A breath of fresh air, thank you. You clarify the core work of the 21st Century -- becoming the first people to consciously learn to know, see, explore, understand, confront, be confronted by and respond to a meta-crisis of a whole form of civilization, i.e. our Modern Techno-Industrial (MTI) form of civilization. Up to now, meta-crises have been seen as deeply personal, which they are, but not as entailing a our whole way of knowing and responding to reality as whole cultures, indeed our whole form of civilization. Given this novelty, it is not surprising that we are having trouble wrapping our heads, hearts, bodies and souls around what we are into, up against being asked to do/become. By the way two other persons who developed non-trivial understandings of this are both Canadians, now deceased: Northrop Frye (literary critic) and Wilfred Cantwell Smith (historian of religion).
Thanks Jonathan, this has helped reify a project I'll be re-releasing. You have also put into words the lack I too felt with "polycrisis", but as you highlighted, hopefully it can at least be the gateway to a deeper diagnosis--so to speak.
This essay led me to "Spiritualize" and the question, "What is spirituality?"
I thought I would offer Sri Aurobindo's comments - I read them first some 50 years ago, and still find them the best I've come across. It may help to keep several things in mind as you read this:
(1) The questioning regarding "spiritual but not religious,"
(2) Sri Aurobindo's comment, over 70 years ago, that "the age of religions is over";
(3) his comment that 'Capitalism is evil" and
(4) the fact that he was the leader of the independence movement in India before Gandhi arrived on the scene, indicating his view of spirituality is not merely sitting on a cushion meditating in private...
****
WHAT IS SPIRITUALITY?
"Spirituality is not a high intellectuality, not idealism, not an ethical turn of mind or moral purity and austerity, not religiousity or an ardent and exalted emotional fervour, not even a compound of all these excellent things; a mental belief, creed or faith, an emotional aspiration, a regulation of conduct according to a religious or ethical formula are not spiritual achievement and experience.
"These things are of considerable value to mind and life; they are of value to the spiritual evolution itself as preparatory movements disciplining, purifying or giving a suitable form to the nature; but they still belong to the mental evolution, — the beginning of a spiritual realisation, experience, change is not yet there.
"Spirituality is in its essence an awakening to the inner reality of our being, to a spirit, self, soul which is other than our mind, life and body, an inner aspiration to know, to feel, to be that, to enter into contact with the greater Reality beyond and pervading the universe which inhabits also our own being, to be in communion with It and union with It, and a turning, a conversion, a transformation of our whole being as a result of the aspiration, the contact, the union, a growth or waking into a new becoming or new being, a new self, a new nature."
Thank you so much for this thoughtful piece! I came across it yesterday when asking myself which term to use in my own writing. This deep exploration was exactly what I was looking for (and you sold me on meta :)
This is a fanastic and hopeful piece that pulls together so many threads I've been contemplating, particularly the question of how we re-admit our interiors back into the big questions of the day and how we move forward without feeling overwhelmed by binary ideas of external collapse. In my last essay, I wondered about "living through the metacrisis without being defined by it" and I'm looking forward to exploring more of that with the help of the Perspectiva community.
My goodness buddy. What a piece of work… Art… Dot inspiration. A hot air balloon that lifts me up, but also has me marveling at the size of the balloon. I’m a bit stunned at your grasp, and your ability to communicate within it. I would actually enjoy engaging with you, should you have the capacity as I engage my own ideas of Regenerative intimacy in the world.
Hi Jonathan. Currently it’s limited to hear on Substack, and I’m relatively new. Under regenerative intimacy to save the Earth. I have a dozen books in the works, all sitting on a merry-go-round together laughing and squealing, though I’m trying to coax them into my inner sanctum one at a time :-)
I hope to release a poetry book this fall. I have a good bit of poetry narrated with my music, and a lot of my music on soundcloud.com/derekwash or search Tendersong there.
Hi Jonathan, was conscious that the only question I answered "No" was the 3rd one, about whether the problem was new or "qualitatively distinct"?
Reading one of my linked posts, I realise Iain's intro from TMWT - quoted in your first "Attention as a Moral Act" piece, says it well:
“I believe we have systematically misunderstood the nature of reality, and chosen to ignore, or silence, the minority of voices that have intuited as much and consistently maintained that this is the case. Now we have reached the point where there is an urgent need to transform both how we think of the world and what we make of ourselves; attempting to convey such a richer insight is the ambition of this book.”
ie The systematic misunderstanding is not new, it's as old as the enlightenment I said, but the urgency has reached some kind of tipping point - the mix of ubiquitous public awareness of "the polycrises" and the mass reinforcement through immediate electronic media. (We really do need to understand what the meta-problem is and what solutions should really look like?)
