Tao Articles

Since Mantak Chia?s book on Fusion of the Five Elements was published 15 years ago, there has been a lot of confusion over the Healing Tao practice of Fusion.. There were a lot of practices in the book that were NOT part of the original fusion practice, but bits of higher Kan & Li alchemy practices (five animals, five planets, taking pearl out of the body, etc.). As the editor of that book, I objected at the time and edited these higher practices out on the grounds that people should master the emotional level of alchemy before playing in cosmic fields beyond the body.

Master Chia put these Kan and Li practices back in and published it, as was his prerogative. He admitted to me some years later that it was a mistake, as the Fusion practice, which we hoped would revolutionize the western psychological community, was largely disregarded by them as being too esoteric or too Chinese in its imagination and not suitable for general western use. The problem has been compounded over time as these and many other higher practices have been downloaded even into the first weekend Basic orbit courses.

This tendency to compress the entire Healing Tao system into a single powerful technique I call the “Tao Big Whopper”. It looks like a delicious, super juicy bargain, but how many people can actually get their mouth around it? Or if they do manage to sink their teeth in, can they really digest the cosmic chi from stars and planets in their first weekend? Can they go home and successfully recreate that practice?

After studying and teaching Taoist alchemy for 20 years, my conclusion is that most people cannot. Their heads get excited with a lot of information, they feel high energy at the workshop, but it is difficult to ground these cosmic chi frequencies. Admittedly, these frequencies are bombarding us every moment, and I believe Master Chia?s intent is admirable in wanting to share as much as he possibly can as quickly as he can. But after years of experimenting with the progression of “information feed” into students of alchemy, and visiting China and studying with other Taoist teachers, I appreciate the importance placed on gradual development in Taoism.

There simply is no rush. If you hurry, you might rush past what is sitting right under your nose. What is right under your nose is your Original Chi, the energy of your original self known as yuan chi. The Inner Smile is the core method for radiating this original chi to every level of your being. But because of the many layers of tension ? ancestral, karmic, or acquired ? original chi is not easily grasped. Thus the ancients, over thousands of years of testing, evolved seven formulas for releasing the obscurations that cloud our Original Spirit, whose light shines on a functional level as yuan chi.

The formulas follow Taoist cosmology, and the adept must progress through each level before progressing to the next. Without this foundation, the original chi never crystallizes into the Immortal Embryo, the original spirit made manifest here in the physical plane. So people practice for years, but they hit a plateau and nothing further seems to be happening. Eventually they give up ? too much work and time, too little fruit.

The major obstacles for practitioners are emotional and sexual. The Healing Tao is a leader in teaching methods for moving sexual chi, but I have found most Healing Tao practitioners to have largely bypassed their emotional energy body development. The Fusion practices don?t seem to be working well enough, and this ultimately retards transformation of sexual chi into higher spiritual awareness. It is one of several reasons why so few practitioners are really successful in their Kan and Li practice. This failure may be due partly to differences between Chinese and western practitioners ? we have very different emotional bodies, the Chinese are more collective-minded, we demand more emotional expression and individual development. But more fundamentally I think it is because of confusion over the Fusion practice.

When I was at Tao Garden four years ago, I ran into many people who were overwhelmed by negative feelings because they were fusing all their negative emotions at once into a single pearl. But their negative emotions were not transforming, they were just jammed into a single point of very “stuck” consciousness. This can be shifted easily by first charging up one?s pearls with “te”, the virtuous qualities of the Tao that are flowing into our physical body-minds (Later Heaven) from our pre-natal self (Early Heaven).

By first absorbing our POTENTIAL power for love & acceptance into the heart pearl, kindness into the liver pearl, gentle wisdom into the kidney pearl, integrity/strength into the metal pearl, and trust/openness into the spleen pearl, we build a reservoir of yuan chi in our emotional body that then allows us to more easily dissolve our negative emotional patterns back into yuan chi. The pearl is a just post natal accumulation of yuan chi.

The practical implication of this is that for westerners I believe it is important to practice the Creation Cycle BEFORE the Control Cycle. This effectively means REVERSING THE FUSION FORMULA SEQUENCE: nurture the five shen (vital organ “spirits or body intelligences” with the Fusion II formula before you attempt to dissolve negative emotions with the Fusion I formula.

As a teacher, I have found this reversal to be the most effective sequence for emotional transformation. It is even more effective if the students understand the difference between shen, qi, and jing, the three core component of Taoist alchemy. I now teach this difference in the Basics, because it is the secret to effortless practice beginning with the Inner Smile and Six Healing Sounds and going through all the Kan and Li practice.

If you don?t understand the difference between jing-chi-shen, you end up using unconscious ego fragments (shen/body spirits not yet integrated) to manipulate your emotional chi field. This is like asking a drunk person to drive you home ? the likelihood of making a wrong turn or having an accident is greatly increased. Why ask a dysfunctional aspect of your psyche to be in control? It merely ends up seizing more control, and amplifying your emotional dysfunction. The net result is the Healing Tao is filled with people who have become a kind of “control freak” to the extent their ego-head is trying to control the chi of their emotional body, rather than actually engaging their true feelings.

This attempt to avoid one?s true feelings is accomplished by focusing on cosmic chi from planets and stars before you have a clue as to what your emotional body is and how it functions. By absorbing higher cosmic chi frequencies too soon you can actually amplify your emotional imbalance. I know of students who followed the fusion formulas in the book (of the nine formulas in the book, the last 4 are actually kan and li) and whose pearl shot out of their heads and left them feeling numb, empty or stuck for years. By going out of the body prematurely, it becomes very difficult to actually feel what is going on inside your body emotionally.

This is one of several reasons I am STRONGLY opposed to the technique of “shooting the pearl” out of the crown at any level of practice. It is NOT a Taoist practice, and cannot be found in any alchemical text. Master Chia borrowed it from the Tibetan “powa” practice of exiting the body at the moment of untimely death, i.e. the method is designed to be used for emergency exit only. The Tibetan masters warn to NOT practice it regularly because it is considered to SHORTEN YOUR LIFE. How could it not? It resembles a kind of spiritual ejaculation of your essence out the crown. I heard a first hand story about a young westerner who did powa practice every day up in a monastery in Nepal. One morning, they found him sitting up dead ? at age 25. I guess the practice worked.

A powerful practitioner like Master Chia might be able to pull the ejaculated essence back into the body (which he fortunately is now instructing students to do), but my observation is that most students are unable to entirely draw it back in. This is because the spiritual gravity of the planets and stars and other unconscious levels of ourself is greater than our body?s spiritual center of gravity in the dan tien. This is especially true in head centered westerners, directing their chi practice from their head brain rather than their belly brain.. How many men can ejaculate sexually and then pull their seed essence back into their body by “thinking” it back? The result of ejaculating one?s pearl essence is to send your chi orbiting in the low astral plane, where your essence floats unconsciously. In the low astral your essence is even more difficult to manage as it pulls on your emotions and can be manipulated by other entities that want to feed on it. This is especially true if the pearl is sexually charged, as it magnetizes (attracts) negative entities that match your negative emotional makeup.

In my understanding of Taoist alchemy, your essence is best directed in the opposite direction, i.e. take it deeper INSIDE the body, deeper into the pre-natal field within the dan tien, so it can fuse into a pearl and be present WITHIN the body. The cosmic planet and star frequencies can be simply absorbed into the pearl and one?s inner space, without needing to ejaculate the pearl out in order to magnetize or attract those chi frequencies. You can expand your AWARENESS (shen) out to the planets at that stage without ejaculating your essence (jing) into outer space. Again, the adept needs to understand how the jing, chi, and shen function differently, and GRADUALLY train them to reintegrate into their original self.

When the pearl/immortal child is sufficiently developed, it will spontaneously leave the body if appropriate. The process of building up the immortal child/pearl by absorbing cosmic chi cannot easily happen if the emotional body is stuck. So we are back to square one, how to first relax and then transform the emotional body using the Fusion practice. This requires just feeling the emotions and their relation to the body without masking them or blasting them with intense downloads of cosmic chi or other manipulations and visualizations by the head/mental body.

I have found the Inner Smile to be more useful here, but the smile cannot reach the emotional patterns if they remain unconscious or as one?s “ideas ABOUT feelings” rather than the feelings themselves. Ultimately, I believe the primary purpose of the Fusion practice is to allow one to get in touch with one?s Original Feeling, i.e., the first unconditioned feelings of yuan chi that arise in Early Heaven BEFORE we convert this chi into Later Heaven negative emotions. This is why I have found it so effective to do Fusion II creation cycle first, but with the twist of using it to circulate the unconditioned feelings or original virtues of each of the five vital organ shen ? unconditional love, unconditional kindness, unconditional trust. Once we have a foundation and relation to our unconditioned or original nature, it is simple to release or transform our acquired negative emotional patterns. To assist in this process, I have also developed chi kung movement forms to help students embody these patterns without getting into excessive mental manipulation.

I hope this short description is enough to help you try this revised version of the Fusion practice for yourself. If not, I have recently made my Fusion teachings and other Healing Tao practices available on 10 audio homestudy courses and 8 video tapes. This series ties all the Healing Tao practices using the Taoist cosmology of the higher practices, without prematurely imposing the higher practices onto the beginning practices. I focus on what happens to the jing-chi-shen relationship in each of the seven formulas of immortality. This Taoist cosmology of three Heavens (Primordial, Early, and Later Heaven) and the cultivation of Original Chi is explained in a longer article (30 pages) posted on my HealingTaoUSA.com website. The article is titled “Daoist Alchemy: A Deep Language for Communicating with Nature?s Intelligence”.

To get a more indepth understanding of this subject, I share all that I have disocovered about these practices in my home study audio-video coures: Chi Kung Fundamentals 1 & 2, Internal Chi Breathing 3 & 4, Fusion 1, Fusion 2 & 3, Healing Love and Taoist Dream practice.

Michael Winn can be reached at winn@healingdao.com

Interview with Marco Bizzozero,, former Director National Theatre of Italy. Famous in Europe as a clown, actor, mime artist, and the first high wire artist ever to perform at La Scalia (Milan Opera), Marco is currently Director, Flower of the Tao Center in Milan, Italy, where he teaches Taoist internal alchemy, tai chi, and chi kung.

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Question: Marco, how would you describe Tao-Tantra?

Tantra is a path to inner fullness through sexuality and pleasure, through happiness and a total coming-together of human beings; it puts men and woman in contact with Tao, with the universe, the absolute, the natural whole. Tao and Tantra are essentally similar spiritual paths, that evolved different methods for achieving the same ecstatic unity. I have simply combined some of their methods back together, taken the best of each to make their common essence more accessible to westerners.

When Taoist or Tantric ecstasy extends through the erotic experiences of a man and a woman, a new state of consciousness is generated, a state which in a flash illuminates and reveals the fundamental essence of being and of the cosmos. Such a deep abandonment to love leads to a sense of wholeness and togetherness: sweetly and subconsciously, the energy of the two lovers extends. The beating of time is irrelevant, subjectivity is ignored, joy merges and submerges their hearts, and their hearts open up to an oceanic sensation of love. Wrapped in this supreme grace, lost in a divine sincerity, for a few moments the lovers discover the total essence of existence.

Happiness, deep abandonment, an extended awareness, a full and total coming-together of two human beings in one – these are the provisions for achieving Tao, supreme reality.

Q: Are such experiences within anyone’s grasp?

Unfortunately they are not common experiences, since sexuality nowadays in not a free and joyous experience, and therefore it is difficult and rare to achieve a total abandonment to our senses, and to our lovers. Love is without a doubt a great path that can lead to a Tantric experience, but a relationship must be cultivated, it must be nourished every day, to make it blossom like a flower, with a great deal of care and attention.

Q: Can an erotic relationship between a man and woman who are not a regular couple be fruitful? Can it help to achieve Tao-Tantra?

Most certainly! But here again there are hurdles.
We have not been educated to seek pleasure, and we don’t even know how to experience intimacy outside an amorous relationship, outside a regular relationship of a couple. When such a situation arises, and when that magic encounter takes place, there is an immediate desire for an amorous relationship. If intimacy is not created, before too long a veil of alienation will come down between the two lovers, estranging them from one another.

The path we follow is a difficult one. Even in the situation of sex without love, sex for pure pleasure, pure biological satisfaction, there can be no true joy — or at least very rarely is it achieved. Casual sex, or a sexual adventure often appears to lead to a devastating series of lost pleasures, a whole round of frustrations. But those fleeting encounters are just missed opportunities. Such situations are often just a cavorting of mutual friction, a body-to-body battle to release pent-up anger, role-plays based on mirrors and masks, subtle games of domination. Anxieties to be part of such games, anxieties about how we are judged or not judged all come into play. And in the end, numb, after a climax that lasts no longer than a sneeze, we are wrapped up in our escapes from solitude.

But pleasure, affections and intimacy are essential sources of nourishment for personal growth, for achieving happiness — and so sooner or later we all return to that spiral of amorous relationships. Off we go again in that seductive, fateful roundabout of thinking with our hearts. Until perhaps one day we will meet our knight in shining armour or our princess, or perhaps we will pretend that we have found a suitable kingdom, or perhaps we will just lose interest.

But in this spiral of broken relationships, so much of men’s and women’s happiness is lost forever. The time has come to change all of this, and action must be taken at the very root of life, where our sexuality lies, where our primary and fundamental life-giving force is averted. This essential energy (Jing), like the thick sap that travels through the stem of the rose, becomes physical pleasure in the body; later, when it is red like the petals of the rose, in our hearts it becomes beauty and love (Chi); eventually, like a scent that spreads all around, it becomes creation and awareness (Shen) in our thoughts. We cannot go on cutting off the stem of the rose because this reveals the thorns: the petals will die, and with them our love and their very scent.

Q: Does real happiness exist? Can we really live in happiness?

Happiness is what brings human beings closer to the universe, the absolute. Unfortunately it is something that is hard to grasp, like a breath of air that just brushes past us and disappears, leaving just a vague memory. Living in happiness means being in love with life, in love with our existence. Because happiness is in itself a love of life. Happiness is the very essence of life.

Sometimes, for example, when we fall in love with someone, we are full of love, we are happy. Everything whirls around us, everything is alive, bright and shiny, everything is a discovery. We see the divine all around us. Once again we realise that life is a matter of interpretation ? it is a projection of what we feel inside. A light is lit inside us, and it is a warm, joyous light fuelled by love; outside of our bodies life is lit up. The rose of love is blossoming inside us, its perfume is spreading beyond our skin, touching the objects that we touch, touching the faces of the people we love: and everything becomes love. This is life becoming happiness, life returning to a state of happiness. Hence, if we discover a flower in a field, if we look into the eyes of our loved one, or glance into the eyes of a child who is watching us, then we can enter this enchantment and through it make out the splendour of the universe.

