Julyan Davey

Weaving a Non-Dual Civilisation - Part 3: Returning to Life

2021-12-18T00:00:00+00:00

In Parts 1 and 2, I explored a model that describes the civilisational transition necessary to shift humanity onto a regenerative path.

In this Part 3, I will explore my personal narrative for this transition which I call: Returning to Life.

Here’s a brief summary.

Humanity has fallen asleep. We have chosen to hide ourselves away in the bottom of the basement and instead of being ourselves, we live a front and together create a fake, dead civilisation. We have chosen to go unconscious to the majesty of Life all around us. We have chosen a living death. Together, we have chosen to reject Life and this choice is killing everything around us, it’s destroying the incredible beauty of the more-than-human world, whose brilliance we cannot even comprehend.

The heroes of our time will not be individuals. While we need millions of people to take a stand for themselves and for Life: one cannot return to Life alone. Instead, the heroes of this story are groups of people who dare to embark on a perilous journey back to Life together. Even though they have the hardest, seemingly impossible task before them, they will not let each other succumb to the Shadow or Thanatos, which means the death urge. Instead, they will pull each other up by the scruff of their necks, holding each other to their commitments to be servants of Life. Whatever comes up between them and whatever hand Life deals them, they will learn to trust that there is Light behind the apparent Shadow. Life is both the Light and the Shadow; it couldn’t be any other way.

If they make it through the labyrinth of modern culture’s conditioning, then maybe, just maybe, another being can emerge: an awake collective consciousness that can take powerful, decisive action in the world. It is the emergence of many of these Beings that has a chance to shift humanity out of our doldrums and support us to step into our place in the cosmic story once more.

I will now explore this narrative in more depth, beginning with the individual’s journey to come alive and then building up to the possibility of the whole of humanity shifting back into alignment with Life.

Time to Come Alive

How many of us in our Modern Culture are truly living?

Look around you — Not many.

Most of us spend our time numbing ourselves to Life.

We live from our psychological survival strategies which carry out the automatic, unconscious patterns and behaviours that kept us safe in our childhoods. These strategies are dead trauma tapes — they play the same way they always have —meaning nothing ever changes.

We live inside the norms, values and assumptions of our culture, leading most of us to simply follow the career, relationship and life paths laid out before us, rather than following what is real and meaningful to us in each moment.

We are stuck in these prisons but they are not really who we are.

In reality, ‘we’, are a dynamic flow of aliveness and creativity just waiting to stream into the world. We are a part of the cosmic dance of Life and Evolution, on its quest to produce more Life.

I call living from this aliveness “flowing in the river of Life”. In Possibility Management, it’s the journey to live in the liquid state, where you choose to stop relying on your default mechanical, automatic responses and instead choose to fly in the groundlessness of Being. Here, there is nothing to hold onto, so all you can do is consciously create afresh, in each and every moment.

Instead of jumping into this maelstrom of Life, most of us sit on the sidelines wishing things were different.

It is a slow but brilliant journey to return to the aliveness within us.

For me, it has felt like coming alive again — And I know that I have a long way to go.

The Transformational Groups, as discussed in part 2, would work to slowly bring its members back to their aliveness, back to their truth and back to Life. They would support each other to work through whatever was blocking them from stepping into their fullness and potential. And whenever conflict came up between them, it would just be another opportunity to take a step back to Life.

It is not just individuals that can come alive again.

Researcher Samo Burja makes the distinction between Live and Dead players. These ‘players’ could be groups, traditions, institutions, or entire nations. They are ‘Live’ if they are able to create afresh i.e. do things they haven’t done before, not being imprisoned by how they’ve responded in the past. Whereas, ‘Dead’ players can only work off the script of the past and are incapable of doing new things.

Embodying a Transformative Culture would support any of these ‘players’ to come alive again. By following their individual and collective threads of meaning and transforming any Shadow that comes up, any collective can become a ‘Live’ player once more.

Only these groups of truly alive humans have the potential to regenerate Life on Earth.

A Journey to Loving Life

This journey of returning to Life would be a quest to learn to love Life once more. It would mean moving towards seeing the beauty and love within every drop of our experience and allowing a sense of gratitude for the gift of Life to emerge.

In reality, we spend most of our time rejecting Life.

We say “No!” to most of what she offers us.

We’re doing it in pretty much every moment.

“It’s not fair — why is Life giving me all this struggle, all this shit?” we say.

We think there’s something wrong with Life. It seems random at best and violent and destructive, with no apparent purpose, at worst.

And when we look around us, Life for many seems to be wall to wall suffering. It seems to be an endless uphill battle, like Sisyphus and his boulder, where whenever someone gets up on their feet, the next thing comes along to knock them down once more.

“There can’t be a creator God” people say, “and if there was, he should be scolded for creating this hell world of pain and suffering”.

Whether or not a creator exists, what we can’t seem to accept: is that the suffering and the struggles are all a necessary part of the majestic choreography of Life.

They give Life the possibility of meaning and push us towards Evolution. By consciously moving towards the Shadow and creatively responding to it, our lives have a purpose once more. We have something to do with our days, a reason for evolving and outgrowing our limited selves.

Life becomes magical when you engage with the Shadow rather than rejecting it because miraculously she’s always providing a next step: a possibility for creating something new and beautiful afresh.

In our culture, we do quite the opposite. We are death-phobic, conflict-phobic and try to consume our way out of suffering as fast we can. It doesn’t work but its consequence is that we end up living in a meaningless universe, for meaning comes from our confrontation with Shadow.

How amazing would it be to have a team of people to support you in consciously moving towards the Shadow, so that you can ongoingly see that underneath the veils, it is Light and that this miracle reveals Life to be a bountiful, wondrous gift?

This is the quest of the Transformative Group.

Simply by working with whatever Shadow is in front of them, through time, its members would come to see the Love that is inherent in all aspects of Life even those that seem like Darkness. Meaning and purpose would flow back into their lives once more.

Through time they would learn that Life is the greatest teacher. That whenever they’re in Shadow, it is a provocation from Life to grow up and more fully embody the wholeness of existence. This leads them to have faith in Life once more. To trust that their very experience and everything that is happening to them is a gift. In childhood, we felt like we were being held by our very experience — that it was nourishing and supporting us. Our trauma disconnected us from this ever-present possibility. By moving towards the Shadow, we can reclaim it and feel held by Life again.

Together, we can say “Yes” to Life and slowly learn through our experience that all of it is Love.

What would it be like to wake up in the morning and know from the bottom of your heart and soul, that this Life is a mysterious gift that just keeps on giving?

Maybe, you would want to give back with everything you’ve got.

Maybe, you would want to create a life and a world in alignment with that truth.

This is the real revolution.

Confronting the Deep Shadow of Collapse

What is the ultimate challenge to that faith in Life?

Probably, the world and times that we live in.

A world where greed has won, where we live in a White Supremacist, Capitalist, Patriarchal Empire. And a time where our human ways of life on Earth appear to be collapsing.

This is an easy excuse to reject Life. To scream at the heavens, blaming Life for giving birth to us in such a tumultuous world and times.

Instead, for a Transformative Group it is the ultimate Shadow that must inevitably be moved towards. We can shine the Light of our consciousness into the dark places of our world and time, that we would rather not see so that they too can manifest as the love that they are.

There’s not a one size fits all way to respond to our times. Different Transformative Groups would come up with their own life-giving responses based on their histories and shared visions and values.

The bottom line is that their response would come out of a confrontation with the Shadows of our world and times rather than an avoidance and rejection of them.

Our greatest gift to the world is to be present to the Shadow: to be present to the suffering and collapse happening all around us.

Life is a Gift Economy

You might think you live in a market economy.

In reality, you can’t escape Life’s economy which is based fundamentally on gift.

In every moment, you are receiving the gift of your experience. Everything you eat contains the work and life of many beings. Everything you are and that you do is a gift to those around you and to Life.

Returning to Life helps you to realise and appreciate more and more of what you have received and are receiving. This is to see the magnitude and depth of the full gift that Life is.

The path of a Transformative Group takes you on a journey back to presence. And, it is when we are truly present that we are able to fully receive the gifts bound up in our experience and see them for the miracles that they are.

Another, often unnoticed gift that we have received, is from our ancestors. These are the generations of humans who came before us that allowed us to be here today. They did their best in some pretty lousy situations and carried forth the flame of humanity into the modern era. Many indigenous communities realise that recognising this ancestral gift can bring more meaning and purpose into our present lives and experiences. We are not here just for us. We are here to continue a whole long line of humanity who have been trying to make the world a better place. Our ancestors have given to us — what can we now give forward to the humans of the future?

Another unnoticed gift is from our cultural and spiritual heritage. We stand on the shoulders of giants. We inherit lineages and traditions that go back for aeons, that have carried forward wisdom about how to live in harmony with Life. In our modern culture with the coming of science, we have rejected the value of many of these traditions. We can reclaim the Life that is trapped within these traditions and wants to flow out into our present culture. Doesn’t that make you want to hold these lineages as sacred and work to protect them, so we can also pass them on to future generations?

Currently, we live a life filled with expectations. We expect to be warm. To be fed. To be looked after. We expect the lights to stay on.

What if these expectations block us from realising the magnificent gifts we are receiving in every moment?

How meaningful could our lives be if we learned to stay present and truly receive the Gift?

Giving Back Your Life Purpose

A gift economy depends on the natural emergence of an impulse to give back when someone realises the depth of what they have received.

A natural response to having seen and acknowledged the enormity of all that Life has given us is to feel immense gratitude, simply that we are alive.

That gratitude creates an immense desire to give back to Life.

How can we pay Life back for what we have received?

For individuals, what better way to give back, than taking up our unique place in the cosmic dance?

This means finding our Life Purpose, Archetypal Lineage or ecological niche that we discussed in Part 2.

It is the gap in creation that Life is waiting for us to step into.

It is the gift deep inside of us that wants to be given back to Life.

It is the place where we have the biggest contribution to make to both humanity and to the more-than-human world.

It ties together all of our life’s experiences, both the highs and the lows, and shows that everything was meaningful because it allowed us to become the person who could give this particular, unique gift.

Living life from this place is deeply meaningful.

Who wouldn’t want to join the party of thousands of people supporting each other to live from this place?

Together, we can make the most of the limited time we have on this Earth.

Collectives Serenading Life

Groups also have their role in giving back to Life.

Collectively, what better way to give back than to come together to create a healthy civilization that honours Life, and makes its very purpose to uphold and revive the sacredness of all things.

It is impossible to generate stable, empowered, non-hierarchical communities within modern culture. Any group that forms gets almost inevitably torn apart by differences, conflicts and the trauma of individuals that groups do not have the wisdom to hold. Modern culture’s assumptions and biases also actively work to prevent stable groups from emerging.

Embodying the Shadow Veils the Light Principle and entering a Transformative Culture, allows members of a group to come into real relationship and communion with one another once more.

Then, we can begin the real task of giving back.

Our time together can be about serenading Life and creating ceremonies that remind us of the sacredness of all things.

In everything we do, we can hold ourselves to this principle that all things matter and that everything is sacred.

Anything from washing dishes to taking out the recycling can become an ecstatic opportunity to celebrate and serve Life and act with an intention to bring more beauty, truth and sacredness into the world.

We can create communities that are themselves gifts back to Life — collectives can be art pieces that serenade the beauty of Life, giving thanks for the majesty of what we have received.

Finding Our Humanity

What about humanity as a whole?

What would it mean for our species to return to Life?

At the moment we have no idea why we are here. Or what humanity really is. Or what our role is in the grand scheme of things.

Since the dawn of the Enlightenment an argument has raged over the nature of the human being. Some like Hobbes have argued that the natural state of the human being is war, where life is ‘brutish and short’. Others like Rousseau, argued that prehistoric ‘noble savages’ lived lives of dignity and love.

In our era of extreme environmental destruction, we have now become incredibly gloomy about our humanity. Many people see humanity as a blemish on the earth. Maybe we were just one of Gaia’s evolutionary mistakes, soon to be wiped out or replaced by the next iteration.

What if instead, we don’t yet know the nature of the human being because we have not yet found our humanity?

Our human purpose here isn’t written on a stone tablet somewhere. It’s inside of us. And can be unearthed if we collectively step into our truth and start living it in the world.

Then we will discover what we are supposed to be doing here.

We will find our humanity.

Maybe our species is just an adolescent, and this cosmic transition is the step needed to find our true nature as adults.

Maybe, just maybe, the creation of humanity wasn’t an accident after all.

We all have a part to play.

Fusing with the Anima Mundi

Many spiritual traditions and ancient philosophers believed that the world is one living Being with a spiritual essence.

Some have called this the ‘Anima-Mundi’ or the ‘World Soul’.

Even greek philosopher Plato understood that “the cosmos is a single living creature which contains all living creatures within it.”

Humanity is a part of this larger Being.

If we can find our humanity, we can take our place as an organ of this Being. We can come to see that our species is part of the golden divinity and interconnectedness of all things. That we receive beauty from all things and have the opportunity to contribute so much to the larger whole.

Our lives on Earth can be filled with meaning and purpose as we sing, dance and play our way through a co-created cosmic story.

And we don’t get there by following some doctrine in the sky but instead by exploring and unravelling the threads of meaning inside and between us.

I’ve tried to flesh out in these three posts a possible future for humanity.

All we can do now is take the next step.

If this series has turned you on: I’m looking for collaborators.

Please get in touch.

Or just join my newsletter.

Many of the ideas in this series came out of my co-creative partnership with Jake Lawy, as well as from the work and models of sublimewe originally created by Sarasvathi Cee as well as my own learnings from the work of Possibility Management, The Diamond Approach and The Soulmaking Dharma. To these people and lineages, I am eternally grateful.

Weaving a Non-Dual Civilisation - Part 2: Unveiling the Light

2021-12-17T00:00:00+00:00

This is part 2 of a 3 part series, exploring the emergence of a non-dual civilisation.

In part 1, we explored the dominance of Shadow in our culture and the patterns that are leading to the devastation of life on Earth.

Today, we will investigate how groups of people could come together and step into a harmonious relationship with Life once more.

This would begin building what I call a Non-Dual Civilisation.

It’s non-dual because it’s a human community that is based upon the deepest wisdom of our spiritual, ecological and mystical traditions and brings it into all areas of life, so that humanity can be a positive force on Planet Earth once more.

It’s a civilisation because we cannot, as some claim, go backwards to a prehistoric, tribal world without technology or agriculture. To respond to the crises of our times, we need governance at a global level. The only path forwards is to properly integrate the advances of humanity into a global, democratic civilisation.

Let’s get back to Tim.

Back to Tim

Tim’s in the gym trying to get ‘#swoleforthesummer’ to feed his insatiable desire to fill the inadequacy of his present moment experience.

Out of the corner of his eye, he notices a flyer on the gym wall.

“Join our Transformative Group and find your life purpose!” it reads.

A part of Tim that has been asleep for many years wakes up and rushes to get in touch with the group.

A few weeks later Tim goes along to an introductory meeting.

Transformative Groups

The group Tim has signed up for, has been working for some time to build what I call a Transformative Culture.

This is a group dedicated to supporting its members to come into right relationship with themselves, each other and Life itself. To individually and collectively return to the flowing river of Life: a wellspring of creativity and Evolution.

To achieve this, they hold themselves to what I call The Shadow Veils the Light Principle. This means that when Shadow shows up in its many forms like suffering, judgement, addiction, pain, conflict and death, the group works to hold it up to the light of awareness, to find the gift within it, and thus transform it into the Light.

It is the Shadow unseen that blocks the flow of Life in ourselves, our relationships and the human race as a whole.

By unveiling the Light, we can become expressions of Love in the world rather than being stuck in unconscious survival patterns that only hurt ourselves and those around us.

Many traditions and modalities have different ways of describing this principle. In processwork: it’s called Riding the Horse Backwards, after a Native American wisdom-trickster who did everything differently i.e. didn’t treat the Shadow as wrong or bad. In alchemy: it’s the search for the philosopher’s stone that can convert base metals (i.e. the Shadow) into gold. For a while, I was calling it The Shimmer Domino Principle because if you imagine flicking a domino super fast, you can’t tell which side is white and which is black, just as when you move towards the Shadow you find the Light and when you move towards the Light you find the Shadow.

The same principle in permaculture is called: The Problem is the Solution Principle. In modern culture, whenever we encounter a problem we treat it as implying that there is something wrong with ourselves, the world or Life herself. We go into a rejection of what is. We scramble around for a way to get away from the problem. You could see the Shadow as simply this problem mindset passed on from person to person and generation to generation.

The alternative is to see that every problem contains its solution. It’s an opportunity for the creative potential of Life to manifest.

For example, if you saw a picture hanging crookedly across the room, you might feel a sense of unease or wrongness but if you stay with it, this feeling contains the solution: walk over there and straighten the picture.

We’ve got a lot of picture straightening to get on with, let me tell you!

Transformative Groups have developed processes, practices and ways of being together that continually support the remembering of this principle.

For example, the group might have a specialised sub-group who can take individuals and collectives through processes when their flow becomes blocked by Shadow. In Indigenous Cultures, these might have been the elders, shamans, witches and medicine people who could support people to break out of their delusions. In one modality, Possibility Management, they are called Evolutionaries. Their job is to notice someone or a group coming out of alignment, being sucked up by the Shadow without consciousness and to support them to return to harmony with themselves, the group and Life.

These principles are also mirrored in Eastern Traditions with their focus on non-duality. They argue that we are stuck in a dualistic world of right and wrong, good and bad but if we can just be with bare awareness itself, the non-duality of things will be revealed. When an individual lives from this place, their suffering ceases because they no longer reject their experience. What would a collective or all of humanity living from this realisation look like?

Well, let’s first get back to Tim, then we can slowly build up to the non-dual collective.

Tim’s Transformation

Tim arrives at his first meeting the following week and is warmly welcomed.

But of course, it doesn’t take long for Tim’s shit to begin to surface. He’s barely been in the group 5 minutes but because he’s so disconnected from himself, his compulsion to prove his superiority through Social Influence quickly comes into play.

Thankfully Sophie, one of the Evolutionaries I mentioned earlier, sees Tim’s disconnection and rather than rejecting or isolating him from the group, offers him a process to begin connecting to himself and working through his issues. She has developed so much trust that behind anyone’s Shadow behaviours there is gold, that she’s not even triggered by Tim’s posturing.

The process proves her right because behind Tim’s Shadow was his experience of not being valued or loved as a child. Tim manages to find this feeling of self-love within himself and see’s the Social Influence for what it is: a protection, a covering and not really him.

Whilst, Tim doesn’t change overnight, every time some of his Shadow comes up, he is supported to process it.

Slowly through time, he can come more and more from his True Self rather than his Shadow and this has drastic effects on his behaviour in all his aspects: Consciousness, Intellect, Heart, Body and Breath.

Whilst the model I explored in the first post was one I developed myself, the model I will now explore comes from a modality called sublimewe whose creator is Sarasvathi Cee.

Saras calls the experience of being in contact with one’s True Self Inner Connection. It is having some of your awareness on awareness itself. This connection contains a knowing that you are not the isolated Self but instead a boundless Being. Gurdjieff called this the ‘Awake’ state that could be reached through a process of Self-Remembering — not losing contact with who you really are. Many Eastern traditions have their own terminology for this. In Hinduism, it’s being connected to Purusha not [_P_rakriti](https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Prak%E1%B9%9Bti). In Buddhism, it’s Atman. In mystical Christianity, it’s Christ Consciousness. I could go on but hopefully, you get it!

In this state, Tim has the experience of enoughness or adequacy. That his experience itself provides everything he needs, he doesn’t need to look elsewhere. He doesn’t need to protect himself anymore. His priority becomes giving back in honour of the beauty he has been given. Through time he can let the layers of his Shadow fall away.

When he does this, his intellect becomes a place for Cognitive Excellence where his stories and theories about reality can be objective because they are not caught up in his ego’s need to defend itself. When reality changes, his map changes. He knows that the map is not the territory. In Buddhism, this is described as seeing the Emptiness of his stories. That whatever stories he creates are not inherently true — they are just stories. Daniel Thorson describes the state of mind when Emptiness has been seen as Liquid Mind, which captures the flowing, alive, ever-changing exploration and creation that is possible in an unblocked Intellect. When Tim is connected to himself, his stories, though not absolutely true, serve to bring more Love and Beauty into the world rather than serving his own protection and saving face.

His heart becomes a source of Heart Knowledge where his feelings contain information about what he most cares about, as well as the energy to create his fantasies in the world. Tim’s no longer trying to avoid his feelings and emotions by numbing himself, instead, he’s staying present with them to allow them to reveal their gifts. You could think of his Heart as a pattern-matching machine. It’s been storing up all of the patterns of experiences of his life and is ready to bring all this knowledge to bear in the present moment. It might reveal itself in the form of an image or a dream of what he really wants. Deep in his heart, is what Bill Plotkin calls his mythopoetic identity, this is an image, metaphor or story that makes the experiences of his life make sense and reveals the unique gift he has to offer the world based upon them.

His body becomes a place of Body Wisdom. It knows what it needs to be healthy and has an intuitive sense of how, who and what can fulfil these needs. Instead of spending his time in Addictive Patterns, he nourishes his body through conscious food, rest, touch and play. In Possibility Management, the Body is divided into a physical body and an energetic body. It’s in the energetic body where distinctions are stored. Having a distinction is the intuitive knowing of the difference between two things. We have a distinction between red and pink. The most important distinctions highlight the difference between what is Shadow and what is not. When they are integrated into a person’s energetic body they become like an inner scaffolding or matrix, that prevents a person from getting hooked when one of their Shadow parts comes up because they have the distinction to see it for what it really is. This also allows them to hold space for others as Sophie kindly demonstrated earlier. They can use their embodied wisdom to set boundaries to prevent others from bringing their Shadow shit to the group, thus holding space for the deepest and most meaningful aspects of each person to emerge.

When all these parts are working in unison together, Tim has an experience of life energy powered by his Breath moving through him and out into the world. Saras calls this his Breath Powered Speaking. When someone gives a passionate speech about what they really care about, you can sense that their voice is charged with life energy and meaning. This allows them to bring the things they most care about into the world. And to share them with others in a way that is inspired by the beauty they have seen in the thing, rather than a sense of being right or wrong or being superior which just ends up shutting the other person down. They can stand up in the collective and say: “This is important!” with sincerity and strength to boot. In Possibility Management this is often called Dragon Speaking. How much more of a difference could a group of activists have, if they went onto the streets connected to the dragon within?

Here is a diagram of the full model of an individual in a Transformative Group:

When a group of people who are supporting each other to live from a place of Inner Connection come together: a whole different set of collective possibilities emerge. It’s not that they will always have Inner Connection, quite the opposite, they’ll go through periods of being triggered with each other and thinking that something is wrong. However, if they have enough support, each of these periods can provide the exact learnings the group needs to grow and mature, so they can handle these moments better in the future. Often, we think of these conflicts as blockages in a groups movement towards their vision. Instead, they are an integral part of that movement.

Similarly to the first article, I am going to look at the different aspects of the collective and see how they manifest in their non-dual forms.

In the intellect, the group has an Ecological Intentionality. When you feel like your very experience is nourishing you, this creates the desire to give back. What else is there to do but give? This means that any strategy that the group comes up with to meet their needs, comes from a desire to be of service and to give to Life. In game theory, this is described as the ‘Omni-Win’ choice. This means that the groups’ strategies are in service not just to the individual, the group or to the other but to all of Life. If some aspect of Life is not considered in a particular plan, then someone in the group will get triggered, and through this process, a contribution will form from their Shadow that will allow what they are holding to be incorporated into the groups’ plans. At the level of Being or Life, there is no conflict. Everyone’s needs can be met and integrated.

In Tantra, there is the idea that our deepest desires are not in conflict with each other or with anyone else. If we can live from the place of those desires then we can experience all things and all life as mattering. Everything inside everyone, and every being is important. This is the Everything Matters Principle, which is another manifestation of non-duality. Our minds want to split everything up into categories of good and bad. Useful, not useful. Important, not important. What if nothing is good and nothing is bad but everything matters. And when we take this stand, a whole other reality opens before us. As Forrest Landry artfully pronounces, “Heaven opens to those who know all is sacred. Hell imprisons all who think that nothing is.”

How is the group going to get down to what really matters for themselves and others? Well in the heart, the group practices Empathic Inquiry which is a natural outcome of Inner Connection. When you are present and connected, curiosity about the mysterious Other naturally arises, as well as a longing to more fully know and be with them. Practically, it means that in their relationships they try to tease out what is most important to the other person. What do they care about so much that it makes their hearts burst open with love and their soul throb with a longing for more of that which they desire in the world? Empathic Inquiry supports each of them to live from their deepest loves and to bring that love as a contribution to each other and to the world.

Amazingly, Empathic Inquiry works with any behaviour. However, violently someone is showing up, there is always some element of truth that wants to move through them. This can be inquired into to discover something that they Love, which can then become a contribution to the group. In Nonviolent Communication, this is called the Tragic Expressions of Unmet Needs Principle. This means that whatever violence someone is displaying, underneath it is an unmet need that they have in common with all of humanity. Empathic Inquiry supports people to be in touch with that need inside of the violent strategy, so they can find healthier ways of getting it met.

We could build a whole democracy based on Empathic Inquiry using our technological skills not to influence and control but instead to aid the flow and integration of information about what people care about. Empathic Inquiry could be weaved into every aspect of our lives together. It could work to build the Listening Society advocated by the metamodernist movement. What would a world look if there was enough support for everyone to find and manifest their deepest desires?

Through time, Empathic Inquiry supports a group vision to emerge. This is an integration of each of the member’s deepest visions for their lives. What they realise over time is that having each other’s support and moving towards their visions together, makes them far more likely to become a reality. So long to modern culture’s solo, greasy pole climbing, entrepreneurs.

In the collective body, the physical creations of the group are Energised Infrastructure. Everything they build and create in the material world is alive. It could be the meals they eat in the evening and the kitchen they keep stocked to support them. It’s all energised by the energy of Life found within their deepest needs and desires and captured in their collective vision. Every action is a fresh creation in the moment. Addictive Patterns are gradually moved beyond, so that conscious choice can prevail. In a For the Wild podcast with Gopal Dayaneni, he described a shift from capital being in charge of human beings to capital being in service to humans. Our capital projects and infrastructure can be in service not just to all human beings, but to all of Life.

What also grows through time in the group is Community Consciousness. This comes in two forms. Firstly, it is an awareness of what is really going on in our collective space. Who is suffering and needs support, who is drifting out of alignment? Sophie, gave us a good example of this in her awareness of Tim’s Shadow coming into play. Another example, is our growing awareness of the ecological emergency and of the strife and oppression of different groups which show that even now, we are developing this quality. It supports us to really know what is going on in our world, not so that we can blame and judge others or go into a rejection of Life but so we can take responsibility for the deepest pains of our time, which are the places where our responses can have the most meaning and impact.

Secondly, another form of Community Consciousness is a group consciousness emerging. This is a Being that encompasses the totality of the group. In moments, members of the group have the experience that they are fulfilling a role in a greater organism. That there are moments when it is their turn to speak up as part of that Being. That when others are speaking there is a felt sense that they are speaking for the collective. That there is really no separation between. This goes even further towards a felt sense of being a part of the entire Being of humanity. Or of Gaia as a whole. Or as taking their place in the choreographed dance of Life. This is the awakening of collective consciousness captured in the phrase: “The next Buddha will be a Sangha (community/group)”.

The final aspect is the collective breath. This is how more and more Life emerges in the group. And how as the group interacts with others, they are likewise more and more brought into a harmonious relationship with Life. Saras calls this Mem-ethical Integration where the things that are necessary for Life to flourish spread from person to person. In contrast with the Shadow Flow described in my first article, you can imagine this as the flow of Life pulsing through the organism of the group and into the wider world. A meme is a unit of something a Being knows is important. We could divide this up into two types of meme: values which capture the various qualities of Life and principles which capture the structure of Life. If you split the qualities of Life through a prism, you get a panoply of different values. If you explore the Logos of Life, or its structure, you find Life principles which elucidate how to live in harmony with Life. Mem-ethical Integration is the spread of these values and principles through the collective.

Let’s get practical! Suppose someone in Tim’s group wants to chop down part of a communal forest to start one of their projects growing lovely organic vegetables because they dream of giving them to the community. Tim, who as we are about to discover has a deep connection to nature, would probably get triggered by this. Instead of this triggering leading to a group breaking conflict, it is seen by the group as an opportunity for contribution. It might take some Evolutionary processes to get there but eventually, they would come out with a plan that integrates both Tim’s nature-loving wishes and those of the organic farmer. Perhaps they create a forest garden that can produce vegetables and be a huge ecosystem for many forms of life. This is an example of how the meme of the value of the natural world spreads through the group over time.

Here is a diagram of the full model of a non-dual civilisation:

Tim’s Contribution

Back to Tim!

The Empathic Inquiry of the group works its magic on Tim and through time he gets more and more in touch with himself, what he desires and what he’s mostly deeply longing to bring into the world.

Many traditions and modalities have described this deepest offering in different ways. In the group practice called sublimewe that I’ve been working with, we call it his life purpose i.e. what he came to Earth to contribute. In Possibility Management it is called your Archetypal Lineage which stresses that it is your place within the village that you inherit from previous generations. Eco-psychologist Bill Plotkin calls it your soul, which for him is about your ecological niche, i.e. the place that you fill not just in the human village but in the more-than-human world.

The discovery of his life purpose comes about through a supported confrontation with Tim’s Shadow and especially his trauma. He realises that the very ways in which he was hurt growing up by his parents and by modern culture provide him with particular gifts and possibilities for helping others. This is another example of the Shadow veils the Light Principle, that our deepest wounds and sufferings present our greatest opportunities for contributing towards others, creating a better world and giving back to Life.

When Tim was a child, when he would express his wild, indigenous self his parents would get angry and shut him down. This created a great pain in Tim where he suppressed and subconsciously hated these parts of himself. But when he rediscovers them, his joy is so big and the opportunity for him to take others through the same journey presents itself. It is so core to his identity, what else would he want to contribute? He realises that finally, his life makes sense! His purpose is to support others in connecting with their wild selves and coming into communion with the natural world through practices of bushcraft and foraging.

Whilst he starts as part of the main Transformational Group, once he has been brought into the culture and discovered his life purpose, the next logical step is for him to go create his own more specific group and welcome others.

So he rounds up a few fellows and creates a Transformational Group focused around wild self-expression, nature connection and bushcraft. They share so much in common that they can go on exquisite discovery journeys together where they explore and research what it truly means for people to re-embody their wild, indigenous selves and how they can best facilitate this in others.

Tim find himself doing his most meaningful work, radiating an aliveness and joy that is infectious and brings other people along with him into finding their own purpose and manifesting it together in the world.

An Integrated Inner and Outer Work Path

Tim following the Path of his Life Purpose means following a unique integrated inner and outer work path. This is a core commitment of a Transformational Group which sees the non-duality and lack of separation between our inner and outer worlds.

Many spiritual traditions have focused primarily on purifying the inner world of the individual. Many activist groups, on the other hand, have focused primarily on challenging the toxic systems in the outer world that we live within.

Neither of these approaches is enough to respond to our situation, as they each have their blind-spots.

The activists ignore the importance of doing the inner work to bring their visions into the world in a responsible, compassionate way rather than from a place of blame, shame and judgement. Often, it is ego squabbles, power-games and dominant culture conditioning that comes up between activists that prevent change from happening. How can we create a new world without challenging the modern culture patterns within us?

The spiritualists, on the other hand, ignore the fact that we live in a system and culture that dictates our every move, that gave us the very trauma in the first place that they are trying to move beyond. It’s like focusing on healing a wound when the violence that caused the wound is still happening. All aspects of our culture and system make spiritual progress harder. How is somebody supposed to find the time to meditate when they are working 80 hours a week to put food on the table and keep the lights on. Is it just a middle class privilege that makes us think that the spiritual path could be the answer?

