The Iran situation. The unravelling of things we took for granted. The sense that the stories we were told about the future are fraying somewhere fundamental.

If you’re reading this newsletter, you probably already sense something deeper is going on — not just a bad news cycle, but a civilisational moment. That’s what this course is about.

Exploring a Second Renaissance Together starts this Wednesday, 15 April. Four weeks, online, with Rufus and Sylvie.

Register now →

Sliding scale: suggested €39/$39, pay from €10. Scholarships also available — just reply.

Can’t make all the live sessions? The pre-recorded materials stand alone as valuable content, and session recordings are available. That said, the live dialogue is where the deepest learning happens — attend what you can.

What you’ll get

This course won’t give you a hot take on the news. It’ll do something more useful: a coherent framework for understanding why so much is converging at once — the deep roots beneath apparently separate crises — and what is quietly beginning to emerge in response.

Not doom. Not denial. A grounded way of seeing.

Over four weeks, we’ll explore:

• Symptoms — How did we each come to see the cracks? What are we actually witnessing?

• Roots — What are the deep assumptions of modernity that are running out of road?

• Hope — Have civilisations actually changed before? (Yes — and we’ll look at the evidence.)

• Seeds — Where is renewal already emerging, and what can we do?

Each week combines short pre-recorded materials (videos and readings, ~30–45 min, on your own time) with a live 90-minute dialogue session with the whole group. The materials give you the framework; the live sessions are where the real integration happens — in genuine conversation with others who see what you see.

Can’t make all the live sessions? The pre-recorded materials stand alone as valuable content, and session recordings are available. That said, the live dialogue is where the deepest learning happens — attend what you can.

This is for people who already sense it

You’re on this list because something in the Second Renaissance framing resonated — the whitepaper, the articles, a conversation, something that clicked. This course is a chance to go deeper: not just intellectually, but in community. To sit with others grappling with the same questions. To come away with clarity, connection, and a felt sense that you’re not alone in this.

Starts Wednesday 15 April — Small group

Register now →

Sliding scale: suggested €39/$39, pay from €10 — or more if you’re able. Scholarships also available — just reply.

Can’t make all the live sessions? The pre-recorded materials stand alone as valuable content, and session recordings are available. That said, the live dialogue is where the deepest learning happens — attend what you can.

With warmth,

Rufus & Sylvie

P.S. If someone in your life is quietly wrestling with these questions, please forward this. We’re keeping the group intentionally small — so the sooner the better.

This month, an encounter with Sri Aurobindo: the radical Indian nationalist become mystic and spiritual teacher, who pioneered a vision and practice for global spiritual evolution. Writing in the early 20th century, Aurobindo set the stage for contemporary frameworks of inner growth and cultural evolution such as Ken Wilber’s Integral Theory, and lays a blueprint for engaged spirituality - participatory transformation of worldly life through deep inner realisation.

Below, you’ll also find curated events, jobs, and opportunities for inner-led change.

Sri Aurobindo on the evolution of human consciousness

From Indian nationalist leader to spiritual teacher

Sri Aurobindo (1872-1950) was an Indian yogi, spiritual teacher, poet, and activist known for his philosophy and practice of Integral Yoga. With his spiritual collaborator, Mira Alfassa, he co-founded Auroville, a township devoted to realising human unity and the transformation of consciousness.

His education - spanning Classical and modern European languages and literature at King’s College, Cambridge, and the study of Indian languages, Sanskrit literature and yoga - grounded his later philosophy in both post-Enlightenment European ideals of progress and freedom, and ancient Indian spiritual traditions.

In his thirties, he became a leader in India’s Nationalist movement, advocating a radical approach including direct and armed action against the British. In 1908, he was imprisoned on suspicion of overseeing an assassination attempt.1 He was acquitted - but not before a profound spiritual transformation, catalysed by a year in solitary confinement spent in meditation and reflection. His later philosophy and writings were founded in his own direct realisations, which also reimagined India’s independence struggle as a part of a global work of spiritual regeneration.

Spiritual evolution towards the “supramental”

Aurobindo’s philosophy interprets the deepest meaning of earthly life as participation in the evolution of consciousness, towards ever greater (re)union between humanity and the divine. Central to this vision is the paired movement of involution (Spirit plunges into the “Inconscience” of Matter, cloaking itself in the ignorance of material existence) and subsequent evolution (spirit progressively manifests itself through worldly life).

Aurobindo held that humans are manifestations of divine spirit, or brahman; manifested in the lower, human realm of mind and matter in order to participate in “the adventure of consciousness and joy”.2 The self-expression of the divine in forms that include suffering and evil was “not a blunder and a fall, but a purposeful descent, not a curse but a divine opportunity. . . . To achieve a possibility of the divine Existence which could not be achieved in other conditions . . . would seem to be the task imposed on the spirit born into the material universe.”3

Thus the purpose of human life on earth is to participate in divine evolution towards a new form of consciousness - supermind - bridging the spiritual and the mundane. This plane of consciousness would see simultaneously both the true divinity and unity (spirit) in all things, and the true plurality and uniqueness (soul) of all things.

Social transformation

Aurobindo’s philosophy prefigures Francisco Varela’s vision of a “second renaissance,” through a renewed synthesis of contemplative traditions and worldly inquiry. Aurobindo held that the incipient evolution of human consciousness and culture meets limits that won’t be overcome by refinement of ordinary mental capacities.

The emergence of Supramental consciousness is required for humans to become “gnostic beings” – allowing new forms of social life, which express deeper harmony, joy, unity, freedom, and creativity, to arise. Just as the Enlightenment rise of rationalism had initiated a radical restructuring of society, so would the emergence of supramental consciousness spark an evolutionary shift: towards a society which “would be and act not as a mechanical but a spiritual integer”.4

“It is only the full emergence of the soul, the full descent of the native light and power of the Spirit and the consequent replacement or transformation and uplifting of our insufficient mental and vital nature by a spiritual and supramental Supernature that can effect this evolutionary miracle.”5

Integral Yoga and the call for individual practice

Such a social transformation would require deep collective inner change: many individuals opening themselves to higher levels of consciousness and awakening to spiritual nature. As Aurobindo wrote to a disciple: “the best way to make Humanity progress is to move on oneself;—that may sound either individualistic or egoistic, but it isn’t: it is only common sense.”6

The pathway of practice he developed to support this radical individual and collective transformation is Integral Yoga:

“Yoga is a generic name for the processes and the result of processes by which we transcend or shred off our present modes of being and rise to a new, a higher, a wider mode of consciousness which is not that of the ordinary animal and intellectual man. Yoga is the exchange of an egoistic for a universal or cosmic consciousness lifted towards or informed by the supra-cosmic, transcendent Unnameable who is the source and support of all things. Yoga is the passage of the human thinking animal towards the God-consciousness from which he has descended.”7

Integral Yoga brings together Hatha Yoga (movement, breath, and meditation to support physical and mental balance), meditation and self-inquiry (for clarity and self-realisation), Karma Yoga (selfless service), and Bhakti Yoga (devotion and chanting) within a unified path of spiritual development.

Aurobindo warned that this was a long and challenging path. Integral Yoga seeks integration of the inner spiritual life with outer vitality: turning towards the divine without turning away from action in the world - a departure from ascetic and monastic spirituality. It calls for wholehearted embrace of divine unity while requiring deep individuation and realisation of one’s own unique nature. As Aurobindo put it, neatly expressing the interconnectedness of the individual and collective quest for self-realisation: “India was strongest and most alive when she had many variations of form but one spirit.”8

Auroville

To manifest Aurobindo’s philosophical vision and pedagogy, he and his spiritual collaborator Mira Alfassa first organised the Sri Aurobindo Ashram, and later founded Auroville - a township in Tamil Nadu where people of all nationalities can live in harmony and peace.

Since 1966 Auroville has had UNESCO status and is recognised as a project ‘of international importance for the future of humanity’. A slowly growing population of over 3,000 people devote their lives to alternative ways of being and working together; foregrounding unity, spiritual growth and environmental sustainability. With an economic model founded on collective ownership, universal basic services, work as self-expression and an emphasis on leisure for inward growth, Auroville is a living experiment in regenerative social organisation after modernity:

“a system to universally provide the minimum needs of the people so that everyone can focus on offering their best for the welfare of the whole community without having to struggle for their survival needs.”9

Explore the field of inner-led change…

A selection of events and opportunities recommended by readers, friends, and allies in the arena of inner-led regeneration.

👋 Help us to showcase the best opportunities and resources: please suggest items to include in the Events, Offers & Links or Jobs Board WhatsApp channels.

Upcoming Events

In Tech We Trust - webinar roundtable

📍Online 📅 18 March 2026, 16:30-18:00 GMT 💸 Free

​“In Tech We Trust argues that technology has become more than a tool — it has become a cultural authority. In late modernity, tech is not simply something we use; it is something we trust, revere, and unconsciously organise our world around. …

Rather than focusing only on governance, the discussion will examine the cultural paradigm shaping our technological era — and the inner capacities needed to navigate it well. … ​Join us as we ask not only what AI can do — but who we must become to live well with it.”

World as Lover, World as Self - workshop

📍Hawkwood College, Stroud, UK 📅 27 March 2026, 9:30-16:00 GMT 💸 £130 (includes lunch and refreshments)

“Join Phoebe Tickell and Rupert Read for an immersive day exploring our profound interconnection with the living world through Joanna Macy’s transformative practices. Moving through the spiral of Coming From Gratitude, Honouring Our Pain, Seeing with New Eyes and Going Forth, we’ll journey through Buddhist philosophy, deep ecology, and experiential exercises to transform eco-anxiety into empowered belonging. Through the Truth Mandala, nature connection practices, and group work, discover your place in the web of life.”

Mystics and Scientists Online Conference: The Coming Age of Enheartenment

📍Online 📅 17-19 April 2026 💸 £95 (early-bird)

“An annual conference exploring the frontiers of consciousness, spirituality, and scientific inquiry. … We have a remarkable line-up of international speakers to empower and inspire you on your path towards fulfilment, understanding and embodiment of the alchemical principle of love as the agent of personal and collective transformation. If we have co-created and manifested our current conditions, we also have the capacity to reorient ourselves and align with the evolutionary impulse of cooperation, mutual thriving, trust and integrity.

This conference will ask how can we best co-creatively reconfigure ourselves, our relationships and the many systems in which we are all embedded while upholding the spiritual essence of what it means to be human?”

ICON 2026: Closer to Coherence - Integral’s Role in Building a Post-Tragic Future

📍Denver, Colorado, USA 📅 28-31 May 2026 💸 $225 (early-bird online) or $699 (early-bird in-person). Reduced price for under 31s.

“ICON is a collective of future-focused people and organizations working to bring forth a positive vision for humanity. Our work is grounded in the values of an emergent holistic worldview. We share in the desire to be part of something larger than ourselves, creating a lasting impact in the present that reaches far into the future. … ICON 2026 INVITES YOU INTO A LIVING LABORATORY OF
CO-EMERGENCE. Here at the edge, where theory meets embodiment,
we don’t wait for the future—we show up as the alchemists weaving it into being.”

Attention and Flourishing Conference

📍University of Navarra, Pamplona, Spain 📅 11-13 June 2026 💸 $75-200

“Bringing together artists, scholars, psychotherapists, and practitioners from around the world, the 2026 Attention and Flourishing Conference at the University of Navarra seeks to examine the undertheorized relationship between the virtue of attention, mental health, and the flourishing of individuals and communities. Hosted in the University’s beautiful Museum, the Conference is intent on exploring the modes of attention at play in artistic practices and the spaces dedicated to them, and how such approaches can foster richer notions of mental health, wellbeing, and the life well-lived.”

Jobs & Opportunities

Regenerative Futures Fund: Hiring Senior Partnerships Adviser

📍Edinburgh (possibility of remote working) 📅 Application deadline: 23 March 2026

“The Regenerative Futures Fund is a co-designed, community-rooted initiative to tackle poverty, racism and climate change in Edinburgh. A pooled fund providing unrestricted long-term funding, and decisions made by residents with lived experience, it is reshaping how funding can empower and transform. … As we enter this new phase, we are seeking a skilled fundraiser to help secure significant philanthropic support for the £15.8m Regenerative Futures Fund.”

Climate Youth Resilience Ambassador Programme

📍Online 📅 Application deadline: 25 March 2026

“As we face increasing challenges, we know that when young people gather together, we are even stronger. These times of polarisation, disinformation and systems breakdown are calling us all to come together. Our programme modules will guide young people aged 18-35 to step fully into the power they already have and to cultivate even deeper capacities. We will build a global impact network of inner-led change-makers, to lead us through the challenges of our times with courage, compassion and grace.”

Young Person’s Guide to Systems Change Fellowship

📍Online 📅 Application deadline: 28 March 2026

“The Young person’s guide to systems change fellowship is a 6-week learning fellowship bringing together young changemakers from different backgrounds to explore how systems shape everyday challenges and how they can be transformed through systems thinking, storytelling and collective learning. Participants will gain practical skills, confidence and connections to support systems change in their own communities.”

The Great Simplification: Hiring Chief of Staff/Director

📍USA 📅 Application deadline not specified

“ISEOF’s public platform, The Great Simplification (TGS), has become a central node in global conversations around what is often called the polycrisis or metacrisis, which we more precisely frame as the “more-than-human predicament.” ... Over time, TGS has evolved from a content platform into a convening space for individuals and institutions grappling with biophysical limits, energy transitions, and civilizational complexity. … The Chief of Staff functions as the senior strategic and operational leader at ISEOF/TGS, effectively serving as the organization’s #2 to the Executive Director.”

Second Renaissance

“Second Renaissance” is one way of framing current times as a period of civilisational crisis and potential renewal – and of pointing to an ecosystem of people and organisations working to catalyse the emergence of a new, regenerative, cultural paradigm. If you recognise terms like metacrisis, Metamodern, Regenerative, Liminal Web, Game B, Integral, conscious evolution and so on, then you’re on familiar ground. Explore the core thesis and theory of change in more detail here.

🌱 Help us to plant seeds of a Second Renaissance. If you want to support the movement, you can:

• 💬 Share your thoughts in the comments section

• 🎁 Share this newsletter with a friend

• 💸 Become a paid subscriber

Subscribe now

Finally, we leave you with some —

Art to nourish the soul…

London-based artist Luc Waring created a series entitled Grim Reaper for the Second Renaissance Art of Impermanence exhibition which took place in Thénac, France in April 2024.

Reflecting on the series, Waring shares:

“When I had the Grim Reaper motif, I wanted to make them light and happy. Through my teaching with Thich Nhat Hanh and the ten years in practice with that lens, death isn’t such a morbid thing anymore, and actually, contemplating death makes life a lot richer, when you realise that it is finite and life won’t last forever. … It’s a gentle reminder that today is something special, tomorrow isn’t promised.”

See more images of Grim Reaper and listen to the artist’s reflections in the video below:

Thank you for reading the thirteenth issue of Seeds of a Second Renaissance.

This month is a little different. We’d like to share a new essay from the Second Renaissance series - addressing a force that shapes not only our material conditions, but the deepest foundations of modern culture: technology.

We reflect on tech as a modern God, its entanglement with our prevailing worldview, and the shift in human capacities and meaning-making that could help us relate to it more wisely. It’s the fifth paper in the series; authored by Rufus Pollock, Rosie Bell and Sylvie Barbier (Life Itself Sensemaking Studio).

We hope you’ll find it useful to explore the essay’s core themes - with an invitation to go ahead and dive into the full paper.

Below, you’ll also find curated events, jobs, and opportunities.

In Tech We Trust

Read the full paper

Watch the webinar

Co-evolving with our tools

Humans have co-evolved with tools and techniques that shape our bodies, behaviours, and societies: from fire to clothing, literacy and weapons.

Nonetheless something does feel different about the age we’re living in. The speed and scale of tech. The irreversibility of its influence. New life-altering tools emerge and embed themselves faster than sense-making can follow. By the time we’re beginning to understand an innovation, it’s often so entrenched in our psychology and economy that we don’t know how to undo it even if we wanted to.

The widening wisdom gap between what we are empowered to do with tech and what we can do wisely is an existential threat; touching climate, information ecosystems, mental health, geopolitics… and now AI.

What follows isn’t a moral condemnation of tools, engineers, or innovation. It’s a diagnosis of a cultural paradigm shaped in the image of technology itself: prizing measurement over meaning, material progress over discernment, and competition over collective care, even as these habits pull us towards a precipice.

Technology as God

Modern society increasingly relates to technology as a surrogate god. Tech isn’t an explicit object of worship, but we trust, revere, defer to, and organise our lives around it. In a secular age where religion has lost its central status as collective authority, technology and its priesthood have inherited a surprising number of divine functions…

In tech we trust
Normalising smartphone addiction, we give technology permission to shape our attention, behaviour, and sense of reality. We allow algorithmic systems to curate perception, mediate relationships, and steer political life.

Tech as divine mystery
Modern tech might as well be magic to those who rely on it daily. We don’t understand how it works, yet we invest it with vast power over our lives - and a significant sense of awe.

Salvation in tech
The transcendental hopes once carried by religion - including fantasies of immortality - resurface in transhumanist dreams and tech-salvation narratives. Simply have faith, and the next breakthrough will redeem the consequences of the last.

The divine right of technologists
Technologists and founders have become the cultural high priests of late modernity - granted unusual legitimacy to speak on everything, invited into spaces of government, and trusted to steer the trajectory of civilisation.

From Servant to master

Technology has often been a helpful servant; facilitating comfort, health, connection, and creativity. So it isn’t inherently bad, but it has become a dominant organising logic that routinely eclipses human values - crossing the boundary from servant to master.

Consider the Zen story shared by Thích Nhất Hạnh:

“A person is galloping quickly on a horse.
At a crossroads, a friend shouts: ‘Where are you going?
The rider replies: ‘I don’t know - ask the horse!’
This is our situation. The horse is technology.”

Most of us can feel it: the sense of being carried by systems we didn’t consciously choose, unable to slow down long enough to ask what we actually want.

The Rational Fallacy

Our runaway horse is enabled by a core dogma of modern times: rationalism. In particular, the homo economicus model of human nature: rational, self-interested agents who reliably choose what serves them best. Within this worldview, markets and technologies are trusted to deliver the common good as the sum of individual choice.

In reality, as we now know well, human decision-making is shaped by emotion, habit, impulse, and values as much as by reason. Technologies themselves systematically shape behaviour and undermine genuine agency in ways that depend on the rational consumer model to be tolerated. Reason is not sovereign in the way the modern market story requires it to be - and the accumulated harm of this fallacy is laid bare by the tech-fuelled destruction of the living world.

AI: the wisdom gap at warp speed

Unprecedented technologies can’t be adopted both wisely and rapidly: their consequences can only be known with hindsight, and the closest thing we have to experts are often the same innovators financially invested in rapid adoption. Accelerating AI brings the underlying pattern into sharp focus.

Concern grows daily about declining human oversight, systemic fragility, resource intensity, and the long-term alignment with human values - yet we appear largely unable to slow this development long enough to ask what we truly want at the level of global humanity.

Beyond the race-to-the-bottom

How might a wiser future society relate differently to technology?

Runaway tech is at root a collective action problem - a race-to-the-bottom dynamic where competition overwhelms collective restraint. If one actor slows down, another speeds up. “If we don’t build it, others will.”

The same pattern permeates interconnected crises from climate to nuclear risk, geopolitics - and now AI. Modernity’s deep story of the world as isolated individuals and competing units; the sense that wellbeing is secured through control and advantage, prevents us from acting in our fundamental shared interests to mitigate existential threats.

No simple plea to common humanity will slow a global technology race: to expect it would be naive. Nonetheless it’s now equally clear that any future society that survives its own technologies will be one that is no longer prone to collective action problems.

This requirement points beyond any moral reasoning possible within the modern paradigm; toward a deeper shift in how we understand our reality.

Interbeing

“The verb ‘to be’ can be misleading, because we cannot be by ourselves alone. ‘To be’ is always to inter-be. If we combine the prefix ‘inter-’ with the verb ‘to be,’ we have a new verb, ‘inter-be.’ To inter-be and the reality of interbeing is not just a word. It is a reality.”

~Thích Nhất Hạnh

A worldview of Interbeing - familiar to readers of our earlier issue on Thích Nhất Hạnh - experiences humanity as fundamentally interconnected with all life. Though the concept can seem utopian in an individualistic world, it reflects a basic reality: harm to the commons ultimately harms everyone.

