Transformative Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) as a Catalyst for Climate Action
Transformative Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) as a Catalyst for Climate Action
I spent five years living under the shadow of the Chevron Oil Refinery on the unceded land of the Ohlone people known as Richmond, California. In 2012, a toxic explosion sent 15,000 to the hospital, primarily people of color. Like many refinery town residents, our family moved to Richmond because it was more affordable. Experiencing oil spills and constant flaring firsthand was a pressing reminder of how systemic racism, exploitative practices, and our dominant capitalist culture are inextricably linked with our climate crisis. Soon after landing in our new home, we connected with a group of Indigenous grandmothers through The Refinery Corridor Healing Walks. Over four years, the grandmothers fused political activism with the sacred traditions of prayer walking and healing as they rallied local communities in the fight to reclaim their land and water from the companies that have poisoned their towns along the five oil refineries of the North Bay and Sacramento Rivers. It was a powerful experience to be in community with others who were experiencing the impact of living near an oil refinery firsthand. While climate changes affect us all, historically excluded, under-resourced communities worldwide have contributed the least to climate change and they are impacted the most by our planetary crisis. This is unjust.
There’s a saying in the climate movement that to change everything will take everyone. In my work as an educational leader of color dedicated to transforming school communities through Social and Emotional Learning (SEL), I believe it’s imperative that schools ultimately position SEL in service of a shift in collective consciousness—a shift where we truly care for each other and our planet as we engage in active hope to collectively and compassionately address racial injustice and our climate crisis.
As we continue to grapple with COVID-19’s impact on mental health, schools have prioritized SEL to support the wellbeing of their staff and students. While this focus on wellbeing is critical, it is also important that SEL isn’t just a band-aid; rather SEL offers an ideal means for engaging in the deeper inner work necessary to transform our schools and society.
What is Transformative SEL?
Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) traditionally refers to the essential skills and competencies we all need for life success. These include self-awareness, goal setting, managing strong emotions, cultivating empathy, social awareness, relationship skills, problem-solving, and making healthy decisions. For years, SEL programming was thought to be race and culture neutral but we know that nothing is race and culture neutral. From the start, schooling in the United States was designed to “benefit and affirm the values and culture of the white people in power,” and it is this dominant culture that has “shaped the educational structures and policies that articulate how children are expected to behave, communicate, and interact” (Chatmon & Osta, 2018).
As the SEL field begins to look more deeply at the ways in which SEL programming can reinforce dominant-culture norms and perpetuate inequitable systems and structures, there’s recognition of the need to shift and engage in what is now known as Transformative SEL: “Transformative SEL is a process whereby young people and adults build strong, respectful and lasting relationships that facilitate co-learning to critically examine root causes of inequity, and to develop collaborative solutions that lead to personal, community, and societal wellbeing” (CASEL, 2021). Key elements of Transformative SEL include focusing “SEL implementation and practice on transforming inequitable settings and systems and promoting justice-oriented civic engagement; redistributing power to promote justice through increased engagement in school and civic life; and emphasizing the equity-centered focal constructs of identity, agency, belonging, collaborative problem solving and curiosity” (CASEL, 2021).
Over the last decade, mindfulness has been increasingly incorporated into SEL programming. The organization I lead, Transformative Educational Leadership (TEL), defines mindfulness as “both a practice and a way of being with which we compassionately attend to the unfolding reality of the present moment within and without.” When we add transformative to this definition, we open our attention to include the systems—educational, social, ecological, and economic—that we are nested within. With transformative mindfulness, we strive to expand our awareness of interbeing. Interbeing is a term coined by my spiritual teacher, Thich Nhat Hanh, meaning to inter-dependently co-exist. Interbeing honors the interdependence of every person with all other persons, beings, and elements of nature. From such a perspective, we are better able bear witness to suffering in its many forms, and act to create a more compassionate and just world through healing-centered engagement.
I came up with the word interbeing many decades ago. The verb “to be” can be misleading, because we cannot be with ourselves alone. “To be” is always “inter-be.” If we combine the prefix “inter” with the verb “to be,” we have a new verb, “inter-be.” To “inter-be” and the action of interbeing reflects reality more accurately. We inter-are with one another and all life. -Thich Nhat Hanh, 1987
In a beautiful illustration of interbeing, Thich Nhat Hanh writes:
“If you are a poet, you will see clearly that there is a cloud floating in this sheet of paper. Without a cloud, there will be no rain; without rain, the trees cannot grow, and without trees, we cannot make paper. The cloud is essential for the paper to exist. If the cloud is not here, the sheet of paper cannot be here either. So we can say that the cloud and the paper inter-are” (Nhat Hanh, 1992).
He goes on to say that if you look deeply enough, you’ll see the logger who cut down the tree and the logger’s ancestors as well, in that sheet of paper. An interbeing consciousness is a shift from a transactional way of being in the world to one where we recognize how we all are a product of infinite causes and conditions with our actions impacting others and the earth. The nonviolence Gandhi and Dr. King practiced is grounded in interbeing. Dr. King wrote, “All life is interrelated, and we are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of identity. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly…this is the interrelated structure of reality” (King, 2001).
Interbeing honors the interdependence of every person with all other persons, beings, and elements of nature. Interbeing is fundamental to Transformative SEL and aligns beautifully with the principles of deep ecology.
Deep ecology does not see the world as a collection of isolated objects but rather as a network of phenomena that are fundamentally interconnected and interdependent. It recognizes the intrinsic value of all living beings and views humans—in the celebrated words attributed to Chief Seattle—as just one particular strand in the web of life. – Fritjof Capra, 1975
The Root Cause of Racial Injustice and Our Climate Crisis: A Lack of Interbeing Consciousness
Transformative SEL invites us to examine “root causes of inequity” (CASEL, 2020). For me, the root cause of inequity is not valuing all life equally, a lack of interbeing consciousness. Colonization, slavery, capitalism, economic exploitation, and continual extraction of the earth’s resources are built on the belief that all lives are not equal. When asked about the connections between racial injustice and our planetary crisis, Dr. Larry Ward, author of America’s Racial Karma, said, “It’s really quite simple. We treat Black people and the Earth the same—as if their lives are disposable and the earth is ours for taking” (Ward, 2021).
Until interbeing becomes a foundation for how we bring SEL into education, these approaches will still ultimately reinforce a transactional, anthropocentric way of being in the world. Rene Descartes said, “I think, therefore I am,” placing the self in the center of one’s worldview and establishing the Western outlook still prevalent today. This dualism has brought great harm to our planet and its inhabitants. Inspired by his Indian spiritual roots, ecological activist, Satish Kumar, turns around Descartes’ phrase and offers us instead, “You Are Therefore I Am: A Declaration of Dependence” (2002). Kumar offers a worldview rooted in relationships and the connections of all things, instead of the separation inherent in the Western worldview. In the SEL world, we talk about needing to connect but the ultimate truth is that we are already connected, we inter-are. What we need to do is become aware of this at a much deeper level and act from this place accordingly. The moment we collectively shift toward an interbeing consciousness and live our lives with deep awareness of how we “inter-are” then it won’t be okay for anyone to live near an oil refinery, drink water with high levels of lead, or work in, let alone consume meat from, a factory farm.
One SEL program that is already incorporating a systems level component that can cultivate an interbeing consciousness is SEE Learning developed by Emory University. The emphasis on supporting students with understanding how systems interact is essential for our times. One of the most powerful ways we can begin to grow our awareness of interbeing is to spend time in nature. Nature supports social and emotional health and wellbeing and research suggests that outdoor experiences have tremendous benefits—socially, emotionally, spiritually, and academically.
False Dichotomy: Racial Justice OR Climate Action
Those who are most at risk to the impacts of climate change are also the populations that already live without access to adequate food, sanitation, and clean water. The United Nations has warned that climate change will push 120 million people into poverty (Kottasova, 2019). The panic and fear some of us experience when we think about the future as it relates to our climate crisis is already the glaring reality many face globally. During the five and a half years I spent implementing SEL in the Oakland Unified School District, our newcomer population rose tremendously, and it was clear that climate change is a key factor in migration—natural disasters and food insecurity in Mexico, Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador account for rising numbers at the US border. Climate solutions benefit all of us, just as climate risks threaten all of us, but climate action benefits the historically excluded, under-resourced most and that is just.
TEL recently held a conference in partnership with the Omega Institute entitled, Caring for Each Other and Our Planet and a real tension surfaced around how can communities that are literally in survival mode be asked to also now focus on protecting the planet. I want to be clear that I am not asking those who have a knee on their neck to engage in climate action. My relative privilege as a South Asian American woman makes it clear to me that my role is to ease the burden on my Black, Indigenous, and Latinx brothers and sisters and those who experience othering more than myself. What I am suggesting is that it isn’t an either/or when it comes to racial justice and climate action but rather a both/and.
Over the last year there have been several conversations about “Decolonizing SEL.” There is no real synonym for decolonization. You can’t substitute human rights or social justice for it, and for me it involves the crafting of a path forward that is rooted in the heart of indigenous cultures: kinship. Kinship involves living from a place where one is established in their relationship to each other, the universe, the land, and nature—all of life is part of one’s family and relations are not just blood relatives. As we engage in conversations about “decolonizing SEL,” those of us who have the capacity and the will can also bring the climate dimension into these discussions so we can see our justice work as interrelated and mutually reinforcing. For me, decolonizing SEL also involves safeguarding our planet. It’s a both/and, and we need all our passion and engagement to build a diverse and powerful movement strong enough to create the world we all need and deserve.
The Role of Schools as Part of the Solution
One out of every six Americans is enrolled in public education and the way schools consume energy, food, and engage in transportation can play a critical role in protecting our planet, especially if we think about the impact schools could have globally if every school engaged in climate action. Right now, across the board, schools are not models of sustainability. Annual energy costs for US educational institutions have been estimated at $8 billion annually—the second highest cost for schools after salaries (US Department of Energy, 2016). School buses drive 5.7 billion miles annually (Doug Shinkle, 2021). Schools serve over 7 billion meals each year and produce an estimated 530,000 tons of food waste annually (World Wildlife Fund, 2019). Sadly, only twenty-nine states and the District of Columbia bring climate change into their science standards, and only five states include climate change in social studies standards (K12 Climate Action, 2020).
If we prioritize advancing a more sustainable world, the schools which serve more than 50 million young people can be a critical force in addressing climate change (NCES, 2021). We can have tremendous impact in building a greener economy by providing more career and technical education programs that support clean energy jobs. Schools can also lead the way in building more sustainable operations. The “development of collaborative solutions” (CASEL, 2020) that SEL calls for are an opportunity to support students in engaging in climate action. Schools are part of the problem, and they also have an opportunity to be part of the solution. There’s great possibility through fusing Transformative SEL with Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) which “empowers people to change the way they think and work towards a sustainable future” (UNESCO).
Beloved Community Extending to the Earth
Dr. King popularized the term “Beloved Community” and infused it with deep meaning. For me, Beloved Community must also extend to the Earth. Here are some initial ideas that link a climate action connection to CASEL’s Five Core SEL competencies, their Equity Focal constructs, and the Education for Sustainable Development Principles. (printable graphic here)
Active Hope: What Kind of Ancestor are You Willing to Be?
