Chidakash Gita of Swami Bhagavan Nityananda

 https://youtube.com/watch?v=iL8LBgK-DRo&feature=share

reflecting on the Circular economy, draft notes on the ways of nature

this is a draft of an article I'm dreaming up, please share ideas in the comments and I'll incorporate your thoughts 

 

While many of us are focused on systems change, circular economy, regenerative agriculture, social justice, nature's rights, green economy, a better future, all inspiring ideas for a better way of being. Most of us are still part of systems and organizations based on very basic ideas which are antithetical to our goals and visions. Our worldview, and that of our culture is often the very root problem, and rethinking our worldview has tremendous implications . For example, in my own field of economics and capital markets, the idea of growth of our investments, and growth of our economy is implicitly a goal. Yet since the model of what is known as extractive business models, destroying ecosystems and cultures is often the result of seeing them as resources both “natural” and “human”, as things rather than living members of our community. And by simply shifting our viewpoint we can unlock the value and meaning left out of the business as usual equation from “me and it” to “we.” Yet if we were to look at the concept of growth, yet just because something grows it does not mean is is good. 

Fritjof Capra the author of the book, Tao of Physics has reflected with one of my mentors Hazel Henderson on the idea that there is way to reevaluate growth for it's own sake, and to differentiate economic activity between beneficial and harmful activities. They articulated a model on qualitative growth to outline ways that we address shortcomings in original economic models where the idea of growth was generally always good. The original model leaves out some contextual factors on the kind of growth and how that growth affects the systems around it with a very linear view of systems from "cradle to grave" rather than "cradle to cradle". 

"It appears that this linear view of economic development, as used by most mainstream and corporate economists and politicians, corresponds to the narrow quantitative concept of economic growth, while the biological and ecological sense of development corresponds to the notion of qualitative growth. In fact, the biological concept of development includes both quantitative and qualitative growth."

"A developing organism, or ecosystem, grows according to its stage of development. Typically, a young organism will go through periods of rapid physical growth. In ecosystems, this early phase of rapid growth is known as a pioneer ecosystem, characterized by rapid expansion and colonization of the territory. The rapid growth is always followed by slower growth, by maturation, and ultimately by decline and decay or, in ecosystems, by so-called succession. As living systems mature, their growth processes shift from quantitative to qualitative growth."

"When we study nature, we can see quite clearly that unlimited quantitative growth, as promoted so vigorously by economists and politicians, is unsustainable. An instructive example is the rapid growth of cancer cells, which does not recognize boundaries and is not sustainable because the cancer cells die when the host organism dies. Similarly, unlimited quantitative economic growth on a finite planet cannot be sustainable.9Qualitative economic growth, by contrast, can be sustainable if it involves a dynamic balance between growth, decline, and recycling, and if it also includes development in terms of learning and maturing."

In other words, we must mature our economic models for our growing civilization to include quality of life for all participants, which was not always a priority for the designers of our economy, to say the least. So at the stage we are in now, we must now realize that we can continue to redesign the basis of thinking in our economy, and build better strategies based on better thinking. And better management of risks, timeframes and probabilities.

We must now explore new ways of seeing things from immediate, observable and material, to long term, nuanced and non-physical, in the manner Buckminster Fuller shared in his book "Operating Manual For Spaceship Earth"

"Can we think of, and state adequately and incisively, what we mean by universe? For universe is, inferentially, the biggest system. If we could start with universe, we would automatically avoid leaving out any strategically critical variables. 

"We find no record as yet of man having successfully defined the universe - scientifically and comprehensively- to include the nonsumultaneous and only partially overlapping micro-macro, always and everywhere transforming, physical and metaphysical, omni-complementary but nonidentical events..." 

"But the finite physical universe did not include the metaphysical weightless experiences of universe. All the unweighables, such as any and all our thoughts and all the abstract mathematics, are weigthless. The metaphysical aspects of universe have been thought by the physical scientists to defy 'closed systems' analysis. I have found, however as we shall soon witness, that total universe including both its physical and metaphysical behaviors and aspects are scientifically definable."

The conceptual challenges of defining quality of life, and human well being must include what Fuller refers to as the "metaphysical" which are scientifically definable and measurable. This underlies the philosophical framework from which we can draw and outline a more realistic and comprehensive view of our economies, and communities to include all of the dimensions of life beyond money and "growth" for it's own sake.

