Within You Without You: Self Regulation as an Expression of Gaian Homeostasis

How Mwe Can Catalyze Quantum Social Change

“We were talking
About the space between us all
And the people
Who hide themselves behind a wall of illusion
Never glimpse the truth, then it's far too late
When they pass away...

When you've seen beyond yourself
Then you may find peace of mind is waiting there
And the time will come when you see we're all one
And life flows on within you and without you.”

George Harrison, “Within You Without You” (Sgt. Pepper)

MWe (We + Me): “Our body-based self — the origin of a Me — is not only connected to others but connected within our relational worlds themselves — a WE — forming the essence of how we belong and our identity.” Dr. Dan Seigel

The Evolution Will Not Be Live-Streamed

If you accept one of the dominant cultural narratives of the climate crisis, then you can perhaps be excused for going on with your life just as you always have. To wit: about 100 corporations are responsible for over 70% of carbon emissions, they control the politicians, they run roughshod over climate talks (COPs), and we are rather powerless to stop them.

Or perhaps you prefer the ‘eat-the-rich’ narrative: the top 1% of the wealthy are responsible for over half of all carbon emissions, and the real problem is exemplified by Taylor Swift jetting to the Super Bowl from Japan to watch her boyfriend play a game.

With either one of these popular narratives, the most you can really do is march with your children in the spectacle of periodic protests, where hundreds of thousands turn out around the world but nothing changes; or, if you’re really heroic, get your ass arrested as a conscientious objector. If you choose instead to simply be super conscientious, and I’m not being facetious here either, you will have become vegan by now - or at least, like me, you’re trending vegan - and you are likely thinking about upgrading your hybrid to an EMV.

Apart from these performative kinds of actions, you most likely tend to block out the many climate alarms going off all the time: last month being the hottest such month on record, last year being the hottest such year on record, continuing the exponential trending of global temps, storms, floods, fires, refugees, authoritarians, and species losses.

After all, you are only one person, right? “It is what it is.” You just have to make the best of it. Psych Defense 101 here. And it’s perfectly understandable if you accept the power-over narrative of “climate change” (a psychologically neutral term).

A third, more sophisticated and knowing narrative, will not only make you feel smarter than most (i.e., dominant), it will ensure that nobody will want to talk to you at dinner parties: math and physics tell the whole story. We have a vanishing budget of global emissions to keep us below 1.5 Degrees Celsius warming in this grand experiment humanity is running on the planet; China keeps adding more coal-fired power plants; and, we’re actually already assured of exceeding 1.5C.

In fact, when scientists are being honest, they admit that “we’re fucked.” And those are not air-quotes, either — go ahead and Google it, if you must. It’s a scientific term now.

I’m here to tell you that these narratives are wrong!

Have I got your interest now?

And no, I’m not a conspiracy theorist, or some pseudo-scientist who is going to tell you it’s just a sun cycle. I even studied thermodynamics in college, completing all the math and science requirements for a degree before switching to communications and becoming an environmental attorney. In that professional capacity, I’ve been following climate science since even before then NASA scientist Dr. James Hansen informed Congress about global warming, in 1988. And I’ve been exclusively focused on the climate crisis and climate psychology for well over a decade now. I don’t think it immodest to claim that what follows are, if nothing else, well-informed opinions.

DISCLAIMER: Please don’t get me wrong. There is surely some truth in all of these competing scientific-materialist narratives. It is the binary thinking reflected in the way they are presented - i.e., as knowledge-based fact-totems - that is dangerously wrong. And that is actually a big part of the meta-crisis, because it collectively triggers our sympathetic nervous systems. Not just individually, but in the body politic as well, we see variations on the themes of fight (polarized debate, authoritarianism), fright (alarmism and compartmentalism), and flight (avoidance behaviors, up to and including addiction and suicide).

I mean think about it: who benefits the most from the abject powerlessness projected by these competing doom-narratives? How do they in any way threaten the status quo??

The 2008 film Wall-e’s depiction is uncomfortably similar to projections made by public health researchers.

Controlling the Competing Narratives

What all these narratives have in common is that they are safely grounded in the defining dominant paradigm of modern society and culture, a meta-paradigm, if you will, because it defines the ways in which our modern world is organized at just about every level. And because our climate stories conform to that same organizing principle, they don’t really have a lot of potential to threaten those powers who’ve become so adept at manipulating that implicate paradigm. This organizing principle and worldview is secret sauce of the power-over structure of societies perpetrated by colonizers ever since the Catholic Church’s ‘Discovery Doctrine’ (1452) granted them moral authority to rule the whole world.

