How to See the Big Picture in a Post-Truth World with Nicholas Hedlund

In this 100th episode of Hunger for Wholeness, Sr. Ilia Delio continues her conversation with Nicholas Hedlund, PhD exploring what it means to seek coherence in a world shaped by fragmentation and acceleration.

Beginning with Teilhard de Chardin’s sense that the future is not simply ahead of us but mysteriously within the present, Ilia and Nick reflect on evolution as an unfinished process of becoming—one that calls for “unity in diversity,” not a monolithic consensus. Nick develops his concept of alethic resonance: truth as an attunement to reality that is participatory and transformative, not merely a set of propositions we “possess.” If reality is relational and dynamic, then truth is not something we control but something we learn to hear, honor, and live.

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 i

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 back. With this episode, we're celebrating 100 episodes of Hunger for Wholeness. Thank you to you, our listeners, for joining us over these past years. In this final episode of this season, Ilia continues her conversation with Nicholas Hedlund, reflecting on how he engages the thought of Teilhard, the role of the future in shaping our evolution, and what real change requires. Later, they explore whether better principles alone can overcome our resistance to change, the future of AI, and how Nick remains hopeful.

Ilia: Teilhard de Chardin, he did not really like the idea of a metaphysics. He certainly rejected metaphysics of being because he said, "It's not just that we exist, but we're becoming something." So his idea was a metaphysics of union or metaphysics of love. There's a dynamism, an energetic movement here that's taking place. And the term he used was hyperphysics, not metaphysics. It's that what binds us together is the future, that the future is our deepest reality together. So if there's anything meta about us, it's the future, according to Teilhard. 

So his idea of that we're all leaning on the future as our greatest reality, our sole support. And I'm wondering if what you're saying is very, in your own way, you're aligning, and This is what Teilhard himself was trying to articulate, that there's something here, a meta forming, but it's fighting the way that we're in this whole planetary life together. And it's not just humans. I mean, all the natural world, animal life, plant life, star life, and it's like a dynamic interweaving web of life. So it doesn't exist, it's existing. It's coming into existence. And I think that's where we kind of went wrong in the sense that it was like, here we are, from our religious perspective, it was like, here we are, God's there, we're here, this is good, this is bad. And it's like, that's out there, that thinking is really, that's like yesterday before yesterday. And so I think complexity is one of the best scientific terms in the sense of the dynamism of relationality that increases information across all these multiple levels. And I think that is, to me, that just corresponds to Teilhard's idea of hyperphysics, that we're forming something together. And maybe we won't arrive at a new metaphysics. Maybe the arrival will be the awareness of the dynamism of ever interacting on ever deeper especially in an AI world. 

Nick: Mm-hmm. Yeah, beautiful. There's a lot there, really. I mean, I think it is a really important point that when we talk about a new metaphysics or a new worldview, we mean a kind of integrative pluralism, right? So it's a unity in diversity, which that's one of the keynote phrases of the integrated worldview. It's like, we're not interested in hegemonic, monolithic unity. We're interested in how do you interweave a plurality of perspectives, ideas, communities into a coherent tapestry, right? A mosaic. So that's, I think, that's one really important piece. And there also is this kind of notion that I'm not sure that there is any kind of static telos to the cosmos, like some kind of final endpoint where it's like, "Oh yeah, we've arrived." But I do think there are like cosmic or ontological attractors. And we can see that kind of baked into the present moment is there's an entelechy, there's There's a enfolded potentiality, right? You know, in the acorn is the grand oak in its full glory, enfolded as a potential. But in a sense it's already there. 

So in a sense the future, it hasn't been fully actualized, but it actually right here in the present. So the, this sort of inner penetration of past, present and future. And so I think for me, a lot of the future is about actualizing potential, right? A lot of how I think about it is that as human beings, we're striving, our developmental process is a process by which we are striving to come more into resonance with reality, with capital R reality, with the sacred, with all that is. And as we move through these different worldviews, there is a kind of broadening of that horizon of what we can know and what we can care for, these expanding spheres of care and concern and cognition. 

