A reflection on my conversation with Adrian Wagner
My conversation with Adrian Wagner stayed with me long after we ended the call. Not because he offered a new solution or a grand vision for the future, but because he kept pointing to something far more uncomfortable and far more fundamental.
He questioned the ground from which we are even trying to change the world.
Adrian understands the Third Attractor as a movement out of the binaries that keep modernity hypnotized. Not only politically or socially, but ontologically. The real trap, as he sees it, is not that we lack embodiment or inner development. The trap is that we are deeply embodying the wrong assumptions about reality itself.
We keep working on ourselves, while unconsciously carrying the same individualistic, Cartesian worldview into our spirituality, our activism, and our sense making. We speak about inner and outer, individual and collective, agency and structure, as if these were clean separations. Adrian challenged that framing again and again.
What if there is no inner and outer in the way we think?
What if cognition, agency, and identity are already entangled with context, culture, materiality, and history?
Drawing from complexity science, enactive cognition, and assemblage theory, he described how we live inside tight assemblage structures that shape how we know, perceive, and act. These structures are not just systems we can redesign from the outside. They are the water we swim in. And most of the time, we never ask how the water is.
This is where his work becomes unsettling. Because it suggests that telling better stories, creating new models, or even building new movements can easily reproduce the very ontologies and epistemologies that led us into crisis in the first place. We change the language, but not the ground from which the language arises.
For Adrian, the Third Attractor is not a destination or a blueprint. It is a continuous practice of staying with complexity without collapsing it into certainty. Complex problems, by definition, do not have final answers. At best, we can learn to take the next right step.
This requires a different culture of sense making. One that can tolerate ambiguity, resist premature coherence, and remain responsive to lived experience rather than abstract models. He was clear that system maps and grand frameworks often give us a false sense of control. They soothe our anxiety, but they can also become subtle tools of power.
Instead, Adrian is deeply interested in micro narratives. The small stories people share about their lived experience. The stories exchanged over tea, in communities, in places where life is actually happening. When gathered carefully and ethically, these narratives reveal patterns without forcing them into ideology. They show us where the energy is, where fear lives, where hope quietly persists.
From this perspective, big stories do not need to be invented. They are already emerging from millions of small interactions. The danger begins when someone claims to have the story that everyone should follow.
This also reframes how change happens. Not bottom up versus top down, but through distributed intelligence. Adrian used the example of honeybees searching for a new home. No single bee knows the whole picture. Decision making emerges through signals, feedback, interference, and time. Intelligence is collective, embodied, and patient.
That metaphor felt deeply aligned with the Third Attractor. Not as a heroic leap forward, but as a gradual reorientation of how we listen, sense, and respond together.
We also spoke about AI, and here Adrian was both appreciative and cautious. AI excels at calculation and pattern detection in the complicated domain. But complex sense making remains a human responsibility. Intelligence is embodied. Trust, intimacy, and meaning arise in the in between space of lived relationship. AI can support us, but it cannot replace that space. The danger is not AI itself, but our temptation to outsource human sense making to machines.
What I appreciated most was Adrian’s honesty. He is not optimistic about the short term. He expects more crisis, more suffering, more polarization. And yet he is deeply hopeful in the long arc of humanity. Not because someone will save us, but because distributed intelligence, when cultivated patiently, has always found ways to adapt.
The Third Attractor, as it appeared through this conversation, is not a promise of harmony. It is an invitation to maturity. To give up the fantasy of control. To stop searching for the perfect solution. To learn how to move together in uncertainty without needing to dominate it.
Perhaps the most important shift Adrian pointed to is this: the future will not be engineered through better answers, but through better questions, better listening, and better ways of being together while we do not know.
And that may be the most radical move of all.
