Learning From Life

▶️ Listen to this episode on Spotify!

I’m looking forward to talking about what I’ve learned. The content of the Fractal Praxis worldview: its logic, lineages, and practical implications. But before we get there I think we really have to situate ourselves in a process: the process of worldview development and evolution. And how—and why we should—learn from life itself.

If you’re familiar with Fractal Praxis, you’ve probably already heard me talk about cognitive structures—a technical term, also known as worldviews, mental models, mental maps, etc.

A person’s worldview is what they take to be true. A worldview is developed over the course of an organism’s life. My worldview feels firm and reliable—it feels like it is the sum of everything I’ve ever learned. To me it might seem fixed, it might seem correct. Seeing that it protects my ego and my being, I may even feel highly identified with it—and that threatening it feels like a threat to my actual life. 

Most people don’t think about a worldview as an evolutionary phenomena. A worldview simply helps you navigate your environment, avoid threats and seize opportunities—survive, reproduce, and thrive. Or, it’s designed to do that—whether it provides an actual survival advantage or not is subject to many variables. 

Most people don’t think about how your mental model of the world is actually a living, flexible structure. It arises from inputs, and the meaning made from those inputs is dynamic and fungible. And just like your body, it is subject to evolution... that your belief system and your operational model of the world is by design temporary—subject to change.

This is one of the main ideas in Fractal Praxis. It is core to the notion of how we could actually change and evolve into a better situation for ourselves, individually, collectively or even at the scale of planetary society.

Let me share a story of worldview evolution from my life—one of many—and how I specifically learned it was possible to learn generalized principles from life itself. This is one of the insights that became the core of Fractal Praxis, in a way that irreversibly shaped my life’s path.

“How Did I Know?” — On Uncovering Universal Meaning

When I was 21 years old, and about to graduate from a four-year bachelors degree in film & video production, I designed my senior thesis project to be a documentary series called The Sust Enable Project. For three months, I was going to try to live a 100% sustainable lifestyle, which I defined at the time as: Consuming just one Earth’s worth of resources per the environmental footprint calculator. At the time the average American’s lifestyle was estimated to consume five Earth’s worth of resources, and I wanted to get it down to just one. I would continue living in Pittsburgh, PA, and attending college, but I would radically restructure my lifestyle to ensure a sustainable level of resource consumption. This would affect every aspect of my lifestyle: from housing, to transportation, to food, water, energy use, etc.

At the time this was my creative opus, and I was completely committed to it. So for three months, I carried out this embodied experiment, putting my body on the line for my beliefs about sustainability—which as a young activist and nascent anarchist, is something I’d already gained experience doing. 

But what I would find is the world pushed back—in a big way. 

While I achieved some limited success in that phase, I had honestly traumatic experiences unfold across those three months. I lost important relationships, my housing situation collapsed, and my mental and physical health declined significantly because of the strain of this project. 

This profoundly challenged my assumptions about sustainability that I had been so gung ho for at the start of the project. 

You see, I had tested my original rigid beliefs about achieving sustainability on my own body. And so my body was the site of the challenges, the feedback, the dissolutions, and the learnings resulting from this experiment. Of course, I felt the shame and humiliation of my initial ideals and valiant aims shattering in front of the witness of my peers and community. But I never could quite let go of the original inquiry. I was still interested in, “well if this wasn’t sustainable, and didn’t add up to achieving sustainability—what would?”

Over the course of the next couple years, I engaged in deep and painful reflection about what went wrong. I did a lot of journaling, traveling, healing, sitting with my anguish and my broken aspirations. In that period I began to make sense of what my lived experiences had shown me about what sustainability was not. 

I could begin to see the rampant individualism & white saviorism in the constructs of the project. 

I could see the narrow definition of sustainability in terms of resources, rather than interrogating the systems, lifestyles and culture producing our dilemmas of unsustainability in the first place.

I could see that I was missing something in my original definition of sustainability, if the projects’ ideals were in reality so damaging and yes, unsustainable, to my actual life. 

I was in a deep dark night of the soul, as it’s known: grappling with my own ignorance, having been confronted so viscerally through my lived experience about what I believed was not only so true, but was going to save us. I had a lot to unpack. 

Eventually I had healed enough and recouped enough of my energy to be ready for the next chapter. I knew I wanted to do something with my story… some deeper cinematic inquiry into the contended meanings of sustainability, presenting diverse perspectives and expanding the inquiry beyond achieving so-called 100% sustainability and into, what does sustainability mean? 

And so it was April 2010, about two years after launching the initial Sust Enable project, that I found myself holding a printed academic article from the field of cybernetics, entitled something like “Foundations of Sustainable Systems.” My intention was to start to see what this scholarly discourse had to say about the meaning of sustainability in living systems. 

By the end of the first section, my jaw had dropped. By the second, I had begun pacing and chanting “oh my god, oh my god” to myself. By the final section of the article, I had crumpled to the floor, sobbing. Why? 