There are some groups out there who have realised the need for both. In Extinction Rebellion, for example, there was a slogan that the aim was to ‘get the meditators in the lock ons (activist tools for blocking roads) and the activists on the cushion (spiritualist tools for seeking enlightenment)’.

However, in these groups inner and outer work remain separate. Whilst, they might argue that both are important and that one should spend time doing both they are still two separate paths. The duality between the inner and the outer world remains intact.

What would it mean to truly integrate inner and outer work?

It means that they are not treated as separate domains. Inner and outer work are weaved into each other in one path to contribute to the emergence of a non-dual civilisation. Imagine a thread that each individual is following on the path. And a thread that the group is following. For some periods on each thread, the main focus needs to be inner work. And for some periods it’s outer work.

For example, say a group realised that because of their shared family illnesses caused by smog, their purpose was to raise awareness around issues of pollution and its effects through non violent direct action. Whilst an admirable aim, inevitably disagreements would quickly appear in the group about how to make the action happen. These disagreements might turn personal, factions might develop vying for ‘power’. These disagreements are a block in the thread of the group where inner work is necessary. This is where you might call in the Evolutionaries, we discussed earlier, who would be able to support the group in turning the ‘problem’ of the conflict into new creativity and life.

Through time these experiences would connect the group more and more with the non-duality of all things. That whatever Shadow, difficulty or suffering comes up in the group can be transformed into beauty and meaning.

This path would allow groups of people to ongoingly bring more and more of what they care about into the world.

Creating Networked Groups Beyond Duality

Whilst Tim is fixated on his quest to support people in returning to their wildness, many other groups form, each focused on bringing a transformative culture to a different aspects of life.

Different people’s life experiences mean that it makes sense for them to work on different things. In modern culture, we are always looking to find the one and only solution to any problem. In a Transformative Culture, every solution, like every individual is unique and the differences are not only accepted but eventually come to be embraced and welcomed.

These groups are networked together, all giving their contributions to the collective and receiving the contributions of others. This brings enormous network effects.

What has prevented networked groups like this from forming in the past?

Well, in our dominant culture, when we get in conflict with each other, each side in the conflict is usually taking one side of a duality. This split prevents us working together and leads to increasing faction-alisation.

Groups building a non-dual civilisation know that in experience itself, the duality they are arguing about does not really exist. This allows them to use it as a creative tension in and between groups.

They can let go and allow the relational field to guide them in how much emphasis to put on particular aspects. We’ve already seen one example of this in the duality between inner and outer work.

Another similar duality that is bound to arise is between bottom up organising which is more associated with the anarchist tradition and attempts to change policy and governance from the top-down which is more associated with communism.

Ghandi attempted both of these two aspects. First was his constructive program, to build at alternative structures at the bottom i.e. the systems and processes that embody the world we want to see. Second, was his obstructive program which focuses on preventing the destruction caused by our current oppressive systems.

This duality would provide a healthy tension between the varying groups in the network. The aim would be to integrate the two poles so that the constructive can support the obstructive and vice versa. I see the obstructive as clearing out and protecting the space in which the flowers of the constructive program can blossom. And the constructive as providing the solid roots for a tree that can block modern culture’s destruction. The Zapatista Movement is a good example of this integration.

Some people, because of their life experience, would naturally want to work on one end of the poles. The beauty of a Transformative Culture is that they would be supported to bring their Heart Knowledge without judgement by others who might find something else important. They’d be able to express the full life of it to the group without claiming to know best. Through time, the Mem-ethical Integration would allow everyone to see the value of each other’s contributions and to find ways for them to build on each other.

At the moment, the progressive movement is in an endless cycle of division and separation. Embodying a Transformative Culture would allow us to turn this around and begin integrating each other’s viewpoints once more, supporting us to build collective power despite our differences.

Rebuilding the Commons

Once a network of groups has formed, it can begin to rebuild the stores of value that make our lives meaningful and support the flourishing of all beings.

Let’s check back in with a few of our forms of capital from the last post.

The group would begin to rebuild Living Capital in everything they do, as well as preventing ongoing destruction. This would flow naturally out of the Ecological Intentionality of the group, since every choice they make would include the needs of nature and thus support the deepening of biodiversity across the planet. This would work towards ameliorating the Climate and Ecological Crisis. I imagine local and global projects to re-wild large areas of the planet and to shift our food production into a harmonious relationship with eco-systems.

Human Beings are, of course, also part of Living Capital and the Path that I have laid out would support each person to move towards an inner wholeness that allows them to be a unique expression of their value. Everyone would become a never-ending wellspring of value that flows from them and out into the world. You could see each person like a river. In modern culture the flow of their river (or their life energy) is trapped and diverted into many spill-off channels that simply flow value into the Capitalist Empire. People are out of touch with their well, their source of value, this is what they really care about. As described earlier, Transformative Cultures, would through Empathic Inquiry, support everyone to be more and more in touch with themselves, their uniqueness and what they have to offer. This is the rewilding of the human being. Each person taking up their unique place as the weird and wonderful creatures that they are.

A burgeoning non-dual civilisation would also rebuild Cultural Capital. Rather than a culture that marginalises the many to support the few, their culture would be an expression of the beauty and meaning of the gift of Life that we have received. Situated within such a culture, Life would begin to make more and more sense, bringing an end to the Meaning Crisis that engulfs our world. This could all be achieved without dismissing any of the findings of modern science which could be integrated into our narratives to create stories that weave us back into Life.

In our present culture, division is rife. We see it in the culture wars. We see it in the varying groups whose ideologies force them to live in completely separate realities. The splits between us are deepening and deepening and we are finding it harder and harder to see eye to eye with one another. Through Empathic Inquiry and Mem-ethical Integration, Transformative Groups would slowly work to heal these splits in human-kind. As Jung hypothesised, individual wholeness comes through a process of both integration and differentiation. For groups, at the moment there is only differentiation. A non-dual civilisation would allow a diversity to flourish without compromising our ability to be with each other and see beyond our differences.

Together, we create our reality. A thriving culture would in all of its manifestations of art, music and story be a reminder of the wisdom of how to live in harmony with Life. It would be a medium for the Mem-Ethical Integration of the values and principles of Life. It also wouldn’t forget about any of our cultural heritage. Both our indigenous roots and our religious traditions could be understood through a wider narrative that respected lineages whilst not being bound by them.

A non-dual civilisation would also work to replenish Social Capital through time, thus healing our crisis of alienation and disconnection. Working through the conflicts and differences between us and returning to a sense of love for the other, builds immensely strong relationships where each person can give deeply without the worry of being exploited. Individuals who have developed the wisdom to know what is Shadow and what is not, can intervene in each other’s lives without upset. They can say directly to each other what they are seeing without fear that this will destroy the relationship. We can begin to open our hearts to one another once again. We can begin to be with each other without needing to hide or run away when the going gets tough. People could begin to live in community once more, reaping all the benefits of belonging, shared costs and the blessings of one another’s gifts.

Whilst our present Material Capital is largely extractive and exploitative. A non-dual civilisation, with its Ecological Intentionality, would begin to use our tool-making, technological know-how in service of Life. For example, there might be those who would discover that their purpose is to create an internet that facilitates the spread of life-giving integration, to replace our current attention-grabbing, life-sucking network. More and more of the world could be taken into common ownership. This might begin with people buying land or houses together and holding them in co-operative. But could eventually result in the whole world becoming cooperatively owned.

Weaving the World Together Again

A non-dual civilisation will not be wished into existence or born overnight — it must be weaved. The only place where we can begin this weaving is exactly where we each are today. We have a possibility to take up the tangled knot of our present world that we have inherited, work to pick apart a thread of something we deeply care about and begin to weave it together with others.

We can entangle ourselves once more in relationship with each other, with the trees and the birds and with all of Life. And before you know it, a magnificent tapestry will appear before your eyes. This is the slow, methodical, birthing of the potential for Love and Light within the human species.

And you can play your part.

Here’s part 3 where I explore my narrative for this transition that I call returning to Life.

Many of the ideas in this series came out of my co-creative partnership with Jake Lawy, as well as from the work and models of sublimewe originally created by Sarasvathi Cee as well as my own learnings from the work of Possibility Management, The Diamond Approach and The Soulmaking Dharma. To these people and lineages, I am eternally grateful.

Weaving a Non-Dual Civilisation - Part 1: Chasing Shadows

2021-12-16T00:00:00+00:00

We live in uncertain times. The very survival of humanity hangs by a thread.

In this series, I will explore the question: What is it going to take to shift humanity away from the precipice?

I will give my account of the biggest and most important transition in human history.

In Part 1: Chasing Shadows, I will explore the situation we find ourselves in and present a model that attempts to answer the question of why our civilisation seems committed to destroying all life on Earth.

In Part 2: Unveiling the Light, I will explore what a transition to what I call a life-harmonious, non-dual civilisation could look like.

In Part 3: Returning to Life, I will share my narrative of humanity returning to life, that I think nicely captures this evolutionary metamorphosis.

How should we think about and respond to the potential collapse of our civilisation?

This is the ultimate question of our time.

But of course, in answering it, we can’t help but try to use the same old master’s tools, the same old approach, that got us into this mess in the first place.

In our modern culture, when there’s something we don’t like, we quickly brandish it a problem, try to pin it down and fix what’s causing it before more things go wrong.

This is how many people have ended up trying to respond to the ultimate clusterfuck of our time: that we are killing life all around us and most probably we’re going down with it.

They try to pin down the root cause of our problems to a particular area of life. Some say the problem lies in our lack of real democracy or in the dominance of corporate greed or our polluting technology. Others, level the blame at our metaphysical, cultural and philosophical ‘stories’ or beliefs. Others still, point the finger at our lack of spiritual development. I could go on, almost, ad infinitum.

Everyone has their pet issue to point a finger at as the ‘real’ problem, while they smile and congratulate themselves on being the only ones ‘advanced enough’ to realise it.

What I myself have realised! is that the problem of our civilisation, or what some have called the ‘meta-crisis’, cannot be pinned down to one aspect of our lives. Instead, it can be seen everywhere we look, within ourselves, in our outward behaviours, in everyone around us and their behaviours, as well as in all of the institutions, systems and culture that make up our society.

In fact, the very attempt to pin it down is one of its many manifestations.

In an attempt to have a more holistic view of what’s going on, we could take a complex systems approach that would allow us to look at the whole of our civilisation and how its parts interact to create the predicament we are in.

But even that isn’t enough!

Why? Because the meta-crisis isn’t purely to be found in the objective world that complex systems science explores. We also need to incorporate the inner subjective world into our model.

That is what I will attempt in this article.

Enter the Shadow

What will tie everything together, is what I call The Shadow. It has been described before in many names including Wetiko and The Underworld.

The psychologist Jung talked about the shadow, but I mean something slightly different. Whilst for him, the shadow was a psychological aspect of the personality, for me, The Shadow is visible in all areas and aspects of Life.

It is a particular energy, that if one becomes sensitive enough, can be detected in anything from a corporation’s audacious advert to a sly seductive glance across the dance floor.

The Shadow is any aspect of the complex living system of our civilisation that denies and rejects Life. This is when it has a purpose based on ego survival rather than on service — a purpose based on the impossible task of controlling Life in order to avoid death. Fortunately/Unfortunately death is a part of life, so ironically what is created is a living death.

You’re probably sitting there thinking: “That’s not me doing all that Shadow shit. It’s THEM!”. Unfortunately, that very act of blaming others shows your indictment, my friend. If you look closely at yourself, you’ll probably realise as I have done, that you’re life is largely dominated by Shadow. It’s quite a shock when you’ve spent most of your time thinking of yourself as a good, friendly, nice boy or girl!

I will now present a story of my imaginary friend Tim, as well as a model that shows how The Shadow manifests in its many forms throughout our civilisation.

But before we begin: don’t lose hope. Not all is Shadow. Within us all, there are parts committed to Love. And out there, there are groups and organisations trying to make the world a better place. They’re just not doing so well right now.

What this series is about, is how the Shadow gets in the way of those parts in us and those groups out there that are actually trying to change things. It’s about how we can empower the Light that does exist in the world, by bringing the Shadow into awareness, to put it in check before it’s innumerable forms destroy Life on Earth.

Whilst I will start by exploring the Shadow from the perspective of an individual called Tim, don’t let that fool you into thinking that I’ve fallen for modern culture’s hyper focus on the individual. I have to start somewhere — remember everything matters!

As you might have noticed, I will capitalise various words in these articles such as Shadow and Life. I do this to highlight that I’m relating to them in their Archetypal rather than literal form.

Enough talk. Let’s get started.

Let’s Meet Tim

Hi Tim!

Tim was traumatised by Western Civilization. Maybe his dad was an alcoholic and abused him. Or maybe he was bullied at school. Or maybe he was just caught up in the myriad ways, small and large, that trauma gets passed on from generation to generation. Some have even called our era ‘the traumacene’, making clear the link between trauma and our environmental catastrophe.

Because of his trauma, Tim’s experience of life is one of a sense of lack and inadequacy. When he is actually present, which is almost never, he feels uncomfortable and a deep sense of emptiness and separation pervades his Being. This is his hole of value: his very experience doesn’t feel valuable, it feels unpleasant. This is why he makes sure to escape his experience as much as possible — finding many ways to numb himself to his reality.

I’m now going to present a model to describe how Tim’s Shadow flows out of his hole of value and later how the same patterns show up in our civilisation as a whole. I will look at what’s going on in 5 aspects of Tim: his consciousness, his breath or life energy, his intellect, his heart and last but not least, his body. You could see each of the bolded descriptions as the process or the flow through that particular aspect. These patterns are not separate, they are all deeply interrelated and support one another. The amazing thing is that you can begin to spot them all around you in yourself and in others and start to get an eye for what is Shadow and what is not.

What’s going on in his consciousness? Well, as described, he’s continually escaping his experience. His awareness is continually on things other than the present moment. Gurdjieff, the Russian spiritual teacher, called this being ‘asleep’. You could also describe it as unconsciousness. I call it Inner Sleeping. Tim might think he’s alive, but he’s not really living. He doesn’t have his awareness in the present moment because it’s too painful to experience. This is the way of life of the average human in modern civilization, numbing themselves out of existence. Take a look at someone on the tube, most of them are not really here. They’re lost in their phones, the Metro or thoughts about the fancy restaurant they’re going to go to with their boyfriend later. But I can’t talk: I’m not really here a lot of the time. No wonder, most of us don’t notice the horrors being committed before our eyes.

From the perspective of Tim’s life energy which is powered by Breath, he is a Blocked Flow. His muscles are tense and none of who he really is can move through him and out into the world. He never experiences the joy of creating in a flow state, when the separation between him and reality might start to fade away.

Instead, Tim has many strategies, built up over a lifetime, for numbing himself and avoiding his reality with its hole of value. They are all examples of his Shadow manifesting in the world. They are all ways in which he does unconscious damage to himself and those around him and avoids taking responsibility for his life.

In his body, Tim plays out what I call Addictive Patterns. These patterns range from the obvious such as addictions to drugs, alcohol, social media, porn and sugar. To the far more subtle, like the ways that he exchanges sexual energy, keeps himself small, enmeshes himself with his partner or avoids eye contact with others. All of them help him avoid the pain of his experience.

In his heart, Tim hides himself through what I call Heart Reactivity. If he were to feel his real feelings and emotions they would be screaming out about the pain of his disconnection from himself and his reality. Instead, he lives a closed-off life, building walls around his heart to keep the pain out. In practice, these walls are his defences of reactivity, blame and judgement. When someone questions his value or superiority, he responds by lashing out with rage. This makes sure that he never gets in touch with the nerve that was touched — his real vulnerability and pain — his hole of value.

In his intellect, Tim engages in Cognitive Defending. He hides behind solidified belief structures, stories and fantasy worlds that keep him from coming into contact with the mystery: a terrifying place (for Tim) of not knowing. Whenever he meets someone, he projects onto them like crazy, coming up with all sorts of stories about who they are, that are really just stories about him. These stories act as walls that defend him from the terrifying possibility of real intimacy with others and with Life.

Here is a diagram of the full model of an individual in the Traumacene:

Tim Heads out Into the World

Now, what happens when Tim heads out into the world?

What he does is try to fill his hole of value with things from the outside. Things he naively thinks are separate from him.

His unconscious aim becomes to take from others and from Life herself. I call this his Extractive Intentionality. He probably thinks of himself as a nice guy, but what he really cares about is getting his hands on status, money and an attractive partner he can brag about to his friends. These would temporarily make him feel good and give him some respite from his continuous emptiness. This is the ‘instrumental rationality’ that philosopher Habermas argued was at the heart of Western Civilisation. It’s a rationality that is always in service of gain — Tim can’t stop plotting ways to get ahead.

How does he achieve this? Well, he uses Social Influence to persuade his boss to give him a bigger paycheck and to convince women that he’s attractive and popular enough to think about having sex with. He puts on a show to make people think he’s high status. He buys fancy clothes and a nice car. These are all part of his Shadow facade. He even tries to convince everyone he meets that a low tax, low intervention government is the way forward because he’s scared his wealth, that keeps him feeling safe at night, might be taken away.

All of his physical possessions, his house, his car and even his job are based on filling his hole of value in one way or another. Unfortunately, the only way he can have these things is by fucking over other people and the planet. This is what I call the Violent Infrastructure that sustains his life. All of it results in what game theory calls zero-sum outcomes. i.e. Tim might get what he wants but only at the expense of someone else. Here are some examples. Buying his house pushes poorer locals out of town, contributing to gentrification. Buying his new car resulted in the digging up of countless raw materials and destruction of habitats, as well as the slave wage employment of countless people in the Global South. In his job at a hedge fund, he contributes to growing wealth inequality and plays his part in the hierarchies of the corporate world.

Each of these ways of interacting has knock-on effects on others. When people come into contact with Tim, his big wallet and the Violent Infrastructure that he supports: they end up getting traumatised themselves. Because Tim doesn’t feel valuable himself, he makes others think that they are not valuable. Tim’s friends might actually start to believe that he’s better than them; that they’re no good. The workers who feed Tim’s voracious consumption struggle to make ends meet and end up bringing up traumatised children as a result. The really tragic thing is that these people will then go on to traumatise others and perpetuate the very same patterns as Tim. I call this domino effect the Shadow Flow.

The result of Tim’s preoccupation with himself and his attempt to fill his hole of value is that he has no time, energy or attention left to focus on the problems around him. He lives in what I call an Outer Ignorance of the crises besetting our times. He’s not even present most of the time, so he has no chance of noticing what’s going on around him — noticing that our world is dying. This is the glaze of ‘not my problem’ that sustains our collective fantasy that everything is going fine. This is the inner mindset of ‘Business as Usual’.

Before we continue on our journey to look at how a whole collective of Tim’s perpetuates the same patterns, I want to set a few things straight.

While, you might think from reading this, that I think it’s all Tim and people like him’s fault. Quite the opposite. The real tragedy is that Tim only acts this way because he was traumatised by civilisation in the first place. There is something beautiful within Tim that wants to come into the world. It’s just pushed far down within him. While on the surface, he might have the appearance of success, in reality his life is one terrible, painful ride of disconnection. Pity him, don’t hate him.

You might also think that I’m saying that the ‘real’ problem is in the individual’s hole of value. Not at all. The problem and the solution is everywhere. It all matters. Whilst, Eastern Meditative paths have helped millions resolve their inner ignorance, we now need a response to our time that includes both inner and outer, both spiritual and political, both individual and collective. We must work at all levels simultaneously.

Onwards fellow humans!

A Civilization of Tim’s

What does a whole civilisation of Tim’s look like?

Take a look around you!

We see the same patterns mirrored at the civilisation level.

The Extractive Intentionality of our entire civilisation creates what I call a ‘value hoover’. This means that collectively, without really being conscious of it, the purpose of our entire civilisation’s activity is to suck as much value as possible from our surroundings, to temporarily fill the holes of value of as many people as possible. The dominant narratives of our time — stories of progress, growth and innovation that we have become entranced by— simply justify the whole farce. ‘Profit’ is the fundamental aim of pretty much every company throughout the globe. What ‘Profit’ means, is extraction — it means sucking value from somewhere or someone and selling it to make more money. This is the role of Capital that Marx banged on about — it just can’t stop sucking.

What facilitates the dominance of Capital is Social Influence. These are the institutions and communication and decision making structures of our civilisation whose primary purpose is spreading the propaganda necessary to keep the machine running. Look at the corporate world, where we are persuaded to buy something literally every 30 seconds. We are advertised at from the minute we wake up, to the minute we fall asleep. Often we don’t even notice. Then look at our politics. It’s all about persuasion, lobbying and competition. It’s certainly not about finding out what people want. It’s about manipulating them into serving the value hoover. Then look at our education system. It’s about making children turn out a particular way so they can take their place in the corporate machine. It’s about making them believe the ‘history written by the victors’ that, for example, claims the British Empire was a wonderful thing. What about our justice system? It’s the same. Let’s not support people in living healthy lives, no that’s a terrible idea! Instead, let’s punish them when they step out of line, to influence them to get back into their place. Let’s make sure to make protest as difficult as possible because we don’t want anyone challenging the power of the value hoover. Hopefully you get the picture. More examples abound, all around you. What you can’t find anywhere is someone listening. No, they just keep on talking. They keep on selling you on their latest gizmo, their new politics. All bullshit.

Now let’s look at the Violent Infrastructure of our civilisation. It’s crazy making. You could pretty much pick any industry or any area of human life and what you would find are hierarchical organisations damaging people and destroying the planet. Schools traumatise us into being adaptive, force us to ignore our bodies and make sure that we spend a life following orders of ‘superiors’. The police and armed forces end up killing and traumatising countless millions. The way we produce food for ourselves ends up destroying wildlife and causing cancer. You could go on and on. A less visible aspect of our civilisation’s Violent Infrastructure are the structures of oppression that convince whole segments of society that some people are superior to others, based on random genetic quirks like their skin colour. These oppressive systems, whilst traumatising millions, have the purpose of keeping us separate, preventing us from seeing our common humanity and the needs which we might come together, in opposition to the value hoover, to satisfy. It’s another cog of the machine.

We live in an Empire of Western Neo-colonialism that’s spread across the world, pillaging as it goes. This is the Shadow Flow of our entire civilisation. The work of Helena Norberg Hodge in Ladakh in India, shows how companies infiltrate local cultures, persuading young people to begin taking on Western values thus becoming potentially profitable consumers for Western corporations. Our Empire is a globalised trauma factory.

And what’s worse is that our civilisation is totally committed to Business as Usual. It can’t even see that any of this stuff is going on. This is the collective Outer Ignorance to the catastrophe’s evolving all around us.

Here is a diagram of the full model of our civilisation:

We can use the 8 forms of capital model, which comes from permaculture, to show how these patterns lead to the many crises of our time.

Each form of capital is a store of value that the Value Hoover can’t wait to get it’s claws on. It has the ultimate aim of converting whatever value it can find into Financial Capital, just so a few people can sleep better at night, tragically avoiding their holes of value.

Living Capital is the natural world that our civilisation depends upon. But because of its very lust for extraction, our civilisation chops off the very branch that it’s sitting on. This is the chopping down of trees to make wood. The turning of meadows into supermarkets. The digging up of rare metals and the world’s carbon deposits. The ultimate aim is to suck the Life out of the natural world. But the end result is the Environmental Crisis of the climate and ecological emergency, that we see all around us.

Another form of Living Capital that ends up being exploited by our civilisation are human beings themselves. How ironic! The machine does everything it can to extract as much value as possible from the human. It puts us to work doing bullshit jobs, oppresses marginalised identities, sucks out our creativity for its own ends. Even our attention is now a resource to be monetised in the growing attention economy. It’s no surprise when humans have been sucked dry, that we see a Mental Health Crisis of staggering proportions.

What about Cultural Capital? This is the songs, stories, rituals and narratives of a community. Often this capital imbues a culture with the wisdom to make healthy decisions. And as we will see in the next post, it’s a healthy culture that helps keeps the Shadow in check. As seen in the example of Ladakh earlier, the value hoover can’t keep its hands-off these Life affirming cultures. Instead, culture becomes an arena for Social Influence where the goal is profit. Thus losing its connection to Life. Habermas described a common culture as creating a Life World that allows reality to make sense for it’s participants. He says that not only did our civilisation colonise the outer world, it also colonised our collective Life World. This is the Shadow Flow at work. It is the Life World that puts our experiences of life into perspective and gives them meaning. Without life-affirming stories to base our decisions and lives around we wander aimlessly. People start to believe that there is no meaning to life and the result is that we live in a cultural Meaning Crisis.

What about Social Capital? This is made up of all the relationships and connections in society. And of course, the value hoover can’t keep its hands off all the juicy value here either. It’s far more profitable to have people paying for things than sharing them with one another, so those relationships have to go. They are destroyed in our isolated one-family households and in our beliefs that stop us from reaching out and asking for help. The Violent Infrastructure of our oppressive systems also breaks down our relationships with one another until we find ourselves isolated in an ethnic, political or identity group, hating the ‘Others’. This leads to the Alienation Crisis which intersects with the Mental Health Crisis discussed earlier.

I haven’t covered all the forms of capital today. There’s also Spiritual, Intellectual, Experiential and Material Capital. You guessed it, the same thing applies wherever you look… the value hoover can’t keep its hands off.

Where we’re headed

If we continue on this path, and The Shadow advances unseen, we are moving towards the complete extraction of all value from Life. What our world would look like if we head down that path cannot be known. But, I imagine a world where technology reigns supreme. Where the forest has become a concrete jungle. And the human has become a robotic instrument of Financial Capital.

We didn’t believe that all Life was inherently valuable. So we lost it all.

In the next post, we will explore an alternative path.

In Indigenous Cultures, The Shadow would be kept in check. In Of Water and the Spirit, Malidoma Some from the Dagara tribe in Burkina Faso, describes how sometimes elements of the village would ‘go private’ by breaking the laws of nature that sustained community life and instead embracing their own Shadow worlds. It was the elders and shamans jobs to “be constantly on the alert to direct and correct these imbalances and illnesses in both communal and individual life”.

Our task now is to rebuild a new form of Indigenous Culture that can keep The Shadow in check, even in our modern world where The Shadow has vast new possibilities for ‘going private’ by exploiting the technological and scientific advances of our age. Instead, these advances could be used to serve humanity and all of Life.

Thankfully, as we will explore in Part 2: the Light has already won.

Shaping Transformative Cultures

2020-11-25T00:00:00+00:00

(Click here for an epic reading soundtrack.)

I am on a quest to discover group cultures that could allow humans to live in harmony with life.

In the past few months, I have developed an idea called Transformative Cultures that I want to share today.

Sharing it excites me so much because I have growing confidence that this is the work that I was put on planet earth to undertake.

But first, what are cultures and why are they important?

We like to think of ourselves as free agents, making rational choices about how we want to live.

But actually, many of our behaviours and the things we think are important are simply inherited from the norms and patterns of our time: that we call culture.

I call our particular culture the culture of control. It’s primarily motivated by a fear of change and works to prevent it by limiting many of the instincts that make us alive and human.

For example, it works to prevent us moving beyond our outdated economic model of organising society by encouraging us to spend our lives in bullshit jobs and on Netflix and social media rather than pursuing our dreams and actively working towards the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible.

When we do come together in social movements to try and change things, we bring with us many of the culture of control’s assumptions and behaviours. This leads us to recreate its toxic patterns within our movements.

To overcome this, we talk lots about being ‘prefigurative’, which means to try and embody the world that we want to see within our movements. For example, we try to make decisions collaboratively because we no longer want to live in top-down hierarchies. However, these attempts barely scratch the surface of what is required.

In order to really change things, we must come together and discover extraordinary new ways of being with ourselves, each other, the natural world and reality itself. This is the creation of new cultures.

Then when we come out onto the streets or into contact with the destructive systems of our world, we will genuinely represent something new and have a real proposal for how humans can live together and with nature in love and harmony.

Today I will share some ideas I’ve had about what these cultures could look like. I don’t claim to have the full picture by any means, but this is where I’ve got to with my thinking.

Let’s get cracking!

What are Transformative Cultures?

Transformative Cultures support humans in returning to the flowing river of life.

What does this mean?

When you look at the long history of life from the big bang onwards, a pattern becomes evident. Life tends to move towards more complexity, collaboration and consciousness. Simple atoms like hydrogen assemble into more complex structures. Cells in the human body come together to make organs, which together create the entire conscious being. The work of scientist Stuart Kauffman highlights this trend. It doesn’t seem too far fetched to say that the purpose of life is evolution; both of matter and consciousness.

Life achieves this through a continual process of dissolution and reformation; integration and individuation; things constantly falling apart and the pieces brought together in new ways. You might call it experimentation! Each discipline has its own terminology for this process. In biology: it’s evolution. In complexity science: it’s emergence. But I call it the process of transformation. Being in the flowing river of life is what it is like to live in alignment with this process.

Natural ecosystems, in tune with this process, have an enormous ability to be adaptive to environmental changes. For example, the peppered moth evolved particularly to survive well during the coal filled pollution of the industrial revolution.

We as humans can also have experiences of being in the flowing river of life. For example, you might have a difficult conversation with someone and speak in alignment with yourself and experience the words moving through you. Or similarly, you might have the experience of a creative project seeming to come from somewhere beyond. I also notice it when group spaces are magically alive or filled with love happening all around.

Unfortunately, our culture of control’s primary aim is to avoid this transformational process inherent to life. Most of us have distanced ourselves and left the river. This is why I have previously described our society as in opposition to life itself.

Another metaphor to describe this process, coming from Possibility Management, is learning to fly. Most people in our society have been conditioned into highly ordered and patterned ways of being and acting in the world. They get stuck in a rut, part of them is afraid of anything different. At some point a life event or a transformational experience might disrupt their rigidity and cause them to ‘take off’, welcoming new identities and behaviours. Unfortunately, after some time they might become attached to their new ways of being in the world, causing them to re-solidify and return to the ground. Learning to fly is the process of learning how to get into the air through casting away your old ways of being without becoming attached to the new ones that emerge. This is the process of getting yourself or a group into the flowing river of life. The diagram above shows one experience I had that followed this pattern.

These metaphors also apply to our social and cultural movements that attempt to change things. When a new movement or subculture comes along like the psychedelic sixties or Extinction Rebellion, it brings a new wave of energy, behaviours and identity to a group of people. But after some time that group becomes attached to the trappings or ways of being of that particular movement. It becomes too scary to try anything new because people’s egos are attached to whatever achievements and status they have already achieved.

A movement in the flowing river of life would be able to let go of the things that were not serving it and make bold new experiments, even if there was a high possibility they would fail. They would not get attached to whatever achievements and status they had already reached. This movement might have a chance at ending the untold suffering of our oppressive systems and destruction of the natural world. It is what we need in order to stand a chance at surviving in the turmoil of a climate and ecological emergency.

To create that movement we need to begin exploring transformative cultures and learn how to embody them in our groups.

We leave the flow of life by building walls between ourselves and the things out there in the world that might change us. We disconnect ourselves from the world around us to avoid the fear of change. This is how we leave the flowing river of life: we build dams! To begin to create a transformative culture, we must tear down these walls!

In this article, I will talk about three relationships where we have built walls and become disconnected: between us and our deepest selves, between us and each other, and between us and the natural world.

Each represents a source of untapped potential for transformation that could support us in returning to the flowing river of life.

In each area, I will discuss how our culture of control cuts us off from the possibility of transformation, as well as how we could create transformative cultures that would encourage and support reconnection in these areas.

While our culture of control is a monolith, with the ideals of neoliberal capitalism spreading around the world like a cancer, there would be many Transformative Cultures. Life thrives in diversity. Each group would come together to experiment with different ways of reconnecting with life. Some of their learnings might only be relevant to a particular environmental context; others would quickly spread across the globe. This is why this article is about Transformative Cultures plural.

Let’s reconnect!

Reconnecting with Ourselves

Deep within us, there are immense vaults of wisdom for living in alignment with life.

We can access them if we delve into ourselves and explore who we are and what we really want.

