ENTER
CREATIVE CONSULTANCY X EXPERIENCE DESIGN
EXPLORING HUMAN AND MORE-THAN-HUMAN IMAGINATION AT THE INTERSECTION OF ART AND TECHNOLOGY
BY FELIPE VIVEROS
We often hear about, or experience first-hand, the devastating effects that capitalism has on our communities and the more-than-human world. We seldom hear, though, about its impact on our living memory, the expanse of which has been described as ethnosphere.[1] Capitalism, our current dominant operating system, is not only destroying lives and the living ecosystem that we are part of, it is devouring ancient cultures, their songs, ceremonies and the ancient wisdom they carry. With that loss, comes a death spiral of further devastation – the irretrievable disappearance of precious life forms which are deeply enmeshed within biomes, which in turn are intertwined within larger ecosystems.
The myths and ceremonies that over millennia have allowed people and the more-than-human world to speak to one another are an essential element of our interdependence. Lose them, and we risk the unravelling of life itself.
As a poet and ecologist, my work involves foraging alternative narratives; reflecting and amplifying other ways of knowing and being. I do this as a way to resist and transform the dominant mainstream discourses, with an aim to opening the spaces in which all life on Earth might flourish once more. I have travelled the world since leaving my native South America in my twenties, in search of what the anthropologist Gregory Bateson called 'the pattern that connects.' In over twenty years of exploration I have sought the common archetypes, symbols and metaphors that connect diverse human cultures to one another, seeking to determine whether the relationship to the living Earth we all share has some common ground. I have encountered so many surprising similarities in distant corners of the world, of cultures that are seemingly unrelated to each other yet nonetheless embody very similar symbols and cultural practices. And I have found that, if we look carefully, we discover how deeply entangled our histories are.
One of the things I have found about different cultures from around the world is the shared perception of the mind-based nature of reality. Whether you come from a Buddhist-infused culture, are of Mayan descent or simply have Celtic ancestors, what those ways of knowing share, is the power of thought to shape reality. It is precisely at this intersection that the secret to delaying the apocalypse might lie. What connects modern science and ancient wisdom is our human need to make sense of an ever-changing universe, through careful observation, in an endless and iterative process.
For instance, take the flying rivers phenomenon; a metaphorical description of an occurrence discovered at the turn of the millenium by the Brazilian agronomist and climatologist, Eneas Salati. Salati – known as the father of flying rivers, and an interdisciplinary team of researchers, spent decades studying the dynamic relationships of the living forest of the wildly diverse Amazônia. Having shown how much of the rainfall in the Amazon is generated by the forest itself (between 25 and 75 per cent), Salati’s team showed how the vast volumes of atmospheric moisture released from the Amazon meet the Andes mountains and travel towards the south-central region of South America, forming as they move, a river in the sky.
There is so much more that is not yet known. The Amazon biome is home to one third of all the myriad critters that populate the Earth: vast mycelium networks, the stunning blue morpho butterfly, the panthera onca - more than the human mind can comprehend. Modern scientific notions such as flying rivers are a striking and compelling image of a natural phenomenon that can expand our limited imaginations upwards and outwards. How? What is hidden to the human eye can teach us a lot about our, oftentimes, narrow perception. The mighty Amazon river carries more water than the Congo, the Ganges, the Orinoco, and the Rio Negro combined, but the flying rivers may carry a flow even greater than that.
The vast volumes of water evaporated by the four hundred billion trees, alive in the Amazon biome, form colossal currents of atmospheric humidity that sweep across the sub-continent. They are life givers, bringing the greatest amount of rainfall seen anywhere in the world, reaching as far south as Argentina and Uruguay, and all the way up to Venezuela and Suriname. But for me, the greatest blessing that the flying rivers provide is a sense of awe and wonder for the grand designs that run throughout the other-than-human world.
.
Perhaps you are a mongrel like me, born in Mapuche Indigenous country yet a mix of the coloniser and the local resistance, blending Italian bloodlines and Indigenous ancestors. Wherever you come from, and whatever your heritage, perhaps you are beginning to understand just how much information our ancient songs, ceremonies and forms of wisdom have to tell us about the nature of the human mind. Rather than the survival of the fittest, it is possible that our minds are actually wired for cooperation, empathy and wonder.
The human mind, we are slowly learning, is relational, like some kind of transmitter-and-receiver. The researcher Rupert Sheldrake invites us to think of it like a TV-like device which receives and transmits a signal. The ‘TV program’ doesn’t happen inside the TV, but miles, sometimes continents away, in the broadcasting station. Likewise our individual minds work as if they are wired and belong together – to a far greater mind – the collective consciousness. Ancient cultures have names for this. The Kogi people of Colombia talk about Aluna, the ‘mind of nature’.
Whether or not we are able to tune in to the ‘mind of nature’ or something else is both up to us, and a result of the cultural constructs that condition, create and shape our worldviews. For those of us living in the West, we have largely been socialised out of our relationship with the sacred. We have been taught a creation story based on a scientific worldview that perceives us as separate from nature, and from one another and where the ‘fittest’ will survive, according to popular interpretations of Darwin’s theory of evolution.
It is therefore not a coincidence that we have become the ‘people of the merchandise’ in the words of Yanomami shaman Davi Kopenawa. We are obsessed with brands and status, accumulating stuff surrounding ourselves with commodities in an artificial, deeply unsatisfying and ultimately delusional ‘paradise’.
This phenomenon, though, of placing humans above everything else is not new – it has been part of our evolutionary journey for millennia. It is part of all of us, but it’s now wildly out of control.
The mind virus that currently clouds and dominates our sense-making abilities was detected long ago by First Nations in North America: they call it Wetiko. Wetiko is an Algonquin word for a cannibalistic spirit that is driven by excess and selfish consumption. It tricks its host (every one of us) into believing that cannibalising others’ life force, including the more than human world, is a valid way to live. Wetiko can create all sorts of glitches and short-circuits in our capacity to see ourselves as a part of a dynamic whole, elevating the self-serving ego and severing the ‘TV antenna’ that connects us to a wider, richer experience of life.
It is this illusion of the separation of self from the living world that infects our modern world, ravaging our planet and ourselves. Described as a ‘malignant egophrenia’ by the author Paul Levy, the ego is driven by a malignant cancer-like logic. Acknowledging this mind virus is fundamental if we are to work effectively on the antidote. As Celia Xacriaba, an Indigenous leader told me during the pandemic: 'we must also work on our spiritual immunity, not just our physical immunity.'
.
A colonial term, the etymology of the word ‘Indigenous’ reads as: originated or occurring in a particular place; native. To describe only some people as native is nonsensical. Whether we like it or not we are all native to a particular place, we all belong to a ‘biological niche’, as my father used to say, ' to which we all tend to return sooner or later'.
For those of us in the West, Indigenous epistemologies and ontologies could be a lifeline back to connection. These are people who intimately know the living world, and who over time have developed a vast body of knowledge that has allowed them to adapt, survive and thrive on an ever-changing planet. As a Kogi Mama (elder), told me 'we still know how to dance with the clouds and make the clouds dance'.
In the many years I have spent working with and learning from Indigenous people around the world, I have witnessed an intimacy and rapport with the more than human world that goes beyond words. Not only have these people resisted and survived centuries of colonisation, genocide and ecocide, but in some cases their presence has not just protected, but enhanced the diversity and resilience of their habitats. In other words they have learned how to make the Earth flourish and they flourish with the Earth.
Slowly, many of us are beginning to learn from and be inspired by the people of these life-centric cultures. Living in symbiosis with the natural world may have been one of the keys to our collective evolution, and the continuity of our species depends on us re-learning it before it is too late.
The principles at the heart of Indigenous peoples’ way of life are marked by a deep appreciation and respect for the needs of other species, for understanding of the invisible boundaries that keep the whole ecosystem going; what scientists call positive feedback loops. In order to heal the land, we need to begin by decolonising our minds and bodies. At least, this has been my main practice for the past decade or so. To try to tune in to the past, and my ancestors, more than the future. And from there to weave prayers and activism, into what could become a river of change.
Right now we are in big trouble. As a species we are at a crossroads that is terrifying yet pregnant with possibility. We need some sort of a miracle, or perhaps a quantum leap to a new kind of story or a retelling of the very old ones to steer us away from disaster. Our future depends on what we are able to dream today, and to dream wildly and well we must hold on to the ethnosphere; to the ways and ceremonies of our ancestors. Only they can hold a prayer of remembrance big enough to sustain the dream of turning the world inside out – or at least a little sideways - to a place that feels less uncertain, a place that feels like home.
For me, metaphoric descriptions such as flying rivers open my imagination to the magnificence of the living universe, but they also help create a bridge between the many ways of seeing the world. By expanding our view, we can better understand our place in the world. And only by cultivating our wildest dreams and radical imaginations can manifest a different story for the future. Only then, when we combine technology and wisdom, science and compassion, will we see the flying rivers grow wide across the skies once more.
[1] The term ‘ethnocene’ was coined by the anthropologist Wade Davis and defines 'the sum total of all thoughts and intuitions, myths and beliefs, ideas and inspirations brought into being by the human imagination since the dawn of consciousness,' According to Davis the ethnosphere is humanity's greatest legacy.
Originally published by the Dark Mountain, Vol 22, by the Dark Mountain Project 2022.
