Finding Our Way Through Collapse

The Eye That Sees Together: Brendan Graham Dempsey on Collapse, Grief, and Mythic Renewal

Some conversations just stick with you and that's exactly what happened after our recent chat with Brendan Graham Dempsey on the Voices of Emergence podcast. This conversation touched on something ancient, something archetypal that touched into the deeper layers of how I make sense of where we are and what might come next.

It's Not the End of the World (It's an Unveiling)

We began by exploring the idea of collapse, though not in the way it’s usually framed. But we weren't talking about a doomsday prepper fantasy. This wasn’t about end-of-the-world panic or prepper fantasies. It was about collapse as something far more intimate and lived. Brendan reframed it beautifully as an unveiling, apokálypsis in its original Greek sense: an unveiling.

Collapse, in this sense, is a kind of disorientation so complete that it clears the ground for something new to grow. It's a breakdown that contains the possibility of a breakthrough, but only if we can stay with the discomfort long enough to let it work on us, rather than running from it or trying to patch things back together too quickly.

For me, this idea immediately brought back memories of my own early experiences with rupture. I grew up moving across continents, each time leaving behind language, friendships, and the familiar shape of life. These overnight moves were quiet initiations, small apocalypses of their own. They shattered the stories I thought were true, forced me to question reality, and left me climbing toward new ground each time, a little older, a little more complex. These weren’t heroic moments in the conventional sense, but they carried the structure of the hero’s journey all the same: rupture, descent, and return.

It’s no surprise that we ended up talking about the hero’s journey during the episode. It still seems to be one of the most resilient patterns of transformation we have. But I found myself asking, as I often do lately: who is the hero now? In a time like this, when so many of our systems and stories are unraveling at once, maybe the hero isn’t an individual anymore. Maybe the hero is the collective.

The Next Buddha is a Sangha

That idea came alive for me when Brendan mentioned Alex Grey’s painting Collective Vision.

It’s a kaleidoscopic constellation of eyes, all seeing together, all converging on a shared center. This isn't the single, hierarchical eye of an empire. This is the plural eye of emergence.

It reminded me of what the Zen master Thích Nhất Hạnh once said: "The next Buddha may be a sangha" (a community). And I thought, yes, this is how that community sees.

This feels like an important contrast to name, especially in our current digital age. The all-seeing eye has become a metaphor for something darker, whether in mythology as the Eye of Sauron, or in real life through surveillance technologies like Palantir. These singular eyes do not witness, they surveil. They reduce the world to objects and data points. They watch in order to control. What Alex Grey’s painting invites instead is a living, breathing ecology of attention. One sees in order to connect. The other sees in order to dominate.

A Third Way Through the Ruins

That difference feels central to what metamodernism is attempting to name. It is neither a regression to modern-era certainties, nor a leap into postmodern fragmentation, nor the hollow optimism of hypermodern tech-as-savior narratives. It offers something else. A third way. One that holds paradox, that acknowledges irony but doesn’t drown in it, that opens space for re-enchantment without collapsing into naïveté. It’s not a clean answer. It’s more like a posture. A way of being with the unknown.

Brendan is mapping this territory beautifully in his work. He mentioned his own "black books," a series of journals where he's charting the evolution of meaning. Listening to him, I immediately thought of Carl Jung’s Black Books, which were private journals of inner descent, and the source material for his famous Red Book, the illuminated record of symbolic renewal. That comparison stayed with me. Maybe we’re all writing our black books now, in one form or another. Maybe we’re all trying to metabolize the collapse of old meanings, each in our own way, as we prepare for whatever might emerge next.

But if the black book is the descent, then the red book is what comes after. It’s the return. The reconstitution of meaning. The co-creation of new symbolic forms. The collective ritual of finding language for the sacred again, not by going back to inherited doctrines, but by drawing from lived experience and shared insight.

So maybe the point isn’t to prevent collapse at all costs. Maybe the point is to move through it consciously. To let it do its work in us. To allow it to change the way we see, and the way we see together.

And maybe that’s how the eye becomes plural.

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🎧 Listen to Episode 5: Finding Meaning in Uncertain Times with Brendan Graham Dempsey on Spotify, Apple and YouTube

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