This article invites readers to explore the profound interplay between personal inner work and the collective challenges of our times. Grounded in the paradoxes of life—accepting mortality while choosing to live fully, surrendering control while embracing creative agency—it looks at how these tensions shape our experiences of the world. Reflecting on the metacrisis of climate change, societal polarization, and personal struggles, Jennifer Harvey Sallin weaves insights from meditation, transpersonal awareness, and quantum metaphors to encourage a deeper understanding of how our inner and outer worlds inform each other. This thought-provoking piece challenges us to reflect on our creative role in an interconnected universe while offering inspiration for navigating complexity and crisis with grace and wisdom.
How to live with paradox?
Wisdom is the art of learning to live with paradox. We all know we’ll die, yet it is wise to choose to enjoy living. We all know there are a million things which are not under our control, and to which we must surrender (our own death included), yet it is wise to practice and find joy in our creative agency, even in the most restricted and dire of circumstances. We all wish at times we could have more and better than we have now, yet it is wise to appreciate what we already have without regret about what we miss.
With the metacrisis all around us – wars and geopolitical crises, the climate and ecological crises, and all kinds of external polarizations and paradoxes – how do we choose to live with wisdom? Some of us live with these paradoxes by denial, domination and furthering the cycle of trauma and chaos in the outer world. Some of us live with these paradoxes by seeking harmony, solutions, and repair in the outer world. Some of us use the tension of these paradoxes to dig deeper into our inner world, to take a journey toward the inner sources and reflections of these polarizations. Many of us use a combination of all of these strategies, in different ways at different times and in varying situations. What is the wisest balance for each of us in any given moment?
The answers to these questions are discovered on the micro level through here-and-now attuned inquiries. On the macro level, we see larger arching answers that accumulate and build through a sustained practice of the moment-by-moment micro inquiries. Many of us experience a particular catalyst in our life which ignites our interest in or need to build both a here-and-now practice of ‘wisdom inquiry’ as well as its meta-practice over time. For some of us, that happens within the scope of our own personal life experience (i.e. ongoing traumas or ongoing frustrations with no immediate resolution). For others of us, such as in times like the present, not-immediately-solvable collective suffering awakens this need.
Arriving at ‘wisdom inquiry’s doorstep’
For me, it’s been a combination of catalysts, both personal and collective. I’ll share here a bit about how I originally arrived at wisdom inquiry’s doorstep, and where that inquiry has led me since I crossed that quantum threshold as an individual, and as we’ve collectively entered the metacrisis.
I’ve written and spoken about my backstory in various places (including in other articles on the Rediscovering Yourself blog and the InterGifted blog, as well as on my and other podcasts, for anyone interested in the particulars). Suffice it to say that I entered early adulthood with serious and longstanding external conflicts that had no easy, immediate solution. My tendency, as is the case with many of us in intractable situations, was to first hold out hope the outer crises in my life would eventually get fixed by others (ideally and especially by those who were actively creating the conflicts). With time, as I realized that others weren’t eager – and were sometimes fully unwilling – to fix the problems they were causing, I changed tactics and tried to fix the outer world myself.
To be honest, it’s even part of why I became a psychologist in the first place (not the whole reason, but certainly a portion of it!). With advanced professional knowledge and skill in helping others change their behaviors, I believed I might be able to influence people in my personal life to do what I needed them to do in order for them to stop causing me harm. You’ve probably guessed that I discovered I was mostly wrong about this. I soon learned through working with clients that a psychologist is really only able to help people who want and are willing to help themselves, and who have the resources needed for change. So in a way I was back to where I started: I needed external change to improve my situation, but the outside needed to want and be willing to change, and to have enough resources to do so, and there was no way I could force any of that through my own desire, will and professional skill.
I dealt with a lot of disappointment, anger, frustration and burnout in my early adulthood as a result. Finally, by my mid-20’s, the reality was starting to set in that I had to find a way to accept that things were the way they were, at least for the time being. That was not an easy task, and that’s where meditation came in.
Learning the skill of ‘being present’
Mindfulness and embodied contemplative practices were really hard for me at first. I had great difficulty slowing down my thoughts and quieting my mind. And with my particular set of childhood traumas which had led to a daily pattern of automatic dissociative states, being present in my body (not just a head on a stick) felt like a monumental challenge. To say it felt impossible a lot of the time is an understatement. It wasn’t as though I sat down on my 25th birthday for my first meditation session, decided to change my perspective, and then did it immediately. It’s more I like thought, Well, hoping for a different future and trying to fix the problems of the past aren’t working as strategies, so I have to try sitting in the messy present and being ok with it for now.
