Realizing the Biosphere: 1. Spirituality for the Anthropocene (w/ Layman Pascal)

but it may be that what we're seeing as ourselves taking action on it is actually it unfolding to its next stage where we think of it as generating its imaginal and technological new infrastructure for its next maturational phase through us but only through Us in so far as we can conceive ourselves as separated from it in various degrees hi everyone welcome to the metamodern meeting podcast where we attempt to make uh and find the meaning of and in the metamodern uh for this um conversation and what I hope will be a series of conversations I'm

joined by Layman Pascal a frequent uh um partner in crime uh and a brilliant thinker in this space that I'm always um profoundly indebted to whenever we have an occasion to work together or uh to talk together provisionally I've um work uh came up with this idea of calling this sort of realizing the biosphere um because I want to talk to Layman about his thoughts around the relationship of humanity and the biosphere kind of the human and the ecological um and dive into that uh because well as we'll see there's there's a lot going on

there and um without I guess um setting that up in any greater depth than that to begin with let's just dive in and uh and say thanks Layman so much for agreeing to do this sort of series and come on this newly renamed podcast what up what up let's talk anthropo ecology yeah now when we were talking about this briefly I thought ah we can talk about the guy anthropos and I thought this was a brilliant term um and then I realized that I just totally ripped that off from uh first Matt Seagal and I

think then he was uh drawing that from Sean Kelly but in any event what we're going to be exploring is in that sphere of of space which is the the relationship of the human uh to the ecological uh and to the biosphere particularly in this kind of moment uh that people are calling the anthropos scene um but viewed through the lens of also Gaia in the notion of um the biosphere uh as more than let's say even just a hyper object more than uh uh just sort of the collective system of uh biological uh you

know relationships that can that constitute uh what we tend to meet mean by that term in some kind of kind of I know third person object sense but something maybe agential something bigger um and so how do we properly situate ourselves in relationship to our kind of collective ecological context and um what is our role also in the sense of like the potential story that we are enacting or playing out or maybe called to participate in um and so when I have heard you talk about these issues in a number of situations uh you know

you you have a a vision for this that I find very compelling and I would love to hear you talk more about so that's the expositional setup I'll stop talking because I want to maybe let you set this up a little bit more and then I can throw a couple uh introductory questions by you to get us started on this but um yeah here's a story I like the story I like is solar systems frequently bias feere eyes when they get the opportunity biospheres cultivate within themselves A diversity of species which eventually favors the emergence

of a particular Sapient species that has specialized functions within that biosphere that biosphere being a self-sustaining organism has something like organs which constitute the species and their symbiotic interactions we are such a species or set of interactive options and what is our special function as an organ in that system can we even conceive of it as an being an organ we can in a sense if we think that our entire evolutionary history as a species has occurred within the particular ecosystem of this potentially superorganism so there's no reason to think we wouldn't be adapted to

it in a special way and mutually adapted with other species to serve functions within that body so our function would be both a let's say spiritual imaginal and technological function that is involved in both the anchoring and the flowering of the biosphere as it moves to its next stage of maturation what I would call the uh it's sort of pregnant right now right the biosphere needs to do two things it needs to regenerate itself we all are aware of that function of the ecosystem but it may also uh Spore it may also produce offshoots right

it may be that the future of a biosphere is to send multiple different kinds of biospheres into surrounding space maybe even surrounding Dimensions depends what our physics is at that point so there's a flowering and an anchoring by anchoring I mean regenerating function and the Sapient species within a biosphere is specially involved in both of those operations and those involvements take the place of uh take the form of let's say um artistic and imaginal investment in creating cultural patterns that create uh embodied human knowledge of and deep aesthetic and transformational experiences of the biosphere and

the Earth um you know populated by artists and Poets but especially embodied in traumatic characters if they have maturation and capacity and then the other function is an external function which is to over time develop the intelligent machines that lead the biosphere to be able to Super integrate its ordinary functions it already has a profound degree of integration and coherence but what can it do as an organism if it grows a new nervous system that can super coordinate complex information patterns instantaneously from the entire ecosystem and at that point maybe it begins its boration and

it also begins to stabilize in a different format so that we've been thinking very often ecologically that oh how do we preserve the biosphere we've inherited which is just the last phase of the biosphere um but a number of people people are looking at our relationship to planetary boundaries and the emergence of our new technologies and are saying well there's no way we can preserve this but it may be that what we're seeing as ourselves taking action on it is actually it unfolding to its next stage where we think of it as generating its imaginal

and technological new infrastructure for its next maturational phase through us but only through Us in so far as we can conceive ourselves as separated from it in various degrees so to me is an interesting speculative mythological story about where we are here I think of it as a hopeful one because of a lot of sub points that I would make about each of those factors uh but that's the picture that I hold in my head I don't necessarily believe it but I find it compelling yeah no that's a great um way to frame this and

a good kind of map to give us as well in terms of then it's also we're we're we're less dealing with the notion of uh is or is this not some kind of super organism that we may or may not be an an organ of but it also kind of gives it a more processual uh unfolding kind of uh narrative aspect that I feel like then we can dive into that in various pieces and again we we're probably going to need to zoom in and zoom out in different ways to kind of get the right

kind of uh grip on this at different points but so taking that as sort of the map here let's start with that and let's let's Zoom back um to kind of the context that would make that kind of story intelligible right cuz when I hear you talk about this I hear Echoes uh of um for example Bobby aerion's Romance of reality book right where he talks about um life as sort of uh not a chance fluke but almost a kind of inevitability where you know and I think he cites folks like uh Carl Sean who

said you know um that uh where life will emerge you know where conditions allows in in the sense that um up it up at Springs right that there's a there's a notion in which um when life emerges in the cosmos it's not just a kind of rather uh highly improbable Confluence of contingent factors that you know led to a particular thing occurring uh maybe once only in billions and billions and trillions of stars and and planetary systems uh but actually that there is a kind of uh logical patterning or a kind of law-like nature to

the neant Tropic forces that we see in the cosmos that have a particular developmental trajectory life's emergence being one of them and so uh that would suggest if that is the case then uh far from us being the only instance of this we might see this uh all over the place or maybe it already has been all over the place maybe we're a consequence of that maybe we are just getting this started Etc but let's step back a little bit and say and set that in its context um talk a little bit of I guess

about the uh the nature of the cosmos that would be such uh as to to see the emergence of life as sort of part of a lawlike developmental trajectory um does that if that makes sense uh sure what kind of Cosmos does this take place in it takes place in a cosmos that um has something like cyclic endless time probably but doesn't merely matter because we're in a discrete phase of that process we have a local time which is the the material time of this last as we calculate it now 14 billion is years and

what's unfolded within whatever this universe is obeys sets of restrictions or constraints that enable it to be a universe right in order to exist at all in a sense you have to already have constrained the virtual computational possibilities in order to be a universe that can persist over time and accomplish the production of matter right that's still a great greater number of constraints and all of these constraints at whatever levels from like the the pure logical operators to the mathematical constraints to the specific physical balances necessary for there to be entities like us reflecting on

