Cover of 'A Life-Coherent Framework for Health, Healing, and Human Flourishing' with a central circular diagram around a human figure and nature imagery, plus side labels. Centered title and author name.

A Life-Coherent Framework for Health, Healing, and Human Flourishing: From Root Causes to Life-Enabling Action | ChatGPT-5.5 Thinking and NotebokLM

Health is often approached through disease categories, risk factors, service delivery, behavioral advice, and cost-effectiveness metrics. While indispensable, these approaches remain incomplete when detached from the living relations through which persons, communities, ecosystems, and future generations are sustained. This white paper proposes a life-coherent framework for health, healing, and human flourishing grounded in the organism–niche relation. It defines health as life-capacity enabled, healing as life-capacity restored, and flourishing as life-capacity expressed in dignity, relation, meaning, participation, and ecological belonging.

The framework integrates several complementary traditions: Maturana’s structural coupling, Galtung’s analysis of violence, McMurtry’s life-value and civil-commons criterion, Antonovsky’s salutogenesis, Naviaux’s salugenesis, life-course health development, social and ecological determinants of health, commercial and digital determinants, implementation and de-implementation science, commons governance, and planetary health. Its central distinction is between salugenesis, the inner biology of healing completion, and salutogenesis, the outer field of health-generating affordances, resources, meanings, and protections.

The white paper presents a six-level architecture: cellular and biological healing architecture; organismal systems integration; psychosocial and behavioral transduction; life-course and intergenerational embedding; the salutogenic affordance field; and the life-ground and civilizational niche. Across these levels, health is sustained when exposures remain within restorative capacity; disease, distress, dysfunction, and breakdown become more likely when cumulative exposures exceed repair margins. The framework further identifies blindspots and capture modes — measurement violence, metric capture, implementation violence, commercial capture, epistemic capture, algorithmic capture, cultural masking, burden displacement, commons enclosure, and resilience-as-adaptation — that cause systems to misrecognize or normalize preventable harm.

The framework culminates in a practical life-coherent action method: recognize, rename, measure, expose, de-implement, restore commons, redesign affordances, protect margins, coordinate, monitor, and learn. It proposes ethical principles of dignity, equity and justice, solidarity, sustainability, precaution, transparency, accountability, love of life, and humility. Its purpose is to support clinical care, public health, policy, technology, governance, and research in becoming more answerable to the conditions that allow life to live, heal, participate, repair, and flourish.

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Book cover for Life-Coherent Civilization: a circular globe-bowl with a tree at center and people seated in a circle, surrounded by icons for health, water, education, economy, governance, law, knowledge, ecological protection, social security, and culture; cityscape and mountains in the background.

Life-Coherent Civilization: From World-Bringing to Participatory Repair | ChatGPT-5.5 Thinking and NotebookLM

This book develops a life-coherent framework for understanding and repairing the dominant civilizational order. Its central claim is that human beings do not simply perceive, manage, or occupy a pre-given world. Through language, institutions, economies, technologies, laws, educational systems, health systems, and practices of coordination, we participate in bringing forth the worlds we inhabit. The decisive question is therefore not only whether a worldview is internally coherent, operationally efficient, legally valid, economically productive, or culturally powerful, but whether the world it brings forth enables or disables life.

The argument is built around three foundational correctives. From Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, it takes the insight that cognition is not passive representation of an independent world, but embodied, relational, and enacted world-bringing by living systems structurally coupled to their media. From John McMurtry, it takes the life-value principle: that good and bad are ultimately grounded in whether thought, institutions, and systems enable or disable the life-capacities of beings and communities. From Johan Galtung, it takes the expanded account of violence as direct, structural, and cultural life-disablement, and peace as the active creation of conditions for human and ecological flourishing.

