* Book: The Evolution of Meaning, Volume 1: Cosmos to Culture. by Brendan Graham Dempsey. IAM Press (Institute of Applied Metatheory), 2026.

In Chapter 1, we start with the fundamentals. What is meaning, and can we define it in a way that lets us trace its complexification across scales? I will excavate meaning to its deepest foundations in energy, information, and the thermodynamic struggle against entropy. We’ll see how the quest to gain meaningful knowledge has fueled a learning process driving the growth of complexity across the cosmos. This complexification has unfolded through four distinct levels: Matter, Life, Mind, and Culture.

Each has introduced a new way of acquiring, storing, and transmitting meaningful knowledge through Structural, Genetic, Cognitive, and Symbolic Learning, respectively.

Through Symbolic Learning humans acquire and transform meaning across cultural evolution. The meanings a society deems most central to its collective flourishing are considered sacred.

Zooming in, then, on the dynamics of Symbolic Learning specifically, we analyze both the individual and collective aspects involved.

Chapter 2 looks first to the individual psychology of learning meaningful knowledge. I examine how human beings acquire knowledge, drawing on developmental constructivism to show that the mind neither passively receives reality nor simply invents it, but progressively constructs more adequate models through experience. Surveying insights from this field, we’ll see how learning generates increasingly complex ways of understanding the self, other people, society, and the world. I then introduce the Lectical Scale, the cutting-edge metric now available for actually measuring such complexity.

Scoring hundreds of interviews that probe people’s meaningmaking, I show how developmental models of thinking about morality, value, self, and the sacred all complexify along the same quantifiable trajectory. On the basis of this, I provide numerical benchmarks for an integral theory of psychological development and identify specific “systems of meaning.”

In Chapter 3, we turn to the collective side of the coin.

Having examined how meaning develops within individual psyches, I now ask whether societies also learn—and whether cultural evolution follows patterns comparable to psychological development. We’ll see how persons and societies recursively shape one another: individuals inherit language, norms, institutions, and worldviews from their cultures, yet also revise those collective structures through their own learning, reflection, and innovation. Drawing on the social psychology of George Herbert Mead, the critical theory of Jürgen Habermas, and the historical epistemology of Jürgen Renn, I will develop a model of this person–society feedback loop and show how meaningful knowledge becomes embedded in language, institutions, technologies, and social organization. With the dynamics established, we’ll explore just what this societal learning process has looked like. With Yuval Harari’s account as our textbook example, we’ll examine some major theories of psychocultural development that have read cultural evolution as a learning process developing through stages. Drawing on these, I introduce new empirical data measuring the Lectical complexity of historical texts, allowing us to test claims about cultural development and better understand how societies transform their shared conceptions of reality, value, and the sacred.

Having traced meaning’s evolution from Cosmos to Culture, the rest of our effort will unpack the various transformations of meaning through Culture’s major stages. Volume 2. Animism to Metaphysics turns to humanity’s first three evolutionary meaning systems: Tribal, Archaic, and Axial.

In Chapter 4, we turn to the worldview of our ancient huntergatherer ancestors and the forager societies that flourished in the wake of the Cognitive Revolution. Drawing on archeology and anthropological reconstructions of Paleolithic oral cultures, we will explore how tribal peoples saw the world, organized social life, and related to the sacred. Informed by Robert Bellah’s category of Tribal religion, we’ll look at examples like the Walbiri people of Australia and the Kalapalo of Brazil, while also considering similar material from the Ju’hoansi, Mbuti, Chukchee and other forager societies before concluding with the complex chiefdom society of ancient Hawaii. Turning to the Judeo-Christian tradition for an example of this structure, I examine the Tribal origins of ancient Israelite religion and consider the concept of God in the Bible’s earliest oral-derived strata.

In Chapter 5, we enter the world of the early agrarian civilizations that arose after the Agricultural Revolution. We’ll see how the palace-temple complex reshaped amorphous, animistic, and egalitarian conceptions of the sacred into anthropomorphized pantheons strictly mediated by elite priests and scribes. Drawing on the first written traditions of Egypt and the ancient Near East, as well as the Vedas of early India and the Greek epics, I will examine the worldview and values of these imperial societies, with their emphasis on glory, conquest, and domination. Within the Judeo-Christian tradition, we’ll explore the form God takes in royal Israelite myth and cult as a warrior storm-god who defeats the draconic forces of chaos.

