# Introduction > We are living now inside the imagination of people who thought economic disparity and environmental destruction were acceptable costs for their power. It is our right and responsibility to write ourselves into the future. > - adrienne maree browne, Emergent Strategy Imaginal Seeds is an offering from [[Gaia]], our living planet. It is a bridge between the old system that is dying, and the new system that is coalescing. It is a capital alchemist, turning legacy financial assets into regenerative capital. Seen from the eyes of the old system, we are an investment and mutual aid circle dedicated to creating a post-capitalist future. While that is a useful description, we prefer to see ourselves as the caterpillar's [[imaginal cells]] that will one day become a butterfly. We hold a vision of a world that is just and sustainable, in which all communities can thrive within planetary boundaries. Our mission is to facilitate reparative and regenerative models of wealth redistribution that advance social equity, economic justice, and ecological resilience. We are guided by [[principles of life]], and inspired by mystics and philosophers who explore the [[adjacent possible]]. Everything starts with what we can imagine, so this document is a work of imagination which can be used as a resource to draw inspiration from, to find values-aligned partners, and to explore our intentions. It is a continuous work-in-progress, ever evolving, and the most current version will always live on the web. It is a fact that we live in a world governed by exploitative and extractive systems that serve only a few at the expense of the many. None of us alive today have experienced any other kind of system. It is therefore difficult to imagine how things could be any different. (See [[single story of progress]]). However, around the world, there is a growing chorus of thinkers, writers, activists, innovators, leaders and business owners who are slowly weaving the fabric of an alternative vision of society. For lack of a better term, this vision might be called [[post-capitalism]]. This vision is a radical departure from many of the assumptions that have dominated our contemporary thinking. It challenges the [[neoliberal]] assumption that we are separate individuals who can best meet our needs through exchanging goods and services on markets. It rejects the notion that there is a scarcity of resources, and that life has to be a selfish struggle for survival. It vigorously opposes the ideology of growth which governs every modern economy. Instead, this vision emphasizes our connectedness and capacity for compassion. It holds that there is enough resources for everyone's basic needs, if it is shared fairly. It values inclusivity and an appreciation of each person's unique gifts. It also takes a more realistic account of our material constraints, and calls upon us to be wise stewards of our precious environment. We have 2 choices. Stick with the current stories of separation and domination, or begin telling new stories of partnership and regeneration. Imaginal Seeds is all about telling the new stories. # How to Read the Manifesto There is no privileged entry point to our thoughts and ideas. We reject modern hierarchies and narratives, which fail to capture the complexity of fluid reality. The sequence of thoughts presented here is just one possible thread through our conceptual universe. But since everything is connected and the whole is a mirror of the parts, one idea will invariably lead to all the others, and everything forms a coherent whole (see [[fractals]].) Nor can we take credit for the ideas in here. Perhaps only 1% of it counts as original thought coming from our conscious egos. Far more than the proverbial iceberg, most of it comes from the collective unconscious, and from the many inspired thoughts and feelings of others. We are simply sticking our antennae into the currents of visionary thinking. Ideally, we would represent our ideas in the form of an image, something similar to Rob Shorter's [Imagination Sundial](https://www.robhopkins.net/2020/06/30/introducing-the-imagination-sundial/). In the sidebar, there is a list of headings, and this is a way for readers to jump non-linearly through the document, going straight to the topics that interest them. # Bend, not Break Following the ecologist David Fleming, we believe that our civilization is headed towards either [gradual descent or sudden collapse](https://leanlogic.online/glossary/climacteric/). Systems thinker Nate Hagens refers to this as a choice between ["bend" or "break"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3bxzo79SjpE). This is the fundamental choice which frames the work of Imaginal Seeds and gives it some urgency. The other options currently being entertained, conventional growth or green growth, are simply not viable. Within our lifetimes, we will undergo a major energy transition. Renewables will not be able to replace fossil fuels at a scale that will enable our economies to continue growing. We must either plan for a gradual descent now, or face the inevitability of a sudden collapse in the future. This mental attitude has been called by some Doomer Optimism (US) or Dark Optimism (UK). It's also captured by the words of one Bangladeshi woman, "In our country, unlike a rich one such as yours, it is a luxury to be pessimistic. There is work to do. Pessimism is not an option." David Fleming is one of the exemplars of this metamodern attitude, and he was wise in counseling us to work on what he chose to call "the sequel". One of his books is called Surviving the Future. Judging by how many decades we've continued ignoring the wisdom of those who seek to protect the environment and the earth, it is most likely that the future will be one of sudden collapse. In which case, it's even more imperative that we focus on the tools and structures we'll need for what is to replace our current civilisation. There are some things that are unavoidable facts. The future will be one where we are drastically energy scarce compared to now. Ever since Buckminster Fuller coined the term [[energy slaves]] in 1940, we cannot escape knowing that someone presently living in the Global North requires about 300 energy slaves to maintain his or her existence. Like the physical slaves of before, these energy slaves will soon be gone. The smartest thing to do would be to use them as strategically as possible in preparing for a future in which these slaves can no longer do our labour for us. But that's not what modernity is doing. In fact, it is doubling down on an unwinnable bet, and aspiring to build even more grandiose technology, which will increase our baseline need for more energy slaves. This manifesto is for those who accept that this is the most fundamental explanation of our plight. The evidence is out there, for anyone who chooses to look. Instead of justifying and arguing for this view, this manifesto focuses on exploring the intellectual and emotional attitudes required to enact creative and flourishing pathways forward. There is another notion of "bend" which is important to us, and which is an important ingredient of moving forward. And this is the notion of bending as an act of humility. Otto Scharmer has said that his entire Theory U is about turning our awareness back onto ourselves, so that we can act from a better stance. "Bend" is a gesture in which we bow in humility so that we can live in harmony with everything else. # Community First There is much uncertainty about the future, but one thing we are quite certain about. Having strong communities will be the foundation of any managed descent, or of our ability to survive a sudden collapse. Under the three pillars of systemic oppression - patriarchy, capitalism and colonialism - there has been a steady erosion of community. Today, markets are the dominant system that orders human relationships. Imaginal Seeds is focused on restoring the primacy of community. Everything we do is based on a Community First principle. Community involves all the informal activities that