Say the same thing differently again.

On the threeness of the world, and the duty, discipline, and dignity of repetition.

My family used to have a poster on the wall that said: “Love me most when I deserve it least, because that’s when I need it most.” It’s a useful thought for friends, partners and parents, and it also applies to our sense of vocation. Sometimes it is precisely when we feel restless with what we’ve been working on, and ready to forsake it, that we most need to take responsibility for reaffirming it. I never tire of Annie Dillard’s way into this idea, from her book The Writerly Life.

Why do you never find anything written about that idiosyncratic thought you advert to, about your fascination with something no one else understands? Because it is up to you. There is something you find interesting, for a reason hard to explain. It is hard to explain because you have never read it on any page; there you begin. You were made and set here to give voice to this, your own astonishment.

You were made and set here to give voice to this, your own astonishment.

Astonishment bears repeating. While message quality matters, it is message salience that, for instance, wins elections, and salience arises from repetition. Writers and researchers are often pulled onto their next thing by creative impulses or funding pressures, and the morale of social movements arises from novelty, not just doing things differently, but being seen to do things differently. However, the problem with doing things differently is that it is often the same strategy that has failed in the past.

I am beginning to think ‘the work’ is to come to know what is truly ours to carry (Dillard’s statement goes on to say “gnaw at your own bone”). Instead of looking for the next thing, our duty is often to stick with what we have been saying or doing long enough for others to hear it, make it their own, and for social diffusion to arise. That commitment does not have to be indefinite, but we know when we are still carrying it, and when we can drop it without regret. It takes discipline to stay on our own message. As the communications guru Frank Luntz puts it:

There’s a simple rule: You say it again, and you say it again, and you say it again … and about the time that you’re absolutely sick of saying it is about the time that your target audience has heard it for the first time.

**

More than a decade ago, while working at the Royal Society of Arts in London, my astonishment led me to begin thinking about the spiritual dimensions of major collective action problems, not least incipient climate collapse. This idea was not unheard of, but it felt too important to me to allow it to remain niche, so I did what I could to raise funds for a public engagement project that led to a report called Spiritualise, where I gave voice to my astonishment.

In a broadly liberal secular context, this inquiry felt socially subversive and epistemically transgressive. I did not want to frighten any horses, so I led the project with some circumspection by creating a big tent for religious believers, atheistic spirituality and everything in between, and giving plenty of reassuring nods to Science along the way. Here is an extract from the introduction:

Scratch climate change confusion long enough and you may find our denial of death underneath; we are terrified by an unconscious awareness of an existential threat, and we may need to look at climate change on those terms to really deal with it.

Look deeply into unfettered capitalism and there seems to be a deluded self, scrambling to make itself real; buying itself into existence, until it finds it is fading again, until we buy some more. But we give little thought to the inherent fragility and virtuality of this self, and speak little of how to work towards its integration and transcendence.

Pay attention to the myriad addictions of apparently normal behaviour and what passes for everyday consciousness begins to look like a low-level psychopathology; we are literally caught up in our smart phones, our social medicines, our curated identities, but perhaps none bring deep satisfaction in the way that gradual mastery of consciousness through spiritual practice can.

And reflect on the epidemic of loneliness in big cities and you sense that love has lost its way. We are all surrounded by strangers who could so easily be friends, but we appear to lack cultural permission not merely to ‘connect’ – the opium of cyberspace – but to deeply empathise and care.¹

I don’t much like the composite noun spirituality, but I alighted on a working definition of spiritual sensibility in the 2nd edition of Spiritualise (2017, p17).

I think of spiritual sensibility as a disposition towards reality characterised by concern for the fullness of life and experienced through simultaneous intimations of aliveness, goodness, understanding, and meaning. Those glimpses of wholeness and integration have a texture that is at once emotional, ethical, epistemic, and existential – the feeling of being alive, the conviction that something matters, the intuition that the world makes sense, and the experience that life is meaningful, respectively. More substantively...cultivating spiritual sensibility is about deepening our engagement with questions of being(death), belonging(love), becoming(self) and beyondness(soul).

In the context of ecological collapse, techno-fascism, deep fakes, and other forms of existential and catastrophic risk, why pontificate about spiritual sensibility? Because virtually every sane response involves a kind of metanoia, a turning around, a change of mind, heart and soul (‘the flip’, below), and I think it has to be gently elicited through changes in practice and policy (‘the fun’, below); this might mean, for instance, a reduction in aggregate energy demand, a shift away from consumerism, and a renaissance in activities with intrinsic value, especially learning (‘the formation’, below).

