This is probably one of the most important and urgent posts on the entire Sloww website (out of 700+ posts). It was originally a Premium post, but I decided to make it public for the benefit of all. Enjoy!
“This entire world is disturbed with insanity, due to the exertions of those who are confused about themselves.” — Shantideva (685 – 763)
“We have met the enemy, and of course it is us.” — Ken Wilber
“The ‘me’ is the mischief in the world.” — Jiddu Krishnamurti
Stream of Consciousness: Is the Meta-Crisis a Me-Crisis?
Quick Housekeeping:
- All content in “quotation marks” is directly from the original authors.
- All content is organized into my own themes.
- Emphasis has been added in bold for readability/skimmability.
Post Contents:
Quick Background
I had an existential crisis exactly 8 years ago beginning in late 2015. Everything you see on the Sloww website (which is now approaching 600 posts) is a direct result of that crisis—from lifelong learning & deeper development, to intentional living, to life purpose, to mental mastery, to spiritual seeing.
A few years ago, I discovered the “meta-crisis” (insert any related term you prefer: “wisdom web,” “liminal web,” “sensemaking web,” “meaning web,” “intellectual dark/deep web,” “emergentsia,” “metatribe”—or the newer “poly-crisis,” “perma-crisis,” “omni-crisis,” etc) What follows isn’t meant to recap the entire emergence and evolution of whatever you want to call this space—Peter Limberg of Less Foolish (formerly The Stoa) has already done a nice job of that (here and here)—it’s just a quick overview of my personal experience with it.
I don’t remember the exact order of events or who/what came first. All I know is that a lot of the disparate pieces started bubbling up for me in 2019. There was the Emerge podcast (Daniel Thorson), Future Thinkers (Euvie Ivanova & Mike Gilliland), Rebel Wisdom (David Fuller & Alexander Beiner), The Stoa (Peter Limberg), Perspectiva (Jonathan Rowson), Game B (Jim Rutt), UTOK (Gregg Henriques), and many more. And, of course, Integral Theory (Ken Wilber) which has been around for decades. It’s also worth noting that there have been a bunch of meta-crisis-related projects that were started and have since been abandoned over the last several years.
In mid-2019, I was binge-watching John Vervaeke’s “Awakening from the Meaning Crisis.” Even though I had already mostly resolved my own existential crisis and purposelessness in 2016-18 before ever coming across the term “meaning crisis,” I still found his video series intellectually interesting and made it through about 40 episodes. (Random thought that will make more sense by the end of this post: What if the increase in “meaning crisis” content is actually trapping more people in the meaning crisis vs helping them resolve it? Almost like they pick up a new identity of “one who is stuck in the meaning crisis” vs actually trying to find/create meaning?).
After digging through my newsletter and Twitter archives, it looks like I’ve been talking about Daniel Schmachtenberger for ~3.5 years (Public | 🔒Premium)—along with his initiative The Consilience Project (Public | 🔒Premium). In Nov 2021, I saw Schmachtenberger say, “I wish there was a directory of meta-crisis solution-related work that I could reference. Would be an awesome project for someone.” So, I proactively created one shortly after: MetaCrisis.org. I call it a “meta-crisis meta-resource” because it curates 100+ meta-crisis people and projects, 15+ maps/syntheses, 15+ communities, 25+ podcasts, 50+ YouTube channels, 75+ Reddit subreddits, 75+ books/papers, and a Twitter list of 250+. For me personally, the most interesting thing is exploring the 250+ hashtags to see who/what interconnects based on their interests and initiatives.
Around that same time, I also published an intro synthesis of the meta-crisis which essentially covered the thinking of Jonathan Rowson (Perspectiva) and Zak Stein (The Consilience Project). At some point I stumbled upon Nora Bateson and her perspective that 🔒developmental stage theory is BS. This was super interesting given Susanne Cook-Greuter’s ego development theory was one of the most impactful things I’ve discovered in the last decade.
