Intro Series X: The NEWDS Approach Part Three: The Full-Spectrum Collaborative Model of Sensemaking (Sensemaking II)
A Seven-Part Model of Collaborative Sensemaking in the Context of Meta-Crisis and Bigger-than-Self Distress
This is the tenth post in an Intro Series where I introduce the key concepts and lay out the intellectual grounding of the Bigger-than perspective I’m developing in this substack. There are a number of interlocking pieces to the Bigger-than approach and I’m publishing a minimum viable number of pieces individually in order to be able to demonstrate the interlocking wholeness that emerges from the interweaving of each piece. Here are the links to parts I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, and IX in this series…
In this post I am joined by Matthew Painton, a deep friend and collaborator. The two of us have been in near-weekly dialogue for over two years, despite living on opposite sides of the planet. We were brought together by a shared resonance with the experience I was starting to call “bigger-than-self reality distress”, and complementary and overlapping approaches towards addressing this. Matthew is a coach by profession, as well as writer, and lives in Brighton in the UK. He has been helping to give feedback on recent articles in this Substack and in this post joins as a co-writer, presenting on his transjective model of sensemaking bigger-than-self reality in the context of meta-crisis.
In the previous post in the series, Laurence discussed the term sensemaking as it is understood in the mainstream and enactive cognition literatures, and laid out the general context in which sensemaking about bigger-than-self distress is occurring. It is this context, of polycrisis, meta-crisis, bigger-than-self distress and reality distress, and the existential aporia of seemingly needing to go through one or multiple phase shifts individually and collectively without knowing exactly to what or how it might come about, which sets up what will be presented in the current post: what we are calling the Full-Spectrum Collaborative Sensemaking Model. This is a context-specific model of sensemaking for making sense of both finite (e.g., time and place-bound) and infinite (e.g., the nature of reality and what it is to be human) aspects of bigger-than-self reality, in ways that are relevant for the times we find ourselves in and what we now know about how life on a finite planet is organised and behaves.
The model comes from the authors’ own sensemaking as enactive cognitive agents facing such bigger-than-self reality distress and aporia/not-knowing, as well as seeing and being with others experiencing their own versions of the same. One could say that the model evolved as a byproduct of the authors’ own wisdom development journeys, and from sitting with and metabolising both agent (bigger-than-self distress) and arena (meta-crisis) poles of the current transjective crisis. The model serves to “aspectualise”, or break down into component aspects, the crisis as it shows up in the subjective and objective poles of experience.
The model takes inspiration from a great multitude of sources, but we want to take the time to single out a handful of them here. One is Vervake’s (2019) 4P theory of knowledge, which proposes four types of knowing; propositional, procedural, perspectival, and participatory. Each kind of knowing has discernible cognitive modes associated with them, and the ‘shallower’ types of knowing can be seen to be grounded in more basic and profound forms of knowing: the participatory mode grounds the perspectival, which grounds the procedural, which in turn grounds the propositional (for more of an explanation on this we invite readers to consult Episode 29 of Vervaeke 2019). A second source is McGilchrest’s (2009) analysis of real and enduring differences in brain hemispheres. McGilchrist characterises the right hemisphere (rightfully, according to McGilchrest, “The Master”) as holistic, interested in novelty, gist, capable of creativity, and grasping overall wholes; and contrasts this with the left hemisphere (rightfully “The Emissary”), which is reductionistic, detail-oriented, excels at carrying out already-known or methodical tasks and logical analysis. A third is Henriques’ (2003) Theory of Knowledge (ToK) System, which has been discussed in more detail in an earlier post, but which provides a framework for understanding emergent complexity in nature, from physical processes to biological self-organisation to animal nervous system and behavioural learning and regulation to human psychology and culture.