Hope is on one end of a spectrum of how we meet the present moment and envision our future and at the other end is despair. Right now, having hope matters and I am not talking about hoping that our experience could be different. I’m talking about active hope, the idea coined by Joanna Macy, that hope is something we do rather than merely have. She writes about The Great Turning which is a name for the “essential adventure of our time: the shift from the Industrial Growth Society to a life-sustaining civilization” (Macy, 2009). This adventure will birth new strengths, a wider network, and an experience of deepening our aliveness with great meaning and purpose. Active hope means having a clear vision about what we are hoping for and then deliberately playing our roles to make that vision a reality. As David Orr, professor emeritus of Oberlin College and a leading educator on environmental studies said, “Hope is a verb with its sleeves rolled up.” Schools have a powerful role to play in creating a more compassionate, just, and sustainable world. Together we can alter the climate path.
In the world of education, we often focus on “essential questions.” Essential questions as defined by Wiggins and McTighe, the authors of Understanding by Design, are “questions that are not answerable with finality in a brief sentence. . . . Their aim is to stimulate thought, to provoke inquiry, and to spark more questions—including thoughtful student questions—not just pat answers” (Wiggins & McTighe, 2008). The essential question I hold deep in my heart is from Dr. Larry Ward: “What kind of ancestor do I want to be?” Just as the Seventh Generation Principle from Iroquois philosophy asks us to hold the long view of every decision and action we take, and reflect on the impact seven generations from now, this question can be a great anchor in driving how we show up daily and how we go about teaching SEL in schools. You can implement an SEL curriculum but if you are not asking yourself in each moment, “What kind of ancestor do I want to be?” your SEL won’t necessarily be transformative. As a lifelong educator I see schools as the unit of change. Let’s all seize this moment to tap into our circles of influence and bring an interbeing consciousness to the prioritization of SEL so we can evolve together and create the conditions for the paradigm shift needed by our planet and all of its inhabitants.
Works Cited
Badar, E. J. (2019, June 23). Mindfulness versus McMindfulness: A conversation with David Forbes. Los Angeles Review of Books. https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/mindfulness-versus-mcmindfulness-a-conversation-with-david-forbes/.
Capra, F. (2010). The Tao of physics: An exploration of the parallels between modern physics and Eastern mysticism. Shambhala.
Chatmon, L. R., & Osta, K. (2018, August 20). 5 steps for liberating public education from its deep racial bias. Education Week. Retrieved from https://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2018/08/22/5-steps-for-liberating-public-education-from.html
Doug Shinkle, G. D. B. (2021, July 20). School bus Safety. https://www.ncsl.org/research/transportation/school-bus-safety.aspx.
Ecology Info Center. (n.d.). Deep ecology. DEEP ECOLOGY. Retrieved September 17, 2021, from http://environment-ecology.com/deep-ecology/63-deep-ecology.html.
Experiencing nature supports social-emotional health and well being – national covid-19 outdoor learning initiative. Green Schoolyards America. (n.d.). Retrieved September 17, 2021, from https://www.greenschoolyards.org/nature-benefits-social-emotional.
Ginwright, S. (2020, December 9). The future of healing: Shifting from trauma informed care to healing centered engagement. Medium. Retrieved September 17, 2021, from https://ginwright.medium.com/the-future-of-healing-shifting-from-trauma-informed-care-to-healing-centered-engagement-634f557ce69c.
IPCC, 2021: Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [Masson-Delmotte, V., P. Zhai, A. Pirani, S. L. Connors, C. Péan, S. Berger, N. Caud, Y. Chen, L. Goldfarb, M. I. Gomis, M. Huang, K. Leitzell, E. Lonnoy, J. B. R. Matthews, T. K. Maycock, T. Waterfield, O. Yelekçi, R. Yu and B. Zhou (eds.)]. Cambridge University Press. In Press.
King, M. L. (2001). Letter from the Birmingham jail. Scholargy.
Kottasová, I. (2019, June 27). ‘Climate apartheid’ to PUSH 120 million into poverty by 2030, UN says. CNN. https://www.cnn.com/2019/06/25/world/climate-apartheid-poverty-un-intl/index.html.
Macy, J. (2009, June 29). The Great Turning. ecoliteracy.org. Retrieved September 27, 2021 from https://www.ecoliteracy.org/article/great-turning
Othering & Belonging: A framework and analysis for a fair and inclusive society. Othering & Belonging Institute. (2018, October 11). Retrieved September 17, 2021, from https://belonging.berkeley.edu/othering-belonging-framework-and-analysis-fair-and-inclusive-society
The San Francisco Foundation . (2020). Oakland Goes Outdoors. YouTube. Retrieved September 17, 2021, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JmgEm_mWoF0.
Refinery corridor Healing WALKS 2017. Refinery Corridor Healing Walks 2017. (n.d.). Retrieved September 17, 2021, from http://www.refineryhealingwalks.com/.
Srinivasan, M. (2019, May 20). Powerful Synergy: SEL & Mindfulness Working Together. Retrieved September 17, 2021, from https://www.mindfulschools.org/research-and-neuroscience/powerful-synergy-sel-and-mindfulness-working-together/.
Stavely, Z. (2019, March 8). After violence and asylum battles, young oakland migrants face a new challenge: Graduating high school. KQED. Retrieved September 17, 2021, from https://www.kqed.org/news/11730734/after-violence-and-asylum-battles-young-oakland-migrants-face-a-new-challenge-graduating-high-school.
State policy landscape 2020. K12 Climate Action. (2020). https://www.k12climateaction.org/blog/state-policy-landscape-2020.
Thich, N. H. (1992). Peace is every step the path of Mindfulness in everyday life | foreword by H.H. the Dalai Lama. Bantam Books.
US Department. of Energy. (2016, April). Energy Savings Performance Contracting: A Primer for K-12 Schools . https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2016/05/f31/K-12-ESPC-Primer_April2016.pdf.
Ward, L. (2021.). Caring for Each Other and Our Planet, Conference at the Omega Institute. Rhinebeck.
Ward, L. (2020). America’s racial karma: An invitation to heal. Parallax Press.
What is education for sustainable development? UNESCO. (2021, May 10). Retrieved September 17, 2021, from https://en.unesco.org/themes/education-sustainable-development/what-is-esd.
Wiggins, G. P., & McTighe, J. (2008). Understanding by design. Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.
World Wildlife Fund. (2019). Food Waste Warriors: A deep dive into food waste in US Schools. https://c402277.ssl.cf1.rackcdn.com/publications/1271/files/original/FoodWasteWarriorR_CS_121819.pdf?1576689275.
The NCES fast Facts tool provides quick answers to many education QUESTIONS (National Center for EDUCATION STATISTICS). National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) Home Page, a part of the U.S. Department of Education. (August, 2021). https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=372.
Bum'ma (Because I Couldn't Say Grandma)
Bum’ma (Because I Couldn’t Say Grandma)
She opened me
to my river’s edge
Pushed me in instructed me to swim
I drowned in all that I was
She gave me permission to access my extra in plain sight
Extra dramatic
Extra artistic
Extra powerful
She was the orisha who acknowledged my magic
Showed me how to control my aries fire
How to burn low and strong and not burn out
How to walk into a room and not burn it down
or blind the masses with the white hot lights of pure honesty
She gave me permission to be the greatest testimonies even in my brokenness
How my back should bend but not fold
How to hold the grit in my craw
When to release it
She showed me prayers in honest belief manifesting powers and shifts
She performed the rituals in my face
She set the intentions
Lit the candles
Read the scriptures
Cast the spells from her lips
Reversed curses to bind the wicked
Made me take the old medicines
and made me pay attention to the flows of the spirit
I grew from the house of her womb one generation away
but she apprenticed me
Grooming the baby into a priesthood of Godliness the likes of no woman should carry
I lay now at the roots of her tree
Planted in my spine
While she whispers to me
On days like this remarkable is everything she said without saying anything
Text | Along the Willamette
Text | Along the Willamette
Text
…………..for D.H.
My friend tells me in a text
that his cat has stopped eating.
She’s in her last week, he writes,
and while I am reading this,
another text chirps in: Or last days,
it says. I consider calling him.
I’ve been where he is—on the precipice
of such grief, the kind that people
who don’t have pets dismiss.
Shouldn’t we find a better word?
Pets, as if all they’re for is us
to stroke their warm bodies,
welcome them onto our blankets
where at night they settle
on our cold feet or against
our backs or, the lucky ones,
our necks or chests.
But she still gives me a purr,
the next text says, though I’ve yet
to answer his first. And I begin
to understand he does not need
to have even one word from me.
He taps each letter with his thumbs
or a forefinger and imagines me
on the other end, as if this
were a phone conversation
and he can hear each breath I take.
Or he imagines we are at our favorite
café, sitting side by side, as we might have
if there had been no pandemic,
and he can feel through his own body
even the way my heart speeds up
as he speaks. And I would hear
the way his voice breaks at each
syllable. But we would not be
at the café. We’d be in his apartment
sitting cross-legged on the beige carpet,
the bright afternoon slowing down,
his cocoa-colored cat curled in his lap,
wheezing, then quieting, the two of us
not speaking, but petting and petting
her soft, still, unresisting fur.
Along the Willamette
At the river’s edge some kind of grassy plant
I can’t identify and detritus I can:
two blue almost collapsed helium balloons
and a silver one a foot or so above the water,
fighting to get away, its birthday message
in red, block letters for someone named Kate,
their strings tangled together in the river.
All year during COVID I’d stayed away,
but this morning, the air sweet and cool,
I wandered the six blocks to the river,
wanting an hour of my old life back:
my routine of walking the wide path,
maybe a few gulls, persistent pigeons,
early morning runners, people on bikes.
Everything I asked for is here.
And now the sun, held back by fat,
white clouds when I left my apartment,
breaks through, lighting the water.
Almost on cue, five kayaks paddle by
causing a rush of waves to knock
and knock against the bank, releasing
the silver balloon, which rises
into the bluing sky, and a dozen geese
in that familiar vee I’ve missed,
their long, black necks stretched
into exclamation marks above it, honk
almost in unison as if to celebrate.
“Happy birthday, Kate,” I say, happy
myself not to be anywhere else.
All Things Are a Commons
All Things Are a Commons
A commons isn’t a shared space for multiple lives but rather the space of their shared lives.
Proceeding from Craig Holdrege’s observation of the American bison in Seeing the Animal Whole, I explain how our functions, conscious ones in particular, establish commons wherein our lives are directly shared with others.
Holdrege portrays the bison as an organic part of the continuous whole life of the prairie which on his visit included him. He writes:
When I perceive a bison’s dark glistening eye, a young bull rolling in the dirt releasing a cloud of dust, or a bison swimming across a river with only its head above water, I am with those bison. I am here and I am there. The bison extend into me and I into them. We intermingle…when we perceive one another and respond to one another we are in those moments not separate. We extend beyond our physical boundaries.1
His awareness can be explained by considering organisms as having multiple identities as they share in each other’s lives. A simple illustration is the bee and the flower: the bee is part of the life of the flower, while the flower is part of the life of the bee. The bee’s function of collecting pollen is fulfilled by the flower, while the flower’s function of reproduction is fulfilled by the bee. Their lives physically intersect and are conjoined when a particular bee collects pollen from a particular flower. Otherwise these extensions of their lives exist only potentially.
Holdrege describes several symbiotic relations between bison and other organisms, for example the grass which they eat and whose growth they promote by cropping and depositing urine and dung onto it. From a distance a bison smells the grass, as the latter disperses volatile substances into the air which are then taken into the animal’s nose. According to establishment science these are neurologically processed to produce an olfactory perception.
