What To Do About the Metacrisis with Nicholas Hedlund

In this episode of Hunger for Wholeness, Sr. Ilia Delio speaks with Nicholas Hedlund, PhD—a philosopher, metatheorist, and contemplative practitioner whose work explores spirituality, science, and worldview transformation.

Ilia begins with the simple question: What is metatheory? Nick traces the thread that drew him into big-picture thinking—an early dissatisfaction with surface-level responses to ecological crisis, and a deeper inquiry into root causes: who we take ourselves to be, what we take the natural world to be, and how our relationship to the sacred shapes the world we build. Together, Ilia and Nick explore the metacrisis (or polycrisis) as more than a collection of competing emergencies. 

ABOUT NICHOLAS HEDLUND

“Humanity is not suffering from a crisis of information but a crisis of integration.”

Nicholas Hedlund, Ph.D., is a philosopher, metatheorist, and contemplative practitioner whose work explores the intersection of spirituality, science, and worldview transformation. He is the director of Eudaimonia Institute and director of research at the Institute for Applied Metatheory, and serves as Editor-in-Chief of Integration: The Journal of Big Picture Theory and Practice.

Nicholas developed visionary realism, an integrative philosophical framework drawing from critical realism, integral theory, and complexity science to illuminate deeper structures of reality and help navigate the global metacrisis. He earned his Ph.D. from University College London, where he studied under Roy Bhaskar and Arthur Petersen, and he was also an exchange scholar at Yale University.

He is the author and editor of Metatheory for the Twenty-First Century and Big Picture Perspectives on Planetary Flourishing, and his work has appeared in peer-reviewed journals including Zygon and Environmental Science & Policy. He is currently completing two new books further developing visionary realism and its implications for civilizational transformation.

Alongside his scholarly work, Nicholas is an APPA-certified philosophical counselor and a spiritual director-in-training, supporting individuals in exploring meaning, inner transformation, and spiritual experience. A long-time contemplative practitioner and musician, he is deeply interested in the resonance between sound, consciousness, and human evolution.

Nicholas teaches in the Integral Noetic Sciences Department at the California Institute for Human Science, offering courses in integral philosophy, consciousness studies

On March 17, the Center for Christogenesis welcomes back the Rev. Dr. Hillary Raining for a webinar on Trauma, Transformation, and Christ-Wholeness. This conversation explores intergenerational trauma, Indigenous wisdom—including “blood memory”—and the integration of the Christian mystical path of healing toward deeper wholeness. Learn more and register at christogenesis.org/trauma.

Transcript

Robert: Welcome to Hunger for Wholeness. I'm Robert Nicastro. Today, Ilia interviews Nicholas Hedlund, a visionary philosopher and leading voice in the world of metatheory. Ilia begins by asking a foundational question. What is metatheory? And what drew Nick to it? From there, the conversation turns to the meta-crisis of our time and how we might respond to it. 

Ilia: We want to welcome this afternoon Dr. Nicholas Hedlund, a very provocative, integrative thinker who is now Executive Director of the Eudaimonia Institute and also associated with the Applied Metaphysics, Metaphysical Theory. Is that right? 

Nick: Institute of Applied Metatheory.  

Ilia: …Metatheory. All very, very interesting and very apropos areas for the work we're doing at the Center. So Nick's work very much aligns, I think, with our vision and our attempt also to construct an understanding of what's driving us and where we might be going. So Nick, I'm just going to just turn it over to you and maybe for the sake of our audience, our listeners, introduce yourself, what brought you into this area of metatheory and metaphysics? For a while we were in the post metaphysics phase, post structuralism and post foundational. So now we're back to the need for understanding what's undergirding or supporting the very basis of our life and the complexities of our lives. So let me hand it over to you and introduce yourself and tell us how you got here. 

