Today I present a solocast about the phenomenon of emergent collective evolution.. that is to say, how our world changes as a result of us as people and the mysteries of our consciousness. Since our world, society, nature, and selves are complex systems/beings, we must embody this reality when thinking about our own personal transformation as well as our collective one.
I refer to a piece I wrote on my personal SubStack here: https://joemartino.substack.com/p/perhaps-this-is-what-it-will-take
In this episode:
– The importance of understand complex systems vs linear systems when it comes to personal transformation, collective transformation and nature.
– How the space of fundamental wellbeing produces emergent being and action in our local and collective field. This is where material change is born.
– The difference between linear striving for change, where we worry about the future, and having a deep trust in moment to moment change.
– How we can let go of the worry and anxiety associated with global problems that feel bigger than us and out of our immediate control.
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Transcript
Joe Martino: Foreign. Welcome back to another episode of the Collective Evolution podcast here. So today I’m not going to have a guest. I’m going to do a discussion here that kind of came out of a piece that I wrote, as well as a few conversation I’ve been having with various friends on the subject of change interchange and how this can show up in society and sort of the desire, I guess, that we have as people to want to create change, but the importance of bringing this understanding of complexity and complex systems, emergent change into the picture. What I mean by that is we are so used to living in a world where we see everything as a linear path. This leads to that leads to this leads to this. And, you know, this is often true in complicated systems like a car, for example, which is, you know, a set of parts that come together in a linear fashion to make the car work. And if you remove one of the parts, the car stops working correctly. Whereas in complex systems like human beings, like relationships, like the Earth, even the evolution of consciousness, if you will, they’re complex systems. It’s hard to know what exactly is going to happen when you change this one thing right there or if you change that one thing right there. And in that sense, there’s no linear path. Right. It’s, it’s like we can’t control as human beings in a linear sense how our ecosystem in the nature works because it’s complex and it’s interconnected. It’s in. There’s relationships there that are hard to predict what happens next. And this whole concept is really important to understand as we get into today’s conversation.
All right, so if you are signed up to my personal substack where I write more kind of personal reflections and musings and various things, you’ll know that I put out a piece called Perhaps this is what It Will Take to Change the World. And the purpose of that piece, it kind of came from this space within myself where I, was thinking about how to convey something in very simple terms that relates
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to our desires, that relates to why do we want the things that we want and this could be what we want in life, from a material point of view, from an experiential point of view. It could also be what we want to see in the world and what we want to see as society and in our collective. And so our desires for how we want to play within this human experience, they come from somewhere. And where do they come from? And instead of sort of getting into this like, big long, like, okay, well these come from there and this comes from that. And you know, our stories and our worldview and our upbringing and the way society says this, the way society says that we’re all kind of attuned to those ways in which that we are programmed or we are brought up, to believe certain things or to feel certain things or to value certain things. Instead of just focusing there, I kind of wanted to invite the space of. Throughout, the piece I was talking about the space of almost like fundamental well being, of a, fundamental healthy functioning of a place where we are connected to. And there’s so many different possible words for this, but just this absolute state of fundamental peace within ourselves that isn’t totally shut off and like, oh my God, I’m in a place of ungrounded wonder. And it’s not this place of like, hey, I have to be off meditating in a cave, you know, 24 hours a day. But there’s this place of true, true deep physiological safety where you know, your muscles relax, where your body moves freely, where your voice is able to connect in different ways. And your eyes are attuned to the totality of nature. You’re really here in the present moment. Moment you can attune to people, you can attune to situations like you’re really here, grounded center in present, allowing spirit to come through you while being connected to material world in a really beautiful way. In this space of fundamental well being in a way is sometimes it. It can be very hard to attune to and to stay attuned to in our modern world because it’s so fast paced and we’re always being invited to come into our minds. But at the same time, this is what trauma, or you could say chronic stress, right? If we have too much stress going on all the time, we kind of become robbed in a sense of this space. And what I mean by robbed is it’s such a beautiful thing to have. It’s such a beautiful thing to experience. And it’s. It’s when