Now the bison also sees the grass, and we understand its seeing to be like its smelling. Light is reflected from the surface of the grass, creating an aura, so to speak, of visibility around the grass. When the bison enters this aura the light is received into its eyes and, also through neurological processing, it is then understood to see an image of the grass. This is the establishment explanation of sense perception: stimuli are taken into the sensory organs then pass into the brain where they become conscious scents and visual images.
Holdrege practices Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s method of science which categorically rejects explaining observed phenomena by reducing it to unobserved entities and processes, and my somewhat different approach does so as well. Obviously we can’t smell with a bison’s nose or see with its eyes, but we can understand our own seeing of the animal and its presentation to our sight by recognizing the immediate self-evident truth about our visual experience.
I open my eyes and see a panorama of images. Contrary to the establishment view, it is three-dimensional. I see images of objects at a distance from the image of my body, revealing that my experience isn’t in my body but that my body is in my experience. My visual perception occupies a space, but this is not the space of “real” solid objects, for it is perspectival and private to me. Instead, it is the space of my visual consciousness.
Like other animal functions that relate to objects, that of seeing is fulfilled by the object, specifically its function of visibility. These functions extend beyond the physical boundaries of both the seeing animal and the seen object. They exist in a potential state until the visual extension of an animal intersects with the visible extension of the object, at which point they functionally conjoin, producing the image in the seer’s extended visual consciousness.
The lives of the seer and the seen are directly conjoined in the image, the fact of which the seer is conscious through their awareness that the object is present to them. An image immediately appears in consciousness and is not formed by obscure neurological processes in the brain. It is however conditioned by the subject’s full life which includes the body as it incorporates aspects of their past experience, store of information and present intention, all of which give it meaning. The image is further conditioned by innumerable other things presently around the body whose conjunction with the subject’s life appears as its visual context.
An act of seeing is not merely the registration of colors and shapes regarded as the image of some particular object. One is also immediately aware of the thing itself in addition to its visual properties. The object is an indivisible whole continuous with the world around it. Its function of visibility is an indivisible function of the indivisible continuous whole which it is, and the same is true of the subject’s function of vision. One sees the visual properties of the object which itself is simultaneously and immediately present in consciousness as an intuition of its essence that in the case of an organism is its very life.
Intuition is subtle and indistinct, but there is no question that we are immediately aware of what the things are that we perceive with our senses. This awareness is usually lost in the totality of experience which is filled with sensory content and in which our attention rapidly shifts about. But just focus your attention on some object, as Holdrege did with the bison, groove with it, so to speak, and you will become aware of its very life in your intuition of it.
As the modern worldview breaks down people are rapidly discovering and putting forth alternatives. This activity is demonstrating that there are multiple modes of consciousness and forms of understanding. My view adds to the confirmation of William James’ position that we live in a pluralistic universe.
The world is a commons in which the lives of different things are shared as they spatially intersect and functionally conjoin.
This is our culture’s best-kept secret, as we imagine that each thing extends no farther than the limits of its body and that consciousness is a material process confined to the dark interior of our wee skulls. But immediate experience tells us otherwise: we are directly aware of the things around us and that our lives are conjoined in our consciousness. This is particularly apparent insofar as we are related to them in other vital ways exemplified by gardeners’ special awareness of the lives of the flowers, fruits and vegetables that they plant and nurture as well as the corresponding sense that people have who lovingly care for or study animals.
As a growing number of writers assert that the separation of people and things is a false belief many offer unity as merely a replacement belief. I show that unity is a matter of immediate experience which directly reveals that our lives are conjoined with those of the things around us, making us, them and the world all commons.
References
[1] Seeing the Animal Whole, and Why It Matters by Craig Holdrege / Lindisfarne Books / 2021.
The Holomovement
The Holomovement
Never before has there been such a sense of urgency to transform society and save our planet, and with good reason. Civilization is on a cliff’s edge, precariously balanced between a breakdown or breakthrough in our cultural and spiritual evolution. Our social, financial and environmental systems are deteriorating, a global pandemic is wreaking havoc on our daily lives and cultural and social wounds that have been festering for hundreds of years are in urgent need of attention. The challenges can seem insurmountable most days, but there is hope.
A global movement guided by the emerging principles of what has been called the new paradigm is gaining momentum. This transformative shift represents the emergent norm of our highest human values, representing the altruistic nature of our species at its best. It encompasses hundreds of thousands, possibly millions, of individuals, nonprofits, small community groups and organizations all in motion working to change the fundamental nature of society.
To achieve this transformative shift will require a movement with a unifying worldview outlined by defining principles that give us hope, meaning and evolutionary direction. Poised at the bifurcation point of our species’ breakdown or breakthrough, it is critical our global family finds consensus in shifting our cultural values from “me,” to “we,” to “all.” A transformative movement of this magnitude needs a name to rally around, one I propose calling the Holomovement.
Finding a Sense of Hope within the Holomovement
I first came across the term “holomovement” nearly 40 years ago while reading “Wholeness and the Implicate Order,” a book written by American physicist David Bohm. Published in 1980, Bohm described the universe as an unbroken wholeness of the totality of existence: an undivided, flowing movement without borders. The holomovement, as explained by Bohm, was “a holistic understanding of our universe as a manifestation of the consciousness of our universe.”
At the core of our universe is the implicate order, the field of consciousness and multidimensional reality of oneness that creates our world. The physical manifestation of how we perceive the universe is the explicate order. The holomovement is what weaves the two together.
While this description was first used to describe the physical explanation of our universe, Bohm went on to apply it to cosmology and even the source of consciousness. For Bohm, the term describes the flow of the unbounded wholeness of reality, including an openness to apply it to the evolution of consciousness and social organization. In today’s context it can be seen as both a spiritual calling and a sociological branding for the so-called “movement of movements” to resolve our planetary crisis.
In recognition of Bohm’s vision and the subsequent realization of the synergistic energy arising, the term “holomovement” perfectly describes the sociological phenomenon underlying the worldwide movement towards unity. Aligned under the whole world view of the Holomovement, we reawaken to our true spiritual nature serving the coherence of new paradigm thought.
A Holotropic Attractor Guiding Us Toward Unity
More than a catchy name, the Holomovement, as applied to our current times, represents radical collaboration in action, founded in love, with a collective mission that continues to honor the autonomy of each of our diverse purpose-driven efforts. Guided by both science and spirituality and propelled by a sense of purpose, I, alongside a group of thought leaders, envision the Holomovement as a rallying cry for this grand movement to take root, grow and bloom into the new structure of our collective consciousness.
Throughout history there have been cultural revolutions, yet we’re still struggling to give people their basic rights, freedoms and services required for human dignity upon which a transformed society can be built. Anger and frustration might fuel a movement, but it is love and compassion that will foster and sustain true transformation.
We need a unifying worldview that bridges religions, race, nationality and cultural values. Within the Holomovement, we outline 8 core principles to create a coherent and inclusive vision and message. Alongside these foundational tenets, we also call upon the wisdom traditions to guide us in their long-held understanding of wholeness in our interconnected web of life. By embodying these principles, we can also explore the nature of this Holomovement through the threads of cosmology, psychology and sociology.
Holomovement 8 Core Principles:
- Interconnected Wholeness. Although dazzlingly complex and multidimensional, the cosmos is a single, living process, profoundly interconnected and sacred in its Oneness.
- A Conscious Living Universe. Dynamic and alive, the universe arises from a source of consciousness, offering each of us meaning within our interconnected wholeness.
- Purposeful Evolution. The Interconnected Whole is evolutionary in its conscious awareness of existence, engaging in a purposeful evolution of its own nature. Over time, the cosmos, the earth and all living things develop increasing levels of complexity, interconnectedness, coherence, cooperation and consciousness.
- Wholesomeness as Our Natural State of Being. All of reality, including individual beings and social and cultural systems tend to be attracted to health, wholeness and the mutual flourishing of life and consciousness. Seemingly “evil” motives and behaviors are not fundamental to human nature, but rather an unbalanced state dominated by materialism and a sense of separation.
- A Self-Healing Cosmos. Our existential civilizational Meta-Crisis (of climate, culture, society, economics, and more) is naturally coinciding with a widespread awakening of virtuous social projects, analogous to an immune response. These contrasting forces, or levels of consciousness, although challenging, offer the necessary impulse to propel our ongoing evolution.
- Embodying the Holomovement. David Bohm coined the term “holomovement” to describe how undivided wholeness is expressed in every seemingly separate entity, event and action. “The Holomovement” is an apt name representing the diverse sociocultural movement toward a just, fulfilling and sustainable human presence on Earth and within the cosmos.
- Prior Unity in Action. The Holomovement is not a project to unite diverse efforts, but an inherent expression of the nature of reality and its collaborative coherence converging into unity while simultaneously respecting the autonomy of individual and group endeavors.
- Cosmological, Individual and Sociological Dimensions. The Holomovement is a name for the action of the undivided cosmos working to reassert health and wholeness in the face of the crises of fragmentation. This cosmological process becomes conscious and is enacted at the level of individual human beings, first through psychological and spiritual transformation, and then as transformed behavior that can scale to transform human groups, organizations, systems and societies. Both individuals and groups can awaken to and choose to participate more consciously and effectively in the inherent activity of the Holomovement.
Radical Collaboration in Action
At the heart of this unifying worldview is the belief that we live in a purposeful and conscious universe. Unfortunately, material wealth is the current metric in which we measure our value, and we’ve been duped into believing success and happiness are linked to our net worth. So much of our collective frustration, anxiety and fear is a result of this rampant materialism. We long for purpose and meaning, but these materialistic habits distract us from awakening to the spiritual essence of who we all are.
It’s time for a spiritual revolution from the inside out. One that is ignited by peace and love and manifests in purposeful social action. Despite the illusion that we are all separate, the implicate order is wholeness and there is an attraction to bring us back to wholeness, or as Dr. Ervin Laszlo suggests, our driving evolutionary force operates as a “holotropic attractor.”
In his recent book “Reconnecting to the Source,” Laszlo breaks down the term into parts, “holo” meaning the whole, the all and “tropic” meaning the orientation or the tendency, “holotropic” is defined as a fundamental, orienting drive toward wholeness.
An “attractor” is something that lures us onward: purpose, love, ideals or truth, beauty, goodness. It is what creates order when chaos is involved.
Within this context, the Holomovement is the material manifestation of this flow toward oneness, the holotropic attractor leading civilization out of chaos and back to our natural state of harmony.
Cosmologically, psycho-spiritually and sociologically, the Holomovement is quite literally a movement of the whole towards truth, beauty and goodness. In a similar fashion as to how yin and yang make Taoist philosophy an interconnected and flowing whole, the Holomovement weaves the spiritual and material into a unified field of collective consciousness.
Our earliest ancestors, with their close connection to the natural and spiritual world, understood the essence of the whole world view as we are now exploring it, based upon a purposeful and conscious universe. Now is the time to merge the understandings of our elders with our knowledge of quantum reality such as proposed by David Bohm, and fuse it all into a grand, worldwide movement for social renewal.
Though the ideal of a thriving and vibrant community is shared with most of our global family, awakening to our interconnectedness proves to be much more complex and challenging. Disillusioned by a sense of separation, we’ve lost our way. Materialism has seeped into our relationships creating a subtle, transactional expectation prompting the unconscious question of “what’s in it for me?” So ingrained is this materialistic mindset, most of us have difficulty avoiding this way of operating.
In the same way Bohm described the implicate and explicate order moving in an unbroken whole, each of us are entwined as co-creators within our evolutionary flow. We are moving beyond the transactional nature of relationships and embodying the transformative power of deep spiritual connection. The good news is the Holomovement is endemic to everything we do. It is consciousness flowing in the universe, through us and the manifestations of our souls. Thankfully, we don’t have to “find it” but rather slow down and drop into a mindful place of deep knowing and feel the force of love that weaves our humanity together.
