(This is the second article in a series of essays about how our psychological & social transformation are tied to the ways that we frame and attune to the biosphere.  The first was Zhiwa Woodbury's piece on Toward a Gaian Psychology.)

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A Brief History of How We Got Here 

THE VISIONARY 19th-CENTURY AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGIST, William James, noted: “no actions but such as are done for an end, and show a choice of means, can be called indubitable expressions of Mind”. One of today’s visionary psychologists, Dan Siegel, defines “Mind” as “an embodied and relational emergent process that regulates the flow of energy and information". Siegel contends that “as long as we define self as a singular noun, the planet is cooked”.  

For those curious about the lemming-like rush of our species towards the devolutionary abyss, the relationship between action, mind and self is of great interest. James’ quote speaks to purposeful action, while Siegel’s relational, systemic self is both singular and collective, prompting him to promote a new pronoun - “mwe” - which only seems awkward at the outset. 

After a half-millennium devoted to analytical science, a synthesis of what we’ve learned is clearly overdue. The profoundly atomized focus on isolated aspects of life, the universe and everything has brought great understanding and yielded great fortunes, but lives and cultures lie shattered in its wide wake. To behave as if mwe, the “embodied and relational” part of the matrix, is “only and always” a singular noun increasingly unmoors the individual from a collective reality-process that behaves as an ecology much more than as an economy. That has never been more apparent than with our presently metastasizing economic system. 

This is not to say that “the flow of energy and information” would not include associations of value and power in a functional system. Rather, the value and potency belongs to the whole system (mwus?), even as these qualities may favor one element over another at any given point in time. The fruit of the tree may benefit the bird that eats it in one moment, but the bird benefits the tree in the next when she plants the tree’s seed elsewhere with a quick squirt. 

“The world hangs by a thread, and that thread is the psyche of man" (C.G. Jung, 1957). Evolution would have it no other way. Increasing biophysical complexity constantly changes the context in which the whole is evolving. The finches and their beaks, which so attracted Darwin’s attention,n had modified both behaviour and body in response to changes in habitat – no doubt to the relief of the cacti whose seed they would continue to disseminate! 

The unmoored self is a recent phenomenon arising from a “high-risk” evolutionary experiment exploring the value of self-reflective consciousness. Just as planetary evolution has generated novel bio-genetic organisations to manage complexity, the same is true within the animal kingdom - most notably with mwus primates. As the socio-cultural “habitat” changed, the human species was able to rise to prominence with a big assist from an increasingly benign, stable climate. 

It would seem that the longest and most sustainable run of human culture has held ‘place’ as paramount. Not only in terms of location, but also as to the individual’s place within both the tribe and the over-arching scheme of things. As our sense of self and sense of place are increasingly distinct, but still not separate, aspects of identity, the importance of place comes with real consequences, and thus relational responsibility, for the well-being of the environment. Place-based, indigenous cultures still tend to function as “an embodied and relational emergent process that regulates the flow of energy and information" within the physical and metaphysical context of what the Lakota characterize as “all my relations” (plant, animal, mineral, etc.). 

Jeremy Lent has carefully referenced how the domestication, management and breeding of horses and cattle on the Eurasian steppes, plus the settled Holocene climate, enabled larger and more settled communities to develop more complex agriculture, with different organisations of society, leadership and power resulting. No longer limited to working with the world’s “flow of meaning and information”, a psycho-spiritual shift saw the emergence of a more unequal social hierarchy, one that was dependent on the products of that flow, rather than the flow itself. 

The immediate and the personal took precedence over the long-term well-being of the collective, to the detriment of “all [our] relations”. This shift was rationalized and propped up by myths and remote deities that elevated the human condition above that of the living world - at least for the dominant culture. The stage was then set for an explosive, extractive, and entitled wave of dominance and submission that dramatically disrupted the “embodied and relational emergent process that regulates the flow of energy and information" at every level. Not only did some of our ancestors reflect upon their own meaning-making processes, they began to imagine the thinking of others in ways that divided the world into “us” and “them”. And, of course, “they” could be manipulated and managed (e.g., with religion and consumer culture) because they were not “us”. And there certainly was no room for mwe, increasingly conflating anything that was not “us” with socialism, with communism, environmentalism, terrorism… 

