If we can’t make sense 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 been more difficult. We live in an increasingly complex environment, and the institutions we used to look to help us understand haven’t evolved fast enough. Our governments, media establishments, think tanks and religions are not set up to deal with exponentially increasing cultural complexity and the flood 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 forces distort our institutions and force us to question what information we can trust. 

FIGURING OUT WHAT IS GOING ON IN THE WORLD WE LIVE IN HAS NEVER BEEN MORE DIFFICULT.

There is a term often used to describe the way we now have to approach the complex modern world: sensemaking. Making sense is more than just understanding; it’s the process of continuously absorbing, interpreting, and giving meaning to the information 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 and reporting that can only be trusted after careful discernment.

It can be tempting to see sensemaking as a very modern term that arose in response to our 21^st-century environment. However, it is really just a new word for an ancient process that we find in spiritual traditions around the world; that of seeing through the delusion of the world we construct around ourselves. As the classical scholar Peter Kingsley has pointed out, this skilful perception was sometimes referred to as mêtis 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, through paying attention and seeing through the illusions around us, to a deeper spiritual reality. We see some form of this wisdom repeated again and again, from Hinduism to Christian Gnosticism.    

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 is by its very nature mysterious.

There are three forces in the Western world we live in now that have had the effect of obscuring or denying this way of seeing the world. The first is scientific reductionism, which attempts to explain reality by reducing it to ever-smaller particles. The second is postmodernism, a worldview that began as an art critique and grew to completely take over the social sciences. It has led to a belief our identities are socially constructed and have no deeper foundation. Likewise, it has focused on the dynamics of power and oppression as the most fundamental drivers of the human experience, which in turn has led to a pathological fixation on identity politics. The third driving force is the market, which has stripped transcendent meaning from the world and replaced it with consumption.

The result is that many people feel lost, stuck in what cognitive scientist John Vervaeke has called ‘The Meaning Crisis’. We have fallen into nihilism or narcissism, and in the process lost access to the ancient wisdom that reminds us 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, psychological, and institutional – we need to tackle this meaning crisis at the same time. That might mean returning to where sensemaking really came from – an inquiry into the 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 want to tell with our lives. It will require us to use every tool we’ve developed in the history of our species, not just the rationalist tools we’ve found useful over the last 400 years.  It will invite us to draw on intuition, aesthetics, embodiment, science, and reason all at the same time. If we can manage to balance these ways of knowing, we may begin to make sense well enough to meet the challenges that lie ahead of us.

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