For collective restraint to become a cultural instinct, a more embodied awareness of interbeing is urgently needed. Cultivating awareness at scale might seem daunting - yet this direct experience is already accessible in family life, mutual care, and shared reliance on social and ecological systems.

Restoring agency: beyond choice to wise choice

If our collective dilemmas call us to consider interbeing, the essay concludes with a more intimate question: How do we learn to want what’s good?

We have gradually outsourced responsibility for our decision-making to an unconscious entity. A future society capable of stewarding powerful technologies will need more than a hollow assumption of rational human agency. It will depend upon the cultivation of subtle inner capacities sidelined in modern life: sensitivity, valueception, holistic perception, collective identity - an inner compass that can temper power with wisdom.

What kind of culture do we need to become, if future technology is to serve life, rather than govern it?

Read the full paper

Download the paper

Join the webinar roundtable

Join us on Wednesday 18th March, 4:30-6pm GMT for a live roundtable discussion with the paper authors and invited experts in AI and social transformation: Michael Garfield (Humans on the Loop podcast), Xavier Snelgrove (Orbital Studies Magazine), and Jenny Stefanotti (Denizen).

Register for the webinar

Watch the webinar recording

​This roundtable will open a timely conversation:

• ​Has technology become a kind of modern “god”?

• ​How do modern assumptions — individualism, rationalism, materialism, and the myth of progress — shape our relationship with AI?

• ​What might it mean to shift from out-of-control technological acceleration towards collective restraint?

• ​Can a worldview grounded in interbeing — the recognition of radical interdependence — support wiser choices about the forces we unleash?

​Rather than focusing only on governance, the discussion will examine the cultural paradigm shaping our technological era — and the inner capacities needed to navigate it well.

​Join us as we ask not only what AI can do — but who we must become to live well with it.

Explore the field of inner-led change…

A selection of events and opportunities recommended by readers, friends, and allies in the arena of inner-led regeneration.

👋 Help us to showcase the best opportunities and resources: please suggest items to include in the Events, Offers & Links or Jobs Board WhatsApp channels.

Upcoming Events

Re-imagining Education Conference 5.0: Cycles of Change

📍Online 📅 26 February - 1 March 2026 💸 $10-$800 or contribute what you can

“How can we reimagine education with the cycles of change? For five years, the Re-imagining Education Conference has gathered to ask a fundamental question: Why reimagine education? Because how we learn changes how we live. REC is a space where reimagining is understood as a living cycle — rich with ups and downs, twists and turns, and journeys inward and outward. … As we host our 5th online conference, REC becomes an emergent research experiment and a living laboratory for critical pedagogy. This year, we learn from the changing cycles of our collective work and from the wisdom of the Earth and its elements.”

Consciousness and Education Conference

📍York St John University, York, England 📅 16-17 June 2026 💸 £47-215 (Early-bird tickets currently available. In-person and online tickets available. )

“We are excited to invite you to the first Consciousness & Education Conference: Why Consciousness Matters for the Future of Education. … This two-day conference explores the implications of a new world view for education. Drawing on emerging post-materialist perspectives in science, philosophy and the humanities, the conference invites participants to reconsider long-standing assumptions about knowledge, learning, agency and meaning in educational theory and practice.”

Book Launch of A World Appears by Michael Pollan

📍Sydney Goldstein Theater, San Francisco, USA 📅 Wednesday 4 March 2026, 7:30pm PT 💸 $52 (includes a copy of the book)

“In Pollan’s dazzling exploration of consciousness, he discovers a world far deeper and stranger than our everyday reality. Eye-opening and mind-expanding, A World Appears takes us into the laboratories of our own minds, ultimately showing us how we might make better use of the gift of awareness to more meaningfully connect with our deepest selves.”

Deep Awakening Practice Circle

📍Online 📅 Starting from April 2026 💸 Sliding scale from $50/month

“A small peer circle for seasoned adults practicing right relationship within fragmented systems. This is a field of mutual care & calibration. Together, we cultivate clarity, invite surrender, and strengthen the ability to live with grounded presence in all conditions. This community is oriented to 1) people working to shape the future of technology, culture & consciousness 2) people who are devoted to living with inner freedom.”

Spring Season at Hostačov: A month of living, working, and thinking together

📍Online 📅 15 March - 13 April 2026 💸 €35-65/day

“From March 15–April 13, people come to live and work together in the Czech countryside — part residential coworking, part shared inquiry — sharing meals, walks, and conversations while working on their own projects in a calm, thoughtful atmosphere. Each weekend brings participatory gatherings on themes like building in uncertain times, systems thinking, philosophical inquiry, and inner development — and people are welcome to help shape sessions and the overall experience.”

Jobs & Opportunities

Hiring Business & Enterprise Lead at Doughnut Economics Action Lab

📍UK 📅 Apply by 22 February

“Doughnut Economics Action Lab (DEAL) works with innovative cities, businesses, teachers, students, and community groups worldwide to turn the ideas of Doughnut Economics into irresistible practice. We explore and demonstrate how to create economies that meet the needs of all people within the means of the living planet, collaborate with others to bring about this transformational change, and help to realise a regenerative and distributive future. In this role, you will be leading DEAL’s engagement with the business world through a focus on business design. This entails generating support and excitement for transforming the deep design of businesses.”

Hiring Secretary-General at ReGeneration 2030

📍Not specified 📅 Apply by 22 March

“This is a full-time, parental leave cover role in the leadership of ReGeneration 2030, the Nordic-Baltic Sea network building youth power to fight for a just sustainable transition. The Secretary-General role combines movement leadership, strategic thinking, organising skills and administrative stewardship, holding the organisation together across strategy, people, resources and action.”

Hiring Growth Marketing Manager at London Interdisciplinary School

📍London, UK 📅 Application deadline not specified

“The challenges facing the world today are not theoretical. They are urgent, messy, and interconnected. And yet, most universities still train students in narrow silos, disconnected from the real world. LIS is doing things differently. We are the first university in over 50 years to be granted full degree-awarding powers from inception. Our mission is to prepare the next generation with the interdisciplinary tools, methods, and mindsets needed to tackle complex problems, and to thrive personally and professionally.”

Second Renaissance

“Second Renaissance” is one way of framing current times as a period of civilisational crisis and potential renewal – and of pointing to an ecosystem of people and organisations working to catalyse the emergence of a new, regenerative, cultural paradigm. If you recognise terms like metacrisis, Metamodern, Regenerative, Liminal Web, Game B, Integral, conscious evolution and so on, then you’re on familiar ground. Explore the core thesis and theory of change in more detail here.

🌱 Help us to plant seeds of a Second Renaissance. If you want to support the movement, you can:

• 💬 Share your thoughts in the comments section

• 🎁 Share this newsletter with a friend

• 💸 Become a paid subscriber

Subscribe now

Finally, we leave you with some —

Art to nourish the soul…

  At the city gate and by your fireside I have seen you prostrate yourself and worship your own freedom,
     Even as slaves humble themselves before a tyrant and praise him though he slays them.
     Ay, in the grove of the temple and in the shadow of the citadel I have seen the freest among you wear their freedom as a yoke and a handcuff.
     And my heart bled within me; for you can only be free when even the desire of seeking freedom becomes a harness to you, and when you cease to speak of freedom as a goal and a fulfilment.

     You shall be free indeed when your days are not without a care nor your nights without a want and a grief,
     But rather when these things girdle your life and yet your rise above them naked and unbound.

     And how shall you rise beyond your days and nights unless you break the chains which you at the dawn of your understanding have fastened around your noon hour?
     In truth that which you call freedom is the strongest of these chains, though its links glitter in the sun and dazzle your eyes.

~ On freedom; an excerpt from The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran

Thank you for reading the twelfth issue of Seeds of a Second Renaissance.

Excuse the gap – the writing team at Life Itself took a much-needed break over the holidays to restore our creative energies. Here’s hoping you also rested well.

To kick off the new year, we follow up our brief introduction to Christopher Alexander with further exploration of value realism – and the revival of Max Scheler’s notion of “valueception” (wertnehmung) within more recent metacrisis discourse. What are the consequences of a culture that excludes value from the field of reality, and how might we reorient collectively towards shared meaning and value?

Below, you’ll also find curated events, jobs, and opportunities for inner-led change.

Max Scheler on valueception in a world abundant with meaning

Amid growing awareness that our socio-ecological crises share metaphysical roots, a renewed discourse of value is gathering momentum. Might there be any intrinsic meaning to human existence — or beyond it? Is value more than mere opinion? If so, how can we orient collectively towards more goodness in our lives and societies?

Numerous philosophers now argue that value and meaning are intrinsic properties of the universe. In this value-laden world, modernity’s “meaning crisis” arises not from an absence of available meaning, but an underdeveloped ability to perceive it.1 The implications are stark: where value goes unseen, it is easily destroyed. To halt our nihilistic spiral of ecological destruction, we must re-learn our long-neglected human capacity to perceive it.

But contemporary voices aren’t the first to say so. Over a century ago, the pioneering German philosopher Max Scheler challenged the emerging reductive materialism of his time; elevating value as irreducibly real. In doing so, he articulated a distinctive human capacity for apprehending value, Wertnehmung — often translated as “value-ception.”

A meaningful, or a mechanical world?

Influenced by the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Lebensphilosophie movement, Scheler was critical of an increasingly flat and instrumentalised modern interpretation of reality. He saw a culture shaped by scientific method and industrial capitalism, relating to the world as a collection of objects for manipulation, likewise reducing human beings to a functional role.

By contrast, he proposed a world rich with meaning and real value. Value, in this view, is not invented by the subject but belongs to the world — much as the redness of a bicycle is rendered in the act of seeing without being created by it.2 Just as sight apprehends colour in perception, feeling and intuition apprehend value. Far from being invented or constructed after the fact through calculation, logic, or reason, value instead directs our attention — enticing or repelling us, prior to cognition.

Linking modern ills to a predilection for control, calculation, and certainty, Scheler affirms a philosophical stance that replaces the urge for mastery with receptivity. Through modes of valueception — wonder, reverence and love — the philosopher marvels at the inexhaustible depths of the universe. Philosophy itself is thus “a loving act of participation by the core of the human being in the essence of all things”.3

Modernity’s crisis of value reversal

If value is real and not relative, why are values so often in conflict? Scheler argues for an objective moral hierarchy: deeper values being preferred to those more superficial. Values that contradict one another occupy different levels; lower in tension with higher. Lowest in this ranking are pleasure and utility, based on sensory experiences, and satisfaction of basic needs and desires. Next come values relating to vitality, based on individual and collective well-being — such as health, loyalty, humility, and compassion. Superior to these are spiritual values such as truth, goodness, and beauty. And most important of all is the sacred — transcending the material realm, pertaining to the divine connectedness of all life and evoking awe and wonder. Scheler thus rejects — or at least demotes — the modern ethics of both utilitarianism (maximising utility) and eudaimonism (maximising pleasure).

Even at the turn of the 20th Century, Scheler lamented the tendency of modern culture to promote lower values of utility above appreciation of the sacred, critiquing the reductive mindsets that gave us economic rationalism and utilitarian ethics. In today’s world, it’s easy to trace the fall-out of this fatal “value reversal” in our current crises. Where non-material values are dismissed as fundamentally unreal, extractive capitalism reduces the living world to an object of utility, while liberal individualism locates human value in productivity and success.

The ethical responsibility to love

“Love is the movement in which ever higher values are disclosed.”

Scheler offers an ethical compass: to cultivate goodness is to move and open towards higher or deeper values. It’s our responsibility to attend to beings and situations in a way that realises their highest possible value. This role is fulfilled through love, an intentional act of the heart that discloses deeper layers of meaning in the world. To love something or someone is to perceive and affirm their fullest, essential value, beyond rational understanding. To hate is to obscure, diminish, or destroy it. Love is ultimately oriented toward the infinite and the absolute, grounding all knowing in relationship to what is sacred.

The value relativism of recent times should not be cast as entirely a negative force — far from it: since Scheler’s time important work has been done to challenge the claims of oppressive structures to total authority over meaning and worth. Conversely, neither should Scheler’s insistence on an objective hierarchy of values be mistaken for harmful ethical absolutism. Because each individual has their unique way of perceiving, valuing and making meaning, ethical responsibility for Scheler is personal, situational, and irreducible. While anchored by a universal hierarchy of value types, each must ask what they are uniquely placed to do — for a particular other, or for the flourishing of value in the world at large.

Value and love in meeting the metacrisis

To consult Scheler’s ethics in the context of today’s metacrisis is to be reminded that the necessary transformation can’t be achieved at the level of technologies, incentives, or even systems. A world shaped by value reversal — where utility eclipses vitality, truth, beauty, and the sacred — can only be set right by re-education of the heart. For Scheler and his heirs, cultivating valueception means learning to love more deeply: other people, the living earth, and the larger mystery in which we participate. Love is not an optional virtue but the fundamental ethical orientation through which a meaningful world can once again be disclosed.

Coda: value and a middle way between existence and non-existence.

Despite its potential to re-enchant our sense of the cosmos, the possibility of primary, pre-cognitive value can remain intuitively hard to swallow. We should not underestimate our own conditioning by a post-modern culture grounded in relativist ethics, which insists, often fiercely, that all value is subjectively imposed rather than discovered. But accepting the reality of value does not require us to abandon our doubts in favour of “naive objectivism” — an unexamined belief in fixed and independently existing fundamental values. Nor does Scheler argue for the material existence of values — but rather for important, non-material realities.

There may persist a subtler intuitive resistance to the idea of any quality as properly prior to or independent from consciousness. While readers may accept that there is some ‘way things are’ independently of our (or any) comprehension, they may nonetheless hold an intuition that value and perception co-arise, such that value cannot meaningfully be said to exist in isolation. The compatibility of meta-modern thought with a Buddhist-informed understanding of participatory perception is a question we hope to explore in future issues.

Explore the field of inner-led change…

A selection of events and opportunities recommended by readers, friends, and allies in the arena of inner-led regeneration.

👋 Help us to showcase the best opportunities and resources: please suggest items to include in the Events, Offers & Links or Jobs Board WhatsApp channels.

Upcoming Events

Learning Planet Festival

📍Online 📅 21-28 January 2026 💸 Free

“Launched in 2020 by the Learning Planet Institute in partnership with UNESCO, the LearningPlanet Festival has been organised each January to celebrate the International Day of Education, bringing together hundreds of thousands of participants from 193 countries. In 2026, the festival returns for its 7th edition, … as part of a growing global movement to reimagine education in the 21st century. Transforming education cannot be done in isolation – it demands collective action.”

Highlighted events include: Youth Earth Citizenship for Planetary Peace and Wellbeing by Home for Humanity; Navigating Climate Emotions in the Classroom by One Resilient Earth; and Atlas of Peaceful Futures Practices by Learning Planet Institute.

Re-Indigenizing: Practices for Decolonizing and Re-Rooting [online course]

📍Online 📅 30 January - 8 February 2026 💸 As an experiment with radical trust towards post-capitalist economics, this course is offered on donation.

“Awaken your connection to the web of life through calling in your own ancestral roots, visiting the past to inform the future. … A’ida Al-Shibli, an indigenous Bedouin born in occupied Palestine who has lived in Tamera for the last 2 decades, invites you to explore how and why systems of oppression intend to cut us from our roots, and invites you to reconnect with your ancestral Indigenous lineage and relationship with land that predates our socialization into systems of oppression. We will be joined by wisdom carriers from different indigenous backgrounds. Our online course will include interactive learning, embodied cognition and self-reflection.”

Bioregional Hope 2026

📍Online 📅 19 January 2026, 7-9pm CET 💸 Free

“Across Europe’s bioregions, systemic change is taking root — not as theory, but as lived, place-based practice. On 19 January, Bioregional Hope 2026 brings these stories together. This year’s gathering focuses on systemic innovation across bioregions in Europe, with presentations from 7 Bioregional Weaving Labs. Each bioregion will share how innovation is emerging through land, water, food systems, governance, finance, and community — shaped by local ecology, culture, and long-term care. Rather than scaling solutions outward, we explore how change deepens in place.”

Second Renaissance London meetup

📍Newspeak House, London 📅 23 January 2026, 7-9pm GMT 💸 Free

“Join us to connect and explore ideas supporting a Second Renaissance - our name for a potential a new cultural paradigm of interconnectedness, wisdom and inner growth. …We’ll use break-out groups and relational exercises to deepen connection and facilitate dialogue - though there’ll be plenty of unstructured socialising too. … This week’s theme is the Game B community created by Jim Rutt and others.”

Cult or Community? The Line Between Control and Connection [webinar]

📍Online 📅 29 January 2026, 9-11am Pacific Time 💸 Free (optional donation)

“Renowned cult expert, Dr. Steve Hassan, and host of Cults I’d Join, Jesse Stone, join the [Foundation for Intentional Community] to discuss what differentiates healthy communities from coercive high-control groups. Explore the nuances and complexities that drive us toward belonging and how to practice discernment in the face of cults. … What makes some communities transformative and supportive, while others become manipulative or abusive? How can people tell the difference? And why, despite the risks, are so many of us still drawn to intense, visionary, or tightly bonded communities?”

Climate Majority Pints

📍Three Johns Pub, Islington, London 📅 10 February 2026, 5:45-9pm GMT 💸 Free

An informal get-together organised by the Climate Majority Project: “Several members of our core team and many collaborators will be meeting up in a pub - and we’d love to see you there! … So this is an invitation to whomever wants to walk in for a chat and a pint to do so! We believe this is a good opportunity to see each other in person and meet people who feel like they are part of the Climate Majority and want to connect with others 🍻”

Pocket Project: Integration Labs

📍Online 📅 February to December 2026 💸 Sliding scale participation fee: €175, €95, or €45.

“The Integration Labs are year-long online groups dedicated to exploring and addressing specific thematic or geographic dimensions of ancestral and collective trauma. Guided by Collective Trauma Integration facilitators, participants deepen their awareness, understanding, and digestion of collective trauma aftereffects, contributing to the healing of the scar tissue in our shared human body. Each person who joins brings a vital presence and witnessing capacity to this work.”

Topics include: “The Living Legacy of Dictatorship: Digesting the Shadow of Soviet Trauma and its Global Repercussions”, “The Collective Curse of “Success-ism: Restoring Wholeness Beyond Scarcity and Conditional Worth”, and “Ethics of Animal Harm: Wounds in the Collective Field: Opening ourselves to Animal Welfare & Ethical Violation in Factory Farming”.

Jobs & Opportunities

Community Steward (part-time) at Community Village

📍Remote with occasional community gatherings in the San Francisco Bay Area, USA 📅 To start in Feb 2026.

“Community Village is a community-first approach to meditation oriented towards people in their 20s and 30s…. Whether you want to learn how to meditate, or are an experienced practitioner: our intention is to co-create welcoming and supportive environments to build meaningful connections, get inspired and learn how to bring practice into everyday life. We are a peer-led community, co-created by its members. …This role will support the community to ensure that regular programs continue to operate smoothly, while freeing up the Leadership Crew & other volunteers to focus on their specific roles.”

Programs Assistant (part-time) at Foundation for Intentional Community

📍Remote 📅 Apply by 3 Feb 2026.

“The FIC is seeking a Programs Assistant to support the Programs Director (PD) in administrative, technical, and customer service tasks throughout the setup, execution, and tracking of our virtual learning programs and content. The PA’s responsibilities are primarily technical with opportunities for creative and collaborative contribution to the development of programs and the FIC as a whole.

The Foundation for Intentional Community (FIC) is a fully remote, nonprofit organization which serves as a resource hub for the intentional communities movement. Our mission is to champion social, ecological, and economic justice and resiliency through the support and growth of cooperative culture and intentional communities.”

Choose Our Future - film competition

📍Open to filmmakers, creatives and visionaries worldwide 📅 Stage 1 submission deadline: 31 March 2026.

“Imagine 2050: What will your story be? We invite filmmakers, creatives, and visionaries worldwide to tackle the most critical challenge of our time: defining the future. Envision and bring to life four archetypal scenarios for 2050, showing the world how the decisions we make today will shape tomorrow.”