Ashby Monk, head of Stanford Global Projects Center is focused on transforming the way that capital markets decisions are made for the largest fiduciaries, sovereign wealth funds, and global pensions. Ashby shared  in his recent paper the challenge of ESG adoption and adjusting perceptions of risk and time frames for asset managers underscores the kinds of issues which need to be addressed now, and not the future:

Until relatively recently, many investors viewed environmental, social, and governance (ESG) factors as an exclusively long-term concern.1 That is, many believed that it might take decades for ESG factors to have material impacts on financial markets.2 However, ESG-related shocks3 over the past few years - such as the COVID pandemic, catastrophic weather events, socio-political upheaval, price surges in response to disruptions in global shipping, and contested elections in first-world democracies - underscore a stark reality: ESG can (and does) have dramatic near-term impacts on asset values, and these impacts create both risks and opportunities. Therefore, investors face mounting pressure to account for how ESG affects their portfolios over all time horizons.

Meanwhile, investors are also facing another, related pressure: avoiding excessive short-termism in managing risk. At least since the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) of 2007-2009, many investors have attempted (with minimal success) to extend the timescales over which they assess conventional, ‘non-ESG’ risks, such as those from credit spreads, exchange rates, inflation, and the longevity of trends and bubbles (to name only a few).

Risk management is an attempt at outlining the possibilities of negative outcomes (negative growth), and ESG is a means by which we measure and navigate the factors outside the traditional economic equation - ideally to mitigate negative consequences which diminish not only financial markets, yet also diminish quality of life. 

Furthermore, some of the challenges we are facing in impact investing, as outlined by Cathy Clark in her recent discussion at SOCAP point to the need for "higher expectations" for what we can achieve, to expand what we believe is possible, and for that to happen we must rethink our own thinking.

The question remains, how do we expand our understanding of both what is possible, and what is probable if we can't even see what is going on due to our conceptual limitations of our model and our blind spots and cultural biases?  The tagline of Ashby Monk’s latest book “The Technologized Investor”  says it all: Innovation through Reorientation. 

We must reorient our worldview and world processes to ensure we co-create new pathways for resilient economic systems and governing our influence on their trajectories, devise better economic systems for shared prosperity and invest in those new better systems. Elinor Ostrom was awarded a Nobel Prize for her work in managing the commons, yet one her most compelling creations is her reframing institutional economics in “Beyond Markets and States: Polycentric Governance of Complex Economic Systems” which suggests a governance model by simply reorienting our system to what is, that there are intermingling multiple centers of activities and influences beyond the notion of markets to guide the commons and society. She underscores the need for new approaches to more accurately understand common pool resources from a simplistic to more comprehensive viewpoint. 

“When the world we are trying to explain and improve, however, is not well described by a simple model, we must continue to improve our frameworks and theories so as to be able to understand complexity and not simply reject it.”

Strengthening our capacities to collectively transform our perceptions on a global scale, is necessary.

"the planet is now our programmed learning environment, mirroring back to humans the global problems we have caused due to our limited perception. This feedback from planet Earth is forcing us to mature, as Halal describes in such innovative and useful detail.  We are looking at ourselves and learning to assess in new ways our limited cognition, our emotions and our continual conscious and sub-conscious processing of the realities of our condition.  The growing calamities of floods, fires, superstorms, biodiversity losses, species extinctions and more frequently zoonotic viruses and the COVID-19 Pandemic are Nature’s current lessons and feedbacks to assist our cognitive and spiritual development." ~ Hazel Henderson book review BOOK REVIEW: "BEYOND KNOWLEDGE: HOW TECHNOLOGY IS DRIVING AN AGE OF CONSCIOUSNESS"

What is the nature of this “cognitive and spiritual development” in practice? 

A recent paper by Johan Buitendag at the University of Pretoria in South Africa shares in the same vein stated the challenge from the standpoint between two guiding paradigms in our culture - Science and Religion:

“The ecological crisis is almost forcing different disciplines to search together for a better world. This places the talk amid the so-called science and religion dialogue in which theology increasingly takes cognisance of empirical research and scientific data and, on the other hand, sciences are becoming increasingly aware of the need to transcend its traditional limitations to find a comprehensive paradigm to come to grips with reality. We all share one Earth: the closer we all come to the point of omega (Teilhard), the closer we also come together. ‘I suggest that we set aside our differences to save the Creation’, observes the naturalist, Edward O. Wilson (2006:4).”

This level of individual and collective self inquiry and challenging our intellectual framework is needed in order to redefine what it is we are doing, and to reimagine the opportunities born from challenging the the implicit assumptions in our systems and institutions. Indy Johar and his team with Dark Matter Labs are applying new thinking across the board in ways that embody this courageous intellectual leap.  Here is an excerpt of an important conversation he had recently.

