## Metadata - Author: [[Jeremy Lent]] - Full Title: The Web of Meaning - Category: #books ## Highlights - While your conscious attention is focused on reading this paragraph, there are roughly forty trillion of your own cells busily working within you, each actively managing its own health and carefully coordinating with its companions to keep you in good shape. ([Location 764](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B097QSCGS8&location=764)) - As philosopher of biology Andreas Weber explains, ‘the experience of being alive … is the center of what defines an organism’. Weber, seeing this drive for life as the true foundation for the discipline of biology, defines what he calls the First Law of Desire: ‘Everything that lives wants more of life. Organisms are beings whose own existence means something to them.’ ([Location 771](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B097QSCGS8&location=771)) - Note: Similar to Schopenhauer's Will. - For a cell to have a sense of its own existence requires a certain kind of awareness. Each cell must be aware of itself as a self: it knows what is within its membrane and what is outside; it determines what molecules it needs and which ones to discard; it knows when something within it needs fixing and how to get it done; it determines what genes to express within its DNA and when it’s time to divide and thus propagate itself. We are reminded of Thompson’s dictum: ‘Where there is life there is mind.’ ([Location 775](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B097QSCGS8&location=775)) - Note: Signals and boundaries. - Researchers have used slime molds to determine the relative efficiency of different highway networks, discovering for example that Canada and China were more efficient than the USA and Africa. ([Location 788](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B097QSCGS8&location=788)) - They even demonstrate a certain kind of moral sense. In the defense of territory, there are occasional ‘free-riding’ bacteria who aren’t pulling their weight; when cooperating bacteria detect this, they will shun the free-riders as punishment, even if they are part of the genomic family. ([Location 796](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B097QSCGS8&location=796)) - Hundreds of millions of years ago, single-celled organisms recognized this might be the case, and began developing tight-knit relationships with others around them, each specializing in a particular function that complemented the skills of another. ([Location 800](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B097QSCGS8&location=800)) - Note: Is this a wrong use of the word 'recognize '? - When experimenters genetically modified tobacco plants to make them glow when calcium levels rose in their cells, they were amazed to find that a simple touch caused the plants to light up in milliseconds. ([Location 818](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B097QSCGS8&location=818)) - Plants do, however, contain a structure that has some analogue to a mammalian brain: their root network, safely concealed underground from hungry herbivores. Charles Darwin, far ahead of his time, was the first biologist to notice how the tip of a root, with the power to direct its own movement, ‘acts like the brain of one of the lower animals’. Since then, scientists have discovered that roots have the ability to process enormous amounts of information about their environment, including attributes such as moisture, pressure, vibration, electrical field, toxins, chemical gradients and the presence of neighboring roots. They can ascertain whether another root belongs to the same plant, a related plant or an unrelated potential competitor, and determine their actions accordingly. The number of these root tips is staggering: small plants have as many as fifteen million, and mature trees are estimated to possess hundreds of millions. Like neurons in an animal’s brain, they are continually transmitting electrical signals throughout their network. ([Location 835](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B097QSCGS8&location=835)) - As Antonio Damasio puts it, ‘we can think of feelings as mental deputies of homeostasis’. ([Location 894](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B097QSCGS8&location=894)) - Integrative intelligence is one that draws from all the sources of wisdom available to us as living organisms on Earth. It doesn’t detract from the gleaming edifices of conceptual intelligence – from the brilliant advances in science, mathematics and technology that have helped redefine the human experience. Rather, it acknowledges that these represent one aspect of intelligence, not the entire spectrum. Perhaps the greatest challenge to human intelligence today is not how to accomplish the next technological breakthrough or build the most advanced AI, but how to integrate human ingenuity with our own animate intelligence and that of the natural world. ([Location 1094](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B097QSCGS8&location=1094)) - A core principle they discerned was that qi exhibits a continual interplay of polarities they called yin and yang. Yin represented softness, wetness, darkness and receptivity, while yang represented hardness, dryness, light and activity. ([Location 1666](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B097QSCGS8&location=1666)) - Complex systems tend to be self-organized. No one came up with a plan