Follow Mark On Facebook and Twitter

Perhaps like you, I am asked for personal guidance from time to time, and often from people who have observed that I enjoy a purposeful and satisfied life – and notably, a life needing or wanting few things, though not nothing.

Over the years, and aided by and aiding my natural health writing, I have distilled my general advice into an emphasis of two core ideas or general qualities, one emotional and one intellectual. Importantly, each of these qualities finds a place in modern psychology, are ones that can and indeed must be self-evaluated and cultivated, and appear consistently to result in more joyful, meaningful, vitalized, and open life.

As my title and graphic indicate, and as I will explain briefly, the two qualities I encourage – unless we are in crisis – involve pursuing and achieving life that is progressively informed and inspired. In my experience, this twin approach and understanding of life gradually and reliably builds superior and thus broadly healthier conditions for us, and often for those who depend on us too.

With the word inspiration, I of course mean uplifted and propelling feeling or experience generally. But more specifically, and in a crucial and often missed idea, I would highlight that feelings of inspiration, elevated happiness, or moving joy are almost always associated with the activation and pursuit of one or more of our various and especially higher-order motivations or drives (see Wikipedia Motivation and Motivations). Turning this idea around, I would say, and I hope helpfully or insightfully, that motivation is the source of inspiration. Importantly, this is just as it is the source of frustration, a condition we might understand as arising in degree when our natural motivations are not adequately or ably understood, pursued, explored, and fulfilled.

This set of proposals brings us to the idea of information, which I will define simply as useful understanding or knowledge, and therefore learning, about the world within and around us (see Wikipedia Understanding, Learning, and also Framing). In a crucial sense, our motivations and thus inspirations contain information and drive learning, and equally depend on and are influenced by our information and learning in turn. Owing to these natural or inevitable dynamics of human and complex animal life, we might understand ourselves and our groups at any point in time as operating amid or expressing distinct levels or states of both information and inspiration.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, since we are long-evolved and able entities, assessing and then increasing our information and inspiration often mainly involves our awareness and seeking of these things, and thus both openness in our lives and honesty with ourselves. In practice, most of us quickly and sufficiently can understand our primary motivations, and thus waiting sources of inspiration, and also our dominating and typically interrelated states of information, or senses of life. In addition, we often readily and durably appreciate that these things are changeable, over the course of our lives or owing to more episodic events, and similarly that our levels of information and inspiration are improvable or cultivatable as well. In each case, this can lead not only to altered and perhaps refined or widened information and inspiration, but to life that is more reflective, aware, mature, essentialized, and chosen or created overall.

My two-level graphic above encapsulates a number of these ideas, and also emphasizes the vital or vitalizing natural importance of progressivity or growth in our lives, endeavors, understandings, and motivations. Crucially, such progressivity is essential not only to informing self-discovery and cultivation, but to sustained inspiration or joy, and related purposefulness or meaningfulness as well. This is because fulfilled motivations often only satisfy us for a time, and thus naturally lead or inspire us forward into life – and into life’s open and enlivening possibilities for healthy new information and inspiration.

As you can see in the graphic, one of its two overlaid models, in white, highlights the natural circularity of our information and inspiration, how each can be surfaced and assessed at any point in time, and also how both might healthfully compound or potentiate one another over time – and through motivated life and learning in particular. The other model, in yellow, more simply emphasizes our potential for life in relatively high or low states of information or learning and inspiration or motivation, and once again our opportunity for and the natural vitality of life that is progressively informed and inspired. Importantly, this progressivity is across many or diverse but also often strongly archetypical and thus instructive forms.

With this brief but likely crucial set of ideas, I would encourage you first to explore and define your current and typically interacting states of information and inspiration – as highlighted, by observing and surfacing your primary assumptions, beliefs, and views, and in turn your main motivations, goals, and priorities – and then, as is a common theme in my work, to consider how each might be satisfyingly and beneficially improved or made healthier, for yourself and so often naturally for others as well.