Second Renaissance

“Second Renaissance” is one way of framing current times as a period of civilisational crisis and potential renewal – and of pointing to an ecosystem of people and organisations working to catalyse the emergence of a new, regenerative, cultural paradigm. If you recognise terms like metacrisis, Metamodern, Regenerative, Liminal Web, Game B, Integral, conscious evolution and so on, then you’re on familiar ground. Explore the core thesis and theory of change in more detail here.

🌱 Help us to plant seeds of a Second Renaissance. If you want to support the movement, you can:

• 💬 Share your thoughts in the comments section

• 🎁 Share this newsletter with a friend

• 💸 Become a paid subscriber

Subscribe now

Finally, we leave you with some —

Art to nourish the soul…

This month, an uplifting song, “Alafu”, by Kenyan artist Monaja (Mwongela Kamencu), which responds to violent social and political struggles in Kenya. The song’s refrain ends with the message: “Alafu? Tuzidi kuzidi” (What next? Let’s keep on keeping on.) Monaja reflects:

I realised that the role of the artist in times of political turbulence is not to merely capture the spirit of the times that the people are living in. The role of the artist is to assist in shifting the political initiative from those in power to the masses – the downtrodden. After all, the promise of Alafu [What next?] lies with the people.

Read more here.

Thank you for reading the eleventh issue of Seeds of a Second Renaissance.

This month, an encounter with Christopher Alexander; a visionary architect whose life’s work challenges a mechanical, materialist worldview; espousing value, beauty and meaning as irreducible living realities.

Below, you’ll also find curated events, jobs, and opportunities for inner-led change.

Christopher Alexander on matter and meaning

Are values like goodness merely a matter of taste? Is a rose in full bloom really no more beautiful than one torn apart? Are all opinions about what makes a place worth living in equally valid? Can judgements about what is good, true, or beautiful ever stand on solid ground? For Christopher Alexander, architectural design becomes a prism for these questions about the meaningfulness of human (and beyond-human) life. In a world where denial of real value has led modern humanity to destroy much that is really valuable, his approach carries revolutionary implications: a radical challenge to the reductive materialism and relativism of the (post-)modern worldview. An unsung pioneer of metamodern thought, writing well ahead of his time, it’s surprising that we don’t hear more about Alexander in the growing body of work seeking to heal the rift between matter and meaning.

Christopher Alexander (1936-2022) was a British-American architect whose ideas about the relationship between life and design were influential far beyond his own field. Awarded a top scholarship at Trinity College, Cambridge where he studied mathematics, he went on to earn the first ever PhD in Architecture at Harvard, eventually becoming an emeritus professor at UC Berkeley. His acclaimed works include A Pattern Language (1977), The Timeless Way of Building (1979) and The Nature of Order (1980-2004).

A radical assertion: value is not just a matter of opinion

“There is one timeless way of building. It is thousands of years old, and the same today as it always has been. … It is not possible to make great buildings, or great towns, beautiful places, places where you feel yourself, places where you feel alive, except by following this way.” (The Timeless Way of Building, p.7)

“There is a central quality which is the root criterion of life and spirit in a man, a town, a building, or a wilderness. This quality is objective and precise, but it cannot be named.” (ibid., p.19)

A fierce champion of human-centered design, Alexander insisted that beauty and goodness are real, discernible qualities of a built environment — a radical argument at a time when many of his contemporaries, influenced by value-relativism, saw only subjective preferences. Some readers may indeed bristle at his claim that value is real — that some places, buildings, and things possess a quality that makes them objectively better, more beautiful, or more whole and alive than others. Relativism — the view that there is no absolute truth, goodness or beauty — is pervasive in a post-modern world that emphasises individual freedom, and confines value strictly to personal taste.

For Alexander, this “timeless way” of designing wholesome buildings is a creative principle found in all living things, and rests on a nameless quality that is “objective and precise, but which cannot be named”. Its resistance to naming or measurement does not mean that it is not real. Indeed, “words fail to capture it because it is much more precise than any word” (ibid., p.29).

Each building expresses the quality differently; Alexander lists both tents and temples as possessing it. Though it manifests materially, the quality is never reducible to fixed material properties. Value exists as a field of many possibilities and combinations, fundamentally bound to context: “It is never twice the same, because it always takes its shape from the particular place in which it occurs” (ibid., p.26).1

Alexander suggests that while this valuable quality cannot be named, it can be sensed or perceived, although the ability to do so varies. And, it is timeless and universal: most people, even across different cultures, most people are predisposed to recognise it in similar places. His books offer many visual examples.

Alive, whole, comfortable, free, exact, egoless, eternal

“The quality without a name in us, our liveliness, our thirst for life, depends directly on the patterns in the world, and the extent to which they have this quality themselves…patterns which live, release this quality in us.” (ibid., p.122)

What Alexander offers is not a quaint suggestion of built structures that emulate the appearance of living things, but rather a radical view of building as nature; as life — interdependent with humans and human creation, and subject to universal creative principles.

Although the quality can never adequately be captured in language, Alexander ‘circles around’ it, via a collection of patterns that constitute life-affirming systems or spaces. Seven core aspects emerge — all to be felt, rather than measured. Each is essential but insufficient alone; a Venn diagram at the centre of which lies the nameless quality…

Aliveness

The mysterious quality we might sense in the sparkle of an eye; a stirring piece of music; the taut muscles of a cat readying itself to pounce. Found in a thing which is “in tune with its own inner forces”.“Things which are living may be lifeless; nonliving things may be alive”. (ibid., p.29)

Wholeness

The quality of being free from inner contradictions. A system that is at one, and at peace with itself.

Comfortable

A space free from restlessness or tension. Supportive and inviting of deep relaxation and ease. A warm mug of tea that fits snugly in the hand. The chair cushions arranged to support us just so.

Free

A quality of openness and wildness, generated by inner forces, rooted in nature. This freedom counterbalances the tendency of comfort and wholeness towards containment, closure, and stagnation.

Exact

In proper relationship with the forces and constraints of the surrounding world and beings; grounded in reality.

Egoless

Expressing its own nature, rather than the ego-driven will of a creator — yet not altogether erasing the creator…

Eternal

A sense of belonging “among the order of things which stand outside of time.” (ibid., p.38)

Together, these qualities form the basis of a discipline that, once learned, must be transcended for the timeless quality itself to emerge; for the architect to build “as nature does”.

Reintegrating spirit and matter for a truer view of reality

Alexander suggests that without a shift in world-view, his encouragement of a shift towards a more wholesome built environment will fall upon deaf ears. Accordingly, he roots his final major publication, The Luminous Ground, in cosmology. He critiques directly a modern, ‘ultra-mechanistic’ view that reduces the world to ‘meaningless lumps of matter’, leading to hopelessness. While the scientific method has facilitated staggering collective achievement, he argues, its dominance has ultimately impoverished our view of reality; excluding love, aliveness, consciousness and unity from our ‘world-picture’.

“Within this picture, if we ask, What is the point? the only scientific answer that comes back is, There is no point. …Who wants to live, who can live, when we believe that we are…nothing but meaningless machines?” (The Luminous Ground, pp.12-14)

To adopt a world-picture that seriously accounts for fundamental meaning and value is not merely a strategy for feeling better, however, but more consistent with the felt reality of life. He writes: “There are thus two worlds in our minds. One is the scientific world which has been pictured through a highly complex system of mechanisms. The other is the world we actually experience. These two worlds, so far, have not been connected in a meaningful fashion” (ibid., p.13). The sentiment resonates strikingly with the work of Iain McGilchrist, who similarly urges re-integration of our mechanical (left-hemispheric) model of the world with the more truthful (right-hemispheric) experience of the world as whole, spirited, and deeply interconnected.

Alexander’s work is an inspired and impassioned call to attend to the inseparability of our conscious inner world and the material spaces we inhabit. The way we build our homes, towns, cities, and playgrounds both expresses our interior world and shapes it. By attending to the timeless and universal quality of value, we have the power to create healthier, more alive, and more wholesome societies.

Explore the field of inner-led change…

A selection of events and opportunities recommended by readers, friends, and allies in the arena of inner-led regeneration.

👋 Help us to showcase the best opportunities and resources: please suggest items to include in the Events, Offers & Links or Jobs Board WhatsApp channels.

Upcoming Events

Second Renaissance Online Conference

📍Online 📅 5-7 December 2025 💸 $45-95

“The Second Renaissance Online conference brings together inquiry and imagination: How can we meet technological disruption with wisdom? How do arts and education nurture resilience and renewal? How do spirituality, health, youth movements, and climate action interweave into a larger story of transformation? How do communities support our values development?”

Confirmed keynote speakers and panelists include: John Vervaeke, Rebecca Henderson, Thomas Hübl, Peter Limberg, Liam Kavanagh, Rufus Pollock and more.

The Wise Agency - online course

📍Online 📅 November 19, 26; December 3, 10 @ 7-9pm ET 💸 Choose a respectful price (recommended $50, but feel free to contribute more or less).

“What exists beyond mere high agency? Join us for a live, experimental series on becoming wisely agentic. … Attendance at all sessions is not required. …

The Wise Agency is a four-part series of presentations and an “inverse course” that aims to draw on participants’ collective wisdom to identify how to accomplish consciously, together. Join Peter Limberg with guests Ayelet Fishbach, C. Thi Nguyen, Paul Millerd, and Scott Britton.”

Coming Home to Place - online festival

📍Online 📅 1-7 December 2025 💸 Video interviews will be free to watch for the first week of December. Donate £30-100 to join the live events and get unlimited access to the interviews.

“Join Gaia Education for an online festival December 1-7 to celebrate our 20-year journey and fundraise for many more years of Transformative Impact. …

Imagine sitting down for an intimate, one-on-one conversation with a leading voice in regenerative practice. That’s the experience we’ve collaboratively created for you. Our recorded interview series brings you directly into the room with pioneering authors, speakers, and practitioners, capturing stories and profound insights from their journeys. Interviews will be released and available from December 1st – 5th. Then, join our Live Events on Saturday 6th and Sunday 7th December.”

Integral Youth Gathering 2026

📍Croatia 📅 23-27 May 2026 💸 €280-380 (depending on accommodation type; includes food)

“Integral Youth Gatherings bring together around 25 young people [between 18 and 42] in a beautiful place in nature to explore personal, spiritual, and relational growth - inspired by Ken Wilber’s Integral Theory.

More than just learning, it’s a space for co-being: practicing new ways of relating, growing together, and embodying transformation in community. As a non-profit and co-created gathering, every activity — from meditations to talks, hikes to music jams — is offered by participants like you. This is a space for us to co-create the world that we want to live in.”

Jobs & Opportunities

Hiring: Financial Steward and Operations Steward at Life Itself

📍Remote with some time in person at Life Itself’s Hubs in France 📅 Apply as soon as possible; applications reviewed on a rolling basis.

“Join the Life Itself team and our mission to cultivate a radically wiser, weller world. Life Itself is seeking two new part-time team members:

A Financial Steward to hold the coherence of our finances, ensuring transparency, care, and alignment with regenerative principles. You’ll oversee budgets, reporting, and systems across our UK and French entities, while helping shape new economic models rooted in integrity and trust.

An Operations Steward to coordinate Life Itself’s day-to-day flow, from events and hub management to systems and culture. You’ll weave coherence across our programs and spaces, helping turn vision into beautifully run realities.”

Call for Proposals: Madness, Mysticism, and the Reenchantment of Psychology

📅 Submission deadline: 4 December 2025

The Society for Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology invite proposals for their Spring 2026 conference (14-16 May, York University, Toronto) on the theme of Madness, Mysticism, and the Reenchantment of Psychology.

“To live in this moment of history is to feel something slipping away. What, precisely, is being lost is difficult to name, though one can sense it in the loneliness that has become the defining mood of our age. We have acquired extraordinary powers of prediction, of surveillance, of manipulation; we can map neural pathways, track the fluctuations of serotonin, and analyze the statistical probabilities of human decision-making. And yet, for all this mastery, we find ourselves unmoored. Our connections to one another are fragile and mediated, our trust in what we once called reality is wavering, and our relationship to the earth itself has been reduced to one of extraction and domination. We have gained technical precision, but we have lost something more fundamental: a sense of depth, mystery, and participation in something irreducible.”

Call for Submissions: Orbital Studies Magazine

📅 Submit by 10 December 2025 to be considered for Issue #0

“Orbital Studies Magazine is a literary science magazine, cultivating space for a more beautiful relationship with the objective world.

Send us your fiction, non-fiction, poetry and visual art pitches on the theme of Ways of Seeing the Objective World. We aim for work which creates a contemplative experience in the reader, shifting their own ways of seeing, bringing them into connection.”

Request for Proposals: Toward a Science of Awakening

📅 Deadline to submit Letter of Intent: 15 December 2025. Deadline for full proposals (by invitation): 1 April 2026.

“At The Consciousness Foundation, we take the view that the persistent, trait-level changes associated with awakening are tractable to scientific study, ready to be investigated with contemporary methods, and hold substantial potential for translation into individual and societal benefit.

We therefore seek proposals for research that makes meaningful progress toward operationalizing a science of awakening: clarifying concepts, developing and validating measures and protocols, conducting rigorous empirical tests, and creating resources that other investigators and practitioners can adopt and extend.”

Second Renaissance

*“Second Renaissance” is one way of framing current times as a period of civilisational crisis and potential renewal – and of pointing to an ecosystem of people and organisations working to catalyse the emergence of a new, regenerative, cultural paradigm. If you recognise terms like metacrisis, Metamodern, Regenerative, Liminal Web, Game B, Integral, conscious evolution and so on, then you’re on familiar ground. Explore the core thesis and theory of change in more detail here.

🌱 Help us to plant seeds of a Second Renaissance. If you want to support the movement, you can:

• 💬 Share your thoughts in the comments section

• 🎁 Share this newsletter with a friend

• 💸 Become a paid subscriber

• 🎨 Contribute to the Second Renaissance Magazine crowdfunding campaign (Oct-Dec 2025)

Subscribe now

Finally, we leave you with some —

Art to nourish the soul…

Curator and artist Sylvie Barbier shares the story behind the Art of Impermanence exhibition which took place in Thénac, France in April 2024. With images and footage of the exhibition, featuring work by Sylvie Barbier, Paz Perlman, Max Pugh, and Luc Waring.

On impermanence:

“The reality of the impermanent nature of life can be both terrifying as well as liberating. The emotions, feeling, thoughts and moment shall pass, the good as well as the bad. Artists regardless of their origin have for centuries been practising presenting the sense of impermanence. In this great moment of change and uncertainty what else to do than to meditate together with the fleeting nature of life. Only by being present to the nature of life can we truly cherish it and touch the bliss of the freedom available with it.”

Thank you for reading the tenth issue of Seeds of a Second Renaissance.

Our world is in a moment of profound transition. The crises of ecology, meaning, and belonging are intertwined symptoms of a deeper civilizational turning. We invite you to join us, and leading-artists, practitioners and thinkers for three days of inquiry, practice, and collective sense-making.

All sessions are online, and recordings will be available to all registered attendees after the conference.

Register Now!

Together we will explore how cultural evolution, inner development, systems change, and new forms of collective intelligence can nourish a wiser and more life-affirming future. It is an invitation for those who feel a new paradigm stirring—and wish to help midwife its emergence.

Join Us Online

• 📅 Dates: December 5–7, 2025

• 🌐 Where: Online (all sessions are fully recorded and available to ticket holders)

• 💸 Cost: from $45 to $99

• 🔗 More Information & Register: https://2rcon.org

Preview

Speakers

We are delighted to welcome three leading figures in the global conversation on metacrisis and renaissance.

Rebecca Henderson: Metacrisis and Inner-Led Change

A major voice in reimagining capitalism, Henderson explores the role of business and inner development in supporting a sustainable and flourishing world. Her current work investigates how inner capacities, from emotional intelligence to moral clarity, translate into real climate action across education, business, and politics. A rare thinker who bridges rigorous economics with deep human insight.

John Vervaeke: Pilgrimage as Meta-practice and the Return of the Sacred

Cognitive scientist and philosopher, Vervaeke is widely known for his award-winning work on the meaning crisis, wisdom, intelligence the 4E model of cognition,and contemplative science. His series Awakening from the Meaning Crisis remains a landmark in public philosophy.

Thomas Hübl: Healing Cultural Trauma for Societal Renewal

A global leader in trauma integration, Hübl’s work combines ancient wisdom traditions with contemporary science to foster personal and collective healing. His development of the Collective Trauma Integration Process and his bridging work across cultures offer a vital lens for meeting the wounds underlying today’s systemic challenges.

Register Now!

Core Themes & Panels

The conference is structured around core themes that trace the descent–ascent arc of the Metacrisis & Renaissance:

• Crisis of Meaning & Meta-diagnosis: Examining the deep cultural, psychological, and technological roots beneath systemic breakdowns.

• Paths of Renewal: Focusing on the contemplative, relational, and embodied practices that cultivate wisdom and resilience.

• Reweaving Knowledge & Art: Uniting science, humanities, and aesthetic insight into a more integrated way of knowing.

• Institutions that Sustain Life: Exploring how governance, economics, and collective design can embody values suited to a flourishing future.

Alongside these themes, we will feature multiple panels across a variety of topics including education, health, spirituality, climate, youth, art, community, and AI including:

• The Embodied Researcher: Science in the Age of Interbeing

• The Prophecy of the Many-faced Goddess: An Oracular Ritual of Death and Rebirth

• Emerging Future: Educating the Next Generation of World Builders

• Health-seeing Interdepend(a)nce: Planetary Health as a Pathway to Transformation

• The Next Political Generation: From Disillusion to Collective Agency

Register Now!

Second Renaissance Fair: An Open Pre-Event, Tuesday 25th Nov

Discover more of the emerging Second Renaissance ecosystem at a free, open pre-event this coming Tuesday 25th November.

• 📅 Date: Tuesday 25th November

• 🕕 Time: 6pm-7:30pm European / 11am-12:30 US Eastern

• 🔗 Find out more & Sign-up: https://luma.com/7b1k9412

We’ll be mixing “faire market” and “science project presentation” vibes in a virtual show-and-tell bringing together organizations and projects from across the Second Renaissance landscape.

How it works

• Explore virtual booths from 20+ organisations
  Join short 10-minute rounds (5 minutes presenting, 5 minutes Q&A)

• Presenters share once (or twice) and then visit other booths

• Fair-goers can move across sessions to visit different booths in 6 rounds, and ask questions

Presenters to date include:
Aletheia, Integral Unfolding, Beyond Goals Intensive, Casa Tilo, EMUNAH ΛCΛDEMY, Ignition, Intentional Society, Leadership³, Limicon, Metachrysalis, Microsolidarity, Mythomatics, Orbital Studies Magazine, Pacific Integral, R4, The Resonant Man, Soul Coherence Studio, and VillageCo.

You can sign up to join us for free here: luma.com/7b1k9412

Together, the Conference and Fair invite us into a shared effort to meet the metacrisis with wisdom, imagination, and collective resolve, offering a rare space to engage in depth with the organisations, individuals and conversations shaping the Second Renaissance.

This month, an issue close to home: introducing the growing field of Developmental Spaces – dedicated, growth-oriented spaces where communities engage in sustained, multi-domain inner development in the service of socio-cultural transformation.

Below, you’ll also find curated events, jobs, and opportunities.

“I think hard times are coming, when we will be wanting voices... who can see alternatives to how we live now, and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies, to other ways of being.”

~ Ursula K Le Guin (2014)

Across the Second Renaissance thought-space, there’s growing recognition that system transformation begins in the inner world — at the level of mindsets and worldviews that create and sustain failing systems. Not to mention our neglected human capacities for wisdom, resilience and flourishing. However, modern societies largely lack the understanding and infrastructure to support inner development at the scale our moment demands.

While pockets of practice already exist – educational programmes, communities, and institutions fostering different ways of knowing and being – they remain relatively small in reach. But a field of innovation is emerging around what we term Developmental Spaces. These are environments for learning and inner growth across multiple dimensions, purpose-built to catalyse a socio-cultural paradigm shift and cultivate a wiser future. A new white paper published by the Life Itself Sensemaking Studio synthesises the rationale and approaches behind this work, with the aim of informing policy and accelerating its adoption at scale. Read on for a summary of the core ideas!

Read the paper here

Inner foundations of outer crises

Today’s interconnected crises stem from the foundations of globalised culture: the deep-seated assumptions, values, and perspectives that shape societies. Evidence is mounting that modern civilisation is breaking down in ways that can’t simply be repaired. Renewal is needed at a foundational level — a profound shift in collective worldview. Ways of being and seeing that we are hardly able to imagine from a modern cultural vantage point.

