🐛 Planetary Regeneration through the New Paradigm of Interbeing 🐟
A broad layout of the emerging phase-shifts of humanity
🌳 What is the Regenerative Renaissance?
It's a coalition of renegades, initiatives, visionaries, programs and orgs on the leading edge of our planetary crisis. It's the phoenix rising out of the ashes of a dying world. 🦅🔥
It's transforming our cultural, economic, ecological, and governance systems towards co-operation and abundance rather than the old paradigms of competition and scarcity. 💐
The basis of this renaissance is the realization that we are participating in an interconnected process of being. We are a part of the evolutionary unfolding of life itself.
🐛 Unpacking the Story of Interbeing
The modus operandi of our current world civilization is one of artificial scarcity, top-down dynamics, and separation. 🖕
We've been unconsciously indoctrinated into a paradigm that tells us "you are just dead matter in an ultimately purposeless universe, and therefore your life is meaningless. Oh, and all the essentials of life are also scarce. You must be in perpetual competition with others and submissive to power structures in order to survive." This is the Story of Separation. 🏗
In my life, this story has elicited feelings of powerlessness, nihilism, disconnection, competition, guilt, shame, hatred, disgust, suffering, emptiness, depression, and anxiety.
Why are these seen as normal? They're the remnants of a dying paradigm.
"We have been stuck in the delusion that [the] purpose is to gain us comfort, security, and pleasure, which follows from the idea that there is no real purpose to life but to survive, which follows from our deeply held Newtonian ontology, which itself is just the culminating articulation of separation." - Charles Eisenstein
But there's a NEW story emerging — the Story of Interbeing. 🦋
It's the new narrative that “Who we are transcends the human body. We're not an isolated and separate composition of random molecules, but actually the entire universe itself.” 🪐
Everything is interconnected. You are an emergent property of the whole universe. And your existence is comprised of thousands of living, breathing, dynamic systems through which your existence can be a catalyst for cosmic shifts to life itself.
This story gets at the core ontology and metaphysics of how we see the world. It reshapes our understanding of:
Who am I?
What's the meaning of existence?
Why am I here?
What is going on?
How did I get here?
What's real?
Our entire experiences are governed by the unconscious stories we tell ourselves. And anyone living in an outdated story is going to continue perpetuating the bones of a dying world.
Exploitation and degradation of our environment will go on unscathed without a core shift in our fundamental ontology. 🛢
By starting with the story we're altering the underlying generative frequency of our civilization. We're creating change through natural emergence over force (i.e., top-down centralization).
The regenerative renaissance is birthing systems that spontaneously arise from experiences of greater beauty, meaning, love, purpose, and joy. And it’s concurrently supporting our planetary, ecological whole. 💚
🌌 Why Non-Linear Holonic Systems = Your Infinite Power as a Human Being
A result of the story is interbeing is that we begin viewing life through complex systems rather than linear, cause & effect reductionistic(i.e, the story of separation) mechanisms. 🕸
When we see ourselves as part of non-linear(figure 1), holonic(figure 2) systems, we realize that it doesn't matter at what scale we're working with. You are a holon in larger systems, and each holon is powerful in its own right.
You can creative cataclysmic-level change RIGHT NOW through bottom-up processes.
Place is utterly fractal. The global scale is no more powerful or better than the individual and local scale. 😵💫
Your local project IS valuable. 🔧
You CAN create change.
And thus the only way to change the system is through first changing ourselves. We can no longer sit back and remain passive victims of the world. We're being called to take responsibility for the world at large.
⚔️ What does effective change look like when starting from the individual?
Well, it can start in any domain of life. There is an abundance of systems to contribute to. Yet this isn't a reason to be overwhelmed but to be excited.
You get to contribute to whichever system brings your soul alive!
This is a life of joy.
Of play. 🖍
Of interbeing.
Of meaning.
Of passion. ⚡️
You're not powerless.
You can become a part of this exciting new way of relating to systems, the world, humanity and the cosmos at large.
Note: I will be deconstructing this more in future pieces as I contemplate and research how to find the highest quality, bottom-up leverage points in holonic systems. For now I'd recommend this book.
🌆 Regenerative Initiatives
Here's a super brief overview of different ways you could disrupt the systems in your life with the story of interbeing and contribute to the stewardship of a regenerative future.
But remember, these are not separate from each other. Ultimately these are all the same. It doesn't which system you involve yourself in. It's all the same. These are just arbitrary conceptual boundaries that we're creating in order to understand the world and our place in it.
💸 Decentralized Economics
Join the hype!
Learn and involve yourself in cryptocurrency, the new economic system.
But perhaps, instead of trying to become the next crypto millionaire you can begin thinking about crypto more systemically.
How will this new currency support the regenerative renaissance and the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible?
What crypto initiatives are supporting our ecology and the story of interbeing and which are just perpetuating old narratives of scarcity and competition?
One specific initiative that I have my eye on which is SEEDS (intro video).
SEEDS is a DAO (decentralized autonomous organization) focused on regenerating our planet, communities and is implementing everything I've talked about so far in this piece.
