Reclaiming the Wholeness of Mind in a Fragmenting World

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Over the past weeks, I’ve been reflecting on a question that seems more urgent with each passing season: is modern civilisation un-teaching us something essential? Not through conspiratorial intent, but through architecture, systemic incentives, and cognitive drift. Through the very structure of our environments, technologies, and institutions, could we be moving further from perceptual and cognitive wholeness—fragmenting the mind into functional blocs, efficient yet blind?

This inquiry arises from several converging observations:

Fragmentation of Perception
Sensory atrophy is increasingly observable. Living in screen-bound, noise-polluted, climate-controlled interiors, we lose contact with the subtle complexity of the natural world. Conversely, contact with nature engages the full sensorium—soundscapes, smells, tactile variation, complexity at fractal scales. Urban environments replace this with flat visual fields and sensory overstimulation—leading paradoxically to both anxiety and perceptual dulling. Exposure to nature has been shown to restore attention, reduce cortisol, and enhance memory (see, for example, Kaplan’s Attention Restoration Theory). The absence of this ecological feedback not only affects health, but perceptual development itself.

Specialisation and Cognitive Narrowing
Neocapitalism thrives on specialisation—in production, trade, and increasingly, in thought. Workers and citizens alike are trained into ever-narrower domains. A coder may not understand politics. A biologist may not grasp economics. A citizen may know neither. This is not accidental. A fragmented society is easier to administer. To quote David Graeber: “The modern economy is an engine of disconnection”. When knowledge is fractured and externalities outsourced, no one is responsible, and few can see the whole.

Disembodiment and Loss of Somatic Intelligence
The modern world encourages disconnection from the body: seated life, dissociation from natural rhythms, and suppression of emotional intelligence. Embodied practices—whether dance, martial arts, or simply walking barefoot—are being replaced by abstract, screen-mediated cognition. The result is not just physical atrophy, but emotional and cognitive fragmentation.

Linguistic Collapse and Conceptual Impoverishment
Language is not neutral—it shapes perception. As the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (in its refined, moderate form) suggests, the limits of language are the limits of awareness. When public discourse is reduced to slogans, hashtags, and memes, so too is our capacity for nuance, contradiction, and subtle truth. One book worth reading on this subject is Pagel’s Wired for Culture – it explores how language evolved as a ‘collective cognitive prosthesis’ - a tool not just for expression, but for perception itself. Shrink the vocabulary, and one shrinks the perceptual world.

Who or What Benefits?
This leads to the difficult but necessary question: if modern civilisation is indeed un-teaching us—blunting perception, narrowing cognition, and disembodying experience—who or what benefits? Is this intentional? Not necessarily. But that doesn’t absolve it. Systems built upon growth, extraction, and abstraction will naturally select for minds that:

  • Perform specific functions, but do not question totalities.
  • React emotionally, but do not regulate deeply.
  • Speak fluently, but lack symbolic or ecological literacy.

These are not accidental side effects. They are structurally beneficial. Fragmented cognition reduces resistance. Narrow attention increases suggestibility. Abstraction displaces accountability.

And yet, none of this is irreversible. If the architecture fragments, the body remembers. If institutions dis-integrate, life itself offers patterns of re-integration.

So what might restoration look like? Perhaps we could consider:-

  • Ecological immersion: restoring sensory and relational complexity through time in wild and semi-wild places.
  • Cross-disciplinary dialogue: dissolving academic silos and reclaiming systems thinking.
  • Somatic and ritual practice: remembering the body as source of wisdom, not obstacle to it.
  • Language revival: poetry, metaphor, and multilingualism as tools for restoring inner vision.
  • Participatory education: where knowledge is lived, not downloaded.

I share this not as conclusion, but as invitation. Have others here observed similar patterns? What practices, lineages, or frameworks have you found that help restore cognitive and perceptual wholeness? And how might we ensure the next cultural architecture is one that teaches what matters most?

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All of this has been one of my major research foci for the past couple of years. I’m imagining a sort of university course to introduce the general idea of how the current fragmented mind arose and how matters might transpire from here. Rather that trying to do a semester’s worth of work in a single thread, instead here is a bit of a course outline, highlighting what I consider high quality sources.

