If we can’t makesense of reality, we can’t take meet the challenges we face as a species.However, figuring out what is going on in the world we live in has never beenmore difficult. We live in an increasingly complex environment, and theinstitutions we used to look to to help us understand haven’t evolved fast enough. Our governments, media establishments, think tanks and religions arenot set up to deal with exponentially increasing cultural complexity and theflood of different perspectives we find online.

Added to this, we live in an era when the idea of truth itself is under question. Multiple narratives vie for our attention, while market forcesdistort our institutions and force us to question what information we cantrust.  

There is a term often used to describe the way we now have to approach the complex modernworld: sensemaking. Making sense is more than just understanding; it’s theprocess of continuously absorbing, interpreting, and giving meaning to theinformation we receive through our senses so that we can decide how to act.It’s flexible, conditional and creative. Good sensemaking is what we need to be able to navigate a media landscape that is constantly changing and full of opinions andreporting that can only be trusted after careful discernment.  

It can be tempting to see sensemaking as a very modern term that arose inresponse to our 21centuryenvironment. However, it is really just a new word for an ancient process thatwe find in spiritual traditions around the world; that of seeing through thedelusion of the world we construct around ourselves. As the classical scholar PeterKingsley has pointed out, this skilful perception was sometimes referred to asmêtis in ancient Greece. Mêtis was a word for subtleness, cunning and trickery.But it also meant an intense presence and awareness that could lead us, throughpaying attention and seeing through the illusions around us, to a deeperspiritual reality. We see someform of this wisdom repeated again and again, from Hinduism to ChristianGnosticism.    

Inherent in this ancient and widespread wisdom is that there is a deeper,underlying reality beyond what we can construct through our language. We might,in peak experiences, glimpse it. But we will never fully understand it. It isby its very nature mysterious.

There are three forces in the Western In the world we live in now that have had the effect ofobscuring or denying this way of seeing the world. The first is scientificreductionism, which attempts to explain reality by reducing it to ever-smallerparticles. The second is postmodernism, a worldview that began as an artcritique and grew to completely take over the social sciences. It has led to abelief our identities are socially constructed and have no deeper foundation. Likewise, it has focused on dynamics of power and oppression as the mostfundamental drivers of the human experience, which in turn has led to a pathologicalfixation on identity politics. The third driving force is the market, which hasstripped transcendent meaning from the world and replaced it with consumption.

The result is that many people feel lost, stuck in what cognitive scientistJohn Vervaeke has called ‘The Meaning Crisis’. We have fallen into nihilism or narcissism, and in the process lost access to the ancient wisdom that remindsus that our conception of reality is not reality, but a cracked mirror reflecting something profound and beautiful we can never truly grasp. 

And if we want to start tackling the many crises we face – ecological, economic, psychologicaland institutional – we need to tackle this meaning crisis at the same time. Thatmight mean returning to where sensemaking really came from – an inquiry intothe nature of reality and our place within it.

That will take us on a journey into the heart of what it means to be human, and the story we wantto tell with our lives. It will require us to use every tool we’ve developed inthe history of our species, not just the rationalist tools we’ve found usefulover the last 400 years.  It will invite us to draw on intuition, aesthetics, embodiment, science and reason all at thesame time. If we can manage to balance these ways of knowing, we may begin tomake sense well enough to meet the challenges that lie ahead of us.