IMAGE: Aruma by Viveros F. (2024) - generated using DALL-E AI
We often hear about, or experience first-hand, the devastating effects that capitalism has on our communities and the more-than-human world. We seldom hear, though, about its impact on our living memory, the expanse of which has been described as ethnosphere.[1] Capitalism, our current dominant operating system, is not only destroying lives and the living ecosystem that we are part of, it is devouring ancient cultures, their songs, ceremonies and the ancient wisdom they carry. With that loss, comes a death spiral of further devastation – the irretrievable disappearance of precious life forms which are deeply enmeshed within biomes, which in turn are intertwined within larger ecosystems.
The myths and ceremonies that over millennia have allowed people and the more-than-human world to speak to one another are an essential element of our interdependence. Lose them, and we risk the unravelling of life itself.
As a poet and ecologist, my work involves foraging alternative narratives; reflecting and amplifying other ways of knowing and being. I do this as a way to resist and transform the dominant mainstream discourses, with an aim to opening the spaces in which all life on Earth might flourish once more. I have travelled the world since leaving my native South America in my twenties, in search of what the anthropologist Gregory Bateson called 'the pattern that connects.' In over twenty years of exploration I have sought the common archetypes, symbols and metaphors that connect diverse human cultures to one another, seeking to determine whether the relationship to the living Earth we all share has some common ground. I have encountered so many surprising similarities in distant corners of the world, of cultures that are seemingly unrelated to each other yet nonetheless embody very similar symbols and cultural practices. And I have found that, if we look carefully, we discover how deeply entangled our histories are.
One of the things I have found about different cultures from around the world is the shared perception of the mind-based nature of reality. Whether you come from a Buddhist-infused culture, are of Mayan descent or simply have Celtic ancestors, what those ways of knowing share, is the power of thought to shape reality. It is precisely at this intersection that the secret to delaying the apocalypse might lie. What connects modern science and ancient wisdom is our human need to make sense of an ever-changing universe, through careful observation, in an endless and iterative process.
For instance, take the flying rivers phenomenon; a metaphorical description of an occurrence discovered at the turn of the millenium by the Brazilian agronomist and climatologist, Eneas Salati. Salati – known as the father of flying rivers, and an interdisciplinary team of researchers, spent decades studying the dynamic relationships of the living forest of the wildly diverse Amazônia. Having shown how much of the rainfall in the Amazon is generated by the forest itself (between 25 and 75 per cent), Salati’s team showed how the vast volumes of atmospheric moisture released from the Amazon meet the Andes mountains and travel towards the south-central region of South America, forming as they move, a river in the sky.
There is so much more that is not yet known. The Amazon biome is home to one third of all the myriad critters that populate the Earth: vast mycelium networks, the stunning blue morpho butterfly, the panthera onca - more than the human mind can comprehend. Modern scientific notions such as flying rivers are a striking and compelling image of a natural phenomenon that can expand our limited imaginations upwards and outwards. How? What is hidden to the human eye can teach us a lot about our, oftentimes, narrow perception. The mighty Amazon river carries more water than the Congo, the Ganges, the Orinoco, and the Rio Negro combined, but the flying rivers may carry a flow even greater than that.
The vast volumes of water evaporated by the four hundred billion trees, alive in the Amazon biome, form colossal currents of atmospheric humidity that sweep across the sub-continent. They are life givers, bringing the greatest amount of rainfall seen anywhere in the world, reaching as far south as Argentina and Uruguay, and all the way up to Venezuela and Suriname. But for me, the greatest blessing that the flying rivers provide is a sense of awe and wonder for the grand designs that run throughout the other-than-human world.
.
Perhaps you are a mongrel like me, born in Mapuche Indigenous country yet a mix of the coloniser and the local resistance, blending Italian bloodlines and Indigenous ancestors. Wherever you come from, and whatever your heritage, perhaps you are beginning to understand just how much information our ancient songs, ceremonies and forms of wisdom have to tell us about the nature of the human mind. Rather than the survival of the fittest, it is possible that our minds are actually wired for cooperation, empathy and wonder.
The human mind, we are slowly learning, is relational, like some kind of transmitter-and-receiver. The researcher Rupert Sheldrake invites us to think of it like a TV-like device which receives and transmits a signal. The ‘TV program’ doesn’t happen inside the TV, but miles, sometimes continents away, in the broadcasting station. Likewise our individual minds work as if they are wired and belong together – to a far greater mind – the collective consciousness. Ancient cultures have names for this. The Kogi people of Colombia talk about Aluna, the ‘mind of nature’.
Whether or not we are able to tune in to the ‘mind of nature’ or something else is both up to us, and a result of the cultural constructs that condition, create and shape our worldviews. For those of us living in the West, we have largely been socialised out of our relationship with the sacred. We have been taught a creation story based on a scientific worldview that perceives us as separate from nature, and from one another and where the ‘fittest’ will survive, according to popular interpretations of Darwin’s theory of evolution.
It is therefore not a coincidence that we have become the ‘people of the merchandise’ in the words of Yanomami shaman Davi Kopenawa. We are obsessed with brands and status, accumulating stuff surrounding ourselves with commodities in an artificial, deeply unsatisfying and ultimately delusional ‘paradise’.
This phenomenon, though, of placing humans above everything else is not new – it has been part of our evolutionary journey for millennia. It is part of all of us, but it’s now wildly out of control.
The mind virus that currently clouds and dominates our sense-making abilities was detected long ago by First Nations in North America: they call it Wetiko. Wetiko is an Algonquin word for a cannibalistic spirit that is driven by excess and selfish consumption. It tricks its host (every one of us) into believing that cannibalising others’ life force, including the more than human world, is a valid way to live. Wetiko can create all sorts of glitches and short-circuits in our capacity to see ourselves as a part of a dynamic whole, elevating the self-serving ego and severing the ‘TV antenna’ that connects us to a wider, richer experience of life.
It is this illusion of the separation of self from the living world that infects our modern world, ravaging our planet and ourselves. Described as a ‘malignant egophrenia’ by the author Paul Levy, the ego is driven by a malignant cancer-like logic. Acknowledging this mind virus is fundamental if we are to work effectively on the antidote. As Celia Xacriaba, an Indigenous leader told me during the pandemic: 'we must also work on our spiritual immunity, not just our physical immunity.'
.
A colonial term, the etymology of the word ‘Indigenous’ reads as: originated or occurring in a particular place; native. To describe only some people as native is nonsensical. Whether we like it or not we are all native to a particular place, we all belong to a ‘biological niche’, as my father used to say, ' to which we all tend to return sooner or later'.
For those of us in the West, Indigenous epistemologies and ontologies could be a lifeline back to connection. These are people who intimately know the living world, and who over time have developed a vast body of knowledge that has allowed them to adapt, survive and thrive on an ever-changing planet. As a Kogi Mama (elder), told me 'we still know how to dance with the clouds and make the clouds dance'.
In the many years I have spent working with and learning from Indigenous people around the world, I have witnessed an intimacy and rapport with the more than human world that goes beyond words. Not only have these people resisted and survived centuries of colonisation, genocide and ecocide, but in some cases their presence has not just protected, but enhanced the diversity and resilience of their habitats. In other words they have learned how to make the Earth flourish and they flourish with the Earth.
Slowly, many of us are beginning to learn from and be inspired by the people of these life-centric cultures. Living in symbiosis with the natural world may have been one of the keys to our collective evolution, and the continuity of our species depends on us re-learning it before it is too late.
The principles at the heart of Indigenous peoples’ way of life are marked by a deep appreciation and respect for the needs of other species, for understanding of the invisible boundaries that keep the whole ecosystem going; what scientists call positive feedback loops. In order to heal the land, we need to begin by decolonising our minds and bodies. At least, this has been my main practice for the past decade or so. To try to tune in to the past, and my ancestors, more than the future. And from there to weave prayers and activism, into what could become a river of change.
Right now we are in big trouble. As a species we are at a crossroads that is terrifying yet pregnant with possibility. We need some sort of a miracle, or perhaps a quantum leap to a new kind of story or a retelling of the very old ones to steer us away from disaster. Our future depends on what we are able to dream today, and to dream wildly and well we must hold on to the ethnosphere; to the ways and ceremonies of our ancestors. Only they can hold a prayer of remembrance big enough to sustain the dream of turning the world inside out – or at least a little sideways - to a place that feels less uncertain, a place that feels like home.
For me, metaphoric descriptions such as flying rivers open my imagination to the magnificence of the living universe, but they also help create a bridge between the many ways of seeing the world. By expanding our view, we can better understand our place in the world. And only by cultivating our wildest dreams and radical imaginations can manifest a different story for the future. Only then, when we combine technology and wisdom, science and compassion, will we see the flying rivers grow wide across the skies once more.
[1] The term ‘ethnocene’ was coined by the anthropologist Wade Davis and defines 'the sum total of all thoughts and intuitions, myths and beliefs, ideas and inspirations brought into being by the human imagination since the dawn of consciousness,' According to Davis the ethnosphere is humanity's greatest legacy.
Originally published by the Dark Mountain, Vol 22, by the Dark Mountain Project 2022.