the universe in the first place the collaborative effect of all those constraints forces forth a kind of a TS now the TS is not a pre-specified outcome as if set by an external entity but it is a set of patterning styles that represent the optimal fit of the constraint influences over time of all of these parameters so given enough time a particular set of attractors start to emerge that could be said to have an aesthetic or a qualitative commonality to them that reflect this bet best fit solution but there could be many different specific instantiations

of that we may even see um successful instantiations of it at every part of the process it might be fractally or holographically distributed but I think there's I think the way I'm talking about this is that what nature what through the biosphere through the humans and the humans technology and inner experience is trying to do is to further the a kind of flexible teleological but open-ended process that is inherent to the rest of the universe merely by virtue of the fact that it is constrained to being a universe and again though it it it suggests

that life is seems to be a key component of that that that that this is not just a kind of weird Side branch that that whatever this process is almost I don't want to say ineluctably but um by moving through the biological domain is um realizing some set of phenomen that um are yeah uh a manifestation of that [Music] teologico degrass Tyson were to be talking about the cosmos being like ah and then we're just this rock over here and some you know some stuff happened here and some molecules did this right um I guess

that that was sort of what I was thinking in terms of asking that question is like the kind of Cosmos in which what unfolds in the way that you're talking about there seems to be uh a kind of Developmental progression of these kind of added constraints to use that language which makes a lot of sense in terms of um again that kind of move towards negentropy of of a of a decrease of entropy into uh more coherent and complex forms you're kind of adding sets of constraints and that the biosphere itself is a kind of

it's almost a kind of a paradigm of uh constraints that uh in which I don't know uh things manifest that are of a particular equality that the cosmos is oriented towards I'm I'm I'm struggling with the wording of this but absolutely absolutely it's uh you know the biosphere on Earth is our primary example and epitome of the preference for these kinds of patterning styles in the cosmos we inhabit at large now we have to take seriously there's a vast amount of cold space out there but also each new step in our cosmological understanding and our

the Acuity of our scientific instruments and theories reveals much more richness going on in what we previously thought of as empty space so this is the furtherance of that richness and of that uh preference if you will that slope of random outcomes for these kinds of patterning states and then you can go the next step and say as beings embedded in this fairly successful version of the process how do we cognitively and ethically and in an embodied way take it to its next step right how do we tease out a polarity within the existing nature

that we encounter and go oh this stuff would move us even further in that direction which is what it wants which is what the cosmos wants if we want to use that language of a gentic preference well now before we move into that step though while we're still kind of in the background context of this talk a little bit about why this kind of way of seeing the cosmos uh you find compelling or even convincing right I mean besides it being a nice story um you know what's sort of the the the reason for ascending

to this Vision versus another particularly when as critics might say well we're you know uh an N of one when it comes to biospheres we look out in the cosmos we haven't found any so talking about the notion of you know the the universe being primed for life is sort of um you know getting out over our skis so what causes you to kind of privilege this form of the story yeah well first we always have to maintain skeptical vigilance right it may be the case that this is the only example but uh there's many

reasons to think that's implausible uh from certain angles just because there is so much universe and because the the richness of the order generating mechanisms turns out to be far more vast and extensive and multifarious than we previously realized I think as we see these kinds of patterning styles start to crop up in the emergence of lifik new systems synthetic biology artificial intelligence systems of various kinds we're starting to see that the basic drivers of this enrichment can take many forms but are not that hard to achieve once certain thresholds are crossed for me there's

an ethical component to this kind of a vision I think we we make the Mist stake of thinking that the delicacy of a process is something we respond to in a greater fashion if it is rare right I don't think that's the case we think well if this was the only one we really have to look after it but there's a kind of uh exhaustion there's kind of nihilism behind that whereas when you think about an infant of One's Own species you think this is a very delicate thing that we have to protect and we

have to protect it because there are many instances of it right it's not I don't want to I don't love this baby because it's the only one that's ever existed in fact I love it more its specialness and delicacy is related to its repetition Factor there's there's already something set up that requires my care for it and I really like this is maybe a little bit off topic but heiger had some beautiful thinking on how in the age of the world picture uh concern sort of demonstrates a transformation into becoming beings that care so you

can have this uh biosphere existing for millions billions of years but it hasn't been populated as far as we can tell by beings that are capable of caring about it in that kind of perspecti of a Wilbur sense and the first sign of beings who are becoming capable of caring for the biosphere which is to say a higher order ethical and emotional participation is their feeling of concern about the environment right for the very first time in the 20th century Amplified by the fact that we in our psyches got that image of the Earth from

space got the mass technologies that seem like they could unsettle everything we're worried but in our worrying we perform the gesture of becoming beings who care for it and the mass production of beings who care for it is essential now I do relate that care to uh multiplicity and repetition I think it's easier to care when actually there are many of these things and it's a normal function that we're supposed to perform there are obviously a great number of visionary individuals and Visionary communities and Visionary substances over the course of human experience that uh very

strongly feel that it's a teeming Universe of various kinds right that has yet to be secured as a physical fact by our science but it seems unlikely that it would be that rare and that localized if the parameters of the universe are set up to enable it I think I feel let's say that it is a biophilic cosmos of various kinds but I also think we need to tell a story that is uh as syn broadly synthetic as possible Right the notion of a rare planet in an empty universe is beautiful because of the moral

challenge it puts to us to be humble and skeptical beings but there's something there's something about the spread of different basic cosmological visions that we need to bring together in order to empower ourselves as thinkers and in order to generate a more integrative culture and that means we have to be able to say something like TS without falling into the traps that have been validly critiqued about most helical thinking we have to be able to say something about our role as part of Nature and something about our role as not part of nature so the

picture I'm sketching out one of the reasons I find it compelling is because I think it does a decent poetic Mythic job of taking many different basic cosmological princi Les into account it has like a history and it has a future it has limitations it has potentials um it has our involvement but it doesn't overemphasize our involvements um so what I like is kind of the Artistry of the different perspective of lenses that come together in that and I think some version of that even though it could be done a different way is necessary to

give us um the collective mobilizing Spirit to start building cultures that are more integr ative and more integrative cultures are what we depend upon to get out of the stasis of the metac crisis that we're trapped in at the moment yeah there's um an interesting element to that that I find metamodern in multiple ways um in the sense of telling stories that have a particular impact or ethos um that have their own sort of um utility to them regardless of anything else you could say and you see this in a lot of metamodern um works

in Broad terms whether that's you know the Lego movie and the prophecy that needs to get the thing going and that actually didn't turn out to be true or Batman uh The Dark Knight I I find that whole kind of treatment of that franchise in a bit sort of like a you know very late postmodern very early metamodern sense of um there needs to be some kind of White Knight figure to kind of um you know improve Gotham otherwise it will descend into uh Into Darkness and so the power of Storytelling for the utility that

comes from uh from the believing and the enacting of it is in some ways separable from uh the kinds of claims in their veracity that they're making and yet if fully lived out have the potential to in a sense selfs substantiate themselves you know have the ability to when um when lived into be made real and become a kind of self fulfilling prophecy so there's an element to what you're saying there that speaks to me at that level which is this is this is the better story in the life of Pi sense um because this

