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 fully compatible with a panpsychic relational philosophy. Everyone wants their experience to be taken seriously. We are embodied spirits, compelled to make sense of this world, and we can only do so in good company.
Life
As environmental thinker Janine Benyus famously observed, life creates conditions conducive to life. This simple definition or observation strongly hints at the fact that the dynamic process of life consists fundamentally of 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, but they exclude all other feedback loops in living systems from contributing to the lived experiences of consciousness at much smaller and much larger spatial and temporal 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 life spans 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 the molecular feedback loops within the body are maintained in a de-powered or 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 human lifetime, fed by shared lived experiences and leading to cultural outputs ready to be absorbed by the local ecology of care.
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, from the very bottom layers of physics upwards. Life consists entirely of relationships, which operate as feedback and learning loops. In aggregate, these loops constitute the building blocks of what our human animal-scale perception experiences as consciousness.
There is no shortage of thinkers who conceptualize life this way, a perspective that becomes very obvious when studying Eastern spiritual and philosophical texts. As humans with inherent limitations, we will never be able to scientifically prove to any quantifiable level of certainty that consciousness emerges in this exact way. However, science will also never be capable of disproving that consciousness emerges and exists in this manner. This in no way means that science is useless; it simply highlights the limits of science, which are part of the limits of human comprehensibility. In the same way, within 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.
A universe conceptualized entirely in terms of dynamic feedback and learning loops leads to a panpsychic philosophy in which consciousness is omnipresent at all levels of scale. This perspective is inherently compatible with Eastern spiritual traditions such as Buddhism and Daoism, inviting us to consider non-anthropocentric viewpoints while alerting us to the cultural bias inherent in modern industrialized notions of intelligence and success.
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. It is the world’s fourth-largest religion, with over 520 million followers comprising seven percent of the global population. Arising in the eastern Gangetic plain as a Śramaṇa movement, it gradually spread throughout Asia and eventually to the West in the 20th century. According to tradition, the Buddha instructed his followers in a path of development leading to awakening and full liberation from dukkha, regarding this path as a Middle Way between extremes such as asceticism and sensual indulgence.
Buddhism’s focus on minimizing suffering and unease corresponds directly to the strong active desire of hypersensitive neurodivergent people to minimize cognitive dissonance. It also hints at the profound social problems that arise when a culture normalizes or 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, emphasizing harmony with the Tao, understood as an enigmatic process of transformation ultimately underlying reality. Taoist thought has informed practices such as meditation, astrology, qigong, feng shui, and internal alchemy, with a common goal of self-cultivation and more harmonious existence. Its ethics emphasize effortless action, naturalness, simplicity, and the three treasures of compassion, frugality, and humility. These virtues align with the sensitivity profiles of many neurodivergent people and constitute a timeless critique of anthropocentric empire-building attempts dating back to the early Warring States period.
Love
The extent to which we are alive emerges from the products of mutual trust, commitments, and shared understanding and experiences 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. The more a culture forces people to trust and invest in such abstract entities, 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 understood from a sober perspective as the 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.
Relationships can be understood as continuous, multi-modal, de-powered dialogues within ecologies of care, including the resulting entanglements of our inner worlds. This relational framework aligns closely with the compassionate framing of conscious evolutionary design and collaborative niche construction, ideas championed by researchers like Richard Watson and anticipated over a century ago by Peter Kropotkin.
Sensitivity Profiles
All humans possess unique sensitivity profiles shaped by neurological baseline dispositions and lived experiences within specific ecological contexts. This is particularly true for hypersensitive neurodivergent people, many of whom have been sensitized by traumatic experiences in a social world where they are systematically marginalized, pathologized, and sometimes criminalized.
Our individually unique nervous systems and sensitivities evolve over the course of our lives. Research indicates that a significant majority of neurodivergent adults frequently feel overwhelmed, misunderstood, disrespected, and unsafe. Overall well-being is determined by alignment between an individual’s sensitivity profile and the surrounding ecology of care. Official diagnostic criteria for autism are deeply entangled with the symptoms of complex trauma, making it difficult to determine where innate neurodivergent baselines stop and trauma responses begin.
