Becoming an Island of Coherence

A way to change the world

The most transformative thing that could happen, in timely fashion, would be broad acceptance of a creation story for a planetary civilization. We are carved up into nations and religions, where oppositions prevail, but we are one humanity and we need a story about what accounts for that. In fact, we have one. It conforms to scientific discoveries of the last 100 years. Getting that understood is the great work of our time, and it is my great work.  

For minds to change, it doesn't cost anything. There's no need for any technology. We can consider Eve biting that apple to be a fairy tale.

Now what is the title of this Substack, which plants itself at our edge of thought, looking to configure a new understanding. Who we think we are is the governing force for our civilization. As we think, so we act. If we are focused on personal gain we do things differently from a focus on being caretakers of Earth.

Brian Swimme’s creation story, dubbed the Universe Story, covers our planetary civilization. He has that story not just in his head, but in his bones. When a person feels an emotion, you feel it, too. We cry at some movies, but not at all of them; when an actor is pretending to feel something you have a different response from when the actor is experiencing an emotion. We can applaud the person who is acting without feeling, but we won’t be moved by it. It’s a human thing, where Brian Swimme’s authentic connection will connect you.

In my Substack posts over the past year, there are videos of Brian that can help us to become an island of coherence. Ilya Prigogine, who originated that phrase, was awarded a 1977 Nobel Prize for what he described this way:

"When a system is far from equilibrium, small islands of coherence have the capacity to shift the entire system."

It’s a parallel to the hundredth monkey story, where something has been building and all of a sudden becomes the new way. For Prigogine, it was a perturbation in a chemical system being tolerated as it gets larger until at some point the system won’t keep including it and there’s a reconfiguration in a new pattern that incorporates the misfitting element.

I like this explanation, of “how transforming the worldviews that underlie economic, governance, and policy systems can give rise to a world of mutual thriving.": 

“Worldviews are often invisible, yet they’re encoded in the institutional and capital environments in which we reside. They deeply influence our lives by determining how we organize and see the world, including how we perceive and define ourselves...Cultures based on worldviews that see themselves as part of an integrated whole have different social systems and languages than cultures based on individuation. A society built from a worldview of separation will codify this separateness into reality, for example through private property defined by redline boundaries, or contracts that create an asymmetrical distribution of power...worldviews based on separation emerged long ago and led to people seeing the world as a collection of objects to be owned, perpetuating conditions for oppression and abuse. Some believe that facets of the polycrisis, such as growing inequality, human-induced climate change, biodiversity loss, and systemic racism, are outcomes of social institutions and systems designed out of separateness, individualism, control, and domination.”

I had these cut-and-pastes with no info on where they came from:

"The issue at play in the AI question, or the question of tempering our growth in general, isn’t just that our technology is built without higher values that can mitigate its excesses. It’s that culturally we lack a story as to why values even matter to begin with...real values come from beyond humans. From the divine. They are not something that can be quantified into ones and zeroes, but something that can be felt. Something that has quality...if we’re going to have a conversation around building our technology so that it values life, we need to start at the deepest levels of what we believe life to be...not just what we value, but how we value."

And:

"What we believe to be real and relevant is the most significant factor in the formation of culture, which in turn influences our thoughts and emotions, which in turn influence our values, which influence our institutions and political policies. The change has to happen at the deepest level if it’s going to have any significant impact on an issue as important as whether or not we go extinct.”

And:

“Bernardo Kastrup, asked what he thought the implications would be of a widespread adoption of an Idealist perspective, answered, 'Our sense of plausibility is culturally enforced, and our internalized true belief about what’s going on is culturally enforced…They calibrate our sense of meaning, our sense of worth, our sense of self, our sense of empathy. It calibrates everything…If you are an idealist, you recognize that what is worthwhile to collect in life is not things. It’s insights…We engage in patterns of addictive behavior, which are always destructive to the planet and to ourselves, in order to compensate for that culturally induced, dysfunctional notion of what’s going on.’”

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For an up-to-date Brian Swimme, here are edits I strung together of responses Brian made to the host of a podcast who wanted Brian to tune him into feeling the reverence for this human journey where we are evolving together, as one humanity, in a “sacred” universe where we are sacred, too:

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Do you want to come to a Zoom where I get Brian to work his magic to tune us in?

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