Scene-Setting: Transjective Planetary Meta-Crisis / Alignment
Before we get into the details of the model, however, it might be helpful to share some diagrams that show in pictorial form the current state of the planet and our human civilisation. At present, the dominant globalising civilisation is misaligned with the health and wellbeing of both the biosphere, and even with that of humanity, if we assume that humanity wants both human, more-than-human, and planetary health and flourishing that is sustainable over generations and centuries of time - values which are broadly shared across human cultures at least in principle. This misalignment has generated an actually-occurring and existentially stressful planetary meta-crisis. The following figures demonstrate, respectively, first the misaligned current state of our civilisation with the biosphere and self-organising principles of living systems, and second what a hypothetical optimally aligned future state might look like, across different levels of mutual self-organisation.
A defining characteristic of the current meta-crisis is the lack of meaningful and sufficiently powerful cultural mechanisms for affording connection between humans - individually and collectively - and with important and foundational aspects and levels of bigger-than-self reality. This results in the situation that millions of people remain relatively oblivious to the planetary scope, scale, depth, and extent of the meta-crisis. For a myriad of reasons, our dominant civilisational culture tends to direct attention in self-referential ways, both at the individual level (e.g., a focus on one’s individual wellbeing and personal life/success), and the collective (e.g., an anthropocentric focus on humanity at the expense of most of the more-than-human world and non-dominant cultures). In this normatively self-referential and disconnected dominant civilisational culture, the experience of bigger-than-self distress that is itself intimately related to and a product of this distributed disconnection, falls overwhelmingly on individuals, as does the burden of sensemaking in a world that is perceived as distressing and not making sense.
In a more desirable possible future, the sensemaking, practices, rituals, and actions of our civilisation would align much more closely with the principles of living systems and other self-organising principles within bigger-than-self reality. In this (hypothetical and idealised) future, the degree of bigger-than-self distress falling on individuals would be much reduced, and the degree to which humanity shares the burden of staying aligned with principles of sustainable human and more-than-human wellbeing would be much greater. Such a possible future, perhaps on the other side of the talked-about individual and collective phase shift(s) that are needed to get there, is represented by Figure 2, and is aligned with individual and collective eustress, a term meaning stress arousal that is beneficial for the organism experiencing it. We imagine that coherence would still involve effort, rather than eliminate stressors, but the unavoidable stressors of life would be related and responded to in such a way that led to more coherence between layers of reality as they exist on the planet.
A Proposed Seven-Part Model of Full-Spectrum Sensemaking
One of the authors (Painton) has been coaching individuals and groups who are suffering with bigger-than-self reality distress for some years, alongside learning to manage his own. He observed that there seemed to be a pattern of aspects, frames and priorities with regard to the polycrisis or meta-crisis that individuals and groups seemed to focus on, each of which has its own relevant concerns, its own ‘type’ or qualities of distress (and eustress) and each of which offers a particular adaptive ‘function’ or ‘grip’ with reality.
Each domain is rooted in a particular sensibility through which individuals make personal sense of the world and extends into a particular domain of social and collective sensemaking, which in turn is directed towards a particular aspect of, or concern for, bigger-than-self reality. Each aspect and domain of reality is afforded by a particular sensibility (or sense-ability) which is rooted in the body and awareness, which is located at the centre and is assumed to extend beyond the body and into the social sphere and the biosphere (or eco-social system). Each aspect is also associated with a particular kind of knowing and concern, grounded in human cognition, and as such shares similarity and overlap with Vervaeke’s 4P theory of knowing.
These different aspects (including awareness) evolved into seven domains of the model we’re tentatively calling the Full Spectrum Collaborative Sensemaking model. In Figure 3, the field of awareness of bigger-than-self reality is divided into six domains, each with a particular aspect of objective and social concern (represented in the outer circles). The grey circle represents the subjective perspective of an embodied individual, who in this framework has six corresponding (subjective) sensibilities (physicality, recognition, perspective, evaluation, reason, and imagination), that contribute to and are governed and integrated by awareness at the centre.
