The Great Burial
Laying to rest a knowledge system that no longer serves life
This is Part two of a two-part series on the collapse of our dominant knowledge system. The first piece offered something like an obituary, tracing how AI, epistemic overwhelm, and institutional decay have rendered our overreliance on propositional knowing obsolete. In this final piece I ask: what might be the ritual? What is the burial?
There is a quiet question stirring beneath the surface of our time. In this in-between, this twilight between worlds, where an old system is giving way, and something new has not rooted yet, we often ask: What must we build? What must we become? But perhaps an equally essential question is: What must we lay to rest, and how?
We speak of regeneration, of systems change, of building the new world. But how can something truly take root if the soil hasn’t been prepared? What if, in order to build what comes next, we first need to bury w hat has been, not just intellectually, but ceremonially?
The Zombie Paradigm
Across the world, something is unraveling. Institutions built on conquest and control are crumbling, many grasping like a dying patient clinging for life, threatening to take everyone else down with them. Our mythologies, of endless growth, human supremacy, and mind over matter, are losing their hold. And yet, amidst the rubble, we keep reaching. Trying to reframe, rebrand, retrofit. Business as usual, now with a regenerative paint job.
But what if a new knowledge system cannot truly take root until we have laid the old one to rest, with gratitude, with grief, and with careful remembrance?
In many traditions, the living dead symbolize what has died but was never integrated, a force exiled from the sacred cycle of life, death, and renewal. They are not evil. They are unmourned. Parts of a system cast out instead of honored. Denied a proper burial, they return not as ancestors, but as ghosts.
So too with the knowledge system we still live inside. Its worldview, of separation, domination, and disembodied reason, has exhausted its gifts. And yet it lingers. It animates our systems like an unburied part of the cultural psyche: still running the code of optimization and control, still demanding relevance, still afraid to die.
But what is exiled returns distorted. If we push it away in anger or shame, we don’t free ourselves, we bind ourselves to its shadow. The invitation is not to reject this paradigm with contempt, but to embrace it as a part of our collective becoming. To say: you were trying to protect us. You helped us survive, grow, understand, build. And now, it is time for something else.
We bury it not as a condemnation, but as a completion. We name its harms and its gifts. We offer it dignity. And we place it in the ground, not to forget it, but so it may decompose into wisdom. From love. Only then can something truly new grow. Not born in opposition, but born from wholeness.
Every tradition knows the importance of threshold rituals, rites that allow a soul to pass in peace. To help the ferryman bring the spirit across. Without such rites, something lingers. The dead disturb the living. The bridge to the next world remains uncrossed. So what could it look like?
What is the Great Burial?
The Great Burial is a question. An art project. A proposal. A possibility. An event. A day, a global timing, a thousand offerings, in a thousand ways, at the same time. Held together by the farewell. Communities around the world naming what they’re letting go of, in their own words, their own rituals, their own ways. Public ceremonies. Private reckonings. Locally rooted, culturally specific, and globally connective.
Art. Dance. Stillness. Fires. Silence. Economists and elders, engineers and mystics, all invited to participate.
To bury the story of supremacy, and remember what it taught us about vigilance. We release the hero, and re-inhabit the village. We compost the myth of disconnection, and seed the ground for kinship. We integrate. We give thanks. We begin the next cycle.
What Are We Burying?
Perhaps it is the myth of the separate self. Perhaps it is the empire of mind over body, man over nature, profit over life. Certainty before questioning. Perhaps it is the story of exceptionalism, optimization, and extraction, the one that promised to lift all boats but delivered disconnection. But maybe it’s not one idea. Maybe it’s a pattern. A presence. A feeling in the collective nervous system that we are still living inside something that has overstayed its welcome. Something fraying. Ghostlike. A scaffold no longer holding.
Most people, across political and cultural lines, can feel it: this isn’t working. This isn’t life-sustaining. So what if, instead of fighting it, we gave it a proper goodbye? What if we made it sacred? We say: thank you. Thank you for the fire of ambition, the marvel of innovation, the courage to explore. Thank you for the scaffolding you gave us while we were still growing. And now, thank you, and goodbye.
To bury something is not to reject it. It is to recognize that its season is complete. To honor the arc. And to give it a rightful place, in the ground, not in our mouths.
Hard Goodbyes
And yes, this is hard. For those who have been, or continue to be, wounded, exploited, violated, or silenced by the systems we’ve inherited, gratitude can feel impossible. How do you honor the inheritance without denying its violence? How do you acknowledge the gifts without becoming complicit in the harm?
There was a time when the Enlightenment broke the back of religious tyranny. When reason and inquiry loosened the grip of dogma and hierarchy. When separation gave us the tools to individuate, to question, to build. To forget this would be to forget the courage of those who came before us, imperfect, sincere, striving to meet their moment with integrity and imagination. Just as we must meet ours.
Yes, some exploited the moment. Yes, power congealed in ways that left many behind. But this is not a call to erase the past, nor to sanctify it. It is a call to compost it. To take the whole, the brilliance and the brutality, and metabolize it into something life-giving.
This is not about left or right, progressive or conservative. All sides have been abandoned by the very knowledge system they once relied on, because what they share, beneath their differences…… is life. And this knowledge system no longer serves life. It abstracts, fragments, and controls, while the living world asks for something else entirely: relationship. This moment is not a battle between ideologies, but a return to right-relation, with each other, with the past, with the living systems that sustain us. And, perhaps there are no separate systems at all, only one web, woven through time, waiting to be tended.
Why Now?
Because we are still trying to heal without grieving. Still trying to transform without releasing. Still trying to lead without listening to what is leaving. Still trying to build while fighting. Climate collapse is not just an ecological event. It is an ontological one. The water is rising in the world, and in us. Many feel unmoored, not because we don’t see what’s coming, but because we haven’t properly acknowledged what is passing.
A global funeral may sound performative. But what if performance is part of the medicine? Rituals have always been humanity’s way of metabolizing the unthinkable. They give shape to what cannot be said in reports or resolved in strategy decks. They let us cry, laugh, sing, and sweat our way through thresholds.
What Might Emerge?
Not the New World, we already have one. But space.
Space for listening. For remembering. For building on real ground. With fewer illusions. With deeper roots. With more room to ask: what are we here to serve, now, in this time, in this context?
The Great Burial is not the end. It is a turning. An act of collective maturity. Of cultural humility. Of necessary release. And when we bury the knowledge system that has already died, with care, with clarity, with real thanks, we do not just say goodbye.
We prepare the soil. Only then can we begin to build something truly alive. Not on top of the rubble, but from the compost of what once carried us.
Would you take part?
What would you lay to rest?
How would you do so?
And more importantly, what would you thank it for?
With appreciation to Peter Merry, whose reflections on the need for a burial sparked the idea for this.
Is this supposed to say Part 3?