Our culture of control prevents people from really coming into contact with themselves. It says that you don’t need to explore who you are, just follow a well-trodden path like becoming a doctor or a lawyer, and you will be rich and happy. Even if you do try to explore who you are, you will face the barriers of our culture at every turn. How will you get enough money to survive and have the time to journey into yourself?

How would a transformative culture reconnect us with ourselves?

Firstly, it would support us to reconnect with our feelings, which are vital sources of energy and information for navigating in the flowing river of life. They give us wisdom about what is most important to us right now. For example, your anger might be telling you about something that you want to change in your life. Your sadness might support you in connecting with someone or realising something that you have lost.

This focus on feelings, does not mean abandoning the intellect as a tool for navigating life. Instead, Transformative Cultures would support us to do the work of intertwining our intellectual and emotional systems, to give us a guidance system to deal with the complexity of modern life. We cannot move beyond our present cultural moment of post-modern, post-truth without the emergence of these more holistic ways of knowing. We need new, more integrated forms of rationality and re-integrating our feelings is an important part of that.

Our culture of control treats feelings as bad and gives us very little support in using them to transform our lives. For example, men are taught that expressing their sadness makes them weak and childish. Women are taught that expressing their anger makes them hysterical. Most importantly, both are considered unattractive to the opposite sex. It is not an accident that we live in a society of numb people; it makes it easy to control us and keep us in line.

Could we go to work each day in our mind-numbing jobs if we had access to the aliveness of our feelings? If we had access to our sadness and anger about what is happening in the world around us, I think the collective energy would be too much to contain and things would have to change.

Healing the emotional wounds of many generations living in a patriarchal, oppressive civilization would be a priority for a Transformative Culture. Those traumas are what prevent us from being open and honest with each other and from authentically bringing our gifts into the world: thus being in the flowing river of life. Whilst, healers would take on the kind of societal importance given to engineers and financiers in our culture of control, we would all need to learn the basic skills of supporting one another emotionally. Re-evaluation Counselling is a good place to start.

Secondly, it would support us to reconnect with our sexuality and desire. In our desire, is what is important to us. This is what makes us alive. Our desire or ‘eros’ is constantly changing and cannot be put within a box. If we are following our desires, we will be following the ebbing, flowing river of life.

In our culture of control, we repress our desires and are afraid of our sexuality. It is instilled in us that pleasure and desire can only lead to hedonism. Why? Because the liberation of desire is a powerful force!

This emancipation of desire does not mean consuming all the chocolate cakes, cigarettes and pornography you crave, unreservedly. It means exploring our desire for those things and asking ourselves whether there are deeper desires, potentially for connection, that we are using these addictions to fill. In her book Pleasure Activism, Adrienne Maree Brown explores these topics in far more depth than I can today.

“I believe our imaginations — particularly the parts of our imaginations that hold what we most desire, what brings us pleasure, what makes us scream ‘yes’ — are where we must seed the future, turn toward justice and liberation, and reprogram ourselves to desire sexually and erotically empowered lives.” — Adrienne Maree Brown

Transformative Cultures would create safe environments for the exploration of sexuality and desire. An example of such experiments is at the Global Love School in the Tamera ecovillage in Portugal which focuses on ‘freeing love from fear’.

Our sexual energy or ‘eros’ is not only useful in the bedroom. Practices such as Rob Burbea’s Soulmaking Dharma show that our erotic energy can guide us towards what is deeply meaningful to us in life. Those things that ignite our passion so much that we can’t help diving in to explore more.

Thirdly, once we have access to our feelings and desires, it would support us to explore our soul purpose. While talk about ‘souls’ might seem woo-woo because of its religious connection to immaterial substances, my conception of soul comes from James Hillman who was heavily influenced by Jung. He saw soul as “a perspective rather than a substance, a viewpoint towards things”.

For me, it is the view that there are particular gifts that want to move through you and out into the world. As each animal has its place in the ecosystem of life, so does each person have their place within the human village.

“Your soul is your true nature. Your soul can also be thought of as our true place in nature… At the level of soul, you have a specific way of belonging to the biosphere, as unique as any maple, moose or mountain.” — Bill Plotkin

There are connections between our soul gifts and our desires and feelings. Our gifts are what we most deeply desire to bring into the world. Often this desire comes with a powerful anger or grief about something that needs to change in the world. Following these desires gives us a pathway to constant transformation in the flowing river of life.

Learning how to reconnect with our soul purpose is a process of developing an energetic awareness towards particular areas of experience. In Douglas Tataryn’s model of the human psyche, this is called “Looking Around”. For example, as a musician, you become aware of the energetic feel of particular notes and harmonies. As a modern-day shaman, you might become aware of the energetic group field that exists in human spaces.

Transformative Cultures could support us in discovering our soul gifts in many ways. Primarily, by creating safe spaces and communities where people can experiment with giving their gifts and getting feedback to grow and improve. They could also support us in overcoming our barriers to creativity. For example, in school, we get it into our heads that we are ‘good’ or ‘bad’ artists. That some of us are ‘musicians’ and others shouldn’t step anywhere near a guitar or open their mouth to sing. Coaching combined with processing the emotional wounds of school, can help us get through these barriers. A Transformative Culture would welcome all forms of creativity and play.

Lastly, through creating rites of passage, adulthood initiations and rituals that would allow us to give our gifts authentically and feel comfortable flowing down the river of life. Many indigenous cultures welcome their young people into adulthood through rite of passage initiations. This is a ritualised process of taking back your authority from those who you have given it to in your childhood (teachers and parents) and using it to take responsibility for your life.

I am beginning to get a feel of what it is like to be in the presence of an adult. The crazy thing has been realising how few and far between they are. We live in a world of children running governments, banks and corporations. Look at Boris Johnson for one! I’ve realised that the majority of people in our culture die as children. Or at least they only wake up to their place in life on their deathbed.

Why? Because our culture of control does not want us to step into our full power and authority as adults. Again, that would be too much for it to control. A Transformative Culture would create empowered people who would rock the boat on a daily basis. If the boat does not rock, then we fall back into stagnancy and decline.

One of the key things that stops us from flowing in the river of life is our fear of nothingness, our fear of death. If we are in the river of life, deaths are happening constantly. The death of identities, the death of behaviours, the death of things that made us feel secure. An important part of rites of passage is giving young people the experience of facing death, so they can realise that their fear is out of place. An example are the vision quests of Native American Cultures.

Similarly, Shadow Work is another important part of the transition into adulthood that Transformative Cultures would encourage. This is a term from Jungian psychotherapy that points to the “dark sides” of our personality that we ignore and often deny in ourselves. For us to be whole adult beings we must integrate this disowned part of ourselves. Only when someone knows the possibility for darkness within them can they truly be compassionate when facing such behaviour in others. Journeying into the shadow is also an important part of discovering our gifts.

This captured by Leonard Cohen’s line:

“There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in”

Similarly Jung writes in [Psychology and Alchemy](https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0691018316/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=ceosage08-20&camp=1789&creative=9325&linkCode=as2&creativeASIN=0691018316&linkId=0ab406f3a50d78cde6a2e6351f5116a6):

“There is no light without shadow and no psychic wholeness without imperfection.”

A culture of people who have connected to their emotions, liberated their sexuality, taken back their authority, journeyed into their shadow and are working on authentically giving their gifts for a better world would be an unstoppable force that even the culture of control could not contain.

Reconnecting with Each Other

One of the biggest potential sources of transformation in our lives comes from our relationship with one another. Each human being is different and coming into direct contact with that difference can provoke us to grow and change — to enter the flowing river of life. Often other people can see what is going on in our lives far more clearly than we can. They have gifts to offer us. Are we willing to listen?

Inside our culture of control, we are raised to avoid the direct contact of being open, honest and vulnerable. Instead, we use our relationships as tools for keeping things the same and staying safe. We keep our conversations on the surface, away from any challenging territory that might provoke change in us or them. If we were honest with each other, things would change in us and others, in an instant. But we are too afraid to take this jump.

Our culture of control encourages us to live as isolated from one another as possible. It knows the radical, revolutionary potential of people living together in community. My experience has been that living in larger groups in community is fucking hard. It brings up all the traumas that are just lying under the surface. But because of this, it is an enormous opportunity for learning, growth and transformation. Groups can become melting pots for ideas, testbeds for transformational practices and create units of power strong enough to challenge the dominant order.

Transformative Cultures would create the conditions for people to come together and live in real villages once again.

How could Transformative Cultures achieve this?

Firstly, by making a philosophical shift to abandon the individualist mindset that has dominated our culture for centuries. We are not isolated individuals but are always co-creating and influencing one another. The relationships between us, or as Deleuze called it the dividual, is just if not more, important than the individual. One example of this shift is the Nguni Bantu term Ubuntu, which is often translated as “I am because we are” and attempts to highlight that we only become a person in relationship to others. We must create practices and ways of being together that constantly remind us of this truth.

Secondly, by creating a different relationship to conflict and difference. In our culture of control, our approach to conflict is punitive. This means that when conflicts emerge we try to find out which person is right and who is wrong. We then punish the person who has done something wrong to prevent them from doing it again. Transformative Cultures would create practices of Transformative Conflict & Justice, that respect each person’s perspective and use the conflicts between them for the transformation of not only everyone involved but also the culture and systems of which they are a part. In every conflict lies the possibility of transformation at many levels from the individual to the culture, to systems. Practices such as restorative circles and convergent facilitation can be used to foster a transformative, life-affirming approach to conflict and difference.

Kafka has a famous quote that “a book should be an ice-axe to break the frozen sea within us”. We don’t need books, we can be that ice-axe for each other! If only we can be open and honest about the differences, tensions and conflicts that emerge between us, then those difficulties can become fuel for community re-connection and transformation.

Thirdly, through supporting us to upgrade our communication paradigm so we can clearly bring our gifts of difference and conflict to the table. In most conversations in our culture of control, we are so scared of conflict and difference that we avoid our actual thoughts and beliefs and replace them with meaningless stories and platitudes that have the sole goal of keeping each other happy and not ruffling any feathers. This is not only boring for everyone involved but prevents the possibility of change.

Transformative Cultures would teach people the skills to communicate their desires effectively. They would support radical honesty amongst their co-creators. There would be a shared understanding of what an alive, transformative conversation looks like, and when a conversations has solidified, becoming more about everyone involved staying safe and protecting themselves, rather than fostering our collective co-evolution.

Non-Violent Communication and other forms of conscious communication can provide many of the skills necessary to support this kind of relationship with communication and conversation. There are also many ‘we-space’ practices that support open dialogue between individuals. For example, physicist David Bohm knew that our society’s problems were deeply entwined with our failure to communicate with one another, so he created the Bohmian Dialogue. Which is a method for directly coming into contact with a group of people in an honest way.

Lastly, through working to heal the rift between genders. The Patriarchy has sowed many seeds of distrust between men and women. This distrust prevents us from being in open, loving, flowing relationships with each other and life.

I have spent a lot of time in the past year confronting the gender knot with myself and others about whether gender is a ‘real’ thing, separate from how we’ve been brought up.

Whether you believe in the existence of a divine feminine/masculine or if you think it’s all part of our societal conditioning, there is something transformational about being in direct contact with the ‘otherness’ of the opposite gender and the wisdom they have to offer. Can you stare the mystery of gender in the face and not blink? Taking this approach, romantic relationships can become alchemical vessels for transformation, if only we can face our fear.

“When the latent war between genders comes to its end, there will be no more war on Earth” — Dieter Duhm

Our culture of control pretends that the Patriarchy no longer exists. That moving towards equal pay and access to opportunities is the same thing as moving toward liberation for both genders. When you get men and women to talk to each other honestly, you realise that we are so far from this dream.

Transformative Cultures would engage in the work of gender reconciliation. One part of this would be men and women going away to understand how they have been conditioned by the Patriarchy and doing the work of liberating themselves. Feminist ‘consciousness-raising’ groups pioneered this work in the sixties and seventies but we now need a new generation of men taking up this challenge. Projects such as Gibran Rivera’s Better Men Project show how this could be possible. Another part of this healing would be for men and women to come together and witness each other expressing the pain of having taken on their particular role in the Patriarchy. An example of this work in action is in the women’s movement in Rojava.

Similar reconciliation processes would be needed to work through all other forms of oppression that make up the Kyriarchy. This is a word to describe the interconnecting systems of domination and submission in our society from racism and homophobia to classism. We must break through these systems that divide us if we are to finally reconnect with one another once again.

If we can reimagine what it means to exist in relationship to others, recreate our relationship to conflict and difference, rebuild our ability to communicate honestly and vulnerably with one another and begin to heal the millennia-old divisions between men and women, then possibly we will have a chance of coming together with the collective power to really change things.

Reconnecting with Nature

The natural world, at least the bits left untouched by our civilization, is already in the flowing river of life. It is already flying. This makes it a fantastic source of wisdom, insight and inspiration for humanity to live in harmony with life. Indigenous traditions around the world have learnt to create balance and beauty amongst themselves and with nature through observing the patterns of life. For example, they realise that rest, reflection and celebration are important for them as a group because they see nature doing just that in the world around them.

I had one such insight whilst looking at a magnificent oak tree that was reaching for the sky. Beforehand I had spent several days worrying about Nietzsche’s dark description of life as inherently power-hungry. I was troubled that any attempt to change things or to bring beauty into the world could just be seen as people trying to control a situation and assert themselves on others. But the oak tree dispelled my worries. Through striving to be its grand self in all its wonder, the tree created an oasis of life. Bushes could surround it on the ground, and countless birds and insects live within its foliage. I realised that the same thing can apply to human beings. When we bring ourselves in our truth and vulnerability, we create space for other people to do the same and in that be more alive. I feel joy even several years on writing about this insight.

Our culture of control has separated us from the natural world to avoid its call to transform and rejoin life. Sometimes, when I’m in a mythological mood, I see psychedelic mushrooms as part of this call to rejoin life. Could coronavirus even be nature upping the ante, crying out at full pelt for us to rejoin her?

We set up our lives to avoid and ignore what is happening all around us. We spend all our lives on our square phones, inside box rooms, inside box houses, inside a city, just to avoid the all-consuming fear of confrontation with nature and life itself.

When we do venture out into the wilderness we are like aliens on a foreign planet, with no appreciation of the beauty and majesty surrounding us. If we were able to truly encounter the natural world again, we might realise what wonder we have sacrificed in the name of consumption and growth.

Transformative Cultures would support us to reconnect with the natural world of which we are a part.

How would it do this?

Firstly, through abandoning the philosophical assumptions of our culture that create separation between us and nature. Whole books can and have been written on this. Put simply, we must move beyond the enlightenment idea that we live in a world of inert, dead matter where physical bodies are entirely separate from immaterial minds. A world where human beings operate in a completely different world to the natural. We need new ideas about the aliveness of nature and our role within it. Andreas Weber is a biologist whose work captures many of these shifts and argues that we must move beyond our enlightenment heritage towards a new era of en-livenment.

Secondly, through encouraging practices of nature connection between humans and the natural world. We need to learn how to be with and a part of the natural world again. We must have experiences that convince us that the beautiful world around us is not inert but filled with life. The best of these practices show the interconnection and dependency between us and nature. Spending time caring for the land using principles such as permaculture is a good example of this. We can realise that human beings can play a beautiful role in the ecosystem of life and support biodiversity and beauty. Other practices such as sit spots encourage connection with the seasons, rhythm and inspiration of nature. I found the work of Paul Krafel particularly insightful in this area. Can you stare the mystery of the natural world in the face? And not blink.

Lastly, through reconnecting with the cyclical patterns of the natural world and bringing them into the organisation of our communities and life. In the city, we barricade ourselves away from the seasons passing all around us to avoid the wisdom that is right there before our eyes. What is wisdom other than insight that removes the blinkers before our eyes and returns us to the flowing river of life? To recapture this wisdom we could return to the natural festivals of the people who originally occupied our land, before the growth of civilization. In Britain, this could be the Gaelic festivals of Imbolc, Bealtaine, Lughnasadh and Samhain. This path might help us realise that we too have different roles and ways to be in different parts of the year. We might also notice that we as human beings also have a life cycle, that mirrors those integral to the rest of nature. Bill Plotkin’s Stages of Human Development is one model that explores this.

This wisdom from the rest of nature can then be used to create communities that live in harmony with life. Many people call this bio-mimicry. i.e. making human systems copy the free-flowing ones of life. I prefer to call it bio-harmony to highlight that what we must do is not copy but return to life.

An example of this bio-harmonising work is the 8shields. Jon Young lived with and studied indigenous groups throughout the world and created a model for human communities to live in harmony with the rest of nature. He puts this model onto a compass wheel to show all the necessary parts a village needs to live in harmony with each other and the rest of nature. If you want to learn more about using nature’s wisdom to create healthy cultures, this workshop is fantastic.

If we answer nature’s call and return to her bosom of life, we will access untold resources for discovering ourselves and our place in the world. Doing this together will create an unstoppable force that can recreate our world in the image of life.

Concluding on the Mystery

All of these ideas and practices have a common theme, which is a re-connection with the mystery of life.

This is the mystery of being in relationship with self, other and world.

Once you reconnect in any of these areas, you realise that all three of the triad of self, other and reality are unexplainable, inexplicable and largely unknown.

Can you stare these mysteries in the face and not blink?

Blinking would be returning to our urge to rigidly classify, ossify and deaden the world around us.

Faced with a civilisation tearing itself apart, what we need more than anything are movements that are in touch with this mystery.

I imagine a new movement emerging onto the scene of life that truly embodies a transformative culture, in awe of the mystery. It would be grounded in communities across the land that would be able to hold this image of a different way of being human. Month-long re-enlivening processes held in these centres would welcome new rebels, back into the fold of life. These people could then venture out into our toxic society, with its culture of control, and demand change with such a force and ferocity that a new world could be born. Like a phoenix rising out of the ashes of our slowly collapsing civilisation.

In this post, I have just scratched the surface of these topics. Each area has a boundless depth for discovery, way beyond anything I have imagined. Groups who choose this journey of reconnection will be in for a wild ride, where whole new vistas of exploration are constantly opening out before them as they deepen their relationship with the mysteries beyond.

Life is calling out to us to reconnect.

What could be a more exciting and meaningful way to live in our tumultuous times, than answering that call and stepping onto this path of reconnection?

Onwards fellow humans!

PS: I am hoping to create a crack team of people to hold and take forward this vision of Transformative Cultures. If this article sets you on fire: please get in touch!

PSS: If you are interested in my ideas about how spirituality could fit into a transformative culture please see my article: Towards a Metamodern Spirituality.

PSSS: Sign up to my newsletter to keep up to date with my explorations.

Junctures on the Path of Change

2020-10-22T00:00:00+00:00

At some point in their lives, many people commit to working towards a better world.

Either they begin to connect to the suffering and pain all around them and feel compelled to do something about it, or they realise that helping others and being of service is their best bet for a meaningful life.

They enter into a life of service.

This shift happened to me when I was travelling in South America after university. I set out on the adventure aiming to have as many different experiences as I could. Back then, I still thought that the good life involved excitedly exploring as many areas of existence as possible. I had a metaphor of life being like an apple. The purpose of life was to ravage that apple with all your ferocity; sucking out every last drop of life-juice. Even with its focus on ‘having experiences’ rather than ‘having things’, this way of being doesn’t leave behind the dominant consumerist attitude of our society. In fact, this ‘experience hedonism’ is now becoming more and more the focus of advertising and media.

My travelling in South America burst the balloon of this way of life. I realised the self-centeredness of focusing on my own experience at the expense of others — that life really only becomes meaningful in relation to other people. There’s something hollow about chasing endless experiences, that left me feeling nihilistic. However many sunsets or incredible beaches you see, it’s never enough to fill the hole of authentic connection and meaning within us. This can only be filled by having a purpose to life that is greater than our own self interest.

Also during this time, I noticed how many countries in South America were having their cultures wiped out and resources exploited, largely because of the spread of our western civilisation. This made me angry and started me on the journey of wanting to change things.

After now spending several years on this path of ‘service’, I have started to notice some common phases that me and lots of my friends have been through. It is these junctures on the path that I want to share today. Admittedly, my understanding of these phases comes from my limited middle class, white, male, university-educated awareness and bubble. So for others, they might be completely different.

The three junctures I have identified are Effective Altruism, Effective Activism and Emergent Activism.

For those aware of the cultural phases I have discussed elsewhere, these ‘junctures of the path of change’ broadly correspond to the stages of Modernism, Post-Modernism and Meta-Modernism.

I will now talk about each of them in turn.

So let’s get cracking!

The Most Good You Can Do Without Changing Anything

Effective Altruism aims to use the tools of science to figure out “the most good you can do” with your time, life and resources. It follows the ethical precept of utilitarianism, which argues that you should judge any choice based on its consequences and aim to produce the greatest good for the greatest number of people. Effective altruists, like Bill Gates, William Macaskill and Toby Ord, focus on solutions that are easily measurable via their scientific calculus, which often leads them to ignore the more cultural or systemic features of the world’s problems, which are not so easily quantifiable.

They focus on interventions like mosquito nets and vaccinations which have the most obvious ‘return on investment’. As I have discussed elsewhere, these solutions often just end up putting patches on problems that were actually created by more systemic issues. The socio-economic systems of Patriarchy, White Supremacy and Capitalism are largely invisible to Effective Altruists, so they have no hope of resolving these underlying issues.

For example, in the area of environmentalism, Effective Altruists focus on technological solutions like solar panels and wind turbines. These are undoubtedly vital parts of shifting to a post-carbon world, but focusing on them obscures and ignores the fact that our entire economy revolves around infinite growth and the exploitation of people and planet.

Using the Effective Altruist’s calculus can lead you to some pretty absurd conclusions. For example, that maybe the best good you can do would be to get a job as a hedge fund manager in order to donate as much money as possible to charities having the highest possible impact. Unfortunately, this completely ignores the fact that institutions like the financial sector are very much tangled up in many of the issues in the first place.

I’m not arguing that using data and evidence can’t help us to make good interventions in the world. Just that the use of that data needs to be in a bigger frame that understands the dominant systems and culture of our society.

This is the reason my elders say: the time is urgent, let us slow down. Slowing down is not reducing one’s speed. Slowing down is noticing the others that frame us and then acting upon that framing or the new spaces of power that are opening up. — Bayo Akomolafe

I was in this Effective Altruism camp for a year or so. You can even see the remnants of it in some of my older articles. At some point, it started to dawn on me that there was something fundamentally wrong with our society and way of life that couldn’t just be fixed by ‘patching here or there’. I realised that it wasn’t the people in Africa who had the problem and needed saving. Instead it was us here in the West with the problem. And it’s a big one!

Time to Fight the Evil System

Effective Activism, on the other hand, acknowledges the systemic causes of the world’s problems. It realises that the capitalist, patriarchal, white supremacist empire and it’s ways of being, going back 5,000 years are largely responsible for the world’s dire situation.

It realises that a seismic shift in our culture and society is required to really resolve these systemic issues and avert a complete climate and ecological collapse.

In order to produce this shift, the Effective Acitivist must figure out where to intervene in the present system to move it towards the new world we want to see born.

When I was in this camp, I often described this as the challenge of social accupuncture. This is to try and find the pressure points in the present system which if we pushed them just right, would have a big enough cascading, knock on effect to really change things.

Once Effective Activists have found their accupuncture points of choice, they often burn themselves out, because all that matters is pushing that spot with everything they’ve got.

In the case of Extinction Rebellion, the movement in which I am most familiar, there is a belief that climate is the most important issue for everyone and if we can just get 3.5% of the population on board then society will inevitably shift. For some, this creates a form of fundamentalism where any other approach is castigated, and all that matters is a hyper, goal-oriented focus on getting ‘arrestables on the ground’.

This approach is still a largely rational one, with its focus on thinking our way through the problems of the world. This is ironic because the obsession with understanding and optimising our impact, mirrors and re-creates our dominant culture. Of course, I’m not advocating completely abandoning the intellect but instead using it in it’s proper place as one of several tools for orientating ourselves through life.

Effective Activists ignore that the oppressive systems of our society also lie within us and that when we come together in social movements we often recreate the very culture and structures that we outwardly oppose. The judgemental part of me says that Effective Activists are so stuck in their heroic saviour complex, with it’s hyper focus on shifting external society, that they ignore the fact that we are all in different ways a part of the problem.

I spent over a year in the Effective Activist mode and have only left it in the past 6 months or so. What has shifted me into the Emergent Activist fold has been two things. Firstly, I’ve had a growing realisation of the insanity of trying to rationally grasp and respond to the entire complex system of human civilisation. Whenever I do try, I end up stuck in my head, forever ruminating on the best way to change things — never actually getting out there into the world. Secondly, I’ve had a growing awareness of how systems like White Supremacy live within us and that completely focusing on external change often just leads to recreating old patterns. Instead, I have realised the importance of coming back to the present moment and connecting with the gifts that are just waiting to come through us, in every moment of life.

Giving Your Revolutionary Gifts

Whilst Effective Altruists and Activists are completely focused on the external implications of their actions, Emergent Activists ask “What wants to emerge through me?”.

They look internally within themselves, to try and discover what gifts they have to offer. The work of the Emergent Activist then becomes to refine our gifts to the world and put them in a revolutionary context.

They do this because they realise that they cannot think their way out of the crisis. That doesn’t mean they abandon thinking. But instead they take back forms of knowledge that have been lost and put them to work in building a better world. For example, they might reclaim their emotions and use their deepest griefs or angers to guide them towards the particular gifts they were put on the planet to give.

Emergent Activists trust that if they and and others take the small steps of finding their gifts and beginning to give them to the world then this can and will make a difference.

Don’t ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive and then go and do that because what the world needs is people who have come alive. - Howard Thurman

The above quote summarises a big part of the shift of the Emergent Activist. What i want to add is the importance of not only “Doing what makes you come alive!” but putting those gifts into the most revolutionary context possible! This involves the work of questioning ourselves, seeing how our attitudes, habits and behaviours were created and how this affects the offerings we give to the world.

One way I think about these gifts, is as a river that wants to flow out of us. Unfortunately, that river is tangled in many ways.

The first tangle, is that we have no idea what our gifts are. The western education system leaves us so stuck in our heads trying to rationalise and understand the world, that we are unable to listen to the signals the universe is constantly offering us about our place in the ecosystem of life. We are so numb, that we have no access to our emotions, which could guide us in where to show up in the world and give us the energy to stand up for what we really believe in. We have no access to our intuition or energetic bodies which could give us subtle clues in finding our gifts. We have had our imagination beaten out of us and have little connection to the natural world, both of which could be immensely vital sources of inspiration and clarity. We must reclaim these wellsprings of wisdom to discover what we are here to offer.

Soul is one’s place: one’s unique niche in the habitat of the ecology of life. Soul is the source of your dream for an evolved world. - Bill Plotkin

A second tangle is that often the solutions we advance to a problem are in fact part of the problem we are trying to resolve. Because most of us have been raised in our toxic western culture, if we don’t put any work into escaping our conditioning, then our gifts will just end up recreating the old. It’s not suprising that when people from our western society come together in organisations like Extinction Rebllion, they often re-create Patriarchal, White Supremacist ways of thinking and being. If we are to give our gifts with as few of these influences as possible, then a large part of our continual work as activists must be to root out these structures and conditioning from deep within ourselves. Bayo Akomolafe calls this approach ‘Post-activism’.

“Post-activism means not only protesting against an external injustice, but also becoming aware of one’s own responsibility at all levels. Post-activism means questioning one’s own stubborn consumer habits and protesting against oneself.” - Bayo Akomolafe

A big part of the second tangle is that it is easy and comfortable to focus giving our gifts to people like us. To engage with people like us we don’t have to change or question ourselves. Part of truly giving our gifts to the world means breaking out of the cultural contexts in which we are most comfortable, so we can serve people truly in need. Part of this untangling is realising the priviledged position we are in to be able to even think about freeing ourselves from the toxic systems and culture of our society.

A third tangle, is the ways in which we are blocked from intimacy and community with others. If we can’t overcome our blockages to connection and community, then we will not be able to ask for the support needed to cultivate our gifts or really offer them genuinely to others. Whilst it might seem that the Emergent Activist represents a return to an individualistic mindset focused on ourselves, this is far from the truth. Instead, whilst we alone as individuals can discover our gifts, we can only bring them into being in relationship to others. I imagine each person’s river as a peice of the puzzle of the bigger tidal wave of a new society. Only by overcoming the blockages between us can we bring our gifts together, creating a new world.

Resolving these tangles isn’t about retreating to your cave up a mountain and doing the work in isolation. Instead this work can only be done in relationship to others and the world.

Our task becomes to work on ourselves as we work on the world. The dichotomy between self-work and other-work is broken down. All work on the outside world gives valuable feedback about our tangles and how we can overcome them. All work on the self gives new energy and ideas for doing activism out in the world.

Conclusion

I have now come full circle. Before I stepped onto this journey of service, I was just focused on what was exciting for me. Now, stepping onto the path of the Emergent Activist I have realised that below all the false aspirations given to me by our dominant society, what excites me is often also what is good for the world. The path of service is identical to the path of desire. If I can let what wants to come out of me into the world in all it’s force and fury and if I can support others in doing the same, then maybe, just maybe, we have a chance to change things.

Wherever you currently are on this ‘map’ of a life of service, I don’t think reading this article is going to change anything. It is only the tumultuous earthquakes we face as we walk through life that are likely to shake things up. All I can say for certain is that these trembles are coming for all of us, whether we like it or not.

Building a Life Affirming Culture

2020-02-18T00:00:00+00:00

This is the text of a talk I gave at a London Emerge Meet-up in February 2020.

I like to think of Humanity’s current predicament as that of a tightrope walker, and an inexperienced one at that. We’re teetering on a rope above a deep canyon, walking a narrow path between ruin and a better world.

Either we get to a completely different way of organising our society and living together. Or our civilisation ends. This time there is really no alternative.

If we don’t make the transition from an industrial society committed to economic growth to a life-sustaining one committed to the healing and recovery of our world, then we will fall into the abyss and it will mean, at best, the deaths of billions of sentient beings and at worst, the end of life on earth.

Don’t slip, humanity. Keep your balance! One false move and it’s all over — maybe forever.

Some astronomers have even hypothesised that the reason we haven’t yet encountered alien life (the Fermi paradox) is because all intelligent species inevitably face these challenges, but most of them fail and don’t live to tell the tale. The abyss is littered with the corpses of tightrope-walking civilisations who slipped and fell.

Finding the Meta-Crisis

But what has put us on this tight rope?

We can point to so many crises in our world today:

A climate and ecological emergency that threatens all life on Earth.

Algorithms and exponential technology that we don’t have the sense to use wisely.

A political crisis that has led to deep distrust in our institutions of democracy and the rise of fascism around the world.

A social crisis of alienation where people are increasing lonely and isolated from their communities.

A mental health crisis where depression, anxiety and addiction are rampant and rising. All fed by a meaning crisis relating to the challenge of finding meaning in our post ‘death of God’ world.

An economic crisis where the 8 richest men in the world own more wealth than the bottom 3.6 billion, combined with our increasing inability to improve the quality of life of people in economies around the world.

These crises say nothing about the many inter-layered and intersecting oppressions of class, race, gender and so on which should be considered crises in themselves. Because without bridging these divisions between us, we will fail to create the unified movements needed to bring about large-scale social change.

It is very easy to think of these crisis as separate and independent and to spend our whole lives as activists and change makers just trying to make a difference to one of them.

Often we end up just ‘patching’ the by-products of these crises rather than tackling their root causes. For example, we ‘patch’ by sending aid to Africa when the entire global economic system is setup to allow our exploitation of that continent.

We also end up spending a good chunk of our time in competition for time and resources, arguing with each other about why our crisis is much more important than others.

The Meta-Crisis

This is why the idea of the meta-crisis is so important. By finding what underlies all of these crises and puts us onto that tight-rope we can target our efforts at the deepest root causes of our societal issues. It also becomes clear that all our attempts to change the world are deeply interwoven and interdependent.

The meta-crisis is an example of what Timothy Morton has described as a hyper-object. It’s impossible to see in its totality in the world around us. But it invades and permeates all aspects of life.

