Tokens Placed by the Gods

Iamblichus describes sunthēmata (sounds, animals, plants, and stones) as “passwords and tokens placed by the gods” to enable us to reach them (Shaw, 2014, p. 183). A modern comparison might be a video game in which tokens, cheat codes, and walkthroughs unlock “extra power.” The comparison is imperfect, but it captures the basic idea: the natural world is seeded with keys, and the right use of them opens a door.

The idea is fascinating because it treats the material world as a vehicle for reaching the divine rather than an obstacle to it. It also raises an uncomfortable question about who gets to turn the key, and for what purpose.

Where Is the Boundary?

If sounds, plants, animals, and stones can be used to reach the gods, where does the boundary between religion and magic lie?

Porphyry raised exactly this objection, accusing the theurgists of sorcery (Shaw, 2014, p. 178). Iamblichus responds that “the sacrifice of a material object released the will of the Demiurge” (as cited in Shaw, 2014, p. 178). But does that really answer the question? E. R. Dodds observed that the rituals of sorcery and theurgy would have been “indistinguishable to the uninitiated” (as cited in Shaw, 2014, p. 209). From the outside, the two can look identical.

Iamblichus draws the line elsewhere. According to him, sorcery adds to the perversion of the universe, while theurgy drives the universe towards perfection (Shaw, 2014, p. 191). That leaves a pointed question: what, precisely, is the crucial difference between perverting and perfecting the eternal balance of the cosmos in the ritual use of sunthēmata?

Intention as the Dividing Line

Elsewhere, Iamblichus says that if someone takes things and “diverts them to another purpose and illegitimately achieves something, the damage from what he has evilly used will fall on him personally” (as cited in Shaw, 2014, p. 191).

This suggests that using the natural powers of the universe through the sunthēmata for personal desire would “pervert” the universe, whereas using them for communion with the divine would perfect it. It is a profound distinction, because it relocates responsibility. It is not the sunthēmata that bear it, but the one who uses them. It is also not the ritual that is right or wrong, but the intention with which it is performed.

The same outward act, such as the offering of a sacrifice, can be an act of devotion in one setting and an act of malice in another. A worshipper may offer a sacrifice to honor the divine, while a sorcerer may perform an identical act for a harmful end. The act is the same. The orientation is not.

This leads to a further question: is religion, understood as reaching for the Divine through ritual, itself a form of magic? If intention is the only real difference, the answer may depend less on what is done than on why.

Light and Darkness

Symbolically and culturally, saints are regarded as bearers of light and sorcerers as carriers of darkness. It seems fair to say that invoking and connecting to the divine increases light, whereas following base, material, and personal desires increases darkness.

Seen this way, a modern capitalist world that runs largely on the fuel of personal desire can be read as steeped in darkness. This is a sharp claim, and a debatable one, but it follows naturally from the Iamblichean premise: if the use of the world’s powers for personal gain perverts the order of things, then an entire economy organized around personal gain deserves scrutiny.

An Unfinished Question

These questions do not resolve neatly, and there is value in leaving them open. What the discussion does clarify is a single principle. If intention is truly the only difference between the saint and the sorcerer, then Iamblichus may be right that the Creator placed the sunthēmata on earth so that humans could use them to reach the divine. The tokens are neutral. The path depends on the one who holds them.

Reflect on This

If the same act can lead toward light or toward darkness depending on its intention, how would you recognize the difference in your own actions?

Reference

Shaw, G. (2014). Theurgy and the soul: The Neoplatonism of Iamblichus (2nd ed.). Angelico Press.

The Mystic’s Journey

In his discussion of meditative states (Wilber, 2017, p. 92), Wilber draws on Evelyn Underhill’s classic study of Western mysticism (1911). Underhill traced the Christian mystic’s path through a sequence of stages, commonly summarized as awakening, purification, illumination, the dark night of the soul, and union.

What makes this map valuable is that it normalizes the difficult middle of the journey. An initial awakening is often intense, and it is typically followed by a long period of purification, a gradual deepening of insight, and sometimes a stretch of profound darkness or loss of meaning. Without a map, these phases can be mistaken for failure or regression. With one, they can be recognized as recurring features of contemplative development that mystics described across centuries.

Enter the Chakras

Immediately after this material, Wilber turns to the seven chakras of yogic theory and links each one to a stage of development. For example, he associates the heart chakra with the mythic-membership stage.

In doing so, he attempts to build a universal spiritual map. Modern Western models of development are superimposed onto Eastern frameworks, including the yogic chakra system and Buddhist meditative stages. There is real value in this. Placing traditions side by side helps practitioners and researchers notice patterns that might otherwise stay hidden within the boundaries of a single lineage.

Where the Traditions Disagree

The difficulty is that the traditions themselves do not speak with one voice.