First, to describe the pre-fragmented world, Graeber & Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything (Possible supplment , Machado de Oliveira Hospicing Modernity)

Next, the works of Iain McGilchrist on brain lateralization and the cultural implications thereof.

Then, Henrich The WEIRDest People in the World, demonstrating brain laterialization differences between the WEIRD and the rest, and detailing historical factors for how that came about.

Further reading, Holland Dominion (given how much Catholic Church history is in the Henrich account), Morris Why the West Rules - For Now (balanced treatment showing the rise and fall and rise of West vis-a-vis East, and framing speculations about how this may play out in the future).

Synopsis. The WEIRD approach (heavily left-brained) drew from many factors, most prominent was the medieval Church’s struggle against German nobility. For political reasons, the Church wanted extended families and clans to be less significant than they remained in many parts of the world (like China). Long story short - led to capitalism. Left-brained tool use works well in that system, defining the “winners”. So onward and upward for the West, right? Not so fast. The left brain tends to over-estimate its own capabilities and fails to sense both dangers and opportunities on the periphery. Somehow, the “rational” West did not see WWI coming, for example. There is plenty of holistic thought nowadays about dangers on the periphery (i.e. all the collapse literature), so restoration of balance must at least be considered.

Now that I think about it, the Holland book on the list above is really pretty essential for getting traction on any of this. Judeo-Christianity is a really deep structure in the West and it keeps showing up even under the guise of Enlightenment, atheism, reason, or whatever the latest thing is. (Nietzsche noticed this too). So before we launch the next “crusade” against whatever it is, let’s ask ourselves - are we really restoring wholeness? Or are we just adopting some new personal Jesus to preach to the masses?

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Great thread opening, thanks @Justin and @RobertBunge

Part of this, to me, is the welcoming of different perspectives as adding depth, not as contradicting or opposing.

Fragmentation; disconnection; separation; big worthy topics. On the one hand there is the necessary individuation (Jung) and self-authorship (Kegan and others) to take us forward from traditional conformist society. On the other hand, I also see the cui bono as mentioned here: those in political power find it easier to divide and rule; the capitalist businesses can sell and profit more if we are disconnected and share less. And thus I share this, which to me can be brought under the phrase “regenerating relationship”.

I like Justin’s 5 restorative suggestion points. I’d like to add my personal focus on “ontological commoning”, which maybe overlaps with cross-disciplinary dialogue; or maybe suggests methodology for that. I have a slight preference for “health” over “wholeness” … both need clarity to avoid misinterpretation. I keep on coming back to the definition of health as “mutual synthesis of organism and environment”.

I’m not so sure that we can even formulate coherently “what matters most”. Isn’t that going to differ between people? Thus, ontological commoning isn’t (as I see it) about getting people to agree on what matters most, but rather to develop the dialogue practices that allow us to inter-relate what matters to each of us.

I read Robert as seeing Judeo-Christianity as a problem — a weed that has deep roots and is hard to eradicate. I see it more as very good and beautiful truths that have been co-opted by power and perverted away from their original.

I’ve just been watching the video of an amazing conversation, including gems like that we need to grow out of, or heal from anger against things to using anger energy for things. So, to me, the next “thing”, or movement, is seen not as “against” anything, but “for” … and not for one thing only, but for the coherence and interrelatedness of the different positive leadings we have, helped and discerned with our peers, exactly to avoid the traps of setting up another “enlightened” guru to preach to the poor benighted masses.

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Lovely thread.

:+1:

I feel the system itself creates conditions for its own perpetuation. It is rare there are conscious agents doing this.

The metaphor i often think of is jellyfish. See this piece:

Capitalism is so successful because it is a self-sustaining material-spiritual system that is both aggressively expansive and able to transform its environment in order to create the conditions for its own expansion. Just as jellyfish (unintentionally) desolate and acidify their ecosystem, making it hostile to other species and hospitable to themselves, so capitalism (unintentionally) takes over socio-economic ecosystems remaking them in its own image.

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Not exactly. Just this morning, reading the preface to Burton Mack’s The Lost Gospel: the book of Q and Christian Origins Mack does a good job of situating the early Christian movement in what we now call a “meaning crisis”. Namely, uprooted people in polyglot cities, swept over by one pointless empire after another, disrupting any prior traditions. In that context, there was a new freedom of association and Christianity sprang from that.