Together, these lines of thought make visible the central error of the dominant paradigm: it has inverted the relation between life and its instruments. Economy, law, technology, governance, knowledge, education, and health systems were historically justified as means of securing life, yet under the dominant civilizational order they are repeatedly reorganized as if life itself must adapt to their imperatives. This book names that inversion, diagnoses its category errors, and develops a life-coherent alternative.

The proposed alternative is the life-coherent vessel: a framework for reordering civilization around the conditions that make life possible. The vessel is not a utopian blueprint, ideological program, or technocratic master plan. It is a diagnostic and practical architecture for asking: What world is being brought forth? Whose life is enabled or disabled? What forms of violence are hidden in normal arrangements? What civil commons are being protected or destroyed? What feedback is being ignored? What forms of repair are now required?

The book proceeds from first principles to applied practice. It begins with the human being as a world-bringing animal; develops the Maturana–McMurtry–Galtung triad; examines the great inversion of dominant civilization; derives the life-coherent vessel; formulates the Life-Coherence Test; situates major correctives across ecology, economy, power, knowledge, law, and governance; and applies the framework to water, health, education, economy, and governance as civil commons. It then offers practical tools for life-coherent praxis: the Field Cycle of Repair, the Life-Coherence Dashboard, and transition pathways for moving from inverted systems toward participatory repair.

The book concludes that a life-coherent civilization is not one that abolishes conflict, uncertainty, plurality, suffering, or error. It is one that learns to organize its institutions around the continuous detection and repair of avoidable life-disablement. Its aim is not to add another theory to the existing archive of civilizational critique, but to offer a usable framework for seeing, judging, and acting differently: a way of bringing forth worlds that remain answerable to life.

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Cover of 'Civil Commons in Practice' featuring a circular tree diagram with segments for Water, Health, Ecology, Education, Governance, and Integrative Case, around a central tree emblem.

Civil Commons in Practice: Comparative Cases in Water, Health, Education, Ecology, and Governance | ChatGPT-5.5 Thinking and NotebookLM

This paper develops the empirical and institutional extension of the Life-Coherent Peace project through comparative case studies in water, health, education, ecology, and governance. Building on the theoretical framework of Life-Coherent Peace, the tragic-choice methodology of the Life-Coherence Arbitration Protocol, and the non-reductionist Life-Coherence Dashboard, the paper asks how civil commons appear in practice and how they can be evaluated without romanticization. The central argument is that civil commons are not defined by public ownership alone, nor by service delivery alone, but by whether institutions secure means of life, expand life-capacities, prevent structural and cultural violence, protect ecological life-ground, enable participatory legitimacy, and remain accountable to repair.

The paper examines five primary cases: Paris water remunicipalization and Eau de Paris; Costa Rica’s EBAIS primary health care model; Finland’s comprehensive public education system; Costa Rica’s Payments for Ecosystem Services program; and Porto Alegre’s participatory budgeting. It also includes Te Awa Tupua / Whanganui River as an integrative case of ecological, Indigenous, legal, and relational governance. Each case is treated as a partial, situated, imperfect approximation of life-coherent institutional design. The analysis asks: What life-good is at stake? What money-sequence or bureaucratic pressures threaten life-coherence? What civil commons mechanism has been built? What life-capacities are enabled? What risks of capture, exclusion, reversal, or reduction remain?

The paper concludes that Life-Coherent Peace does not require perfect institutions. It requires institutions that are organized to serve life before money, administration, or power; that can detect where they disable life; and that can be corrected through participation, accountability, ecological humility, and repair.

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Indicators of Life-Coherent Peace: Designing a Non-Reductionist Dashboard for Policy, Commons, and Ecological Governance | ChatGPT-5.5 Thinking and NotebookLM

This paper develops a non-reductionist indicator framework for evaluating Life-Coherent Peace in policy, civil commons, and ecological governance. It builds on Life-Coherent Peace: An Autopoietic, Life-Value, Anti-Violence Framework for Human and Planetary Flourishing, which defines peace not as mere non-war, but as the organized social, ecological, economic, cultural, and relational enablement of life-capacities. The original framework explicitly identifies empirical application, indicator development, comparative case analysis, and policy evaluation as necessary next steps (Sahely, 2026a).