Within the yogic and tantric traditions of Hinduism, there is no single agreed account of how the chakras relate to spiritual development. Even the number of chakras varies across texts, although the most widely known system presents six chakras plus the crown (Avalon, 1919/1974).

Kundalini yoga, for instance, teaches that enlightenment occurs when kundalini energy rises from the mūlādhāra (root chakra) to the sahasrāra (crown chakra) (Avalon, 1919/1974). The path is imagined as an ascent, and the crown is its summit.

Ramana Maharshi taught something different. For him, final realization abides not in the crown but in the spiritual Heart (hṛdaya), even if kundalini has already risen to the sahasrāra (Ramana Maharshi, 2006). In this view, the heart is not a midway station on the way up. It is the destination, and in some sense the origin.

This difference matters for anyone interested in heart-centered practice. A ladder with the heart in the middle and a ladder with the heart at the center of everything describe two very different relationships to the same organ of awareness.

The Risk of One Ladder

These disagreements suggest that a single universal map may simplify traditions that were never in full agreement among themselves. Underhill’s stages emerged from the lives of Christian mystics, shaped by their theology, their language, and their communities. The chakra system arose within the tantric traditions of India, with its own cosmology and its own internal debates.

Placing them on one developmental ladder may reveal real similarities. It may also flatten what makes each path distinctive. This is a familiar tension in comparative spirituality, and it echoes the long-standing debate over the perennial philosophy: how much of the unity between traditions is discovered, and how much is imposed by the person drawing the map?

A Balanced Way to Use the Map

Wilber’s framework is most useful when it is treated as a tool for recognizing similarities across traditions, while still honoring the unique wisdom of each path. A map is meant to orient, not to replace the territory. Used this way, it invites comparison without demanding that every tradition agree to be translated into the same terms.

Reflect on This

If one tradition places the heart midway along the path and another places it at the very center of realization, what changes in how you would practice?

References

Avalon, A. (1974). The serpent power: The secrets of tantric and shaktic yoga. Dover Publications. (Original work published 1919)

Ramana Maharshi. (2006). Talks with Sri Ramana Maharshi. Sri Ramanasramam.

Underhill, E. (1911). Mysticism: A study in the nature and development of man’s spiritual consciousness. Methuen.

Wilber, K. (2017). The religion of tomorrow: A vision for the future of the great traditions. Shambhala.

As theurgy developed, primarily through the works of Iamblichus, the soul’s descent into matter, or vice versa, was carefully studied. The Greeks attempted to understand spirituality as a logical science. How did their gods and deities descend into matter, animating and possessing it, so that communion with the gods could take place? What were the factors involved? And how could one connect to the gods?

As theurgy developed, it identified sunthēmata as tokens and objects that could be used in ritual to invoke the gods for communion. One method was to place plants, stones, and animal offerings into hollow statues. Then, during rituals, specific sounds and practices were used to invoke a specific deity to possess the statue. Once the deity had manifested in the statue, the devout followers of that deity could pray to and worship it (having a more spiritual experience), as the statue was considered to be animated through the rituals. But how would one judge the suitability and capacity of the statue or sunthēmata to receive the divine?

The capacity of an object, or even the human body, to receive the divine was called epitēdeiotēs. Iamblichus developed this concept in detail. The difference in mystical experiences due to the receptacle’s fitness or aptitude to receive a spiritual form was termed epitēdeiotēs (Shaw, 2014, p. 135). It was compared to the actualization of fire in dry wood. The purity of a human soul would be a major factor determining the manifestation of the deity in the human body. Iamblichus reasoned that this was why ritual alone was not adequate to enact the union of the human body with the gods. The epitēdeiotēs of the human body had to be prepared first through the processes of purification. We see this today in almost every religion through the practice of physical and ritual purification before worship: for example, wuḍūʾ in Islam, netilat yadayim in Judaism, ācamana in Hinduism, and temizu in Shinto. However, the body is also purified through the avoidance of alcohol, drugs, and sexual intercourse, and by following a strict diet. Therefore, the intensity and duration of the possession depended on the purity of the receptacle.

Another factor on which it depended was sympatheia. Sympathy and correspondence were the natural sympathies that some tokens had with specific deities. For instance, some plants, stones, animals, and scents worked well with the rituals of certain deities. However, there was also an innate ability in each person that determined how much of the divine they could receive. This natural disposition depended on the person’s natural constitution, or what we would today call DNA.

Seeing how the Greeks understood spirituality, one can easily relate this to our own spiritual practices today. Whether through ablutions before prayer, fasting, or abstinence, we are still preparing the receptacle, consciously or not, so that the divine may find a fitting place to dwell. In many ways, Iamblichus’s greatest insight was that union with the spirit depends not only on what we do in ritual, but on what we ourselves have to become.

Reference

Shaw, G. (2014). Theurgy and the soul: The Neoplatonism of Iamblichus (2nd ed.). Angelico Press.