Because what I found articulated in this article, I already knew. 

I KNEW these principles of sustainable systems. I had come to know them, through a process of critiquing the various consequential failures of the Sust Enable Project—mostly felt through my body and the shattering of my initial worldview and relationships.

The abject wonder that overcame me then, and the ineffable sense of unity with everything that came over me… Hard to describe. Then the question: “How could I have known?” became that governing inquiry that would shape the rest of my life’s path. 

I somehow had found and harvested universal principles about sustainable systems in general—despite my initial ignorance to these matters, through my commitment to understanding what went wrong, I had somehow indeed learned these principles. 

The structure of the lived experience lifestyle experiment I had built made this possible. Because I started out to live a fully sustainable lifestyle, and I could not, which made me question the whole construct. Coming to realize that: perhaps there WAS a universal nature of sustainability—but that most of our discourses didn’t even get close to it, and that we’d have to do a LOT of unraveling our standard worldviews before we could approach an understanding of it like indigenous peoples had… This became the motivation to my creating the next film project, Sust Enable: The Metamentary. A film that deliberately pushed cinematic boundaries to try to tell an evolving story—one mirroring the mind-warping journey required to really grapple with what it would mean to really achieve sustainability.

The awe and connection to everything I felt in the aftermath of reading that article in April 2010, was just the beginning of my liberation into the wisdom attainable through intimate study of lived experience. It was my first encounter with reality as teacher, which deepened my resolve at that time to abandon any further pursuit of traditional schooling & social attainment whatsoever, and instead launch myself into an intensive and rigorous pursuit of into knowledge directly through relating with my lived experiences, processing them in systematic ways, and relating with my own wonder and intuition—in reality… and constructing thoughtful experiments to test the bounds of what I could know and the meaning I was assigning to things.

The Results of Applied Worldview Evolution

When I’m sharing Fractal Praxis, it is a worldview, yes, but one its that has undergone and evolved as a result of more than a dozen massive internal restructuring events. Under deliberate pressure, Fractal Praxis has been forced to integrate information and insight from across a wide range of disciplines: from secular scientific theories, to religious and spiritual understandings and experiences, to indigenous and anarchist worldviews that transcend the imposing logic of western colonial capitalism dualism, etc. Given all this invisible labor accumulated in the worldview I’m presenting, I might even be so bold as to claim that Fractal Praxis is approaching a Grand Unified Theory. Of course—this too, is subject to evolution.

When I say my worldview has undergone major restructurings, I mean I personally have survived these. The anecdote I just shared is only one of several major breakdown-breakthrough events that occurred in relatively short succession in my early to mid 20s. 

If you have not had this kind of thing happen to you, then just imagine: your previously intact worldview—your story of self, your story of the world, your construct of what everything means—gets torn asunder, shattered into a million pieces, and you are left completely rudderless. Everything you thought meant something… could mean as little as nothing. The events themselves might be slow unravelings, or spontaneous transcendental events… but are often preceded or followed by literally years-long suffering, depressions, rooted in meaning-making efforts. 

It’s an intense way to choose to engage with life. The payoff of a more holistic, effective and elegant worldview is obviously quite high… but the toll paid to arrive there is often brutal. It is the temporary loss of a sense of self, a total loss of orientation and meaning, even. Take for instance my first spontaneous spiritual peak experience which occurred at age 23, and which made the entire 23 years of my life feel like a dream, and that short experience was like the only true thing I’d ever encountered. …How do you bounce back from THAT without any religious grounding at all—indeed, having previously identified as a humanist atheist?? 

Most of us would fear a loss of this magnitude like we would fear losing our own lives. But I am here to report from the other side: that these losses of self, importantly, are NOT a loss of life. In a way, these experiences are an initiation back into life as a process, one that does not cease when ideas or strategies fail. When you can access a life that transcends your ordinary assumptions—no matter how coveted—you will be initiated in the ways I have been.

Fortunately, as I grew to understand this process and the mechanisms behind self-loss and gaining stronger cognitive structures, I began to see this as an overall trustworthy process. I knew I could lean into this process, and that even as harrowing as the total loss of meaning might seem, that I could be relatively “safe” so long as I stayed with the process with attunement, patience and self-kindness. As a result, this meta process—so intense that most of us avoid it our whole lives—became as accessible to me as physical exercise. To develop a stronger and more flexible mind is somewhat like developing muscles—sometimes by tearing them.

Most ideas are flimsy, and are made to be reorganized into higher order structures. Indeed, I argue, this is the premise and the praxis of life itself. However, other ideas have so much explanatory power that they render the rest of the world intelligible. 

In my early 20s, I came across a few ideas that possess, in my view, a great deal of explanatory power. For example: my study of sustainability brought me into awareness of systems thinking. And systems thinking is a framework that makes everything else in the world make so much more sense. So these handful of ideas adopted in my early 20s have actually managed to weather and withstand all of the subsequent transformations. They continue to form a philosophical foundation, or pillars, underpinning Fractal Praxis. I will be attempting to unpack these pillars over the course of the next several episodes. From Ockham’s Razor, to syntropy & planetary change praxis (Fuller), to how consciousness develops through recursion (Hofstadter), to the universal phenomenon of cognition, broadly defined, in all living organisms (Maturana & Varela)...