Figure 3 shows how embodied and extended (human) awareness is afforded by six cognitive sensibilities. Each of the sensibilities interfaces with a particular aspect of bigger-than-self reality, having its own particular concern (which affords relevance, motivation and grip) and its own kind of knowing. Together, a particular sensibility, its personal and social aspect and its relevant concern and knowledge make up a sensemaking (sub-)domain of awareness. The six domains are not actually separate, but a continuum, much like how we discern distinct colours of a rainbow out of the continuum of light. The six objective aspects and their corresponding personal and collective knowledge concerns are: materiality (security/insecurity), relations (me/us/them), pattern (chaos/order), information (truth/false), quality (positive/negative), and mystery (known/unknown), whilst the seventh aspect is awareness (presence/absence) which extends from the centre to the outer edge, encompassing all the domains. The meta-crisis appears quite differently (frame) depending upon which domain(s) one prioritises, foregrounds and interfaces with, or feels most threatened by.
Having established the sensibilities, domains, and aspects, we can now overlay examples of the kinds of personal and systemic threat/distress and virtue/eustress which tend to arise in each area. The primary value of this is to discern and distinguish the different qualities of bigger-than-self distress which can simultaneously arise in response to the metacrisis and otherwise can tend to manifest as overwhelm (hypoarousal), reactivity (hyperarousal), dissociation and/or dissonance and incoherence.
In contrast to the distress-affected version of these domains, Figure 5 shows a eustress-aligned version, or what virtuous relations, values and actions look like in each of the domains. Virtues arise between agent (self/community) and arena (bigger-than-self reality) when there is a coherent sense-making relationship between them. The virtues are both evidence of coherence and mediators of coherence within, amongst and between self-organising, sense-making systems (such as people, companies, eco-systems, nations and species). Figure 5 shows how such virtuous feedback loops here could engender ever greater systemic and personal coherence between self (agent) and reality at large (arena).
Each of these aspects/concerns/sensibilities/domains can be seen to contain and represent important pieces of the overall picture of polycrisis and meta-crisis and of how individuals and communities interface with bigger-than-self reality in this context. Each individual and community's type of stress and distress represents their own particular sensemaking ‘interface’ with the highly complex and polyvalent meta-crisis, and bigger-than-self reality. For example, one person or group may interface with the meta-crisis primarily through the aspect of social injustice or moral outrage (distress) and an orientation or aspiration towards the virtue of justice (eustress) whilst another may interface primarily through biosphere depletion (distress) and an orientation towards right relationship with nature and practical physical mitigation and adaptation in the place that they live (virtue).
Painton initially tried to map or characterise these different and distinct aspects in order understand how a particular group or individual is framing and interfacing with the meta-crisis, to help keep track of complex and sensitive coaching conversations and to help disentangle compound and often overwhelming concern and distress into more manageable and digestible domains and priorities. As a coach, he also sought to understand how any particular quality of distress might be transmuted into its respective virtuous or enlivening action. We will now look at each of these aspects in more detail.
The Seven Aspects of (Bigger-than-Self Reality) Awareness: Physical, Relational, Informational, Qualitative, Patterning, and Mystery/Mythos
Materiality. This aspect has to do with physical, observable aspects of bigger-than-self reality, including, in the context of meta-crisis, right-livelihood and biospheric or local environmental concerns, resource and energy use, climate change, pollution, and other planetary boundaries. This domain is associated primarily with Vervaeke’s (2019) notion of the procedural level of knowing, which involves sensorimotor skills and learning and physical actions that materially affect change in the world. The transjective quality to this aspect has to do with fittedness and ecology - are an individual or collective’s skills well-matched to the changing environment such that they can continue to sustain their own and their community's physical well-being, and the physical health of more-than-human and bigger-than-self systems under their influence? Distress occurs when skills don’t match the socio-ecological environment, while eustress comes from an optimal fittedness and flow between one’s skills and their desired impacts on the (ever-changing) environment. Distress here is associated with insecurity or fragility - a lack of appropriate skills, degeneration of the physical environment and corresponding subjective experiences of futility, scarcity, hunger, and poverty; while eustress is associated with regeneration of the physical environment and security, antifragility, enoughness, purpose, and flow. This domain corresponds to both economy and ecology - the fact that the fields of ecology and economics are so estranged from each other in the current culture is very much part of the meta-crisis.