we have these chronic stress moments that dysregulate our nervous system that sort of hijack the way our attention is, you know, being paid to what’s going on around us. And instead it can sometimes be really caught up in our thoughts. We have a difficult time experiencing the sense of fundamental well being. And the journey back to that is the journey back to nervous system regulation. It’s the journey back to the present moment. It’s the journey back to being in a connected space with what we might call spirit or the space around us where our higher self, our soul has a voice to easily speak through. Where our creativity is on board. There’s emotional, there’s thought related, there’s physiological and there’s spiritual ways of expressing this space that I’m talking about. And all are, you know, very easy to kind of connect with when we know and feel this space because we don’t have the incessant thoughts, we don’t have constant negativity going on. We’re not worried about things. Our energy in our body is very smooth and flows and we’re not getting fatigued all the time. And we’re just kind of being in this very, very welcoming space. Our emotions resemble those things, right? It resembles being pretty even keel. And yes we can feel anger if it’s necessary, but it comes and it go. And yes we can feel sadness if it’s necessary, but it comes and it goes. We’re not creating our own suffering in this space. And when we attune to this space, our wants, our desires, all these different things begin to change and what starts to happen is emergent. From that space comes a much more, you could say pure way of wanting to experience the world, wanting to experience our values, our belief systems, our worldview, all these sorts of things. And there’s things that we desire that are more. I want to see people be well because their wellness, I can feel that it connects to my wellness and my wellness connects to their wellness. And we can sense that inter being and likewise with nature as it’s well and I’m well and you know, there’s a better relationship, a better connection with nature. And these are become more important than let’s say material accumulation of wealth or material accumulation of you know, other things that, that we feel like we might really, really really want. When we’re maybe a little bit more mentally oriented, a little bit more of our thoughts and we feel like we want these things because this thing is going to bring this sense of joy within myself. But when we connect more deeply to this space, our desires change. And that’s kind of the one of the key pieces to the article that I wrote and the what I wanted to talk about today. As I mentioned in the introduction Briefly, was. Was just this idea of
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we can then take this understanding of our own individual desires and what we want and what we want to see, and we can push it out onto the world, onto the collective. You know, what do we want the collective to experience? Well, how do I want the world to look? I want it to match my beliefs, my activist ideas, my ideologies, right? And we start to want to, you know, create the world around us and convince other people and all these sorts of things that this is how the world should be and this is how it should look. And there’s usually a lot of good intent and all that sort of stuff from there. But when we start to get into that space, we start saying, okay, what’s step one? What’s step two? How do we. How do we create this? How do we make this happen in the world? How does. How do we. How do we convince people of this? Or how do we, you know, make sure that the government stops doing that or whatever it might be? And this is where it’s really, really important to understand this subject of complexity as I’ve spoken about, because inevitably there is, I believe, a sacred call.
There is this. This thing that’s emerging within many of us that is recognizing that the way we’re living our world, the way that we’re experiencing things, there’s a sense of staleness. I wrote about this recently as well. There’s a sense of staleness from a standpoint of, almost like a sacred staleness, like a staleness that is meant to express to you as an individual, but also as a collective that, look, it’s time to evolve. It’s time to expand our vision. It’s time to expand our purview of what’s possible and that we’ve played in this realm of almost contain, a certain container for a period of time. And now that container is becoming too small for the ways in which our consciousness and our desire to experience is expanding. And now it’s time to kind of break some of those barriers of that container. And. And that’s why I say it’s a sacredness, is it’s not coming from this place of we’re striving and we’re judging and saying, hey, this is, you know, bullshit and too small and we need to be bigger. Right? It’s more of this. It’s this deep sense of feeling. It’s this deep sense of space that is bumping up against the confines of a container and saying, yes, there’s a part of me that wants to express Bigger. There’s a part of me that wants to express, express more beautifully. And I want this feeling that’s emerging within me to also be seen in my outside world. And no, I’m not going to have this deep, unwavering break, to my fundamental well being. And I’m not going to go into this massive place of suffering just because the doesn’t match my inside state. There is a, fundamental wellbeing and joy that can be held even when the world is in the space that it is in now. However, there’s even the awkwardness