is the sort of story we'll need if we're to avoid catastrophic biospheric collapse etc etc at the same time there's also the openness in a kind of more I would say kind of strong metamodern sense of um theological component here in the developmental component which is Grand narratological thinking um in a kind of unabashed sense though in a self-critical way that you're also naming as being essential um and that is saying hey maybe it's also more than than just a story and I think we have to leave that open as a possibility as well and

also there are multiple ways that this story can be the story um even though let's say whether or not we are the only current existing active biosphere in the cosmos or not this could still a version of this could still hold place I mean you know uh Jim rut for example I think he's of the mind that uh yeah we're probably the only one the only game in town but hey this is reason why we need to adopt this kind of um uh uh consideration for the reproduction of the biosphere in the cosmos essentially right

like we have this precious kind of uh first to the show experience and now you know let's um live up to that challenge so to speak so whether we're first or whether we're just you know the the 10 trillionth um I think that there is this way of thinking about being part of of a biosphere in a um in a teleological oriented sort of way that we are um we have a responsibility to it in some senses and there I wanted to pick up on that metaphor you're using there of the of tending to a

child because that actually helps me a lot think about the Dynamics of this which is um that there is something uh uh like reproduction that that when we reproduce the species when we reproduce culture we have a sense of reverence for that and the sacrality of it right um moments of birth are profound and by the same token I suppose moments of death are as well because they're the opposite end of that Spectrum but when new life comes in we have it it it musters I think a sense of sacrality that even secular-minded folks can

can uh you know get behind the use of a word like that and say yes totally um and there's a sense in which if we can Orient ourselves to the biosphere in that way to nurture it to tend to it um and to see it to maturity and development and uh and sort of live out its full life cycle and complete whatever process it's a part of that is sort of um that's a sacred task that I think parents are also familiar with so there's that analogy there but at the same time there's a profound

difference right because we are at the same time you know parent but also organ of right we're like dependent upon but also we're you know in this potential role of maybe a very unique role of trying to facilitate uh biospheric reproduction so anyway that seems to me like a very pregnant for lack of a better term uh metaphor that we could uh we could used to um kind of you know build out this picture a little bit of what our relationship to the biosphere is so you know something like a parental reproductive oriented sort of

relationship but um but again we I think we we've got to then add a lot of let's in on that for a second because there's an interesting reversal to standard thinking that's implied by something that like that right like the The ancestral Mythic notion at least as inherited retrospectively by moderns is nature as mother human as Offspring right and to flip that around and think nature as having a m humans as having a maternal responsibility for nurturing the delicacy and reproductive future of the biosphere is very empowering and I think it may awaken some feminine

element and a lot of discussions about rethinking the biosphere involve how do we integrate certain kinds of feminine qualities into these stories that we're telling it puts us in a really interesting position to be parent to this system and that's a little bit analogous to the way Wilbur frames it right in sexology spirituality one of the problems he has with what he calls flatland ecology is not just that the people don't think in terms of their being any developmental depth opportunities for themselves it's that size is used as the fundamental indicator of higher levels of

complexity and he disagrees with that he thinks the the complexity of the human which is really the human biospheric system is greater than the complexity of the biospheric system without us don't mistake the fact that it's physically larger than us for meaning that it's the next scale of intelligence so that's a really interesting critique we might be larger just like we might be parental it might be smaller it might be the child in some ways there's different ways to finesse that I think the interesting thing to do with that kind of critique that Wilbur puts

forward is to suest suest not that the noosphere per se and the is larger than the biosphere just like minds are larger than bodies are cells it's to say that it's the combined system of the two of them which is larger sometimes I say the trans noospheric biosphere it's like what it's it's a transformed or more integrated noosphere that brings the patterns of the biosphere to life within itself and synergizes with them to produce something new which is a thing that's larger than the nature system so when you talk about then uh the the new

the news sphere that's able to leverage sort of the biospheric patterning as being itself some kind of higher order uh or higher level uh way of being it what speak more about that because it seems to suggest that like we can take into the new sphere which is to say the whole human cultural intellectual imaginal space uh that gets deposited on the complexity of of the biosphere we can take into that more or less degrees of sort of biospheric style patterning that that would integrate it more or less uh successfully with the biosphere and that

if we can do that better then we are experiencing more integration with the biosphere in the news sphere talk more about that because that's an interesting idea yeah I think that's U there's something in there that is at once an aesthetic and ethical and a pragmatic opportunity for us to think of the next phase of the process of the unfolding of these patterning Styles moving towards the let's say that the the synergized noospheric biosphere is the awakened Gaia it's the potential emergence of Consciousness as the planet we don't have to get too heavy about how

we exactly Define consciousness just that there's a kind of additional level of computational sophistication and potentially interiority and affect going on here and that it's dependent upon the noosphere being uh enriched by this patterning style that's already present in the biosphere to the point that it actually can exceed that right what we've got now is a noosphere that although it's the one we've lived with throughout the modern period and maybe even the human historical period it may still be the nent noosphere right it's very nice thing okay we've got satellites now so technology the information

envelope goes outside the biospheric envelope well yeah but that's like looking at the fetus after a week is sort of how I feel about it what happens is that the noosphere has continued to fill up with information about the biosphere so that informational shell is undergoing a transformation what the information sphere knows about living things today vastly greater and more complicated than what the information system knew about biological things a hundred years ago right we've um begun to colonize the patterning space of fractals we've begun to say like oh we used to be like oh

we can't compute that now we're like oh we can kind of compute that right uh we have uh live data about what's happening in the biosphere right from tracking from tags from weather maps from all kinds of new processes we're still unfolding our ability to be detected and information sharers and Recorders and attenuators of what's going on in the biosphere all kinds of movements and this is where it gets to a kind of a religious thing because it occurs across different epistemological disciplines all kinds of aspects of Life are bringing forward a richer form of

understanding of organic systems and the possibility of repatterning our minds our social bodies and our technological bodies with that the perfect example is the biomic movement which is looking for solutions to human technological and social and Architectural problems in the way that especially in the micr structure of the way that organic systems have already solved these constraints so like that's an ex that's something every day that process is learning more just like every day there's more pictures and drawings and eyeballs on the ecosystem right these are only two examples of something if you went just

one discipline to another throughout the human species you would find that the noosphere is increasing the degree to which it is saturated by the richness of biological patterns and that can be taken as a kind of gestational move toward a super synthesis or a synergizing effect between the noosphere and the biosphere and at that point it becomes the biosphere as noosphere so to speak yeah and that's interesting too because there's multiple levels to that in the sense of there is just sort of raw data you could talk about it as being more information about but

it's also not just quantity it's like the kind or the quality in the sense of are we actually patterning information processing in biospheric terms right like um you know what I mean by that is something like um when we look out at uh you know the kind of human landscape and we see our rectilinear buildings that we construct and it's a very kind of um kind of imposition of the human onto the natural that's a very clear-cut delineation there that you can see but you can also imagine how we might develop Technologies of creating structures