The Holomovement is living and flowing through each of us and we can no longer afford to fall back into habits of complacency, ignorance and denial. So profound is our entangled connection with people and planet there is no distinction between who is suffering. Ultimately, we all feel its effects.
What is possibly the most challenging transformative step in solving the current crisis of our world is exactly what we must do to see positive change. It is imperative that we form and nurture relationships across all divides and belief systems if we are to rediscover our collective sense of purpose and spiritual worth. Love and compassion are not finite resources within the flow of the Holomovement. In fact, the more we connect with others through goodwill, compassion, joy and curiosity, the more abundant these qualities become.
A Commitment in Tending Our Spiritual Commons
Tending our spiritual commons can no longer be the work of a few. The Holomovement and its unifying world view envisions a spiritual shift embraced by the mainstream. As interconnected groups around the globe, we are inspired to coalesce the rise of human consciousness and resolve the challenges we face in this singular moment of history. Finding inspiration and energy within the Holomovement helps us to better understand our true purpose, thereby accelerating our evolution towards our highest principles as we simultaneously surrender to the collective pull of prior unity.
Imagine the beauty and wonder and feeling of flow that we could experience if 7 billion people, acting with compassion and purpose, moved together in phase for the good of the whole.
Each of us has a soul-based purpose to contribute within this diverse sociocultural movement to restore the dignity and integrity of humanity as a functioning whole. Now is the time for human consciousness to find its purpose and put it into practice, every day, hour, minute. This is the call to action in following our individual purpose toward the greater good of our oneness.
Message from Haiti | Inspiration Between Two
Message from Haiti | Inspiration Between Two
Roodly Laurore’s Note:
Haiti, in recent times, has cast an anchor both nationally and internationally. Haiti is a republic with a democratic option where all the institutions are now totally obsolete. We are now talking about chaos: no deputies, no functional senators, no magistrates, no president, and no courts. The three powers of the state are non-existent. The country is currently experiencing acute poverty linked to poor governance and widespread corruption. Then, add a series of natural disasters like the earthquake of January 12, 2010 and that of August 14, 2021, not to mention several cyclones. These chronic problems dating back more than thirty years result in a vertiginous rise in insecurity which, in a certain sense, destroys the very foundation of society and has led to the assassination of president Jovnel Moise on July 7, 2021. Theft, rape, and kidnapping are the means used by many armed gangs to make money.
In this unhealthy diabolical atmosphere, I forced myself, under the threat of these armed men, to leave my home to go and live elsewhere in extremely difficult situations. I patiently wait for the opportune moment to return there. The country becomes hell for these daughters and sons to the point where all the young people have only one goal: leave the country by any means. Some go to Chile, others to Brazil, and sometimes to the United States or Canada in search of a better life.
Traders close their doors to settle in the Dominican Republic, resulting in an increase in the unemployment rate, causing at the same time unprecedented misery. It is true that Haiti is plunged into darkness, and we do not yet see the way out, but as long as there is LIFE, there is hope.
May God Bless Haiti!
Roodly Laurore
08/22/2021
Jerrice J. Baptiste’s Note:
It is a pleasure to collaborate with my uncle Roodly Laurore. He introduced me to poetry at a very young age in Haiti. He was my first mentor and the one who I return to for wisdom. We both feel the need to bring words into the world that will raise the consciousness of the planet.
Inspiration Between Two
A collaboration between Roodly Laurore and Jerrice J. Baptiste
Earth suffers because of us.
Beautiful black earth.
Blue sea alive
we adore
will disappear one day
sooner rather than later.
She who feeds us
her beauty is our joy.
The bluish immensity that surrounds it
represents a challenge to human pride.
Nothing visible is eternal.
Sooner or later everything will pass.
Our eyes speak of things
we have seen, the visible.
Moon sits on edge of dry sea,
bitter taste of salt disappears.
How do we eat without salt?
We are walking in shallow water.
Caress the cheeks of the tearful moon
needing courage to climb the black sky.
Heart sighs with the invisible
will, sensitivity, morality
Creator’s symbols
to a high degree our contact with great minds
to unify soul and body
to reconcile water and fire
so that the whole universe harmonizes.
It is happiness, bliss.
With the calm mind comes silence.
Every night with the happy moon
stars are shining. Children are sleeping.
Eyes look at the wonders
of mountains: the birds are singing
their wings heard in the wind
make our ancestors smile.
We embrace past, present, future.
Inspiration Entre Deux
Nous faisons souffrir la terre.
La belle terre noire.
La mer bleue en vie
que nous adorons
disparaîtra un jour
plus tôt que plus tard.
Elle qui nous nourrit,
sa beauté est notre joie.
L’immensité bleuâtre qui l’entoure
représente un défi à l’orgueil humain
rien de visible n’est éternel .
Tôt ou tard, tout passera.
Nos yeux voient souvent les choses visibles
la lune qui parcourt le bord de la mer desséchée .
Le goût amer du sel disparu.
Comment mangeons nous sans sel?
Nous marchons dans l’eau profonde.
caressée les joues de la lune en larmes .
Courage pour monter au ciel bleu.
Le cœur soupire des choses invisibles.
La volonté, la sensibilité, la moralité
symboles de l’image du créateur
à un degré élevé en contact avec les grands esprits
pour arriver à unifier l’âme et le corps
pour réconcilier l’eau et le feu
afin que tout l’univers s’harmonise.
C’est le bonheur, la félicité.
Avec l’esprit calme vient le silence.
Chaque nuit avec la lune heureuse,
les étoiles brillent. Les enfants dorment
Les yeux regardent les merveilles
des montagnes: Les oiseaux chantent
leurs ailes entendues
dans le vent font sourire nos ancêtres
pour embrasser le passé, le présent, et le futur.
The Hermetic Revival
The Hermetic Revival
The universe runs on natural laws. Apples fall. Birds fly. We live. We die. When we take the time to understand these laws, we can use them. We can leverage them. We can push against gravity to fly. We can use the knowledge that one day we must die, to live better lives.
And since the very beginning of civilization the wisest of us have been united in the pursuit of discovering these natural laws, in order to learn from them and use them to experience greater happiness, meaning, and control over our lives in the time that we have.
Nearly 2,000 years ago, when these themes and ideas would get you killed for heresy and blasphemy, they were discussed in whispered tones and passed down only from master to student in moments of extreme trust. However, through effort of preservation and excavation we have been able to get a look into our philosophical past and a once-great tradition that led to greater understanding of the universe and our place in it.
This tradition is Hermeticism.
What Is Hermeticism?
The hermetic tradition represents a non-Christian lineage of Gnosticism, which is the name for a variety of ancient religious ideas and systems dating back to the 1st and 2nd centuries A.D.
The surviving writings of Hermeticism are known as the Corpus Hermeticum, composed of a series of letters from a master, Hermes Trismegistus, to his disciple. These letters were lost to the western world after classical times, but survived in Byzantine libraries.
In the Fifteenth Century, the letters were rediscovered and translated into Latin by the court of Cosimo de Medici (yes, grandfather to Lorenzo de Medici, patron of Leonardo Da Vinci and several other Renaissance artists). These letters were so influential during the time that they acted as a catalyst in the development of Italian Renaissance thought and culture.
Inspired by this wave of innovation, these timeless principles were resurrected again by the Freemasons and showed up in the teachings of American revolutionaries.
But why is this philosophy so influential?
Being a Gnostic tradition, Hermeticism is a school of ideas and systems that focuses on the pursuit of gnosis — empirical knowledge pertaining to spiritual mysteries.
In a historical world where all major religions had gatekeepers to the spiritual experience, the Gnostics, and later Hermeticists, rebelled in thought. They took the pursuit of the mystical experience into their own hands and developed a way of thinking about the world that helped them communicate with and directly experience what they called ‘a more visionary reality.’ Which begs the question, what kind of man was Hermes Trismegistus, and what made him so widely influential?
Who is Hermes Trismegistus?
“Master of all arts and sciences, perfect in all crafts, Ruler of the Three Worlds, Scribe of the Gods, and Keeper of the Books of Life, Thoth Hermes Trismegistus — the Three Times Greatest, the “First Intelligencer” — was regarded by the ancient Egyptians as the embodiment of the Universal Mind. While in all probability there actually existed a great sage and educator by the name of Hermes, it is impossible to extricate the historical man from the mass of legendary accounts which attempt to identify him with the Cosmic Principle of Thought.” – Manly P. Hall — The Secret Teachings of All Ages
Hermes Trismegistus is the purported author of both the Emerald Tablet and the Corpus Hermeticum, and one of those characters in history that blend the mythical with the actual.
He is the author who represents a combination of the Egyptian God Thoth and the Greek God Hermes – both gods of writing and magic in their respective cultures.
Hermes was credited with thousands of highly esteemed writings, in both Egypt and Greece, suggesting a shared cultural tradition between the two in the man. And while the Italian Renaissance believed Hermes to be an Egyptian priest, it is possible the Corpus Hermeticum was actually written by a collective of unknown authors who were Platonistic and Stoic Greeks.
All that can be said for sure, is that the Seven Hermetic Laws shared in the Corpus Hermeticum were found, in part, in the Nag Hammadhi library in 4th century Egypt A.D., and in the Emerald Tablets of Thoth — proving a common thread of some sort.
Whether Hermes actually existed, was in fact both the Greek God Hermes and the Egyptian God Thoth, and whether this represents a shared cultural link between Ancient Greece and Egypt — there is no way to prove.
What we can be certain of, is that these principles of Hermeticism held immense value for these ancient cultures, whoever their author may be. And whenever they resurface, they act as a catalyst for creative renaissance, revolution, and cultural regeneration.
These Seven Laws are some of the oldest and most influential systems of thinking, and have expanded horizons, broadened possibilities, and aided many in the pursuit of fuller, happier, more meaningful and longer lives — as much in modern times as ancient ones.
While reading these principles, remember that they were written thousands of years ago, before any modern science verified their surprisingly accurate esoteric claims.
The Seven Hermetic Principles for Self-Mastery
1. The Principle of Mentalism:
The All is mind; The Universe is Mental.
This first principle embodies the truth that ‘All is Mind’, meaning, the Universe itself, at an underlying and foundational level, is Mental and that all phenomena of life, matter and energy of the material universe are thoughts of an infinite and universal, living Mind. Which means all things share a connection in that they exist within the Mind of ‘THE ALL’, as it is put, and therefore are subject to the laws of created things. This Mental Universe, for the sake of experiment, could be explained as an infinite intelligence, intelligent field, or as the nature of consciousness itself – a dialogue of thought dancing with thought.
The Principle of Mentalism, explains the nature of energy, power, and matter as being subordinate to the Mind, as it shows up within ourselves and the pervading nature of all things.
When you view everything you think, and therefore do, as an interaction of thought with thought, an understanding of the first principle of Mentalism arises, which allows you to grasp the the laws of the Mental Universe and apply them to your well-being and personal advancement. Like using the knowledge of the Principle of Polarity, which is the fourth Hermetic principle, to understand that love and hate are the same intensity of emotion, varying only in degree. And through the mind, can be transferred from one degree to another by the power of objective thinking and conscious choice. The two emotions maintain their intensity, only changing in degree to suit whatever outcome and experience is most desired. This is possible by the law of Mentalism, and to also influence other laws, and what happens on other planes.
