What To Do About the Metacrisis with Nicholas Hedlund

In this episode of Hunger for Wholeness, Sr. Ilia Delio speaks with Nicholas Hedlund, PhD—a philosopher, metatheorist, and contemplative practitioner whose work explores spirituality, science, and worldview transformation.

Ilia begins with the simple question: What is metatheory? Nick traces the thread that drew him into big-picture thinking—an early dissatisfaction with surface-level responses to ecological crisis, and a deeper inquiry into root causes: who we take ourselves to be, what we take the natural world to be, and how our relationship to the sacred shapes the world we build.

Together, Ilia and Nick explore the metacrisis (or polycrisis) as more than a collection of competing emergencies. Beneath the many crises, they argue, lies a crisis of worldview—an often-unexamined metaphysics that informs our institutions, our technologies, and our shared sense of meaning. If metaphysics is inescapable, the question becomes: how conscious, coherent, and reality-resonant is the one we’re living from?

Nick offers a hopeful frame: when we can name what is misaligned at the worldview level, we can begin responding at the level of root cause—and participate in the emergence of a more integrative, metamodern horizon.

ABOUT NICHOLAS HEDLUND

“Humanity is not suffering from a crisis of information but a crisis of integration.”

Nicholas Hedlund, Ph.D., is a philosopher, metatheorist, and contemplative practitioner whose work explores the intersection of spirituality, science, and worldview transformation. He is the director of Eudaimonia Institute and director of research at the Institute for Applied Metatheory, and serves as Editor-in-Chief of Integration: The Journal of Big Picture Theory and Practice.

Nicholas developed visionary realism, an integrative philosophical framework drawing from critical realism, integral theory, and complexity science to illuminate deeper structures of reality and help navigate the global metacrisis. He earned his Ph.D. from University College London, where he studied under Roy Bhaskar and Arthur Petersen, and he was also an exchange scholar at Yale University.

He is the author and editor of Metatheory for the Twenty-First Century and Big Picture Perspectives on Planetary Flourishing, and his work has appeared in peer-reviewed journals including Zygon and Environmental Science & Policy. He is currently completing two new books further developing visionary realism and its implications for civilizational transformation.

Alongside his scholarly work, Nicholas is an APPA-certified philosophical counselor and a spiritual director-in-training, supporting individuals in exploring meaning, inner transformation, and spiritual experience. A long-time contemplative practitioner and musician, he is deeply interested in the resonance between sound, consciousness, and human evolution.Nicholas teaches in the Integral Noetic Sciences Department at the California Institute for Human Science, offering courses in integral philosophy, consciousness studies, and the global metacrisis. Learn more about his studies and work on his website. His PhD thesis, Visionary Realism And The Emergence Of A Eudaimonistic Society, is also available online.