As our worldview grows and becomes more comprehensive and more coherent and more sophisticated, in a sense those worldviews are becoming more into resonance with reality because that's how reality is. Reality contains all that comprehensiveness. this vast complex web. And so the more we appreciate that and see that and the way we move is actually coherent with that reality, then that's what I call alethic resonance. And so like on the level of knowledge it's moving beyond this correspondence theory of truth and like the idea of truth is to just mirror what is out there and then we have this corresponding knowledge about it. But in a sense they're kind of split off. 

There's this whole idea that the human mind split off from the world, humanity is split off from nature. All these are kind of these splits that we're working on healing. But I think in the view of visionary realism and mythic resonance, that shifts to this expressive referential kind of idea. So it's both descriptive and expressive. So we can come up with knowledge that if it actually connects to the reality of the world, then it's not just mirroring it over here. That in a sense, our knowledge becomes a participatory expression of the world. And so when we actually like can tune our worldview to the intrinsic, alethic structure of the world, then we can actually kind of close the gap. And actually the unity that is already baked into the structure of reality is then in a sense being actualized and honored in the way that we're showing up. And then we can start to build communities, relationships, technologies, social institutions that are also in resonance with that. And so it feels like it's this process of reality keeps evolving. And so our worldview is going to keep evolving. And I don't think there's any endpoint of that. But I think there is a kind of telos there in a sense that is a dynamic attunement. Where humanity could actually come to a point where we create a society where we all kind of have, we're all really doing a pretty good job of attuning to the structure of reality and identifying like these places where Bhaskar calls them "demi-realities" where there's delusions or falsehoods, but they're nonetheless real because when we have a delusion and we act on it, it has real causal consequences in the world. So it's not that it's not real, it's just, it's out of alignment. It's dissonant with the structure of reality. So I don't know, I feel like what Teilhard is pointing to with how the neurosphere might evolve towards an omega, that actually makes a lot of sense to me in terms of this notion of alethic resonance. If Bhaskar has these transcendental secular arguments that argue that love is actually part of the structure of what he calls the meta real, part of reality.

Ilia: Is that Bhaskar?

Nick: Roy Bhaskar. He was my mentor and he's the founder of the philosophical school of critical realism. And in the third phase of his work, it's called Meta-Reality, it's kind of the spiritual philosophy. And he uses the Kantian style transcendental arguments to articulate a secular spirituality. And that secular spirituality, which I think is important to complement kind of the more contemplative modes of empiricism. So that he's actually arguing that we can arrive at love not just through direct contemplative experience but we can actually kind of retroduce or make a philosophical, rigorous philosophical argument that says love must be part of the fabric of the universe for a lot of everyday events to be even possible. So if love is, as Roy Boscar argues, part of the structure of reality, then as we are coming more, our worldview, our consciousness is becoming more into resonance with reality. That means that we are becoming more receptive to the universal field of love. And as that energy starts to move through us, we on a human level are becoming more loving, right? So we're coming into resonance with that love. And you can imagine that that dynamic continues to grow and we start to build more social institutions and technologies that have that kind of awareness baked into them as we move towards a flourishing planetary society, a eudaimonistic society. And that eudaimonistic society is basically one where we've first removed the blockages and constraints to our free flourishing, right? Because the whole notion is that we want to flourish, like it's built into our soul, into our spiritual DNA. And all we have to do is kind of remove the blockages to that and create structures that support that to unfold naturally.

Robert: It's easy to say that love belongs to the structure of the universe. But how does that claim translate into the texture of everyday life? then invites Nick to explore what he means by "Alethic Resonance" and to reflect on the meaning of truth, what it is, and what it means for truth to resonate. Later, the conversation turns to whether better principles can carry evolution forward in the face of resistance, the future direction of AI, and the sources of Nick's hope.