In Chapter 6, we turn to the great ethical and spiritual revolution of the first millennium BCE. We’ll see how traditions across Greece, India, China, and beyond began appealing to universal principles of justice, truth, and right conduct. In this process, the sacred was reimagined in more transcendent and metaphysical terms: not simply as powerful anthropomorphic gods, but as ultimate reality, cosmic order, the Good, the Way, or a God above all gods. Drawing on prophetic, philosophical, and mystical texts, I will trace how Axial meaning developed into the major world religions and metaphysical traditions that would shape antiquity and then the medieval world. So the Judeo-Christian God became elevated from a local, wrathful, polytheistic deity of a particular people to the universal, moral, monotheistic God of the entire world.

Having surveyed the premodern transformations of meaning, value, and the sacred, we cross the caesura of modernity and conclude in Volume 3. Modernity to Omega with an assessment of the developments these have undergone in just the last 500 years and where they are headed.

We begin in Chapter 7 with the brave new worldview that emerged after the Scientific Revolution. As the cosmos came to be understood as a mechanical system governed by immutable laws, God was increasingly recast as a distant designer—or rejected altogether—while miracles, revelation, and ecclesiastical authority came under sustained criticism. I will trace how Enlightenment commitments to tolerance, universal rights, secular knowledge, and political freedom transformed both society and the modern psyche, giving rise to the rational, selfauthoring individual. Drawing on major scientific, philosophical, political, and social-theoretical texts, we’ll examine modernity’s new faith in Progress: the conviction that humanity could use reason, education, science, and technology to overcome ignorance, oppression, and scarcity and construct a better future. In this milieu, God would undergo a profound rethinking, moving from metaphysical but still moral and personal source to a fully abstract, impersonal, and amoral order, principle, or causative force. As this diminution strained the limits of spiritual devotion, Western intellectuals increasingly confronted a meaning crisis—one epitomized by Nietzsche’s tragic pronouncement, “God is dead!”

In Chapters 8 and 9, we look at the directions taken by late-modern thinkers responding to the loss of foundationalist metaphysics and the failure of Enlightenment ideals. In Chapter 8, we examine the deconstructive worldview that arose by turning modernity’s critical tools back upon the Modern worldview itself. As the catastrophes of the twentieth century undermined faith in Reason, Progress, science, and technological mastery, postmodern thought emphasized that these supposedly universal ideals tended to serve domination, homogenization, and destruction. They responded by exposing the historical contingency of knowledge, asking how language, institutions, identity, and power shape what societies take to be true. Drawing on major works of poststructuralism, feminist theory, critical theory, and cultural criticism, I will trace how this perspective challenged universal narratives in favor of pluralism, relativism and the deconstruction of inherited categories. In postmodern theology, we will look at the various ways “God” is unmasked as a tool of oppression, stripped of transcendent status, emptied into the world, brought into emancipatory political struggles, and/or commodified by neoliberal consumer capitalism.

By contrast, Chapter 9 looks at the reconstructive response to late-modern anti-foundationalism, perspectivalism, ideological conditioning, and historically changing worldviews. Rather than treating these insights as the end of truth, meaning, and value, metamodern and integrative thinkers recognize them as important correctives to and checks on modernity’s own unacknowledged metaphysical presumptions. We’ll see how this worldview retains Modern commitments to reason, development, and universal values while incorporating Postmodern awareness of social construction and epistemic limitation. Looking at contributions to complexity science, Big History, developmental theory, integral philosophy, and metamodern thought, I will explore how the Integrative worldview attempts a renewed account of cultural progress, grounds meaning and value within cosmic complexification, and seeks a new synthesis of science and spirituality for a post-postmodern age.

With our survey of historical meaning systems complete, we take stock of everything we have seen and reflect on the implications. Adopting an Integrative approach to this material, Chapter 10 offers a speculative vision for how to read this account of cultural evolution as a single learning process in which the sacred has been progressively undergoing developmental transformation, from hydrogen to holiness.