In Hermeticism, there are many descriptions of different planes, levels or dimensions of existence, that overlay atop one another. They are usually depicted as layers of concentric circles, where the inner-layers are more foundational and influence the outer layers. In Hermeticism, there are three Great Planes: the mental plane, physical plane, and spiritual plane which have varying lesser-planes between them that also differ in degree between undifferentiated matter and spirit.
From a first person perspective, the mental plane is experienced as thought, insight, intuition, and reason. But understanding of how this plane corresponds with other, unseen, or causal planes, tells us that there may be more to our thoughts than we perceive – that our thoughts are not tied simply to the physical plane, but have an effect on energetic and spiritual levels, which is less obvious but still very real.
This principle is what allows the student to apply their mental faculty to leverage all other laws, by perceiving thought as the ‘operating system’, which allows them to interface with other layers of being and to anticipate other natural and energetic laws, and cause them to occur in ways that are beneficial. Because all planes exist within the realm of a Mental Universe they can be reasoned with. Through this principle, David can take down Goliath, we can explore the Moon, and reason with all phenomena of the Mental universe.
2. The Principle of Correspondence:
As above, so below; as below, so above. As within, so without; as without, so within.
This principle embodies the truth that there is always a correspondence between the laws and phenomena of various planes that manifest as being and life. Grasping this principle is what allows one to deduce the hidden solutions to problems by looking at what exists a layer above, and below the problem, and infer the pattern and shadow nature of what is in-between.
Of course, there are planes and phenomena beyond our knowing, as we are limited to the spectrums of visible light and audible sound, but by witnessing the patterns that do exist in our dimension we can deduce what may exist in higher and lower ones.
Just as the knowledge of Geometry allows one to measure the cosmos and map its movements as a dance of spheres and spirals, observing the Principle of Correspondence, we can come to know the whole of the Universe by exploring the higher and lower nature of things surrounding the mystery. And likewise, we discover more of ourselves, by experiencing and studying the world we are integrally a part of through the pursuit of gnosis. The micro is in the macro, and vice versa.
3. The Principle of Vibration:
Nothing rests; Everything moves; Everything vibrates.
This principle embodies the truths that ‘nothing rests,’ ‘everything is in motion,’ and ‘everything vibrates.’ It explains that matter, energy, and even spirit, are simply varying rates of vibration.
A classic example of this is frequency, in which the seven octaves of music, tuned up 44 octaves, miraculously become the spectrum of visible light (passing through states of being that include the buzz pitch of insects, ultra-sound, plasma, ether, hyper sound, and even octaves of heat.) As they change manifestation, the vibrations maintain the same correspondence, the difference being only in measurement and energy as frequencies slide up and down the electromagnetic spectrum.
At the highest rates of vibration, the rate and intensity are so rapid something may appear to be motionless, like a spinning wheel appearing stable. And at the lowest levels of vibration, objects move so slowly they appear to be totally at rest. Between these two extremes, exist infinite manifestations all occurring at varying octaves of vibration, each with their own phenomena. Hermeticists believe that thoughts have their own rate of vibration and can be controlled like tuning an instrument, to produce various results for the aim of self and environment mastery. As understanding of vibration, frequency, harmony and resonance increases, so too power over the self and the world.
4. The Principle of Polarity:
Everything is dual; Everything has poles; Everything has its pair of opposites; Like and unlike are the same; Opposites are identical in nature, but different in degree; Extremes meet; All truths, are but half-truths; All paradoxes may be reconciled.
The fourth principle explains that opposites are really only two extremes of the same thing, the difference being in degree. An obvious example is ‘hot and cold’ — both are temperatures, varying only in degree. There is no clear crossover moment when hot stops being hot, and starts being cold and vice versa, with no absolutes on either end. The same can be said of ‘light and darkness’ ‘hard and soft’ ‘big or small’ and even ‘love and hate.’ With ‘love and hate’ there is no clear point where one emotion becomes another, or when it passes through ‘like’ ‘dislike’ or ‘indifference.’ All are merely our perceptions of the degree. The principle of Polarity explains these paradoxes.
This principle is important to Hermeticists, because it suggests we can change the polarity of a degree of emotion, by recognizing it is the same and choosing the degree which best suits our needs. This practice is the art of Mental Alchemy.
5. The Principle of Rhythm:
Everything flows, out and in; Everything has its tides; All things rise and fall; The pendulum swing manifests in everything; The measure of the swing to the right is the measure of the swing to the left; Rhythm compensates.
Between opposite poles the pendulum swing expresses the principle of Rhythm. This principle embodies the truth that everything exists in measured motion, from here to there, moving in and out, swinging backward and forward, like the rise and fall of the tides, ebbing and flowing and never truly sitting still. Never stopping, always changing.
This principle controls the cycle of life and death, creation and destruction, rise and fall, and of course manifests in our mental states.
When you are in tune with the Principle of Rhythm and understand that every mental state exists in Rhythm, always ebbing and flowing, you can learn to use this principle to your advantage by polarizing yourself to the degree you desire. Then, through awareness of this principle and how it manifests, holding yourself there to keep the pendulum from swinging you backwards to its extreme.
Imagine going to an event that you know holds a lot of emotional significance for you, and checking in with yourself there. Knowing, you are experiencing a high and that this state is unsustainable, you can slot in time for transition to keep yourself from crashing, knowing the Principle of Rhythm is affecting or will affect you. Likewise, with times of stress and grief, you can give yourself time to return to neutral before ramping back up again.
Know that things you lose, will come back, and that things you own now, will disappear later.
Being able to use these smooth transitions can be the difference between days of recovery (mentally, physically, and emotionally) and smooth grace periods between times of intensity. Knowing when to retreat and when to return is one of the many keys to self mastery. Through heightened awareness gained by understanding this principle, you can rise above the swing of the pendulum. Rhythm will have an effect on you one way or another, but with awareness you can use it to propel you forward and ride it back to recovery.
All people who experience self-mastery do this to some degree, but those who exert their will upon this principle are able to act from a place of purpose as opposed to letting the pendulum swing them into reactivity.
6. The Principle of Cause & Effect:
Every cause has its effect; Every effect has its cause; Everything happens according to law’ Chance is but a name for law not recognized’ There are many planes of causation, but nothing escapes the law.
This principle embodies the fact that there is a ’Cause for every Effect;’ and an ‘Effect for every Cause’, meaning, that nothing merely ‘happens for no reason,’ and that there is no such thing as ‘chance.’ In harmony with the principle of Correspondence, there are higher planes dominating lower planes and nothing escapes the Principle of Cause & Effect. Nothing happens without explanation.
The empowering use of this principle is to make the conscious choice to rise above the plane of thought you currently occupy to become your own Cause, and not just an Effect of others and the situations you find yourself in. That is to say, be your own first mover as opposed to someone who merely reacts to circumstance. I know I am out of alignment with this principle, when I find myself feeling reactive, stressed and frazzled; waking up only to handle and deal with the things that come my way instead, of going out of my own way to determine and create what I desire to experience. The goal is to put into action the first move, which will bring me the result I desire, not as a surprise, but a product of calculation.
So, I know that if I want to be a better writer, I clearly need to write each day and read more often. If not, I am resigning myself to merely reacting to the consequences of not having done the work and experiencing the problems that inevitably arise when I’m not pursuing my highest calling.
Of course, when you are on the quest to become someone who has mastery over their self, and can control their moods, character, and the environment around them — you will naturally have to obey the causation of higher planes in accordance to this principle. But the important distinction is that having awareness of this will give you the ability to rule on your own plane, without resigning to the roles of the dunce or victim.
7. The Principle of Gender:
Gender is in everything; Everything has its masculine and feminine principles; Gender manifests on all planes.
This principle embodies the fact that both the masculine and feminine exist in all things. Not just in sex, but in the creative nature of all things, on all planes. In harmony with the principle of Correspondence, this means that the masculine and feminine exist not only in the physical plane, but also the mental, and the spiritual as well. The principle of Gender plays a role in all things: generation, creation, and regeneration — nothing can come into being without the use of this principle.
The masculine is the penetrative, assertive, progressive, conquesting, explorative energy that drives progress. The feminine is the receptive, sacred, treasured, protective energy, that maintains tradition and honors the priority of what is most important, while nourishing that which is most essential to life.
Too much masculine energy, without a balance of feminine, leads to a growth of power to the extreme of reckless abandon — where we lose perspective of what is most important and forget the principles which began the conquest in the first place. While, too much feminine energy, without a balance of the masculine, leads to a life grounded so deeply in the present, that our lives become determined by the cycles and external circumstance out of our favor.
All beings contain this great Principle within them, as two parts. Every male has feminine energy, and every female has masculine energy. In sex we see the interplay of these energies. In our moods, actions, attitudes, and personalities we see the dance of these energies within ourselves.
The most potent use of this principle is how Gender is responsible for creation, generation, and regeneration on the mental and spiritual planes, and not just the physical. True progress is possible through the balancing of the two energies of Gender in oneself, ones relationships, and environment. We examine how present we are in our lives. How focused we are on the future. What we sacrifice for our achievements. What we protect and honor as our highest priority. How far from home we have traveled in pursuit of what we desire the most. How much we are giving and how much we are receiving. We ask ourselves if these energies are in balance.
To choose the middle path between extremes of the ‘present feminine’ and ‘future-driven masculine’, and seek balance in all things, is the key to using all Seven Hermetic Principles principles to full effect and achieving lasting self-mastery.
A User’s Guide for Gnosis
Each of these principles exists in nature, and applies directly to our mental, emotional, and spiritual states. They give us a map of hidden territory both within and without. Having awareness of these principles, and how they affect one another, gives us an understanding of our own patterns, what holds influence over us, and how we can use these principles and their laws to direct our own lives.
The Seven principles of Hermeticism teach us how to use our minds to communicate with the Mental Universe. All dreamers imagine and aspire to a realm higher than the base matter we come from. Whether that be Plato’s World of Forms, a Christian Heaven, the Astral Plane, or the esoteric notion of a Higher Dimension — these principles help us understand the phenomena of the planes above us, the planes below us, and how their patterns can illuminate what we cannot see. Also, how we can tune our own vibrations to experience the ease of being in harmony with forces that naturally occur at higher vibrations. And to choose the Polarity we wish to experience, knowing all choices open to us, or remain where we choose, knowing how to transcend the pendulum swing of Rhythm. And finally, to realize that we are always being ‘effected’, that nothing happens to us by chance- we can choose to cause the effects that we most prefer. In order to benefit from all of these principles, we must seek balance of both the masculine and feminine within ourselves to create our ideal realities, and wield this power without straying too far from the middle path.
These principles have served as tools for the priests and pharaohs of Egypt, the philosophers of Greece, the artists and inventors of the Italian Renaissance, and the revolutionaries and leaders of America (among others to be sure).
But remember: these are Gnostic principles. By themselves, these principles are useless, but have power when you creatively apply them.
So, here are some questions to help you apply the Seven Hermetic Principles through direct inquiry and experience gnosis in your own life.
Questions for Applying the Principle of Mentalism:
Have you ever experienced the effect of mind over matter? Use the power of visualization to make yourself feel less hot, or cold. To taste a fruit in your mind, or experience a memory as if it’s happening now.
Have you ever had the same idea as someone else, or discovered something you thought was unique, only to realize it’s been written about before? Our thoughts are connected and this is one way we can tangibly understand that our thoughts are not our own and do not originate within us.