Ilia: A lot of what you're seeing here is very consonant with Teilhard's ideas. He thought that love was the core energy of the universe. He once said that the physical structure of the universe is love. And that kind of does in other words, there's an irresistible force here that's drawing us all the time to something that is unitive, creative, transcendent. You know, it pulls us beyond ourselves into something more and that's why we love in that sense, not just on an emotional psychological level, but even in terms of our work, in terms of everything about, like even going food shopping and the types of food you buy, from the mundane to the sublime, so to speak. But there's a few things I just wanted to kind of clarify with you. One, the idea of alethic residence is very interesting in terms of this question of truth, Because students always ask me, "What is truth?" And this term is very interesting to me because Herod thought about truth as that which brings coherence and fecundity. In other words, does what I know deepen my life in a way that I am more alive? Truth is about aliveness. What I am within myself now brings me up more than myself to be more in tune with the world around me, whether it's nature or people or events. So that truth is sort of, even in the Thomistic sense, it's an illumination. There's light that shines through, metaphysical light, so to speak, that shines through. So in that elithic resonance, I'm part of the whole. I am tied into a wholeness that is so much more than myself, and therefore that idea of truth becomes very alluring. That's what I want to pursue because I think truth is tied to a fecund life, a more fruitful life, a life alive. But this is where actually I think what... There's two things as you were talking, I think. What challenges this and stifles it sometimes are, well, traditions, any religious tradition that claims that they have the truth, that is the truth, and therefore they have consolidated, boxed it up. don't believe it if you don't believe this system, then whatever you're thinking is not true, it's false. So we're still trapped, I think, in that axial kind of distinction between what's true and what's false. But I think even this distinction itself is unhelpful and not true, because it's this system is true and anything out this side, the system is false. In fact, that was built into the emergence of monotheistic thinking true religion versus false religion. And so this new understanding of truth as a resonance, as a deep connectivity, in a sense with what I know, what I am, where I am and how I act, that's a whole different level of understanding truth as the vitality of life. And I think this is extremely important in a world where fake news is, now people don't trust anything because it's fake or and tell fake from real. And so it's also a question which I had as you were talking about AI and the way it can generate virtual reality and the inability to know the real versus, what is the real versus what is the virtual or what is the constructed. You kind of almost sound like if we kind of get these principles we can move to a more fruitful life. But truthfully, from where I sit, it seems that evolution is marked by resistance. So Henri Bergson's idea that what typifies the human is the resistance to change, that we want to hold on to our old systems of true and false and right and wrong and these little boxes that built the world of yesterday. And we're deeply fearful of embracing a new paradigm that seems the boundaries are not clear, we're not sure where it's going to leak and move into something that is untrue and what would that mean for us. So I'd like to hear a little bit more on two things. One, the virtual world of AI and the question of a lethal resonance, and then also that the human resistance to change and to paradigm shifts. I think we see this in many ways today. I can also add to that the resurgence of traditional religion a lot of people going back to traditional Christianity or traditional Islam and or orthodoxy.

Nick: Well, I'll start with the resistance piece. I mean, absolutely what I'm saying is not to overlook or deny the resistance. That's a huge reality. There's so much resistance. But I think part of moving towards a flourishing culture, a wisdom culture, is one that realizes that reality is going to continue to go on doing its thing whether we acknowledge it or not. And that's yeah, I mean, I think it was Philip K. Dick that said, "Reality is that which continues to exist whether you believe it or not," something like that. And so, the indigenous scholar Tyson Yom Kippuria talks about how the essence of the indigenous worldviews, there was like a core meta principle that he finds like across indigenous worldviews. And he summarizes that as either you move with the land or the land will move you. And so it's kind of like, well, you can resist and that's fine, but there's always, there's going to be a price to pay. Like reality, we're not living in a vacuum, so reality is going to respond to us. It's going to, there's always this relational communicative feedback loop happening. And whether we're in resonance with that and a kind of harmonic with the structure of reality, that's going to be mirrored back to us as well. And if we're resisting and we're out of resonance and we're attached to delusional ideas, that's going to feedback at us in a strong way too. And you know, I, a big part of my practice too has been like to actually interpret a a lot of the symptoms of the meta crisis as reality speaking back to us, right? And this idea of like cosmopolitan localism, like the meta crisis is a very vast and planetary notion and it can be very abstract, but it's always actualizing concretely in our local communities that are in lives. So it's really powerful to just look at, well, how is the meta crisis actualizing in my life and my local community and my sphere of influence? Right. And for me here, I live in Northern California in the mountains. And the last five, seven years here, we've had some very wildly intense catastrophic wildfires, right, that seem to be associated with climate change and kind of poor land management practices of fire suppression, lack of proactive controlled burning, and et cetera. So when we have these intense events, like where there was a fire just eight miles down the road rearing down on us. Like that's a very visceral experience, like when the powers, the destructive powers of nature are right there. And so I think there's a deep like communication there that I have received in trying to listen on a deep level to like, what is the field of nature, of reality, of the sacred trying to communicate to me and to our community in what's happening here? like yes the fire element is really out of balance in our human interiority. And a lot of the the go, go, go more, more, more me, me, me, mine, mine, mine, um, consumptive, hyper busy, overwhelmed kind of culture that we're all living in. I think that's one manifestation of like an out of balance fire element. If you think into that, it's a very activated, fiery kind of mode, right? So the calling to pull that fire element back in into a fire of inner transformation, right? And to transform our consciousness and our hearts and our personality structures and to be transfigured by that fire, to learn how to live more in harmony with the natural world, right? And become once again, active stewards, active custodians of our natural world, like many of the indigenous, most of the indigenous communities, if not all, were actively doing all kinds of things in their local environment, lighting fires to burn out the underbrush. So we've been doing that kind of thing on our land. There are cultural burn practices and really connecting with the sacred fire and then very much ecologically informed going into the forest, burning out the underbrush and inviting that spirit of renewal that the fire brings, that destructive element can be incredibly generative and fecund if we wield it in the right way, or if it can be extremely catastrophic. I mean the fire natives in the Reading fire, the Carr fire I believe was, there were 17,000 foot vortexes of flames.