Q: Why does this experience of happiness in relationships always come to an end?

Our relationships fail because they stem from need, not from abundance. They do not derive from a heart brimming with love; they are experiences that are born with the other person and depend on the other person. But no other person can fill our hearts for ever. Someone else can give us love and affection, but not happiness.

Q: But we were told that love could last for ever, in eternal happiness, and we fell for it!

Instead love, true love, creative, earnest love, love that has the courage not to give up in the face of changing states of awareness in both lovers, very often, with just a few exceptions, sooner or later will die. And when this happens, when love abandons us, we feel betrayed by life. And evil appears dark inside us: we see the emptiness from which our love arises, life itself seems empty.

Q: But how can we be happy, just because we are alive; how can we fall in love with life itself?

Tao and Tantra teach us how. Firstly we need to nourish our authenticity, and with this the image we have of ourselves. The coming-together of a man and a woman can prove to be a fountain of unique discoveries and changes.

In Taoist-Tantric ecstasy (as in love-making), the state of being from which everything stems is abandonment, and abandonment derives from listening. Tantra teaches us that an ability to listen is the highest personal quality. A man who knows how to listen can discover divine femininity in a woman, and likewise a woman who listens can discover divine masculinity in a man. The most profound abandonment stems from the heart, from reciprocal adoration. It implies seeing Buddha in the body and in the eyes of another, sensing the mystery, knowing how to adore the other person. This is the wonderful path that ? whether it is part of an amorous relationship or not ? makes us perceive the marvels of existence, that makes us fall in love with life.

Men and women cannot go on waging war on one another. A war that we wage on someone is a war that we fight in ourselves. There is only one male archetype, for men and for women: two interpretative approaches, but only one archetype. And this is likewise true for the female archetype.

By diminishing the value of the male side of a man, a woman reduces the value of the male side to her own character. And the reverse is true for men, who for centuries have not cultivated the female side to their characters, at the same time subtracting value from the feminine side of women’s characters.

This closing of the chakra of the heart, this juggling for power upsets the balance with gravity itself, the balance between yin and yang that give a unity of being to both men and women. Today we need to give meaning and value to the male and the female sides of our characters, treating them as divine principles. We need to make them blossom in our social conscience, loving them and taking pleasure from them, inside man and inside woman. Through meditation ? through cultivating the energy behind the female and male sexual values, and the exchange of energy ? Tao and the Tantra teach us to create the wealth that is within us, and to share it in loving play.

Only someone who has inner wealth can find the freedom of need: “Only those who come to the fountain will quench their thirst.” Inner wealth means identity of gender, autonomy, independence, a capacity to listen, the opportunity to share. Only when our thirst is truly quenched can we become a source of freedom for our partner. And man and woman can become reciprocal sources of nourishment and growth.

The symbol of yin and yang reveal to us the great power that our relations have. When we nourish the image that our partner has of him or herself with love, we cultivate the life inside our partner, just like water and the sun. “Just as the top is, so is the base; just as the inside is, so is the outside”: accepting the shadow of our partner and reflecting the light of his or her image, we clean the mirror of our own awareness, and we fuel our very fountainheads of love. In other words, by nourishing the image our partner has of him or herself, we create inner light and inner wealth in ourselves. This is what being a couple means, this is an opportunity for existential happiness.

Loving ourselves, loving others, loving life — these are all part of a single, inseparable and divine experience.

Q: Is there a great deal of interest in Tao-Tantra in Italy?

Last year a hundred or so people attended our Tao-Tantra seminars. This is an important sign, a courageous sign of a desire to get to know the intimate side of our relationships and to make them blossom.

For many of us it was a fantastic experience of opening up, of trust and abandonment, of coming together, both on an individual level and with others. At the end of each group session, alongside this true, re-discovered joie de vivre, this seeing the light of the world, there was a great awareness of what we were seeking, and what we could expect from human relationships: a feeling of togetherness, uniquely and humbly in the face of the mystery of life.

Q: What are the main approaches and techniques used during your group sessions?

All approaches are part of an alchemy-like process that hinges on two poles of energy during love-making: that of the heart (fire, passion, listening, thoughtfulness, abandonment, accepting without judging, celebrating the expectation, the event itself, the awareness of our divine nature), and that of sexuality (water, sweetness, the expression of our desires, the extension into cuddles, kisses and hugs, the “touching of the soul”, “the wheel of love”, the cultivation of sexual energy and multiplying it).

Many approaches (linked to the pole of water) are Tantric and Taoist meditations, techniques to expand our awareness so that we can become conscious of our sexual energy and propel it into our body and into our partner’s body. These are techniques to expand physical pleasure and energy, allowing the man to decide the right moment for ejaculation, separating this moment from orgasm, exchanging his own vital yang principles with the yin principles of the woman. Such practices allow the woman to re-discover her Tantric nature and her vast erotic power. In this manner, when this exchange of energy and pleasure goes beyond the genital organs, there results an “alchemy-like union”, in other words an extension of the orgasm to the organs and to the brain: at this point the coming-together of the partners becomes Tantric ecstasy.

Q: What level of intimacy is needed?

Usually these approaches are not experimented in full within the group, time and total intimacy being required. However, we work on preparing the techniques and the energy needed. At no time have any participants been forced to take any of the experiments further than they wished. Many of the exercises involve various opportunities for experiences: the level of intimacy is free, and the levels of intimacy chosen by all participants are carried out in full and complete respect of the other participants.

Q: And as for the heart, what do you mean by “a leap into the inner heart”?

Of great importance, indispensable for this alchemy-like process are the experiences that activate the centre of the heart, that allow participants to take a true “leap” into their hearts, and into that of the group. And this leap comes about through games, dances and rites; we abandon our masks, our defenses, our fears and our prejudices. For a few days and in certain moments, we go back to living like children, experiencing all the authenticity of our experiences.

The Tao-Tantra group is a place for sacred encounters, providing trust, friendship and support. It is a great opportunity for development, enwrapped in a collective field of spiritual energy, where the light of love and awareness pervades and transforms all those taking part. Here, everything becomes a game of enchantment. The sensation of feeling at home, protected and loved, leads to a incantation in the eyes of our companion, where we discover the qualities of our own hearts.

This is the magic that allows us to see the Eternal Tao in others and in ourselves the combined forces of Shiva and Shakti, Great Yin and Great Yang.. And bewildered, we continually ask ourselves why we are so far from such an awareness in our daily lives, so far from such happiness.

This is the happiness of being here, playing this Sacred Game of Life, where laughing together is a grace, and where silence is a presence: together with our partner, heart to heart, skin against skin, here, together, on the threshold of mystery.

A medical physicist in the United States, Cho Zang-Hee, who pioneered the proton emission tomography (pet) scanner, had his curiosity aroused 6 years ago, when he injured his back and found almost instant relief with acupuncture treatment. So he started carrying out experiments with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fmri) on the usual human guinea-pigs – volunteer medical students. He flashed a light in front of them and, as expected, the visual cortex of the brain lit up on the fmri. Then, Cho had an acupuncturist stick a needle into one of the acupoints at the side of the little toe, which are supposed to be connected with the eye. In one person after another, the visual cortex lit up, just as if they had been stimulated with a flash of light. Inserting the needle into a non-acupoint in the big toe had no effect (see Dold, 1998).

Cho also found that on repeated stimulation of the same acupoints, some subjects gave increasing response in the visual cortex, while others gave decreasing response. One of the acupuncturist said it was due to yin and yang, and without seeing the data, correctly identified which subjects had an increase (yang) and which had a decrease (yin) in 11 out of 12 cases.

The only explanation for acupuncture in the west is that the nerves underlying the muscles are stimulated by the needle, which then sends impulses to the limbic system of the brain, the mid-brain and the pituitary, leading to the release of endorphins and monamines, chemicals which block pain perception. This is the accepted basis for anaethesia induced by acupuncture. But it does not explain other effects. It certainly does not explain what connects the acupoints in the foot directly to the visual cortex of the brain.

The meridian theory of traditional Chinese medicine recognizes a vital energy, qi, circulating in nature and in our body. Within the body, qi is said to circulate through channels known as meridians. The meridians interconnecting the viscera and limbs, the deeper and superficial layer of the body in a branching network of increasingly fine mesh. The meridians and their acupoints have no known relationship with anatomical systems in western medicine, despite many attempts to search for correlations (see Ho and Knight, 1998).

Until quite recently, I have thought little about acupuncture. Instead, I have been involved, since 1985, in trying to understand living organisation from the perspective of contemporary physics, especially of non-equilibrium thermodynamics and quantum theory. At the same time, I was developing and using new experimental approaches to investigate organisms non-destructively, as they are living and developing. As a result, I have now come to an understanding of the organism that is beginning to connect with the meridian theory, and, I hope, in due course, with holistic health systems of all other cultures. I have outlined a tentative theory of the organism in the second edition of my book, The Rainbow and The Worm, The Physics of Organisms (Ho, 1998). Let me briefly describe it and then show how it may link up with the meridian theory.

Many physicists have puzzled over how organisms seem able to resist the second law of thermodynamics which says all systems tend to evolve towards thermodynamic equilibrium – a state of maximum disorder in which all useful energy has degraded into a random, useless form referred to as entropy. Instead, organisms can summon energy at will in a perfectly coordinated way, and to maintain and reproduce its exquisite organisation. Everyone knows that because the organism is an open system, it does not actually violate the second law, because the environment provides raw materials and useful energy and becomes more disordered as organisation is built up and maintained in the system, and entropy exported out of it. But how does the organism actually do it?

It turns out that the key to living organisation is not so much energy flow as energy storage under energy flow. Furthermore, the organism has somehow managed to close the loop of energy storage to become a self-maintaining, self-reproducing life-cycle (see Figure 1).
The organism is thus a system in which energy is stored in a coherent form, the energy remaining coherent as it is mobilized throughout the system. Notice that I have substituted ?coherent energy? for the usual concept of ?free energy?. Coherent energy, as I shall explain presently, is stored in a range of space-times in which it remains coherent, and is tied to the characteristic space-times of natural processes. I say ?characteristic space-time? instead of the usual ?characteristic time? because in the new physics since Einstein’s relativity theory, space and time are no longer separable. (Indeed, organic space-time is very different from the linear, homogeneous, space and time of Newtonian physics (see Ho, 1998).) ?Free energy?, on the other hand, has no relationship to space or time, and is a notoriously vague concept.

Coherent energy is energy that comes and goes together so it can do work, as opposed to incoherent energy which cancels itself out. Anyone ever hit by a wave on the seashore will know what coherent energy is as opposed to the random motion of say, molecules of air in this room. Coherent energy is mobilised within the organism with minimum dissipation, which means it generates minimum entropy. This depends on a symmetrical coupling of energy yielding and energy requiring processes within the living system. Symmetrical coupling involves a complete reciprocity, so that the effects of one process on the other are the same, and furthermore, they can reverse roles so the giver of energy becomes the receiver and vice versa. How is that achieved?

Practically all living processes are organised in cycles. The organism is thick with biological rhythms ranging from periods of split seconds for electrical activities of brain cells to seconds such as the heart-beat and respiration, to periods which are circadian and circannual. But no one has ever been able to explain why that should be. The answer is provided by thermodynamics. It turns out that symmetrically coupled cycles are the key to both the conservation of coherent energy and compensation (or cancelling out) of entropy within the system so that living organisation is maintained. I have represented a miniscule fraction of all the coupled cycles in the living system intuitively in Figure 2, the sum total of which make up the life-cycle. The way to think about it is that as one cycle of activity is running down, it is charging up a second cycle, so that the role can be reversed later. Similarly, as disorder is created in some part of the system, a kind of superorder appears in elsewhere, which can restore order to the first part.

Each cycle of activity has a characteristic space-time and together, they span all space-times from the very fast to the very slow, the global to the local. Each cycle is hence a domain in which coherent energy is stored, as said earlier. Of course, neither the conservation of coherent energy nor the compensation of entropy is perfect, otherwise, no one would ever need to eat, nor would ever age. But such a dynamic structure of the system is the key to maximising the storage of coherent energy and the speed and efficiency with which coherent energy can be mobilised (see Ho, 1995). Thermodynamically, then, the organism is a dynamically closed system of minimally dissipative coupled cycles feeding off the one-way energy flow, so that the unavoidable dissipation is exported to the environment (Figure 3).

The special energy relationship in the organism, therefore, is what enables it to mobilize energy at will, whenever and wherever required and in a perfectly coordinated way. In the ideal, the organism can be conceived as a quantum superposition of coherent activities, with instantaneous (nonlocal) noiseless intercommunication throughout the system. The flow of qi in meridian theory corresponds rather well to the mobilisation of coherent energy. Coherent energy is vital energy, and it is arises because the organism is especially good at capturing energy, storing and mobilising it in a coherent form.

Let us look more closely at the mobilisation of coherent energy. Coherent energy is stored everywhere within the system over the entire range of space-times. Consequently any subtle influence arising anywhere within the system will propagate over the entire system and get amplified to global effects. In other words, the system, by virtue of being full of coherent energy everywhere, will be ultrasensitive to very weak signals. This may be the basis of all forms of subtle energy medicine.

Quantum coherence in living organisms was still firmly rejected by mainstream biologists when I proposed it in 1993 (Ho, 1993). I was in turn inspired by the idea that organisms may store energy as ‘coherent excitations’, which originated with solid-state physicist Herbert Fr?hlich in the 1960s (see Frohlich, 1980). Later on, quantum physicist turned biophysicist, Fritz Popp, suggested that organisms are quantum coherent photon fields (see Popp et al, 1970; 1992). Today, mainstream scientists including physicist Roger Penrose (1995) have begun to invoke quantum coherence to account for the macroscopic, phase-correlated electrical activities observed by neurophysiologists in widely separated parts of the brain (see Freeman, 1995; Ho, 1997).

I must emphasise that the theory of the organism just presented is firmly based on empirical experimental findings from our own laboratory as well as from established laboratories around the world. Many of the findings are published in scientific journals, but there is little or no satisfactory explanation for them within conventional mainstream biology. I won’t have time to describe all the experimental results which have built up a picture of coherence in the organism (see Ho, 1998). Perhaps the most suggestive evidence is our discovery in 1992 that all organisms are liquid crystalline.