Mind & Psyche 

As we sit on the edge of so many aspects of systems collapse, it is clear that the overall trajectory of this approach has been, at best, mixed. Complexity has unquestionably been increased, some amazing insights and technologies have been produced. Smart phones and artificial hips, anyone? But the increasingly dominant paradigm, focussed as it is on maintaining a growth economy rather than sustaining a dynamic ecology, requires the world processes to be continually fixed and re-ordered according to a pre-set worldview in which a perceived stable and structured centre is maintained.  Meanwhile, from the edges, the cracks begin to open up – inequity, mental health, species loss... 

As our thinking and self-centered views became increasingly unmoored from the ever-changing context, maintaining stability and structure has required ever-greater control, power and energy - to the point of exhaustion! More and more aspects of the world became “othered”, and those elements which can not be controlled must be ignored, marginalized, or cancelled out somehow. 

Immense effort has been devoted to developing human understanding and control of the “flow of energy and information” in subservience to the dominant worldview. Ironically, this quest for specific detail has led back to the cyclical mysteries that inspired our ancestors and still inform indigenous, and some non-western, cultures to this day. After extensive, respectful study amongst tribal people, and subsequent reflection on the processes of Modernity, anthropologist Gregory Bateson adopted a “systems thinking” approach in which he concluded that “the major problems of the world arise from the difference between how nature works and how people think.” 

In that same timeframe, visionary biologists Umberto Maturana and Francisco Varela were exploring crucial aspects of “how nature works” and – surprise, surprise - “it” turns out to be intelligent. They discovered that even the simplest cell exhibits agency in relationship with its environment. They called this agentic relationality autopoesis, meaning ‘self-production’. Their ground-breaking research suggested not only that the organism is in some way aware of itself within its environment, but also exhibits proto-memory capacity. As scientists John Briggs and F David Peat observed: 

 “Autopoietic structures have definite boundaries, such as a semipermeable membrane, but the boundaries are open and connect the system with almost unimaginable complexity to the world around it.” 

To while away long hours at sea, ancient mariners would squeeze a carved ship into a tight bottle. Unmoored from the fullness of Mind, Modernity has similarly endeavoured to squeeze a limited, unmoored and distorted facsimile of the individual into the human Psyche. We are now being challenged to reassess the unavoidable necessity of relationship. 

The organism exists both within and because of its environment. And the environment is dynamic, composed of organisms responding and changing. Imagine Grand Central Station at rush hour: individuals are responding to the crowd and the crowd moves in response to its many interrelated parts. And it’s not just physical, is it? Each person’s sense or feeling of being in the crowd, and the mood of the crowd as a whole, interpenetrate in ways that align the individual and collective purpose of the moment – getting to work safely. The crowd becomes a human murmuration. 

The point here is noticing that this interpenetration is an exchange of energy, shaped by and shaping meaning-making processes that are superpositional: both individual and collective, particle and wave. We encounter this primarily as a visceral, embodied experience that does not need to be consciously acknowledged. As Jung and quantum physicist Pauli concluded in their collaboration, we exist as psychophysical phenomena, and sometimes experience synchronicity as a result. 

Reviewing research from 50 years ago, psychologists Martin Seligman and Richard Eames discovered neurological processes that respond by withdrawing energy from situations where some life-serving choices are limited. The organism does not engage, conserving its energy for when an opportunity may arise. The original meaning attributed to this evidence, before neuroscience became available, was the theory of “learned helplessness” often applied to women or children in abusive situations. While that might be how it looked from the worldview of a particular time and place, that is not what the body was doing. Our embodiment is part of a far greater – and older - process. 

Enter the science of homeostasis. 

Homeostasis is the process by which an organism, ecosystem and planet systematically maintains its state of well-being. It is a dynamic process, not a fixed state, due to the relational nature of being itself. At the planetary level homeostasis involves water, minerals, air, and the community of life in all its resplendent variety. We inhabit a world of interpenetrating processes that crack rocks open, are absorbed through leaves and roots, and empower organisms to love, trap, eat, howl, kill and forgive. 