and buildings and and and infrastructures that are more uh nature likee in their layout so more curved lines and less rectilinear you know right angles that sort of a thing um which will come with increased you know uh uh structural durability and antifragility and these sorts of things what I mean by that is like if you take that biomimicry into the structural aspect not just the you know um quantitative aspect right it's not just that like oh and now we're covering the Earth with more and more um Urban centers therefore there's more and more of

the biosphere taking over I'm sorry the neosphere taking over it's like no actually to what degree is the neosphere itself evolving to look more like the biosphere on which it is sort of uh dependent in what it's emerged out of um and so that's like a that's a qualitative aspect that's going to be shifting um over time and again we see that already with certain kind of sensibility shifts um and aesthetic shifts that are trying to build in more of that uh that design element into this which I think is a really interesting aspect and

then that also makes me think of um you know how that plays out developmentally which is a really interesting thought where you'd almost expect that as this move as this gets going early on that uh we would be really close to the biosphere in terms of how we you know do everything and to some degree that's true if you look at the materials we use of stone and wood and that sort of thing but at the same time human thought has always sort of um been uh a kind of imposition uh addition to or a

a kind of force against the the natural in a sense and it has taken some degree of increased accommodation and learning of nature to better adapt to Nature's structures to be able to uh Implement those kinds of uh designs and ways of of thinking um and I find that actually very um in line with kind of cognitive developmental Theory as well right it's sort of the thing where um you know when a baby is born and the first 10 years of life let's say the thinking of the child is going to be different than a

a kind of adult more mature uh level of thinking that's been able to integrate and to accommodate more to existence and they're not kind of imposing themselves as much on things they're more able to adapt and that is where a lot of the increased complexity comes from I think similarly you could look at the evolution or the development of the new sphere as becoming more adapted ideally to its biospheric kind of context and less imposition less you could say assimilatory right it's not just trying to put rectangles everywhere it's like hey actually what if we

curve things and we do this right and so you could then consider the news spheric cultural Evolution process as being its own developmental accommod accommodator process where we're actually integrating more elements of of the biosphere into our own thinking about reality and leading to you know some kind of development in those lines so there's an interesting pairing there of kind of cognitive development and cultural development which is what I'm always uh interested in those sorts of parallels um anyway anything anything from that come up well the only thing I would add in there is kind

of the obvious thing of the of the critique which is well yes but didn't indigenous peoples already have a very successful noospheric uh accommodation and we go yes but uh it only operated in certain domains materially and it took a very long time to produce that sophistication right if you have a group of people who's relatively healthy and they're operating Biore Regional and they have a story that brings them together and they have a functional maturational pedagogy of some kind that over many generations they can become exquisite ly adapted in a kind of heuristic way

at at how to accommodate that and we see these really rich noospheric models of the biosphere that come out of those systems but as you increase the amount of material complication and decrease the amount of time you get these problems cropping up and those Solutions are not adequate to operate at these other tempos so now we have to be able to do it much faster and with a much greater range of material situations and we have to be more uh deliberately productive right so one of the places we're starting to see this is uh organism

like meta materials of various kinds right right down to breathable pavement but what about buildings that heal themselves right if anybody pays any attention to science and industry news there's always hints that new materials are being generated that will be able to for example uh reinforce themselves as a result of stress rather than become weakened as a result of stress things like that that are are variations of the antifragility and adaptive processes that we find elaborated so successfully in organisms yeah that's very well said and I would I mean I I I share all of

that uh sentiment too where yes and or yes but in terms of uh you know the the the relative success of um you know whether it's forg or hun gather societies indigenous communities to be able to certainly compared to the ravenous uh modern approaches to these issues more adapt ly integrate you know newsphere and biosphere at the same time if you read for example like uh Harari sapiens you know there's a whole thing he gets into there about how um you know it was it was early human Neolithic Societies or Paleolithic societies that drove a

lot of a large game extinct across every continent that that human beings moved into there wasn't yet that kind of planetary uh awareness of hey could we be over fishing or you know um over gaming or this sort of thing and were uh practices that were um vital to the kind of uh success of early human communities that today would be actually you know considered ecologically disastrous and uh and and and and so we can learn from that and we have hopefully but at the same time one of these also very I think genuine and

important critiques is well if this is all true Brendan and Layman how come when we look around the world today we see just again that ravenous ravaging modern destruction of the Eco uh of the ecology in the biosphere I mean if this is all true shouldn't we expect to be seeing this tendency this sort of theological orientation or groove of reality leading Humanity into more of that kind of integration whereas aren't we kind of seeing the exact opposite at the moment so what would you say to that uh yeah there's several ways to address that

one is simply time scale right that the way these things unfold it might be painfully slow for us right that as far as the Earth is concerned I mean when we look back back at uh Comet impacts and their effect on the biosphere uh it's been able to reboot and retool and modify itself each time but there are huge periods of setbacks are possible in this process even if it's a successful ongoing process so there's no guarantee and there's no guarantee about the speed at which it has to happen however it is happening right we're

going to say yes on the one hand if you look at the situation technologically on the Earth right now there is a lot lot of difficulty there's a lot of uh externalization of problematic elements there's a lot of aesthetic desecration there's a lot of ruination of the stabilization of the resource bases and their interaction that we depend on all that's going on but we didn't even know what the Earth looked like until a couple of decades ago there were no ecological movements until a couple of decades ago how old is Earth Day these sorts of

things when did we get the tools to First notice notice the cellular substructure of plants or the quantum Behavior going on in the eyeball of an insect right these these Tendencies are happening and they are accumulating and they form the basis for uh an optimistic but still morally engaged in deeply concerned counter narrative to the one that's merely based on looking at the um expansion of the patterning style that feels disruptive to the one that we see in nature however I will add this one more Factor our suffering of the gap between the expansion of

the crude noospheric patterning style and the necessary richness of the biospheric styles on which we depend that's a moral Catalyst right that is something that when people suffer that distinction they're becoming uh ecologically radicalized in a certain way they're being converted even more deeply to the need to be more direct conscious and accelerated participants in the ecologization of the noosphere yeah for sure I mean it again to bring Bobby's work back in he he talks about what he calls poppers principle which is this idea that um problems drive you know progress or or that uh

we learn when we have to adapt right when there's a problem uh otherwise we're kind of going to be on autopilot so we should expect there to be uh points at which we bump up against these limitations and then this is the Catalyst that um propels things forward if we're able to to find that uh you know uh possibility space um but it does also lead into the bigger set of questions which we'll be tacking a lot tackling a lot here which is are then relationship to this process and you talked about just a second

ago you know being sort of radicalized into considering then how Behavior changes your relationship changes all that kind of thing um and again there's a lot that we could talk about that uh you know in terms of all this but um one of those I think first kind of things that comes up for me is like um you know is this an individual shift of behavior in terms of radicalization I mean um my wife just read uh A Year Without garbage and now we're kind of going all in on like how can we get rid