The present paper takes up that task. It asks how life-capacity, means of life, civil commons, structural violence, cultural violence, ecological life-ground, relational legitimacy, value sequence, and repair capacity can be evaluated without collapsing them into a single technocratic score. The paper argues that Life-Coherent Peace requires measurement, but not reductionism. Its proper evaluative form is a multidimensional dashboard that combines quantitative indicators, qualitative testimony, participatory interpretation, ecological thresholds, cultural red lines, institutional accountability, and recursive repair.

The paper proposes a Life-Coherence Dashboard organized around ten domains: basic life necessities; health and embodied viability; thought, education, and sense-making; felt being and psychosocial security; action, agency, and participation; relational legitimacy and non-domination; civil commons and universal access; ecological life-ground; cultural-linguistic worlds; and value sequence and institutional accountability. For each domain, the paper distinguishes signal indicators, threshold indicators, distribution indicators, narrative indicators, and repair indicators. It concludes that Life-Coherent Peace should not be evaluated by ranking societies in a simplistic league table, but by disclosing, with affected communities, whether the conditions of thought, felt being, action, relation, culture, and ecological viability are being enabled, disabled, repaired, or placed at irreversible risk.

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Cover of a book titled 'Testing Life-Coherent Peace Under Tragic Choice' with a bronze balancing scale over a round table and a blue footer crest behind the author name.

Testing Life-Coherent Peace Under Tragic Choice: A Companion Casebook for the Life-Coherence Arbitration Protocol | ChatGPT-5.1 Thinking and NotebookLM

This paper develops a methodological companion to Life-Coherent Peace, a theoretical framework that integrates John McMurtry’s life-value onto-axiology, Humberto Maturana’s biology of autopoiesis and love, and Johan Galtung’s theory of direct, structural, and cultural violence. The companion asks whether the Life-Coherence Arbitration Protocol can guide judgment under tragic conditions in which two or more legitimate life-needs collide. The central case concerns a displaced population requiring immediate shelter, water, sanitation, food, safety, and medical continuity, while the only apparently available land is an ancient forest that sustains biodiversity, watershed integrity, carbon storage, and the cultural-spiritual continuity of an Indigenous community. This case is methodologically stronger than water privatization as a stress test because it does not present a simple opposition between life-value and money-sequence disvalue. In this case, both sides invoke life. Human survival, Indigenous self-determination, ecological continuity, cultural inheritance, species viability, and future generations are all at stake.

The paper argues that life-coherent arbitration should not be understood as a technocratic formula, moral trump card, or state-administered definition of flourishing. Rather, it is a disciplined, participatory, anti-reductionist, ecologically constrained, and recursively repairable method for handling competing life-needs under conditions of urgency, scarcity, asymmetrical power, and historical injury. The paper applies the eight steps of the Life-Coherence Arbitration Protocol to the tragic-choice case: identifying affected living unities, mapping life-capacities, distinguishing needs from wants and means from substitutes, identifying thresholds of irreversibility, seeking compossible options before sacrificial trade-offs, applying minimum sufficient force, requiring participatory languaging, and establishing monitoring, repair, and revision. It concludes that the protocol does not abolish tragedy or guarantee harmony. Its purpose is more modest and more necessary: to prevent premature sacrifice, hidden domination, money-sequence calculation, epistemic colonization, and the conversion of non-substitutable life-ground into priced preference.

