Only via an examination of the metaphysical can we develop counter-systemic approaches to destabilize the collective, neoliberal conscious.

What then, oh Ivo, wise one? Tell us what we should do! That attitude of giving up power to experts or gurus (whether Buddha or Boris Johnson) to save us, is more modern malware. True, this age is screaming out for wisdom and it is there, but wisdom schools are often insular, generally unconcerned with social issues and often stuck in tradition. And teachings and practices are primarily focused on the individual’s suffering and realisation. That’s fine, but it is limited and excludes deep inquiry into other realms, the ontology of social reality for example. On the other side, the social sciences generally lack this deeper ontology, is either materialist or constructivist, and mostly reasons through linear-causal views of reality, seeing issues through modern mental-rational frameworks. The change-the-individual-to-change-society-approach leaves out both the elephant in the room and much of the room itself – the social imaginary and its causal powers. When it comes to changing, we’re generally no match for it. The imaginary ‘has us’. Spiritual warriors who come back from retreat know all too well the experience of re-entry into society and the rapid loss of whatever state of expanded identity was acquired. Give it a day and we’re back to our old self. Retreat spaces and monasteries are set up for this reason, so you are out of the social imaginary with its pressures of entrainment. These spaces are designed on a principle of functional ignorance, so other perceptions can foreground themselves in consciousness. It works, but it’s analogous to doing science in a box. As soon as we leave the closed retreat system and enter the open one of society, the blissful results of our spiritual experiments prove unsustainable. So alternative approaches are needed to step into the practice gap of social ontology and to inquire into the structures, our agency and effect of our culture’s narratives. I do not see that work as spiritual, it merely relies on methods and insights that are found in spiritual traditions. Nor is the aim individual realisation, but merely to become a better perceiver of the real when we are trying to effect change in the world and to prepare people that they will be changed by doing it. Thus, it demands we drop our self-obsessed neoliberal work-on-ourselves stance, or our spiritual trophy hunting and go straight into what I call The Messh – the entangled, extended, enacted, embedded, embodied, nondual and nonlinear dynamic totality. That may sound overwhelming. But, says the independent scholar Bonnitta Roy:[xxxvii] ‘we are not so much working for greater systemic reach or to identify all the links in an enormous causal chain; rather we need to closely examine the metaphysical operating system of our minds, and participate in the creative emergence of a new structure of consciousness.’ She adds that the metamorphosis needed is driven by pressures that run counter to the modern mind’s ‘upward path’ and argues that: ‘it operates through what David Chandler calls “counter systemic approaches” which destabilise the modern imaginaries of “progress”, “civilisation” and “development” while challenging our “fixed and empty framework of time and space with ourselves at the centre”.’[xxxviii] Roy brings much together here. Just as we can’t work purely on ourselves, we also can no longer continue to work ‘on’ the world. That means further widening the infamous subject–object divide, placing humans further away from others, matter and nature. It means fueling the mechanisms that are driving the Meta-crisis. It also means that we need to reimagine what we consider to be a human being. This imagining cannot be done rationally. It must be done experientially, reflexively and iteratively; and without self-concern. As Octavia Butler said: ‘All that you touch, you change. All that you change, changes you.’