Ilia: Oh my God.

Nick: I mean this is an incredibly powerful communication from reality. of saying like when we start to see that kind of thing. So just this, I call it alethic listening, like this practice of becoming humble, reverent, receptive, and trying to listen on a deep level to our inner selves, to what we're seeing from the natural world, and respond accordingly. So that's one piece about the resistance, like we can't escape reality, we can only be more or less attuned and in resonant and harmonic with it. like this revindication of truth, which is obviously extremely important in the post-truth world that we live in, where it's just make up your own alternative facts. And it's kind of this almost like ironic self-fulfilling prophecy of the post-modernists, right? You can just construct reality as a power game. And now it's, yeah, it's become this demi-reality power game of like, yeah, you just construct your own perspective. And if you get enough buy-in through propaganda, then you can have a political agenda that can be viable on that basis. 

All that's to say, the revindication of truth and there is a reality, even if the human is in part constructing our culture, our worldview, our knowledge is mediated by these psychological and social and historical and linguistic structures. And so there's always an epistemic relativity and a fallibility. And I think that's part of what we want baked into the new metaphysics is that in a sense, the new metaphysics says no one can have the hegemonic metaphysics. There's always going to be this epistemic unity and diversity because all perspectives are fallible. And Godel's incompleteness theorem points to this as well, is that you can't have a system that's comprehensive and consistent. So it points to this ever-receding horizon. And no one can ever capture the flag and say, this is the capital T truth. And we can just codify that and write it up in these books and call it a day that's never going to happen. That awareness comes online in this integrative worldview with a big nod to the postmodernists for helping us to see that. And so this new understanding of truth, like what I'm talking about with alethic resonance. One metaphor that I use is like with, obviously with resonance. We're working with a musical metaphor already, but like this idea that there's a natural frequency, right? In music, there's the root note or the natural frequency, and then there's a harmonic series. There's all these harmonies that correspond to that core note. 

So I think this is a powerful metaphor there because we're saying there's not one way to be in resonance with truth and reality. There's actually a whole like fractaling, sprawling series of harmonics that are the basis for creative and innovative ways to express a resonance with reality. And that that resonance is not a strictly propositional process of like academic knowledge. It's like there are forms of art that are, you could call it unethically resonant, right? That aren't necessarily making any kind of propositional truth claims, right? So I think that speaks to the integrated pluralism notion. So that we can express and participate with that reality in a way that's resonant, but almost like infinite expressions of what's possible there. And I think that's one of the deep things that we're grappling with is that human beings have this kind of logos, this like we have this sort of Promethean fire of the gods to create on a radical level the concept inner imaginal world. We can see something and then we can actualize it. So how do we understand ourselves as both coherent with the rest of the natural world, but also like, oh yeah, we do have these emergent powers that are extremely powerful. 

