Sanctuaries of Coherence in a Time Between Worlds
Understanding the deep roots of our predicament and the educational response it requires.
Seeing The Metacrisis
“The metacrisis is the historically specific threat to truth, beauty, and goodness caused by our persistent misunderstanding, misvaluing, and misappropriating of reality.”— Jonathan Rowson
Humanity is living through a time of profound civilizational rupture.
In 1993 Edgar Morin and Anne Brigitte Kern introduced the term polycrisis¹, describing the complex entanglement of interwoven crises facing humanity, arguing that the true vital problem was not one single issue, but the interconnected mesh of all crises on Earth. More recently, during the 2023 World Economic Forum's annual gathering in Davos, the concept has entered mainstream discourse as institutions and communities struggle to make sense of an increasingly unstable world. While the reality of the polycrisis has been more widely acknowledged and has helped illuminate the interconnected nature of our challenges, we believe it does not fully explain the deeper roots generating them. Beneath the interconnected visible crises of our time lies what some have called the metacrisis.²
The metacrisis understands the interconnectedness of our global collective crises—ecological collapse, social fragmentation, institutional breakdown, technological risk, and meaning crisis—as symptoms of deeper, underlying conditions and patterns generating them. The metacrisis is a crisis at the “meta” layers of civilization, it's a dysfunction in the underlying ways of perceiving, relating, and understanding reality that modern civilization has been built upon. These patterns have become embedded not only in our institutions and systems, but in our perception, shaping how reality becomes intelligible to us: what we value, how we relate, and what kinds of futures we are capable of imagining.
It is a crisis not only of systems, but of being.
It points to the crisis unfolding:
• within ourselves, in our psyche, soul and spirit;
• between ourselves, in the ways we relate to one another and life itself; and
• beyond ourselves, in the worldviews, ontologies and civilizational narratives that shape how reality becomes meaningful and intelligible to us.³
In the same way that a symptom points to an underlying disease that is causing it, the polycrisis is pointing to the metacrisis as the deeper civilizational patterns influencing our global challenges.
We understand the metacrisis as unfolding across three interconnected layers:
The Symptomatic Layer
The Polycrisis
The Structural Layer
Meta-Systemic Dysfunctions
Crisis of Power
Increasing concentration of power within individuals and institutions serving their personal agendas.
Crisis of Incentives
Systems optimizing for short-term, rivalrous, and extractive behaviors.
Crisis of Trust
Fragmented information ecology undermining collective sensemaking and discernment of truth, breaking down coordination.
Crisis of Complexity5
Systematic optimization of simplistic metrics extracting from a complex living ecosystem and web of relationships.
Rivalrous dynamics + Exponential tech = Death of humanity4
The Cultural-Ontological Layer
Foundational Dysfunctions1
Crisis of Perception
Persistent delusions of separation, misapprehending nature and reality.
Crisis of Relationship
The loss of our intimate relationships with all life: ourselves, others, the world and the sacred.
Crisis of Value2
The erosion of meaning, connection to the sacred and orientation towards the good, truth and beautiful.
Crisis of Capacity
Individuals are not developing the emotional, relational, spiritual and intellectual maturity at the same rate that our technologies are increasing in power and consequence.
Global Intimacy Disorder + Exponential tech = Death of our humanity3
At its core, the metacrisis reveals a widening gap between the complexity and power of the world humanity has created and the depth of wisdom required to navigate it responsibly - and design accordingly. This is known as the growing wisdom gap.⁵ We believe understanding these metacrisis dynamics is essential because the depth of our response must correspond to the depth of the predicament itself.
If the roots of the crisis are ontological, relational, developmental and spiritual, then responses focused solely at the level of symptoms or systems will remain insufficient. The challenge before us, therefore, is not only to redesign systems and institutions, but to become more wise.
It is to transform the very ways of seeing, being, knowing and acting that gave rise to those systems in the first place. To be capable of perceiving interdependence, holding complexity, relating responsibly, and participating in life without generating conditions that undermine the future.