The shocking truth, from a scientific materialist, individualized perspective at least, is that we are enmeshed within and participating inside a living planet that thinks, feels, remembers, learns and evolves in ways our puny brains can barely imagine! The notion seems metaphoric or anthropomorphic to the literal, rational, western way of thinking about ourselves as apart from nature and, quite literally, on top of a world of things. We even like to think of ourselves as top predators, at least until we learn that over half of the humans who have ever walked this planet have been killed by mosquitoes!  

When we take time to engage more fully with Mind, even at the level of our purely human experience, attending more directly to how we experience “the flow of energy and information”, we find ourselves reconnecting to something older. More primal. We find ourselves participating within a vast, multilevel membrane of sensation, meaning, and memory I call: the Psychosphere. 

The Psychosphere is a necessary new term, inspired by (and completing) the way geoscience talks about the living planet’s ‘organs’; that is, in terms of spheres (bio- litho- atmo- etc.), but without ever granting it animacy or agency. Psychosphere speaks more directly to how the inner processes of all living things contribute to a larger, interacting, sphere of intelligence that is itself intrinsic to and surging within all participatory forms of life. (Contrast this with de Chardin’s “noosphere”, a far more anthropocentric and siloed concept of collective consciousness). 

Psyche & Psychosphere 

Right now, a denatured, anthropocentric Psyche, just a handful of centuries old, is imposing itself on the whole - the 14 billion year, holistic Psychosphere. Good luck with that! In the process, it is distorting the planetary homeostasis on which we and all life depend.  The dynamics of this unacknowledged mode of dominance are not unlike those involved in riding a bicycle: the rider is never balanced, always balancing – moving between states of disequilibrium while rhythmically passing through equilibrium itself. If this to-and-fro swings too wildly from one extreme to the other, the rider is thrown off. Depending how they land, they may or may not be able to get back up on the bike. 

It is similar to homeostasis because the rider is largely unaware of the complex processes playing out in the body. The body itself is “on purpose” – that is, riding a bicycle; momentum plus micro-muscular activity is usually sufficient to keep the flow going. Our bodies are evolved to read changes in the environment, even down to the planet’s magnetic field. Each of our approximately 30 trillion cells is attuned to notice and respond to change, whether we’re cognitively in tune with them or not. And if we consistently ignore the signals our body is sending us, the body will even the score, often in ways we do not welcome. 

Pan-psychologist Zhiwa Woodbury has described the interplay between human and planetary stressors. Modernity’s enculturated dislocation hangs in a nowhere between Psyche and Psychosphere, alive with dissonance and uncertainty. The received understandings of our times, embedded in notions of separation, disconnection, entitlement and dominance, crash against urgent planetary feedback intended to maintain homeostasis. The human determination for business as usual meets with increasing resistance – not for personal or political reasons, but simply because these are the feedback loops that have driven evolution processes for 14 billion years. 

This is an evolutionary moment of potential awakening. We can choose to be on the bus or under it. And the bus is remarkable. Social scientist Karen O’Brien has observed that life has evolved by way of feeling, not thinking - an idea echoed by such luminaries as biologist-philosopher Andreas Weber, Harvard Divinity School associate Katherine Peil-Kauffman, and neuroscientist Antonio Damasio. Life navigates by way of emotional sentience, an embodied, felt sense, or ‘qualia of being’. 

O’Brien contends that this qualitative sensing finds expression by humans in the language of shared values, including some “universal values” that underpin our evolutionary journey. We “swim” in the rich soup of belonging, whether we recognise it or not. Woodbury maintains that, because we are situated within Gaia’s biome, we feel climate feedback as embodied experience through our direct participation in the basic common sentience of all life, expressed through our own biome, or intuited on a walk in the woods. As the performance artist Laurie Anderson slyly intones: 

“All of nature talks to me. If I could just figure out what it was trying to tell me.” 

This conversation with nature can be glimpsed by any of us, though we only “figure it out” in communion. Lacking both frame and language to even acknowledge that such communion with the whole is even possible, let alone happening, we experience a sense of blocked flow, unable to complete Life’s gesture that we’ve been designed to feel. 