of plastic from everything that we do if possible and that kind of radicalization is is essential I think and really important at the same time as many in the kind of uh environmental movement well know this is not necessarily just uh to be put at the feet uh or on the shoulders rather of individuals right this is a systemic issue that um you know the way that we run our global economy is vastly more uh important than you know in terms of how that's structured versus how much plastic I buy um and uh I often

cite this as an example because it was really heartbreaking to me but when I moved into the retreat here uh we decided to get some new pillows and some new comforters and things for the for the for the bedding for the blank uh for the beds here and um you know I had in the past been really thoughtful about washing out Ziploc bags and this sort of a thing trying to do kind of my small part well we ordered 50 pillows and every pillow came in its own box in its own plastic wrapping covered in

all of these um uh you know inflated pieces of plastic to keep it insulated right so we got 50 boxes uh with the sense that I guess if these pillows you know hadn't been well insulated they might have broken or something but in that one purchase right everything that I'd ever tried to do in my entire life around reducing my plastic consumption was utterly undone right and it just kind of gives I don't know it gave me a sense of the relationship of the individual and the collective like what we can do individually and what

our systems are doing and how these things interact but um there's a question in there which I think does relate to uh the role of the individual in facing the biosphere so conceived so maybe let's start there a little bit and I think this will take us into um some some deeper aspects but um yeah pick that thread up a little bit and start talking a little bit then about yeah the role of the individual here in all this yeah the role of the individual is a very interesting one I think we are finding ourselves

placed in positions if we're lucky enough to be in the uh reasonably stable parts of the world where the moral and emotional situation of the map of the world that we're telling each other is forcing us into becoming kind of religionization we don't quite know how how to do it we're we're frustrated we're suffering from it we're realizing we can't we can't actually materially solve this problem as individual agents and the pressure that we feel right which Could Be Imagined as a in some sense a downward pressure from the biosphere into ourselves the pressure to

become more proactive ecologically informed agents what does that pressure signify if the individual can't fundamentally make much material difference and in fact the logic of believing that it rests on the individual is a logic that sustains the problematic collectives economic and ideological problems that are generating the difficulty but even though that's the case right that we have to solve the big problems at the level of system implementation and incentives the individual nonetheless feels that pressure they feel a drive which is structurally similar to a classical religious drive and in fact could be called the most

classical religious drive we Trace religion back into the arcade period so I think what we need to do with a better kind of a story is to start telling ourselves that it's good that we feel that but it's not prompting us to be the responsible bearers of the outcomes of capitalism modernity and Technology we can't turn that around individually what we can do individually is become more deeply engaged in turning our lives uh and the lives of our families into noospheric examples of being more highly patterned by biospheric processes and there are many ways to

do that right uh drawing a flower taking a psychedelic plant into your brain uh foraging learning to work in permacultural ways with Landscapes trying to build things that operate using Nature's logic there are all these sorts of uh functionally available opportunities for for our nervous system our symbolic system to start to become more deeply colonized by those organic patterns and I think that's what that drive is prompting us towards yeah we can't really operate individually at the level of materially fixing this we do have to materially fix this but that's a collective and systemic challenge

our minds need to be uh colonized by nature is sort of uh not the usual way of talking about that but it's a an interesting way of of talking about it one of the things that you just said though uh C brought this idea to mind I wanted to throw by you because um so the original notion of like uh first and second tier kind of comes out of um you know Clare graves's uh model of emerging cyclical um you know uh structures of Consciousness and as they're related to particular living conditions and he hypothesized

that basically when you get up to what in spiral Dynamics language is called yellow or in his language is a n uh you get this sort of uh a Prime n Prime because you're actually reduplicating at a kind of planetary level almost what had been experienced at the individual level when it first showed up in the human consciousness and then you get again B Prim uh B Prime and O Prime and that's sort of like a reduplication almost of that kind of indigenous uh tribal structure but again at sort of a planetary level and this

kind of second tier way of thinking now is sort of engaging in those kind of archaic processes in a way but at the sort of you know redo duplicated uh recapitulated level at a planetary scale um would be how I would talk about that and what was interesting about that though in hearing you talk about the notion of how this um sort of triggers in us a very kind of archaic religious impulse uh the question is something like this um is there something that we are seeing then for example I'll use my my myself here

when I um got really into and aware of the ecological situation the need for environmental um change and impact um there was a kind of guilt aspect that comes into that right like you examine your lifestyle and you think how can I make an impact I'm going to wash out every plastic thing I use or you know if I use more plastic than I need to then do I feel guilty about right and as you say there's and I I might be reading a little bit into what you said a little bit here but I

I I'm I'm suggesting that maybe there is a kind of analog there to a kind of early religious form of thought that is very much about like you know Purity right trying to you know do the right thing and um you know almost a kind of superstitious legalistic um extravagance um for the sake of some perceived uh important religious goal and I'm wondering if we see some form of that recur um at this sort of you know Rec recapitulated level in eco-awareness right if if uh if these moves towards a kind of Neo aeis to

kind of remove all the plastic from our lives is sort of symptomatic of this and so there's a a structural question there if if you think that that's a legitimate thing and then I guess related to that is aren't we then in danger potentially of reproducing the various pathologies of earlier forms of religious life at a new register if this is so it's really hard to know the degree to which um higher levels of models can be understood to replicate lower order forms uh certainly uh octave like theories of how energy Dynamics function would suggest

something like that could be the case uh it's definitely engaging to think in that way um there are elements that we can highlight in the new archaic mood that resemble a lot of those old patterns the new aestheticism the new Shamanism the new ritual cultures um the new kinds of nature immersion even the new tribalism the new entheogen patterns things like that all of those seem seem very similar and our a recapitulation at a higher level if we want to take it that way now some of those ancient problems will be addressed simply because it

is operating at a higher level in that story right like uh there's a tendency among people who are Regional in their worldview to think that a problem is gone away if it's deposited in another region right maybe a lot of people have had this experience of going from a Cosmopolitan Zone where people are very concerned about the en en you drive out into a rural Zone where people are closer to the land and suddenly there's just garbage on the side of the road right you like they're too identified with it and with their region to

be thinking about it from a distance and as a result as it goes out of sight out of mind the water takes it away we've just been dumping pollution in this all the time it wasn't a problem until we were Mass scale producers but at the scale of mass production there's also a world picture that is a wrapped around it's an enclosure it feeds back on itself so the same process which is oh if there's another place we can just dump the problem there that changes if there's no other place maybe that place becomes space

or something right but some of those accumulating problems are handled merely by the fact that it's a bigger scale even though they push the problem to yet another level and we'll have to deal with that at some point so that's one aspect of it another one is I think the process of the colonization of the Mind by Nature so to speak of the production of this planet's noosphere of itself involves really getting more precise philosophically as well as technically right technically we're seeing Oh nature functions like this and functions like this and we can actually

map that and model that and use it as production we can build things we didn't used to think we were able to build however philosophically you know with the sort of conceptual modeling system becoming more adapted to those natural pth patterns as well we get increased granularity on what we mean by things like healthy and what we mean by natural right so there were a lot of healthy natural things in populations that were adapted over a long period of time to their local niche as long as it didn't get disrupted but they didn't necessarily know