How are versions of all of the historical meaning systems still with us and available for deployment today? How do we understand value in an evolving universe? What kind of God, if any, does this panorama of cosmic history invite us to consider? What are the implications for action in our contemporary world? Finally, what might the future hold in store, should we extrapolate from the complexification trajectory to date? Could it be that an infinitely perfect God is not our original source but actually our ultimate, infinitely perfecting destination? What awaits us in this sublime cosmic Mystery, which everything has been striving to render into meaningful knowledge, yet always remains beyond full understanding, beyond intelligibility—Meaning beyond meaning, divine darkness beyond all “Gods”? "

Excerpts

The Metamodern / Integral Framing

(from the introduction)

Brendan Graham Dempsey:

"What was beyond postmodernism?

Had anyone been talking about this, describing what comes after? Did it have a name?

My search led me to the nascent discourse of metamodernism in cultural studies. In 2010, academics had begun arguing that a new cultural paradigm had emerged, which returned a sense of hope and constructive sincerity on the other side of deconstructive irony. They suggested that people were increasingly re-affirming values over cynicism, picking a side despite recognizing that their stance was limited, partial. Grand narratives of meaning, they said, were as necessary as they were problematic, and people were returning to myth and meaning, but in a self-conscious and reflexive sense chastened by postmodern awareness.

All of this resonated powerfully with my own work and seemed to offer a framework in which to present all I was doing. Excited, I got involved with the early discourse, presenting my paper “The Death and Resurrection of God in Metamodern Religion” at the first metamodern academic conference in Scotland in 2014. I started a podcast called Metamodern Spirituality and wrote the books Metamodernism and the Return of Transcendence (2021) followed by Metamodernism: Or, The Cultural Logic of Cultural Logics (2023).

A broader metamodern ecosystem of thinkers began to appear, and I soon became familiar with the work of Hanzi Freinacht, the pen name under which two Scandinavian theorists were writing works synthesizing metamodern thought with another post-postmodern discourse, integral theory. This brought a developmental aspect to the conversation that I had never encountered before. Looking to developmental psychology, Freinacht argued that people’s cognitive complexity affects the values and cultural worldviews they adopt. Meaning has a developmental component. The movement from premodern religious conformity to modern rational individualism to postmodern deconstructive cynicism to, now, metamodern reconstructive coherence was not arbitrary, he said; it represented a deepening, a growth, a progressive logic working itself out. More than that, this transformation was playing out at both the individual and collective levels.

Now, it was like fireworks went off in my head. These ideas resonated profoundly with my own experience and intuitions.

Fascinated, I dug deeper into their integral influences and soon found myself immersed in the works of metatheorist Ken Wilber. Across books like Sex, Ecology, Spirituality; Integral Spirituality; and The Religion of Tomorrow, Wilber presented a comprehensive vision that integrated science and spirituality into a single developmental narrative. Since the Big Bang, the universe had been complexifying, with parts forming wholes, which became the parts of still greater wholes, and so on. This growth pattern led from physics (atoms into molecules) to biology (molecules into cells into multicellular animals) to human beings, where the stages described by developmental psychology continued the story. The story of evolution, then, was not random or directionless; it moved along a vector of increasing complexity and consciousness.

For me, this metamodern/integral framing brought together numerous strands into a shockingly coherent picture. As I dove into the developmental literature it rested on, I saw my own journey—the one you’ve been reading—reflected back in uncanny precision. James Fowler’s model of faith development, for instance, describes a sequence of stages through which people’s meaning-making evolves: from a stage of unreflective religious conformity (e.g., fundamentalism) to a stage of reflective, reason-based systematizing (e.g., apologetics) often experienced as disillusionment or demythologization (e.g., historical-critical atheism/naturalism) to a stage in which all systems experience profound destabilization and relativization (e.g., nihilistic deconstruction) and begin to draw from insights about the archetypal unconscious (e.g., personal myth), moving into a more open, mystical register and culminating in the universalizing identification with the cosmos itself (e.g., integrative consciousness). In Fowler’s model, I saw my own spiritual path mapped out decades before it ever happened. My experience of the evolution of meaning, it turned out, was a common experience, a shared experience, one with a pattern.