There is a line from the Hermetic writings that has stayed with me for weeks.

In the thirteenth treatise of the Corpus Hermeticum, the young disciple Tat asks his father, Hermes Trismegistus, to teach him the secret of spiritual rebirth. Hermes does not hand him a doctrine. He gives him a condition:

“When you are ready to become a stranger to the world I will give it to you.”

The answer is unsettling because it is not information. Hermes is not saying “study harder” or “learn more.” He is saying that until something in Tat changes, the teaching cannot be received, however clearly it is explained.

I came across this passage in Gregory Shaw’s essay Taking the Shape of the Gods: A Theurgic Reading of Hermetic Rebirth. The more I sat with it, the more I heard it echoed in nearly every mystical tradition I know.

A Tradition That Outlived Empires

Hermeticism is a strange and beautiful survivor. Its texts were written in Greek in Roman Egypt, probably in the first centuries of the Common Era, but they present themselves as the wisdom of Hermes Trismegistus, the “Thrice-Great” Hermes identified with the Egyptian god Thoth.

The fourth-century Neoplatonist Iamblichus, one of the most important figures in late antique philosophy, took these writings very seriously. As Shaw explains, Iamblichus believed the Greeks had lost touch with a sacred way of knowing, one that had been preserved by the Egyptians in the writings of Hermes. For him, the Hermetic texts were not curiosities. They were a living path to the divine.

At the centre of that path is the idea of rebirth: becoming, in some real sense, a new being. Hermes tells Tat plainly that “this thing cannot be taught.” It can only be entered. The doorway into it is estrangement.

What struck me most was how universal this teaching is. Across cultures and centuries, the mystics keep returning to the same figure: the stranger, the traveler, the passer-by.

In the longest psalm of the Hebrew Bible, David prays:

“I am a stranger in the earth: hide not thy commandments from me.” (Psalm 119:19)

The two halves of that verse belong together. Because the speaker is a stranger in the world, he asks for what is hidden to be revealed. Estrangement is not a complaint here. It is the qualification for receiving.

The Gospel of Thomas

In the Gospel of Thomas, found among the Nag Hammadi codices (the same Egyptian library that preserved Hermetic texts), Jesus gives what may be the shortest spiritual instruction ever recorded:

“Become passers-by.” (Saying 42)

In another saying he is sharper still: “If you do not fast as regards the world, you will not find the kingdom” (Saying 27).

The Prophet Muhammad ﷺ

In Islam, the Companion ʿAbdullah ibn ʿUmar reported that the Prophet took hold of his shoulder and said:

“Be in this world as if you were a stranger or a traveler.” (Sahih al-Bukhari 6416)

It is one of the most beloved hadiths in the Sufi tradition. The traveler stops at an inn, rests and is grateful, but he never confuses the inn with home.

The Upanishads

In the Mundaka Upanishad, the seeker must first examine all the worlds that can be won through worldly action and “acquire freedom from all desires.” Only then does he take fuel in his hand and approach a teacher, who reveals to him the knowledge of Brahman (Mundaka Upanishad 1.2.12–13). The order is the same as with Hermes and Tat: first detachment, then transmission.

The Tao Te Ching

And from ancient China:

“In the pursuit of learning, every day something is acquired. In the pursuit of Tao, every day something is dropped.” (Tao Te Ching, ch. 48)

This is the Hermetic insight in reverse. The way is not found by accumulating. It is found by letting go.

In all of these sayings, the stranger or traveler stands for detachment: from the world, from its desires, and from the endless grasping of the ego.

The heart, in the language of so many traditions, is meant to be a vessel. If it is already full of attachments, cravings and anxieties about what we have and what we lack, there is no room for anything else to enter. As long as the heart is crowded, one cannot, in the words of the Neoplatonists, take the shape of the gods.

This is the root of asceticism on the spiritual path. Across traditions, seekers have fasted, kept vigils, withdrawn into solitude and given up comfort and luxury. They did this not because the body is evil, but to loosen the grip of the senses and desires. Iamblichus called this stage catharsis, purification.

Shaw describes its purpose beautifully. Catharsis exists to “overcome the confusions of embodiment and allow the divine to take its seat in one’s own body” (Shaw, 2015, p. 158).

That last phrase, in one’s own body, is where the story takes a surprising turn.

Read quickly, all of this sounds like a call to escape. Leave the world, deny the body, rise above matter. Many scholars have read Hermeticism exactly that way. Garth Fowden, in his influential study The Egyptian Hermes, interpreted Hermetic rebirth as an escape from the body and the physical cosmos.

Shaw disagrees, and this is where his essay becomes truly illuminating.

Following Iamblichus, Shaw argues that becoming a stranger to the world belongs only to the Lesser Mysteries, the stage of cleansing. To stop there is to mistake the means for the end. The Greater Mysteries lead somewhere unexpected: not away from the world, but back into it, transformed.