What we actually discovered was a novel noninvasive optical imaging technique based on the polarised light microscopy (Ho and Lawrence, 1993; Newton et al, 1995; Ross et al, 1997). It is a technique that earth scientists and other have used for studying mineral crystals, and more recently liquid crystals; in other words, any material with molecular order. But crystals have static order, so how can living, mobile organisms be crystals? Indeed, the imaging technique demonstrates that organisms are so dynamically coherent at the molecular level that they appear to be crystalline (Ho and Saunders, 1994; Ho et al, 1996). That is because light vibrates at 1014Hz, much faster than the molecules can move coherently together, which is at most 1010 Hz. So long as the motions among the molecules in the cells and tissues are sufficiently coherent, they will appear to be statically ordered, or crystalline, to the light passing through. This is analogous to the ability of a very fast film to capture the image of a moving object as a sharply focussed ?still? picture. This imaging technique is telling us that the living organism is coherent beyond our wildest dreams, with dynamic order that extends from the molecular to the macroscopic.

There is a dynamic, liquid crystalline continuum of connective tissues and extracellular matrix linking directly into the equally liquid crystalline cytoplasm in the interior of every single cell in the body (see Ho, 1997; Ho, 1998; Ho and Knight, 1998, and references therein). Liquid crystallinity gives organisms their characteristic flexibility, exquisite sensitivity and responsiveness, thus optimizing the rapid, noiseless intercommunication that enables the organism to function as a coherent, coordinated whole. In addition, the liquid crystalline continuum provides subtle electrical interconnections which are sensitive to changes in pressure, pH and other physicochemical conditions; in other words, it is also able to register ?tissue memory?. Thus, the liquid crystalline continuum possesses all the qualities of a ?body consciousness? that may indeed be sensitive to all forms of subtle energy medicines including acupuncture.

The connective tissues of our body include the skin, bones, tendons, ligaments, cartilege, various membranes covering major organs and linings of internal spaces. We tend to see them as serving purely mechanical functions to keep the body in shape, or to act as packing material. Actually, connective tissues may also be largely responsible for the rapid intercommunication that enables our body to function effectively as a coherent whole, and are therefore central to our health and well-being.

The clue to the intercommunication function of connective tissues lies in the properties of collagen, which makes up 70% or more of all the proteins of the connective tissues. Connective tissues, in turn form the bulk of the body of most multicellular animals. Collagen is therefore the most abundant protein in the animal kingdom.

There are many kinds of collagens – all sharing a general repeating sequence of the tripeptide, (X-Y-glycine), where X and Y are usually proline or hydroxyproline (reviewed in Ho and Knight, 1998; Haffegee, 1999; Zhou, 1999). They also share a molecular structure in which three polypeptide chains are wound around one another in a triple-helix (rather like an electric flex) with the compact amino acid glycine in the central axis of the helix, while the bulky amino-acids proline and hydroxyproline are near the surface. In the fibrous forms, the triple-helical molecules aggregate head to tail and side-by side into long fibrils, and bundles of fibrils in turn assemble into thicker fibres, and other more complex three-dimensional liquid crystalline structures. Some collagens assemble into sheets constructed from an open, liquid crystalline meshwork of molecules.

All these structures are formed by self-assembly, in the sense that they need no specific ‘instructions’ other than certain conditions of pH, ionic strength, temperature and hydration (Zhou et al, 1996; Haffegee, 1999). The process is predominantly driven by hydrophilic interactions due to hydrogen-bonding between water molecules and charged amino-acid side-chains of the protein. Hydrogen bonds is a special kind of chemical bond in which a hydrogen atom is shared between atoms such as oxygen and nitrogen. It is the most important and ubiquitous chemical bond in living systems. If you don’t know anything else, you must know the hydrogen bond. A water molecule is made of one oxygen atom and two hydrogen atoms and each of the two hydrogen atoms can make a hydrogen bond with another the oxygen belonging to another water molecule or a protein molecule. And the oxygen atom of the water molecule can accept two other hydrogen atoms in hydrogen-bonds.

But collagens are not just mechanical fibres and composites. Instead, they have dielectric and electrical conductive properties that make them very sensitive to mechanical pressures, pH, and ionic composition and to electromagnetic fields (reviewed in Ho, 1998; Ho and Knight, 1998; in particular, Zhou, 1999). The electrical properties depend, to a large extent, on the bound water molecules in and around the collagen triple-helix. X-ray diffraction studies reveal a cylinder of water surrounding the triple-helix which is hydrogen-bonded to the hydroxyproline side-chains. Nuclear magnetic resonance studies and Fourier Transform InfraRed (FTIR) spectroscopy have both provided evidence of three populations of water molecules associated with collagen.

These are interstitial water, very tightly bound within the triple-helix of the collagen molecule, and strongly interacting with the peptide bonds of the polypeptide chains; bound water, corresponding to the more loosely structured water-cylinder on the surface of the triple helix; and so called free water filling the spaces between the fibrils and between fibres. Typically, there is a layer of water some 4 to 5 molecules deep separating neighbouring triple-helices. This biological water is integral to the liquid crystallinity of collagens (Zhou et al, 1999) and other composites such as the extracellular matrix, the cell membrane and the ‘cytoplasm’.

The existence of the ordered network of water molecules, connected by hydrogen bonds, and interspersed within the protein fibrillar matrix of the collagens is especially signicant, as it is expected to support rapid jump conduction of protons, ie, hydrogen atoms without its electron, which constitute positive electric charges. This jump conduction is a kind of semi-conduction and is much faster than ordinary electrical conduction or conduction through nerve fibres. That is because it does not actually require any net movement of the charged particle itself. It is passed rapidly down a line of relatively static, hydrogen-bonded water molecules.

Jump conduction of protons in collagen has been confirmed by dielectric measurements. The conductivity of collagen increases strongly with the amount of water absorbed (from 0.1 to 0.3g/g collagen), in accordance with the power-law relation,
s(f) = XfY
where f is the water content, andX and Y are constants. The value of Y is found to be 5.1 to 5.4, and is a function of the collagen fibrillar structure. These results suggest that continuous chains of ordered water molecules join neighbouring ion-generating sites enabling proton jumps to occur. The high value of the exponential suggests that up to 5 or 6 neighbours may be involved in the jump conduction. Based on these findings, it is estimated that conductivity along the collagen fibres is at least one-hundred time that across the fibre.

A major factor contributing to the efficiency of intercommunication is the structured, oriented nature of collagen liquid crystalline fibres. Each connective tissue has its characteristic orientation of fibrous structures which are clearly related to the mechanical stresses and strains to which the tissue is subject. This same orientation may also be crucial for intercommunication.

Aligned collagen fibres in connective tissues provide oriented channels for electrical intercommunication, and are strongly reminiscent of acupuncture meridians in traditional Chinese medicine. As collagen fibres are expected to conduct (positive) electricity preferentially along the fibres due to the bound water, which are predominantly oriented along the fibre axis, it follows that these conduction paths may correspond to acupuncture meridians. By contrast, acupoints typically exhibit 10 to 100-fold lower electrical resistances compared with the surrounding skin, and may therefore correspond to singularities or gaps between collagen fibres, or, where collagen fibres are oriented at right angles to the dermal layer. The actual conducting channels may bear a more subtle relationship to the orientation of the collagen fibres, as conductivity depends predominantly on the layer(s) of bound water on the surface of the collagen molecules rather than the collagens themselves. So-called free water may also take part in proton conduction as the result of induced polarization, particularly as water molecules naturally form hydrogen-bonded networks. This would be consistent with the observed increase in conductivity of collagen as hydration increases to a level well beyond the bound water fraction, around 0.15g/g; and with the fact that the normal hydration level of tendon is about 65%.

The hydrogen-bonded water network of the connective tissues is actually linked to ordered hydrogen-bonded water in the ion-channels of the cell membrane that allow inorganic ions to pass in and out of the cell. There is thus a direct electrical link between distant signals and the intracellular matrix of every single cell in the body, leading to physiological changes inside the cells, including all nerve cells. This electrical channel of intercommunication is in addition to and coupled with the mechanical tensegrity interactionsbetween the connective tissues and the intracellular matrix of every single cell, a continuum that always changes as a whole. Any mechanical deformations of the protein-bound water network will automatically result in electrical disturbances and conversely, electrical disturbances will result in mechanical effects.

As mentioned earlier, proton jump-conduction is a form of semi-conduction in condensed matter and much faster than conduction of electrical signals by the nerves. Thus the ?ground substance? of the entire body may provide a much better intercommunication system than the nervous system. Indeed, it is possible that one of the functions of the nervous system is to slow down intercommunication through the ground substance. Lower animals which do not have a nervous system are nonetheless sensitive. At the other end of the evolutionary scale, note the alarming speed with which a hypersensitive response occurs in human beings, or how rapidly they can respond to an emergency. There is no doubt that a body consciousness exists prior to the ?brain? consciousness associated with the nervous system.

I have argued that a body consciousness possessing all the hallmarks of consciousness – sentience, intercommunication and memory – is distributed throughout the entire body. Brain consciousness associated with the nervous system is embedded in body consciousness and is coupled to it (Ho, 1997; 1998).

Under normal, healthy conditions, body and brain consciousness mutually inform and condition each other. The unity of our conscious experience and our state of health depends on the complete coherence of brain and body.

Traditional Chinese medicine based on the acupuncture meridian system places the emphasis of health on the coherence of body functions which harmonizes brain to body. This makes perfect sense if one recognizes the brain as part of the body. Western medicine, by contrast, has yet no concept of the whole, and is based, at the very outset, on a Cartesian divide between mind and brain, and brain and body. Because there is no concept of the organism as a whole, there is, in effect, no theory of health, only an infinite number of disease models, each based on the supposed defect of a single molecular species. There is an urgent need to develop a theory of health for proper delivery of healthcare in the next millenium.

Acknowledgment

Peter Saunders, Fritz Popp, Franco Musumeci, Kenneth Denbigh, Geoffrey Sewell, John Bolton, David Knight and Stephen Swithenby have taught me a lot of what I did not know about mathematics, physics and chemistry, and shared their insights with me, some of them over many years. Stephen Ross, Julian Haffegee, Zhou Yu-Ming and Richard Newton were my collaborators on many of the experimental projects. Without their enthusiasm, ingenuity and support, the work described in this paper would never have been done.

References
Dold, C. (1998). Needles & Nerves. Discover September, 58-62.
Freeman, W.J. (1995). Societies of Brains. A Study in the Neuroscience of Love and Hate, lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Hove.
Fr?hlich, H. (1968). Long range coherence and energy storage in biological systems. Int. J. Quantum Chemistry 2, 641-649.
Haffegee, J. (1999). Collagen self-assembly and alignment in vitro. M. Sc. Thesis, Bioelectrodynamics Laboratory, Open University.
Ho, M.W. (1993). The Rainbow and The Worm. The Physics of Organisms, World Scientific, Singapore.
Ho, M.W. ed. (1995b). Bioenergetics, S327 Living Processes, Open University Press, Milton Keynes, especially Chapters 3, 5, 7, 8.
Ho, M.W. (1997a). Quantum coherence and conscious experience. Kybernetes 26, 265-276.
Ho, M.W. (1998). The Rainbow and The Worm. The Physics of Organisms, 2nd. Ed. World Scientific, Singapore.
Ho, M.W. and Knight, D.P. (1998). The acupuncture system and the liquid crystalline collagen fibers of the connective tissues. Am. J. Chinese Medicine 26, 251-263.
Ho, M.W. and Lawrence, M. (1993). Interference colour vital imaging: A novel noninvasive microscopic technique. Microscopy and Analysis September, 26.
Ho, M.W. and Saunders, P.T. (1994). Liquid crystalline mesophase in living organisms. In Bioelectrodynamics and Biocommunication (M.W. Ho, F.A. Popp and U. Warnke, eds.)World Scientific, Singapore.
Ho, M.W., Haffegee, J., Newton,R.H. Ross, S., Zhou, Y.M. and Bolton. J.P. (1996). Organisms as polyphasic liquid crystals. Bioelectrochemistry and Bioenergetics 41, 81-91, 1996.
Newton, R.H., Haffegee, J. and Ho, M.W. (1995). Colour-contrast in polarized light microscopy of weakly birefringent biological specimens. J. Microscopy 180, 127-130.
Penrose, R. (1994). Shadows of Mind, Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Popp, F.A., Li, K.H. and Gu, Q. eds. (1992). Advances in Biophotons Research, World Scientific, Singapore.
Popp, F.A., Ruth, B., Bahr, W., Bohm. J., Grass, P., Grohlig, G., Rattemeyer, M., Schmidt, H.G. and Wulle, P. (1981). Emission of visible and ultraviolet radiation by active biological systems. Collective Phenomena 3, 187-214.
Ross, S., Newton, R.H., Zhou, Y.M., Haffegee, J., Ho, M.W., Bolton, J. and Knight, D. (1997). Quantitative image analysis of birefringent biological materials. J. Microscopy 187, 62-67.
Zhou, Y.-M. (1999). The optical properties of living organisms, Ph.D. Thesis, Open University, Bioelectrodynamics Laboratory.
Zhou, Y.M., Newton, R.H., Haffegee, J., Brown, J.Y., Ross, S., Bolton, J.P., Ho, M.W.: Imaging Liquid Crystalline Mesophases in vivo and in vitro: Measuring Molecular Birefringence and Order Parameter of Liquid Crystals. Bios Journal, 1996.
Zhou, Y,-M., Newton, R.H., Haffegee, J.P. Meek, K. and Ho, M.W. (1999). Effects of different solvents on collagen birefringence and structure. (in preparation).

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The Institute of Science in Society
PO Box 32097, London NW1 OXR
Tel: 44 -020-7380 0908

Note: Elisabet Sahtouris, like Mae Wan Ho, fits my ideal of the spiritually awakened and politically involved scientist. Sahtouris is a biologist who spent 13 years on a small Greek Island contemplating the connections between small cell systems to human organisms to planetary ecosystems to human economic systems as a map of evolution. This mirrors perfectly the Taoist alchemy approach to energetically harmonizing the Human (vital organ system) with the Earth’s seasons & directional energy matrix with the harmonics of Heaven (planets, stars, black holes).
Her article could be titled “The Tao of Globalization”, as it is about the nesting of all these different systems into a harmonious whole and the impact of economic systems on the whole. She doesn’t talk about the Life Force per se, but has mapped out its omnipresent signature in creating yin (cooperative) and yang (competitive) biological systems to maintain healthy growth and balance. A long piece, but fast reading and well worth it. Her entire book, Earth Dance, and other brilliant articles can be downloaded from www.ratical.org/Lifeweb.
-Michael Winn

The Globalization of humanity is a natural, biological, evolutionary process. Yet we face an enormous crisis because the most central and important aspect of globalization — its economy — is currently being organized in a manner that so gravely violates the fundamental principles by which healthy living systems are organized that it threatens the demise of our whole civilization.