The missing infrastructure of inner growth

In other words, if we’re serious about system transformation, we must also be serious about inner transformation. However, modern materialist culture largely treats the inner world as irrelevant — leaving us with very few robust, trusted, research-based institutions dedicated to large-scale inner growth for the common good. The potential for human flourishing and renewal is vast; but our inherited maps are fragmented. We need scaleable, integrated approaches to inner transformation — sustained by dedicated communities that can weave new cultural stories together.

“From the beginning of recorded history, and arguably before that, humanity has evolved in both interior (subjective) and exterior (objective) aspects. But at some time, through the emergence of modern science leading to the industrial and information revolutions, a gap developed — an ever-widening chasm between interior (cognition, awareness, emotion, value) and exterior (e.g. technological ) capacities.”

~ David J. Temple

Integrating domains of inner growth

Building on synthesis supplied by Integral Theory, we sketch several interdependent domains of inner growth:

Waking Up (Spiritual Development)

Concerned with awareness and consciousness, this domain draws from spiritual traditions and neuroscience. Development involves tuning awareness and loosening unconscious mental ‘fabrication’ (assumptions, self-identity), cultivating less ego-bound modes of perception and a greater sense of interbeing.

Cognitive Development

Refers to progressive complexity in thinking — from basic concepts to abstract, systemic, and meta-systemic reasoning. Supports ethics, creativity, logic, and learning.

Growing Up (Worldview Development)

Progressive shifts in fundamental ways of conceiving world and self — from egocentric and ethnocentric to world-centric. Often linked to ego development and expanding circles of care.

Cleaning Up

Involves healing trauma and integrating shadow material. Rooted in somatic psychology and trauma theory, processing unconscious wounds and defense mechanisms supports growth in emotional regulation and relational capacity.

Showing Up

Translating inner shifts into active, ethical engagement with the world. Aligning insight and capacity with skilful action for positive change. Requires relational intelligence, moral imagination, and courage.

Any attempt to categorise the inner world is necessarily partial — a map, not the territory. The domains we describe are interdependent, each supporting the others, and their boundaries should be held lightly. Still, distinctions are useful: one can be cognitively advanced without much awakening, spiritually awakened yet unintegrated (‘spiritual bypassing’), or active in the world while neglecting inner work — showing up without cleaning up. Together, however, the maps and practices within these domains can equip individuals and communities with the qualities needed to become resilient amid breakdown, and flourish into new cultural shapes.

Sustaining collective intention

For this kind of growth to take root, dedicated spaces are essential; providing containment, community, and continuity.

From state to trait — Sustained practice is needed to integrate isolated experiences into stable, lasting change.

Communities of purpose — Like-minded support is critical to depart from the mainstream.

Psychological safety — Vulnerability and deep inner work require trust and mutual care.

Generative social fields — Group dynamics can be powerful catalysts for change.

Pockets of change — Cultural transformation often begins in dense micro-communities, where transformative ways of being, thinking and acting can seed future ways of life.

Precedent: Integrated approaches to inner development

Inner development is nothing new. While Western science has often been limited by materialist assumptions, Eastern contemplative traditions have preserved sophisticated methods of inner development. Psychology has begun to bridge this gap, revealing parallels between contemplative frameworks and cognitive science. More recently, European sustainability scientists such as Christine Wamsler and colleagues have emphasised (and systematised) inner capacities as essential for paradigm shift. The Stockholm-based Inner Development Goals initiative offers a research-based framework of transformative inner skills dimensions to meet complex global challenges.

Precedent: dedicated Developmental Spaces

Monasteries, folk high schools, Bildung centers and other intentional communities have embodied aspects of Developmental Spaces in different eras. In modern times, the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS) has been a pioneer in bringing integrative approaches into higher education.

Transformation at scale

This white paper is offered hopefully, in service of a future evidence-based movement for Developmental Spaces, provided widely enough to serve large segments of populations. The vision is ultimately to see a replicable, scalable model with potential to influence the deepest orientation of societies towards a regenerative future — a ‘Second Renaissance’.

Read the paper

Explore the field of inner-led change…

A selection of events and opportunities recommended by readers, friends, and allies in the arena of inner-led regeneration.

👋 Help us to showcase the best opportunities and resources: please suggest items to include in the Events, Offers & Links or Jobs Board WhatsApp channels.

Upcoming Events

Developmental Spaces White Paper: Launch webinar

📍Online 📅 Wednesday 5 November, 5-6:30pm CET 💸 Free

“A webinar to celebrate the release of the Developmental Spaces white paper. ​The event will feature: a presentation by the paper co-authors; comments by invited guests; and questions and discussion. All interested in the field of inner development and inner-led social change are warmly welcome.”

Contemplative Wisdom, Transformative Action Conference

📍Online 📅 7-9 November 2025

“Hosted by the Garrison Institute Fellowship Program, Contemplative Wisdom, Transformative Action is a three-day virtual gathering that brings together contemplative practitioners, social change leaders, scholars, and visionaries. Together, we will explore how awareness-based practices can catalyze personal resilience, systemic healing, and collective regeneration.”

Wiser Futures Unconference

📍Newspeak House, London, UK 📅 Sunday 9 November, 1pm-10pm 💸 By donation

“Join us in shaping Wiser Futures! … This gathering of communities will explore paths to a planetary society defined by long-term thinking, collective wisdom and interconnectedness.​ … Co-hosted by Second Renaissance London and Long Now London the aim is to bring people together from a range of aligned London-based communities — as well as folks who are new to the scene but want to learn more and take part. Together, we’ll seek out commonalities, grow networks, cross-pollinate ideas, practice together and build the field.”

Second Renaissance Fair

📍Online 📅 Tuesday 25 November, 5-6:30pm GMT 💸 Free

“Think Science Fair meets Open Space, where projects, initiatives, and communities can share and showcase their work via a rotation of virtual booths. …A booth is your chance to show and tell — whether it’s a project you’re building, a community you’re growing, or an initiative you want others to know about, all coming together to create a vibrant marketplace of ideas, with people stopping by — via organised breakout rooms — to learn, connect, cross-pollinate and collaborate.”

Creating Transformative Cultures: 5-week course

📍Schloss Glarisegg, Steckborn, Switzerland 📅 8 Jan-14 Feb 2026 💸 1950-3950 CHF

“Creating Transformative Cultures, EDE Glarisegg is a five weeks experiential laboratory, where you are encouraged to pose the questions most relevant to our times. You explore what it means to be alive on this beautiful but wounded planet. How to hold the complexity of a world in crisis? Within yourself and others? … Our programme is a carefully curated, holistic five-week learning journey. It weaves together workshops, group sessions, skill-sharing, time in nature, moments of silence, music, dance, and morning routines, along with both individual and collaborative explorations in large and small groups. … This course is rooted in, and certified by, the global framework of the EDE curriculum (Ecovillage Design Education).”

Tools for Thought: Building new tools for interdisciplinary thinking

📍Tyrol, Austria 📅 14-17 November 2025 💸 350-850 EUR

“We’re organizing an interdisciplinary gathering in the alps, in which we’re bringing together a radically interdisciplinary collection of thinkers to build, hack and prototype together on the central question: can we invent new Tools for Thought We’ve had a few last-minute spots open up, which we’re keen to fill with thoughtful, creative individuals from the arts, humanities, social sciences and media in particular.”

Jobs & Opportunities

Climate Psychology Alliance: 4 part-time paid positions

📍UK-based remote working 📅 Application deadline: 31 October 2025

CPA are hiring for 4 part-time paid positions: Administrative Coordinator (10h/week); Inner Climate Response Alliance youth coordinator (8 hours/week); CPA youth coordinator (8 hours/week); Inner Climate Response Alliance community resilience coordinator (11 hours/week). “Three of the four posts advertised here have some or all of their funding from the Inner Climate Response Alliance, a new partnership made up of the Mindfulness Initiative (MI), the Climate Psychology Alliance (CPA) and Climate Majority Project (CMP). The Inner Climate Response Alliance is bringing together the first UK-wide community of practice for people holding the inner dimension of our climate and global crisis.”

ENVIRON-MENTAL project: Postdoctoral researcher

📍Institute of Anthropology, Leipzig University, Germany 📅 Application deadline: 1 November 2025

“We invite applications for a postdoctoral researcher position (m/f/d/x) with the DFG project “Environ-mental health: Experience, ethics and poiesis of ecological grief amid wounded environments in India” (ENVIRON-MENTAL). … ENVIRON-MENTAL is an ethnographic study of affective reactions to (anticipated) environmental damage and loss in India and beyond. It explores the experience of grief, the ethics and politics of grieving in wounded environments, and the potential grief has for the transformation of relations in a more-than-human world. … The postdoc will conduct ethnographic research on ecological grief and distress in contexts such as everyday lived experiences, the clinic, or environmental activism in India or another location.”

Mind-at-Large Project: Call for Abstracts

📅 Submission deadline: 15 January 2026

“The Mind-at-Large Project is a three-year, multidisciplinary exploration into consciousness and its role in the nature of reality. … The first gathering, “A New Dawn,” inaugurates this unfolding inquiry. … We invite papers that engage creatively and critically with the re-emerging paradigm of “mind-at-large,” traversing multiple thresholds of philosophical, scientific, and cultural discourse, including but not limited to: Philosophy of Mind … Mind & Matter … Biology & Consciousness … 4E Cognition …Indigenous and Animist Perspectives … History of Science & the Disenchantment of Nature … .” Open to Undergraduate, MA, PhD, and early-career scholars (within five years of degree completion).

Second Renaissance

*“Second Renaissance” is one way of framing current times as a period of civilisational crisis and potential renewal – and of pointing to an ecosystem of people and organisations working to catalyse the emergence of a new, regenerative, cultural paradigm. If you recognise terms like metacrisis, Metamodern, Regenerative, Liminal Web, Game B, Integral, conscious evolution and so on, then you’re on familiar ground. Explore the core thesis and theory of change in more detail here.

🌱 Help us to plant seeds of a Second Renaissance. If you want to support the movement, you can:

• 💬 Share your thoughts in the comments section

• 🎁 Share this newsletter with a friend

• 💸 Become a paid subscriber

• 🌟🌟🌟 NEW — Contribute to the Second Renaissance Magazine crowdfunding campaign (Oct-Dec 2025)! (see below)🌟🌟🌟

Subscribe now

Support a new artistic era: join the Second Renaissance Magazine crowdfunding

This month marks the launch of the crowdfunding campaign for the Second Renaissance Magazine!

The magazine is not just a publication, it’s the foundation of a Second Renaissance: a living platform where artists, writers, and thinkers come together to shape meaning through art, ideas, poetry, and essays that alchemise meaning in a time of crisis.

We are raising £17,500 to bring the next two issues to life. Your support covers curation, editing, design, and printing — but most importantly, it ensures that the artists who share their vision and labour are fairly compensated. Every contribution brings The Second Renaissance Magazine to life. Here’s what your support makes possible:

• $25 helps cover editing and printing costs for a few pages of the magazine

• $50 supports one of our designers or writers in shaping a visual story or essay

• $100 directly compensates an artist for creating original artwork.

Every pledge is doubled (up to £200) thanks to our generous private match funders — meaning your impact goes twice as far.

We’re currently at 10% of our goal — and reaching 50% in the next two weeks will unlock the next phase of creation — allowing design, editing, and art direction to begin.

Join the campaign

With your support, the Second Renaissance becomes not only visible, but sustainable. Together, we can midwife this cultural shift.

Finally, we leave you with some —

Art to nourish the soul…

Thank you for reading the ninth issue of Seeds of a Second Renaissance.

This month, Iain McGilchrist’s game-changing account of the brain’s hemispheres—and how a particular way of paying attention has given rise to our socio-ecological crises.

Below, you’ll also find curated events, jobs, and opportunities.

Iain McGilchrist: “Reality changes with the nature of the attention we pay to it”

Iain McGilchrist (born 1953) is a British psychiatrist, neuroscience researcher, philosopher, and literary scholar. He rose to prominence with two monumental books, that weave together neuroscience and metaphysics to transform understanding of human consciousness: The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World (2009) and The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World (2021).

McGilchrist’s most cited theory concerns the distinct adaptive functions of the brain’s two hemispheres, and how their different modes of attention shape the world we perceive and create. An imbalance between these two modes of perception gives rise to manifold dysfunctions in modern society. His ideas are influential across the Second Renaissance landscape: read on for a bite-sized introduction.

The hemisphere hypothesis

Neuroscientists have long known that the human brain is divided into two non-identical hemispheres of similar size, but the function of this separation has remained a topic of debate. A popular myth—that the left hemisphere governs reason, logic, and language, while the right hosts creativity, emotion and image—was long ago debunked.

McGilchrist proposes that the principal difference between the hemispheres is the way they pay attention: two profoundly different ways of looking at the world; both of which were vital for survival in our ancestors’ evolutionary landscape. Narrowly focused upon separate details, left hemisphere awareness (LH) supports short-term goals that involve grabbing and controlling familiar aspects of our environment—such as obtaining the right food. Meanwhile the right hemisphere (RH) is broadly vigilant and alert to emergent danger—awake to the whole picture of the world around us.

McGilchrist notes that because our mode of attention shapes the world we encounter, the hemispheres render two fundamentally different realities. The left hemisphere builds stripped-down maps that facilitate action; while the right remains coupled to real-time experience; present with the fullness of ‘ever-flowing’ reality, including that which simply can’t be grasped. Thus, LH consciousness gives rise to a virtual world of inert, isolated parts; while the RH experiences direct relationship, within a complex, continuous, meaning-full whole.

The divide is expressed acutely when the LH is suppressed, through injury or clinical processes such as transcranial magnetic stimulation: “people see things that we would call inanimate sometimes as animate. And if you do the opposite and suppress the right hemisphere, they begin to see even people and animals as machines or pieces of furniture.”2

Hierarchical realities

McGilchrist proposes that while both hemispheric functions are vital, and can work well in harmony, the RH’s reality is fundamentally more in touch with the world—and that the LH’s abstracting, grasping function evolved as ancillary to this more primary, whole-istic understanding—hence, The Master and His Emissary. Healthy individuals, groups, and societies encounter the world through direct presence (RH), focus on specific parts to map and analyse how we might act upon them (LH)—then, crucially, reintegrate the results of this LH analysis into a broader and deeper picture of the interconnected whole: the Emissary submits to the Master.

Whereas the right hemisphere values the function of its counterpart, the same is not true of the left. In fact, our LH harbours an inflated self-confidence; experiencing its partial understanding as total, and filtering out information that doesn’t fit its model of reality. McGilchrist gives the example of stroke victims who have suffered right hemisphere damage resulting in partial paralysis, denying that anything is wrong—even claiming to have moved the limb in question or inventing stories about the limb belonging to someone else.

A society out of balance

The left hemisphere isn’t “bad”—indeed, its analytical strength has vastly extended the reach of human ingenuity and power over our environment. For this very reason, the structures of modern society have come to embody a LH (mis)understanding of the world; reflecting it back to us wherever we go, and reinforcing our tendency to trust it. Accelerated by the industrial revolution, the LH has built a world in its own image; over-valuing the virtual, technical, mechanical and bureaucratic; fixated on control. Empowered by the LH-centric tools of logic and scientific method, we treasure only what we can measure and dismiss everything that resists the model as less important—even less real.

In this impoverished, atomistic reality; fixated upon the “explicit, definable, and controllable,” we are increasingly cut off from what’s sacred—including the living world, beyond its ‘utility’. The cost of getting stuck in this feedback loop, conditioned by an inanimate, mechanical view of life, is manifesting in crises of runaway extractivism and social breakdown.

Re-balancing the hemispheres

Hemispheric theory isn’t the limit of McGilchrist’s work—far from it—but its deep diagnostic power for our crisis-hit times has established him as a cornerstone of social philosophy in the ‘Second Renaissance ecosystem’. It’s widely agreed that we require an urgent re-balancing of the hemispheric strengths. Science and intuition; logic and a sense of the sacred; all are needed to steer us wisely through a time of potential collapse—with the rightful ‘Master’ restored to the helm.

McGilchrist resists advising his eager interlocutors on what to ‘do about’ our societal imbalance—emphasising that linear problem-solution thinking is very left-hemispheric, and inappropriate to our complex predicament. But he does point to periods of time when dawning civilisations have demonstrated better (hierarchical) relationship between the two hemispheres. Extraordinary flourishing has arisen from periods of skilful enquiry combined with non-attachment to certainties and openness to possibility. Our societal view gradually narrows as the maintenance of civilisation ossifies into structures and rules that lead us to forget how things really are; tending ultimately towards collapse.

As collapse unfolds around us there may be little we can do to ‘fix’ it—but we remain free to cultivate ways of being that reintegrate our conceptual skill within a wider, ‘holistic-intuitive’ view. Practising wonder, humility and compassion can help us loosen fixed assumptions and inhabit curious, connected awareness. If you’re wondering where to start, many meditative practices engage right hemisphere awareness—and sustained practice can bring lasting change.

At over 2000 pages in total, McGilchrist’s The Master and His Emissary and The Matter with Things make a daunting reading list. (Did we read them entirely before writing this? We couldn’t possibly comment.) For a stepping stone into this work, try the RSA’s animated introduction, ‘The Divided Brain’ (12 minutes) and David McIlroy’s introduction to The Matter with Things, ‘Understanding Iain McGilchrist’s Worldview’.

Explore the field of inner-led change…

A selection of events and opportunities recommended by readers, friends, and allies in the arena of inner-led regeneration.

👋 Help us to showcase the best opportunities and resources: please suggest items to include in the Events, Offers & Links or Jobs Board WhatsApp channels.

Upcoming Events

Facing Human Wrongs: Leading in the Metacrisis

📍Online 📅 Start date: 4 October 2025. Register by 27 Sep. 💸 Base fee: $650 CAD

This 6-week online course “explores the stories that have given rise to the dominant global culture and the engines that drive the metacrisis we face. It offers tools that can help us see our own leadership behaviours that perpetuate, rather than improve, our broken systems, and create deeper trust and understanding (allowing us to lead with greater integrity). This inquiry is designed to support you in the hard work needed to “unlearn” the stories that led to the metacrisis and experiment together with new ways of knowing, being and leading.”

Emergent Dialogue: A Practice of Interbeing

📍Online 📅 Starts 8 October 2025 💸 €320-500 per module. Financial support available.

A practice programme in Emergent Dialogue: “a practice that enables groups to open the field of Interbeing and to cultivate the capacity to co-create with its intelligence. …The power of this practice is to discover new creative potentials and capacities of co-leadership with an intelligence greater than any individual. Through this collective practice, you become an agent of emergence, discovering how to synergize diversity from the ground of wholeness and thereby become a force for deep individual and cultural change.” The three core modules are on: coherence, conscious co-creativity, and intersubjective sense-making.

Cultural Healing Convocation: A gathering for reckoning, reclaiming, reimagining

📍Online 📅 24-25 October 2025 💸 Pay what feels right, starting from $10

“The culture that separates us from ourselves, each other, and the earth can be healed and you have a role to play. Whether you’re new to this work or have been walking this path for years, this Convocation creates space for anyone called to be part of cultural healing. You’ll gather alongside traditional wisdom keepers, cultural bridge-builders, trauma-informed practitioners, community organizers, and fellow seekers who understand that personal healing and cultural change are inseparable.”

Liminal Learning Quest

📍Elbow Lake, Ontario, Canada 📅 19-24 October 2025 💸 From $2200. Some scholarship places available.

A hybrid programme for young people aged 18-24 which supports wayfinding in work, life, and social contribution: “We start with a weeklong Quest in the wilderness. You’ll join 15 or so other explorers and a handful of Guides. There will be campfires and canoes, exercises in contemplation and self-reflection, and an invitation to get real together — about fears, hopes, and dreams about living a purposeful life. A Quest is more than just a retreat. It’s a transformational experience designed to help you gain clarity, resilience, and a deeper sense of purpose.”