In the culmination of this path, the purified soul receives the divine energeiai, the creative activities of God that flow through all things. The body itself becomes what Iamblichus called “an organ of the gods” (Shaw, 2015, p. 163).

Hermes himself hints at this. In another treatise he tells Tat that matter, bodies and essence are all activities of God, and he concludes: “There is nothing that he is not.”

So the stranger does not finally abandon the world. The stranger learns to see it again, no longer as a prison, but as the living activity of the divine.

Shaw sums up the whole Hermetic path in a single paradox: rebirth “is realized as giving birth, not escaping from the world but creating it.” The initiate takes on the shape of the gods, yet remains mortal, “holding our natural place in the cosmos.”

I think this distinction matters a great deal for anyone on a spiritual path today.

There is a kind of spirituality that stops at detachment. It becomes a quiet contempt for the body, for ordinary life and for the material world. It can look like holiness, but it is still a kind of duality: spirit good, matter bad, heaven up there and the world down here.

The deeper teaching, found in Iamblichus, in the Sufi idea of returning to the world after annihilation in God, and in many other traditions, is non-dual. Detachment is the doorway, not the house. We let go of the world so that we can receive it again, rightly.

The traveler in the hadith does not hate the road. He simply does not mistake it for home. And because he is not trying to possess the road, he is free to notice its beauty.

In my own journey, I have experienced that letting go of attachment and desire brings a quality of unshakeable peace and bliss. It is real, and it is unmistakable when it comes.

To become a stranger to the world is not to leave it, but to stop being possessed by it, so that the world can be received again, this time as the body of the divine.

Perhaps that is as it should be. Hermes did not promise Tat that rebirth would come quickly. He only said: when you are ready.

What has detachment meant on your own path? Have you found it a doorway, or have you found yourself stopping at the threshold? I’d love to hear your reflections in the comments.

Sources

• al-Bukhārī, M. (n.d.). Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī (M. M. Khan, Trans.). Sunnah.com. https://sunnah.com/bukhari

• King James Bible. (2017). King James Bible Online. https://www.kingjamesbibleonline.org (Original work published 1769)

• Lambdin, T. O. (Trans.). (1990). The Gospel of Thomas. In J. M. Robinson (Ed.), The Nag Hammadi library in English (Rev. ed.). HarperSanFrancisco.

• Lao Tzu. (1972). Tao te ching (G.-F. Feng & J. English, Trans.). Vintage Books.

• Müller, F. M. (Trans.). (1884). The Upanishads: Part II (Sacred Books of the East, Vol. 15). Clarendon Press.

• Shaw, G. (2015). Taking the shape of the gods: A theurgic reading of Hermetic rebirth. Aries: Journal for the Study of Western Esotericism, 15(1), 136–169. https://doi.org/10.1163/15700593-01501008

Most of us know the feeling. We sit in meditation, breathe deeply, and touch something vast and peaceful. Then we stand up, open our inbox, and within minutes it is gone. The calm we felt on the cushion seems to belong to another world entirely.

Experiencing higher states of consciousness in our private space is beneficial. But if those states remain confined to the yoga studio or the meditation room, the fruits of our practice are greatly diminished. The real question is not how to reach these states, but how to live in them.

Meditation that doesn’t end

Of the many techniques I have learned over the years, breath awareness and mindfulness have been the most effective, and the simplest, ways to stay grounded through the stress of a working day.

I once attended a day-long mindfulness workshop with Shamash Alidina, author of Mindfulness for Dummies, who taught us how to remain in a meditative state throughout the day. The workshop was organized around the five senses, and we were retrained to use them as an embodied meditation practice.

One exercise has stayed with me. While walking, eating, or talking, we learned to divide our attention among several subtasks. When speaking, we would reserve about 20% of our attention for our breath, breathing consciously; another 20% for our body, feeling the fabric against our skin or our feet pressing into the floor; and the rest for speaking consciously.

The result surprised me. I felt completely absorbed in the task, and at the same time completely present. Meditation was no longer something I did; it became the way I did everything. Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now offers similar practices for anyone who wants to explore this embodied way of living.

What closes the door

In my reflections, I have come to believe that we restrict the flow of our consciousness and psychic being into our mind, body, and vital being whenever we fall into anger, fear, or disappointment.

• An enlightened person would not be angry, for they know they do not control everything.

• An enlightened person would not be fearful, for they realize that their soul is an eternal, pure self that cannot be harmed.

• An enlightened person would not be disappointed, for they do not attach expectations to external outcomes.

Consciousness exists in beingness. It simply is. If we aspire to that state, we must learn to experience that is-ness.

As Shakespeare’s Hamlet puts it: “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” It is not events themselves but the way we translate them into our framework of understanding that determines their effect on our thoughts and emotions.