More surprisingly, the metamodern/integral framing suggested there were parallels between individual psychological development of this kind and collective sociological development. This had been precisely my intuition as well, when I’d looked out and sensed a world caught in the clutches of a collective meaning crisis. My entire epic poem was a personal narrative told as a collective drama; it was not just about me processing a loss of faith but about the modern death of God and the collective need to clarify meaning in new terms before civilization fell into the abyss. The idea that society as a whole was, you could say, also progressing through the increasingly complex stages of faith suggested that, indeed, meaning had a new act coming. The movement of worldviews from Tribal Animistic to Archaic Mythical to Axial Metaphysical to Modern Rational to Postmodern Pluralistic to Metamodern Integrative was part of a broader, even cosmic story of development and complexification.

In this way, I saw it expressing the most detailed version yet of the New Myth. It was a story of the evolution of consciousness. Along the way, the image of God was being transformed and evolved. But that evolution had a direction: towards greater developmental growth. The entire universe was complexifying—and so was God. My meaning crisis, then, was not some grim loss of innocence, some bleak but necessary coming to terms with a meaningless cosmos. It was, rather, my own participation in the evolution of meaning itself. It was a developmental procession through the stages of life’s way. It was part of my ascent up a leveled cosmos. It was a part of the path on my mind’s journey into God—the God emerging, the God evolving, the God to come."

The Complexification of God

(from the introduction)

Brendan Graham Dempsey:

"An evolving, complexifying universe in which God likewise complexified fascinated me. And so, as usual, I went all in.

I explored the broader integral literature

(SteveMcIntosh’s Integral Consciousness and Evolution’s Purpose,
Dustin DiPerna’s Evolution’s Ally,
Paul Smith’s Integral Christianity, etc.)

and metamodern literature

(Lene Rachel Andersen’s Metamodernity,
Tomas Björkman’s The World We Create, etc.).

Then I went to the sources these metamodern and integral authors were drawing from and read them.

Cosmological accounts like

Erich Jantsch’s The Self-Organizing Universe,
Ervin László’s Evolution: The Grand Synthesis,
Eric Chaisson’s Cosmic Evolution;

sociological accounts like

Jean Gebser’s The EverPresent Origin and
Jürgen Habermas’s Communication and the Evolution of Society;

and, of course, all the developmental literature: Jean Piaget, Lawrence Kohlberg, Cheryl Armon, Michael Commons, etc.

And yet, as has tended to be the case, the more I dug into the existing material, the more I found it wanting in various ways. There was no doubt that this was by far the best, most comprehensive framework I’d yet found—the gestalt felt solid, and was rooted in my entire life’s experience and study. But it also became clear that there were various deficits, gaps, lacunae, and even outright errors holding it back.

For one thing, some of the material was simply out of date or didn’t reflect the newest scholarship or science. In the last 30 years, the field of complexity science, for instance, has exploded, with considerable advances in our understanding of emergence, semantic information, far-from-equilibrium thermodynamics, and other crucial phenomena that have yet to be integrated into the story. Likewise, the field of developmental psychology has seen a paradigm shift, with cutting-edge neo-Piagetian models and metrics—none of which are currently well reflected in the literature. Indeed, much of the developmental theorization in the current discourse remains on a spectrum from incomplete to speculative, based on out-of-date science that was misleading or simply wrong.

At the same time, other powerful integrative metatheories and unifying theories have since emerged which stand to offer profound synergistic insight if brought into the conversation.

Gregg Henriques’s Unified Theory of Knowledge (UTOK), for instance, and
Bobby Azarian’s Unifying Theory of Reality (UTOR)

— both identified with the metamodern paradigm by their formulators—represent big-picture models deeply grounded in the scientific state-ofthe-art. There has also been work to advance integrative metatheory by synthesizing Ken Wilber’s integral theory with Roy Bhaskar’s critical realism and Edgar Morin’s complex thought. All of this represents major developments in the field, but to date no comprehensive account has brought such strands together for a more holistic, metatheoretical (or archtheoretical) analysis of psychocultural evolution.

