Copyright Resilience
In this meditative timewalk from Val Fex in the Swiss Alps, we ascend through four horizons of history and human development — each offering a widening vantage point on the unfolding of our present planetary moment. Rooted in the alpine landscape that once inspired Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, and guided by his three metamorphoses of spirit alongside the arc of Theory U, this journey invites us to pause, turn, and look back — not only across centuries, but into the shifting interior terrain of our collective becoming. As we climb, the diagnosis of our time deepens: from systemic ruptures (Horizon 1), to societal ruptures (Horizon 2), paradigm ruptures (Horizon 3), and finally to civilizational and inner-spiritual ruptures and shifts (Horizon 4). This timewalk moves from collapse to emergence, from outer crises to inner transformation — pointing toward a new kind of leadership rooted in vertical literacy, and the alignment of attention, intention, and agency to co-shape the future that is calling us now. As you read these lines, consider where are you right now — in your life, in your inner landscape, in your sensemaking of what is unfolding now? This walk invites you to accompany an inquiry into the deeper structures of our current planetary moment — not just with the mind, but with the whole being and self. Nietzsche and the Three Metamorphoses As I do most summers, I spent part of this one high in the Swiss Alps with my family, in an old farmhouse in Val Fex, deep in the Engadin. On our hikes, my thoughts kept circling back to the unfolding of this planetary moment. And as anyone who has ever walked a mountain path knows, the quiet magic often begins not on the walk itself, but at the moment when you pause, turn, and look back. In that stillness, something shifts. The village you left only hours before — so central then — now rests distant, far below, a small point on a broader unfolding. From this higher vantage, the landscape widens and reframes the familiar in a broader context, inviting the mind to stretch gently beyond its former edges, toward a new horizon. Image by Jayce Pei Yu Lee (2025) I have been returning to this place for almost half a century now — pretty much every summer since my teenage years. It’s a major source of regeneration for my family and myself. It also happens to be where, in the 1880s, Friedrich Nietzsche wrote some of his most significant books, including Thus Spoke Zarathustra. In that book Zarathustra emerges from ten years of solitude in the mountains, having attained clarity and awakening. He returns to the villages and shares with the people what he has realized. His teachings begin with “God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.” In other words, all metaphysical certainties are no longer viable in a post-Enlightenment world. Nietzsche’s work can be seen as a destruction of all hollow structures and residual forms and serves as a radical clearing, an opening of a new space. At the same time, his philosophy also foreshadows the profound ruptures that the 20th century would bring to the human experience. Early in the book, one of his teachings that I love most focuses on the “Three Metamorphoses of the Spirit,” which captures in a nutshell the essence of what today is known and taught as developmental psychology or adult development, which functions as one of the foundational resources for advanced work in deep systems change. “Of three metamorphoses of the spirit I tell you,” begins Zarathustra, “how the spirit becomes a camel; and the camel, a lion; and the lion, finally, a child.” First, the spirit becomes a camel. “What is difficult? asks the spirit that would bear much, and kneels down like a camel wanting to be well loaded.” It takes upon itself the heaviest burdens — duty, suffering, truthfulness — “like the camel that, burdened, speeds into the desert.” There, in the harsh vastness, the spirit enters solitude. “In the loneliest desert,” the second metamorphosis occurs: the camel becomes a lion. The lion would “conquer his freedom and be master in his own desert.” But to do so, he must face his final master: “the great dragon.” This dragon is called “Thou Shalt.” It glitters, covered in golden scales, and on each scale a commandment gleams: “Thou shalt.” “But the spirit of the lion says, ‘I will.’” It must battle the dragon to create space for its own will. “To create freedom for oneself and a sacred No even to duty — for that, my brothers, the lion is needed.” And yet, even this fierce freedom is not the end. “But say, my brothers, what can the child do that even the lion could not do?” The child is “innocence and forgetting, a new beginning, a game, a self-propelled wheel, a first movement, a sacred Yes.” Only the child can create new values, born of play, emergence, and becoming. “Of three metamorphoses of the spirit I have told you: how the spirit became a camel; and the camel, a lion; and the lion, finally, a child.” The remainder of this piece is an invitation to walk with me on a meditative mountain walk — one inspired by the same Engadin peaks that once inspired Nietzsche’s most profound philosophical thoughts. As we ascend, we’ll pause at intervals, turn, and look back, seeing and sensing our present moment from multiple perspectives and historical views. As we ascend, we’ll re-encounter the three metamorphoses of the human spirit — the camel, the lion, and the child — and engage with them to deepen our understanding of this moment. First Horizon. 