Relations. This aspect has to do with how we perspectivally relate to self, each other, and environment. Cognitively, it is linked with what Vervaeke (2019) refers to as perspectival knowing, which is the kind of knowing that allows us to take a perspective or mode of identifying with, or as, or towards a being, community, place, or issue. Relationality can expand to include other beings in a “we/us” perspective (prototypically and evolutionarily, this ability likely began with identifying with one’s offspring and kinship group and became exapted from there). Perspectival knowing and identification can also contract or exclude - for example, into “me” versus “you”, or “us” versus “them”. It is thus a highly affectively charged domain, and includes the possibility of both polarised or discordant dynamics and harmonic and synergistic dynamics. Distress in the domain of relations appears as rivalry, conflict, domination/victimisation, lack of belonging, negative conceptions of self and/or humanity, and eco-distress in relation to ’nature’ and/or local environment. Eustress shows up as inclusivity and a right relationship within the web of relations, and is embodied through nourishing relationships involving a sense of mutuality that neglects neither self nor other. Being able to take the we perspective and the perspective of the other requires compassion which optimises for mutuality and transmutes zero-sum rivalry, competition and conflict into higher level identity, mutuality, cooperation and synergy. Notably, this domain also applies to the intra-psychic realm, as the psyche and its inner dialogue contains multiple perspectives and these can be more or less harmonic/discordant, too.
Quality/Evaluation. Humans and other living organisms constantly evaluate the relative qualities of reality as positive/negative, pain/pleasure, and good/bad. Cognitively, this maps onto Henriques’ (2003) ToK model in the realm of biological cognition - from simple prokaryotes upwards, there is a need for evaluation of what is good/bad for the organism that stems from its autopoietic (self-authoring, self-maintaining) nature: biological organisms are inherently concerned with what aids survival and reproduction. This basic biological necessity shapes cognition in fundamental ways and in humans is exapted into all sorts of applications of cognition. For example, in Buddhist philosophy, one of the five aggregates that are thought to make up mind and are integrated into foundational mindfulness practice is vedana, often translated as sensation or feeling tone, referring to the mind’s categorisation and experiencing of phenomena as pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral (Anālayo, 2010). Qualitative evaluation is also the domain of ethics, morality and principles - especially of justice, and right relationship on more extended levels than the interpersonal domain. This constant evaluation happening in cognition in relation to its environment provides motivation and orientation towards the good/positive and away from the bad/negative. Distress in this domain is associated with a reciprocal narrowing of one’s perspective into moral outrage, grievance, unbalanced self-righteousness and exceptionalism, or apathy and dissociation from the impact of one’s actions on the whole. Eustress in this domain, by contrast, is associated with a reciprocal opening towards moral virtue, actions that impact on individual and collective health of humanity and the more-than-human world, the righting of wrongs involved in justice.
Information/Reason. This domain is what we commonly consider to be in the realm of science, logic, facts, and evidence. Cognitively, it is associated with McGilchrest’s (2009) left-hemisphere mode of perceiving and computational rationality. The informational aspect of reality is engaged with via (disembodied, objective, Cartesian) computational rationality, which seeks to optimise for actuality - or truth, in order to be able to predict and modify reality. This category emphasises an objective and reductive approach - breaking wholes down into constituent parts (data-differentiation). This domain pertains especially to factual and intellectual sensemaking and quantification - for example, how many square kilometres of forest or jungle are intact, or what the relative efficiency is of alternative fuel sources to fossil fuels. Distress in this domain shows up as uncertainty and/or over-certainty, cognitive dissonance, hair-splitting, objectification and a dissociation or lack of perspective or right relationship with/from the other sensemaking domains. Eustress in this domain looks like clarity, a harmony of thought that comes from the integration of multiple perspectives, and comfort with and skill in not-knowing and existing at the edge of one’s understanding - or curiosity.