It’s not something we can ever completely capture with just one perspective. It will always overflow our attempts to understand it. It is like the parable of the blind men and the elephant. Where several blind men attempt to describe an elephant but as they’re touching very different parts like body or tusk they get a very different perspective of what an elephant is.

My Meta-Crisis

In the rest of this talk I want to propose one perspective on the meta-crisis that I find particularly compelling.

This might sound like hyperbole, but I want to argue that what underlies and ties these crises together is a system, culture and way of being that is in opposition to life itself.

Normally, life makes the conditions for more life. But at the moment, the dominant human systems and culture do quite the opposite. They destroy the conditions for other life to exist and for real human flourishing and creativity. But why?

One answer can be found in the the growing field of complex systems science. Life, which is a form of complexity, emerges when there is balance in a system between efficiency, hierarchy and order on the one hand and adaptivity, resilience and chaos on the other.

This discovery of modern science eerily parallels the concepts of yin and yang of eastern philosophy and the dichotomy between the Apollonian and Dionysian instincts discussed by Nietzsche.

All aspects of our life have, in the last 10,000 years or more slowly swung wildly away from the conditions that support life i.e. a harmonious balance between order and chaos towards more order, structure, hierarchy and efficiency.

How Nature Does It

Nature already keeps this balance which has allowed life to flourish. And by moving the human part of nature away from that balance we are causing untold damage to the systems that support us. This is why the field of bio-mimicry, or bio-harmony as I like to call it, is so important.

Nature achieves this adaptivity through diversity both in terms of the beings that exist in our world but also in her cycles.

Once you cotton onto this distinction, a lack of diversity can be seen in all aspects of our consensus reality. We are wildly out of balance. Let me give a few examples.

Ways of Seeing it

This imbalance can be seen in the culture and philosophy of our society, where one way of knowing i.e. logical rationality has come to dominate over all others. And one story of separation, materialism, individualism, free markets and consumerism has come to dominate our cultural matrix.

This imbalance can be seen in our very brains whose relentless, unchanging thought patterns lead us to depression and anxiety. And are rescued by chaos inducing psychedelics and meditation.

This imbalance can be seen in our economy where capitalism values efficiency at all costs and money is placed as the only source of value in life at the expense of all others. And the organisations of our society value the efficiency of top-down hierarchies over self-managing adaptivity.

This imbalance can be seen in our oppressive social systems where one mode of experience, that of the White Western European Man, is held aloft above all others. The patriarchy is an example of how a particular way of being a man (dominant, hierarchical, action-orientated) has come to dominate. So much so that most of the solutions for fighting gender equality focus on how women can act more in this mould rather than truly correcting the dynamic.

That’s just a few examples.. There are hundreds more when you start looking. This same pattern repeats itself every where you look.

Conclusion

After reading some Charles Eisenstein I had a nightmare of a concrete world. Where all of the complexity and beauty around us has been converted into complicated, but highly ordered human machines. We replaced trees with carbon sucking machines. And rivers with metal pipes. We geo-engineered the atmosphere. This dream takes our current world to the extreme but to some extent we are heading in that direction.

The idea of the meta-crisis can be so helpful in our work to bring balance back to our civilisation. Because by seeing that the meta-crisis invades all areas of our lives, all areas become avenues and opportunities for change.

We can bring together:

our inner spiritual and emotional development
our activist work to fight the present system
our construction of more harmonious systems
our creation of new life-affirming cultures

… into one united, pro-life movement to do battle with our life-phobic society and get us balancing our way across that tight rope.

The Metamodern Flame

2020-01-31T00:00:00+00:00

“Look again and you will see the Gods rise in the most human and unassuming of eyes.” — Kate Tempest

I’m obsessed with spoken work artist Kate Tempest.

I think her work comes closest to expressing life in the 21st century Western World.

She embodies something I’m calling the Metamodern Flame.

Metamodernism is an emerging cultural phase and worldview that can help us deal with the many crises faced by our civilisation. I wrote more about it here.

The Metamodern Flame is our ability to find the sparks of change within the very systems, culture and people that are destroying our planet.

In Tempest’s case she manages to find beauty, meaning and transformation within the most ordinary and unassuming of places. In her album Let Them Eat Chaos, she describes many people who carry out the toxic patterns of our neoliberal, capitalist, patriarchal society. But she does so in a way that highlights their deep humanity by showing that their actions are inspired by the same basic human needs that we largely all share in common.

In my life I have found it very easy to disregard those who don’t question and just do as society tells them. It’s easy to see their entire being as created by our oppressive systems. They want the things that adverts tell them to want. They chase the wealth and success cherished by our culture. Many left-wing (or postmodern) commentators end up disregarding their lives as being simply the playthings of global elites. But as Tempest shows, if we are to get these people on board in our efforts to change the world, we cannot disregard them but must reach out and fan the flame of our common humanity.

Dominic Barter and The Metamodern Flame

I found a deep synchronicity between this perspective and some of the things I have been learning in my work in the Extinction Rebellion Conflict Team. I recently went to a training weekend with Dominic Barter who back in the 1990s went into the incredibly dangerous Favelas in Rio in order to do what he calls ‘hanging out’. This ‘hanging out’ eventually led to the creation of restorative circles, which are a community held justice process for repairing the harm caused by incidents. Instead of killing each other they could come together as a community to hear each other’s grievances and find solutions.

In the weekend we spent with him, Dominic focused attention on how his work had been co-opted and productised by people around the world. His method is to listen deeply to a community of people and let social systems emerge from that listening. He is always trying to find what he calls the restorative flames, which are the positive seeds of transformation already embedded in a particular group of humans. This means that any social system he helps create emerges directly from the group that he is working with. Those who co-opt his work end up doing the exact opposite of this. They take the methods he’s developed with particular groups and apply them dictatorially in completely different contexts, often in return for payment.

Killing Colonialism

This co-option represents the continued colonial mindset present in our culture. In the era when Western countries had colonies around the world there was an idea that we, the white European, knew best. Our systems of government, justice, culture and education were superior, so we were doing a great service by exporting them throughout the world. This wasn’t just an altruistic act however, because by exporting our institutions we were able to shape, control and exploit millions of people worldwide.

This colonial mindset is very tied to the enlightenment or modernist way of seeing reality. This argues that through science we can understand an objective reality and thus make progress. In Europe we had made the most progress and had the deepest understanding of reality, therefore it was a gift to spread this knowledge with others. This way of being can be seen today in corporate structures where those at the top, feel like they have the most knowledge, and thus autocratically impose policies on the rest of their organisations. I’m also reminded of this approach when people suggest that their one specific form of society, spirituality or culture is the answer to our civilisation’s crises. By arguing in this way they reinforce the colonialist mindset.

There is not just one reality but many. Postmodernism brought the idea that reality is largely a cultural creation formed by the values and assumptions that we bring to it. We create reality through our perceptions. If this is the case, then the top down approach of modernism is hubristic in the extreme. How do we know that our institutions or systems can apply in completely different cultural contexts? When we look at the experience of trying to export parliamentary democracy throughout the world we find that many of these attempts fail. Postmodernism gives us an explanation for this and argues for a bottom-up approach. But sometimes it ignores the fact that some people do have insights and perspectives that can guide us.

Metamodernism attempts to find a balance between top-down and bottom-up approaches. It recognises that there isn’t a ‘view from nowhere’ as modernists suggested. But it also accepts that we need models and ideas to shape how we approach bottom-up information. To do this we use our current knowledge to try to find the metamodern flame i.e. the things we see happening in a particular section of society that we want to support. But we are constantly receptive to feedback and our knowledge is constantly adapting to given situations.

We are constantly trying to find a balance between asserting our own ideas and ideals on a particular situation and being completely receptive to the other. This can be seen as a dance along a spectrum between yin (receptivity) and yang (activity). Of course, it’s not always about being precisely in the middle between these two extremes. Sometimes a particular environment would respond better to a more extreme approach.

Playing with the Spectrum

It is vital to realise that this spectrum exists and what place we are currently occupying along it. Then we can play with how given situations respond to a particular approach. We can also begin to think about how we can create what John Vervaeke calls opponent processing systems that help find the optimum place on the spectrum given particular environmental conditions. Opponent processing is when two parts of a system are in opposition to each other and through their opposition a balance is created that can adapt to changes in the environment. Examples of this in the human body are the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems. The sympathetic nervous system is constantly on the lookout for signs of danger and wants to respond with increased heart rate, alertness and blood flow. The parasympathetic nervous system, on the other hand, is constantly trying to conserve energy by lowering the heart rate and relaxing the body.

I think there is even a similar thing happening within Extinction Rebellion where the Regenerative Culture Team, that advocates for ending our culture of productivity and burnout, is in opposition with XR’s demand to ‘Act Now’. Whether the balance between these two cultural systems is healthy I am unsure. But creating these types of dynamic systems is definitely an important step in ending our colonialist, patriarchal society.

The Spiritual Flame

The idea of the Metamodern Flame also ties in with many of the points I made in ‘Towards a Metamodern Spirituality’. In it I argued that there was a paradox at the heart of spirituality because existence is godly because it miraculously arises out of nothing, whilst at the same time some bits of it are more godly that others. The Metamodern Flame is about treating all parts of reality as sacred whilst at the same time trying to move towards more godliness. It lives within and exploits this paradox.

There is also a deep resonance here with Non Violent Communication. Which suggests that under all human acts of oppression, domination and violence you can find deep needs which are being unmet. These deep needs are largely common to all human beings. We can use our skills of perception to interpret and translate other peoples violence into the language of needs which we all share. By doing this we can help them escape the pain of being separated from what they actually desire.

Another connection to spirituality is that the metamodern flame is not just about finding common needs as suggested by NVC. But also about finding the things that are unique to a particular person, situation or group. This is the showing up part of the waking up, cleaning up, growing up, showing up model suggested by Ken Wilber. It explores how we can ‘show up’ in our uniqueness and give what we have to offer to the world. In our interactions with others we can constantly be searching for their uniqueness and encouraging it to come to the fore.

Conclusion

The Metamodern Flame has been a revelation in my life. I have begun to use it to find the seeds of transformation in all areas of my life from my relationships to my work. I think it can be applied to pretty much anything and on many different levels. We can use it to help create new social systems that work actively to overturn the colonialist mindset. But we can also use it in our day to day interactions with friends, colleagues and lovers.

Let’s take a representative of our toxic society that we all love to hate. Maybe a sexist, cocaine guzzling, carefree investment banker.

We could easily chastise and cast aside them with no second thought. But the Metamodern Flame can help us realise that there are deep needs within them that are currently being expressed in toxic behaviours but could be channeled towards beauty and transformation. There is also the uniqueness and gifts that this person has to offer which are largely repressed by their current lifestyle. If you looked closely enough you would find their uniqueness buried in their very toxic behaviours. It is through connecting with their deep needs and uniqueness that we are able to transform them and then society.

Towards a Metamodern Spirituality

2020-01-22T00:00:00+00:00

Metamodernism is the cultural phase and worldview that comes after postmodernism.

Modernism was the optimistic child of the enlightenment. It believed in our ability to understand an objective reality through science and thus make progress. This worldview still exists in academics like Steven Pinker who argue that we must double down on our enlightenment values in order to carry on driving humanity forward.

Postmodernism came along like your friend who knows everything and critiqued this progress. Didn’t modernism realise the damage it was doing to people and planet in search of economic growth? Just look at the inequality, loneliness, neocolonialism and ecological turmoil all around us. Surely you can see the complete bankruptcy of the modernist worldview! The postmodernist superpower is to critique and deconstruct the world we live in. But in order to go beyond postmodernism’s critiques, we need a new cultural phase and worldview to allow us begin to imagine a new, better world.

Enter Metamodernism.

Metamodernism is the cultural phase and worldview that can help us tackle what Tomas Björkman has called the meta-crisis. This is the spiritual, cultural and philosophical crisis that lies behind the more obvious calamities of today’s world — like the climate and ecological emergency or the failings of liberal democracy. Metamodernism works by deeply absorbing and understanding postmodernism’s critiques whilst still attempting to build a better society and world.

Each previous phase birthed their own forms of spirituality. For example, new age spirituality fits like a glove with our consumerist, capitalist, individualistic, postmodern society. It is focused completely on self-transformation and doesn’t concern itself with transforming the outside world. It’s a build-your-own spirituality from everything on offer in the shelves of the spiritual supermarket. We need something better.

For a while I have been asking the question: what would a spirituality look like that actually helped us confront the crises of our world?

The Phoenix Project

A spirituality that forced us to engage with the issues of our time rather than helping us to run away from them. This would be a Metamodern Spirituality. It would be a spirituality that would help us birth The Phoenix. Which is our metaphor for the world that wants to emerge from the ashes of our current collapsing and chaotic society.

In this blog post I want to lay out some of the criteria I’ve pieced together of what a metamodern spirituality might look like. I’ll start with the more philosophical and metaphysical pieces of the puzzle and then move onto more practical aspects.

Building a Proto-Synthesis Grand Narrative

A key feature of postmodernism was the abandoning of all grand narratives. Any overarching story of life is seen to be limiting and oppressive. Any attempt to create a grand narrative can easily be deconstructed based on its cultural and value assumptions. Postmodernism realised that many of the things we take for granted in the world around us are simply stories we tell ourselves. Take money for example: just another story.

The metamodern move is to begin to return to grand narratives once again. We need overarching stories that show us our place in the cosmos, give us meaning in life and help us battle the meta-crisis within. In the 20th century we clung to the stories of Capitalism and Communism as if they were new Gods, replacing the Christian God that Nietzsche pronounced was dead. In the metamodern era we must treat any new grand narratives for what they are: just stories. And thus, hold them lightly. We must continually critique them and allow them to evolve.

Our metamodern spiritual grand narrative should be a synthesis of all of our knowledge and understanding about the world. It should break down the centuries old division between science and religion. But we should recognise that it is always incomplete, always ripe for updating, and we should hold it lightly as the deconstructable story that we know it is.

The Return of Teleology

Part of this new metamodern spiritual grand narrative might include a return to teleology. Teleology is an Aristotelian word that means that an object has a directionality or wants to move towards a particular form. Aristotle thought that all objects had a teleology towards becoming their highest manifestation. Humans for example, wanted to move towards embodying their highest virtue, which for him was rationality.

The Scientific Revolution overturned teleology and suggested that things don’t have directions: they just move according to their parts. And so teleology was banished to the trash can of history.

Becoming a cup

But with the rise of complex systems science there is the possibility for a kind of teleology to make a return. Whilst complex systems science doesn’t suggest that a cup wants to be a cup, it does suggest that the parts of a cup self-organise in a complex system and the overall result of that is a movement towards cup-ness. That’s their teleology.

From a spiritual perspective this then begs the question of what the complex system of the universe is self-organising towards. When you look over the systems of life there does seem to be a pattern: the emergence of complexity. This can be seen at all scales of the universe from the smallest to the largest. Atoms self organise to create molecules. The animals and plants of nature self-organise to create a thriving ecology. And your own organs self-organise dynamically to create the being that we call me. In some sense the universe has a teleology towards more and more complexity.

This isn’t a scientifically provable fact because it’s not an experimental proposition but as our scientific understanding increases it seems like a more and more plausible interpretation. In complex systems science, the state of a system at which this emergence of complexity is maximised is called the edge of chaos. This is the place in which science and spirituality come together as one and why we call our formulation of metamodernism The Edge of Chaos.

Traversing the Transcendent Immanent

Another important feature of a metamodern spirituality is what is called The Transcendent Immanent. Sounds complicated right: let me explain!

The Axial Revolution, which occurred in places like Greece, India, Persia and China between the 8th and 3rd century BCE, brought about many new ways of thinking that still heavily influence us today. Ever since then, we have been obsessed with a ‘two-world’ mythology.

The first world is immanent. It is the physical realm that we occupy that some consider dream-like. It is downplayed in many spiritual traditions as the place of suffering, self-deception and sin.

The second world is the transcendent, spiritual realm: of love, bliss and the end of suffering. This separation between the immanent and the transcendent gives us a mythology that inspires us to overcome our worldly limitations and reach for our highest potentials.

We see this same fundamental mythos running through the majority of our religions and philosophies. For example: Plato talked about a cave of illusion and a transcendent realm of forms, at the heart of Christianity is the comparison between an Earthly world of sin and a transcendent Heaven above and even Descartes followed along with his mind-body split.

A big part of metamodernism is moving beyond this two-world mythology. Why? Because, by setting up a bi-polarity, it inherently devalues our present moment experience and denigrates the immanent realm that most of us are forced to live within. Could this denigration of the immanent, partly be to blame for our uncaring attitudes towards the natural world? I think so. If things like trees are just physical dream-like manifestations in an immanent world that we must overcome, then why should we care for them?

A metamodern spirituality will begin to see the transcendent within the immanent. It will begin to transcend into rather than out of a deeper and more embodied relationship with the world. Instead of seeing God as a distant man in the sky, we will begin to see the Godly nature of reality itself, that every moment is an unfathomable gift that just keep on giving. We will begin to see the very nature of our experiences as alive and sacred.

But how can we hold onto the inspirational aspects of the ‘two-world’ mythology, that pushed us towards bettering ourselves and the world? The answer is the self-organising teleology we just discussed. Moving towards the Edge of Chaos or the emergence of more complexity, consciousness and love is a movement towards Godliness. This presents the paradox at the heart of the Transcendent Immanent: existence is Godly, but some ways of being are more godly that others.

Abandoning Anthropocentrism

Another important part of this switch to Transcendent Immanence is moving beyond Anthropocentrism. This is the idea that humankind is the most important element of existence. What arrogance! Many philosophies that put humanity at the centre of the universe, lead to us devaluing the natural world around us and using it for our own ends.

The most obvious example of this is Kant’s ‘Copernican Revolution’ which put human subjectivity at the centre of the universe: arguably leading to many of the troubles of the modern world. In his formulation, the reality we experience is determined by our minds and real objects in the world are inaccessible to us. This devalues the material, natural world as objects such as trees don’t intuitively have a mind-like quality and thus we see them as inanimate and fair-game for exploitation.

A Metamodern Spirituality must begin to see that mind or subjectivity is not limited to us but is inherent in the world and universe around us. The philosophy of Spinoza, visions of panpsychism (which is the view that all things have a mind or a mind-like quality) and panentheism (which is the view that divinity pervades all things) can help us in this regard.

Healing the Wound of Dualism

Seeing mind or subjectivity as inherent in the world and universe is part of healing one of the most dominant versions of the ‘two worlds’ myth: the wound of dualism.

For much of western philosophy we have looked at reality through either an objectivist or subjective lens. Modernism has an objectivist approach to reality. i.e. it believes that a world exists ‘out there’ independent of observations. Postmodernism, on the other hand, focuses on the subjective aspects of experience. Culture and value differences mean that everyone’s experience of reality is distinct, unique and not comparable. The objectivist approach leads to us being in a dead world without meaning. The subjectivist approach leads to us occupying our own worlds, completely separate from each other and deeply wounded. These two approaches continually re-appear in Western Philosophy and culture, for example in the Romantic and Empiricist movements.

A dualistic approach cannot account for the participatory nature of reality. It always argues that there is just a being in a world but the relationship between being and world is not important. Instead of focusing on either subject or object, a metamodern spirituality would be based on the relationship between subject and object or what has been called The Transjective. This is deeply inspired by the work of Heidegger whos *Dasein *meant being-in-the-world which signified, similarly to Nietzsche, that one is always a being engaged in the world not separate from it.

Another way to think about this shift to the Transjective is through Irvin Yalom’s work on the having vs the being mode. He argued that in our society we tend to operate largely in the having mode which corresponds to a subject looking to manipulate objects. We manipulate the world in order to obtain objects and possess particular things. For example: I have a car. The being mode, on the other hand, is about changing the nature of your being. For example becoming a doctor. It’s not something you have but something that moves through you. The being mode is deeply participatory and transjective. Our society has tried to satisfy itself purely through the having mode leading to intense suffering as our being needs are not met. So we need a spirituality that gives space to our being needs through The Transjective.

This position is very aligned with the deepest truths of many religious and spiritual traditions which stress that the way we look at reality and how reality is, are not separate but deeply entangled and intertwined.

Blasting open the Metaphysical Monoculture

To reach a Metamodern Spirituality we must blast open the metaphysical monoculture we live within.

Alright smarty pants! What the hell does that mean?

Well, first let me explain a metaphysics. It’s a set of the underlying assumptions that give rise to our beliefs about existence and often is made up of an epistemology, an ontology and a cosmology. More fancy words — when will this end!

An Ontology tries to answer the question of ‘What is real?’ or ‘What exists?’
An Epistemology tries to answer the question of ‘How we can know?’
A Cosmology tries to answer the question of ‘What is our place in the cosmos?’

These metaphysical assumptions are axiomatic: they cannot be proven by science or logic but are the foundation stones that we build science and rationality upon.

A monoculture is an agricultural term for when we are only cultivating one particular crop in a given area. Our culture is only cultivating one particular metaphysical crop. When in fact many are possible and desirable — many crops would mean a thriving metaphysical ecosystem!

This is the metaphysical monoculture at the heart of our culture:

We answer the question of what is real with material stuff like atoms.
We answer the question of how we can know with the propositional knowing of logic and science.
We answer the question of what is our place in the cosmos by saying that we largely don’t have one. There is no meaning or purpose inherent to the universe: we must create our own.

It is these assumptions that lie at the heart of our toxic, alienated, ecology destroying way of life. They are not all problems in themselves but when we hyperfocus on them at the expense of any other perspective, then we have a problem. For example, by treating trees as just matter, we devalue them and they become fair game for us to exploit at our will. With a different, more mytho-poetic, epistemology we might instead see trees as divine, radiant beings and work to protect them. We must blow open the doors to explore new metaphysics! This is guerrilla metaphysics.

We can explore new ways of knowing, new epistemologies that fight against the epistemicide of our culture. For example we might explore: perspectival, procedural, participatory, imaginal and intuitive forms of knowing. We need an epistemological renaissance that enriches our very existence and brings life back to the dead world of atoms we have created.

We can explore new ideas about what is real or what exists: some have called this ontological terrorism. I love the work of Gilles Deleuze for blowing open this particular doorway. For example, whilst our culture believes that the only unit of sociological import is the individual, there are so many other ways we can see ourselves. Me and Will, my co-creator of the Phoenix Project, often talk about ourselves as a dividual called Sophie. She is the person greater than the sum of the parts of just the two of us. She is abundantly creative and energetic!

And as I have discussed earlier in the section about grand narratives, we can begin to imagine new cosmologies, new ways of looking at our place in the cosmos.

Inner Work For Global Political Transformation

Blasting open the metaphysical monoculture can allow us to overcome our fixation with individualism, a vital shift if we are to begin to collectively heal our world.

We live within and practice largely self-centered, individualistic spiritualities. “I am on a path towards enlightenment and it’s going to help me live a more harmonious, peaceful, anxiety free life”. The aim is to become happy whatever the circumstances in the world around you.

As has been argued by both Žižek and in the recent bestseller McMindfulness, this kind of spirituality plays into the hands of our toxic capitalist system, as by practicing mindfulness we make ourselves more able to cope with the anxieties of late stage capitalism rather than actually attempting to change and overthrow our bankrupt system. I discuss this more in my blog on mindful action.

We have lost faith in changing the outer world, so we focus on making ourselves spiritually pure.

A metamodern spirituality must lose this myopia of individualistic spirituality. We must break down the division between inner and outer work that tell us we must make a choice which to focus on or which is more important.

We must tell activists focused on the outer transformation of our society and culture that to best do their work they must also engage in the inner work of fighting the system within themselves. And we must tell those hyper focused on inner work that our peace and tranquility is deeply dependent on the system we live within. Neoliberal capitalism is the main force in the world preventing our collective enlightenment and we must work to move beyond it.

Once the inner/outer work distinction is seen through, our life can become a constant dance between working on ourselves and working on the outer world, whilst at the same time realising that there is not really any separation between them. Both bring more love, wholeness, peace and beauty into being.

In order to engage in outer work as part of our spiritual practice there is another big division that we must break down. This is between spirituality and politics. Many religions and spiritualities of the past have been largely a-political which allowed them to attract the widest possible devotees.

But with the fate of our planet on the line we can no longer maintain this division. What we must realise is that spirituality is inherently political. The spirituality we practice brings particular ways of seeing into the world that shape our reality and push us towards particular political outcomes. And our politics is and should be deeply inspired by our spirituality. We want to bring a politics into the world that manifests our deepest spiritual insights about the nature of reality. We want our politics to represent and serve the best of ourselves, not the worst. Some examples of this melding of politics and spirituality are Ronan Harrington’s very meta-modern Alter Ego gatherings and the late Mark Fisher’s Acid Communism which tries to bring together left wing politics and psychedelic consciousness.

A great imaginal story we can embody is that of the Shambahala Warrior. The story speaks of a group of people who are destined to use compassion and the deepest insights of meditation to save our planet from destruction. A metamodern spirituality would help us live out and embody the archetype of the Shambahala Warrior whilst using ironic distance to avoid taking it too seriously. Books and movements like Spiritual Activism, Engaged Buddhism and Mystical Anarchism can help us work towards this.

Practices of Reconstruction

Another important aspect of a metamodern spirituality is taking advantage of guerrilla metaphysics to inspire practices that reconstruct reality.

Many contemplative spiritual traditions focus on deconstructing the world around us. For example, in Vipassana Buddhism we try to deconstruct the stories that are causing us to suffer into their smallest sensory units. We then continue to deconstruct those very sensory units themselves to discover their inherent impermanence, lack of self and unsatisfactoriness. These revelations hopefully lead to a reduction in suffering. But they can often also lead us to reify these discoveries by treating them as absolute truths — placing us right back in a metaphysical monoculture. A metamodern spirituality must avoid this.

Deconstruction will not be enough to fight the meta-crisis. If all we practice is deconstruction then we will find it hard to avoid the nihilist hole where any possible meaning to our life can be dismissed and deconstructed into mere sensations. Practicing deconstruction also often reifies inaction and passivity. Precisely the opposite of what we need in these turbulent and chaotic times.

So a metamodern spirituality must begin to reconstruct, re-fabricate and re-enliven the world around us. In Buddhism this move has been called the fourth turning, but similar moves are possible in other traditions. In Buddhism this moves comes from a deep understanding of the concept of emptiness. This is the idea that all of our experiences are dependent upon the way that we are looking at the world. This means that we are always operating within a metaphysical structure of one kind of another. This dispels the notion that there is one way that reality is. Or one absolute truth about reality. We are always participants in the game of life.

Seeing our concepts and experiences as fundamentally empty can take us to what Daniel Thorson has called Liquid Mind and give us new freedom to play with reality itself. The book Seeing that Frees is a great place to start this journey into emptiness. Liquid Mind can help us have the freedom to (re)-construct the grand narratives we discussed earlier while preventing us from getting caught up and lost within them.

Rob Burbea’s work on soul-making and the imaginal is a great example of this metamodern turn towards reconstruction. Now that we have opened up the realms of metaphysical possibility we can begin to explore practices that re-create the world in ways that lead to beauty and meaningfulness and that enhance the sense of sacredness in our lives.

Why we need to Wake Up, Clean Up, Grow Up and Show Up?

Abandoning a focus on practices of deconstruction can lead us to realising that there is more than just one spiritual path available to us.

How many times have you heard of a supposedly enlightened guru who has been caught doing unwholesome acts? A lot, right! But it is quite possible that they weren’t lying about having had many insights into the nature of reality because spiritual growth is more complex and multifaceted than we normally realise. If there is more than one spiritual ‘path’ then these unethical gurus could have made progress along one of them but be left lacking in other areas. A metamodern spirituality must capture this complexity.

The ‘Wake Up, Clean Up, Grow Up, Show Up’ model suggests that there are several different independent paths to making real spiritual progress. Waking Up is the more traditional path of coming to realisations about the nature of reality that are freeing and empowering. Cleaning Up is dealing with any trauma or shadow that prevents you from fully bringing yourself to life. Growing Up is having a more complex and nuanced understanding of reality. One in which you are able to take multiple perspectives and synthesise them together. Showing Up is the least well known of the four paths and involves discovering your deepest purpose and meaning.

These four paths are deeply interconnected with each other. For example, the Waking Up path can often be used to bypass Cleaning Up. If we are able to enter states of bliss at will, we can use them to avoid confronting the trauma we carry around from our childhood, which can then later bubble up in our life. This is often called Spiritual Bypassing.

A metamodern spirituality must incorporate all four facets of spirituality and show their deep interconnection. Some techniques like The Diamond Approach and Big Mind already merge several of these aspects together in one method.

Coming upon Communitas

“The next Buddha will be a Sangha.”

A Sangha is a group of spiritual practitioners. This quote captures the idea that metamodern spirituality will largely be a communal affair. We must fight against the deeply individualistic nature of both our own culture and previous spiritualities. It is only if we are able to come together, that we will be able to truly face our collapsing civilisation head on.

We live in a time of deep alienation from one another. Any attempt to heal the trauma of our world must be based upon coming together communally once again. Our spirituality must cultivate a sense of communitas which is a Latin word meaning a feeling of deep connection with others and sense of belonging.

In order to bring this sense of communitas, people have been developing what are called we-space practices that can bring about deep collective coherence, understanding and the sense of a group field. An example is Ria Baeck’s Collective Presencing.

We are also witnessing the spread of different meditative techniques that focus on more group and dialogical methods. An example of this is Insight Dialogue which helps people reach deep meditative insights through dialogue about present moment experience between two people. Another example are soulmaking dyads, where two people explore the imaginal realm together.

We also need a spirituality that is democratic, peer-to-peer and participatory to avoid the problems of the cults and gurus of previous spiritualities. An example of a forward thinking group is the London Radical Mindfulness Group. Combining this with a scientifically supported spirituality where an ecology of practices are subject to the scientific method will give groups confidence that there is a foundation for their beliefs and practices.

The Return of Ritual

Another vital part of a metamodern spirituality is the return of ritual. This is another consequence of blowing open our metaphysical monoculture. To most western humans, rituals have become a farce. How could the sacrament be anything other than wine and bread? And how could just putting physical stuff in your mouth have any spiritual impact? We eat bread every day. What’s the big deal?

But once we are open to sometimes taking a more consciousness-first approach and once we stop deconstructing every aspect of our experience to materialistic roots, we can realise that rituals can be deeply transformational experiences.

A few weeks ago I took part in a ritual of crossing the bridge over a river and shouting out into the cosmos something I would hold myself accountable to over the coming year. As this experience was held by a group and I was able to not constantly be questioning it’s validity it turned out be a really powerful one for me.

Rituals can help us to bond with each other and create a sense of community. They can help us find our place in the cosmos and rediscover a sense of meaning and purpose in life. They can inspire a deep connection to the natural world and to the gift of life itself. Exactly the things we need to tackle the many crises of our time.

Humans have been using rituals for millennia and we have only abandoned them in the last centuries to largely devastating effect. If we are to confront the meta-crisis: we must return to ritual.

Inspired by Indigenous Cultures

A metamodern spirituality must respond to our continual destruction of the natural world. We are destroying the vital systems that support our civilisation and taking thousands of species with us in the planet’s sixth mass extinction event. When will we stop wreaking havoc upon the beautiful gift of life on Earth?

A metamodern spirituality must resacrilize and reanimate the natural world of which we are a part. Many of the philosophical points we discussed earlier like opening up to guerrilla metaphysics can help us to accomplish this. Stories like the Gaia Hypothesis give us an imaginal way of looking at the world where we are being constantly cared for by mother nature and we can change our lives to enact that care for all life. That brings deep meaning — we know we are inseparable from our living planet.

But more importantly a metamodern spirituality will look for guidance from indigenous cultures who have managed to live more harmoniously within their ecosystems. Approaches like 8 Shields bring together indigenous wisdom traditions from around the world into a comprehensive framework for living in relationship and harmony with nature.

We should particularly look to indigenous wisdom in the areas of eldership and coming of age rituals. We live in a world largely without elders. Old people in our society are often ridiculed. But in many cases they have built up wisdom over a lifetime that could help us live more harmoniously with life.