I spent a good portion of my early meditations trying to be present, but getting distracted with my plans to start fixing things again, and only noticing after 15 minutes that I was back where I started. Then I’d try to be present again, and after another 15 minutes, notice I had just been imagining all the ways a different future would solve all my problems. Then I’d try to be present again. And repeat.
‘Being present’ meant making the space to not have to solve anything for the moment, to be with what is however it is, without judgment or fixing. It was literally a skill I had not developed well. I needed to cultivate it as an adult, and for that I needed support. I sought guidance from many teachers and non-dual thinkers (some resources included at the end of the article, and throughout the articles on this blog), studying contemplative psychology, somatic psychology and other forms of entry into non-dual practice. It has been quite a wild ride, with lots of twists and turns, and surprising new dimensions and realities.
Present = relationship between the past and the future
In the two decades since then, I’ve spent well over 10,000 hours in meditation. In that time, I’ve been able to train myself to be fairly competent in the skill of being truly present with what is. And being present with what is has brought me to the realization that ‘the present moment’ is way bigger than what I used to understand it to be. I used to think that what is (i.e. the present moment) was a kind of void or vacuum between the past (in my case, the thing to fix) and the future (in my case, the state-change I was hoping for). I realized through all my hours in practice that the present isn’t separate from the past and future perceptions I hold, but is instead quite literally the relationship between them – and I am at the center of that relationship. In fact, we could say, I am that relationship, and how I am being at any given moment is the expression of that relationship.
Because of so many experiences of feeling disempowered in my life’s present moments throughout my development, that relationship carried deeply ingrained patterns of pain and suffering. So much so, that many times, I felt like I myself was composed of pain and suffering. No wonder I had wanted to and often needed to dissociate. But as I practiced hour after hour, year after year, I could feel deep down that the suffering was not who I am, even if I have sometimes held (and still sometimes hold) that belief. Who I am is the relationship between events (past) and potential events (future). So over the years, the focus of my attention has leaned more in the direction of ‘how do I be as and in this relationship of elements?’, instead of ‘what do I do to fix the elements of the relationship?’. My energy has shifted toward my creative experience of living in the dynamic of and between the two extremes of my ‘being space’ (my perceived past and present).
The way it is <> the way I am
It’s not that the past and desired future don’t exist at all. Things did happen and will still happen. It’s just that the things that did happen and the things that will happen can’t be separated from who I am being in the present. Whenever I have been dissociated in the present, I have had a particular experience of and reaction to what happened in the past, and a particular way of imagining and planning for the future. Both are usually grounded in fear, judgment and pessimism. As I have learned to feel self-compassion in the present – i.e. being relationally self-compassionate with my past and my future – , my experience shifts considerably. I start to feel accepting of myself, even in spite of what has happened to me, and less demanding toward myself about fixing all the things that I imagine awaiting me in a scary future.
I think for most people who start practicing the art of present moment awareness – the big, relational version I’m talking about here (i.e. not just thought-stopping or sitting in a void, as mentioned above) – , we come to understand deeply that yes, the way it is informs me, but the way I am also informs the way it is and these effects can’t be separated. As many who are suffering from an external problem have discovered: the problem ‘out there’ is also ‘in here’, in how I am being in the past-future relationship of the present moment. And that how I handle the ‘in here’ part has an important influence on the way I experience the ‘out there’ part (I’ve written more about this mirrored process specifically in my recent article, Psychology of Activism: A Mirrored Path of Changemaking).
Riding the ‘quantum wave’
On a quantum level, it is as though I was in a relational being pattern of bouncing from particle (“it’s out there and it’s their problem” – past) to particle (“it’s out there and it’s my job to fix it” – future), and decades of practicing presence have helped me to develop the skill of riding the quantum relational wave more sustainably: “how are ‘out there’ and ‘in here’ informing each other, and how am I relating to all of it in the present?”.
Practicing presence has helped me to come to terms with the fact that wisdom isn’t a binary position, or an “everything solved out there” resolution of things: it is the capacity to live consciously and open-heartedly with the ongoing paradoxes of life’s complexity and dilemmas. And for those of us facing suffering or sustained crisis, it’s not a resignation, but a shift of perspective and a restructuring of engagement: from a predominance of fear, judgment and compulsive fixing to a predisposition toward acceptance, humility and creative empowerment. While the outside details may appear to remain the same (at least for a time), the internal experience of them, and the potential action that arises from that internal experience, show a very different picture.