But perhaps most important for me is the lack of detail hitherto provided by psychocultural developmental models.

Understandably, the main thinkers speak in broad terms about major structures, worldviews, and periods, but the specific evidence to fill out and ground these generalities has usually been sparse. In describing a tribal animistic worldview, how often do such thinkers ever actually name specific tribes, cite data from the anthropological literature, or quote actual people from forager lifeways? Discussing archaic warrior cultures, when do they ever provide citations of actual texts or archeological material, work through the historical examples, consult the disciplinary literature on the Ancient Near East, archaic Greece, etc.? Sure, occasional examples are given here and there to make the point, but, surprisingly, no thorough, comprehensive, evidenced account yet exists of the major meaning systems to have evolved through cultural evolution. That is, no properly exhaustive survey exists of the historical evidence for psychocultural development.

Finally, it is the case that, in assessing the evolution of meaning and the sacred, very little work has been done explicating the evolution of the Western (Judeo-Christian) God-concept specifically through a psychocultural development lens. Western philosophy has received such analysis by Habermas, and transformations of Buddhist thought by Wilber, but no one has yet attempted a detailed account of the evolution of God (Yahweh) through the posited major developmental stages, from Tribal to Integrative.

For these and many other reasons, I have come to feel that a new, updated account is sorely needed. The story of meaning’s evolution, from the Big Bang to today, deserves a definitive telling—one based on the best, most up-to-date science, metatheoretical models, and historical data.7

This book aims to provide just that. Drawing on my studies in religious anthropology, ancient civilizations, philosophy and theology, art and literature, postmodern theory, cultural studies, depth and developmental psychology, and integrative metatheory such as I’ve outlined above, I will attempt to bring it all together to trace how meaning has evolved from the ancient past to today.

Across my developmental evolution, I have acquired not just familiarity with these different fields and disciplines helpful for this undertaking, but also a lived sensitivity to meaningmaking as such. Goethe once observed that to know only one language is really to know no language at all. It’s only in learning another grammar and lexicon that the rules and character of your native tongue become illuminated. So it is, I would say, with meaning. It takes falling out of a worldview to appreciate it as a worldview. It takes changing belief systems to see how a belief system was shaping your perspective. In my life, I’ve learned to speak meaning in multiple tongues. This traversal through multiple worldviews has, I think, been important in its own way to this project. Ultimately, it has helped me see meaning not just in terms of one worldview versus another, but precisely in the transformations through all of them.

This book is meant as a historical tour through such transformations. It is the story of humanity’s participation in and advancement of a developmental learning process, through which meaning has been complexifying. In unfolding the major stages through which this process has been moving, it examines global, cross-cultural trends across some 70,000 years of social evolution, but tracks with special emphasis the different forms that God has taken in the Western social imaginary. Altogether, it attempts to articulate a grand narrative of cosmic history, in which human culture is the latest carrier of a sacred torch that was handed off at the Big Bang."

More information

Older 2024 Version of the book

* Book: The Evolution of Meaning. A Universal Learning Process. By Brendan Graham Dempsey. Sky Meadow Press, 2024

URL = https://www.skymeadowinstitute.org/press

"In this first volume of his book series The Evolution of Meaning, Dempsey introduces a theory of meaning based in thermodynamics and information processing. If the acquisition of meaningful information is what aids the viability of entities in context, we can appreciate evolution through cosmic complexification as a learning process. Tracking the trajectory of this learning process through the emergent levels of Matter, Life, Mind, and Culture, we see how meaning takes on new shades of depth and informational richness across scales. By the time we reach the domain of human culture, we can recognize notions of meaning, value, and the sacred as extensions of more fundamental processes on which they are based but to which they cannot be reduced. This framework allows us to situate human meaning-making within its broader evolutionary context and will inform the attempt in future volumes to track the complexification of such meanings across human history."

Evolution of Meaning

Contents

Contents

From the ToC

Narrative summary

Excerpts

The Metamodern / Integral Framing

The Complexification of God

More information

Older 2024 Version of the book

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