Similarly, our culture has no rituals to take us through the stages of life. In many indigenous cultures, the young are initiated into adulthood by elders, people whose responsibility it is to channel the wisdom of the ancestors before us. Without these initiations we succumb to ‘Peter-Pan syndrome’, where we have adult bodies but remain as children and are unable to confront the many challenges of our modern world. Time to Grow Up!

Conclusion

Spirituality at the Edge of Chaos?

I’ve laid out my key criteria for a metamodern spirituality. We must create a ritualistic group spirituality that breaks open the metaphysical monoculture, moves towards the transcendent immanent by using an ecology of transjective practices to create groups that can confront the many compounding crises of our time. In future posts I would like to bring many of these features together into a collective philosophical whole and synthesis that we call The Edge of Chaos. This is a spirituality and meta-narrative that can help us face the meta-crisis and avert the collapse of human life on Earth. And an everyday approach to life that can help us reach peak emergence, flow and creativity.

But for now I would love to hear feedback on the ideas in this post. So get commenting, discussing and thinking!

Aim for Mindful Action

2020-01-18T00:00:00+00:00

I’m late to meet a friend. Cycling at breakneck speed. My mind is filled with self hatred. Why didn’t I set off earlier? Why do I always end up like this? How horrible am I to keep my friend waiting so long?

This kind of situation is ripe for mindfulness. Just observe your present moment experience. Pull your mind back from knee jerk criticism. Stay with whatever sensations arise. Don’t respond to them. We call this ‘staying at contact’ or ‘bare attention’.

Whilst this advice is undoubtedly helpful, often it comes with a penchant for inaction. Stop caring about getting to your friend on time. Why does it even matter? Just chill out and stop desiring.

I think this is a trap that many meditators fall into of believing the right way to be mindful is to be passive. To let what happens, happen.

There is a belief that I should make no attempt to control outcomes out there in the world. Because any attempt to control, would ramp up desire and cause suffering.

I call this approach: Mindful Passivity.

What’s the problem with Mindful Passivity?

Mindful Passivity is not only an unhelpful belief in personal meditation, it could prove catastrophic for life on planet Earth.

Individually, Mindful Passivity can reinforce the ego, which becomes attached to appearing ‘chilled out’ or having the air of an advanced meditator. This is how you end up with the all smiles cultish, guru tribe: all competing to seem the most spiritual.

You can just as much be completely encased in ego sat smiling in a field as you can running a marathon or fighting a battle.

Fundamentally passivity prevents letting go. It tries to find one last thing to hold onto: passivity and inaction.

On a planetary scale, mindful passivity could prove fatal. When we are faced with a climate and ecological emergency unfolding all around us, what we need more than anything is action. We need people with the deep wisdom of spirituality to help defend life on our planet, not to be training themselves for hours every day to be passive observers of our collapsing civilisation.

Why has mindfulness become a buzz word in the corporate world? Because Mindful Passivity plays into the hands of the destructive capitalist, patriarchal system which is tearing our world apart. It creates passive people who are more able to deal with the toxicity of our present society, so do nothing about changing it. Thus the system avoids reaching a crisis point when we might have to actually remake our way of life. See Zizek’s writing or the recent bestseller McMindfulness for a more detailed exploration of this issue.

Mindful passivity also creates people who run away from the deeply political nature of reality. There is a ongoing battle over whether the control of our society is by and for the people or whether it is by and for rich elites. You might think we live in a democracy, by and for the people, but our entire way of life is largely in the interests of the ruling classes. As Chomsky has pointed out, there is a strong link between who spends the most money and who wins presidential elections in the U.S.. Thus we largely end up with policies that are in the interests of the few: those with the most money to donate to campaigns. To rectify this we need to politicise large segments of the population. The growth of Mindful Passivity works directly against this.

But how does mindfulness and meditation breed Mindful Passivity?

Mindfulness breeds Mindful Passivity because of its focus on ‘bare awareness’. It makes the assumption that there is some way that reality is right now and if we can tune into it our suffering will decrease. People tend to think that the way to get to how reality is, is to stop trying to change it, to stop taking action. But this is deeply misguided because by trying to not to act, one is taking an action. This is an inescapable paradox: we cannot avoid our entanglement with reality itself.

For example, mindfulness instructors often advise us to, “be with the breath as it is”. But there is no way that the breath is, separate from our way of engaging with it. We are always taking action, no matter what we do. The question is whether it is passive or active action. Action to bring about truth, goodness and beauty. Or passive action which keeps things the same.

These tendencies towards Mindful Passivity are heightened by the archetype of the Buddha, sitting cross legged under a tree, completely unaffected by the world outside of him. As meditators we very admirably strive to be able to deal with whatever happens in our lives. But this can often lead us to accepting whatever happens and not trying to play any part in it.

Another belief within Western Buddhism that leads to Mindful Passivity is the idea that the reality we experience is samsara: dreamlike or illusory. If reality is like a dream then you should just watch it go by as a passive observer. We don’t try to change our dreams or make them turn out one way over another, we just let them go by.

I think there is a fundamental mistake in our translation and understanding of the word samsara. Instead of meaning that reality is a dream, I think it means something more like reality being malleable or flexible. That how we engage with life, determines what reality is like. As I said before, existence is not static but a game we are deeply engaged in creating.

Often advanced meditators claim to have found some absolute truth about the way reality is. They argue that the three characteristics, taught by the Buddha, which are impermanence, no-self and unsatisfactoriness, are the deepest truths of reality. Or in other traditions like Advaita Vedanta, there is a belief that the non-dual state of awareness is somehow the ‘truth’ of existence. These beliefs suggest that engaging with reality in those ways is the only right way to be. This limits our possibility for action. But if instead, we can see these states as relative ways of seeing that happen to reduce suffering, then we can take back our capacity to shift our experience of reality. This is staggeringly liberating.

An Ode to Mindful Action

Mindful passivity is not an inevitable outcome of the doctrines of Buddhism. It is just purely how it has often developed in the West in service of our individualistic, consumer society. Once we realise that is impossible to escape action — that even by staying still we are making a choice: we can be freed from passivity.

Back to the example of me being late for a friend. It wasn’t the fact that I was trying to be on time that was causing me to suffer. It was the way I was relating to that desire. There was a huge amount of self and ego caught up in my striving.

I shouldn’t stop acting or stop trying to be on time for people I care about. Instead, I should realise that how I engage with my actions will determine how much I end up suffering. If I make the outcomes of the action something I hold onto very tightly: then I will suffer. If I can hold them lightly: then I will be free.

I want to take a stand for Mindful Action. Which combines fervent action with a mindful awareness. You stand up for your beliefs in the world. And try to make things better. Take control of the political situation we face. But you do so whilst trying to not get caught up in self-hate or unhelpful stories. And what can help you achieve this: the bare attention of mindfulness.

In Taoism, there is a concept of wu-wei. This translates as “action with no action” which I think has a similar meaning to Mindful Action. That we should try to shape the world around us, but we should do so without getting attached to the outcomes of our action. This is similar to the western concept of flow which is when someone is so immersed in energised focus that they lose their sense of self.

A great story that embodies mindful action and is very appropriate to our present day situation is the Shambahala Warrior. The story speaks of a group of people who are destined to use compassion and the deepest insights of meditation to save our planet from destruction. They are not sitting back, letting the world burn all around them whilst they sit cross legged in their mum’s basement. No! They take action. They can inspire us.

Given the situation on our planet, mindfulness is very much a two-faced coin. On one side it helps to create armies of corporate drones, immune to stress, who prop up the current system that is working hard to destroy our planet, create enormous inequality and shatter the communal bonds between us. But on the side, mindfulness could be a tool for positive action that could create artisans of peace who use mindfulness to aid in our titanic struggle to remodel human society in the image of compassion. I hope the concept of Mindful Action will help the latter emerge victorious.

How We Run Away

2020-01-03T00:00:00+00:00

We are all running away from reality.

Most of the things we do as 21st century humans amount to pain avoidance.

We lose ourselves in social media, Netflix and celebrity culture to avoid the pain in our own lives and in the world around us.

We drink and take drugs to make ourselves feel better for a short while. To give us a break from the onslaught of life.

We work flat out 60 hours a week so we have no time to stop and contemplate. No time to confront existence.

Some of us are lost in love. Using sex or the intimacy of love to shield ourselves away from the world. To pretend that everything is okay.

Some of us get lost in the intellectual world to avoid our emotions. We are constantly creating stories to explain our lives instead of confronting the simple emotional truths of our existence.

We have meaningless surface level conversations to avoid facing the difficult truths about our relationships with each other. In every relationship there is a conversation waiting to be had. But we run away.

We keep on buying more and more stuff. Clothes, shoes, technology. We are always chasing the next thing. The next pay rise. The next holiday. Why? Because it is too painful to be in the present. So we run away.

We even support each other in running away by creating a negativity phobic culture. Often to be liked or seen as successful we must pretend to be positive; pretend that everything is going fine and dandy. We support this collective avoidance that pushes the difficult truths away from us so we can avoid facing them ourselves. Put on a sad song and often people will say “That’s so depressing, do we have to listen to this?”. Why? Because the sad song would remind them of the pain they are running away from.

But what are we running away from?

We run away from the world we’ve built. A world of homeless people on every corner. A world of life dying all around us in the sixth mass extinction event. A world that is already paying the price of decades of rising carbon emissions and ecosystem destruction; deep down we know much worse is on the way. A world of sweatshops. Of forced or wage slave labour making our food and clothes. A world of deep unfairness, where the 6 richest men have more wealth than the bottom 3.6 billion people. A world where we (the white westerner) have been plundering the Global South for centuries. And we show no sign of stopping. We run away from this pain all around us.

We run away from how isolated and separate we really feel. We live disconnected from the natural world and disconnected from each other. Many live lonely lives, largely without community. We carry around the wounds from this separation in the form of trauma. We don’t believe we are any good. In fact many of us come to believe we are worthless. We carry around the scars of war, oppression and living in an unfair, uncaring system. If we just stopped for long enough, eventually these traumas would show their ugly head and we would be forced to confront them. But doing so would put us through hell while we processed them. So we run away.

We run away from the fact that one day we will die and what that means for our life right now in the present. No-one knows what happens after death. That uncertainty is terrifying. Contemplating death puts your life into perspective. It goads you into questioning whether how you are living now is in alignment with the fact that one day you will no longer be here. Many people are unhappy with how they are living so this questioning would prompt them to realise how deeply unsatisfied they are with life. Instead they choose to run away. They stay on the treadmill of life and remember not to ask too many questions.

We run away from existential terror. For many of us God no longer plays a large role in our lives. As Nietzsche pronounced: “God is dead and we killed him”. Without God we are free to create ourselves and existence presents a vast world of possibility. That freedom is terrifying. Without God we are adrift, floating down stream, without anything to hold onto. Instead of confronting that existential angst we bury ourselves in our lives and never confront our freedom.

If we were to confront reality in all of its tragedy, many of us would be swallowed up in its torrent. We look away to save ourselves and who’s to blame us. Most of us need to look away just to stay sane. But if we are to start confronting the problems of the world then we are going to need to start peeling back our fingers to take a glimpse.

I believe that spirituality is the skill of learning to look reality in the eye and not flinch.

Spirituality isn’t about everything always being good. Or achieving a state where all you do is smile, like the members of some cultish guru tribe. No! It’s about building the inner resources to let you look deeply into the toilet bowl of reality.

Some forms of spirituality focus on our freedom to create our own stories. They say that how reality is, is always dependent upon how we look at it. We are free to write narratives different to those expected of us by society. That’s incredibly liberating. But often this power can be used to ignore the tragedy of life. For example when contemplating the ecological crisis it is very easy to change the narrative to make the problem go away. For example, one could say that given cosmological timescales, it doesn’t really matter so much. The Earth will still be okay. But in doing this we avoid the thing that is most relevant to lives on Earth right now. Spirituality isn’t about being able to escape the pain of our world by narrative switching. But instead learning to deal with the pain of even the most difficult narratives.

You might worry that if you looked openly at the darker aspects of our world you would just be depressed the whole time. But I believe there is something beyond grief. Grief takes us on a long winding path towards beauty. And the beauty found is ever so precious. For example, when we contemplate the destruction of wildlife on Earth we realise how much we care about what is being lost and we have the opportunity to valiantly protect it. This is real beauty.

So wherever you are, peel back a few fingers from your eyes and look out at the truths of our existence before you. It is only by looking at the darkness in the world that we can hope to move towards the light.

Learning to Love Myself in a Society that Doesn’t

2019-11-26T00:00:00+00:00

The past 6 months I have been in an ongoing battle with anxiety.

I’ve been delving deep into myself to try and understand why I can’t stop being afraid.

I’ve realised that at the core of my being I don’t believe in my own self-worth. And I am scared that the outside world will prove my worthlessness.

This has set me off on a journey of learning to love myself.

I’ve been realising how my lack of self-love isn’t just a personal problem. Instead it’s at the heart of the social, ecological and political crises we face. There is a phrase that “the personal is political” and I am slowly realising it’s truth.

Our society wants to pin all the blame on the individual so it can rid itself of culpability and prevent the necessity of change. It suggests that the cause of our mental health problems lies in the neurology of our brains — not in problems with society as a whole. Instead of solving the underlying systemic problems we medicate the pain away. What this fails to realise is that our mental health and the health of our society as a whole are deeply intertwined.

It is this intertwining that I want to explore in this post.

First I want to clarify what self-love is. It is easy to think of self-love as being the same thing as selfishness: putting yourself first or thinking you’re the best. People think that love for oneself and love for others are mutually exclusive. i.e. if you have more of one then you have less of the other. So they think choosing to love yourself is selfishly putting yourself first.

But actually selfishness and self-love are not only different but are opposite. The selfish person does not love themselves too much but too little. In fact they hate themselves. This self-hate pushes them to snatch at existence to fill the void of love within.

There is nothing more conducive to loving others than being able to love yourself.

This self-love is the affirmation of one’s own life, happiness, growth and freedom, rooted in one’s capacity to love. I love myself because I have the capacity to love others and to bring beauty and meaning into the world.

This ability for self-love is crushed by our society from a very early age. To develop self-worth one must be loved unconditionally, that is, not loved for what we do but who we are. Loved for our very existence not for how we act in a particular moment. Our society ties our value as individuals to our ability to follow its rules and normalised ways of life. We are only loved and valued by society if we do what we are told. At school we are valued for our test results and good behaviour. At work we are valued for our productivity and professionality. In our social lives we are valued for our popularity.

Society keeps reminding you: “You only have value for what you do. Not for being who you are”.

This creates people who constantly doubt their self-worth. Which is exacerbated by people’s experiences of oppression, war and poverty that I think create much of the trauma of our world. When these people have children they look to their offspring to validate themselves. This means that they end up loving their children conditionally. Which then ends up creating children who have problems with self-worth, thus passing on the trauma to the next generation.

Our society is built upon systems where some people are valued more than others. Everyone is in a place on many different hierarchies with people both below and above them. There is the financial hierarchy demonstrated by the deep inequalities of our society. There is the status hierarchy where everyone is ranked according to their popularity. There is hierarchy embedded into our very being as men/women, straight/gay, elite/working class. With the straight white European man at the top and everyone else below. These hierarchies reinforce our sense of not being good enough. Even if like me, you are lucky to find yourself at the top of a hierarchy, it’s not because of being truly you that you are valued, it’s just because of the random coincidences of your birth. I.e. Very much conditional love.

These oppressive hierarchies are an important part of how capitalism continues to operate. There must be continual division between people to prevent us from realising what we have in common: that we are a part of a system that oppresses everyone. Having people who do not believe in their own self-worth prevents them from fighting against these hierarchies because they begin to believe they are justified. An example of this is internalised racism where black people come to believe that the racial hierarchy they live within is justified. But this internalised oppressed is far more widespread. Most people don’t believe in their own self-worth.

If you want people to continue doing ‘bullshit’ bureaucratic jobs completely divorced from the gifts that person has to give to the world, then make them feel like they have no inherent value. That is exactly what our society does.

If you want people to keep on buying materialist crap that makes them feel better for a brief moment but in the process destroys our planet, then make them feel like they have no inherent value. That is exactly what our society does. If people don’t have a feeling of self-worth then they will constantly look at the outside world to validate themselves.

Consumerism is only one example of an addiction that finds its root in a lack of self-worth. But likewise we use drugs (including alcohol), social media, Netflix and work to try to get away from the pain of feeling like we aren’t worth anything.

People who lack self-love are often at the centre of conflicts that derail our movements and projects for social change. Any suggestion that someone has a different opinion to them becomes an affront to their value as an individual — one that they must defend at all costs. It’s incredibly sad and painful to have low self-value. And we will fight or avoid anything that is a reminder of it. We become hyper sensitive to the opinions of others. Often we respond with anger — lashing out at people and the world around to get them back for what we perceive they have done to us. Or we go through life with the aim of pleasing other people and avoiding these conflicts at all costs. This prevents us from fully expressing ourselves in the world and in our work. If our attempts to change the world don’t recognise these dynamics then we will forever be divided and unable to bring our collective creative brilliance to the world’s problems.

I think it is fundamentally because they have self-love that some people are able to follow their callings into the world and pursue lives as artists, scientists or activists. If only we can help each other discover self-love again, then maybe we can begin to heal the world.

But how can we begin to heal and find self-love? I think healing involves finding reasons for our worth as individuals that are not dependent on the things we do. I have found two deep sources of value for myself. The first is my uniqueness as a human being and its very mystery. The very fact that I exist in this way, that is unlike any other being on the planet, is miraculous. Doesn’t something miraculous like an amazing sunset have value? The second is that in that miracle of me is my potential to bring goodness, beauty, meaning, truth and love into the world. Even in my worst actions my potential for these things remains. The beautiful thing is that not only do I have miraculous value and potential but so does every being on the planet.

What I’m learning on my journey of self-love is that it’s one thing to know these truths intellectually, but quite another to actually live and act in self-love. Especially as we are surrounded by a society that is constantly reminding us of our lack of intrinsic self worth. The solution I think is to come together to create systems and relations that empower us and affirm our inherent value. We can affirm our bodies by not denying their needs or desires. We can treat each other’s emotions and stories as valuable. We can care for each other unconditionally and learn to communicate non-violently. Thus we can create a society of self-love.

References

The Art of Loving by Erich Fromm
All About Love by bell hooks
Truth or Dare: Encounters with Power, Authority and Mystery by Starhawk

On the Revolutionary Potential of Carrots

2019-09-19T00:00:00+00:00

“The time is coming when a single carrot, freshly seen, will trigger a revolution”

This is a quote by post-impressionist artist Paul Cezanne.

It’s been stewing in the back of my mind for a while now.

What does it mean? How could a carrot cause a revolution?

At first glance most of us look at a carrot and think: “That’ll go nicely in my carrot and coriander soup”.

But what really is a carrot? If I were to push you, then most likely you’d fall back on the physical explanation of our dominant narratives. “A carrot is biological matter made of atoms and quarks” you would say.

But does that really explain a carrot?

Or does it just push the question backwards a little? It obscures the deep mystery of carrots behind a facade of ‘understanding’. It points to atoms and quarks and says: “Here’s the answer. Case closed. Nothing interesting to see here”. When really the carrot is still a complete mystery.

These explanations don’t satisfy me. There is nothing in the atoms of a carrot to explain how it appears to us. The orange-ness of a carrot is not to be found in atoms. Atoms are a useful story we use to predict events in the world. But quickly we come to believe that the story is more real than the carrot.

Carrots are unexplainable. We can use the culinary arts to tell us what will happen when we stew a carrot. Or science to tell us what will happen if we burn it. But these explanations don’t preclude the wondrous being of the thing itself.

What would happen if we started to look again at carrots and see them for what they truly are: unexplainable, mysterious and magical?

And what would happen if we started to look at all of the world in that way? Seeing everything around us, our connections, our body, our emotions as being part of a great mystery?

This is what it means to look at a carrot afresh. It means to look at our existence with new eyes: the eyes of a child. It takes us to an ineffable place before we got lost in our useful but incomplete maps, models and stories.

Seeing the world afresh is revolutionary. Not just for ourselves but for our society.

Most of us are operating in the realms of certainty that our dominant narratives offer us. Given that certainty it makes sense to spend our lives unquestionably following societies beck and call. As the old adage goes: “We work our whole lives to buy things that we don’t need, to impress people we don’t like”. If all that exists is easily explained matter then why not follow it and pursue a consumerist life?

Could we really keep that up in the face of the deep mystery of existence?

I don’t think so. If we could collectively realise the message of a carrot freshly seen: that life and everything in it is a mystery. Then maybe we would realise the craziness of our current ways of life.

In the face of this mystery we spend our lives following societies dictats. We slave ourselves away at our desks in order to buy more things. If we can truly connect with mystery I think we would abandon all that and begin to live lives of play, creativity and diversity.

Mystery also makes life meaningful. If something exists and you can’t explain it, you already have something to be grateful for.

But mystery also asks something of you. You have been given this miraculous gift of life — the gift of the carrot — how will you respond?

Will you respond in a way that lives up to the beauty and majesty of what you have received? Or will you whittle your life away following someone else’s dream?

Want Change? Take the Outside View

2018-12-02T00:00:00+00:00

“Have you ever had a dream, Neo, that you were so sure was real? What if you weren’t able to wake from that dream? How would you know the difference from the real world and the dream world?” — Morpheus (paraphrase of Chinese Philosopher Zhuangzi)

In The Matrix humans live inside a computer generated simulation that hides the truth of the “real” world underneath. Neo is asked whether he wants to take the blue pill and remain in the simulation or take the red and finally see the world as it actually is.

Funnily enough, we all live inside a real life simulation of another kind. No, it wasn’t thrust upon us by a sci-fi alien race. Instead, we built it ourselves. It’s our culture.

Most people never notice that they live within this culture simulation. They don’t realise that most of the things we believe and most of the ways we act were already predetermined for us. Most people think they chose their career. They think they came upon their political beliefs after hours of conscious deliberation.

Poppycock! These are just the stories we tell ourselves to give us some semblance of the feeling that we’re in control. In fact, our cultural reality shapes our lives down to the tiniest detail without us even realising it.

But, maybe, it is possible to wrestle back some control! How you ask? Through a skill I’m calling The Outside View. It is the ability to realise the existence of this giant cultural simulation that we all live within and start to question whether things could be different.

This shift gives us just a little bit more freedom, and just a little bit more power to act differently. While this might not seem like much, I really believe this is just what the world needs.

Fancy joining me and taking that red pill?

Maybe you don’t believe me? “Come on Julyan, I chose who I am”, you say. “It wasn’t all determined for me. What are you chatting about?”

Seems like you’re missing the outside view! Looks like I’m going to have to give you some examples.

So let’s take a concept like beauty.

Our society tells us that this is beautiful:

But the Kayan tribe in Myanmar think this is beauty:

Who’s right? No-one! It’s just depends which culture you were born into.

Makes you think that beauty is a whole lot more arbitrary than you thought, right?

This is why anthropology (i.e. the study of other cultures) is so important. It allows us to see how differently other people have lived and thus how arbitrary our own way of life is.

When you start using the Outside View everything you once thought was solid starts to break down. You realise that the way our economy works, how we interact with each other and many of the social institutions of our era are just arbitrary. You begin to see through our collective stories and see them for what they really are: fictions.

You might think you live in London, England. But that too is just a human invention. Another story. England doesn’t actually exist. It’s only a bit of land.

You might think it’s normal to go to the supermarket, swipe a bit of plastic and walk away with fruit and veg from all over the world. Well no! In the grand scheme of human history that’s fucking mental. Pieces of paper and plastic have value in our society. Can you believe it!

So hopefully I’ve convinced you that we can take the outside view and see the simulation we live in. But where does that get us? What’s the point?

It’s quite easy to fall into a trap of thinking that our culture is ‘modern’, advanced and superior to what came before. But maybe things aren’t quite what they seem….

In fact, key parts of our present cultural simulation happen to be destroying the planet. They also happen to be propagating gross inequalities and deepening widespread social alienation. That’s the point!

We need to take the outside view to look down on our present situation and ask what we can change to solve these big challenges? And what already works that we need to protect at all costs.

We need to look down on our lives on planet earth like an anthropologist from Mars. And then get redesigning our way of life!

Let’s take an example. For the last century or so advertising and the media have been instilling in us a particular idea of success. We’re told again and again that the goal of our lives should be to be “successful”. And that means getting ahead as an individual. Getting a promotion faster than your colleagues. Getting the best school places for your kids. Or getting enough money to buy your dream house in the country.

On the one hand, this cultural meme has pushed people towards starting new businesses and developing world changing technologies. But on the other, it leads us to operate purely as individuals ignoring the collective plight of our communities and species as a whole.

Now we realise the matrix we live in — how about we build a new one? Why not have a culture that’s about contribution rather than getting ahead? Where success isn’t measured by how much money you have but instead by how much you’ve contributed to humanity as a whole. Similarly, success could be about having deep spiritual connections with other people, the natural world or even existence itself. Wouldn’t that make our society a whole lot better?

People who are able to take this outside view end up making the biggest contributions to humanity. Like the suffragettes, Gandhi and Martin Luther King. Did they accept the societies they were born into? No. They worked to build better ones. Why not join them? We can’t completely escape our culture but we can imagine new possibilities, differing realities and radical ways of being. This is the beauty of the outside view.

But Julyan you say! If all we have to do to change the world is to take the outside view and realise how arbitrary out current simulation is, then why hasn’t anything changed yet?

If only it were that easy. Unfortunately there are many forces in today’s society that conspire to prevent the outside view from ever being fully realised.

It starts very young with our education system. One way to look at schools is as places where naturally curious, artistic and weird kids are sent to force them to adhere to the culture of the adult world. What did you learn in school? “Facts”? What they mean by facts are the things that our culture has found to be correct. Some of these facts are helpful and do of course work. Maths helps you build bridges. But we’re never taught the ability to question that knowledge or the culture that produced it.

Peer pressure in schools also forces children into the cultural mould. For example many feminist writers have discussed how societies gender norms are imprinted in the playground. By the end of school most kids have come to accept the cultural norms of our era. Instead, we need an education system where the outside view is at the heart of the curriculum. Where questioning, curiosity and difference are celebrated above all else.

But even in the adult world everything conspires against the outside view. Take media as an example. Pretty much all the media we consume on a daily basis closes down the outside view. If you look through a newspaper or a news website like the BBC I bet you can’t find one sentence that challenges the cultural realities of our time. Why not? Because they need to appeal to a load of people who are stuck in the simulation. They wouldn’t sell many newspapers if they rocked the boat. So for the outside view to flourish we need whole new forms of media. The Correspondent looks like an interesting project in this space.

Our culture also provides us with many distractions to stop us from ever taking the outside view. Alcohol (and other drugs) numb us to the pain in our lives and in the world around us. Football teams make us feel like we belong to something bigger than ourselves. Social media is not only crazily addictive but limits us to a small echo chamber of opinions and ideas. Even psychotherapy, as well as many forms of spirituality, make us think that our challenges are individual and must be overcome alone. Instead, they are often the results of the collective failings of our culture that we must work together to overcome. Enlightenment is a group activity folks!

Even politics itself has become a distraction from the outside view. It’s easy to spend all day arguing which person we want to be elected without realising that neither party really challenges the cultural realities of our time. We need to escape these distractions so we can really start confronting the crisis of our era!

Wow that’s a lot of things holding back the outside view! And they’re just the tip of the iceberg. With all these forces opposing the outside view you must be wondering if it has any hope at all?

Well it’s certainly going to be an uphill battle. But what keeps me optimistic is that in many areas of life, if you look closely enough, you’ll find groups of people who are beginning to challenge the assumptions of our simulation. People are making schools centered around curiosity. Scientists are creating new methodologies to capture the fact their work is always done within a simulation. New media is emerging that supports the outside view rather than suppresses it. Spiritual movements are developing that are not just based on individual purification but on collective transformation. Whatever field you work in. Whatever career path you’re on. You can seek out these groups that embrace the outside view and make yourself a positive part of a better future. Let’s do it!

The Phoenix Rises - New Stories for Humanity

2018-12-01T00:00:00+00:00

Human civilisation is approaching a breaking point. We face a mounting climate and ecological catastrophe, a worldwide rise in nationalism and a growth-based economy that drives increasingly deep inequality and personal alienation. We need change, and fast.

Unfortunately, most of our attempts at change happen only at a surface level. While it’s great to rid the world of plastic straws, the roots of the problems we face go so much deeper. They stem directly from our values, beliefs and behaviours, which together create our global operating system. If we keep obsessing over consumption, economic growth and individual success then we’re not going to make the changes needed for humanity to survive the 21st century.

So to confront the causes of today’s challenges, and not their symptoms, we need to rework our individual and collective ways of thinking, relating to, and understanding the world. From there we can build radically different cultural, political and economic institutions, allowing a new operating system for life on planet Earth to emerge. Our metaphor for this collective, global transformation is the Phoenix, the bird whose death is only a precursor to a new birth.

We need a global phoenix, a new operating system, to rise from the ashes of the current operating system, which lies dying all around us. In areas of life as diverse as science, society and spirituality something is already stirring. The seeds of the Phoenix are already out there. We actually have all the tools and resources we need to solve our pressing challenges. We just need to put the pieces together in an accessible, realistic vision and share it with the world — then we can start to build it.

So the Phoenix Project aims to share, develop and explore the ideas, philosophies and practices of the new operating system, as well as the stories of the people co-creating it. Change will only happen if we can spread their messages to enough people. So we are building a place to spread articles, resources, books, organisations, and podcasts for a new world — and to create a community of conversations around them.

We started our journey with the question: “What needs to change to confront today’s challenges?”. We captured our initial answers in the post Exponential Altruism, which was our idea for harnessing the incredible power of small groups driven by a vision of change and contribution. This investigation led us into months of conversations and investigation — personal and philosophical, scientific and spiritual. And now we want to bring other people — yes, you! — into this ongoing process of questioning ourselves, one another, and reality itself. Not to suggest a final set of answers or solutions, but to begin to share and develop ideas for a more harmonious, creative and interesting world.

Together, we hope these ideas will come to form a radically new worldview — a new story for humanity.

New Stories

We can’t escape living within a worldview, a story, of one sort or another. Those stories affect everything in our lives, from our science to society to spirituality. The current operating system is dying because it takes certain stories — like materialism, individualism, and competition — as absolute and eternal truths. Now this doesn’t mean that we should abandon these perspectives, but rather realise that they are not set in stone, leaving us free to choose, play with and create new systems that work better for us as people and our planet.

You might think this all sounds naive, idealistic, or downright irrelevant — what does my personal worldview have to do with climate change? Well, what we fail to realise is how much our worldview influences our behaviour — and that our behaviour, collectively, creates many of the crises we face. With a new worldview maybe we can build a new, better way of living on planet earth. Now this might sound like a hippie vision if ever there was one. But if humanity is to survive the twenty first century, nothing short of a hippie vision will do. There are so many exciting transformative projects springing up all over the globe that give us a belief in “the more beautiful world our heart knows is possible”. Our pressing and important task is to bring those possibilities, those potentials, into public consciousness and eventually make them our reality.

We can live our lives as cells in the dying phoenix, whose flames are beginning to touch every being on Earth, or we can take part in the new one and nurture the beginnings of a new world.

Let’s do it!

Exponential Altruism - A Strategy For A New World

2018-10-11T00:00:00+00:00

Our world faces multiple global crises that are growing in both severity and urgency. These are not limited to a climate and ecological catastrophe¹, a worldwide rise in nationalism², and an unsustainable growth-based economy that has led to extreme wealth inequality³.

Simultaneously, we’re observing multiple revolutions in human behaviour and values. One example from the last century is that we’ve extended our empathy to a wider and wider spectrum of conscious beings through the civil, animal, LGBTQ and other rights movements.⁴

On top of that, rapid technological change is giving us more power than ever before, bringing us some hugely positive revolutions, but at the same time driving newfound crises. For example, advances in robotics and AI promise to free us from menial labour but also threaten to unleash widespread unemployment and further deepen inequality.

