About Realizing Worlds
Realizing Worlds is an inquiry into how our ways of being shape the worlds we live in, and how those worlds shape us back.
A world, in the sense I’m using, is the organised field of a life: what stands out, what feels real, what matters, what seems possible, who you take yourself to be while it is happening. You never observe your world from outside it. You are always already inside one, taking part in its making, and it stays invisible for as long as it works.
The title holds both senses of the verb. To realise something is to see it. To realise something is also to make it actual. We realise worlds in both senses at once, usually without noticing.
A way of being is more fundamental than a way of looking. We are always already standing somewhere: in a mode of attention, a quality of presence, a stance toward what appears. That stance is never neutral. It shapes what we perceive, and beneath that, what is available to be perceived at all.
The dominant way of being most of us inherited is modern. Modernity gave us extraordinary capacities, but its characteristic habits also encourage us to experience the self as a project to be managed and the material world as something to be known, organised, and used. What we cannot measure, control, or use for better purposes becomes harder to recognise as real. Postmodernity added the correction that every frame is contingent, but gave us fewer resources for deciding what deserves commitment, how we should live our lives, or what might still be worthy of reverence.
Many people can feel that neither the modern promise of mastery nor the postmodern practice of suspicion is enough. The cost appears as flatness, exhaustion, fragmentation, and a persistent sense that the things that matter most remain somewhere outside the life one is actually living. This is one dimension of what has been called the meaning crisis. It also belongs to the larger metacrisis. These are crises of world-making: our current ways of being generate realities we are increasingly unable to understand or inhabit well.
A common response is to reach for wisdom that modernity displaced or marginalised: a contemplative tradition, a religion, an Indigenous cosmology, a philosophy of life. These traditions often preserve forms of attention, participation, ethical formation, and contact with reality that modern life has thinned. But they are embedded in their context. They assume cosmologies, communities, rituals, authorities, social roles, and rhythms of life we cannot simply recreate by individual choice. To take one up now often means navigating between two failures: trying to believe what one does not find credible, or extracting a practice from its world and turning it into a technique that the existing life absorbs without being deeply changed.
Realizing Worlds sometimes travels through territory that some call metamodern: commitment without certainty, construction after deconstruction, sincerity that knows it cannot prove its own innocence. But its central question is more specific.
What ways of being are generative for our times? Generative means able to meet what is actually in front of you, stay in contact with it, and sustain beauty, responsibility and care, inside a life that includes work, relationships, institutions and ecological constraints.
The inquiry runs at multiple scales ranging from individual to civilisational. Much of what I write starts in my own practice and in the work I do as a coach, where a way of being is the specific thing standing between someone and new possibilities for perceiving, acting, and relating. Depth traditions have their most direct purchase here. Whatever freedom you discover, you still live in a shared world you did not choose. Realisation does not exempt you from that. It changes who is standing there. A world is not something you make alone.
A way of being shows up as patterns of attention and action, and those patterns settle into relationships, norms, practices and eventually institutions. The institutions then arrange the environments that train the same patterns into those who participate in them. Worlds, once stabilised, cultivate the ways of being that sustain them. A school timetable begins as a practical way of organising lessons. For the child who spends twelve years inside it, it becomes a way of experiencing time and knowledge itself: attention starting and stopping on a bell, reality divided into subjects, and learning measured in grades.
World-making moves outward: into how we meet each other, what institutions we build, and what we let stand. We make worlds whether we notice ourselves doing it or not. The question is whether we can participate in their making more consciously, responsively and together.
Inspirations
A major inspiration for Realizing Worlds is the meditation teacher Rob Burbea, through Seeing That Frees, the recorded retreats, and the soulmaking teachings he developed late in his life. Burbea treated perception as participatory: a way of looking fabricates what you see, along with the self that seems to be doing the seeing. He also took the aim of contemplative life to be larger than freedom. He wanted an opening and enriching of the sense of beauty, and of sacredness, in self, other, and world, and he built this into a craft, tracing how desire, image and understanding feed one another so that what appears keeps opening instead of closing into something that seems to stand on its own. The image is empty and sacred, and holding both at once is the whole skill.
Another is Aletheia Unfolding (Steve March), which I practice as a coach. Where Burbea works with ways of looking, Aletheia works closer to the ground from which any looking arises. Aletheia takes the Greek word for unconcealment and turns it into a craft: you stay with what is here with enough presence and attunement that it can show itself and reorganise on its own terms. March describes the result as a life lived as a sacred act of participation.
The third inspiration comes from cognitive science, which reached participation from another direction. The enactive tradition of Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson and Eleanor Rosch argues that a mind does not represent a world that was already sitting there. A living body brings a world forth through how it moves, what it needs, and what can harm it. John Vervaeke’s work on relevance realisation deepens the picture. At any moment far more presents itself than you could ever attend to, so something must keep deciding what stands out and what recedes. That process runs below deliberation and below concepts. A mind does not paint meaning onto a blank world, and a world does not stamp meaning onto a blank mind. The two couple and disclose each other. His sense of the sacred follows from this: we make meaning constantly, and when we find ways to make that meaning-making meaningful, and then celebrate and cultivate it, that is what the word points to.
For all three the sacred happens in the relationship with the world.
Work with me
The ideas explored here inform my work as an unfoldment coach and meditation teacher. If you might be interested in working together, learn more here.
Writing process and use of AI
I use AI as part of my writing process.
The questions I explore on Realizing Worlds arise from my lived experience, practice, reading, and reflection. I follow what matters, develop the underlying ideas, direct the inquiry, evaluate the evidence, and take responsibility for every claim I publish. The essays aim to make genuine contributions: to articulate something clearly, pursue a question beyond conventional formulations, or develop new conceptual and practice frameworks, while remaining grounded in lived experience, practice, careful reasoning, research, and fact-checking.
I work with Claude to produce an initial draft of what I want to say, section by section. From there, each section passes through many rounds of examination, revision, and rewriting. I test arguments, refine distinctions, check sources, reconsider language, and sometimes rebuild entire passages until the text fully aligns with my intention and judgement.
I regard AI as a powerful tool for inquiry and truth-seeking. Used well, it can support ideation, comparison, critical examination, conceptual depth, and accuracy. It can help expose my biases and blinds spots, identify gaps in my arguments, surface relevant intellectual lineages, generate counterpositions, and make writing clearer and more rigorous.
I am also aware of its limitations: disembodied fluency, hallucinations, generic language, premature coherence, performative balance, and a tendency to smooth away what is unresolved or particular. I have designed my process to actively notice and counter these tendencies.
I hold the essays to the following standard: whether they are true, worthwhile, genuinely contributive, accountable to lived experience, carefully researched, and fully mine to stand behind.
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