I'm still reading this, but paused to see if I can ask your permission to republish it in The R-Word -- https://rword.substack.com/ . But I could not find an email address for you ... and so I'm posting my request to you in this fashion.
I didn't need to complete my reading to know I wanted to make this request. It's a perfect fit for what's going on in The R-Word lately, as is most anything found in Perspecteeva's multiple web presences. I love it that you folks are digging in around questions of deliberate cultivation of the social imaginary! That's my leading edge of inquiry now! I think this is the most urgently important work in our world today! Indeed, the word "education" can mean nothing outside of a context in which the social imaginary takes center stage.
And sorry, I'm on a bit of a roll with this topic, which I can explain if you have the time, but ... :-)
One post of mine from a couple of years ago, is a direct reference to your suggestion of "meta-crisis" and relating this to my own millennial meta interests. https://www.psybertron.org/archives/14579
…ever since the term polycrisis went mainstream, I noticed myself bristling, and I feel a kind of avuncular responsibility to remind people what metacrisis means and why it matters much more than the idea of polycrisis.
The metacrisis is the historically specific threat to truth, beauty, and goodness caused by our persistent misunderstanding, misvaluing, and misappropriating of reality. The metacrisis is the crisis within and between all the world’s major crises, a root cause that is at once singular and plural, a multi-faceted delusion arising from the spiritual and material exhaustion of modernity that permeates the world’s interrelated challenges and manifests institutionally and culturally to the detriment of life on earth.
Meta highlights that we also need to look within ourselves to psyche and soul, and also beyond, for a renewal in our worldview or cosmovision which has a direct bearing on prevailing ideologies and social imaginaries.
The metacrisis says there is a spiritual crisis within the political failure to attend to myriad crises (e.g. the destruction of our only liveable planet is clearly delusional but also sacrilegious);
...‘a new government’ is definitely not enough, and widely touted plans for ‘a new economy’ or ‘a new politics’ will not take root without arising alongside some kind of spiritual innovation to shift perception and understanding about the nature of the self and the meaning of life...
Meta says there a crisis that is not just ‘out there’ in the world, but ‘in here’ in your heart and mind, and ‘between us and reality’ in the way we relate, notice, imagine, understand, listen and speak. We are participants in crisis, not just spectators.
...metanoia, the first word in the New Testament in Matthew’s gospel, which is often translated as ‘repent’, but really means a profound and world-shifting change of heart and mind. That’s what we have to go towards, and it is something metacrisis helps us to see and do, but polycrisis does not.
How here's me, Suzanne, again. McGilchrist is critiqued for not coming up with a way forward, which is all that I deal with, where I suggest that "to shift perception and understanding about the nature of the self and the meaning of life," changing our story is the most basic thing that would do it. Would you have a look? https://suzannetaylor.substack.com/s/changemaking-now. I'm trying to launch a substantial conversation on and off Substack!
One more thing. If we educated children properly they would create a different world, but given it will take some time for children to become adults, best we not wait for that
The type of attention we pay to the world co-creates the world. What are you doing with other people’s co-creative faculties? That’s a lot of CR Isis you got there on the plate. You’re like a polyamorous Denis Hopper in Blue Velvet-
“… any crisis that moves!”
Lol. Crisisporn
Btw- Good luck amalgamating the feedback and creating the new visionary.
Come to the Afterparty for the extra 3K words… the Brady-bunch patriots have their jacobin Smurf hats on…it’s Phrygian cold out there, hay.
You guise read like Clement ripping off Valentinians. A pseudo intellectual cavalcade of ten cent words worshipping the opposite of RSA’s 21st Century Renaissance bait and switch storefront jive.
Does the “21st century renaissance” involve convincing the moderately educated to spend money on co-creating their perma-nightmare with regular bad news?
How many simultaneous illusory crises do you need to manufacture and maintain with regular updates in order to convince her hivemind to anti-placebo itself into another revolution?
Which side of this Sarah Bellum are you on, anyway?
A breath of fresh air, thank you. You clarify the core work of the 21st Century -- becoming the first people to consciously learn to know, see, explore, understand, confront, be confronted by and respond to a meta-crisis of a whole form of civilization, i.e. our Modern Techno-Industrial (MTI) form of civilization. Up to now, meta-crises have been seen as deeply personal, which they are, but not as entailing a our whole way of knowing and responding to reality as whole cultures, indeed our whole form of civilization. Given this novelty, it is not surprising that we are having trouble wrapping our heads, hearts, bodies and souls around what we are into, up against being asked to do/become. By the way two other persons who developed non-trivial understandings of this are both Canadians, now deceased: Northrop Frye (literary critic) and Wilfred Cantwell Smith (historian of religion).