When pain becomes a path

Perhaps the most radical examples of this come from the world’s great spiritual traditions, which have transformed even bodily pain into a path of salvation and growth:

• Christianity speaks of redemptive suffering, embodied in the crucifixion of Jesus.

• Judaism describes yissurim shel ahavah, the “afflictions of love,” suffering sent to refine the soul.

• St. John of the Cross wrote of the dark night of the soul, a painful purification that precedes union with God.

• Shamanic traditions honour the wounded healer, who is initiated through illness or crisis and so gains the power to heal others, an idea Carl Jung later carried into psychology.

In each case, a revolutionary reframing turns even gross physical pain into a force capable of transforming a person into one of the greatest forces of nature.

Rumi’s take

Rumi expressed the same insight seven centuries ago in his Masnavi:

هر کجا دردی، دوا آنجا رود
Har kojā dardī, davā ānjā ravad

Wherever there is pain, there the remedy flows.

A few lines later, he adds:

Seek less for water; seek instead a thirst,
and water will spring forth from above and below.

Our pain, our longing, and our thirst are not obstacles on the path. They are what draw the remedy toward us.

Sources and further reading

• Alidina, S. (2010). Mindfulness for Dummies. Wiley.

• Eliade, M. (1964). Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy. Princeton University Press.

• John Paul II. (1984). Salvifici Doloris [Apostolic letter on the Christian meaning of human suffering].

• Jung, C. G. (1966). The Practice of Psychotherapy (Collected Works, Vol. 16). Princeton University Press.

• Rumi, J. Masnavi, Book 3, v. 3210 (trans. R. A. Nicholson).

• Shakespeare, W. Hamlet, Act 2, Scene 2.

• St. John of the Cross. Dark Night of the Soul (trans. E. A. Peers).

• Babylonian Talmud, Berakhot 5a.

• Tolle, E. (1999). The Power of Now. New World Library.

There aren’t many institutes out there looking to bridge the gap between the disciplines of spirituality and science. California Institute of Human Science, established in 1992, embodies the vision of its founder Dr. Hiroshi Motoyama, a mystic and a scientist, among other things. What others saw as conflicting Dr. Motoyama saw as complimentary. He crystallized his lifelong practice of spirituality by inventing an electronic device for identifying meridians and chakras. Both presumed, according to ancient texts, to be present in the subtle energy body.

The institute is again coming at the forefront of noetic science research by conducting a multiyear study headed by Dr. Sean Esbjorn-Hargens. Worldwide Initiative for Super Experiencer Research (WISER) study aims to survey in excess of a thousand participants who have had multiple types of paranormal experiences. Once super experiencers are recorded their unique bioenergy markers will be identified to answer how is a super experiencer different from someone who does not have paranormal experiencers. You can become part of the WISER study by clicking on the link and filling out a form. Apart from various guided meditations and lectures, the event was also attended by the Dr. Thomas Brophy, president of the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS). Dr. Brophy offered the attendees an overview of current state of affairs and future direction of noetic and consciousness research.

The retreat culminated in a celebration of academic achievement as the event drew to a close with a graduation ceremony, marking a milestone for the newest cohort of scholars to emerge from CIHS. The ceremony was a fitting close to a gathering steeped in inquiry and inspiration, a reminder that the pursuit of knowledge carries its own quiet dignity. As graduates walked away with their degrees in hand, they carried with them a deepened commitment to a field that dares to ask the questions most institutions have yet to learn how to ask.

I want to sit with that claim for a moment, because it struck a genuine chord in me. But I also want to push back on it slightly, not to dismiss it, but to sharpen it. I don’t think education is the metacrisis. I think it’s more precise, and ultimately more useful, to say that education is the root cause of the metacrisis. The distinction matters more than it might first appear.

Seed and Fruit

Consider what the education system actually produces: engineers, doctors, lawyers, business leaders, politicians, the people who go on to design our infrastructure, treat our bodies, write our laws, run our companies, and govern our nations. These are the hands that shape the world we live in. And it is the shape they give it (extractive, short-termist, fragmented, indifferent to whole-systems thinking) that eventually produces what scholars have taken to calling the “metacrisis”: climate breakdown, democratic erosion, mental health collapse, ecological overshoot, and a hundred other symptoms of a civilization that has lost its bearings.

If we trace the causal chain backward, the metacrisis isn’t the root. It’s the fruit. It’s what grows, further down the line, from a seed planted much earlier, in the classroom, in the lecture hall, in the entire architecture of how we teach young people to think about themselves and their place in the world. The metacrisis is downstream. Education is upstream. Calling education itself the metacrisis collapses that distance, and I think something important is lost when we do that, namely the clarity of knowing exactly where intervention needs to happen, and how far its effects still have to travel before we see them play out in the world.