Nick: Absolutely. Well, thanks so much for having me. It's a pleasure to be here. Yeah. So I'm Nick Hedlund. I'm the executive director of Eudaimonia Institute, as you said, also the director of research at the Institute of Applied Metatheory. And I also teach at the California Institute for Human Science in the Integral Noetic Sciences Department. Amongst other things, I'm also the editor-in-chief of a new journal called "Integration," in practice. So yeah, I've been doing this stuff for a couple of decades now. 

For me, a lot of it started with this, like a deep calling to understand the world's situation and like, what's really at the root of it. What are the root causes of this situation that we find ourselves in? I mean, my doorway was in a lot of ways through ecology and understanding the ecological crisis and climate change and this kind of thing. As I probed into those inquiries more in the beginning of my undergrad years, I was deeply dissatisfied with the kind of mainstream answers that I was getting around how these problems can be addressed. It just felt very clear to me that it was a kind of tinkering on the level of symptom and surface. And I was just deeply drawn to following this golden thread of this inquiry to like, what is really going on? Who do we take ourselves to be? Who do we take the natural world to be? What is our relationship to a sense of the sacred that undergirds the many crises that we see? 

So I think there was an intuition from very early on in my late teens, early of something like what I would later come to call the meta-crisis. Underneath the kind of cacophony and complexity of the many planetary crises that we see, whether we're talking about the ecological or the political and economic crises, the technological crises, the cultural breakdown, or this kind of psycho-spiritual crisis and the symptomology of the meaning crisis and this kind of thing, that underneath that there is a worldview crisis that is this kind of deep causal driver of all the other things that we see. address the situation on the level of worldview, will continue to sort of tinker with the symptoms and the poly-crisis notion of like the symptom layer of the world situation. There's a kind of cascading compounding effect and very much akin to like the Greek myth of Hercules slaying the Hydra, right? So when he encounters the Hydra and he tries to chop off one of the heads and, you kind of surface level way, their crises keep compounding and feeding back onto each other. But then if he can sort of penetrate to the heart of the matter, to the belly of the beast, if you will, to the worldview level, to the level of consciousness and meaning and spirituality and you know, the fundamental existential questions of who we take ourselves to be. 

So that worldview kind of level consists of an ontology, most fundamentally an epistemology and axiology, and there's different ways of breaking it down. I guess we could say a praxeology as well. But in that ontology, there's also, you can kind of break that down into a philosophical ecology or a view of what is nature, a theology or a view of what is the sacred? What is our relationship to the divine? What is the human, a philosophical anthropology? Who do we take ourselves to be? What is our collective self-understanding? So all that together, the kind of constellation of all those elements constitutes like a vision of reality, a view of the world. And that view of the world is the basis from which we design our institutions, our technologies, our social systems. It's the place that informs all our individual behaviors, et cetera. 

And so that's and we can also, we can kind of do a philosophical retroductive move where we actually look at, okay, a lot of times when we analyze the world situation on the level of like institutions, and that's very valid and important thing to do is say like, okay, and look, there's all these perverse incentive structures baked into the very structure of our capitalist world system and whatnot that are the problem. And a lot of people's analysis tends to stop there. You know, capitalism is the problem, or if we just could internalize the externalities or address these multipolar traps, then all of a sudden we'd have the resolution to our world situation. And I think that while doing work on that level is really important, I think it's still working at a deeper layer in the kind of stratification of the world. And so we need to go to that deeper layer of worldview, consciousness, et cetera. And from that place, if we can actually, in a sense, bring our worldview back into resonance with reality and identify those places where our worldview is out of resonance with reality, that's where we're really going to get traction on a deep level, on a level of root cause. 

Ilia: Honestly this is a breath of fresh air. You're probably the first person who has articulated the need for a renewed metaphysics that's constant. So that's how I teach actually. Without a big picture, we're just little people lost in a sea of stuff, you know. And the big picture, the worldview is how I begin a lot of my classes. You know, what is your worldview? How to understand the whole big picture. 

And the second is, in other words, developing principles of our existence that are consonant with nature. So there's just a whole slew of factors where as you well know, that these principles, well, first of all, they've shifted, certainly as our understanding of nature has shifted, but the systems that we're actually locked into have not shifted. And so a lot of these systems are built on just outdated principles. 