As Holland points out, Christianity has always had a critical undermining effect on all competing orders around it, and that includes a self-critical undermining effect on its own institutions. Even ancient Judaism was a sort of atheism with respect to all the surrounding gods, and the Hebrew prophets had special ire for anything smacking of nature religion. In this light, later cultural developments in the West, such as Weber’s Spirit of Capitalism, are not exactly coincidental.

Unlike Nietzsche, however, I’m not especially keen on reversing Judeo-Christian “slave” morality and reverting to classical pagan celebration of martial domination. My notion of a “second renaissance” is more than just restatement of either Western Christian or Western pagan source material. I’m much more interested in reading any of the Western source material through Buddhist, Taoist, Vedantic, or indigenous eyes. The goal of that is not so much abolition as it is completion.

Jürgen Habermas is also on that project, and I did a close reading of Habermas’s Also a History of Philosophy vol 1 a couple years ago with Brendan Graham Dempsey and few others. Habermas has effectively a cognitive theory of the Axial Age, which is quite congenial to Dempsey’s psychologically informed work on metamodern spirituality. In any case, few interpreters frame the prophetic tradition in cognitive terms, but that’s where I personally ended up after comparing the prophets with early Greek, Indic, and Sinic philosophers respectively. What was “learned” in the ancient near East that was not learned quite so well elsewhere? In a nutshell, I would sum it up as the potential for meaningful moral action in relation to historical order. The current sense of time, progress (or regress), and moral action in the world most of us take for granted in a forum like this (why else bother with a “Second Renaissance”?) really springs from this Abrahamic soil.

That said, the ancient Hebrews arrived at historical consciousness mostly by screwing it up (and by getting screwed over) in every conceivable way. The Christian tradition is not dissimilar. Finding the ethical right path through the geopolitical wasteland has been a work in progress for quite awhile now. My personal sense of what “redemption” might look like for that Western tradition includes some degree of humility in the presence of all the other traditions, each one of which uncovered vital elements of consciousness or cosmos or social relationships the Abrahamic traditions could benefit from incorporating. To give one example, Thich Naht Hahn seems to grasp the essence of Christianity better than most of the Christians I have encountered. More cultural cross fertilization like that strikes me as a plausible way forward.

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Thanks, @RobertBunge , your framing of a “course on fragmentation and re-integration” is exactly the kind of integrative scaffolding we need right now. I’m particularly struck by the inclusion of McGilchrist and Henrich side by side—drawing the neurocognitive implications of lateralisation into direct conversation with cultural-historical development is, in my view, one of the most critical lines of inquiry for understanding how the WEIRD mind emerged and persists. I’m also in full agreement on the value of Graeber & Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything as a foundational anchor—especially in highlighting that our present configuration is not inevitable, and that diverse cognitive-social ecologies have flourished before. I too have been trying to remind people of that who either dismiss humanity as a whole as a broken species or just resign themselves to oblivion as the only possible outcome. Your mention of Hospicing Modernity as a supplement is well chosen. Vanessa Machado de Oliveira’s work elegantly walks that edge between intellectual deconstruction and soul-level reckoning.

No debate here: left-brain cognition was adaptive within a certain political-ecclesial-economic arrangement, and those who succeeded within it became the arbiters of what counted as “reason.” But now that very structure appears increasingly unable to perceive its own periphery—precisely where emergent threats and deeper truths reside.

The persistence of the Judeo-Christian narrative scaffold, even under secular or postmodern veneers, is a critical blind spot—one Nietzsche warned of but which few modern thinkers confront head-on. It’s astonishing how often ideas of salvation, progress, and even collapse are framed in implicit eschatology.

Two possible additions to your list:-

  1. Varela, Thompson, and Rosch – The Embodied Mind
    This merges cognitive science, phenomenology, and Buddhist philosophy to challenge the Cartesian separation at the heart of fragmentation. It also highlights the possibility of restoring coherence not through ideology but through embodied perception and direct experience.
  2. Gregory Bateson – Steps to an Ecology of Mind
    His systems theory framework maps beautifully onto the very problem of left-brain overreach—and his work on “the pattern that connects” could be seen as an early warning of what happens when minds lose the ability to perceive wholes.

That said—there’s a deeper tension I can’t shake, and I’d be curious to hear your thoughts on it. If we are to truly teach wholeness, can we do so through screens? Through scheduled semesters, PDFs, and classroom walls?