One important point is that technology isn’t just a neutral tool we use to achieve our aims. ⁵ Instead it shapes our very values themselves. For example, our growing addiction to digital devices is slowly drowning us in a sea of distraction, making us less connected to one another and less aware of humanity’s situation.

These revolutions and crises are all interacting, cross-pollinating and influencing one another, culminating in the giant clusterfuck of what it is to be a human in the twenty first century. And it’s only going to get crazier.

Humanity’s current predicament is like that of a tightrope walker, and an inexperienced one at that. We’re teetering on a rope above a deep canyon, walking a narrow path between ruin and global flourishing.

If we fall into the abyss it will mean at best the deaths of billions of sentient beings and the suffering of billions more, and at worst the end of life on earth. Don’t slip, humanity. One false move and it’s all over — maybe forever.

Some astronomers have even hypothesised that the reason we haven’t yet encountered alien life (the Fermi paradox) is because all intelligent species inevitably face these challenges, but most of them fail and don’t live to tell the tale.⁶ The abyss is littered with the corpses of tightrope-walking civilisations who slipped and fell.

On the far side of the abyss, is the dramatically better world we should be aiming for. This world has the potential, at least, to provide fulfilling and meaningful lives for all humans on earth, in harmony with the countless other organisms who share our planet. We’d use our advanced technology to serve a deeper well-being for all in line with our innate desires for creativity, connection and curiosity.

At present, we’re a seriously unsteady, unfocussed, and uncoordinated tightrope walker. Indeed, most of us aren’t even aware of the tightrope crisis. Those of us who are feel powerless to help. Even fewer people have ideas about how we can work together to get out of this alive — or at best, unscathed.

So making our way across the tightrope is the biggest fucking challenge but also the biggest fucking opportunity of our time.

So for a while we’ve been asking the question: what needs to change to help humanity get through this cataclysmic transition and make progress along the tightrope?

Attempting to answer this question has led us to the concept of operating systems. An operating system is the values, beliefs and tools of a society. It is like the “big stick” that the tightrope walker is holding to stay balanced as she is battered by the winds of change.

We are converging towards a truly global society, economy and culture — so it’s not just the operating system of the UK or of Egypt that matters, but of the planet as a whole. The modern operating system has given rise to institutions that span the entire globe, and with them, an increasingly connected international civilisation.

The problem is that our current operating system is fucking everything up. It is the root cause behind many of today’s pressing crises. For example, some of the values inherent in the current operating system — materialism, the profit motive, an obsession with growth, meritocracy, individualism, devaluing natural environments and seeing them only as resources — have created a global economy driven by insatiable consumption of finite resources. This is inherently unsustainable and destabilising. Eventually we’re going to run out of the rare metals needed for your iPhone, the fossil fuel reserves will dry up, and ancient rainforests will be decimated beyond repair…

“Anyone who believes in indefinite growth on a finite planet, is either mad or an economist.”― Kenneth Boulding We can’t carry on like this.

Even though most of us don’t realise it, we both embody and create the current operating system on a day-to-day basis. It goes a long way to determining pretty much every aspect of our lives: from our career choices, to our relationships, to how we spend our time and money. Growing up within this operating system shapes our thinking so deeply that we find it hard to even consider the possibility of an alternative. We are unable to take an outsider’s view and see how our world could be different.

Our everyday behaviour reinforces the system and propagates it worldwide, forever washing away hundreds of irreplaceable native cultures with inherently different values. Languages, family values, traditions and knowledge are being forever lost to the history books — replaced by iPhones, designer clothes, meat eating and materialism. These huge populations are adopting the current operating system with incredible fervour, their newfound desire for material and financial wealth adding greatly to the many global crises. We can’t deny them this life because we’ve been living it ourselves for so long. But the big fat lie we’ve all been sold is that the Western lifestyle leads to happiness. It doesn’t. Quite the opposite, in fact.⁷

We need to replace our current operating system with a new one. It’s not surprising, really. If you have a computer, you need to upgrade the software from time to time. Like a software engineer we need to design and deploy the new operating system of society that will replace the old, confront today’s global challenges and lead to more human flourishing.

How can we make progress towards finding and developing a new operating system?

Imagine if in every city in the world, there was an active community of creative, entrepreneurial people united by an ethic of altruism, collaborating on impactful projects to build the new operating system.

This is the vision of Exponential Altruism: the combination of an ethic of altruism spread through the revolutionary power of small groups.

A switch to altruism is vital to replace the current operating system’s self-interested, consumerist values with a mindset of contribution — working for the good of all. This is an improvement in two ways:

It would vastly increase the number of people confronting the global crises and attempting to steer the revolutions in a positive direction. These people would find a new source of deeper meaning and fulfilment rendering the consumerist lifestyle obsolete. It doesn’t destroy the planet, but actually fixes it. Win-win scenario, really. Only with millions of people acting in this way do we have a hope of a successful transition to a new world.

The second piece of the puzzle is the revolutionary power of small groups. To really spread this new mindset and for these people to actually have a significant positive impact: they will need to collaborate.

It’s very difficult for an individual to have an impact on these big challenges. In turn, governments and large corporations are far too slow to respond to the rapid changes of the modern world — humans simply aren’t designed to work in groups of this size. They struggle to innovate and to understand the complexity of technology and society, because everything moves too quickly.

The small group is positioned perfectly between the individual and society— they are able to help individuals in an intimate way, but are also large enough to instigate top-down changes, for example by campaigning for new policies. They’re a sweet spot for introducing change.

We already know this — it is the reason for the global startup and entrepreneurship explosion. But this explosion is primarily profit-driven. Imagine a new wave of startups, social enterprises and activist groups motivated by a vision of a flourishing humanity.

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed, citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” — Margaret Mead

The world, past and present, is littered with examples of small groups driven by a vision of change who have made incredible dents in the world. An example is Gandhi’s Salt March which started with only 78 people and contributed greatly to India’s freedom from British colonial rule.

We need to break down the global vision into specific challenges to figure out what these groups would actually work on. To that end, we’ve identified four possible pillars of the new operating system, which we will expand upon in a later post.

For now, we can say that four important steps towards the new operating system would be:

a circular economy — creating an economy that repairs, reuses, recycles instead of constantly extracting finite resources and then discarding them.⁸ Important aspects of this could be the giving, sharing, and volunteer economies.
a listening society — building a new welfare state that caters for the deep emotional and psychological needs of its members.⁹
an ecological consciousness — treating other conscious beings and planet earth itself as ends in themselves rather than just resources for humanity. ¹⁰
a move towards decentralisation— enabling autonomy, self-governance, removal of dominance hierarchies and weakening coercive power structures like multinational corporations and nation states.¹¹

To realise these visions these groups should adopt a diversity of methods. Many groups limit themselves to just one method like protesting, e.g. vegan activist groups. To bring about this new operating system, projects would need to take different forms— social enterprises, art projects, volunteer collectives, new technologies, charities, petitions and protests… the possibilities are limitless. A diverse approach like this would also attract a wide diversity of people under the broad banner of changing our global operating system.

The groups would also need to think global but act local. By this we mean recognising the global crises and revolutions we face and how a new operating system can help, but at the same time trying to solve these issues at a local level because this is where people can work as communities to have a bigger impact. This is particularly important in the West where many of the problems of the current operating system originate, and where we have unprecedented resources for tackling them.

To get you inspired, here are some example projects these groups could work on:

Imagine a social enterprise restaurant to retrain homeless people to work as chefs.
Imagine a community-run art festival to celebrate non-materialist values.
Imagine a collective group therapy session where people find a rare space to talk openly about their emotional lives and to empathise with others through listening.
Imagine a vibrant public space dedicated to solving problems in the local and global community, where groups can form and grow around new projects that help themselves, others and the planet.

If we’re to replace our current, obsolete operating system, then a vital part of the new system will be its ability to grow exponentially and outcompete the old.

So how would these local projects scale up, add together, and contribute to an exponentially growing new operating system? Here are a few ideas:

Firstly, acts of altruism have been shown to naturally multiply as they spread through networks.¹² When individuals benefit from an act of altruism, they not only act similarly towards others in the future, but actually show more generosity than they initially received.
Secondly, some projects of the groups would actively begin to remove the hindrances to altruism that are built into the current operating system. For example, spaces where people could express themselves openly and support others, such as in the group therapy session discussed above, would help people realise their own potential for contribution and engagement. Helping them leave behind a system that incentivised self-interested behaviour.
As a result of engaging in these contribution-driven projects, individuals would feel a whole new sense of meaning, community, fun and learning that they simply weren’t getting before.¹³ These positive effects would naturally encourage friends, family and colleagues to join.
Lastly, digital technology is already on an exponential trajectory. Taking advantage of these change would help the groups to grow rapidly and scale without limit. For example, connecting local groups in a global network would speed up the rate at which the movement can gather new members as well as share their ideas and expertise. The collective knowledge, intelligence and experience that can grow from such a global network will strengthen it immensely.

Conclusion

We are ultimately driven by the question: how can we make it easier to be altruistic in modern society?

Countless people yearn to help the world, but simply do not know how. What they don’t have is an organisation that helps them make the transition from a life in the unsatisfactory consumer economy to the deep fulfilment and community of the contribution-oriented economy.

We aim to create that organisation — a feeder from the old to the new operating system that allows people’s natural drive to change the world to take roots and flourish.

Imagine having an idea for a project that would help your local community, and knowing that you could approach a group in your town or city that would help you develop the idea, lend their skills, and provide people power for the cause. That wherever you went in the world, you could find these kinds of projects and lend a hand, an idea, or a day of work… and while you were at it you could make friends for life, find a skill you loved to do — and a cause you really believe in.

Wouldn’t that be good for you, and the world?

Through this publication, we’re exploring how an organisation might do exactly that, using small groups united by an ethic of altruism to seed a new operating system. As it stands, this is the core plan of Exponential Altruism.

Subscribe to see where these ideas will take us and get in touch to share your ideas, criticisms and experiences. We’re not claiming to have the answers, but are committed to searching for them and sharing everything we learn in the process.

References

Johan Rockström, et al. (2009): Planetary boundaries: exploring the safe operating space for humanity, Ecology and society 2, 2009, Vol. 14, S. . ↩
Hugh Gusterson (2017): From Brexit to Trump: Anthropology and the rise of nationalist populism, American Ethnologist 2, 2017, Vol. 44, S. 209–214. ↩
Christine Bauhardt (2014): Solutions to the crisis? The Green New Deal, Degrowth, and the Solidarity Economy: Alternatives to the capitalist growth economy from an ecofeminist economics perspective, Ecological Economics, 2014, Vol. 102, S. 60–68. ↩
Jeremy Rifkin (2010): The Empathic Civilization: The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis, Polity. ↩
Neil Postman (2011): Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology, Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. ↩
Jacob D Haqq-Misra and Seth D Baum (2009): The sustainability solution to the Fermi paradox, arXiv preprint arXiv:0906.0568, 2009, Vol. , S. . ↩
Tim Kasser (2002): The High Price of Materialism, MIT Press. Also https://julyandavey.com/2018/08/10/usetarianism/ ↩
Kate Raworth (2017): Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist, Chelsea Green Publishing, ch.6. ↩
Hanzi Freinacht (2017): The Listening Society, Metamoderna. ↩
F.M. Lappe (2011): EcoMind: Changing the Way We Think, to Create the World We Want, PublicAffairs. ↩
E.F. Schumacher (2011): Small Is Beautiful: A Study of Economics as if People Mattered, Random House. ↩
James H Fowler and Nicholas A Christakis (2010): Cooperative behavior cascades in human social networks, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2010, Vol. , S. 200913149. ↩

Why Is It So Hard to Help the World? And What We Can Do About it.

2018-10-10T00:00:00+00:00

Most people want to help those suffering across the planet. Most people would welcome a more harmonious, loving existence for all. Wouldn’t you? But our society and culture gives us a very limited set of options for making a difference in the world.

As far as I can see we’re presented with just two substantial options about how we can help: Sacrifice or Charity. Both have big flaws.

The first option is individual sacrifice. It always involves giving something up or punishing ourselves in some way. We’re told that we should make sure to recycle. We should only buy fair trade, organic products. We should try to save energy by turning off lights and having shorter showers.

While these sacrifices are important, our consumer society is giving us the only type of option it knows: an individualistic consumption one. Maybe we need to move beyond a paradigm that says the only impact we can have on the world is through our consumption choices.

But this article isn’t about the problems with the sacrifice option, although undoubtedly there are many. If you’re interested a great place to start is this short YouTube video called forget shorter showers.

This article is about the second option that society presents us with: the charity option. We’re told that we can continue our lives as normal, guilt-free, as long as we regularly donate to charity. We’re shown pictures of starving children, war zones and devastated ecosystems which are carefully designed to cultivate an almost painful level of empathy. We’re then told that the only way we can feel better about ourselves and the world is to reach into our pockets and fork over some of our hard earned cash.

But my main issue with this option isn’t the methods used to get you to donate but instead where the money ends up going.

Fundamentally most of this money ends up funding what I call patching solutions.

This is where, instead of addressing the root causes of issues, we just patch a plaster on top hoping to make things temporarily better.

Take poverty in Africa as an example. Charities often take an overly simplistic view of the problem. They see poverty and underdevelopment as attributes of Africa itself. Sort of like an apple being red. They fail to see that there is a global economic system behind poverty that perpetuates and deepens the problems on the African continent. In the analogy of the apple we could say it was actually a green Granny Smith! But the world system was painting it red. Most charities fail to acknowledge this.

The REALLY ironic (and upsetting) thing is that when you take a deeper look into the complex system behind poverty, many of the forces that work to perpetuate it come from the West. The buck stops with us!

A great example of this is resource extraction. We’ve been told all our lives that the African continent is poor, but in terms of resource wealth, many African countries are some of the richest on the planet. A third of the earth’s mineral deposits lie beneath its soil.

In The Looting Machine Tom Burgis explains how large parts of Africa can be simultaneously resource rich and economically poor.¹ His conclusion: we live in a world of financial colonialism where Western (and increasingly Chinese) governments and multinationals plunder the continent for its resource wealth, often leaving the countries themselves little if anything to show from the interaction. Instead they are often left with toxic, self-serving regimes, kept in power largely by the cash from resource wealth. The people of Africa don’t benefit much from their huge natural wealth, but their dictators and elites most certainly do. It’s mostly Western companies and governments doing this plundering, so it is our responsibility to fix this situation.

To sum up this charity option, I have a metaphor. It’s like the West is trying to ignore the fact that in our left hand we have a knife that’s repeatedly stabbing the third world (resource plundering etc), while at the same time time we’re using our right hand to put patches on the wound. Then we’re back to the stabbing. Sounds like madness, right?

The even CRAZIER thing is that our patches aren’t EVEN that good. I wrote my dissertation on the effectiveness of aid to Africa. Tonnes of research led me to the conclusion that although sometimes we do manage to patch the issues (that we mostly created in the first place), often we actually make the problems worse. A good example of this is how the aid we give to foreign governments often increases corruption. And this corruption often solidifies authoritarian regimes that do a lot of damage to their citizens.

Isn’t it obvious that instead of trying to patch up the third world we should simply stop stabbing it?

I want to propose a third option for helping the world, the systemic option, that does exactly that. Instead of patching the issues of the world it could actually work towards addressing their underlying causes.

So in the case of Africa, instead of trying to patch poverty, this systemic option would work to combat its underlying causes. What are these underlying causes? Well let’s trace them right back to their roots baby!

So you’ve got poverty in Africa caused primarily by Western ‘stabbing’. In the case of Resource Plundering, what’s behind that? Well we use the plundered resources to continue our rampantly consumerist Western lifestyles. Why do we have these Western consumerist values in the first place? Well, because they’ve been thrust down our throats for decades: first by the advertising of companies who want to make as much profit as possible, and second by governments who rely on economic growth to stay in power.

I’m going to make one final step in this causal chain and ask: how were these values propagated by advertising and governments able to really pervade our culture? Fundamentally, I think it’s because large portions of the population were never exposed to any alternatives to a consumerist life. We are all in a struggle to find something inherently meaningful in our lives and advertising is here saying: “Look, buying things is meaningful! It’s an easy path to happiness!”. And we lap it up because there’s nothing else on the menu.

I’ve simplified things a bit here because these causes don’t actually follow in a linear chain like this. There is no root cause of poverty. In fact, each cause is constantly cross-pollinating all the others. It’s not a linear chain but a giant web of networked causation.

But Julyan, you might say, changing any of these systemic issues in a world as complex and multi-dimensional as ours is close to impossible. Our only choice is to put on the patches of the charity option. For a while, I too held this view. But I think it over-simplifies the issues at hand. It views systemic change as an all-or-nothing affair. It says either we live in a capitalistic, hierarchical world dominated by self-interest where problems like poverty exist, or we make the seemingly impossible switch to a better system overnight. Even though we don’t yet know what that system would look like.

But in fact, when we think about our existence on planet earth as a networked system, we realise there are tonnes of things we can do that would ameliorate the systemic problems of the planet. A networked system means everything is intimately connected and interdependent which means if we can make a change to one part of the network it has effects on the whole.

Taking the poverty example, here are a few ideas for how we could use this systems option to improve things:

We could lobby our governments to remove advertising from our cities (achieved by Sao Paulo, proposed in Berlin).
We could use art, events, and festivals to help people realise that there are other possibilities for meaning in life than consuming things.
We could start companies or social enterprises that don’t exploit the third world and maybe even try and help it!
We could bring our community together to become energy and resource self-dependent. The list goes on.

You might say these are all pretty high, mighty and difficult to achieve goals. But we can make small steps towards them. Simply helping just one person overcome the pressures of the current system and live a life based on systemic purpose instead of self-interest would have knock-on effects throughout the network. Instead of ending up in a job that perpetuates the systemic issues, e.g. most banking/ finance jobs, maybe they start an organisation to teach people about the problems of consumerism and the wonderful simplicity of a more minimal life. This would then have even more knock-on effects as people benefit, take on non-materialist values, and then spread them to others. In this way we can create feedback loops of positive change that spread through global networks.

Through these feedback loops, we can create multiple global chain reactions that filter through society to slowly unearth and tackle the root issues of our time.

We’ve created this publication, Exponential Altruism, to start exploring what this systemic option would look like and how to bring it into the world.

So I’ll leave you with one final question: how can you put the systemic option into practice in your own life? Where you try to engage with the problems of the planet, not just by patching but by working to tackle the underlying issues of our time.

References

Tom Burgis (2015): The Looting Machine: Warlords, Tycoons, Smugglers and the Systematic Theft of Africa’s Wealth, HarperCollins Publishers. ↩

A Usetarian Manifesto

2018-08-10T00:00:00+00:00

Our world is dominated by consumerist values. Advertising and the media spread the message that our lives should be dedicated to the pursuit of more. Only more money, more social status and more possessions will make us happy. Actually, this pursuit of more has catastrophic effects on both our personal well-being and shared environment.

I’ve been thinking for a while that we need a movement to push back against the spread of these values systems and to propose an alternative. We need something like Veganism but for the spread of anti-consumerist values. The animal rights movement has made huge progress in recent years with Veganism growing by 700% in the last 3 years. ¹ So why can’t we do something similar to put an end to the constant pursuit of more?

While I was hitch hiking me and a friend came up with the idea of Usetarianism! Primarily, it is a simple pledge to, where possible, only buy second hand products. But underneath, it is a value system based on living a life of voluntary simplicity as opposed to constantly searching for more.

In this article I will first lay out what is wrong with the current consumerist value system and then explain in detail the pledge and value system that go with it.

What Materialism does to our personal well-being?

The first thing to understand is that having more money, possessions or wealth do not, despite the message we’re sold by advertising every day, make us happier people.

The starkest evidence of this is that Nigerians are on average as happy as the Japanese, despite their income per person being twenty five times less! Another example is that despite incomes in the US more than doubling in the last 50 years there has been no change in overall happiness.

Psychologists have observed that humans tend to quickly return to a relatively stable level of happiness despite major life changes. This is hedonic treadmill theory. The idea is that the pursuit of happiness is like a person on a treadmill who has to keep walking just to stay in the same place. This effect is very evident when people’s income grows or they get a new possession like a car. To begin with you’re super excited to get a new Ferrari. Everyone’s commenting on it and you feel great. But pretty quickly the car just becomes a normal part of your life. What was an exciting novelty pretty quickly becomes the norm and stops making you feel good. This means that if we decide to jump onto the treadmill and get happiness from our possessions, then we’ll always be searching for the next thing that will finally make us happy. We’ll get a Ferrari but that won’t be enough. Soon we’ll want a private jet. But nothing will ever satisfy us. [This] article explains this better than I can.

Tim Kasser ² has done a lot of research into the effects of materialist values on our well being. These materialist values are spread by consumer societies to make us want more. These values include placing a great importance on wealth, social status and image. Kasser’s research shows that people with these values are overall less satisfied with their lives than those who focus on more fundamental values like their relationships with others and caring for society and the environment. People who seek happiness through materialist values tend to be more anxious and depressed, drink more alcohol and smoke more cigarettes and spend more time watching television. They’re also less empathetic and struggle to put themselves “in another person’s place”. Materialist values also erode into all aspects of our lives. An example is that people who adopt these values start to see other people in their lives primarily for their own materialistic ends. This produces the “instrumental friendships” cultivated by networking.

So instead of seeing people with ferraris and private jets as icons to be inspired to. We should see them as people enslaved to a defunct, damaging value system and then try to help them escape from it.

What Materialism does to our environment?

Not only does our rapacious pursuit of more have negative effects on our personal wellbeing it also has a devastating impact on our shared environment: planet earth.

In order to keep consumers buying regularly, manufacturers build in planned obsolescence into their products. This means that instead of making products fit to last a lifetime, they make them only last for a short period of time to encourage people to buy more. This leads us to use ever more natural resources. By 2020 every year we will be extracting 82 billion tonnes of natural resources from planet earth. Most of which will quickly end up back in land fills and be unusable for millennia.

Scientists have identified nine “Planetary Boundaries” ³ like climate change and biodiversity loss that, if passed, will have disastrous consequences for life on earth. We’re already in a “critical” region for four of these boundaries and if we are to have any hope of not going all the way into the red we need to stop our culture of more, more, more.

Voluntary Simplicity - a better alternative

So what is the alternative to these materialist values? The answer: voluntary simplicity.

Instead of constantly wanting more we should choose to have a simple life. We should only desire the things we actually need. Like healthy food and a safe, clean place to live. Once we’ve got them we can focus on other things like having deep meaningful relationships and having a positive impact on the world. If we desire anything more than the things we need then this will complicate our lives and stop us from having the time and energy to pursue the things that will really make us happy.

The ex-President of Uruguay Pepe Mujica, is a good example of someone living a life based on voluntary simplicity. Even whilst President, he lived a simple life on his 45m2 farm in a poor suburb of Montevideo. He donated over 90% of his presidential salary to NGOs. And his only possession is a Volkswagen Beetle that he bought in 1987 for 1,400 euros.

“I want to have time for the things that inspire me… That’s what real freedom is: moderation, not consuming much, a small house that lets me have the time to enjoy the things I really love… If I had lots of things I would only focus on them not getting stolen.” - Pepe Mujica

He also described “the poor as those who always want more and more.” and whilst in office accused the majority of world leaders of nurturing a “blind obsession to achieve growth with consumption, as if the contrary would mean the end of the world.”

The Usetarian Pledge

Instead of constantly wanting more we can follow the example of Pepe Mujica and choose a simple life. We really need to create a movement to spread this message and these values around the world.

I’ve been asking myself for a while why has the Vegetarian movements been so successful? And how can an anti-consumerism movement follow in its footsteps?

I think one of the key reasons for vegetarianism’s success is that it’s not just people going around saying “we should be kinder to animals”. Instead there is an absolute pledge of not eating meat that has real world consequences. Humans eat 3 times a day and that’s 3 opportunities every day for someone to say “I’m vegetarian” and others to ask why and then the movement to spread.

Could we create a similar pledge for anti-consumerism?

The simplest comparable pledge is to only buy second hand products.

I’ve decided to call this Usetarianism! The pledge is firstly to buy only used products but also to only desire things that are actually useful.

I hope that this will work similar to vegetarianism because often people will ask “where did you get that cool shirt from?”, then you’ll be forced to explain to them about the pledge.

Unfortunately unlike vegetarianism it is does have some caveats as, for example, we can’t all get our food second hand. And there are some things like socks and pants that are difficult to find second hand.

But for the vast majority of things you want to buy you can go to your local charity shop or go on eBay and find second hand things that will cost you a fraction of the price.

So become a Usetarian today! Adopt voluntary simplicity and a lifestyle that is better for you and the planet.

Footnotes

https://www.livekindly.co/number-of-vegans-in-the-uk-surges-by-700-in-just-two-years/ ↩
The High Price of Materialism by Tim Kasser ↩
https://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol14/iss2/art32/ ↩

Building a Second Brain

2018-06-17T00:00:00+00:00

Building a Second Brain

In Part 1 I explained why I’m trying to build a Second Brain or Zettelkasten and what features it needs to have.

I’ve now spent a couple of weeks experimenting with different solutions and now want to present to you my Second Brain Version 1.0.

I’ll try and make this as non-technical as possible for those of you who aren’t programmers.

Software

There are literally thousands of different note taking programs that could be a solid base for my Second Brain. I tried out a tonne of them from Evernote to Workflowy.

In fact, pretty much any of them would do the job. But some are definitely better long term solutions than others. Here are my criteria to find the best solution:

Notes stored in text files with markdown.
Fast, simple and easy to use.
Open Source

Firstly, the software needs an easy way for me to export the notes. Or even better it should store the data in an easy to use format like markdown text files. Markdown is a universal way of telling the computer when I want things like a header or a list. Why is this important? Well what happens if venture capital funding dries up and Evernote dies? Then I’m stuck with my notes on a system that will take time to migrate away from. Also another benefit of just text files is that I can easily store them on Dropbox or Github.

Secondly, it needs to be super fast and easy to use. Lots of commercially designed software like Evernote suffers from feature creep. i.e. they build way too many features that most people don’t need. And this results in the software being bloated and slow to use.

Thirdly, the software should be open source. What happens if Evernote deletes a feature that is vital to my Zettelkasten. Then I’m stuck. But if it’s open source I can just use the existing code and make my own version where the feature still exists. Also open source is the future!

These criteria might seem anal. But I’m hoping that now it’s setup my Zettelkasten will last for the rest of my life. Will Evernote last the rest of my life? Who knows.. But it seems worth it to be careful now rather than pay the consequences later.

Sublimeless

So after lots of searching I came across some software called Sublimeness.

It’s still in an alpha version but fulfils all of the criteria laid out above. It uses text files + markdown. It’s purpose built to be a Zettelkasten so only has the features I need. And even better it’s totally open source!

If you’re interested the creator discusses Sublimeness in this forum: https://forum.zettelkasten.de/discussion/226/renes-sublimeless-zettelkasten

So here is a first look at my Zettelkasten Version 1.0.

If you want to follow along you can see how to install the software here: https://github.com/renerocksai/sublimeless_zk#installation

And here are some Keyboard Shortcuts (for mac) to get you going:

Create a new note ⌘N
Search Notes ⌘P
Search Commands ⌘⇧P

You can store the folder containing the notes in Dropbox or if you’re technically minded have it automatically ‘version controlled’ with git. (here is my script for this)

Note Layout

I think the most important part of my Zettelkasten isn’t actually the software I’m using but the layout of the notes.

Most notes I’ve made in the past end up lasting pages and pages. This means that I never actually go back to them. And never absorb any of the information.

My Zettelkasten has one fundamental rule:

One Idea -> One Note

Here’s what the layout of my notes looks like:

---
title: 201806162019 Altruism
date: 2018-06-16 20:19
tags: #philosophy #humannature
---

{key information}

# More 

{extra information}

# References

To achieve this I have a key information section and a place for any extra information. I’m keeping the key information to a paragraph length maximum. This forces me to dilute down an idea to its simplest, most easy to understand form.

In Sublimeness you can set the new note template to mirror this layout by entering the following into preferences.

"new_note_template": "---\ntitle: {title}\ndate: {timestamp: %Y-%m-%d %H:%M}\ntags: \n---\n",

I’ve also setup a bibliography in a program called BibDesk which integrates with Sublimeness and allows me to do references super easily. So that when I come to use some of this information in a paper or project I know where it actually came from. Other solutions exist for windows and linux.

Note Relations

Another important thing I had to decide was how the notes would relate to each other.

I have two solutions for this.

Interlinked Notes
Summary Notes

Interlinked notes is simply where I have a link to related notes inside of an existing note. This means I can traverse the ‘tree’ of my notes by clicking through these links.

Summary notes are where I layout a sort of ‘table of contents’ for a particular area.

For example here is my table of contents for human behaviour from the book Behave:

I also make use of tags so that I can easily find notes that are connected together.

Maybe at some point I will simplify this system for note relations or come up with something better. But for now I think this approach will maximise my ability to easily access information and generate new ideas.

Printing Scripts + Anki Scripts

So one of the key requirements for my Zettelkasten was for it to be both a physical and a digital system.

To achieve this I have written a script that exports the title of each note and the ‘key information’ and places them on each side of a printable flash card.

This means that my Zettelkasten will exist in both the physical and the digital realms! Whooopeee!

I’ll be able to lay out my cards on the table and spot patterns. Thus creating totally new ideas!

I also intended on writing a similar script to create digital flash cards for the Anki space repetition software but I realised this is going to take some more time so it’s not part of my Version 1.0.

Conclusion

So there you have it! My first version second brain. I think I will make adjustments to this setup in the future. But this seems like a great first step to having a managed knowledge system that I can build upon for the rest of my life. Setting this up and making my first few notes has made me think a lot about the way we read effects what we learn. So my next post is going to be an introduction to reading with my Second Brain in mind.

Searching for a Second Brain

2018-05-22T00:00:00+00:00

I love learning new things. I spend my days reading books, articles and doing online courses. But how much of that information do I actually remember?

The sad truth: not much.

Partly I learn just for fun. I get this excitable thrill when I first understand something even if 10 minutes later I’ve forgotten all about it.

But really the main hope of my learning is that it will build a greater understanding of the world. And through that knowledge increase my ability to have a positive impact upon it.

If I forget pretty much everything I learn then am I really just wasting my time?

For a while, I’ve been contemplating how I can create a system of notes to store the information that I learn and most importantly actually retain it so I can use it in my life. I call this system a second brain!

More and more our generation are told that we have to commit to “life long learning” if we’re to keep up with the constantly changing world that we face.

But if we do that learning in the same way as we were taught in high school - i.e. cramming lots of “facts” in the weeks before an exam only to forget it all a few weeks later - then this whole “life long learning” craze is pretty pointless.

In this post I want to layout what a second brain needs to look like to actually solve these problems.

Later once I’ve actually figured out the mechanics of how I’m going to set this up I will write a more practical post on how to actually build your second brain.

But isn’t Google already a second brain?

Before I lay out what I think a “second brain” should look like. I need to dispel some pretty obvious questions that I imagine many of you might be having.

“Can’t you just use google to find out any information you need?”

“Isn’t google and the internet already equivalent to a second brain for humanity?”

Well…. sort of.

Yes you can google to find information and that’s fantastically useful in a lot of cases.

But for a category of activities that’s often called “Knowledge Work” this isn’t good enough.

Knowledge work is done by writers, academics, creatives and ideas people.

The core task of knowledge work is finding connections between unconnected ideas.

For example, most academic papers, at least in the humanities and social sciences, can be simplified as taking an idea or model that was used elsewhere and applying it in a new area.

To make this connection between ideas you have to have them in your brain.

You can’t google to connect something because you won’t know what to google for.

It seems likely, with the growth of automation, that this knowledge work will become more and more important as the 21st century progresses. So finding solutions to the problems I have identified are crucial.

Previous Attempts: The Zettelkasten

After doing some research I realised that lots of writers and academics have already faced this problem before and found their own unique solutions.

