Learning to participate more wisely in life.
As a research collective, we are continuously asking, sensing, and mapping:
Six living questions orient our work. We return to them as our lives, relationships, and understanding continue to change.
Inquiring into the nature of reality
How do we continually make sense of a reality that exceeds our full comprehension? How might we keep refining the ontologies, worldviews, and cosmologies we live by so they help us participate in life with greater wisdom, care, and responsibility?
Orienting to our historical and planetary moment
Given the multiplicity of histories, experiences, and realities being inhabited by different people across space and time, what is the historical, ontological, and planetary context we actually find ourselves in?
Understanding the forces shaping our world
What systems, institutions, histories, worldviews, technologies, movements, and ways of seeing and relating have brought us to this moment, and continue to shape how we perceive, desire, organize, and act?
Sensing possibilities already alive in the present
What worldviews, practices, communities, movements, and ways of living are already unfolding right now? What seeds of more life-affirming worlds are trying to emerge within the present?
Inquiring into human possibility
Who are we beneath the conditioning of our lives within modernity, and who do we need to become in service of more life, more beauty, more truth, and more goodness to come — especially in the times we are living?
Discerning participation and responsibility
How are we being called to participate in this moment? What is my unique contribution to the emergence of life-affirming futures?
With our whole bodies,
lives, and souls.
The way we come to know is part of what we are learning.
This research is not necessarily academic. We engage it both individually and collectively, with our whole bodies, lives, and souls.
We are informed and inspired by approaches that make room for embodied knowing, relationship, participation, and responsibility. These threads accompany an inquiry that is continually being lived and revised.
As our work develops, we aim to publish transdisciplinary research, original essays, social cartographies, and curated collections that contribute to narrative-building and cultural sensemaking—and help orient wise action in times of uncertainty.
Embodied · embedded · enactive · extended
John Vervaeke · the 4Ps
Shawn Wilson · Indigenous Research Methods
A meta-relational approach to inquiry
The realization of the nature of reality through the depth and clarification of our first-person experience
Inquiry becomes research. Research becomes lived experiment.
Beyond the guiding questions that continually inform and transform our work, we currently have two main fields of research with active experiments:
We're developing an in-depth map of the ecosystem of wisdom-centered systems transformation across Brazil and Latin America.
Explore the Map (opens in a new tab)Civilization is always educating us and shaping the kind of humans we become. How might we cultivate cultures, systems, and institutions that support rather than undermine our becoming?
Active Research & Inquiry ThreadInquiries and experiments into post-capitalist, collaborative forms of living, engaging with tools and practices for commoning, shared intelligence and transcontextual coordination.
Between Members of the Collective and the FellowshipAn early stage framework being developed, applied and tested through the Transformative Educational Lab.
Explore the PedagogyAn inquiry into the nature of wisdom, how it develops and what kinds of wisdom we need for a time of planetary crisis.
Paper in development — Early StageA 10-month experiment co-created with youth aged 18–29, therapists and mentors, guest teachers, and a growing wisdom council.
Explore the FellowshipDo you feel called to collaborate on any of this research? A warm invitation below
The field from which this research grows.
As we dedicate ourselves to this research, we recognize at least two underlying challenging historical issues, present in both academic and independent research:
01 / Whose knowledge becomes visible?
In 2008, Arnett showed that 96% of psychological, comparative social and behavioural science studies in the top six psychology journals came from WEIRD countries (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic), representing a mere 12% of the world’s population.
Recent analyses (e.g., Thalmayer et al., 2021) found a slight increase in cultural diversity: from the previous 96%, now this research is excluding roughly 89% of the world's population. Since then, this kind of underrepresentation of the Global South has been shown to occur not only in psychology, but to continue to be the case for the vast majority of academic disciplines.1For a good introduction to these early findings and some of the more recent developments, see:
M.S. Rad, A.J. Martingano, & J. Ginges (2018), “Toward a psychology of Homo sapiens: Making psychological science more representative of the human population”, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 115 (45) 11401-11405.
For more, see also:
Henrich J, Heine SJ, Norenzayan A., 2010 “The weirdest people in the world?” Behavioral and Brain Sciences. 2010;33(2-3):61-83.
Hamer et. al., 2026. “Beyond WEIRD societies: Global social identifications across 45 countries and their socio-cultural and economic predictors. Political Psychology, 47, e70134.
Our point here isn't even to bring up (again) that we need more diverse perspectives. Yes, we do, but above all, we know from first-hand experience that responses to many of the ailments, needs and challenges of modern society already exist and can be found in non-WEIRD communities. However, given the systems, structures and incentives in place, as well as the long history of discrimination, extraction and repression they face, these contributions remain underfunded, underseen and underrepresented.
This means that while we have an abundance of practices, knowledges and ways of being that are conducive to life affirmation, such as the ones being surfaced by the Global Tapestry of Alternatives (GTA), for example, they are systematically persecuted and under-emphasized, remaining marginal to power and public conversation, sometimes even within those communities themselves.