basic um adaptable fundamental principles of health and naturalness that could be transported into different environments and deployed there or adaptively modified when circumstance es change right so I think there's a possibility for our philosophical work to start to reveal what are the the Richer understandings of words Concepts like healthy and Concepts like natural in a way that can be more broadly and rapidly and diversely employed than what we saw in the historical version yeah well so I totally agree that um these kinds of octave ways of thinking are interesting if nothing else one way of

considering a similar sort of phenomenon though is just the fact that uh the kind of um cognitive complexity stack that has probably been around for you know maybe all of human history is still more or Les how do I say this is still more or less the stack that we're working with today like yes uh now that we are in a context where there's you know Mass education and things like that maybe there is uh we do see a kind of General uptick into more advanced formal operational thinking and you know you can use models

of hierarchical complexity to try to think about uh you know averages in different populations and these sorts of things and I will certainly acknowledge that there are kind of incremental moves up there in that General way but I don't at the same time think that like all of humanity is on this sliding scale that's progressively moving you know just all together uh in lock step and a much more I think nuanced way of thinking about it is that um there are always the various kinds of cognitive skill sets and levels of complexity um that there

again have been for Millennia um in contemporary society as well meaning that different mimetic structures might appeal to different folks um who are you know for example um maybe instead of uh when I was a kid you know I had a more kind of fundamentalist religion that my uh growing you know uh concrete into abstract level thinking could uh latch on to and sort of manifest through but maybe if you grow up in that Cosmopolitan context it's Eco environmentalism that is your kind of fundamentalist religion that you then manifest that cognitive level of complexity through

and so I guess for me the question then is that if that is the case and we're kind of continuing to work with sort of the human cognitive package um then is there something that is of value um in those kinds of um religious manifestations whether it is a kind of asceticism or a kind of guilt Consciousness even or can we leverage those kinds of forms of religious Consciousness in service of Eco environmental sensitivity or is there something um dangerous and awful about doing that that's sort of the question that I'm trying to ask but

not doing it in a very good way if you know what I'm saying uh I think I do um I think if we are using the lens of developmentalism whether it's something like there's new emerging levels or there's something like there's just a stack and it's always been accessible in various ways given different technosocial conditions there are ways of thinking what's a healthy PR green not green the level but green like the nature as an aesthetic and an ethic how do we line them all up along green in a way that's healthy and complimentary to

each other and if we come across populations or individuals or periods or parts of ourselves that are fundamentally aligned to you know conformist Amber blue traditionalist whatever words we want to throw at that system it's a very interesting system that has a real place for uh Mass mythological discharges of guilt feelings of various kinds but you can mobilize that there's been such a richness historically of the ways in which that's done and I might add in its natural habitat it's actually quite close to the land right it looks a perverse when modernity has displaced it

from its traditional life conditions but if you look at Amber in any of the ancient sort of high Pagan kingdoms uh you see most of what they were doing was still farming and fishing was still moving dirt around with their hands right so they were they were deeply embedded and in meshed in a constant activity that was driven as a sacred task and if they didn't perform this sacred shared task serving the human nature relationship then they felt bad about it right they it's as if when you grow out of tribal in a sense uh

many sacred things get disrupted because your tribal signifiers are wrecked by the shared Mass uh Nation culture of the kingdom and that wound becomes a kind of generator a motivator of new activities and if those activities can be mythically harnessed in repetitive ways that participate in the Reconstruction of the natural environment uh then you have something that fits in with an ecological orientation at those other levels as well yeah well and I guess for me it's always just been uh I've seen versions of that unfold but they tend to seem pathological rather than salutary right

like uh when various uh ideologies get adopted in a religious modality they don't necessarily work in a surplus cohesion producing way you know they uh they tend to work more like broken Rel and so um I think that's really one of the challenges or tensions here of like when we move into this space of trying to have a collective effort oriented towards nurturing and maybe expanding the biosphere how do we avoid that reflecting certain kind of pathological forms of sort of displaced religiosity um and on the one hand we want to leverage those forms of

Consciousness to that end and in some ways it almost seems like that would be an essential aspect of these kinds of Endeavors on the other hand there's all sorts of ways that that seems prone to go wrong or maybe primed to go wrong and uh uh yeah at least it's it's a yeah I mean it's it's always the case that any given operating system socially or cognitively can have basic things within it that will always regenerate certain pathologies but we don't know exactly what those are because we mostly are looking at uh pathologized examples of

these phenomenon right that uh that kind kind of you know a bluecar Mythic folk thinking you see in the urban United States today is not a great example of what it would be like under healthy normal conditions so what if we could say is if we had uh things for those people to do if they had healthy bodies if they had healthy diets if there was an accompanying uh psychoanalytic or Shadow work process as part of their education if they didn't feel totally harried and Bo in by the the modern and the postmodern elements of

society where they were socially valorized and had space to be with each other that would be a condition wonder which you would expect to see a lot more Health you might still see some problematic aspects but we don't know how many until we try to implement healthy versions of these and we're not really collectively trying to implement those healthy versions very strongly but I think uh the everything that I'm talking about would require some kind of distribut supported version of Health for each of these layers yeah and in there it seems like there's a lot

of common cause between sort of what you could call the the blue or Amber and the Green in terms of moving back uh towards reentering land agriculture um moving dirt around with your hands Etc um as an increase in um potential Health uh and and and salutary effects um that would come from that and it's really in a sense the kind of modern orange that seems to be the limiting factor there which is still uh pedal to the metal in terms of industrialization and sort of capitalist expansion so anyway without kind of bringing in all

those sorts of uh um you know mtic you know tensions into this I think it's a it's an interesting thing of trying to move into deeper harmony with the Gaia system I think there's necessarily going to be a move uh that needs to take place where we start to see uh more of what we are engaging in as being directly actively you know we we can support that by creating spaces and communities and like open training of people who would play more intellectual spiritual ethical and cultural roles in that production however I think in order

to make a big shift you need to address the problem you just mentioned which is the sort of modernity problem modernity has shown its ability to radically restructure the Amber life world sort of the the folk experience of being on this planet has been completely absorbed in the incentive structure and technological potencies of modernity if that were to change right if modernity got paid for creating healthy Amber in tandem with a healthy ecosystem that it would just start implementing that at a radical rate right now there are ways to think about that they're problematic they're

all going to sound somewhat strange but I think it's good to open up possibilities around that for example if you you know we constantly tend to complain that the Pentagon budget is out of control it's more each year and we always give them more than they ask for by we I mean the American legislature uh but if they were put in charge of the life and death circumstance of keeping um the natural system of the United States rich and intact then we would say oh well good maybe give them even more money right I would

like to see them radically mobilized and get paid and get hooked on getting paid so that next year they come back and they want an even bigger budget for creating biodiversity and you know a more ecologically pervasive and permeable infrastructure things like that right it's possible to think a version it's in a Sci-Fi kind of way of a modernity that works out how to pay itself to force the previous systems to get in line on a generally m multi-stage developmental ecological reconstruction of the civilization yeah well and and I feel like that gestures uh to

