The Work of the Enlivenment Network

Here in the Enlivenment Network, we are trying to develop this pathway through the debris of Modernity and its mirror companion, Coloniality. The deep-seated alienation and dissociation we see in rising anxiety and depression among ‘First World’ people, whose level of material wealth and possible lifespan has never been higher. We are confronted with the feeling among our young that they have been sacrificed on the altar of greed and narcissism, masquerading as prosperity and freedom, which overtook us before we realised its catastrophic consequences.

As we try to break through the noise of mainstream media, lifestyle Influencers and right wing political evangelists, we are part of a larger global movement of people searching for a different way of thinking about things, and in so doing, a different way of being and doing. A new ontology as the ‘ground’ of making sense of things, as the world and its ‘moral order’ as we have known it, seem to be falling apart.

The Enlivenment Worldview

The Enlivenment Worldview is a paradigm shift from the techno-rationality and competitive individualism of Modernity and its shadow, Coloniality, which is the long term result of the European Enlightenment worldview. This worldview, with its roots in the mind/body split of Greek and Cartesian philosophy, and human/nature split in Christianity, embraced the now dominant techo-rationality of Modernity through the impact of the Scientific Revolution, and its expression into the various technological revolutions that reshaped European cultures and their worldview in the 19th and 20th centuries. Which in turn were projected onto the world through 19th century colonialism and two world wars that birthed the ‘American Century’ of global economic hegemony.  Under Trump 2.0, this is now unravelling at pace, but the threads of this unravelling lie within the utilitarian, extractivist logic of techno-rationality, in search of certainty and control in a world that defies such ambition.

By contrast the ENLIVENMENT WORLDVIEW as articulated by Andreas Weber’s bio-poetics embraces a new cultural orientation towards the open-ended and embodied, meaning-generating, paradoxical and inclusive processes of life. It allows for our source of existential meaning to be continuously revealed by relations between individuals, producing an unfolding history of freedom. The freedom that this Enlivenment seeks to advance is our freedom as individuals and groups to be alive-in-connectedness with one another and the more-than-human world. To come home to the embrace of Gaia, Earth as a living, breathing presence, as celebrated in the knowledge systems of Australia’s First Nations peoples, told through their songlines and held in sacred trust by their Elders.

Where to now?

There is a collective searching for where to now? What can ‘emerge’ through the cracks in the debris? Or as Bayo Akomolafe says, how do we escape the stranglehold of the familiar (the Western liberal story of Progress and Prosperity) to allow the imperceptible to blossom?

How do we atone for the dark forces of coloniality that was visited so relentlessly upon those who lived in communion with our fellow Earthlings and the Earth itself, in order for Modernity to feed its restless quest for progress and prosperity?

While Western Europe looks to the Deep Ecology movement, those of us who live in lands where the Indigenous peoples and their knowledge systems still have a voice—in Australia, Canada, the US, Central and South America, the Inuit and Sami people of the Arctic—must pay attention to ontologies radically different to those that have formed the cultural foundations of Modernity.

And in the increasingly multicultural nature of modern nation states, this searching must bring in other ontologies drawn from the deep seated cultures of Asia, the Middle East and Africa, which lie beneath their modern ‘Western’ styled clothes of materialist economic growth.

Whether we like it or not, although we physically live in our neighbourhoods, these are all bound together by the tentacles of a global economic and political order, and the deeper systems logic of our planetary ecosystem that speaks to us through deep time, and increasingly catastrophic weather events and radical shifts in the weather patterns upon which we have built our local economies.

There is a crying out for new possibilities to emerge.

In Europe, Jonathon Rawson tracks these in the Emerge Project, which was initiated in 2018 by the Ekskaret Foundation Stockholm, the Co-Creation Loft in Berlin and Perspectiva in London. He explains that ‘Emerge’ is a word (image and brand), a website, a network (by loose affiliations) and on Mighty Networks and a series of gatherings (Berlin in 2018 and 2021, Kyiv in 2019, Austin in 2022, and several local smaller ones).