IMAGE: Aruma by Viveros F. (2024) - generated using DALL-E AI
Felipe Viveros is a writer, researcher, artist, ecologist and strategist. His work focuses on the intersection of digital storytelling, policy and systems change. He is the founder of not-for-profit agency for systems change Culture Hack Labs.
BY FELIPE VIVEROS
We often hear about, or experience first-hand, the devastating effects that capitalism has on our communities and the more-than-human world. We seldom hear, though, about its impact on our living memory, the expanse of which has been described as ethnosphere.[1] Capitalism, our current dominant operating system, is not only destroying lives and the living ecosystem that we are part of, it is devouring ancient cultures, their songs, ceremonies and the ancient wisdom they carry. With that loss, comes a death spiral of further devastation – the irretrievable disappearance of precious life forms which are deeply enmeshed within biomes, which in turn are intertwined within larger ecosystems.
The myths and ceremonies that over millennia have allowed people and the more-than-human world to speak to one another are an essential element of our interdependence. Lose them, and we risk the unravelling of life itself.
As a poet and ecologist, my work involves foraging alternative narratives; reflecting and amplifying other ways of knowing and being. I do this as a way to resist and transform the dominant mainstream discourses, with an aim to opening the spaces in which all life on Earth might flourish once more. I have travelled the world since leaving my native South America in my twenties, in search of what the anthropologist Gregory Bateson called 'the pattern that connects.' In over twenty years of exploration I have sought the common archetypes, symbols and metaphors that connect diverse human cultures to one another, seeking to determine whether the relationship to the living Earth we all share has some common ground. I have encountered so many surprising similarities in distant corners of the world, of cultures that are seemingly unrelated to each other yet nonetheless embody very similar symbols and cultural practices. And I have found that, if we look carefully, we discover how deeply entangled our histories are.
One of the things I have found about different cultures from around the world is the shared perception of the mind-based nature of reality. Whether you come from a Buddhist-infused culture, are of Mayan descent or simply have Celtic ancestors, what those ways of knowing share, is the power of thought to shape reality. It is precisely at this intersection that the secret to delaying the apocalypse might lie. What connects modern science and ancient wisdom is our human need to make sense of an ever-changing universe, through careful observation, in an endless and iterative process.
For instance, take the flying rivers phenomenon; a metaphorical description of an occurrence discovered at the turn of the millenium by the Brazilian agronomist and climatologist, Eneas Salati. Salati – known as the father of flying rivers, and an interdisciplinary team of researchers, spent decades studying the dynamic relationships of the living forest of the wildly diverse Amazônia. Having shown how much of the rainfall in the Amazon is generated by the forest itself (between 25 and 75 per cent), Salati’s team showed how the vast volumes of atmospheric moisture released from the Amazon meet the Andes mountains and travel towards the south-central region of South America, forming as they move, a river in the sky.
There is so much more that is not yet known. The Amazon biome is home to one third of all the myriad critters that populate the Earth: vast mycelium networks, the stunning blue morpho butterfly, the panthera onca - more than the human mind can comprehend. Modern scientific notions such as flying rivers are a striking and compelling image of a natural phenomenon that can expand our limited imaginations upwards and outwards. How? What is hidden to the human eye can teach us a lot about our, oftentimes, narrow perception. The mighty Amazon river carries more water than the Congo, the Ganges, the Orinoco, and the Rio Negro combined, but the flying rivers may carry a flow even greater than that.
The vast volumes of water evaporated by the four hundred billion trees, alive in the Amazon biome, form colossal currents of atmospheric humidity that sweep across the sub-continent. They are life givers, bringing the greatest amount of rainfall seen anywhere in the world, reaching as far south as Argentina and Uruguay, and all the way up to Venezuela and Suriname. But for me, the greatest blessing that the flying rivers provide is a sense of awe and wonder for the grand designs that run throughout the other-than-human world.
.
Perhaps you are a mongrel like me, born in Mapuche Indigenous country yet a mix of the coloniser and the local resistance, blending Italian bloodlines and Indigenous ancestors. Wherever you come from, and whatever your heritage, perhaps you are beginning to understand just how much information our ancient songs, ceremonies and forms of wisdom have to tell us about the nature of the human mind. Rather than the survival of the fittest, it is possible that our minds are actually wired for cooperation, empathy and wonder.
The human mind, we are slowly learning, is relational, like some kind of transmitter-and-receiver. The researcher Rupert Sheldrake invites us to think of it like a TV-like device which receives and transmits a signal. The ‘TV program’ doesn’t happen inside the TV, but miles, sometimes continents away, in the broadcasting station. Likewise our individual minds work as if they are wired and belong together – to a far greater mind – the collective consciousness. Ancient cultures have names for this. The Kogi people of Colombia talk about Aluna, the ‘mind of nature’.
Whether or not we are able to tune in to the ‘mind of nature’ or something else is both up to us, and a result of the cultural constructs that condition, create and shape our worldviews. For those of us living in the West, we have largely been socialised out of our relationship with the sacred. We have been taught a creation story based on a scientific worldview that perceives us as separate from nature, and from one another and where the ‘fittest’ will survive, according to popular interpretations of Darwin’s theory of evolution.
It is therefore not a coincidence that we have become the ‘people of the merchandise’ in the words of Yanomami shaman Davi Kopenawa. We are obsessed with brands and status, accumulating stuff surrounding ourselves with commodities in an artificial, deeply unsatisfying and ultimately delusional ‘paradise’.
This phenomenon, though, of placing humans above everything else is not new – it has been part of our evolutionary journey for millennia. It is part of all of us, but it’s now wildly out of control.
The mind virus that currently clouds and dominates our sense-making abilities was detected long ago by First Nations in North America: they call it Wetiko. Wetiko is an Algonquin word for a cannibalistic spirit that is driven by excess and selfish consumption. It tricks its host (every one of us) into believing that cannibalising others’ life force, including the more than human world, is a valid way to live. Wetiko can create all sorts of glitches and short-circuits in our capacity to see ourselves as a part of a dynamic whole, elevating the self-serving ego and severing the ‘TV antenna’ that connects us to a wider, richer experience of life.
It is this illusion of the separation of self from the living world that infects our modern world, ravaging our planet and ourselves. Described as a ‘malignant egophrenia’ by the author Paul Levy, the ego is driven by a malignant cancer-like logic. Acknowledging this mind virus is fundamental if we are to work effectively on the antidote. As Celia Xacriaba, an Indigenous leader told me during the pandemic: 'we must also work on our spiritual immunity, not just our physical immunity.'
.
A colonial term, the etymology of the word ‘Indigenous’ reads as: originated or occurring in a particular place; native. To describe only some people as native is nonsensical. Whether we like it or not we are all native to a particular place, we all belong to a ‘biological niche’, as my father used to say, ' to which we all tend to return sooner or later'.
For those of us in the West, Indigenous epistemologies and ontologies could be a lifeline back to connection. These are people who intimately know the living world, and who over time have developed a vast body of knowledge that has allowed them to adapt, survive and thrive on an ever-changing planet. As a Kogi Mama (elder), told me 'we still know how to dance with the clouds and make the clouds dance'.
In the many years I have spent working with and learning from Indigenous people around the world, I have witnessed an intimacy and rapport with the more than human world that goes beyond words. Not only have these people resisted and survived centuries of colonisation, genocide and ecocide, but in some cases their presence has not just protected, but enhanced the diversity and resilience of their habitats. In other words they have learned how to make the Earth flourish and they flourish with the Earth.
Slowly, many of us are beginning to learn from and be inspired by the people of these life-centric cultures. Living in symbiosis with the natural world may have been one of the keys to our collective evolution, and the continuity of our species depends on us re-learning it before it is too late.
The principles at the heart of Indigenous peoples’ way of life are marked by a deep appreciation and respect for the needs of other species, for understanding of the invisible boundaries that keep the whole ecosystem going; what scientists call positive feedback loops. In order to heal the land, we need to begin by decolonising our minds and bodies. At least, this has been my main practice for the past decade or so. To try to tune in to the past, and my ancestors, more than the future. And from there to weave prayers and activism, into what could become a river of change.
Right now we are in big trouble. As a species we are at a crossroads that is terrifying yet pregnant with possibility. We need some sort of a miracle, or perhaps a quantum leap to a new kind of story or a retelling of the very old ones to steer us away from disaster. Our future depends on what we are able to dream today, and to dream wildly and well we must hold on to the ethnosphere; to the ways and ceremonies of our ancestors. Only they can hold a prayer of remembrance big enough to sustain the dream of turning the world inside out – or at least a little sideways - to a place that feels less uncertain, a place that feels like home.
For me, metaphoric descriptions such as flying rivers open my imagination to the magnificence of the living universe, but they also help create a bridge between the many ways of seeing the world. By expanding our view, we can better understand our place in the world. And only by cultivating our wildest dreams and radical imaginations can manifest a different story for the future. Only then, when we combine technology and wisdom, science and compassion, will we see the flying rivers grow wide across the skies once more.
[1] The term ‘ethnocene’ was coined by the anthropologist Wade Davis and defines 'the sum total of all thoughts and intuitions, myths and beliefs, ideas and inspirations brought into being by the human imagination since the dawn of consciousness,' According to Davis the ethnosphere is humanity's greatest legacy.
Originally published by the Dark Mountain, Vol 22, by the Dark Mountain Project 2022.