Jobs & Opportunities

[Funding] Sparks of Regeneration: An Invitation to Innovators, Disruptors & Change-makers

📅 Application deadline: 9 October 2025

“Are you launching or leading a project that embraces the principles of regeneration - whether you call it “regenerative” or not? Are you grounded in social equity, community-led change, and systems thinking? Do you believe in the power of global collaboration and local wisdom to shape just and regenerative futures? Apply now to be part of The Regenerative Futures Programme’s gathering of creative problem-solvers, a space to grow your ideas, connect with fellow change-makers, and contribute to a global field of regenerative practice.”

[Job] Freelance Narrative Researchers and Strategists at NEON

📅 Application deadline: 30 September 2025

“NEON is looking to expand our pool of trusted freelance narrative researchers, analysts, and strategists to support our growing messaging programme. If you’re a consultant experienced in progressive framing, messaging or narrative research and strategy – we want to hear from you! … NEON is a not-for-profit organization committed to accelerating social movements. We build capacity and infrastructure to accelerate the transition to a new economy.”

[Volunteer] Circles of Compassion project

📅 No application deadline stated

“Circles of Compassion is an early-stage project that was recently started by members of the Effective Altruism community. We aim to design, test, and implement interventions that are scalable and effective at expanding children’s Circles of Compassion — i.e. broadening which human and non-human sentient beings they experience compassion towards and feel compelled to act on in reducing their suffering.” They’re looking for an Operations Volunteer and two Research Volunteers.

[Job] Marketing & Community Cultivator at Singing with Nightingales

📅 Application deadline: 19 September

“Singing with Nightingales (SWN) is looking for a creative and free-thinking freelance thought partner and practitioner who can help us develop, and start to deliver, our marketing and communications strategy this autumn to help us achieve our aims for the coming year."

[Job] Development Director at Othering & Belonging Institute

📅 Application deadline not stated

The Othering & Belonging Institute (OBI) at UC Berkeley are hiring a Development Director: “If you are a dedicated leader in philanthropy, eager to build meaningful donor relationships and support our mission of creating a world where belonging without othering is the norm, we want to hear from you. Join us in our commitment to social justice, and together, let's make a positive impact! Your expertise could be the key to changing the world.”

Links & Resources

Voices of Emergence: a new podcast

“Voices of Emergence is a podcast and publishing space for real conversations about healing, transformation, and how we meet these times of change. We speak with creators, elders, culture-makers, and people asking deep questions and living into better ones. Many of our guests are navigating personal or collective thresholds. Some are forging paths through creativity, insight, or acts of leadership.”

Second Renaissance

*“Second Renaissance” is one way of framing current times as a period of civilisational crisis and potential renewal – and of pointing to an ecosystem of people and organisations working to catalyse the emergence of a new, regenerative, cultural paradigm. If you recognise terms like metacrisis, Metamodern, Regenerative, Liminal Web, Game B, Integral, conscious evolution and so on, then you’re on familiar ground. Explore the core thesis and theory of change in more detail here.

🌱 Help us to plant seeds of a Second Renaissance. If you want to support the movement, you can:

• 💬 Share your thoughts in the comments section

• 🎁 Share this newsletter with a friend

• 💸 Become a paid subscriber

Subscribe now

Finally, we leave you with some —

Art to nourish the soul…

Artist statement (2017):

A’Court’s practice explores the notion of the visual sublime working within painting, collage and drawing, she employs re-imagined landscapes as a trigger for encounter or contemplation.

Classical landscape references are reinterpreted in a new context, rendered in graphite on a variety of surfaces. The form, composition and materiality are meticulously constructed to summon a state of mind rather than a specific location.

The tension between the precision drawing and the loosely painted ground references different models of art history and alludes to contrasting types of mental attention competing for the same psychological space.

A’Court invites curiosity of ones own mental states. Her interest has been formed by her meditation practice and by the ideas of pre-eminent psychiatrist and writer Iain McGilchrist in his book “The Master and His Emissary-the Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World”, presenting his research on the hemisphere differences and the different perspectives they have in constructing our current experience and impact on our society.

See Sue Williams A’Court’s work here and read Iain McGilchrist’s reflection on her work, Escape from Eden, here.

Thank you for reading the eighth issue of Seeds of a Second Renaissance.

This time, a brief introduction to the much-respected work of Vanessa Machado de Oliveira and the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures Collective, on Hospicing Modernity. (It’s high time too: the sequel to this work, Outgrowing Modernity, was published last week.)

Below, you’ll also find curated events, jobs, and opportunities.

Hospicing modernity: Tending to the end of the world as we know it

What if we must learn to trust each other without guarantees? …

What if collective healing will be made possible precisely by facing—together—the end of the world as we know it?

~Vanessa Machado de Oliveira, Hospicing Modernity

As extractive systems wreak havoc on our inner and outer worlds, a growing number of voices warns: the cultural mindset of modernity has reached its limit. We can’t simply ‘fix’ the trouble we’re in from within the same logic that created it: unavoidably, industrialised societies are due a radical shift in our deepest ways of relating to the world.

Vanessa Machado de Oliveira (aka Vanessa Andreotti) is a Brazilian researcher and educator, and professor at the University of Victoria in Canada. In Hospicing Modernity (2021), she identifies this paradigm shift as a living process: laying to rest a complex entity manifested in our lives, enmeshed in a wider planetary metabolism. Our shared task is to witness what is dying within and around us, honour its gifts and “compost the shit” to clear space for new life.

Hospicing is care work; tending the dying with care and compassion, and supporting those left behind in the difficult process of letting go (p.xxii). Hospicing modernity is a process of accountability—recognising our own attachment to the promises and comforts of this hegemonic worldview, and the ways in which we’re incentivised to sustain it.

Existential investment

Despite the violence and unsustainability baked into the modern project, its reassuring promises shape our identities, desires, and even our sense of meaning (p.112).

Deep-seated fears manifest as desires, which ossify into assumed entitlement to particular ways of life; creating a psychological and cultural bind. Thus, while many of us understand modernity’s harmful side, we’re deeply conditioned by its comforts and securities; an unconscious line that we’re unwilling to cross. We might be willing to recycle or turn off the lights, but would we go for a few hours each day without electricity, or only buy fresh food without packaging?

Denial

Machado de Oliveira identifies four “constitutive denials” (p.22) upon which modernity depends:

• denial of systemic violence and complicity in harm: comfortable people prefer not to notice that our securities rest on the exploitation of marginalised humans, animals, and the planet.

• denial of planetary limits: in pursuit of exponential growth and consumption, the modern mindset ignores the finite boundaries of planetary life.

• denial of entanglement: modern reductivism rejects the fundamental interconnection of all things—including not only the pure and beautiful but also the painful, toxic, and ugly.

• denial of the magnitude and complexity of our problems: we favour feel-good fixes that fail to address deeper causes of our predicament.

Shaped by this motivated forgetting, modernity persists within and through each of us: expressed in our beliefs, desires and choices.

Ontological change

Therefore, the change that can clear a path for renewal will be ‘ontological’ — relating to our habits of being — in contrast to more shallow methodological change (to improve collective policies, practices, and strategies) and even epistemological change (concerning knowledge, imagination, and evaluation of legitimacy). Ontological change means examining our most fundamental notions about the nature of reality, self, experience, consciousness, time, space, change, life, and death – and pushing the bounds of what is intelligible, possible, relevant, and imaginable.

Clearing Space

Crucially, hospicing modernity involves tending to its decline — confronting its harms, learning, and disinvesting from it — without any guarantees or roadmap for what comes next, or even the promise of a better future. While we require openness towards alternative visions of values like progress, justice, care, and relationship, we aren’t looking to replace one system with another. Rather, space must be cleared for new narratives to emerge — which might not even be imaginable from a modern point of view.

In fact, the very need for a clear vision stems, Machado de Oliveira points out, from modern logic and fixation upon certainty:

we will only be able to imagine something genuinely different if we first become suspicious of what we desire and are able to imagine within modernity… In many ways, the only way out of the intellectual, affective, relational, and creative limits imposed by modernity is to intentionally pay more attention to modernity’s death rather than try to fix, replace, or escape it.

Rooted in practice

Hospicing Modernity offers itself as a book of spells — pedagogical experiments and reflective exercises to help readers expand our capacity to meet uncomfortable paradoxes, sit with messy truths, surrender arrogance, and reckon with our own complicity in harm without overwhelm. Through this learning we can better engage with the world and its crises, with sobriety, discernment, and accountability.

This teaching is addressed primarily to those of us living in contexts of “low-intensity struggle” — who largely enjoy the comforts modernity offers, who can choose whether to show up for change, and whose safety tends not to be fundamentally threatened. Nonetheless, nobody is quite “off the hook” — all are to some extent complicit in and victims of modernity’s harms. As such, whoever we are, we are invited to open our hearts:

to dig deeper, to relate wider, to engage in productive disillusionment, and to fall apart and together generatively, as we face the end of the world as we know it.

Explore the field of inner-led change…

A selection of events and opportunities recommended by readers, friends, and allies in the arena of inner-led regeneration.

👋 Help us to showcase the best opportunities and resources: please suggest items to include in the Events, Offers & Links or Jobs Board WhatsApp channels.

Upcoming Events

Second Renaissance Festival

📍Life Itself Farmhouse Hub, Thénac, France 📅 5-7 September 2025 💸 €175-800, inc. accommodation & food

“Join us … for an intimate gathering celebrating creativity and connection. Experience music, dance, storytelling, and self-organized offerings designed to inspire joy and co-creation during times of change. For this inaugural edition we’ll be keeping this small with no more than 20-30 participants.”

Transform Trauma Oxford: Healing Our Relational World

📍Oxford and online/virtual 📅 28-30 September 2025 💸 £360 (virtual ticket) £900 (in-person ticket). Scholarships available.

“Welcome to Europe’s largest trauma, mental health and wellbeing conference. … We are delighted to confirm Esther Perel, Richard Schwartz, Bessel van der Kolk and many more. These distinguished professionals will share groundbreaking insights, innovative strategies, and proven methodologies centred around this years theme of Healing Our Relational World.”

Twin Oaks Communities Conference

📍Twin Oaks, Louisa, Virginia, USA 📅 29 August-1 September 2025 💸 General admission: $160. Work exchange, youth, and one-day tickets also available.

“Join us … to network and learn about intentional communities of all kinds — co-housing, co-ops, communes, ecovillages, and more — at one of the best-known intentional communities in North America.”

Communities: Interdisciplinary Workshop

📍Hostaçov Chateau, near Prague, Czech Republic 📅 26-28 September 2025 💸 €100-250, inc. accommodation & meals

“An experimental gathering exploring how communities create knowledge, meaning, and transformation. … No individual, organization, or even nation can navigate today’s challenges alone. The future belongs to communities that can evolve together – but what makes some networks resilient while others fragment under pressure?”

Autumn Praxis Residency (Conscious Co-Living)

📍Life Itself Riverside Hub, Bergerac, France 📅 October to December 2025 💸 €1100-1300 per month, including room and food

“What does it mean to live well, together? How can our ways of being transform the world? Join us for the third Autumn Praxis Residency at the Life Itself Bergerac Hub: a 2.5-month-long container for contemplative, relational, and embodied practice in community. You’ll live together with others who are asking questions like these in their lives and work, and experience the frame of collective rhythms and practices for conscious community living which has been developed at the Hub over the past 5 years. Stay for just an orientation week, 1 month, or the full length of the residency.”

Jobs & Opportunities

Job: Human-Centered Transition Design Faculty Member

📍TU Delft (Delft University of Technology), Netherlands 📅 Application deadline: 15 September 2025

“The department [of] Human-Centered Design (HCD) within the faculty of Industrial Design Engineering (IDE) is recruiting an Academic Career Track (ACT) faculty member with expertise in Human-Centered Transition Design. … In this role you will provide leadership in three domains: (1) integrate Human-Centered Design knowledge and methods into Transition Design education in the IDE curriculum, (2) conduct rigorous research that critically reflects on and expands the role of design, particularly human-centered design knowledge, in shaping societal transitions, and (3) acting as ambassador for human-centered approaches to Transition Design.”

Job: Guardian & Residency Host in Southern France

📍Maison Marcelle, near Nice, France 📅 Start date: January 2026. Application deadline not stated.

“We are looking for two people who would like to live in a small, remote hamlet in the hills of Southern France (40 minutes from Nice) – and help shape this place with heart, hands and a sense of community. If you think of yourself as someone who feels at ease living in a remote setting, is good with the land, competent at fixing things around the house, and has a broad range of technical skills, we would love to hear from you! This is a position that requires a mix of manual labor and social skills, though they could be split between two people.”

Job: Lead Commuity Organiser at Act Build Change

📍UK-based 📅 Start date: November 2025. Application deadline: 26 August.

“This is a hands-on role for an experienced organiser who will lead key aspects of our community organising practice. You'll design and deliver training workshops, coach emerging organisers, and build meaningful relationships with both partner organisations and individual members to expand our movement.” Act Build Change is a “transformative organising school that makes community organising and collective care methods accessible to everyone who wants to end injustice.”

Free programme: Climate Adaptation for Creatives

📍UK and selected countries in wider Europe 📅 Programme begins: 22 September. Application deadline: 7 September 2025

“Developed in partnership between British Council and Black Mountains College, Climate Adaptation for Creatives is a free online programme exploring how the arts can meaningfully contribute to climate and environmental action. Through this programme, you'll reflect on the role of creativity in responding to today’s environmental challenges and connect with others across the UK and Wider Europe working at the intersection of art and climate.”

Call for papers: “Intentional Community Resilience in an Age of Uncertainty”

📍Lebensgarten Ecovillage, Steyerberg, Germany 📅 Conference: 10-12 July 2026. Proposal submission deadline: 1 November 2025

“The International Communal Studies Association (ICSA) invites scholars, practitioners, and theorists to participate in our upcoming conference, “Intentional Community Resilience in an Age of Uncertainty” that will occur at Lebensgarten Ecovillage, Steyerberg, Germany, on July 10-12, 2026. This conference will explore how [intentional] communities cultivate resilience in the face of pressing contemporary challenges and offer lessons to the broader society for effective social change.”

Second Renaissance

*“Second Renaissance” is one way of framing current times as a period of civilisational crisis and potential renewal – and of pointing to an ecosystem of people and organisations working to catalyse the emergence of a new, regenerative, cultural paradigm. If you recognise terms like metacrisis, Metamodern, Regenerative, Liminal Web, Game B, Integral, conscious evolution and so on, then you’re on familiar ground. Explore the core thesis and theory of change in more detail here.

🌱 Help us to plant seeds of a Second Renaissance. If you want to support the movement, you can:

• 💬 Share your thoughts in the comments section

• 🎁 Share this newsletter with a friend

• 💸 Become a paid subscriber

  Subscribe now

Finally, we leave you with some —

Art to nourish the soul…

This month, a series of works by Jeanne Simmons which portray both the resilience and delicateness of elements of nature — and express love for, and interconnectedness with, the natural world.

In both “Grass Cocoon” and “Extensions” my model, Nicole, could not walk away from her situation. She was literally bound to the Earth. She was also profoundly at peace with her condition. We cannot escape our relationship with the natural world. There can be no “us” without “it”.

~ Jeanne Simmons

To see the full images and artist commentary, see ‘Rupture and Reweaving: A Gallery on Gratitude and Loss’, published in the latest issue of Kosmos.

Thank you for reading the seventh issue of Seeds of a Second Renaissance.

The Second Renaissance Festival is for those who wish to envision a better world - a weekend of music, ideas and interbeing, co-created by all who come. This first’s year festival is a small experiment with just 20-30 people — to create an intimate, close-knit container. It’s a chance to meet others like you, drawn to respond to this time of crisis and rebirth.

Find out more & book tickets 👉

Expect weird and wonderful workshops, heartfelt rituals, music and dance - a meeting of heart and mind as we play our way into depth and connection. As a co-created project, the program will emerge from the gifts and talents of those who join.

We’ll gather at our beautiful Farmhouse Hub in Thénac, just five minutes from the Plum Village Monastery - a place of natural beauty, with vast open fields and starlit skies. Stay in a private or shared room, a dormitory, or camp under the stars, with nourishing food provided.

Key Information

📅 When: 5–7 September (option to arrive a day earlier or stay a day later)

📍 Where: Life Itself Farmhouse Hub

💶 Price: €175 – €500 (depending on accommodation & low-cost option for volunteers)

🎟 Tickets: Get yours here

🔗 More details: festival.lifeitself.org

We do not want financial burdens to restrict your access to the festival. If the ticket price is an obstacle, please get in touch via events@lifeitself.org

Find out more & book tickets 👉

We’re also on the look out for volunteers! If you’re interested, or if you have any other questions, please reach us at events@lifeitself.org.

This month, a brief introduction to Thích Nhất Hạnh’s teaching on interbeing: how recognising life as radically interconnected can lead towards more compassionate ways of living.

Below, you’ll also find curated events, opportunities, and resources.

As we prepare the current issue, we’re absorbing the news that Joanna Macy, a devoted elder in this space and beloved teacher to many, died peacefully on 19th July 2025. Joanna’s vision has supported countless souls to restore a sense of connection with all life, nourishing activism and sacralising care in a wounded world. Read more about her work here.

Thích Nhất Hạnh on Interbeing: recognising radical interconnectedness with all life

Faced with breakdown across multiple dimensions of society, many agree that we’re overdue a reckoning with the deep, collective worldviews* that underpin dysfunctional modern life. Some advocates for cultural transition identify a particular shift necessary to transform rivalry and exploitation towards a wiser, life-respecting future: from a worldview of separateness to one of interbeing.

*(roughly, core beliefs about what reality is and what it means to be human)

Zen Buddhist monk Thích Nhất Hạnh (1926-2022) was a revered peace activist and spiritual leader. Exiled from Vietnam, he founded Plum Village monastery in France. Among his many gifts to contemplative activism, the term “interbeing” points to the fundamental truth of interdependence: all that exists does so by virtue of relationship with everything else. “There is no such thing as an individual separate self,” he wrote:

“A flower is made only of non-flower elements, such as chlorophyll, sunlight, and water. If we were to remove all the non-flower elements from the flower, there would be no flower left. A flower cannot be by herself alone. A flower can only inter-be with all of us. It’s much closer to the truth. Humans are like this too. We can’t exist by ourselves alone. We can only inter-be. I am made only of non-me elements, such as the Earth, the sun, parents, and ancestors.” (Thích Nhất Hạnh, How to Love)

Reflecting upon a troubled modern society founded on destructive individualism, Thích Nhất Hạnh saw a profound need to reorient the sense of human identity from self to world. Inescapably, to be is to inter-be: clouds, people and blades of grass are equally dependent on all else that is. Realising this, we may begin to see that another’s suffering is our suffering, and likewise that our wellbeing is inseparable from that of others, and of our world. Thus we might behave with greater care towards everything around us: not only other humans, but animals, rivers, forests…

Interbeing is a way of seeing that must be practiced. Thích Nhất Hạnh’s teaching emphasises mindfulness of relationship, embedding a felt sense of shared existence. For example, when we walk with attention to the ground that supports us, eat with gratitude to the people, plants and elements that nourish us, or breathe with conscious awareness of the fragile atmosphere that sustains us, we encounter directly our own continuity with the living world. Through mindful inquiry, we can gradually dissolve the illusion of separateness and inhabit the living web that connects all life. The more we cultivate this awareness, the more naturally compassion arises—not because we are told to care, but because we experience the truth of our interbeing. The food on our plate as sun and rain; the body arising from Earth and ancestry, reflected in the stranger we meet outside.

Interbeing is a core insight of Engaged Buddhism, a movement likewise founded by Thích Nhất Hạnh. During the Vietnam war, as Buddhist renunciates questioned whether to attend to practice or to the suffering beyond the monastery walls, he perceived both as a single path - turning not only inwards but outwards, responding actively to the suffering of the world.

Engaged Buddhism is the living practice of interbeing—encompassing everything from courageous activism to small acts of kindness and conscious consumption. Above all, practitioners recognise that personal awakening and social transformation are not separate paths, but interdependent; two expressions of a single truth. Interbeing is not merely a spiritual insight but a revolutionary ethic: a way of seeing and being that draws us towards a more compassionate, life-sustaining future.

Explore the field of inner-led change…

A selection of events, opportunities, and resources recommended by readers, friends, and allies in the arena of inner-led regeneration.

👋 Help us to showcase the best opportunities and resources: please suggest items to include in the Events, Offers & Links or Jobs Board WhatsApp channels.