Thanks Jonathan, this has helped reify a project I'll be re-releasing. You have also put into words the lack I too felt with "polycrisis", but as you highlighted, hopefully it can at least be the gateway to a deeper diagnosis--so to speak.
This essay led me to "Spiritualize" and the question, "What is spirituality?"
I thought I would offer Sri Aurobindo's comments - I read them first some 50 years ago, and still find them the best I've come across. It may help to keep several things in mind as you read this:
(1) The questioning regarding "spiritual but not religious,"
(2) Sri Aurobindo's comment, over 70 years ago, that "the age of religions is over";
(3) his comment that 'Capitalism is evil" and
(4) the fact that he was the leader of the independence movement in India before Gandhi arrived on the scene, indicating his view of spirituality is not merely sitting on a cushion meditating in private...
****
WHAT IS SPIRITUALITY?
"Spirituality is not a high intellectuality, not idealism, not an ethical turn of mind or moral purity and austerity, not religiousity or an ardent and exalted emotional fervour, not even a compound of all these excellent things; a mental belief, creed or faith, an emotional aspiration, a regulation of conduct according to a religious or ethical formula are not spiritual achievement and experience.
"These things are of considerable value to mind and life; they are of value to the spiritual evolution itself as preparatory movements disciplining, purifying or giving a suitable form to the nature; but they still belong to the mental evolution, — the beginning of a spiritual realisation, experience, change is not yet there.
"Spirituality is in its essence an awakening to the inner reality of our being, to a spirit, self, soul which is other than our mind, life and body, an inner aspiration to know, to feel, to be that, to enter into contact with the greater Reality beyond and pervading the universe which inhabits also our own being, to be in communion with It and union with It, and a turning, a conversion, a transformation of our whole being as a result of the aspiration, the contact, the union, a growth or waking into a new becoming or new being, a new self, a new nature."
Thank you so much for this thoughtful piece! I came across it yesterday when asking myself which term to use in my own writing. This deep exploration was exactly what I was looking for (and you sold me on meta :)
Glad to hear it. Thanks for letting me know. You might imagine, while doing it, I sometimes had my doubts about whether it was worthwhile!
I’m looking forward to the book 😄 I hope you keep writing it!
This is a fanastic and hopeful piece that pulls together so many threads I've been contemplating, particularly the question of how we re-admit our interiors back into the big questions of the day and how we move forward without feeling overwhelmed by binary ideas of external collapse. In my last essay, I wondered about "living through the metacrisis without being defined by it" and I'm looking forward to exploring more of that with the help of the Perspectiva community.
My goodness buddy. What a piece of work… Art… Dot inspiration. A hot air balloon that lifts me up, but also has me marveling at the size of the balloon. I’m a bit stunned at your grasp, and your ability to communicate within it. I would actually enjoy engaging with you, should you have the capacity as I engage my own ideas of Regenerative intimacy in the world.
Thanks Derek. Much appreciated. Where can I find your work?
I just released a poem piece today, with audio. Under regenerative intimacy to save the Earth
Hi Jonathan. Currently it’s limited to hear on Substack, and I’m relatively new. Under regenerative intimacy to save the Earth. I have a dozen books in the works, all sitting on a merry-go-round together laughing and squealing, though I’m trying to coax them into my inner sanctum one at a time :-)
I hope to release a poetry book this fall. I have a good bit of poetry narrated with my music, and a lot of my music on soundcloud.com/derekwash or search Tendersong there.
Thank you for reaching. I’m smiling
Hi Jonathan, already sent replies by email, and since then have posted my response here:
https://www.psybertron.org/archives/17736
Good luck.
Hi Jonathan, was conscious that the only question I answered "No" was the 3rd one, about whether the problem was new or "qualitatively distinct"?
Reading one of my linked posts, I realise Iain's intro from TMWT - quoted in your first "Attention as a Moral Act" piece, says it well:
“I believe we have systematically misunderstood the nature of reality, and chosen to ignore, or silence, the minority of voices that have intuited as much and consistently maintained that this is the case. Now we have reached the point where there is an urgent need to transform both how we think of the world and what we make of ourselves; attempting to convey such a richer insight is the ambition of this book.”
ie The systematic misunderstanding is not new, it's as old as the enlightenment I said, but the urgency has reached some kind of tipping point - the mix of ubiquitous public awareness of "the polycrises" and the mass reinforcement through immediate electronic media. (We really do need to understand what the meta-problem is and what solutions should really look like?)
Definitely worth a re-read! Thank you Jonathan!
Hi Jonathan.