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Contents:

* The Wake-up Call
* Global Community
* Lessons of Nature
* Introducing Holarchy
* Body economics
* The evolution of cooperation
* Holarchic negotiations evolve
* The Principles of Living Systems
* The “either/or” syndrome
* A balance of all levels
* Dynamics of Natural Democracy
* What’s to be done?

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Lessons of Nature:

* All living systems self-organize and maintain themselves by the same biological principles, which we can identify and abstract.

* Among the principles essential to the health of living systems are empowered participation of all parts and continual negotiation of self-interest at all levels of organization.

* Humanity constitutes a living system within the larger living system of our Earth.

* Essential to the health of humanity is empowered participation of all humans and negotiated self-interest among individual, local and global economies as well as the Earth itself.

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The problem is we have tried to tell the human story without telling the Earth’s story.
–Thomas Berry

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The Wake-up Call

What an astonishing thing it is to watch a civilization destroy itself because it is unable to re-examine the validity, under totally new circumstances, of an economic ideology.
–Sir James Goldsmith, London Times, Feb 1994

Although I have made a fortune in the financial markets, I now fear that the untrammeled intensification of laissez-faire capitalism and the spread of market values into all areas of life is endangering our open and democratic society. The main enemy of the open society, I believe, is no longer the communist but the capitalist threat.
–George Soros, Atlantic Monthly, Feb 1997

When globalized capitalism’s leading players themselves warn us of the dangers of the system in which they have gained their enormous wealth, we had better pay attention. They are telling us clearly that the current course of economic globalization cannot continue without threatening the very survival of humanity.
Will our seriously imbalanced civilization survive? Historian Arnold Toynbee studied twenty-three past civilizations, looking for common factors in their demise. The two most important ones, it seems, were the extreme concentration of wealth (George Soros’ warning) and inflexibility in the face of changing conditions within and around them (Sir James Goldsmith’s warning).
We cannot go on playing global Monopoly when a cooperative game is called for by our obvious global problems. In 1994, Robert Kaplan warned that anyone who thought things were still going well was ignoring three-fourths of the world. His cover article (“The Coming Anarchy,” Atlantic Monthly, February 1994) was illustrated by a burning globe. This year, same month, same weathervane magazine, the cover featured George Soros’ article telling us that global corporate and financial capitalism is at fault.
The central problem at present is that the “democratic” congresses of some seventy nations including the United States, have voted away the sovereignty of their nations by agreeing to uphold the provisions of the World Trade Organization (WTO), which can meet in secret and challenge any laws made at any level in member nations (including their provinces, states, counties or cities) if they are deemed to conflict with its interests.
How could this happen? In the United States, the story goes back at least as far as the first few decades following World War II, a heady time in which we still believed in “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” while gradually our Congresses were bought off by corporate interests.
As Paul Hawken pointed out, “Washington D.C. has become a town of appearances and images, where sleight of (political) hand has largely replaced the clumsy system of payoffs, outright bribes and backroom deals of old….One per-cent of American society owns nearly 60 percent of corporate equities and about 40 percent of the total wealth of this nation. These are the plutocrats who wield the power and control this pre-eminent “company town” while trying to convince the other 99 percent of the citizenry that the system works in our best interests, too.” (The Ecology of Commerce, Harper Collins, NY 1993, p. 111)
In the course of the Cold War, had we been paying adequate attention, we would have seen that both communist and capitalist systems were subjugating local interests (individual and community) to national and global interests, however much we in the West were ideologically taught that our individual wellbeing was primary and our democracy good for our communities. Practice did not bear out theory; to wit: unemployment, poverty, crime, unsafe streets, drugs, unsafe foods, polluted air and water, ill health, spiritual crisis, despair and even rapidly increasing child suicide and murder. Similarly, megacorporations, now globally legitimized by the WTO, the GATT (General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade) and the pending MAI (Multilateral t Agreement on Investment), are overriding the interests of nations, local communities and individuals. (See Appendix B for more details.) As Ralph Nader points out, “Under WTO rules, for example, certain *objectives* are forbidden to all domestic legislatures… including [objectives such as] providing any significant subsidies to promote energy conservation, sustainable farming practices, or environment-ally sensitive technologies.” To understand this situation and to see what we can do to alter the course of events toward a healthy future for all humanity, we need to look at the inherent contradictions between these current economic developments and the democratic, ecologically sound economic system we could develop.
As a biologist, I find that the easiest way to comprehend this contradiction is by looking at humanity as a whole in its natural context, thus recognizing ourselves as a living system and comparing our current unhealthy economic situation with the economics of healthy living systems. In doing so we will see clearly why the “Wake-up” call is being sounded and how to respond with the biological resilience that is our evolutionary heritage, privilege and responsibility.
Therefore, I will discuss in some detail the natural organization of living systems, with their endlessly negotiated “political economies” as we are only now coming to under-stand them. If you bear with me in this discussion, a new and coherent understanding of our global crisis and its solutions will emerge very clearly. The challenge of crisis confronts us; our opportunity lies in responding positively and actively.

Global Community

The human being of the West has abandoned being human and has turned himself into an individual… community has died in them.
–Nicolas Aguilar Sayritupac, Aymara Indian, Lake Titicaca, Bolivia

To think of ourselves as a living system, we must see ourselves in community with all other people at local, national and global levels. While this may seem superficially easy, it is actually not. Western culture, now globally dominant, has systematically trained us, as Sayritupac accurately observed, to think and act as though we are separate individuals, often in competition with each other for scarce resources of one sort or another, primarily money, which has be-come the perceived means to all we want and need in life. From the vantage point of an evolution biologist watching the human species, it’s encouraging to see that community and community values are at last coming back to life in Western culture. Not as an alternative to individualism, which was an important human development, but to complement it in a healthy balance.
The new swell of interest in, even fervor for, a global human community with equitable and ecologically sustainable economics is vitally important for our species survival. Words such as “community” and “communal values” were consciously or unconsciously suppressed in our culture during the Cold War because of their linguistic similarity to “communism.” Happily they are back in our vocabulary now that the Soviet stigma has been removed from them. We have, in fact, suffered greatly from their absence. The big question is whether we can restore community and communal values to our globalization process before all is lost.
The globalization of our species is not a choice; it is a natural, inevitable evolutionary process that began when humans settled on all continents. Human empire building over the past few thousand years continued the process by merging cultures over ever larger areas. In modern times, this empire-building process has been shifting from imperial nations with colonial empires to corporate cartels and other global corporate entities with economic empires which, in some cases, now dominate or overrule national political structures.
Yet, simultaneously, nations have joined in a United Nations effort with remarkable success in negotiating cooperative global systems such as telephone, postal and air travel networks, as well as the initiation of other global agreements on electronic/ satellite communications, oceans, etc. that are less democratic and of programs that seriously attempt to implement global health, education and peace. Because these efforts at the democratization of humanity conflict with the concentration of wealth and power, the United Nations is continually under intense pressure. Thus we see that it is not globalization per se that is undesirable. The cause of the enormous crisis we face is the manner in which the most central and important aspect of globalization, its economics, is currently organized. For this reason, we must become more conscious participants in the process of globalization, to avoid letting a handful of powerful players lead us all to doom.
First and foremost, we must recognize globalization as a biological process — something that is happening to a natural living system we call humanity. Then we can see how an economics that violates the fundamental principles by which living systems are organized currently threatens the demise of human civilization.
Fortunately life is resilient, and we are witnessing a growing storm of protest rising from calmer discussions of economic globalization. These are healthy reactions that can help lead us to survival, for they indicate increasing recognition and concern that communal values have been overridden in a dangerous process that sets vast profits for a tiny human minority above all other human interests.
Most people looking at problems of “market-driven capitalism” are becoming aware on some level that the measure of human success must shift from money to wellbeing for all. To do this, communal values must be reclaimed and acted upon in a way that ensures a balance of global interests with local interests and with the interests of all other species.
The evolutionary process is an awesome improvisational dance that weaves individual, communal, ecosystemic and planetary interests into a harmonious whole.
Biological research of the past few decades, on the evolution of nucleated cells, multicellular organisms and mature ecosystems as cooperative enterprises, is updating our ingrained view of antagonistic competition as the sole driving force of evolution–a Darwinian view that was adopted as the rationale for an unjust dog-eat-dog world of antagonistic capitalist competition and ultimately the fascist holocaust. As Soros says, “there is something wrong with making the survival of the fittest a guiding principle of civilized society. This social Darwinism is based on an outmoded theory of evolution.”
As the more enlightened view gains prominence — that life is far too intelligent and naturally cooperative to proceed simply by blind accident and dominance struggles–it will be increasingly translated, to our collective benefit, into a more enlightened view of our human society in all its social, economic, political and cultural ramifications.
My purpose is to help with that translation, for we humans, no matter how spiritual, are inescapably biological creatures, and the solutions we seek are readily available in nature’s experience. We are a living system embedded in a larger living system, and we could benefit greatly from the lessons already learned in the five-billion-year dance of our planet.

Lessons of Nature

The only myth that’s going to be worth thinking about in the immediate future
is one talking about the planet — not this city, not these people, but the
planet and everybody on it.
–Joseph Campbell

Introducing Holarchy:

We can see more clearly what is going on if we look more closely at the individual, the community, the nation and global human society as living systems embedded within each other like Russian nested dolls or Chinese boxes. Arthur Koestler coined elegant terms for this concept: holons in holarchies (Janus: A Summing Up, Pan Books, London 1978). Each relatively self-contained system, such as a cell, an organism, a family or an ecosystem, is a holon, while holarchy refers to their interdependent embeddedness within each other, and was intentionally derived but distinguished from the term hierarchy to avoid its value implications of relative superiority. Take the living system most intimately familiar to all of us: the human body. We’ve long known that our bodies behave as a community of cells, which are organized into organs and organ systems. The central nervous system functions as the body’s government, continually monitoring all its parts and functions, ever making intelligent decisions that serve the interest of the whole enterprise. Its economics are organized as an equitable system of production and distribution, with full employment of all cells and continual attention to their wellbeing. The immune `defense’ system protects its integrity and health against unfamiliar intruders. It can be thought of as a kind of global political economy with organs as bioregional units, their different tissues as communities, cells as families or clans, and the organelles within cells as individuals (which many of them once actually were, as we will see shortly).
More recently, microbiology has revealed the relative autonomy of cells and their organelles in ever more exquisite detail: every cell constantly making its own decisions, for example, on what to filter in and out through its membrane, how to adjust its local production and distribution economics, which segments of DNA to reorganize or copy from its nuclear gene library for use in maintaining its cellular welfare, etc. Hardly the automatons we had thought them to be!
Physiologically we can see that the needs and interests of individual cells, their organs and the whole body must be continually negotiated to achieve the body’s dynamic equilibrium or healthy balance. Cancer is an example of what happens when this balance is lost, with the proliferation of a particular group of cells ignoring the needs of the whole, multiplying wildly at the expense of the body holon, ultimately defeating their own purposes by destroying it.

Body economics:

On the whole, our bodies work in remarkably harmonious health. But imagine what would happen if our bodies tried to implement an economic system such as we humans practice in our world at present:
How would your body fare if the raw material blood cells in bones all over your body could be mined as resources by more powerful “northern industrial” lung and heart organs, transported to their production and distribution centers where blood is purified and oxygen added to make it a useful product? Imagine it is then announced that blood will be distributed from the heart center only to those organs that can afford it. What is not bought is thrown out as surplus or stored till the market demand rises. How long could your body survive that system? Is it an economic system that could keep any living entity healthy?
Can we turn the United Nations into a governing body as dedicated to service as is our central nervous system? When will human diversity be recognized to be as necessary and creative as the diversity of our cells and organs? When will we be as concerned with the health of every local bioregion in our global body as our individual body is, or practice its cellular full employment policy? When will we implement its efficient and universally beneficial kind of economics?
Obviously metaphors have their limits and I do not for a moment suggest we slavishly emulate body models. But they are examples of living systems with healthy politics and economics, and we all have them in common, regardless of our worldviews, or of our personal, political or spiritual persuasions. Surely body metaphors are preferable to outdated and unrealistic mechanical metaphors of perfect societies that were supposed to run permanently and smoothly as well-oiled machines once we got them built correctly. The whole Cold War was rooted in competition over which side had that perfect social machinery!

The evolution of cooperation:

Our bodies are multicelled creatures which actually evolved from an earlier evolutionary phase of “multicreatured” cells, whose story was pieced together by microbiologist Lynn Margulis. (Symbiosis in Cell Evolution, 1981; Early Life, 1982). The story of their evolution holds an extremely important lesson for humanity today.
In brief, it goes like this: Ancient bacteria, some two billion years ago, had blanketed the Earth by themselves, inventing all the ways of making a living still employed today (mainly fermentation, photo-synthesis, respiration) and devouring its “resources” with downright human thoroughness. Finding themselves in crisis, they began to invade each other for new resources in a phase I call bacterial imperialism, which we humans echoed so much later in our ignorance of their experience. This phase led to renewed crisis, because their early attempts at “globalization” into huge colonies were based on competitive exploitation of each other with no concern for all participating members’ wellbeing.
Many such colonies died, until somehow they finally managed to evolve the cooperative scheme we call the nucleated cell: a huge bacterial community with a peaceful division of labor, which we call the nucleated cell. All this was achieved, of course, without benefit of brains, in time to avoid the extinction of Earthlife eons ago. In fact, their “invention” of these huge cells is what makes you and me possible, for each of our cells, as well as those of all organisms larger than bacteria, is one of their descendent cooperatives. (For details of this story, see “An Inspirational Tale of Ancient Times”, below.)
Life, as this story shows, is resilient and creative.
Some of the greatest catastrophes in our planet’s life history have spawned the greatest creativity! And therein lies my hope for humanity. It is worth looking at this cooperative evolutionary process up close. What is it that prevents your cells, or your organs, from pursuing their self-interest competitively such that relatively few “win” and most “lose?” The superficial answer is that they are part of a cooperative community in which the health of every level in the body’s holarchy promotes the health of individual cell and organ holons. But what is it that makes our individual cells and organs behave communally? If we can answer this critical question biologically, we will gain important insight for applying the lessons of nature to our human affairs.