make our lives meaningful - music, play, family, volunteering, activism, friendship, home, etc. Our aim is to grow this informal economy. In the words of David Fleming, we would like to "recruit the intelligence and purpose of the people in the extraordinary task of inventing a future." Every single word of that statement is worth pondering over. It is the greatest challenge of our time, one that we cannot back away from. It will require the participation of every single human being alive today. And it is a responsibility that cannot be outsourced to any institution. # Mother Earth The most important thing we need to do in order to achieve a gradual descent is to repair our relationship with Mother Earth. Modernity is collapsing because it has denied the aliveness of our natural systems and of the universe we live in. Blinded by the [[Cartesian dualism]] of scientific rationalism, our civilisation is destroying the living world that supports us. We need to reclaim an animistic view of the world, in which even mountains and rivers have spirits. We need to pay attention to the invisible energies around us. For too long, we have unconsciously absorbed the negative energies of industrialisation, through the food we eat, the products we buy, the media we consume. All of this has a price, for which we are now paying. The good news is that Mother Earth wants us back. She is willing to forgive us. But first, we must learn to forgive each other. We must end racism, sexism, class division, able-ism, and all other forms of hierarchical violence. When we are able to forgive and transform the harms we have caused each other, then we will have shown Mother Earth that we deserve her forgiveness. That is why the problems of climate change cannot be dealt with separately from those of social injustice. Imaginal Seeds takes a deeply [[intersectional approach]]. We look forward to a day when Gaia will express herself through our politics, when everything we do will partake in that intelligent pulse at the heart of our world. We take it as a given that Gaia is real, that she is living, and that we are part of her, even when we don't realise it. The path back to Gaia is not going to be a pleasant one. It is a long and arduous road, but one that must be taken. There are easier alternatives, but they all end in collapse. The good news is that long and arduous roads can be very satisfying and rewarding. # Satisfaction The goal of life should be satisfaction. Our regulatory hormones and neurotransmitters help take care of this. They reward us by giving us deep feelings of satisfaction whenever we do things that contribute to our survival. Today, however, these regulatory systems in our body are hijacked to a fossil fuel economy. All of the food, consumer products, entertainment, and hierarchical power that feeds our sense of satisfaction comes from this temporary [[carbon pulse]]. As Nate Hagens puts it, our entire economic system is geared towards transforming billions of barrels of ancient sunlight into microliters of dopamine. We need to learn how to get satisfaction from less energy-intensive activities. This is slow and painstaking work in altering the very neuro-wiring of our brains. And no world-class surgeon is going to be able to do that for us. We have to re-wire ourselves using culture. We are trying to build an entirely new culture, one that we have never witnessed before, because it will have to be a synthesis of Indigenous wisdom and modern achievements. # Indigenous Cultures We don't want to romanticise Indigenous cultures, but they are the wisdom keepers of our planet. Despite centuries of genocide and persecution, they have managed to retain knowledge and practices that are vital to the repair of our relationship with Mother Earth. We want to mobilise and protect Indigenous communities wherever they exist, and connect them to each other in networks of support and alliance. To avoid falling into the trap of romanticism, we do not expect Indigenous communities to be perfect. They have as many flaws as non-Indigenous communities, but their knowledge and wisdom is essential in these times of ecological precarity. Neither should we fall back into New Age mysticism and reject all the valuable insights from science. A new synthesis of science and Indigenous wisdom must be sought. The scientist Monica Galliano, author of Thus Spoke the Plant, is a good example of what such a synthesis might look like. Indigenous cultures are our guides to holding nature with reverence. They teach us how to honour animals and plants as our equals, not as inferior beings for us to control and exploit. When we approach the natural world with humility, we will be amazed at the bountiful flow of gifts that will come to us in the form of food, medicine, song, art, spirituality, and joy. An easy way to understand what an Indigenous perspective might look like is to study the [[Two Worldviews]] framework. # Partnership vs Domination Riane Eisler has made the important point that we have been focused on the wrong ideological divides, choosing between capitalism and communism, religion and secularism, technology and primitivism, left and right. She transcends these old categories and shows us that the main distinction we should be focused on is whether our societies follow the domination or partnership paradigm. Both communism and capitalism have operated using the domination system, and thus are more similar than they are different. Janine Benyus makes a similar point that we have overly focused on the competitive aspect of nature, to the detriment of its collaborative aspects. Ever since Darwin, we have become so obsessed with competition in nature that we have modelled every aspect of our society on it. Actually, nature succeeds by finding mutually beneficial partnerships. When those can't be obtained, it settles for predatory or parasitic relationships, in which one party benefits at the expense of the other. Competition is even worse than predation or parasitism, because neither party benefits. It is a sure way of exhausting one's limited supply of energy. When organisms find themselves in competition, they try to move out of competition as quickly as possible. Science is only now catching up to its initial error, which came about because evolutionary theories were first introduced in a 19th-century Victorian society where industrialised competition was an ever-present reality. The Victorian scientists erroneously transposed their social environment onto their scientific theories. In the 1980s, political scientist Robert Axelrod used game theory and computer simulations to prove that cooperative strategies will do better than competitive strategies over the long run (see his book The Evolution of Cooperation.) Promoting or planting a culture of partnership wherever it can take root is one of the key strategic goals of Imaginal Seeds. # Imagination To get to where we want, imagination is crucial. We tend to think of imagination as visual, because [[we are primarily visual creatures]]. However, the kind of imagination we need is both visual and non-visual. To access our non-visual imaginations, we often have to deactivate our vision. This is why the "blind seer" archetype is so common (such as Tiresias from the Greek myths). We have many resistances to this new story of partnership and humility. Most of us are attached to the modern hallmarks of safety such as certainty, progress and heroic agency, even those of us who might identify as victims or marginalised groups. We will not willingly give up certain conveniences, and our unconscious will act against every attempt to do so. To disarm these emotional attachments, we must enact rituals of imagination that guide us out of this trap, as Ariadne's thread guided Theseus out of the Minotaur's labyrinth. Whilst we expand our capacity for non-visual imagination, we cannot ignore the power of images. Carl Jung found that the human psyche will always direct energy towards images. We are currently innundated with images of advertising, consumption, pornography, etc. Even our