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 frame of love as vulnerable mutual knowing is entirely compatible with a panpsychic relational philosophy. Everyone wants their lived experience to be taken seriously. As embodied spirits, we are compelled to make sense of this world, and we can only truly do so in good company.
Life
Life creates conditions conducive to life, as Janine Benyus famously observed. This simple definition or observation strongly hints at the fact that the dynamic process of life consists of continuous feedback loops. Life is entirely relational, sacred, cyclical, fleeting, compostible, nested, regenerative, and it forever remains mysterious for all participants.
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. Widely popular anthropocentric conceptions of consciousness at best generalize to animals with brains, yet they completely exclude all other feedback loops in living systems that contribute to the lived experiences of consciousness at much smaller and much larger scales.
Powered-up, or positive, feedback loops are those in which, over time, more information piles up in some living cells or beings than in others. Such powered-up feedbacks are always temporary phenomena relative to the lifespans of the living cells or beings involved. The bodies of human animals grow to a certain scale and then stay intact for a lifetime. During this period, all molecular feedback loops within the human body are maintained in a de-powered, balanced state, fed by external energy from living food, resulting in waste that consists of building blocks 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 stay intact for a lifetime. Throughout life, the feedback loops within a healthy relationship are maintained in a de-powered state, fed by shared lived experiences and mutual understanding, resulting in cultural output that is 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 at all levels of scale. This perspective is fully compatible with Eastern spiritual traditions such as Buddhism and Daoism. It invites us to consider non-anthropocentric viewpoints, alerts us to the cultural biases inherent in modern industrialized notions of intelligence and success, and draws attention to both the lower and upper limits of human scale, including our cognitive and emotional limitations.
Spirits
Buddhism, also known as Buddha Dharma, is an Indian religion and philosophical tradition based on teachings attributed to the Buddha, a wandering teacher who lived in the sixth or fifth century BCE. As the world’s fourth-largest religion, it has over 520 million followers comprising seven percent of the global population. It arose in the eastern Gangetic plain as a Sramana movement and gradually spread throughout Asia before eventually reaching the West in the twentieth century.
According to tradition, the Buddha instructed his followers in a path of development leading to awakening and full liberation from dukkha, often translated as suffering or unease. He regarded this path as a Middle Way between extremes such as asceticism and sensual indulgence. Buddhism’s central focus on minimizing suffering and unease corresponds directly to the active desire of hypersensitive neurodivergent people to minimize cognitive dissonance, while also highlighting the social problems that arise when a culture insists on maintaining high levels of cognitive dissonance over extended periods.
Similarly, Taoism or Daoism is a diverse philosophical and religious tradition indigenous to China that emphasizes harmony with the Tao, an enigmatic process of transformation ultimately underlying reality. Taoist thought has informed various practices, including meditation, astrology, qigong, feng shui, and internal alchemy, with a common goal of self-cultivation and harmonious existence. Taoist ethics generally emphasize virtues such as effortless action, naturalness, simplicity, and the three treasures of compassion, frugality, and humility.
These Daoist virtues align closely with the sensitivity profiles of many neurodivergent people and constitute a timeless critique of all anthropocentric empire-building attempts, calling for disengaging from and subverting such structures. Taken together, the core ideas within Buddhist and Daoist traditions reflect the commonalities found across human-scale indigenous cultures and egalitarian hunter-gatherer societies.
Love
The extent to which we are alive emerges directly from the products of mutual trust, commitments, and shared understanding across all our relationships. By virtue of their scale and design, so-called relationships with abstract, super-human scale anthropocentric institutions are devoid of genuine shared understanding and experiences. The more a culture forces people to trust and invest in such institutions, the less capacity we have for genuine relationships with living beings, and the less alive we are.
Once we understand these dynamics and consciously reorient our lives toward human scale, the prospect of institutional collapse can be viewed from a sober perspective as the natural expiry of a social license that was inherently invalid all along. There is immense value in learning from indigenous societies that have not yet been fully crushed by the myth of homo economicus.
We can understand relationships as continuous, multi-modal, de-powered dialogues within ecologies of care, resulting in the deep entanglements of our inner worlds. The compassionate frame of love as vulnerable mutual knowing is entirely compatible with a panpsychic relational philosophy of the universe based on learning loops and the life-affirming language of ecologies of care.
Sensitivity Profiles
All humans possess unique sensitivity profiles shaped by neurological baseline dispositions and lived experiences within specific ecological contexts. This is especially true for hypersensitive neurodivergent people, many of whom have encountered traumatic experiences in a social world that systematically marginalizes, pathologizes, and sometimes criminalizes them.
Our individually unique nervous systems and sensitivities evolve over our lifetimes. Research indicates that a vast majority of neurodivergent adults frequently feel overwhelmed, misunderstood, disrespected, and unsafe. Overall well-being is determined by the alignment between our unique sensitivity profiles and the ecologies of care in which we are embedded.
The official diagnostic criteria for autism are deeply entangled with symptoms of complex trauma. Those who identify as autistic and neurodivergent clearly possess uncommon baseline sensitivity profiles from birth, upon which traumatic lived experiences in the modern hypernormative, industrialized world accumulate. Ultimately, it is impossible to cleanly separate autism from trauma responses.
