We are not facing a mere civilisational crisis. We are living through a slow-motion psychospiritual implosion—a forgetting so total it wears the mask of progress. Systems are cracking, yes: economies, ecosystems, information ecologies, political orders. But the deeper disintegration is ontological. The crisis lies in how we know, how we see, and how we relate. Beneath our technological brilliance and institutional rot is a hollowing of soul, a loss of interior coherence.
It is tempting to look for answers in policy or protest, but neither speaks deeply enough. We do not need another programme. We need a reconsecration of perception itself.
Across various disciplines—developmental psychology, cognitive neuroscience, systems theory, philosophy, ecology, and the remnants of ancestral wisdom—we find fragments of a forgotten pattern. Not a linear path, but a spiral. Not a ladder of improvement, but a rhythm of transformation. A turning.
Of course, some here may already know how Clare Graves once proposed that human values evolve in waves. These waves, or layers of being, emerge in response to life conditions: from survivalism to tribalism, from rule and order to individual achievement, then pluralism, systems integration, and eventually holistic planetary consciousness. Each level has its gifts and shadows, and none can be skipped. But crucially, when stress becomes to great for a level to handle, the system either breaks down or transforms.
This, then, is where we stand. The pluralistic age has reached its limits. Inclusion has become fragmentation. Truth has become optional. Complexity is now incoherence. And so the spiral turns again. But the next turning is not merely conceptual. It must be cognitive, embodied, and cultural. It must reach into the very structure of our minds.
Here the work of McGilchrist becomes highly relevant. His thesis is simple but seismic: our culture has become dominated by the left hemisphere of the brain. Not merely in individuals, but structurally—in language, institutions, and ways of knowing. The left hemisphere is concerned with control, precision, categorisation, and manipulation. It sees the world as parts to be named and used. The right hemisphere perceives holism, context, metaphor, music, mystery. It sees the world as alive.
In a healthy psyche, the right leads and the left serves. But in our age, the emissary has overthrown the master. The servant now believes himself king. The result is a civilisation that excels at metrics and machinery but forgets the meaning behind them.
This imbalance is not a metaphor. It is a pathology. And no change of policy will resolve it. Only a shift in how we attend to the world can restore coherence. Only by returning to right-hemispheric perception—to embodied relationship, to ambiguity, to reverence—can we begin to heal what has fractured.
Yet this is not about abandoning reason or science. It is about integration. Integral Theory maps this terrain well: every perspective, to be complete, must account for interior and exterior, individual and collective. Science without introspection is blind. Spirituality without systems awareness is hollow. Culture without biology is disembodied. Politics without the aim of world unification is pointless. Wholeness means all at once.
This second renaissance, if it comes, will not look like the first. It will not arise from salons and manifestos, but from relational, lived experience. Both local and planetary, slow and sudden, it will begin in the soil. We have for examples plentiful ones already: ecovillages, permaculture practitioners, those rediscovering ancient wisdom through meditation and plant medicines. Yet the impacts of those go as far as their localities - the task before us is to make such practices global.