In early 2023, I read Tim Urban’s (creator of Wait But Why) new book What’s Our Problem?: A Self-Help Book for Societies (Book Summary) and thought it was a perfect example of completely missing the bigger picture (or more specifically, the root problem). Luckily, around the same time, I stumbled upon Nicholas Lattanzio’s work on 🔒nondual empiricism and embodied nonduality. It was the first thing I’d come across that directly tied together all the same disparate dots I was seeing: meta-crisis, identity, self-inqury, nonduality, free will, and more.
- “When we talk about the meta-crisis, I call it the ‘identity crisis.’ This is a crisis of culture. This is a crisis to the person. This is not a crisis to the planet. This is not a crisis for atoms. This is not a crisis for the universe. This is a crisis just for us.” — Nicholas Lattanzio
Oh, of course, the root problem is ourselves! Then I realized four years ago I had already planted the seed when I published this: 50+ Deep Perspectives on Humanity’s Underlying & Ultimate Challenge (Hint: Ourselves). So, long story short, I’ve come full circle and now feel I have more clarity.
Onto the claim…
The Meta-Crisis is a Me-Crisis
Our #1, ultimate challenge, root cause, generator function, most urgent and important problem is: ourselves or our “selves” (in other words, who we think we are; we are our minds; our present and predominant 🔒subject-object relationship).
Superficial problem:
Just to quickly cover this, many say that technology is outpacing wisdom. That’s true, but that’s what I call the “superficial problem”—what we can see and point to as a problem.
Daniel Schmachtenberger:
- “As technology is empowering our choices and we are getting something like the power of gods, you have to have something like the love and the wisdom of gods to wield that or you self-destruct.”
Ken Wilber has been saying this for decades:
- “Humanity is once again faced with its most primordial nightmare: an explosive growth in exterior technologies has not been met with an equivalent growth in interior consciousness and wisdom … Stated in more general terms, one of humanity’s constant nightmares has been that technological growth has always run ahead of the growth in wisdom, care, and compassionate use of that technology … In other words, exterior development has run ahead of interior development … Without interior development, healthy exterior development cannot be sustained … Unless we put as much attention on the development of consciousness as on the development of material technology—we will simply extend the reach of our collective insanity.”
Same with Alan Watts:
- “The problem of man and technics is almost always stated in the wrong way. It is said that humanity has evolved one-sidedly, growing in technical power without any comparable growth in moral integrity, or, as some would prefer to say, without comparable progress in education and rational thinking. Yet the problem is more basic. The root of the matter is the way in which we feel and conceive ourselves as human beings, our sensation of being alive, of individual existence and identity. We suffer from a hallucination, from a false and distorted sensation of our own existence as living organisms … This hallucination underlies the misuse of technology for the violent subjugation of man’s natural environment and, consequently, its eventual destruction … We are therefore in urgent need of a sense of our own existence which is in accord with the physical facts and which overcomes our feeling of alienation from the universe … How on earth are we going to arrange a transformation of man’s consciousness so that he’ll know it? Not just in theory, but something he feels in the same way as you feel what you take to be ‘I’ at the present moment, confronting an external world. How will you transform that sensation? Because if you don’t transform that sensation, you’ll not ever be fit to use technology. We shall continue to use our technology in a hostile spirit towards the external world, and we shall wreck the external world. We’re busy doing it now. There is no necessity to abandon technology. We can’t abandon it. But, we can certainly use it in a different spirit … Technical power must be in the hands of a new kind of man.”
Let’s go deeper:
- “When I think about the world today and the challenges facing mankind, I don’t think the problems are technical. I think they’re human.” — Nichol Bradford
- “In order to make peace with technology, we have to make peace with ourselves.” — Tristan Harris
Deeper problem:
Here’s a hot take: the most dangerous Western export isn’t McDonald’s or Coca-Cola. It’s the predominant Western worldview—that you are your mind and a self-made, individual, separate self who is solely and ultimately responsible for your life with free will—that’s the most dangerous thing on the planet right now. This taken-for-granted and unquestioned premise/assumption is what causes so much downstream damage in the world.