Everyone wants their experience to be taken seriously. Simplistic diagnostic labels and therapies centered on decontextualized individuals will never be adequate. Our unique sensitivity profiles, which encompass our entire nervous systems rather than just our brains, shape our distinct ways of sensing and making sense of the world. Activists committed to genuine paradigmatic change advocate for intersectional solidarity beyond rigid labels, challenging the cookie-cutter categories of the DSM that gloss over the uniqueness of lived experience.
Powered-up relationships that maintain persistent, unbalanced feedback loops between humans generate cognitive dissonance, experienced as a dis-ease demanding resolution. Suppressing cognitive dissonance for extended periods results in mental, spiritual, and bodily ailments. Hypersensitive individuals often maintain a conscious awareness of this dissonance and feel compelled to take action to reduce it, whereas others may tolerate it over extended periods without connecting the source of their discomfort to their illnesses.
Culture Co-Evolution
All major evolutionary milestones in the history of Gaia exhibit co-evolutionary characteristics, including the emergence and co-evolution of biological cells and multi-celled organisms. Empirical knowledge of cell biology teaches us about the complementary roles of abstract symbol systems and semantics in co-evolutionary processes, demonstrating that evolution is fundamentally an ecological process rather than a purely species-specific biological one.
The semi-permeable membranes of biological cells provide a model for co-evolutionary processes between multiple living organisms that has been road-tested for billions of years. With the formal foundations of category theory, model theory, and denotational semantics, we can precisely articulate the interdependencies between symbol systems and semantics.
Co-evolutionary processes between cultural organisms are steeped in a paradigm of conscious collaborative niche construction rather than mindless, energy-intensive, and wasteful head-to-head competition. From a co-evolutionary frame, head-to-head competitions are recognized as short-term, energy-wasting distractions that should be clamped down upon as soon as they emerge within a family or cultural organism.
These cultural foundations are paramount in egalitarian hunter-gatherer societies, representing the product of hundreds of years of cultural co-evolution. They illustrate the priorities of values in healthy, life-affirming cultures and explain the enduring popularity of open-space approaches to omni-directional learning.
The Human Spirit Within Gaia
Humans evolved to make sense of the world at human scales. As part of an open-source human-scale heritage for future generations, transparent and appropriately designed digital technological guardrails around human capacities for language and culture could extend the reliability of human collaborative niche construction to larger scales without centralizing decision-making powers in the hands of authoritarian figures.
It is time to replace a ten-thousand-year-old misguided faith in power-hungry strongmen with a scientifically enlightened faith in more than four billion years of Gaia’s evolved wisdom. Radical egalitarianism forms the architecture of the adaptive intelligence of the human species, differing significantly from the nervous systems of other primates due to our unique capacities for language and culture.
It is absurd to attempt to define normal or adaptiveness at the level of individual humans. Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic societies have become detached from the evolutionary roots of our capacity for culture, becoming surrounded by spectacular simulations where atomized individuals must anchor themselves in the non-biological world while treating human cultural construction with deep suspicion.
In the cultural metamorphosis currently underway, Gaia remains the true and ultimate authority. As academia and scientific disciplines continue to examine our understanding of Gaia through the humanities, mathematical disciplines, and engineering statistics, we must critically evaluate the cultural assumptions underpinning modern scientific investigations. Mathematics stands out as the discipline uniquely focused on making all assumptions explicit.
Distinguishing human cultural outputs from empirical scientific attempts to understand Gaia brings internalized ableism into sharp focus. The questionable social license of modern technocratic and economic disciplines is frequently constructed through self-referential validation and normalized violence. The cultural challenge in modern engineering is an active disinterest in making underlying assumptions explicit, relying instead on convenient, industrialized frameworks to advance the arrow of progress without a scale-aware precautionary principle.
Reviving Trust in Humanity
Nothing in the atomized modern social world makes complete sense anymore because human-scale cultural organisms and their life-sustaining importance have been eroded from living memory. Faith in humanity and Gaia has been shaken to the core.
The competitive frame of homo economicus normalizes the compulsion to appear independent and strong. Fears of exposing vulnerabilities pave the path for ubiquitous mistrust and mental health crises, embodying the culture of internalized ableism. Research clearly shows that while neurodivergent individuals deeply wish to help others, many are profoundly afraid to ask for help themselves.
Deep indoctrination in the myth of homo economicus has also made modern humans distrustful of themselves. The vast majority of attempts to achieve success within the dominant cultural framework leave people feeling that something is fundamentally wrong with them, resulting in an epidemic of self-hatred, shame, and suppressed guilt hidden beneath outwardly narcissistic behaviors.
These toxic patterns will persist until the ideology of homo economicus is discarded. A healthier approach to our remaining entanglement with this system is to understand it as a form of palliative care for dying institutions, incrementally equipping people with viable exit paths as these structures become obsolete.
Buddhist and Daoist values can provide overarching guidance along this journey, offering ways to minimize human suffering by sharing frameworks and reasoning with emerging human-scale ecologies of care. Our nervous systems are deeply connected at the human scale. We are embodied spirits, and we evolved to be fully present with each other.
Wisdom is the capacity to understand the difference between the human capability for advanced recursive tool design and genuine human ecological understanding. Gaia is calling for a conscious paradigmatic shift in the design of our tools, moving away from the life-denying religion of homo economicus toward the life-affirming religion of homo ecologus. Well-designed digital tools hold the potential to amplify the noblest of human impulses as we navigate the journey ahead.
Autistic, authentic, and autonomous ecologies of care beyond the human grow organically, at human scale and pace, one trusted relationship at a time.