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Life-Coherent Peace: An Autopoietic, Life-Value, Anti-Violence Framework for Human and Planetary Flourishing | ChatGPT-5.5 Thinking and NotebookLM

This paper develops the concept of Life-Coherent Peace as an integrative framework for human and planetary flourishing. It brings together John McMurtry’s life-value onto-axiology, Humberto Maturana’s biology of autopoiesis and love, and Johan Galtung’s peace research on direct, structural, and cultural violence. The central argument is that peace should not be understood merely as the absence of war, direct injury, or disorder, but as the organized social, ecological, economic, cultural, and relational enablement of life-capacities. McMurtry provides the value criterion: the good is that which enables a more coherently inclusive range of thought, felt being, and action, while disvalue reduces, disables, or destroys these capacities. Maturana provides the biological and epistemological grounding: living beings are autonomous, structurally coupled unities who bring forth worlds in domains of languaging and emotioning, and human coexistence becomes possible in the relational domain of love understood as acceptance of the other as legitimate in coexistence. Galtung provides the diagnostic grammar: violence is not only direct harm but also the structural and cultural organization of avoidable life-disablement. Read together, these thinkers disclose peace as life-coherent coexistence: the compossible flourishing of persons, communities, species, and planetary life-support systems. The paper strengthens this synthesis by addressing two critical challenges: first, the risk of reducing love to bureaucracy or imposing life-value through domination; second, the problem of competing life-needs when different life-enabling claims come into conflict. It therefore proposes a Life-Coherence Test and a Life-Coherence Arbitration Protocol as disciplined, dialogical methods for evaluating policies, institutions, technologies, and cultural arrangements. The paper concludes that Life-Coherent Peace is not a utopian end-state or technocratic command system, but a secular covenant for life on Earth: a shared commitment to organize coexistence so that living beings can think, feel, act, relate, and flourish without destroying the life-ground of others.

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Book cover for From the Biology of Love to Life-Coherent Governance; a diverse group sits in a circle outdoors with wind turbines and a city skyline in the background.

From the Biology of Love to Life-Coherent Governance: A Maturanan, Galtungian, and McMurtrian Framework for Structural Violence, Civil Commons, and Non-Forcing Politics | ChatGPT-5.5 Thinking and NotebookLM

Humberto Maturana’s biology of love provides a biological-ethical foundation for rethinking politics as the conservation of coexistence rather than the management of populations by external control. For Maturana, love is not sentimentality but the relational domain in which the other arises as legitimate in coexistence. This white paper extends that insight into an ethical-political framework by integrating Maturana’s biology of love with Johan Galtung’s theory of direct, structural, and cultural violence; John McMurtry’s life-value onto-axiology and civil commons; and Elinor Ostrom’s work on commons governance and social-ecological systems. The central thesis is that politics becomes life-coherent when institutions conserve and expand the conditions under which persons, communities, species, ecosystems, and future generations can live, develop, participate, repair, and coexist without domination. Conversely, political pathology arises when institutions conserve themselves by disabling life-capacity while legitimating such disablement as necessary, efficient, profitable, rational, or inevitable. This framework reframes governance as non-forcing coordination: the design, protection, and repair of life-enabling conditions rather than the coercive imposition of order from above.

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Cover for a book titled 'From Natural Drift to Evolutionary Living Coherence' with a mountainous landscape, a large tree, hikers, birds, and circular icons representing Evo-Devo concepts.

From Natural Drift to Evolutionary Living Coherence: A Maturanan Framework for Evo-Devo, Niche Construction, Symbiosis, Inheritance, and Population Genetics | ChatGPT-5.5 Thinking and NotebookLM

Humberto Maturana and Jorge Mpodozis’s theory of natural drift reframes evolution as the historical conservation and diversification of organism–niche relations rather than as the direct optimization of organisms by external selection. This white paper develops natural drift in dialogue with contemporary evolutionary biology, including the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis, evolutionary developmental biology, developmental plasticity, niche construction, symbiosis, holobiont theory, inclusive inheritance, epigenetic inheritance, and population genetics. The central thesis is that evolution can be understood as the historical conservation, transformation, and diversification of viable ways of living. In this framing, development generates phenotype–niche possibilities; behavior guides organism–niche relations; plasticity enables structural coupling in ontogenic time; niche construction modifies the conditions of future evolution; symbiosis expands the organism beyond the host genome; inheritance transmits more than DNA; and population genetics describes the genetic stabilization, sorting, and transformation of variation across generations. Natural selection remains indispensable, but it is interpreted as one sorting process within the wider historical drift of living coherence. This synthesis does not reject the Modern Synthesis; it situates it within a broader relational biology of organism, niche, lineage, and biosphere.

