems that couldn’t be proved algorithmically, i.e. within conventional mathematics. (Without appeal to insight). More loosely still, the work referenced in [xvi] shows that any scientific conjecture about phenomenal consciousness can’t be proved or disproved within the current structure of conventional, experimental science.
[xix] For more on Richard Harvey’s work, please visit www.therapyandspirituality.com. A good entry-point to his work is his book Your Essential Self.
[xx] ‘Eastern’: I share John Vervaeke’s seeming distaste for this term. But, like him, I use it anyway!
For example, for super-technical but super-important reasons, I tend to contrast non-dual Christianity (which I sometimes call a Western approach) with other non-dual traditions such as Advaita and Buddhism (Eastern non-dualities, in my terminology). But Christianity was born in the Middle East! So that’s really a contrast between Middle East and further East, not between West and East!
(And lumping hundreds of approaches into an overarching ‘Eastern’ category - as I sometimes do! - is indefensible, bordering on offensive …)
[xxi] In this work, distinctions between masculine and feminine aspects are not the same as distinctions between men and women. Notably, as I’ll go into at some length in subsequent articles, women and men are both essentially complete with respect to masculine and feminine capacities. There seems to be a statistical-correlation between male/female identifications and certain relative-configurations of those capacities. But that doesn’t invalidate basic completeness.
[xxii] It’s not even clear what the ‘God of traditional Christianity’ is! It largely depends on which timepoint we take ‘tradition’ to refer to. Right now, traditional Christianity (on average) takes God to be a man-in-the-sky. The ‘tradition’ in 100AD was likely very different.
Vervaeke has advocated a ‘non-theist’ position, as an alternative to the apparent theist/atheist dichotomy. In his view, theists claim that the Ground-of-Being is ‘a being’. In this series, ‘God’ is more-or-less synonymous with a Ground-of-Being that is both alive, and has an identity that is distinct from that of the One Being. (Advaitic True Self. Buddha Nature, Christ Consciousness. Etc.) So ‘God’ here is a Being, but not as Vervaeke uses the b-word. While these nuances may seem extremely technical and esoteric, they’re vital to a coherent-and-precise understanding of out-of-time causes of the metacrisis.
[xxiii] Remarkably, out-of-time models discussed here have a lot to say about the relationship between conscious experience (or sentience), intelligence, and matter. Notably, they call for specific experiments concerning the experience/matter relationship [xvi]. Thus, they respond in an unusually-direct way to Schmachtenberger’s call for a ‘corral on technology’, particularly when ‘technology’ means so-called ‘artificial intelligence’. Direct, experimental, responses can strongly challenge currently-emergent speculation about the ‘intelligence’ (or consciousness) of large-language models, and related in silico information-processing technologies. Crucially, these challenges to left-brain views of what intelligence is, are framed in the left-brain’s own language. (I.e., logical-theorems, experiments, and data [xvi].)