attempts to exit from our current system can only find form in dystopian images of the future. We need positive images of where we want to head, otherwise our actions will be incoherent and ineffective. We must create new images as focal points for our energy. Imagination helps to channel consciousness and energy, our primary resources for creating the future we desire. In the Hindu cosmology, the world was created when Shiva, the god of consciousness, and Shakti, the goddess of energy, had a cosmic union. We need imagination to enact this creation of the world over and over again. Imagination is where consciousness and energy meet. However, we have to be mindful of ourselves and be alert to the many ways in which modernity infiltrates our imaginations, like the Evil Queen in Snow White sneaking a poisoned apple in with the good ones. Bayo Akomolafe says: > If we can know with encyclopaedic detail the world we want to live in after the present one collapses, extreme caution is advised: that 'new' world is very likely the present one investing in its continuity by infiltrating our imaginations. So in addition to exercising our imaginations, we have to bend towards ourselves and see ourselves more clearly, or risk replicating the same harmful patterns in whatever we build next. # Stories One of the most powerful manifestations of the imagination are the stories we tell. Oakland-based artist and social activist Favianna Rodriguez says: > The power of culture lies in the power of story. Stories change and activate people, and people have the power to change norms, cultural practices, and systems. Stories are like individual stars. For thousands of years, humans used the stars to tell stories, to help make sense of their lives, to orient them on the planet. Stories work in the same way. When many stars coalesce around similar themes, they form a narrative constellation that can disrupt business as usual. They reveal patterns and help illuminate that which was once obscured. The powerful shine in one story can inspire other stories. We need more transformational stories so that we can connect the dots and shift narratives. The stories we tell can either limit us, or expand our possibilities. There are fear-based narratives, and there are narratives centered around love. There are stories that simplify reality in comforting ways, and there are stories that face up to the fullness of reality. The type of stories we tell make a difference. Poetry and music are special kinds of stories. They are lyrics of the heart. They are not luxuries, but are essential to navigating the challenges ahead. As Elizabeth Alexander writes in her foreward to the poetry collection How Lovely the Ruins, "Poems are where voices can join together and sing in a voice more powerful than one. Poems mark a trail of identities; poems laid end to end are a map of the human voice." She goes on to say: "Poems are handbooks for human decency and understanding. Poets hold water in their cupped hands and run back from the well because someone is parched and thirsting. The poem is a force field against despair." Storytellers of all kinds are vital guardians of cultural possibility. They hold a special place in the Imaginal Seeds universe. How we support them, hold them, become inspired by them, and amplify them, is a core part of our activity. # Emergence It is in the nature of good storytelling that it unfolds in an emergent manner. That means you cannot predict where it will go next. Each new chapter has the power to re-frame everything that goes on before. So too will Imaginal Seeds explore change on the frontiers of the adjacent possible. That's why we set less store by objective targets and measures. These belong to the old paradigm of problem solving. No amount of problem solving will get us out of the current mess. As Peter Block points out in his book Community, it is more important to focus on [[possibility]] than on problem solving. When we focus on problem solving, we are more likely to stay stuck in the old paradigms that created those problems in the first place. When we focus on possibility, we are more likely to make a true departure for a better future. This is the core of the Imaginal Seeds approach. Rather than let some "strategy" dictate our next step, we allow ourselves to gravitate towards people who embody possibilities that we are interested in, who may be stepping-stones to even more interesting possibilities. Our goal is to increase and augment humanity's treasure vault of beautiful possibilities. This approach has great support from AI researchers Kenneth Stanley and Joel Lehman, who wrote a book called Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned, in which they show that it is far better to pursue "interestingness" than to work towards a grand goal. They show that some of our greatest achievements, such as the invention of personal computers, could not have happened in a planned manner. The personal computer happened as the result of a series of "interesting" steps, such as the invention of vaccuum tubes, that were completely unrelated to personal computers except in hindsight. No one could have guessed that vaccuum tube technology was a critical pathway for the invention of the personal computer. Emergence is a path of hope. Hope is not about knowing what will happen, or even knowing how we are going to make things better. It is about knowing that many more things are possible than we can imagine, and having the courage to take that next step towards possibility. As Shaun Chamberlin puts it in this [interview](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MR0C8h7go40), hope is about "telling the stories with our lives that we are proud to tell - in the context that we find ourselves." Or as Raymond Williams put it, "To be truly radical is to make hope possible, not despair convincing." # Paradox Being able to sit in paradox is crucial to this work. We live amidst many paradoxes. We must achieve inner transformation, but we must also transform entire communities all at once. We have to hold people accountable, and we have to be compassionate and tender with them at the same time. We have to honour the past, and we have to let it go. We are all equal, and yet we are obviously all different. Sitting in paradox requires letting go of our comfortable binaries of right and wrong, true and false, beautiful and ugly. It requires giving up our oppositional approach to politics and conflict. It requires being able to say "I don't know" a lot of times, maybe most of the time. In their book Post Capitalist Philanthropy, authors Alnoor Ladha and Lynn Murphy identify [[10 working paradoxes]] that they grapple with. In fact, they regard paradox as "the appropriate starting place for the complex, entangled, messy context we find ourselves in as a species". They begin their book with this quote from Niels Bohr: > How wonderful that we have met with a paradox. Now we have some hope of making progress. Niels Bohr is also credited with the following paradigmatic statement of paradox: > The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth. We endeavour to discover profound truth after profound truth, valuing the efforts of all who engage with this pursuit in good faith. Aphorisms are concise but powerful containers of paradox. Here are some that we enjoy: - The times are urgent. We must slow down. (Bayo Akomolafe) - Power has never been so concentrated. We must ignore it. # Conversation Here's a recap of some of the conversational points in this manfesto. We want to place communities first, and repair our relationship with Mother Earth. We need to find less energy-intensive ways of satisfying our desires. We want to let Indigenous wisdom guide us back to reverence of nature. We want to create partnership systems where we collaborate rather than seek domination. We want to tap into our imagination, tell stories, and co-create emergence together, whilst holding the many paradoxes of the moment. Throughout all this, conversation will be necessary. > To build communities and ultimately a society where