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- Key Questions to Reflect Upon: We prepared some thought-provoking questions designed for your personal reflection
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Perspective Shift:
- Worldviews aren’t opinions — they’re operating systems. The systems we live in are generated by the meta-theories we hold. If we want to change our world, we need to upgrade our deep code — not just our interfaces.
- The Metacrisis isn’t a pile of problems — it’s a philosophical emergency. What looks like ecological, political, or technological collapse is really the fallout of an exhausted metaphysics. We’re not only in crisis, we’re in between worldviews. The future of humanity depends on updating our ontological map of reality, not just our policies or technologies.
- Truth isn’t static — it’s resonant. Truth isn’t just correspondence. It’s attunement. It’s the ongoing process of bringing our awareness into harmony with the structures of Being — a practice Nick calls aletheic resonance.
- The sacred isn’t a metaphor — it’s a feature of reality. Disconnection from the sacred isn’t a personal failure, it’s a civilizational symptom. And it’s pointing us toward a more participatory, reverent relationship with the kosmos.
We’re not just burned out. We’re disoriented. Our systems don’t make sense. Our maps don’t match the terrain. We’re trying to solve planetary crises using the same worldviews that created them. And no matter how many headlines we read or habits we hack, the fracture runs deeper than we thought.
We’re not only facing a climate crisis, or a political one, or a technological one. We’re facing something deeper, a rupture in reality itself. Our world feels increasingly dissonant. We don’t know what to trust. Our sense of meaning is frayed. Even our solutions seem to be causing new problems.
We scroll, we vote, we meditate, we organize — but the center doesn’t hold.
What if the real crisis isn’t just “out there,” but beneath and between us? What if we’re relying upon worldviews that no longer meet the challenges of the world we live in?
This is the Metacrisis — not a pileup of problems, but a failure of the stories we’ve been using to make sense of everything.
In this groundbreaking presentation, meta-theorist Nick Hedlund introduces a powerful new synthesis of Integral Theory and Critical Realism, a framework he calls Visionary Realism, which he frames as an evolutionary response to the Metacrisis itself: a way to reconnect with truth, align with reality, and rediscover the sacred at the very heart of being.
Does any of the following sound familiar?
🔥 “Everything feels broken and disjointed — nothing makes sense anymore.”
Nick offers a systemic diagnosis of the Metacrisis as more than just overlapping crises — it’s a breakdown in our very way of making sense of reality. Visionary Realism reframes this as a crisis of worldview, which explains why solving surface problems doesn’t work, offering a philosophically coherent framework for reweaving meaning in our lives and in our world.
🔥 “I don’t know what to trust — politics feels biased, science feels limited, spirituality feels ungrounded.”
The synthesis of Critical Realism (which reclaims truth and depth in a post-postmodern way) and Integral Theory (which maps the evolution of meaning-making) provides a way to honor both the reality of the world and the complexity of perspectives. It resolves the disorientation of postmodern relativism without regressing into naive absolutism.
🔥 “I want to do something meaningful — but I don’t know where to begin.”
Instead of giving you a checklist of surface actions, this talk helps facilitate a deeper alignment: what Nick calls aletheic resonance — attuning to the Real with humility, reverence, and active participation. This becomes a guiding principle that can be applied to life, activism, relationships, and vocation. It’s a spiritual-ethical compass rooted in metaphysical clarity.
🔥 “I’m exhausted by polarized culture wars and abstract ideological battles.”
Nick’s presentation offers a depth ontology that allows us to hold both structure and complexity — e.g., biological sex and gender fluidity — without collapsing one into the other. It transcends flat debates with a posture of epistemic humility, encouraging deeper listening and more compassionate discernment.
This is a talk for anyone who senses that we’re being called into a new kind of humanity — not through dogma or ideology, but through a deeper alignment with what is most real.
Listen in to explore:
- Why our current crises are symptoms of a deeper Metacrisis
- How worldviews shape — and distort — our responses to reality
- The limitations of both constructivism and naive realism
- The power of integrating developmental psychology with ontological depth
- What it means to resonate with truth instead of merely “believing” it
- How a new kind of human is emerging through this crucible — and how to become one
—Recorded at the 2024 ICON Conference in Denver, Colorado
Key Questions
Here are some questions you can contemplate while listening to this discussion. We suggest you take some time to use these as journaling prompts.
- Where in my life do I feel out of resonance with reality? Notice the places where your actions, beliefs, or relationships feel dissonant. What deeper truth might be trying to speak through that discomfort?
- Am I trying to fix symptoms — or am I addressing root causes? When I respond to crisis (personal, political, planetary), do I focus on surface-level fixes… or am I willing to ask what worldview is producing the pattern?
- Where have I collapsed truth into perspective? Have I mistaken what’s real for what’s constructed? Or vice versa? Can I feel the difference between honoring pluralism and erasing ontology?
- What is the deepest principle guiding my life — and is it true enough to hold in crisis? When everything breaks down, what am I left standing on? Is it resilient enough to guide me through complexity and contradiction?
- Do I relate to the territories I inhabit as sacred… or as scenery? When I walk through nature, do I see an “it” or a “thou”? Can I feel myself as part of the fabric of being — not above it, but of it?
- How do I listen — not just to others, but to Being itself? What practices help me attune to more than my own thoughts — to the world as it is, not as I want it to be?
- Am I shaping the world from my depth… or reacting from my surface? Do my choices arise from deep alignment with the Real, or are they fragments of urgency, fear, or social conditioning?
- In what ways am I participating in the Metacrisis — and how might I participate in its resolution? What stories, habits, or unconscious assumptions am I enacting that reinforce the crisis? What worldview shift is being asked of me?
Be sure to check out Nick’s initiatives at the Institute of Applied Metatheory:
Strategic Metacrisis Mapping Initiative
This initiative will deploy a sophisticated, integrated, and comprehensive philosophy to show what is possible when we leverage Big Pictures to support new forms of sensemaking and meta-strategizing about complex, wicked problems. There is an emerging consensus of a profound, global “metacrisis” characterized by entangled, interpenetrating, and co-arising ecosocial, spiritual, ethical, and epistemic crises, and their underlying network of interconnected root causes. [+link]
Encyclopedia of Big Pictures
Taking the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy as inspiration, the Encyclopedia of Big Pictures will be a free online resource that defines the relevant terms and concepts for the growing body of philosophical work underlying integrative metatheories. [+link]
Unified Worldview Initiative
Much of humanity lacks a coherent, comprehensive worldview that effectively integrates mind and consciousness with matter and successfully aligns objective knowledge of natural science with subjective and social ways of knowing. The Unified Worldview Initiative (UWI) is designed to underlabor for the continuing emergence of a complete and coherent Integrative worldview capable of addressing this “Enlightenment Gap” and orienting humanity through this moment of planetary transformation. Led by Dr. Gregg Henriques and supported by a core team of integrative metatheorists, the UWI will incorporate a critical but missing transdisciplinary metapsychology into our 21st-century big pictures by integrating three of the most powerful and generative frameworks for understanding the human being: Critical Realism, Integral Theory, and the Unified Theory of Knowledge (UTOK). [+link]
About Nicholas Hedlund
Nicholas Hedlund, PhD, is a visionary philosopher working at the nexus of philosophy of science, worldviews, and socioecological transformation. He received his PhD in philosophy and social sciences from University College London, studying under the philosopher Roy Bhaskar. Nicholas also holds a master’s degree in philosophy & religion, as well as one in psychology. He is director of Eudaimonia Institute, an emerging social innovations lab for planetary flourishing.