The Heart of the Metacrisis
Our call and duty to open the medicine portal.
This weekend I joined brilliant voices from across the liminal web and the frontiers of transformative education to explore the theme of Human Transformation in the Metacrisis at a conference at Harvard.
It was an honour to gather together with so many long term friends, collaborators and inspiring voices from across the liminal web. During the weekend, I had the opportunity to facilitate ‘Medicine for The Metacrisis’ a workshop expressing our core address of this moment.
and I are continually developing this through our work in , where we’ve just concluded the Month of The Medicine: exploring what powerful medicine we can bring forth to support wholeness and aliveness. and are commencing The Month of The Metacrisis. We’re already recognising the transformative and agency-bearing potency that approaching metacrisis in a resonant field offers. We will continue to develop this approach when we offer it at The Realisation Festival in June.When all is said and done, and every existential threat has been mapped, the depths of how FUBAR things appear to be is fully seen. Here we still find ourselves together, breathing, sensing into how we can relate to one another and our circumstances with wisdom and courage. It is at the very heart of the metacrisis, we encounter fully our humanity and divinity.
We believe that the metacrisis cannot be held alone, nor is it wise to try to. Our deeply localised and relationally intertwined ancestors were never adapted to grasp and hold the myriad existential risks we face, or may soon face, from the subjectivity of an isolated ‘individual’. Nor for that to be mediated by light emitting, information tablets. The potential for overwhelm is ever-present for us in the circumstance of polycrisis because we not evolutionary adapted for what we face — and instead have evolved a host of perverse systems, structures and habits that undermine our capacity to respond.
The brilliance of the ‘metacrisis’ frame offers something fundamentally new in how we relate with the multiplicity of crisis on all fronts. To name a few: Crisis in capacity to make sense; information warfare; crisis in education; crisis of democracy and polarisation; global climate changes; crisis of debt; crisis of fertility; and mental health…(Breathe)
Metacrisis is a recognition that there is deep connectivity between all of the crises in the world and our nations at the level of systems, communication and most fundamentally human consciousness: what and how we are being.
For example, the crisis in the environment is borne out of our relation to ‘the environment’ — an asymmetry and lack of communication between our complicated production systems and the complex organic reality we are embedded in. The ‘epistemic crisis’ or incapacity to make sense or know what is true, rises alongside polarisation and fragmentation; all of which is borne out by our subtle trauma, relational patterns, addictions, fears and lack of capacity for collective conversation. In short, this understanding recognises that our state of being connects all: we are the instruments of the metacrisis.
The great risk in this frame is that metacrisis becomes another objective abstraction, perpetuating the kind of disembodied thinking that’s gotten us here. Conversely, the great opportunity is that metacrisis dissolves this subject-object divide because metacrisis is both everywhere and nowhere, it is within us and without us. The metacrisis is a koan which calls us beyond our current understanding, towards an evolution in human subjectivity.
When we can hold metacrisis in an embodied way, it allows us to dissolve some of the separation from what is ‘out there’ and what is ‘in here’, putting us on the right track to go beyond our centuries-long trip into separation.
There are many compelling stories of how we’ve arrived here, for example in the work the development of ‘the meaning crisis’ as explicated by John Vervaeke and in the recent presentation of Brendan Graham Dempsey at Harvard. Others point to a story of our lost relationship to the earth, of the persecution and alienation of the feminine. In both cases, we find the through-line is human subjectivity. The way we are, the way we think and understand.
If the environmental crisis is rooted in our departure from sacred participation and connectedness with the earth, then metacrisis is the doorway into a new realisation of this connection. The symptoms that we see heating up all around us represent a saturation point — signposts that we’re approaching the maximal limits of our present state of being, subjectivity and relationality. Like our bacterial predecessors in the slowly warming primordial soups of the earth, we will either boil or evolve into something fundamentally new.
Metacrisis is a doorway. It is both breakdown and breakthrough. Apocalypse and revelation.
Another ever present risk in the chaos of metacrisis is that we bite off more than we can chew, to try to control what we cannot control. We become burnt out, overwhelmed, possessed by polarity, divided, shut down, and energetically shackled to systems and addictions that don’t support our integrity. As we seek to hold all of this in balance, we already live in a world filled with ancestral trauma. These psychic blockages and fragmentations create institutions that perpetuate our infancy, dependence and personal fragmentation. Similarly, we’re surrounded by digitally engineered parasitic forces that seek to sap and undermine our attention and life force, leading us away from what is sacred, real and valuable. The precision of these forces accelerates every passing day. So what are we to do? Must we also accelerate in response, or is there a profound slowing down available to us that can allow us to see more clearly?
Medicine for the metacrisis is a project, and space that can create a space from which we can begin to address this. Building out of both mine and Matthew’s work, as well as the spirit of The Resonant Man, Medicine for the metacrisis opens the alchemical portal where breakdown and breakthrough meet and dance.
We recognise the truth in the ancient adage ‘As above, so below.’ That our personal crisis is inseparable from metacrisis, and that just as we’ve seen that profound witnessing of our individual struggles can transform them, so too our relationship to global crisis.
Medicine for the Metacrisis draws from a fundamental recognition that we need to heal in order to be able to hold more of what’s here, and that the central evolutionary piece of this healing is resonant fields. That these fields, held and developed in community, can allow us to access collective wisdom and intelligence beyond our individual capacity, while over time increasing individual capacity and connection to innate wisdom. With the inspiration of physicist-philosopher and dialogue pioneer David Bohm, we recognise that these fields are essential to healing societal fragmentation. And equally, as Bonnitta Roy and many others put forward in the conference, there is a radical transformation in civic education needed now.
These fields of resonance act as medicine in themselves — the more the field is developed, the more deeply it works to support healing and integration. The most potent fields connect us with a sacred intelligence and love goes beyond romantic, brotherly or filial. A kind of love that leads us deeply into and beyond our current perception of reality and affords the essential capacity to be deeply ok in metacrisis. And, as
articulated so well, this affords a reconnection with a deep and innate wisdom contained within the body: precisely that which we need to navigate chaos well.Through this work of medicine for the metacrisis, we’re beginning to grasp that within the metacrisis lies something like a metaopportunity. In recognising that the crises of the world live within, between and beyond us, we can equally recognise that our inner potential, our relational impact and sacred participation in reality are thoroughly interconnected to a world beyond ourselves.
We are just beginning to understand what it means to come together in a space of deep unconditional regard. We are just beginning to understand the power that lies within us when we die unto everything that is not true. We are just beginning to become the vessels that can bear witness to the landing of sacred reality and heaven on earth — if only for a few moments.
In the metacrisis nothing less than heaven’s wisdom will do.
— Jacob Kishere
Beyond this publication, The Resonant Man holds a gathered circle weekly for men devoted to sacred evolution. You can explore joining us through a a discovery call. We hold live event in dialogue with facilitators, wisdom keepers and women’s circles.
Co-founder Jacob Kishere offers live events and comprehensive podcast production services through SENSESPACE Studio and is gifting 1-1 Soul Journey sessions this month.
If you want to join Jacob, Matthew and the Resonant Man community in person, you can attend our Resonant Man Summer Weekend at Pitchcott Farm on June 20-22.
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