everyone’s needs are met, everyone has to be able to express their needs, to hear those of others, be committed to look for the overlap and celebrate the differences with creativity. > - https://medium.com/@jonasgroener/key-learnings-from-the-microsolidarity-gathering-428f54c75187 Hannah Arendt talked about the importance of conversation in the realm of politics: > There may be truths beyond speech, and they may be of great relevance to man in the singular, that is, to man in so far as he is not a political being, whatever else he may be. Men in the plural, that is, men in so far as they live and move and act in this world, can experience meaningfulness only because they can talk with and make sense to each other and to themselves. In a world dominated by the specialised languages of law, economics and science, it is important to reclaim the sacred value of language that everyone can communicate to each other with. This is Arendt again: > If we would follow the advice, so frequently urged upon us, to adjust our cultural attitudes to the present status of scientific achievement, we would in all earnest adopt a way of life in which speech is no longer meaningful. For the sciences today have been forced to adopt a “language” of mathematical symbols which, though it was originally meant only as an abbreviation for spoken statements, now contains statements that in no way can be translated back into speech. The reason why it may be wise to distrust the political judgment of scientists qua scientists is not primarily their lack of “character”—that they did not refuse to develop atomic weapons—or their naïveté—that they did not understand that once these weapons were developed they would be the last to be consulted about their use—but precisely the fact that they move in a world where speech has lost its power. And whatever men do or know or experience can make sense only to the extent that it can be spoken about. The physicist David Bohm recognised the importance of conversation, and he wrote a whole book on it called Dialogue. Bohm Dialogues are a powerful process of engaging in conversation that is open-ended and generative. We need more templates for conversations that go beyond being mere discussions. We don't need more discussions. We need more conversations. We need what Vanessa Andreotti calls [[depth learning]]. There is a great need for skilled facilitators, those who can guide large groups through difficult and challenging conversations. We particularly like the approaches of nonviolent communication and sociocracy, two communities that are committed to the partnership paradigm. # The Tale of 2 Brains Not only do we need to have better conversations with each other, so do the two sides of our brain. In one of the best TED talks ever given, neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor described what happened when she suffered a stroke to her left hemisphere. She discovered that the right hemispheres of our brains see the world in a completely different light, almost as if they have a different personality. Many of the things we have drawn attention to in this Manifesto, such as imagination, Indigenous wisdom, storytelling, and tolerance of paradox are qualities that the right hemisphere of our brains excel at. Conversely, the qualities that are dominant in our culture, such as reductionist, moralising, and rational ways of looking at the world, are strengths of the left hemisphere. When our 2 hemispheres work in balance with each other, we are able to work with the fullest scope of reality accessible to us. Psychiatrist McGilchrist believes that at some point our culture began favouring the left hemisphere, and this set up a feedback loop that reinforced left-hemisphere dominance. In an ideal world, the left hemisphere should be subservient to the right hemisphere, because it has a narrow, more limited view of the world. It is good at making simple models of the world, and using those models for survival. But it is not very good at more expansive ways of looking at things. McGilchrist made his name by writing a book called The Master and the Emissary, in which he harnessed an incredible mountain of evidence to support his contention that the left brain, which should be the emissary of the right brain, has now become its master. The left brain has taken its simplistic models and mistaken them for reality, and it ruthlessly imposes its picture of reality on the right brain. This is why it is so difficult for people to accept that the universe has meaning, that Gaia is alive, and that synchronicity happens. It's our left brains asserting dominance, and dismissing the richness of the right brain's more holistic view of the world. McGilchrist has made a very instructive comparison of left brain / right brain qualities: [[Comparison of left and right brain hemispheres]] # Descartes' Wound Left hemisphere dominance has likely been increasing since the invention of writing, but we can pinpoint the year 1619 as the pivotal moment when it really took big strides in colonising our mind. That was the year in which French philosopher René Descartes had 3 dreams. He dismissed the first two as nightmares, but in the third one, he saw a dictionary on a table, and in his hands a book of poetry, open to the lines "quod vitae sectabor iter?" or "what way of life should I follow?" He interpreted this dream to mean that his life's purpose was to establish human knowledge on a foundation of certainty, as represented by the dictionary. To do this, he became an extreme sceptic, questioning everything, even the existence of the physical world, until he found something that could not be doubted, which turned out to be his own mind, for how else could he be thinking or doubting? Thus emerged one of the biggest rifts in Western thought, the separation of the human mind from the rest of creation. As Martin Lee Mueller puts it in his book Being Salmon, Being Human: > With that Cartesian split, a deep ontological crack began to shoot far and fast through the phenomenal world, not unlike when lake ice relieves its inert tension in a rumbling boom that reverberates through the frozen landscape, leaving behind a jagged lake surface. Here, on one side of the split, was the pure substance of his own thinking, that first moment of certainty in the history of thought. Descartes thought of it as *res cogitans*, or thinking stuff: creative, intelligent, self-conscious, self-willed, rational, human mind. > > On the other side of the split was *res extensa*, or extended stuff. *Res extensa* included our bodies, the domesticated animal companions with whom we shared our lives, all wild creatures, mountains, rivers, primal forests, the atmosphere, the oceans, the geological forces of the planet, the whole of the planetary presence, the rapidly extending cosmos beyond. The formulation encapsulated and formalized his contemporaries’ experience of a cosmos that was suddenly blown wide open. It emphatically acknowledged Galileo’s reductionist project, which sought to know the universe truthfully by recognizing all knowledge gained through the senses as deceptive. Never had there been a philosopher who was less ambivalent about the fact that anything other than the thinking human mind was ontologically, epistemologically, and morally irrelevant. > > The consequences were profound. Descartes had students vivisect living animals. When the animals on the vivisection table began to scream and writhe and yelp and kick in agony, Descartes urged his students to ignore the screams and to cut deeper into the bleeding flesh. You should not trust your senses: The screams of the animal on the vivisection table might sound to the ears like screams of pain, but the animal is just a machine. All nonhuman animals are machines, apparatuses that can be reduced entirely to their constituent parts, and that can be known entirely through mechanical explanations. Whatever signs of agency, creativity, or conscious decision other animals portray become mere functions of the machine. Descartes had been a wounded soul. In his youth, he kept