Upcoming Events

Second Renaissance Festival

📍Life Itself Farmhouse Hub, Thénac, France 📅 5-7 September 2025 💸 €175-800, depending on type of accommodation

“Join us … for an intimate gathering celebrating creativity and connection. Experience music, dance, storytelling, and self-organized offerings designed to inspire joy and co-creation during times of change. At the Second Renaissance Festival, you can be whoever you are and follow what you love.”

New Economies Gathering: Hope in a Time of Collapse

📍Lyon, France 📅 1-2 October 2025 💸 The gathering is funded by P4NE and free to attend.

“Hosted by Partners for a New Economy, [this] is a global gathering bringing together 250 people committed to fundamentally transforming our economic system. Now in its fourth year, P4NE’s gathering builds connection for strategic action across geographies, disciplines and sectors. It provides the opportunity to explore and exchange the new economic ideas, practices and strategies that will equip us to support one another, build power and respond with the urgency required as we navigate these complex and challenging times.”

Sensemaking Summer School: Exploring the Metacrisis and a Second Renaissance

📍Life Itself Riverside Hub, Bergerac, France 📅 17-24 September 2025 💸 Sliding scale between €250-€750. Includes food, accommodation and curriculum.

Join us for a week-long gathering of inquiry, learning and connection. The school will bring together 20 participants — researchers, practitioners and changemakers —to inquire into the roots of the metacrisis and share new perspectives on catastrophic risk, collective action, and governance. It will draw on concepts like the Metacrisis and a Second Renaissance, as well as Complex Systems, Integral Theory, Effective Altruism, Metamodernism.

Schumacher Wild Summer School on Commons, Conviviality, and Community

📍Kleine Aarde, Boxtel, Netherlands 📅 19-22 August 2025 💸 £500-800, depending on type of accommodation

“We’ll explore the themes of commons, conviviality, and community, grounded in nature connection, relational governance, and phenomenological approaches. We’ll discover more questions along the way - how can we develop our intuitions about ‘community’ and bringing people together for common purpose? We’ll call upon some useful wisdom from Elinor Ostrom and EF Schumacher, as well as dozens of other thinkers. And we’ll experience an embodied, holistic approach to learning that will, in itself, become an important part of our living inquiry. This course is an exciting collaboration of Schumacher Action Labs (NL), Schumacher Center for New Economics (USA), and Schumacher Wild, the ‘regeneration phase’ of world renowned Schumacher College (UK).”

Second Renaissance Oasis: Experiments in Spiritual Spaceholding (Special Event)

📍Online 📅 29 July 2025, 18:00-19:30 CEST 💸 Free

“Together we're exploring spirituality inside a Second Renaissance. This special event edition of The Oasis is open to all who feel called, an experimental space held by Danielle and James including meditation, movement, song, and playful interaction. Our purpose is to relate, together and individually, to that particular connection we've found in whatever variety of spiritual backgrounds we bring with us — something like the transcendent wholeness of the universe.”

Social Permaculture Mountain Retreat

📍Lutruwita (Tasmania), Australia 📅 17-19 October 2025 💸 $300

“Join us for a weekend tour into the social gardens of Permaculture and Cultural Emergence to explore individual and collective purpose, and transformative practice for inner and outer flourishing. Come away with meaning and purpose relevant to the times we inhabit; a network of collaborators, new friends, support, and a community of practice for dreaming, learning, growing, creating and BEING in.” Contact Vari Gleeson (cloud.hill@hotmail.com) or Liana Guegan (liana@segong.net).

Jobs & Opportunities

European Solidarity Corps Volunteer Positions at Blivande

📍Stockholm, Sweden 📅 January 2026 to January 2027. Apply by 15 August 2025.

“We are looking for four participants to join us for a full year of cultural and community-focused work. There are four different roles to choose from, each offering a unique opportunity to grow, contribute, and learn tailored to different talents and intersts.” The volunteer positions available are: The Structured Culture Lover; The Social Media Hero; The Practical Builder; and The Artistic Green Thumb.

Call for participation: New Youth Network on Beyond GDP

📍Global 📅 Application deadline not stated

“The global call to join the Youth Network on Beyond GDP is now open. We invite young changemakers from all regions to join and lead the way to rethink economic systems and move beyond GDP. … The Youth Network will serve as a sounding board for stakeholders shaping new Beyond GDP frameworks, including the UN Secretary-General’s High-Level Expert Group on Beyond GDP.”

Mending Earth: A Learning Journey for Climate Resilience Leaders

📍Online 📅 16 September 2025-13 January 2026.

“We are offering a deep learning journey for aspiring leaders in climate resilience and regeneration. Online learning will take place from September 2025 to January 2026, and is open to 200 committed humans between 18 and 35 years of age. … This learning journey was co-designed by One Resilient Earth, in close collaboration with 8 youth co-designers. The Learning Journey is being offered thanks to the generous support of the Deutsche Postcode Lottery.”

Regenerative Communities Fund: Open Call for Demonstrators

📍Croatia, Finland, France, Portugal, Spain 📅 Apply before 30 September 2025

“If you are part of an existing, innovative, community-led initiative (CLI) working on climate action, regeneration, or just transition, this is your opportunity to connect, share, and amplify your impact across Europe. We invite you to carefully read the Call for Proposals, where you’ll find all the key information, registration documents, and application links. Apply now!”

Second Renaissance

*“Second Renaissance” is one way of framing current times as a period of civilisational crisis and potential renewal – and of pointing to an ecosystem of people and organisations working to catalyse the emergence of a new, regenerative, cultural paradigm. If you recognise terms like metacrisis, Metamodern, Regenerative, Liminal Web, Game B, Integral, conscious evolution and so on, then you’re on familiar ground. Explore the core thesis and theory of change in more detail here.

🌱 Help us to plant seeds of a Second Renaissance. If you want to support the movement, you can:

• 💬 Share your thoughts in the comments section

• 🎁 Share this newsletter with a friend

• 💸 Become a paid subscriber

  Subscribe now

  ---

  Finally, we leave you with some —

  Art to nourish the soul…

  This month, a poem by Thích Nhất Hạnh about how to handle anger — written around 1965 after hearing the news that the Vietnamese city of Ben Tre had been bombed, and an American army officer had declared that he had to destroy the town in order to save the town.

  FOR WARMTH
  by Thích Nhất Hạnh

  I hold my face between my hands.
  No, I am not crying.
  I hold my face between my hands
  to keep my loneliness warm —
  two hands protecting,
  two hands nourishing,
  two hands to prevent
  my soul from leaving me
  in anger.

  You can listen to the poem read in Vietnamese by Thích Nhất Hạnh and in English by Krista Tippett, host of the On Being podcast here.

Thank you for reading the sixth issue of Seeds of a Second Renaissance.

For both seasoned travellers and those new to these shores, each edition offers a bite-sized exploration of keystone ideas and thinkers whose work you may wish to know more deeply.

You’ll also find curated events, opportunities, and resources from around the ecosystem below.

Donella Meadows on Leverage Points for Effective Systems Change

In complex systems, with multiple moving parts, both visible and invisible – where is the best place to intervene for positive change? In a world that is far too vast and messy to be perfectly predicted or controlled – what kind of approach to problem solving, decision making and social change is needed? The work of Donella Meadows speaks to these questions, combining a mathematical and philosophical approach to help us understand how complex systems work, and illuminating ways to creatively and courageously (re-)design systems for the outcomes we want.

Systems Thinking 101

A system is an interconnected set of parts which interact with each other to produce effects different from the effect of each part on its own. There are systems of all kinds, scales, and functions – your digestive system, a national economy, a rainforest, a kitchen, your family. Systems can be nested within other systems and systems interact with each other. A system’s behaviour over time is governed by feedback loops and flows of information or material: for example, a university may adjust admissions standards if too many or too few students are entering.

Systems thinking helps us to better understand how interventions in one part of a system have consequences elsewhere, immediately or years down the line. Such partial “solutions” can end up creating more, or graver, problems than they address.

Systems thinking can also help us go deeper to the root causes of problems. While most political or social interventions focus on changing elements (which are easier to see and recognise than the relationships or implicit goals in a system), this generally keeps the system pretty much the same. For example, if you change one or two – or even all – the players of a football team, you’ll still have a game of football, albeit with one team playing better or worse than before. But if you change the rules of the game, which govern how players interact and the team’s overall goal, you’ll start to have a system no longer recognisable as what it was before. Similarly, swapping in and out political leaders each election cycle does not necessarily do much to change the foundations which govern a system’s behaviours and problems.

Rigorous systems analysis may reveal counterintuitive insights: because as systems become more complex, their behaviour can become more surprising.

Leverage Points

Where, then, is the best place to intervene when facing problems in complex systems? Meadows identifies twelve leverage points – places in the system where a small change could lead to large impact – and ranks them in order of effectiveness (depicted below). As we move from the physical parts of a system to the parts involved in information flow and control, to the underlying structures and intentions, more powerful leverage for long-lasting change can be found.

Let’s take a brief look at the top three leverage points in the list.

3. Goals: The purpose or function of a system

Articulating, enacting and standing up for new systems goals is a powerful leverage point because lower leverage points (e.g. parameters and information flows) will be moulded to conform to the system’s overarching goal.

2. Paradigms: The mindset out of which the system (its goals, structure, rules, delays, parameters) arises

“The ancient Egyptians built pyramids because they believed in an afterlife. We build skyscrapers because we believe that space in downtown cities is enormously valuable.”1

Everything we do stems from a set of shared beliefs and assumptions about how the world works – a paradigm. What makes sense in one paradigm might seem nonsensical, or even unthinkable, in another: think of how some prehistoric cultures practised human sacrifice. A change in paradigm gives rise to totally different goals, values, and actions.

1. Transcending paradigms

The final leverage point is to loosen your own attachment to any particular paradigm, to realise that no paradigm is definitively “true”, and to remain open and humble.

Learning to “dance” with(in) complex systems

This final point gestures towards the attitude which Meadows argues is vital for learning to “dance” with complex systems. After our best attempts at rigorous systems analysis, the important thing is to let go of the illusion of perfect control or total understanding: “Living successfully in a world of systems requires more of us than our ability to calculate. It requires our full humanity—our rationality, our ability to sort out truth from falsehood, our intuition, our compassion, our vision, and our morality.”2

Pioneering systems thinker and environmental scientist Donella Meadows (1941-2001) was one of Joanna Macy’s key influences: the Work That Reconnects, which we introduced last issue, draws on Buddhism, systems theory, and deep ecology. Meadows’ work is also a direct influence for the “three layers of polycrisis and metacrisis” model which is central to the Second Renaissance theory of change.

Links & Resources

Check out the following free resources on systems thinking and systems change:

• School of Systems Change Resource Library

• The Young Person’s Guide to Systems Change

• The Donella Meadows Project

Explore the field of the Second Renaissance & inner-led change…

A selection of events, opportunities, and resources recommended by readers, friends, and allies in the arena of inner-led regeneration.

👋 Help us to showcase the best opportunities and resources: please suggest items to include in the Events, Offers & Links or Jobs Board WhatsApp channels.

Upcoming Events

From Metacrisis to a Second Renaissance: A 4-week online course

📍Online 📅 2-23 July 2025 💸 €39 / $39 (scholarships available on request)

“​In this 4-session course, we will come together to learn about and explore the Metacrisis and a Second Renaissance – this growing moment of civilizational breakdown and the potential paths to a better future. … This series is an invitation to those already curious about the cracks in the modern worldview — and those feeling the pull towards a more connected, meaningful, and regenerative future.” Organised by Life Itself.

Realisation Festival 2025

📍Dorset, UK 📅 26-29 June 2025 💸 Starting from £445

“The Realisation Festival is a gathering for the soul. …The weekend is an opportunity to reckon with our times, as well as unlearn assumptions and reimagine responses. The gathering uniquely brings together talks and workshops, music and other imaginative activities to broaden and explore the analysis and ideas. It is led by remarkable artists and improvisers, as well as world class speakers.” Organised by Perspectiva.

Rising Tide: Science & Mystery

📍Online 📅 28 June 2025, 17:30-18:45 BST 💸 Free (optional donation)

“How can cutting-edge science help rekindle our appreciation for mystery? Join us for an online inquiry lead by Chamkaur Ghag, leading astroparticle physicist who will be sharing about the relationship between science and the unknown.” Organised by The Raft.

Jobs & Opportunities

Emerge Lakefront: Scientist-in-Residence Scholarship Programme

📍Emerge Lakefront Campus, Stockholm 📅 Start date flexible from 1 Aug to 1 Nov. Apply by 30 June.

6-month residency programme with housing and community fees fully funded at Emerge Lakefront: “Are you a scientist, systems thinker, or research-oriented innovator longing to ground your work in real-world impact, community, and inner development? The Scientist in Residence Scholarship invites individuals to join Emerge Lakefront — a global residency for changemakers living and working at the intersection of personal transformation and societal evolution.”

Call for Papers - ‘Presencing the Future of Democracy and Governance’ - Journal of Awareness-Based Systems Change

📅 Deadline for submissions: 30 November 2025

“The Journal of Awareness-Based Systems Change (JASC) is now receiving submissions for our special issue on democracy and governance. … We invite practice-based contributions offering insights into questions such as:

• How do non-state, grassroots, or Indigenous governance traditions challenge conventional democratic models? How might democratic futures be shaped by practices of governance that do not fit within dominant institutional logics?

• What forms of governance actively cultivate cultural, social, ecological, and intergenerational responsibility? What is needed to sustain these practices?

• How do governance innovations emerge under conditions of climate breakdown, economic instability, and shifting geopolitical orders? What tensions arise when governance is a site of adaptation, contestation and transformation? …”

Call for Papers - ‘Threads of Hope: Ancestral Knowledge and Feminist Futures’ - Journal of Futures Studies

📅 Deadline for proposals: 1 August 2025

“The Journal of Futures Studies (JFS) invites submissions for a Symposium on the theme “Threads of Hope: Ancestral Knowledge and Feminist Futures.” … The Threads of Hope Symposium further seeks to explore how practices often dismissed as inferior – e.g., domestic or decorative arts such as women’s textile and embroidery work – can serve as rich speculative, strategic, and narrative tools for imagining alternative futures. It invites conversations that are not only academic, but also tender, communal, and embodied.”

Second Renaissance

“Second Renaissance” is one way of framing current times as a period of civilisational crisis and potential renewal – and of pointing to an ecosystem of people and organisations working to catalyse the emergence of a new, regenerative, cultural paradigm. If you recognise terms like metacrisis, Metamodern, Regenerative, Liminal Web, Game B, Integral, conscious evolution and so on, then you’re on familiar ground. Explore the core thesis and theory of change in more detail here.

🌱 Help us to plant seeds of a Second Renaissance. If you want to support the movement, you can:

• 💬 Share your thoughts in the comments section

• 🎁 Share this newsletter with a friend

• 💸 Become a paid subscriber

Subscribe now

Finally, we leave you with some —

Art for the soul…

Ice Watch by Olafur Eliasson, 2014

Twelve large blocks of ice cast off from the Greenland ice sheet are harvested from a fjord outside Nuuk and presented in a clock formation in a prominent public place. The work by Olafur Eliasson and Minik Rosing raises awareness of climate change by providing a direct and tangible experience of the reality of melting arctic ice. Ice Watch has been installed in three locations.

The first installation was in Copenhagen, at City Hall Square, from 26 to 29 October 2014, to mark the publication of the UN IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report on Climate Change. The second installation took place in Paris, at Place du Panthéon, from 3 to 13 December 2015, on the occasion of the UN Climate Conference COP21, and the third version of Ice Watch was on view from 11 December 2018 to 2 January 2019 at two locations in London – outside Bloomberg’s European headquarters and in front of Tate Modern.

For more images of the artwork, see here.

2

Donella Meadows, ‘Chapter 7: Living in a World of Systems’ in Thinking in Systems (2008).

---

Thank you for reading the fifth issue of Seeds of a Second Renaissance.

---

For both seasoned travellers and those new to these shores, each edition offers a bite-sized exploration of keystone ideas and thinkers whose work you may wish to know more deeply.

You’ll also find curated events, opportunities, and resources from around the ecosystem below.

Joanna Macy’s Work That Reconnects: A spiral of change for a Great Turning

February’s issue, which introduced Donna Haraway’s notion of “staying with the trouble”, ended with a question: how do we avoid overwhelm, to remain responsive to the troubles we’re entangled in? ​​ The Work That Reconnects speaks to this inquiry directly. Joanna Macy’s practical, soulful framework helps us to own our feelings about what’s happening in the world, transfiguring apathy and even despair into creative action.

Joanna Macy (born 1929) is an activist, author, and scholar of Buddhism, systems theory, and deep ecology. A cherished figure in environmental movements, her teaching has supported countless activists to cultivate the motivation, courage, and resilience to take action amid socio-ecological crisis.

The Work that Reconnects is a framework and open-source collection of practices for personal and social change; a ‘spiral’ journey through four touchpoints: Coming from Gratitude, Honouring Our Pain for the World, Seeing with New Eyes, and Going Forth. Let’s step briefly through each…

Coming from Gratitude

Gratitude for the gift of life nurtures a foundation of trust and unconditional joy, even in difficult times. Macy considers gratitude a subversive stance — “that primal ‘Wow!’ at being alive” that refutes the message of dissatisfaction driving the industrial growth society and that is a refreshing alternative to guilt or fear as a source of motivation for environmental action.1

Honouring Our Pain for the World

Resourced by deep roots of gratitude, loosening our curated image of composure or politeness, we make space to voice our feelings about what’s happening in our world. As we witness each other in our sorrow, outrage, fear, and numbness, we may notice how our pain tells a story “...about our interconnectedness. We feel distress when other beings suffer because, at a deep level, we are not separate from them. The isolation that splits us from the living body of our world is an illusion; the pain breaks through it to tell us who we really are”.2

Seeing with New Eyes

By experiencing our collective care for the world, we may deepen our sense of community with widening circles of life. (This kind of shift, depicted below, recalls the Integral model of development explored in issue 3.)

As we deepen a sense of belonging to the ecology of life, connected with beings across geographies and time, our resourcefulness to express our care for the world grows. We realise forms of power beyond aggression or domination, learning to wield “power with” instead of “power over”: working in partnership with others, dancing with what is beyond our control, and aligning our actions with the rhythms of life itself.

Going Forth

The final station in the spiral invites imagination and action. Here we dare to believe that radical change is possible — and already happening. We tend the inner fire that blooms from our deepest hopes for the world, and orient our actions towards making them real — persevering regardless of uncertain outcomes. This is Active Hope.

This four-part journey can be undertaken solo or in a group; relating to issues big or small. You might take time to wind your way through the spiral if you’re feeling disturbed by a news report — or when feeling stuck as a group of neighbours organising a local community project. A great collection of resources (including exercises and activities for each station of the spiral) is freely available in the online Work That Reconnects Resource Library.

The spiral is a practical tool towards what Macy calls the Great Turning (or, we might say, a Second Renaissance): a fundamental shift in ways of living and relating to the world, akin to the Agricultural or Industrial Revolutions. Through the Work that Reconnects, we acknowledge pain and distress as natural, widespread, and healthy reactions to the state of our world; cultivate ever-widening circles of care; and begin to act in alignment with emergence, grounded in Active Hope.

In this way, despite grave odds and heartbreaking times, countless small stories, campaigns, and actions continue to weave in service of a larger narrative. A deep-rooted, far-reaching shift towards life-sustaining civilisation: the Great Turning.

Explore the field of inner-led change…

A selection of events, opportunities, and resources recommended by readers, friends, and allies in the arena of inner-led regeneration.

👋 Help us to showcase the best opportunities and resources: please suggest items to include in the Events, Offers & Links or Jobs Board WhatsApp channels.

Upcoming Events

Tamera’s 30th Anniversary Summer University: Building Community in Times of Global Crisis

📍Tamera, Relíquias, Portugal 📅 5-11 July 2025 💸Sliding scale from €900-€1520

“As Tamera turns 30, we invite friends, fellow voyagers and all those engaged in community-based alternatives for an immersive gathering. Together, we want to look back on our journey, situate ourselves in today’s global context and ask: What makes intentional communities contextually relevant today, as we confront a crisis of civilization? We’re honored by an outstanding array of speakers, including leaders of various intentional and frontline communities, social movements and Indigenous groups, and thought leaders and visionaries from around the world.”