1989: Systemic Ruptures & Shifts Early in our hike, after gaining roughly 30 meters of elevation, we pause for a moment, turn, and glance back at our current situation. If we translate meters of elevation into years of history (1 meter = 1 year), then we are looking back to roughly 1989–2001. During that time, we saw the collapse of the Berlin Wall (1989), the Soviet Union (1991), the Apartheid regime in South Africa (1994), and a little later, New York’s Twin Towers on September 11, 2001. Looking at our current moment from that vantage point, what do we see? The collapse of the Berlin Wall marked the end of the Cold War that had dominated geopolitics for over 40 years. Growing up in postwar West Germany, I shared the collectively held belief that the Berlin Wall would remain in place for a long time, at least for another generation or two. No one expected it to collapse within a few years. Yet that was precisely what happened. Fun fact: In 1989, as a university student, a few fellow students and I co-organized a Peace Studies Around the World program in which 35 students from 12 countries traveled together under the direction of peace researcher Professor Johan Galtung. That trip brought us to Western and Eastern Europe shortly before the wall fell. In all the countries we visited, we interviewed institutional leaders as well as grassroots activists to gain an understanding of the world from various angles. Here is what struck me most: no one, not even those at the forefront of the developments that ultimately led to the wall’s collapse, saw it coming. Only a very few people, including Johan Galtung, predicted it correctly before it happened. That experience taught me two valuable lessons. One, sometimes the very people who are instrumental in effecting major historical shifts have no idea what impact their work is about to unleash, mainly because they somehow internalized an illusion of their own insignificance. And two, why did Johan Galtung, who had access to the same facts I did, predict the collapse of the Berlin Wall by the end of that year, while I, having lived and operated as a grassroots activist on both sides of the wall, was unable to see it coming? The difference between the master and the student was this: the student’s judgment was too strongly shaped by his own experience and his buy-in to the collective belief structures dominant at that time (the failed uprisings of Budapest in 1956, Prague in 1968, etc., which all ended up the same way: extinguished by Soviet tanks). By suspending the apparent “inevitability” of such patterns and seeing the cracks in the old system for what they truly were, Galtung was able to predict what now seems obvious. What do we see if we apply these lessons to our current moment? We see that we are stuck. We are stuck in patterns of the past that cause us to collectively create results that almost no one wants. We refer to these results as a polycrisis or, in the context of Theory U, as the Three Divides: the ecological, the social, and the spiritual divides of our time — i.e., the massive destruction of our natural, social, and cultural ecosystems. If you study the key indicators of these crisis areas over the past 50–100 years, you can easily become depressed since, if these trends continue, the outcome is obvious: the journey ends in systemic collapse, which is in fact what we see beginning now. As the saying goes, if you are not depressed, you are probably out of touch or in a state of denial. Just as the leaders of the East German system were in denial when they ignored the visible cracks in the foundations of their system during the 1980s, we can see the signs of collective denial all around us. We see it in the form of election denial, climate denial (a well-funded industry in the US, courtesy of the fossil fuel industry), denial of the likely causes of the Covid 19 pandemic (by the same industrial complex that was created to protect us from these risks), denial inside the Western media bubble of the US role in the events that led to the Ukraine war, and so on. In summary, we are stuck in a state of denial about the destruction of the ecological, social, and spiritual foundations of organized human life on this planet. Where is that stuckness particularly visible? In US and Russian foreign policy. While Putin is stuck in the past (trying to make Russia a great empire again), the same is also true for the US foreign policy (regardless of which party is in power in Washington), which brings us to 2001 and the terrorist attacks. In that pivotal moment, the United States stood at a crossroads. One path invited us to lean in to a deeper listening, a process of deep sensing that opens our awareness to emerging future possibilities (the arc of presencing). The other path came with the gravitational pull of absencing, where fear, othering, and anger re-activate patterns of the past. We know which path was taken. The Bush-Cheney administration chose the latter, launching a war on terror that reverberates through our world two decades later. And what did that choice yield? Not the weakening of terror, but its evolution and strengthening. The Taliban never disappeared; Al-Qaeda