for how they should be designed, or built them according to a blueprint. Instead, the different parts making up the system interact until they settle into a relatively coherent and stable pattern of behavior. One of the fascinating attributes of self-organized systems is how simplicity appears to emerge from underlying complexity. A person walking down the street, a bird flying in the sky, a dolphin swimming in the ocean – each appears elegantly coherent as an entity, and yet each is the result of innumerable complex interactions taking place simultaneously within, unseen except as an integrated whole. ([Location 1837](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B097QSCGS8&location=1837)) - As described evocatively by embryologist Karl Ernst von Baer, living organisms – animals, plants, bacteria or fungi – can be understood as the thoughts of nature. ([Location 2948](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B097QSCGS8&location=2948)) - Far from being the next step in life’s evolution, humanity’s ascendancy in its current form represents a major step in the wrong direction. We can comprehend this better when we consider the importance of integration as the key to life’s success in continually improving negentropy. In a truly integrated system – consistent with Federation ethics – each entity possesses intrinsic dignity and worth, pursuing its own purpose as part of the larger whole. Our civilization, however, has built its relationship with the rest of nature not on integration but on dis-integration. It is based on dominating the natural world with no consideration for its well-being. ([Location 3087](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B097QSCGS8&location=3087)) - As living organisms, we are fractal eddies of self-organization, participating in one form or another in life’s four-billion-year-old rebellion against entropy. ([Location 3492](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B097QSCGS8&location=3492)) - Becoming a fully integrated organism means not just integrating within, but also integrating fractally with community, society and the entire ecosystem. We exist in a holarchy. Just as a single cell can’t flourish in a diseased organism, so the well-being of an individual human requires a healthy ([Location 3815](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B097QSCGS8&location=3815)) - In the 1950s, when psychedelics such as LSD and psilocybin entered public awareness, they were of great interest to psychologists, who viewed them as powerful tools that could offer insight into mental processes. One pioneering researcher, Stanislav Grof, placed them in the same category as the microscope or telescope – just as those instruments had revolutionized biology and astronomy, so he believed LSD could revolutionize psychology and psychiatry. The very word psychedelic – coming from the Greek for ‘mind-manifesting’ – was formulated from the idea that its use could make manifest the hidden workings of the mind. ([Location 5328](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B097QSCGS8&location=5328)) - Even in modern society music retains its communal bonding effect – we feel its connective power in marching bands, chanting and religious ceremonies. Music theorists suggest it exerts its force through the same synchronous dynamics found in the rest of nature: like Huygens’ pendulums, its rhythmic oscillations entrain us into cogenerating a collective self, literally identifying with something larger than our own autonomous being. ([Location 5446](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B097QSCGS8&location=5446)) - But as noted in Chapter 4, from a purely reductionist perspective music doesn’t really exist – it can’t be pinned down in a musical instrument, in the ear or in the brain. Music is an emergent phenomenon arising from participatory interaction between a player and a listener. It exists in the interrelatedness between embodied minds, in dynamic patterns of vibrations generated, transmitted and received through time and space. ([Location 5451](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B097QSCGS8&location=5451)) - Just as music is an emergent phenomenon arising between a player and listener attuning through patterns of vibrations, so meaning is an emergent phenomenon enacted by a conscious entity as it relates an experience to other experiences. The more extensively we connect something with other parts of our lives, the more meaningful it is to us. The meaning of something may be understood as the network of relationships it is perceived to have – a more extensive and integrated network makes it more meaningful. ([Location 5481](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B097QSCGS8&location=5481)) - The cosmic power of love is an ancient idea. An early Greek philosopher, Empedocles, described the universe as comprising two opposing forces: strife, which pulls things apart, and love, which brings them together ‘to become one’. Modern physics validates this venerable theory. In Chapter 6 we encountered the dark force of entropy pulling the universe inexorably apart. Meanwhile, gravity – described by cosmologist Brian Swimme as a form of love – exerts a countervailing force responsible for congealing energy into stars and planets. Life itself can be viewed, from this perspective, as an act of cosmological love, as it stages its four-billion-year-old rebellion against entropy through the connective powers