Pattern. This domain involves a more holistic (as opposed to reductionistic) recognition of patterns at play in reality - for example classification, entropy and complexity, repetition and anomaly, chaos and order, harmony and disharmony. Cognitively, this is associated with McGilchrest’s right hemisphere mode of being: it is a holistic, whole-of-being sense that shows up not as linear, reductive, logically reasoned bits of information but as gists and linkages between aspects of perceived reality. Where the information domain reduces, differentiates, and deductively reasons, the pattern domain integrates, compresses, and inductively intuits. Detecting real patterns in reality gives organisms a sensemaking advantage: the deeper the pattern, to the extent that it is real, the more of reality it will afford one to perceive via seeing through it. For example, the pattern of evolution and self-organising systems (which was, at some point, intuited and inferred, rather than arrived at through deductive reasoning alone) allows us to perceive and understand a vast array of the world around us without needing to study each individual instance of it.
Distress in the patterning domain looks like reductive aspects of reality not fitting together, not making sense as a whole, and the detection of patterns that do not actually exist (e.g., conspiracy, pseudoscience, folly). On the objective side, when a culture is divorced from the patterning domain, it might produce unpredictability and ugliness on both agent and arena sides of the coin - aspects of the world not participating with each other well, a lack of elegance, constant disruption to once-relied upon patterns, and many patched together solutions that don’t fit with one another - dissonance. Eustress in this domain, by contrast, looks and feels like beauty - things fitting together harmoniously, seeing real inter-scalar patterns in reality that afford one more optimal grip, and elegant ways of being that afford the solution or prevention of multiple potential problems that might arise.
Mystery/Mythos. Human experience is circumscribed by mystery so deep and impenetrable that we tend to exclude it from ordinary awareness or everyday (and even, to our detriment, scientific) knowledge: at the edge of all the frontiers of human knowledge and understanding is a more fundamental not-knowing which can never be fully accommodated or transcended. Perceiving in the domain of mythos involves the kinds of information- and pattern-rich narrative frames that tie multiple aspects of reality and potentially whole networks of distributed cognition (e.g., organisations, societies) together into some sort of intelligible and meaningful narrative whole. Cognitively, the mythological mode is associated with the realm of what Corbin (e.g., 1964) refers to as the imaginal, which in his definition acts to synthesise and bridge the senses and the intellect without being reducible to either. The mythological domain, and the meaning that it engenders is both the most abstract (disembodied), integrative, and (enactive) domain of sensemaking for humans. Mythos and meaning arise at the boundary between the known and the unknown, and are a projection of familiarity and plausibility onto the unknowable that always surrounds us.
Importantly, the virtue we associated with mythos is not Truth (associated with Information) or Beauty (associated with Pattern), but Coherence, which could be understood as goodness-of-fit with reality. Coherent mythos does not contradict whatever is constantly emerging from the unknown into the known as events and facts, but rather assimilates them into a coherent story. Eustress-engendering mythos weaves imagination, knowledge and speculation into plausible stories and explanations that we invest in with belief and identity about the what, how and whys of human experience which otherwise remain unanswered and without which reality appears random, incoherent, meaningless, unintelligible or absurd. Mythological distress occurs whenever the explanatory narrative ground upon which meaning and sensemaking customarily depends no longer makes sense or can no longer explain reality as it is being experienced. The signs and symptoms of mythological distress show up as ossification/reification of the propositional so that it becomes impenetrable to change and refinement, as well as relativism, cynicism, nihilism and meaninglessness, as well as a rejection of novelty in mythological sensemaking and doubling down on obsolete mythologies with which we identify.