A Crisis of Education, Formation, and Human Development
“If education is not the answer, you are asking the wrong question: why it's time to see planetary crises as a species-wide learning opportunity.”— Zak Stein
The three layers of the metacrisis outlined above illuminate a deeper educational and developmental crisis unfolding beneath our global challenges. If the metacrisis is simultaneously systemic, ontological, relational, developmental, and civilizational, then our educational responses must also be capable of engaging these multiple layers of reality.
One of the deepest failures of modern education is that it has become extraordinarily effective at cultivating information, specialization, and technical capability, while remaining largely incapable of cultivating wisdom, relational maturity, and ethical depth.
We believe this educational crisis exists across three interconnected dimensions:
• Conventional education often reproduces the fragmentation underlying the metacrisis.
• Alternative educational movements, while valuable, remain too fragmented to meet the scale and complexity of civilizational transition.
• Civilization itself functions as an educational environment, shaping desires, identities, perceptions, and behaviors that perpetuate the metacrisis.
Much of today’s educational landscape — conventional, alternative, and civilizational — remains insufficient for the magnitude of the transition we are entering.
At one level, conventional educational systems continue to shape millions of people through fragmented industrial-age models of learning centered around standardization, information transfer, testing, and economic productivity. While these systems generated extraordinary scientific, technological, and economic capacities, they often did so within cultural and economic paradigms, unable to adequately orient those powers toward the flourishing of life as a whole. In this sense, more education is not necessarily better. Forms of education that reinforce fragmentation, competition, extraction, hyper-individualism, and disconnection from life may deepen the very conditions generating the metacrisis itself.
At the same time, many alternative educational approaches and transformational initiatives have emerged in response to the limitations of conventional education. Ecological education, holistic education, contemplative practice, systems thinking, developmental frameworks, community-based learning, and social impact movements have all contributed important insights toward reimagining human development and cultural renewal. Many of these efforts represent essential and beautiful responses to a world in crisis.
Yet the depth and complexity of the metacrisis reveal that isolated approaches alone are not enough. Many remain fragmented, siloed, or structurally dependent upon the same civilizational logics they seek to transform. Few are capable of engaging the multiple layers of the metacrisis simultaneously: the systemic, relational, ontological, developmental, and civilizational dimensions of our predicament.
At the deepest layer, we cannot respond to the metacrisis if education is reduced merely to schools, universities, or alternative institutions. Education, in its deepest sense, is the intergenerational process through which societies reproduce ways of perceiving, relating, knowing, valuing, and being across time.
Human beings are always being educated through culture, media, technology, economics, architecture, religion, family systems, institutions, and the wider social worlds they inhabit.
Civilization itself is an educational environment:
- Systems shape consciousness.
- Cultures shape perception.
- The media shapes desire.
- Institutions shape identity.
- Economies shape relationships.
- Technologies shape attention.
Civilization shapes the kinds of human beings we become. The question is not whether civilization is educating us, but what kinds of human beings it is cultivating.
We believe many of the dominant systems shaping modern life are reinforcing fragmentation, extraction, acceleration and disconnection from life. Consequently, fragmented systems cultivate fragmented human beings, who then recreate fragmented systems. This recursive cycle has become one of the central dynamics perpetuating the metacrisis itself.
Therefore, the challenge before us is not merely educational reform, but a profound expansion of what education itself means.
The task is not simply to create better schools, programs, or institutions — though this is indeed necessary — but to cultivate living developmental ecosystems: relational ecologies of communities, practices, workplaces, educational spaces, and cultures capable of supporting the long arc of human maturation required during a civilizational transition.
Over time, such developmental ecosystems may help give rise to new civilizational infrastructures: new forms of institutions, businesses, cultural spaces, educational architectures, and public life capable of sustaining wiser forms of human participation across generations.
The question before us is no longer only: how do we improve education?
But more fundamentally: what kinds of educational architectures, developmental cultures, and civilizational infrastructures must now emerge to cultivate the forms of wisdom, maturity, and human participation required for humanity to navigate this time between worlds?
What This Moment Requires
“The way we respond to the crisis is part of the crisis.”— Bayo Akomolafe
We believe the metacrisis cannot be resolved through new technologies, policies, or institutions alone. The same ways of seeing, being, knowing, and relating that contributed to the metacrisis cannot generate the conditions required for a life-enhancing civilization to emerge.