Most Western humans still are their mind/self. As long as you think you are your thoughts and your ideas are your identity, you’ll believe you are a courageous soldier in the culture war when really you are an unconscious slave to your socialized mind. Most are still swimming in the water of their socialization that they don’t yet see—and because they don’t yet see, they can’t yet question (most importantly, self-question). This explains why so many think they are “self-made.” Why there’s so much undeserved credit taken and blame given. Why there’s so much punishment and retribution. Why there’s so much 🔒(mis)attribution of agency and belief in the 🔒myth of ultimate moral responsibility (and, don’t even get me started on free will—that post links to over 40+ posts on free will and interconnected subjects). You name it. We’ll dissect this in more detail moving forward as it relates to psychology and spirituality.
Here are a few quotes that seem to get the deeper problem:
- “Despite all the concrete problems faced by society, the most pressing problems are actually ‘in our heads’ (i.e., in our minds and souls, we are in a crisis of the psyche) … The meta-crisis—the crisis that contains all of the other crises—is something like a crisis of the human mind … There are a large number of crises drawing increasing amounts of public attention, such as the ecological, economic, immigration, geopolitical, and energy crises. But there is also an invisible crisis unfolding within our own minds and cultures that is getting much less attention. This is the meta-crisis, which has to do with how humans understand themselves and the world … It is the psyche—the human dimension—that is in the direst of straits.” — Zak Stein
- “The ecological crisis—or Gaia’s main problem—is not pollution, toxic dumping, ozone depletion, or any such. Gaia’s main problem is that not enough human beings have developed to the postconventional, worldcentric, global levels of consciousness, wherein they will automatically be moved to care for the global commons. And human beings develop to those postconventional levels, not by learning systems theories, but by going through at least a half-dozen major interior transformations, ranging from egocentric to ethnocentric to worldcentric, at which point, and not before, they can awaken to a deep and authentic concern for Gaia.” — Ken Wilber
- “The difficulty is, to borrow an old Chinese saying, that when the wrong man uses the right means, the right means work in the wrong way. In other words, there’s something wrong with the way we think, and while that is there everything we do will be a mess … We confuse ourselves as living organisms which are one with this whole universe with something we call our personality … We have to come back to a sane view of our own life which is the way we really are an organism functioning in terms of the whole environment, with the whole environment, instead of this funny little separate personality … If we are going to hand over the direction of nature to nature, which is what it comes to, it’s absolutely necessary that we let go of ourselves, and it can’t be done—not by anything that we call ‘doing’, ‘acting’, ‘willing’, or even just ‘accepting’ things. You can’t do it. Why? Because you don’t really exist as that kind of a separate ego or personality … When we stop, we find a world that is happening rather than being done—and that happening, as distinct from doing, is our fundamental self … Before we think of doing anything in this critical situation, we must realize the completely illusory nature of the beings that we think we are and get back again to the beings that we really are.” — Alan Watts
- “The ‘me’ is the mischief in the world … Division exists because of the ‘me’—the content of consciousness. The emptying of the mind brings unity … The problem is not changing society … The real problem is: can there be a real mutation in the human mind? That is the real question. When that takes place, society will look after itself … The physical revolution, which one is advocating all over the world at the present time, doesn’t bring about a fundamental change in man … We are talking of a revolution—not physical, but the psychological revolution … We are taking a journey together into the whole psychological structure of man—because in the understanding of that structure and the meaning of it, we can then, perhaps, bring about a change in society.” — Jiddu Krishnamurti
- “We are unlikely to effectively solve these problems unless we truly understand their ultimate source: the human mind. In our view, to survive and flourish … we must look inward. In an era defined by human impact, the most pressing questions of this time are about ourselves. The duration and prosperity of our species’ journey together on this planet will, in part, be determined by the extent to which we can come to understand our minds and apply the lessons we learn to how we live our lives.” — Nathaniel Barr & Gordon Pennycook
