The Enlivenment Network

We have chosen to call ourselves the Enlivenment Network, inspired by Andreas Weber’s vision of reimagining our way of making sense of things through the lens of bio-poetics. His Enlivenment Worldview embraces a new cultural orientation towards the open-ended, embodied, meaning-generating, paradoxical and inclusive processes of life. A source of existential meaning that is continuously revealed by relations between individuals, producing an unfolding history of freedom.

We follow Weber in his claim that in ‘Enlivenment’ we have found a starting point from which to identify the various neglected areas of reality that are hidden in the blind spot of modernist, scientific thinking.  It is where we can reconcile the insights of contemporary science, including the insights about the quantum nature of reality and the interconnections of ecology, with ancient wisdoms.

The non-dual visions of Buddhist ideas about the indivisibility of the union of emptiness and appearance, celebrated in the Heart Sutra. The idea of living in flow, which is celebrated in Daoism, and its symbol that reconciles seeming opposites: yin and yang. The fundamental relationality of First Nations knowledge systems and their ability to live in the reality of non-linear time, whereby creation ancestral spirits are past and an ever-living breathing presence embedded in the land, sky, and water.

As an engaged network of creatives, the Enlivenment Network will work to reignite our collective sense of purpose and connection to the living world through the arts, storytelling, collaboration, and action. We invite you to join us as we create, share, and explore ways to enliven both our communities and our planet, through a range of kickstarting projects, with more in the pipeline.

Paradigm Shift

We are part of a world-wide movement, turning away from the life-threatening trajectory of scientific objectification aligned with transactional neo-liberal economics, which is shaping the next AI revolution, as we confront our global failure to address the causes of life-changing global warming across the planet, and the various impacts this has set in train.

Weber maintains that our inability to honour being alive, as a rich, robust category of thought in economics, public policy and law, means that we do not really understand how to build and maintain a sustainable, life-fostering, or enlivened, society.

At its most extreme, this trajectory informs Trump 2.0, teaming up with the hyper masculinist US tech bros, as they wreak havoc on the liberal assumptions of the rules-based world order, established under US hegemony after WWII. The attempts to civilise the profit maximising brutality of capitalism and its assault on nature, through various forms of regulation and laws, have now been dismissed as ‘woke’, to be ruthlessly stamped out by all means possible.

Weber’s development of the idea of enlivenment is a distinct paradigm shift from the techno-rationality of the 19^th Century Enlightenment Worldview, whereby science, society and politics lost their interest in understanding actual, lived and felt human existence, and became captured by the logic of scientific objectification, in order to ascertain truth about the nature of reality.  About how things work.

Abandoning the religious certainty of a world created and ruled by an all-powerful patriarchal God, the Enlightenment Worldview has involved a promethean quest for scientific certainty: to pin down the ‘rules of creation’ through mathematics, experimentation, minute categorisation, and abstract universal models about the world we live in—driven by the promise of delivering increasing Progress and Prosperity, as measured in material wealth, human convenience and human lifespan—a dream of individual freedom and happiness.

The Crisis of Meaning

Weber suggests that the multidimensional crises of the current global situation are best understood as a crisis in global sense-making. This points to the cognitive dissonance between the promise of economic growth and prosperity for all, against the lived experience of the diminishment of meaningful prosperity for the many.

We have the evidence. We know that beyond a certain point of material wealth, there is no increase in the experience of much-vaunted happiness. And the downside of the constant struggle to compete to acquire such material wealth, as if it can produce the ever-allusive happiness, has become more and more apparent. The Australian Health report reveals that fully 43 per cent of the Australian population have experienced a mental disorder, with anxiety and depression now one of the major chronic ‘diseases’ impacting Australia.

It should not surprise us therefore that ANU’s recent survey, Erosion of Hope, has revealed an Australian population that is increasingly pessimistic about their future, and that of their children. This is despite economic statistics pointing to how our government successfully managed a global inflation crisis to both increase wages and maintain historically low levels of unemployment. These statistics no longer have emotional traction. They feel lifeless, or should I say life-denying.

I’ve long been a political junky, but increasingly I can barely stomach the prognostications by journalists on Sunday’s Insiders, our premier weekly review of politics. The narrow preoccupations of the journalists and their seemingly smug viewpoints are intolerable. They seem impervious to what is really going on.

Despite a statistical increase in life expectancy, real incomes and education levels, the promise of ever-increasing prosperity feels hollow. There is increasing nostalgia about a world we seem to have lost, where the average income earner could own their own home, could take the weekend off to spend time with the family, perhaps even own a little boat to go fishing, and felt a certain security about their job and income. The survey reports that In January about one-fifth (20.4 per cent) of Australians were living comfortably on their present income, a little under half (46.5 per cent) were coping, but nearly one-quarter (23.9 per cent) were finding it difficult and a little under one-in-ten (9.2per cent) were finding it very difficult. Fully one third of the population are struggling.

