This initial essay for my Substack will set the stage for future writing here. My work focuses upon how we can and will create vibrant health and resilient well-being for humans and the ecosystems that we, and all of life, depend upon.
We begin by recognizing that the life-ways that generate health, strength and happiness in the individual are not, and cannot be separate from that which creates and cares for the deep health of the biosphere itself, and vise-versa. The unified state of being, also called the unified field of consciousness, demands that this be true. Ancient spiritual traditions and the cutting edge of quantum mechanics both tell us the universe is an unified, undivided wholeness.
As above, so below. As within, so without. And thus we can see plainly with the eyes as much as with our spiritual insight that the current conditions of widespread environmental degradation and profound human physiological and emotional dysregulation both stem from the same source: human disconnection from nature and earth, from the cosmos, and from our own true nature. In our highest manifestation, we are unified within ourselves and our history, and are the unifiers of the heavens and the earth, the emergent property of the union of the celestial and the terrestrial. We must return to that state, consciously and willfully, to heal the many divides that plague our species and our planet.
Let us being where we are today, circa January 2022: We are somewhere near the end of a global pandemic, and faced with significant challenges to our life-support systems—the ecosystems that provide everything we need: clean air and water, healthy and nutritious food, energy for our lives and economies, building materials, medicine—everything. These ecosystems are all inextricably interwoven in a fabric of life that has been building in complexity for five billion years, culminating in mankind and everything we’ve created—a totality of which is something truly extraordinary from an evolutionary perspective.
Over the last two centuries, mankind has experienced a massive, and nearly unparalleled explosion of technological growth, the likes of which our species has not experienced since the advent of language, agriculture, or even fire. Humans are the pinnacle of evolution on planet Earth, and now we’ve evolved to the point that we ourselves—as individuals and as a species—are the main driving force behind our personal and global evolution.
Thus we can see we are at a crossroads of evolution. We must take control of our own personal evolution, and by extension, the evolution of our families, communities, ecosystems, bioregions, and beyond. In order to accomplish this, we must start with ourselves in our daily lives, with careful examination of what serves us, and cast out that which does not serve our future selves and future generations.
Our daily lives have become largely ruled by technological elements that provide us with tools and experiences that were beyond human imagination just a few short centuries ago. We have used the fruits of two hundred years of technological boom to alter human experience and the biosphere in radical, nearly cataclysmic ways.
Nearly every aspect of human experience, as well as many aspects of terrestrial biotic functioning has been massively altered by the explosion of technology in the modern era. We live in a landscape that is so different from the environments our ancient ancestors that we may as well be living on the surface of the moon relative to the built environment and life-ways that were in existence prior to the industrial revolution. We evolved to thrive within these old life-ways over thousands of years, and our biological hardware, our genotypes and phenotypes, our psychology and intellect, all struggle to keep pace with the changes of modernity.
The significant gap between our evolutionary environment, and the current technological milieu creates a massive “evolutionary mismatch” between our evolved biological systems, and the current world. Much of modern disease and suffering is being driven by this mismatch, and solving this mismatch through intelligent design of agricultural, medicinal, and other life support systems will go a long way to solving our most intractable problems.
I don’t mean to cast modernity in a purely negative light. Many of modernity’s changes have created net positive effects on lifespan, quality of life, learning, social mobility and in many other ways. Modernity has allowed the conditions for science, art, and creativity to proliferate, bringing with it, among other things, a depth of understanding of micro aspects of the natural world that previous generations would find beyond imagination.
There are myriad other benefits to technology and modernity; we must not throw out the baby with the bathwater. We are tasked now with winnowing away the aspects of modernity that do not serve us going forward, and fuse them seamlessly with the aspects of wisdom of the ancients that still serves us. Now, more than ever, we must pivot, and utilize all of what mankind has learned, not just that which has been gained in the last two hundred years, and harness all of mankind’s wisdom, to build a vibrant future for ourselves and future generations.
We can go further and state that our future evolution depends on our present ability to include and transcend previous knowledge in unification and synthesis, as described by Wilber, Gebser, et al. in the Integral model, something we’ll refer to again and again. In this context, modernity is of course a key catalyst, but one that, too, like all previous stages, must be included on the path to transcendence. And transcend we must.
Humanity at this stage may be seen as an embryonic creature, about to emerge from its womb or chrysalis. It’s a precarious moment, a moment of pivot, a moment when we must look back on all that we are, and bring all aspects into alignment and wholeness in order to proceed to the next stage.