Holarchic negotiations evolve:

One definition of the word evolution is the flow of interwoven steps in an improvisational dance. Although it comes from dance terminology, it actually fits biological evolution very well, since we can now see it as an ongoing process of interweaving, self-organizing holons in holarchy. The dance is not always smooth. Nature sometimes stumbles as it improvises, making crude moves, especially on the part of young aggressive species, such as our own, that attempt to take over the whole dance.
In fact, one can discern in evolution a repeating pattern in which aggressive competition leads to the threat of extinction, which is then avoided by the formation of cooperative alliances, as in the bacterial story above. To show how this works, let me introduce a concept of simultaneous self-interest at all levels of living systems holarchy, a concept I have not yet encountered among other evolution biologists. Darwin, as we well know, held the competitive individual to be the driving force of evolution (as we have applied this theory socially, it could be called the capitalist version of evolution), while later biologists countered with the alternative of species self-interest, wherein individuals within species demonstrated altruism and self-sacrifice for the common good (the communist version) but species as wholes were competitive with each other. Richard Dawkins, refuting both these views, claimed they were in error because competition among selfish genes drove evolution (micro-capitalism?). But what if all these evolutionists are right in sum, rather than individually? That is, what if every level of organization in nature looked out for its self-interests simultaneously?

An Inspirational Tale of Ancient Times
In studying the Earth’s evolution, the most fascinating story I know is that of ancient beings who created an incredibly complex lifestyle, rife with technological successes such as electric motors, nuclear energy, polyester, DNA recombination and worldwide information systems. They also produced–and solved–devastating environmental and social crises and provided a wealth of lessons we would do well to consider.
This was not a Von Daniken scenario; the beings were not from outer space. They were our own minute but prolific forebears: ancient bacteria. In one of his popular science essays, Lewis Thomas, estimating the mitochondria that are descendants of ancient bacteria in our cells as half our dry bulk, suggested that we may be huge taxis they invented to get around in safely ( Lives of a Cell, 1974).
From whatever perspective we choose to define our relationship with them, it is clear we have now created the same crises they did some two billion years ago. Further, we are struggling to find the very solutions they arrived at–solutions that made our own evolution possible and that could now improve the prospects of our own far distant progeny, not to mention our more immediate future. I owe my understanding of this remarkable tale to microbiologist Lynn Margulis, whose painstaking scientific sleuthing traced these events back more than two billion years.
The bacteria’s remarkable technologies (all of which still exist among today’s free-living bacteria) include the electric motor drive, which functioned by the attachment of a flagellum to a disk rotating with ball bearings in a magnetic field; the stockpiling of uranium in their colonies, probably to heat their communities with nuclear energy; perfect polyester (biodegradable, of course), elaborate cityscapes we can only now see under the newest microscopes and their worldwide communications and information system, based on the ability to exchange (recombine) DNA with each other–the first World Wide Web!
Yet, like ourselves, with our own proud versions of such wondrous technologies, the ancient bacteria got themselves deeper and deeper into crisis by pursuing win/lose economics based on the reckless exploitation of nature and each other. The amazing and inspirational part of the story is that entirely without benefit of brains, these nigh invisible yet highly inventive little creatures reorganized their destructively competitive lifestyle into one of creative cooperation.
The crisis came about because respiring bacteria (breathers) depended on ultraviolet light as a critical component in the creation of their natural food supply of sugars and acids, while photosynthesizing bacteria (bluegreens) emitted vast quantities of polluting oxygen which created an atmospheric ozone layer that prevented ultra-violet light from reaching the surface of the Earth. Cut off from their food supply, the hi-tech breathers, with their electric motor rapid transport, began to invade the bodies of larger more passive fermenting bacteria (bubblers) to literally eat their insides — a process I have called bacterial colonialism.
The invaders multiplied within these colonies until their resources were exhausted and all parties died. No doubt this happened countless times before they learned cooperation. But somewhere along the line, the bloated bags of bacteria also included some bluegreens, which could replenish food supplies if the motoring breathers pushed the sinking enterprises up into brighter primeval waters. Perhaps it was this lifesaving use of solar energy that initiated the shift to cooperation. In any case, bubblers, bluegreens, and breathers eventually contributed their unique capabilities to the common task of building a workable society. In time, each donated some of their “personal” DNA to the central resource library and information hub that became the nucleus of their collective enterprise: the huge (by bacterial standards) nucleated cells of which our own bodies and those of all Earth beings other than bacteria are composed.
This process of uniting disparate and competitive entities into a cooperative whole–a multi-creatured cell, so to speak–was repeated when nucleated cells aggregated into multi-celled creatures, and it is happening now for a third time as we multi-celled humans are being driven by evolution to form a cooperative global cell in harmony with each other and with other species. This new enterprise must be a unified global democracy of diverse membership, organized into locally productive and mutually cooperative “bioregions,” like the organs of our bodies, and coordinated by a centralized government as dedicated in its service to the wellbeing of the whole as is the nervous system of our bodies. Anything less than such cooperation will probably bring us quickly to the point of species extinction so that the other species remaining may get on with the task.
adapted from E.Sahtouris’ “The Evolution of Governance” IN CONTEXT, #36, Fall
1993; http://www.context.org/ICLIB/IC36/Sahtour.htm

This would necessitate ongoing negotiations among individual parts and levels of organization, and this is exactly what seems to be happening. Moreover, Nature’s dance seems to be energized by the conflicting self-interests of various parts and levels, and choreographed by the compromises it has made in the course of evolution, and continues to make in every day of the present. At its best, the dance becomes elegant, harmonious, beautiful in its dynamics of non-antagonistic counterpoint and resolution.
The repeating pattern of evolution is the sequence from unity to diversification, which produces conflict that instigates negotiations, resulting in resolution leading to cooperation, and thus back to unity in the form of a higher level of organization.

The most important lesson learned in the course of its evolution, often the hard way, is that no level of holarchy may be sacrificed without killing the whole!
Let’s explore this driving dynamic as it plays out in our everyday human experience. The Greek playwright Aristophanes said of marriage partners a long time ago: Can’t live with ’em; can’t live without `em. Look at this familiar situation anew: A couple is a holon in which two individual holons (the partners) are embedded. This is thus a two-level holarchy, the levels being that of couplehood and that of the individuals. The couple will survive in good health only if each of the three holons’ self interest is negotiated with the other two! Once you see this, then extrapolation to family is easy. Now try community.
My favorite creation myth from India tells that the cosmos began as a vast sea of milk in which a tiny wavelet formed, and was torn ever after between wanting to be itself and longing to merge back into the sea. Is this not another metaphor for individual and community in the endlessly creative dialog and metalog of self-expression, already re-cognized in ancient times? What matters in this dialog is that the contradictions do not become antagonistic.
A mature ecosystem–say a rainforest–is a complex ongoing process of negotiations among species holons and between individual species and other parts and levels of the self-regulating holarchy comprised by the various micro and macro species along with air, water, rocks, sunshine, magnetic fields, etc. As Soros pointed out in the Atlantic Monthly, “Species and their environment are interactive, and one species serves as part of the environment for the others. There is a feedback mechanism…” among levels. Let us now look at a fuller complement of the principles by which these interwoven living systems operate, so that we may get on with analyzing our global human crisis more effectively.

The Principles of Living Systems
Anyone who knows how to run a household, knows how to run the world
–Xilonem Garcia, a Meshika elder in Mexico

Xilonem Garcia, in this statement, expresses her intuitive knowledge that anyone who understands the principles of living systems can apply them to any holon at any level of its holarchy.
If we think about it, we can all be aware of such principles operating in our bodies. And we seem to intuit and practice them reasonably well at the family level. Not many people starve three of their children to overfeed the fourth, for example, or beautify one corner of their garden by destroying the rest of it. At the level of our local communities or towns, we begin to lose sight of those principles, and when we consider our nations or the world, we seem to have forgotten them entirely, despite the fact that these are living systems, too.

Main Features and Principles of Living Systems

1. Self-creation (autopoiesis)
2. Complexity (diversity of parts)
3. Embeddedness in larger holons and dependence on them (holarchy)
4. Self-reflexivity (autognosis–self-knowledge)
5. Self-regulation/maintenance (autonomics)
6. Response ability–to internal and external stress or other change
7. Input/output exchange of matter/energy/information with other holons
8. Transformation of matter/energy/information
9. Empowerment/employment of all component parts
10. Communications among all parts
11. Coordination of parts and functions
12. Balance of Interests negotiated among parts, whole, and embedding
holarchy
13. Reciprocity of parts in mutual contribution and assistance
14. Conservation of what works well
15. Creative change of what does not work well

Let us look, then, at a list of the main features and principles of all healthy living systems or holons, be they single cells, bodies, families, communities, ecosystems, nations or the whole world (see above). By understanding these principles, we can assess the health of any particular living system and see where it may be dysfunctional. This in turn will give us clues to making the system healthier.
I leave it to the reader to consider this list in detail, and to choose a familiar living system, such as an organization or community, to analyze for its adherence to each principle in turn. Our purpose here is to learn to do such analyses in order to understand in what ways our living systems are healthy and in what ways they are not. We want especially, in this discussion, to apply there principles to the process of political, economic and cultural globalization–of forming our new “body of humanity.” As soon as we begin checking this list, we see that while globalization of humanity is bringing about a complex, self-organizing process and is embedded within our ecosystems (1,2,3), it does not meet most of the other requirements because only a relatively small part of humanity is involved in decisions and has the power to serve its own interests, often at the expense of other parts.
We must question how well it knows itself (4), for the process to date has not been fully conscious, at least among the vast majority of humans. Most of us feel swept along by its tides with far less than real knowledge of what the process is all about.
We have not adequately taken into account our embeddedness in and dependence upon the Earth holon with all its various sustaining ecosystems. As a result, our self-regulation is woefully inadequate. To wit, the input of matter and energy from our ecosystems into our human systems (7) has been unsustainably rapacious, transforming them to our use as though they were simply resources put there for our benefit. Our output back into those ecosystems has further despoiled them rather than restored them.
While our human system certainly has the complexity and diversity of parts common to all living systems, we have not recognized that as an asset. Rather, we have tried to make the system’s human components as uniform as possible by imposing a Western consumer ethic and other Western cultural patterns of industrialization, education, fashion, etc. on the world as a whole.
We had better take into account that monoculture is a very strange concept we humans have introduced into Nature and that it does not make a lastingly workable living system. Monoculture fails in agriculture as in social culture, in economics as in religion. Social monoculture is rooted in an outmoded and ignorant fear of difference and of scarcity. It is time we learned to respect and cherish our human diversity as the creative source of harmonious complexity.
As we continue through the list it is readily apparent that our worldwide system of humanity is not functioning well as a living system. The system neither empowers nor employs all humans (9). While our communications (10) are technologically impressive, we do not use them to coordinate parts and functions (11) in ways that foster a balance of interests at all levels (12) of the human system (individuals, families, communities, bioregions, nations, world), nor is there yet an intent for reciprocity in mutual contribution and assistance (13). As for conservation (14) and creative change (15), we are entirely unused to seeing that both are necessary parts of a single system because of our pervasive either/or syndrome, which I would like to discuss in some detail.

The “either/or” syndrome:

The capitalist/communist drama that played out for most if not all of our lifetimes reveals a fundamental dramatic flaw: an odd and ultimately impossible ideological choice: to build society on the basis of individual interest or on the basis of communal interest.
Throughout the Cold War, our global alignment presented nations with this either/or choice between “left-wing” communism and “right-wing” capitalism. One simply could not be “for” both capitalism and communism, both left and right.
Even within our political democracies we divide ourselves into radical and conservative parties of various hues, and ask, or require, ourselves to make the choice to vote for one or the other of their left or right political programs. In essence, “right” is conservative, “left” is radical (and still “tainted” by association with communism).
In nature, no living system chooses between conservation and radical change as a way of life. Some living systems, such as squids and sharks, cockroaches and certain lizards, have functioned so well despite dramatic changes in their environments that they have survived virtually unchanged over eons, rather like bicycles in the jet age. Others, such as our own human species, have virtually leaped into change. But they have not taken their particular directions from some unflinching commitment to either conservation or change; they have simply done what was called for depending on circumstances. Most species combine conservation and change as circumstances demand. Fifty years of laboratory evidence shows that when they change, they do so by rearranging their DNA intelligently in response to circumstances in the environment
(Sahtouris, E. A Walk Through Time: From Stardust to Us, Wiley, New York 1998).
Thus Nature interweaves conservation and change to protect what works and change what doesn’t. And we would do well to adopt that strategy, as Alvin Toffler suggested some time ago in urging us to stop looking left and right, but rather to assess any idea in terms of whether it will lead us forward or backward (Toffler, A. The Third Wave, Wm. Collins, London, 1980).
In practice, it turns out, there was more in common between capitalism and communism than their professed either/or ideologies indicated. Alvin Toffler was the first author I recall talking about parallels between the Soviet East and the Capitalist West. Both, he pointed out, were unfairly exploiting the Third World to support their large industrialist economies. Now David Korten goes further, telling us ” a modern economic system based on the ideology of free market capitalism is destined to self-destruct for many of the same reasons that the Marxist economy collapsed in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union.” (Mander & Goldsmith, editors. The Case Against the Global Economy and For a Return to the Local, Sierra Books 1996). He spells out these common features as:

1. the concentration of economic power in unaccountable and abusive centralized institutions (state or transnational corporations);
2. the destruction of ecosystems in the name of progress;
3. the erosion of social capital by dependence on disempowering mega institutions;
4. narrow views of human needs by which community values and spiritual connection to the Earth are eroded.