IMAGE: Aruma by Viveros F. (2024) - generated using DALL-E AI
We often hear about, or experience first-hand, the devastating effects that capitalism has on our communities and the more-than-human world. We seldom hear, though, about its impact on our living memory, the expanse of which has been described as ethnosphere.[1] Capitalism, our current dominant operating system, is not only destroying lives and the living ecosystem that we are part of, it is devouring ancient cultures, their songs, ceremonies and the ancient wisdom they carry. With that loss, comes a death spiral of further devastation – the irretrievable disappearance of precious life forms which are deeply enmeshed within biomes, which in turn are intertwined within larger ecosystems.
The myths and ceremonies that over millennia have allowed people and the more-than-human world to speak to one another are an essential element of our interdependence. Lose them, and we risk the unravelling of life itself.
As a poet and ecologist, my work involves foraging alternative narratives; reflecting and amplifying other ways of knowing and being. I do this as a way to resist and transform the dominant mainstream discourses, with an aim to opening the spaces in which all life on Earth might flourish once more. I have travelled the world since leaving my native South America in my twenties, in search of what the anthropologist Gregory Bateson called 'the pattern that connects.' In over twenty years of exploration I have sought the common archetypes, symbols and metaphors that connect diverse human cultures to one another, seeking to determine whether the relationship to the living Earth we all share has some common ground. I have encountered so many surprising similarities in distant corners of the world, of cultures that are seemingly unrelated to each other yet nonetheless embody very similar symbols and cultural practices. And I have found that, if we look carefully, we discover how deeply entangled our histories are.
One of the things I have found about different cultures from around the world is the shared perception of the mind-based nature of reality. Whether you come from a Buddhist-infused culture, are of Mayan descent or simply have Celtic ancestors, what those ways of knowing share, is the power of thought to shape reality. It is precisely at this intersection that the secret to delaying the apocalypse might lie. What connects modern science and ancient wisdom is our human need to make sense of an ever-changing universe, through careful observation, in an endless and iterative process.
For instance, take the flying rivers phenomenon; a metaphorical description of an occurrence discovered at the turn of the millenium by the Brazilian agronomist and climatologist, Eneas Salati. Salati – known as the father of flying rivers, and an interdisciplinary team of researchers, spent decades studying the dynamic relationships of the living forest of the wildly diverse Amazônia. Having shown how much of the rainfall in the Amazon is generated by the forest itself (between 25 and 75 per cent), Salati’s team showed how the vast volumes of atmospheric moisture released from the Amazon meet the Andes mountains and travel towards the south-central region of South America, forming as they move, a river in the sky.
There is so much more that is not yet known. The Amazon biome is home to one third of all the myriad critters that populate the Earth: vast mycelium networks, the stunning blue morpho butterfly, the panthera onca - more than the human mind can comprehend. Modern scientific notions such as flying rivers are a striking and compelling image of a natural phenomenon that can expand our limited imaginations upwards and outwards. How? What is hidden to the human eye can teach us a lot about our, oftentimes, narrow perception. The mighty Amazon river carries more water than the Congo, the Ganges, the Orinoco, and the Rio Negro combined, but the flying rivers may carry a flow even greater than that.
The vast volumes of water evaporated by the four hundred billion trees, alive in the Amazon biome, form colossal currents of atmospheric humidity that sweep across the sub-continent. They are life givers, bringing the greatest amount of rainfall seen anywhere in the world, reaching as far south as Argentina and Uruguay, and all the way up to Venezuela and Suriname. But for me, the greatest blessing that the flying rivers provide is a sense of awe and wonder for the grand designs that run throughout the other-than-human world.
.
Perhaps you are a mongrel like me, born in Mapuche Indigenous country yet a mix of the coloniser and the local resistance, blending Italian bloodlines and Indigenous ancestors. Wherever you come from, and whatever your heritage, perhaps you are beginning to understand just how much information our ancient songs, ceremonies and forms of wisdom have to tell us about the nature of the human mind. Rather than the survival of the fittest, it is possible that our minds are actually wired for cooperation, empathy and wonder.
The human mind, we are slowly learning, is relational, like some kind of transmitter-and-receiver. The researcher Rupert Sheldrake invites us to think of it like a TV-like device which receives and transmits a signal. The ‘TV program’ doesn’t happen inside the TV, but miles, sometimes continents away, in the broadcasting station. Likewise our individual minds work as if they are wired and belong together – to a far greater mind – the collective consciousness. Ancient cultures have names for this. The Kogi people of Colombia talk about Aluna, the ‘mind of nature’.
Whether or not we are able to tune in to the ‘mind of nature’ or something else is both up to us, and a result of the cultural constructs that condition, create and shape our worldviews. For those of us living in the West, we have largely been socialised out of our relationship with the sacred. We have been taught a creation story based on a scientific worldview that perceives us as separate from nature, and from one another and where the ‘fittest’ will survive, according to popular interpretations of Darwin’s theory of evolution.
It is therefore not a coincidence that we have become the ‘people of the merchandise’ in the words of Yanomami shaman Davi Kopenawa. We are obsessed with brands and status, accumulating stuff surrounding ourselves with commodities in an artificial, deeply unsatisfying and ultimately delusional ‘paradise’.
This phenomenon, though, of placing humans above everything else is not new – it has been part of our evolutionary journey for millennia. It is part of all of us, but it’s now wildly out of control.
The mind virus that currently clouds and dominates our sense-making abilities was detected long ago by First Nations in North America: they call it Wetiko. Wetiko is an Algonquin word for a cannibalistic spirit that is driven by excess and selfish consumption. It tricks its host (every one of us) into believing that cannibalising others’ life force, including the more than human world, is a valid way to live. Wetiko can create all sorts of glitches and short-circuits in our capacity to see ourselves as a part of a dynamic whole, elevating the self-serving ego and severing the ‘TV antenna’ that connects us to a wider, richer experience of life.
It is this illusion of the separation of self from the living world that infects our modern world, ravaging our planet and ourselves. Described as a ‘malignant egophrenia’ by the author Paul Levy, the ego is driven by a malignant cancer-like logic. Acknowledging this mind virus is fundamental if we are to work effectively on the antidote. As Celia Xacriaba, an Indigenous leader told me during the pandemic: 'we must also work on our spiritual immunity, not just our physical immunity.'
.
A colonial term, the etymology of the word ‘Indigenous’ reads as: originated or occurring in a particular place; native. To describe only some people as native is nonsensical. Whether we like it or not we are all native to a particular place, we all belong to a ‘biological niche’, as my father used to say, ' to which we all tend to return sooner or later'.
For those of us in the West, Indigenous epistemologies and ontologies could be a lifeline back to connection. These are people who intimately know the living world, and who over time have developed a vast body of knowledge that has allowed them to adapt, survive and thrive on an ever-changing planet. As a Kogi Mama (elder), told me 'we still know how to dance with the clouds and make the clouds dance'.
In the many years I have spent working with and learning from Indigenous people around the world, I have witnessed an intimacy and rapport with the more than human world that goes beyond words. Not only have these people resisted and survived centuries of colonisation, genocide and ecocide, but in some cases their presence has not just protected, but enhanced the diversity and resilience of their habitats. In other words they have learned how to make the Earth flourish and they flourish with the Earth.
Slowly, many of us are beginning to learn from and be inspired by the people of these life-centric cultures. Living in symbiosis with the natural world may have been one of the keys to our collective evolution, and the continuity of our species depends on us re-learning it before it is too late.
The principles at the heart of Indigenous peoples’ way of life are marked by a deep appreciation and respect for the needs of other species, for understanding of the invisible boundaries that keep the whole ecosystem going; what scientists call positive feedback loops. In order to heal the land, we need to begin by decolonising our minds and bodies. At least, this has been my main practice for the past decade or so. To try to tune in to the past, and my ancestors, more than the future. And from there to weave prayers and activism, into what could become a river of change.
Right now we are in big trouble. As a species we are at a crossroads that is terrifying yet pregnant with possibility. We need some sort of a miracle, or perhaps a quantum leap to a new kind of story or a retelling of the very old ones to steer us away from disaster. Our future depends on what we are able to dream today, and to dream wildly and well we must hold on to the ethnosphere; to the ways and ceremonies of our ancestors. Only they can hold a prayer of remembrance big enough to sustain the dream of turning the world inside out – or at least a little sideways - to a place that feels less uncertain, a place that feels like home.
For me, metaphoric descriptions such as flying rivers open my imagination to the magnificence of the living universe, but they also help create a bridge between the many ways of seeing the world. By expanding our view, we can better understand our place in the world. And only by cultivating our wildest dreams and radical imaginations can manifest a different story for the future. Only then, when we combine technology and wisdom, science and compassion, will we see the flying rivers grow wide across the skies once more.
[1] The term ‘ethnocene’ was coined by the anthropologist Wade Davis and defines 'the sum total of all thoughts and intuitions, myths and beliefs, ideas and inspirations brought into being by the human imagination since the dawn of consciousness,' According to Davis the ethnosphere is humanity's greatest legacy.
Originally published by the Dark Mountain, Vol 22, by the Dark Mountain Project 2022.
IMAGE: Aruma by Viveros F. (2024) - generated using DALL-E AI
Felipe Viveros is a writer, researcher, artist, ecologist and strategist. His work focuses on the intersection of digital storytelling, policy and systems change. He is the founder of not-for-profit agency for systems change Culture Hack Labs.