Wishing you new health, and ever more informed and inspired life, now and always,

Mark

Mark Lundegren

Tell others about Mark and the transformative Natural Strategy method!

Follow Mark On Facebook and Twitter

Big egos, small egos. Wild or unsettled personalities, calm and reflective ones. What do these terms mean or describe, in their essence?

I would encourage you to consider this important and ever-waiting question. In practice, the way we answer it can lead us to, or keep us from, constructively understanding, navigating, and in turn aiding the people, egos and personalities, and larger world around us. Similarly, our answer can promote or hinder mastery of our own inevitable ego and personality, and naturally animated self and life.

Given this topic’s broad significance or even decisiveness, and to help you reflect productively on the nature of human ego and personality, I would like to offer a two-part model of our natural ego, personality, and selfhood. After this, I will cap our discussion by providing a simple framework or tool, described in the graphic below, for progressively managing and perhaps assisting people, their natural egos, and their resulting personalities and behaviors – and once more, including our own.

The word ego has a number of uses or meanings, and here I want to use it in a particular, structural or building, and I hope at once instructive and immediately helpful way. For our discussion, with the word ego I mean to describe the propelling, motivating, driving, or animating side or dimensions of our human selves and nature. With this definition, I therefore intend to point to essential or healthy natural aspects of us all, and also ones that notably and demonstrably are seeking or seizing, commonly autonomic and reactive, largely present-minded or situated, and as such often relatively primitive, immoderate, or inconsiderate in their focus and effects.

This set of human and indeed animal qualities of course is in contrast, or is antithetically or structurally opposed, to the  reflective, deliberative, regulative, or executive side of us and our overall selves or full personalities, which is the second component of my two-part model of the natural self. As we can observe in our daily experience, this side of our human nature is well-understood, especially as it is cultivated or otherwise strong, as broadly moderating, inhibiting or delaying, harmonizing or coordinating, often future-minded or anticipating, and thus comparatively sophisticated and considerate overall.

If this decidedly unromantic characterization of our egos or animating faculties, as narrower and less sophisticated than our executive or regulating dimensions, seems questionable or uncertain, consider a person – or a species or entire world – predominantly led by each force or set of qualities, and their likely quite different general effects or trajectories. Indeed, the steady movement from rule by animation, ego, impulsivity, or individualism to that of increasing rule by regulation, extension, sociality, or environmentalism aptly describes our historical legacy, and thus usefully might locate or asses our human and natural condition at any point in time.

Given this, while ego or animation may be essential to organic life in all its forms, its natural counterpart of aiming, regulating, and broadly harmonizing or universalizing executive capability can be seen as equally vital to life, and also as increasingly or more widely so in life’s more advanced forms. In this way, we might take our natural regulating or executive qualities not only as succeeding or ensuing from animation or ego, but also as typically aiding, optimizing, improving, and therefore more sophisticated qualities overall. With these ideas in mind, we wisely or helpfully might understand that in all conditions of life, but especially and perhaps proportionately in complex and progressing life, the naturally animated self is of necessity a regulated self as well.

Within this two-part characterization or model of the human and indeed natural self, I would add that both our egoistic and executive sides or dimensions can be taken as at once naturally evolved or innate, and also as continually shaped or nurtured by experience (with evolution perhaps further, but still unusually, understood as an empirical or experiential and nurturing or cultivative force overall). These longer-term and more immediate shaping or developmental forces in turn can be seen as together forming the common, recurring, and indeed often archetypical expressions or reiterating variations in the egos, executives, and resulting total selves or personalities that we readily can observe across natural life and human society.

On this last and often overlooked point, my model or depiction of our human egoistic and executive faculties, working at once in opposition, in concert, and constructively, leads to the idea and observation that the human ego and executive, and resulting animated and regulated self or personality in total – as with the egos and selves of any sentient animal, or animated species – are far from arbitrary or indiscriminate constructs, again even with their natural variability or multiplicity of expression. This idea, in particular, explains why various models, summaries, or inventories of our animating drives or egoistic needs, regulatory capabilities or inclinations, and resulting selves or personalities are broadly coherent, insightful, predictive, and useful.

