Full-Spectrum Bio-Harmonic Intelligence

Full Spectrum Bio-Harmonic Intelligence

There are profound differences between living organisms and machines. We are designed for full spectrum bio-harmonic intelligence, where the entirety of our capacities reflect emergent qualities growing synergistically in the full spectrum of our Aliveness. The quality of emergence points to our capacity to re-organize and to develop capacities that are much more than a simple, mechanical, or additive outgrowth of previous phases.

We are not machines, although we can be made to act like them through systematic frustration of our emergent design. When the mechanistic view of the world overtook science in the enlightenment era, and with the subsequent industrial revolution,  much effort was spent on making men behave like machines.  Modern imperial culture is deeply rooted in this mechanistic and extractive view of reality with an almost-complete ignorance of the fundamental, emergent qualities that make living systems so profoundly different from mechanical systems.

What are these emergent qualities?

Consider a seed, a sprout, a sapling, a tree, a flower, fruit; all emergent expressions of each other, profoundly related yet profoundly different. If you take a mature tree, you will not be able to find the little seed it grew out of inside of it. Why? As life is emergent; it grows out of its previous phases. The word emergent   points to this directly as something which “rises up out of its surroundings.” As a seed is surrounded by its shell, the sprout emerges out of it.

If you harm, alter, irradiate or contaminate that seed, or the soil that it grows in, the tree that grows out of it will also be altered due to these same emergent qualities of life.

The butterfly, for example, is an emergent expression of a caterpillar, and yet the butterfly is profoundly NOT a caterpillar, but rather an emergent expression of a caterpillar of a wholly different quality of organization. There is no “caterpillar” inside a butterfly. For a caterpillar to become a butterfly it has to actually become totally UNDONE, as a caterpillar, turning into an undifferentiated cellular “goo,” before that cellular protoplasm then organizes itself anew as a butterfly. In that undifferentiated protoplasm you will find neither the caterpillar nor the butterfly, and yet the caterpillar is dissolved in that undifferentiated state and the butterfly emerges from it.

Take a moment to consider this deeply. This very same process of creative dissolution and disaggregative creativity is what is happening to ALL phases and expressions of ALL of what we call Life. We are ALL undergoing this process.

Curiously, our language, born of repeated imperial conquests, was perfected to inventory, label and define what and who was conquered, as static possessions.

Many ancient and indigenous languages, rather than defining, are designed to invoke and call out attention to some aspect of Reality. Indigenous wisdom (literally “condition of the ways/ trails/ tracks) are inherent to the very language used, which calls our attention to track out the ways, the qualities, the conditions of the interrelated qualities or aspects of a Living Unfolding that indigenous words point to. Thus we develop the capacity to notice dynamic,verb-based qualities of Living Emergence, with our attention. For as “deep” as this may appear, written in words on a webpage and read by a de-indigenized, displaced person, consider that this is just common sense for anyone whose livelihood, spirituality, and sense of relatedness is profoundly connected to a Living Reality where everything is in constant change and unfolding. 

With this in mind, we can begin to grasp the profound difference between the definitional speech of empire and the attentional speech of People who still grasp that we are only free in the measure of our awareness and response-ability. “Freedom,” in indigenous culture, and in the Germanic roots of the word; frei: “to court, to woo, to love, to free” + dom: “condition of, state of,” has a profoundly different sense from the “do anything you want” notion of modern, delocalized, displaced, anonymous and commodified culture. “Freedom” is profoundly synonymous with relatedness and belonging to a whole community of Living Shapes that are nourishing and becoming each other in a very real, and mysterious, process of Shaping that is Aliveness. Look beyond the words and out onto what lives around you to get what I’m pointing at.

Tiokasin Ghosthorse, whose talk I invited you to listen to in Seeding, speaks of being able to speak all day long, in Lakota, without ever using a noun. The Natural Languages, born of the Natural Intelligence of Natural Peoples have this quality of “sticking to” and “pointing to” dynamic processes, and calling our attention to this dynamism, rather than statically labeling “things.”

In English, we often reflexively think that if we can label something, that we “know” what it is. That’s how deep our attention goes, generally; from label to label.

