August 2025 Newsletter
Welcome to our August 2025 Newsletter. Here you will find our community, research, Second Renaissance, and the Bergerac Praxis Hub updates from the month of August.
🚀 Upcoming Explorations 🚀
Applying the Polycrisis & Metacrisis Frames
Our world faces overlapping crises that reinforce one another - a polycrisis. Beneath these symptoms lies the metacrisis: the deeper cultural and systemic conditions that generate them. Understanding both is key to moving from surface problems toward real solutions.
Join Rufus Pollock and Oren Slozberg on September 10th at 530pm CEST for a conversation exploring just this - the polycrisis and metacrisis frameworks - and how they can be applied to three major areas of climate breakdown, runaway AI, populism and democratic retreat.
Oasis Special Edition: Second Renaissance Fair
On Tuesday September 30th we'll be hosting a Second Renaissance Fair at the Oasis. Deviating from the usual being-and-building set up of the Oasis Calls, in this special edition we will be hosting a Second Renaissance Fair to showcase and share projects and initiatives within the community.
If you would like to attend sign up via the luma event page - https://lu.ma/yq9ixlgd
To host a stall also add your details here.
From Metacrisis to Second Renaissance: A 4-Week Exploratory Journey – Live Sessions Starting in October
Rufus Pollock and Sylvie Barbier will be hosting the next live From Metacrisis to Second Renaissance: A 4-Week Exploratory Journey. The 4-week course starts on Wednesday, 5th November, and runs every Wednesday from 5pm-630pm CEST. It’s a chance to gather online for interactive learning, dialogue, and deeper exploration of the Second Renaissance framework.
🔗 Register here: https://luma.com/dnlu160o
Here’s what our latest participants said about the course:
I deeply appreciated the course’s embodied approach to navigating pathways toward a paradigm shift.
A wonderful connection space which inspires to keep seeking and building towards the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible.
🌻Conscious Collectives🌻
August saw the launch of the Life Itself Australia Connection Calls. In this month’s call they gathered to explore the possibility of a Deliberately Developmental Space (DDS) in Lutruwita, drawing on diverse backgrounds to imagine what transformative practice in a Tassie DDS could look like.
🌅 Second Renaissance 🌅
Zak Stein: Education, AI & Personhood Conferral Problem
Watch Zak Stein’s keynote presentation from the Human Transformation in a Time of Metacrisis conference held at Harvard in May here:
Second Renaissance Forum
Some of our top forum posts over the past month have included:
💡Life Itself Research💡
The Research Group had a slightly quieter August than normal in terms of meetings, and will be going back to its weekly schedule from September.
One written output in August was a well-received overview of the Metacrisis by Jonah Wilberg.
And soon to be released is the research talk Measuring Worldviews: Putting Integral Altitudes to the Test from Brendan Graham Dempsey.
You can subscribe and keep up to date with all research talks and news here:
🌳The Bergerac Praxis Hub🌳
Here is a beautiful recap of the Inner River art residency, which took place in July 2025 at the Life Itself Praxis Hub in Bergerac -- written by Alexia Netcu, one of the members of the hosting team.
We have a few spaces still available in our Autumn Residency for December. If you are interested read more and apply here:
🌱 Help us to create a weller, wiser world together, to support the movement, you can:
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