And I find that the human person today is really struggling to maintain existence with outdated principles systemically, and yet knowing that something needs to change. So the kind of superficial, I am completely on board as well with, we're too anthropocentric for one thing. We feel like if we solve these human problems of capitalism or racism or anything else-ism, that it's going to resolve our problems and we'll move into a positive direction. And I think the problems are just so much deeper as you pointed out, right? These are problems within a larger problem and it's sort of like a holistic or a much more embedded type of problem-ness that we're dealing with. And I think that, yeah, like you, that there is a need for renewed metaphysics. 

Now, let me ask you this because I'll tell you because where I'm coming from, so I mean, as you look in the ancients, that sense of religion, not in the institutional sense, but the sense of ultimate meaning, myth-making, that kind of cosmic religion that was really pervasive among the early Greek thinkers, was very much tied to how they conceived the world, whether it's Plotinus' one or Plato, or this kind of structuring of the world and where we fit into it. So I was just curious, does that play a factor for you in any way or religion or you use the word spirituality. And so I, you know. 

Nick: Yeah. You know, I had an interesting upbringing in that regard. I would say my family was essentially secular. And there was a kind of the inherited cultural backdrop of a Judeo-Christian worldview, but in a very light and secular way of like, oh yeah, we celebrate Christmas, but in that kind of more, more secular materialistic kind of way. But that said I think my mom is kind of a, a bit of a nature mystic. And if I really drew her out around her beliefs and her worldview, she does have actually answers there of like a sense of for her, the sacred is found in the natural world and through these experiences of sublime connection. 

Ilia: Right. 

Nick: with the natural world. And I think that rubbed off on me a lot as well. And then also just growing up and I felt really impacted in a powerful way by the land that I grew up on in Oregon in a suburb outside of Portland. And even though it was a suburb of Portland, it was just so wooded and just these amazing old Douglas fir trees and maples and all covered in moss. And there's something about growing up in that environment that I think also was itself a transmission of the sacred power of the natural world. 

So yeah, I think that was kind of the context and that also led to an experience when I was about nine of like really grokking death for the first time. And I remember that moment very clearly. There's this particular image that popped into my mind that I can still see, but it was just like, really this question really landing. I'm like, what does that mean that we're going to die? And so I remember that it's like, it really impacted me and I had to sit with that for a long time. And the fact that I didn't have a religious kind of upbringing was both really challenging for me because there was no simple answers that were given, but also very generative because it was like I had to cook in the existential kind of heat and tension that that produced. And that's part of, I think, what led me on my path to where I am now. It's like, okay, I really, really need to grapple with these questions and find out for myself what feels like truth for me. 

Ilia: Yeah, that's very, very interesting because when I listen to you, it sounds to me, so I take religion as a biological phenomenon. It's built into nature. There's a depth dimension to life. So being in nature the awe, the beauty, the goodness that nature to us and that feeling of oneness, those to me are all religious principles or they're all religious dynamics that are going on there. So I think for where I sit, the problem of how we have come into a metaphysical mess is actually the way religion was constructed in the institutions and packaged and dwindled down and precipitated into dogmas and canons and the do's and don'ts of everything and sort of the separation of mind and matter that led to a very kind of fractured of humanity in its own way. The deep fear of death, not just death, but hell or the fear of judgment or this fear of guilt and really unhealthy dynamics, quite honestly. And so I am interested in the way religion has undone us metaphysically because from a Catholic side that claims to have this lovely metaphysics of being which we all participate in. There's a primary cause and secondary cause. But our reality is anything like that. It's not that at all, actually. I worry about artificial metaphysics that have really overshadowed and probably distorted the reality of the world in which we actually live. 

Robert: If metaphysics has brought us to the edge of crisis, and yet cannot be abandoned, how might it be reawakened without deepening the damage? Ilyan asks how we can begin repairing and addressing the damage already done. From there, Nick clarifies what he means by the meta-crisis, or poly-crisis, and what meaningful responses might look like. 