- “Without a global revolution in the sphere of human consciousness, nothing will change for the better … and the catastrophe toward which this world is headed, whether it be it ecological, social, demographic or a general breakdown of civilization, will be unavoidable.” — Václav Havel
- “Our separate self-sense in the West has caused much of the trouble we are in now having exploited nature for our own benefit and to the detriment of overall well-being of our home.” — Susanne Cook-Greuter
- “Society can only change when it is conceived—when it is built up—free from the ‘I’, free from the ‘me.'” — Jean Klein
Maybe also worth mentioning here is Iain McGilchrist’s brain hemisphere work which you could say argues that the “emissary” (left hemisphere) has overtaken the “master” (right hemisphere) and we see the downstream implications of this throughout the Western world:
Psychologically:
So much of the deeper problem makes sense once you understand how the 🔒subject-object relationship explains one’s sense of self (the big epiphany is that the subject of one stage of development becomes the object of the subject at the next stage of development). Since psychological development is about “seeing” more through perspective transformation, it requires making something visible/conscious that was previously invisible/unconscious.
One of the clearest maps I’ve found so far is Susanne Cook-Greuter’s ego development theory (see infographic below). Your developmental stage helps explain your self-sense, perspective-taking, sense-making, meaning-making, etc. It describes what you are aware of and can notice—and therefore what you can articulate, cultivate, influence, and change:
- “(Each stage) represents a distinct, qualitatively different, uniquely defined, and increasingly complex view of self and reality.”
- “In the extreme, we can say that with each transformation we are actually entering a new reality.”
- “EDT tells us something about how a person interprets whatever they are conscious of and can take as object.”
Notice anything shocking in that infographic? 80-85% of Western humans are still in the conventional stages of development! This isn’t just a guess. Susanne Cook-Greuter has done thousands of MAPs (Maturity Assessment Profiles) and analyzed the data/research for years before coming up with the stage structure you see here (which builds on Jane Loevinger’s ego development work). Western society and culture currently develop Western humans to conventional stage 4 as the adult stage—which explains why 80-85% are still stuck there. They think they’ve “made it,” and that’s that!
- “Three American mantras/ideas: ‘if I can do it, you can,’ ‘you are the master of your own destiny,’ ‘the self-made man/woman.’ In developmental terms and cultural press, this is the quintessential voice of the Achiever stage with its focus on individual control and power. It does not yet recognize the many influences that impact success and failure … It is at the postconventional stages that this insight comes into awareness.” — Susanne Cook-Greuter
The dotted line in the middle of the infographic is considered “the watershed” between conventional and postconventional stages of development. Here’s just a sampling of the critical things that happen when this watershed is crossed:
- The transition to stage 4/5 is considered a major watershed in EDT as it signifies the move from conventional to postconventional meaning-making—it is the first time that the vertical move and the questioning of previously unexamined ideas is no longer supported by society and its chief conventional representatives.
- At the first postconventional level adults come to realize that the meaning of things depends on one’s relative position in regard to them, that is, on one’s personal perspective and interpretation of them.
- Postconventional adults can become aware of their own unexamined beliefs. Interest in laying bare one’s underlying assumptions as well as those of the society is an important new capacity at these new stages.
- The shift from conventional to postconventional stages also reflects a qualitative shift from a more linear, rational, intellectual to a more organismic and embodied awareness. In addition, this new way of perceiving can foster the realization that the whole (the Gestalt) is more than its separate parts.
- The attitude of certainty that permeates the conventional mindset changes dramatically with the move into the postconventional.