The Quiet Theory Running Underneath Everything

To understand why education produces this outcome, it helps to look at the theoretical scaffolding holding up most of contemporary schooling, something called human capital theory. It’s rarely spoken aloud, and most people who pass through the system never encounter the term directly, but it shapes nearly every incentive inside modern universities.

Human capital theory treats education primarily as an economic mechanism: a way of training tomorrow’s workforce, with employability as the implicit, and often explicit, end goal. Under this framework, a human being isn’t approached primarily as a full person with inner life, moral agency, or spiritual depth. They’re approached as a productive asset. A unit of potential output. A peg, shaped and sanded down until it fits neatly into the machinery of the economy.

This isn’t a conspiracy theory or an exaggeration. It’s simply the operating logic beneath curriculum design, funding priorities, and institutional messaging at most universities today. Employability metrics. Graduate salary rankings. Corporate recruitment pipelines built directly into business schools. The entire architecture is optimized for one thing: producing workers who can be usefully slotted into existing economic structures, with minimal friction and maximum output.

What’s largely absent from this picture is any serious institutional interest in what philosophers have long called the alethic values: truth, beauty, and goodness. These aren’t decorative, old-fashioned ideals with no practical use. They are the actual compass points by which a person might learn to evaluate whether the systems they’re building, the companies they’re running, or the policies they’re writing are actually good, not just profitable, not just efficient, but good, in the deep and difficult sense of the word.

What we need, I’d argue, is nothing short of a radical reimagining of education’s purpose, a full reprogramming of what the system is for. Not the optimization of market output, but the cultivation of human beings capable of pursuing truth, recognizing beauty, and acting from goodness, even, especially, when doing so runs counter to economic incentive.

My Own Education, In Hindsight

I didn’t arrive at this critique from the outside. I lived inside the very system I’m describing.

I completed both my bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Business Administration in London, two entire cycles of formal education, at what are considered some of the more prestigious institutions for that field. And in all that time, I was never once prompted to reflect on social or cultural evolution. Never once asked to think seriously about the polycrisis, or the deeper trajectory of the civilization I was being trained to serve. Not once did a professor ask me to consider whether the skills I was acquiring were oriented toward truth, beauty, or goodness, only ever toward competence, competitiveness, and employability.

And it worked exactly as designed. My education primed me, quite effectively, to walk directly into a high-paying consultancy position in one of the world’s major financial hubs. That is precisely what I did. At the time, it felt like success: the system had done its job, and I had done mine.

Looking back now, though, it’s strikingly clear how thoroughly that entire educational experience was calibrated to serve the human-resource needs of large corporations, not to cultivate wisdom, not to develop discernment, not to help me or my classmates grapple with the deeper questions our historical moment actually demands of us. We were being manufactured, gently and invisibly, into a very specific kind of usefulness.

Where This Leaves Us

If Stein is right that something at the root of our civilizational crisis runs through education, then the work ahead isn’t just reforming curricula or adding a few “ethics” electives to business school requirements. It’s something closer to a wholesale reorientation of what we believe education is for, away from producing employable units, and toward cultivating whole human beings capable of discernment, wisdom, and care for the world they’re about to inherit responsibility for.

That reorientation won’t come from the top down. It has to start with those of us willing to notice, honestly, how thoroughly we ourselves were shaped by the very system we’re now trying to see clearly.

Patten frames our moment as a “boom or doom” scenario, and the phrase has stuck with me because it really does make sense once you sit with it. We are living through the possibility of the greatest destruction humanity has ever faced, at precisely the same time we are living through the greatest leap in scientific capability our species has ever produced. That’s not a coincidence or a paradox to be resolved. It’s the actual shape of the predicament.

Consider what’s converging right now: CRISPR and gene editing, nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, robotics, synthetic biology, and quantum computing, arriving not in sequence but simultaneously, each one accelerating the others. Who genuinely knows what the world looks like in twenty years when these technologies compound? The pace of development isn’t just increasing, in some domains it’s increasing exponentially, which means our usual intuitions about “the future will look roughly like a slower version of now” simply stop applying. It stands to reason that the next two decades will bring seismic change to society as we currently understand it.

The Redundancy Question

One thread of this that I keep returning to, from a noetic and psychological angle rather than a purely economic one, is what happens to human beings when AI makes entire categories of work redundant. We’re not just talking about factory automation anymore. AI is predicted to hollow out bureaucracy, the legal profession, banking, and a long list of white-collar sectors that people assumed were safe because they required “thinking.”

So here’s the real question, the one that actually interests me as someone studying consciousness and inner experience: what happens to the psyche of a species that built its entire sense of purpose around productive labor, when that labor is no longer needed?

Two very different futures seem plausible. In one, millions of people discover dolce far niente, the sweetness of doing nothing, and use the freed time for connection, creativity, contemplation, or spiritual development. In the other, those same millions lose their raison d’être, their reason for being, because meaning was never separated from output in the first place.

