Social Soil and Islands of Coherence

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Otto Scharmer (of MIT and the Presencing Institute) has written an article which brings hope as a way forward for humanity. There is a link below. You can read or listen, which only takes 25 minutes. It can feel that the world is accelerating to destruction under the triple impact of extractive capitalism, technology and warfare. These  threaten to “unsolder all”.

The latest threat comes from AI. It is artificial intelligence that gives the clue to a way forward. It feeds on human interaction and destroys it. However when even a small amount of data that it relies on is AI generated then the whole AI structure simply collapses. Our social interaction is necessary even for AI to function. 

Scharmer points to the way in whichwe become aware both of our self and our place within community and our purpose within the cosmos. It sounds grand, but it comes about from small steps we each can make – now – and within our local lives. This vision was prefigured by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin in his “Phenomenon of Man”. He forecast in the 1940’s that technology would enable and require humanity to connect each-to-each and reach an “Omega Point”. The awareness of the love that is all and which we call God.

Scharmer compares the health of society to agriculture. Productivity starts with soil. Our extractive monoculture has been eroding earth so that it is less and less fertile. However, regenerative farming encourages gloriously fertile earth and it is from this that abundance of plants and harvest flows. The same applies to us. We yearn for the joy of richly connected community which arises from tending our social soil. Smile at someone on the bus. Participate with others in local groups. This can be overwhelmingly powerful. This is a proven route. The Scandinavian folk-bildung movement transformed their society 100 years ago,  led to Rosa Parks’ refusal to give up her bus seat and inspired Martin Luther King.

Scharmer explains the effect through the work of Ilya Prigogine who showed that when systems are far from equilibrium then small islands of coherence can lead the whole system to a new emergent level. Surely then this is our exciting work? To reach out and take part in building social soil, with others. Starting with small steps. As my son says – smile and the world smiles upon you.

https://www.noemamag.com/we-may-be-entering-a-second-axial-age/

Materialism. Arrogant, Illogical

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“Si materialistes qui fussent les premiers evolutionistes il ne leur venaient pas l’idee que leurs intelligence de savants eut rein a faire en Elle-meme, avec l’evolution” Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Teilhard de Chardin is here making a point about materialists in the field of evolution, such as Darwin and the moden day Richard Dawkins. What he means is that materialists imagine themselves as observers, separate from what they comment upon. Yet they, and their brains are a result of and part of evolution.

Another human trait is to feel superior to what you observe. The act of viewing something as separate leads to a sense of boundary; from which follows..

Materialism, arrogant. Illogical.

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Every breath we take..

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Every breath we take affects and changes the universe. Every action and every thought does the same. Each of us is significant.

Oh yes, and death is an illusion.

This is something that is pointed to by religion, philosophy and science.

The oldest religion may be what is encoded in Sanskrit. Put simply (by my reading anyway) Hindu thinking has at heart a truth that all is one whilst we experience it in our own diversity.

Philosophers have also reached this conclusion. I would point to Maurice Merleau-Ponty with his observation about perception and embodiment. His final book talks of the “flesh” of the world which we build by our action and reflections. Carl Jung points to a “universal unconsciousness”. What we think of as separate is really like the peaks of icebergs sharing connection below the surface. Both of these draw on Eastern thinking, which does not share what looks like the philosophical mistake of Descartes (that there is separation between material and intangible).

Scientists working on Quantum Reality point to intimate connection with quantum entanglement. This was developed by David Bohm into a metaphor of the universe as a hologram – where everything contains the imprint of everything else. For him the facts point to an “implicate” universe alongside what we see materially – the “explicate”. Everything is a flow, a river, and one-thing. What we perceive of as material and separate in place and time is an illusion caused by seemingly stable eddies in that flow.

My own conclusion? We don’t understand the whole of reality of which we are part. To pretend that is a mistaken arrogance. However the likelihood and the signs are – that all is connected and we are part of all that is – now and across time. More than that therefore. Everything we do has universal significance. Death is an illusion.

Evolution to Revelation: Toward the Omega Point

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The Illusion of the Gradual

To paraphrase Ernest Hemingway’s famous observation on bankruptcy, evolutionary change happens in two distinct ways: gradually, then suddenly.

Charles Darwin profoundly understood the gradual. His theory of natural selection brilliantly maps how species slowly adapt to their environments through competition. However, it fails to fully capture how life makes its greatest leaps forward. These sudden, explosive emergences of something entirely new are driven not by fierce competition, but by profound cooperation.

The Power of Biological Partnership

Consider the foundation of complex life. Long ago, independent single-celled organisms, rather than competing, merged to create an entirely unprecedented form of life. These collaborative structures eventually joined to form our bodies—entities vastly more complex than the mere sum of their cellular parts. Even today, the energy fueling our existence is generated by mitochondria: ancient, “other” cells folded into our biology, which still carry their own distinct genetic material.