As a life-long eco-activist, I can attest to how easy it is to marginalize those who try to utilize such sub-narratives for political purposes, by e.g. labeling such activists as alarmists, idealists, doomers, etc., which grant others permission to ignore them and/or compartmentalize the information.

The dominant paradigm that gives rise to this power-over structuring of corporate/consumer society and culture is scientific materialism. The resulting binaries arise from Cartesian dualism. “Reality” is thus defined in accordance with the false binaries of self and other, man and nature, civilized and savage/wild, subject and object, journalistic objectivity (vs. ‘advocacy journalism’) and, relative to the climate crisis, what I like to call the reductionist “world as test tube” framework of climate change as described by physics and math.

All the projections of climate science are based upon climate models - which by definition are NOT reality, though we tend to forget this - and all models have to grapple in turn with hidden variables. Climate science, after all, is still a relatively new discipline.

And what is the biggest hidden variable of all? Which variable is itself a hyper-object? World as living organism. Gaia and the all-important phenomenon of homeostasis:

The tendency of a system, especially complex organisms, to maintain internal stability through the coordinated response of its parts to any situation or stimulus that disturbs normal functioning.

Can you begin to grasp here how such a force might challenge the math and physics at such magnitudes of order and disorder?

A simple illustration of this confounding meta-variable would be cloud cover. Increases or decreases in the number and type of clouds would indicate that climate feedback loops are at work cooling or warming the planet, and it is well-nigh impossible for climate scientists to predict future trends in cloud-cover:

“Computer models of Earth’s future climate suffer from uncertainties linked to the challenge of predicting cloud cover and how the effects of clouds might evolve as the planet warms.” (Stanley, 2020)

Another, even more problematic manifestation is the recent, very disturbing news that the Atlantic Ocean conveyor-belt currents that regulate much of our weather are very close to the tipping point of collapse. This catastrophic event is now predicted to happen at anytime in the next 25 years. This is definitely not good news. But consider this: one of the expected impacts from passing this global tipping point will be that much of the Northern Hemisphere... will cool down.

Wait, what?!? How exactly does that figure into the 1.5 - 3.0 Celsius projected temperature rise this century? I’ll leave it to our intrepid doomsayers to travel down that rabbit hole.

The question I pose instead is this: Could collapsing ocean currents, increasing cloud cover and, potentially, increasing volcanic activity all be examples of Gaia striving for homeostasis? What about the dramatic increases in extreme forest fires? Could that represent Gaia’s attempt to replace forests with grasslands, since grass sequesters far more CO2 in far shorter timeframes than forests do?

Suddenly, our physics and math calculations don’t seem to tell the whole story here, do they!?

An Emerging, More Empowering Climate Narrative

The competing narrative that is emerging from Gaia theory, which doesn’t fit roundly into the square hole of scientific-materialism, can be summarized with one catchy slogan, should the climate activists ever get their heads out of their contracted sympathetic nervous system sphincters:

The closest I’ve seen to someone who ‘gets’ this being reported in the mainstream press came very recently from the mouth of Susana Muhamad, Colombia’s environment minister, who is expected to be the Biodiversity Cop16 president when Columbia hosts the next round of negotiations on that critical agreement:

“Although the climate is affecting biodiversity, nature is an answer to the climate crisis. It is not the only answer but it is a very important pillar.”

The difference between this perspective on the poly-crisis and the climate-centered perspective is the simple recognition, which is prevalent in the more progressive countries of South America than in the Global North, that Gaia (a.k.a. Pachamama) is alive, and not some crazy aunt to be locked out of the room when we’re talking solutions.

There was one truly consequential scientist who understood this systems science comprehensively - and no, I’m not talking about James Lovelock here. Maybe you’ve heard of the 30/30 initiative that most of the world’s governments, including the U.S., have signed off on as part of the Biodiversity Conventions? Shorthand for safeguarding 30% of the world’s terrestrial and marine ecosystems by 2030.

What you rarely hear, however, is that this 30/30 goal is but a first step towards the real objective: rewilding and recovering another 20% of degraded ecosystems to achieve 50% functioning ecosystems by 2050, or 50/50. This is based upon the “half-Earth” solution to global warming proposed by E.O. Wilson.