Therefore, with our work, we seek to make them more visible and ask:
What kinds of research and cultural production need more space to emerge, how can we support the people doing it, and how can we support the creation of pathways for their work to be published and shared?
02 / How can we make sense of complexity?
It's impossible to make sense of all of the information available to us, not to mention the endless conflicting perspectives and interpretations of it. We naturally have to defer judgment through relational trust. Historically, we've done this mostly in smaller groups of people, often in our local communities. Today, this relational trust (and distrust) is spread out across institutions, systems, cultures, and peoples from various backgrounds.
Given the wide range of information and sources available (and unavailable) to us, we have to use various criteria to determine how trustworthy they are: how much we know about that topic and that source, their relationships, the methods they use, their worldviews, how much we know about their history, the systems and incentives they're embedded in, etc...
In the fields of academic and para-academic research, this information overwhelm often reflects itself as dense walls of text, hundreds of citations, specialist language and more, creating a field only an elite few can actually understand, discuss and advance.
While some of this is inevitable, not all of it is. We can take stances that minimize the barriers for entry and make the fields we're in more open to newcomers, diverse perspectives and multiple ways of knowing.
Citations at the level of a whole book or paper are often too broad for the general public or for a newcomer into the field. It puts the cognitive load on the reader to infer the relationships behind it. Hundreds of references in something we're reading may still leave us unable to understand a particular stance, its history, the relationships around it, or the ecology of information in which it sits.
For example, when first coming into a field, it would be very helpful to know and make visible: a) how a source relates to a claim, b) who a person or organization is connected to, including the type and strength of those affiliations, and c) the status of a claim within a field.
Following this, we could say there are at least three layers of context to a citation, that are often not even visible:
Does it support, oppose, address, explain, supplement, or lead to something?
Who is the person or organization affiliated with? What is the nature and strength of the relationship? What context does it bring to how we understand their work?
How widely is a claim accepted? How much evidence supports it? What are their counter-arguments?
*In our Ecosystem Map, we're experimenting with these and other design patterns as Advanced Filters.
Of course, the ones doing these kinds of mapping or categorization are not arbiters of truth. They're also implicated in the map, their incentive and belief systems are also crucial to be considered when interpreting this presentation of information.
All of this also points to the need for a second layer of sensemaking, which should include, for example, transdisciplinary perspectives on it. We should not just take as a given what's widely accepted in a field. These are just a few examples that make more visible the information ecologies in which we're embedded.
We aim, therefore, to facilitate learning and navigation by:
1. Making the fragmented information ecosystems we live in more visible & obscure language more scaffolded.
2. Making resources more accessible by highlighting multimedia formats that engage multiple senses (images, audio, video, arts, practices, etc).
3. Using knowledge design patterns that reduce cognitive overload and make relational trust more explicit.
What this means for our approach:
What forms of wisdom sprout from communities who face, as well as have already endured and been transformed by various forms of collapse?
How we are moved by and implicated in the research is part of the research. We keep metadata and warm data alongside the material itself.
We work to make complex bodies of knowledge less emotionally and cognitively demanding, as well as easier to present, explore, and understand.
The issues we outlined above make it disproportionately hard for many people, whether caretakers, neurodivergent, living with physical limitations, or from marginalized, oppressed, or exploited backgrounds, to engage with some of the most transformative and consequential work happening in the world. In the great majority of times, this is also often the case for researchers and practitioners across the Global South as a whole.
Our work emerges also as a response to that. We do this so that not only those with an abundance of material, financial, energetic, cognitive and relational support can engage with this research if they choose to do so, by making explicit and trying to minimize the various levels of scaffolding needed to engage with it.
We are committed to working through these challenges so both our research and the research we engage with becomes more robust, diverse, mindful of our biases, transformative, and accessible to an increasing number of people.
A Metta Tropical
Knowledge Commons
A collective knowledge garden.
Cultivated through relationship.
As we research and cohere, we are slowly tending a collective knowledge garden: a way to organize hyperlinked media, information, and resources through multiple tags and collections, alongside warm, relational data—why something matters to us and how it is relevant to our lives and the work ahead.
Part of our research and experimentation is knowing there is much room to improve how we discover, cultivate, and share information, and how we learn and build trust as individuals and communities.
Cultivating a growing repository of legitimate, resonant sources is a way to share inspiration and life pathways, and to re-establish intergenerational trust and transmission in an age of overwhelmingly digital relationships.
Beginning with the Fellowship
As the Fellowship progresses, we aim to tend and share the educational resources we cover, initially across five streams.
If you want to learn more or possibly collaborate, here are a few suggested readings as sources of inspiration, that inform and get into the spirit of our work.