searching for certainty, and only found disappointment and endless arguments. As a soldier, he found human societies rife with conflict. He had his life-changing dream during the 2nd year of the Thirty Years War, a war that involved all of Europe and would end up consuming 8 million lives before it was over. In a typical trauma response, he retreated into his own mind, specifically into the left hemisphere, and made a fortress out of it. Today, we are living the profound consequences of the anthropocentric left brain's dominance which Descartes sealed with mathematical rigor. He combined geometry, arithmetic, and algebra and invented co-ordinate geometry, a way to turn every aspect of the spatial world into numbers. We now live in a world where anything that can't be quantified is regarded as inferior in status to those aspects of reality that can be measured. # Co-sensing with radical tenderness The way back from Cartesian madness is through a pedagogy of tenderness. In her book Teaching with Tenderness, Becky Thompson explains how she was struck by the poet June Jordan saying that "none of us have known enough tenderness." She goes on to imagine what a pedagogy of tenderness would look like. For us, it would involve a lot of listening. In his book Teaching Mathematics, Brent Davis produces a list of metaphors that show how much our culture prioritises the visual: > Within our culture, there is a pervasive use of visual metaphors to describe the *facets* of education. We *see* learning as gaining *insight*, intelligence as *brightness*, investigation as *looking*, understanding as *seeing*, opinions as *perspectives* or *views*, hopes as *visions*, and (very often) teaching as *supervision*. More broadly, tendencies to associate truth with *light*, believing with *seeing*, and objectivity with the distance afforded only to the observer, point to the overwhelming domination of vision over the other senses. We are socialized to be attached to certainty, control, comfort, convenience, consumption and coherence, and our society priorities the visual sense to reinforce this. These attachments are causing us to be stuck, as they are like addictions which prevent us from transforming ourselves and our society. Dani d'Emilia and Vanessa Andreotti wrote a text which they called Co-sensing with Radical Tenderness as a tool to unlearn this modern/colonial socialization. Reading the text, and pondering over its statements, is a process of dethroning the ego and disinvesting from colonial entitlements. (https://decolonialfutures.net/radicaltenderness/) We would like to find our way back to a profound listening with ourselves and nature. Listening is intimite, relational, and contextual. # Subtract!!! > “I would not give a fig for the simplicity this side of complexity; but I would give my life for the simplicity on the other side of complexity.” > – Oliver Wendell Holmes_ We are naturally inclined to want to add things. Humans are builders. It's our preferred way to show our achievements to each other, and we are hardwired to care about status and achievement. It's hard to show off something that isn't there. And our society reinforces this bias all the time. Professors will tell students to submit essays of "at least" a certain length, and math teachers will deduct points if students don't "show your work". This psychological bias has been explored extensively in Leidy Klotz's book Subtract. One of the ways that sets Imaginal Seeds apart is that we think of removing things. For example, our interest in regenerative agriculture fits this philosophy quite well. Regenerative agriculture is about removing harmful pesticides and herbicides from the process. It's about taking away energy-intensive processes, and letting nature do its work. In his book Immoderate Greatness, William Ophuls uses the analogy of a juggler to describe the increasing complexity of civilization over time: > A juggler, no matter how dedicated and skilled, can only handle so many balls. Add even one more, and he loses control. Now imagine that same juggler trying to keep his own balls in the air while simultaneously fielding and throwing balls from and to multiple others. That is roughly the situation in a complex civilization: many millions of individuals and entities are engaged in a mass, mutual juggling act. How likely is it that there will be no dropped balls? And how will it be possible to keep adding balls and participants and not overload the system so that it begins to break down? From this analogy, it is clear that the most effective and immediate first step to restore some semblance of control and avoid a breakdown would be to start removing balls from the system. Unfortunately, most efforts to change our systems, no matter how well-intentioned, often add complexity instead. The problem with excessive complexity is two-fold. Firstly, it overloads our managerial expertise. We may have built incredible information technology systems, but we are still saddled with a Neolithic brain. Most complex problems are non-linear in nature, and our brains don't cope with non-linear effects very well. The more complex the system, the more unintended consequences there will be to our interventions. The second problem with excessive complexity is that it is incredibly energy intensive. It requires a lot of energy to power complex systems. We have achieved incredible complexity in the last few hundred years due to the [[carbon pulse]], but our fossil fuel bonanza will soon come to an end, and we will not be able to afford the cost of such complexity. As complexity increases, the costs begin to outweight the benefits. Take our industrial agricultural system as an example. It requires massive fossil fuel inputs, so much so that it takes 10 calories of fossil-fuel energy to produce 1 calorie of food. As William Ophuls has succinctly put it, "because energy is the sine qua non of complexity, anything that diminishes the quantity, quality, or efficiency of energy threatens a complex civilization's survival." For these reasons, Imaginal Seeds considers it an indispensable tool to ask of a system, "What can we subtract from it?" "What would happen if we removed this?" When most people want to change a system, they first think of adding something, and then they stop there. A tiny percentage of people will go on to think about what can be removed. This is vast untapped potential for systems change. One of the most powerful expressions of the subtract paradigm comes from the artist Michelangelo. When asked how he conceived of his beautiful sculptures, he is reported to have said, “The sculpture is already complete within the marble block, before I start my work. It is already there, I just have to chisel away the superfluous material." ![[Michelangelo's Slaves.png]] We all know the saying: "The whole is greater than the sum of its parts." This saying is a mistranslation of what German psychologist Kurt Koffka meant to say. What he actually said was, "The whole is *something else* than the sum of its parts." Koffka wasn't happy about the mistranslation. It's yet another sign that we are biased towards addition over subtraction. His actual insight was that we could just as well improve a system by subtracting from it as by adding to it. But this is often an uphill task, for we are adverse to removing something that others have invested much time and energy into creating. As a result, we often settle for a less-than-optimal state of affairs. It takes courage and persistence to cut through to the more elegant simplicity on the other side of complexity which Oliver Wendell Holmes would have given up his life for. Imaginal Seeds wants to find the few souls who see that subtraction is a powerful tool, and support their work, for they will undoubtedly face resistance. Think of which civil servant or government bureaucrat is more likely to be rewarded and promoted for their ideas: the one who suggests an innovative hi-tech solution to a problem, or the one who suggests removing something his or her esteemed predecessor had worked hard to introduce? We