Surely, the content is vital—but so too is the form. A curriculum about re-integration, delivered in disembodied fragments, risks reinforcing the very disconnection it seeks to heal. Perhaps what’s needed is not just a new syllabus, but a new architecture of learning:

  • Outdoors, in the wild—where attention widens and ecology becomes teacher.
  • Ritual and rhythm, not just information transfer.
  • Multi-generational and multi-lingual settings, echoing how knowledge used to be held.
  • Skill and contemplation interwoven—tracking, cooking, poetry, systems thinking, grief work.

The container must match the content. What we teach is shaped—often invisibly—by how we teach it. To “restore wholeness” may ultimately require that the form of education be whole in itself.

And this is no simple matter.

It can’t be gained from a single walk in a forest or a weekend of planting berry bushes. Wholeness is not a supplement—it is a condition, a culture, a slow reweaving. Consider how the contemporary education system takes more than a decade to reshape the human mind—from something wildly creative and emotionally alive at age five, into something functional, fragmented, and machine-compatible by adulthood. Not uniformly, of course. There are exceptions. But the pattern holds.

For myself—someone who has had the privilege of living and working close to the land most of my life—I still found that I couldn’t fully break through the artificial paradigm of the Western mindset until I experienced psychedelics. And that, I recognise, is a complex and controversial subject—perhaps one that warrants its own thread. But it raises a real question: what would a curriculum of re-integration actually look like? Could we build something that doesn’t reject the brilliant intellectual scaffolding you’ve laid out—but rather adds to it?

A course that draws not only on Henrich and McGilchrist, Holland and Graeber—but also on tactile experience, ceremony, ecological immersion, shamanic intelligence, and shared reflection around the fire? Not information, but transformation. A return not to the past, but to a deeper root system from which any truly coherent future must grow.

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Short answer - to teach wholeness we must go beyond screens and schools. A few examples.

Yesterday I was in a webinar with Joe Brewer and over 100 global participants on bioregional regeneration. We were discussing best ways to design “immersion” programs, which involve environmental education and getting people started toward meaningful regenerative activity. Joe made it clear that “immersion” programming must involve hands touching local soil and direct experience of nature.

I also work directly with Lene Rachel Andersen and the Global Bildung movement (which aligns with other holistic education movements around the world). Any book or article describing the history and practices of that movement will quickly illustrate that Bildung is more than just head work. It involves signing, dancing, shared meals, and residential community.

Finally, this morning my plans involve a spiritual discussion group face-to-face in a person’s home (which is large and appointed like a metaphysical bookstore with lots of beads and lights and overstuffed couches and reading chairs - sadly lacking only a cat). Then off to kayaking, which is my own preferred form of meditation practice.

So yes, keyboards and screens are clearly needed to post on a forum like this. But whatever my left brain is up to here gets informed by a lot of right brain action from other parts of the day. Being lashed to the mast of AI so to speak in my primary professional work, I can’t stress enough that the only hope for humans to transcend AI and add unique value is to inhabit the bio-bodies which are our nature and to access what I like to call “full stack” humanity.

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Read Bateson years ago - very influential on my thinking. Not that title by Varela, but another he did with the Dalai Lama. So +1 on both of these references!

My listed sources in the post above are not at all the only books worth reading. I’m just trying to construct a story line for a course or a book or a series of articles or a video series or such. It’s not really about me or the sources or the specific production - its the story itself. Another rough synopsis below.

Brain lateralization is as old as reptiles. All birds and mammals exhibit it. The right brain scans the horizon. The left brain pick out specific food sources and manipulates objects close up. All human history and evolution can be framed by how we have orchestrated those processes. In lower tech eras, (Gebser’s archaic, magic, and mythic), right’brained holism played a larger role. In the current era (Gebser’s mental), left-brained precision focus dominated language, culture, production, and sensibilities, at least in the West. The widespread post-WWI notion that modernity or the West has somehow lost its way has a pretty simple explanation in the idea that any creature neglecting its right brain faculties will fail to navigate its world. The cure is not all that complicated - work the neglected half of the organ and put it to its proper use! Gebser calls the resulting sensibility “integral”.