Awareness. The seventh facet, awareness, both grounds and assimilates all of the other facets. Cognitively, awareness is associated with Vervaeke’s (2019) notion of participatory knowing, which is referred to as a kind of irreducible knowing-by-being or ‘presence’. This knowing-by-being has deep implications - for example, the Neoplatonic tradition holds that we can know being itself through coming into greater participatory contact with our own being, precisely because the kinds of patterns that reality is made up of are also what we are made out of (e.g., the self-organising relevance realisation machinery of our cognition operates through fundamentally similar principles to the self-organisation of biological evolution, or even of the existence of planets and stars). This kind of participatory, knowing, or presencing, can integrate all the other facets of knowing/perceiving discussed above, but is not itself reduced to them (in a manner reminiscent of the title of McGilchrest’s book on the subject, The Master and his Emissary).
An optimal use of awareness, we suggest, is mindful, approach-oriented, and directed toward wisdom and the reduction of self-deception. Distress showing up within awareness is a symptom of socio-ecological dissonance and if responded to un-mindfully can lead avoidant or reactive behaviours which make matters worse in feedback loops of reciprocal narrowing (as discussed in Essay II of the current series); typically avoidance and dissociation, reactivity, overwhelm, and maladaptive responses which can be characterised as ‘absencing’. When metabolised and made sense of in skilful ways (that begin with a presencing and embracing attitude towards experience), distress can transmute into virtuous or wise action that has a positive affective valence and which generates greater coherence in feedback loops between agent(s) and arena. The optimal function of awareness can thus be seen as to constantly transmute distress into enactive and enacted wisdom through (ideally an ecology of) practices that can be broadly described as presencing.
The Centrality of Awareness for both Wisdom Development and Sensemaking
Understanding and foregrounding the centrality and integrative and governing function of awareness helps to clarify the central importance of wisdom development in response to the meta-crisis. Cultivating the development of one’s wisdom through the updating of one’s embodied cognitive priors and the corresponding change in the deep frames and affordances one has with one’s socio-ecological niche, facilitates change in one’s very being-in-the-world, of one’s participatory knowing itself. As this change occurs at a level of depth - the participatory knowing level - that grounds the other levels of knowing, such change then creates flow-on effects into perspectival knowing (e.g., a more present and interconnected view of the self and its embeddedness within and as an embodied expression of reality) and the kinds of procedural and propositional knowing that appear as relevant from there.
Effective wisdom development, as Laurence has argued in previous articles in this series, involves transforming one’s embodied cognitive system and being such that one’s actions tend to flow in a self-organising manner towards the reduction of self-deception and the cultivation of actions that have a virtuous impact. Such a being or community’s actions would tend to lead to both the reduction of bigger-than-self distress and the increase in bigger-than-self coherence - but at the same time, be appropriately balanced by humility and an awareness of one’s finitude, constant vulnerability to self-deception, and need to orient towards self-correction even as one transcends previously held sources of self-deception. It is this kind of participatory knowing, integrated with the other forms of knowing as illustrated within the model, that can perhaps provide an appropriate aspiration for those seeking to address bigger-than-self distress within themselves and the world, and provide an embodied response to the meta-crisis that feeds into wider socio-cultural and ecological niches.
Understanding and foregrounding the centrality and governing function of awareness not only helps to clarify the central importance of wisdom development, but also shows the link between wisdom development and integrated, full-spectrum and collaborative sensemaking in response to the meta-crisis, and how these two mutually inform and potentially enhance one another. The meta-crisis is a transjective phenomena; it is a crisis in and of subjective internal awareness just as much as it is objectively and effectively occurring ‘out there’ in objective bigger-than-self reality. As has been argued earlier in this series, the ultimate cause of the meta-crisis is an absence of awareness (or naivety) with regard to a systems view of life that runs deeper than the propositional and has us (erroneously) perceiving and realising ourselves as separate from the self-organising systems of reality and the biosphere. This absence of awareness and erroneous perceiving and realising is highly distributed throughout humanity via a self-deceptive dominant civilisational overculture, and has engendered a structural civilisational misalignment with the pre-existing, self-organising systems that we are both part of (but often dissociated from awareness of) and depend upon.