Note that all of these illustrate systems in which the “top” level is empowered by disempowering local and individual levels. We are accustomed to understanding this about communist systems, but we have ignored the erosion of our own democratic principles in the process of capitalist globalization. A another example of the either/or syndrome, the USA’s President Clinton’s Commission on Sustainability, in its initial meetings, actually argued whether discussions of ecological sustainability need involve economics. The debate occurred because we have created yet another apparent either/or situation: economics versus ecology–sometimes epitomized in the United States as “jobs versus spotted owls.” In the brief time I was given to address this Commission, I pointed out that ecology in Greek is the logos or organization, of the oikos (society as “household”), and ecology the “household’s” nomos or rules. Thus, they can hardly be at odds in any healthy society. The problem is not whether they need be linked, but that we separated them in the first place! (Recall here Xilonem Garcia’s earlier quoted comment that “Anyone who knows how to run a household, knows how to run a world.”)
Our latest version of the either/or syndrome seems to be in a growing debate on globalization versus localization, as is implied, for example, by the title just cited: “The Case Against Globalization and Toward Local Economy.” While most authors of this recent IFG (International Forum on Globalization) book are really only opposed to the way in which globalization is happening, considerable numbers of people actually are arguing this situation in classical and ultimately unrealistic either/or fashion.

A balance of all levels:

It is of the utmost importance that we not let economic globalization override the interests of people and their local economies and ecosystems, for this would be a grave violation of the principles of living systems, as we have just seen. Local economies are holons within the global human holarchy, and must have the power to negotiate effectively, in their own self-interest, with other levels of that holarchy.
The solution to our currently imbalanced globalization is not to oppose globalization; it is to do globalization better.
We can easily see that balance among the interests of the global holon and those of the regional and local holon economies it comprises is as important as the balance between the interests of any local economy (as a holon) and those of the individual people and non-human species which comprise it. Thus the appropriate response to the world corporate interests that railroaded the GATT (General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade) and the WTO (World Trade Organization) into existence under the rubric of “economic liberalism” without in fact giving it a democratic vote after adequate information, is clearly the strengthening of self-sufficient local economies, as David Korten, Herman Daly, Edward Goldsmith and other members of the IFG have explained. It is also to launch a sufficiently strong movement to demand change in the GATT and /WTO themselves, and in the United Nations which spawned them as it earlier spawned the World Bank and the IMF (International Monetary Fund).
Taking our cues from our bodies, or from the Earth itself, with its diverse ecosystems, we can see that bioregionalism–basic local self-sufficiency economics which takes all species, including humans, into account — is as necessary and important an aspect of healthy globalization as are equitable international trade relations. Certainly no one part of a healthy globalized economy will be able to exploit another. That means local economies will have to protect themselves against unfair trade and strong economies will have to permit that protection in their own interests of seeing a healthy global economy.
Soros points out in his Atlantic Monthly article that in nature, “Cooperation is as much a part of the system as competition” and again, “The doctrine of laissez-faire capitalism holds that the common good is best served by the uninhibited pursuit of self-interest.” But unless self-interest is “tempered by a recognition of a common interest,” the society, on which the market rests, “is liable to break down.” This is an excellent example of understanding living systems principles.
That is, “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” by all people must be possible within the global economy

Dynamics of Natural Democracy

My tradition helps us learn that individual and group needs must be met in ongoing ways for the People to survive as a People… As we try to consciously and conscientiously fit economics and business back into a holistic approach to life and living; there is much that can be learned from societies and communities that have never forgotten that wholeness;… communities that understand Life as flows of energy,… [in which] everyone receives basic support…. everyone contributes… no part is separate from any other part… the health of the whole enables the health of any part thereof… sickness of the smallest part impacts the whole.
–Paula Underwood, World Business Academy Journal, vol. 10 no 4, 1996

In historic terms, capitalism and communism are human social systems experiments that looked good in theory but proved problematic in practice. One has failed; the other is still being tested. Both have imbalanced the interests of individual and community by making one subservient to the other, rather than putting them in balance with each other.
It is of considerable interest that both capitalism and communism were in part inspired by the democratic political economy and social structure of the Native American Haudenosaunee, a union of native nations that the Europeans called Iroquois. Ben Franklin, influential with the other founding fathers of the USA, on the one hand, and Friedrich Engels, who influenced Karl Marx, on the other, were inspired by this unique democracy. Unfortunately, neither the capitalist nor the communist systems inspired by the Haudenosaunee really understood her tradition as Paula Underwood describes it above.
It is still a lesson to be learned from many native cultures that humankind is but one holon within the Earth holarchy. In such awareness, we all would see clearly the advantage in negotiating (not eliminating) our human differences, and we would also cease and desist immediately our denial of planetary interests and our profligate destruction of the ecosystems sustaining us with ever more difficulty.
If we were an intelligent species–and that remains to be demonstrated, given our knowing destruction of our own life support system and our rather juvenile antagonisms over what belongs to whom–we would look to the planet that spawned us for guidance in human affairs, as was the original purpose of natural and political philosophy in ancient Greece. It would then become obvious that human affairs have reached the danger level at which cooperation must restore the imbalances of aggressive competition and hoarding if we are to survive.

What’s to be done?

Survival means the survival of humankind as a whole, not just a part of it…. If the South cannot survive, the North is going to crumble. If countries of the Third World cannot pay their debts, you are going to suffer here in the North. If you do not take care of the Third World, your well-being is not going to last, and you will not be able to continue living in the way you have been for much longer.
–Thich Nat Han, “The Heart of Understanding”

The global wave of protests against the unfair advantage of huge corporations and bodies such as the World Trade Organization (WTO) that represent their interests, as I said at the outset, is a healthy reaction necessary to rebalancing holarchy in our species is to survive the current crises. We have seen that globalization is the natural next phase of evolution. We are not entirely in control of this process and it is beyond our power to stop. We have already globalized transportation, communications, money, industries, food, weapons, pollution and other aspects of human culture, many of them peacefully.

Sir James Goldsmith, one of the wealthiest men in the world at the time, was quoted in a London Times article of 1994 (March 5). He said: “What an astonishing thing it is to watch a civilization destroy itself because it is unable to re-examine the validity, under totally new circumstances, of an economic ideology.” That ideology is now questioned and discussed ever more openly.

The main problem is being identified as imbalance in our global economics. All the WTO’s member states authorize the WTO to do their business negotiations and all are bound by its decisions. They can be forced to change any of their own present or future laws if, as the WTO provisions read , “the attainment of any [WTO] objective is being impeded” by its existence. The trade dispute panels of the WTO and NAFTA do not guarantee members’ economic disinterest. Further, they keep all their proceedings, documents and transcripts secret. There cannot be any media or citizen participation, and no review or appeal is available.

This constitutes a loss of sovereignty among the member nations, whose agreements to join were railroaded through congresses with inadequate discussion. But it is not too late to redress these severe imbalances as the world’s people wake up to them.

Under present WTO practices, Thailand has been told it cannot refuse to import US cigarettes for health reasons, and Indonesia may not keep the rattan it needs for domestic use. Neither children nor adults are protected from exploitative and unhealthy conditions of labor, and no member country may make any effort to protect its local industry and employment against erosion by unfair competition in the world market. Self-sufficient organic farming is literally outlawed, while poisonous chemicals are forced on countries, destroying the health of people, crops, land, air and water for the sake of short-term profits in high places. The US, after long grassroots efforts resulting in bans on tuna fish caught without ensuring the safety of dolphins, is now being forced to import it again. Europe fights hard against forced imports of genetically altered foods.

As each injustice comes to light, people become informed and active. The good news is that we don’t have to do our economics inequitably to globalize. It is possible, as Hazel Henderson has pointed out for decades, to do win/win, rather than win/lose, economics. (Paradigms in Progress: Life Beyond Economics , 1991; Building a Win/Win World, 1996).

As Henderson points out, the UN’s most powerful nations commandeered the World Bank and the IMF, then dominated the GATT discussions and set up the WTO together with corporations and financial institutions. Yet the UN’s special agencies, during the same timespan, formed agreements and treaties on nuclear proliferation (IAEA), air traffic rules (IATA) and postal rates (GPU), also working doggedly on health, education and security issues, as well as accepting a great deal of criticism and recommendations for UN restructuring, which is now an official process. Obviously the UN can only be as good as its member states will make it and as NGO (Non-Government Organizations) can push it to be.

Polls show clearly that the people of the United States support the UN overwhelmingly, while their presumably representative government does not pay its dues and periodically threatens to quit. Interesting global power shifts would happen if it did. Henderson recommends a new UN funding structure by a tiny tax (.003%) on international currency transactions, global commons use fees, “sin taxes” on polluters, drug traffic fines and taxes on arms sales, to avoid the problems created by non-payment of dues by its members. The UN, whatever its problems and whatever our view of it is, remains, as Henderson points out, “the world’s major networker, broker, and convenor of new global negotiations.” All the new problems of globalization are centered in its spinoffs, especially the newer GATT and WTO. So we must also see as a sign of hope the relentless popular pressure of NGOs that is proving itself increasingly an agent of change.

In 1995 the UN World Summit on Social Development in Copenhagen, covered by two thousand journalists, discussed replacing GNP measures with a people centered and ecologically sustainable “new development paradigm.” The 1996 UN Habitat II Summit in Istanbul hosted a World Business Forum that set up a process for Global Standards. Inside the World Bank, its own staff is now in the process of creating significant progressive changes. Now, in 1999, NGOs are sponsoring the Hague Appeal for Peace.

In addition to such NGOs, labor organizations, religious organizations such as the United Religions Initiative and others devoted to interfaith peace and alliances, various conscious investment and pension funds, meetings such as the annual Gorbachev Foundation sponsored State of the World conferences and grassroots movements are all playing a role in global awareness and the restructuring of human society. These are just a few of many examples showing that we are growing wiser as a species in our self-organization at the global level.

Some capitalist entrepreneurs are uniting with each other to work out ways of doing alternative and responsible-to-community capitalism in organizations such as The World Business Academy, Business for Social Responsibility, the Social Ventures Network and the Conscious Business Alliance. Certain corporations are moving toward stakeholder ownership, very serious recycling, and holarchic decision making. Role models such as the Body Shop, Interface and Ben and Jerry’s show us the possible future of all business enterprises. The picture of globalization and the needs and aspirations of the human community are clarifying now and we can get on with the task of insuring our civilization against demise. We can prove ourselves a mature species, ready to learn from our parent planet’s four and a half billion years of experience in evolving workable living systems.

The beloved American author Mark Twain tells the story of a young man returning from his first forays out into the world, amazed on hearing his father speak–surprised at all his father has learned while he was gone. It is of course a characterization not of new learning in the father, but in the son. The son’s budding maturity lies in his new ability to listen to an elder’s accumulated wisdom.

When we humans, after all a very young species, drop our adolescent arrogance of thinking we know it all and read the wisdom in our parent planet’s accumulated experience of living systems design, we too will mature as a species, to our own benefit and that of all other species, as well as the planet itself.

See Also :
* “NEW POLITICAL TAGS: GLOBAL VS. NATIONAL” from the 12/22/97 edition of The Christian Science Monitor .
* from nirvanet’s Zen Planet :
* 9/97 ZP interview: Elisabet Sahtouris
* Interview: Part Two
* E. Sahtouris: BRAZIL AND GLOBALIZATION

for further information please contact:

Elisabet Sahtouris, Ph.D.
1477 Floribunda Ave, Suite 204
Burlingame, CA 94010 USA
e-mail: elisabet@sahtouris.com

Note: Here is an interesting lecture on the relationship between the three forces of Love, Eros, and Sex. If you substitute the Taoist concepts of Shen (Spirit) for Love, Chi for Eros (the flowing yin-yang pulsation of the chi field is inherently orgasmic), and Jing (sexual essence) for Sex Force, the talk becomes relevant to Taoist practitioners.
The Taoist sexual practices, when cultivated to a higher level through Taoist internal alchemy meditation, take one far beyond the scope of what is suggested by this lecture. The transformations between jing, chi, shen and back again are the main focus of alchemy, and the jing (sexual essence) is the primordial force fueling the process in the physical plane. The higher level Taoist adept also transcends the limitations inherent in monogamous relationships by learning to absorb needed jing, chi, or shen qualities needed for personal completion from other people at a distance (without sexual relationship) or from the earth, planets, and stars.
But this lecture puts these three terms into popular western concepts and may help them come more alive, particularly the emphasis on married relationships being a vessel for soul (shen) exploration. Many Taoist sexual practitioners get stuck at the level of cultivating chi only, without exploring the spiritual presence of shen (spirit/intelligence) underlying the chi field. After nearly 19 years with my partner Joyce Gayheart, my own experience is that the deeper one’s alchemy practice takes you into the Tao, the deeper the soul experience of one’s partner. The lecture was channeled over 40 years ago from “Spirit” by Eva Pierrakos, but survives the test of time. Her Pathwork center in the New York Catskills was used for Healing Tao summer retreats by Mantak Chia from 1989 to 1992. Many Pathwork students went on to become well known channels — Pat Rodegast (Emmanuel books), Barbara Ann Brennan, and Michael Morgan. Published by The Pathwork ? Foundation (1996 Edition) Pathwork Guide Lecture No. 44, January 16, 1959.
– Michael Winn

Greetings in the Name of the Lord. I bring you blessings, my dearest friends. Blessed is this hour.

Tonight I would like to discuss three particular forces in the universe: the love force as it manifests between the sexes, the erotic force, and the sex force. These are three distinctly different principles or forces that manifest differently on every plane, from the highest to the lowest. Humanity has always confused these three principles. In fact, it is little known that three separate forces exist and what the differences between them are. There is so much confusion about this that it will be quite useful for my friends to hear what the reality is.

The erotic force is one of the most potent forces in existence and has tremendous momentum and impact. It is supposed to serve as the bridge between sex and love, yet it rarely does. In a spiritually highly developed person, the erotic force carries the entity from the erotic experience, which in itself is of short duration, into the permanent state of pure love. However, even the strong momentum of the erotic force carries the soul just so far and no farther. It is bound to dissolve if the personality does not learn to love, by cultivating all the qualities and requirements necessary for true love. Only when love has been learned does the spark of the erotic force remain alive. By itself, without love, the erotic force burns itself out. This of course is the trouble with marriage. Since most people are incapable of pure love, they are also incapable of attaining ideal marriage. Eros seems in many ways similar to love. It brings forth impulses a human being would not have otherwise: impulses of unselfishness and affection he or she might have been incapable of before. This is why eros is so very often confused with love. But eros is just as often confused with the sex instinct which, like eros, also manifests as a great urge.

Now, my friends, I would like to show you what the spiritual meaning and purpose of the erotic force is, particularly as far as humanity is concerned. Without eros, many people would never experience the great feeling and beauty that is contained in real love. They would never get the taste of it and the yearning for love would remain deeply submerged in their souls. Their fear of love would remain stronger than their desire.