Across this now wide body of work exploring human motivation, personality, cognition, and behavior, we and our natural egos are expected or predicted to pursue, recurringly and even doggedly, our natural range of drives, demands, needs, interests, or programming, in all ranging from the essential to the ethereal. At the same time, this process commonly is described, and readily can be observed, as equally being pragmatic, selective, or again regulated – that is, unfolding or proceeding in ways that are responsive to our particular conditions or circumstances, our past experiences and current expectations, and our naturally varying proclivities and preferences.

Tellingly or instructively, if we overlook or miss these essential facts or dynamics of naturally animated human life, indeed of all animal or animated life, and even of all life to some degree, we often create for ourselves a world that is substantially confused, arbitrary, indecipherable, unprincipled, unpredictable, and thus marginalizing or estranging to us. By contrast, when we sense or embrace this general set of ideas, by any set of terms, this commonly and immediately leads us to a rich, ongoing or perennial, structured and roughly predictable, willful but responsive, in turn manageable and influenceable, and overall empowering or enabling order in the people and activities around us – and again in ourselves, and our own egoism and executivism, as well.

More cautiously, it is important to add that this natural order or regularity in naturally egoistic and executive life, or of the naturally animated and regulated self, also is plainly a complex, intersecting, convoluting, and also approximating state, and thus always and naturally a partly uncertain and unpredictable state too. Owing to this natural complexity, and quite crucially, we naturally must, and continually do, employ various aiding and simplifying models or cognitive frameworks to help us make sense of and navigate our orderly but also animated, complex, and varying human and natural condition, as I have done here.

Building on this foundational model or description of the human and natural self, and again as outlined in the graphic above, this discussion provides sufficient context to offer and help you begin to experiment with a simplifying, perhaps deciphering, and likely quite useful framework for thinking about, influencing, and in turn guiding or optimizing the natural egos, executives, and resulting selves or personalities around us – and once more including the particular ego, executive, and personality within, or rather substantially forming, us personally or individually.

As you can see in the graphic, this framework for mapping and then perhaps influencing or altering the egoistic or animated self – one that again plainly extends to non-human selves – builds on, distills, and applies the above discussion. In all, the framework has two crucial dimensions, attributes, or variables. First, and more simply, is our typical degree of animation or activation, meaning our average level of energeticness or engagement in life, and thus conversely often our typical level of regulation or circumspection. This state, or set of states, again is viewed as promoted by our egoistic dimensions and in turn regulated by our executive ones.  Importantly, our or any person’s degree of animation is well-understood as naturally and typically varying with circumstance, area or domain of activity, and other factors, but also naturally as having an average. In your immediate surroundings, you likely can identify various people who are aptly described as highly, moderately, or only modestly energetic, dynamic, or animated overall, but also again in ways that always are subject to degrees of consistency in this regard as well.

By contrast, and somewhat more subtly, the second dimension of the framework, is our breadth of animation, engagement, or occupation in life. This often richer and more nuanced ego, executive, and in turn personality attribute can be thought of as the number or span of areas where we or others typically are highly or recurringly activated, engaged, or animated – and thus perhaps, but only perhaps, highly or recurringly unregulated and less than circumspect. Here, we again might turn to one or more empirical inventories of our natural human drives, imperatives, or preoccupations, gauge our or another’s average activation or engagement in these areas, quickly and informally gain a sense of our or their overall breadth of activation or preoccupation, and with added care, even produce a rich psychographic of them or us. As before, you likely can identify many people you know who are well-described as widely, more selectively, or quite narrowly energized, engaged in life, or animated.