endured; and ISIS, arguably much worse, emerged in direct response to our doomed efforts. Hopes of regional stabilization crumbled, with entire states unraveling. The financial toll, estimated at $8 trillion, became a massive burden future generations will have to carry. The human cost is beyond staggering: 905,000–940,000 killed directly, plus 3.6 million more people killed through indirect impact. And the very values the war claimed to defend were hollowed out, exemplified by the moral catastrophe that is Guantanamo. This is a textbook case of what happens when systems get stuck, when we, collectively, keep producing outcomes that almost no one wants (other than the military-industrial-tech complex). And it is an example of a foreign policy grounded in othering (of whoever is seen as the main adversary) that keeps producing crimes against humanity or worse, as we, among others, see in the unbearable situation in Gaza (which, in the eyes of an increasing number of experts, now meets the legal definition of genocide). So what we see from the benefit of 30+ years of hindsight is this: In 1991, the collapse of the Soviet Empire left us with only one superpower. And today, 34 years on, we see the other shoe beginning to drop: the collapse of the US empire. The collapse of the US empire does not necessarily mean a collapse of the US republic. The collapse of the former could even lead to the flourishing of the latter. The collapse of an empire means that the hegemon is no longer able to make other countries do what serves the hegemon but not them. Case in point: the failed economic boycott of Russia (which the majority of the world keeps ignoring, including most of the global South). Yet, despite all the issues alluded to, I remain profoundly hopeful. Why is that? Because something astonishing has happened over the past few decades. The dawning of a new planetary awareness, a new Earth consciousness that is emerging in countless places. Yes, it is a very subtle shift. And yes, that awareness has not yet fully manifested in collective action. Nevertheless, the shift in thinking is profound. Two of three people on this planet are willing to sacrifice part of their income to address climate change. They know we cannot continue doing more of the same. They want to be part of a different story of the future. But they don’t know how. Second Horizon. 1917: Societal Ruptures & Shifts Image by Jayce Pei Yu Lee (2025) Fast forward a few hours. We’ve now gained about 100 meters of elevation on our hike. Again, we pause and turn to view our current situation from this vantage point, roughly 100 years ago. And, as Jayce’s image above shows, to sense forward (what is emerging now?), we first have to extend our awareness backward. From the perspective of that period, let’s say the year 1917, let’s examine our current moment and observe some interesting parallels. In 1917, the European powers collectively find themselves entrenched or deeply stuck in World War I, a catastrophic event that they had collectively sleepwalked into. We see the US enter WWI in April. And we see the October Revolution in Russia later in the year. Those two world events, we know today, shaped the remainder of the century. Back in the early 20th century, it felt like we’d crossed a threshold from one age to another. A 100-year period of relative peace and stability among the European powers came to an end (even though throughout the 19th century, several of those powers had colonized and imposed extractive practices on pretty much the rest of the world). Back then, as today, the institutional leaders of the time were wholly inadequate to the situation; they sleepwalked into World War I, just as our current leaders are collectively sleepwalking toward the destruction of the ecological, social, and spiritual foundations of organized human life on earth. Yet, that whole period of chaos, encompassing World War I and World War II (which, in hindsight, may be viewed as a single era of destruction), also planted the seeds for a new order that, after 1945, materialized with remarkable speed and ease. It laid the groundwork for an era characterized by decolonization, the rise of multilateral institutions, and democratic empowerment at a scale previously unseen. Then, as now, we observe a neo-national authoritarian backlash against much of the progress that has been achieved, primarily in response to a lack of awareness and ideas from the ruling elite. Similarly, we also see again an emerging movement in support of profound ecological, social, and spiritual renewal, which faces, now and back then, challenges in translating aspirations into collective action. Looking back at the past century, we can now see more clearly the roots of the Three Divides. The social divides reflect the unresolved social tensions within capitalism — inequality and poverty — that sparked the international socialist movement and the women’s movement in the 19th and 20th centuries. The ecological divide stems from the environmental costs of industrial economies, which led to the rise of a global environmental movement in the late 20th century in response to increasing pollution and ecological breakdowns. The spiritual divide that is opening up in the 21st century, is manifesting in a widespread mental health and loneliness crisis that is largely driven by the adverse