in the relationship between what I feel and what I see in my outside world. That awkwardness, although there, it doesn’t waiver the fundamental wellbeing too much, but it gives us just enough of an evolutionary pressure to say, okay, what is being asked to come through me? Or what does my creativity want to create? How do I want to model? How do I want to be with other people? How do I want to create? How do I want to express a project, whatever it might be. For example, and I use this in the article is, you know, I came to this space within myself way back in 2009 and from this beautiful space of fundamental wellbeing and noticing the awkwardness that existed within, I feel the space, but I’m not fully seeing it in my outside world. And the sense of our systems and structures are not built from this space of fundamental wellbeing. They’re built from this awkward separateness and the stories of competition and forcing and trying to make sure that our world is how we need to control it. Right. And when I was in this space and I looked, well, how do I want to contribute? Like, because there’s something that wants to come through me, that’s where collective evolution was built. And so this space of fundamental wellbeing is in a passive space where we sit back and we just accept the world for what it is. But it’s, there’s an acceptance, there’s an acknowledgement, there’s a connection, there’s a joy, there’s a love. But there’s also this sacred action that emerges. There’s this space where it’s like, yeah, for me it was, I want to create this platform. I want to create collective evolution to inspire people to explore everything that we’re talking about right now, to see new possibilities, to examine the ways in which we’re living and asking, are we capable of something more? There’s this, you know, this desire to explore personal transformation, which we spent a lot of time over the last 15 years doing. And from all this there was a lot of action, there was a lot of impact, there was a lot of change that happened within people as we reached millions and millions and millions of people over the course of time. And so, you, know, I want to express that this fundamental space of well being where we’re foregoing the striving, the forcing of our agenda on the world is also not a passive space. It’s one of this sort of sacred action that emerges. My platform there, the collective evolution, it was, it was, sure, it was huge. But it doesn’t mean that each and every one of us has to have an action that was that was making an impact on so many people. It could be that our action is to create a local community of you know, organic food growing where we, we grow within accordance
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with regenerative soil, practices where we’re kind of converting one acre of land into something that is really, really hardy and really, really sustainable and really regenerative for our local community. That could be the action we take. And that trickles out a conversation, happens to one of the family members that’s involved in that project to another family member. And then all of a sudden it’s like, oh, wow, that sounds cool. And these things expand and they emerge. And so there’s no need to kind of judge the size of the action, but just how important it is to be and to model it and to bring it into our, you know, our field, what we have around us. and in some ways it might expand into something bigger. And in some ways it’s just being what it is, which is an important thing to kind of pay attention to. But as we have this sort of sacred action, the sacred call that comes out, we notice that there’s something that is within that, that is not predictable. What I mean by that is when we’re in the space of emergent fundamental well being and we’re thinking about how do we change the world, how do we, how do we make the world feel more in alignment with what we have? There’s when in that space versus when not in that space, or I should say when, when the mind, let’s say in its linear fashion is more engaged, the mind will kind of bring this perspective to nature, perspective to society, perspective to human beings, perspective to relationships, that wants to see it in a linear fashion, where, okay, if I do this, then this should happen, then that should happen, then this should happen. Therefore, if we want to change things, we need to find it’s going to be step one, step two, step three, step four. And this is how this will change and that’s how that’ll change. But then we start down that path and we realize, wait a minute, it’s not happening as I thought, things are not working out. And then we start to get upset or we start to feel like, oh, it’s impossible or it can’t happen. And then we kind of waver back into this space of, of doubt and lack of trust and more frustration with, with kind of what we’re doing. But the point here is, is these systems that I’m talking about, society, relationships, you know, our collective consciousness, the earth, nature, they’re complex systems, which means there isn’t a linear fashion way that they’re going to unfold. Which means we can’t look at how do we change the world, how do we fix the way governments work, how do we do all this stuff? We can’t look at it in a linear fashion. We have to look at it from the standpoint of going back to that fundamental place of well being and allowing each phase, each step of whatever’s going to unfold, to unfold and be okay with sort of the space of the unknown that will present itself almost every step of the way. As we kind of take one