In turn, the objectively occurring effects of the meta-crisis and polycrisis can unfortunately be expected to create further reciprocal narrowing of awareness (via reactive and amplifying feedback loops of distress, as shown in Figure 4) without wise and virtuous use of awareness to respond to such conditions. Better understanding one’s own and other peoples sensemaking domains and frames, and how such frames differentially situate, orient and interface us within the highly complex, variable and overarching meta-crisis and polycrisis, allows for much deeper, full-spectrum collaboration, mutuality, resilience and understanding and for deeply vocational, virtuous and enactive responses within any particular domain that can better complement and inform each other. Understanding how objectively occurring phenomena - threats and stresses are responded to in each sensemaking domain as very different qualities and experiences of concern, distress and virtue, can afford greater grip and mutual opening between and across different domains, projects and communities.
Mythos, Meta-Cognition, and Metabolisation: Towards Coherent and Collaborative Sensemaking, Unfolding, and Enactment
Hopefully, one can see how the proposed seven-part collaborative full-spectrum sensemaking model of bigger-than-self reality distress and eustress might facilitate a virtuous, eustress-enhancing process of sensemaking for individuals or collectives experiencing bigger-than-self distress. However, this is merely a sensemaking model: accurate and useful sensemaking might be greatly helpful in responding to bigger-than-self reality, but while this is important, we do not advocate spending unending amounts of time in sensemaking. Sooner or later, one’s sensemaking will need to afford grip on action in the world, and in one’s own life - and indeed, the sensemaking model provided here itself illustrates the profound incompleteness of propositional knowing on its own, disengaged from the other sensemaking domains and from action in the world. We therefore suggest an additional tripartite model between mythos, meta-cognition, and metabolisation, which when done well leads to an unfolding enactment of one’s sensemaking within one’s life and the world.
In this tripartite model, the mythos and meaning that comes from our sensemaking, aided perhaps by the seven-part model above, needs to come in relationship with our embodied, embedded cognition as it extends enactively into the world. Mythos’ relationship to the other aspects, when enacted skilfully, plays a synthetic role between all the other facets of awareness that gives one a coherent grip with which to relate to bigger-than-self reality as a whole and its different levels and aspects. Meta-cognition acts as a kind of bridge between this sensemaking and metabolisation: it includes both useful theory about cognition (such as the model described above) and practices of awareness (such as circling and meditation) , so that we can more fully situate and consistently presence ourselves in the world in crisis that our sensemaking is leading us to comprehend and our distress is causing us to avoid. Understanding the adaptive functions of distress and eustress in its various forms (metacognition) underpins and assists with their metabolisation. Metabolisation makes use of the kind of Autopoietic Healing and Harmonising (AHH) processes discussed earlier in this series and is the cognitive/embodied co-processing of distress and eustress that is engendered by the meta-crisis. Metabolisation plays a kind of integrating function, digesting these truths into deep, perspectival and participatory elements of our being-in-the-world.
We have already touched on meta-cognition in our discussions of mindfulness earlier in the current series. The next article in the series will go into more detail about the metabolisation process as it might unfold in a person’s journey with bigger-than-self distress and reality distress, and distinguish three phases of metabolisation that seem to occur in such a journey. Sensemaking is a crucial step in the process, and the model presented in this article is designed to facilitate appropriate and useful sensemaking in the context of important and complex civilisational and biospheric events unfolding today, to enable those experiencing bigger-than-self distress to arrive at worldviews that afford greater capacity for virtuous, enlivening meaning-making and action.