Eros is the nearest thing to love the undeveloped spirit can experience. It lifts the soul out of sluggishness, out of mere contentment and vegetation. It causes the soul to surge, to go out of itself. When this force comes upon even the most undeveloped people they become able to surpass themselves. Even a criminal will temporarily feel, at least toward one person, a goodness he has never known. The utterly selfish person will, while this feeling lasts, have unselfish impulses. Lazy people will get out of their inertia. The routine-bound person will naturally and without effort get rid of static habits. The erotic force will lift a person out of separateness, be it only for a short time.

Eros gives the soul a foretaste of unity and teaches the fearful psyche the longing for it. The more strongly one has experienced eros, the less contentment will the soul find in the pseudo-security of separateness. Even an otherwise thoroughly self-centered person may be able to make a sacrifice during the experience of eros. So you see, my friends, eros enables people to do things they are disinclined to do otherwise; things that are closely linked with love. It is easy to see why eros is so often confused with love.

How then is eros different from love? Love is a permanent state in the soul. Love can only exist if the foundation for it is prepared through development and purification. Love does not come and go at random; eros does. Eros hits with sudden force, often taking a person unaware and even unwilling to go through the experience. Only if the soul is prepared to love and has built the foundation for it will eros be the bridge to the love that is manifest between a man and a woman.

Thus you can see how important the erotic force is. Without the erotic force hitting them and getting them out of their rut, many human beings would never be ready for a more conscious search for the breaking down of their own walls of separation. The erotic experience puts the seed into the soul and makes it long for unity, which is the great aim in the Plan of Salvation. As long as the soul is separate, loneliness and unhappiness must be its lot. The erotic experience enables the personality to long for union with at least one other being. In the heights of the spirit world, union exists among all beings — and thus with God. In the earth sphere, the erotic force is a propelling power regardless of whether or not its real meaning is understood. This is so even though it is often misused and enjoyed for its own sake, while it lasts. It is not utilized to cultivate love in the soul, so it peters out. Nevertheless, its effect will inevitably remain in the soul.

Eros comes to people suddenly in certain stages of their lives, even to those who are afraid of the apparent risk of adventuring away from separateness. People who are afraid of their emotions and afraid of life as such will often do anything in their power to avoid — subconsciously and ignorantly — the great experience of unity. Although this fear exists in many human beings, there are few indeed who have not experienced some opening in the soul where eros could touch them. For the fear-ridden soul that resists the experience, this is good medicine regardless of the fact that sorrow and loss may follow due to other psychological factors. However, there are also those who are over-emotional, and although they may know other fears of life, they are not afraid of this particular experience. In fact, the beauty of it is a great temptation to them and therefore they hunt greedily for it. They look for one subject after another, emotionally too ignorant to understand the deep meaning of Eros. They are unwilling to learn pure love, and simply use the erotic force for their pleasure and when it is worn out they hunt elsewhere.

This is an abuse and cannot continue without ill effects. Such a personality will have to make amends for the abuse — even if it was done in ignorance. In the same vein, the over-fearful coward will have to make up for trying to cheat life by hiding from eros and thus withholding from the soul a medicine, valuable if used properly. Most people in this category have a vulnerable point somewhere in their soul through which eros can enter. There are also a few who have built such a tight wall of fear and pride around their souls that they avoid this part of life experience entirely and so shortchange their own development. This fear might exist because in a former life they had an unhappy experience with eros, or perhaps because the soul has greedily abused the beauty of the erotic force without building it into love. In either case, the personality may have chosen to be more careful. If this decision is too rigid and stringent, the opposite extreme will follow. In the next incarnation circumstances will be chosen in such a way that a balance is established until the soul reaches a harmonious state wherein there are no more extremes. This balancing in future incarnations always applies to all aspects of the personality. In order to approach this harmony to some extent at least, the proper balance between reason, emotion, and will has to be achieved.

The erotic experience often mingles with the sexual urge, but it does not always have to be that way. These three forces — love, eros, and sex — often appear completely separately, while sometimes two mingle, such as eros and sex, or eros and love to the extent the soul is capable of love, or sex and a semblance of love. Only in the ideal case do all three forces mingle harmoniously. The sex force is the creative force on any level of existence. In the highest spheres, the same sex force creates spiritual life, spiritual ideas, and spiritual concepts and principles. On the lower planes, the pure and unspiritualized sex force creates life as it manifests in that particular sphere; it creates the outer shell or vehicle of the entity destined to live in that sphere.

The pure sex force is utterly selfish. Sex without eros and without love is referred to as animalistic. Pure sex exists in all living creatures: animals, plants, and minerals. Eros begins with the stage of development where the soul is incarnated as a human being. And pure love is to be found in the higher spiritual realms. This does not mean that eros and sex no longer exist in beings of higher development, but rather that all three blend in harmoniously, are refined, and become less and less selfish. Nor do I mean that a human being should not try to achieve a harmonious blend of all three forces.

In rare cases, eros alone, without sex and love, exists for a limited time. This is usually referred to as platonic love. But sooner or later with the somewhat healthy person, eros and sex will mingle. The sex force, instead of being suppressed, is taken up by the erotic force and both flow in one current. The more the three forces remain separate, the unhealthier the personality is. Another frequent combination, particularly in relationships of long standing, is the coexistence of genuine love with sex, but without eros. Although love cannot be perfect unless all three forces blend together, there is a certain amount of affection, companionship, fondness, mutual respect, and a sex-relationship that is crudely sexual without the erotic spark which evaporated some time ago.

When eros is missing, the sexual relationship must eventually suffer. Now this is the problem with most marriages, my friends. There is hardly a human being who is not puzzled by the question of what to do to maintain the spark in the relationship which seems to evaporate the more habit and familiarity with one another sets in. You may not have posed the question in terms of three distinct forces, yet you know and sense that something goes out of a marriage that was present at the beginning; that spark is actually eros. You find yourself in a vicious circle and think that marriage is a hopeless proposition. No, my friends, it is not, even if you cannot as yet attain the ideal.

In the ideal partnership of love between two people all three forces have to be represented. With love you do not seem to have much difficulty, for in most cases one would not marry if there did not exist at least the willingness to love. I will not discuss at this point the extreme cases where this is not so. I am focusing on a relationship where the choice is a mature one and yet the partners cannot get around the pitfall of becoming bound by time and habit, because elusive eros has disappeared. With sex it is very much the same. The sex force is present in most healthy human beings and may only begin to fade — particularly with women — when eros has left. Men may then seek eros else-where. For the sexual relationship must eventually suffer unless eros is maintained.

How can you keep eros? That is the big question, my dear ones. Eros can be maintained only if it is used as a bridge to true partnership in love in the highest sense. How is this done? Let us first look for the main element in the erotic force. When you analyze it, you will find that it is the adventure, the search for the knowledge of the other soul. This desire lives in every created spirit. The inherent life-force must finally bring the entity out of its separation. Eros strengthens the curiosity to know the other being. As long as there is something new to find in the other soul and as long as you reveal yourself, eros will live. The moment you believe you have found all there is to find, and have revealed all there is to reveal, eros will leave. It is as simple as that with eros. But where your great error comes in is that you believe there is a limit to the revealing of any soul, yours or another’s. When a certain point of usually quite superficial revelation is reached, you are under the impression that this is all there is, and you settle down to a placid life without further searching.

Eros has carried you this far with its strong impact. But after this point, your will to further search the unlimited depths of the other person and voluntarily reveal and share your own inward search determines whether you have used eros as a bridge to love. This, in turn, is always determined by your will to learn how to love. Only in this way will you maintain the spark of eros in your love. Only in this way will you continue to find the other and let yourself be found. There is no limit, for the soul is endless and eternal: a whole lifetime would not suffice to know it. There can never be a point when you know the other soul entirely, nor when you are known entirely.

The soul is alive, and nothing that is alive remains static. It has the capacity to reveal even deeper layers that already exist. The soul is also in constant change and movement as anything spiritual is by its very nature. Spirit means life and life means change. Since soul is spirit, the soul can never be known utterly. If people had the wisdom, they would realize that and make of marriage the marvelous journey of adventure it is supposed to be, forever finding new vistas, instead of simply being carried as far as you are taken by the first momentum of eros. You should use this potent momentum of eros as the initial thrust it is, and then find through it the urge to go on further under your own steam. Then you will have brought eros into true love in marriage.

Marriage is intended by God for human beings and its divine purpose is not merely procreation. That is only one detail. The spiritual idea of marriage is to enable the soul to reveal itself and to be constantly on the search for the other to discover forever new vistas of the other being. The more this happens, the happier the marriage will be, the more firmly and safely it will be rooted, and the less it will be in danger of an unhappy ending. Then it will fulfill its spiritual purpose.

In practice, however, marriage hardly ever works that way. You reach a certain state of familiarity and habit and you think you know the other. It does not even occur to you that the other does not know you by any means. He or she may know certain facets of your being, but that is all. This search for the other being, as well as for self-revelation, requires inner activity and alertness. But since people are often tempted into inner inactivity, while outer activity may be all the stronger as an overcompensation, they are being lured to sink into a state of restfulness, cherishing the delusion of already knowing each other fully. This is the pitfall. It is the beginning of the end at worst, or at best a compromise leaving you with a gnawing, unfulfilled longing. At this point the relationship turns static. It is no longer alive even though it may have some very pleasant features.

Habit is a great temptress, pulling one toward sluggishness and inertia, so that one does not have to try and work or be alert any more.

Two people may arrange an apparently satisfactory relationship, and as the years go by they face two possibilities. The first is that either one or both partners become openly and consciously dissatisfied. For the soul needs to surge ahead, to find and to be found, so as to dissolve separateness, regardless of how much the other side of the personality fears union and is tempted by inertia. This dissatisfaction is either conscious — although in most instances the real reason for it is ignored — or it is unconscious. In either case, the dissatisfaction is stronger than the temptation of the comfort of inertia and sluggishness. Then the marriage will be disrupted and one or both partners will delude themselves into thinking that with a new partner it will be different, particularly after eros has perhaps struck again. As long as this principle is not understood, a person may go from one partnership to another, sustaining feelings only as long as eros is at work.

The second possibility is that the temptation of a semblance of peace is stronger. Then the partners may remain together and may certainly fulfill something together, but a great unfulfilled need will always lurk in their souls. Since men are by nature more active and adventurous, they tend to be polygamous and are therefore more tempted by infidelity than women. Thus you can also understand what the underlying motive for men’s inclination to be unfaithful is. Women tend much more to be sluggish and are therefore better prepared to compromise. This is why they tend to be monogamous. Of course, there are exceptions, in both sexes. Such infidelity is often as puzzling to the active partner as to the “victim.” They do not understand themselves. The unfaithful one may suffer just as much as the one whose trust has been betrayed.

In the situation where compromise is chosen, both people stagnate, at least in one very important aspect of their soul development. They find refuge in the steady comfort of their relationship. They may even believe that they are happy in it, and this may be true to some degree. The advantages of friendship, companionship, mutual respect, and a pleasant life together with a well-established routine outweigh the unrest of the soul, and the partners may have enough discipline to remain faithful to one another. Yet an important element of their relationship is missing: the revealing of soul to soul as much as possible.

Only when two people do this can they be purified together and thus help each other. Two developed souls, who have a knowledge of purification in their subconscious, though they may ignore the various steps of these teachings, can yet fulfill one another by revealing themselves, by searching the depths of the other’s soul. Thus what is in each soul will emerge into their conscious minds, and purification will take place. Then the life-spark is maintained so that the relationship can never stagnate and degenerate into a dead end. For you who are on this path, and follow the various steps of these teachings, it will be easier to overcome the pitfalls and dangers of the marital relationship and to repair damage that has occurred unwittingly.

In this way, my dear friends, you not only maintain eros, that vibrating life-force, but you also transform it into true love. Only in a true partnership of love and eros can you discover in your partner new levels of being you have not heretofore perceived. And you yourself will be purified also by putting away your pride and revealing yourself as you really are. Your relationship will always be new, regardless of how well you think you know each other already. All masks must fall, not only the superficial but the real, which you may not even have been aware of. Then your love will remain alive. It will never be static; it will never stagnate. You will never have to search elsewhere.

There is so much to see and discover in this land of the other soul you have chosen, whom you continue to respect, but in whom you seem to miss the life-spark that once brought you together. You will never have to be afraid of losing the love of your beloved; this fear will be justified only if you refrain from risking the journey of self-revelation together. This, my friends, is marriage in its true sense and the only way it can be the glory it is supposed to be.

Each of you should think deeply about whether you are afraid to leave the four walls of your own separateness. Some of my friends are unaware that to stay separate is almost a conscious wish. With many of you it is this way: you desire marriage because one part of you yearns for it — and also because you do not want to be alone. Quite superficial and vain reasons may be added to explain the deep yearning within your soul. But aside from this yearning and aside from the superficial and selfish motives of your unfulfilled desire for partnership, there must also be an unwillingness to risk the journey and adventure of revealing yourself. An integral part of life remains to be fulfilled by you — if not in this life, then in future lives.

Should you find yourself alone, you may, with this knowledge and this truth, repair the damage that you have done to your own soul by harboring wrong concepts in your unconscious. You may discover your fear of the great adventurous journey with another, which will explain why you are alone. This understanding should prove helpful and may even enable your emotions to change sufficiently so that your outer life may change too. This depends on you. Whoever is unwilling to take the risk of this great adventure cannot succeed in the greatest venture humanity knows — marriage.

In this way, my dear friends, you not only maintain eros, that vibrating life force, but you also transform it into true love. Only in a true partnership of love and eros can you discover in your partner new levels of being you have not heretofore perceived. And you yourself will be purified also by putting away your pride and revealing yourself as you really are. In this way, your relationship will always be new, regardless of how well you think you know each other already. All masks must fall, not only the superficial but the real, which you may not even have been aware of. Then your love will remain alive. It will never be static; it will never stagnate. You will never have to search elsewhere. There is so much to see and discover in this land of the other soul you have chosen, whom you continue to respect but in whom you seem to miss the life spark that once brought you together. You will never have to be afraid of losing the love of your beloved; this fear will have justification only if you refrain from risking the journey of self-revelation together.

This, my friends, is marriage in its true sense and the only way it can be the glory it is supposed to be. Each of you should think deeply about whether you are afraid to leave the four walls of your own separateness. Some of my friends are unaware that to stay separate is almost a conscious wish. With many of you it is this way: you desire marriage because one part of you yearns for it — and also because you do not want to be alone. Quite superficial and vain reasons may be added to explain the deep yearning within your soul. But aside from this yearning and aside from the superficial and selfish motives of your unfulfilled desire for partnership, there must also be an unwillingness to risk the journey and adventure of revealing yourself. An integral part of life remains to be fulfilled by you — if not in this life, then in future lives.