Personalized metacrisis
As it relates to the art of cultivating wisdom in the paradoxes of the current collective dilemmas, it’s important to remember that we each experience a unique version of the metacrisis we’re all in together. Where we live, our dominant cultures, what resources we have access to, and our mental and emotional predispositions, among other particulars, shape the past and potential futures of our personal ‘being landscape’ within the metacrisis.
For someone like myself, who is in a fairly privileged position on the physical level for the moment (not yet affected directly by climate disruption, with access to resources, in a fairly stable country), my current dilemmas are experienced differently than those of someone in a situation of immediate physical or existential threat. Hence, I can sit in a safe space, spend hours in contemplation and take plenty of time to write these words. Were I in a position of immediate danger, I naturally wouldn’t be writing an essay on wisdom, but rather tending to the practical issues of survival.
However, this isn’t the full picture, because someone facing immediate existential threat could still approach their situation with more hope, resilience and optimism than I feel here in my as-of-now physically safe state. As discussed above through my own story, our mental and emotional predispositions (often forged in traumas) can make us experience our own potential future hardships or even others’ current and potential future adversity from a place of disempowerment, pessimism and fragility. Conversely, our traumas or other life experiences can sometimes make us stronger and more eager to respond to hardship or threat with courage, passion and exceptional fortitude.
This all maps onto how we each approach the collective aspects of the metacrisis. As I mentioned earlier, for some of us particularly tuned into the collective suffering of the current moment, just feeling the weight of it all can already be experienced as an agonizing existential crisis (without even thinking of our own personal situation). On the other hand, awareness of the collective suffering can be, for some, deeply meaningful and encouraging. This is true for those who feel that we are in the midst of a collective transformational and transcendent process, and that the metacrisis itself is an important positive catalyst in our shared evolutionary journey.
Catalysts
Regardless of where, when and how we might experience a sense of profound crisis, existential threat or intolerance of suffering, that moment can indeed be a catalyst. As near death experiences and times of ‘rock bottom’ and other extreme suffering show, and as I have witnessed in various iterations in my own life, urgent crises can become a moment of profound personal breakthrough toward wisdom. This is, in part, what people who feel hopeful about the value of the metacrisis are pointing to. These kinds of no-going-back experiences can bring us past the precipice of denial and the range of things we think we can control, and so give rise to the generative questions I mentioned at the start of this article about life and death, surrender and creative agency, and desire and appreciation. In many cases, how we answer each of these questions can usher us toward deep transformation:
The worst just happened (or I believe it will happen): how do I chose life in the face of death?
What choices do I make knowing I must surrender control over so much?
How do I appreciate what I have when I have lost (or will lose) so much?
And something that can haunt those of us currently in a position of any form of relative privilege:
How can I surrender control and appreciate what I have, when other people and beings and the earth itself are suffering all around me?
Open possibilities
It’s impossible to say when the exact right moment is to explore questions of wisdom in crisis. It would be cruel to give our friends – or ourselves – some kind of oversimplified ‘wisdom formula’ as a solution when they or we are in crisis and struggling: to “just appreciate what you have” or to “just accept things the way they are”. That would be a form of future-fixing for them (jumping to the particle). Rather, we can in any moment hold the possibility open that the light of wisdom and transformation may start to shine itself through the cracks created by the crises we find ourselves in.
It’s more of a question of when we, or our higher self, feel able or ready to dive deeper into the quantum wave possibilities; when our self operating system is able to start to integrate what have been perceived as fragmented elements of our experience. We notice this opening when we feel somehow able to soften or start to let go of fixed and polarized positions we carry, such as: I don’t want to die; the world should be different than it is; I want to have control; I need more; I must fix everything; others must fix everything. In truth, quantum wisdom has its own relative timing, and ‘seeking wisdom’ is more about remaining open its possibility, even in times of crisis, rather than trying to force its breakthroughs.
Once we open that door and start to walk through it, we start to see, as I’ve been describing in other words above, how quantum consciousness wave possibilities act less like teachers who know all the answers on the test or doctors who can give us an immediate cure to what ails us, and more like good therapists who know how to ask meaningful and sincere open questions in complex and non-binary situations:
Knowing and accepting you’ll die, how do you want to live?
Knowing you don’t have control over everything, how do you want to use your creative agency?
Knowing you desire more, how do you want to feel and express appreciation for what you already have?