Katie Teague helped me develop a related case in video form (I was flattered to hear Cynthia Bourgeault liked this video).

Spiritual questions have a wide scope, from the practical, philosophical and psychological, to the metaphysical, theological and esoteric, with a certain amount of sociology and anthropology thrown in. Part of the challenge of saying that spiritual matters matter, is to locate that expansive scope within a morphology (study of form) alongside other aspects of life that also have expansive scope, like ‘society’, while remaining intelligible. In A Secular Age (2007, p5), Taylor puts it like this:

We all see our lives, and/or the space wherein we live our lives, as having a certain moral/spiritual shape. Somewhere, in some activity, or condition, lies a fullness, a richness; that is, in that place (activity or condition), life is fuller, richer, deeper, more worthwhile, more admirable, more what it should be. This is perhaps a place of power: we often experience this as deeply moving or inspiring.

What was astonishing to me a decade ago was that these fairly simple ideas appeared to lack adequate intellectual grounding or an institutional locus that could help the requisite inquiry gather social momentum.

A decade later, democracy is even weaker, AI is more pervasive, genocide is daily news, a pandemic ushered in a new age of bioprecarity, more planetary boundaries have been transgressed, and on almost all measures, peace is receding. It can feel like the world is at war with itself.

Co-arising with this sense of crisis culmination, there have been countervailing motions, including the psychedelic renaissance, the mindfulness revolution, Christian revivals, and the BBC’s interest in witches. Meanwhile, intellectual fashions are shifting, with the necessity for post-growth economics becoming clearer, a growing awareness of the connection between education and collapse, purpose is back on the table in biology, non-materialist views of consciousness are in the ascendant, and the notion that value is an ontological primary that we can directly perceive is taken seriously. Several organisations have sprung up around these ideas, and I tried to make sense of what connects us in a series in 2022: Now that you’ve found the others, what are you going to do?.

Perspectiva’s work has begun to feel far less niche. There is work to do, and many allies, so it’s time to start considering the decade ahead.²

**

Our official name is Perspectives on Systems, Souls, and Society. This alliterative organon is not a map of a static world but a device to help organise knowledge as we participate in an unfolding process. The point of the trio is to provide intellectual grounding and orientation, to follow Einstein’s advice to be as simple as possible but not simpler, and Ursula Le Guin’s call to become realists of a larger reality. In more detail, but still as an approximation (I challenge it below):

• There is a world ‘out there’ - an objective exterior world of processes and events that can (in principle) operate entirely independently of human perception and is mostly the concern of natural science.

• There is a world ‘in here’ - a subjective interior world of consciousness, thoughts and feelings, full of emotion, meaning, and mattering; the concern of philosophy, psychology, spirituality, and religions.

• There is (in most contexts) a shared world ‘between us’ and/or ‘for us’, an inter-subjective and inter-objective life of culture and ideas and institutions that forms a socially constructed reality and patterns of collective psychology; that world is of interest to social scientists and is the domain of politics broadly conceived.

The world is the relationship between these three worlds, and the world changes as that relationship changes. We know and value each of these worlds in different ways, and they call for different kinds of inquiry, evaluation, agency, practice and protection. In part three of The Threeness of the World, I outline how five (among many) theorists - Popper, Guattari, Habermas, Archer, Henriques - frame this idea slightly differently. (If you are a fan of fourness, I wrestle with it here).³

A decade ago, Tomas and I settled on referring to these worlds as systems (exterior), souls (subjective), and society (inter-subjective and inter-objective) because we felt the compromises were bearable. One can understand ‘systems’ at many different levels of complexity, but a simple definition is that it is a set of elements in relationship within a boundary operating for a goal. Similarly, ‘souls’ can mean many things, but in essence, the soul is about the experience of being alive, including the miracle and transcendent mystery of it. And ‘society’ is roughly the mixture of ideas, technology, institutions, practices and culture that characterise our shared lifeworld.

The systems, souls, and society organon is a tool for discernment, a mirror to reflect on perspectival and participatory knowing, but above all, it is a multifaceted antidote to failed theories of change that stem from relatively limited ways of knowing, by encouraging thought and practice on the co-arising of systemic understanding, spiritual realities, and societal struggle. This is the idea that bears repeating.

I used the example of climate change to illustrate this point in part two of a series called The Threeness of the World, over on my personal account, The Joyous Struggle.