Richard Sennett was already naming this almost two decades ago when he wrote about the “spectre of uselessness,” long before AI made it an urgent policy question rather than a philosophical one. And the stakes here are not abstract. Research on existential meaninglessness consistently shows increased risk of suicidal thoughts and behavior when people lose a felt sense of purpose. This isn’t a side effect we can wave away as an adjustment period. It’s a mental health crisis hiding inside a technological triumph.

The Trap of Systems Thinking

This is where my thinking loops back to something uncomfortable: systems thinking tells us that every solution to today’s problem tends to become the seed of tomorrow’s problem. The law of unintended consequences doesn’t take a holiday just because the intentions were good. If AI solves the “not enough labor” problem, it may simultaneously manufacture a “too much idle time, too little meaning” problem at a civilizational scale. And there’s an old proverb that keeps surfacing in my notes on this: an idle mind is the devil’s workshop. When you strip away work, you don’t automatically get contemplation and peace. Sometimes you get restlessness, despair, or worse.

So the technological “boom” side of Patten’s framing might quietly manufacture its own “doom,” not through the machines turning on us in some science-fiction sense, but through something much quieter and more psychological: mass disorientation of purpose.

Where the Real Solution Might Live

The argument I keep landing on, and the one Patten himself seems to be building toward, is that a shift in worldview and perspective is the actual solution to the metacrisis, not another technological patch. That tracks. It might be our best possible shot. But it comes with an uncomfortable catch: changing an education system, and reshaping how an entire generation is raised to relate to meaning, purpose, and inner life, doesn’t happen on a policy timeline. It happens on a generational one.

Which raises the hardest question in the whole inquiry: do we have the luxury of that kind of time? Environmental thinkers, Jem Bendell most notably among them, argue that we don’t. That the convergence of ecological collapse and technological disruption is moving faster than any generational shift in worldview could possibly keep pace with.

And yet, here’s where I think the noetic framing actually offers something the purely systemic or policy framing can’t: we do have a starting point, and it isn’t decades away. It’s now, and it’s internal. We must look inside and start with ourselves, because worldview shift doesn’t only happen through institutions, it happens through individual consciousness, one person, one practice, one moment of genuine inner reorientation at a time.

It is the little steps, the drops that make the ocean. But it’s worth remembering the second half of that image too: the drops that cause tsunamis. Small shifts in individual consciousness are not necessarily small in their consequences. If enough people undergo a genuine inner shift in how they relate to purpose, productivity, and meaning, that accumulation doesn’t stay small. It becomes a different kind of wave than the one we’re currently bracing for.

Whether that wave arrives in time is not something I can answer yet. But it’s the question I’m sitting with as I keep reading.

Subsystems that Process Information

• Input Transducer: Brings information from the environment across the boundary. (Animal senses (predator detection), Market research, News media, Telescopes)
• Internal Transducer: Receives information about the internal state of the system. (Hormonal signaling, Inflation/unemployment reports, National census, Global GDP growth, Earth-observation satellites monitoring the planet’s climate and geology)
• Channel and Net: Routes information to various parts of the system. (Mycorrhizal fungal networks, SWIFT payment network, Internet/telecom, Satellite communication and deep space networks routing information)
• Timer: Signals time-based patterns and sequences for the system. (Circadian rhythms, Fiscal quarters, Election cycles, orbital period governing day-night and seasonal cycles)
• Decoder: Changes external information into a private, internal language. (Nervous system (sensory processing), Financial analysts, Journalists/translators, astronomical data)
• Associator: Links items of information together to form new knowledge. (Pollinator-plant coevolution, Credit-rating agencies, Academic research, astrophysics)
• Memory: Stores information over time for later retrieval. (DNA, World Bank economic archives, Libraries/archives, ice cores and geological strata recording Earth’s cosmic and climatic history)
• Decider: Makes executive choices and controls the system’s actions. (Natural selection, Central banks (interest rates), UN Security Council, Space agencies (NASA, ESA))
• Encoder: Translates internal information back into a public language. (Bird calls/pheromones, Corporate PR/earnings calls, Government spokespeople, The Voyager Golden Record encoding Earth’s information for cosmic transmission)
• Output Transducer: Sends information out across the boundary to the environment. (Seed dispersal, Export industries, Diplomacy/cultural exports, Radio antennas transmitting signals into space)

The superorganism is then systems interacting with suprasystems and subsystems with dynamic complexity. It spans across the fields of ecology, sociology, economics, astronomy, and politics to understand the whole of Earth as a single operating unit.

As we introduce Artificial Intelligence as a potential general-purpose technology to this superorganism, what may we expect? AI being ubiquitous in the next few decades is not a flight of fancy. If we take Miller’s subsystems seriously as the functional anatomy of any living system, then AI’s entrance into the planetary superorganism is not merely the arrival of a new tool, but rather it is the emergence of a new organ, one that inserts itself primarily into the information-processing subsystems. The very subsystems responsible for how the superorganism perceives, decides, and acts. This is precisely why AI’s impact cannot be understood through a single lens.