Collective polarizations
In my own response to the metacrisis, I’ve been doing contemplative activism in the climate and ecological spaces over the past six or so years. In these years, I’ve asked myself these key ‘quantum wisdom questions’ time and time again as it relates to the situation of our world and my participative role in it. As you can imagine, these explorations haven’t given me any easy answers for ‘solving everything out there’, but rather have helped me to attune to how I’m relating to Life itself, and what is most important to me in that relating. Specifically, my explorations have helped me to see the limits of my control on a global and universal scale, accept my mortality on a more fundamental level, grieve dreams that didn’t come true, and more profoundly accept the interplay of my inner world with the outer world – and the agency of my being within the relationship between the two. These ‘quantum therapy conversations’ within my contemplations and meditations have gradually shifted my attention away from reactive rage and fear (which I had plenty of and wrote about in various places on this blog), and instead toward proactive acceptance, appreciation and agency.
In particular, the deepening metacrisis has required me to face intergenerational and collective legacies within me: the ‘presets’ of my worldview and view of self-in-world, as it relates to the human species, the earth as a being, and the history of life as we know it. This work has taken me back to the transpersonal space, which if you’re not familiar with this term, describes states or areas of consciousness beyond the limits of personal identity. Transpersonally, how I approach my connection to the world shifts how I answer the questions of my quantum inner therapist’. In a sense, I’m cultivating wisdom that responds not only to my own life/death, surrender/creative agency, desire/appreciation polarizations, but also to the collective life/death, surrender/creative agency and desire/appreciation polarizations.
Quantum spirals
On the collective level, my ‘quantum inner therapist’ has been asking me questions like:
Knowing and accepting you and everyone around you will die, how do you want to live as an interconnected being in the present?
Knowing you don’t have control over everything and neither does anyone else, how do you want to use your creative agency and influence/inspire others in their use of their own creative agency?
Knowing you desire more for yourself and for other people, beings and the earth, how do you want to feel and express appreciation for what you have and who and what you are today?
As we know, though it can feel so impossible in a huge world of 8 billion people and countless other creatures and lifeforms, every part of the field of being affects the whole field of being. So, as discussed above, while it can’t be my intention to change the field single-handedly – not a wise position, because it’s not realistic – I cannot not change the field somehow, since I am part of it. My wisdom in any given moment lies in the responsibility I have toward the degree of field influence I hold by how I am being.
I’m speaking in circles here, of course. All this is spiral work, quantum work. None of it can be pinned down to one thing, one answer – not for now, not for later, and not for everyone. However we look at these fundamental questions of participation in life, whatever angle or degree we view them from, they change form and shape and color and dimension. Our life, like the universe, is alive in the quantum sense. There’s no amount of polarization that will actually pin down one answer for all time. That’s the paradox we live with every day, in ourselves, in the metacrisis of the world, and in the relationship between the two. It’s the place I’ve been navigating for a long while, and I wanted to share it with you – hence this article, even if it brings you no oversimplified wisdom formulas or easy fixes. It invites you into and encourages you on your own explorations and practice of ‘quantum wisdom inquiry’, in whichever present moment you find yourself.
Asking yourself
So, I’m curious, if you’re at a place in your life where you or your higher self are in the mood or the position to play inner quantum therapist, how are you answering these quantum wisdom questions:
Knowing and accepting you’ll die, how do you want to live?
Knowing you don’t have control over everything, how do you want to use your creative agency?
Knowing you desire more, how do you want to feel and express appreciation for what you already have?
And how does that shift your sense of personal and transpersonal participation in our collective present?
Keep exploring
Many times our answers point us to the need for here-and-now physical support that helps us to ask these questions and access their answers in a more empowered and grounded way. As I mentioned above, in my own case, I have needed to face intergenerational and collective legacies in order to be able to ask and answer these questions without being triggered into polarization. I’ve needed a significant amount of support for this, which I have found in therapy, reading, peer connection and mentoring. Therapeutic approaches which have been particularly helpful for me are Internal Family Systems and Compassionate Inquiry. And here are some resources that have helped and inspired me along the way, and may inspire you too:
The work of David R. Hawkins (i.e. Power vs. Force: Then Hidden Determinants of Human Behavior)
The work of Paul Levy, especially The Quantum Revelation: A Radical Synthesis of Science and Spirituality
The Work of Karen O’Brien, especially You Matter More Than You Think: Quantum Social Change for a Thriving World (check out her Quantum Social Change Substack too)
The work of Amrit Goswami (i.e. Quantum Creativity: Think Quantum, Be Creative)
The work of Dan Siegel, especially Mind: A Journey to the Heart of Being Human
The work of Thomas Hübl, especially Healing Collective Trauma: A Process for Integrating Our Intergenerational and Cultural Wounds
The work of Stuart A. Kauffman, especially Humanity in a Creative Universe
The work of Christopher M. Bache, especially Dark Night, Early Dawn: Steps to a Deep Ecology of Mind
cover photo thanks to PatoLenin via Pixabay
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