Why 3rd Space?
- Because the crises we face are not only political or economic – they are spiritual, cultural, and civilisational.
- Because technical solutions alone cannnot heal a broken story of the world.
- Because meaning is not a luxury – it is a foundation for sane socities and sacred futures.
- Because knowledge is lived not just argued.
- Because diversity of wisdom is a strength.
- Because community is an act of courage.
About Us
What We Are
Most of us, at least in the mainstream, find ourselves entangled in a world driven almost exclusively by economics: a world still constructed through binary and atomistic thinking, and defined by values that are divorced from a living connection to life as a whole. Few would question the benefits, or the hazards, that modern science and technology have brought us. Enormous advances in healthcare, technology and global communication have impacted the world in significant ways. Yet, we have also witnessed the dismantling of our liberal and democratic traditions by corporate takeover, and the de-evolution of the media as an impartial source of information for the public at large. Our late-capitalist society dramatically impresses itself upon the experience of being an individual, and the evolutionary potential of our own subjectivity to reach for new horizons.
Navigating the Anthropocene
Mobilising Movements
Powerful social movements are mobilising in response to climate change, the excessive power of global corporations and the billionaire class, ineffective government, and continuing racial and gender injustice. Voices of dissent and hope, as well as new paradigms of thinking and innovation, are connecting with each other and the world at large across cyberspace. The recognition of a crisis of ‘meaning’ is generating a different order of thinking within postmodernity. This is challenging the exclusive anthropocentric humanism of our time with a different priority of values: those that privilege authenticity and support non-hierarchical and integral ways of living and being.
Fostering Dialogue
Co-founder
Steve Brett
Steve is the co-founder of 3rd Space and Executive Director of Emergence Foundation, a London-based charity supporting diverse, creatively emergent projects in the UK and Europe. Travelling through Asia and later living and working in India for seven years shaped lifelong values, and a passion for human and cultural transformation. A social worker, counsellor and psychotherapist by training, he has lived in and been part of the creation and evolution of several intentional communities including thirty years at EnlightenNext with Andrew Cohen, focussed on the evolution of consciousness and culture, dialogic work and spiritual practice.
He has an MA in South Asian Area Studies from the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, and has taught eastern philosophy and history, and human and cultural development in the US, UK, Europe and India. He sees himself as part of the movement to transform global culture at this time of climate, ecological and existential crisis, through writing, understanding the impact of colonialism in the global north and south, intercultural and intersubjective dialogue, and participating in non-violent civil disobedience movements.
Photo © Sophie Lindsay for Realisation Festival
Co-founder
Mary Adams
Mary is co-founder of 3rd- Space, Executive Director & Trustee of Emergence Foundation supporting innovative social and environmental projects across the UK and Europe.
Pursuing deeper answers to the contradictions and existential challenges of modernity, Mary spent decades exploring consciousness and the core drivers of culture. Graduating in South Asian Philosophy and Language from the Australian National University, she engaged in both eastern and western, academic and non-academic settings.This included years spent in India where, under various spiritual teachers ie Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj, J. Krishnamurti, & Vimala Tharkar, she explored the foundations of human consciousness through intensive practice, dialogue, and solitary retreats,
Trained in psychotherapy, a founding member of Gaia House International Meditation Centre, Mary has co-founded and taught in centres for human development in the UK, Europe, & USA. Working in the field of collective intelligence, a student of spiritual teacher, Andrew Cohen for 27 years, she lived in an intentional community, co-pioneering and facilitating groups in inter-subjective dialogue practices, meditation, and inquiry. As co-director of Education she helped design and teach educational programs including women’s development & leadership. The dramatic demise of this organisation and its controversial history proved a profound learning experience.
Currently based in London, through writing, intercultural dialogue, and non-violent civil disobedience, she works within a global network committed to transforming the paradigm underpinning the metacrisis we face today.
Course Director
Faheem Nusrat
Faheem has spent thirty years working in global technical consulting at Helios Towers helping bring internet connectivity to sub-Saharan Africa; at Shopify working on making commerce better for everyone, and across the wider tech industry as both a builder and a critic of what it was becoming.
He did that work earnestly in his younger years, from inside the capitalistic engine of global tech. These days he works from outside it whilst still consulting through meta-you Ltd, but with a different centre of gravity.
For over twenty-five years he has been in formal meditation and inquiry practice. What started as a parallel life eventually became the main thread. But it’s the tension between these two worlds -technology and inquiry – that drives his contribution as Course Director. A long-standing collaborator with 3rd Space, he is interested in how we can think more deeply without needing a doctrine to do it.
My work now is oriented toward the philosophy of living together and what it means to be human in a time when almost every assumption about that is being renegotiated.