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As almost always, the word “always” in this kind of context betrays prejudice. It is simply untrue, unless you make it true by definition. Here’s an example from the Quaker tradition, with which I identify:

including the sentence: “The experience that valuable worship can be held in a multifaith context, especially when silence is the basis for prayer. We would assert that school worship which shows respect for other faith positions by presenting them with accuracy and sympathy is, by our definition, Christian.”

One may, of course, be forgiven for overlooking this kind of testimony amid the wealth of evangelical intolerance or worse, but this does show up the danger of using the word “always”. I would agree that the Quaker branch of Christianity has included a self-critical undermining of various supposedly Christian beliefs and practices, but conversely there are many branches who claim Christian heritage who have no patience for self-criticism, or questioning of institutions.

And, naturally, I agree with

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Thank you, @Justin for many points of relevance and interest, however I cannot rest leaving unchallenged:

Alongside the apparent shift in many commentators these days towards reintegrating some form of Christianity, I have to ask, what is this “Judeo-Christian narrative scaffold” to which you are referring? Now, I too have no difficulty finding places in these traditions that have blind spots, even critical ones. But in what sense can you call that the Judeo-Christian narrative scaffold? As I implied in reply to @RobertBunge, there are branches of that tradition which shine admirable quantities of light on just about any blind spot you can name. Thus I find it rather disingenuous to label the whole thing as “Judeo-Christian”, as if the tradition as a whole were monolithic and subject to blind spots. And unfair to many who identify in one way or another with some branch of that tradition.

About “implicit eschatology” — again, I have no doubt that you can find places that have whatever eschatology you find unhelpful, but I would find it much more helpful if you spoke out clearly what eschatology you were referring to.

In both cases, one may if one likes frame an idea of what is generally accepted in a tradition, but on closer enquiry one will no doubt find those who identify with the tradition but do not accept the matters which one has framed as generally accepted.

As I have said to some who identify as atheist: please tell me about this god in which you do not believe. I have never had a reply that paints a picture of the kind of God that makes sense to me. So I can easily continue: “I don’t believe in that kind of god either”.

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Holland can speak for himself:

“This book explores what it was that made Christianity so subversive and disruptive; how completely it came to saturate the mindset of Latin Christendom; and why, in a West that is often doubtful of religion’s claims, so many of its instincts remains - for good or ill thoroughly Christian” (p. 17)

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Thanks for the direct quote, and I notice the care with wording that Holland displays. I can’t disagree!

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How about “Abrahamic” narrative scaffold? I’m currently reading about the origins of the Baha’i faith in the context of late 18th century Persian Islamic expectations of the 12th Imam. Structurally, messianic expectations have a family resemblance. What we are really sorting here is “Western” vs “Eastern” in the context of the Axial traditions. With roots as deep as Zoroaster, the West favors dramatic clashes of light versus darkness. (With certain mystical or philosophical traditions striving for a non-dual view). The Abrahamic element - embodied across Judaism, Christianity, and Islam - is to historicize the moral contest of the universe and to attach meaning to the comings and goings of various kings, emperors, caliphates, etc. Contrast this with the complete lack of interest in Hindu and Buddhist traditions with dynastic transitions on the Indian subcontinent. There is a deep structure in the West that cares about linear time, progress, and the affairs of this world.

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I’d like to return to the original post here, and reflect on how we can synthesise approaches to “reclaiming the wholeness of mind…”

@Justin’s “converging observations” strike me as very reasonable and relatable, and yes, I have observed similar patterns. And I very much welcome the questions

What I’m wondering about is how to relate ways forward to the problematic observations.

  1. We could just attempt to answer the questions, irrespective of the observations.
  2. We could try to compose a more satisfyingly complete set of observations which would help direct us towards answers.
  3. We could take one observation at a time, and suggest answers that address that observation; or one strategy at a time, and paint a picture of how that affects one or more of the observations.

I’m inclined towards the third option. Not, I hasten to add, thinking that solving one of these would solve everything, nor that there is one “silver bullet” — not at all. But the other two approaches feel to me unsatisfactory. Against (2) I don’t think we are going to get a complete-looking catalogue of the woes of modernism (or whatever you want to call them) and I neither want to wait for that, nor start arguments about which observations may be more or less important to attend to. Against (1), I do think that it’s a good idea to have some kind of “theory of change” story that actually addresses the problems we see around us in the present. I would be concerned if the proposed ways forward could not be linked to correcting those observations.