German sociologist Niklas Luhmann used a method of index cards to record his ideas and knowledge. He called this a Zettelkasten (German for “slip box”) and used it to build a systems theory approach to social structures.

Each “Zettel” or index card contained one idea and the cards were grouped according to theme.

I discovered this method through non-fiction writer Ryan Holiday who used it to come up with ideas for his non-fiction books on Stoicism.

Ronald Reagan (not that I’m a big fan) also developed a similar system that he kept going until he died! His notes were mostly filled with quotes that helped him write the countless speeches and talks that he had to give as president.

Specification for My Second Brain

So lots of people have tried to solve this problems before. There’s even lots of software built for the purpose. For example Evernote claims to help you “remember everything”.

But none of these solutions completely fit what I’m looking for. Because I don’t think they fundamentally solve the problem of how to retain useful information to allow you to make creative connections.

To actually solve this problem requires a system with the following characteristics:

Both Digital and Physical.
Encorporates “Chunking”.
Use Spaced Repetition.
Clearly Structured.

Now I will explain each one in more detail.

Both Digital AND Physical

People who’ve tried to solve these problems already seem to either choose to use physical cards and boxes or they have a digital software system.

There are big advantages of both physical and digital systems that I don’t want to miss out on.

A physical system works really well when you can just thumb your way through a few hundred notes to find the information you’re looking for. You can also spread the cards out on a table and put them together in order to find connections. You can take the cards with you on the train. And I have a hunch that actually using physical objects rather than a screen would help you learn and create more.

But imagine if you had thousands of notes like the Sociologist Luhmann. It might take you hours to find what you’re looking for. Digital search, on the other hand, is pretty much instant.

The other advantage of a digital system is that you can write programs to analyse the cards you’ve created. And you can make changes to all the cards at once. That could save tonnes and tonnes of time!

So somehow I want my system to encorporate the best of both digital and physical.

Encorporates “Chunking”

Cognitive Psychologists have shown that the best way for the brain to process information is in “chunks”.

A chunk is a group of information that is easier for the brain to recall.

For example try remembering a number like 12101946.

And then again try to remember it as 12/10/1946.

The second should be a lot easier.

Lots of the Zettelkasten systems I’ve looked into seem to have tonnes and tonnes of information on each “Zettel” or card.

This makes it super difficult for the brain to process the information.

I think a vital principle for a successful system is: One idea, One Card.

And actually I would go even further than that. If I can’t describe it in 3 sentences then it’s probably too complicated.

Another cool idea would be to use mnemonics to make these chunks even easier to learn and recall.

Uses Spaced Repetition

Another learning technique that can be applied to my “second brain” is spaced repetition.

In this method you steadily increase the intervals of time between reviewing the information that you want to learn.

This is based on an idea in psychology called the spacing effect. This states that you will learn more if your studying is spread out over time as opposed to studying the same amount of content in a single session.

When you first learn something it enters your short term memory. But if you don’t go back to it, it will quickly be forgotten.

If you relearn that same bit of information a bit later then it will stick around for a bit longer.

This process continues with the time between learning and forgetting getting further and further apart.

People have developed software such as Anki to solve this problem. They show you flash cards at the correct intervals so that you learn as quickly and efficiently as possible. These techniques have also been taken on by learning software like Duolingo and Memrise.

My ideal Zettelkasten system would encorporate this spaced repetition method so that I will actually retain the information that i store.

Clear Structure

I think the most important feature of a successful system is going to be having a clear structure in place.

I have to decide:

What will a “Zettle” or note look like?
How will I group notes? By tags? or categories?
Will I have links between notes?
Will there be some hierarchy or graph structure to the notes?
Will I have different types of notes for different types of information? For example a definition vs an argument?

I haven’t found the answer to these questions yet. But it seems like without making a clear, fixed structure it will be impossible to keep the information organised and easy to use.

Because of how vital having very structured notes are, I think there is definitely a cost to up-keeping and retaining this knowledge.

This leads me to two final questions:

“What knowledge is worth this cost?”.

but also

“How can I judge in advance which particular bits of information are likely to be useful in the future?”

Conclusion

I’m hoping that in the next few weeks I can get my “second brain” system setup and working!

I think this would give me a huge advantage for the rest of my life. It can be applied to pretty much any endeavor I take on. And it will hopefully allow me to see connections that other people are missing.

I have this vision that in some utopian future when children first enter school they will be ceremoniously given their own Zettelkasten where they can record their intellectual lives and practical pursuits!

Maybe one day!

How To Break Your Technology Addiction

2018-03-19T00:00:00+00:00

What’s the biggest addiction of the 21st century?

Maybe heroine, cocaine or alcohol?

Well no! I think the biggest 21st century addiction is to technology.

Addictions aren’t just about drugs. They are anything that we persist in doing despite visible negative consequences.

Now I will explain why I think technology classifies.

Why technology is addictive?

If you’re between 18 and 24 the data says that you look at your phone on average 74 times per day. 35% of people admit that their phone is the first thing they think of when they wake up. Only 10% think of their partner!

Take a look at a minute of this video from the documentary Stare Into The Lights My Pretties. I don’t think you can watch that clip and not think we’re all addicted. We’ve been trained in the same way as that rat to constantly seek the dopamine hit of technology.

There’s a technique used in the gambling industry called intermittent variable rewards. If you want to incentivise someone to perform an action you could give them a reward every time they do what you want. But actually a far better strategy is to only give the reward some of the time. The uncertainty of whether you will get the reward is supremely addictive for the human brain.

This exact technique is used by Facebook. When you check, you don’t know whether you will have 0 messages or 5. The brain releases a tonne of dopamine because it doesn’t know what reward it’s going to get. This is crazily addictive.

Why it has serious negative consequences?

I realised my own addiction to technology when I started trying to write every day. I would write a few sentence and then get distracted.

When I tried to focus on what was causing the distraction I nearly always found it was because my mind had developed a habit that whenever it didn’t know what to do it would say “oh you can check technology”. Trying to write is filled with these moments. What should I write next? How should I write that next sentence? Instead of persevering to solve these questions my brain would take the easy route and check technology.

Pretty much all valuable work requires intense focus. To do this deep work you need long periods of undistracted time. If you impulsively check Facebook, WhatsApp or Email then you will be constantly distracted.

Also helpful for doing important work is getting into flow states. These are periods where you’re working on something that’s just at the boundary of your abilities. Time seems to melt away and hours pass without you noticing. Lots of researchers think this is an optimal state for human beings. Getting into flow states is incredibly challenging if you’re always getting notifications or you’re always checking your phone.

Technology has killed bored. It’s killed day dreaming. Solving problems and figuring out what to do with your life often requires a type of thinking called diffuse thinking. This is when your brain connects seemingly disparate ideas in order to solve problems. This is the type of thinking that occurs when your day dreaming. Your brain is just playing around with different ideas. If you’re never bored because you can always find something novel or new online then you’ll never day dream. What’s life without day dreaming!

Our collective technology addiction has also had a bad effect on our interpersonal interactions. How can you be fully “with” someone when you’re constantly thinking about checking your facebook.

Why you can’t just trash your phone?

Sometimes all of these negatives make we want to do this to my phone and laptop.

So I can spend all of my time like this gal:

But actually technology still gives a lot of value to my life. I can keep in contact with people from around the world. I can find out about inspiring events near me. I can listen to podcasts that open my eyes to new ideas. I can write, make videos, make music. Be creative.

The key is to figure out how we can make use of all these benefits without technology taking control of our lives.

What I’ve done about it.

I’ve been experimenting with a load of techniques for tackling technology addiction for a while that I want to share with you today. I’ll describe the method and then explain how successful it’s been for me.

1. Eradicating my FB newsfeed

I wanted to be able to use FB for messaging and events but the newsfeed is a crazy, addictive (maybe depressive) time sink so it had to go.

There’s an application called News Feed Eradicator for chrome and another for firefox.

That leaves your FB looking clean and undistracting:

Success: 7 / 10

Don’t spend any time checking my news feed any more! A big win! But this was never really that much of a problem for me.

There’s also a similar extension for youtube. That stops you going on crazy crawls.

2. Greyscale Phone

There’s a lot of research that says that the colourful icons of our phones give our brains shiny rewards every time we unlock.

You can set your phone to greyscale to get around this.

For an iPhone: Go to Settings > General > Accessibility.

For android: Here’s a guide.

Success: 6 / 10

Seemed to be checking my phone a bit less after switching to greyscale but not a massive change.

3. Phone outside bedroom

A big problem for me was checking my phone the minute I got up. It was my alarm. So I would turn off my alarm.. and had then trained myself to check online. And I’d probably spend the next 0-1 hour browsing away.

It really primes my day badly if I do this. I’ve started the day thinking about other people’s problems. Rather than what I can contribute to the world.

So get an alarm clock and keep your phone out of the bedroom.

Success: 8 / 10

This simple switch seemed to help everything else for me. If you don’t start the day checking your phone then it has a lot less influence over the rest of your day

4. Morning Deep Work Time

A key thing I was trying to achieve by cutting back on technology was to have more time to engage in deep work.

More time for working on projects that I actually care about rather than mindless browsing.

I decided to create a Morning Deep Work Ritual. By this I mean I decided that until midday I would not use technology for anything BUT deep work.

I wouldn’t check messages. I wouldn’t check the news.

It was kind of hard to maintain the motivation to actually do this.

Until I found Freedom App.

It lets you block sites of your choice on any schedule you like. So I setup it to block all my distracting sites every morning. I even made it impossible to turn off. I had to stick to this.

It also has a phone app as well so you can really go cold turkey.

Success: 9 / 10

This has really had a big impact on my life. If I don’t spend the morning distracted then I tend to not spend the afternoon distracted either. If I get stuff done in the morning then I can enjoy my afternoons. Go climb. Go meet people.

5. Messaging Time

As well as having a deep work ritual I am trying to have one time a day when I check and reply to emails and messages. Then I won’t be constantly checking and replying to messages all day long. And I can take my time in my replies.

Success: 4 / 10

Finding this kind of difficult to achieve because I’m always using messages to organise things. So I try to plan meeting up with someone to work on a project. Then end up spending half an hour messaging other people. Must be a better way to get around this but I haven’t figured it out yet.

6. Eradicate All Notifications

The first thing to do to tackle technology addictions is to eradicate all notifications. These notifications are basically companies saying: “Come back and spend time with meee!”. If you have notifications on then you’re basically letting these companies, who’s primary motive is to keep you distracted so they can make a profit, determine how you spend your time.

Here’s a guide to turning off notifications on ios and android.

Success: 10 / 10

Ditching notifications is vital for not being constantly distracted.

7. Number of Visits + Countdown Popups

There’s an awesome app called BrowseWithIntent! It cleverly pushes you towards better technology habits.

One use of it is to show you a popup of how many times you’ve visited a site.

So you can be like “Oh shit, I’ve already been on FB 37 times today”. What am I doing with my life. This is a cool idea but in the end I just end up ignoring it.

An even better feature of Browse with Intent is a countdown popup. When the brain checks facebook it’s looking for a quick dopamine hit. You can frustrate that hit by making the brain wait 10 seconds before getting what it wants. This will be intensely frustrating but often I see the countdown time, realise I’m not going to get what I want, then go back to what I was actually w orking on.

Success: 7/10

8. Technology Flow Chart

I had an idea to make a flow chart or checklist to decide whether I was allowed to use technology.

Success: 4/10

This was useful to think about when technology was actually adding value to my life. But because technology addiction is a habit most of the time you end up using technology without any conscious process. So the flow chart doesn’t actually help.

The Craftsman Approach to Technology.

In general all of these approaches encapsulate the “Craftsman Approach”. This idea, that I discovered in Cal Newport’s book Deep Work, is that instead of accepting all technology as positive, we should deliberately choose technology as a “tool to achieve a job”. A carpenter might have a particular saw for a particular job. Likewise, we should use facebook for a particular job. i.e. as a tool for managing just our events. Or just our messages. But we should work to keep it just for that job and not let it take over all aspects of our lives.

The Please Disease and Finding Out What I Want

2018-03-16T00:00:00+00:00

I don’t know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody. - Bill Cosby

I’ve been having a lot of anxiety lately about what subject do for a research masters. And more generally what to do with my life. Every few days for the last month or so I’ve been switching back and forth between a whole host of options. But just before I was about to fall asleep last night I had a big realisation about why this decision is proving so difficult.

The issue is that somewhere within me I have a strong desire to please others. I want to avoid causing any upset or trauma. I want everything to be “okay” in my relationships with other people. I’m scared out of my mind of rocking the boat. But also like every human being I want to be liked. I want people to think “wow, he’s got it all together”. He has an identity. Julyan the philosopher, artist, scientist etc. When I’m trying to make a decision like this I don’t end up thinking about how that decision would affect me but what my friends or family would think of it. In the case of my masters: Is it radical enough for some of my lefty friends? Is it technical enough for my sciencey brother and the people I know in the startup world? Is focused enough on the growing ecological crisis for my mum? Will it get me the rewarding job in academia I think my Dad hopes for me? Is it creative enough for my arty friends? Spiritual enough for my meditation buddies? I even think about distant family friends and can’t help but think: what would they make of this choice? Most of these ideas about what people want are my own projections. Most people don’t actually care. And my close friends and family just want me to do what’s best for me. But because I care so much what they think I blow up their minute preferences to extreme proportions.

This is an awful way to make decisions. You can’t incorporate all of these options and aspects into a masters program. Or into a fulfilling career or life. You can’t live a life where you try to appease everyone. At some point you have to choose a path and that involves leaving some and maybe a lot of people thinking: “Why the hell is he doing THAT!”. In fact if you take the “please to appease” path through life you probably won’t do anything remarkable. Most people who do new things do it despite the fact that most of society thinks they’re crazy. Just look at the suffragette movement or someone like Elon Musk building reusable rockets even though everyone thought it was impossible. Big and important things happen when people back themselves to do what they think is right.

The thing that I’m still struggling with is figuring out in all the noise what I actually want. Here are a few ideas I’ve had already:

1. What do I keep coming back to?

I’ve been inspired by Emily Wapnick’s idea of Multipotentialites. Which says that some people weren’t born to have one true calling. They are best when they can naturally dot around through their many varied interests. I love this approach because it turns around the perspective from feeling like a flawed human being for not have a “one true passion” into feeling proud to have so many interests and do many things. But at some points I still think we have to pigeon hole ourselves to some extent. Really important projects are probably going to take longer periods of time than our attention spans will hold. Studying my masters in one subject for example. A whole year doing one thing. That’s absolutely terrifying. But without it I’m missing out on something that is maybe important. Being able to do academic work that contributes to the knowledge base of humanity.

So to find out what I actually want maybe the question is what topics and areas do I keep coming back to. We might spend some time apart but then something draws me back. The curiosity that draws me back is deeply personal. It’s because one day I thought: “That sounds cool why don’t I look into it”. Rather than me thinking: “What will everyone think if I start doing that”.

2. What obsessed me in my childhood?

I don’t believe the idea that we are born with a destiny to do one thing for the world. People are way more complicated than that. We have the option to do many things and make many choices. But maybe thinking back to our childhoods can help us to decide. If we think about the time before social pressures really kicked in. What did we care about? What intrigued us? Humans love stories so we’re more likely to find purpose and commit to something if we can create a narrative around why we’re doing it. If we can say “even when I was 5 I was thinking about the stars”. Or I started working as a psychologist because of my own intense battles with depression. It might sound like I’m saying we should create a fictional story for ourselves. Maybe. But definitely inklings from our childhood can help guide the way.

3. Does it excite me?

The most important question for me is whether when I sit down and through an option it makes excited. If I imagine myself living out the decision in a years time do I think “Wow that’s fucking cool!”. Is it something that would make me want to get up in the morning? I only have one life. 80 or so years to live on the planet so If I’m not spending that time doing things that give me energy and joy then I’m definitely doing something wrong.

My late night realisation about my “Please Disease” has helped me to understand why these decisions cause me so much stress. I’m still figuring out how I can find out what I truly deep down want in the noise of my need to please. But one thing is for sure: to live a fulfilling life you’re going to have to make some people unhappy.

On Being Fearcited

2018-02-19T00:00:00+00:00

For those of you who don’t know: in January I moved to Berlin!

I’m coming up to my one month anniversary of being here so I thought I would write something about it!

In the beginning, it felt like one of the scariest things I have ever done. Being in a new city where I knew absolutely no-one could have been a huge recipe for disaster! Berlin is a dark and cold place this time of year. For a while moving here felt like a terrible mistake.

But at the same time I felt enormous excitement at the possibilities and freedom open to me here. And the fantasy of being in a new unexplored place.

I’ve travelled on my own quite a bit in the past which was always challenging in itself. But hopping from place to place is a very different challenge to moving to a new city for an extended period of time. Travelling in South America gave me a lot of self-reliance that I’m forever tapping into and grateful for. But while I was travelling there, I always had a feeling that if it got bad or I felt depressed I could move on. I could go to the next place, rekindle my excitement and leave my fears at the wayside. If needed I could constantly be reinventing myself.

Here in Berlin my emotional life has been like a yoyo swinging back and forth between the two polar extremes of anxiety and excitement.

What is being Fearcited?

I’ve realised that I should embrace these emotions. In fact my best times here are when I feel them simultaneously. An emotion I will call being Fearcited! Chills on the back of your neck. Heart rate raised. A stomach in knots. Your mind is shouting out “Don’t do it!” . “Go home!” Take the easy, safe option. Stay in bed where it’s warm and nothing can go wrong. But your body acts anyway. You find yourself almost robotically moving towards your fear without a second thought.

It crops up when I’m on the edge of my comfort zone. When I’m doing new things that could go wrong. Things that could make me look like an idiot.

If you’re just afraid or just excited then you have a problem. If you spend your time in the pits of anxiety because you’ve pushed yourself too far, you end up like a deer in the headlights. Paralysed. You can’t move. Doing anything is too much effort. Too scary.

At the other extreme if you are only excited then you’re probably not pushing yourself far enough to try things that could go wrong. Things that could blow up in your face. It can be nice to live a carefree life. But I always feel that I’ll regret not chasing my dreams. That I’m missing out on taking life as an adventure rather than a fun fair ride. That I’m not making the most of this beautiful life I’ve been given.

Being “Fearcited” is the sweet spot! It’s the place of growth. When you push yourself to be “Fearcited” there’s a good chance you will come out the other end as a new person. I like the word “Fearcited” because it sounds a little like “Farsighted”. And you feel “Fearcited” when you’re taking the long term view.

“ Farsighted - wise, as in foreseeing future developments” - Oxford English Dictionary

I’m “Fearcited” when I do the things that are most important. The things I will look back on from my death bed and say “Wow that was something special”. Being in Berlin has helped me to realise that putting myself in situations where I feel “Fearcited” and then overcoming them is a pathway to growing myself as a human being.

Flow and Fearcited

And I’m not the only one to think this. I’ve seen similar ideas pop up in a few places. It’s at the heart of Flow Psychology. This is the idea that human beings are at their peak when they are working so intently on something to the extent that reality, space and time seem to fade into the background. But we only get into this zone when we’re faced with adversity. There must be a challenge that is just the right level of difficulty. Not too much so that we are paralysed into inaction. But just enough so feel like we’re doing something meaningful. Something new. This is what it is like to be “Fearcited”.

“Of all the virtues we can learn no trait is more useful, more essential for survival, and more likely to improve the quality of life than the ability to transform adversity into an enjoyable challenge.” - Mihaly Csikzentmihalyi

Fearcited and Practice

Another interesting idea is Deliberate Practice which I read about in the research of Prof. Anders Ericsson. He asks the question how do the best of the best in their fields make it to the top. How did Roger Federer become the best tennis player in the world? Or Magnus Carlsen reach the pinnacle of chess? The answer: they practice what they find difficult. They search for players who are better than them to learn from. They don’t sit back and enjoy their victories but are alway striving for more. They become accustomed to being “Fearcited!” So it seems that if you can learn to live with this feeling then you will go far.

“The reason that most people don’t possess these extraordinary physical capabilities isn’t because they don’t have the capacity for them, but rather because they’re satisfied to live in the comfortable rut of homeostasis and never do the work that is required to get out of it. They live in the world of “good enough.” The same thing is true for all the mental activities we engage in,” - K. Anders Ericcson

So my thought for today. Find the things that you are afraid of but also excited by. Dive in! Feel “Fearcited”.

NVC in Richard Linklater’s Before Midnight

2018-02-05T00:00:00+00:00

NVC in Richard Linklater’s Before Midnight

I’ve been reading a lot about Non Violent Communication in the past few weeks. It’s a method for compassionate communication for resolving conflicts between individuals and groups. The creator, Marshall Rosenberg, used NVC during peace programs in conflict areas from Rwanda to Ireland. But it’s also useful in any relationship at home or in the workplace.

The key idea of NVC is that people come into conflict when they have unfulfilled needs. Normally they express these needs through “violent” language which is often misunderstood and just perpetuates the conflict. NVC provides a method for fully expressing our needs allowing us to deal with others with compassion and love.

“Nonviolence means avoiding not only external physical violence, but also internal violence of spirit. You not only refuse to shoot a man, but you refuse to hate him.” — Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Last night I watched Richard Linklater’s film Before Midnight. It is the third film in a trilogy about a couple who meet on a train from Vienna to Budapest. The first two films are very romantic. In the first film they spend a day together walking around Vienna, slowly falling in love.

But by the third film the romance has faded. They have two children together and have started bickering about pretty much everything. Jesse (played by Ethan Hawke) is unhappy that he can’t spend more time with his teenage son who lives in Chicago with his ex-wife. Celine (played by Julie Delpy) is at a career crossroads and thinks that if she moves to Chicago it will blow her chances of having a career outside of her family.

While watching the film I couldn’t help but think that NVC applies so much to their problems. Instead of expressing their actual needs they spend the film arguing and not actually listening to one another. Maybe if they could follow the guidelines of NVC then their problems would be more surmountable.

In this post I will explain NVC’s method of communication and apply it to Jesse and Celine’s dilemma.

The NVC Method

The fundamental idea of NVC is that human conflict comes from unfulfilled needs.

These needs cause feelings and thoughts which then lead to violent communication.

Needs -> Feelings / Thoughts -> Violent Communication

The solution to these “violent” modes of communication is to better understand our own needs and those of others. NVC teaches 3 methods for achieving this.

1. Self - Empathy

An important part of NVC is understanding what is going on inside of us.

What are the needs that underlie the thoughts and emotions we are feeling?

We can’t adequately express our needs without knowing what they are.

The NVC website provides a [list of feelings] and a [list of needs] if you’re confused.

2. Receiving Empathetically

NVC suggests that we should try and listen for the underlying feelings, needs and requests people are making whether they come in a “violent” form or not.

When someone shouts “F#ck you!”, what they really mean is, “I am in so much pain that I can’t express my real needs and feelings.”

This doesn’t mean we should try to feel the same feelings as the other person. That’s sympathy.

Instead we should aim to “be with” the other person in their problems.

Empathy instead should involve “emptying the mind and listening with our whole being”.

“Empathy is full presence to what’s alive in the other person at this moment.”

One technique suggested by NVC for receiving empathetically is to take whatever “violent” or otherwise language the other person is using and try to re-phrase it in terms of the implicit NVC components. i.e. the feelings and needs you guess they are trying to express.

3. Expressing Honestly

When we feel we have an unfulfilled need that we want to express NVC has a 4 step process for doing this.

a) Express an observation. (specific to time and content) Don’t generalise.

Don’t say: You never listen to me. Say: You didn’t seem to be listening to me when I was telling you about my troubles at work.

The important thing here is differentiating observation from evaluation. You’re not saying the problem is inherent to the other person. This would only make them defensive. But instead you just express a single observation.

b) Explain how you are feeling in relation to what you observe.

Don’t say: It makes me think that you don’t love me. Say: It makes me feel unloved.

The key part is to separate feeling from thinking. Thinking implies judgement, criticism or blame. You’re not saying it was wrong for them not to be listening. But just how it personally effected you.

c) Explain what you need or value (rather than a preference) that causes your feelings.

Say: I need re-assurance and love in my life.

d) Request the concrete actions I would like taken.

Say: Would you be willing to try to pay more attention to me next time I’m trying to get stuff off my chest?

We should clearly request what we would like to happen without demanding it. This leaves the other person the option to refuse.

Jesse and Celine’s dilemma

So in Before Midnight what are the underlying needs of the couple?

Jesse is trying to express his need to spend more time with his son. Celine, on other hand, is trying to express her need for meaningful work.

So applying the NVC framework:

Expressing Honestly:

When I have to say goodbye to my son, I feel depressed and worried that I’m not spending enough time with him. I need to spend more time with my son and I think he needs me in his life. How would you feel about moving to Chicago to be closer to him? — Jesse

Receiving Empathetically:

It must be so difficult to only see your son once a year. I can see how that makes you feel depressed. — Celine

Expressing Honestly:

But when you suggest moving to Chicago, I feel resentful because I won’t be able to pursue my career there and it is important to me to be doing purposeful work. Instead of moving to Chicago, would you consider trying to get custody of your son? — Celine

Receiving Empathetically:

I can see how you feel threatened when I suggest moving to Chicago. It’s so important that you have work that is meaningful and fulfilling and you don’t feel like that I’m forcing you to be a stay at home mum. — Jess

I’m not saying that using NVC would solve Jesse and Celine’s problems. Maybe the conflict is not resolvable and they have to split up and go separate ways. But I think using NVC would allow them to figure out what they are both need and are feeling without the bickering and growing hate for each other.

The Spiritual Component

The more time I spend thinking about NVC, the more I feel it’s fundamentally a spiritual practice. By trying to understand the needs of others and by expressing ourselves honestly, we are escaping our individuality and idea of self. It also connects us with the idea that we are all in some sense the same. We all have these needs and feelings. We all struggle to express them.

All in all, NVC seems to be a hugely important tool for creating a peaceful, more compassionate world.

To be like Buddha. Be like Sherlock.

2018-01-30T00:00:00+00:00

In this series of posts, I will explore different philosophies of life. I’m going to look at a whole variety of ideas. Some religious, some philosophical. Some ancient, some modern. In the hope that these ideas can they help us live better lives today in the 21st century.

In this post, I will delve into Buddhism. Although I’m an atheist, I still think there are plenty of things to be learnt from religious traditions. Stripped of their mysticism and dogma they are guidebooks for living fruitful lives.

Why Sherlock Holmes?

I’ve been thinking about how to simplify all of Buddhist teachings into a single metaphor.

What I’ve come up with is:

“Buddhism teaches us to be like Sherlock Holmes.”

What do I mean by that?

Sherlock Holmes investigates his surroundings in extreme detail to solve a murder mystery. He finds the small nuances that solve the case.

I think the fundamental aspect of Buddhism is using the same powers of investigation to investigate the mental world.

The Buddha believed that everyone must discover the nature of reality for himself or herself.

They should look within themselves and figure out what is actually happening in their minds on a moment to moment basis.

Meditation is how we can look into our minds and see what’s going on.

“No one saves us but ourselves. No one can and no one may. We ourselves must walk the path.” - Gautama Buddha

He believed that if they did this they would all discover the same essential truths about existence.

So what are those essential truths?

Impermanence Annica

The mind is in constant change.

When you look within, all you can find are thoughts arising and then passing away.

You can’t pin down anything constant or solid. It’s all in constant flux.

Our bodies are the same. You are not the same person as you were 5 minutes ago let alone a year ago. Cells are constantly splitting, dying and moving through the body.

“It’s no use going back to yesterday, because I was a different person then.” - Lewis Carroll

If we’re in distress this truth of impermanence can be very helpful.

Even if the brain is totally obsessed by an anxious or depressed thought, at some point that obsession will come to an end.

We might be in the midst of all-consuming grief, loss or sorrow but we can console ourselves with this truth that it won’t last forever.

Suffering Dukkha

When you pay attention to the brain you realise there are constantly thoughts and feelings arising in the brain.

But looking deeper what are the contents of these thoughts?

Buddhism teaches that they are made up of two human impulses: Craving and Aversion.

Craving is when we want the world to be different. We become attached to this different state of the world and we spend our time thinking: “Why can’t I have the thing that I want”. This makes us suffer because while we don’t get what we want we spend all our time unhappily desiring it. And even when the things we desire come to pass we quickly become accustomed to them so they don’t actually make us any happier.

“Life contains but two tragedies. One is not to get your heart’s desire; the other is to get it.” - Socrates

The rest of the time we spend being aversive. We push away painful thoughts or states of being. We think that being in a particular state is so bad that we must do everything we can to escape it. Often like a man in quicksand when you fighting against these states pulls you further into them.

“Nothing can harm you as much as your own thoughts unguarded.”

Once we realise these are the patterns of your mind we can do something about it. We can be less drawn by the craving. Be happier with our lives as they are. We can learn to accept the negatives as part of the bigger picture.

“For, after all, the best thing one can do when it is raining is let it rain.” - Henry Longfellow

No Self Anatta

This is the idea that the self does not exist. When we investigate our thoughts eventually we realise that there is no separate observer in the mind. All we can find are thoughts arising and falling. Nothing else. There’s isn’t another entity viewing the thoughts. For this reason, most Buddhists do not believe in the soul.

But how can this help?

If we realised that the “I” that we normally care so much about doesn’t actually exist. Then there is nothing to be egotistical about and a lot of our worldly cares can pass away.

I hope you’ve liked this intro to Buddhism!

5 MOOCs to keep up with a changing world!

2017-01-18T00:00:00+00:00

I wanted to make a list of the online courses that have had the biggest impact upon me! So here’s 5! All with tonnes of powerful ideas and tools for learning and understanding the world.

1. Learning How to Learn by Barbara Oakley and Terrence Sejnowski

This course has tonnes of ideas for turbocharging learning!

A huge idea is that there are two learning modes: Diffuse and Focused.

Focused thinking is when we are really concentrating on a problem and trying to ignore all extraneous information.

Diffused, on the other hand, looks at the big picture. It happens when you let your mind wander and make connections at random.

The course teaches you how to combine BOTH of these modes to maximise your learning potential!

2. Human Behavioural Biology by Robert Sapolsky

Sapolsky is a legend in the field of understanding humans and their actions! In this course he explores loads of scientific disciplines from Evolutionary Psychology to Neuroscience to Ethology to help answer the question what makes us tick.

The big idea I like in Sapolsky is his idea of buckets! Which is that if you just stick to one way of looking at the world then you’ll eventually run into trouble. Instead you should have a tonne of buckets which you can apply to real world problems.

Sapolsky teaches us the main buckets to study human behaviour. So if you see someone doing something crazy then you’ll have a host of ideas to figure it out. Neuroscience might tell you one thing. Evolutionary Psychology another.

It’s when you can combine these approaches together that you have a hugey powerful holistic view of the world!

It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it. - Aristotle

A cool resource for notes: http://www.robertsapolskyrocks.com/

3. Justice by Michael Sandel

“Michael Sandel is a philospher with the global profile of a rockstar. He’s a Harvard Professor who doesn’t just lecture in halls but in stadiums!” - Tim Franks BBC News

Sandel’s Harvard course on Justice is the best introduction to philosophy and the problems of morality and society! It’s absolutely captivating, I binged watched it like a HBO show! He uses stories so well to illustrate some of the biggest ideas in ethics and political philosophy.

These ideas are timeless but technology is making the issues even more pressing. What is the meaning of freedom of speach in the online world? And how can we maintain morality in a technological world?

4. Machine Learning by Andrew Ng

Ng founded the Google Brain project at google which developed artificial neural networks to take advantage of google’s crazy massive distributed computer systems. They even used it to trawl youtube videos detecting cats, without ever telling the computer anything about what a cat is like!

So he is the perfect person to teach us Machine Learning! This course has become a classic as a first step into the world of machine learning.

It contains the most effective machine learning techniques so you can actually learn the technologies powering self driving cars and computer vision!

5. Harvard’s CS109 - Data Science

Many people think that machine learning is going to be THE major underlying technology in the future.

If this is true then one result is that data is the new Oil!