of self-organization. ([Location 5538](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B097QSCGS8&location=5538)) - we can all choose to numb ourselves to our connectedness, just as we can close our eyes to avoid seeing the rainbow. In fact, the conditioning we receive by growing up in the dominant culture of separation teaches us from infancy to numb ourselves from feeling these deep connections. By the time we’re adults, our eyes have been tightly shut for so long that it takes an intentional act to open them, bit by bit, until we see the rainbow that was waiting there for us all along. Like the putative righteous Christian who ends up in heaven having his memories deleted so he won’t have to care about his loved ones suffering in hell, each of us can choose to delete those parts of our consciousness that attune to the love and suffering of others, to the sentience of all life on Earth and to the sublime glory of the universe. But that choice inevitably leads to a loss of meaning in life. Imagine somebody discovering the magnificence of Indra’s Net and choosing to steal one of the glittering jewels, only to discover when they get home to savor it that by itself it’s merely a piece of cut glass that simply reflects back a fragmented version of themselves. That’s the choice that Uncle Bob – and all of us to some degree or other – make when we shut ourselves off from our embedded interconnectedness in the web of meaning. In the immortal words attributed to the Sufi mystic Rumi: ‘Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.’ ([Location 5600](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B097QSCGS8&location=5600)) - Indigenous cultures worldwide believed that spirits existed, not just in people, but in creatures, trees, mountains and all significant natural phenomena. The spread of monotheism gradually stamped out this idea in many parts of the world, replacing it with a strict dualistic cosmology. Based substantially on Plato’s teachings, the cosmos was now perceived as split between God’s eternal domain and the polluted, messy world below. This split was replicated in every human being, who possessed an everlasting soul temporarily imprisoned in a mortal body subject to corruption and sinful impulses. The soul was the point of contact with God, who was the ultimate source of everything holy, while the natural world, stripped of divinity and spirits, became a mere desacralized theater in which the human drama was played out. ([Location 5665](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B097QSCGS8&location=5665)) - Reductionism has spread throughout scientific thought so pervasively that scientists using it frequently remain unaware that it is a particular lens that configures how they make sense of what they’re investigating. ([Location 5688](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B097QSCGS8&location=5688)) - Increasingly, people in the modern world reject the dogmas of traditional monotheistic faiths, but are left wondering how to make sense of things in a way that is both internally coherent and authentic to their own felt sense of meaning in the cosmos. Even in the United States, known for its more fundamentalist religiosity, a quarter of the population consider themselves ‘spiritual but not religious’, a number that increased by a remarkable 50 percent between 2012 and 2017. ([Location 5706](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B097QSCGS8&location=5706)) - Even though reductionism and science are frequently regarded as indistinguishable, there is a clear contrast between them. In its ontological form, reductionism is a belief system relying on a leap of faith: it asserts that, because its method works effectively to understand many things about the universe, it can be used to understand everything about the universe. Science, on the other hand, is a systematic methodology for examining the nature of reality based on principles of observation, hypothesis, prediction, testing and analysis. At its best, science is built on core values of transparency, open-mindedness, honesty and receptivity to criticism. It is possible to reject the reductionist leap of faith about the cosmos while remaining fully committed to the scientific method as a powerful vehicle to investigate the nature of the universe.10 Much of the debate that characterizes the conflict between science and spirituality misses this crucial distinction. People who believe in a spiritual dimension to the cosmos frequently criticize what they call ‘scientism’ or ‘scientific materialism’ when the more appropriate target of their criticism would be ontological reductionism. ([Location 5711](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B097QSCGS8&location=5711)) - ‘The aim of science,’ wrote nineteenth-century mathematician Henri Poincaré, ‘is not things themselves, as the dogmatists in their simplicity assume, but the relations among things.’ By the beginning of the twentieth century, German scientists had founded the field of ecology to study living systems, while others developed Gestalt psychology – known for its famous statement, ‘The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.’ In the 1920s the mind-bending discoveries of theoretical physicists led to quantum mechanics, which revealed a subatomic universe that could only be predicted in terms of probabilities, thus undermining the classical view of a deterministic cosmos. ([Location 5727](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B097QSCGS8&location=5727)) - When Edward Lorenz, founder of chaos theory, demonstrated that complex systems such as weather were intrinsically chaotic and unpredictable, he received a shocked response from most scientists. Two decades later, he received the distinguished Kyoto Prize, and was said to have ‘brought about one of the most dramatic changes in mankind’s view of nature since Sir Isaac Newton’. ([Location 5733](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B097QSCGS8&location=5733)) - Systems thinkers don’t reject the basic parameters of reductionist science or posit an alternative dimension where the rules of physics don’t apply. They merely argue that, at each level of complexity in a system, new properties emerge that can’t be understood using methodologies appropriate for lower levels. However, embracing systems thinking activates a conceptual switch that disrupts the foundations of the reduction-ist worldview. In the words of Nobel laureate Roger Sperry, once principles of complexity and emergence are accepted, ‘then the very nature of science itself is changed’. ([Location 5740](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B097QSCGS8&location=5740)) - Systems thinkers, by contrast, frequently look for overarching principles that transcend particular disciplines, such as when researchers compare the self-organization of ants to that of neurons, or apply the power law to analyze avalanches, stock market crashes and musical compositions. ([Location 5748](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B097QSCGS8&location=5748)) - Even more subversively, systems thinking undermines the sacrosanct distinction between the observer and observed that allows scientists to claim their methodology is ‘value-free’. Once you recognize you are embedded in the very system you’re observing, your sense of reality changes. You realize that the way you approach whatever you’re studying may affect it, and may impact your own perception of it. ‘We can no longer be naïve observers who live outside the phenomena we manipulate,’ writes a team of prominent systems biologists. Instead of trying to control complex systems as though they’re machines, this leads to exploring how to participate skillfully within the system. When scientists, for example, study climate breakdown, a reductionist approach may view the greenhouse effect as a technical problem to be solved through geoengineering, whereas a systems approach recognizes the feedback loops between politics, economics, cultural values and emissions as a nonlinear meshwork of interactions. ([Location 5751](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B097QSCGS8&location=5751)) - A classic Zen poem goes: ‘The bell doesn’t ring,/ Nor does the stick;/ Only the “between” is ringing.’ ([Location 5785](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B097QSCGS8&location=5785)) - ‘From the Supreme Ultimate above,’ Zhu Xi said, ‘to a small thing like a blade of grass, a plant or an insect below, each has its li … we must understand them one by one … As more and more is accumulated, one will spontaneously be able to achieve a far and broad understanding.’ ([Location 5810](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B097QSCGS8&location=5810)) - Note: Reminds me of permaculture - This approach to the universe is known more generally as pantheism: the belief that divinity exists, not in a separate dimension, but in every aspect of the universe. For a pantheist, the universe itself, along with everything within it, is sacred and worthy of the deepest reverence. While this belief is shared by most Indigenous cultures worldwide, pantheism in the Western tradition is frequently associated with the philosopher Baruch Spinoza, who was ostracized by his Dutch Jewish community in the seventeenth century for proposing that there is no distinction between God and nature, and that God therefore exists throughout the cosmos. Not surprisingly, Einstein was fascinated by Spinoza’s pantheism and considered himself a disciple, declaring, ‘We followers of Spinoza see our God in the wonderful order and lawfulness of all that exists and in its soul as it reveals itself in man and animal.’ ([Location 5815](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B097QSCGS8&location=5815)) - A modern rendering of gewu requires, above all, a practice of integration: weaving together the fixed laws of reductionist science, the organizing principles of complex systems, teachings from wisdom traditions and spiritual insights of subjective experience to arrive at a coherent appreciation of the universe and our place within it. It invites us to recognize that we live in a vast, fractal universe with patterns that are both recognizable and forever unfolding, mysterious beyond human comprehension, yet manifesting a deeply meaningful harmony that permits us, with reverence and awe, to apprehend its unfathomable glory. ([Location 5827](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B097QSCGS8&location=5827)) - A careful examination of our own personhood using modern gewu yields intriguing results. We already know that the body is a Ship of Theseus: all its constituent parts are continually changing; the only constancy is its li – the relatively stable set of relationships between them that maintains coherence. This is equally true for the intangible elements of our personhood: our thoughts and feelings, our character