Does this help at all, @Justin ?

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In a word, yes!!!. That’s a decently good description of Global Bildung, bio-regional immersion, and any number of holistic educational programs already up and running. It’s not a wheel that needs reinvented. The current question is more like how to take the prototypes to scale.

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Asking why capitalism (or any system) is self-sustaining is a good starting point. For that purpose, I currently like Kojin Karatani’s work the most.

The background - mode of exchange A (gifting, sharing, reciprocity). That was human life before agriculture, essentially. Mobile indigenous societies could not pile up material possessions, so the frequently gave it all away.

With agriculture, things like fixed buildings can be passed down from generation to generation, so accumulation begins. Note that agriculture is self-sustaining, because it increases both available calories and the population consuming those calories. At a certain point, returning to hunter-gatherer lifestyles cannot sustain the resulting population, so unpleasant agricultural labor becomes a necessity of life.

On the basis of agrarian society, Karatani then identifies mode of exchange B - seizure and tribute, as practiced by the State. Civilization, in a nutshell. Notice that the priestly and military apparatus of the State is essentially a parasitic system on top of the agrarian peasantry. Karatani’s mode C - commodity exchange - began as an adjunct to the State to source materials and productions at a distance, distances too far for direct conquest and seizure.

Although modes B and C are generally self-sustaining, they are also vulnerable to local resource depletion and frontier invasion, so civilized history was geographically dynamic, although core systemic structures changed only slowly. The most decisive change in civilized history, arguably, was when mode C got loose from mode B in the early modern European context. Note that Ming China, for example, had plenty of trade, capital, and technology, but the State still managed to orchestrate all of it. There was no Ming Emperor in Europe. So by-the-by, city states, trading networks, and eventually nation-states cozy with capital become the leading forms in Europe. Soon to be exported everywhere else by means of conquest and colonialism.

Karatani identifies the current self-sustaining system as a Borromean knot of Capital-Nation-State. Those three all reinforce each other. Will there ever be an endgame for this system? Quite likely - due to global resource depletion. The most open question is how much turmoil and destruction will attend the inevitable transformation. Karatani postulates an unnamed mode D based on global reciprocity. That is an outcome worth hoping for. If it fails to transpire, however, we might all instead regrettably revert to mode A, post-apocalyptic version.

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I would align with Robert in broadening this term to Abrahamic religions. It is the scaffolding that has undertaken a systematic campaign of oppression, persecution and annihilation. Not because of any inherent failure, but because it has been shaped and co-opted by power structures, who twist it as a justification for their actions, and because of its pervasiveness across the world. No other ideological scaffolding has been used to generate such degrees of harm. We are looking at:

  • Two millennia of persecution, through the exclusion of different faiths and belief systems, if not outright destruction: Inquisitions, Jihads, Crusades, Witch hunts…

  • Ideological falsehoods about the dominance of man over the world, which form frameworks related to racial supremacy (White, European society has a right to ‘civilise’ the rest of the world)

  • Systematic eradication and/or aggressive assimilation of any belief system that is different (history is replete with examples)

Now, against this, I would agree with you that these belief systems are not ‘bad’ per se. Indeed, they have great insights and beauty – there’s passages in Ecclesiastics about impermanence that could as equally be found in a Buddhist text, and later on in the New Testament about the role of love and compassion; whilst traditions like Sufism, Kabbalah and Christian Monastics preserved and carried forth much knowledge. The problem is much of this is on the fringes: remember texts were heavily ‘refined and filtered’ through the ages, with the famous Council of Nicaea being but one example.

The Abrahamic faiths stand apart from others in elevating man to a position of exceptionalism (and usually not just man in general, but the believers of the faith being expounded). Likewise dominance, giving man (and especially said believers) special ‘rights’ over all others and other living beings. These faiths also place God as external to existence and also emphasis some authorised conduit to reach God (giving authority to the religious infrastructures).

