Dr. Kathleen Gaia, vaguely associating with the Sisters of Perpetual Peace, drew her first equity credits through the Social Work Department. But, as with nearly all functions, and perhaps some dysfunctions as well, pertaining to Dr. Gaia, this became a controversial matter for a time, early in the Post-Millennial Period, as the Green Revolution was drawing toward its inevitable close.
Dr. Gaia insisted that her students should call her Kathleen, not Sr. Kathleen, not Dr. Kathleen, but not Kathy, or Kate, or, most vehemently, NOT Katey. This preference became iconic of her regenerative iconoclasm. Kathleen was her own tour de force, especially in her view of history and evolution, and economics, and metric systems, and information…. OK, maybe the word especially is not the best choice; perhaps eclectically would be better. Anyway, case in point, Kathleen was almost solely foundational to the School of Social Work becoming the School of Ecologic Practice.
It’s so difficult to know where her history of cultural evolution story actually begins because everything about her spirals around into everything else about her. Kathleen is a spinning regenerative, life sustaining, revolution, whether she spends the day in mindfulness practice, just breathing deeply, what she calls positive intention, as if she sees Mother Earth writing down her intentions, her attendance, her presence, each moment of each day, and night; or whether she is consulting for the U.N.’s ReGenesis Committee. Kathleen is of, by, and for abundantly fertile compost-culture.
Kathleen came to what was then the School of Social Work with an outrageous Dissertation proposal probably because she was a Buckminster Fuller scholar and a Permaculture Designer. One or the other might not have triggered her personal cultural revolution, but that she understood Fuller as a Permacultural Teleologist seems to have set the stage for her unusual entry into, and eventual symbiotic relationship with, our Ecology Practice Department. She confronted not only a huge cultural gap but her dissertation became more of a transliterative dictionary of self-inflicted terminology than she would have greatly preferred. On the other hand, this early translation project grew intrinsic to her capacity to sustain Positive Intention (also known as Basic Attendance) throughout a wide range of paradigms and interactive environments, sometimes quite heated. She just keeps coming back to her symbiotically interdependent principles of Regenerative Systems.
Buckminster Fuller’s Permacultural and Teleological Regenerative Information Conjecture
Rev. Kathleen 0. Gaia
Synopsis
Buckminster Fuller’s rather too comprehensive Synergetics: Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking came to fruition while Gregory Bateson’s parallel reflections were published under the titles of Steps to an Ecology of Mind and Mind and Nature. Meanwhile, at Yale, then Princeton, Julian Jaynes produced his major opus, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind.
These titles, and the undercurrents within these three thought streams, might combine as Explorations in the Geometric Ecology of our Bicameral Mind. Unlike Bateson, both Fuller and Jaynes move toward an evolutionary teleology, the conjecture that evolution follows a positive trending intersection toward a primal intersection of both ecological meaning and economic purpose, or value-transfer confluence. Bateson and Jaynes, unlike Fuller, are interested in the mapping emergence of pattern and learning. Jaynes, unlike Bateson and Fuller, is interested in the cultural and historical evolution of our Left-Right hemispheric brains, or, more specifically, the emergence of Left-hemispheric dominance, which he thinks of as an evolutionary breakdown or perhaps breakthrough in his later reflections.
Each of these seminal thinkers, and others more epistemologically inclined, such as Thomas Kuhn, Karl Popper, David Bohm, lived, thought, wrote, published during the late-Industrial Revolution era. This was also the time when Albert Einstein’s Theory of Relativity was the culturally dominant model for understanding spacetime. It was not until the early post-millennial era that Fuller’s work came to cultural dominance, recognizing both that relativity is a function of primal relationship and that Einstein had explicitly assumed a 4 equi-dimensional spacetime Commons, or Hilbert Space, only within which the conversion formulas for measuring energy in relation to space and time are applicable. Our ego-relativity aside, within spacetime universe, our eco-relational Commons can be optimally comprehended through a redundantly tetrahedral fractal development pattern, as evinced by the regenerative pattern of RNA, the 4-prime dimensional base implied within atomic metamorphosis, and the Group Theory work of Gregori Perelman and William Thurston. Their intellectual children are not just chaos and complexity theories, but also what has become the Permaculture Design Movement.
Fuller does not experience our cognitive ecology as responding to static information. He sees geometry as a way of describing and predicting relationships in a constantly changing, revolving, physical universe. Math is about verbs, action, relationships; not so much about stasis, nouns, nomials, names, numerals, lifeless symbols. Jaynes understands the development of symbols and language in a similar evolutionary functional model. Jaynes’ lens was as a psychological ethologist. He believed that nature’s evolution systemically predicated the development of a dominant, deductive, self-conscious left-hemisphere. There is a natural and functional teleological explanation for the development of self-awareness, also causally related to the development of early language and written symbols.
During the early 21st Century, Permaculture and Synergetics melded into the Prime Universal Principles:
- Spacetime prime, rational, relationships evolve into, and from, 4 equi-dimensional thermodynamic and magnetic balanced frequencies and functional, confluent relationships, trending toward synergetic formation.