impact of social media and AI, particularly among younger people, and adding spiritual pollution and cultural erosion to the other issues that we have been carrying over from the past centuries in the various forms of the social and ecological divides. While the first two sets of divides have given rise to massive societal movements, the response to the spiritual divide is only just beginning now. While the environmental movement has been a societal response to the pollution and destruction of our outer nature (environmental pollution), the awareness-based movement for human and planetary flourishing that we see emerging now, can be seen as a response to the pollution and destruction of our inner nature (spiritual pollution), i.e., our deeply felt relationship with the planet, with people, and with ourselves. What is the primary mode in which the various social and ecological-environmental movements have responded to the challenging landscape described above? In the mode of the lion, to use Nietzsche’s distinction, in the mode of “Thou Shalt.” Across most of our social movements, we have been much better at articulating what we are against (the sacred No, the lion) than we are at articulating a vision of our society that we really want (the sacred Yes, the child). Viewing the current moment from the Second Horizon involves, in the language of Theory U, a shift from transitioning from downloading to seeing (Horizon 1) to transitioning from seeing to sensing (Horizon 2). That shift is critical because it enables us to begin to notice what keeps us in the grip of past patterns. This shift requires us to bend the beam of attention back onto ourselves, as described in Theory U in more detail. How? By suspending our habits of judgment, and by redirecting our attention from the object to the source. What, you may ask, is the source of the source? What is the deeper source of the polycrisis we are facing now? That question leads us into the realm of our underlying mindsets and paradigms of science and thought, which takes us back to the 1600s, to inquire into an even wider Horizon. Third Horizon. 1600s: Paradigm Ruptures & Shifts Image by Jayce Pei Yu Lee (2025) Having hiked for a few more hours, we are now about 400 meters above our starting point. From here, we can look at the current moment from the viewpoint of the 1600s — a horizon that illuminates the birth of modern science, capitalism, and the nation-state. Between 1602 and 1609, the Dutch East India Company was founded, Galileo made telescopic discoveries, and the Peace of Westphalia was signed in 1648. In other words, during those few years, we see the creation of modern institutions like the nation state and international corporations, i.e., capitalism. These events mark an epistemological break: subject–object dualism, mechanistic reductionism, and rationalism replacing integrated, relational worldviews. And just as Jayce’s image above indicates, there are multiple points of light or viewpoints at play, and with that, multiple worldviews or paradigms of thought. So, why do we keep reenacting collective results that no one wants? From this perspective we can say this: it’s because we continue to operate from a mindset and epistemology that has, as the polycrisis tells us, outlived its usefulness. After all, we cannot solve problems with the same thinking that created them. What is that thinking based on? In essence, it is a mechanical-reductionist paradigm that applies the scientific method only to the outer world (third-person knowledge: objective) but fails to extend the approach of precise, methodical observation to the more subtle realms of human experience (first- and second-person knowledge, or subjective and intersubjective knowing). The Blind Spot of Science But the blind spot of Western science, as I learned from the late cognition scientist Francisco Varela, is precisely that: experience. The problem, he said, is not that we don’t know enough about the brain. The problem is that we don’t know about experience. “Everyone thinks they know about experience, but I claim they don’t.” Accordingly, to advance the evolution of science, we must extend the scientific process of methodical observation to the more subtle spheres of human experience, encompassing both the outer and inner realms. That is why Varela focused on integrating the three known approaches to exploring experience with a method that incorporated psychological introspection, phenomenology, and meditation. He synthesized those practices by identifying three gestures of awareness: suspension, redirection, and letting go, which, as elaborated in Theory U and Presencing, constitute the epistemological backbone of awareness-based systems change. Going down the left side of the U means suspending judgment, redirecting attention from object to source, and letting go of what isn’t essential. From that perspective, we can say this: experience is not “what happens to us” experience is “what we do with what happens to us.” And that doing centers on these three gestures of becoming aware: suspending, redirecting, and letting go. What, then, is the main reason we continue to reproduce results that no one wants? The problem concerns our underlying paradigm of thought, which we use to construct economic, political, and social institutions such as corporations, nation-states, and