By Jorn Bettin
Core ideas within Buddhist and Daoist spiritual traditions are deeply reflective of the commonalities found across many human-scale indigenous cultures. A compassionate framework of love as vulnerable, mutual knowing is entirely compatible with a panpsychic relational philosophy. Ultimately, everyone wants their experiences to be taken seriously. We are embodied spirits, compelled to make sense of this world, and we can only truly do so in good company.
Life
As Janine Benyus famously observed, life creates conditions conducive to life. This simple definition strongly hints at the fact that the dynamic process of life consists of intricate feedback loops.
Life is entirely relational, sacred, cyclical, fleeting, compostible, nested, regenerative, and it forever remains a mystery for all participants. At every level of scale, from molecular interactions to vast planetary systems, existence is bound together through continuous communication and mutual adjustment.
Spirits
Any high-dimensional space that provides a reasonable description of Gaia—meaning all of life, including the potential of homo ecologus—is best conceptualized entirely relationally, starting from the very bottom layers of physics upwards.
Life consists entirely of relationships, which function as feedback and learning loops. In aggregate, these loops constitute the building blocks of what, from our human-animal-scale perception, is experienced as consciousness. There is no shortage of thinkers who conceptualize life in this exact way, a reality that becomes glaringly obvious when studying Eastern spiritual and philosophical texts.
As humans constrained by our biological limitations, we will never be able to scientifically prove to any quantifiable level of certainty that consciousness emerges in this manner. However, science will also never be capable of disproving that consciousness emerges and exists in this way. This does not render science useless; it merely highlights the inherent limits of scientific inquiry, which are part of the broader limits of human comprehensibility. Similarly, in the abstract symbolic universe of mathematics, there are statements that can never be proven true or false, and we are not even equipped to identify all such statements.
At the spatial and temporal scales relevant to biological and ecological systems, the smallest feedback loops emerge between molecules, resulting in the mind-boggling complexity found in cell biology and the molecular genetic code. These feedback loops scale up to the largest interactions between bioregional terrestrial and marine ecosystems within Gaia. Popular anthropocentric conceptions of consciousness at best generalize to animals with brains, while unjustly excluding all other feedback loops in living systems that contribute to lived experiences of consciousness at much smaller and larger scales.
Powered-up, or positive, feedback loops are those in which, over time, more information—whether in the form of molecules or abstract codes—accumulates in certain living cells or beings than in others. Such powered-up feedbacks are always temporary phenomena relative to the lifespans of the living entities involved.
Human bodies grow to a certain scale and then remain intact for a lifetime. Throughout this duration, all molecular feedback loops within the body are maintained in a balanced, de-powered state, fueled by external energy from living food, resulting in metabolic waste that is ready to be reassembled into new life by the thermonuclear energy of the sun.
Similarly, social feedback loops between human animals grow into relationships, and healthy relationships remain intact for a lifetime. Throughout life, the feedback loops within a healthy relationship are maintained in a de-powered state, sustained by shared experiences and mutual understanding. This yields cultural output ready to be absorbed by the local ecology of care and integrated into new relationships.
A universe conceptualized entirely in terms of dynamic feedback and learning loops naturally leads to a panpsychic philosophy in which consciousness is omnipresent across all scales. This perspective is deeply compatible with Eastern spiritual traditions such as Buddhism and Daoism, inviting us to consider non-anthropocentric viewpoints, challenge the cultural biases inherent in modern industrialized notions of intelligence and success, and acknowledge our cognitive and emotional boundaries.
Buddhism, also known as Buddha Dharma, originated as an Indian philosophical tradition and śramaṇa movement based on the teachings of the historical Buddha in the 5th or 6th century BCE. Emphasizing a Middle Way between asceticism and sensual indulgence, its core focus is minimizing suffering, or dukkha. This focus corresponds directly to the active desire of hypersensitive neurodivergent people to minimize cognitive dissonance, while highlighting the societal fractures that arise when a culture insists on maintaining high levels of cognitive dissonance over extended periods.
