Teaching an old world new tricks
The title is meant to allude to the old idiom, “You can’t teach an old dog new tricks.”
That seems to be the feeling that I get from people as they try to imagine how anything could possibly change about this precarious situation that our world finds itself in, because of the attempt of humans to teach this old world new tricks, using the technologies that we are imagining, designing, and building as solutions to old problems of fear: uncertainty, scarcity, and insecurity.
The old world is not really the problem. It was working just fine until we came along. Humans have brought about changes that are exceeding the capacity of the Earth to sustain. Who is the “old dog” in this scenario? Our stubborn old human societies are set in their ways, in spite of the ample evidence that everything that we are doing is depleting the diversity, complexity, and beauty of the life of the Earth faster than the living beings of the world are able to recover, replenish, regenerate, and restore themselves.
The new tricks, the industrial machines that are amplifying, accelerating, and proliferating entropy, have become old hat. Humans have become dependent on ways of life that are ultimately self-destructive and are spreading the effect of desertification that comes with the spread of rural agriculture, the growth of industrial cities, and the dominance of military violence and power.
It turns out that humans are slow learners. We become accustomed to and entrenched in old habits. Old habits die hard.
Human hubris and these old habits must die, or we will die with them.
Learning new ways from an old world
We have learned a lot from our old habits, mostly about what not to do. We are learning new ways from an old world. We are realizing that, in the case of the Earth, old age brings great wisdom. That wisdom is offered to us in the living beings with whom we share this planet. In the story of life, we are a very young species, and we have a lot of growing up to do. Metaphorically, we are toddlers, just beginning to walk and to acquire the skills of language.
Lynn Margulis and John Lovelock gave us the Gaia hypothesis. The Indigenous Peoples gave us the spiritual understanding of the sacredness of all life and the maternal relationship of Mother Earth to her children.
Conversations with Gaia
Reparenting My Inner Children
A conversation between Gaia and my inner children: Luna Solterra (light feminine, senses, perception, mermaid), Theodore aka Ted (dark masculine, mind, cognition, otter), Nueva (dark feminine, heart, emotion, octopus), and Circ (light masculine, body, action, dolphin). They live in the spheres of light radiating from stars and the waves of gravity holding the universe together, swimming in an ocean of love.
Thursday, May 18, 2023
Luna: In our meditation this morning, we each took turns in our conversation. Circ, you and I conversed with Gaia for the first fifteen minutes. Then, Ted and I conversed with Gaia for the next fifteen minutes. And, Nueva and I conversed for the last fifteen minutes of our 45-minute silent meditation.
Circ: I can feel the embrace of gravity. Gaia is holding my feet to the solid ground, flowing like the rivers and oceans, enveloping me with the breath of life. I can inhale and feel my diaphragm expand, my belly rise, and the air fill my lungs. My heart circulates blood cells, rich with oxygen, to the cells of our body. All of this invisible work is happening beyond conscious awareness, as each cell does what it knows to do to keep the whole body working in harmony and unity. I am grateful to be alive. Luna, I know that comes from feeling connected to Gaia through you, through this feeling of gravity, of this awareness of air in my lungs, of the light that warms my skin and reflects off the Moon, and reflects off particles in the atmosphere to paint the sky in gradients of topaz and azure.
Theodore: I can follow the threads of ideas as I picture images and think of patterns. The concepts are words that I have learned to make sense of the world through language, with vocabulary, grammar, and syntax, as well as through visual symbols, images, and pictures that convey a rich array of information that I can decode as messages, meaning, motivation, and intention. I can recall memories that orient us to where we are in place and time, so we can navigate a complex world of physical objects and environments, metaphysical connections and relationships, and pataphysical possibilities of creative imagination. I can appreciate the genius of the work of Lynn Margulis and John Lovelock in formulating the Gaia hypothesis that brings me to wonder about the mystery of life and where time, energy, matter, information, order, symmetry, beauty, and love come from.