other step forward, some other bit of clarity emerges and things that seem like they’re impossible to change. Like for example, if you were to look back at Mahatma Gandhi and he, you know, was, was saying, you know what? We can take down the British rule through non violence. And everybody would go, come on, they all have guns, they have so much power, they can just come in and do whatever they want. And there was this fundamental sense of no, there is another way. And I’m sure he didn’t know what it was going to look like on day one, day 30, day 60, whatever it might be. But that he stuck to that space and took inspired action from this space of fundamental peace, fundamental well being. And the pieces, came together in ways that one cannot predict. The mystery of the field around us, the beauty of how things sort of come together that we cannot predict, begins to emerge and come together in ways that are just beyond what we could sit here and say, this is how it’s going to happen. And because we can’t say, oh, this is how it’s going to happen, doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t go to this space of fundamental well being and act from there. The mind is going to tell us, no, you got to wait till you have you can see the whole map of exactly how it’s going to look. And then you got it. Then, then you can do it, right? The mind is going to say that. Then the mind is going to say, well, you took step one and step two and now step three is not working out how you thought. So maybe we should be frustrated, but that’s also not how it works, right? It’s the change that we want to see in our physical world, where we might see various incredible powerful structures, what some people refer to as psychopathic or sociopathic leadership, where we have people that are just totally disconnected from anything that is, well, in positions of power in our world, where we see this social authoritarianism that’s just rising in our world and it seems so impossible that it would ever come down. And then we say, well, how are we going to take it down? What are the steps? And the point is, is that we don’t need to know the steps. That’s not the point. The point is to come to this place of fundamental well being and truly anchor in that and be in that and watch what emerges. Because these
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systems that we’re looking to change are not linear, they are complex. And we cannot predict the ways in which, not just from a more physical point of view perspective, which is to say, if I begin to press or pull different levers, certain things begin to change in the world. And okay, though I can see how, certain actions are changing. I can see, you know, what’s going on. But there’s also an underlying field. There’s an underlying field of consciousness that has its own effect on the collective consciousness. Meaning there’s, there’s an aspect to the sort of the foundational game, the foundational programming where all of these physical actions are emerging in our world. And as the energy begins to shift, there sometimes changes, quantum, changes you cannot predict begin to emerge. And you’re like, well, how did that person just suddenly have this total change of thought, total change of heart, total change of being where they went from this very angry, very it’s all about me to that doesn’t work anymore. And now I want to start living my life this way. And you never could have predicted this person would change in this way, but it happened, right?
And it didn’t really take any outside thing for that to change. This person just kind of woke up one day and that happened. And I’m not suggesting everybody’s awakening is that way or everybody’s, you know, connection back to this place is going to look like that. It’s more so that that’s possible. So instead of getting hung up on how do we change or how would we ever fix that part or how would we ever stop these crazy people in positions of power, how would we ever stop? I think the point is to trust. The point here that I’m trying to make, and this is kind of the extension of the article that I wrote, which I do invite you to read, is that there’s a trust, there’s an emergent phenomenon that comes out of this space of trusting, the space of being in this fundamental well being. And it’s. Everything I’m saying is going to sound counter almost woo, woo to the, to the ways in which our rigid mind looks at it and says, no, we have to fight, we have to strive, we have to push, we have to block, we have to do that. But you don’t. Right? And that’s, that’s kind of the, that’s kind of the invitation here is that the greatest bits of impact, and I shared this in the article that I’ve made in my entire life. The greatest things that I’ve ever changed have come from this space. They have not come from me striving me, trying me, forcing me, you know, any of these things that didn’t work. It was in this other space that the most powerful action emerged. And again, it’s contrary to what we’ve learned to come to as a species in our modern world in terms of, you know, everything we learn in school is about how you’re going to make your mark and how you’re going to fight your way through and how you’re going to, you know, there is a place in life for planning, there is a place in life for strategizing, and that’s part of this. But allow that strategizing and planning to emerge from this beautiful place within ourselves versus I don’t want to go there because, I trust that my mind will figure out the correct path to destroy whatever it is I’m trying to go up against. Right.
