Our personal and collective intelligence is a live 3 way conversation between the body, the mind and one’s environment? When our wants betray our needs the whole conversation can suffer.
The mind influences the body and the body influences the mind. We interact with our environment and it feeds back to us, and so on. To put our finger on the pulse of this conversation may help us to mind our bodies and spirit into healthy dimensions. But the pulse of most conversations can have different values for different people. For some being rich is more important than being wealthy. Many people have chosen the itch of the rich over the health of wealth and our planet, our bodies, have suffered. When the value of a thing has us sacrificing our ability to enjoy it we must question its validity. For example, judgment has some value but do we know its limit? When we judge others we are often just setting up the the conditions to repeat this behavior on ourselves. A quality of mind and body interaction that our best social platforms are surely aware. "Feeling a bit down from spending hours a day judging others? Well, we have just the thing for you! Give us your money and we turn that pesky self doubt into a flurry of engagement from the most valuable of strangers". This is a broken window parable of sorts. A love and hate relationship with our drugs dealers of choice. The magic of space
More and more we are becoming aware of how our lifestyle affects the planet but truly it is our lifestyle that is dependent on the planet and the planet is not very healthy right now. The planet is our body and we would be well minded to take better care of it, less we head towards premature death as a species. It's not doom and gloom either, it's hard science.
Mass species extinction and the degeneration of global ecosystems is real. Digging deep into the human condition will be a necessary aspect of preventing the worst. Our lifestyle at present are indeed a strange style of denial. We can see it, we just don't know how to stop it...yet? Nature moves in mysterious ways but also not so mysterious. Biodiversity and complexity are consistent threads that run through the ecosystems of the world, literal echo systems with negative and positive feedback loops. Our body and the body of the planet often just need space to do the magic of healing.
Can technology save us?
Our whole world is built on this. A literal plastic economy of both self and other. OKM isn’t suggesting we tear it down but that we recognize the necessity of making the shift towards true cost economies. The third industrial revolution is certainly a video worth watching if you would like a glimpse into the coming needs and demands of our future economies. With AI we may even hit an fourth industrial revolution before the planet finds out we are in the 3rd? Wild times!
We have within us all the grand intelligence of nature but often, in our self defined intelligence, we deny the basic rules of the house. Our present civilization is platformed on a technology and set of lifestyle expectations that are perhaps unsustainable. In fact we know they are in their present material state. We will need more than hope if we are to innovate our way through the eye of this needle! It is the hope of technology that we can, through innovation and collaborative action, come up with solutions that allow us to continue on with our positive modern directions. We need truth and we need reconciliation. We need to act quick but also wisely. The world's biggest corporations are using the most sophisticate technology and AI to increase our chews per-second, and we would be naive to think we will slow this down if we don't act wisely and swiftly. Normal is not cool.
Less is more?
I asked my Mom while putting together these first blogs for OKM, “what have you found to be your greatest challenge in taking care of your body health” and she answered, “just doing it”.
It sort of makes Nike’s brand slogan almost a bit patronizing, as if that was the easy part. "Oh, they meant purchase. Just purchase!" Our mind is inextricably linked to our bodies in a way that facilitates motivation or creates obstacles to it. I have found that it doesn’t take much to stay in shape and be healthy but that it often requires less. Less excess and more consistency. Our bodies and minds are attuned to the rhythm of our presence. When we are stressed our mind seeks answers, reasons and solutions? It wanders endlessly to the past and the future to understand it’s pain and map a way out. And while our mind is busy imaging the past and the future, it indulges in the craving and aversion of its contents. We end up losing the presence of our body and we hold in tension without knowing it. Our general state becomes one that is with constant subtle stress. A river of cortisol, our stress hormone, becomes a default chemical romance for many. Whether you are rich or poor, this is the mind of the body, the mind of the planet.
True wealth and equality are within grasp. We are in the lap of abundance, we are in the lap of Mother Earth but we would be well minded to double down on our personal and collective health in this moment of global wake up call.
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