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The Vision

“Our primary mission is to sow seeds of a life-affirming future at the fertile intersection of the individual, cultural, and more-than-human worlds.”

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 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 a brighter future sourced from a deep love for life that has the power to support conscious re-alignment with generative patterns of thought and deed.

This new world, if it is to become, will be the result of a collective transition from an egocentric life-diminishing worldview to an ecocentric life-affirming one. This worldview transition is both an emanation emerging out of the evolving context of our times and also a strategic design process vectoring towards a more beautiful, equitable, just and harmonized future.  It is an invitation for radical participation in a social-cultural phase-shift into an ecocentric process-relational orientation to life. This process requires 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 pathway must holistically include an understanding of the complex interconnection and interdependence between the unique self, human culture, and more-than-human facets of being. For true stability to collectively emerge and sustain itself, all 3 of these primary domains must continually be developed and harmonized toward increased 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 will be able to permeate and inform all facets of human existence. To that end, we are invited to continually consider how we facilitate soul rooted human development, holistic human cultural exchange, and the re-animation of the more-than-human world of which are interwoven.

The development of an ecocentric worldview is thus an educational and phenomenological 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 this remembrance, it is necessary to design and implement bio-regional hubs (educational centers) of eco-cultural regenesis, 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 worldview that has in large part become entrenched within many our social institutions. While each of these spaces are the emergent process of the earth’s desire to more freely explore the ground of emergent ecocentric visionary unfoldment, we are proposing a kind of scaffolding that can effectively act as a dynamic feedback system for the radical development of all three pillars of the ecocentric evolutionary process (i.e. soul rooted personal development, holistic cultural regeneration, and the re-animation of the more-than-human ecology). By touching and developing all facets of the 3 pillars, as well as the dynamic interchange between them, a hub can serve as a “living symbol” of a new way forward.

Many visionary projects and endeavors emerging across the globe today are tending to the 3 pillars even without formally articulating them or the importance of them. While it is not entirely necessary to have a formal 3 pillar design framework in order to move towards a similar future aspiration, it can effectively support the pace and coherence possible through providing a shared language and teleology necessary for full collaboration. Hubs that effectively develop the 3 pillars will begin to act as living symbols of cultural regenesis through providing essential praxis ground for immersive, holistic, experiential educational development. These praxis hubs will 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. Without a fundamental shift in self-understanding, human relationality, and how we perceive and steward the more-than-human ecological world, 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 evolutionary needs of the collective 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 steward the more-than-human ecological world in life-affirming ways across time.

(Re)Animation of the More-Than-Human World

We, and all 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 our more-than-human kin. This is a process of profound remembrance that life itself is an extraordinary miracle, which we are being invited to participate within in order to support the safeguarding and continued thriving of this miraculous unfoldment to continually unfold over time.

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 conscious 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 align the gifts that life has grown in us with the evolutionary drive of our planet to know and explore itself at greater levels of complexity 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.