Ilia: Can we both agree that we have a failure of metaphysics today that's undergirding the poly-crises of our times? 

Nick: Yeah, 100%. Yeah, I mean, and I didn't kind of speak to that explicitly previously, but like, yeah, worldview is kind of another way of saying metaphysics. You know, worldview is basically an ontology, even though you can break it down in those other components that I mentioned. It's basically an ontology, which is basically a metaphysics, right? And I think part of the understanding that I'm working with, it's come into more clarity through my years of study and inquiries that like metaphysics or ontology is actually flexible, you can't avoid it. It's inescapable, right? 

And so, like you said, it's like, there's always some kind of an understanding of truth and reality that's informing our lives. We can't move through the world as biological creatures without some kind of implicit understanding or map of reality or metaphysics, right? And so, then we're really talking about, if we can't escape metaphysics, it's mostly a question of like, how conscious is our metaphysics? How coherent is our metaphysics? How adequately does our metaphysics actually express and resonate with the structure of reality, right? You can approach this kind of question from different kind of different scopes, right? And you can start macroscopically sort of zoomed out and you can say, well, a lot of it has to do with our metaphysics is actually out of alignment with reality, out of resonance with reality, right? And then you can kind of keep zooming in and try and identify particular aspects of that. So that might be a sense that, well, the modern worldview and its kind of scientific materialism and physicalism and this sort of split between matter and spirit and this sense that interiority is not really real, consciousness isn't really real, and it's all just sort of meaningless, scurrying matter and the nihilism that follows from that. 

And so each of the world, the dominant worldviews, the traditional, modern, postmodern worldviews, have their strengths and like moments of like beauty, like these pearls that they've contributed to the kind of wisdom commons of humanity, but they also have aspects of them that are delusions, illusions, absences, like just aspects of reality that were just left out. So I think a lot of it is kind of zooming in and trying to identify what elements there do we need to preserve and what elements there need to be alchemized or transfigured or in some cases just fully negated as we kind of try and weave these different aspects of the various worldviews that are out there in our culture into a new worldview that's emerging at an integrated worldview, a meta-modern worldview, something that is coming on the other side of the postmodern critique. And we're starting to reconstruct a worldview that's integrative and honors the best moments in each of the prior worldviews. It says, look religion wasn't all bad, even though the dogma and the kind of ideology and the... 

Ilia: You need it, actually. 

Nick: Yeah, yeah, we absolutely need that. The sense of social solidarity and that sort of deep ethical commitment. This sense of like, we're in this together from life, and we're willing to die for the cause, to sacrifice our lives and devote our lives to the divine. Now a lot of that's been lost in the modern and postmodern world. And even as we've gotten into the sort of post-secular spiritual turn and the rise of the culture of contemporary spirituality, a lot of that's still been lost. And you have this kind of commodification and privatization of spirituality that keeps it like this sort of weekend workshop vibe. Yeah. Like, yeah, I signed up for this weekend workshop. That's a really different vibe than like, this is my community. This is my commitment for life. I'm willing to devote myself and even die if I have to for this higher purpose, this higher calling. 

That's one of the big questions that we're grappling with right now. You have this kind of bind where a lot of people are implicitly being offered these different worldviews, okay, you can have all the deep sense of community and security and solidarity and a kind of ethical, moral core that the traditionalist worldview and religions, institutions bring, but you're also going to have to deal with the dogma and the sort of narrow-mindedness and the other aspects of it that come with that and the rejection of reason and science, right? But for a lot of us, it's like, hey, that's not very tenable to reject science and reason. But then if you say, okay, we're going to reject religion and become fully scientific and secular, then you have that is materialistic worldview that kind of has a nihilistic key list to it. And that's not very satisfying either. Then we end up with this kind of narcissism and nihilism and this meaning crisis of like, well, we might as well just take a bunch of opioids or do a shooting. 