To answer your question about God. What I think is not God is the one purported by the Abrahamic faiths: as an anthromorphic figure somehow external to existence, who intervenes (in an ad hoc manner) to the world of humans. To me, this makes no sense. I do however respect those who adopt this belief, which, after all, is most of the world – and even am open to the possibility that certain individuals - whether Jesus, Mohammed or the Buddha – are unique from others; perhaps arising from a confluence of energies or patterns and being able to access a deeper knowledge. I say this hesitantly, because I neither subscribe to it, nor can I totally dismiss it. Now, what makes more sense – to me – is the idea of God being part of existence, as being both the source and fundamental nature of all things. That not only aligns with many Eastern religions (the concept of Brahma, the Tao, and arguably to a degree Sunyata), but also some thinkers in Western ideology, such as Spinoza. It’s oft-cited that such a God, revealed through the symmetries and inherent beauty of physics, is what Einstein related to most – though, like him, I do not think humans can fully comprehend what this state or being (per se) is. Equally one could say that the concept of a God that lacks some individual identity is not God at all, however, I would counter that a state of complete order, of all-prevalence, from which all arises and is inseparable from, which may be at the very root of consciousness as well, is the closest approximation to God as can be conceived of. Although this is probably a matter for a separate topic.

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I’d add to this just the simple observation regarding longevity. Right now, the current system - what we call capitalism, though it’s rooted in deeper foundations of separation - cannot continue for much longer. And it’s not been around very long, either. Consider the history of human civilisation and, granted, we may take the view that cultures 5000 or 10,000 or longer are irrelevant, too basic, primitive. I’d counter to that: ancient belief systems, and indigeneous world views, are increasingly being shown to harbour deep truths. The longer back we look, the greater uncertainty we have about how societies worked. Consider, for example, the Incan buildings, where stones were precisely aligned, in a manner that, today, not even laser-cutting tools could achieve. The amazing biodiversity of the Amazon (sadly being destroyed) has been found to arise from tribes employing gardening skills that would leave today’s botanists in a state of ecstasy. And of course we have more permanent, obvious examples like the pyramids but my take is this is just the tip of an iceberg, of deep knowledge, the likes of which we have forgotten and the remaining fragments we are rediscovering to some degree. Bit of a diversion but my point is: capitalism is an exception to human history, perhaps best seen as a kind of social virus that consumes its host. However I see capitalism as just an outcome of a deeper belief system, as noted.

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I’m a bit more comfortable in my Western, Abrahamic-influenced skin, but it’s not an easy family to descend from! First of all, with respect to the critique above, compare the original Abrahamic tradition with something like Marduk worship (because of course that was the jumping off point for the Abrahamic spiritual family tree). Was Babylonian or Akkadian religion less persecutory, exclusive, exploitative, etc? The original Abrahamic impulse was something like nomadic theology of liberation in relation to the power pyramids the wandering tribes saw dominating the valleys all around them.

My reading of the Tanakh in particular is as a story of coming to consciousness through lots of trial and plenty of error. Is there any part of those writings that does not contradict some other part of those writings? To me this is what learning looks like - back and forth and forth and back - circling around some core insight but never quite landing on it. What we currently regret as Abramahic separation from nature was originally more like escape from the drudgery of corvee labor for the building of ziggurats or forced sharing of herds for slaughter in some emperor or another’s rites of spring with the local high priestess.

Your list of particulars in the post above (persecution, exclusion, destruction, falsehoods, dominance, eradication, assimilation) reminds me most of all of the Freudian defense mechanism. Lots of deflection and projection. Your list of preferred Abrahamic interpretations (Sufism, Kabbalah and Christian Monasticism) reminds me of Freudian sublimation. Lately I’ve been hanging out a lot with Baháʼís (technically, another Abrahamic religion - but uniquely founded in the modern era), and Baháʼí writings make heavy use of the notion of spiritual “adolescence”. They see all the world’s problems in the 19th and 20th centuries as something like growing pains. I find that interpretation congenial - it’s pretty much how I view human cultural evolutionary process writ large.

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By scale, most certainly. The Abrahamic religions went on to span the globe, rather than a corner of the Middle East.

By intent? Debatable. The accounts we have of those religions invariably come from Abrahamic sources - the stuff about child sacrifice, I suspect, was either invented or grossly exaggerated. The same thing happened with what we have of Carthaginian society, with similar depictions as a result of the Roman conquest and historians determining how Carthage was seen.

This isn’t to say I think the Abrahamic religions are uniquely bad. Far from it. They are just the ones that have caused the greatest damage, historically. Both through the manner in which they have spread and dominated and how, over the ages, they have been twisted by power structures.