This moment therefore calls for profound human and civilizational transformation in how we understand ourselves, reality, and our relationship with all life. Most modern civilizational structures — educational systems, media environments, economic systems, technologies, and cultural norms — continuously shape human desires, identities, ambitions, and behaviors in ways that reinforce fragmentation, extraction, hyper-individualism, disconnection from life, and the inability to perceive our deep interdependence with living systems.
At the heart of both our challenge and our work is a developmental question.
[what is the question?] - my development question + "we have lots to learn with living systems, indigenous practices, wisdom traditions, etc."
We understand this moment as a civilizational rite of passage: a threshold demanding that humanity evolve beyond many of the ways of being modernity has normalized. Responding to the metacrisis requires transformation at the level of perception, relationship, identity, values, and participation in life itself.
This means cultivating forms of wisdom, relational maturity, ethical depth, ecological awareness, ontological grounding, and developmental capacity capable of disclosing different ways of being human and participating in the world.
Yet we currently possess very few structures capable of supporting such becoming. Most educational and developmental systems continue reproducing the same patterns of consciousness and culture that generated the crisis in the first place. While many important alternative initiatives have emerged over recent decades, most remain fragmented, isolated, difficult to access, or unable to sustain the long arc of transformation required during a civilizational transition.
Human transformation of this depth cannot emerge through isolated workshops, short-term interventions, or information transfer alone. It requires new developmental ecologies: interconnected systems of practices, spaces, relationships, communities, and educational processes capable of seeping into existing systems, transforming them, creating new ones and supporting deep personal and collective transformation across time.
These developmental ecologies become the seeds of new developmental cultures which, over time, can evolve into civilizational infrastructures capable of supporting wiser forms of human participation at scale. The task before us is not simply to create isolated transformational spaces, but collective coordination to help cultivate the conditions for new worlds, developmental cultures, and life-enhancing civilizations to emerge.
Building Wisdom-Centered Educational Architectures
Supporting individual and collective transformation in response to systemic collapse and in service of a mature, wise and life-affirming civilization.
A Lineage
Historically, at moments of civilizational rupture, new educational and relational architectures have historically emerged at the edges of society to help individuals navigate transition. Monasteries, wisdom traditions, folk schools, mystery schools, and quilombos created developmental environments capable of cultivating the ontologies, capacities, relationships, and cultural coherence required for their time. We are drawing from these lineages to build something our moment requires and largely lacks.
What We Are Building
A wisdom-centered educational architecture and developmental ecosystem, rooted in the Global South, capable of supporting the long arc of human transformation required during a time between worlds. We are particularly focused on serving a new generation of emerging leaders — post-activists artists, educators, thinkers, organizers, change-makers and world-builders — who feel called to participate in the civilizational challenges of this moment.
Our work begins at the root. The metacrisis is fundamentally a crisis of how human beings perceive, understand, relate to, and act within reality. Which means our response begins at the level of ontology: how reality becomes intelligible, relational, and livable. At the center of our work is a relational-ontological pedagogy, an approach to education focused not only on what people know, but on transforming the ways they see, relate to, and participate in life. This transformation unfolds through embodied practice, experiential training, communal formation, rites of passage, rituals and long-term relational culture. These dimensions are mutually reinforcing aspects of a living developmental ecology.
A central aspect of our work is mapping and weaving together the fragmented ecosystem of initiatives, practices, frameworks, and communities already responding to the metacrisis across the Global South and the world. We believe many essential developmental initiatives for this moment already exist across fields such as contemplative practice, systems thinking, regenerative culture, complexity, trauma healing, metamodern thought, relational work, ecological learning, and wisdom traditions. Yet these efforts often remain isolated, inaccessible, or disconnected from coherent developmental pathways. Our aim is not simply to create another isolated initiative, but to help integrate them into our wisdom-centered educational architecture capable of supporting deeper individual and collective transformation within five streams: The Sacred, Soul, Systems, Soil and Society.