While those today who have ridden the housing boom (replete with tax protected superannuation savings) may rest with a mortgage free home of increasing splendour—a designer bathroom for every bedroom, a media room, a swimming pool, and a 2 car garage, an increasing proportion of the population can neither afford to buy a home of any sort, or even rent one. Where the cost of rental accommodation for a single income family is now more than 50 per cent of median income, and where the cost of utilities: telecom, gas, and electricity continues to increase.

In the ANU survey only 16 per cent of the population expected life to improve over the next 50 years.

Unmet Expectations

The experience of a global pandemic (COVID 19) threw assumptions about the benefits of globalisation into disarray, and exposed vulnerabilities about community and family life. Although medical science continued to produce ‘miracle cures’ for a variety of diseases and skeletal issues that impact human beings in the burgeoning field of sports medicine, and the expected life expectancy of human beings in so-called advanced economies continues to be projected upwards, even in these countries the population is experiencing increasing levels of chronic illness—mental ill health, musculoskeletal disorders, diabetes, arthritis, asthma, obesity, auto-immune disorders, for which more and more expensive acute medical interventions have proved unsuccessful.

Shaped by the story of ever-increasing levels of prosperity, we now face the dilemma of unmet expectations. Even the dream of extending life expectancy has not delivered nirvana to the aged. Instead, we face a tsunami of dementia impacting about 8 per cent of Australians aged over 70, and 30 per cent for those aged over 85, placing a high burden on our aged care facilities and their staff. When we combine this, with a similar survey of the impact of scientific progress on the natural environment, the results are even more catastrophic. Despite science knowing more about the state of the natural environment and the many species that live there, the application of science to technology for the purposes of wealth extraction for the benefit of humans is accelerating the destruction of the natural environment through industrial waste, resource extraction (mining, factory fishing, land clearing), and carbon-induced global warming, not to mention increasing technology-enabled military conflict. We witness all this in our daily news feeds.

We are desperate for a different take on things, a different way to find meaning and purpose set against this landscape of destruction. A way to overcome our sense of alienation on the dualistic framing of reality that is embedded in our culture, the hangover of the Cartesian separation of mind and body.

Weber suggests that embracing a non-dualistic viewpoint allows for more inclusion and cooperation because there is no disjuncture between rational theory and social practice; the two are intertwined. The freedom that the Enlivenment seeks to advance is our freedom as individuals and groups to be alive-in-connectedness. He asserts that only this integrated freedom can provide the power to reconcile humanity with the natural world.

Avoiding Pitfalls

However, we have to wary of any pitfall to posit reason against feelings, falling into a Cartesian trap. As Weber notes, we can easily confound the overwhelming feeling of closeness and the experience of ‘being really alive’ with psychological fusion and projection, which always carry with them some sorts of emotional abuse. We see much evidence of this in the burgeoning wellness and new-age spirituality ‘industry’—the false guru syndrome, the wellness influencer.

The Enlivenment Worldview, calling on the insights of both science and ancient wisdoms, is replete with ways of reclaiming feeling, while engaging in reason.

Buddhist ideas are based on the idea of ‘awakening’: its meditation practices designed to increase awareness free of anxiety, rather than to produce sleepy relaxation. Its spiritual focus is not on ecstasy, but enlivenment. On very practical ways to come to terms with the fact that ‘suffering’ (dukka) in the form of failed expectations and angst is pervasive, among the rich and poor alike. That it is intrinsic to human life. By a careful examining of its causes, a path to the cessation of this suffering was found. Not in techno-escapism or moralistic censorship, but in the realisation that the nature of life, including our very sense of self, is impermanent and to learn how to flow with that impermanence. That the nature of reality is as paradoxical and magical as quantum science reveals, and cannot be pinned down into any controllable certainty. But that it is possible to train our minds to find their inner refuge of vast wakeful spaciousness and unimpeded compassion, in joyful and playful acceptance of our human condition.

As the Zen masters are said to say: ‘shit happens.’ Death may come at any moment. Things change.

Coda for Simplicity

Recently, in conversation with my eldest son, a single father with a teenage daughter, who finds himself caught in the rental crisis pincer movement: the gap between income and expenditure, I thought of a ‘mantra’ to help him cope. He has a strong affinity for the ocean and is a passionate surfer, and fortunately for him, he lives on the coast. I suggested when he feels hemmed in with rising anxiety about things, to:

Breathe with the ocean; flow through life like the dolphins in the ocean; and take stock of priorities with the keen eyesight of the soaring sea eagle.

In difficult times, we need to remember the simple practice of appreciation. To notice what we do have, not what we wish we had. To let go of our frustration that we cannot, individually, solve the big things reshaping society. As well as lining up with all those folk doing their best in small ways, helping one another as best we can, we can find a sense of connection through friends, family and nature that nourishes us in simple ways in fulfilling the matrix of our basic human needs—safety, food and shelter, affection and love, making sense of things, a sense of interbeing with the world, a space for fun and relaxation.