Have you ever focused your awareness somewhere on your body and felt it tingle, or the intensity of sensation increase there, simply because you directed your mind toward it? This is a demonstration of the common phrase, energy goes where attention flows.
Questions for Applying the Principle of Correspondence:
Have you ever dealt with a personal problem, and begun to feel like the situations you find yourself in prod at the issue repeatedly until you resolve it? The themes in our lives tend to re-occur and correspond on many levels, until we learn our lesson.
Have you ever noticed a pattern in nature, that repeats whether in the bloom of a flower, or shape of a river, and wonder how these seemingly unconnected events share the same geometry? All things grow by the same sets of natural laws.
Have you ever felt like you were a part of something larger, that you may not even be able to see or perceive, yet you are directly contributing to it? We, ourselves, are a part of the correspondence.
Questions for Applying the Principle of Vibration:
Have you ever listened to a song and felt a certain way about it, like some chords are pleasant to hear, and others feel inherently wrong? The way things vibrate effects us at a foundational level.
In the same way, have you ever looked at a painting or a combination of colours and found it to be beautiful, and at other times find it to be distressing? The expression of certain vibrations, even that of colours, affect us on an emotional level.
Have you ever attracted something into your life, good or bad, by obsessing over it? The phenomena of synchronicity, or manifestation, occurs because of the resonance and harmony between the way things vibrate.
Have you ever felt simply out of harmony with your environment, your job, or the people in your life? As we change, so too do the subtle vibrations of things and we can fall out of harmony with what does not honor where we are at this time in our lives.
Questions for Applying the Principle of Polarity:
Have you ever been in an argument with someone you deeply love and experienced your passion transform into anger almost instantly, then return back to love later? The Principle of Polarity can confuse our emotions, if we do not control the way we feel to honor ourselves or those we care about.
Have you ever dipped your fingers in water so hot that it shocks the nerves and feels cold at first? The way we experience the shock of extremes of polarity are similar in the mind and nervous system.
Have you ever focused on what it would feel like, to feel a certain way, then began to feel that way spontaneously? Our minds don’t know the difference between what is imagined and what is experienced and we can self-author our own experience if we choose to. This may feel like cheating, but sometimes it is necessary in order to consistently be in a state of peak performance to accomplish our goals.
Questions for Applying the Principle of Rhythm:
Have you ever witnessed a repeating pattern in your own life or the lives of others? Our lessons tend to re-emerge if we do not learn from them and integrate them well the first time.
Have you ever been to an event, or a party, and had the time of your life. Then, had a tremendous comedown the next day or even few days, even if you were sober the entire time? What comes up, must come down, and vice versa. Knowing how to ride your own rhythm gives you the ability to anticipate and plan accordingly.
Likewise, have you ever spent several days in isolation then felt yourself propelled towards adventure and novelty? What is down, will eventually come back again. All things exist in cycles and the key to enjoying them is understanding them and knowing how to benefit them, without taking them personally.
Questions for Applying the Principle of Cause & Effect:
Have you ever felt out of control, or completely blindsided by something in your life? Little things lead to big things. In hindsight, sometimes we can understand what caused what happened to us, and learn from it for next time.
Have you ever wanted to accomplish something that felt too big, or too unrealistic at the time? In the same way, we can start small with what we want to accomplish, knowing that these littles causes will lead to new effects. Which will put on further on the path of what we want to achieve, simply as a rule of nature.
Have you ever felt reactive, like your entire days were consumed by dealing with things that were simply happening to you, with no time to create anything new? When we get caught up in the weeds of our to-dos, we can lose perspective of how today we are receiving the effects of causes that happened earlier. And even worse, lose perspective on how the wins of today will create the causes of tomorrow.
Questions for Applying the Principle of Gender:
Have you ever felt like you were so caught up in the future and in fantasy that you never took the time to do what was necessary to attain them? Too much masculine energy, without enough feminine presence, can lead to unhealthy fantasy and disillusionment.
Have you ever felt so present, so at ease, and hedonistically enjoying the now, that you never cast your gaze on what would happen tomorrow? Too much feminine energy, can lead to such a deep sense of presence that we forget to create the causes today for the effects we want to experience tomorrow.
Have you ever been addicted to one extreme or the other? True self-mastery comes from being able to tread a middle path. Knowing that this is where we are able to most accurately direct the path of our life and show up in a way that is most authentic to who we want to be.
These questions are a great place to get started applying the Seven Principles to your life, but don’t stop here. Use your knowledge of these principles to create your own experiments and take your own notes through life. Gain direct experience of what you are curious about, without requiring spiritual permission from anyone other than yourself. Pursue that which you desire, so long as it does not bring harm to another.
And along the way, remind yourself of these principles at every turn. Resurrect them every chance you get. Use them to sharpen your will, develop self-mastery and create what you wish to experience in this life, without compromise.
The Atlas of Disappearing Places
The Atlas of Disappearing Places
These images are from the book, The Atlas of Disappearing Places.
Around the globe, the climate crisis is manifesting in the ocean and along our coasts as stronger storms, warmer waters, chemical changes, and higher sea levels. In this atlas, we tell the stories of twenty places that are being impacted by these changes. Our stories explore the experiences, species, and ways of life that are disappearing, why these changes are happening, and what might come next in a climate-disrupted future.
As an artist and writer, Christina works at the intersection of nature and culture, often using the ocean as both site and metaphor. Her interactive art installations on health and illness in natural systems—including our own bodies—investigate process, relationship, and responsibility in this time of climatic and cultural upheaval. Her main interest is in exploring the complexity of our relationships with the living world and how much we have left to learn.
She painted these maps on sheets of dried “sea lettuce,” members of the genus Ulva, a group of green macroalgae found in many parts of the world. The process involves hauling forty pounds of wet, briny seaweed back to her studio and washing and laying each sheet out to dry in an iteration of “women’s work,” such as basketmaking or weaving, in which materials have to be seasonally gathered and processed before the artwork can be made. Only two cells thick, the green sheets of Ulva then bleach in the sun to a beautiful, translucent parchment that is brittle, fragile, and luminous.
Each map is painted with water-soluble inks. If water touches the ink, it will wash away. If the parchment gets wet, it will instantly reanimate into slippery, slimy sheets, and the map is gone, elusive as the passage of time. All of the maps in this book were created from a single piece of Ulva perhaps 150 square feet in size, the largest Christina has ever found. Each map is a re-creation of one or more published data sources from our research, using the color scheme shared by almost all researchers—red equals danger! Most of the seaweed images were then digitally layered onto a Google Earth image to provide geographical reference points. Most chapters also include smaller maps that show the global extent of each climate impact, replicating each researcher’s choice of map projection.
© Christina Conklin and Marina Psaros. This excerpt originally appeared in The Atlas of Disappearing Places: Our
Coasts and Oceans in the Climate Crisis, published by The New Press. Reprinted here with permission.
Embodied Thinking and Embodied Feeling
Embodied Thinking and Embodied Feeling
Embodied self-awareness is both how we feel and experience ourselves and how we think about ourselves. Our only access to the experience of our whole body system is via these two forms of awareness. There is no other way to be embodied. There is no other way to be human.
Feeling and thinking can take many different forms, from the sublime to the ordinary, from love to hate, from passion to detachment. Understanding these different forms of embodied self-awareness (ESA)—their content and origins—and the many ways to monitor and regulate our ESA is the subject of my book.
Feeling and thinking, because they arise in different neural networks and have different pathways around the body, are for the most part mutually exclusive. We can’t do both at exactly the same time.* Whenever thoughts come into our awareness—even thoughts about our felt experience, such as “I wonder what caused this pain” or “I just need to slow down and focus on what I am feeling”—we immediately go off-line from our felt experience.
Table 1.1: Differences between the thinking and feeling components of embodied self-awareness†
Another shared Western cultural practice is that we learn, through formal systems of education, to think and that we are predisposed to think almost all the time. Since we are entirely familiar and practiced in thinking, let’s review what it means to feel something coming from inside the body. These self-feelings, or felt experiences, of ESA are composed of interoceptive, proprioceptive, autonomic, and emotional feelings. These components of felt experience will be covered in more detail in the next chapter, along with a discussion of where they arise in the nervous system. For now, Table 1.2 gives a brief overview.
Table 1.2: Felt experiences that arise from within our bodies
Curiously, interoception can also involve feelings about thoughts. There is the feeling when we know something but can’t quite recall it at the moment, a “tip of the tongue” feeling. Then there is the feeling that something we hear or see feels familiar, like we have been exposed previously but again can’t quite bring the prior situation into memory. A third feeling about thinking is the sense that we are getting close to solving a problem, the sense of coming to a conclusion, or a sense of completion. Finally, there is the sense of boredom, of having heard these thoughts or participated in these conversations, and continued exposure to these thoughts feels tedious or tiring.
Experiential Exercise: Thinking vs. Felt Experience
All the feelings listed in Table 1.2 are familiar. Everyone has felt them at some time but most likely for brief periods. It is so easy to think that we are living fully in the present moment with our felt experience, yet the fact is that we are thinking and not really feeling.
You can experience this attraction to thinking by taking a few minutes right now. First, think about how you feel and have been feeling today and the past few days. You’ll find it is fairly easy to generate a sizable list of self-descriptions that are likely to be fairly accurate. You probably will find it challenging to stop thinking so much, but let’s try and see what happens.
Instead of trying to think about yourself, sit or lie down in a comfortable place, and remove any distractions that might disturb you. This works best if you are in a quiet place. Close your eyes. See if you can slow your thoughts long enough to feel something concrete right in the present moment. It doesn’t really matter what you feel, so long as it captures your attention long enough for you to feel it. It could be the hardness or softness of the surface on which you are lying or sitting, the texture of your clothing against your skin, an ache or pain, an itch, your heartbeat, or an emotion that wants to surface.
The initial training in many embodied awareness practices such as mindfulness meditation begins with focusing on some concrete feeling, like your breath going in and out or your feet on the floor. Research done at various universities and medical centers in Norway shows that focused attention is not very helpful for accessing felt experience, which needs a more free-floating or diffuse kind of attention to the body. Focusing attention will activate an effort to concentrate and control, and it most typically leads into some kind of thinking about whether or not we are doing it right or getting where we think we are supposed to be going with this experiential exercise.
Instead, see if you can allow your attention to yourself to wander about your body. Let the wandering be without any deliberate effort to take a particular route through your body. Body scan meditations, for example, use focused attention, usually starting at the head and working the attention gradually down to the feet, or vice versa. That’s not what we want to do here. See if you can resist having a plan or purpose and just let your attention go wherever it finds something to feel, wherever your curiosity takes you.
Maybe there is a feeling of tightness or achiness in your chest. Notice that, and then broaden your attention to see if any other places feel tight like in your face or your belly. Again, you are sensing and feeling without any plan—you are following where your attention “wants” to go. See if there are any emotional feelings such as fear or worry or irritation that go with the tightness, or ache, or pain, or expansiveness, or whatever you feel.
See what thoughts come to you about any of these feelings, and just let them float around in your awareness as you keep coming back to your felt experiences. See if it is possible to do this without any deliberate effort to make the feeling get better, to change it, or to try to understand it. If you feel this urge to fix or change or explain your feeling, just notice that, and let the urge be merely another feeling that is coming up for you. It is not necessary to act on that urge.
Each time you come back to your felt experience, it may “land” in a different part of your body, so just practice letting yourself go wherever that takes you. At some point, if you give yourself enough time, as you are letting your attention wander through the sensations coming from your body, there is likely going to be one or a few sensations or emotions that begin to stand out, that capture your attention and hold it in one place for a least a few minutes. Once again, this attentional capture is not deliberate, not focused. It is someplace you arrive but not because you followed a specific route or plan.
