03/09/2026
Comment FIVTH and I’ll send you the full episode 🎧
The Fifth Empire: Building a New Civilisation from the Inside Out — with Luke Levene | Think Flow Grow Cast with Tim Böttner #288
Four great empires have fallen. There is a fifth — and it looks nothing like the others.
Babylonian. Persian. Greek. Roman... each one built on territory, on power, on control. Each one bigger and more brittle than the last. And all of them brought us to the threshold we’re standing on right now.
For eight hundred years, a prophecy has been carried in Portugal that says something else is coming. Fernando Pessoa called it the Fifth Empire — a civilisation of light. Not an empire of land. Not an empire of power. An empire of coherence.
I sat down with Luke Levene, founder of The FiVth — a gathering that happens every May in Portugal around exactly this question. The people who’ve built this with him include Robert Edward Grant, Dr. Filippo Biondi, Debra Silverman, Charles Eisenstein, Sarah Breskman Cosme, Chervin Jafarieh, Emilio Ortiz, Robert James Comber, and more.
We went deep into the history and mythology, but we get to the real question fast: if the Fifth Empire is an empire of consciousness, what does that mean for your ordinary Tuesday?
Because here’s the claim underneath all of it. A civilisation doesn’t reorganise through politics or revolution. It reorganises as a byproduct — when enough individual people come into coherence.
Which means the work isn’t out there. It starts here. In you. In your body. And then it becomes collective.
And I know how that sounds when you look at the news. Everything out there points the other way. But somewhere underneath, in a place that doesn’t need evidence, I think we can feel this is the only way through. And because we can feel it — I believe it’s what’s coming.
Comment FIVTH and I’ll send it over.
⬇️ And I’m curious:
Where do you feel something ending — and what do you sense on the other side?
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