It is this combination and partnership that propel life forward. Nature is far more than just “red in tooth and claw”; its history is defined by long evolutionary pauses followed by radical, revolutionary leaps.

The Awakening of Self-Reflection

One of the most monumental phase-changes in this evolutionary story is humanity’s capacity for self-reflection. It represents a true moment of revelation in the history of life: we are not merely conscious; we are explicitly aware of our own consciousness. Symbolically, this awakening is beautifully mapped in the biblical story of the Garden of Eden.

The Rise of the Noosphere

This perspective deeply echoes the philosophy of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. In The Phenomenon of Man, he traces life’s trajectory from the Big Bang through sequential phases of physical, chemical, and biological evolution. He describes how plasma and quarks coalesced into atoms, which built increasingly complex molecules, eventually giving rise to the proteins that sparked life.

De Chardin posited that from the very beginning, all matter possessed both an “outer” quality (physical morphology) and an “inner” quality (consciousness or spirit). As he beautifully articulated, “the story of life is no more than the rise of consciousness veiled by morphology.”

He believed humanity has now entered a new era where ideas themselves evolve, generating a new layer of consciousness. He termed this the “noosphere”—a collective realm of thought layered over the Earth’s biosphere.

Artificial Intelligence as the Next Leap?

Remarkably, in the 1940s, De Chardin predicted that humanity would eventually invent tools to seamlessly link pure thought, paving the way for a unified, global consciousness—an awareness of profound oneness, or the divine.He called this moment, the Omega Point.

Viewed through this lens, perhaps the dawn of Artificial Intelligence is something we should welcome rather than fear. There is a growing interest among scientists in panpsychism. This resolves the “hard problem of consciousness” through the proposal that the universe is one thing and all within it is conscious. 

On Marriage

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On Marriage

We here, this day, invite love into time

Green force sourced fire which desiring uncurls

To summer’s meadow-ripened fragrant thyme

And rose pinkèd dawn whence joy hence unfurls

Though roses thorn do bear our troubled strife

Their pointing pricks through enhancing to chance

Each day alway to be best of our life

Capturing rapturing flowing to dance

Dancing that flowers between us to speech

Translating through grace mere you into Thou,

Thou art my all in all though each from each

Sparki-kindled kiss created through

Which meeting’s meaning our worlds unfold,

In weight and height and time love’s story’s told.

Legislating for Minorities: A Threat to Democracy?

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We focus on legislating for minorities. This serves to divide; since these are treated as separate groups. How does this fit with democracy, which surely is rule by the majority?

A just society is a society that if you knew everything about it, you’d be willing to enter it in a random place.” John Rawls

One of the problems is that there is a loosening hold on shared values wherein society protects and honours all, especially the weakest and those furthest from some “norm”. Without such fundamental shared morality then we are left as a nation of “isms” – racism, sexism and the like. A place where those who are left out have no choice but to band together and fight – as a separate group.

Europe’s moral code, and hence America’s, was founded in Christianity. This no longer serves to bind us, but is there a secular equivalent to “love your neighbour as yourself”? John Rawls put forward this idea.

“A just society is a society that if you knew everything about it, you’d be willing to enter it in a random place.” John Rawls

What a wonderful ideal. A society and politics I would follow and fight for…

Weaving Candyfloss

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It seems to me what we call “me” – our ego – is spun up as we develop from a foetus. Something like candyfloss at the fun fair where a stick is held within a spinning sugar stranding machine so that this wonderful pink confection arises seemingly from nowhere. I remember the mixture of awe and anticipation as a child as it magically appeared from nowhere.

If that’s a helpful image, then what is the stick from which our ego is spun? In a material sense of course it is our genes and the physical bodies of our parents. The sugar that adheres is our bodily experience. Our ego is a confection of embodiment. Our particularly experienced ego, our very selves in this life are the latest manifestation of emergence that has been unfolding since the Big Bang and the accretion of the earth and moon 4.6 billion years ago and the emergence of life 3.7 billion years ago. Life evolving through single cells and dinosaurs to humans. We are just the latest, and not the last, expression of life. What though is the point of our ego, It will die. What trace will be left, and for what purpose? This candyfloss will re-merge with all that is as our individual body fades. Why have this sweet separated space in which we become?

Carl Sagan said “ we are the way the cosmos gets to know itself”.

And that knowing is through relationship with other parts of the embodied universe. In that way something new emerges. Something like fabric created from weft and warp of individual fibres – each in turn spun from plaited ropes of our individualities.

Maybe a way then to think about this is imagining our individual candyfloss combined into a rope or plait with others?