Perhaps most importantly for the purposes of this post:
- The transition from conventional to postconventional meaning making also signifies an overall, large-scale shift from increasing differentiation and the creation of an independent self-identity towards increasing integration and deconstruction of the separation developed in the first half of the growth trajectory.
- The first half of the trajectory fosters the increasing separation from the newborn’s union with the mother towards the discrete, self-sustaining adult identity with clear boundaries, a self that is capable of making reasoned decisions, postpone gratification and pursue meaningful goals and purposes. It is this self-governing that is often viewed in the modern world as the fully developed ‘adult.’
- The second half of the trajectory represents a step-wise deconstruction of the sharp and artificially created boundaries towards an ever deeper identification with all that exists. The second half can also be likened to an ongoing individuation towards a more holistic, full-bodied, and integrated self that is fully aware of its interdependence with other systems and one that can take a perspective on its fundamental non-separateness. The postconventional stages show an overall trend of assimilation and integration towards an ever more conscious sense of unity with the ground.
Just to offer a non-stage theory perspective, here are some highlights from Nora Bateson who thinks 🔒developmental stage theory is BS and talks about questioning the entire Western epistemology which so many are still unconsciously trapped in:
- “As long as we look for boundaries as such, we will find them. As long as we find them we will 🔒misattribute agency, purpose, development, and all sorts of other stuff … There is no such thing as an isolated individual—we are all interdependent. Period. Our evolution is only in our mutual contribution and learning … I am not an independent agent in this; I am an interdependent agent.”
- “Is there a part of any of us that we can point to and truly say, ‘that is me—untouched or influenced by any of my history, my culture, education, family, religion, social life’? … When we look through the lens of interdependency, it is impossible to separate individuals from their contexts of influence and experience. This blurs the ‘hero’s story.’ (A hero) can better be attributed to the town or village that nourished a person than to that person’s individual qualities.”
- “So, where does change happen? How can we begin to perceive differently? I think one of the worst, most pernicious illusions out there is that you are an ‘agent of change’ … If you look at that thinking, it is absolutely imbued with all the mechanistic, industrialized metaphors that are actually creating the problem. You are not a change agent … You are the system, you are the culture … So, where’s the free will?”
When asked, “What can I do? I’m a being that feels some sense of agency and responsibility for what’s happening in the world,” here’s how Nora Bateson responded:
- “The best thing that we can do is, first of all, start to explore that notion of your own self as complex. And then, pretty soon, you come to this question of, ‘Where is the edge of me?’ And, in that question, there is an opening. Where is the edge of me? Do I end at the edge of my skin? Am I the edge of my bank account or my tax ID number? Am I the edge of my family? Am I the edge of my community? My nation? Am I the edge of the biosphere? Where’s the edge of me? In that question and that exploration there’s a very active shift, and the possibilities of what you can do. Otherwise, you end up in a nasty little paradox around: if I do something good for me, it’s going to be bad for you. If I do something good for my nation, it’s going to be bad for your nation. If I do something good for my family, it might not be good for a family over there. Recognition of that interdependence that we are all in is a shift, and there’s just another order of questions and possibilities that come out of that shift. I’m interested in the unprecedented possibilities that come out of that recognition.”
- “The notion of the individual entity having agency is confused by a paradox. The confusion lies with the idea of individuation. The entity (organism, person, or organization) is bound to its unique perspective or epistemology, and in that sense is identifiable as a 🔒separate source of responsibility. But, there is no aspect of that entity that is uninfluenced, uninformed, or unbound to the larger contextual interactions. On closer examination we begin to see that agency is diffused into the larger contextual processes that are shared by the entire community. Agency is a paradoxical product of mutual learning within and between people, nature, and culture.”
So, stage theory or no stage theory, it all ultimately points to the same thing. And, guess what? It’s the same thing spirituality has been pointing to for a very, very long time.
Spiritually:
Again, the 🔒subject-object relationship does the heavy lifting here because it’s the interconnecting bridge between psychology and spirituality.