BY FELIPE VIVEROS
We often hear about, or experience first-hand, the devastating effects that capitalism has on our communities and the more-than-human world. We seldom hear, though, about its impact on our living memory, the expanse of which has been described as ethnosphere.[1] Capitalism, our current dominant operating system, is not only destroying lives and the living ecosystem that we are part of, it is devouring ancient cultures, their songs, ceremonies and the ancient wisdom they carry. With that loss, comes a death spiral of further devastation – the irretrievable disappearance of precious life forms which are deeply enmeshed within biomes, which in turn are intertwined within larger ecosystems.
The myths and ceremonies that over millennia have allowed people and the more-than-human world to speak to one another are an essential element of our interdependence. Lose them, and we risk the unravelling of life itself.
As a poet and ecologist, my work involves foraging alternative narratives; reflecting and amplifying other ways of knowing and being. I do this as a way to resist and transform the dominant mainstream discourses, with an aim to opening the spaces in which all life on Earth might flourish once more. I have travelled the world since leaving my native South America in my twenties, in search of what the anthropologist Gregory Bateson called 'the pattern that connects.' In over twenty years of exploration I have sought the common archetypes, symbols and metaphors that connect diverse human cultures to one another, seeking to determine whether the relationship to the living Earth we all share has some common ground. I have encountered so many surprising similarities in distant corners of the world, of cultures that are seemingly unrelated to each other yet nonetheless embody very similar symbols and cultural practices. And I have found that, if we look carefully, we discover how deeply entangled our histories are.
One of the things I have found about different cultures from around the world is the shared perception of the mind-based nature of reality. Whether you come from a Buddhist-infused culture, are of Mayan descent or simply have Celtic ancestors, what those ways of knowing share, is the power of thought to shape reality. It is precisely at this intersection that the secret to delaying the apocalypse might lie. What connects modern science and ancient wisdom is our human need to make sense of an ever-changing universe, through careful observation, in an endless and iterative process.
For instance, take the flying rivers phenomenon; a metaphorical description of an occurrence discovered at the turn of the millenium by the Brazilian agronomist and climatologist, Eneas Salati. Salati – known as the father of flying rivers, and an interdisciplinary team of researchers, spent decades studying the dynamic relationships of the living forest of the wildly diverse Amazônia. Having shown how much of the rainfall in the Amazon is generated by the forest itself (between 25 and 75 per cent), Salati’s team showed how the vast volumes of atmospheric moisture released from the Amazon meet the Andes mountains and travel towards the south-central region of South America, forming as they move, a river in the sky.
There is so much more that is not yet known. The Amazon biome is home to one third of all the myriad critters that populate the Earth: vast mycelium networks, the stunning blue morpho butterfly, the panthera onca - more than the human mind can comprehend. Modern scientific notions such as flying rivers are a striking and compelling image of a natural phenomenon that can expand our limited imaginations upwards and outwards. How? What is hidden to the human eye can teach us a lot about our, oftentimes, narrow perception. The mighty Amazon river carries more water than the Congo, the Ganges, the Orinoco, and the Rio Negro combined, but the flying rivers may carry a flow even greater than that.
The vast volumes of water evaporated by the four hundred billion trees, alive in the Amazon biome, form colossal currents of atmospheric humidity that sweep across the sub-continent. They are life givers, bringing the greatest amount of rainfall seen anywhere in the world, reaching as far south as Argentina and Uruguay, and all the way up to Venezuela and Suriname. But for me, the greatest blessing that the flying rivers provide is a sense of awe and wonder for the grand designs that run throughout the other-than-human world.
.
Perhaps you are a mongrel like me, born in Mapuche Indigenous country yet a mix of the coloniser and the local resistance, blending Italian bloodlines and Indigenous ancestors. Wherever you come from, and whatever your heritage, perhaps you are beginning to understand just how much information our ancient songs, ceremonies and forms of wisdom have to tell us about the nature of the human mind. Rather than the survival of the fittest, it is possible that our minds are actually wired for cooperation, empathy and wonder.
The human mind, we are slowly learning, is relational, like some kind of transmitter-and-receiver. The researcher Rupert Sheldrake invites us to think of it like a TV-like device which receives and transmits a signal. The ‘TV program’ doesn’t happen inside the TV, but miles, sometimes continents away, in the broadcasting station. Likewise our individual minds work as if they are wired and belong together – to a far greater mind – the collective consciousness. Ancient cultures have names for this. The Kogi people of Colombia talk about Aluna, the ‘mind of nature’.
Whether or not we are able to tune in to the ‘mind of nature’ or something else is both up to us, and a result of the cultural constructs that condition, create and shape our worldviews. For those of us living in the West, we have largely been socialised out of our relationship with the sacred. We have been taught a creation story based on a scientific worldview that perceives us as separate from nature, and from one another and where the ‘fittest’ will survive, according to popular interpretations of Darwin’s theory of evolution.
It is therefore not a coincidence that we have become the ‘people of the merchandise’ in the words of Yanomami shaman Davi Kopenawa. We are obsessed with brands and status, accumulating stuff surrounding ourselves with commodities in an artificial, deeply unsatisfying and ultimately delusional ‘paradise’.
This phenomenon, though, of placing humans above everything else is not new – it has been part of our evolutionary journey for millennia. It is part of all of us, but it’s now wildly out of control.
The mind virus that currently clouds and dominates our sense-making abilities was detected long ago by First Nations in North America: they call it Wetiko. Wetiko is an Algonquin word for a cannibalistic spirit that is driven by excess and selfish consumption. It tricks its host (every one of us) into believing that cannibalising others’ life force, including the more than human world, is a valid way to live. Wetiko can create all sorts of glitches and short-circuits in our capacity to see ourselves as a part of a dynamic whole, elevating the self-serving ego and severing the ‘TV antenna’ that connects us to a wider, richer experience of life.
It is this illusion of the separation of self from the living world that infects our modern world, ravaging our planet and ourselves. Described as a ‘malignant egophrenia’ by the author Paul Levy, the ego is driven by a malignant cancer-like logic. Acknowledging this mind virus is fundamental if we are to work effectively on the antidote. As Celia Xacriaba, an Indigenous leader told me during the pandemic: 'we must also work on our spiritual immunity, not just our physical immunity.'
.
A colonial term, the etymology of the word ‘Indigenous’ reads as: originated or occurring in a particular place; native. To describe only some people as native is nonsensical. Whether we like it or not we are all native to a particular place, we all belong to a ‘biological niche’, as my father used to say, ' to which we all tend to return sooner or later'.
For those of us in the West, Indigenous epistemologies and ontologies could be a lifeline back to connection. These are people who intimately know the living world, and who over time have developed a vast body of knowledge that has allowed them to adapt, survive and thrive on an ever-changing planet. As a Kogi Mama (elder), told me 'we still know how to dance with the clouds and make the clouds dance'.
In the many years I have spent working with and learning from Indigenous people around the world, I have witnessed an intimacy and rapport with the more than human world that goes beyond words. Not only have these people resisted and survived centuries of colonisation, genocide and ecocide, but in some cases their presence has not just protected, but enhanced the diversity and resilience of their habitats. In other words they have learned how to make the Earth flourish and they flourish with the Earth.
Slowly, many of us are beginning to learn from and be inspired by the people of these life-centric cultures. Living in symbiosis with the natural world may have been one of the keys to our collective evolution, and the continuity of our species depends on us re-learning it before it is too late.
The principles at the heart of Indigenous peoples’ way of life are marked by a deep appreciation and respect for the needs of other species, for understanding of the invisible boundaries that keep the whole ecosystem going; what scientists call positive feedback loops. In order to heal the land, we need to begin by decolonising our minds and bodies. At least, this has been my main practice for the past decade or so. To try to tune in to the past, and my ancestors, more than the future. And from there to weave prayers and activism, into what could become a river of change.
Right now we are in big trouble. As a species we are at a crossroads that is terrifying yet pregnant with possibility. We need some sort of a miracle, or perhaps a quantum leap to a new kind of story or a retelling of the very old ones to steer us away from disaster. Our future depends on what we are able to dream today, and to dream wildly and well we must hold on to the ethnosphere; to the ways and ceremonies of our ancestors. Only they can hold a prayer of remembrance big enough to sustain the dream of turning the world inside out – or at least a little sideways - to a place that feels less uncertain, a place that feels like home.
For me, metaphoric descriptions such as flying rivers open my imagination to the magnificence of the living universe, but they also help create a bridge between the many ways of seeing the world. By expanding our view, we can better understand our place in the world. And only by cultivating our wildest dreams and radical imaginations can manifest a different story for the future. Only then, when we combine technology and wisdom, science and compassion, will we see the flying rivers grow wide across the skies once more.
[1] The term ‘ethnocene’ was coined by the anthropologist Wade Davis and defines 'the sum total of all thoughts and intuitions, myths and beliefs, ideas and inspirations brought into being by the human imagination since the dawn of consciousness,' According to Davis the ethnosphere is humanity's greatest legacy.
Originally published by the Dark Mountain, Vol 22, by the Dark Mountain Project 2022.