Since this two-part assessment process is fairly straightforward and intuitive, and as a result notably often can be completed quickly and usefully, if roughly, amid active or animated life and endeavor, I won’t spend more time on this topic. Instead, as highlighted in the italicized entries across the graphic, and in a theme that will be familiar to my regular readers, I instead would like to close our discussion by pointing out that positions near the middle of these two dimensions for mapping and understanding the animated self – or ones that are centered, moderated, or regulated between limiting extremes in each overarching personality or behavioral quality – may be more effective, useful, welcome, happy, and healthy over time. Importantly, here I would highlight that these five latter qualities of course are distinct from one another, only partly overlapping, and thus may occur at somewhat different points or areas on the framework’s graph or map of the animated self.

With this last proposal in mind, I would encourage you to begin to observe the many motivated or animated egos, regulated or moderated executives, resulting larger selves or personalities, and their often predictable behaviors around you, as they exist within you, and perhaps extending into the non-human organic world around us as well. In practice, you likely will find this framework of for understanding and ultimately guiding the naturally and variably animated self easy to use and apply, revealing and descriptive, and useful and predictive.

For a more advanced and in fact animated step, you then might consider and explore more optimal degrees of activation and breadth of occupation for yourself – states which again commonly may lie between extremes in activation and occupation – and perhaps eventually help others to understand and achieve new optimality in their natural or inevitable animation, and also regulation, amid modern life.

As always, I would welcome your thoughts and comments on this important, far-reaching, and I hope ultimately practicable set of ideas.

Health & best wishes,

Mark

Tell others about Mark and the transformative Natural Strategy method!

Follow Mark On Facebook and Twitter

As I work to refine and finalize my new book, and so often to simplify and true what I had written previously, I would like to offer a simplifying, truing, and quite powerful tool for personal and group development. The tool is called The Three Rings.

If the name conjures thoughts of a circus or carnival, I would say the idea is not wholly misplaced, though in an ironic way and even one invoking pathos, as you will see.

Notably, the Three Rings tool has its roots not only in months of editing on my part, but also a number of years of minimalism, or what is sometimes called essentialism, and also health-centered life, or what I frequently describe as renaturalized modern living.

The Three Rings – Drives Focus On What Aids & Does Not Aid Us (Click to Enlarge)

The term minimalism of course is well-known today, though it is variably defined or interpreted. For some, it is a practice of consciously or astutely living with less, paring down to what is required for life, and often feeling freer and less stressed via reduced consumption and work demands.

As suggested, another, more probing, and often more propelling sense of minimalism is instead as essentialism, or the exploration of what we need most to be at our best, or to express our potential or essence. But even here, this often wider and more seeking sense of minimalism normally understands that things away from our core focus can be unhelpful and even inhibiting – obscuring or impeding our personal or collective potential and the pursuit of flourishing life. However, in either sense, the idea of minimalism is in contrast to more common modes of modern functioning, which are often decidedly maximalist and less than attentive.

By contrast, the idea and opportunity of health-centered life remains substantially overlooked and unexamined, in concept and practice, even as the words health and healthy are widely employed. As with so many concepts, even important ones, the idea of health has variable meanings and levels of depth. For some, and whether as respects people or groups, health is the capacity for longevity, enduring, or surviving, which is accurate to some extent or in basic terms. But the idea of health can have larger or richer meanings than this first sense. In these cases, our understanding of health is often more akin to the idea of thriving, vitality, robustness, or readiness – whether for natural change, challenge, novelty, or uncertainty.

In the first, more survivalist sense of health, the idea of healthy life involves a minimalism of sorts. Focus may be on avoiding risk and pairing down behavior, and perhaps reducing effort and expectation, all of which may be wise as a means to endure in time. But this basic view of health also frequently takes the world and its health demands and opportunities simplistically, as given, or as relatively fixed and predetermined. But a more thriving or robust sense of health, as with a more thriving and robust sense of minimalism, sees health-centered living as more than doing what is safe and required, more than a life of caution and self-defense. Instead, emphasis again is on vitality, the potential for change, curiosity, adaptiveness, and probing for new and superior modes of life and health – if always astutely or wisely.