Spirituality calls it “asleep” for a good reason:
- “The human mind is such an extraordinary thing. It has invented the computer. It has split the atom. It sends ships into space. It has not solved the problem of human suffering … How come we haven’t found the answer to that? We’ve made all kinds of technological advances. Has that raised the quality of our living by one inch? My opinion is no, not one inch. Oh, we have more comfort, more speed, pleasures, entertainment—greater technological advances. Any improvement on that loneliness and emptiness and heartache? Any improvement on that greed and hatred and conflict? Less fighting? Less cruelty? If you want my opinion, I think it’s worse. And, the tragedy is, the secret has been found … The only tragedy there is in the world is ignorance; all evil comes from that. The only tragedy there is in the world is unwakefulness and unawareness. From them comes fear, and from fear comes everything else … The mystics, saints, and others make great efforts to wake people up. If they don’t wake up, they’re always going to have these other minor ills like hunger, wars, and violence. The greatest evil is sleeping people, ignorant people … The great masters tell us that the most important question in the world is: ‘Who am I?’ Or rather: ‘What is ‘I’?’ What is this thing I call ‘I’? What is this thing I call self? You mean you understood everything else in the world and you didn’t understand this? You mean you understood astronomy and black holes and quasars and you picked up computer science, and you don’t know who you are? My, you are still asleep. You are a sleeping scientist.” — Anthony de Mello
- “There is only one perpetrator of evil on the planet: human unconsciousness … You believe that you are your mind. This is the delusion … Responding to a radical crisis that threatens our very survival—this is humanity’s challenge now. The dysfunction of the egoic human mind, recognized already more than 2,500 years ago by the ancient wisdom teachers and now magnified through science and technology, is for the first time threatening the survival of the planet … To end the misery that has afflicted the human condition for thousands of years, you have to start with yourself and take responsibility for your inner state at any given moment. That means now.” — Eckhart Tolle
- “When consciousness tries to perceive itself, it creates an object, and that object is the I-thought or the I-feeling. The I-thought is not a problem as long as it refers to consciousness. When it becomes attached to an attribute, to a noun or an adjective, such as ‘I am a woman,’ ‘I am a human being,’ ‘I am happy,’ ‘I am unhappy,’ ‘I am frustrated,’ and so on, it becomes the mother of all problems.” — Francis Lucille
- “Though free from any such intention, is it the business of SCIENCE-1 (1st Person) to save the world from the consequences of SCIENCE-3 (3rd Person). The current headaches—war, racial conflict, economic greed, the generation gap, crime and violence, mental illness, drug addiction, with all the other symptoms of mankind’s basic anxiety—come from thinking one has a head to ache, that one is what one isn’t, a thing or 3rd person. And everyone who is cured of this insane delusion automatically helps to cure others, and so does far more towards the world’s amelioration than the world could begin to suspect.” — Douglas Harding
- “‘Me’ is always already not happening. Only wholeness isness-ing … The way to be the change that the world needs is through absence, through the dissolution of the center point that isn’t actually there. By not me-ing, by wholeness-ing, that’s the change that the world needs. The ultimate morality and ethics is through the absence of me.” — Allen Saakyan
I recently 🔒synthesized Bernardo Kastrup (technically science but it aligns with all the spiritual insights so we’ll keep it in this section):
- “The entire industry and philosophy of self-help in the West is completely based on the notion that your life’s about you, and you should take the reins of your life—you should take control of your life, and if you do that you can do anything. It’s the foundation of the Western sense of well-being in the 21st century … The ‘ego’ is that mental complex that we identify with—that narrative of individual selfhood (the person that was born that day, does this for a living, is married to that other person). The ego clearly doesn’t choose my thoughts and my emotions, otherwise I would be the happiest man in the universe … Our choices are determined by nature, and there is a lot more to nature than the ego.”