I'm still reading this, but paused to see if I can ask your permission to republish it in The R-Word -- https://rword.substack.com/ . But I could not find an email address for you ... and so I'm posting my request to you in this fashion.
I didn't need to complete my reading to know I wanted to make this request. It's a perfect fit for what's going on in The R-Word lately, as is most anything found in Perspecteeva's multiple web presences. I love it that you folks are digging in around questions of deliberate cultivation of the social imaginary! That's my leading edge of inquiry now! I think this is the most urgently important work in our world today! Indeed, the word "education" can mean nothing outside of a context in which the social imaginary takes center stage.
Excellent article. Had many lightbulb moments that connected ideas together that I'd been grappling with myself.
And FYI ... one commenter on my blog reference to this piece - AJ Owens - has responded with a piece on his own blog: https://staggeringimplications.wordpress.com/2023/09/06/husserl-and-the-metacrisis/
And sorry, I'm on a bit of a roll with this topic, which I can explain if you have the time, but ... :-)
One post of mine from a couple of years ago, is a direct reference to your suggestion of "meta-crisis" and relating this to my own millennial meta interests. https://www.psybertron.org/archives/14579
I cut and pasted some highlights:
…ever since the term polycrisis went mainstream, I noticed myself bristling, and I feel a kind of avuncular responsibility to remind people what metacrisis means and why it matters much more than the idea of polycrisis.
The metacrisis is the historically specific threat to truth, beauty, and goodness caused by our persistent misunderstanding, misvaluing, and misappropriating of reality. The metacrisis is the crisis within and between all the world’s major crises, a root cause that is at once singular and plural, a multi-faceted delusion arising from the spiritual and material exhaustion of modernity that permeates the world’s interrelated challenges and manifests institutionally and culturally to the detriment of life on earth.
Meta highlights that we also need to look within ourselves to psyche and soul, and also beyond, for a renewal in our worldview or cosmovision which has a direct bearing on prevailing ideologies and social imaginaries.
The metacrisis says there is a spiritual crisis within the political failure to attend to myriad crises (e.g. the destruction of our only liveable planet is clearly delusional but also sacrilegious);
...‘a new government’ is definitely not enough, and widely touted plans for ‘a new economy’ or ‘a new politics’ will not take root without arising alongside some kind of spiritual innovation to shift perception and understanding about the nature of the self and the meaning of life...
Meta says there a crisis that is not just ‘out there’ in the world, but ‘in here’ in your heart and mind, and ‘between us and reality’ in the way we relate, notice, imagine, understand, listen and speak. We are participants in crisis, not just spectators.
...metanoia, the first word in the New Testament in Matthew’s gospel, which is often translated as ‘repent’, but really means a profound and world-shifting change of heart and mind. That’s what we have to go towards, and it is something metacrisis helps us to see and do, but polycrisis does not.
How here's me, Suzanne, again. McGilchrist is critiqued for not coming up with a way forward, which is all that I deal with, where I suggest that "to shift perception and understanding about the nature of the self and the meaning of life," changing our story is the most basic thing that would do it. Would you have a look? https://suzannetaylor.substack.com/s/changemaking-now. I'm trying to launch a substantial conversation on and off Substack!
One more thing. If we educated children properly they would create a different world, but given it will take some time for children to become adults, best we not wait for that
The type of attention we pay to the world co-creates the world. What are you doing with other people’s co-creative faculties? That’s a lot of CR Isis you got there on the plate. You’re like a polyamorous Denis Hopper in Blue Velvet-
“… any crisis that moves!”
Lol. Crisisporn
Btw- Good luck amalgamating the feedback and creating the new visionary.
Can’t wait to meet them!
“Anyone who lived through ‘Take Back Control!’ in the UK or ‘Make America Great Again!’ in the USA knows that words shape reality.”
Writes 30K words on crisis.
CrIsis CrIsis CrIsis !
Drain the Marsha Marsha Marsha
Methane is odorless, but it still stinks in here.
PolycrIsis wanna Cracker?
Come to the Afterparty for the extra 3K words… the Brady-bunch patriots have their jacobin Smurf hats on…it’s Phrygian cold out there, hay.
You guise read like Clement ripping off Valentinians. A pseudo intellectual cavalcade of ten cent words worshipping the opposite of RSA’s 21st Century Renaissance bait and switch storefront jive.
Does the “21st century renaissance” involve convincing the moderately educated to spend money on co-creating their perma-nightmare with regular bad news?
How many simultaneous illusory crises do you need to manufacture and maintain with regular updates in order to convince her hivemind to anti-placebo itself into another revolution?
Which side of this Sarah Bellum are you on, anyway?
Ps- nobody lived through MAGA
You’re already dead.