Along with this Emerge Project, we have the Emergence Network and well-known figures such as Bayo Akomolafe calling on us to think differently. Akomolafe, drawing on his Nigerian roots, explains the Emergence Network is a planetary network of care and inquiry gesturing towards new assemblages of response-ability during moments when the ways that we think about and address the troubling crises of our times are increasingly a part of those crises.  A virtual village of emerging gestures and practices inspired by posthumanist, Yoruba indigenous, and postactivist instigations.

Then we have the Emergence Magazine, an online publication with an annual print edition that seeks to connect the threads between ecology, culture and spirituality.

Intimation of a Terminal Condition

We thought the Great Financial Crisis of 2008 was a midlife crisis of the liberal dream, as we congratulated ourselves on the rise and rise of middleclass materialists in China and India as they climbed out of their ’Third World’ status. We did not realise all this was an early intimation of a terminal condition, now playing out in the hubris of Trump 2.0.

As one writer has put it, when talking about his own country, the USA, the world’s wealthiest and most powerful nation state, home to the new libertarian tech oligarchs, who are taking over the world as we welcome in the AI revolution:

“We are experiencing what the ultimate individual freedom of Liberalist structures and a Postmodern culture has in part brought us: skyrocketing rates of homelessness, suicide, depression, anxiety, existential insecurity, an AI takeover, the rise of extreme weather events due to climate change, a lack of strong international leadership, an income wealth gap unheard of in the modern era, mass internet addiction, a poorly educated and civics illiterate population, chronic disease and a national health crisis, a media ecosystem with no shared understanding of ‘reality’ and a level of polarization that is teetering our nation on the brink.”

While:

“an increasing chorus of voices are beginning to recognize that the gifts of Liberalism and Postmodernism — economic prosperity, hyper-individuality, nearly unlimited personal freedom — are not actually (or solely) what brings humans deep meaning, actualized purpose, holistic wellbeing, and soulful joy.”

The Possibly of Alchemical Transformation

But we know that a diagnosis of a terminal illness, or a similar life-changing event also opens up the possibility for an almost alchemical transformation. I had such an experience myself when the unexpected break up of an intimate relationship, combined with a diagnosis of cancer, broke through my carefully constructed habits of intellectualised control. It forced me to confront the trauma of my childhood and the cost of my coping strategies, plunging me into what the Jungians call my descent journey to release what I had literally locked into my body.

I entered into a period of intense dreams, and learned how to go back into my dreams and ask them what they were trying to tell me. They continued to tell me to dance. But I knew this did not mean take up ballroom dancing, but to learn how to live a different way, to ‘dance with life’ as fluid process. As the Australian filmmaker, George Miller says to Virginia Trioli in her ABC series on Australia’s Creative Types: “We need to live in a world of verbs, not nouns.” Life is a dance of flow, of impermanence.

While studying for my Masters Degree in Science and Technology Studies during these turbulent times, I was able to explore the ideas that had shaped Modernity, and to read the trenchant criticism by feminist scholars of the ‘masculinity’ of the whole science project, as espoused by thinkers such as Francis Bacon.

It sent me on a journey to move beyond the rule of Logos to explore mythopoetic ways of knowing, including making clay fertility sculptures for my garden. And so I read my way through Joseph Campbell’s explorations of world mythologies, while at the same time I studied how the IT revolution was transforming manufacturing, and society at large.

However, my real breakthrough came from discovering the wisdom teachings of Tibetan Buddhism, embedded in a richly mythopoetic world of deities and rituals combined with sharp analytical reasoning. My very first teaching was on ‘Turning Suffering and Happiness into Enlightenment’—the quintessential teaching on how to turn difficult life situations into a wisdom wakeup call, and therefore a blessing. From victimhood to courageous fearlessness and inner freedom. Or as the New Zealand rugby player Ruby Tui has said, how to ‘make lemonade out of lemons’, when explaining how she turned her traumatic childhood into courageous resilience through her love of rugby.

This is where we are all finding ourselves now. Searching for courageous resilience and new threads of poetic ontologies among the debris. It is why, as Andreas Weber says, we must embrace bio-poetics, a shift from old-style European Enlightenment thinking, to post Modernity Enlivenment thinking.

The Journalists’ Dilemma

We’ve been brought up on a mainstream media that triumphed a diet of exposé investigative journalism about evils and betrayals, matched by news that ricochets between entertainment and horror, often interspersed with gimmicky advertising. A recipe for training us in cognitive dissonance, or searching for avoidance.