I’m not going to rehash the science of the half-Earth proposal here - you can explore that yourself at the link above and, or you can find the timeline showing how restoring nature reverses global warming, here. I wrote about this with more detailed science and holistic explanations in my 2109 essay A Natural New Deal for Planet Earth.

What I want to convey here, instead, is what it would mean to adopt this more nature-affirming narrative for you personally, as well as for the climate movement more generally. Let’s take these in reverse order.

Science versus Psychology

To date, the environmental movement of the last half-century, and the climate movement of the last twenty years, has based their appeals almost entirely on science and law, and then wondered aloud how it is they have not captured the hearts of everyday citizens. (Right??)

This is why, after 25 years or so of being part of a failed movement, I left the frontlines in 2012 and went back to school to study ecopsychology. I wanted to understand the pathology of our culture and society.

What I came to realize is that what we still call ‘climate change’ is actually biospheric trauma, and that the climate crisis is, at its very root, a crisis of relationship - which is another way of saying it is a spiritual crisis. Indigenous people, of course, have been trying to tell us this for how long? But for mainstream media, ‘trauma’ and ‘spiritual’ are still rather taboo topics. “Climate change” is a very safe term, and science is neutral, giving them the appearance of objectivity.

Objectivity is killing us.

Trying to solve a crisis of relationship with political solutions is like a social worker trying to fix a dysfunctional family dynamic with better toys, appliances, and a new car. “Surely, there must be a technological fix here!”

What is the relationship at issue with the climate crisis? It is the relationship between us all - meaning those who are part of the economic system - and a living planet that we and all living beings are integrally part of, not apart from. To address that dysfunctional relationship collectively, we have to change it at the level of where we live - the ecosystems and bioregions that we interact with from within. Local solutions, in other words, that are people-driven.

How empowering is that?

As Western Science now acknowledges, often the best way to go about this kind of ecological re-set is through “two-eyed solutions” — collaborating with Indigenous people to apply their Traditional Ecological Knowledge of the land and water (TEK), which goes back thousands of years, in a way that still takes advantage of our own scientific understandings (e.g., ecology, biology, hydrology, etc.). Which means, of course, also coming into proper relationship with the survivors of the genocidal traumas our ancestors perpetrated; that is, meaningful reparations of that severely damaged relationship. This approach, in turn, requires great humility on our part, and incredible forgiveness and tolerance from our Indigenous allies. By doing so, however, we strike the most powerful alliance of all — with Gaia.

Just to give you a simple example of how this thorough-going relational approach to resolving the climate crisis actually works, our own science demonstrates that if we worked with the Tribes in the U.S. to restore available grasslands in the Intermountain West and Plains states, by restoring their traditional relationship with wild bison on those degraded grasslands, Gaia would reciprocate by drawing down twice the amount of CO2 that we are currently emitting.

That’s called “reversing global warming,” in case you were wondering. And Yellowstone’s bison are just one of twenty climate keystone species around the world that hold this kind of radically restorative rewilding potential. Even if we don’t realize the full potential of these approaches, it buys us more time for phasing out fossil fuels.

Some good news here: this is actually happening!

I personally worked with Tribal interests and federal land managers in 2022-23 on an initiative to accelerate the tribal-transfers of wild bison from Yellowstone National Park by brokering a co-management agreement, based on federal supremacy and tribal sovereignty, that freezes out hostile state interests (bison compete with cows for forage on public lands). Eleven key tribes held a summit last November, in advance of entering into negotiations with the Park Service, where they came to agreement that any solution needed to be holistic and ecosystem-wide. That means expanding bison herds from the Park into the surrounding ecosystem and, with room to roam, from their current population of 5,000 to 50,000 or more, super-charing the tribal transfer program that is key to both reparations and ecosystem repair.

Those are the only bison that still know how to ‘ReMatriate’ the biodegraded grasslands. So creating a large source population of wild bison to help re-seed other herds throughout the West is critical. This “two-eyed” solution is being led by the first Native American Secretary of Interior in the history of the U.S. - an agency formerly run by cowboys, almost exclusively for cows. Appointing Secretary Haaland is the one thing I am most grateful to Joe Biden for, though there are still those in her department who are trying to undermine the co-management process.

That’s a quick snapshot of what changing relationships looks like on the ground. Not exactly the kind of thing that gets reported on in the climate news, however.

People Power!

So how do we fundamentally change the relationship between people and Gaia? What is your role in all this?