Similarly, Daoism emphasizes harmony with the Dao, an enigmatic process of transformation underlying reality. Its virtues of effortless action, naturalness, simplicity, compassion, frugality, and humility align closely with the sensitivity profiles of many neurodivergent people. Furthermore, foundational texts like the Zhuangzi offer a timeless critique of anthropocentric empire-building through the subversive power of humor.
Together, these spiritual traditions echo the commonalities of human-scale indigenous cultures and egalitarian hunter-gatherer societies, offering operating principles rooted in mutual aid and ecological balance.
Love
As environmental activist Vandana Shiva notes, all ecological work is rooted in caring deeply for the Earth and recognizing that life is interconnected through countless layers of consciousness. The microorganism gives love to the plant, and the bee gives love to the flower within a beautifully interwoven web of existence.
The extent to which we are truly alive emerges from mutual trust, commitments, and shared understanding within our relationships. By virtue of their scale and design, relationships with abstract, super-human-scale anthropocentric institutions are entirely devoid of genuine shared understanding. The more a culture forces people to invest in such institutional structures, the less capacity remains for authentic relationships with living beings, and the less alive we become.
Recognizing these dynamics allows us to view the prospective collapse of rigid institutions through a sober lens: simply the expiry of a social license that was inherently invalid from the beginning. We have immense lessons to learn from indigenous societies that have not yet been crushed by the myth of homo economicus.
Relationships can be understood as continuous, multi-modal, de-powered dialogues within ecologies of care. Recent reframings of evolutionary biology around collaborative niche construction, moving away from hyper-competitive models, echo the pioneering mutual aid frameworks outlined by Pyotr Kropotkin over a century ago.
All humans possess unique sensitivity profiles shaped by neurological baselines and lived experiences within specific ecological contexts. This is particularly true for hypersensitive neurodivergent people, many of whom have endured traumatic marginalization in a hypernormative industrial society. Official diagnostic criteria for conditions like autism are frequently entangled with complex trauma responses, demonstrating that standard medical models focused on pathologizing decontextualized individuals are deeply limited.
Intersectional activists advocate for solidarity beyond rigid diagnostic categories, challenging the cookie-cutter frameworks of manuals like the DSM that gloss over the uniqueness of lived experience. Unbalanced feedback loops and unaddressed cognitive dissonance generate mental, spiritual, and physical distress, underscoring the vital need for supportive, human-scale environments.
Culture Co-Evolution
All major evolutionary milestones in the history of Gaia possess co-evolutionary characteristics, exemplified by the emergence of biological cells and multi-cellular organisms. Cell biology teaches us about the complementary roles of abstract symbol systems and semantics, pointing toward evolutionary processes that are inherently ecological rather than species-specific.
Semi-permeable cellular membranes provide a road-tested model for co-evolutionary interactions between multiple living organisms. When applied to human cultures, this framework points toward conscious collaborative niche construction rather than wasteful head-to-head competition. Egalitarian hunter-gatherer societies have practiced these collaborative priorities for hundreds of thousands of years, demonstrating the enduring value of omni-directional learning and open-space approaches.
As we navigate the limits of human scale, recognizing the wisdom embedded in Earth’s systems allows us to step away from centralized power structures and embrace radical egalitarianism as the true architecture of human adaptive intelligence. This architecture stands in stark contrast to the transactional nature of modern WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic) societies, which remain trapped within hyper-commercialized spectacles.
To transcend these limitations, we must critically examine the cultural assumptions underpinning modern academic disciplines, statistics, and engineering. The relentless economic drive to maximize quantifiable utility and extract profit from human lives has normalized the commodification of existence. Reviving trust in humanity requires moving away from atomized individualism and toward community-led ecologies of care.
Cooperatives and human-scale initiatives offer a viable path forward, providing palliative care for dying institutional structures while building life-affirming alternatives. By aligning our tools and communities with the relational wisdom of Gaia, we can foster a cultural metamorphosis that honors our shared humanity and our deep connection to the living planet.
