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Reimagining Ourselves at the End of Our World: Kinship, Interconnection, and Spirituality in the Metacrisis

December 2, 2025

Recorded on: Oct 1, 2025

Description

Over the past decade, the world has become increasingly chaotic and uncertain – and so, too, has our cultural vision for the future. While the events we face now may feel unprecedented, they are rooted in much deeper patterns, which humanity has been playing out for millennia. If we take the time to understand past trends, we can also employ practices and philosophies that might counteract them –  such as focusing on kinship, intimacy, and resilience – to help pave the way for a better future. How might we nurture the foundations of a different kind of society, even while the end of our current civilization plays out around us?

In this episode, Nate is joined by guide and author Samantha Sweetwater to explore how separation is at the root of the metacrisis and how nurturing interconnection, relationships, and ecological maturity act as foundational components for systems change. Samantha delves into the distinction between power of life and power over life, emphasizing the need for personal transformation that aligns with collective evolution. She also describes how we could shift our cultural focus from the hero’s journey to a kinship journey through the practices of remembering, reconnection, and tending to collective emergence.

How might we reimagine humanity’s ecological role as that of stewards, rather than domination? Could focusing on reconnection, rather than separation, help us bridge the polarizing divides that currently prevent many of us from working together? And how might this work of remembering, which begins with ourselves, ripple out into stronger connections with our loved ones, communities, and ultimately to humanity and life as a whole?

About Samantha Sweetwater

Samantha Sweetwater is a wisdom guide, author, and founder of One Life Circle—a ministry of remembering. She works at the fertile nexus where unraveling systems make way for emerging forms of kinship, leadership, and value. For over three decades, she has facilitated individuals and organizations across five continents through journeys of personal, cultural, ecological, and spiritual emergence. She mentors leaders in business, technology, and finance, helping them to navigate awakening, develop systemic wisdom, and align impact with regenerative futures.

Founder of Dancing Freedom and Peacebody Japan, she sparked a global movement of embodied awakening and has trained hundreds of facilitators. She has also been a seed farmer—a practice that taught her the rigors of tending the real. She holds an MA in Wisdom Studies, a BA in Social Theory and Dance, and has been initiated into indigenous lineages of Africa, Latin America, and Turtle Island.

Show Notes & Links to Learn More

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The TGS team puts together these brief references and show notes for the learning and convenience of our listeners. However, most of the points made in episodes hold more nuance than one link can address, and we encourage you to dig deeper into any of these topics and come to your own informed conclusions.

00:00 – Samantha Sweetwater

03:42 – Metacrisis

04:16 – Polycrisis

09:23 – Whales and dolphins often have bigger brains than humans

11:01 – Daniel Schmachtenberger on TGS discussing the age of separation

11:09 – Development of agricultureFiat currency

12:30 – 1790 census showed 9 in 10 Americans lived on farmsToday farming makes up 1.2% of U.S. employment

12:55 – Many youth are not knowledgeable about where their food comes from

13:16 – Anthropocene

13:24 – EcozoicSymbiocene

13:50 – Manifest Destiny

14:10 – Evolution is not a hierarchy with humans at the “top”Additional info

14:30 – Monocropping

14:43 – We could feed more people if we had smaller, more diversified farms

15:38 – Interdependence (ecology)Interbeing

16:25 – Co-regulation

16:51 – Thích Nhất Hạnh

18:10 – Game theory

21:28 – Patriarchy and racism as ways of organizing power

22:47 – Hockey stick economics

23:15 – Soul ecology

23:55 – Complexity of Fin Whale song in North Atlantic

25:12 – Song Sparrow

26:40 – David Bohm – Wholeness and the Implicate Order

27:19 – Greek concept of cosmos

27:43 – Implicate and explicate order

29:15 – Arthur KoestlerHolons

29:23 – Nature is a system of systems

29:44 – Matryoshka dolls (Russian nesting dolls)

33:52 – Economic superorganism

34:04 – Frankly #108 The Influence of Psychopaths: Why Humans Are Better Than We Think

34:59 – Maximum power principle

36:33 – Daniel Schmachtenberger – “existential tech” is omni-lose

37:02 – Dark triad personality traitsTGS Episode + Frankly Episode

38:24 – The Light Phone

42:02 – Iroquois Confederacy and its influence on current systems of democratic governance

43:28 – Pol.is (Audrey Tang TGS Episode)

45:40 – DiatomsWinnemem Wintu’s relationship with salmon

48:20 – The three bricklayers story

49:55 – Dr. Dan SiegelDr. Siegel discussing MweDr. Siegel – IntraConnected: MWe (Me + We) as the Integration of Self, Identity, and Belonging

50:38 – Hero’s journeyKinship

52:34 – David Sloan Wilson and Edward O. Wilson –  Rethinking the Theoretical Foundation of SociobiologyTGS Episode with David Sloan WilsonChicken experimentFrankly #104 Ducks and Blueberries

54:28 – Project Interdependence

1:05:21 – About holotropic experiencesStanistlov GrofTranspersonal psychology

1:06:49 – Holotropic breathwork

1:07:20 – Being in awe has the same self-transcendent brain effect as being on psychedelicsDacher Keltner and the science of aweDacher Keltner – Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life

1:09:45 – Psychedelics as a non-specific amplifier

1:10:12 – Role of mindset and setting with psychedelics

1:10:40 – Psychedelics can help with accessing deep memoriesa deeper state of empathy

1:13:30 – Joanna Macy’s framework of systems changeTGS Episode on The Work That Reconnects

1:19:00 – Dave Snowden – As through a glass darkly: a complex systems approach to futures

1:21:47 – Nora Bateson (TGS Episode #10#20RR #2RR#10RR #20), Warm data

1:22:24 – Citizen science

1:22:53 – Increasing satellites

1:24:27 – Shambhala Warrior ProphecyJoanna Macy on the Shambhala Warrior Prophecy,

1:28:03 – Wendell Barry – “Be joyful though you have considered all the facts.”

1:30:23 – The tradition of the Bwiti people is to “be a student of life”

1:31:40 – David Sloan Wilson (TGS Episode), Daniel Schmachtenberger (TGS Episodes PlaylistRR#10), Luke Kemp (TGS Episode #153#194)

Nate Hagens

Nate Hagens

Nate Hagens is the Director of The Institute for the Study of Energy & Our Future (ISEOF) an organization focused on educating and preparing society for the coming cultural transition. Allied with leading ecologists, energy experts, politicians and systems thinkers ISEOF assembles road-maps and off-ramps for how human societies can adapt to lower throughput lifestyles.

Nate holds a Masters Degree in Finance with Honors from the University of Chicago and a Ph.D. in Natural Resources from the University of Vermont. He teaches an Honors course, Reality 101, at the University of Minnesota.