My Three Rings tool uses these latter, richer senses of minimalism and healthy life, and seeks to make each clearer, more tangible, and more actionable in our lives and groups. Owing to its simplicity, and the natural power of both essentialist and health-seeking life, you likely can use the approach right away and beneficially.

As you can see in my graphic, The Three Rings tool is just that:

> The First Ring – things, including people and relationships, that aid us, our vitality, or healthy progressivity, if always at present and in our current understanding. You will note that I have intentionally drawn this ring quite small in size, suggesting it may contain comparatively few elements and thus benefit from a seeking and health-minded essentialism, especially amid maximalist and health-indifferent social norms.

> The Second Ring – things that have no effect on our health and vitality. Again, I have drawn this ring small in size, since most seemingly inconsequential things in our lives, or within our sphere of attention, use our resources, make demands on us, distract us, and thus occlude or inhibit our vitality to some extent. The effect of any one item may be trivial, but is additive. As such, we all risk significant reductions in our vitality, purpose, and focus by having too many peripheral things in our lives, or by thinking that they have no impact on or cost to us.

> The Third Ring – things that reduce our health and progress, whether we understand them as such or not. This ring is by far the largest of the three in my graphic, though its size relative to the other rings – in a world full of possibilities and distractions – still may be too small, especially when we first begin to live in more essentialist and health-seeking ways

As I said, you can begin to use this developmental tool immediately, and perhaps quite powerfully too. Simply start by making lists of items or uses of your time, in your life or group, that appear to fall plainly into each of the three rings. Likely, you quickly will assemble a basic list of items in each category, and then notice missed items over time. In all cases, you can and should add to and adjust your lists as needed. You also should expect your judgments of the health, vitality, or impact of items to change in time and with learning.

As your lists become richer and clearer, probe or test your thinking by discussing them with others, especially people whose judgments you value, or other group members when using the tool to assess group health. When your lists feel relatively complete, at least for the moment, next try removing or limiting one or more seemingly unaiding things from your life or group, while also perhaps redirecting your time and energies toward one or more items that seem aiding and vital. This change can be temporary or permanent, but will nearly always provide learning about your life or group. And with this learning, you will be ready to repeat this process, as often as you want, and perhaps more boldly, thrivingly, essentially, and healthfully each time.

Before concluding our discussion, let me add three perhaps helpful points. First, you will notice I included a horizontal time axis through the graphic. This is to emphasize that our objective health enablers or opportunities naturally occur and will change in time, owing both to change in the world and change in us and our groups.

Second, I have similarly included a vertical health axis. This is to remind that all health or vitality assessments, and all health aids or opportunities, inevitably occur amid a particular state or level of health, just as they do in a particular place and time. As our health changes, upwardly or downwardly, our objective health needs and potentials generally change as well. Third, and as touched on before, it is essential to keep in mind that all of our subjective health judgments are just that. They are naturally imperfect, less than complete, sometimes incorrect, and thus best approached with care and curiosity.

With these ideas in mind, I will end by again encouraging a repeating, probing, learning, engaged, energetic, and thus vital or progressive approach, when using the Three Rings tool and in your life and groups more generally.

Health & best wishes,

Mark

Tell others about Mark and the transformative Natural Strategy method!

Like Mark On Facebook or Follow On Twitter

If you are following work on my second book, I have finished the editing phase and am taking a short break before beginning final proofreading and polishing. Drafting the book took 16 months and editing it about 8 months, so I am hoping this final phase will last about 4 months.

As touched on in a previous post, the new book is very much the philosophical companion to my first book, The Seven Keys of Natural Life. This earlier work introduced my natural or evolution-based philosophy, but overall is focused on the application of its core ideas, and primarily is a book of practice – one that began as a series of seven personal and group development workshops.