The emergent qualities of living systems reveal an order of intelligence far more dynamic and inherent to life than the definitional rote programming and labeling most moderns imagine “intelligence” to be, with an almost-complete lack of sustained attention to the dynamics of what we are observing. Few modern people have any notion of how stupid the reflexive comments of “Oh! That’s a so-and-so!” that moderns are continually making sound to anyone whose culture is rooted in sustained attention.

There is a profound wisdom in Living Systems that has been systematically ignored, hijacked and diminished by our modern way of approaching life mechanistically and definitionally.

Living Systems have a vastly different growth process than a machine, say a car, for example. If you start building the engine, and then proceed to build the rest of the car, the engine is still at the center of your car, intact and unchanged, until you start running it. The engine parts themselves don’t grow or transform as you add other parts to the car.

Another quality that makes organisms different from machines is that we are fluid-based organisms. Our emergent qualities are actually properties of the mineralized waters of Earth that emerged in Aliveness. My teacher, Rockman, used to say that we are “soggy rocks” having an adventure.

Being fluid-based means that any quality of Aliveness, or degradation thereof, visible at one level of a Living System, will be visible all the way down to the cellular, intracellular and fluid levels, as well as all the way up to higher levels of organization.

Say you are having what we typically call “a relationship problem,” for example, or a disequilibrium, an imbalance. That imbalance will also have a metabolic component AND may even originate and be “solvable” at the metabolic level.

It will also be visible in other dimensions of your Life Expression, including the greater relational systems that your “relationship” is playing itself out in. Living Systems are coherent and emerge together in totality.

This, too, is notably different from mechanical systems. Going back to the car, as an example: if your brake pads wear out, this does not necessarily imply that your stereo is also experiencing the same kind of problem.

Humans, and other life forms, are emergent beings. What we experience at every phase and at every level of our development has profound consequences in the expression of all phases and levels of development. This is true not only in the time sequence of our development, but also in the levels of our development, from the micro to the macro, from the microscopic realities that compose our cellular and intracellular realities to the social, and even global, realities we compose together.

If our cellular health is frustrated, so will our psychology, our relationships, our economy and our environment be. This is how emergent realities play out. In the ancient European tradition we have the saying, “As above, so below.” This saying points to the fractal nature of living systems, where qualities and patterns of organization are reflected through many levels.

We are seeing that play out in really deep ways at all levels of modern life today, yet this understanding of the emergent qualities of life does not generally inform how we orient ourselves in the midst of our challenges.

When I started teaching in 2009 I was excited to share my lifetime of exploration of deep relational and perceptual dynamics with different peoples worldwide. As I’ve mentioned before, in very short order I discovered how challenged people were to lead their own learning, instead of always wanting to be led by the nose.

No one is to blame in this. We adapt to our experiences. We DON’T adapt to the experiences we DIDN’T have.  If we adapted to the modern, top-down, authoritarian human management system masquerading as “government” and “education” today, we become trained human parrots. Government comes from the Latin gubernare: “to direct, steer” + mente: “mind.” The purpose of government is to steer the minds of the governed. 

With the Prussian-style instructional system, erroneously called schools (sic.), it was discovered that natural intelligence could be systematically frustrated and crippled, in order to generate an industrial, predictable, useful human, a “human resource” or “proletarian,” who requires external authority and almost incapable of functioning competently and elegantly outside of a chain of command. Such developmentally crippled people, however, make fantastic, “machined” parts for industrial, cultural, economic and other corporately-incentivized, govern-mental processes

In my own case, it took the better part of studying (from the Latin studium: “application, care”) for twenty years in a traditional wisdom system to even begin to grasp what it was exactly that I had been taught, and was very challenged to do: i.e. Seeing, Hearing and Moving. I slowly began to See, Hear and Move as a Natural, Living Being instead of a persistent and insistent filterer-of-all-things through the idea-lies-ed schema of the world I had.

On top of the Prussian instructional model, add the full-on, cellular assault that fully-weaponized, corporate agriculture sets off in our bodies. Stir in some persistent financial turmoil through manipulated cycles of debt-based monetary systems plundering the masses’ wealth every ten to fifteen years and, yes, many people are very, very challenged just to make it through another day. Booze, drugs, prescription pills and new ways to “not be present,” whether zoning out in front of the television or the computer, help numb what we’re actually experiencing. 50% of North American adults are experiencing some form of chronic illness.

