Over the last months, I have spoken with twenty-four remarkable people about the possibility of a third attractor. What fascinates me is that nearly everyone agrees on one thing: we cannot do this alone. Whether we imagine regenerating culture, redesigning governance, reinventing education or remembering the deeper oneness of life, every vision eventually arrives at the same insight. In the end, it all depends on our capacity to come together.
And yet, when I look around, when I look at my own life, when I listen carefully between the lines of these conversations, I see how difficult it is.
Not because we do not care.
Not because we do not see the meta-crisis.
Not because we are not inspired.
It is difficult because everyone is already full.
Everyone is giving everything they have to their own projects, their own responsibilities, their own families, their own fragile hope.
Bruce Alderman described this very clearly when he said that no single group can hold all the depth needed across all four quadrants: interior, systems, culture and behaviour. What we need is an ecosystem of people working together, but each part of that ecosystem is already stretched to its limits.
Nish Dubashia added another essential dimension. People are naturally attracted to values that match their own developmental stage, which means that even the most brilliant idea will not necessarily appeal to everyone. Each of us is navigating our own meaning-structures and our own life-conditions.
And Said Dawlabani pointed to something that is deeply human. Much of the world is passive, not because people do not care, but because they are exhausted and disillusioned. When you feel powerless, it is hard to look up, let alone join hands.
Grace Rachmany spoke about the practical side. Communities do not scale simply because we want them to. They need connective tissue, shared agreements and shared identities. Without this, people remain islands. Beautiful islands, idealistic islands, but still islands.
Catherine Pawasarat said something that struck me. Many people secretly hope that others will build the world they want to live in so that they can join later. This longing for someone else to build it is exactly why the work does not move.
Everyone is building something. But almost no one has time to look around.
I see this very clearly now.
Each person I spoke with is doing extraordinary work. They are creating regenerative campuses, forming new political parties, designing novel governance models, birthing new spiritual practices, tending eco-villages, building networks of commons-based collaboration, mapping culture, transforming education, healing grief and teaching non-duality.
But each of them is standing inside their own fire.
Their calendars are full.
Their energy is finite.
And they are deeply identified with the part of reality where they feel responsible.
Mary Adams emphasised a painful truth. We are already in the breakdown, whether we admit it or not. And many people in privileged contexts have not yet let this in deeply enough to fundamentally reorient their lives. Without that confrontation, the urgency to connect remains abstract.
Elizabeth Debold added something subtle and important. New narratives cannot be engineered from above. They emerge only when we become available to the intelligence that made us. Becoming available requires humility, spiritual maturity and a willingness to let go of our ideas about how the future should look. Most of us do not experience enough spaciousness to do that.
John Churchill spoke about the imaginal, the energetic architecture of attraction. For a new future to draw us in, it must be charged with meaning, imagery and emotional power. But creating that charge requires time, presence and shared devotion, which are exactly the resources that people lack when they are absorbed in their own commitments.
The challenge is not a lack of alignment.
The challenge is a lack of shared attention.
Almost everyone is pointing in the same general direction. Regenerative culture, spiritual depth, systems change, developmental responsibility, inner transformation and outer redesign.
But we are like constellations that do not yet know they form a sky.
We have not looked up together.
And more importantly, we have not had the time.
What, then, is the real work?
Not to force unity.
Not to build one movement.
Not to create one story.
The real work is to create conditions where attention can meet attention. Where fields can meet fields. Where the work of one node becomes visible to another.
Cecile Renouard described this through education that engages head, heart and body. Only when people feel the whole can they act for the whole.
Diane Musho Hamilton said that the true release of collective energy happens when polarities flip. When I see my own position inside you and you see yours inside me. Reaching this moment requires a container strong enough to hold difference, and containers like this take practice and time.
Layman Pascal reminded me that real change comes not from one shared narrative, but from shared principles and improved habits of being. This is the slow, evolutionary building of collective coherence.
The deeper truth is this.
Even like-minded people struggle to come together.
Not because we lack love.
Not because we lack vision.
Not because we lack intelligence.
It is because we lack shared rhythm.
We are not in each other’s orbits long enough to generate real gravitational pull.
And yet, every single conversation contained a quiet confidence that some form of coming together is inevitable. Maybe not as one network or one movement. Maybe instead as clusters, nodes, prototypes, local cultures and spiritual communities.
In other words, maybe what we already have will become enough once it becomes connected.
Perhaps the third attractor begins when we finally see each other.
Even briefly.
Even imperfectly.
The third attractor will not be engineered.
It will not be imposed.
It will not be controlled.
It will emerge when enough of us pause, breathe and orient toward one another. When our isolated sparks begin to recognise that they belong to a single field.
I feel this very deeply now.
We do not need to agree.
We do not need to merge.
We do not need to unify.
We need to recognise.
We need to resonate.
And we need to return to the truth that none of us can hold the whole alone.
That is the invitation before us.
And perhaps it has already begun.