Consequently, simplistic and pathologizing diagnostic labels centered on decontextualized individuals will never be adequate. Those active in the neurodiversity and disability movements advocate for intersectional solidarity beyond rigid labels, challenging the cookie-cutter categories of manualized psychiatric systems that gloss over the uniqueness of lived experience.
Powered-up relationships—persistent, unbalanced feedback loops between humans—generate cognitive dissonance experienced as a dis-ease that demands resolution. Ignoring or suppressing cognitive dissonance for extended periods results in mental, spiritual, and bodily ailments. Hypersensitive individuals often possess conscious awareness of this dissonance and are compelled to take or avoid specific actions to reduce it, whereas others may tolerate dissonance over extended periods while suffering latent health consequences.
Culture Co-Evolution
All major evolutionary milestones in the history of Gaia possess co-evolutionary characteristics, drawing lessons from the emergence 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 species-specific competition.
The semi-permeable membranes of cells provide a model for co-evolutionary processes between multiple living organisms that has been tested by Gaia for billions of years. Utilizing category theory and denotational semantics, we can articulate the interdependencies between symbol systems and semantics, advancing a paradigm of conscious collaborative niche construction over energy-intensive and wasteful head-to-head competition.
From within a co-evolutionary frame, all head-to-head competitions are revealed as short-term, energy-wasting distractions that should be curtailed. These are the cultural foundations prioritized in egalitarian hunter-gatherer societies as the product of hundreds of thousands of years of cultural co-evolution, demonstrating the priorities of healthy, life-affirming cultures.
Beyond human scale, we can relax and place faith in Gaia’s wisdom. Where invited, we can provide palliative care to dying super-human-scale institutions while offering relevant education toward safe and viable exit paths for those entangled within them.
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 can extend the reliability of human collaborative niche construction to larger scales without centralizing decision-making power in the hands of autocrats.
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 is 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.
Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) societies have become detached from the evolutionary roots of our capacity for culture. Surrounded by spectacles and atomized individualism, individuals often find themselves anchoring only in non-human biological worlds while viewing human cultural construction with deep suspicion. In the ongoing cultural metamorphosis, Gaia remains the sole true authority, speaking with increasing clarity to us all.
Becoming Aware of Cultural Bias
To become consciously aware of cultural bias across human endeavors, it helps to examine academia as consisting of subsystems connected via learning and feedback loops. By distinguishing human cultural outputs from empirical scientific attempts to understand Gaia, we can bring internalized ableism into sharp focus and expose the dangerous levels of pseudoscience within modern technological disciplines, artificial intelligence, and the digital economy.
The cultural challenge in engineering is an active disinterest in making foundational assumptions explicit, relying instead on convenient presuppositions to advance the narrative of progress. Furthermore, the modern economic religion has institutionalized an obsession with maximizing quantifiable economic utility and net worth from human lives, creating stratified age cohorts that undermine valuable intergenerational learning.
Reviving Trust in Humanity
Nothing in the atomized modern social world makes sense anymore because human-scale cultural organisms and their life-sustaining importance have been eroded from living memory. The competitive frame of homo economicus normalizes the compulsion to appear independent and strong, while fears of exposing vulnerability foster ubiquitous mistrust and mental health crises.
Deep indoctrination into the myth of market-driven individualism leaves people distrustful of themselves, fueling an epidemic of self-hate, shame, and suppressed guilt disguised by outwardly narcissistic behaviors necessary for survival in a toxic society. These destructive patterns will persist only until the underlying economic ideology is discarded.
As we look toward collaborative frameworks and human-scale ecologies of care, Buddhist and Daoist values offer overarching guidance for minimizing suffering. By sharing these insights within emerging communities, we can rebuild trust, honor our interconnected nervous systems, and nurture genuine relationships that reflect the wisdom of the living planet.