Mindful Research Retreat

📍INTP campus in the French Pyrenees 📅 20-27 July 2025 Apply by 31 May 💸€500/week

“This is a meditation retreat. It's also a time you can be productive in your research. But most importantly, it's a time to intentionally lean deeper into the joy of doing the work we love, together with like-minded people, surrounded by beautiful mountains. The core of this will be a guided exploration of how to make our research itself a deep and joyful meditation practice.” Run by Institut Natura e Teoria en Pirenèus (INTP), an independent research collective and residency centre in the Pyrenees.

Microsolidarity Network EU Summer Camp - Save the Date

📍Casa Tilo, near Barcelona, Spain 📅 20-25 August 2025

Hot off the press: “Expect nothing less than a bootcamp for community hosts: grow your organising skills; deepen your connections with people in the network; cut loose for one of the great parties of the summer. We’re going to have a low ticket cap of 40 people, so click here to let us know if you’d like to join and we’ll send out more details soon.”

Life as Practice: a Year-long Mentorship Program

📍Online 📅 September 2025 to August 2026 Apply by 30 June for early bird pricing 💸 €1799 to €2796

“You are warmly invited to Life as Practice, a unique year-long group mentorship guided by Stockholm-based couple Stephen Reid and Laura Gottlieb. Running from September 2025 to August 2026, this immersive container is designed to help you integrate personal development into your daily existence, transforming routine into ritual and challenges into catalysts for growth. It’s a journey into living more consciously and embodying your practice fully, within a supportive community structure.”

Jobs & Opportunities

Ecological Futures Camp at Black Mountains College

📍Troed-Yr-Harn Farm, Talgarth, Wales 📅 28 July-1st August. Apply by 30 June.

A free residential programme for young people aged 16-25. “Experience Black Mountains College and explore your future. How can you use your passions and skills to make a difference in a climate-changed world? Spend 5 days with us, on our 120-acre farm and surrounding mountains. Imagining, designing and taking action. Guided by activists, artists, and industry professionals, you will explore your role in creating a just society within safe planetary boundaries.”

Systems Thinking Internship at ReImagined Futures

📍Remote (EU residents only) 📅 Starting September 2025. Apply by 15 June.

“ReImagined Futures is looking for a passionate systems practitioner for a 6-month full-remote internship starting in September 2025. Key Highlights: Co-create systems maps in areas like biodiversity, food or childcare; Opportunity to work on projects with local governments, global networks and systemic investors.”

Lecturer (Sustainable Futures, Ecology, Political Economy or Alternative Economics) at Black Mountains College

📍Black Mountains College, Talgarth, Wales 📅 Apply by 1 June

“We are seeking to recruit a Lecturer to contribute to our undergraduate degree, a BA (Hons) in Sustainable Futures: Arts, Ecology and Systems Change. … We are looking for a candidate with an ability to teach in at least one (and preferably two) of the following areas: ecology, perspectives on sustainable futures as they pertain to the Global South, and political economy or alternative economics.”

Volunteer Opportunity at L’Arbre Qui Pousse

📍L’Arbre Qui Pousse, Ottignies, Belgium 📅 Apply asap

“We are looking for 1 French-speaking volunteer asap for a 1-year immersion in one of the liveliest ecovillages in Belgium! Mostly to work on events and developing an education campus inspired by the Schumacher College.”

Links & Resources

If you would like to explore Joanna Macy’s work further, check out some of these free resources…

Active Hope Foundations Training

“A free, video-based, engaging & practical online course designed to nourish our capacity to make a difference in the world. It is available now and you can start at any time.”

Deep Times Journal

“Deep Times is a journal offering articles, art, and poetry rooted in the Work That Reconnects, which emphasizes interdependence within ecosystems and societies. It aims to foster life-sustaining, equitable cultures through inspiration drawn from reconnecting with ancestors and future generations, a concept termed “Deep Time” by Joanna Macy.”

Songs for the Great Turning

“Songs, especially when sung together and in harmony, are a vital tool in the Great Turning ... They help us experience in the body our connection to each other and the planet, summon our collective courage, enliven us and inspire us to play our part in creating a life-sustaining society. We present here a collection of songs that are easy to learn and sing in groups, at Work That Reconnects gatherings, in our work in the world, in our daily lives.”

Study Guide for Coming Back to Life by Joanna Macy and Molly Brown

“Joanna Macy and Molly Brown have created a study guide to accompany the new edition of Coming Back to Life to help deepen your understanding of the Work That Reconnects and its underlying worldview and paradigms. Questions are designed for reflection, journaling, and study group explorations. We invite you to create small groups in your own community using Coming Back to Life to widen the circle of the Work That Reconnects.”

Second Renaissance

*“Second Renaissance” is one way of framing current times as a period of civilisational crisis and potential renewal – and of pointing to an ecosystem of people and organisations working to catalyse the emergence of a new, regenerative, cultural paradigm. If you recognise terms like metacrisis, Metamodern, Regenerative, Liminal Web, Game B, Integral, conscious evolution and so on, then you’re on familiar ground. Explore the core thesis and theory of change in more detail here.

🌱 Help us to plant seeds of a Second Renaissance. If you want to support the movement, you can:

• 💬 Share your thoughts in the comments section

• 🎁 Share this newsletter with a friend

• 💸 Become a paid subscriber

Subscribe now

Finally, we leave you with some —

Art to nourish the soul…

Joanna Macy is also well known for her translations of the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, together with her collaborator Anita Barrows. We hope you enjoy this beautiful poetry film produced by The On Being Project.

‘Let this Darkness be a Bell Tower’. Poem by Rainer Maria Rilke. Translated by Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows. Read by Joanna Macy. Directed and animated by Matt Huynh and Mila Nery.

2

Joanna Macy and Chris Johnstone, Active Hope: How to Face the Mess We’re In without Going Crazy (Novato, California: New World Library, 2012)

---

Thank you for reading the fourth issue of Seeds of a Second Renaissance.

---

For both seasoned travellers and those new to these shores, each edition offers a bite-sized exploration of keystone ideas and thinkers whose work you may wish to know more deeply.

(For curated events, opportunities, and resources from around the ecosystem, just skip to the end.)

Integral Theory: the basics - part 2

Let’s continue our very basic digest of Integral Theory. Last time, we introduced the AQAL (“All Quadrants, All Levels”) model, based on Ken Wilber’s synthesis of knowledge systems and wisdom traditions across history and cultures. We explored the “quadrants”: four irreducible perspectives to touch base with for a more thorough understanding of a given reality. Today, we’ll tackle “levels”: the Integral map of “holonic” human growth, which suggests hopeful possibilities for personal and societal evolution.

Levels: A Developmental Perspective on Human Consciousness, Cultures, and Systems

According to AQAL, throughout all quadrants, reality is composed of “holons” — whole entities in themselves, which are also part of larger wholes. Ascending “levels” represent holons of increasing complexity and entail new capacities. For example, within the interior-individual quadrant, psychological development is mapped across a spectrum from egoic to transpersonal awareness. Meanwhile in the exterior-collective quadrant, we might observe the development of social systems through stages of increasing complexity: from tribes to empires to mass democracies to global networks.

Integral “levels” are most commonly applied to human consciousness and culture — or, psychological, spiritual, social, and moral growth. Here, levels progress from: egocentric (self-focused) through ethnocentric (in-group) to worldcentric (care for all humanity) and ultimately kosmocentric (transpersonal union with manifest and unmanifest reality). (The model has roots in Jean Gebser’s Structures of Consciousness.)

In the Integral framework, each stage of development “transcends and includes” the previous. Ideally therefore, higher levels do not reject or dismiss the insights or values of earlier ones as inferior — but build upon and integrate them. For example, a toddler is less (cognitively) complex than a grown adult, but we don’t consider them inferior — simply at an earlier developmental stage.

This principle can be harder to observe in a stage model of cultural evolution. History is littered with examples of more complex cultures that have treated different modes of social organisation as inferior. Integral might respond that such an attitude represents an advance in social organisation (lower right quadrant) to a higher stage of complexity, while worldview (lower left) remains at a less developed (ethnocentric) level. The tension reinforces the value of understanding which quadrant we’re operating in.

Integral isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, and the framework is often criticised for its too-linear or tidy picture of human transformation. Wilber himself points out that in reality “development is a very messy affair! The basic levels or basic waves simply represent some of the more noticeable bends in the great River of Life, nothing more, noth­ing less.”1

Integral theorists also emphasise that “the map is not the territory” — and that any scale of measurement is somewhat arbitrary. Nonetheless, Wilber distilled over 100 models of human consciousness from psychology and spiritual traditions into his schema. As maps go, few are this ambitious or holistic.

Why do levels matter?

Understanding levels can help us to navigate conflicts and foster empathy. For example, our deepest values and identities reflect levels of both individual and cultural development. Where painful conflict arises between political groups, it’s often possible to identify clashes between different levels of worldview. Awareness of quadrants and levels can help us to understand the values of others and even integrate polarities.

Lastly, levels offer a hopeful vision of future cultural evolution towards awakened consciousness and widening circles of care — rooted in centuries of contemplative and psychological teachings, across many different cultures and traditions.

In our time of intense polarisation, an Integral understanding could be vital: supporting real appreciation of differing perspectives, expanding our capacity to hold polarities as part of rich and complex systems, and reminding us of ever-present potential for human transformation.

Explore the field of inner-led change…

A selection of events, opportunities, and resources recommended by readers, friends, and allies in the arena of inner-led regeneration.

👋 Help us to showcase the best opportunities and resources: please suggest items to include in the Second Renaissance forum thread.

Upcoming Events & Courses

Summer Course: Integral Theory for Idiots with Layman Pascal

📍Online 📅 6-27 July 2025 💸 Early Bird tickets available now for €280

“There are three kinds of people in this world. There are many folks who feel they don’t know enough about Integral Theory, some folks who still think it’s the best thing ever, & an unknown number of integral cynics who think it is limited, flawed, misleading, and already outdated. Integral Theory for Idiots is for all three types. Layman Pascal will put you all in a blender together — framing the discussion as part of the general field of developmental metatheories, liminal culture & adaptation to the new bio-informational planetary situation. This carnivalesque educational and participatory journey will be part (lively) introduction, part (dancing) critique, and part (enthusiastic) appreciation.”

UTOK Conference on Consciousness

📍Online 📅 25-27 April 2025 💸 $0 to $25

“UTOK, the Unified Theory of Knowledge, is a groundbreaking naturalistic worldview for the 21st century, developed by Professor Gregg Henriques. Professor John Vervaeke, a world-renowned cognitive scientist, has pioneered a cutting-edge theory of cognitive agency known as recursive relevance realization. Together, they have developed Extended Naturalism, a framework that offers a transformative understanding of emergence, ontology, epistemology, phenomenology, and human psychology …. Join them and other leading thinkers at this conference to explore this potentially revolutionary perspective.”

European Bildung Days 2025: How to Promote Bildung

📍Hamar, Norway 📅 8-10 May 2025. N.B. Ticket sales close on 25 April. 💸 Standard ticket: €269. Concessions for students.

Conference, workshops and public event hosted by the Global Bildung Network: “How do we promote bildung? How do we educate so that we promote students’ bildung? How do we promote awareness about bildung in society? Particularly among politicians and other decision makers? Join us for some thought provoking, creative, and festive European Bildung Days in Hamar with other bildung professionals, semi-professionals, volunteers, researchers, and perhaps even some politicians.”

Resilience Rucksack Workshop

📍Online 📅 7 May, 3-4:30pm or 8 May 2025, 12:30-2pm BST 💸 Free taster sessions

From our friends at The Resilience Project: “Our Resilience Rucksack workshop is one of our most popular offers - exploring themes of climate anxiety, wellbeing and resilience. … Learn how to face eco anxiety head-on and leave with tools that will help you to stay grounded, avoid burnout, and keep showing up for the planet.”

Jobs & Opportunities

Volunteer at Inner Development Goals Summit 2025

📍Stockholm, Sweden 📅 15-17 October 2025

“The Summit is the annual flagship event of the IDGs. It highlights best practice stories from business, governments, civil society & academia on how inner skills can lead to outer change and explores tools & methods on how to develop these skills individually, in teams and as organisations. The Summit aims to create a lived experience of the IDGs that will foster a feeling of inspiration, hope & community and shift the narrative on sustainability and human development. … IDG Volunteers play a critical role in ensuring the success of the event and creating a welcoming and engaging atmosphere for all attendees.”

Youth 4 Climate: Call for Solutions 2025

📍Open to youth from 159 countries and territories covered by UNDP 📅 Apply by 26 May 2025

“Y4C’s Call for Solutions is a global innovation challenge for Youth and Youth-led organizations working on climate action focused projects. The Call aims to fund new and existing youth-led solutions that are ready to implement or scale, and to support the further development of young people's ideas and projects by providing relevant learning opportunities with the support of partners. … In 2025, the Youth4Climate Call for Solutions launches its third round of funding opportunities for young people aged 18 to 29 and youth-led entities. Applicants to the Call for Solutions can request up to USD 30,000 in seed funding.”

2025 Ecoversities Residencies Program – Open Call for Proposals

📍Multiple 📅 Apply by 30 April 2025

“The Ecoversities Residencies Program is a relational, co-learning experience. Through this program, the PER Circle offers seed funds and companionship for your journey, providing ongoing support before, during, and after your residency. We invite members of the Ecoversities Alliance and participants of an Ecoversity (community, organization, project or collective that is member of Ecoversities Alliance), to immerse themselves in a different Ecoversity context, cross-pollinate knowledge, and strengthen the Ecoverse fabric by engaging deeply with local practices, wisdom, and communities. This is an opportunity to co-create meaningful experiences that go beyond a temporary visit and instead foster long-term relationships.”

The Commons: General Manager

📍San Francisco, California, USA 📅 Apply by 15 May 2025

“The Commons is a community-based “Fourth Place” that catalyzes each member’s path to authenticity, full self-expression, and aliveness - rooted in the belief that community is essential to that journey. …We’re now seeking a General Manager to take on day-to-day leadership—operationalizing and expanding the Commons, and ensuring it remains both soulful and sustainable as it grows.”

Climate Psychology Alliance: Communications Coordinator (Temporary, part-time)

📍UK-based 📅 Apply by 5pm on 25 April 2025

Climate Psychology Alliance (CPA) is “a membership organisation whose purpose is to explore psychological responses to the climate crisis in order to strengthen relationships and resilience for a just future.” They are looking for “a new temporary communications coordinator for four months” to “lead on our internal and external communications and administration”.

Second Renaissance

*“Second Renaissance” is one way of framing current times as a period of civilisational crisis and potential renewal – and of pointing to an ecosystem of people and organisations working to catalyse the emergence of a new, regenerative, cultural paradigm. If you recognise terms like metacrisis, Metamodern, Regenerative, Liminal Web, Game B, Integral, conscious evolution and so on, then you’re on familiar ground. Explore the core thesis and theory of change in more detail here.

🌱 Help us to plant seeds of a Second Renaissance. If you want to support the movement, you can:

• 💬 Share your thoughts in the comments section

• 🎁 Share this newsletter with a friend

• 💸 Become a paid subscriber

Subscribe now

Finally, we leave you with some —

Art to nourish the soul…

A poem by Irish poet David Whyte (1955-present), which invites us into the beauty of vulnerability and opening to intimate contact with the world.

This is an excerpt from ‘Intimate Invitation’:

… But come here now,

into the arms

of the waiting world,

put down

that heavy burden

you have carried so long,

and rest

from the hard,

every day labour

of not hurting,

or not feeling,

or not hearing,

or not saying

or seeing.

Stop keeping

the tears at bay.

Give it all up,

just come home.

Listen to a beautiful reading of the whole poem by David Whyte on this episode of The Point of Relation podcast with Thomas Hübl [19:05-22:08].

1

Wilber, Ken (2000). Integral Psychology: Consciousness, Spirit, Psychology, Therapy. Boston & London: Shambhala Publications. p.7.

---

Thank you for reading the third issue of Seeds of a Second Renaissance.

---

For both seasoned travellers and those new to these shores, each edition offers a bite-sized exploration of keystone ideas and thinkers whose work you may wish to know more deeply.

Too early in the day for Integral Theory? Skip to the bottom for curated events, opportunities, and resources from around the ecosystem.

Integral Theory: the basics

This month, a very basic digest of Integral Theory — among the most pervasive ideas in the field of inner-led change. Start digging anywhere in the Second Renaissance landscape, and it won’t be long until you scrape a bit of Integral – explicit or otherwise. This philosophical map empowers us to recognise multiple dimensions of information as we make sense of the world around us, offering an antidote to reductive analysis and siloed thinking.

Developed by American philosopher and polymath Ken Wilber in the late 20th century, Integral Theory offers a multi-perspectival, cross-cultural framework for understanding human potentials, complex issues, and possibilities for transformation. At its heart is the All Quadrants, All Levels (AQAL) model.

Quadrants: Four irreducible perspectives on reality

AQAL’s ‘four quadrants’ represent four ‘ways of looking’ necessary for a fuller understanding of a given reality. The quadrants sit on two intersecting axes, representing fundamental classes of phenomena. The horizontal axis spans the interior, subjective world (left side) to the exterior, objective world (right side); while the vertical axis spans individual reality (upper quadrants) to collective reality (lower quadrants).

Seeking understanding in all four quadrants helps us to gain a richer picture of complex issues: each quadrant contains unique information which can’t be fully understood through the lenses and methodologies of the others. For example, an empirical, objective lens can’t grasp subjective human experiences, such as emotions or states of consciousness, without reducing them to externally observable factors. Yet, the quadrants all interrelate and impact each other to constitute manifest reality.

Integral sheds light not only on the here-and-now, but also on the trajectories of complex systems over millennia. Importantly, much work in the Second Renaissance landscape understands that our current civilisation disproportionately emphasises the upper right quadrant, flattening other essential dimensions – such as intangible value and rich inner world experiences — to objective materiality.

As Integral thinkers are keen to remind us, the map is not the territory—and even a map that aims at multi-perspectival understanding can’t avoid certain biases and reductivism! Nonetheless, it may help us to seek a more comprehensive understanding of ourselves and our complex crises, which might inform more sensitive and impactful interventions.

To come: We’ll discuss the “levels” part of AQAL in next month’s edition.

Integral, out there

Integral theory is a foundational influence for the Second Renaissance thesis and theory of change; and for inner-led change organisations across a wide range of sectors: from transformative education and leadership training (e.g. Pacific Integral; Trans4m), to politics (e.g. Integrale Politik), to urban design (e.g. Integral City), to governance (e.g. The Hague Center). Integral Theory and integral studies itself is a live and advancing field (e.g. see California Institute for Integral Studies; Institute for Integral Studies Freiburg; Integral European Conference). While explicit acknowledgement varies, Integral forms a springboard for much thought in the arena of Metamodernism.

Explore the field of inner-led change…

A selection of events, opportunities, and resources recommended by friends and allies in the arena of inner-led regeneration.

👋 Help us to showcase the best opportunities and resources: please suggest items to include in the Events, Offers & Links or Jobs Board WhatsApp channels.

Upcoming Events

Integral Altruism Summit

📍UK, tbc 📅 Summer 2025 🔗Application form N.B. Soft deadline: 23 March

“This summer, we will hold the first integral altruism summit, probably somewhere in the UK. The goal is to seed a new network of those excited about integrating effective altruism with other changemaking paradigms, and applying that understanding to doing the most good. This will be a chance to collectively decide what integral altruism is, and set plans in action to improve the world in an integral way.”

Integral Altruism is a budding new network, inspired by Integral Theory, which aims to integrate new worldviews into Effective Altruism. They meet monthly in London.

Unconference on Metacrisis & the Second Renaissance

📍Harvard Graduate School of Education, Cambridge, USA 📅 2-3 May 2025 🔗 https://secondrenaissance.net/unconference

“The metacrisis is a symptom of something deeper—a world in transition. The Second Renaissance is about what comes next: new ways of knowing, new ways of organizing, new ways of being. This is an in-person gathering bringing together key voices from the metacrisis, second renaissance, metamodern, and liminal communities to meet, connect, and create together. It is part of the larger Human Transformation in a time of Metacrisis event, a two-day convening exploring education and transformation in the face of the metacrisis.”

School of Wise Innovation Spring Cultivator

📍Online 📅 3 April-12 June 2025 🔗 https://wiseinnovation.school/2025-spring-cultivator

“Virtual learning and practice journey for founders and changemakers exploring how to live, work, and create with greater harmony. Cultivating healthy soil for ourselves and our visions to flower. We'll be refining our lives and projects together, while learning from experts on navigating this moment of great change.”

