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Grappling with the Metacrisis: Understanding and Responding Effectively to the Great Challenges of Our Time

Updated: 5 days ago




Founder of Eudaimonia Institute, Nicholas Hedlund & Sean Esbjörn-Hargens on Deep Transformation Podcast– Grappling with the Metacrisis: Understanding and Responding Effectively to the Great Challenges of Our Time


“We really need both—we need big Heart to connect and be friends with each other and love each other and we need that in equal measure to big Mind.”


Nicholas Hedlund & Sean Esbjörn-Hargens are big picture philosophers with extraordinary big hearts as well as big minds, dedicated to understanding how consciousness, culture, and nature relate to each other, and to forging a path for the Earth and civilization to flourish rather than fall apart. In this dialogue, the world of metatheories comes alive with urgent, purposeful meaning, because as Sean and Nick point out, integrative metatheories like Ken Wilber’s integral theory and Roy Bhaskar’s critical realism are the only tools that provide a useful framework for us to talk about and confront the vast web of interrelated and wicked problems we face on every level at this time. Now, we are only just beginning to understand the nature of the metacrisis—how the external crises are driven by interior crises of sensemaking and meaning making—but how do we bring everyone to the table to find solutions? How do we get the wisdom of these approaches to bear upon the crises we face?


It turns out that heart connection—love, caring, and being willing to listen and to change—is a crucial, key ingredient for us to move forward in a positive way. Nick and Sean express both heartbreak and wild enthusiasm—heartbreak that our entire planetary community is so threatened and we have only a small window of time (till 2030) to transform our consciousness and culture into taking a cooperative and reverent approach to life, and enthusiasm to be alive at this pivotal time where everything hangs in the balance. Recorded December 7, 2022.


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Transcript:


We came up with this term "metacrisis" and I think what we're really trying to get at is the sense that not only are there all these crises and all these different realms from the ecological, the technological, the political, the economic, ethical, existential, epistemic... all these dimensions of life. There's all these different crises.


So, it's more than just sort of the sum of those crises, but it's also understanding that all those crises are profoundly intertwined, profoundly interconnected, and they're overlapping, and interpenetrating in their feedback loops, and networks that are connecting them. So, we really can't separate out any of these crises from the others. And if we try and solve any one of these crises by themselves, we find that they feedback on the others and that new problems are created, new complexities are emerging...


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