A meta-narrative is an overarching story that gives us context and meaning—a purpose to life. Meta-narratives provide the unifying big picture that encompasses, transcends, and integrates the smaller stories and themes contained within.
Historically, religions and mythology were the primary authors of meta-narratives. However, meta-narratives fell into extreme disfavour with the rise of post-modernism and have been further broken down until we’ve ended up in silos of identity, with nothing more than our fragmented personal or maybe tribal or cultural narratives. To make matters worse, the dominant Western Newtonian meta-narrative called “scientific” leads us to conclude we are nothing more than a chemical accident with no value or purpose. Technology platforms are reinforcing those narratives by pulling us deeper and deeper into self-reinforcing echo chambers, in ways we can’t see, reinforcing our individual worldviews, creating fear, and driving us apart.
The breakdown of a unifying meta-narrative has served no one well and has made us even more fragmented and estranged from our world and one another. To address our meta-crisis, we need a mytho-poetic, yet scientifically verifiable, narrative that includes everyone, and which is integral in nature. We need a narrative that lifts up the human story rooted in nature, to ennoble, encourage and call us to further evolve in this time of crisis.
Our individual voices compose a new collective story to pull us into a future that works for all. In reclaiming our story, we would own our destiny with a narrative that doesn’t divide, but brings humanity together in a narrative where all voices matter.
The challenge inherent in creating such an integral meta-narrative is that, while it might seem on the surface that such a narrative “should” come from those of us who are integral ourselves, many of us also come from relative privilege and the global north, and lack the lived experience needed to credibly assert inclusivity in any narrative we might create. We also risk ignoring the true nature of how transformation replicates. Real change, lasting change, is inside out. It transmits cell to cell between people with relationships grounded in trust–slowly at first, and then all at once, like the imaginal cells of a butterfly.
In this workshop we will explore the history of meta-narratives, our current state of affairs, and the potential for unintended consequences should we embark on a deliberate effort to coax a new meta-narrative into being. We will conduct a small-scale experiment to collectively rewrite our future through the co-creation of a group meta-narrative, and examine the outcomes as a learning experience to inform an aspirational attempt to run the same experiment on a global scale.