When I set out to share what I was learning, I hoped to show people how to start liberating their lives cellularly, relationally, culturally, and economically. I soon discovered that most people have a very wooden way of engaging with life’s possibilities, not only due to their programming, but to the stress that that programming generates in their lives. And, yet, that “stress,” no matter how distressing to them, is also familiar, and normal, to them.

Few people See, Hear or Move in reality. Most people simply don’t live on this planet; not consciously, not sense-ably. They live in a simulated reality. They could follow a program, modify a program, and juggle ten different balls to keep their lives from crashing, or to recover from crashing, and on and on, but their direct engagement with the logic of our Living Planet is almost wholly absent from their way of “thinking,” without really thinking. I was amazed – yet not so amazed – that this is what “life” has become for people whose emergently, intelligent qualities have been waylaid as many of ours have.

In my own process, one of the greatest and most powerful challenges was simply learning how to learn.

Many people over 35 years old are already suffering from growing health problems. Those health problems didn’t start when those people entered their late thirties or forties and got a medical diagnosis. It takes 15 to 25 years of continually frustrating our cellular health before a “condition” gets diagnosed by the medical system.

Our bodies have tremendous, on-going, emergent capacities for self-healing. Illness only manifests after exhausting this natural, emergent, self-healing quality of our Aliveness for decades, typically. Some of you may say, “Yes, but hold on! There are children who are born sick or who develop severe sicknesses at a very young age.” Surely and, of course, we see “children” as nouns which “become children” at birth, while largely ignoring our qualities as emergent expressions of a biological-ancestral continuity.

Children emerge out of their mothers’ bodies and health processes, many of which have been chronically stressed, depleted, inflamed, and deprived for decades.

Each one of us, as expressions of emergent Aliveness, is actually billions of years old. We encode the entirety of our ancestrally emergent Life Experience. I am not just “me.” Our ancestors are not just behind us. They are within us, much as the seed is in the tree yet is no longer a “seed,” it is a seeding. All Life, in all its phases, is emergent.

Although our definitional language has us perceive ourselves as “individual persons” (Latin persona: “mask”), separate from our parents, our Life-Logical reality is that we are also emergent expressions of the Living Qualities encoded in our ancestry, all the way to our mothers, out of whose Living Waters, and Qualities of those Living Waters, we unfold, are woven and emerge. Saying that “we are ancestry” is not pointing to our connection to “the past,” but to these emergent qualities of Aliveness that are very much present, right now, in us.

We, individually, are momentary unfoldings of an emergent, living adventure that is the seeding of our entire ancestry, both backwards and forwards. That is the power, consequence and response-ability we each carry, from our culture, to our “selves,” all the way down to our cells. The QUALITIES of our patterning are present and reflected at every level. Take a moment to consider this in your own unfolding.

The indicators of cellular health, which can be tested, are almost completely ignored by corporate, pharmacratic medicine, in favor of testing“health” at the organ and body-wide level. Manifestations of illness in organ systems only catches the disturbances much further down the emergent pathway of health and well-being.

Unhealthy, stressed-out bodies will not readily invest in creating the new neural connections necessary for what we call “learning” to happen. That doesn’t mean an unhealthy person can’t learn; they may be able to, and it will require much greater amounts of effort with less elegant, streamlined, lasting and effortless results, as compared to someone who is healthy.

That’s what I saw as I began working with people around the world.

The same goes with relationships. When couples, for example, experience relationship difficulties they typically go to a counselor or therapist for talk therapy. Few therapists imagine how many emergent levels of biology are implicated in relationship difficulties. Few of us imagine how much more rapidly, effectively and joyfully we could improve any relationship if we begin supporting ourselves at ALL emergent levels of our biology, starting with our foundational, cellular health, our neurological development, as well as integrating the dynamics at play at the “relationship” level of our experience. Why?

Transforming “relationship” dynamics actually implies causing new growth to occur at the cellular, neurological and metabolic levels. When we optimize the conditions for actual, living growth to occur inside of us, we also optimize the conditions for transformation to occur at the “relational” level which emergently reflects the current qualities of our vital, bio-logical organization.