Mainstream media is worried. The Guardian reports that over 39 per cent of the population in Western democracies are practising ‘news avoidance’. In the face of this, how can the political project of ‘democracy’ actually work?

People tell us they are exhausted by the constant diet of catastrophe ripping the world apart. From catastrophic floods, cyclones, typhoons, tornadoes, and snow storms, matched by increasing desertification and water shortages in many parts of the world.  And then there are the constant wars.  Militarised conflict, mostly driven by vengeful men seeking to impose their view through ‘might is right’, or weaponised trade wars and the capture of government administration by wealthy oligarchs, now playing out in the US and Russia.

Once upon a time it felt that large scale demonstrations could actually have an effect. Remember the Vietnam war protests? But these days they are treated as just one more passing media event, or on a more sinister level, now labelled as domestic terrorism whose participants should be subject to draconian laws designed to manage the sort of ‘real’ terrorism we associate with 9/11 and city bombings across Europe.

New avoidance is not only in response to the diet of catastrophe and weaponised cultural divisiveness. It’s self-righteous aggrandisement of the Christian evangelical Right, or its mirror image among Islamists seeking a Caliphate that can put women in their rightful place, and hold the economic and military power of the West at bay.

It is also driven by a sense of despair, that there is no viable pathway forward through the polycrises, which are engulfing us—whether we live in the affluent suburbs of First World nations, are members of the growing emerging middle classes of China and India exerting our purchasing power, or the marginalised and impoverished, feeling the full brunt of conflict and climate change. All this brilliantly portrayed in 2073, a film by Asif Kapadia

We’re told that instead of the exposé story of ‘monsters in our midst’, we long for stories of hope, for a way forward through the debris. But something that rings true, and is not merely gaslighting reality. We long for authenticity, yet for those of us who have enjoyed the material benefits of modernity, and its offerings of personal individual freedoms, we do not want to lose these either. As the Guardian reports from one news avoider:

“We need to feel uplifted, encouraged and hopeful, not oppressed and afraid.”

The Problem of Complicity

However, if we use social media, Tik Tok, lifestyle Influencers and comedy festivals to merely look away and burrow into our small worlds, we know history will judge us as complicit in the unfolding tragedy. Forever haunted by that soul-wrenching film, Zone of Interest, or the long history of a ‘culture of silence’ that settled over the story of Modernity’s Prosperity and Progress, which has turned its gaze away from its impact on Indigenous peoples and their knowledge systems by European colonial settlers across the Americas and Australia. For when their independence from European empires came, as Nation States, the cultural genocide, and racial marginalisation and exclusion, continued unabated —despite the humanistic claims of European cultures.

So, what is this new story that can be both authentic and uplifting, that can give us some hope and encouragement to find a pathway through the debris of the collapsing dream of Western modernity, which it has exported to the world—including to the very large populations of China and India, and to the marginalised, struggling and conflicted worlds of Africa and the Middle East?

Looking through Cross-Cultural Voices

We see a common thread in the various attempts at a new ‘emergence’. Andreas Weber says that science has to recover poetics from its estrangement through Logos, a world of intellect, reason and materialism; a world of ‘values’ that can be dissected, proven, measured and manipulated.  At the core of our struggle is how to move beyond a world of binary categorisation that denies ambiguity and nuance, and insists on certainty in a world of intrinsic impermanence. A world of fluid processes, not ‘thingness’. Where death is not an enemy but part of the cycle of life.

The mythologists among we children of the West, with our deep cultural roots in Greek mythology and who hunger for a recovery of mythopoetic ways of thinking, say we must recover Dionysius from its dismemberment by Kronos, the tyrannical Titan who devours his own offspring to maintain control. Because, driven by Logos and the competitive individualism of Modernity, our globalised social order has become Kronian—a state of being characterized by division, suppression, and a relentless hunger for control, where life is split into binaries: good versus evil, order versus chaos, self versus other, male versus female—leaving no room for nuance, ambiguity or integration. The creativity and spontaneity of Dionysius has been forever banished, or corralled and corrupted into advertising, monetised art, music ‘products’ or ironic memes, struggling for oxygen in the detritus of polarising discourse and frustrated rage.

