Into and out of the meta-crisis: Interview with Daniel Thorson
What is at the root of our overlapping crises, and what is the path out?
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Daniel Thorson lived in a monastic retreat for six years, has spent almost two years in silence, and has met hundreds of leading health practitioners and philosophers as host of his podcast Emerge. Few people have studied the sources and antidotes to the material, philosophical, and existential crises of our time. This is the subject of my interview with Daniel, which has been edited for brevity.
The mental health to spiritual health pipeline
Johnny: A lot of mental health journeys end in spiritual journeys. Why do you think that is?
Daniel: I think this is a huge question. The one book that comes to mind is this wonderful book by James Hillman. I think it's called We've Had 100 Years of Psychotherapy and Everything is Still Getting Worse. There seems to be straightforward limitations on how the West is currently constructing mental health care therapy. For instance, generally, it's considered to be for treating pathology. Just that is a huuuuge constriction of what it deals with, the world that it creates and invites people into. My general sense is that what people are tuning into that makes them turn towards mental health care is suffering.
But actually, it's like, I don't know how to live well. That's a whole different game. Partly it's depression. But if you don't know how to live well, you'll feel depressed.
And we could talk about this in a lot of different ways, but what it means to live a good life. We might not know that that's what we want, but I believe that's actually what we all really deeply, honestly want.
What is the meta-crisis?
Johnny: Hard pivot here. What is the meta crisis? What does that mean?
Daniel: If I was in a conversation with somebody, I'll do it with you if that's okay. Do you, Johnny, see that things are fucked up in the world?
Johnny: Yes.
Daniel: Okay. Do you see that it's not just one way that things are fucked up, but actually a multitude of ways they're fucked up?
Johnny: Absolutely.
Daniel: So we got climate, economy, our culture is fucked up. There's a migration crisis. We could go on and on. Then we can ask a question like, is it the case that perhaps there's some underlying generator of all of these crises? Because solving climate change isn't going to do it. Protecting the species from dying off isn't going to do it. Solving the migration crisis isn't going to do it. There's still 20, 30 other crises. What is generating all of these crises?
Is there a way of looking at it such that we can see the underlying thing that is producing all of these crises? That's what the metacrisis frame allows us to see.
This has its analogy in Buddhism, where it's like all the problems of our life, all the myriad problems of our life, all the suffering, actually is produced by clinging. We think we have tons of different problems. But there's, according to Buddhism, at least one solution. Interesting.
The path out of the meta-crisis
Johnny: On that note, you've mentioned that we cannot understand our way out of the meta crisis. Do you see a path out of the meta crisis in a different way?
Daniel: Yeah, I think it's probably better to say we cannot merely understand, or simply understand our way. I do. Yes, I do believe that there is still a possibility that we can find a way forward that makes sense.
I'm going to use the thinking and work of one of my mentors, Zack Stein. He actually recently released a book called First Principles and First Values. They talk about the meta crisis as being best understood as actually a global intimacy disorder, where the parts of our global system have become disassociated from each other, meaning that we, humans, have become alienated from each other, from our own interiority, from the natural world, and that all of these crises are in some way a kind of epiphenomenon of that alienation, that fragmentation, that failure of intimacy.
My sense of the way forward is that we need to create and discover what will look like radically new forms of intimacy that allow human collectives to bind themselves together in the face of complex challenges and act with new kinds of intelligence, creativity, wisdom, and that will be the basis of new kinds of intimacy. In particular, intimacy with truth. My sense is that to the degree that we have become unmoored from truth or unmoored from reality, it's impossible to coordinate. It's impossible to coordinate because the only thing that can coordinate us is ideologies, and ideologies are made up.
We, humans, have to become clarified in our relationship with truth. One thing is that many people don't even believe in truth right now. In our world, they don't believe the truth is a real thing. And so there’s a lot of work that has to be done. Then once we've clarified it, we can start to get together and be in right relationship with truth and build culture that is rooted in truth. Then culture can actually start to form the unfoldment of the collective. That is, I think, the way forward, and that's going to take a lot of work, a lot of prayer. I have no idea how to do it, but it does seem clear that that's the thing that needs to be done.