will seek to bring in voices who have no attachments to the current complexity of the system, so that they can help us discern what needs to be stripped away: Indigenous voices, minority voices, marginalised voices. Most of us are too attached to our achievements to do the hard work of subtracting. We need the help of other voices in divesting from modernity's notions of linear progress. Examples of successful outcomes that resulted from subtraction: - Ryan McFarland discovered he could make a better starter bike by removing the pedals and training wheels, thus creating the Strider bike. - Marie Kondo's approach to sparking joy: "The best way to find out what we really need is to get rid of what we don't". Systems-change strategies that involve subtraction: - Subtracting money from an economic system. - Removing obstacles to change, rather than adding incentives for change. - Subtracting hi-tech and engineered solutions and letting nature do its work. - Subtracting private ownership to reveal the underlying shared Commons. What follows are some of the main areas where we push for subtraction. ## Subtract growth Since the discovery of fossil fuels, the global economy has been able to grow seemingly without limits. But as degrowth economists point out, this growth is unsustainable. It is reliant on non-renewable energy and materials. Despite this common sense observation, growth has become an ideology embraced fanatically by those on the right and the left. Take, for example, this statement made by Larry Summers, Chief Economist of the World Bank in 1991, “There are no… limits to the carrying capacity of the earth that are likely to bind any time in the foreseeable future. There isn’t a risk of an apocalypse due to global warming or anything else. The idea that we should put limits on growth because of some natural limit, is a profound error and one that, were it ever to prove influential, would have staggering social costs.” Summers later went on to serve as Treasury Secretary under President Clinton, and was President Obama's chief economic adviser. His views sadly represent both adminstrations' attitudes towards growth. You would think Democrat administrations would prioritise social equity over growth. This is why, after decades of growth without social equity, there is so much resentment towards the US Demoncrat party. By asking "How do we find joy in what is necessary?" and its subsidiary question "How do we agree on what is necessary?", Degrowth and its siblings, such as Doughnut Economics and Commoning, are robust attempts to disrupt the tendency of the old system to perpetuate itself. They shatter the infinite hall of mirrors and false depictions of reality which we are caught in, and summon us to go back to first principles. How are we going to survive the future? We cannot know in advance. Some claim we can only gesture towards possible pathways (https://decolonialfutures.net). One of the subsets of possible pathways that Imaginal Seeds is committed to exploring is the domain of culture. David Fleming spoke eloquently of culture as a primary ingredient of life, not a luxury to be had after everything else has been settled: > For the post-market economy, the difficult task will not be to move away from our market-based civil society: that will fall away so fast that we will find it hard to believe it was ever there. The task, on the contrary, is to recognise that the seeds of a community ethic—and, indeed, of benevolence—still exist. We now need to move from a precious interest in culture as entertainment, often passive and solitary, to culture in its original, earthy senses of the story and celebration, the guardianship and dance that tell you where you are, and who is there with you . . . Two cultural movements that we find extremely promising are [[Sociocracy]] and [[Digital Garden/Nonviolent Communication|Nonviolent Communication]]. We believe that they are important pillars of "community infrastructure" or "infrastructure for conviviality" that will allow us to have the difficult conversations that lead to life-saving transformations, ones that don't just shift consumption patterns, but end in reductions in aggregate consumption. We need to provide people with opportunities for convivial collective consumption, rather than intensive private consumption (even for basic needs). ## Subtract money Every breath we take is a gift. Every breath we exhale is something we can turn into speech and song, and these become gifts to others. Some believe that our breaths and DNA form a vast web of communication among all life. Plants often know what medicines to produce for us, because they have taken in our carbon dioxide. They know us from the inside. They are our best chemists. When a baby is born, he or she is supposed to receive all the love and life-giving presence that can be given. No one asks the baby how much it will pay for these services, or what it is doing to deserve this generosity. The basis of life is this informal gift economy. Money and markets are what have been added on top of this fundamental layer. Without the underlying gift economy, however, capitalism would collapse upon itself. The money system has become a system that siphons off energy from the gift economy. This is literally so in the case of all the women whose unpaid care labour at home supports the rest of the economy. Without homes, there would be no labour to go into workforces. And yet mainstream economics refuses to count what goes on inside homes as an integral part of the economy. The feminist economist Marilyn Waring wrote eloquently about this in her 1988 book If Women Counted. Miki Kashtan, whose organisation Non-Violent Global Liberation (or NGL) is committed to the values and principles of living life in the spirit of the gift, recommends the following 3 steps to begin entering the gift economy for ourselves: - The most important first step anyone can take to is to decouple giving from receiving, to look for opportunities to give without receiving, or to receive without giving. - Attending to needs outside of the market. - If we have more than we need, release our accumulation and allow back into circulation. ## Subtract quantification Ever since Descartes shared his cartesian geometry and showed how the entire spatial world could be represented by numbers, we have been obsessed with the largest territorial conversion program in human history - the program of converting all of reality into numbers. But this over-reliance on numbers has blinded us to our other capacities, especially the ones for feeling, sensation and intuition, as these realms are resolutely impervious to quantification. It has also cut us off from our deepest connection to nature. For contrary to Galileo, who said that the book of nature was written in the language of mathematics, nature communicates to us through feelings. Philosopher Andreas Weber argues that feelings are the foundational reality of the living cosmos: > On the surface, the bacterial cell’s behavior appears to be quite simple and automatic, which tempts an observer to compare a cell to a robot. But its simple and efficient behavior is possible only because an organism is capable of goal-oriented action and does not act like a robot. Robots would need an accurate map of the space they are acting in. It is this requirement that in truth turns out to be complicated. For the organism it is much simpler. It can satisfy its needs without a map because it acts out of self-concern. This mode of perception allows for orientation in any environment. There is no need for a map to direct behavior. A living being only needs desire and inner experience. Feeling is the most accurate way to relate to reality. It might even be the only way (if we regard objectivity as a collective fiction that disguises feeling) A veil of quantification hides this rich tapestry of feelings and desires from us. Subtracting quantification would allow us to give up the illusion of control, and immerse ourselves once more in the living pulse of the unvierse. ## Subtract social walls > "The same