IMAGE: Aruma by Viveros F. (2024) - generated using DALL-E AI
We often hear about, or experience first-hand, the devastating effects that capitalism has on our communities and the more-than-human world. We seldom hear, though, about its impact on our living memory, the expanse of which has been described as ethnosphere.[1] Capitalism, our current dominant operating system, is not only destroying lives and the living ecosystem that we are part of, it is devouring ancient cultures, their songs, ceremonies and the ancient wisdom they carry. With that loss, comes a death spiral of further devastation – the irretrievable disappearance of precious life forms which are deeply enmeshed within biomes, which in turn are intertwined within larger ecosystems.
The myths and ceremonies that over millennia have allowed people and the more-than-human world to speak to one another are an essential element of our interdependence. Lose them, and we risk the unravelling of life itself.
As a poet and ecologist, my work involves foraging alternative narratives; reflecting and amplifying other ways of knowing and being. I do this as a way to resist and transform the dominant mainstream discourses, with an aim to opening the spaces in which all life on Earth might flourish once more. I have travelled the world since leaving my native South America in my twenties, in search of what the anthropologist Gregory Bateson called 'the pattern that connects.' In over twenty years of exploration I have sought the common archetypes, symbols and metaphors that connect diverse human cultures to one another, seeking to determine whether the relationship to the living Earth we all share has some common ground. I have encountered so many surprising similarities in distant corners of the world, of cultures that are seemingly unrelated to each other yet nonetheless embody very similar symbols and cultural practices. And I have found that, if we look carefully, we discover how deeply entangled our histories are.
One of the things I have found about different cultures from around the world is the shared perception of the mind-based nature of reality. Whether you come from a Buddhist-infused culture, are of Mayan descent or simply have Celtic ancestors, what those ways of knowing share, is the power of thought to shape reality. It is precisely at this intersection that the secret to delaying the apocalypse might lie. What connects modern science and ancient wisdom is our human need to make sense of an ever-changing universe, through careful observation, in an endless and iterative process.
For instance, take the flying rivers phenomenon; a metaphorical description of an occurrence discovered at the turn of the millenium by the Brazilian agronomist and climatologist, Eneas Salati. Salati – known as the father of flying rivers, and an interdisciplinary team of researchers, spent decades studying the dynamic relationships of the living forest of the wildly diverse Amazônia. Having shown how much of the rainfall in the Amazon is generated by the forest itself (between 25 and 75 per cent), Salati’s team showed how the vast volumes of atmospheric moisture released from the Amazon meet the Andes mountains and travel towards the south-central region of South America, forming as they move, a river in the sky.
There is so much more that is not yet known. The Amazon biome is home to one third of all the myriad critters that populate the Earth: vast mycelium networks, the stunning blue morpho butterfly, the panthera onca - more than the human mind can comprehend. Modern scientific notions such as flying rivers are a striking and compelling image of a natural phenomenon that can expand our limited imaginations upwards and outwards. How? What is hidden to the human eye can teach us a lot about our, oftentimes, narrow perception. The mighty Amazon river carries more water than the Congo, the Ganges, the Orinoco, and the Rio Negro combined, but the flying rivers may carry a flow even greater than that.
The vast volumes of water evaporated by the four hundred billion trees, alive in the Amazon biome, form colossal currents of atmospheric humidity that sweep across the sub-continent. They are life givers, bringing the greatest amount of rainfall seen anywhere in the world, reaching as far south as Argentina and Uruguay, and all the way up to Venezuela and Suriname. But for me, the greatest blessing that the flying rivers provide is a sense of awe and wonder for the grand designs that run throughout the other-than-human world.
.
Perhaps you are a mongrel like me, born in Mapuche Indigenous country yet a mix of the coloniser and the local resistance, blending Italian bloodlines and Indigenous ancestors. Wherever you come from, and whatever your heritage, perhaps you are beginning to understand just how much information our ancient songs, ceremonies and forms of wisdom have to tell us about the nature of the human mind. Rather than the survival of the fittest, it is possible that our minds are actually wired for cooperation, empathy and wonder.
The human mind, we are slowly learning, is relational, like some kind of transmitter-and-receiver. The researcher Rupert Sheldrake invites us to think of it like a TV-like device which receives and transmits a signal. The ‘TV program’ doesn’t happen inside the TV, but miles, sometimes continents away, in the broadcasting station. Likewise our individual minds work as if they are wired and belong together – to a far greater mind – the collective consciousness. Ancient cultures have names for this. The Kogi people of Colombia talk about Aluna, the ‘mind of nature’.
Whether or not we are able to tune in to the ‘mind of nature’ or something else is both up to us, and a result of the cultural constructs that condition, create and shape our worldviews. For those of us living in the West, we have largely been socialised out of our relationship with the sacred. We have been taught a creation story based on a scientific worldview that perceives us as separate from nature, and from one another and where the ‘fittest’ will survive, according to popular interpretations of Darwin’s theory of evolution.
It is therefore not a coincidence that we have become the ‘people of the merchandise’ in the words of Yanomami shaman Davi Kopenawa. We are obsessed with brands and status, accumulating stuff surrounding ourselves with commodities in an artificial, deeply unsatisfying and ultimately delusional ‘paradise’.
This phenomenon, though, of placing humans above everything else is not new – it has been part of our evolutionary journey for millennia. It is part of all of us, but it’s now wildly out of control.
The mind virus that currently clouds and dominates our sense-making abilities was detected long ago by First Nations in North America: they call it Wetiko. Wetiko is an Algonquin word for a cannibalistic spirit that is driven by excess and selfish consumption. It tricks its host (every one of us) into believing that cannibalising others’ life force, including the more than human world, is a valid way to live. Wetiko can create all sorts of glitches and short-circuits in our capacity to see ourselves as a part of a dynamic whole, elevating the self-serving ego and severing the ‘TV antenna’ that connects us to a wider, richer experience of life.
It is this illusion of the separation of self from the living world that infects our modern world, ravaging our planet and ourselves. Described as a ‘malignant egophrenia’ by the author Paul Levy, the ego is driven by a malignant cancer-like logic. Acknowledging this mind virus is fundamental if we are to work effectively on the antidote. As Celia Xacriaba, an Indigenous leader told me during the pandemic: 'we must also work on our spiritual immunity, not just our physical immunity.'
.
A colonial term, the etymology of the word ‘Indigenous’ reads as: originated or occurring in a particular place; native. To describe only some people as native is nonsensical. Whether we like it or not we are all native to a particular place, we all belong to a ‘biological niche’, as my father used to say, ' to which we all tend to return sooner or later'.
For those of us in the West, Indigenous epistemologies and ontologies could be a lifeline back to connection. These are people who intimately know the living world, and who over time have developed a vast body of knowledge that has allowed them to adapt, survive and thrive on an ever-changing planet. As a Kogi Mama (elder), told me 'we still know how to dance with the clouds and make the clouds dance'.
In the many years I have spent working with and learning from Indigenous people around the world, I have witnessed an intimacy and rapport with the more than human world that goes beyond words. Not only have these people resisted and survived centuries of colonisation, genocide and ecocide, but in some cases their presence has not just protected, but enhanced the diversity and resilience of their habitats. In other words they have learned how to make the Earth flourish and they flourish with the Earth.
Slowly, many of us are beginning to learn from and be inspired by the people of these life-centric cultures. Living in symbiosis with the natural world may have been one of the keys to our collective evolution, and the continuity of our species depends on us re-learning it before it is too late.
The principles at the heart of Indigenous peoples’ way of life are marked by a deep appreciation and respect for the needs of other species, for understanding of the invisible boundaries that keep the whole ecosystem going; what scientists call positive feedback loops. In order to heal the land, we need to begin by decolonising our minds and bodies. At least, this has been my main practice for the past decade or so. To try to tune in to the past, and my ancestors, more than the future. And from there to weave prayers and activism, into what could become a river of change.
Right now we are in big trouble. As a species we are at a crossroads that is terrifying yet pregnant with possibility. We need some sort of a miracle, or perhaps a quantum leap to a new kind of story or a retelling of the very old ones to steer us away from disaster. Our future depends on what we are able to dream today, and to dream wildly and well we must hold on to the ethnosphere; to the ways and ceremonies of our ancestors. Only they can hold a prayer of remembrance big enough to sustain the dream of turning the world inside out – or at least a little sideways - to a place that feels less uncertain, a place that feels like home.
For me, metaphoric descriptions such as flying rivers open my imagination to the magnificence of the living universe, but they also help create a bridge between the many ways of seeing the world. By expanding our view, we can better understand our place in the world. And only by cultivating our wildest dreams and radical imaginations can manifest a different story for the future. Only then, when we combine technology and wisdom, science and compassion, will we see the flying rivers grow wide across the skies once more.
[1] The term ‘ethnocene’ was coined by the anthropologist Wade Davis and defines 'the sum total of all thoughts and intuitions, myths and beliefs, ideas and inspirations brought into being by the human imagination since the dawn of consciousness,' According to Davis the ethnosphere is humanity's greatest legacy.
Originally published by the Dark Mountain, Vol 22, by the Dark Mountain Project 2022.
IMAGE: Aruma by Viveros F. (2024) - generated using DALL-E AI
Felipe Viveros is a writer, researcher, artist, ecologist and strategist. His work focuses on the intersection of digital storytelling, policy and systems change. He is the founder of not-for-profit agency for systems change Culture Hack Labs.