I mean, I'm being a little bit flippant, but you know, these are, I do think these are symptoms of this deeper, what John Vervaeke calls the meaning crisis, right? This disenchantment, what Weber called the disenchantment of the world, right? And the death, Nietzsche called the death of God, right? So in that scientific, secular worldview, that tends to lead to this deep void of meaning and purpose and deep social solidarity. So that's not a very good option either. So both of these things have their benefits and they have big, big weaknesses that are becoming increasingly untenable as the planet becomes more interconnected and complex. 

And then you have this sort of postmodern critique of both the modern and traditionalist worldview and the postmodern growing out of the French philosophical tradition, Derrida and Foucault and Lyotard and these folks and critiquing the traditional structures of religion that were already critiqued by the Enlightenment philosophers. And then also critiquing the modern project and mostly critiquing the modern project saying, yes, all this science and reason and rationality and progress and innovation is good and fine, but what about all the oppression, all the ways in which the modernist world system leaves people of color and women and et cetera oppressed, and the fact that it's totally unsustainable and we're destroying the very ecological substrate that sustains us. And then the critique of science as to some extent a power game and a language game and like, is this really truth? Are we really getting at the truth of the world? Or is this just a social construction that's meant to serve certain dominant interests and so on? And there's obviously a lot of truth in that perspective as well. 

I like the idea that the postmodern can also be understood as the most modern, or it's the kind of dialectical negative of modernity that doesn't really get outside of the fundamental worldview or ontological or metaphysical presuppositions of modernity. It's still sort of stuck inside a flat land, kind of flat ontology that conflates ontology and epistemology that doesn't really see the reality of interiority. That's also, it's sort of stuck in a deconstructive mode. the, yeah, this needs to be reconstructed— okay, we can critique all these things, but what are we going to do about it? What's the better world that we're going to build that's going to be better than modernity or better than the traditional world? And that's the project of what I call the integrative worldview, or we call it a meta modern worldview. It's transcending and including the best of the traditional and modern and postmodern worldviews and trying to weave them into a new synthesis that again, like there's a lot of alchemy that has to happen for that synthesis to happen. 

I think that's a point that gets overlooked sometimes. There's a lot of negative transfiguration. Like there's a lot that actually has to happen to retool those worldviews and identify where they have contradictions and absences, and then figure out how do we start to synthesize the best of those moments into a new worldview that can really speak to the core values and needs and moments of truth and beauty and goodness in each of those worldviews. And so I think that's a lot of the work we're doing, like at the Institute of Applied Metatheory and Eudaimonia Institute is like, well, what does this integrative worldview look like? And so I'm working on that both philosophically and metaphysically in terms of like, okay, let's get into it on that very detailed nitty gritty level of doing philosophical metatheory and whatnot, but also sociologically. 

We're also really interested in like, well, let's actually scan across the horizon of our global society right now and look at these different communities that are arguably embodying or expressing this integrative metamodern worldview. And try and see what they have in common and how we can appreciate the diversity in that group, because we're not, an important point here is that these worldviews are not kind of like monolithic and static worldviews. They're more like worldview families. So, I mean, for example, I would say you and I probably both have an integrative worldview, but that doesn't mean all our beliefs are the same. 

Like you have a whole different background and are steeped in tradition in a different way than I am. So it doesn't mean a kind of hegemony and monolithic agreement, but there's a broad resonance, right? And the way we're orienting to things and we can start to map that. The idea of the meta-crisis is actually meant to be very hopeful and empowering because it says, if you just look at the poly-crisis, just the symptom events of the world situation, it can be quite overwhelming. And there can be a lot of rationality to a pessimistic view. Like it doesn't look good for humanity, but I think if we with this lens, we can see that look underneath all that kind of intractable complexity and overwhelmingness that is in a lot of ways headed in the wrong direction. 

Ilia: Yeah. 

Nick: We can see that there is something that we can actually address in a powerful way on the level of worldview, right? And we can start to examine our own worldview. 

Ilia: Yeah. 