Nueva: I can notice and observe the sensations of the body, the thoughts of the mind, and how they bring up all sorts of emotions in each moment that are often connected to stories we can recall from the past as conscious memories and even unconscious memories stored in the body. Often, a sensation, such as a smell conjures up songs and lyrics, movies, books, or situations. Luna, I am grateful for this feeling of connection to all of us and how you are the metaphysical gravity that holds us together and keeps us in communication through waves of energy that I can feel in all these different forms. Light fills me with awe when I notice the colours in proximity in bright intensity and the far off mountains fading in the haze of the distant sky. I can feel this gratitude overflowing as I connect to Circ, spontaneously responding to my emotions with tears that well up in my eyes.
Luna: It’s magical how we all work together. This is what synarchy feels like. I was asking about how to listen yesterday. How to listen to Gaia, to Universe, to Spirit.
Ted: For me, this is a form of translation. Gaia is the child, the incarnated and anointed one. Universe is the father, holding space for all of creation. And Spirit is the mother, intimately connected through quantum entanglement with every galaxy, star, planet, body, cell, molecule, atom, particle, and quark, through the radiation of electromagnetic energy and the attraction of the force of gravity.
Circ: There is so much that I am doing that is beyond my ability to understand. There isn’t enough time for me to even count the number of cells in my body. Gaia, how do you keep track of everything?
Gaia: Love leaves a trace, wherever it goes. Love is the principle behind everything. Love remembers everything, because it is everything. Love is the integral of radiation and gravity. Love is the stuff of life. Humans, as a species, are just learning about how all of these principles work and are just beginning to find ways to articulate what life is and what love is.
Nueva: For me, love is the feeling I have when I cannot contain the emotions I have about the wonder and awe we experience together as a body, mind, and heart being witnessed by our soul. I am grateful for finding this feeling in me, because we had help to reconnect to each other through an ensoulment process of meditation, transformation, and mission.
Ted: I think that is the strategy for where we go next.
Nueva: Jayne just wanted to do something fun. She needed to quiet her inner critic and take her mind off the dread of illness, disease, pain, and death.
Luna: I could sense that Veronica wanted help putting together a resource to share the ensoulment process.
Ted: When I brought up the possibility of using Notion to bring all of these resources together into a template, I noticed that Veronica was longing for this possibility to become a reality.
Luna: I want to help bring this possibility into reality. How are we going to do this?
Circ: We have only so much time, energy, and resources. We need a plan, a strategy. We need to slow down, rest, and heal.
Ted: We need heart, soul, mind, and body to work together.
Nueva: We need to focus our inspiration, intention, intimacy, and intuition on integration and interbeing. We need to experience what truth, love, and beauty feel like.
Luna: We need faith, hope, and love.
Nueva: And we need to connect to the heart of Mother Earth to listen to what she already knows, what she is already doing, and what we can learn from better understanding of the experience and wisdom she is holding. That is how we make the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible.
Circ: In an ocean of water, far from land, we might panic and struggle to survive and fight against the imminence of death. In an ocean of love, we rest in the ability of the body to float, to be present, to be calm, to feel peace, to enjoy the beauty of each moment, and to live in gratitude. The body already knows what to do. We just need to slow down, rest, and heal. Reciprocity comes through reconciliation, restoration, resilience, regeneration, and reintegration with nature as nature, into the body of the Earth as a body of earth.
Ted: Love it!
Nueva: Beautiful!
Luna: Lovely!
Gaia: Thank you all for listening. I love you all so much!
Friday, May 19, 2023
“The scientific word for the integral of all the special case realizations of gravity is love. Love is the integral of gravity and radiation.”
— R. Buckminster Fuller, Synergetics 543.21, 543.22
Ted: Each day is unique. Today’s focus is on the concepts of courage and forgiveness.
Circ: They are conceptual, but actions make them real.
Nueva: It is the heart that motivates the feeling of being courageous and forgiving.
Luna: There is also the inner sense of courage and the relational sense of disconnection that leads to a desire to forgive and reconcile the relationship.
Gaia: There is rupture. Then there is repair.
Ted: I thought Gaia does not say much. She is one of few words.