There is ‘the science’ which contends with greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and their impact on land, ice and sea; and food and water (systems). There is ‘the experience’ of climate change not only in terms of homes being burnt down or flooded but also in terms of widespread denial, anxiety, anger and/or guilt (souls). And there is something like ‘the politics’, which is about how the discussion impacts the economy and unfolds culturally, the relative salience of the issue, the justice of loss and damage claims, thousands of civil society organisations, the scope for international cooperation, the UN climate regime etc (society). All of the above is ‘climate change’, and these three worlds need to be in conversation, but they are different worlds, calling for distinct kinds of discernment and agency…

The threeness perspective helps to understand why, for instance,

• Why we cannot buy love (because different worlds have different forms of value).

• Why technical solutions fail (because they often overlook adaptive challenges that are not about systems as mechanisms, but systems within societies comprised of people with souls).

• Why we should not seek to understand an individual in the way we understand a group (because while souls may evolve and mature, societies are defined by a wide range of emergent properties arising from the interplay of, for instance, race, class, institutions, technology etc).

• Why spiritual bypassing is a problem (because emotions are real, and power matters).

Philosophically, it’s never quite that simple, so don’t read the footnote if you are happy with a tidy trio that explains everything.⁴

**

“You say the same thing again and again and again – and you say it differently every time.” - David Ogilvy

David Oglivy’s advice applies to marketing, but it has wider application, and in Perspectiva’s context, there are different registers, depending on whether we are providing philosophical premises, supporting personal journeys, or developing societal vision.

Ontological/descriptive level: Systems, Souls, and Society

This trio remains our foundational philosophical orientation with roots and homologies with a range of theorists, including Karl Popper, Felix Guattari, Ken Wilber, Jurgen Habermas, Margaret Archer and Gregg Henriques, as detailed here. Developing the theory and practice arising from this outlook remains Perspectiva’s raison d’être.

Personal/injunctive level: Getting Real, Becoming Real, Making Real.

Getting Real is about realisation as awareness, reckoning with the state of our world today, and the commitment to see through delusion. Becoming Real is about realisation as unfolding or transformation, our personal journey of learning and unlearning, and engaging in practices that help us live well in response to the challenges of our times. It’s not linear, but Making Real is realisation as manifestation, often the natural unfolding of the first two dimensions - what can you realise, and make manifest?

This trio is used at The Realisation Festival, which arose as a partnership between Perspectiva and St Giles House. These three meanings of realisation are developed in What’s the point of The Realisation Festival?. Earlier this year, I recorded videos for a rough n’ ready course called Realisation 101, which we anticipate will be available before the end of 2025.

Programmatic/transformative level: The Flip, the Formation, and the Fun.

This trio is programmatic in nature, and it is my current favourite. In plain language, ‘the flip’ is a change in our understanding of reality, the formation is a change in our relationship to what is good, and the fun is about a change in societal purposes.

In technical terms, the flip represents a fundamental shift in metaphysics - mostly to see consciousness and value as ontological primaries and the world as sacred; the formation represents a shift in metaethics - mostly a shift from utilitarianism to virtue ethics and, as a corollary, transformative education as a modus operandi; and the fun represents a shift in metapolitics - mostly a shift from an extractive growth economy built around extrinsic ends to an economy built around intrinsic ends of a cultural and creative nature, loosely (and yes, slightly provocatively) characterized as ‘fun’.

**

We need the perspective of threeness to avoid what Joan Baez famously called: “little victories and big defeats”, arising from over-relying on change processes that only influence one or two of the three ‘worlds’. The challenge highlighted by the threeness perspective is to get beyond panaceas, and to grow:

Beyond crisis declarations - because it is time to perceive and think generatively.

Beyond systems change - because systems won’t change until we realise they have souls.

Beyond spiritual bypassing – because the realities of power cannot be wished away.

Beyond narrative fixation - because we ourselves need to become the story.

*

To take these four challenges in turn:

Robert Pirsig’s classic multi-million copy bestseller, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (p104) helps to clarify why we need to get beyond ‘systems change’:

The true system, the real system, is our present construction of systematic thought itself, rationality itself, and if a factory is torn down but the rationality that produced it is left standing, then that rationality will simply produce another factory. If a revolution destroys a systematic government, but the systematic patterns of thought that produced that government are left intact, then those patterns will repeat themselves in the succeeding government. There’s so much talk about the system. And so little understanding.