Many people are experiencing what the crude, modern, mystical tradition of definitional “medicine” labels as “depression.” The primary task of so-called medicine is to label, and then follow an algorithmic decision tree to treat what are called “diagnoses.” This approach almost-completely ignores the interconnected, emergent qualities and levels implicated in any manifestation of imbalance at any particular level. “Depression” is precisely what the word implies: “being pushed down,” and is manifested biochemically, developmentally, neurologically and relationally. Few of us imagine that what we call “normalcy” in “modern” culture comes hand-in-hand with a drastically altered neurological development and lower levels of neurotransmitters. Dr. Gabor Maté goes into depth on these topics in his talks referred to in previous posts.

If, instead of simply medicating depression – and essentially allowing people to “feel better” while NOT changing anything fundamental at the relational, and deep developmental structures that generate depression (i.e. VERY, VERY much of “modern” culture), we embrace and encourage our development and thriving synergistically, at ALL levels of our cellular, developmental, relational, economic and social levels of organization, we discover that as we lead lead ourselves to thrive at foundational levels, we soon discover ourselves thriving at more and more levels of our experience, including interpersonal, social, economic and ecosystemic levels.

But without enlivening and revitalizing foundational levels of organization, emergent levels will largely reflect the disturbances at those foundational levels.

Imagine cultivating your individual, synergistic thriving, and connecting with other individuals committed to a similar journey, and emerging, in relationship to others, at levels of intelligent self-organization that reflect the brilliance of Natural, Emergent Intelligence.

Once we start supporting ourselves at as many emergent levels of our human BEING, the results we get are not additive. It is not a 1+1+1=3 result. The growth of our capacities becomes synergistic, where 1+1+1=7, for example.

Likewise, when we try to obtain a result in one aspect of our lives, yet are suffering from the underlying, and supportive levels, being challenged or frustrated, we experience results where 1+1+1=1/2. As I’ve traveled and taught around the world I have interacted with many people struggling and getting these kinds of results.

Once we start supporting ourselves synergistically and stacking the favors we do for our own Aliveness, we begin to emerge into new experiences, capacities and dimensions of Vitality, Intelligence, Connection and Capacity that we had never imagined. We allow our lives to emerge in dimensions of Brilliance, Ease and Well-being that are unimaginable to most people today. I call this Full-Spectrum Bio-Harmonic Intelligence. It’s far simpler and far more powerful than most of us imagine. It does require precise support, not just “doing what we think is best,” and a road map based on the Actual Design of our Aliveness.

A very important place to start is at the foundation which allows all of our emergent experiences to flourish: supporting our cellular health.

From there we Awaken Our Natural Genius, learning how we’re actually designed to learn creatively, rapidly, easily and joyfully and liberating ourselves from the brutalizing dynamics of programmed instruction.

As we gain healthy and develop our capacity for creative, playful, powerful, self-led learning, then we begin to look at the deeper dynamics operating in our relationships, healing the consequences of adversarial parenting and adversarial relationship dynamics, and integrating our forbidden, ignored, shamed and guilted core experiences, while reawakening our literal sense-abilities.

As our relationship to our world transforms, we begin to literally SEE it for the first time, not as an idea, but as a reality. Then we begin to see that many of our economic and lifestyle challenges were not so much the result of “the nature of the world,” but of our difficulties in SEEING it, literally and in its reality, and LEARNING how to engage creatively and richly with it, instead of trying to navigate the corporate-governmental illusory labyrinth specifically designed to frustrate, and harvest, our efforts to the benefit of the illusion makers.

We ReAwaken Our Living Economies, discovering that the wealth that will make the most difference in our lives and our bank accounts, is the wealth we dare to activate and BECOME, and the wealth that we dare to connect to and recognize in the Aliveness which surrounds and inhabits us.

Imagine what can happen at relational, interpersonal, co-creative, social, economical and ecological levels of expression of Aliveness when individuals who are learning to thrive synergistically begin supporting each other at this level of synergistic engagement and commitment to Full-Spectrum, Bio-Harmonic Intelligence! Take a moment and consider how YOU can begin to thrive synergistically, starting at the cellular level.

Begin to appreciate how all levels of your experience reflect other levels of your experience. What can you do TODAY to support yourself at another level?

Gather Seeds, of Wisdom, which is Way-Finding.

Find Your Way to Thrive Synergistically!