Even Surrounded By Wild Nature, We Can Have A Degree Of Natural Isolation

By contrast, the new book is almost entirely a work of philosophy, though I do include calls to action in the chapters, as is my frequent practice and general recommendation amid all new learning and understanding. In particular, the new work explores twenty-four human ideals or perennial attributes – from happiness and beauty to inspiration and growth – approaching each definitionally, historically, scientifically, and then essentially. Using this material, I show how these and indeed all other attributes or aims, except one, are inherently instrumental, subordinate, or aids to natural life – and as such, are not nature’s central, overarching, and controlling ideal or imperative. The book has been a journey of discovery and insight for me, and I hope it will be for you as well.

For today’s discussion, I want to begin by pointing out that the new book contains and expands upon two crucial themes from my Seven Keys. These are the modern opportunity of renaturalized life and the natural limits of knowing amid all life. I would like to briefly explore each of these ideas here, but indirectly and in keeping with my title, by taking up a third, intersecting, and perhaps more pressing or evocative topic, that of countering natural isolation.

The concept of natural isolation is of course familiar and recurring in modern life. But it is also an idea that is variably defined and interpreted, and thus perhaps superficially or narrowly so at times. For many, it seems plain that at least part of modern life, notably in its intensely consumerist or wealth-preoccupied forms, is now proceeding without significant regard for its longer impact on our species and the broader natural world around us. Owing to this, and particularly to the extent people are conscious of this fact, we might conclude that much of modern life is substantially denaturalized or unhealthy, and estranged or isolated from nature in important regards.

Expanding on this idea, I would add that perceptions of modern isolation or natural estrangement appear credible across multiple definitions of  what it means either to live naturally or be isolated from nature, suggesting that modern natural isolation may be pervasive and sweeping. Notably, these varying potential senses of naturalness or natural human life include: 1) regularly being present in or routinely interacting with wild nature, 2) appreciating and seeking lessons from living and non-living nature, 3) living in ways that seek to be sustainable, or unharmful to or in harmony with the earth’s natural ecosystems, 4) pursuing or possessing elevated natural health and vitality as people and groups, and 5) alignment with essential or recurring aspects of pre-industrial or pre-agricultural human life (whether conservatively and strictly or more progressively and synthetically).

I should point out that the term natural also can be taken to mean everything occurring in nature, which of course makes the idea of natural isolation less tenable. While this definition, interpretation, or framing of the idea of naturalness is doubtlessly valid or logically consistent, I would suggest this may be trivially so, and often have found it an unaiding sense of naturalness, natural life, and natural progress. In particular, this way of thinking may miss essential opportunities for learning and growth waiting in more active or keener senses of what it means to be natural, connected to nature, or optimally integrated with nature overall.

Building on these themes, let me add that just as the above senses or definitions of naturalness are fairly common – and suggestively, fairly intuitive as well – various prescriptions or remedies for shortfalls in essential naturalness are recurring and widespread today as well. For example, we might be encouraged to visit or recreate in wild nature, live in more natural settings, or move to more sustainable and thus arguably natural living patterns (see here and here). Alternatively, we may be advised to bring elements of wild or living nature into our urban surroundings. Somewhat less commonly, but perhaps more cleverly, and returning to the idea that nature is indeed everywhere, we might be counseled to find and better appreciate living nature at work in and around urban life – from the marvel of plants sprouting out of city cracks to other species living alongside us, and from the natural features of modern social groups to the workings of our psyches.

While these renaturalizing steps or formulations may be familiar – and thereby also perhaps naturally and ironically downplayed – it is essential and instructive to highlight that they often can be quite beneficial. Whether we review science summarized in the self-help press or examine the empirical study of nature connectedness and similar lines of investigation, we see strong indications of regular advantage from many of these measures. To begin a list, new time in or exposure to wild nature, increased appreciation of nature, or greater feelings of affiliation with nature are correlated with: 1) reduced stress, 2) positive emotional affect, 3) improved social harmony, 4) greater health-mindedness, 5) more sustainable living patterns, and 6) new perspective and learning (including the often especially advantageous perspective and learning that is metacognition or metalearning).

