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Over the past few days, we have seen how the world is carried by mental models, and how these models organise themselves into stable patterns – attractors – that give us meaning, orientation, and predictability.
Today, we will look at what happens when such patterns can no longer sustain experience. Not only that they collapse, but how something new always emerges at the same time. This is called emergence.
To understand this, it is useful to see the whole process as a continuous movement – an experiential cycle:
Experience → understanding → attractor → manifestation → new experience.
In other words: what we experience shapes how we understand the world, and this understanding in turn shapes what we later experience.
This cycle is always in motion. It never stops. It exists in the individual, in relationships, in society, in science, in culture – and in how we understand ourselves. It is not a method we choose. It is the fundamental way in which experience organises itself.
Emergence occurs when this cycle can no longer continue in the same way.
When an attractor loses its power, it means that the stable understanding no longer corresponds to what is actually being experienced. A gap arises between what we “know” and what we encounter. This gap cannot be filled with more of the same. Understanding must then be reorganised.
This is what emergence is: a necessary transformation of meaning when old structures become insufficient.
It is about a particular way of understanding the world becoming impossible to maintain.
At first, this is almost always experienced as loss. As emptiness. As confusion. As standing without a map. Many interpret this as something going wrong. In reality, it is a sign that the experiential cycle is shifting to a new level. New, more coherent and precise ways of understanding the world are forming (what in technical terms are called “emergent higher” representations).
When old understandings no longer work, a space opens up. In this space, there are not yet any stable answers. It can feel unsafe. But it is precisely here that new meaning can arise.
Over time, new connections begin to appear. New ways of seeing. New links between experiences. At first, these are weak, uncertain, and unfinished. But if they correspond more closely to what is actually lived, they gradually stabilise. They become new attractors. And the cycle continues at a new level.
That is why it is crucial to understand this: when an attractor collapses, a new, emergent understanding always arises. Always.
But it arises.
There is no phase in which experience “ceases”. There is no empty ending. There is no real dissolution without simultaneous reorganisation. What falls is transformed.
This applies at all levels.
Major historical shifts can be understood in exactly the same way: as the collapse of dominant, collective attractors – followed by the emergence of new, more complex patterns of meaning. What are later called “eras”, “ages”, or “civilisational shifts” are, in practice, shifts in the frameworks of meaning people live within.
Before physical society changes, understanding has already done so. Before laws, economies, and institutions collapse, trust, meanings, and worldviews have already begun to erode.
We see this clearly in history. When the medieval religious worldview lost its power in Europe, it was not churches that collapsed first, but the idea that God, authority, and truth could only be mediated through a single institution. The Reformation, the Renaissance, and later the Enlightenment were primarily shifts in understanding.
The Industrial Revolution was not driven by machines alone, but by a new conception of work, time, value, and humanity’s relationship to nature.
The transition from monarchies to democratic states did not occur because people suddenly gained power, but because the idea of divine authority lost its legitimacy. In each case, the change in consciousness came first – and material reorganisation followed.
The same pattern can be seen in our own time. Digitalisation has not primarily changed the world because we got faster computers, but because ideas about work, knowledge, proximity, and value were transformed.
Before remote working, platform economies, and global networks became “normal”, people had already begun to experience work as something flexible, fluid, and location-independent.
Before social media transformed the public sphere, the idea of who could speak, be seen, and gain influence had already begun to detach itself from traditional institutions. Technology followed this understanding – it did not create it.
We see something similar in how identity, gender, belonging, and life choices are understood today. What is often presented as “cultural conflicts” largely concerns the loss of power of old, stable ideas about who one is and how life should be lived, while new, more diverse and complex understandings are in the process of being established.
Before laws, language, and institutions change, people’s inner maps have already begun to be redrawn. Here too, change in understanding comes first – and social and political reorganisation follows.
Transformation is not a choice. It is the very form experience takes when old patterns no longer hold.
That is why, ontologically speaking, we never have reason to fear that something “disappears”. It may feel that way. It may look that way. But in reality, there is always a transformation of meaning and structure. Experience, meaning, and understanding are not lost. They are reorganised.
In our time, this is happening simultaneously on many levels. Many central attractors are losing their power. Many experiential cycles are shifting. That is why the world feels unstable. Not because it is falling apart, but because it is in the midst of a profound transformation.
Tomorrow, we will look at how this relates to collective cycles and awakening – and why such periods have always been both demanding and creative.
Question:
Can you see an area in your life where something had to break down before a deeper understanding could emerge?
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