- Original Teleological Intent: Prime binomial, and binary, relationships self-organize and perpetuate universal open energy, and information, systems.
- Omega Point Optimization Practice: The mindful effectiveness of regenerative integral multisystemic therapeutic design increases as negative dysfunctional monochromatic silos of competitive ego-nomial [formerly known as economic] ecologies decrease.
- Information can only exist within a systemic identity; the absence of absence. Polynomial spacetime information is the positive functioned face of the absence of reversed temporal, Not-Polynomial negative spacetime–which Bohm refers to as Implicate Order.
In other words, bottom line, compassionate mindfulness increases within human natural systems as ego-passionate irrationality and dissonance decrease; a teleological tautology. Active peaceful practice grows where nonviolent intent and design is planted. This has become the Prime Permacultural Principle of Thermosystemic Balance.
Kathleen responded to concerns that her theoretical frame would be more appropriate to our Environmental Sciences Department, or maybe even what was left of the moribund and largely dysfunctional Economic History Department, through the development of her therapeutic model. She understood cultural history, including anthropology, as the narrative incarnation of informational string theory. Resilient, inclusive, sustained articulation, connection, weaving of globally interspeciated and intergenerational information-Codex strands, comprehended as a positive-intent, cooperative information network, produces optimizing therapeutic intervention trends. In other words, our healthy ecological systems are intrinsically therapeutic, and follow the natural system development trajectory of positive evolution. Unfortunately, the Industrial Revolution, a by-product of Left-brained dominance—also known as Yang-centric imbalance—severed eco-nomic value transfers from their eco-logical nutritional root system. So, to Kathleen’s permacultural way of looking at our Tree of Life, if we want our social work project design to meet Continuous Quality Improvement multi-systemic information standards, then obviously we have to re-ligion, reconnect our cooperative economic production to our interdependent and synergetic ecological root system. It is not an integral, optimizing systemic development practice to sever our social investment strategies, and practice, from the richly fertile wealth of our ecological wisdom, and intent.
Her advocacy for a global cooperative eco-normic networks illustrates how Kathleen applied her Regenerative Ecological Practice to more specific public sector planning proposals.
In all my benighted years as the United Nation’s EcoChaplain I have heard an ear-full of mind numbing noise. But, nothing more so than this endless chaotic and dissonantly suffering confusion of egonomics with econormics. So, if you would be so kind, I would ask if you might focus on breathing together for a few moments, soften your eyes, and listen as we time travel together back in history.
Our time, this time that we have each chosen to walk and sing and dance on Earth, has been long predicted. Some have called it the Second Coming, others the Great Apocalypse, others the Great Turning. Each of us breaths together in this room today because our species’ karma evolved us to know everything we need to know to uncover our mutual gratitude for winter’s harsh wind voices. Until we can appreciate what the discontent of this Great Winter Transition can teach us, we cannot enter our promised land of eternal spring.
So let us imagine ourselves reborn into the advent season, within our mother’s womb. This is our time of metamorphosis from permacultural seed into our regenerative Earth Tribe, rebirth conceiving abundant opportunity. Our short-term risk is only stepping faithfully into appropriate gratitude for our mutual subsidiarity, trusting the principle of waxing and waning reversion, within Mother Earth’s nurturing care.
We belong to Her clearings
Her places panoramic
Older than our Logos Voice of culture.
We toddle, listen
memorize Your scent as this day’s time;
Your shadows, curves, slopes, curls,
a panoply of silent places
shaping paradigms for mind’s rest
imagining Your scale as mine
to play or hide
or grow smaller
or dance
to sounds of nature’s buzz and chatter,
clack and clatter,
august synapzzz resounding quake of grounding gravitas,
moving, shifting, hunting
resting silently again.
Behind my breath
I hear Yours
and ours together
before this voice,
interrupts our nutrient bath,
through intimate birthing horizons,
vast belonging songs
string back to cultured paradise cavern,
pearl of advent crystal-ringing exform’s mythic treasure.
This Great Transition to reflow our rivers,
warm tears spiraling down our drainpipes
into warming seas of salty fears containing
all Earth’s regenerated tears through past years
and generations,
a sea-green latticed pearl of tears
cooperatively compiled from EarthTribe’s
quakes and pains,
suffering and surprising joy.
Tears come with sad
but also wildly glad
Gaia cares not which way she collects them.
These are Her tears to share with Father Sky,
their seeds of immense iniquity,
but also equity
absorbing pain and suffering,
lubricating ecstatic pleasure,
tears water sap
filled abundantly rich nutrients
re-hydrogenating,
regenerating,
creating
catharsis leads to slower grace,
wisdom to hear both pain slow smoke-filled exhalation
and wild enthusiasm’s equally valued teachers,
mentors along our permacultured path,
learning to water regenerative values
by starving long-suffered disillusion.
