Everywhere we look, something seems to be breaking down. Institutions that once held our trust are faltering. The economic systems that promised progress now produce exhaustion and inequality. Climate patterns are unraveling, and so are the inner structures that once gave meaning to our lives. For many, it feels like we are already living through collapse.
When I speak with thinkers and visionaries about the Third Attractor, this theme returns again and again. Brandon Norgaard calls it “political decay.” Said Dawlabani speaks about planetary systems in free fall. Robb Smith calls our moment “civilizational crisis.” Yet, beneath their analysis I hear something deeper: a quiet confidence that this breakdown is also a birth.
Collapse, they remind me, is not the end of the story. It is the end of one way of being human. Every living system eventually reaches a point where its old patterns can no longer sustain the complexity it has created. What looks like destruction from one perspective is, from another, a process of composting. Out of the ruins of what no longer works, something new begins to germinate.
I have come to see collapse as a teacher. It strips away illusions. It reveals what we have avoided. It asks us to look directly into the face of impermanence and to find a deeper ground of coherence within ourselves. When we stop clinging to the systems that are dying, space opens for the creative intelligence of life to move through us. That is the beginning of co-creation.
Co-creation is not about fixing the world from above. It starts wherever life is still vibrant and possible. It happens when people come together to prototype new ways of living, working, and relating. These experiments might look small at first—a regenerative farm, a conscious business, a new kind of learning community—but they are seeds of another civilization.
What inspires me is that these new forms do not come from ideology. They emerge from a deeper listening. They arise from people who have faced the darkness without turning away and discovered that something luminous survives the fall. That something wants to express itself through us as compassion, as creativity, as a new kind of intelligence that includes the whole.
The transition from collapse to co-creation is not a single event. It is a movement of consciousness that each of us can join. It begins the moment we stop waiting for someone else to fix things and start asking, “What is life asking of me now?”
We may not be able to prevent all the breakdowns that are coming. But we can choose how we participate in them. We can become composters of the old and gardeners of the new. Out of the ashes of collapse, a more mature humanity can rise—one that remembers its belonging to the whole and knows how to create from that place.
That, for me, is the heart of the Third Attractor: not denial of collapse, but the courage to co-create through it.