It will have the same importance to the world as Oil did in the 20th century. Because do do machine learning you need data and lots of it!

So it’s an incredibly powerful tool to be able to understand and use data. And this course is the best I’ve found to get some deep insights into all of that.

At the end you’ll be able to take some data and make accurate predictions from it. Which is, in my opinion, the most powerful tool for really understanding the world.

The Completionist Mindset

2017-01-04T00:00:00+00:00

I want to start writing shorter posts where I lay out an idea that I think is important; one that I’ve either had personally or that I’ve come into contact with. Hopefully this will help me develop the skill of being able to distill something to its purest core making it clear and easily understood. So here goes! Attempt 1. One of my own!

The completionist mindset is excessively viewing life as a set of achievements to be accomplished. It’s when you read a book to say that you’ve finished it or to tick it off your checklist rather than for the insights or imaginations it will provide. Do you want to read Tolstoy for his observations on human nature and society or to get further through your list of “top 100 books to read!”?

For me and some friends I’ve discussed this with, the mindset has developed when we first realised the shortness of life. When you’re coming to terms with the truth that you’re existence will one day end you begin to think that every moment has infinite importance. This can be hugely positive and bring intense meaning to your life but the completionist mindset is taking this view to its extremes in an excessive way. You view your life in terms of a list of things you will have accomplished by the day of your death. And the more different, varied things on the list then the better the life that you have lived.

The completionist mindset has two fundamental problems:

One

It creates enormous paranoia and anxiety about making the best possible choice in each moment in order to add to your “life record”. Anxiety of this kind reduces the actual enjoyment of our lives and the things we choose to do. Living in the present moment is more important than always making the perfect decision. It’s impossible to bring presence when you’ve been captured by the completionist mindset.

Two

The things we think are cool and important now are probably not the same as when we die. This article highlights what people who are dying actually care about: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2012/feb/01/top-five-regrets-of-the-dying They’re not about accomplishing things but living a life of meaning, allowing ourselves to be happy and having deep, honest relationships with our friends and family.

Metaphor Experiment

One way I’m experimenting with presenting ideas is in the form of metaphor’s or images.

I have an image in my mind of the completionist mindset as an avatar in an old online role playing game I used to play as a kid. Nerdy as fuck…. I know! But it helps me think about it. Your avatar has a series of achievements to meet in areas that have been built into the game. Visit all the places on the map. That sort of thing. Some then give you “titles” that you can present to the online world. My favourite started at: “Kind of a big deal”, passed through “I have many leather bound books” and finished at “God Walking Amongst Mere Mortals”. In life these sections are often set by our society and our environment. Like in the game often we don’t actively chose them. The achievement for our “real-life avatars” might be getting married, having a successful career, getting fit, trying out as many sports as possible or travelling to all the countries of the world. When you’ve achieved one of these you can then present the title to the world. Mr Davey, Your Honor, Judge whoever… or just when you tell people you’ve traveled to 35 countries and are an “accomplished traveller”. I hope this side metaphor helps you to understand the completionist mindset!

Bias Busting - Tube Snap Judgements

2016-07-04T00:00:00+00:00

Introduction

I was recently discussing with Tom McGivan the extent to which we should make snap judgements of people based on their appearances.

He phrased the problem as follows:

On the one hand, I feel bad for looking at how people appear and making a judgement. Maybe they won’t live up to my poor expectations. In fact they may end up being incredible people who I never meet because I’ve ruled them out so superficially.

On the other hand, how people appear seems a pretty decent rule of thumb as to where people’s values lie. For example, I was just on the tube and saw these two guys. One was wearing a thin-layered gilet, woollen tie, signet ring etc. The other a fancy suit. And I thought to myself, I expect these guys chat about something I don’t agree with (assuming it would be something sexist, racist or to do with spending money/time in a way I don’t value). And lo and behold they did. So my judgement on the basis of appearance served me well. And it often does in situations like this.

But the question remains, where to draw the line between these two propositions?

A classic response to this conundrum is the Buddhist idea of non-dualism. This states that we use our perceptions to place everything in the world into fixed categories. For example, on the Tube we might decide that some people are worth talking to and some are not. Or that some people are interesting and some are not. These categories are inherent falsehoods. They are simplifications of the inherently complex, unique and ever changing people behind the categories. Buddhist’s argue that to reach “enlightenment” we must abandon such notions and perceive the world for what it truly is.

Today I will investigate what modern cognitive psychology research has to say about this Buddhist approach and how our brains jump to conclusions about the people around us.

An Intro to Systems Theory

Daniel Kahneman is an academic who works in the intersection between Psychology, Cognitive Science and Behavioural Economics. He is seen as the godfather of the field of Heuristics and Biases. As you will see, this area is very relevant to the topic of snap judgements. One of his main ideas is Systems Theory.

He models the brain as running two systems:

System 1 is the emotive system designed to respond quickly and make leaps of judgement, like when you judge someone based on their appearance. Pre-historic humans had to live in a rapidly changing environment. This system allowed them to see a lion and then run away without actively thinking: “There’s a lion. If I stay here it will eat me. Therefore I must run away”.

System 2, on the other hand, is the thinking system. It’s used when you think through the pros and cons of a big decision or plan for the future. It likely developed later in our evolutionary history.

Bothersome Biases

Kahneman has spent his life categorising the errors made by each system. These are called biases and lead to the majority of human mistakes.

One classic mistake, made when we make snap-judgements, is the substitution of System 1 for System 2. Unfortunately, System 2 has a fatal flaw: it is energy limited. Every time you make a decision it uses energy and adds to your “decision fatigue”. When your brain is trying to judge someone on the tube, there are probably more important dilemmas later in you day. In order to conserve energy, your brain doesn’t attempt to use System 2 and think through the problem, it acts lazily. It passes the problem onto System 1, which quickly jumps to a conclusion. Far easier!

Fundamental Attribution Bias is another mistake your brain makes when making snap judgements. It is the tendency to place emphasis on the internal characteristics of a person rather than the things that act upon them. For example, if someone is being annoying on the tube, your brain jumps to the conclusion that they are an inherently irritating person. But in fact their actions could be brought about by any number of external factors. Maybe their train was delayed, making them late for work.

Ingenious Intuitions

Because of these biases Kahneman is very suspicious of the snap-judgements made by our System 1. However, Gary Klein, another Psychologist, argues that we should trust our System 1s. He tells a story of a team of fireman gruelingly batteling a fire in a burning building. The head fireman felt an intuition and told everyone to get out of the building. They all got out and a few seconds later the building collapsed. The fireman had no evidence that the building was going to collapse he just had an intuition. His System 1 was telling him something.

But where do these intuitions come from? Throughout history and still today people have explained these gut feelings mystically. They are messages from God. Or the universe. Or your true self. But in fact these inuitions are simply pattern matching. A fireman has been in so many fires and seen so many buildings collapse that his system 1 notices the patterns subconciously.

Another example of this is the famous chess match between the Deep Blue supercomputer and the chess Grandmaster Kasparov. Deep Blue could crunch 200 million positions per second compared to Kasparov’s 3 per second. So how could Kasparov even compete? The answer: patter matching. A grandmaster like Kasparov is able to instinctively notice similarities between the current game and those in his history. This gives him a wealth of stored knowledge that is still difficult to program into a computer.

My System 1 is a RACIST!

One of the most repugnant aspects of System 1 is how it treats groups other than your own. Once, when I was walking around London late at night I realised that I, Julyan Davey, am a racist. Well not quite. But maybe my System 1 is. If I saw someone acting a bit suspiciously I was way more likely to think “this is the night when I get robbed or stabbed” if that person was black than white. But it’s not just limited to race. My System 1 possibly has the same reaction with working class white people. Now you could say this was a good reaction because black people and working class people are probably statistically more likely to be criminals or involved in knife crime. But this is like the argument that we should strip search Muslims at airports because they are indeed more likely to be terrorists. Plain crazy! The number of black criminals or Muslim terrorists is so small as a percentage of the population as a whole. Obviously on a dark road you should be careful whoever you can see. But in this case System 1’s assumption jumping seems to be truly detrimental.

If you are interested in testing your own biases towards particular groups then a website, set-up by a group of researches, called Project Implicit will give many people a big shock. There you can test your instinctive reactions to particular gender, sexual, racial, age or ethnic groups. Although you tell your friends you don’t have a [racist/sexist/elitist] bone in your body, maybe your System 1 thinks differently.

Combating Intuition

How much should we try to fight our flawed instinctual reactions?

Or should we just go with our gut?

Researches have repeatedly conducted experiments attempting to de-bias subjects from their flawed thinking. But time and time again, this has proved challenging if not impossible. Ultimately we may be stuck with our intuitions, as they are deeply embedded in how our brains process our environments. The best I think we can hope for is to realize the extent to which we are flawed.

So when you next look at someone on the tube who looks like they’ve just left the nearest psychiatric ward and you think: “They look absolutely mental!” You’re probably pretty spot on. But realise that you too are a flawed human and sometimes will be deceived.

7 Tips for Authentic Travel

2016-07-03T00:00:00+00:00

Introduction

Recently, I returned home from travelling around South America for 6 months. In this post I will record what I learnt about how to have the best possible experiences whilst remaining true to yourself. Several people have asked me for travelling advice, so this post is partly for them. But it’s also to lay out my thoughts now, whilst they are still fresh, so that I can return to them later when I’m planning future forays overseas. So here I present my 7 top tips for long term travel!

1. Plan Ahead: Why are you travelling?

One of the most important things to figure out before you set off on your trip is exactly why you are travelling. Many people jump into round the world travel without really knowing what they are hoping to get out of the experience. When I set off I just wanted to leave my normal life behind and do something different for a while. But I realised that this wasn’t particularly helpful because there are just so many different possibilities. The more specific you can be about what you want to get out of your trip, the better your experience will be!

During my trip I realised that I was in South America because I wanted to “achieve” three things:

Conquer Fear
Learn Spanish
Meet local people

That seems simple. But if you’ve decided why you’re doing something beforehand it means you can always return to your answer when you have decisions to make. It allows you to avoid following the crowd and do exactly what you want. You can be yourself in a foreign land.

“Not all those who wander are lost”

J.R.Tolkien

2. Don’t Plan Ahead. Be Spontaneous!

At the same time, there is always the urge when travelling to plan ahead. To say “This month I’m going to be in Italy, then I’ll go to Greece for 2 weeks”. You have to fight this planning urge! Why you ask?

Two reasons:

1) Hard to be spontaneous

If you’ve got your whole trip planned out in advance then you miss out on the beauty of the randomness of travel. When you meet someone cool, you can’t just stay and hang out for a while. If you hear about an interesting new place you should be able to head straight there. But that’s difficult if you have to stick to a schedule. Those random places that no-one back home has heard of are often the best.

“The traveller sees what he sees. The tourist sees what he has come to see.”

G.K.Chesterson

2) Creates Anxiety

If the master plan that you’ve created doesn’t come to fruition, you’ll feel unhappy. You’ve spent a while visualising the perfect two weeks you were going to have in Greece. Then your flight is cancelled, your bus crashes or more likely you get ill. If you don’t plan, when bad things happen, you can just say: “Fair Enough! I don’t have anywhere to be.” Not planning also forces you to enjoy the place you are in now. Rather than constantly thinking about the future.

“What day is it?”, asked Winnie the Pooh
“It’s today,” squeaked Piglet
“My favourite day,” said Pooh.

3. Get into the culture.

If you want to have heightened experiences you’ve got to make an effort to learn about the history, art and attitudes of the country you are visiting.

For example, if you’re walking around the site of an Incan-Spanish battle, there is a huge difference in the quality of your experience if you know something about the history. If you haven’t bothered to learn anything, you walk around, listen to your guide, take a few photos and then you feel satisfied enough to tick it off your checklist of Trip Advisor places to visit. But if you’ve actually learnt something about the Incans or the Spanish, then the battle site will mean so much more to you. Maybe you know why the site is important for historians or how the people fought at the time. Knowing these things will mean you can have a more vivid experience. One you are far more likely to remember.

It’s the same with art. If you listen to some local music or films you will start to understand what makes the country tick. And how and why it is different to the rest of the world.

“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”

Marcel Proust

4. Learn the Language

The one thing that most improved my trip was learning Spanish. You might think “do I really need to spend time learning the language when there are people in every country who can speak English?” YES, make the effort!

Firstly, there’s a strong link between language and culture. So to be able to really engage with the culture you’ve got to learn the language. Secondly, if one of your aims is to have different experiences to back home, then the people you need to meet are those who can’t speak any English. They are the most likely to give you a new take on life and be unalike your friends back home.

Say you’re sat on a crazy long 20-hour bus ride. If all you can speak is English, you’ll just sit uncomfortably reading your Lonely Planet. But if you’ve learnt the local language you can talk to the people around you. And that will open up whole worlds of possibility! People will suggest places you should visit, most of which you won’t find in the normal guidebooks. These places are usually the coolest because most tourists don’t go to them so you are able to have different experiences to the classic traveller. There were so many times on my trip that talking to people in their own language led to fantastic experiences. They invited me to stay in their houses, took me to music concerts and shared their feelings about their country. Even if you’re just travelling for a short time, it’s definitely worth learning the basics, because the local people will appreciate your efforts so much. It’s just a lot of fun too!

“Peculiar travel suggestions are dancing lessons from God.”

Kurt Vonnegut

5. You don’t have to be rich to travel. In fact, best not to be!

Whilst there seems to be a growing culture of buying experiences, the best travelling adventures are nearly always free. Bought experiences never compare to when you meet someone special or when you have your own adventures. If you have money I think you are actually less likely to have life changing experiences travelling. Ask yourself: Are you more likely to meet interesting people in a £200 a night luxury hotel or a £10 hostel? When you have some financial pressure you’ll have to be more inventive about finding fun things to do cheaply. This will force you to have unique travel experiences which you will remember for the rest of your life. If I am ever a rich traveller I will set a limit on what I can spend each day. To artificially create the financial pressure towards the best experiences!

6. Less is More. Fight the FOMO!

There is always a pressure to try and do everything that a country has to offer. FOMO (or Fear of Missing Out) is a big part of this pressure because you hear stories about so many places that sound really cool and you don’t want to miss out on anything! But you really can’t do it all. And if you try, it will make each place you visit less valuable. If you really want to get to know a place and its people, you have to stay there for a while, not just a weekend! You have to give it a chance to show it’s best side, for randomness to take its toll and unusual things to happen.

7. Conquering Fear

To explain what I have learnt about conquering fear, I’m going to tell a story about one of the first cool people I met. Funnily enough, this was on the plane about an hour after setting off from Heathrow. I had a competition with my friend Tom, who I was travelling with, to see who could find out the coolest thing about the people we were sitting next to on the plane. Tom was sat next to a Musician who looked like Pharell Williams who later invited us to one of his concerts in Rio. But my seating companion really changed how I view risk and fear. He was on his way to Antarctica to complete a world first trip on a new route to the South Pole! I asked, “So have you done anything like this before?” And he proceeded to tell me about his solo crossing of the Atlantic and climb of Everest! Wow!

At the time I was feeling a bit nervous about being thousands of miles from home so I asked him how he dealt with the fact that all of these things come with real risks. If something went wrong on his Antarctica expedition, no-one was going to come and get him. He replied that you should think about the risks of doing something before you leave home when you decide whether or not to attempt it. But after that decision you should not think about it again. And when the fear arises you just have to say to yourself: “Not helpful brain! I’ve already decided.” At times on my trip I imagined a monkey on my shoulder who repeatedly prods and asks “What if you die? What if this? What if that?” My reply: “Go away monkey!”

“What gives value to travel is fear. It is the fact that, at a certain moment, when we are so far from our own country … we are seized by a vague fear, and an instinctive desire to go back to the protection of old habits … this is why we should not say that we travel for pleasure. There is no pleasure in travelling, and I look upon it more as an occasion for spiritual testing.”

Albert Camus

Checklist Tourism vs Authenic Travel

In general these tips can be summarised as two approaches to travelling.

The first I call “Checklist Tourism”. An attempt to tick the boxes on the must see sites in a country. Done primarily for others. So you can post a thousand jealousy inducing photos on facebook. And later wow your friends and family with the places you have visited. Your trip will resemble the hundreds of other travellers who visit the same spots.

The second I call Authentic Travel. This is travelling primarily for your own development. You have some goal in mind. You aim to have experiences that will change how you see the world and your place in it. At the end of your trip you will be able to look back on countless unique moments that only you, and no other traveller has experienced.

“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did do.”
– Mark Twain

The Power of Identity

2016-07-01T00:00:00+00:00

Introduction

Colombia is well known as the friendliest nation in South America. But I was still shocked at how warm and affectionate Colombians actually were when I visited in May. So many people came and talked to me when I sat on a bench or helped me when I looked lost. I started to wonder what could cause some groups of people to together behave so differently. One explanation for Colombian’s friendliness and their overall happiness is that they have long suffered at the hands of drug lords and civil war. So they hugely appreciate any signs of stability in their country. They are able to be grateful for the little things in life that we in the west have become used to. But during my travels, I realized that this good feeling was sustained with another mechanism. Identity. Colombians know that the world thinks of them as friendly. This creates a pressure to live up to this high bar.

Self-help books have been proclaiming for generations that, like the Colombians thinking of themselves as friendly, we can use our minds to change the physical world. If only we concentrate hard enough on a goal, then the world will shift to make it come to fruition. Or so they say! At first glance, it seems crazily unscientific. But actually the work of the psychologist Festinger, as long ago as 1959, suggested that there is a route through which this effect can take place.¹ He discovered cognitive dissonance. This is the mental stress that occurs when an individual simultaneously holds contradictory beliefs, ideas or values. Or, similarly, if they perform an action contrary to one of their beliefs or values. Cognitive dissonance pushes us towards consistency. When a Colombian is deciding whether to help a traveller in need they are swayed by cognitive dissonance. By the contradiction between the identity they hold, being friendly Colombians, and the fact they haven’t yet given their aid.

Identity tricks us

Despite the positive effects of identity for Colombians, defining your identity can also have some pretty big downsides. This is because it can narrow the thoughts or actions to which your cognitive dissonance will allow. I think this effect has a large part to play in the poor quality of dialogues in the political and religious worlds. For example, if you define yourself as a labour party member, then you will be more likely to support all things that the labour party does. You are also more likely to think that any policies put forward by the other side are abhorrent. In fact, the optimal solution is probably not the approach of either side but some combination of the two or an underground option that no-one has considered. But if you have a defined identity you are less likely to search for these alternatives because they will conflict with your identity.

Philip Tetlock, a psychologist and political scientist who authored the book Superforecasting: the Art and Science of Prediction, analysed the predictions of political experts and found that they fell into two main groups which he calls “foxes” and “hedgehogs”. Hedgehogs view the world through the lens of one big idea such as Conservatism. Whereas foxes try to draw on a much wider variety of models of the world. Political pundits who act like foxes drastically outperform their hedgehog opposites. To achieve this “fox” like position we must prevent ourselves from becoming engrossed with one particular viewpoint.

Another possible area where defining an identity could have downsides is introversion and extroversion. If you define yourself fundamentally as introverted or extroverted then maybe this could significantly impact how you behave. For example, a self-defined introvert, might back away from social interaction because it’s “not who they are”. Or an extrovert might struggle to be quiet and listen because cognitive dissonance forces them to live up to their loud mouthed reputation. Research shows that roughly 60% of the introversion/extroversion trait is influenced by genetics. But the remaining 40% is large enough for identity to play a role. There are also not just two poles encoded by genetics, but an entire scale. So identity could play a role in pushing people towards the extremes.

Using identity

Whilst defined identity can lead to limited thinking, it’s ability to influence people’s actions, make it a powerful tool if you want to change individuals or societies. An example of this is the case of a Parrot from the Caribbean Islands of St. Lucian.² In the 1970s the bird was on the verge of extinction and named as the 13th rarest bird worldwide. The extinction was largely down to the local people who regularly shot and ate the bird. A young graduate at the time called Paul Butler, wanted to figure out how to protect the parrot. He launched a pride campaign, in order to link the Islander’s identity with the parrot. He hoped laws would then be passed to prevent hunting. To change the islanders identity he starred in TV and Radio programs about the bird, persuaded rock groups to write songs about the bird and visited schools across the island to spread the message. His identity based strategy worked. The parrot has now been designated a protected species and its numbers have recovered significantly. But most importantly its long term future is secure because it has become a core part of the islander’s national identity.

An Abstemious Identity

Identity rears its head everywhere. It also had a part to play in the recent Brexit debate. Whilst the economic case for Remain seemed overwhelming, identity was where the real battle took place. Did voters see themselves as British or European? Identity seems to be a powerful factor in so many areas. It’s not only a tool for change but also it can be a limiting weakness. Advertisers constantly look to exploit the identities we attach to ourselves. I’m not arguing that we should abandon identity altogether and become wisps in the wind, but that we should be careful what we attach our identities to. And realise the power of identity to influence others.

Footnotes

Festinger and Carlsmith (1959) ↩
Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard by Chip and Dan Heath ↩

Overcoming Obstacles

2015-04-01T00:00:00+00:00

After reading The Obstacle is the Way by Ryan Holiday, I have become fascinated by Stoic Philosophy. The works of Marcus Aurelius, Seneca and Epicurus, thinkers from almost two thousand years ago, can still be applied to so many aspects of modern life. They embody a form of life philosophy which refuses to spend its time with vague hypothesizing but instead attempts to answer questions that can help us all to live a better, happier life. In the past few days, I have devised a mechanism for dealing with the problems and obstacles in my own life, that I will be laying out in this blog post.

The crux of stoic philosophy is that the obstacles in our lives provoke us to grow and improve. So when you’re facing a difficulty, instead of spending hours worrying, you should concentrate on the positive growth that the obstacle can provide. Stoic thinkers also argue that it is your mental response to an obstacle that determines whether it can be overcome. So the person who finds and implements a strategy to solve a problem, will always perform better than the person who spends their time complaining or worrying.

In my life, I was finding that I would spend hours mulling over obstacles. I’d find my mind constantly returning to the same fairly negative thought patterns over and over. So based on Stoic philosophy, I have devised a three-part technique for dealing with the problems and obstacles that arise in life. This is a how-to, strategy guide for dealing with a mental funk!

1) Clear your mind. Reset your mentality.

Before you can tackle the obstacle you’re are facing it is important to leave negative, worrisome thinking behind. Often when in the midst of an obstacle or worry, you enter into a negative thought cycle. Where you simply don’t have the mental strength to escape, and think rationally about the problem at hand. But I have discovered that if I take a short walk around the block I can clear my mind and reset my mentality. Getting your blood moving and experiencing the sensations of the world, outside of the issue you are facing, allows you to come back to the problem objectively and with renewed fervour. Everyone can find their own method for leaving the negativity behind from hopping on the rowing machine for a sprint to playing Fifa. The aim is to combat instantaneous thinking, where you simply jump to the nearest, usually most negative response to an obstacle.

2) Assault the problem.

After you’ve gotten over the intoxication of inactivity and negative thinking, it is time to assault the problem full on.

I find that sitting down with a pen and paper or open word document is the best way to brainstorm my thinking on an issue. The first thing is to write down exactly what the problem you are facing is. Try to do this objectively, not exaggerating the severity of the problem or being overly harsh on yourself for past mistakes.

Next, you should think about what the problem can teach you. And how it can help you to grow and develop as a person. It’s very difficult to accept that a problem isn’t as bad as it seems, but you should attempt to think with a positive mindset.

Finally, you should consider how you will physically deal with the issue at hand. How can you overcome the problem and teach yourself the most at the same time? One way to achieve this is to attempt to find a new perspective on the problem. Many people spend hours thinking about problems that simply aren’t actually problems. For example, an annoying work colleague might seem like the gravest of problems. But when you begin to see the issue from their perspective you might begin to empathise with them. It is very difficult, if not impossible to change others, and so the best outcome for you is simply not to be bothered by them.

I find it really useful to think of a one-line conclusion to the problem, that I can use as my mental mantra, to prevent dawdling on the problem’s negative thoughts.

3) Stop thinking. Get growing.

Once you’ve concluded on the problem at hand, it is important to get to work on a solution and not mull on the issue anymore. You’ve focused your attention 100% on the obstacle, so further deliberating is unlikely to produce any new insights. The best way to prevent the negative thought cycle from returning is whenever it arises in your mind, instantly bring your thoughts back to the conclusion that you came to in part 2. Move on with your life.

Two other ways to tackle your brain mulling over the same issues, used by Marcus Aurelius:

Repeat:

I am not going to die from this.

Ask Yourself:

Does what happened keep you from acting with justice, generosity, self-control, sanity, prudence, honesty, humility, straightforwardness?

The key to this way of thinking is to recognize the power that you have in the world. Even if the obstacle is insurmountable, and you are destined to lose however you act, you still have the immense power to respond with courage, not letting the obstacle get you down. This is to accept your stock in life and concentrate your efforts on improving it. One phrase that encapsulates this idea is amor fati, which is a latin phrase meaning love of fate.

There is a fantastic story of Thomas Edison who, when his research campus containing all of his life’s work was burning down in a fire, simply called all of his friends and family around to enjoy the chemical fuelled fire show. Declaring “They will never see a fire like this again” and that “he just got rid of a load of rubbish”. He could have spent weeks mourning the huge set back in his life work, but that would have got him nowhere. So he accepted the problem and tried to get whatever he could out of it. He then assaulted the issue and despite a loss of $1 million dollars worth of work in the fire managed to make revenues of over $10 million that year.

Remember:

Life is 10% what happens to me and 90% of how I react to it. - Charles Swindoll

Exploring Creative Meditation

2015-03-01T00:00:00+00:00

In the last few days I have been delving deeply into the question of creativity.

Questions like:

Where does an idea come from and how is it developed?

Is there a difference between creativity in music and the arts and the innovation of intellectual ideas and inventions?

In this post I would like to define my thinking on these issues and shine some light on how you can bring creativity into your life.

Benefits of Creativity

The act of being creative has huge cathartic benefit; it allows you to access the inner nature of your being in a way that cannot be achieved in normal “efficient” day to day life. Myriad artists and musicians have discovered that pent up angst and anxiety can be released, just by picking up a paint brush. Also, as humans we strive to feel connected to the rest of the world and creativity is the means by which our consciousness can have an impact upon life itself.

Where does creativity come from?

I’ve discussed this topic with a few friends who have described creativity as coming from within, whilst at the same time being a process where something completely new is created. I have grappled with this idea and come to the following simple conclusion over the origins of creativity.

To explain creativity, I think we need to discuss the nature of the mind. After observing my mind during meditation, I have begun to consider the mind as a network of nodes. This model of the mind fits incredibly well with the neural pathways that we know exist in the brain. So an idea such as the concept of the colour blue is a node in the brain, with pathways to many other nodes. These connected nodes are likely to be concepts that we associate with the colour blue, such as the sea. The sea node may itself be connected to a node for the memory of a childhood fishing trip. Which could itself be connected to nodes for the emotions that were felt at the time or the relationship with the people on the trip.

I must make it clear, that I’m not suggesting that these nodes actually exist in the brain; just that this model seems to fit very well with my own personal mind experience. However, it is quite possible that an equivalent scientific understanding of a node could be the firing of a distinct group of neurons in the brain.

So, if we assume this nodal model of the brain is somewhat equivalent to reality, what does this mean for creativity? For me, creativity seems to involve finding a connection between two unrelated or weakly connected nodes.

This Steve Jobs quote really embodies this idea:

Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. Steve Jobs

Creativity as Connection

One example of such a connection was the conceptual view of the big bang developed by Stephen Hawking. He managed to link the common idea, amongst physicists, of how black holes form and develop; with a conception of the big bang and the universe as a whole. This linkage was the key discovery, that he would then go on to spend years developing. That connection between two concepts was the creativity, and what developed after, was purely the acadmic product of this initial breakthrough.

Given this understanding of creativity, I considered whether it could also apply to other artistic endeavours. For a while, I was stumped by how musical creativity could be examined in this manner. But then I was discussing this topic with a friend who plays guitar, who explained how this model could also apply to music. On a conceptual level music could have a relationship to real world thoughts and feelings; this relationship reflects the same creative process discussed earlier. But a more simple explanation is that over a lifetime of listening to music, certain sounds or sequences of notes or chords develop themselves as nodes in the brain. These nodes become accessible by your subconcious and so musical creativity can be defined as finding a linkage between these musical nodes.

Creative Meditation

I have already mentioned how being creative can bring huge positives to life. But how can this creativity be encouraged and developed? I have discovered a process, that I’m going to call creative meditation, that achieves this. Creative meditation can be performed in several ways and is still very much a work in progress. My first experience of this method was whilst walking home, by myself, from a train on the coldest of nights. I was rushing to get back to the warmth but my mind was racing. I realised that simply through observing the world I could be creative. I would see signs, faces, posters and all manner of physical objects. Upon seeing one of these objects, I would immediately visualise the associations or links that my brain would naturally make. If, for example, I saw a girl in a red coat, my brain would instantly be drawn to the story of red riding hood. But the links I was making began to become more complex. I saw a red stop sign and my brain was instantly drawn to a childhood experience.

My first encounter with this form of free association was fascinating by itself, as it allowed me to discover the connections that my brain was naturally drawing. The importance of certain childhood events was particularly interesting. But I also believe this could develop into a legitimate mechanism for creative thinking. Surely, the more one practices this creative meditation, of making linkages between different objects or concepts, then when we try to be creative in our work or art, it should come far more naturally. By simply not preventing your brain from making these natural connects, a whole world of possibility abounds!

Julyan Davey

Weaving a Non-Dual Civilisation - Part 3: Returning to Life

Time to Come Alive

A Journey to Loving Life

Confronting the Deep Shadow of Collapse

Life is a Gift Economy

Giving Back Your Life Purpose

Collectives Serenading Life

Finding Our Humanity

Fusing with the Anima Mundi

Weaving a Non-Dual Civilisation - Part 2: Unveiling the Light

Back to Tim

Transformative Groups

Tim’s Transformation

Facets of the Transformative Group

Tim’s Contribution

An Integrated Inner and Outer Work Path

Creating Networked Groups Beyond Duality

Rebuilding the Commons

Weaving the World Together Again

Weaving a Non-Dual Civilisation - Part 1: Chasing Shadows

Enter the Shadow

Let’s Meet Tim

Tim Heads out Into the World

A Civilization of Tim’s

Where we’re headed

Shaping Transformative Cultures

What are Transformative Cultures?

Reconnecting with Ourselves

Reconnecting with Each Other

Reconnecting with Nature

Concluding on the Mystery

Junctures on the Path of Change

The Most Good You Can Do Without Changing Anything

Time to Fight the Evil System

Giving Your Revolutionary Gifts

Conclusion

Building a Life Affirming Culture

Finding the Meta-Crisis

The Meta-Crisis

My Meta-Crisis

How Nature Does It

Ways of Seeing it

Conclusion

The Metamodern Flame

Dominic Barter and The Metamodern Flame

Killing Colonialism

Playing with the Spectrum

The Spiritual Flame

Conclusion

Towards a Metamodern Spirituality

Building a Proto-Synthesis Grand Narrative

The Return of Teleology

Traversing the Transcendent Immanent

Abandoning Anthropocentrism

Healing the Wound of Dualism

Blasting open the Metaphysical Monoculture

Inner Work For Global Political Transformation

Practices of Reconstruction

Why we need to Wake Up, Clean Up, Grow Up and Show Up?

Coming upon Communitas

The Return of Ritual

Inspired by Indigenous Cultures

Conclusion

Aim for Mindful Action

How We Run Away

Learning to Love Myself in a Society that Doesn’t

On the Revolutionary Potential of Carrots

Want Change? Take the Outside View

The Phoenix Rises - New Stories for Humanity

New Stories

Exponential Altruism - A Strategy For A New World

Conclusion

References

Why Is It So Hard to Help the World? And What We Can Do About it.

References

A Usetarian Manifesto

What Materialism does to our personal well-being?

What Materialism does to our environment?

Voluntary Simplicity - a better alternative