An “incompleted gesture” happens to be Peter Levine’s definition of trauma. A feeling of being stranded, isolated, any sense of our own agency blocked at the source from which we are called to drink - we see this kind of trauma reflected everywhere around and within us now. Woodbury refers to this gross accumulation of unresolved climate trauma as “the traumasphere,” which can be thought of as the Psychosphere’s response to an embattled Psyche’s continued bruisings. 

Trauma thrives on our lack of cognition in relationship with it. 

The more we can get in touch with this discordant experience, by contrast, feeling it as both wayfinder and reminder, the more we get in touch with those universal values that want to unite us within the process of homeostasis. And the more we come into alignment with a purpose greater than our particular lives - Life itself, say - the more we find that thriving is still possible. Even if the system itself is in a state of collapse. It’s not a binary proposition. Both thriving and collapse can be possible at the same time. 

These universal values can be seen at play behind even the most bizarre, self-centred and dissonant aspects of our world. Selfish interests, too, operate from this same underlying psychophysical fabric, this one flesh. Self-reflection is a high-risk evolutionary experiment for managing complexity. It succeeds or fails by merit of whether the reflection is directed back on the self and its needs, or is instead oriented towards the needs of the whole upon which the self depends. Nature’s mechanisms don’t mind either way: complexity can always fall back and then recover. 

Gaia is another story, operating at her own scale. 

Even though it emerged from good science, “Gaia” still triggers discomfort among those who see themselves as rationalists, given that it seems to add degrees of personhood, gender and/or deity status to an overarching process of life that is beyond gender, defies personhood, and for which deification is reductive. Still, Gaia’s presence can be sensed through any of these hard-wired relational lenses. 

In this regard, Gaian awareness is like Galileo’s telescope – a means to see a ‘far-beyond’ world that cannot be reduced or appropriated. (This alone is sufficient to terrify a property-obsessed, religiously-oriented establishment that seeks to either own or deny the telescope.) Nonetheless, just as Galileo’s denouncers recognised a deeper ‘knowing’ unfolding, and a new paradigm emerging, so our Gaian sensibilities (with supporting science) enable each one of us to recognise our ‘selves’ already at one within a network of varied and nested values and relationships. 

And that emerging paradigm is as radically new as Copernicus’ solar system was back when people placed Earth at the center of the universe, ironically with “Psychosphere” (Earth!) standing in place of the sun this time. Is this Gaia’s comeback story? 

While facile, illogical argument is used to deny the importance of this re-cognizing in all sectors of society, the continued abuse of the larger living organism we are part of creates increasing cognitive dissonance within our collective Psyche (e.g., border security obsession, societal breakdown) as well as increasing levels of illness in our collective soma (e.g., immunodeficiencies, pandemics, micro- and nano-plastics, etc). Where our enculturated “Psyche-lite” runs up against our embodied feedback from the whole blooming Psychosphere, we are experiencing a kind of existential dissonance. This multilevel dissonance is driving the meta-crisis. It is vital feedback, and can no longer be ignored. 

“Competition and cooperation, partnership and predation, productivity and destruction” are valued within the larger system. As Weber notes: “All these relations, however, follow one higher law: over the long run, only behavior that allows for productivity of the whole ecosystem and that does not interrupt its self-production is amplified. The individual can realize itself only if the whole can realize itself. Ecological freedom obeys this form of necessity. The deeper the connections in the system become, the more creative niches it will afford for its individual members”. 

James Lovelock, who first used the name of the Greek Goddess Gaia to describe the interdependent web of life-giving process on which life itself depends, gave into a fairly gloomy view towards the end of his centenarian life: “before this century is over billions of us will die and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the Arctic where the climate remains tolerable.” Despair, too, is a built-in feature of the meta-crisis. 

We are continuously receiving feedback for recovering some semblance of balance and diversity of life at scale, regardless of our prognostications, especially given the rise of Indigenous wisdom wedded with Western science in new, regenerative ways that are difficult to model. This is why coming back into authentic relationship with Psychosphere has so much potential to unleash the energy currently being blocked - traumatised - by our dissociation and misunderstanding of homeostatic feedback. The symbiotic potential of “two-eyed seeing” (that is, the blend of Traditional Ecological Knowledge from Indigenous cultures with modern science, perhaps even including artificial intelligence) depends, in part, on the developed world coming to terms with Psychosphere. 