Second Renaissance Project Update

📍Online 📅 1 April 2025 🔗 /https://lu.ma/qvdqtwvv

“​Join us to learn more about the Second Renaissance Initiative - where we've come from, where we're going and how you can get involved!”

Jobs & Opportunities

The Fifth Element (Club of Rome) - Communications Officer

📅 Apply by 6 April 2025 🔗 Job post

“The Fifth Element, a programme of The Club of Rome, seeks to build unique initiatives to reframe human development for wellbeing on a healthy planet. By asking new questions about the crises humanity is facing, and by exploring and facilitating the recognition of blind spots, we aim to catalyse the emergence of a human revolution, through a shift in mindsets. The team is searching for a communications specialist who will be responsible for designing, producing and managing a variety of communications materials and channels related to The Fifth Element and related projects.”

Advaya - Seeking pitches and submissions for 2025

🔗 Submissions form

“We are seeking contributions that are evocative, thoughtful and in line with advaya's mission. Rather than focusing on breaking headlines, we aim to offer our readers rich, context-driven narratives that explore the complexities of our world from diverse, nuanced perspectives. Whether in the form of essays, interviews, op-eds, poetry, photography, or multimedia, we are interested in hearing stories that challenge, expand, and inspire.” Relevant topics span: Ecology & Science; Society & Culture; History & Mythology; Philosophy & Psychology; Wisdom & Spirituality.

Climate Youth Resilience - Ambassadors for Inner-Led Change

📅 Apply by 14 April 2025 🔗 Info & Application

“We're recruiting 10 Ambassadors for Inner-Led Change from the Europe region (as well as 10 each in SWANA, LATAM, North America, Asia-Pacific, and Sub-Saharan Africa). This is a 6-month (free) training program for youth leaders aged 18-35 who are active in climate or community resilience organisations.”

Second Renaissance

*“Second Renaissance” is one way of framing current times as a period of civilisational crisis and potential renewal – and of pointing to an ecosystem of people and organisations working to catalyse the emergence of a new, regenerative, cultural paradigm. If you recognise terms like metacrisis, Metamodern, Regenerative, Liminal Web, Game B, Integral, conscious evolution and so on, then you’re on familiar ground. Explore the core thesis and theory of change in more detail here.

🌱 Help us to plant seeds of a Second Renaissance. If you want to support the movement, you can:

• 💬 Share your thoughts in the comments section

• 🎁 Share this newsletter with a friend

• 💸 Become a paid subscriber

Subscribe now

Finally, we leave you with some…

Art to nourish the soul

A poem by Rilke, which spurs us listen to our souls and live from the depths of our wholeness. Listen to the poem read by Joanna Macy here or read it below.

Thank you for reading the second issue of Seeds of a Second Renaissance.

Whether you’re a seasoned traveller or new to these shores, each edition offers a bite-sized exploration of keystone ideas — and thinkers whose work you may wish to know more deeply. You’ll also find curated events, opportunities, and resources below.

Dip into… the ideas of Donna Haraway

This month, a brush with Donna Haraway: a leading interdisciplinary scholar in the fields of science and technology studies, feminist theory, animal studies, and environmental criticism. Haraway’s invitation to “stay with the trouble” and cultivate “response-ability” is relational medicine in our time of alienation and crisis.

“In urgent times, many of us are tempted to address trouble in terms of making an imagined future safe, of stopping something from happening that looms in the future, of clearing away the present and the past in order to make futures for coming generations. Staying with the trouble does not require such a relationship to times called the future. In fact, staying with the trouble requires learning to be truly present, not as a vanishing pivot between awful or edenic pasts and apocalyptic or salvific futures, but as mortal critters entwined in myriad unfinished configurations of places, times, matters, meanings.”

~ Staying with the Trouble (2016), p.1

In The Companion Species Manifesto (2003), Haraway argues that identity and being itself are formed through “co-constitutive relationships in which none of the partners pre-exist the relating, and the relating is never done once and for all” (p.12). This is the process of becoming-with – core to a worldview which sees that everything exists in relationship. Relationship, moreover, of multispecies interdependence: “entangle[ment in] a motley crowd of differentially situated species, including landscapes, animals, plants, microorganisms, people, and technologies” (When Species Meet, 2008, p.41).

Within this entanglement, the presence that Haraway urges us to cultivate is a radical inhabiting of our damaged world; at home in “the trouble of living and dying” (Staying with the Trouble, p.2.). In their future orientation, both hope and despair are incompatible with real attunement to the senses and the world around us – “to material semiotics, to mortal earthlings in thick copresence” (p.4).

Thus Haraway makes the case for response-ability – an agentic response to our crises that begins with our entanglement in them. Renouncing ‘human exceptionalism’ and becoming sensitive to others and the more-than-human world.

Response-ability starts with our present situation and surroundings; sensing into what’s needed, and preoccupied by neither hope nor despair. Not only do these states limit our connection to the present, but they also limit our agency. Whether we trust blindly that somehow everything will be okay, or believe that we’re doomed, it’s too easy to do nothing.

Beyond this paralysis, Haraway invites us to meet troubled reality just as it is, coming face-to-face with loss, death and, importantly, grief. She writes: “Grief is a path to understanding entangled shared living and dying; human beings must grieve with, because we are in and of this fabric of undoing” (Staying with the Trouble, p.39).

To appreciate ‘becoming-with’ entails grieving our impacts in our shared world and on our fellow inhabitants.

Inspired by Haraway, we might enquire:

How do we remain present to our times, not grasping for another time or place when things get knotty?
How do we avoid overwhelm, to remain responsive to the troubles we’re entangled in?
How do we assume responsibility in the sense of accountability – and cultivate our capacity to respond?

The influence of Donna Haraway is ever present in emerging work for inner-led change – both implicit and explicit. A residency series exploring collective and personal awakening for troubled times chose the name Sympoeisis; likewise a topic of enquiry for artist Cheryl Hsu. Meanwhile, Kainos is the new media platform from Rebel Wisdom’s Alexander Beiner; while Jamie Bristow and Rosie Bell seek to inhabit the “messy middle” between optimism and despair.

Explore the field of inner-led change…

A selection of events, opportunities, and resources recommended by friends and allies in the arena of inner-led regeneration.

👋 Help us to showcase the best opportunities and resources: suggest items to include by posting in the Events, Offers & Links or Jobs Board WhatsApp channels.

Upcoming Events

Limicon 2025: A Co-Created Convention for a Changing World

📍Online 📅 5 March-2 April 2025 🔗 https://www.limicon2025.com/

“Limicon is the fan convention of the liminal web, attracting practitioners, artists, sense-makers, ritual crafters, philosophers, community weavers, experimenters, builders, and enthusiasts in and around the liminal, integral, metamodern, game b, bildung, regen, and related scenes.”

Participants can propose and host sessions. Sessions scheduled so far include: Metamodern Spirituality Says What?; Sacred Ecology Experience; Dazed & Confused Trump 2.0; and Connectabowl: Community Tending. There's also the opportunity to get involved with shaping Limicon by joining their co-creation calls.

Education for Flourishing in a Time of Polycrisis and Second Renaissance

📍Harvard University, Cambridge, USA 📅 2 May 2025

“A transformative 1-day event focused on bridging education, systems change, and human flourishing. Together, we will explore how we can cultivate the capacities needed to respond to the polycrisis and catalyze a Second Renaissance.”

Life Itself Spring Gathering

📍Bergerac, France 📅 27 March-6 April 2025 🔗 Event page

“Connect with others who are interested in topics such as: paradigmatic social change; contemplative, relational, and embodied practices; community weaving; inner development; alternative economics and politics… and more…”.

A weekend Open Space gathering followed by a Community Co-working Week. You can join just for the weekend or for the full 10 days.

Opportunities

Climate Majority Project - Campaign Manager and Administrative Assistant

📅 Apply by 28 Feb 2025 🔗 Job post

Our friends at the Climate Majority Project (CMP) are hiring for two roles that will “help to shape and execute a campaign that aims to bring adaptation to the top of the UK’s national agenda.” The CMP encourages citizens from all walks of life to recognise their power and take meaningful, effective climate action, including measures for psycho-social resilience.

LEAP Program for Regenerative Leadership

📅 Apply by 28 Feb 2025 🔗 Details and Application form

Our friends at Oikos International are offering this free programme in skills for regenerative leadership. Eligibility: students and postdoctoral researchers enrolled in a Higher Education institution. The programme runs April-September 2025 and covers topics such as navigating conflict, healthy boundaries, and values alignment.

Second Renaissance Collective

📍Harvard University, Cambridge, USA 🔗 Apply to join

Boaz Feldman and Patricia Mou have co-initiated “The Second Renaissance Collective”: a group at Harvard University dedicated to waking up and showing up. The group meets monthly in person (Cambridge/Harvard) to read texts, reflect and practise (meditate) together. Some thinkers or traditions which may feature include: Charles Eisenstein, John Vervaeke, Vanessa Machado de Oliveira, Ken Wilber, Buddha, Joanna Macy, Zak Stein and more.

Inspiring Links & Resources

Kainos: A new media platform for imagining new futures

Kainos is a new alternative media platform launched by Alexander Beiner (co-founder of Rebel Wisdom). Kainos “tells stories that help people make sense of a time of upheaval and imagine new futures”. They “create films, articles and experiences that blend cultural sensemaking with hope, imagination and impact” and “explore popular culture, philosophy, psychology, alternative economics and spirituality in an ongoing inquiry in which Kainos members are active participants”.

Iain McGilchrist: New Substack

Earlier this month, Iain McGilchrist, an influential thinker in the emerging inner-led change space, launched a Substack. Iain McGilchrist is a psychiatrist, literary scholar, philosopher and neuroscientist known for his seminal texts The Master and His Emissary (2009) and The Matter with Things (2021). His first post, ‘Metaphors can make you blind’, is about “when we can’t ‘see’ what we can’t see”.

Second Renaissance

*“Second Renaissance” is one way of framing current times as a period of civilisational crisis and potential renewal – and of pointing to an ecosystem of people and organisations working to catalyse the emergence of a new, regenerative, cultural paradigm. If you recognise terms like metacrisis, Metamodern, Regenerative, Liminal Web, Game B, Integral, conscious evolution and so on, then you’re on familiar ground. Explore the core thesis and theory of change in more detail here.

🌱 Help us to plant seeds of a Second Renaissance. If you want to support the movement, you can:

• 💬 Share your thoughts in the comments section

• 🎁 Share this newsletter with a friend

• 💸 Become a paid subscriber

Subscribe now

Finally, we leave you with some…

Art to nourish the soul

Cat’s Cradle / String Theory by Baila Goldenthal speaks to the webs of interdependence in which we live: entangled, in play, and in collaboration.

Thank you for reading the inaugural issue of Seeds of a Second Renaissance.

This newsletter Seeds of a Second Renaissance is a curated, digestible, and accessible newsletter for anyone seeking to learn, participate, or collaborate in these areas — or, more broadly, in inner-led transformation for radically wiser societies.

For more about the Second Renaissance see https://secondrenaissance.net/.

Who is it for?

This newsletter is for anyone interested in inner-led transformation for radically wiser societies.

It's for you if you're new to terms such as metacrisis, regenerative, integral, and teal — and you want to discover and explore the emerging "Second Renaissance" ecosystem.

It's also for you if you're familiar with some of these ideas — and you want to deepen your knowledge, connect the dots, and participate more in the ecosystem.

What’s inside?

Inside each issue, you’ll find:

• Summaries of key ideas and practices

• Recommended articles, podcasts, books, and videos

• Events and collaboration opportunities

You can expect topics such as: inner development, systems change, relational practices, contemplative activism, soulcraft, new social paradigms, somatics, consciousness, and cultural evolution...

... and thinkers such as: Joanna Macy, Bayo Akomolafe, Ken Wilber, Donna Haraway, adrienne maree brown, Thich Nhat Hanh, Otto Scharmer, and John Vervaeke…

Subscribe now

Suggest items to include

We welcome suggestions for items to include — events, jobs, articles and resources. Please share your suggestions in the the Events, Offers & Links WhatsApp channel or in the Jobs Board WhatsApp channel.

If you’d like to get more involved, e.g. on the writing or editorial side, send us a message in the Get Involved WhatsApp group introducing yourself and sharing any initial ideas you have! We’ll be happy to chat :)

Join the movement 🌄

Help us plant seeds of a Second Renaissance. If you want to join in you can:

• 💬 Share your thoughts in the comments section

• 🎁 Share this newsletter with a friend

• 💸 Become a paid subscriber

On Tuesday 28th January we are launching the Art of the Second Renaissance Manifesto and Magazine. This live online event will be co-hosted by artist and Life Itself co-founder Sylvie Barbier, Peter Limberg from the STOA and Schuyler Brown futurist, facilitator, healer and writer. Participation is free and all are welcome!

We look forward to having you and celebrating a new creative dawn. 🎉 🌅🎉

Use the below button to register for the event.

Register Now

Or read the full article here:

Life Itself

Launch of Art of the Second Renaissance Manifesto & Magazine: Tuesday 28th January

Next Tuesday 28th January we are launching the Art of the Second Renaissance Manifesto and Magazine. This live online event will be co-hosted by artist and Life Itself co-founder Sylvie Barbier, Peter Limberg from the STOA and Schuyler Brown futurist, facilitator, healer and writer…

Read more

a year ago · 6 likes · Sylvie Barbier and Lauren Wigmore

The Second Renaissance Barn Raising, held online on Tuesday, December 3 2024, was a vibrant four-hour gathering designed to harness the collective creativity of the community. Inspired by the tradition of barn raisings - where neighbors would come together to build a shared structure - this event invited participants to co-create meaningful resources for navigating the Second Renaissance space. In this Barn Raising we focused on the Write Your Own Postcards activity, which emerged out of discussions within the Second Renaissance Curators team around crafting travel guides, archetypes, and personal stories to support individuals in finding their way within and around the ecosystem.

Write your own postcards

This simple yet impactful activity brought together new and familiar faces, weaving creativity and fun into the development of useful and accessible nuggets of information. Using a straightforward template, attendees shared personal knowledge and experiences related to areas, organizations, practices, and people within or around the Second Renaissance Ecosystem Map. The goal of the event was to foster connections among those present and to support individual journeys into and within the space, for those who discover and read the postcards.

In total, we had 30 attendees and 48 postcards created. Participants ranged from artists and technologists to facilitators, researchers, healers, students, and thinkers. The event’s collaborative energy created ripple effects of enthusiasm, as participants wrote and designed their postcards, and invited others to join, contributing to a dynamic and inclusive flow.

The event followed a structured yet fluid format. Attendees began in the Postcard Room, where they could craft a postcard, then either create another or move to the Weaving Room for light discussions and connection. While the weaving space didn’t delve deeply into sensemaking as initially anticipated, it served as a gathering point for sharing ideas and re-energizing before returning to postcard creation.

What's next?

We’re aware of the want and need to keep this momentum going, to turn these postcards into a useful offering and connect them to wider resources, and to continue to run with the energy that was present in the event.

Our current, work-in-progress, plans are:

1. Transferring postcards to the Wiki: This will create an interconnected web of resources for wider accessibility.

2. Generating more postcards: Through an asynchronous activity to allow ongoing contributions of postcards to the Wiki.

3. Evolving the purpose: The use and development of the postcards will be shaped organically through the upcoming workspace calls.

To support, a Wiki Collaboration Club will commence with calls in January 2025, helping participants familiarise themselves with the Second Renaissance Wiki and contribute ongoingly to build this important knowledge base.

The spirit of the Second Renaissance

The event exemplified the power of community: highlighting collective wisdom, creating new resources, and supporting individual journeys through shared action. It reinforced the immense value of stepping into collaborative spaces, as participants testified:

“I'm delighted to see how Life Itself and the Second Renaissance hosts are able to create highly generative, warm, spaces. It was easy to drop into flow and participate all while making new connections and rekindling existing connections. Looking forward to more!”

“Raising barns brings community together in times of need, making work fun and amazing. In this case, mapping "the space" and connecting with people and projects in an intentional way. The feeling I left with was, "I'm not alone, there are other brilliant people doing amazing things and I want to get involved!"

Stay involved

Keep an eye out for updates and opportunities to contribute in the new year. We’ll be kicking off with our Second Renaissance Connection Calls on Tuesday 7th January.

Still want to contribute to the postcards? We will soon be sharing a video on how you can participate asynchronously and add your postcard to the growing collection.

Visit our Second Renaissance Wiki here.

And finally, for questions or ideas, reach out via the Second Renaissance Discord channel or email Lauren at hello@lifeitself.org.

Register Here

What: Second Renaissance Barn Raising 

​When: Tuesday 3rd December at 530pm - 930pm CET / 830am-1230pm PST / 1130am-330pm EST

​Where: Online - Zoom

​Who: You! Anyone in the space who wants to directly contribute to a collaborative event to co-create resources for the community

What is a barn raising?

A barn raising is a community effort to create something meaningful and useful together.

Historically, it was a gathering where a community cooperatively erected the framework of a neighbor's barn, typically followed by a celebration.

In our case, it’s a work party to harness collective wisdom and experiences, building resources that serve our community and help people navigate the Second Renaissance space.

What to expect

The Second Renaissance Curators team will host a 4-hour barn raising event on Zoom. 

It’s all about tapping into your lived experiences to craft “postcards from your learning journey” that reflect the diversity and richness of our group and the space. 

• Flexibility: Join us for the whole event or part of it, as your schedule allows. 

• Engagement: A short video introduction will be shared beforehand to get you up to speed.

• Creation: Work together in small groups or individually to contribute your ideas in a lightly-structured, creative way.

Core Activity: Write Your Own Postcard

Using a simple template with room for creativity, Write Your Own Postcard invites you to contribute personal knowledge and experiences tied to areas, organizations, practices, and people within or generally aligned with the Second Renaissance Ecosystem Map.

What You’ll Do

1. Create Postcards: Using templates with guiding questions, share your experiences, interests, and ideas. (Examples will be provided on the day.)

2. Connect: Find others with similar themes, and explore how your ideas intersect.

3. Contribute: Add your postcard to our growing resource pool. 

Your contributions will initially form the basis for quick, accessible information nuggets for newcomers to the space, or those who want to learn more about specific areas, supporting people’s journeys into or through the space, which can feel overwhelming or hard to navigate at times.

Over time, these postcards could evolve into guides, infographics, or social media resources.

Why Postcards?

Postcards are bite-sized and accessible. They are:

• Easy to create, read, and share.

• Perfect for collaborative spaces like wikis.

• Flexible: They can stand alone or be combined into larger resources.

• Creative: One side can feature an image or design if desired.

What This Means for You

• Express Your Unique Perspective: Your lived experience is valuable.

• Shape the Resource Hub: Help build a resource hub that will guide and inspire others.

• Find Your Community: Collaborate and connect with like-minded contributors.

• Have Fun: Get creative and work on this low-pressure, high-impact project.

FAQs

I’m very new to this space. Will I be able to contribute?
Yes! Sharing how you found us, your wants, and your guiding questions are just as valuable as contributions from someone who’s been in the space for 10 years. These postcards are for people like you.

I’m only available for part of the event. Can I still join?
Of course! Orient yourself with the pre-barn-raising introductory video and join us when you can. All contributions are welcome.

Who are the Curators Team?
The Second Renaissance Curators Team includes:

• Rufus Pollock, Co-Founder of Life Itself – Curatorial Lead

• Catherine Tran, Life Itself Research – Research Lead

• Danielle Johnson, Limicon – Onboarding Lead and Deputy Wiki Lead

• James Baker, Intentional Society – Curator and Social Designer

• Lauren Wigmore, Life Itself Communications – Communications Lead

• Simon Grant, Life Itself Senior Research Associate – Wiki Lead

• Sylvie Barbier, Co-Founder of Life Itself – Design and Narrative

James and Lauren will lead this project, supported by the rest of the team.

What happens to the information on the postcards?
All information submitted as part of this project will be open source. Please only share what you’re comfortable making public.

Can I invite others?
Yes, absolutely! The more, the merrier. Send them our lu.ma event link:

Register Here

If you have any questions in the meantime, contact Lauren at hello@lifeitself.org

Learn more about the Second Renaissance here.