Tag Archives: psychology

From Mind to World: Envisioning a Better World In Route to Building a Better World

In Ecosystem Restoration it has been taught to envision how a site could be improved. What does it look like for a degraded landscape to be restored? The act of imagining that and all the (thought) processes involved can be enriching.

This applies to different settings and scales as well. Self improvement can be seen as ‘ecosystem restoration’ in a sense. Ecosystems can teach us analogous lessons about oneself, as we are also a life system and embedded in the life systems. Restoration has a lot of overlap with regeneration and evolution/succession, and all of these processes can be present in one’s life. (More on my experience/thought on ecosystem restoration and oneself at Love what grows and elsewhere on this blog.)

The different scales of envisioning a better world are also related to one another. In some cases, I wonder if they’re related in any fractal way, with the patterns on one scale being replicated throughout other scales at different orders of magnitude. An important aspect of this is that the act of envisioning a better world on one scale can facilitate the actual building a better world on another scale.

To imagine a better world is a beautiful step toward a better world – only a step, but a step nonetheless.

To bite, to fast, or to test my food first – and how?

“What happens when anyone can make it appear as if anything has happened, regardless of whether or not it did?”

https://www.buzzfeed.com/charliewarzel/the-terrifying-future-of-fake-news

Just today I’ve seen two blatantly fake and misleading news stories circulating my Facebook bubbles. As usual, they gain momentum on the fringes (political extremes) and become more widespread by grabbing the attention of any fish that’ll bite and get hooked. Let it go – it ain’t even food!

The problem highlighted by this article has two ferocious prongs:

> On one end, we have the “fake news” itself and all the misled steps that can follow it. I’ll let that speak for itself.

> On the other end, we have the potential for reasonable people to start casting broad and blind blankets of doubt over any information they encounter – perhaps rightfully so!

While the latter can seem safer at first, consider how disturbed the lives of extreme conspiracy theorists are by the single behavior of excessive skepticism. If you cannot have confidence in any data, you are left only to your biases or data-less decisions and conclusions. Skepticism is a key part of science, but science progresses with skepticism *AND* increased confidence through verification.

Verification is quite important then. How do we verify information we receive, from the news, from the Internet, from your own senses? Do we verify some things more than others? Do we do the meta- level task of considering _how much_ verification is needed for certain information?

For that matter, how can you verify that anything in this post has any basis in reality? And before we even go there, … is this food? Bon voyage.

Real recognize real

Unless we learn to recognize and accept all parts of ourselves – dark and light, near the surface and in the depths – we may be destined as a world to a prejudice far worse than what we face now, due to more extreme conditions in the near future testing our patience about ourselves.

What to do with the dark parts of ourselves we cannot reconcile with? I think it depends on perspective. All things have a place in nature, eating someone and being eaten by someone else; those things which have no place can cease to exist, eaten and not returning, or migrating to a more suitable habitat. What is the force of succession within us? What are your internal ecosystems, where your light and dark exist? Are they at peace, or are they troubled and troubling?

The task at hand – the sort of psychological progress Carl Jung focused on – is a deeply personal one. Yet, it may be a critical work for the future of humanity.

I & I