and personality, and our network of relationships. From a systems perspective, our personhood is a multidimensional natural attractor, always in flux within certain parameters, both variable and resilient, undergoing occasional phase transitions as we grow and adapt through time. We are, in the words of philosopher Alan Watts, ‘temporarily identifiable wiggles in a stream’. ([Location 5833](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B097QSCGS8&location=5833)) - From the perspective of modern gewu, we could keep using the term multidimensional natural attractor, but why not adopt the word that describes it in common parlance – spirit? Rediscovering the profound understanding of Indigenous cultures, we can recognize that the spirit of a person, an animal, a tree or a river is the intangible but powerful unifying principle that maintains the entity’s natural attractor in coherent form. It is the emergent integrative property of any natural entity. ([Location 5840](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B097QSCGS8&location=5840)) - in his aptly titled book I Am a Strange Loop, explores some implications of a scientifically conceived spirit, reflecting how the musical notes of Chopin’s études, little black marks on a piece of paper, can be thought of as ‘soul-shards’, enabling us to share within our own consciousness ‘some tiny fragment of the internal experiences of another human being – his sufferings, his joys, his deepest passions and tensions’. ([Location 5850](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B097QSCGS8&location=5850)) - Attractors of consciousness, as we’ve seen, extend beyond individuals to take the form of cultural attractors and archetypes – long-lived patterns of sense-making and behavior that ripple through the ages, newly reinterpreted by each new generation but recognizably stable with a coherent identity. ([Location 5861](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B097QSCGS8&location=5861)) - Indeed, if ‘spirit’ can be scientifically described as the unifying principle of a natural attractor, the term spirituality may accordingly be specified using similar terms. ‘My sense,’ observes Buddhist teacher Joan Halifax, is that ‘the spiritual flows between beings, be they with humans or other beings.’ Sharing this perspective, we can define spirituality as seeking meaning in the coherent connections between things, rather than in the things themselves. In this sense, spirituality and systems thinking are intrinsically aligned. ([Location 5869](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B097QSCGS8&location=5869)) - In a foundational teaching, the Buddha instructs his disciples to meditate on every aspect of their experience – their feelings, perceptions, ideas – and to recognize in each case that ‘This is not me, I am not this, this is not my self.’ Buddhism teaches that the conception of a fixed self confines a person within its boundaries, thus leading to the endless pursuit of hedonic pleasures to try to appease its needs – which are never fully satisfied. On the other hand, through dedicated practice it’s possible to become aware of the self as a dynamic, enactive process – impermanent and perpetually in motion – bubbling up continually from an endless stream of experience.36 The possibility exists to welcome and harmonize with each of these unfolding enactments of temporary selfhood without becoming attached to any particular one – which can bring about the eudaimonic state of sukha. ([Location 5887](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B097QSCGS8&location=5887)) - Even without the help of Buddhist practice – and in spite of what we’re told by the dominant culture – human identity naturally extends far beyond the individual ego. Philosopher Samuel Scheffler elegantly illustrates this point with a simple thought experiment. Imagine you knew you would live a normal lifespan but, unbeknown to anyone else, Earth would be completely destroyed a month after your death in a collision with an asteroid. Would you feel indifferent because your own life would be spared? Unlikely! If you’re like most of us, you would see this future event as catastrophic, taking most of the meaning out of your own existence. Scheffler’s point is that, to a great extent, we derive our sense of purpose in what we do from the assumption that humanity will continue its existence into the future. We identify not just with our own direct descendants, but with humanity as a collective unit. The remarkable conclusion he arrives at is that the ‘coming into existence of people we do not know and love matters more to us than our own survival’. ([Location 5896](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B097QSCGS8&location=5896)) - we can recognize that what blazes within us is the same flame of perpetually striving negative entropy that is shared by every sentient being and every living cell on Earth. ([Location 5959](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B097QSCGS8&location=5959)) - We have arrived at a stage in the human saga on Earth where the decisions we make over the next few decades will determine the future direction, not just of humanity, but of Earth itself. ([Location 5972](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B097QSCGS8&location=5972)) - Note: Is this a true claim? - The rise of the internet, which is still in its infancy, may turn out to have as profound an effect on our group identity as