- “The strong illusion we have, especially in Western societies, of personal agency ties in with this notion that your life is about you and my life is about me. We are this personal agent; in some sense, separate from nature. We are mental and the rest of nature is not mental, so we are sort of aliens in here. The world is of a completely different nature than we are from the inside, and so we are separate and individual. So, for our little lives as this tiny little speck of dust walking around this little rock to have meaning, this personal agent has at the very least to be able to make choices and set its destiny in some way. Otherwise, it’s just an automatic play of predetermined moves. That’s what jails us. It’s this need for that kind of illusory freedom that confines us because it prevents us from seeing the horizon, from taking notice of what is really going on.”
- “The only way you can take account of what’s happening is through meta-consciousness, or metacognition, but that leads to egotism because now you recognize yourself as an individual distinct from the rest and that leads to wars and all the crap. The ideal state would be one were there is meta-consciousness, but there is also the understanding that our lives are not about us … This race between increasing metacognition, but also the understanding that life is sacrificial and it’s not about us, determines whether our civilization comes to an end or not … If the metacognitive understanding that your life is not about you wins the race, then we survive as a civilization.”
I also recently 🔒synthesized all things Rupert Spira:
- “In my meetings in Europe and America, I have asked thousands of people if they were ever asked by their parents, teachers, or professors who or what it is that knows or is aware of their experience, and not a single person has yet answered in the affirmative … Our experience is conceived as a subject doing, or experiencing, or knowing an object. This is considered to be so obviously and fundamentally true as not to need investigation. Any investigation that takes place tends to take place with this as the basic presumption. It is the lack of clear self-knowledge that is responsible for the veiling of the peace and quiet joy that are the nature of our being or our self.”
- “We have been conditioned by our parents, our communities, our nations. That goes for all the conditioning of all of our minds … The personal conditioning of each of our minds is not simply the product of each of our minds … We have been conditioned to feel we are separate selves. We are not personally responsible for feeling that we are personal people, for feeling that we are separate selves. The separate self, the ego, is an impersonal conditioning. There is nobody who is personally responsible for their personal conditioning … Strangely, understanding this doesn’t make us behave in irresponsible ways. It’s when we believe there is personal responsibility that we find ourselves behaving in irresponsible ways. When we feel, ‘I am a separate person’, it is that feeling that gives rise to irresponsible behavior. When the sense of separation goes, our behavior is in line with the totality and serves the totality.”
- “Why is it that there is so much despair in the world on the inside, and so much conflict on the world on the outside? The reason there is so much despair is because we have overlooked the nature of our own being, and the reason there is so much conflict is because most of us don’t recognize that the being that we essentially are is shared with everyone and everything. For instance, if we look at the conflicts that are taking place in the world today, would those conflicts be taking place if the people who are participating in them knew that they shared their being with the people they were in conflict with? The knowledge of our own being, its knowledge of itself, is not only the most profound knowledge possible but also the most precious. It is the source of the peace and happiness for which we long above all else, and the foundation for the resolution of all conflicts. The knowledge of being must, as such, be the foundation of any truly civilized society.”
And, let’s once again come full circle back to Nicholas Lattanzio’s 🔒nondual empiricism and embodied nonduality:
- “I think, therefore I am’ presupposes that there is an ‘I’ that does the thinking. However, the thinking is producing that ‘I’ that thinks it’s doing the thinking. ‘I’ am not actually generating my thoughts about what ought to be—they’re just popping into awareness and the mind says, ‘Yep, that’s me, I did it.’” (Note: Jean Klein referred to this as the clown who takes the bow at the end of a performance even though they didn’t do anything).
- “We become the map. We can’t even realize that we are the observer of the map. In effect, we become what we are aware of. If you’re identified with the various categories of the content of the body and mind, then you’ll suffer the things that are important to those categories: my body is suffering physical pain, my athlete identity is suffering failure, my attractiveness ideal is suffering poor body image. It’s the idea you have of who you think you are, suffering from ideas it has about who it takes itself to be. That’s the identity crisis.”
