The Spiritual Ecology of Microsolidarity

I share here the transcript of a short monologue I recently gave, speaking about the spiritual undercurrents of our community-building project, Microsolidarity. Thank you to Abhay for opening the conversation.

The spiritual undercurrents of Microsolidarity? I have avoided pointing it out or putting it into language on purpose, because people have very intelligent defences against it. I don't want to activate those defences. I don’t want to disable them either. I think people are defensive against religion and spirituality for good reasons. They should work through that in their own pace and go in their own direction. I don’t want to push people to feel they have to believe things they don’t actually believe it — that is my worst fear. But there are these little sprinklings of spirituality in there, and it feels like I could be more honest about that.

One of the things is how we conceive of ourselves. We’ve been through a project —especially in the last 150 years, but you can trace this history for a long time— of seeing ourselves as seperate individual identities, like atoms that float through space and occasionally meet another atom and they decide “Should we have an encounter? Should we affect each other?”

That’s not the only way to be a self, or to think of a self.

There’s a way to see your self as inextricably entangled with all the other selves. We’re continuously inside of each other. That was made so obvious by the pandemic: immune systems are collective, they're not individual.

We’ve been trained for a long time to see ourselves as these individual things, but it seems more wholesome to find ways of locating the identity in a collective: seeing that I'm part of something bigger, and the thing that is “me” is also a collective.

There’s good scientific explanations for the ways in which our tissues are making decisions, that there's agency in our blood cells, that me as a thinking person doesn't have any influence over the decision-making that's going on down there. There’s different levels of agency at the microscale, and I'm the grateful recipient of all the work that they're doing at the lower scales.

And how do you shift (or invite) people to go on a journey, to come out of individualism into something more mutualistic and entangled? Good question!

One way is to show up in a space where you’re allowed to be yourself, and notice the ways in which you are different to the others, and notice the ways in which you’re the same. And then let’s go into a crew with 3 or 4 other people. Your crew is not like any of the other crews here in this house. Your crew has a personality. It has a history. It has desires and wishes and fears, that are greater than the sum of its parts. It’s its own little creature. And this house, the collection of all these 4 or 5 different crews: again, this house has a single individual group spirit that is composed of parts of each of us, and parts that are not ours.

There’s no end to that. I can just keep repeating that paragraph at larger and larger scales including more and more beings, some of which are human, some of which are not, some of which have bodies, some which do not. Some of them are narratives or ideas. Some of them are from the past. Some of them are from the future.

There’s a way of seeing the personhood of very large groups. Not just large groups of people, but large groups of beings. The biggest group, that contains all the things: that’s basically what I think God is, it’s just the pattern that everything has in common, it’s the inclusive bubble that has no exceptions.

I’m trying to find practises, or little nudges, or games, or weird turns of phrase that spark your imagination, to find your own version of that thing that I'm going through: to come out of seeing yourself as this separate individual and just take your place as part of the ecology, as part of the bigger thing, the thing that’s not you but is partly you. What’s wholesome for the planet and for all the rest of the living creatures that we share it with, seems to stem from this attitude of mutuality and entanglement and reciprocity. Maybe we can practise in very concrete simple ways that invite us into a more esoteric exploration, that you can then choose your own language for.