Until we can see that systems are awash with emotions and epistemologies and suffused with an implicit metaphysics, there is little hope of really changing them. We need to stand back, yes, but also look within and see beyond.

Beyond Spiritual Bypassing: We need to connect spiritual discernment with political realism, inspired by MLK’s famous statement that power without love is “reckless and abusive” but love without power is “sentimental and anaemic” - “Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice. Justice at its best is love correcting everything that stands against love.”

Beyond Narrative Fixation: Insofar as we need a new story, we have to forge it, become it, and live it. We are characters in an improvised historical drama. The kinds of stories we need today have not happened yet, and they only arise from our actions, as Joe Brewer puts it well in Living into Being.

Beyond Crisis Declarations: As we free ourselves from our attachment to crisis (at its most literal, metacrisis means ‘after crisis’) we start to pay more and better attention to what crisis thinking may unhelpfully perpetuate or occlude. For instance, we may start to attend better to what Bonnitta Roy calls ‘complex potential states’ and Nora Bateson calls Aphanipoiesis, Jeremy Johnson’s intellectual leadership on integral consciousness, or Karen O’Brien’s fractal perspective on the challenge of scale.

**

The heart of Perspectiva’s work, then, is an insistence on being helpfully awkward by connecting forms of inquiry that typically don’t want to be connected but should be.

For instance, most academics are not incentivised to develop the integrative and applied capacity to move from critique to vision or method; they are also heavily invested in their own epistemic authority, which precludes the kinds of ad-hoc collaboration and transdisciplinary experimentation the world needs.

Most spiritual teachers and retreat centres are therapeutically oriented and transcendentally inclined, which often leads them to be ambivalent or uncomfortable with the realities of power and technology that shape our lives outside of sanctuaries.

Most activists are motivated by problems in the material world. In their dedication to campaigning, they are rarely offered arenas to reflect on their assumptions, projections or immunity to change (See The Entangled Activist, published by Perspectiva Press).

And there is now a whole podcast industrial complex invested in leading “the conversation”, but it often remains stuck at the level of discourse and algorithmic serfdom.

The work of connecting the three worlds is critical to forging a viable world in this second quarter of the 21st century, but it is work that is taken for granted, neglected, forsaken, orphaned, and it doesn’t happen by itself.

Systems, souls, and society is a way to draw attention to the enduring need for that kind of integrative work across the three worlds, to overcome immunities to change.

None of this is easy. Perspectiva exists to help us all grow into the “larger reality” that Le Guin asks us to be realistic about. We also seek to articulate that larger reality, keep it salient, and encourage its manifestation in new practices. This is the urgent one-hundred-year project we joke about.

And it’s a serious joke!

1. References from the report: Meyers, T.C. (2014). Understanding Climate Change as an Existential Threat: Confronting Climate Denial as a Challenge to Climate Ethics. De Ethica (1)1. // Loy, D. (2002) A Buddhist History of the West. Albany: SUNY. See also Christopher Lasch in The Minimal Self and In The Culture Of Narcissism. // Leary, M. (2004) The Curse of the Self: Self-awareness, egotism, and the quality of human life. Oxford New York: University Press.

2. We are grateful for philanthropic support in recent years from The Fetzer Institute, The John Templeton Foundation, Inspiration Incubator, The Open Society Foundations, The Emerging Futures Programme at The Joseph Rowntree Foundation, and the JJ Trust. (You can also help Perspectiva by becoming a paid subscriber, or by donating directly to Perspectiva here).

3. Full Series: The Threeness of the World 1//The Threeness of the World 2//The Threeness of the World 3//The Threeness of the World 4//The Threeness of the World 5//The Threeness of the World 6

4. Is there really an ‘out there’ and an ‘in here’ in the context of, for instance, Four E Cognitive Science, where the mind is embodied, embedded, enactive and extended? Does ‘systems’ really work to characterise the ontology of the objective world rather than merely as one way - the systems way - of knowing it? And if an apparently ‘objective’ natural system like a nervous system can still co-arise with an inter-subjective education system, or an inter-objective economic or political system, ‘systems’ is doing some polysemantic acrobatics. Even the self can be seen as a system which complicates the distinctiveness of the soul as a term for subjective terrain. David Bohm even wrote of Thought as a system, and as I indicated when discussing Karl Popper in part three of the series, thought manifests in books and institutions. And Carl Jung believed in an objective psyche, which complicates the notion that our inner lives are inherently subjective… I still believe Systems, souls, and society is simplicity on the other side of complexity, rather than merely simplistic, but the complexity remains.