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Aletheia unfolding
Johnny: On that work…you lived in a monastic retreat for six years. You have spent almost two years in silence. You've met hundreds of leading health health practitioners and philosophers in your podcast Emerge. And the modality that I perceive you to be most excited about is called unfolding.
Daniel: Aletheia unfolding. Yeah.
Johnny: Can you describe what that is and how it differs from conventional paradigms?
Daniel: While I was living at the monastery, and this was an atypical monastery, we were doing all kinds of interesting things. The idea of this monetary was really interested in the relationship between contemplative practice and the meta crisis. And so we did all kinds of interesting experiments. One of the experiments that I got to run was I taught a three-month retreat container at the Canadian branch. I was in that container that I designed mind, trying to layer together a bunch of different practices, modalities, and methods for transformation.
I think that one of the main questions in the context of the meta crisis is, who do we need to become in order to step into a position of responsibility and responsiveness in the context of a planetary crisis, in the context of the meta crisis? That was my intention, was to create that path of transformation, or at least one path.
And then at the end of that experiment, I had a conversation with John Rewakey. You can listen to the recording, and there's an interview. And after that recording was released, Steve March, the creator of Aletheia Unfolding, listened to the interview and reached out to me.
I got his materials and I started looking at it, and I knew enough to be able to see what he created. And I realized after not too long. I was like, oh, he's done it.
It was like I had been working on precalculus. And all of a sudden, Isaac Newton sends me a letter. And it's like, Hey, man, just to let you know, I solved precalculus. I also invented calculus. And I also invented and discovered this thing called imaginary numbers, just so you know.
And I was just like, oh, wow. One, I don't have to do what I thought my life's work was, which was very relieving. And I can just learn this. And I was right. The deeper I went, the more it became clear that, at least from my perspective, he has made one of the most significant innovations and transformations that I've seen in my lifetime. And I've been practicing it for almost two years now, pretty intensively, and I've been just consistently amazed. Every challenge, every developmental challenge that I have found in my life, I've brought into unfolding, and it has very, very meaningfully shifted it, made a difference. It has accelerated my own development. And this is what my friends who are in the training with me and have continued to do the practice have also reported.
Johnny: Can you describe what Aletheia Unfolding solved for that you hadn't seen in previous practices?
Daniel: So there are many pieces to this. And I think the most significant ones, or at least the ones that I'll speak to now, are, one, the very clear focus on the fundamental motivation for practice. So this is the shift from the self-improvement paradigm to the self-unfoldment paradigm. And this is huge. This is critical. This makes all the difference. Steve talks about this as the first and last training.
I, for whatever reason, had never really clarified this in all my years of practice. And it turns out that if you are practicing with even a very subtle and hidden desire to change, improve, or fix yourself or your experience that will thwart the process of unfolding. Instead, Aletheia unfolding starts from a very, very clear basis of loving goodness, truth, and beauty for its own sake. In the practice, we are not endeavoring to fix, change, upgrade, improve, anything at all. In that way, it's aimless, which can be a bit like confronting the parts of us that think we need to change. But instead of doing what those parts think we should do, we just look directly at the truth of them and bring them into the light.
In doing that, change just happens. Because it turns out that it is not because we aren't trying enough that we don't unfold. It's because we just get in the way of a very natural process. We obstruct our own becoming. That is what causes problems. This is very much the same as in Buddhism, what we call clinging. We get in the way. And so that difference makes all the difference.
Johnny: So how has Aletheia unfolding impacted you?
Daniel: One of the main ways that has really impacted me is because it seems to be able to receive and metabolize any challenging experience that arises in my life. There's a fearlessness that I feel when it comes to just the situations of my life. And that feels like it really helps me make difficult choices that feel like they're an integrity or aligned with truth because I'm like, okay, worse comes to worse. I can take this into an unfolding session.
It actually is more material for my own development, my own growth. I have faith that whatever it is, I can take it into this practice, and it will result in the clarification of being. That trust in my own process, my own unfoldment, it just gives me a confidence and willingness to push myself or put myself into situations that feel risky, that feel just at my edge.
I feel like I'm allowed to be at my edge more because I know that if I make a mistake or go too far, I have a space, I have a practice that really reliably can meet me there and open me up and expand my edge so that I can go right back into the situation with clarity and then move forward.
Johnny: Thank you
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