patriarchal power structure that oppresses and exploits girls, women, and nonbinary people (and constricts and contorts boys and men) also wreaks destruction on the natural world. Dominance, supremacy, violence, extraction, egotism, greed, ruthless competition—these hallmarks of patriarchy fuel the climate crisis just as surely as they do inequality, colluding with racism along the way. Patriarchy silences, breeds contempt, fuels destructive capitalism, and plays a zero-sum game. Its harms are chronic, cumulative, and fundamentally planetary." > - Ayana Elizabeth Johnson In 1977, the Combahee River Collective named a phenomenon they called "simultaneity of oppression." This morphed into the term "intersectionality" in the late 1980s. Put simply, their message is that we are all in this together. We can't save one group at the expense of another group. Our identities are so intertwined that we must save everyone, or risk losing everything. We must dismantle our social walls so we that can more quickly see this truth. Right now, the polarisation of society is distracting us from this entangled reality. We need our wisdom keepers to creafe safe spaces for people to come together and experience the beauty of life when their social walls are dismantled. The hope is that with the social walls down, the walls between us and nature will also begin to crumble. But this is not mere hope. It is the only way we are going to survive. # Small is Beautiful > To see a World in a Grain of Sand > And a Heaven in a Wild Flower  > Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand > And Eternity in an hour > – William Blake Reality is fractal. The large is reflected in the small. Quantum physicist David Bohm thought reality was holographic. The whole could be re-created from any of its parts. Fractal consciousness is the antidote to our seemingly inexhaustible thirst for scale. In fact, the desire for scale is a reaction to scarcity. When resources are scarce, there is a tremendous need for efficiency. Scaling is the economist's and businessman's favourite tool for achieving efficiency. But biology has a different answer. Biology knows that there are costs to increasing scale. When you make a circle bigger, it may seem like nothing important has changed. But in fact, the ratio of the outer border to the inner space has shrunk by a huge amount. The consequence for a biological system is that nutrients have to travel much farther from the outside, and waste has to make a correspondingly large journey to be expelled. A whole host of complex organs such as hearts, kidneys, stomachs, etc evolved to handle this. The same applies to human societies. Bigger cities mean more complicated transportation and waste removal systems. They involve what David Fleming called the "intermediate economy" or "regrettable necessities": >  ... things which are necessary, given the size and structure that we happen to have at the moment, but regrettable in that we don’t actually get any pleasure from them. >   > The most obvious example of a regrettable necessity is the transport of goods: transport is a necessity, given the way we organise things at the moment, but there is nothing in the actual process of transport which adds to the quality of the goods or to the flavour of the food. Fleming has a dire prediction: > When the oil peak hits, it will be the intermediate economy that collapses. That sounds like good news, but in fact it will be terrible news for everyone except those who have already succeeded, or can quickly succeed, in building small-scale living systems in which the complication — the reliance on a massive intermediate economy — has been all-but eliminated. As long as we operate with a scarcity mindset, we will never be able to exit from scarcity, because our solutions will always involved increasing orders of complexity. Our scarcity mindset will always drive us towards solutions that require scale or efficiency. How can we conduct experiments of abundant thinking, and dip our toes into the life stream, so that we can come up with better solutions based on fractal consciousness? We have been conditioned to think that we have limited means and infinite needs or desires. So economics as a discipline evolved to answer the question of how we can effectively allocate scarce resources. We now have economic problems, and economic solutions. But there is another way to look at it. We can start with the principle of sufficiency. We have sufficient means at our disposal, and using those means, we can create a good life according to our own definition of what is a good life. We work towards goals that are proportionate to our means. The follwing link is a great summary of David Fleming's Lean Logic by David Bollier. Lean Logic is the main inspiration for the ideas in this section, and for much of the manifesto: https://www.resilience.org/stories/2017-06-19/david-flemings-surviving-future/ # Ritual It might seem odd to include a section on ritual in a manifesto for progressive change. But ritual is how we make a home for ourselves in a world of constant change, and without the feeling of safety and belonging, we won't have the equilibrium from which to act with effectiveness. Ritual helps to build a home in the temporal realm because it influences our relationship with time. It restores a sacred quality to things, and anchors the kind of rooted consciousness we want to inhabit. Rituals help us direct and shape our awareness. Imagine having a ritual of saying "Enjoy your breath" to remind ourselves that life is full of delicious moments? We want to be intentional about the rituals we bring into our lives and communities. It is a tragedy that the most common ritual we share is probably the one of checking our smartphones for incoming messages. Such a ritual serves to disconnect us from the present moment instead of bringing us home to it. At their best, rituals help to slow life down to make space for our intentions. They should be unique to every individual, group and collective, serving the needs of the circumstances they find themselves in. The rituals we need in the era of the Internet are different from the ones we needed in ancient agricultural times. It doesn't make sense to unquestioningly adopt rituals from your family, religion, or socio-economic group. Instead, rituals should be a pleasant negotiation among peers. # Step into Fruitful Darkness > Hello, darkness, my old friend. > - Simon Garfunkel Seeds only grow in darkness. Most life begins in darkness. We forget this, because ever since Plato's analogy of the cave, we have associated light with good, and dark with bad. But light blinds as much as it illuminates. Lyanda Lynn Haupt writes of the immensity of life that lives in darkness: > Ninety percent of life unfolds in complete and eternal darkness—beneath the soil that cradles every footstep, and beneath the sea, where whole worlds exist absent the penetration of any light at all. Without absolute darkness, the seed will not germinate, the decomposers and fungi that live underearth will not toil, the transformation of death into new life will cease its spinning.... This complicated moment on earth is no time to retreat into the simplistic metaphor of “bringing light.” The hope we must maintain, the imagination we must put to use, and the physical health we require all ask of us a more intricate wisdom. > – Rooted Today, we live in the blinding glare of too much publicity, too much surveillance, too much social media, too much homogenous rational thought. We are lacking the rich loam of cognitive diversity from which a robust imagination can spring. We live in the tyranny of times and spaces that have been colonised by capitalism and modernity's single story of progress. One of the boldest, riskiest, and most radical moves that Imaginal Seeds will make is to invest in darkness. We will plant seeds in darkness and nurture them. What this means in practice is that we will use our resources to reclaim time and space, and give them over to individuals or groups of people to do what they will, without the