Notably, many of these effects, or at least associations, can occur amid novel experiences more generally and not only during naturalistic ones. But the last point above seems especially important to our discussion, and an opportunity to highlight that we, our groups, and indeed all of life naturally function or exist in three crucial ways. First is with the potential for new insight and action at each point in time, second as natural processes of insight and action at our core, and third as the ongoing products of insight and action – whether by us or others, and past or present. For me, these attributes are all fundamental aspects or properties of our human and larger natural condition. But they are also basic features of natural life that are often unfamiliar, unintuitive, and unexamined, and I would encourage you to consider these natural or inherent qualities of all life, especially if they strike you as novel or uncertain.

Together, this set of observations suggests at least two important things for a discussion of natural isolation. One is that we, and all of life, invariably are caught up in natural processes of action and learning, can be defined quite elementally as natural successions of action and learning, and therefore may be seen essentially as ongoing instances or cases of information processing. This is inevitably and inescapably true across living nature – to see that this is so, try to conceive of an instance of life, or perhaps even a case non-living nature, that does not involve some form of processing. Further, it is also clear that all evolved organisms are similarly and inescapably suspended, contained, immersed, or enmeshed in the biological and experiential programming that enables their natural information processing. Indeed, in our essence, we are our natural processing and programming, and are inseparable from and untenable apart from these natural dimensions of life.

Owing to this functional specialization and autonomy, another crucial point for the topic of natural isolation is that each of us, and every organism, are at once part of and yet apart from the rest of nature, or are subject to degrees of natural isolation or individuality. Though we all may be derived or evolved from the totality of nature and plainly are aspects or expressions of nature in a broad sense, we also are clearly individualized as organisms and groups, subjective and specific, functioning on our own unique terms or processes. In other words, we are not all things and everywhere, are always at least somewhat separate or differentiated and isolated or demarcated from other things, and of course we are never the collosal thing-in-itself that is nature in total.

This fact or degree of natural isolation or separation of all specific things is inevitable, unavoidable, and ongoing. Crucially, it is most complete or least trifling in the case of functioning organisms, subjective entities, or autonomous subjects, and amid the often intricate and highly idiosyncratic processes and programming we use for learning, insight, and action – properties that we perpetually rely on and again even are in our essence. And let me add that this is true regardless of how natural or isolated we may or may not feel, the skill or excellence with which we act and learn, and whether or not we directly and actively live in wild nature.

While all this is naturally and unavoidably the case, and perhaps uncomfortably or humblingly so, I want to end our discussion by pointing out that there is at least one essential aspect of our natural functioning that can be significantly freed of natural isolation or separation, individuality or errantness, and idiosyncrasy or particularity. Critically, though this is just one area, it also may involve the most fundamental dimension or quintessential quality of nature, and take us to the core or heart of all of natural functioning.

As you may know from my earlier writing, this core and arguably most crucial aspect of nature is the quality or process of adaptive learning and action, or the pursuit of surviving and then thriving life and existence. Looking across nature, and again in both its living and more elemental forms, we have good reason to believe first, that the quest or opportunity for adaptive health and progressive ascent is the central ordering principle and imperative of all of nature, and second, that this is necessarily so, since any other mode of functioning would be selected against or disfavored in the eternity of time and opportunity that is complex nature in its broadest terms.

Owing to this, we as living organisms are always and never naturally isolated. Though we are indeed inherently different from and less than the whole of nature, we also can live in harmony with this whole in its essence – via a natural life of continual striving, probing, learning, health-mindedness, endurance, and transcendence. In this way, and perhaps only in this way, we can become, reflect, and remain rich  expressions of all of evolving nature, unisolated from and integrated with it, and manifestations of all-pervading nature at its core.

I welcome your comments and questions on these far-reaching ideas, ones which find a prominent place in my new book.

Health & best wishes,

Mark

Tell others about Mark and the transformative Natural Strategy method!