AI as Threat

AI’s most consequential risk is that it doesn’t merely add a subsystem but threatens to colonize existing ones, distorting the functions they were evolved or designed to perform. Consider the Decider subsystem. At the human scale, this has historically been distributed across central banks, parliaments, courts, and individual human judgment. As AI systems increasingly inform decisions once reserved for human deciders, we risk a quiet transfer of executive control to a subsystem with no accountability structure, no capacity for moral reasoning, and no stake in the consequences it produces. A superorganism whose Decider function has been captured by opaque, misaligned optimization targets is a superorganism at risk of acting against its own survival. It is the biological equivalent of a tumor hijacking the signaling pathways of a healthy organ.

The Channel and Net and Encoder/Decoder subsystems face a parallel threat. Social media algorithms, now increasingly AI-curated, control what information flows between the billions of nodes (humans) in the societal system. When this channel is optimized not for the coherence or survival of the whole system but for engagement and profit, we get emergent pathology that has unintended consequences. Misinformation, synthetic media, and deepfakes represent a corruption of the Encoder function itself: the capacity to translate internal states into public language becomes untethered from any internal state at all. AI can encode messages from nothing, flooding the Channel and Net with signal that has no true source.

Perhaps most existentially, AI threatens the Boundary subsystem; the boundary responsible for maintaining identity and integrity. As AI erodes the distinction between human-generated and machine-generated content, between authentic and synthetic experience, the boundary between “self” and “environment,” so crucial to any living system’s survival, begins to blur. At the individual psychological level, the institutional level, and now, potentially, at the level of the planetary superorganism’s own self-model, this will have cascading effects.

AI as Tool

Yet the very subsystems AI threatens to distort, it can also radically strengthen. This is the fundamental ambivalence of any general-purpose technology.
As an Input Transducer, AI-augmented sensor networks, satellite imagery analysis, and climate modelling give the superorganism unprecedented sensory resolution. We can now detect deforestation, ocean temperature anomalies, and disease outbreaks in near real-time, effectively expanding Earth’s capacity to perceive its own condition, not unlike a nervous system gaining new receptors.

As Associator and Memory, AI’s capacity to find patterns across vast datasets (protein folding and climate feedback loops) allows the superorganism to link information in ways no individual human mind, or even collective human institution, could manage unaided. AlphaFold’s contribution to AI-assisted drug discovery is, in Miller’s terms, an enhancement of the Associator function at a civilizational scale.

As Distributor, AI-optimized logistics and supply chain management move matter and energy with far greater efficiency, reducing waste in a system whose Extruder function (its capacity to expel waste sustainably) is already dangerously overloaded, as evidenced by the very crises of food and energy insecurity.
Used consciously, AI could become the superorganism’s most powerful Internal Transducer. It can become a genuine planetary nervous system capable of sensing its own condition (via climate dashboards, global health surveillance, real-time economic indicators) with a coherence and speed no prior civilization may have possessed. Hagens’ framing of Earth as a superorganism becomes far more than metaphor if AI genuinely functions as the connective tissue linking planetary sensing to planetary response.

AI as Mirror

Perhaps AI’s most underappreciated role is as a mirror. This is not because it reflects the world back to us, but because it reflects us, and by extension, the superorganism’s own internal contradictions, back to itself.

Large language models are trained on the sum total of digitized human expression: our knowledge, but also our biases, our unresolved conflicts, our unmetabolized traumas. In this sense, AI functions as a kind of collective Decoder turned inward: it doesn’t just decode external signals for the system; it decodes the system’s own accumulated, half-conscious content and hands it back in coherent, articulate form. When an AI model reproduces racial bias, political polarization, or engagement-optimized content, it is accurately encoding patterns already present in the human noosphere it was built from. This is precisely the kind of “mirror” dynamic Dr. Hedlund gestures toward in his own thesis while discussing the epistemic crisis as a crisis of worldview fragmentation. AI doesn’t cause this fragmentation so much as it makes it newly, uncomfortably visible, reflecting back the incoherence of a superorganism whose Decider and Associator subsystems have not yet learned to integrate across its many competing worldviews.

Understood this way, the emergence of AI within Earth’s superorganism forces a question: is the planetary system’s crisis fundamentally one of matter and energy (resource scarcity, ecological degradation), or is it, at a deeper level, an information crisis — a failure of the Decider, Associator, and Channel and Net subsystems to process an increasingly interconnected reality coherently? If the latter, then AI is neither simply humanity’s salvation nor its doom. It is at best the amplifier of whichever tendency, integrative or disintegrative, currently dominates the superorganism’s own psyche. The mirror does not choose what it shows us. It is we who choose.

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