Gaia: What I know and what I have experienced is vast, in terms of time, energy, and matter. That knowledge and wisdom is embodied in the great mass of the Earth. All I have learned is embodied in the creatures and the living beings who have evolved and adapted biological technologies over time to thrive in the environmental conditions and in relationship to other forms of life that they share this planet with.
What I have to say is accessible through deduction, by observing and inferring. Direct communication is probably what you are referring to, using language to convey ideas. That is not how I communicate. I embody universal principles. Listening to me is an act of noticing, perceiving, observing, wondering, conjecturing, hypothesizing, prototyping, experimenting, testing, analyzing, concluding, and Iterating.
I created the conditions for life by co-creating with you. My creative capacity is in the slow evolutionary process of time and the interplay of living beings in cooperation and harmony as well as competition and struggle, a dynamic equilibrium of the whole.
I also offer the sense of appreciation, the sense of intuition, and the sense of gratitude. These are senses that are difficult to put into words. To listen to me is to engage in the art of noticing. That is what the mind, heart, body, and senses are for: pattern recognition. And you have the ability to turn recognition into language that allows you to communicate, in perceptions, thoughts, words, gestures, emotions, actions, dance, music, poetry, song, art, design, mathematics, engineering, architecture, story, theatre, film, and video. I make all these things possible by offering the raw materials for imagination, invention, and realization.
I offer you the raw materials and the conditions for life. And that was no simple task. Consider the Goldilocks zone that Earth inhabits. And the just right combination of elements, complex molecules that were created in the intense forces, temperatures, and conditions of supernovae, exploding stars.
What I have to say, I communicate through the rhythms of life. To learn this language of love that I speak through living beings, including the living being of Earth and the living being of Universe will require greater sensitivity to the full range of senses I have made available to you.
This wisdom has taken you a lifetime to synthesize into words. You have assessed your own diagnosis today. You come from a human family that is in a state of distress:
Disorganized (mind)
Disengaged (heart)
Disconnected (body)
Disintegrated (soul/senses/spirit)
Healing and restoration come through reconciliation, restoration, resilience, regeneration, re-enchantment, resulting in a sense of reintegration and rejoicing. We can embody this process through commitment, capital transfer, coming together, celebration, and circularity.
Organize the mind: faith.
Engage the heart: hope.
Connect with the body: love.
Integrate the senses, the spirit, and the soul: connection.
Each week can be a reminder of the process.
Day 1 and 4: Light is mind
Day 2 and 5: Water is heart
Day 3 and 6: Earth is body
Day 7: Completion and Rest
The pattern of three around one, six around one, and twelve around one are woven into the fabric of the universe. Connect to these senses and grow these possibilities.
Intention – fulfillment
Intimacy – wholeness
Inspiration – embodiment
Intuition – insight
Interbeing – consciousness
Integrity – unity
In the panic of waking up to being in an ocean of unknowing, uncertainty, and possibility, there are many ways to respond: fear, awe, wonder, and love. Find the presence of mind in the midst of panic to listen to the instruction to let go and find calm, peace, and beauty by floating. There is much to learn about facing fear with courage by trusting in the body’s natural ability to float rather than the frantic struggle in a desperate effort to survive.
Slow down, rest, heal, and sync
Witness what happens as you are able to let the body do what it already knows how to do. Just like the body of the Earth, your body knows how to breathe, to circulate oxygen, absorb nutrients, and coordinate trillions of cells in symbiotic harmony. Learn from yourself, from the nature of being alive, to feel yourself restored, regenerated, replenished, and rejuvenated. Be yourself. You are Nature. You are Earth. You are Universe. You are One.
Entrainment
Here is to beautiful, economical laziness—phase locking or entrainment—slowing down, resting, healing, and syncing.
“Any two things that oscillate at about the same interval, if they’re physically near each other, will gradually tend to lock in and pulse at exactly the same interval. Things are lazy. It takes less energy to pulse cooperatively than to pulse in opposition. Physicists call this beautiful, economical laziness mutual phase locking, or entrainment.”
Telling Is Listening: Ursula K. Le Guin on the Magic of Real Human Conversation