The Vision
“Our primary mission is to sow seeds of a life-affirming world at the fertile intersection of the individual, culture, and the more-than-human.”
Ecocentric (R)Evolution
We stand at a collective threshold. Our current world can no longer take us safely and meaningfully into the future. The egocentric separate-self society of our modern times has become pathological and self-destructive. The values and incentives of this industrial growth paradigm are actively undermining our chance of safeguarding a meaningful existence into the future. A new world is asking be born; arising both as a visceral remembrance of a different way of being that is rooted in our ancient past and informed as well by an emergent dream of possibilities for a brighter future that is founded on a deep love for life and a conscious re-alignment with generative patterns of ecological behavior that sources and sustains all things.
This new world if it is to become, will be the result of an effective collective transition from an egocentric life-diminishing worldview to an ecocentric life-affirming one. This worldview transition is both a eminnation emerging out of the evolving context of our times and and strategic conscious design process vectoring towards a more beautiful, equitable, just and vital future. It is an invitation for radical participation in kind of social cultural phase-shift into an ecocentric process-relational orientation to life. This process is requiring and will continue to require our active and conscious participated in its becoming as a kind of collective choice to co-create the more beautiful future the earth is dreaming through us. The design must holistically include an understanding of the complex interconnection and interdependence between the unique self, culture and more-than-human facets of being. For true stability to collectively emerge all 3 of these domains must continually be developed towards increasing depth of wellbeing, quality of experience, and creative actualization. Through this triplicate design process (further enumerated below in our overview of The Three Pillars of Ecocentric Evolution), the dissemination of ecocentric life-affirming values can and will need to permiate all domains of human existence. We must continually consider and reconsider how we develope the unique self in a soul rooted and ecocentric way, how we holistically and continually (re)generate cultural, and how we can ever more fully (re)animate the more-than-human world of which are interwoven.
The development of an ecocentric worldview is thus an educational and phenomonological challenge that cannot be solved by rational or intellectual processes alone; it must also be experienced as a psycho-somatic remembrance that stimulates a reinvigoration for life, as life. This experiential knowing of a new/old way of being/belonging to ourselves, each other, and the world needs to be at the root of all life-affirming development, technological or otherwise. To provide opportunities to feel and play with with this remembrance, it is necessary to design and implement bio-regional hubs (educational centers) of eco-cultural regenisis, which can offer individuals the affective experience of what the application of ecocentric values could look and feel like across different contexts, conditions, scales, and locations.
The birth of these localized semi-autonomus praxis hubs of eco-cultural regenesis is already underway for it the adaptive response of our times to the oppressions of the materialistic, egocentric and life-diminishing world world view that has in large part become intrenched within many our social institutions. While each of these spaces are the emergent process of the earths desire to more freely explore the ground of the emergent ecocentric vision, we are proposing a kind of scaffold that can effectively act as a dynamic feedback system for the radical development of all three pillars of the ecocentric evolutionary process (soul rooted development, cultural regeneration, the reanimation of the more than human). These 3 pillars form the 3 pillars of the oikos (the home) by touching and developing the 3 pillars a hub can serve as a “living symbol” of a new way forward. Many of the hubs emerging across the world are tending to the 3 pillars even without formally articulating it. While it is not entirely necessary to have a formal 3 pillar design in order move towards a similar place, it can effectively support the speed of collective development through providing a shared language and teleology neccessary for collaboration. Hubs that effectively develop the 3 pillars will begin to act as living symbols of cultural regenisis providing a kind praxis ground for truely immersive educational development. These praxis hubs serve as tangible expressions of our human yearning to re-awaken to a meaningful existence through the cultivation of a shared understanding and collective commitment to serve our uniquely human niche as conscious co-creative agents of life’s evolutionary process. We at SEEDS are in service to the sprouting, tending, and propagation of these seeds of a life-affirming pathway forward.
We call ourselves a “school” because we understand ourselves to be actively apprenticing with life itself in order to learn from the diverse ecocentric evolutionary processes that take place within and around us at all times wherever life exists. As students of life, we are striving to remember and (re)learn how life-supporting processes can take place through us and what life is asking of us in these pivotal and unprecedented planetary times. We see the creation of localized praxis hubs of eco-cultural regenesis as the ideal spaces for immersive educational experiences, providing a kind of “living classroom” within a diversity of contexts, scales, and bio-regions.
Below are the three primary Design Aims that serve as scaffolding (“pillars”) for the ecocentric evolutionary process to unfold across place and time.