BY FELIPE VIVEROS
We often hear about, or experience first-hand, the devastating effects that capitalism has on our communities and the more-than-human world. We seldom hear, though, about its impact on our living memory, the expanse of which has been described as ethnosphere.[1] Capitalism, our current dominant operating system, is not only destroying lives and the living ecosystem that we are part of, it is devouring ancient cultures, their songs, ceremonies and the ancient wisdom they carry. With that loss, comes a death spiral of further devastation – the irretrievable disappearance of precious life forms which are deeply enmeshed within biomes, which in turn are intertwined within larger ecosystems.
The myths and ceremonies that over millennia have allowed people and the more-than-human world to speak to one another are an essential element of our interdependence. Lose them, and we risk the unravelling of life itself.
As a poet and ecologist, my work involves foraging alternative narratives; reflecting and amplifying other ways of knowing and being. I do this as a way to resist and transform the dominant mainstream discourses, with an aim to opening the spaces in which all life on Earth might flourish once more. I have travelled the world since leaving my native South America in my twenties, in search of what the anthropologist Gregory Bateson called 'the pattern that connects.' In over twenty years of exploration I have sought the common archetypes, symbols and metaphors that connect diverse human cultures to one another, seeking to determine whether the relationship to the living Earth we all share has some common ground. I have encountered so many surprising similarities in distant corners of the world, of cultures that are seemingly unrelated to each other yet nonetheless embody very similar symbols and cultural practices. And I have found that, if we look carefully, we discover how deeply entangled our histories are.
One of the things I have found about different cultures from around the world is the shared perception of the mind-based nature of reality. Whether you come from a Buddhist-infused culture, are of Mayan descent or simply have Celtic ancestors, what those ways of knowing share, is the power of thought to shape reality. It is precisely at this intersection that the secret to delaying the apocalypse might lie. What connects modern science and ancient wisdom is our human need to make sense of an ever-changing universe, through careful observation, in an endless and iterative process.
For instance, take the flying rivers phenomenon; a metaphorical description of an occurrence discovered at the turn of the millenium by the Brazilian agronomist and climatologist, Eneas Salati. Salati – known as the father of flying rivers, and an interdisciplinary team of researchers, spent decades studying the dynamic relationships of the living forest of the wildly diverse Amazônia. Having shown how much of the rainfall in the Amazon is generated by the forest itself (between 25 and 75 per cent), Salati’s team showed how the vast volumes of atmospheric moisture released from the Amazon meet the Andes mountains and travel towards the south-central region of South America, forming as they move, a river in the sky.
There is so much more that is not yet known. The Amazon biome is home to one third of all the myriad critters that populate the Earth: vast mycelium networks, the stunning blue morpho butterfly, the panthera onca - more than the human mind can comprehend. Modern scientific notions such as flying rivers are a striking and compelling image of a natural phenomenon that can expand our limited imaginations upwards and outwards. How? What is hidden to the human eye can teach us a lot about our, oftentimes, narrow perception. The mighty Amazon river carries more water than the Congo, the Ganges, the Orinoco, and the Rio Negro combined, but the flying rivers may carry a flow even greater than that.
The vast volumes of water evaporated by the four hundred billion trees, alive in the Amazon biome, form colossal currents of atmospheric humidity that sweep across the sub-continent. They are life givers, bringing the greatest amount of rainfall seen anywhere in the world, reaching as far south as Argentina and Uruguay, and all the way up to Venezuela and Suriname. But for me, the greatest blessing that the flying rivers provide is a sense of awe and wonder for the grand designs that run throughout the other-than-human world.
.
Perhaps you are a mongrel like me, born in Mapuche Indigenous country yet a mix of the coloniser and the local resistance, blending Italian bloodlines and Indigenous ancestors. Wherever you come from, and whatever your heritage, perhaps you are beginning to understand just how much information our ancient songs, ceremonies and forms of wisdom have to tell us about the nature of the human mind. Rather than the survival of the fittest, it is possible that our minds are actually wired for cooperation, empathy and wonder.
The human mind, we are slowly learning, is relational, like some kind of transmitter-and-receiver. The researcher Rupert Sheldrake invites us to think of it like a TV-like device which receives and transmits a signal. The ‘TV program’ doesn’t happen inside the TV, but miles, sometimes continents away, in the broadcasting station. Likewise our individual minds work as if they are wired and belong together – to a far greater mind – the collective consciousness. Ancient cultures have names for this. The Kogi people of Colombia talk about Aluna, the ‘mind of nature’.
Whether or not we are able to tune in to the ‘mind of nature’ or something else is both up to us, and a result of the cultural constructs that condition, create and shape our worldviews. For those of us living in the West, we have largely been socialised out of our relationship with the sacred. We have been taught a creation story based on a scientific worldview that perceives us as separate from nature, and from one another and where the ‘fittest’ will survive, according to popular interpretations of Darwin’s theory of evolution.
It is therefore not a coincidence that we have become the ‘people of the merchandise’ in the words of Yanomami shaman Davi Kopenawa. We are obsessed with brands and status, accumulating stuff surrounding ourselves with commodities in an artificial, deeply unsatisfying and ultimately delusional ‘paradise’.
This phenomenon, though, of placing humans above everything else is not new – it has been part of our evolutionary journey for millennia. It is part of all of us, but it’s now wildly out of control.
The mind virus that currently clouds and dominates our sense-making abilities was detected long ago by First Nations in North America: they call it Wetiko. Wetiko is an Algonquin word for a cannibalistic spirit that is driven by excess and selfish consumption. It tricks its host (every one of us) into believing that cannibalising others’ life force, including the more than human world, is a valid way to live. Wetiko can create all sorts of glitches and short-circuits in our capacity to see ourselves as a part of a dynamic whole, elevating the self-serving ego and severing the ‘TV antenna’ that connects us to a wider, richer experience of life.
It is this illusion of the separation of self from the living world that infects our modern world, ravaging our planet and ourselves. Described as a ‘malignant egophrenia’ by the author Paul Levy, the ego is driven by a malignant cancer-like logic. Acknowledging this mind virus is fundamental if we are to work effectively on the antidote. As Celia Xacriaba, an Indigenous leader told me during the pandemic: 'we must also work on our spiritual immunity, not just our physical immunity.'
.
A colonial term, the etymology of the word ‘Indigenous’ reads as: originated or occurring in a particular place; native. To describe only some people as native is nonsensical. Whether we like it or not we are all native to a particular place, we all belong to a ‘biological niche’, as my father used to say, ' to which we all tend to return sooner or later'.
For those of us in the West, Indigenous epistemologies and ontologies could be a lifeline back to connection. These are people who intimately know the living world, and who over time have developed a vast body of knowledge that has allowed them to adapt, survive and thrive on an ever-changing planet. As a Kogi Mama (elder), told me 'we still know how to dance with the clouds and make the clouds dance'.
In the many years I have spent working with and learning from Indigenous people around the world, I have witnessed an intimacy and rapport with the more than human world that goes beyond words. Not only have these people resisted and survived centuries of colonisation, genocide and ecocide, but in some cases their presence has not just protected, but enhanced the diversity and resilience of their habitats. In other words they have learned how to make the Earth flourish and they flourish with the Earth.
Slowly, many of us are beginning to learn from and be inspired by the people of these life-centric cultures. Living in symbiosis with the natural world may have been one of the keys to our collective evolution, and the continuity of our species depends on us re-learning it before it is too late.
The principles at the heart of Indigenous peoples’ way of life are marked by a deep appreciation and respect for the needs of other species, for understanding of the invisible boundaries that keep the whole ecosystem going; what scientists call positive feedback loops. In order to heal the land, we need to begin by decolonising our minds and bodies. At least, this has been my main practice for the past decade or so. To try to tune in to the past, and my ancestors, more than the future. And from there to weave prayers and activism, into what could become a river of change.
Right now we are in big trouble. As a species we are at a crossroads that is terrifying yet pregnant with possibility. We need some sort of a miracle, or perhaps a quantum leap to a new kind of story or a retelling of the very old ones to steer us away from disaster. Our future depends on what we are able to dream today, and to dream wildly and well we must hold on to the ethnosphere; to the ways and ceremonies of our ancestors. Only they can hold a prayer of remembrance big enough to sustain the dream of turning the world inside out – or at least a little sideways - to a place that feels less uncertain, a place that feels like home.
For me, metaphoric descriptions such as flying rivers open my imagination to the magnificence of the living universe, but they also help create a bridge between the many ways of seeing the world. By expanding our view, we can better understand our place in the world. And only by cultivating our wildest dreams and radical imaginations can manifest a different story for the future. Only then, when we combine technology and wisdom, science and compassion, will we see the flying rivers grow wide across the skies once more.
[1] The term ‘ethnocene’ was coined by the anthropologist Wade Davis and defines 'the sum total of all thoughts and intuitions, myths and beliefs, ideas and inspirations brought into being by the human imagination since the dawn of consciousness,' According to Davis the ethnosphere is humanity's greatest legacy.
Originally published by the Dark Mountain, Vol 22, by the Dark Mountain Project 2022.