glare of accountability, expected returns, contracts, rude quantification, etc. We will purchase space and territory for people and nature to do their imaginative explorations free of oppressive intervention. We will help them reclaim time, and thus freedom from the shackles of neoliberal markets. Like all good growers, we don't just subtract, we also add the valuable nutrients of support, allyship, and conviviality. We lend our seeds the energy of our trust and hope. We sing to them our lyrical songs of the heart. We also map them in relation to each other, practising a permaculture of interconnected life. We enter projects at their earliest germinating stages, when they are just conversations happening in liminal spaces. These projects might look like the Spaces, Places, Pacts and Practices of Rob Shorter's [Imagination Sundial](https://www.robhopkins.net/2020/06/30/introducing-the-imagination-sundial/). When those projects bud and make an appearance above ground, we nurture them until they are visible enough for others to care for them. Indigenous wisdom keepers have long recognized the value of darkness. Many ceremonies, such as Native American sweat lodges or Peruvian ayahuasca ceremonies, take place in darkness. The taoist yin-yang symbol shows us that the seed of being is planted in the dark realm of non-being. To experience soul-enlivening darkness, we recommend a visit to the Dark Sky Project at Lake Takapō in New Zealand: - https://www.darkskyproject.co.nz Or any of the other dark sky reserves listed here: - https://www.darksky.org/our-work/conservation/idsp/reserves/ # Theory of Change [[Theories of Change]] is a separate document that describes some useful frames we've found for deciding what we want to do to change the system. There is no ultimate frame, or theory of change. They are all valuable lenses. All good theories of change will explain where we are, where we want to go, and how we are going to get there. That is what they do in a nutshell. This entire manifesto has been one gigantic theory of change. But nested within it are some more focused theories, which you can explore if you are so inclined. # Wealth as Energy True wealth is not measured in money, but in sunlight's energy and how it cascades through all of life. Imaginal Seeds is dedicated to converting our accumulated financial wealth into real wealth. What does this mean in practice? The following are specific areas of focus for us. The list is always evolving: 1. Conservation, restoration and regeneration of natural ecosystems. 2. Regenerative food systems that minimise waste and protect our vital soil. 3. Net-zero biophilic built environments (cities that learn from nature and live in harmony with it). 4. Distributed governance (such as Sociocracy). 5. New ownership models such as worker cooperatives and the Commons. 6. Degrowth initiatives that find alternatives to our system of perpetual growth. 7. Strong, collaborative, local communities who prioritise the common good. 8. Embodied practices of inclusion and social justice. We adopt the following as First Principles: - Create small group effectiveness. - Promote emotional literacy. - Create conditions of slack. - Support projects that have low-intensity energy requirements - Protect Indigeneity - wisdom that is connected to land, water and air # Resonance Do not believe us. You are the best authority on what is in your highest interest. Take what you can use, and leave the rest. We are all engaged in the struggle to figure out what life is, who we are, where we come from, and where we're going. No one has all the answers, but we can live the questions: > Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer. > – Rainer Maria Rilke This manifesto was written from the perspective of someone who is in a low-intensity struggle, who has relative power in the current system, and who has inherited a specific set of beliefs and values. Not all of it can be relevant to everyone. Those who are caught in high-intensity struggles (such as Indigenous peoples on the front lines of extractive violence, or low-wage workers doing back-breaking work) might find these ideas abstract and meaningless. Others who are invested in the current system might feel threatened by the ideas expressed here. To each, we can only offer our sincere wish to engage in open, non-judgmental dialogue, so that we can find resonance across our differences. It is resonance that allows the imaginal cells of a butterfly to find each other, to begin self-organising into a system complex and powerful enough to overcome the immune system of the caterpillar which is attacking them. Resonance is something that is accessed through emotion, sensation and intuition. Our invitation is for you to try on these ideas for a day or a week. You don't have to believe them. Just listen to your body, your sense of being in the world, and see if something shifts and resonates within you. When resonance happens, we tend to find more synchronicity and meaning in the world. Pathways open up that are inexplicable through physical cause and effect understandings of the world. Things seem to flow better. You become aware of being part of a system that functions with an intelligence that is vast and dynamic. You feel more alive with purpose and energy. If you find yourself resisting these non-scientific and non-rational ideas, consider for a moment that it might be your left brain trying to shut down the more holistic perspectives of the right brain. Consider, also, that it might be a blindness imposed by modernity's single story of progress, the one that prevents us from seeing corn as anything but yellow. We don't know what Gaia has in store for us, but if her past evolutions are anything to go by, the sequel will be something more complex, resilient, beautiful, diverse, and self-aware than anything we have come across in the past. Our power lies in our ability to open up to the awe and wonder of this unfolding story, and imagine ourselves into it. # Questions for Reflection Here are some questions you can ponder after reading this manifesto: - What is humanity's ecological niche? Every animal has a niche that encapsulates the ways in which they contribute to the health of an ecosystem. What is ours? - What is the boldest form of adaptation you can imagine for our species? - Why were you born? How do you continue to live that truth today? --- # Bibliography The following books, articles and essays are entry-points into the Ideaspace of Imaginal Seeds. Start with any one of them, and it will eventually lead you to all the others. To understand our perspectives better, we invite you to explore these incredible contributions to visionary thinking. - [[Creating a World That Works for All]] - Sharif Abdullah - [[Reference Notes/Community]] - Peter Block - [[Reference Notes/Dialogue]] - David Bohm - [[Reference Notes/Highlights/Books/Emergent Strategy]] - adrienne maree browne - [[The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible]] - Charles Eisenstein - [[Reference Notes/Sacred Economics]] - Charles Eisenstein - [[Surviving the Future]] - David Fleming - Lean Logic - David Fleming - [[The Listening Society]] - Hanzi Freinacht - Gaia Alchemy - Stephen Harding - [[Reference Notes/Less is More]] - Jason Hickel - [[From What Is to What If]] - Rob Hopkins - [[Flourish]] - Sarah Ichioka and Michael Pawley - [[Leverage Points]] - Donella Meadows - [[Reference Notes/Hospicing Modernity]] - Vanessa Machado de Oliveiro - [[Many Voices, One Song]] - Ted Rau and Jerry Koch-Gonzalez - [[Nonviolent Communicaton]] - Marshall Rosenberg - [[Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned]] - [[Reference Notes/Highlights/Books/The Code of Capital|Code of Capital]] - Katharina Pistor - [[Reference Notes/Highlights/Books/Doughnut Economics]] - Kate Raworth - [[Small is beautiful]] - EF Schumacher - [[The Seed Underground]] - Janisse Ray - Unflattening - Nick Sousanis - This Could Be Our Future - Yancey Strickler - Hospicing Modernity - Vanessa Machado de Oliveira - [[The Hologram]] - The Biology of Wonder - Andreas Weber