Empathy, Maternal Reverie and Counter-transference

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Donald Winnicott developed our understanding of child development. He was analysed and deeply influenced by the thinking of Melanie Klein. What he is perhaps best known for is his concept of “maternal reverie”, the deep contemplative connection that mothers have with infants. This allows the neonate to have the confidence to start the journey toward their own ego and their separation from all-that-is. He also had the idea that what was needed was a “good enough” mother. That is to say, perfection isn’t needed, rather just showing up and connecting with love.

Donald Winnicott

Counter-transference as a tool for empathic understanding

 

What is less known about him is his development of modern counter-transference. This is perhaps the fundamental way in which therapists help their patients. The word was originally coined by Freud, but used by him in a completely different way. Winnicott understood that non-verbal connection can be used to understand and help patients. Essentially it is using ones own feeling state as an indicator of the internal world of the analysand (patient). Feeling is the fundamental way in which we make our decisions. Feelings are non-verbal and therefore inchoate.

The extensive training of psychoanalysts does involve substantial learning, reading and discussion. Perhaps the most important parts though are the years of infant observation and of personal analysis. This latter allows therapists to understand what internal feeling states belong to them and to set these aside. By doing this they can use their own “self” to feel what their patient is feeling, to harmonise with them. This is Winnicott’s counter-transference.

This has all now been underpinned by research and neuroscience, for instance through the developing field of neuropsychoanalysis. But we don’t need science to tell us any of this. Haven’t we known this the dawn of time about the fundamental importance of empathy?

Man’s Despair (and Repair?)

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Another friend of mine took his life last month. I resonate with his despair. It seems to be that there is an issue for men in our sixties. What comes to me is that society asks a few individuals to adopt the guilt and weight of the wrongs of previous generations; and that this burden can be unbearable. It seems to me that men of my generation and background (I am 68 and middle-class British) are also coping with 1,000 years of female oppression.

James Hollis – insightful Jungian analyst – wrote “Under Saturn’s Shadow”, a book in which he surfaces the ways in which the patriarchy also oppressed men.

James Hollis who wrote …

”Under Saturn’s Shadow”

In it he describes men’s isolation from each other and their feminine side – as we were expected to labour, fight and often die. Feminism releases men from this; however the role-expectation was crystallised in those of us brought up in the 1950’s and 1960’s. We feel the need still to fulfil a role (breadwinner, protector etc) that is no longer appropriate. It’s like having an appendix. Unnecessary, but it’s still there but without a role.

On top of this there is a projection of the wrongs of all those generations of patriarchy onto these role-less shoulders. This is our work; but some middle aged men find this too difficult to cope with.

James Hollis puts it like; this referring to the patriarchy which had an interest..

”not in the individuation of the person, but in the integration of the unformed person into the collective definition of tribal masculinity. Still, take away such psychically charged images of identity, take away the wisdom of the elders, take away the community of men, and one has the modern world”.

.. and again..

”Surely the greatest tragedy for men in regard to the feminine principle is that their fear alienates them from their own anima, the principle of relatedness, feeling and connection to the life force. This alienation from self obliges alienation from other men as well. Often their only connection with each other comes through superficial talk about outer events, such as sports and politics”

And our repair? It’s in the work..to live with vulnerability, to find our feminine and thus a different masculinity. To attempt to become gentle men.

Sitting by the Well

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Marion Woodman, a Canadian Jungian Analyst, was a source of deep and accessible wisdom. She recorded a series of talks as “Sitting by the Well”. These are compelling listening. They offer entrancing insights into the wisdom to be gained by listening to and through our body.

“The body has a wisdom of its own. However, slowly and circuitously that wisdom manifests, once it is experienced it is a foundation, a basis of knowing that gives confidence to the ego. To reach its wisdom requires absolute concentration: dropping the mind into the body, breathing into whatever is ready to be 
released, and allowing the process of expression until the negative dammed up energy is out, making room for the positive energy, genuine Light, to flood in” Marion Woodman

https://videopress.com/v/QdvIjsjg?resizeToParent=true&cover=true&preloadContent=metadata&useAverageColor=true

She points out that the word – matter – shares a common root with – mater ; which of course means mother. In the years before her death in 2017 she talked technological evolution as matter itself coming to consciousness. This echos the work in the 1950’s by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin for instance within the “Phenomenon of Man”.

”Matter is spirit moving slowly enough to be seen”. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Others also focus on embodiment as the intersection of spirit and world – for instance David Bohm, TS Eliot and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. What distinguishes Marion Woodman is that in her talks and writing she grounds this into easily understood and practical steps.

I really recommend anyone to listen to Sitting by the Well, . Most audible book services offer a free trial period, within which you can hear them…