To starve long-suffered disillusionment, our growing absence of active hope, these are negative ways of describing our new millennial positive teleological faith. The fact that some of us still exist, although the number of species is dwindling, that anything exists at all, proves the lie of this Closed Universal System assumption of cosmology, and gives deductive power of reason to hope for final outcomes other than entropy and dissonance.
Perhaps it is believing we are each ultimately mortally bound independent ego identities that draws our minds to this Closed Universal System assumption. But, our sensory experience protests this irrational conclusion and draws us, instead, toward faith in our interdependently immortal freedom, released from spacetime’s ego-consciousness, bringing power to hope, grow faith, regenerate love for our open systemed Permaculture Paradise.
If it is our Tao
if it is true
that Original Intent predicts
what Teilhard de Chardin’s Omega Point articulates,
that this globally resounding echo through our universe of post-millennial time
reconnects our religions with our science and our best artistic grace,
then could we please agree that we have chosen to begin anew together,
to fly together,
not fly apart,
to dance and sing in permaculturing, eco-normic, widening circles,
not march and shout in diminishing extractive ego-centric markets.
Some of us do not believe it was a coincidence that we were born at this time together. Together we have sufficient knowledge, we simply lack the power to be where we belong, in some future paradise moment, both ecologically and economically balanced, inclusive, fair, with fresh air and water, and plenty of wholesome food for all the Earth’s Tribes, regenerating diversity into our sustained future.
We have a messianic dream and live a crucifying nightmare of anguish.
So, once again, I ask you to close or soften your eyes, breathing in Earth’s radiant energy, into our lungs and blood streams and neural systems. Then breathing out and down, imagine following your deep and tender root system into the past, down toward Earth’s core, from which emerges all our diversely interdependent root systems. Breath in Father Sky’s radiantly productive energy, and exhale in and down and through and back to where spacetime begins with all of us together. Here, in this interconnectedness, in this symbiotic vulnerability, we experience our shared messianic vocation.
Hear our new millennial Messiah Voice first as our shared suffering and loss:
Messiah’s Torch Song to Mother Earth
I have given up on us
because you gave up on us
before I even came along.
You saw in me some hope
that maybe you were wrong
perhaps my humane race could be redeemed
if just one would take the time
to notice and care
that you are.
But, I was not that one for you.
The one to see wealth
where you have it
rather than long to be fed
with what is not yours to provide.
It breaks my heart to know
that I can’t fix yours.
I step into your absent grace
and here I am with you
where I have only seen you
as my fixer-upper.
I am afraid to be your only love
it feels too much to ask of me
to love you when you’ve never loved another.
Can you tell me why
I never cry
when I try to hurt you?
Can you tell me why I only cry
when I tell you that I need you?
But I can’t find you.
I had given up on me
before we ever came along.
I saw in you my last life’s hope
that I could share myself
without running out
until our dying day.
We would never end
telling stories of now,
and then,
and why we never want this one to end.
We would look outside
in each other’s eyes
and see inside
through each other’s eyes.
It’s your nervous roots within your skin
your mind,
your heart,
too weakly fibrillating for faith
that I might care
and know you as you are.
And yet your hope,
it lingers there,
ringed trees glow reminder
when there is hope that’s positive
then water it with light.
My hope emerges warm teared compost
for our faith that love could be for us
to share such diverse synergy,
grow love for all who come to share
this pilgrim floored and worn-out rug.
This transition time, our time, all time is the measure of relationship. Relationships, each one, taken together, are our time. How and where, with whom do we invest our nutrient time-relationship? In which values, and are these positively intended or negatively practiced, harmonious or dissonant, automated autistic ego-stressed suffering? We would wisely water harmonious, emergently evolving ecosystems, in part by starving silos of ego-centric monocultures.
Where are our most holistic human natural systems? Where endure our surviving permacultured seeds of hope? Where are our Shaman Warriors for Peace?
Look to your most regenerative mentors. Those few leaders who are more about walking our revolving-reverting pilgrimage together than about talking individualistic creeds, designs, and plans for personal salvation. Then give priority to those who work with young people, sharing regenerative mentoring skills, creating positive, healthy peer-support environments to sustain life. Find master gardeners who live as well as they eat, permaculture designers whose cooperative intensions sync with their regenerative designs, ecosystemic ministers who understand nutrients and toxins can be absorbed through all the senses, from taste through feeling, sound, voices internal and external, sight internal and external, fragrance and stench. Divided and splintering spiritual strains are decaying and dissonant. We need to follow our nutrient string back to our Original Intent, our permacultural story, of Tao harmony, of active peace introducing abundant global love, of a justice that balances mercy for self as interdependent with others, sharing both responsibility and opportunity for reweaving broken communication and community fibers composing our universal Tree of Life.
Your religious, faith, intentional communities, having found their shared cultural root system, are now free to lead our public sectors, and our public sectors can be free to once again lead our humane nature toward eco-logical intension and design informing eco-normic global practice. This is the economic right of nature, to regenerate through the balancing evolution of mutual gratitude between Self and Other, Yang and Yin, Explicating and Implicating Systems, Convex with Concave, as our universal longing folds into our global belonging, within Earth’s nurturing care.