- “The purpose of nondual empiricism above all else is to understand the true nature of ourselves and to transcend human suffering; this is done primarily from first-person, direct experience using specific meditations (namely self-inquiry and self-abidance) to strip ourselves of all that which we are fundamentally not, all of the things that are relative layers of our identity but are fundamentally not that.”
See & Free the Me
To recap, our #1, ultimate challenge, root cause, generator function, most urgent and important problem is: ourselves or our “selves” (in other words, who we think we are; we are our minds; our present and predominant 🔒subject-object relationship).
The solution to the me-crisis: awareness of our “selves” (in other words, more people realizing they are not who they think they are; more people realizing they are aware of their minds; more people questioning, investigating, witnessing, and transcending their socialized minds; more people changing/developing their 🔒subject-object relationship).
How one lives is based on what one “sees” (the art of living is primarily the art of seeing). When more people are aware of and realize they are not their minds, a new view of our “selves” changes our relationship with moral responsibility, agency attribution, free will, and more. This will fundamentally change everything else in society.
We don’t need everyone to become “enlightened” where subject and object merge in nondual awareness and duality dissolves including the sense of separate self. Instead, we just need more “awakening” where one (as subject) is aware of and able to observe/witness the mind/self (as object). It’s still duality, but you could call it “enlightened duality” (a Rupert Spira term).
The good news is the “how” comes in a wide variety of flavors! There’s no one “right” way to do it.
This can look like deeper psychological development and more people crossing “the watershed” into postconventional stages (Susanne Cook-Greuter).
This can look like interdependent/transcontextual thinking, mutual learning, abductive processing, ecological shifts in questioning, etc (Nora Bateson).
This can look like Bernardo Kastrup’s metacognition outpacing egotism.
This can look like good old fashioned spiritual practices like the direct path, via negativa, neti neti, self-inquiry, self-witnessing, self-abidance, etc (🔒step-by-step guide). Nicholas Lattanzio lists a 🔒bunch of techniques: parts work/shadow work; cognitive defusion; right concentration, right mindfulness and bare attention; nonconceptual knowing; compassionate lovingkindness & empathic engagement; compassionate Self-directedness.
This can look like psychedelics, meditation, retreats, events, or travel.
This can look like a crisis and learning the hard way (that’s what I had to do with an existential crisis).
What it’s primarily looked like for me over the last decade has been an ever-deepening unfolding of questioning that leads to learning that leads to development that leads to questioning that leads to learning that leads to development that leads to…
How I’m helping:
Here’s how I’m attempting to be part of the solution to the deeper problem: synthesizing lifelong learning that catalyzes deeper development.
I’ve realized my contribution is inquiring and synthesizing lifelong learning that catalyzes deeper development. I didn’t choose to care about this. This is what life seems to be doing through me:
- “You do what you do because that’s what the harmony of the universe requires. If I am a potter, I make pots. But who is making the pots? I am not under the illusion that I am making the pots. Pots are. The potter is … There is writing happening. Maybe thats hard for you to understand. I am here but ‘I’ am not here. I am writing but ‘I’ am not writing.” — Ram Dass
- “The game plays the game; the poem writes the poem; we can’t tell the dancer from the dance.” — Stephen Mitchell’s translation of Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching
Here’s what that looks like so far after 8 years (every post on this website fits into one of these “Sloww Stages” based on my learning and lived experience—and you can see the progression in inquiring to learning to developing):
Feedback & Finding the Others
I’d love to hear from you if this post positively resonated with you or if you couldn’t disagree more! Please share your thoughts in the comments.
For those who strongly resonate with this and are actively working on directly related meta-crisis projects, please let me know. The meta-crisis space has such a wide variety of interest areas and initiatives these days that I’m using this post as a signal to “find the others” specifically most passionate about this aspect.
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