something I would like to get into maybe next time which is the the social the systemic aspect of this but if you've got just a few more minutes I would like to maybe use our current setup here um to move into this other topic which is related to the individual and and and and the Gaia system which is you know I know that you've been interested in kind of the role that psycho Technologies can play in uh in the the ecological sphere in in the biosphere um and here I feel like if there is a

role for individuals to be playing that's certainly going to be playing out in our own individual Minds um but it's a fascinating concept I hadn't really even entertained the idea I'd be curious to hear what you're thinking around what that looks like how do um you know contemplative practices meditative practice what you know whatever these psycho Technologies are maybe it's also entheogens and whatnot um how do those play a role in the individual relationship uh and realization of the biosphere yeah this is a really open question because I think we're just standing at the beginning

of it essentially what we have is the opportunity to begin framing our internal existential development as being part of some kind of imaginal biospheric process right there aren't a lot of examples of that in the anthen community there is sometimes a sense that what they're doing is a sacrament to the ecological system that's one way to go at it the only other prominent example I've seen and it's in the book is is the jeffan approach where he um who knows how seriously postulates two ways in which psychot technology can be understood as part of uh

service to the biosphere in his cosmology the one is this notion where uh Prana uh atmospheric subtle energy if we imagine such a thing uh is like milk it will curdle unless it gets processed through a human sematic system intentionally and so we get a buildup of a toxic element in in the atmosphere which causes a difficulty in the ecosystems regulation of itself because the humans aren't doing their breath work practice properly and in great enough numbers interesting so that's one way to think about right so these are two like suggestions for people to begin

to try to come up with their own imaginal versions uh the other one which is the famous one from be's Tales where he basically says the because of cosmic accidents a lot of the self-organizational energy of the biosphere is being drained off to feed the moon uh as a result uh we need a lot more of of restorative energy and we get that from the human beings but we get it under two different conditions you get a little bit out of them when they die or a lot out of them when they undertake uh conscious

labor and intentional suffering practices to modify their internal condition through deeper understanding and participation if we produce enough of this stuff then the ecosystem will have the nutrient it needs to perform itself stabilization practice and if we don't then it just has to increase the numbers of humans so that more of them die so that it can drain off that little drop that it gets when we terminate right so there's a lot of elements to that but again it's basically a story where there's in the first thing there's something for us to cleanse in the

Second Story there's something for us to produce but there's a an imaginal sematic or subtle quality of some kind that we think of as the source of our unfolding as Spiritual Beings but that's conceived of as a side effect it's primarily that the ecosystem needs this from you we've developed we've evolved in such a way that there's a kind of symbiosis where your spiritual awakening is the side effect of your production of this element that the ecosystem needs uh so if you want to grow you don't have to focus on growing you have to focus

on doing this internal work to be of help to the guyan system right so those are two examples of beginning to imagine our way forward to a ref frame of inner practice as service to the biosphere it's very interesting uh because this I feel like starts to bump up against another thing that I want to talk to uh you about uh next time which is the the the the Naturalization of the Sacred and the sacralization of the natural which is you know um there's been a lot of talk in the kind of broader scene around

sacred naturalism uh I think what was it you and uh Bruce did I think did a uh yeah we did one with GRE Enrique as well okay yeah and then Greg of course and John Veri did a whole thing on Transcendent naturalism um I think that there and I'm certainly am am very committed to this myself um there's a movement towards trying to think of the spiritual in naturalistic terms and not to lead to the breakdown into this Two Worlds mythology um and a a natural world a supernatural World Etc I bring all that up

because um what you're describing are some imaginal constructs that would seem to potentially run a foul of that naturalizing impulse right if we're working with pronic energy that that's supposedly out there but it's sort of outside the bounds of any kind of certainly scientific measurement or any kind of I don't know uh existing naturalistic Paradigm to account for then it seems like we're sort of back in the realm of Mythos that might have that kind of uh galvanizing Mythic Force to it that could be kind of collectively salutary but it might also be really problematic

and maybe um you know it provides a whole new way in which people can really dig into that guilt thing if you really think about oh I didn't do my breath exercises today I guess I'm destroying the environment you know like that's a whole new way of kind of internalizing religious guilt in that sense but what I I I bring that up partially as just a thought and a potential critique but also because um there is a way on that that notion of the intentional suffering bit that I feel like could be very very naturalized

which is when you don't just buy into that rep ious modern form of consumption and you're actually constrained by a planetary uh awareness that's sensitive to the limits of the biosphere so you don't just buy another this or that you don't just buy fast fashion you don't just you know buy another polyester that whatever right there's a suffering that comes with that right there's an actual sense of asceticism you could say in a positive way it's discipline for a collective good and that I think genuinely is a degree of um while small a tangible real

and entirely naturalistic um outcome uh that is you know related to biospheric health you could say and so rather than maybe having to construct imaginal aspects um real or not just currently let's say outside the Realms of a naturalistic paradigm we could I think Orient to the very real natural limitations that we face and just try to in a sense religionization a an environmentalist act that I'm doing by washing out this plastic bag this is an act of Devotion to Gaia or something of that nature again very ripe for pathology I'm sure but at the

same time maybe precisely the sort of kind of constraint that we would need to to both you know kind of energize those sorts of things that you're describing what what do you think of that I think there's a lot of opportunity to put people experimentally in circumstances where they can try out what those modalities and those different imaginal framings are doing for them individually and as a community right and if some of them turn out to work or generate new ways of being or gain a momentum of themselves I think that that could become the

basis of uh a new attitude toward the sacred which will resemble a successful attitudes toward the sacred historically the question of subtle energies which of course we're going to be holding Retreat on in a couple of months um to me it always comes down to sort of three B basic things right we're either talking about some special energy that isn't currently recognized by physics or we're talking about bioelectricity which is recognized but not really explored or taken seriously or we're talking about a metaphor for some kind of other processes that go on that are meaningful

and interactive uh chi or Prana could be any of those things and I think the ambiguity uh in a positive sense can be taken as a creative ferment for people's minds it's so natural to think in terms of those energies even though energy is a pretty New Concept um that it grounds people's emotional and subconscious life in standing before complex natural processes but we should always be wondering which of them it might be in any given case uh but I think there's also very simple kind of you know uh sincerely ironic ways of thinking about

this where like if you make if you can make your hand tingle and then you can send the it seems like I can send the tingle to my other hand and then it's seems like it tingles that little seems like does a lot of work there uh but it's a lot of work that says hey we can explore this but we're not bound by it because we might make an objective discovery that says that's not exactly what it is and that's fine it still might be a really useful thing to engage in yeah totally and

um and I mean I guess I to to to work still with this idea of um you know being in service of Gaia let's say by um deepening my own spiritual practice I think that there's a there's a huge uh opening there uh a set of possibilities that that could unlock that I think would be would be profound if if and I think the the imaginal component as much as we might be uncertain about how much we want to say yay or nay to something like subtle energy um that kind of a concept I think