Yet there's no shortage of regenerative initiatives to co-create.
A couple others that I'm intrigued by:
📁 Regenerative Business
⚙️ Going Non-Hierarchical
It doesn't matter which business you're a part of. There are ways to intervene in regenerative and visionary ways.
This could mean that you begin proposing non-hierarchical approaches, asking different questions, stepping up into your personal sovereignty and leadership within the organization and focusing on ways of turning hierarchical structures into horizontal ones.
A few principles:
🕺 Autonomy: claim your personal leadership.
✊ Purpose: what are the specific and larger purposes of this meeting/report/interaction/project?
👓 Transparency: open-source your work. Drop the myth of the self-made man and realize that everything you do requires everyone else in the organization. Stop putting your ideas and projects behind walls.
💬 Decision-making: share the power.
📚 Learning and development: towards self-directed and collectively held. If one is transparent about what one is learning and where one is at then it's easier for collective learning.
😤 Relationship and conflict: how can you facilitate collective conflict resolution without taking it up the ladder.
⛓ DAOs
Decentralized Autonomous Organizations provide an entirely new way of working and doing business. So what's all the hype about in regard to DAOs.
Functions of a DAO:
🗳 Participatory Decision-Making: there are no bosses, no hierarchy and no one can tell you what to do when to show up. It's all co-operative.
🦧 Antifragile & Evolving: they evolve based on higher values such as meaning, beauty, and love rather than being solely focused on the bottom line.
🫓 Non-hierarchical: Everyone is invited and no one is the boss.
And much more.
The HOW of running DAOs is an experiment in progress. We're building the plane as we're flying it. Bitcoin is considered the first fully functioning DAO but many are following in its place.
🌽 Decentralized Regenerative Agriculture
Food is a gateway to healing the whole system. By simply reshaping our agricultural practices we can have HUGE positive effects on the planetary ecosystem.
Some regenerative agricultural practices include:
Agroforestry
No-till farming
Holistic Management
Pasture Fed Livestock
Holistic Grazing
Permaculture
Biodynamic
Heritage Grains
Rewilding
Seed Saving
Polycropping
Land Justice
Community Supported Agriculture
Urban Farming
Returning land to indigenous people
Community Sovereignty
📱Ethical Technology and Collective Intelligence Platforms
Tech is broken.
We're in a David and Goliath battle against tech corporations, the war on your attention is a lopsided arms race. We're losing our freedom by giving our attention to these social media giants who are preying on our deepest reptilian vulnerabilities.
We must reclaim our sovereignty so that tech supports human well-being, connection, community, meaning and joy rather than separation.
If you don't pay for the product, then you are the product
What are we moving towards?
By open-sourcing new tech platforms and giving complete control over data we may be able to construct a healthy online ecosystem.
We can begin by asking 'what is the purpose of the internet?'
Collaborative Technology Alliance proposed:
We envision the future of the social web as an ecosystem of collaborative tools designed to enable communities, guilds, and loosely affiliated groups everywhere to collaborate, share resources, sensemake and create at scale. These tools will rise as a way to stabilize and rejuvenate the commons, and more efficiently distribute resources to the parts of the network that need them most, rather than concentrating the resources in the hands of a few.
Another approach to creating a regenerative online ecology is to begin moving towards an interoperable tech ecosystem.
Interoperability: The capability of a product or system to interact and function with others.
We've all experiences "tool fatigue". You know, the feeling of having way too many digital tools to juggle at once.
The goal with innovative tech is to create software and tools that are interoperable and help coordinate collective intelligence.
This could assist us in experiencing ourselves as active participants in this single process of evolution and collaboration on the internet — the story of interbeing.
Exciting New Humane Tech & Collective Intelligence Platforms
🌍 What World Do We Want to Live In?
I want to end with a journal entry that I wrote a few months back when asked "What is the future you envision for humanity?"
I want to see a world where the default mode of life is connection. Where the individual not only does that which inspires him/her most, but where that thing is also aligned with the greater regeneration of the planet and life at large.
Where we trash this bullshit idea that only that which can be quantified in terms of $$$ is valuable. And instead we shift our lives towards which supports true human well-being and life force.
Connection to life should be what we're optimizing for in our lives, rather than security (because feeling safe is not the same as feeling alive and connected to life.)
And I'm sure many of you also want to create lives governed by your own creative exploration. Where you're embodied and living the reality that you want to see in the world. Where deep human connection is taking place and you feel fully seen and supported.
Where you're living a holistic and integrated life where all aspects of life and reality support each other.
So we can all experience deeper, fuller, all-encompassing beauty, connection, openness, curiosity, freedom, non-judgementality and integrity each and every day.
You made it! Thank you so much🙏🏻 Your presence here is appreciated.
As you can probably tell, I’m hyped about the space of holistic and systemic change as well as transforming our experiences of life through embodied philosophy and spirituality.
If this piece intrigued you and you’d like to dive deeper I have a FREE course + community launching on July 14th. You can apply for a spot here.
Much love from Mexico 🇲🇽,
Ethan Nelson
