The Need for Coherence: Building New Containers for Meaning in an Age of Fragmentation

How Living Communities Help Us Find Our Way Back to Reality

Imagine trying to navigate a relationship where you're never quite sure what's real - where your understanding of yourself, others, and what matters seems to shift unpredictably from moment to moment. Now imagine this isn't just about one relationship, but about your relationship with reality itself.

This is what happens when we lack a coherent worldview. It's not just an intellectual problem – it's deeply practical. Without a coherent way of making sense of existence, we develop what we might call a "disorganized attachment" to reality itself. Like a child who never develops secure attachment with caregivers, we're left without the basic trust and understanding needed to engage with the world effectively.

When Worlds Fail to Cohere

The lack of a coherent worldview manifests in specific psychological and behavioral patterns. One of the most striking examples is identity diffusion disorder, where the inability to maintain a stable sense of self mirrors the broader failure to create coherent meaning structures about reality.

When our nervous systems lack the scaffolding of a coherent worldview, we see predictable patterns emerge:

• Difficulty maintaining a stable sense of self across different contexts

• Challenges in forming deep, lasting relationships

• Tendency toward fragmented or contradictory belief systems

• Struggle to maintain consistent values or direction

• Pattern of seeking intensity rather than meaning

These patterns aren't just individual psychological issues - they're symptoms of a broader cultural failure to provide coherent frameworks for making sense of existence.

How Coherence Works

Modern understanding of how minds work¹ suggests that our nervous systems are constantly building and refining models of reality. These models – our deep priors and expectations – shape every aspect of our experience. When they're misaligned with reality's actual structure, we suffer.

This suffering serves an important function: it's reality's way of teaching us, of guiding our nervous systems toward better alignment with what is true. Like a parent's redirection of a child, suffering shows us where we've lost intimate contact with reality - where our predictive models have created distance or distortion where there could be closeness and clarity.

But reality teaches through pleasure as well as pain. When our internal models align well with reality's patterns, we experience states of flow, deep coherence, and what we might call eros - a felt sense of being in right relationship with what is. These aren't just pleasant experiences - they're reality's confirmation that we're learning to be in more intimate contact with the world. They are, in a sense, moments of secure attachment with existence itself.

Beyond Individual Solutions

While individuals can develop coherent worldviews even within incoherent cultural contexts, this is extremely challenging and rare. Just as secure attachment in children requires consistent, attuned caregiving, developing a secure relationship with reality requires immersion in relationships that themselves have a coherent relationship with what is. These relationships serve as containers that can hold both practical development and deeper transformation, providing the relational context necessary for lasting change.

This explains why just having good ideas or frameworks isn't enough. Our nervous systems develop coherence through relationship - both with reality itself and with other humans who can mirror and validate our emerging understanding. Just as children learn to trust and engage with the world through secure attachment relationships, we learn to trust and engage with reality through contexts that demonstrate coherent ways of being in relationship with what is.

The Need for New Containers

Given this fundamentally relational nature of coherence, we face a pressing need in our time: the creation of new spaces and communities that can support the development of coherent worldviews. Or perhaps more accurately, the creation of coherent worlds - for our views of the world and the worlds we inhabit shape each other in an ongoing dance. These spaces would serve as "microcultures of coherence" - living arenas where individuals can develop more stable and meaningful relationships with both self and reality.

We need new experiments in creating spaces that can nurture coherent worlds through living relationships and shared practice. These spaces must be able to hold both the practical work of developing better models of reality and the transformation that arises through deeper engagement with what is. They need to create shared fields of meaning and practice where coherence can be transmitted not just through ideas, but through the embodied experience of being in relationship with others on the same journey.

This isn't just about individual transformation - though that's crucial. It's about developing the collective capacity to make sense of and respond to our world. In a time when so many are experiencing a profound disconnection from reality itself, the creation of spaces that can foster secure attachment to existence may be one of our most urgent tasks. Without such containers, we risk perpetuating cycles of fragmentation and suffering. But with them, we might learn again how to be in intimate relationship with what is - how to trust, engage with, and ultimately love reality itself.

Work with me: I offer one-on-one guidance helping people develop secure attachment with reality through deep unfoldment work. If this resonates, explore working together

1. For a clear explanation of how this works, see Oshan's article on Predictive Processing