This is where it becomes critical to personally understand Gaia as living organism - breaking the scientific-materialism test tube - and to embrace the idea of homeostasis. If the climate movement would just ditch the dominant (corporate-driven) paradigm in favor of Gaia theory and “Nature is the Answer,” this is exactly the kind of stuff they’d be reaching out to us about, instead of breaking our hearts with pictures of stranded polar bears.

Unfortunately, it seems that the only people who are actively promoting these ideas in the Global North are climate psychologists, who should be in the position of consultants, not leaders. There are just not enough of us to lead a movement to fundamentally change the way humans relate to the planet. We might hold the answers but, try as we might, we don’t have the necessary infrastructure or platforms.

But here’s the empowering part, the part I want you to takeaway from all this systems thinking:

the homeostasis, or self-regulation, of a meta-organism depends in large part on the self-regulation of the lesser organisms that comprise that larger organism’s system of homeostasis.

And that means us - you and me. In Dan Siegel’s terminology, MWe. MWe are all cells in Gaia’s immune defense system, and Mwe can come into alignment with Her by taking response-ability for our own intuitive sense of self-regulation.

What does this mean, as a practical matter?

Speaking personally, I can tell you that it has meant my taking responsibility for my own self-regulation, which makes me a much more effective climate advocate on Gaia’s behalf - the Yellowstone bison example being my offer of proof - as compared to someone who engages politically without becoming an expression of Gaia’s homeostasis (see, e.g., me in my former career as an eco-defense lawyer in the failed environmental movement).

I am nothing without Gaia. By engaging in deep self-regulation with Her, by mindfully entering and maintaining a relationship based on co-regulation and natural coherence, she finds a ready means for expressing Her agency through me.

In fact, after decades of such daily self-regulatory practices in relationship with Gaia, it was an encounter with a heavily pregnant Cougar on the recently liberated Elwha River, a close encounter facilitated by a Lakota healer and friend of mine in January of 2022, that directed me to go work on the Yellowstone bison issue in the first place. And then, after a short vision quest, Cougar sent me another Lakota tribal member - out of the blue - who imparted all the key knowledge that empowered me, as Communications Director for Buffalo Field Campaign, to radically change the sociopolitical narrative around Yellowstone bison in the space of just 9 moons. That led to the Tribal Summit last November, by which time I’d turned the process back over to that same Lakota healer who facilitated the Cougar encounter.

If all this sounds too metaphysical and mysterious to you, that just shows me that (a) you are not an Indigenous person, and (b) you have yet to develop a healthy, self-regulating relationship with Gaia through one of the many embodied lifeways she makes available to us for this purpose. This is something only you have the power to change, and by doing so you and we, in symbiotic relationship with Her and other already activated cells and organelles, both human and non-human, can really begin to unleash Gaia’s latent regenerative power to change the world.

Quantum Phenomenology

“Native American societies have a lived sense of the unity of all living things, as expressed in the Native American phrase ‘all my relations,’ which has been called a prayer and a cosmology in one breath.”

Dr. Leslie Gray, Native American Psychologist, Shamanic Psychotherapist, and founder of Woodfish Institute

When I use the term “self-regulation,” I’m referring to the embodied processes by which we bring ourselves into proper relationship with our own psyche (Greek for ‘soul’), our close others, and with what our wise elders refer to as “all my relations.” That’s the crack where Gaia gets in.

As it turns out, our psyches are embedded in Gaia’s Psychosphere, just as our bodies are embedded in Her biosphere. When we entrain our minds in synch with Her natural rhythms, with the immense power of intention, we open up a feedback loop by which Gaia can express Her agency through our intuitive senses, giving rise to the phenomenon of inspiration. As I always try to tell anyone who has the ears to listen, every idea I’ve had in the last dozen years has come through me, from Gaia, not from me.

Because I’m a panpsychologist and quantum systems thinker, because I compulsively follow these kinds of intuitions down to the bones, I refer collectively to these individual practices as “praxis” — specifically, a form of quantum phenomenology. It’s an idea I’m still working with, and will be presenting this coming Earth Day in the ground-breaking Gaiarcadia Summit. (Please register here, for free, as a show of support.) I’ll go into more detail in the next installment of The Dharma Beat.

Stated more simply, what I’m really talking about here is the whole spectrum of how we achieve the psycho-somatic ‘flow’ state of entrainment, or natural coherence. You can think of it as getting in synch with what is “within you and without you,” as George Harrison so eloquently put it.

Nature is the answer.