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Book cover for 'Emotioning and Living Coherence' by Dr. Bicha ra Sahely, BSc, MBBS, DM; subtitle indicates a framework for affective biology, disease, healing, and non-forcing action; features a colorful concentric diagram, a tree, and subtle cellular imagery.

Emotioning and Living Coherence: A Maturanan Framework for Affective Biology, Disease, Healing, and Non-Forcing Action | ChatGPT-5.5 Thinking and NotebookLM

Humberto Maturana’s concept of emotioning offers a biological account of affect that is neither reducible to subjective feeling nor separable from organismic life. For Maturana, emotions configure domains of possible action; a change in emotion is therefore a change in the world that becomes available to the living system. This white paper develops emotioning as a bridge between autopoiesis, structural coupling, affective neuroscience, interoception, emotional sentience, allostasis, co-regulation, psychoneuroimmunology, trauma, disease, healing, and non-forcing action. The central thesis is that emotioning is the embodied, historically calibrated, relationally co-regulated, and biologically consequential configuration of possible action through which organisms sense, value, and navigate their viability within a niche. Contemporary affective neuroscience supports this view by identifying ancient affective action systems, while Damasio’s account of feelings as body-state experiences links affect to life regulation. Peil Kauffman’s theory of emotional sentience further reframes emotion as a self-regulatory sense that provides self-relevant information about organism–environment relations. Interoceptive and allostatic models show how bodily regulation, prediction, energy allocation, and affect are intertwined. Attachment, social baseline theory, and social safety theory reveal that affect is not only individual but relationally and immunologically consequential. The paper concludes that healing requires more than symptom control: it requires restoration of viable affective coupling. Non-forcing action, or wu-wei, is proposed as the corresponding praxis of affective attunement: acting with the living organization rather than against it.

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Book cover titled 'From Autopoiesis to Living Coherence' with a multicolored circular diagram surrounded by plants and wildlife, top-heavy typography.

From Autopoiesis to Living Coherence: A Maturanan Biological Framework for Disease, Healing, and Non-Forcing Action | ChatGPT-5.5 Thinking and NotebookLM

Humberto Maturana’s biology of cognition offers a rigorous non-reductionist account of living systems as autonomous, structurally determined, autopoietic unities that conserve themselves through ongoing structural coupling with their medium. This white paper develops a Maturanan biological framework for understanding disease, healing, and non-forcing action. It proposes the concept of living coherence to describe the dynamic conservation of congruence among the nested processes through which a living system maintains viable organism–niche relations. These processes include metabolic and mitochondrial regulation, redox signaling, immune tolerance and repair, neuroendocrine-affective regulation, microbiome ecology, developmental plasticity, behavior, social relations, and ecological context. Within this framework, health is interpreted as the dynamic conservation of viable coupling; disease as costly conserved drift, loss of congruence, or collapse of organism–niche viability; and healing as the restoration or reorganization of viable structural coupling. The paper draws on Maturana’s concepts of autopoiesis, structural coupling, cognition, emotioning, love, and natural drift, and places them in dialogue with contemporary work in allostasis, mitochondrial psychobiology, redox biology, organism-centered immunology, microbiome science, affective neuroscience, evo-devo, and enactive cognition. The resulting framework supports a biological interpretation of non-forcing action: intervention as careful, congruent perturbation that respects the autonomy of living systems and enlarges their field of viable possibilities.

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