So we go from the theory of object relationships, and subject relationships to interdependence. And that is a systemic translation in who we are, and our recognition of self. And that's difficult, by the way, because we've been trained to think (and I've been trained to think) that we possess the problem. I've been trained to think through the theory of self-sufficiency and other things. So thinking through boundaries, thinking through nouns and our linguistic frameworks are all linked.

So as we move into a world of interdependence, we are at the birthing period of our relationship with ourselves, our relationship with the future, because also we have distanced the future — debt structures are, you know, all these things, predictive models, these are ways of seeing the world through a linear modality, which I think is at a point of challenge.

So that sentence, and those series of sentences are like a new continuum, in a way, which is emerging — we have new political and new technological capabilities which are merging to create a new basis of how we as a civilization transcend ourselves. So I see it as a transition that we're in the middle of.

Perhaps in order to transcend ourselves, and what we can do, we must first define what we see as realistically possible in the system around us, and in order to know how to bring about what we see is possible, and increase the odds of the positive outcomes we desire with our investments, we must both understand how we measure and perceive probabilities. In other words, we must look at the way we think as part of the problem, or the solution.

Yet, there’s the rub, most of us haven’t considered the problem is simply the way we are looking at it.

There’s a law in physics known as Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, and it goes something like this: in the realm of small particle science, the small particles themselves are altered by the technology you have to use to find and observe them. It can’t be otherwise. If you expand that by a few orders you get this : However it is that you approach the thing you seek, that thing responds to your approach and your way of seeking, so much so that what you end up finding is the sum of the reactions of the sought-after thing to your way of trying to find it. You find your looking, in other words, you will always see your eyes. What you will find is a faithful rendering of your on consequences. - Stephen Jenkinson Die Wise

The focus on ways the way our mind and brain's structure influences our sense of what is going on on the poles of chaos to coherence inspired Buckminster Fuller comment on the idea of symmetry and oscillating systems, yet feels like the questions he pose also reveal the nature of how we perceive things influences the outcomes we feel possible.

He wrote in "Synergetics" 

'There is no 'noise' or 'static.' There are only only as yet undifferentiated and uncomprehended frequency and magnitude orders. Chaos and ignorance are both conditions of the brain's only sense harvested and stored information as yet unenlightenedly reviewed and comprehendingly processed by the order-seeking and -finding mind.

"Assymetry is the reason that Heisenberg's measurement is always indeterminate. Assymetry is physical. Symmetry is metaphysical.

"All most-economic-pattern systems, asymetric as well as symetric, are resolvable into symmetric components in synergistic accounting.

"Our seeability is so inherently local that we rarely see anything but the asymmetries. Sociologists have trouble because they are overwhelmed by the high frequency of asymmetries (rather than the only synergetically discoverable principles.)"

Hazel Henderson in her first book Creating Alternative Futures went to this level of recognition that the very manner and mechanism of our seeing is an impediment to seeing unless recognized.

"The ferment Heisenberg caused in physics is now leading to efforts by Wheeler, Everett, Capra and Wigner and a host of audacious young physicists to write the observer back into the equation - an overdue recognition of the most basic of the "hard" sciences that, in a very real sense, reality is what we pay attention to. In fact, the humanoid is a perceiving/differentiating device of limited range inevitably distorts the visioning of the totality. Indeed perhaps original sin is nothing more than differentiating, out of which grows such communal grief. Out of more holistic insights we may discover a different view of probability theory, rooted in the understanding that “randomness” and “disorder” are only measures of human ignorance. While of peripheral vision, by the drive of “probabilities,” was an imaginative leap, perhaps we may also embrace the possibility that those “probabilities” actually exist, even though we are not paying attention to them, as the many worlds-interpretation in quantum physics suggests.”

 ~ Hazel Henderson from her book 1976 book "Creating Alternative Futures, the End of Economics"

We must expand what we can see, and shift how we see, and even more imporatant challenge the identity story of who is seeing is essential point here. We must rewire the way we think about these things, and the economy and fully embrace our collective identity and narrative is born from the reorientation of the individual experience of self and that informs what we see. Sinceo ur capacity to imagine is somehow limited by our perceptions baked into "the humanoid" which is a perceiving/differentiating device of limited range" the question remains how do we actually expand the range of what we can perceive? 

 Well, to begin with, we have to look at the nature of perception itself to know more precisely what it is we are looking to shift and transform. 

This process of collective reflection, and transformation can be informed by the gifts of ancient wisdom traditions of the east and west who inquired deeply into the nature of mind. These gifts were developed through the millennia by the men and women who were, and are, masters of consciousness in the Greek, Eurasian, Chinese and Indian, and Egyptian Civilizations which predominantly are the seeds of our current worldview. 