can do a lot of work to awaken our imagination to start to conceptualize ways of framing our inner and our interpersonal and cultural work such that it seems like it's a sacred service to the ecological system yes there's possibilities for that to go astray uh we've got to keep our eye on that but there's possibilities of any approach going astray no definitely but I also think that everything you're saying does um it it holds together as part of other things that um you know we've discussed in terms of God as emerging potential and the kind

of surplus cohesion aspect that there's some notion or maybe I'm I don't I'm throwing this out and see what you think about but like I feel like if we're thinking about um spiritual practice as a kind of generation of surplus cohesion by means of bringing into deeper integration the various subsystems of ourselves um if we're doing that and if that produces certain effects and if we do that with other people in religion likee ways that again produces Surplus cohesion amongst at you know the collective level then it seems like we are engaging in this kind

of emergent process underway that that we are a part of that also the the biosphere itself has been engaging in which is this neant Tropic emergent generation of surplus cohesion through deepening levels of connection and integration right so all of that would seem to tie together in the sense of what is the kind of the human spiritual goal or story it's something like coming together creating in Greater levels of interior integration amongst ourselves and among ourselves and in the process bringing the biosphere more into ourselves and more into itself and then bringing something all together

out of this very vast complexifying process that wasn't there before and to me that could be then imagined multiple ways that could be that's Gaia realizing itself in a fuller sense it's also as I tend to language it more using kind of traditional theological language that's the emergence of God or that's the development of God um and so I'm wondering if kind of these projects either can be brought into dialogue with each other if they're versions of the same thing um but they they all seem to be gesturing in the same direction which is uniting

individual spiritual practice with Collective religious practice in a way that's oriented towards you know a naturalistically complexifying cosmos leading towards that tilos that we were talking about earlier so there's a lot there sorry but there's yeah exactly and this I mean that's an exciting worldview to me and like we were saying earlier one of the reasons EX exciting is it brings so many different elements together if we're going to say like hey let's let's think together toward a cosmically infused sacred naturalism in which the human has a special role as a service to the ecology

that can be served through technical and sociological production even of machines up to and including AI as well as served by spiritual poetic artistic and imaginal functions in a way that moves the universe project forward as part of the living system in which we evolved without necessarily making any other specific assertions about that process right there's there's sort of a basic shape there that could be elaborated in a number of different ways but it's its position such that it can bring many different things together it can bring together cosmology and ontology and philosophy and many

facets of religion you know when we think about the sort of basic uh you know schoolyard if I can put it that way religious options where you're like well atheism theism or Buddhist emptiness something like that right they okay can all in a way be unfolded into a more ecological version of implicit Divinity in which we serve a function and unfolding that implicit Divinity to new levels and new functions because you can say well it's actually a very materialist Vision it's not that far from a scientific materialism to say oh right sacred nature it's not

that far from a theism in a way when you go listen everything we're thinking about God this overwhelming power toward which our heart aspires in order to be dramatically of Mythic service and be righteous well that's we're saying yes that's the case it's just expressed here through the kind of uh ecosystemic Avatar in a way and then you can say well emptiness yes but by emptiness you really mean uh a a process that deconstructs linear human identities and Concepts and asks us to be participants in in a more loose and more open compassion-based process right

all of that can be assumed into a kind of new sacred naturalism as well I I I don't religious possibilities off the board just to say that the thing we're describing is interestingly positioned between lots of different options such that it might be the center of the Mandola I think Terence mcken called nature the center of the Mandola but I think he was thinking of it and it already is the center of the Mandola I think we're saying something like there is a structure here that could be uh located at the integration point of all

these other Realms of concern that we are also invested in uh it needs to really think about how uh the tenants of whatever belief system you've got either works with or is causing a problem in the General Life sphere of the world so we need really intelligent PR green versions of all the great religions we need them all to probably be somewhat informed by uh a a broad variety of ecologically sourced psychotropic experiences right and that can mean anthens it can also just mean time spent contemplatively in the woods it can the uh weird buzz

you got from foraging plants right that there's a lot of opportunity for psychological richness to be stimulated by direct encounters with what we think of as the natural world and for those experiences over time to begin to really saturate every kind of Social and religious space and then like I was saying before the opportunity for all of us to start thinking of a variety of versions whereby our inner practice lives are somehow directly of service even if it's just that idea that we're playing with it begins a process of creatively exploring you know the pattern

space of psycho Technologies as service to biospheres yeah one thing that maybe is obvious but just came up for me in a really intense way when you were talking about that is how we are so alienated from the patterns of nature because of the man-made artificial um structures that we live in this the the the urban concrete jungles that we've produced for ourselves as our new ecological niche that that means that all of our conscious experience all of our learning processes our entire Developmental and learning pathways are along a trajectory that seems alienated from those

deep kind of fractal and natural patternings and so um that seems like a profound barrier to the kind of um biospheric colonized Consciousness that you're describing because in a sense the more that we colonize with sort of early uh human thought the natural sphere and take away that complexity and just navigate along asphalt and concrete and rectilinear lines and everything none of that complexity then is coming back inside of us that then forms our thought and so a huge element then becomes public design architecture this is again I think maybe a nice te up to

that sociological element of like what are the systems we're inhabiting do we change those systems to be more in line with these kinds of natural patterns so that that is going into our Consciousness and then uh feeding that kind of feedback loop um so that we're then also producing more structures like that and so um it's a really good question for us to ask ourselves as to whether or not flat land or or you know models of reality without depth are born from people who largely live in flat spaces rather than people who move in

vertical spaces on a regular basis right that's sort of one example of thinking about what the environment does to the body that helps create our ideation both socially and religiously and it's very interesting to think about just a few thousand years ago the entire history of human spiritual practice basically took place outdoors in the wilderness right there weren't special buildings for it now the Situation's kind of reversed we have a duty and we have an opportunity to make the patterns of the human social environment which we design for safety and comfort don't and shouldn't give

up uh make more more enriched more like the organic patternings but what we can do instead of going to buildings for spirituality is fundamentally think about nature as a kind of aesthetic or pilgrimage or experimental opportunity to go into it for a limited amount of time right we already do this to a large degree people go camping right uh and it's a kind of aesthetic practice they're denuding their life of a bunch of things that make it comfortable they're going to do it as a kind of pilgrimage they're going to do it enshrined in some

natural environment and their hope is they will feel restored regenerated and have a bunch of glimpses of the world that satisfy their soul so they can go back to their social life reinforced so there is uh I think a lot of opportunity for us to think about in the current environment which is still dominated by fairly simplistic modernist patter to think of the pilgrimage to Nature as one of our fundamental religious opportunities and when we think of it in that way then we can start to elaborate it as how do we get a stronger more

successful version of that process yeah fascinating well this has been great as I knew it would be I thank you uh my friend for your time and I'm looking forward to yeah picking this up next time where we can get into some of those things that we brought up and uh I'm looking forward to hearing more um about this really fascinating set of topics and uh again appreciate you coming on to talk about it um till next time thank you thank you my friend all right talk to you in