Thus, my Substack will focus upon the unification of wisdom of the ancients with modern scientific understanding, unifying the wisdom in our own biology and that of nature itself, and uniting these subunits with the wisdom to be found in our consciousness, our spirituality and connection to the unified field, the unity of all of creation. This blog is about unification. It is a written embodiment of Morehei Ueshiba’s sword so sharp it cuts things together.
My mission here is not to reject modernity and its tools and thought-forms, but to re-contextualize them within a broader mosaic of time and history, and to form their tools into a sturdy workshop of practical application. This is a voyage into deep science, philosophy, and above all, practice. We consider human health and vitality to be the highest good, not just for its own sake, but for the sake of expressing our highest human potential. As mentioned in the second paragraph of this writing, we recognize that the ultimate form of human vitality is that which also serves the biosphere in harmony and synergistic alliance. We seek to form symbiotic relationships with all of creation, to build local super-organisms that radiate biological potential and connect to other interlinked super-organism communities in a dynamic, mutually supporting web.
These tasks are of course far easier to speak of, and to describe in text format than to create. Acknowledging this, we begin at the center: the human heart, the emanation from which our humanity emanates. We begin with right relationship to ourselves, and to all beings, and that starts with love, and its desire to be of service.
From this spiritually centered locus, as we survey the landscape of our lives, we find that the basic aspects of life drive the majority of our challenges: food, water, shelter, and relationships.
Beginning with food, we see that the modern industrial agricultural complex has served our development by providing for masses of people at economically minuscule costs per calorie. However, in the greater context, mass mono-crop and feedlot agriculture, as cost-efficient as it may be, comes with significant and catastrophic externalize costs to the environment, to food quality, and to human health.
The foundational challenges to the food system must be addressed at the local level, through the development of productive, high-quality, and truly regenerative agricultural and food-production practices, and at the individual level through public education and inspiration leading to widespread adoption of locally produced food. We must eliminate, or massively minimize through optimal choice the supply chains that stretch for thousands of miles and which destabilize local economies and destroy local environments thousands of miles away, instead replacing them with nutritious, ethically produced, economically viable local food production and distribution.
Medicine, according to Hippocrates, is an extension of food. As above, so below. Taking the same purview of medicine as we did in the prior paragraph with agriculture, we see the same catastrophic over-reliance upon synthetic chemistry to used to disrupt symptoms, rather than a truly holistic organizing principle. The current medical milieu is almost completely focused upon amelioration of symptoms, rather than upon true wellness and prevention. The SARS-CoV2 pandemic should be an absolutely crystal-clear clarion call to observe the catastrophic effects of modern medicine, and modern lifestyles in general. In truly healthy populations, the viral outbreak is a non-issue, as the CDC has found that nearly 80% of those hospitalized for COVID were obese, and 95% of deaths occur in people with multiple comorbidities. In that light, this is clearly a pandemic of the unhealthy, but unfortunately, that’s a massive swath of the population.
The pandemic may be the most obvious data set with which to see the vast majority of industrialized humans suffer from “Industrial Human Syndrome,” characterized by improper nutrition, sleep, movement, and emotional management leading to widespread metabolic dysfunction, adiposity, elevated stress, disrupted sleep, and damaged pyschospiritual well-being. Thus, the pandemic has cause severe effects in many people, with carry-over effects in our economies, and in the fabric of our communities. We’ve seen a drastic over-reliance upon late intervening emergency medicine using expensive medicines produced through synthetic chemistry, when we should be focused on creating vibrant health and well-being long before infection, and upon early treatment of what should be minor effects of viral illness with nutritive substances such as vitamins, minerals, and botanicals, and with low-cost, low-risk drugs.
Housing and the built environment can be seen through the same lens. The same with our personal relationships. The conditions of modernity are largely uniform, and so virtually every subject matter we choose to examine will yield similar pattern identification. Ancient Daoists, and modern cosmologists observe a unity in all things. These common patterns should not be a surprise.
With this multi-system approach of observation, pattern identification, and rectification through right relationship, in future Substack posts, we’ll begin to flesh out our approach to holistic re-engineering health and wellness, agriculture, the production and distribution of food and medicine, human movement patterns, sleep and regeneration, relationships, housing, and any other subject that connects to this vast wheel of creation and re-creation.
I invite you to join me on this exploration, as we form new structures and fortify those that already serve. This is a conversation as well as an exposition. Welcome!