"The discipline of metaphysics is notoriously controversial and metaphysical claims are suspect in modern and postmodern discourse. Where modern scientists often critique the claims of metaphysics as unverifiable and thus untrue, postmodernists critique both science and metaphysics for making truth claims in the first place. I argue that metaphysics is what saves us from a descent into discourses that are merely about power and illusion. I am not arguing for a return to premodern forms of metaphysics, but in favor of adopting metamodern metaphysical characterizations of the human based on an understanding of love as a transpersonal universal force akin to gravity. Philosophers have long called this force Eros and have placed it at the center of the human experience."
What does "making sanctuary" mean in our current day and age? The way we understand it is as in Bayo's use of the word: "sanctuaries are not places where we are set straight; they're invitations to be broken down."
Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures Collective
"We contend that the predicament we face is not primarily rooted in ignorance and thus solvable with more knowledge, nor primarily rooted in immorality and thus solvable with more normative values; rather, it is rooted in denials that stem from harmful desires for and investments in the continuity of the securities and satisfactions promised by modernity-coloniality. Faced with these denials, we emphasize a collective need to "grow up" so that we might "show up" differently to do the work that is needed as we collectively face unprecedented global challenges."
"Overall, the conditions that makes one's' life good are that one judges and experiences that ones life is satisfying, virtuous (morally good), and deeply connected. A theory of the cognitive conditions that afford achieving such ends would be a theory of the flourishing that is necessary to wisdom. Wise people have the knowledge of the nature of selves such that they can promote and protect: agency, meaning in life, the agency‐meaning in life identity formation relation, and the virtues needed to protect selves and communities of selves and to afford participation in this way of life."
"The purpose of this paper is to provide readers with an opportunity to reassess their work and life in the face of what I believe to be an inevitable near-term societal collapse due to climate change. The approach of the paper is to analyse recent studies on climate change and its implications for our ecosystems, economies and societies, as provided by academic journals and publications direct from research institutes. That synthesis leads to my conclusion there will be a near-term collapse in society with serious ramifications for the lives of readers. The paper does not prove the inevitability of such collapse, which would involve further discussion of social, economic, political and cultural factors, but it proves that such a topic is of urgent importance."
"Many pedagogies that seek to address the climate and nature emergency (CNE) promise hope and solutions for an idealized future. In this article, we suggest these pedagogies are rooted in the same modern/colonial system that created the CNE and other ‘wicked’ socio-ecological challenges in the first place, and thus they are not well-suited for preparing students to navigate these challenges. We also ask what kind of climate education could invite students to interrupt the reproduction of colonial futures, and deepen their sense of social and ecological responsibility in the present."
Arousing the Desire for Wanting to Exist in the World in a Grown-up Way
Gert Biesta
"Discussions about education often focus on the purposes that should be achieved or the outcomes that should be produced. In this paper, I approach the question of the purpose of education differently, by asking what the work of teachers and other educators should focus. The answer I propose is that this work is about arousing the desire in children and young people for wanting to exist in the world in a “grown-up” way. I explain my use of the idea of “grown-up-ness,” and explore how education should provide time, space and curricular forms through which children and young people can “work on it”. Education needs to provide sustenance so that children and young people can be supported and nourished in their task of trying to exist in a grown-up way."
Regenerative Inquiry for Intergenerational Responsibility
Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures Collective
"Scholars from varied disciplines and knowledge systems have pointed to the disavowed social and ecological costs of the promise that we can continue pursuing infinite economic growth on a finite planet. In this article, we offer an alternative approach to education grounded in a regenerative inquiry methodology. Regenerative inquiry can prepare people to honestly confront the limits and harms of “green growth” and support them to “grow up” by expanding their capacity to navigate complexity and uncertainty and activating a sense of intergenerational responsibility."
"Leading edge scientists and theorists of evolutionary emergence have shown us that the universe is going somewhere. There is a plot and a direction to this story. In this story we are not puppets, moved by a mythological God. Each of us is a leading actor, playing a unique role, and love is the driving force, the inherent plot of the universe. The universe is a love story. Not an ordinary love story. An Outrageous Love Story. The revelation of evolution is not merely the discovery of an objective fact. Rather it is the realization that the universe is passionately alive, throbbing and pulsating with energy and growth. This is not merely a poetic metaphor. This narrative is what we believe to be the most compelling, post-dogmatic narrative of purpose, Eros and meaning available at this moment in history."
A warm note for elders, partners & youth
Does this kind of work move you? Is it something you have also been thinking about or working on for a long time?
Being transparent: we are trying, but we do not really know how to do all of this. And to our understanding, nobody else does.
If you are an elder, a lineage holder, or someone who has long been creating transformative educational architectures or working towards systems transformation, we need your wisdom and support if we are to have a chance of creating life-affirming cultures and societies.
If you are a young person—or, like us, from a generation in between—we also invite you to come learn and co-create where your gifts feel most aligned.
If this research or the tending of a knowledge commons enlivens you, we would love to hear from you.