This will be my effort to get to the WHAT—the “root beliefs” upon which the rest of Fractal Praxis’ original thinking will be elaborated. 

The Hope & Promise of this Phenomena for Change-Making

I want you to feel that these processes are trustworthy, too. I want you to see how important this is for evolving into individuals and communities that are MORE capable of being here well—of being more “fit” to the requirements of the actual world, of life itself... not our projections about it. 

The world is constantly giving us feedback about what IS—but if we’re not attuned and oriented to processing this feedback arising from our lived experiences, we are missing out on a whole lot of wisdom. We are missing out on opportunities to more deeply relate to the rest of life—AND we are missing out on opportunities to develop autonomy and forge original, independent worldviews through harboring a direct, vibrant relationship with life, rather than simply inheriting conditioned worldviews.

There IS a way to learn generalized principles directly from life, through engagement and meaning-making. You can process your lived experiences in ways that allow you to harvest MORE generalized, universal truths from the particular details you experienced. That equip you with knowledge to become more sovereign, aware, and skillful in your interactions with the entire world.

These are radical claims, and I’m going to be backing them up.

I seek to radicalize you into more aware, sensitive, and intentional relationship with reality as felt thru your own life. Because it is a promise: that you can and will become more sovereign, more fully intelligent, more sensitive, and more powerful through a direct path—through your own hard work to evolve into who you must become in this life.

This is a path of hope.

• Hope for becoming reorganized by Life & your own intrinsic intelligence. 
• Hope for being able to “go beyond” the worldview and story of self you’ve inherited—and been conditioned to believe in. 
• Hope for a transcendent, living, breathing process that welcomes you into reunification with nature—beyond stories of self. 
• Hope for forging a new culture grounded in direct and shared understandings—to go beyond the inherited culture which causes and reinforces the systemic problems & predicaments we struggle with today. 
• Hope for a path to deeper autonomy: going beyond conditioned self, beyond influence of any brainwashing even, into a rigorous sense-making process-based relationship with life directly, giving you direct wisdom and growth material. 
• Hope for the courage to recognize that, no matter how well-reinforced like a castle wall it might be, there is no rational argument, no worldview at all, that makes you fully “safe” in this world. That instead, you must take responsibility for the results your worldview is getting you in this life… and that beyond becoming a “right” person, you can become a whole person—adaptive, intelligent, and re-embedded in fulfilling relationship with all aspects of life.

A framing inquiry for my work since even before the Sust Enable project at age 21 is: How do we "get right" with life? How do we be here, well? How do we make good, and do good? How do we fulfill on our precious lives through inhabiting them fully, and increasing intelligence and goodness for all? And can we do it ourselves, no external authority nor even a mythos needed? 

How do we get so HERE in our own lives that we become exceptionally functional, beneficial, beautiful, and fearless? When we can take total responsibility for the results we get from the world—and for the patterns that people come to know us by? When our minds become so exquisitely powerful as to be able to adeptly parse the patterns and devise effective interventions in even the most dense, heart-rending, entangled messes? When we become warriors of going to our own edges, and integrating them?

I believe all of this is attainable, if not accessible, to us. Through digesting direct experience for the truth, leaning on an intrinsic process that is in fact home to all of us: LEARNING.

That we can grow/evolve more adaptive worldviews—this is a type of liberation. It tangibly reduces the friction in our lives. It makes our interactions and relationships more beneficial in general. It allows us to operate with the elegance of beliefs that hold great explanatory power, and release non-conducive beliefs systematically. It allows us to target and embody effective interventions that make the world more beautiful through right relationship and right action. 

It is hard not to reduce the irreducible, not to bypass the true and take comfort in shallow ideas. But it is possible to train our worldviews this way. And it is highly rewarding—evolutionarily, and personally/spiritually. 

All sentient beings can access this path. And I intend my particular life to be put forth as an example of a process, not an end outcome. That is to say: I’m not intending to be a guru (although I think my worldview has many merits). Rather, from this point on, I’m aiming to show my work—to be a whole proof, a comprehensive demonstration.

But it wouldn’t be a “win” to me if you merely thought what I thought. Instead, what I want for you is to embrace these processes for your own liberation. The process YOU use to get to greater meaning is YOURS to uncover and to wield. It is this process that will liberate us—which is why “praxis” is right there in the title of this work. (Not dogma—praxis.) 

Arrive where you need to be, yourself. Don’t believe as I believe—believe what works for you to believe, and test it—thus developing an original worldview, as only YOU can. 

If you become this person, and if we become this people—all we touch will be transformed. 

Your friend in liberation,

C.

If you enjoyed this piece, please forward this to a friend, or make a one-time donation. 🙏