sense-making crisis - TOWARDS LIFE-KNOWLEDGE

Symbolostasis refers to the process by which symbolic systems — comprising language, narratives, rituals, mythologies, and signifying practices — maintain, update, or restore coherence across threshold transitions. Analogous to allostasis in biology, which sustains physiological viability through adaptive regulation, symbolostasis describes how meaning systems regenerate semiotic stability under changing psychological, cultural, technological, or ecological conditions. This paper develops a formal framework for understanding and applying symbolostasis across multiple domains — from trauma healing and regenerative medicine to narrative reweaving in cultures and coherence-based design in artificial intelligence. Grounded in the Tend–Align–Transcend–Integrate (TATi) grammar and a coherence-first metaphysics, symbolostasis emerges as a teleodynamic function essential for symbolic life to flourish in an increasingly fragmented world. In a time of civilizational disintegration and meta-crisis, this capacity to metabolize, reorganize, and regenerate meaning becomes not only therapeutic but existential.

This white paper addresses the civilizational threat posed by the convergence of exponential technologies and rivalrous social dynamics, a trajectory that Daniel Schmachtenberger describes as structurally self-terminating. Integrating his analysis with John McMurtry’s Life-Value Onto-Axiology (LVOA), we diagnose the life-blind value systems at the root of systemic breakdowns across economics, media, governance, education, and identity. We propose a civilizational re-alignment grounded in the Primary Axiom of Value: that value is that which sustains and enables life-capacity without loss. From this foundation, we articulate the emergence of regenerative systems and sovereign selves — anti-rivalrous, coherence-generating, and ontologically grounded in interdependence. The white paper outlines the qualities of imaginal cells, the redesign of value equations, and the cultivation of semiotic, emotional, and systemic coherence as prerequisites for a viable future. Coherence, not control, becomes the foundation of civilizational continuity. Only life-value aligned systems survive — and evolve.