Where We Are Rooted - A Confluence of Lineages
We are rooted in Brazil and Latin America, shaped by this territory, this language, this soil. Our work emerges at the intersection of three lineages that rarely meet:
The intellectual and philosophical rigor of the scientific community, especially from the systems and complexity sciences, the regenerative movement, and the metacrisis and metamodern conversation, developed largely in the Global North.
The contemplative depth of wisdom traditions from around the world — especially the Buddhist lineage — which has shaped our ontologies, practices, and understanding of long-arc educational architecture for the cultivation of wisdom, compassion and ethical life.
The embodied, relational wisdom carried by indigenous, quilombola, Afro-diasporic and marginalized communities, that despite centuries of erasure and forced collapse, have carried and protected ways of seeing, being and relating that the rest of the world is only now beginning to value.
We do not claim to live inside all these traditions. We come to them with respect, curiosity, and the recognition that what they carry is not background context for our work, but the core medicine at the center of it.
What we are attempting is difficult, necessary, and (we believe) genuinely new. We are not simply importing Global North frameworks southward, nor treating wisdom traditions as timeless solutions immune to their own historical limitations and cultural context, or romanticizing the wisdom of historically marginalized communities.
Instead, we are exploring what becomes possible when rigorous systems inquiry, contemplative wisdom, and the living ontological intelligence of this territory are brought into genuine relationship with one another. From this encounter, a new pedagogical and developmental culture can emerge, one that could only take root here, where these lineages have a reason to meet, and where the urgency of this moment makes their separation no longer affordable.
Our Aspiration
With humility, we see this work as an early experiment in what new forms of education and culture might become during a time between worlds. Not educational systems adapted to the logic of modernity, but developmental architectures attempting to respond to the full depth of the metacrisis: its ontological roots, relational wounds and civilizational demands. We don't fully know how to do all of this. But we believe there is a real need to start somewhere, to begin radical and honest experiments with the evolution of educational forms, trusting that what we tend carefully to now will matter to those who come after us. This is what we are trying to build. With everything we have.
In Portuguese, rooted in this soil, e com a alegria que só essa terra conhece.
Cultivating Wisdom in Service of All Life
Our aspiration is not merely the development of wise individuals, but the emergence of wisdom-centered cultures: communities, educational spaces, organizations, practices, and institutions designed to cultivate the conditions for wisdom to emerge and be transmitted across generations. In such a future, wisdom cultivation becomes a shared cultural function rather than a marginal pursuit — held by a growing ecosystem of wisdom-centered institutions capable of nourishing the conditions for life-affirming civilizations to emerge.
We believe wisdom-centered institutions represent a new paradigm for individual and collective development. Unlike many modern institutions designed primarily around efficiency, growth, and productivity, these institutions are organized around cultivating mature human beings, resilient communities, and wiser ways of participating in the web of life.
They are not separate from society, but woven into the fabric of everyday life. They can take the form of businesses, schools, communities, cultural spaces, technologies, spiritual centers, social movements, and new organizational models that recognize that every environment shapes the kinds of human beings we become. Therefore, every institution carries a responsibility to consider what forms of consciousness, relationship, and culture it is helping cultivate.
Over the coming decades, we hope to contribute to the emergence of an ecosystem of wisdom-centered institutions across Brazil and beyond: bioregional organizations strengthening local communities and ecological resilience; residential communities prototyping new ways of being, relating, and organizing together; educational spaces integrating wisdom traditions and contemporary knowledge; communities supporting initiation, rites of passage, and elderhood; philanthropic institutions redistributing resources toward cultural renewal; political movements capable of holding complexity beyond polarization; artistic movements restoring our sense of belonging with life; and technologies designed to deepen rather than diminish our humanity.
Together, these emerging institutions can become the foundation of a new wisdom-centered civilizational infrastructure: a distributed ecology of people, communities, and institutions connected through enough ontological coherence, relational trust, and shared devotion to the flourishing of all life leading to deeper collective coordination in response to the biggest challenges of our times.
The Architecture of Becoming
Underneath our work lives a simple understanding that the future of civilization depends not only on what we create, but on who we become. And who we become depends on the worlds that shape us.
Towards Collective Coordination in Service of Life
All of this is in service of a single horizon: nurturing the transformation of individuals and community towards a genuinely different kind of collective response to the crises of our time.