The mainstream journalists say the way through is to abandon the world of objectivised facts about the world ‘out there’, and turn it into stories about the journalist’s subjective experience, of the world ‘in here’, the authenticity of lived experience.

And yet, where is the language for this lived experience when language has lost its poetics or shared idea of the very nature of ‘reality’? Or where the individual lived experience has become trapped in narcissistic self-reverie, divorced from the larger whole, from the ‘world-soul’ of mythos. And where the struggle for self-identity and community belonging in such a rapidly changing world is caught up in the lethal ‘tribalism’ of ethnic, religious, gender and nationalist division.

This is the collective journey that we are on, whether we know it or not. Whether we are caught in a cost-of-living crisis, struggling to ‘pay the rent’ for a roof over our head and put food on the table, along with all those demands that go with a modern life. Where we cannot simply get things ‘back on track’, because the tracks have buckled and are being swept away.

Recovering Our Spiritual Sensibility

In Australia, for we children of secular humanism (comprising nearly 40 per cent of the Australian-born population), more and more we are looking for ways to experience ourselves as spiritual beings—able to inhabit the liminal landscape of a world that speaks to us in languages other than the human tongue. Which tugs at our consciousness through the power of this ancient land as a living, breathing presence, nurtured for millennia through the ceremonies of the songlines.

Those of us in the Enlivenment Network recognise that in a multicultural Australia, we are weaving many threads together in a shift to an enlivenment worldview, which recognises our fundamental membership of the community of Earthlings, which aligns with the Indigenous knowledge systems of Australia and their relationist ethos of Caring for Country.

As the women of East Arnhem Land explain in their book, Song Spirals (2019):

Country means not just land but also the waters, the people, the winds, animals, plants, stories, songs and feelings, everything that comes together to make up place.  Country is alive for us, it cares for us, communicates with us and we are part of it. . . .  Our songs are not a straight line.  They do not move in one direction through time and space. . . .  Each time we sing our songspirals we learn more, go deeper, spiral in and spiral out.

In explaining the process of co-becoming with Country, they talk about their practice of milkarri by which they communicate with country.

When we sing through the tears of milkarri it comes from deep inside us.  Milkarri is a chant, a soft tremulous voice deep with emotion, sometimes grief, sometimes joy, pierced with loss and pain, often all of these and more. 

Country is the way humans and non-humans co-become, the way we emerge together, have always emerged together and will always emerge together.  It is all the feelings, the songs and ceremonies, the things we cannot understand and cannot touch, the things that go beyond us, that anchor us in eternity, in the infinite cycles of kinship, sharing and responsibility.  Country is the way we mix and merge, the way we are different and yet become together, are part of each other.  It is the messages, languages and communication from all beings to all beings.  And Country is the songspirals.  It is milkarri.

For the many Australians who are non-Indigenous, we are finding the threads within our own culture that can answer this call of milkarri that speaks to deep roots within our own ancestral cultures that predate our radical separation from membership among all Earthlings, our radical separation between human and nature, mind and body, between Logos and Dionysius.

We also need to explore these threads in the animistic and Buddhist cultures of Asia, the threads in China’s Daoism, Islam’s Sufi tradition, the rich threads in Hindu mythology, and the many threads of Africa’s rich cultural stories and musical genius.  

The WOMAD festival held in Adelaide each year provides a wonderful example of how all these cultural threads are finding ways to talk with each other. These conversations continue in the Bankstown poetry slams that capture the diverse voices of multicultural Western Sydney, and spill out into local creative events in our neighbourhoods and schools.

Rawson, operating with a European framework, suggests that the meaning of emergence highlights the possibility of a different intentional stance towards the world; one that is grounded in receptivity, intuition and subtlety rather than ideology, reason and force. He suggests that all over the world, networks and organisations are rising up to explore uncharted intellectual, spiritual or cultural terrain that invites ways of being, thinking, and doing, and building new forms of institutional praxis and political capital around them.

He concludes, in his Dispatches from a Time Between Worlds, that we know we need to respond to the challenges of our times from a broadly post-conventional perspective, with an appetite for philosophical, social and spiritual innovation that is commensurate with the challenges of our times.

Join us on the journey on the pathway through the debris towards an enlivenment worldview.