the emergence of language back in the Paleolithic era. In the same way that bacteria learned to transfer genes to each other to create a virtually immortal quasi-superorganism, so humans are developing the ability to transfer ideas to each other and participate in forming a global consciousness. Can we wake up in time to appreciate our collective identity and participate in something greater than our fixed selves? As Thích Nhât Hanh has suggested, the next Buddha may not be in the form of an individual, but the awakening community.47 The possibility for future flourishing requires that we wake up, not only to ourselves as a collective consciousness, but to our deeply ingrained role with the rest of life on Earth. We must recognize that, as an integral part of Gaia, we are engaging in a process by which Earth itself is becoming self-aware. As astrobiologist David Grinspoon has noted, if long-lived aliens had been watching Earth from space for the past few billion years, they would suddenly notice Earth waking up, with dramatic changes such as light shining from the dark side of the planet and little objects emanating from the planet into space. The moment when cognitive processes play a meaningful role in the functioning of a planet, Grinspoon suggests, represents a new eon in the planet’s history – a transition as significant as the rise of multicellular life itself. ([Location 5976](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B097QSCGS8&location=5976)) - Note: Makes me think of Bill Plotkins' mythopoetic identity - At this critical juncture our overriding imperative must be to harmonize the power of conceptual consciousness with the animate intelligence in ourselves and intrinsic to all life on Earth. ([Location 6002](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B097QSCGS8&location=6002)) - Each of our daily actions and conversations emanate li ripples which intersect with others to make a collective impact on humanity’s future trajectory. How can we sort through the chaotic signals bombarding us continually from all directions? How can we discern the best means for our own li ripples to make a positive impact through this tangled, interconnected web? ([Location 6007](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B097QSCGS8&location=6007)) - Note: David Weinstock' practices on becoming what you need - Ever since the fifteenth century, when Europeans first ventured to other continents, they carried with them a Windigo-like infection of relentless consumption, ravaging the local inhabitants and natural abundance of the places they conquered, never satisfied, forever seeking new ways to devour even more. When they encountered the silver mountain of Potosí in modern-day Bolivia, they extracted every last grain, enslaving an estimated eight million Indigenous workers to mine its riches over three centuries, beating them into submission until their agonizing deaths, poisoned by the mercury used to extract the silver. When they discovered that crops such as sugar or cotton could profitably be exported back to Europe, they initiated the horrifying slave trade, transporting twelve million Africans to the Americas to be used mercilessly in chattel slavery to increase the wealth of white landowners. ([Location 6036](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B097QSCGS8&location=6036)) - Note: Nice summary of colonial exploitation - Consistent with the Windigo’s cannibalistic impulse, our society seems prepared to devour itself rather than curb its manic obsession for growth. Even as we face an existential climate emergency from greenhouse gas emissions, companies find new ways to extract fossil fuels from the earth, demolishing pristine forests in Canada for their tar sands below and injecting poisonous chemicals deep underground to frack rock formations for methane. Driven by our Windigo mania, our civilization seems caught up in what UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon has called a ‘global suicide pact’. ([Location 6049](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B097QSCGS8&location=6049)) - GDP only measures the rate at which society transforms nature and human activity into the monetary economy, regardless of the ensuing quality of life. ([Location 6086](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B097QSCGS8&location=6086)) - When researchers developed a benchmark called the genuine progress indicator (GPI), which factors in qualitative components such as volunteer and household work, pollution and crime, they discovered a dramatic divergence between the two measures. GPI peaked in 1978 (roughly the time of the neoliberal takeover), and has been steadily falling ever since, even while GDP continues to accelerate ([Location 6089](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B097QSCGS8&location=6089)) - Racist violence against Black Americans, institutionalized into national policy from earliest days, is currently manifested in what is known as the school-to-prison pipeline, resulting in the dismal statistic that one in every three Black American men can currently expect to be imprisoned in their lifetime. ([Location 6103](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B097QSCGS8&location=6103)) - Note: That's a lot worse than I thought - Uncle Bob’s declaration that world poverty is decreasing is regularly made by development pundits. However, as economist Jason Hickel explains, this claim is only true when it