There are a wide range of teachers who have brought about new worldviews at critical turning points in their culture's greatest crises throughout history, which in effect helped not only the civilization's survive but leapfrog to a new, and often better, way of being for life.

One of the more obscure of the philosophies of mind and conscious evolution is known as Kashmir Shaivism. For me, the core value of the worldview is one of simple self maturation and self appreciation to fully experience the best we can be. 

This most compelling of the three branches in this context for me is known as the "Doctrine of Self Recognition" or as Socrates said "Know Thyself” Think about this, what was the nature of the part of you who knew what you dreamt when you woke up this morning, and how long the dream was, and how deep your sleep was? Who was that in you who knows and keeps track of all that? It's really simple, it's your essential self awareness. Take a look, who's looking?  Your own inner witness, is the intelligence which is the conscious living awareness in all beings. 

on a collective level, we are facing the need for a collective reorientation of the nature of who we are, and our reality, and the nature of our relationship with the womb of earth and all living beings and communities of which we are intrinsically born of - in the same way that we are literally made from the body of our mothers, humanity is simply made of the earth.

That gap would be to add the "observer" back in the equation of understanding our world, and better ways to live in it, then why not start with knowing who we are first? Or at least have a better sense, simply because it feels to me that the question of "who am I?" will never be completely answered. 

The ideas I’m talking about relate to ideas in wisdom traditions of the east and indigenous cosmology - that the conscious force which created the universe is also the universe which means that we are of that same force. Whatever we call the intelligence behind the universe, is not exterior to us, it is us. When humanity created stories which separated ourselves we 

My friend of 20 years Sthaneshwar Timalsina has created a foundation to hold the wisdom of gems of India.  He told me that he believes that there are about 10,000 people who are intimate with the Himalayan philosophy known as Kashmir Shaivism, which in itself is a wide grouping of philosophical schools. In its essence, the core of the school is the notion that the intelligence which created the universe, is the same exact intelligence which we feel inside as the sense of “me”, and for the religious among us, my first teacher in this system said: “Meditate on yourself, honor yourself, your God dwells within you as you.”   In both cases, the reality that there is something about the universe, which includes us, cannot be separated by us. And therefore if the way we see the world affects our relationship with it, then by reflecting on the manner in which we see it to improve it can actually change the world for better by ever challenging ourselves to serve the betterment of life with new vision into our world systems, relationships, designs and institutions. 

I feel it would be a wonderful thing to explore the nature of our own awareness, both individually and collectively, and reflect on how our perceptions can be improved to increase the better outcomes in our portfolios, businesses, families, foundations, universities, government agencies, cities, schools, holy circles, national parks, etc.

 Message me if you want to join the conversation, please share what you have in mind!

[notes on the metaverse: There’s a public discussion needed on this to address the need for effective governance in the the cryptoverse to not necessarily subsume the reductionist take over of a model of civic society which I feel you agree is inevitably going to fail through the limitations of the worldview and it’s economic blind spots. That’s just as well, it seems since the technoutopian world view leaves ample opportunity for symbiotic complimentary visioning of alternative futures for the economic engine to serve all life and life support systems‘ coherence regeneration and repair.

This calls forth ideas expressed by visionary economists and systems thinkers such as Elinor Ostrom, Fritjof Capra , Hazel Henderson, Kate Raworth, Indy Johar and groups like Dark Matter Labs, Silicon Valley Block Chain Society, Ethical Markets, CERES, Exo, Singularity, GIIN, Fintech TV, Bloomberg and others to inform a new operating paradigm to perhaps supplant the vision of Meta and Metaversologists to embrace the promise of a different world view, along the lines of Bucky Fuller’s for 100% of humanity. And/or we simply create a platform or a group within META to do the aforementioned, after all what happens when a Trojan horse is created within the walls of the enemy fortress to discover it is more of a conceptual Eleusinian Imaginal cell seeing a better way from within our own mindset?]

(Contextual bioregional pilots for systemic regenerative coherence with in-place projects and people in new patterns for relational dynamics in poly centric organizations based on the principles we shared today as different models, fractally applied in myriad versions as a community of practice and praxis. Each bioregion with wisdom of all perspectives and generations implicitly involved in each unique place based context

I feel we are holding the promise and shared vision to create the agreement field and principles underlying the shared vision and design of whole system of a new relational “cosmology” or story behind such a currency system to embody the vision and redirect value from the fragmented reductionist system of economic thinking to systemic planetary awareness bioregion by bioregion

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