economic/financial systems based on extractive mindsets and practices. All these designs need to be reexamined and rethought from scratch — that is, from the ground of our primary assumptions. From Science 1.0 to Science 2.0 In the 1600s, a scientific worldview emerged that has shaped these assumptions until today. René Descartes, in his Discourse on the Method (1637), articulated them succinctly by establishing (1) the individual subject as the starting point of knowledge, which thus separates the human mind from the rest of nature (subject-object split); (2) a view that seeks to understand nature as a machine (mechanistic reductionism): to understand a complex whole, one must break it down into its component parts and analyze each in isolation; and (3) a view that emphasizes the primacy of reason and mathematics as the most reliable tools for achieving knowledge (mathematical rationalism), privileging quantification over intuition in lived context. This approach has led to major scientific advances, but, as we know today, it often obscures relational, systemic, and emergent dynamics, which is precisely the stuff that is hitting us now in the age of polycrisis and reflexive modernity (Beck) that we have entered. To progress, however, we need to evolve and extend that scientific paradigm by rearticulating all three of these cornerstones. An extended concept of science, let’s call it science 2.0, needs to: (1) embrace participative action research methods (rather than being reduced to detached observation, following the subject-object split); (2) deploy whole system and integral methods, such as systems thinking or awareness-based systems change, as well as (3) broaden and deepen its focus from shallow to deep data by extending the range of scientific activity from objective (third-person) knowledge to the subjective (first-person), intersubjective (second-person), and trans-subjective modes of knowledge (fourth-person knowing), as exemplified by methods like micro-phenomenology, indigenous systems sciences, Theory U, or Social Presencing Theater. All science is about letting the data talk to you. That is precisely what made science 1.0 so successful, with the natural sciences as a paradigm-shaping meta-discipline for the past centuries. In the future, we must acknowledge the shortcomings of our current paradigm, as evidenced by today’s polycrisis and the three divides. We need to extend the epistemological foundations toward a science 2.0, grounded in social sciences (as evolved by awareness-based systems change) as the paradigm-shaping meta-discipline of the decades to come. Okay, but critiquing the foundations of our scientific paradigm is hardly new. Why have we not made more progress? The mechanistic‑reductionist paradigm remains dominant and heavily funded — despite increasing evidence of its blind spots. Of the roughly $2.35 trillion in annual R&D expenditures globally, close to 99% is allocated to research within the old science 1.0 paradigm. Despite all the talk, less than 1.5% of global R&D dollars flow to projects that are based on a non-reductionist, whole-person, and whole-system approach of science 2.0. So, what’s missing? Paradigm Collapse In 1611, Galileo traveled to Rome to present some of his stunning findings that shattered the old worldview of the day (confirming the revolutionary Copernican view of the universe as heliocentric rather than geocentric), including the compelling evidence that he made accessible through his telescope. Some of the clerics at the Vatican allegedly refused to look through the telescope, saying: “If God wanted us to see those moons, He would have made them visible to the naked eye.” What is the 21st-century version of such a denial? What is our version of a telescope that we are collectively refusing to look through? The answer is already indicated above. We are collectively refusing to acknowledge the connection between the undeniable evidence that we are moving toward civilizational collapse (mass destruction of our ecological, social, and cultural ecosystems) and the underlying mindset (and its related institutions) that is driving it. In short, we are in denial of a broad paradigm collapse. Current-day expressions of that denial include unquestioned economic growth ideology, techno solutionism, and AI determinism. So, what’s the new landscape that we see from 400 meters up the mountain on our hike? From this distance we realize that any form of systems shift (Horizon 1) or societal shift (Horizon 2) will fall short as long as it does not reflect the deeper paradigm shift at issue here (Horizon 3). In the language of Nietzsche, we have moved from an initial transformation, from downloading to the awareness of the camel (Horizon 1: rule-conforming actions); to a second transformation, from the camel to the lion (Horizon 2: rule-confronting actions), and then to the start of a third transformation, from lion to child through a change in mindset or an “epistemological shift” (Horizon 3: rule-generating actions). However, we also realize that for this shift to be embodied systemically, we may have to dig even deeper. The current AI moment forces us to contemplate even more profound questions: Who are we as human beings? Why are we here? What are we here for? What is ours to do? With these questions in mind, we now turn to the final leg of our ascent.