Only when you meet love, life, and the other being in such readiness will you be able to bestow the greatest gift on your beloved, namely your true self. And then you must inevitably receive the same gift from your beloved. But to do that, a certain emotional and spiritual maturity has to exist. If this maturity is present, you will intuitively choose the right partner, one who has, in essence, the same maturity and readiness to embark on this journey. The choice of a partner who is unwilling comes out of the hidden fear of undertaking the journey yourself. You magnetically draw people and situations toward you which correspond to your subconscious desires and fears. You know that.

Humanity, on the whole, is very far away from this ideal, but that does not change the idea or the ideal. In the meantime you have to learn to make the best of it. And you who are fortunate enough to be on this path can learn much wherever you stand, be it only in understanding why you cannot realize the happiness that a part of your soul yearns for. To discover that is already a great deal and will enable you in this life or in future lives to get nearer to the realization of this idea. Whatever your situation is, whether you have a partner or are alone, search your heart and it will furnish you the answer to your conflict. The answer must come from within yourself, and in all probability it will relate to your own fear, unwillingness, and your ignorance of the facts. Search and you will know. Understand that God’s purpose in the partnership of love is the complete mutual revelation of one soul to another — not just a partial revelation.

Physical revelation is easy for many. Emotionally you share to a certain degree — usually as far as eros carries you. But then you lock the door, and that is the moment when your troubles begin. There are many who are not willing to reveal anything. They want to remain alone and aloof. They will not touch the experience of revealing themselves and of finding the soul of the other person. They avoid this in every way they can.

My dear ones, once again: understand how important the erotic principle is in your sphere. It helps many who may be unwilling and unprepared for the love experience. It is what you call “falling in love,” or “romance.” Through eros the personality gets a taste of what the ideal love could be. As I said before, many use this feeling of happiness carelessly and greedily, never passing the threshold into true love. True love demands much more of people in a spiritual sense. If they do not meet this demand, they forfeit the goal for which their soul strives. This extreme of hunting for romance is as wrong as the other, where not even the potent force of eros can enter the tightly locked door. But in most cases, when the door is not too tightly bolted, eros does come to you at certain stages of your life. Whether you can then use eros as a bridge to love depends on you. It depends on your development, your willingness, your courage, your humility, and your ability to reveal yourself.

Are there any questions in connection with this subject, my dear friends?

QUESTION: Yes. It is so difficult for a woman to talk to a man. Men don’t answer when one tries to get into a conversation touching the emotional understanding. That makes it very, very difficult for the woman.

ANSWER: Here is a great error, my dear. But let us first establish one fact that should be well understood. Woman is by nature more emotionally inclined. Man is by nature more spiritually, or on a lower level, more intellectually inclined. By that I do not mean that he has to be what you call an intellectual. It is simply that usually the reasoning faculty is stronger in men. Because of this the revealing of his emotions is a very difficult step for a man. In this a woman can help him. The man will help the woman in other ways. The mistake you make is in thinking that revelation and the meeting of souls is brought about by talking. Oh, it may be a temporary crutch, it may be one detail; or rather it may be simply a tool, a means of expressing certain facets. But this is all. It is not in the talking that you find the other soul or that you reveal yourself, though this may be a part of it. It is in the being that this whole and basic attitude is determined.

It is the woman who is stronger emotionally. For her it is usually easier to muster the courage to meet soul to soul and touch the deepest core of longing that is also in man. If she can use her intuition and reach that part of her partner, he will respond provided he has the maturity. He must respond. Whether this response comes occasionally through a conversation or not, is not so important. It is not a question of whether a verbal discussion serves in reaching the other soul. Certainly, speaking is a part of it, together with all the other faculties. But the ability to speak about things is not the determining factor. First the inner basis has to be established. Then you will be flexible enough to use all the faculties God has given you. To find and meet the other soul means going into the state of inner being; the doing is only an incidental result, a mere detail which is part of the outer manifestation. Is that clear?

QUESTION: Yes, it is clear. And I think it is wonderful. In other words it is the task of the woman to find the other soul?

ANSWER: It may often be that it is easier for the woman to take the first necessary steps after eros is no longer capable of maintaining its own momentum. But both need to have the basic willingness to go on the journey together. As stated before, the woman often finds it easier to reveal herself, to let the emotions come out. The mature woman who is earnestly willing to undertake the adventure of true marriage will have the mature and healthy instinct to find the right partner. The same applies to the man, of course.

Once this willingness exists in both, either one may lead the way. It does not make any difference who starts. It may often be the woman, but it may also be the man at times. Whoever starts it, a time will come when the other one will also lead and help. In a relationship that is alive, healthy, and flexible, it must alternate and change constantly. At any given time, whoever is the stronger, the leader, will help in the liberation of the other. For this soul-revelation is a liberation — liberating the other soul from the prison of loneliness, and liberating the self. This prison may even appear comfortable if you live and stagnate in it long enough. One should not wait for the other to start. Whoever is more mature and courageous at a particular instant will start, and will thus raise the maturity of the other which may then surpass his or her own. Thus the helper becomes the helped; the liberator becomes the liberated.

QUESTION: When you talk about the revelation of a soul to another, do you mean that, on a higher level, this is the way the soul reveals itself to God?

ANSWER: It is the same thing. But before you can truly reveal yourself to God, you have to learn to reveal yourself to another beloved human being. And when you do that, you reveal yourself to God too. Many people want to start with revealing themselves to the personal God. But actually, deep in their hearts, such revelation to God is only a subterfuge because it is abstract and remote. No other human being can see or hear what they reveal. They are still alone. One does not have to do the one thing that seems so risky, requires so much humility and thus threatens to be humiliating. By revealing yourself to another human being, you accomplish so much that cannot be accomplished by revelation to God who knows you anyway, and who really does not need your revelation.

When you find the other soul and meet it, you fulfill your destiny. When you find another soul, you also find another particle of God, and if you reveal your own soul, you reveal a particle of God and give something divine to another person. When eros comes to you, it will lift you up far enough so that you will sense and know what it is in you that longs for this experience and what is your true self, which is longing to reveal itself. Without eros, you are merely aware of the lazy outer layers.

Do not avoid eros when it wants to come to you. If you understand the spiritual idea behind it, you will use it wisely. God will then be able to lead you and enable you to make the best of helping another being and yourself on the way to true love, of which purification must be an integral part. Although your purification work through a deeply committed relationship manifests differently than it does in the work on this path, it will help you toward a purification of the same order.

QUESTION: Is it possible for a soul to be so rich that it can reveal itself to more than one soul?

ANSWER: My dear friend, do you say that facetiously?

QUESTION: No, I do not. I am asking whether polygamy is within the scheme of spiritual law.

ANSWER: No, it certainly is not. And when someone thinks it may be within the scheme of spiritual development, that is a subterfuge. The personality is looking for the right partner. Either the person is too immature to have found the right partner, or the right partner is there and the polygamous person is simply carried away by eros’ momentum, never lifting this force up into the volitional love that demands overcoming and working in order to pass the threshold I mentioned before.

In cases like this, the one with an adventurous personality is looking and looking, always finding another part of a being, always revealing himself or herself only so far and no further, or perhaps each time revealing another facet of his or her personality. However, when it comes to the inner nucleus, the door is shut. Eros then departs and a new search is started. Each time it is a disappointment that can only be understood when you grasp these truths.

Raw sexual instinct also enters into the longing for this great journey, but sexual satisfaction begins to suffer if the relationship is not kept on the level I show you here. It is, in fact, inevitably of short duration. There is no richness in revealing oneself to many. In such cases, one either reveals the same wares all over again to new partners, or, as I said before, one displays different facets of one’s personality. The more partners you try to share yourself with, the less you give to each. That is inevitably so. It cannot be different.

QUESTION: Certain people believe that they can cut out sex and eros and the desire for a partner and live completely for love of humanity. Do you think it is possible that man or woman can swear off this part of life?

ANSWER: It is possible, but it is certainly not healthy or honest. I might say that there is perhaps one person in ten million who may have such a task. That may be possible. It may be in the karma for a particular soul who is already developed this far, has gone through the true partnership experience, and comes for a specific mission. There may also be certain karmic debts which have to be paid off. In most cases — and here I can safely generalize — avoidance of partnership is unhealthy. It is an escape. The real reason is fear of love, fear of the life experience, but the fearful renunciation is rationalized as a sacrifice. To anyone who would come to me with such a problem, I would say: Examine yourself. Go below the surface layers of your conscious reasoning and explanations for your attitude in this respect. Try to find out whether you fear love and disappointment. Isn’t it more comfortable to just live for yourself and have no difficulties? Isn’t really this what you feel deep inside and what you want to cover up with other reasons? The great humanitarian work you want to do may be for a worthy cause, indeed, but do you really think one excludes the other? Wouldn’t it be much more likely that the great task you have taken upon yourself would be better fulfilled if you learned personal love too?

If all these questions were truthfully answered, the person would be bound to see that he or she is escaping. Personal love and fulfillment is man’s and woman’s destiny in most cases, for so much can be learned in personal love that cannot be attained in any other way. And to form a durable and solid relationship in a marriage is the greatest victory a human being can achieve, for it is one of the most difficult things there are, as you can well see in your world. This life experience will bring the soul closer to God than lukewarm good deeds.

QUESTION: I was going to ask a question in connection with my previous one: Celibacy is supposed to be a highly spiritualized form of development in certain religious sects. On the other hand, polygamy is also recognized in some religions — the Mormons, for instance. I understand what you said, but how do you justify these attitudes on the part of people who are supposed to look for unity with God?

ANSWER: There is human error in every religion. In one religion it may be one kind of error, in other religions another. Here you simply have two extremes. When such dogmas or rules come into existence in the various religions, whether at one extreme or another, it is always a rationalization and subterfuge to which the individual soul constantly resorts. This is an attempt to explain away the counter-currents of the fearful or greedy soul with good motives. There is a common belief that anything pertaining to sex is sinful. The sex instinct arises in the infant. The more immature the creature, the more sexuality is separated from love, and therefore the more selfish it is. Anything without love is “sinful,” if you want to use this word. Nothing that is coupled with love is wrong — or sinful.

There is no such thing as a force, a principle, or an idea that is in itself sinful — whether sex or anything else.

In the growing child who is naturally immature, the sex drive will first manifest selfishly. Only if and when the whole personality grows and matures harmoniously will sex become integrated with love. Out of ignorance, humanity has long believed that sex as such is sinful. It was kept hidden, and therefore this part of the personality could not grow up. Nothing that remains in hiding can grow; you know that. Therefore, even in many grownups, sex remains childish and separate from love. And this, in turn, led humanity to believe more and more that sex is a sin and that the truly spiritual person must abstain from it. Thus one of those oft-mentioned vicious circles came into existence.

Because of the belief that sex was sinful, the instinct could not grow and meld with the love force. Consequently, sex in fact often is selfish and loveless, raw and animalistic. If people would realize — and they are beginning to do so increasingly — that the sex instinct is as natural and God-given as any other universal force and in itself not more sinful than any other existing force, they would then break this vicious circle and more human beings would let their sex drives mature and mingle with love — and with eros, for that matter.

How many people exist for whom sex is completely separate from love! They not only suffer from bad conscience when the sex urge manifests, but they also find themselves in the position of being unable to handle sexual feelings with the person they really love. This occurs quite often in some measure, although it does seem extreme. Because of these distorted conditions and this vicious circle, humanity came to believe that you cannot find God when you respond to your sex urges. This is all wrong; you cannot kill off something that is alive. You can only hide it so that it will come out in other ways which may be much more harmful. Only in the very rarest cases does the sex force really become sublimated so as to make this creative force manifest in other realms. Sublimation in its real sense can never occur when there is fear and escape involved, as is the case with most human beings. Does that answer your question?

QUESTION: Perfectly, thank you.

QUESTION: If two young people fall in love and marry and they are not well matched and they don’t understand each other, is it possible that these two people could go on this journey together and have a good marriage?

ANSWER: If both are willing to learn love for one another and gain maturity together. Even where an immature choice was made, it could still become a successful marriage, but only if both are willing and are clearly aware of what marriage is supposed to be. If both lack the will and sense of responsibility for that, they will not have the desire to make such a journey together.

QUESTION: How does friendship between two people fit into this picture?

ANSWER: Friendship is brotherly love. Such friendship can also exist between man and woman. Eros may want to sneak in, but reason and will can still direct the way in which the feelings take their course. Discretion, and a healthy balance between reason, emotion, and will are necessary to prevent the feelings from going into an improper channel.

QUESTION: Is divorce against spiritual law?

ANSWER: Not necessarily. We do not have fixed rules like that. There are cases when divorce is an easy way out, a mere escape. There are other cases when divorce is reasonable because the choice to marry was made in immaturity and both partners lack the desire to fulfill the responsibility of marriage in its true sense. If only one is willing — or neither — divorce is better than staying together and making a farce out of marriage. Unless both are willing to take this journey together, it is better to break clean than to let one prevent the growth of the other. That, of course, happens. It is better to terminate a mistake than to remain indefinitely in it without finding an effective remedy.

One should not, however, leave a marriage lightly. Even though it was a mistake and does not work, one should try to find the reasons and do one’s very best to search out and perhaps get over the hurdles that are in the way. Since they are due to inner mistakes, the partners could try to make the best of it, if both are in any way willing. One can learn a lot from one’s past and present mistakes. To generalize that divorce is wrong in any case is just as incorrect as to say that it is always right. One should certainly do one’s best, even if the marriage is not the ideal experience that I discussed tonight. Few people are ready and mature enough for it. You can make yourself ready by trying to make the best of your past mistakes and learn from them.

My dearest friends, think carefully about what I have said. There is much food for thought in what I told you, for each of you here, and for all those who will read my words. There is not a single person who cannot learn something from them.

I want to close this lecture with the assurance to all of you that we in the spirit world are deeply grateful to God for your good efforts, for your growth. It is our greatest joy and our greatest happiness. And so, my dear ones, receive the blessings of the Lord again; may your hearts be filled by this wonderful strength coming to you from the world of light and truth. Go in peace and in happiness, my dear ones, each one of you. Be in God!

Edited by Judith and John Salyo, Pathwork Guide Lecture No. 44 (1996 Edition)

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