Letting your attention drift around and then get drawn or pulled into a particular feeling endows that feeling with a personal intrinsic motivation to explore it. You don’t have to try to focus on it because you are just allowing the feeling to “call” you to it.
How is this calling different from focusing? Being “called” by a felt experience is similar to when you might be busy with something and a friend, child, or partner calls out to you and asks for your attention to something that they need to share with you. If you choose to drop your focus on your goals, plans, and expectations, you can be more open to the other person. You can just listen and take in the other person, what they say to you, and the feelings they express.
A lot of people have trouble just dropping their focus and really listening to themselves or to another person who calls them. If this happens to you, simply notice the pull of the focus, the wanting to not let go of whatever it was that you were working on. See if you can let that be just another feeling to which there is no attachment: it can float by as you let yourself be called by a different feeling or another person.
In this experiential exercise, you are approaching your own body with a similar kind of openness that you might offer to another person, a similar dropping of your plans and expectations, a similar “showing up” in the present moment. You are “listening” to your own body “speaking” to you in its own way, and not because you are supposed to be doing something in particular or trying to control the outcome.
Often this felt experience that captures your attention will get more intense and alive, and you will feel totally one with the experience. And at some point this feeling will begin to fade or soften, and you’ll eventually return to your thoughts. But see if you notice any change in yourself after staying with the feeling, like a deeper breath or a sense of relief. Feelings of relief and relaxation are some of the physiological signals indicating that you have allowed yourself to be fully in the present moment with a felt experience.
From Restorative Embodiment and Resilience: A Guide to Disrupt Habits, Create Inner Peace, Deepen Relationships, and Feel Greater Presence by Alan Fogel, published by North Atlantic Books, copyright © 2021. Reprinted by permission of publisher.
* I realize this statement is taking a rather extreme position. Some people I have talked to claim that they can do both at the same time. I have not had this experience, and the neural architecture doesn’t support this claim. If you feel you can do this, however, then I recommend slowing yourself down and really experimenting with seeing what you can feel when you are thinking. When I am feeling anything in my body, my sense is that the thoughts I was just previously having are somehow still “there” but transparent, faded into a background as residual images, and are no longer thoughts that I can “work on” or that lead anywhere.
To rephrase the earlier statement—that thinking and feeling can’t happen at the same time—almost any kind of thinking is a symptom of an impairment in the ability to sense our felt experience. Table 1.1 gives a summary of the differences between thinking about ourselves and feeling ourselves.
† I am grateful to Amanda Blake for allowing me to borrow some of her wording to construct this table. See Amanda Blake, Your Body Is Your Brain (Trokay Press, 2018).
The Value-Renewed Society
The Value-Renewed Society
Burning Questions
The world has been fascinated by the windswept images of Mars that are periodically transmitted by NASA’s Exploration Rovers, Spirit and Opportunity. Perhaps, as we study the video of the terrain and discern how this desolate planet lost its water eons ago, it helps take our minds off the searing climatic conditions that we face at home.
Since the exploration and colonization of the Western World in the 16th-17th centuries, the dominant worldview has been that our planet’s resources have few limits. Modern societies never bothered much with the systemic differences between renewable and non-renewable resources — after all, nature seemed boundless in its capacity to meet the needs of every population on Earth
The distinction between renewable and non-renewables was left for science to examine. The nascent field of economics was focused more on measuring the endless supplies of the commons, justifying the conquest and exploitation of the new territories and rationalizing the oppression of human labor to keep the business of resource development moving ahead.
After the Second World War, the West insisted that multilateral trade was the gateway to world peace; but all we hope for now is that trade will insulate us from a world which still finds itself at war over its commons. An observer visiting us today from Mars might define homo sapiens as “the race which has perfected its intelligence to fight over, consume and waste its material resources”.
Indeed, we have outsourced our hopes and dreams to the market economy. Wealth is our purpose. Prices our values. Ownership trumps sharing. Property is happiness. Human self-actualization lies in the magic of the marketplace.
Despite variations in their details, a single thread runs through classical, neo-classical and Keynesian economics, as well as ‘economics with Chinese characteristics’. Today’s governments and corporations still operate from the playbook that resource supplies are infinite, yet know very well that they are running down. This is because economics has taught our officials that the wealth arising from a financial yield in production or investment is more valuable to people than an organic yield from nature.
Of course, we could explain to our Martian visitor that we simply inherited this formula from our ancestors. We could say that we are not responsible that the indigenous wisdom for replenishing our shared resources has been neglected in our current social planning and policy.
Maybe the most honest thing we could say is that in a world without resource limitations, what we have done during the last five hundred years seemed like the most efficient course of action — that it all made sense at the time. But willful ignorance does not explain why we still haven’t found a way to admit our mistakes and commit ourselves to regenerating the commons and satisfying the needs of everyone in society.
Instead of going to bed at night dreaming of mining the minerals on Mars or finding some new pool of water on an asteroid, we need to ask ourselves some burning questions about our vision of life on Earth:
- Why do governments and corporations continue to believe that adding value to our commons through prices and investment will finance solutions for climate change, environmental deterioration or social inequality?
- How long do we have until the high cost and low marginal returns on extracting value from food, water, energy and technology causes our economies to collapse because they have no systemic way of renewing the commons?
- Is it possible that human civilization could replenish the planet, redevelop our economies and maintain high levels of social complexity by taxing the value that we take from our commons?
At an Earlier Turning Point in History
Anthropologists describe a major economic shift that occurred early in the agricultural age. When farmers turned from cultivating food by hand to using cattle to plow their fields, it changed the way that agriculture was produced.
The benefits were startling: by harnessing cattle (energy) to huge plows (technology), food could be grown at scale and at lower cost. Efficiency became the key in agricultural production, necessitating a new category of economic value to account for this transformation. The word ‘cattle’ evolved into the word ‘capital’, signifying this change for the ages.
It was a fateful development in human society. This was the point at which agro-cultures adopted a system of accounting that was entirely different from the practice of carrying capacity, which matched the availability of local resources with the needs of local people. Rather than an economy based on the biophysical distinction between renewable and non-renewable resources, civilization now began to make a socioeconomic distinction between use-value and exchange-value.[1]
When the use-value of individual farming was supplanted by the exchange-value of agriculture driven by cattle and plows, it changed how people know and experience the worth of their things. The significance of this historic turn has been discussed by many analysts, from Aristotle and Adam Smith to Karl Marx and Karl Polanyi.
Use-Value: What We ADD to the Commons
What does it mean to add value to the commons? Consider all the goods and services that we utilize and appreciate. Many things that we extract or produce from nature serve a useful purpose by enriching our experience and making life easier. Within the field of economics, every product that has practical qualities and satisfies some personal function or need is said to have utility or use-value.
Use-value is associated with economic freedom. As a highly active and creative species, human beings express free will and self-determination through the things we decide to use. And in using these things, we are also likely to take care of them to keep them functional.
Thus, the practical utilization of a good or service may engage both our creative power and sense of responsibility. It may even lead to the realization of our higher potentials, like the use of material or natural resources for the betterment of society. In transforming matter or energy into a useful product, or in protecting or maintaining this product, we are adding value to the commons.
This is why many individuals are motivated to be productive, to own and operate their own businesses and profit from their work. Use-value adds significance to the resources that we use by optimizing their present utility, although this does not necessarily mean that we are sustaining their utility for future generations.
Exchange-Value: What we TAKE from the Commons
Here’s where it gets complicated. When the energy-intensive labor of cattle and the efficient technology of the plow replaced the plodding farmer with a simple hoe, it began a new era in the way that human civilization creates and manages money. For the first time, people began to value some things more for their cash value than for their utility.
Thus, a personal item is perceived to lose the quality of use-value when it is removed from the commons and compared or exchanged with other commodities through its pricing in the marketplace. This new way of accounting was institutionalized as exchange-value, while practical use-value was relegated to secondary status in society.[2]
Exchange-value measures the marginal returns on capital rather than the sustainable yield of natural resources. From the standpoint of exponential growth and market efficiency, exchange-value is often seen as ‘generative’ in its ability to amass capital. But to the extent that exchange-value ignores the naturally generative growth of use-value, this exponential form of increase is not sustainable at all. The underlying reason for this misvaluation is not surprising: economics is not paying attention to science.
The fungibility created by exchange-value completely blurs the biophysical distinction between renewable and non-renewable resources. For example, agriculture and fossil fuel are lumped together in the same system of value because both are traded in the marketplace for a price. Yet food and oil represent entirely different forms of material value, which are either regenerative or exhaustive by definition (see the Periodic Table of the Elements or Chemistry 101 for a refresher course on what endures and what doesn’t).
Instead of adding value to the commons, at every step of the modern chain of exchange value individuals are ‘adding value’ for themselves — from extraction, production, marketing and sales to distribution, consumption and waste. SEE FIGURE 1 We have been trained to think of this system as beneficial because it creates prosperity for those who are involved, directly or indirectly, in this modern economic chain.
Yet how much of this value-added activity goes back into the regeneration of our commons or allocates distribution in society? Very little. Our financial and social chains are not designed to recirculate resources in an ecological way. While use-value may add some worth to the commons on an individual basis, the algorithms for exchange-value are not designed to renew nature or create equitable distribution in society. Rather than add value, exchange-value actually subtracts value from the environment and from people.
Transforming the Tax Structure to Regenerate the Commons
This raises broader questions:
- Why have societies become so adept at producing resources while their distribution and replenishment are failing?
- Why isn’t the value that is taken from the commons directed into meeting human needs and restoring the resources to meet those needs?
- Why aren’t public officials quantifying the fundamental differences between renewables and non-renewables as an expression of their use-value?
Volumes could be written on how modern governments have not been accountable to their people. The climate emergency makes this problem even more pressing. During the past several decades, the dysfunction of the ancient system of use-value and exchange-value has been thoroughly exposed. Since 1970, as global population demand began to exceed the planet’s resources, there has been no way to manage this shortfall because we have no tools for measuring it, no means of financing a solution for these resource deficits, and no direct way of reversing the practices of business and government which are causing the crisis.[3]
Why has this happened? Through use-value, we add value to the commons through labor, care, and local management of our possessions. Use-value can easily distinguish the difference between resources that are renewable and those that are not — we simply use them differently. The problem is that the original meaning of use-value — a simple appreciation of the items that we like — is not taken seriously by our social and economic institutions, except for boosting these ‘likes’ into exchange-value.
Consider what happens when society taxes the value that we add to the commons, like the sales tax that we pay on food at the supermarket. This is a value-added tax that goes to a governmental district rather than the people who produced the food. It makes little sense to tax use-value because customers are being charged twice for the same item — the cost of the product as well as the sales tax. And following this, the revenue from the sale goes directly back to the businesses and governments and is rarely reinvested in society or ecology.[4]
On the other hand, the convention of using exchange value to measure our commons encourages us to emphasize the production of resources into commodities. It leaves the distribution and replenishment of resources to the discretion of policy makers, allowing these egalitarian measures to flounder from limited legal requirements or enforcement. This is why ecological preservation and the redistribution of resources are so controversial in the modern market economy: they require financing from a value-added surplus, which is left to the prudence of individual and corporate philanthropy or public taxation.
We are proposing a major shift in the way that governmental taxation is structured in modern economies. We suggest a way of structuring the assessment and appropriation of taxes that is based on the dynamic flow of both renewable and non-renewable resources from their creation/extraction to their waste and recycling.