For me personally, what works best is inducing various kinds of deep contemplative states, such as “forest bathing,” in which I intentionally slow my mind and body down to the theta states of Gaia’s electromagnetic field. Psychologically, theta states include intuition, meditation, and reverie. Physiologically what is happening with forest bathing is that my mind is being infused by the “loose electrons” from the negative ions prevalent in nature. Physically, I am slowing my pace down to coincide with my breathing - initially, two steps timed to the in-and-out breath, and eventually a complete breath cycle for each individual step. Mind follows breath, and when we drop into open awareness, truth has a chance to emerge - organically.

As a matter of science, we know that all those free electrons entering our lungs, our circulatory systems, and careening around in our brains change the quality of our mental state in a positive way - the so-called “Rocky Mountain High.” It’s the exact opposite of what happens when we are flooded by the positive ions of big cities and, interestingly enough, the Santa Anna winds that coincide with a noticeable rise in crime rates in L.A.

In the forest, I know the trees are providing the oxygen I need in exchange for the extra carbon I exhale that they need. So right away, I’m mindful of being in symbiotic relationship with the trees, who have their own, very slow, shared awareness, emerging from their own psycelium. I’m intentionally co-regulating with that life-energy.

By coming into mindful relationship with the forest in a state of natural coherence, I also can feel my ‘soma’ become umbilically connected to our Mother - through the trees, if you will. Others achieve these same kinds of coherent relational states with the plant medicines provided by the wood wide web, as Indigenous people have done for thousands of years. Trance states induced by drumming and/or dancing have the same effect for many others (especially women, it seems), as can the ‘runner’s high’ in the right locale (beach/forest) with the right intentionality. Etc.

And then, as it turns out, I’m able to recall that coherent mental state on the cushion in my daily dharma practice - or with my hatha yoga practice, or with simple pranayama (e.g., box breathing, an effective form of stress release). The same is true, I’m sure, for many other pathways to entrained states. What they all share in common is a willingness, a powerful intention, to open ourselves up to a larger sense of self - a greater intelligence - that is not limited to just our bodies and brains. As Annie Murphy states in The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain:

Thinking outside the brain means skillfully engaging entities external to our heads... drawing them into our own mental processes. By reaching beyond the brain to recruit these “extra-neural” resources, we are able to focus more intently, comprehend more deeply, and create more imaginatively — to entertain ideas that would be literally unthinkable by the brain alone.

Except that, in my experience, these “ideas” are actually sourced in transmissions from Gaian intelligence. Awareness is an almost magical pathway into shared states of being, coherence, and co-regulation with other-than-self, up to and including Gaia, and these directly received transmissions (gnosis) later emerge as fully formed thoughts and ideas - ‘unthinkable by my brain alone.’

This may not sound like “activism” to you. Right? And in truth, I think of it as something even more powerful: “activation.”

Because once you become activated in this way, you change in relation to others, and connect in different ways to new coherent communities, and you begin to become part of what the sociologist and climate scientist Karen O’Brien calls “quantum social change,” where systemic processes that feed on individual inputs can bring about leaps in social organization when they reach critical mass.

It isn’t incremental change, either - even though it happens one mind at a time. It’s systems change, and can give the appearance of chaotic waters suddenly congealing into the orderly matrix of ice. These kinds of quantum changes occur like the collapse of a wave, building up slowly, slowly, and then changing all at once.

Gaia’s defenders, like the water protectors of Standing Rock, differ from political activists in an important way. As don Juan put it to Carlos Castaneda in The Gateway to Infinity; The Second Gate of Dreaming:

"Warriors are always joyful because their love is unalterable and their beloved, Earth, embraces them and bestows upon them inconceivable gifts... This lovely being, which is alive to its last recesses and understands every feeling, soothed me, it cured me of my pains, and finally, when I had fully understood my love for it, it taught me freedom."

Systems invariably change from within. It’s quite a challenge to try to change them from without. Trying to change systems from the outside, from a posture of superior objectivity, is the scientific-materialist way of being an activist. Similarly, changing relationships also only happens from within that relationship.

The climate crisis is a crisis of relationship through and through. Gaia is a vast, complex system of natural relationships. Whether we realize it or not, we are always already in relationship with Gaia. Remaining unaware of that is the root of the problem. Conversely, becoming aware of that relatedness, becoming activated and cultivating open awareness in mindful relationship with Gaia, that is our superpower.

We are the ones she’s been waiting for.