The 3 Pillars Of Ecocentric Evolution
SEEDS has identified three primary “pillars” that serve as scaffolding for the ecocentric evolutionary process to holistically unfold. Without attention to all three, true ecocentric life-affirming human evolution cannot and will not emerge. These three pillars, further enumerated below, are ways of relating to the three primary domains of human experience: the individual self, the human collective, and the more-than-human world. Without a fundamental shift in self-understanding, human relationality, and how we perceive and steward the more-than-human world (i.e. ecology), a life-sustaining and life-enhancing existence will remain elusive and perpetually impossible for our species.
Soul Rooted Personal Development
Like a seed that roots and sprouts into time and place forever alters the course of evolution, so too, the soul awaits our discovery; awaits the ripe conditions from which we can grow into our fullest self. Soul Rooted Personal Development is the process of uncovering this internal seed, tending the conditions for its growth, and harvesting the fruits to share with our world. It is the process of self-discovery as well as the cultivation of enough wholeness to be able to offer what is uniquely ours as an evolutionary gift within the eco-cultural context of our collective human times. This type of self-knowledge is extraordinarily meaningful, powerful, and transformational. This level of wholeness is radical, integrative, and catalytic. This way of self-expression in service to the collective evolutionary needs of the times is inspired, attuned, and liberatory.
The ecocentric life-affirming world of the future will of necessity be in service to the soul rooted development of the individual human through facilitating the conditions and educational structures for a holistic individuation process to occur throughout the lifespan. For a holistic human culture understands that the cultivation of soul rooted ecocentric adults and elders are the agents and transmitters of eco-cultural values that sustain the culture and steward the health of the more-than-human conditions forever forward into the future. Thus, the individual in the ecocentric world of the future will come to understand their unique qualities (soul) and will be supported to cultivate them as a gift for the continuity and evolution of the culture and the-more-than human world of which they are an irreplaceable part.
Holistic Cultural (Re)Generation
In order for human culture to sustain itself meaningfully across time, it must balance both continuance (stability) and evolution (change) so as to eternally create and re-create the conditions necessary for life and consciousness to exist across deep time. This necessitates the (re)generation of holistic human culture. In simple terms, healthy culture can be defined as the co-created relational facilitation that promotes the maximization of participation, creativity and experience for the greatest number of people across time. Human culture shapes the consciousness of individuals, and due to the ubiquitous impact of human consciousness across the globe, human culture within our current globalized context quite literally shapes the planet at large.
The ecocentric life-affirming culture of the future must grow to be conscious of itself in order to facilitate the ripe conditions for consciousness to land, grow, and evolve within individuals across all three interlocking domains of the human experience (i.e. self, culture, and more-than-human). Thus, human culture must become a healthy living system that is both structured (stable) and adaptive (fluid), so that it has the capacity to facilitate relationships that value and generate diversity, creativity, resilience, harmony, and continuity across time. A healthy human culture produces vibrant ecocentric soul rooted sovereign adults endowed with the skills to relate collaboratively within human culture and engage within and steward the more-than-human world in life-affirming ways across time.
(Re)Animation of the More-Than-Human World
We, and all of our gifts and capacities, have been given to us from life by life in service to life. This process of re-animating the more-than-human world is the process of life awakening back up to itself, inside of itself, in service to the continued unfoldment and animation of itself in all forms into the deep future. This fundamentally necessitates a re-awakening to the gift of life itself as it lives through each of us as individuals, between us as a human culture, and within our relationships with all of life. This is a process of remembrance of the ancient and timeless knowing that life itself is an extraordinary miracle, and that to be conscious within the experience of life is to be able to acknowledge and participate within this miraculous unfoldment.
To re-animate life is to bring life back to all elements of the living cosmos, which allows it to unfold with more dignity, vibrancy, and sacredness across time. As human beings, we are life grown out of billions of years of an evolutionary process that is more mysterious, intelligent, and dynamic than we are even capable of fully comprehending. This life, this planet, each of our ecologies we call home, are all miraculous expressions of the intricate and delicate dance of evolution wildly playing with creative possibilities within an unfathomable expanse of creation. Through our self-reflective consciousness, we are invited to act as stewards of this world, born out of it, and in service to it. What is possible for life and consciousness on this planet when we attune the gifts that life has grown in us with the evolutionary desires of life to know and explore itself ever further into the future? The world is alive, as are we, and through the conscious process of re-animating existence, we are able to live the dream of the cosmos through all that we are and everything that we do.