IMAGE: Aruma by Viveros F. (2024) - generated using DALL-E AI
We often hear about, or experience first-hand, the devastating effects that capitalism has on our communities and the more-than-human world. We seldom hear, though, about its impact on our living memory, the expanse of which has been described as ethnosphere.[1] Capitalism, our current dominant operating system, is not only destroying lives and the living ecosystem that we are part of, it is devouring ancient cultures, their songs, ceremonies and the ancient wisdom they carry. With that loss, comes a death spiral of further devastation – the irretrievable disappearance of precious life forms which are deeply enmeshed within biomes, which in turn are intertwined within larger ecosystems.
The myths and ceremonies that over millennia have allowed people and the more-than-human world to speak to one another are an essential element of our interdependence. Lose them, and we risk the unravelling of life itself.
As a poet and ecologist, my work involves foraging alternative narratives; reflecting and amplifying other ways of knowing and being. I do this as a way to resist and transform the dominant mainstream discourses, with an aim to opening the spaces in which all life on Earth might flourish once more. I have travelled the world since leaving my native South America in my twenties, in search of what the anthropologist Gregory Bateson called 'the pattern that connects.' In over twenty years of exploration I have sought the common archetypes, symbols and metaphors that connect diverse human cultures to one another, seeking to determine whether the relationship to the living Earth we all share has some common ground. I have encountered so many surprising similarities in distant corners of the world, of cultures that are seemingly unrelated to each other yet nonetheless embody very similar symbols and cultural practices. And I have found that, if we look carefully, we discover how deeply entangled our histories are.
One of the things I have found about different cultures from around the world is the shared perception of the mind-based nature of reality. Whether you come from a Buddhist-infused culture, are of Mayan descent or simply have Celtic ancestors, what those ways of knowing share, is the power of thought to shape reality. It is precisely at this intersection that the secret to delaying the apocalypse might lie. What connects modern science and ancient wisdom is our human need to make sense of an ever-changing universe, through careful observation, in an endless and iterative process.
For instance, take the flying rivers phenomenon; a metaphorical description of an occurrence discovered at the turn of the millenium by the Brazilian agronomist and climatologist, Eneas Salati. Salati – known as the father of flying rivers, and an interdisciplinary team of researchers, spent decades studying the dynamic relationships of the living forest of the wildly diverse Amazônia. Having shown how much of the rainfall in the Amazon is generated by the forest itself (between 25 and 75 per cent), Salati’s team showed how the vast volumes of atmospheric moisture released from the Amazon meet the Andes mountains and travel towards the south-central region of South America, forming as they move, a river in the sky.
There is so much more that is not yet known. The Amazon biome is home to one third of all the myriad critters that populate the Earth: vast mycelium networks, the stunning blue morpho butterfly, the panthera onca - more than the human mind can comprehend. Modern scientific notions such as flying rivers are a striking and compelling image of a natural phenomenon that can expand our limited imaginations upwards and outwards. How? What is hidden to the human eye can teach us a lot about our, oftentimes, narrow perception. The mighty Amazon river carries more water than the Congo, the Ganges, the Orinoco, and the Rio Negro combined, but the flying rivers may carry a flow even greater than that.
The vast volumes of water evaporated by the four hundred billion trees, alive in the Amazon biome, form colossal currents of atmospheric humidity that sweep across the sub-continent. They are life givers, bringing the greatest amount of rainfall seen anywhere in the world, reaching as far south as Argentina and Uruguay, and all the way up to Venezuela and Suriname. But for me, the greatest blessing that the flying rivers provide is a sense of awe and wonder for the grand designs that run throughout the other-than-human world.
.
Perhaps you are a mongrel like me, born in Mapuche Indigenous country yet a mix of the coloniser and the local resistance, blending Italian bloodlines and Indigenous ancestors. Wherever you come from, and whatever your heritage, perhaps you are beginning to understand just how much information our ancient songs, ceremonies and forms of wisdom have to tell us about the nature of the human mind. Rather than the survival of the fittest, it is possible that our minds are actually wired for cooperation, empathy and wonder.
The human mind, we are slowly learning, is relational, like some kind of transmitter-and-receiver. The researcher Rupert Sheldrake invites us to think of it like a TV-like device which receives and transmits a signal. The ‘TV program’ doesn’t happen inside the TV, but miles, sometimes continents away, in the broadcasting station. Likewise our individual minds work as if they are wired and belong together – to a far greater mind – the collective consciousness. Ancient cultures have names for this. The Kogi people of Colombia talk about Aluna, the ‘mind of nature’.
Whether or not we are able to tune in to the ‘mind of nature’ or something else is both up to us, and a result of the cultural constructs that condition, create and shape our worldviews. For those of us living in the West, we have largely been socialised out of our relationship with the sacred. We have been taught a creation story based on a scientific worldview that perceives us as separate from nature, and from one another and where the ‘fittest’ will survive, according to popular interpretations of Darwin’s theory of evolution.
It is therefore not a coincidence that we have become the ‘people of the merchandise’ in the words of Yanomami shaman Davi Kopenawa. We are obsessed with brands and status, accumulating stuff surrounding ourselves with commodities in an artificial, deeply unsatisfying and ultimately delusional ‘paradise’.
This phenomenon, though, of placing humans above everything else is not new – it has been part of our evolutionary journey for millennia. It is part of all of us, but it’s now wildly out of control.
The mind virus that currently clouds and dominates our sense-making abilities was detected long ago by First Nations in North America: they call it Wetiko. Wetiko is an Algonquin word for a cannibalistic spirit that is driven by excess and selfish consumption. It tricks its host (every one of us) into believing that cannibalising others’ life force, including the more than human world, is a valid way to live. Wetiko can create all sorts of glitches and short-circuits in our capacity to see ourselves as a part of a dynamic whole, elevating the self-serving ego and severing the ‘TV antenna’ that connects us to a wider, richer experience of life.
It is this illusion of the separation of self from the living world that infects our modern world, ravaging our planet and ourselves. Described as a ‘malignant egophrenia’ by the author Paul Levy, the ego is driven by a malignant cancer-like logic. Acknowledging this mind virus is fundamental if we are to work effectively on the antidote. As Celia Xacriaba, an Indigenous leader told me during the pandemic: 'we must also work on our spiritual immunity, not just our physical immunity.'
.
A colonial term, the etymology of the word ‘Indigenous’ reads as: originated or occurring in a particular place; native. To describe only some people as native is nonsensical. Whether we like it or not we are all native to a particular place, we all belong to a ‘biological niche’, as my father used to say, ' to which we all tend to return sooner or later'.
For those of us in the West, Indigenous epistemologies and ontologies could be a lifeline back to connection. These are people who intimately know the living world, and who over time have developed a vast body of knowledge that has allowed them to adapt, survive and thrive on an ever-changing planet. As a Kogi Mama (elder), told me 'we still know how to dance with the clouds and make the clouds dance'.
In the many years I have spent working with and learning from Indigenous people around the world, I have witnessed an intimacy and rapport with the more than human world that goes beyond words. Not only have these people resisted and survived centuries of colonisation, genocide and ecocide, but in some cases their presence has not just protected, but enhanced the diversity and resilience of their habitats. In other words they have learned how to make the Earth flourish and they flourish with the Earth.
Slowly, many of us are beginning to learn from and be inspired by the people of these life-centric cultures. Living in symbiosis with the natural world may have been one of the keys to our collective evolution, and the continuity of our species depends on us re-learning it before it is too late.
The principles at the heart of Indigenous peoples’ way of life are marked by a deep appreciation and respect for the needs of other species, for understanding of the invisible boundaries that keep the whole ecosystem going; what scientists call positive feedback loops. In order to heal the land, we need to begin by decolonising our minds and bodies. At least, this has been my main practice for the past decade or so. To try to tune in to the past, and my ancestors, more than the future. And from there to weave prayers and activism, into what could become a river of change.
Right now we are in big trouble. As a species we are at a crossroads that is terrifying yet pregnant with possibility. We need some sort of a miracle, or perhaps a quantum leap to a new kind of story or a retelling of the very old ones to steer us away from disaster. Our future depends on what we are able to dream today, and to dream wildly and well we must hold on to the ethnosphere; to the ways and ceremonies of our ancestors. Only they can hold a prayer of remembrance big enough to sustain the dream of turning the world inside out – or at least a little sideways - to a place that feels less uncertain, a place that feels like home.
For me, metaphoric descriptions such as flying rivers open my imagination to the magnificence of the living universe, but they also help create a bridge between the many ways of seeing the world. By expanding our view, we can better understand our place in the world. And only by cultivating our wildest dreams and radical imaginations can manifest a different story for the future. Only then, when we combine technology and wisdom, science and compassion, will we see the flying rivers grow wide across the skies once more.
[1] The term ‘ethnocene’ was coined by the anthropologist Wade Davis and defines 'the sum total of all thoughts and intuitions, myths and beliefs, ideas and inspirations brought into being by the human imagination since the dawn of consciousness,' According to Davis the ethnosphere is humanity's greatest legacy.
Originally published by the Dark Mountain, Vol 22, by the Dark Mountain Project 2022.
IMAGE: Aruma by Viveros F. (2024) - generated using DALL-E AI
Felipe Viveros is a writer, researcher, artist, ecologist and strategist. His work focuses on the intersection of digital storytelling, policy and systems change. He is the founder of not-for-profit agency for systems change Culture Hack Labs.