The motto of collective evolution has always been change starts within. And that’s not just a cute little thing
And so I kind of just wanted to come here for this particular episode and just add some thoughts that emerged from writing this article, conversing with several people about it, and put something out in, a podcast form that offered a little bit of deeper thought on this because I think there’s a lot of suffering that is happening right now where we’re losing hope about what’s going on in the world. We’re losing hope about kind of the ways in which that it’s hard to wrap our minds around how something is going to change how we could possibly, quote, unquote, take down systems that are, so powerful. How we could even to sort of take the Buckminster Fuller sort of point, of view, which is to say, you know, how would we create other systems that make the old ones obsolete? It’s hard to wrap our minds around the scale of that. And I think the point is, is we don’t have to. Right? There is a sense of. We can acknowledge the systems. We can acknowledge the newness of how each step we take can emerge more and more and more of a parallel system. But it’s to trust that that emergence will continue to come in a way, step after step after step from this place of fundamental wellbeing that we build within ourselves and that we create in our communities and that we create in the people that are holding the vision for a new world. The motto of collective evolution has always been change starts within. And that’s not just a cute little thing to say. Oh, yeah, change starts within. isn’t that a great slogan? No. That is literally the point of what we’ve been trying to share for 15 years, which is that when we as beings, who are the creators, both, by the way, we hold space and containers within our consciousness for what is possible, but also through what we create with our physical hands and the physical, physical nature of which this planet is, both of that is here. Both of that is how we,
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We. We’re always bringing spirit into our physical creation. And the physical creation then reflects spirit. And it’s always going back and forth, right? That is how we experience this world. And, and when us, the experiencers, are attuned in a way that is holding a different possibility, and it’s holding it deeply enough for long enough, in a wide enough amount of the collective consciousness that the actions that emerge from that begin to change the way our physical world shows up. Right? Because we’re taking different actions, we’re building things differently. We’re meeting each other differently. We’re. We’re talking about different ideas. Right? It sounds simple when you really think about it, but it has to be held by the people. And so the people, when we say change starts within. Yes. Change in the outer world starts within the people. And I, don’t believe it is as simple as what a lot of people are thinking, which is, oh, you just, you know, you just hold the vision of it in your mind. And then the world will just totally change. we’re going to be the creators of this. Right? There is a intimate relationship between us Experiencing this planet physically, that is part of this world is to experience this world physically. So while we can play within our consciousness to affect the field in a sense, there is also this sacred action that emerges from our creativity, that emerges from our conversation, that emerges from the way we engage with the physical world. And that part cannot be left out. And so as we kind of are attuning to and hearing this sort of sacred call into something new, see the ways in which it shows up in your life, but focus on holding that space of fundamental well being. How do we get to that space? Well, that’s a deeper conversation. not necessarily for this particular, episode, but it relates a lot to coming back to the present moment, working past the stories from a mental, and emotional and a physical level. The stories and the pain and the trauma and the dysregulation and the stress and all these different pieces that are part of how our wellness and how the way we see the world is formed. so that’s, you know, there’s a. There’s more stuff that we can kind of get into in different places. And maybe I’ll put some links to some, various ways in which I’ve tried to tackle this question so that it’s a little bit clearer in, terms of what do we actually do to create change and what are the ways in which we have to, you know, do some work on ourselves, on our nervous systems, on our past, on our consciousness, on our emotions, on our energy fields. All these sorts of things play into this. But this is an invitation into the importance of that work and how that work is a big part of what holds and what makes possible the world that we want to see emerge before us and how, there doesn’t need to be a forcing or a striving. There also doesn’t need to be a. We need to know every bit of the plan before it unfolds. We don’t need to know how these people are going to be stopped or how this is going to happen. But to trust who come into a place of a trust that says if we just begin holding the space and continually acting and continually expanding out the space, the action will continue to come because we are continually taking the action and more will emerge as we continue to go. Because that is the nature of complex systems is to embody that we are not living in a linear system. The world is not a linear system. Human beings are not linear systems. Nature is not a linear system. We can’t treat it like a linear system. We have to embrace the complexity of what we are and allow how this is all going to change to come from this beautiful place within us and know that the complexity will handle itself little by little over the course of time. And I think that’s a big part of our journey here. So that’s all I really wanted to share on this one. thank you so much for tuning in and, you know, be sure to pass this on to somebody else. Share this episode. This relates. You know, I said in the early episodes, I kind of created an episode one through seven or one through eight, that I titled one one through eight. for this podcast to kind of talk about the various important ingredients that would be in a lot of the conversations that we talk about here at ce. And you might want to go back and listen to those ones labeled 1 through AH8. They relate to the need for short term, long term change, how we can engage with that from an in system and an out system point of view. They relate to systems of complexity, linear systems, and the importance of understanding those within, the way that we think about how the world or how our society or how our relationships or how ourselves will change and the importance of embracing that complexity. And we talk about a whole bunch of other things within that, so be sure to check those out. but yeah, that’s it, that’s all. And thanks again so much for tuning in and we’ll catch you next time.