A Commons World is Probable
Commons must be taxed according to whether they are renewable or non-renewable.
The practice of separating renewable and non-renewable resources only after they are consumed and discarded as waste, which many of us follow faithfully, has led to declining marginal returns in society’s investment in social equality and sustainable resources. Assigning an exchange value to material waste for the purpose of recycling is far too late in the process to create an equitable or sustainable economy; and in many cases, the trash has no cash value in the recycling market.
This has created the improbable solution of having to finance ecological renewal and redistribute resources from the surplus or supply-side of the economy, the implementation of which has twisted capitalist societies in knots. Political polarization over resource distribution and regeneration has made citizens vulnerable to declining biodiversity, shortages of arable land and freshwater, pollution, changing biogeochemical flows and the volatility of social and economic inequality.[5]
We need a different way to allocate resources. Commons must be taxed according to whether they are renewable or non-renewable. This is why we should begin thinking of taxes on the commons much earlier in the economic chain — not at the point of sale or the time of recycling, but before these resources are produced and distributed. If taxes are assessed at the point of resource extraction, they could be earmarked immediately for poverty alleviation, conservation or regeneration.
As long as governments view all resources as fungible commodities based on their exchange value, just as businesses do, we ignore what physics, chemistry and biology are telling us about powerful ways to address environmental deterioration and the provision of human needs in society. This is why citizens and government have a public duty to develop a system of appropriations that respects the intrinsic differences between renewable and non-renewable resources.
Tomorrow’s economies will require a full-scale, integrated system that restores natural resources and satisfies the needs of our growing population. In this new era of extreme climate change, biodiversity loss and growing scarcities of non-renewable resources, the taxes for funding distribution and sustainability must now become a function of value-renewed activities.
…we should begin thinking of taxes on the commons much earlier in the economic chain
Toward a Needs-Based Economy
While the field of ecological economics has attempted to model our economies upon natural systems, it has thrashed around trying to assign prices to ecosystems, applying the old use-value/exchange-value dichotomy. We have all heard the ideological claims that the market price system is a law of nature; that the overdetermination of the supply-side is a laissez faire expression of evolutionary balance; or that human need is actually reflected in the marginal utility of our individual wants.
Yet when we look to the biosphere for ways of providing for our needs, what is central is not the ecosystems themselves, but the fact that human beings who live in these ecosystems are organisms with an evolutionary intelligence that is already programmed deeply into our bodies. This is not use-value, but something deeper, far more biological, chemical and physical than utility.
This is why we are not suggesting that human society should return to an accounting system based on use-value but to the actual value of human need. Basing the economy on human need is the prerequisite for the recirculation of wealth in society.
Here’s why. Every cell in the human body constantly communicates with the brain about its needs, which triggers a process of protein synthesis to meet these material requirements. Each individual human body instinctively helps the mind to identify need, and then works to meet that need by activating the biology and chemistry of the body.
But there is no automatic process for meeting human needs in the modern social and economic system. Unlike the human body, which achieves its own forms of self-nourishment and self-organization, the biosphere does not define our needs or satisfy them for us. A life-preserving society can thrive within our biosphere only when the human mind quantifies and plans the specific requirements of food, water, sanitation, shelter and energy for people.
Both renewable and non-renewable resources require their own indices of valuation which are based on the relationship that human bodies have with the natural world to ensure the ongoing appropriation of these resources. So it’s up to society to define the symbiotic relationship between our bodies and the ecosystem in which we live. To sustain the lives of a given population, society must begin its accounting process at the point of resource extraction to match the availability of resources in an area with the needs of its people.
Thus, the funding for production, distribution and replenishment would be appropriated in advance so that society maintains the healthy metabolism of its habitat in the same way that any living organism — such as a human body — assimilates air, food, water and energy through its own individual parts. In this way, humanity becomes a collective body, within which each individual physical body is intrinsically connected and depends upon other physical bodies through their interrelationships.
Much attention today is focused on the sustainability of air, wind, oceans, potable water, agriculture, soil, plants, animals and energy. Supported with the right systems, it’s possible that renewable resources could become available to everyone, now and in the future. The goal would be for a regional community to match the yield of a particular resource with the people living in that area.
Vital as this is, the major attention given to renewable resources takes us away from the problem of non-renewable resources.[6] While there is much to say about the equitable and sustainable production and allocation of renewable resources, we will focus on renewable resources in another article. Below we examine non-renewable resources, which require a higher degree of management than renewables, precisely because they are scarce.
Managing Non-Renewable Resources
How would a value-renewed, needs-based society manage non-renewable resources? It requires a public trust that makes strategic decisions in coordination with business and government. This is a broad-based group of people who are given the power and authority to manage non-renewable resources in the public interest.
Their goal is to maintain a steady supply of these scarce resources for both the present generation and for future generations. Following is how this public trust would separate the future reserves from the present appropriations of non-renewable resources.
- SEE FIGURE 2 In its capacity as the legitimate representative of the people, the public trust sets a cap for each non-renewable resource in its area (for example, fossil fuels, arable land, water and other minerals), which preserves and guarantees a percentage of each resource for the future.
- The public trust agrees to lease the remaining portion of the non-renewable resource that is available outside of the cap to small businesses in the area.
- The income that the Public Trust receives from leasing non-renewables to businesses is invested directly back into financing the conservation of these resources for the future population.
- SEE FIGURE 3 The diverse business sector, comprised of individuals and small partnerships, produces and sells its product to the public.
- Businesses profit from their sales.
- Businesses pay a tax, based on their commercial development of the resource, to the government.
- This tax on businesses goes into the government’s Commons Fund. Because of the resource cap, this fund retains its monetary value through the guaranteed security of its reserve assets, which are scarce resources protected for the future.
- The government circulates personal dividends from this reserve fund to the public in the form of a Citizen’s Basic Income. This guarantees the people’s purchasing capacity and serves as a social safety net for meeting the needs of the population in the present.[7]
- Protecting a percentage of non-renewable resources under a cap (1., above), stabilizes the region’s monetary system. It allows each region to base its present currency value on the long-term value of the non-renewable resources that are preserved under the cap, which are treated as reserve assets. SEE FIGURE 4.
The Value-Renewed Society
Let’s sum up. By taxing the value that people add to the commons, our socioeconomic system has made us unconscious of our codependence with nature and our inherent empathy and compassion as organisms in relationship with other organisms. We need to recognize that ecological health and resource distribution cannot remain a function of adding value, redistributing a surplus or expressing demand in the marketplace.
Maybe we will learn something from the bleak photos that we are seeing now from Mars. Whether or not life existed there at one time, these glimpses of a water-forsaken landscape remind us how rare life is in the universe. Yet, for human beings on Earth, having reproduced successfully for countless millennia, people still take for granted how expert our bodies have become in their own self-sufficiency and self-organization.
- So what is causing us to seek models for sustainability in the outside environment, when the biological, chemical and physical equipment of human bodies is the foremost collective action system on this planet?
- Why is our current well-being still being purchased at the expense of future generations?
- How long can we continue to mistake the broken system of economic supply and demand for the laws of thermodynamics?
The shift from a value-added to a value-renewed society will answer these questions. As humanity perceives itself as a collective body, it will construct a value chain from resource limits to population needs, requiring an entirely new worldview of socio-economic accounting. Rather than claiming the right to produce infinite resources, we will take responsibility for conserving finite resources, meeting human needs and regenerating our common wealth.
This recirculation of wealth through a needs-based economy is the new story of civilization. It is based on taxing the value that we take from our commons so that the commons will pay us dividends — funds that society will use in replenishing these resources and sharing them with society to meet the needs of everyone.
[1] Today, activists often speak about the inherent understanding in indigenous cultures that many types of resources are finite and require the practices of conservation, equality, cooperation and regeneration in their economic use and exchange. But we are seldom trained to recognize that this is more than a cultural, social or economic distinction — it involves a deep recognition of the differences between renewable and non-renewable resources.
[2] For example, the exchange-value in a stock market is not at all the same as the use-value of a physical stock of resources or even a stock of cattle, where some measure of equality is expected by individuals in sharing a useful resource. Yet modern societies celebrate exchange value as a kind of collective economic equality, which, in one sense, is correct.
Since the prices offered for products are the same for everyone and thus ‘equalized’ in their availability through a trading platform, we are told that the market economy generates a kind of decentralized equality in individual purchasing power. since there are many different products on offer at a price that is the same for everyone. In fact, exchange value does not create greater equality but less equality. Instead of valuing what we add to the commons through our use, civilization values what we take from the commons through the exchange value that we place on the resource extraction and production of goods and services. At first glance, this seems like a minor distinction because we have been trained to ignore it. But it has profound implications.
As products become relatively equal to access through the price system, it becomes easier for goods to be imported into a community from the outside. By seizing this ‘equal opportunity’ to spend currency elsewhere, people stop contributing to the wealth and well-being of their local markets. At the same time, exchange-value encourages the unfettered power of big businesses to extract profits out of these communities without re-spending or investing this money locally. This steals local jobs and income, leaving financial hardship and hollowed-out cities, villages and farms behind. Instead of an engine for equality, exchange-value has become the dominant cause of economic inequality because local communities do not receive equal protection, equal treatment or equal access to the resources and services that people need.
[3] One side of the argument is the degree to which government has enabled corporations to allow society to become completely dependent on economic growth. But we focus here on the other side of the argument: the failure of government to represent its people by admitting that our value-added-practices are actually subtracting real wealth — leaving our socio-political complexity, energy sources, information systems and economic practices in extreme danger.
This has become an even more acute situation since the rise of autocratic parties and nations across the world since 2000. Some say that the rise of illiberalism has been accelerated by the climate crisis. Our view is that the modern experiment with democracy must continue. In transforming the nature of government and the social agreement with its citizens, we suggest that the cure is greater economic democracy to supplement and restore political democracy.
We believe that this new social contract must be won, not through violent confrontation, but through concerted social action in our democratic political systems, legal systems and judiciary. We also recognize that this requires the peaceful resistance of the global population for the public control of the resources that belong to everyone by right of birth.
[4] Exchange-value is designed to measure, not whether a resource can be regenerated, but how much wealth that people can remove from the commons for their personal benefit. Since the early days of colonialism in the 16th century, corporations which extract raw materials to make products have established a reputation for paying as few taxes as possible. Meanwhile, many governments scarcely tax the exchange value that people take from the commons, thereby encouraging everyone to remove value from the public goods of nature and society without restoring them.
[5] Neither use-value nor exchange-value are concerned with equitable distribution or sustainable usage. Social poverty and ecological degradation are not simply externalities or byproducts of the economy — they fuel its growth. The only way that the accounting system of exchange-value has continued to create innovative solutions and economic growth to balance its deficits in the late 20th century is through the use of hydrocarbon energy and technology. As long as fossil fuel and technological solutions drive this system, we have had the luxury of pretending that there is always more energy and land to capture for the generation of new wealth. But this old story of endless growth has entrapped society in a serious illusion. It is the rationale of a world with infinite resources to burn.
[6] There is a popular idea that sustainable resources will simply replace non-renewable resources. But it’s not that simple. Non-renewable resources will still be necessary for societies to function in the future.
[7] Notice that in 1. – 3., the public trust spends its leasing income — the fees that businesses paid to develop resources within the cap — on the conservation of non-renewable resources to meet the needs of people in the future. In 4. – 8., the government guarantees that the taxes paid by businesses finance the distribution of non-renewable resources to meet the needs of the current population.