measures proportional rather than absolute numbers. Researchers estimate that the minimum daily income people need for basic nutrition and a normal life expectancy is $7.40. The number of people earning less than that has increased over the past few decades to over four billion – more than half of humanity. The staggering rise in global inequality makes these numbers even more invidious. It’s difficult to come to terms with the depravity of a situation where twenty-six billionaires own as much wealth as half the world’s population – roughly the same billions who can’t afford enough nutrition for their basic needs. ([Location 6106](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B097QSCGS8&location=6106)) - Imagine you had a friend who inherited vast wealth, but could only access it in the form of an annuity. Dissatisfied with his annual stipend, he hired a bevy of lawyers and accountants to find ways to retrieve his wealth more rapidly. Now, living in palatial surroundings, his accountants warn him that he will soon clean out his account, but he ignores them. If he then turns to you and proudly claims that his opulent lifestyle is a sign of progress, you might consider him to have lost his mind. This, however, is in essence the current state of our global society. ([Location 6118](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B097QSCGS8&location=6118)) - Note: I appreciate these accessible analogies. - the most dangerous technology currently threatening humanity’s future is not the direct result of science. It’s not something tangible, such as steel, electricity or the steam engine. It’s a conceptual invention existing only in the human mind – the limited liability corporation. ([Location 6127](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B097QSCGS8&location=6127)) - The limited liability corporation was first conceived in the seventeenth century as an ingenious mechanism to encourage wealthy Europeans to invest in ventures exploiting the resources of overseas colonies. It was structured to give investors all the upside if things went well, but limit the downside to their initial investment if things went wrong. This simple set-up became a perfect vehicle for the Windigo AI. At first corporate charters were limited to a specific venture, but by the nineteenth century the algorithm had broken out of its initial constraints. American industrialists, seeking new ways to enrich themselves, influenced state legislatures to grant them perpetual charters allowing them to do anything not explicitly prohibited by law. From there, the Windigo AI kept expanding its domain, becoming a legal ‘person’ in the United States entitled to constitutional protections but without any factors that constrain real persons, such as mortality, risk of jail or a moral conscience. ([Location 6141](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B097QSCGS8&location=6141)) - Note: I like the AI analogy - Of the hundred largest economies in the world, sixty-nine are now corporations. ([Location 6151](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B097QSCGS8&location=6151)) - Transnational corporations control most of the world’s media, finance, manufacturing and agriculture, and are invited to intervene in international treaty negotiations, ensuring that their interests remain protected. ([Location 6154](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B097QSCGS8&location=6154)) - Corporations are legally programmed with the ultimate goal of maximizing financial returns for their investors above all else. ([Location 6158](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B097QSCGS8&location=6158)) - Humanity now finds itself in the dire position of having ceded control of its destiny to a psychopathic force dedicated solely to turning human and nonhuman life into ever-increasing financial returns. ([Location 6160](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B097QSCGS8&location=6160)) - There are two major implications arising from this recognition of our shared human commonwealth. One is that there is no moral justification for a Mark Zuckerberg or Jeff Bezos to amass multiple billions of dollars when half the human population remains malnourished. A future society may look at our endorsement of these inequities with the same bemusement with which we regard the medieval notion of the divine right of kings. ([Location 6367](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B097QSCGS8&location=6367)) - Oppressive relationship structures inherited from domination systems – such as patriarchal and racist modes of behavior – would be reshaped from early childhood by educational modalities emphasizing ethics of partnership systems. ([Location 6402](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B097QSCGS8&location=6402)) - Note: More and more, I'm liking the language of domination and partnership systems. - We live in a world designed to keep us numb – a culture spiked with innumerable doses of spiritual anesthesia concocted to bind us to the hedonic treadmill, to shuffle along with everyone else in a ‘consensus trance’. We are conditioned from early infancy to become zombie agents of the Windigo AI – to find our assigned role as consumer, enforcer or sacrificial victim, as the case may be, and to exhaust our energy in expediting its goal of sucking the life out of our humanity and nature’s abundance. ([Location 6511](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B097QSCGS8&location=6511)) - Note: The metaphor of a spell we must break speaks powerfully to me herr - As Neo-Confucian philosopher Wang Yangming noted, ‘There have never been people who know but do not act. Those who are supposed to know but do not act simply do not yet know.’ You know when you’ve reached the place of fully experiencing the Earth’s heartbreak, because you suddenly realize you are drawn to action – not because you think you should do something, but because you are impelled to do it. ([Location 6530](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B097QSCGS8&location=6530)) - Author and activist adrienne maree brown describes a process she calls ‘emergent strategy’, in which relatively simple acts of intentional, transformative practice with others can self-organize into larger structures of societal change. ([Location 6545](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B097QSCGS8&location=6545)) - Note: Great one sentence summary of emergent strategy - The dominant individualist culture has bred into many of us an inclination toward a ‘hero complex’, encouraging us to strive to be the one to make the biggest difference. Part of becoming an ecological self is to recognize and rise above this tendency – to find a participative role within a larger community of changemakers creating what George Monbiot calls the ‘new politics of belonging’. ([Location 6547](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B097QSCGS8&location=6547)) - Note: Resonates with No More Heroes. This is such an important point - Above all, the manner in which we interact with others is crucial. Each of our actions, each of our conversations, plays a part in generating humanity’s future. In contrast to the old communist adage ‘The end justifies the means’, an ecological principle is that there is no end – simply a continued organic unfolding of whatever means becomes the predominant mode of operation. For this reason, while outrage at injustice and devastation may helpfully energize us, it is critical not to let feelings of hate and resentment infiltrate our actions. When we engage with the world with resentment, it ultimately strengthens the story of separation that created the damage in the first place. ([Location 6552](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B097QSCGS8&location=6552)) - Note: Another crucial point, well made. - An ecological worldview leads naturally to acting out of love – the realization and embrace of connectedness. ([Location 6558](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B097QSCGS8&location=6558)) - In the wise words of Detroit-based sound healer Sterling Toles, ‘We must not only heal the suffering that oppression causes, but we must also heal the suffering that causes oppression.’ ([Location 6574](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B097QSCGS8&location=6574)) - From this perspective, when Uncle Bob seems to be parroting the soundbites of Windigo, Inc., it might become possible to reach beyond the surface of his arguments and connect compassionately with his heart. Most likely, Uncle Bob also cares for life’s flourishing, desires a beautiful world for his great-grandchildren and sees himself as a good person trying to do the right thing. Numbed by our society’s nonstop anesthesia drip, Uncle Bob might yearn deep down to feel a greater sense of meaning in his life – a sense of participating in something bigger than himself, in co-creating a brighter future. Can you connect with Uncle Bob in this place? Can you invite something in his spirit to embrace some link in the web of meaning? ([Location 6576](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B097QSCGS8&location=6576)) - Note: This is precisely why NVC consciousness is critical - Uncle Bob, of course, is within all of us. We’re continually in dialogue with a version of him within ourselves. For many of us, his voice may even be dominant in our internal democracy of consciousness. He speaks for the cultural values we have internalized growing up in the dominant culture of separation. Weaving the web of meaning ultimately means integrating all the different parts of ourselves, including those that feel egotistical, fearful and selfish. When we hear these parts within us, it is an invitation to look deeper and ask what are the core human needs that have not been met, that are crying out for attention. ([Location 6582](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B097QSCGS8&location=6582)) - Note: The work of liminal consensus - weaving our own particular strands of meaning, we may find a surprising number of others doing the same. Like an immune system protecting its host from toxins, an untold number of other caring, compassionate humans are devoting their energies to life-affirming activities. The scale of each weave ranges enormously, from fleeting, intimate moments of tenderness with a loved one to passionate public speeches that inspire millions. More important than the scale is intention: a deep, authentic devotion to the well-being of life galvanized into action. ([Location 6596](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B097QSCGS8&location=6596)) - Princeton University, ‘Evolution’s New Wrinkle: Proteins with “Cruise Control” Act Like Adaptive Machines’, Science Daily, 2008; Tom Misteli, ‘Self-Organization in the Genome’, PNAS 106:17, 2009, pp. 6885–6. ([Location 8246](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B097QSCGS8&location=8246))