Nick Hedlund describes Visionary Realism as an attempt to sketch a worldview adequate to the complexity and sacredness of reality, one built on reverence, humility, and listening. In this episode of the Integration podcast, he talks with Brendan Graham Dempsey about what stands in the way: the split Kant first named between what's knowable and what's real, a divide Hedlund traces forward into postmodernism and treats as the hidden engine of the metacrisis.

Visionary Realism grew out of Ken Wilber's integral theory and Roy Bhaskar's critical realism, though Hedlund is clear that neither survives the encounter unchanged. His answer to the Kantian split runs through Bhaskar's distinction between the world as it is and the world as we know it, arriving at a reframing he calls "constellational containment," where mind sits nested within the worl ...