At the individual level, collective cognitive dissonance feels like anxiety, depression, denial, disavowal, powerlessness, overwhelm, and even violent acting out. At the level of Gaia, it feels like burning forests, flooded coastlines, oceans of plastic, biodiversity collapse, and climate chaos. We suffer to the extent that we still see these phenomena as operating in different spheres. Having divorced ourselves from the planetary whole, and become good at ignoring/suppressing Psychospheric feedback, any effort to find an ethical centre around which to strike a balance gets mired down in human-centred (egoic) meaning-making, performative politics, proxy climate-wars, zero-sum economic engineering, dystopian fantasy, and many other forms of cognitive dysfunction. 

The Gaian process is unpredictable and impossible to pin down like some butterfly in a Victorian museum. But recentering Psyche within Psychosphere unleashes energies in any living system, individual or collective. Bringing the light of awareness to psychosphere’s feedback loops releases pent-up “trauma” and reveals the mutlivalent conversation “flow” in which we all already play an integral part. By coming into proper relationship with Gaian homeostasis ourselves, we begin to naturally align our needs with the crying needs of our immediate ecosystems and bioregions. We experience healing, relief and “active hope”, aligning Psyche with Psychosphere in service to the Biosphere that supports it. In sharing and exploring our felt-sense of place, and extending to one another - and the greater whole - the respect of our innate curiosity, we empower our growing inquisitiveness with a strength and flexibility that define humility. 

Notice how many values are mentioned or implied in that last paragraph. O’Brien’s ‘universal’ values. Pioneer transpersonalist Roberto Assagioli called them “transpersonal qualities”. By any naming, these dynamics are as intrinsic to life as consciousness itself is proving to be. Consciously engaging and amplifying these experiences in ourselves reinforces our trust in an ongoing 14 billion-year process. And a quantum scientist would observe that in directing our awareness in such a manner, we not only align with this great flow, we also bring the “observer effect” to the Self-realisation of the whole. 

We begin, in other words, to identify as Gaia. This evolutionary pause constitutes a collective developmental moment, a potential leveling up, or quantum leap. Developmental psychologist Robert Kegan describes such moments as being when the subject of one level becomes the object of the next. The driving force of one level becomes the object of reflection at the next. This implies a dis-identification: I am more than that. Perhaps mwe are Gaia awakening to a new kind of global awareness. 

The Great Interregnum

We find ourselves living in liminal times. The old world is cracking, the new one, not yet born. This is a perilous place—but also a creative one. The chrysalis may not be comfortable, but it’s necessary. Much like our own central nervous system, the Psychosphere is abuzz with a constant circulation of signals. Not all of it is easy to receive. But all of it is ‘real’ (natural) and accessible. 

We are asked to feel again. Not to collapse into emotion, but to attune to it. Not to solve everything, but to participate in the mending of life’s web. Those who have ‘done their work’ of processing built-up traumas and grief over losses in our own lives, and the sad state of global affairs generally, are already being activated as cells of a Gaian auto-immune defense system. Those with the most unresolved trauma and grief in their systems, by contrast, are acting out like cancer cells, which is itself another piece of feedback. It is the trauma that unites us, and the cure can be found close to the wound. 

Let us choose not be experts in this highly polarized climate. Let us be kin. Instead of giving in to despair, let’s resolve to work on ‘all our relations’. Regardless of long-term outcomes, we’ll benefit greatly in the interregnum, as cosmologist Richard Tarnas labels these in-between times. 

Let us bring our con-science together to feel with the Earth, breathe with the trees, think with the waters, remember with the winds, and humbly accept guidance from those living close to nature who never lost these abilities. They are our elders when it comes to relating with whole systems of life’s cycles, and when science aligns with such wisdom in service to all Life and to the Seventh Generation, then Psyche can be re-integrated with Psychosphere, Mind with Matter, Felt-sense with Thinking, and Consciousness with Will. 

This is not metaphor. 

This is reality. This is the work - how mwe find our way home. 

Together.