So I have this kind of visionary realism that has this sort of scheme of like, it feels really important to me that we understand ourselves as nature, but without reducing like some flat notion of nature. Because obviously we're really, we have a uniqueness. We have certain like radical powers that you don't find in a tree, you don't find in a fox, right? And so this scheme that I have articulated is one in which there's these different strata of nature. And what I call nature zero is kind of like primordial root level consciousness, like ground consciousness, which we could also say consciousness/light or vibration. I think I'm kind of a dual aspect monist in that sense of like, I think if we look at it from the outside, it arises as vibration or light. If we look at it from the inside, it's consciousness and that's this ground consciousness, and then from that, you have this primordial flaring forth and the physiosphere emerges and then from the physiosphere, the biosphere emerges. 

So physiosphere, biosphere, that together I call nature one. So it's what we normally call nature. Oh, that's nature. It's the natural world, the physical world. That's nature one, but it's completely unified with nature zero, right? Like nature zero is suffused in every aspect of that. And then from the biosphere, from nature one emerges nature two, the neosphere, the sociosphere, the human self-reflexive mind that has these potent concepts, this logos that we've been given, and so we really kind of can with the mind, with the imaginal, in the imaginal world, we can kind of create whatever we want and that's where the postmodernists are kind of right. Like we do construct worlds and we have that power, but we have to learn how to wield that power like with wisdom and kind of prudence. And I think a lot of the essence of that wisdom is like, how do you create what forms on that human neospheric level that are in resonance with the broader structure of nature one. And that's really important, like principle alignment. Like there are prints, there are boundary conditions of nature. The planet has certain boundaries we've crossed, like something like six out of nine of them. 

We're not doing a very good job of aligning how our social world is working vis-a-vis the way the natural world works. So we need that principle alignment there. And then as we move towards that greater alignment of nature one and nature two, then it's like, okay, there's an infinite process of creative expression once we get that, the basic principle alignment right. We're like, Hey, we are honoring our relationship to the natural world. So this sense that we are nature, we are nature too. We are second nature, but there also needs to be a kind of gesture of reverence and respect because we are, the robot circles are the ecological asymmetry. So like we are dependent on nature one, but it's not dependent on us. And if we don't align ourselves with the principles of how nature one works, we're not going to have a chance to continue to unfold the evolutionary process through the human. And that's a very real reality that's sobering and should get us, I think, into a gesture of reverence. It's like respect, reverence, and we don't just construct our own reality. And there's a lot of fallacy in new age spirituality. I think, oh, we create our own reality. What do you mean by that? Are you creating the boundary conditions of the world in your own spiritual practice? That's a very hubristic notion, I would say. Yeah, and so a lot of what visionary realism is an invitation into is like a kind of humility and a deep listening and like, how do we be really good humans and not so much this obsession with transcendence and enlightenment and all this kind of thing. And how do we be good, ethical, true humans that are living in resonance with the broader kind of symphony of reality that we're a part of?

Long-winded way of getting around to your last question about AI is like, look that principle of alethic resonance is the meta principle by which we ought to be designing AIs. How do you design AI for human flourishing? What does it look like to design AI that's actually got a principle alignment with the structure of nature one and nature zero for that matter. Right. And there's a lot of nuances there in terms of having those kinds of conversations with people that understand how these technologies are actually built and structured. 

And one of the big problems is the problem of like reference, like that the AI, the LLM, AI's don't really know, like if what they're saying is true or not. It just, it's a hall of mirrors of signifiers refracted on signifiers and they're genius at identifying patterns within these the tokenized data, right? But it's just, there's no necessarily they're there and it's, so we need to actually really work on like, how do you have processes of kind of social validation amongst experts and then how do you retrain the AIs to be like, okay, this is actually in alignment with, with truth. It actually knows what it's referring to. And I don't think the LLMs can do that on their own. They would have to be very specifically trained and in a ongoing dialogical dance with real humans that are in touch with reality.