Nick: And look at our own assumptions and do our best to try and step into this emerging integrative meta-modern worldview and apply it in ourselves, in our own inner practice, in our own contemplation, in our relationships with other humans, in our relationship to the natural world, in our relationship to the sacred, right? And that for me is extremely hopeful because I think in that worldview, which is still emerging, it's not super clear what exactly the contours of that worldview are, but it holds, I think, the promise to potentially address crisis on a root causal level of ideology, right? And that's extremely exciting to me and I think that that is reason for hope. 

Ilia: We are actually working in very similar, in our own particular ways, but very similar paradigms. And so there is a deep resonance with what you're saying with our work at the center. One of the things with regard to the poly crisis and why a lot of people think on the day-to-day level, on the feet to the ground level, the world is falling apart and it seems very conflicted and there's no resolution to any of these problems that seem to be deepening. And so there is, I find among people, tremendous fear, a lot of anxiety, the kind of a struggle for survival mentality, that's it's eat or be eaten idea. And yet it because part of it is the news, the good news, you might say, of a larger worldview or an emerging new meta worldview that we're part of, that actually is taking place in and through our lives, is not known sufficiently in my view, because we tend to focus on the particular and we diagnose the particularities, and therefore we don't have a sense of something more, the universal, the whole, which we long for. 

A word I've used over the years is “hunger for wholeness,” which is the name of our podcast. I think you're actually right. 

I'm actually finishing up a book on the emergence of monotheism. I'm very interested in the question of shifts in large world views. So as we move from cosmotheism or pre-axial religions into monotheism and axial religion, which is where the human person as we've known that person basically emerged, It didn't really happen within a particular period of time, it was actually over a long span of time. And basically, I've been following the work of Jan Assmann, the German Egyptologist, in his book, The Price of Monotheism. There's a price for every shift, every major shift in worldview. There are things lost and there are things gained. And it's a much more organic and dynamic process where it's a constant and enfolding of new beliefs and new ideas, the death or the dissolution of some old beliefs as we move, say, from the many gods into the one God, for example, idea. We never really lost the many gods entirely. It's just that this one God kind of rose up, rose up not because it had anything to do the human person came into a higher level of reflective consciousness with a sense of self. And so the idea of the one God was in a sense reflective of the sense of the one self. 

And so a lot of the shifts that we're talking about here are deeply tied to the question of human evolution. And human evolution is not a straightforward path. I mean, it is very much the fact that we develop tools, we build things, they build us and we're in this ongoing journey of knowing, creating, imagining worlds that have never existed before and then those worlds changing us. And so that's where I find us today. And I think this whole process of shifting, because you mentioned the enlightenment and all that, that for a few hundred years, this idea of modernity and it had its benefits. That's really where science and technology really took off in that period. And yet there was a price. 

So for everything that emerges, there's a price to pay. But I do find us, yeah, and then the whole postmodern, the backlash against metaphysics, the idea that there's no overarching narrative. And that is a question I kind of had for you, but you answered it. Because one thing people resent is being kind of forged into one overarching narrative. Here's your metaphysics. And in fact, everyone, every local religion or every local person, we do have... 

So what's important here, if I understand you, Nick, correctly, is what's important is to be aware of a larger picture of a metaphysics, something that is more than just the immediate, this is where I walk and this is what I do and this is what I eat type thing, this is who I like and this is who I don't like, that there's a larger picture here. So I do think we are moving, because I think the principles of evolution can be very helpful in articulating or understanding this kind of shift that we find ourselves in, which I think will not take that long. In the past, it took long because the levels of information were less and the lines of communication were, they didn't have the internet basically. But I think AI and I think technology is just speeding up the ship that we find ourselves in. And it's more like, almost like bubbles if I were to think of like a constellation, like when you blow a bubble and you get all these little bubbles, when I hear you say integrative integrative metaphysics, it's like all these kind of little world views or little metaphysics bubbling together, but yet there's a hole there. 

Robert: Next time, Ilia asks Nick about the role of Teilhard de Chardin in his work and how the future shapes our metaphysics. As always, I'm Robert Nicastro. Thanks for listening.