Ilia: I think you're absolutely right. I mean, I thought the same thing. Like AI, is that the problem? It's the way we have built it, what we want with it or don't want. We don't even know. We ourselves are like, we're unraveled within ourselves and therefore we're creating stuff to find ourselves in a sense. But I actually love your paradigm and 120% with you that I love your levels of nature, nature zero, nature one, nature two. That's right. And I've always thought of each of us as the universe on the level of thought, you know? And so the fact that every little universe would have its own way of seeing the world and that we're kind of universes within universes within universes and therefore we are the whole. 

In other words, there's no whole. The whole is each person thoughtfully connected within themselves, among themselves, and that wholeness is what emerges from, you might say, the wholeness of personhood itself. So in a sense, the human person is sort of the linchpin here. And I think a lot of what we're talking about here is the fact that we... And we have to acknowledge it. We are in evolution. In other words, thought is changing. Our way of understanding things is changing. And that's a good thing because we got really stuck for a while. You have a lot of tremendous insights here. For our listeners, do you have any books that you've written or where would you send our listeners to deepen the understanding of your ideas and your meta theories?

Nick: Well, I'm in the process of transforming my PhD dissertation from University College in London. It was called Visionary Realism and the Emergence of a Eudaimonistic Society, Meta-Theory in a Time of Metacrisis. That's available online and we can maybe link to it in the show notes. And yeah, and then I've got a couple of other books that I've done, Meta-Theory for the 21st Century, and then also Big Picture Perspectives on Planetary Flourishing is another one. A lot of that is linked on my website or the eudaimonia institute website. There's more resources that you can dive into there and hopefully I'll be publishing that book in the next year or so.

Ilia: Oh, that would be great. So it's been really a joy to be in conversation with you and I hope we will not be strangers, but we will be resonating partners and collaborating up ahead because I think our world, or whatever we're building, we're actually building something in a similar way, in our own distinct ways. So it's very, very interesting. 

So first of all, I want to thank you for sharing your great insights and it's hopeful. And I think what the thing is, in a world that seems to be teeter-tottering on the edge of a cliff, I think what you're describing here is very hopeful for the next level of human life and planetary life and I like to think of it as planetary life, but we humans are part of something that's too much more than ourselves. Because I think we have become overly anthropocentric, all about us and it's really at the heart of a lot of our breakdown today. So thank you. So thank you for your work and wish you many blessings as you continue on. Look forward to reading more of your material.

Nick: Thank you so much. Yeah, it's been a total joy to dialogue with you and really appreciate the work you're doing and the work at the Center for Christogenesis and everything. And yeah, it really is hopeful. And I would just add here as a final note that I've gotten substantially more hopeful the deeper I've gotten into this. I feel like I went through a kind of peak or crescendo of pessimism and doomerism, and I think that was necessary. That really alchemized me in important ways. And there's a lot of rationality to that perspective, right? 

But I think the more you kind of get into this big history understanding of things, the more you realize how profoundly life wants to and knows how to keep evolving and surviving. And we've been through so many close calls already of extinction level events and catastrophic risks and life always has found a way.

Ilia: It does. But I think you said it before, we do have to now be attentive to what our nature, we are part of a nature that is more than just our mere human nature. Human nature itself is nature.

Nick: That's right.

Ilia: So, our deepest connectivity to nature must be in our consciousness, in our awareness because nature will rise up. It will take its toll. It's like an ecological abuse.

Nick: And it will do so in and through us insofar as we have the capacity to listen and allow that and to come resonance with it. So it's not like there's an outside force that's going to come in and save us from our own destruction. But those radical powers that like the great, what was it? The great oxidation event, right? Where life almost went extinct, right? And then all of a sudden multicellular life emerged and completely flipped the metabolic problem on its head. So it's that same kind of radical power that's available to us, but this time it has to come through like a self-conscious, like participatory expression of those powers through us as the nature too.

Ilia: Exactly. Well, listen, thank you so much and carry on this great work. We really need it.

Nick: Okay, well thank you so much.

Robert: Our thanks to Nick Hedlund and to all of our guests who made this landmark season possible. We'll be back after a short spring break, and we're excited for what lies ahead for Hunger for Wholeness. In the meantime, follow us on social media or subscribe to the Center for Christogenesis newsletter to receive updates on upcoming releases along with insights and events featuring Ilia Delio and other guests. As always, I'm Robert Nicastro. Thanks for listening.