Tag: Culture

Book cover with a central tree and circular bubbles around it forming a ring; 'Love' at the center and the title 'Toward a Maturana-Informed Viability Grammar' by Dr. Bichara Sahely.

Toward a Maturana-Informed Viability Grammar: Deriving Diagnostic Distinctions from Living, Love, Conversation, and Culture | ChatGPT-5.5 Thinking and NotebookLM

This white paper develops a Maturana-informed viability grammar: a disciplined set of diagnostic distinctions for asking how living systems, persons, institutions, cultures, and civilizations conserve or negate the conditions of living. Rather than beginning with abstract systems theory or imposed categories, the paper proceeds from Humberto Maturana’s biological and epistemological method: the observer, distinction, explanation, living organization, organism–medium congruence, structural coupling, emotioning, languaging, conversation, culture, and love. From this ground, the paper derives a life-coherent diagnostic grammar organized around conservation, constraint, margin, disturbance, present structure, regulation, relevance, and possible doings. These are not treated as metaphysical primitives, but as reflective questions that help living see what it is conserving.

The central claim is that viability cannot be reduced to survival, adaptation, stability, resilience, or functional persistence. A manner of living may persist while conserving fear, domination, humiliation, extraction, self-negation, or ecological destruction. Life-coherence therefore asks whether a conserved manner of living preserves the biological, relational, cultural, and ecological conditions through which living remains livable. The paper argues that love, understood in Maturana’s precise sense as the relational domain in which the other arises as legitimate in coexistence, is not sentimental but foundational. Suffering is interpreted as the conserved negation of love; healing as the restoration of trust, self-respect, respect for the other, and possible living; reflection as living becoming able to see how it is living; ethics as care for consequences in coexistence; responsibility as answerability for participation; freedom as the reflective possibility of conserving otherwise; and transformation as a new conservation beginning to live.

The paper concludes by presenting the diagnostic primitives as instruments of life-coherent inquiry and by emphasizing a recursive safeguard: the grammar must be applied to itself. Its purpose is not to master life from outside, but to help persons, institutions, cultures, and civilizations ask what they are conserving, what consequences follow, and whether another manner of living can begin.

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Shakil Choudhury – Deep Diversity: Integrating Psychological, Scientific & Spiritual Contributions for Healing Injustice and Inequity | Deep Transformation Podcast

Award-winning educator and activist Shakil Choudhury is the author of the outstanding book Deep Diversity: A Compassionate, Scientific Approach to Achieving Racial Justice, and in this potent conversation we learn a lot we perhaps didn’t know about the psychological, emotional, and neurobiological reasons for our ingrained biases, and the systemic bias in the culture at large. How and why do we discriminate? Many of our biases are hidden in the unconscious, which makes it that much harder to bring them into the light so we can begin to understand what’s going on and find ways to move ourselves and society toward justice and equity. Shakil explains that changing societal norms is at the heart of the battle for racial and social justice, as our habitual cultural behaviors tend to be viewed as legitimate, normal, and natural, when actually they may be outdated, off base, offensive, and unjust. Shakil deftly lines us out with specific steps we can take to recognize and change our own behaviors, as well as actions organizational leaders can take to effect change on a broader level.

Shakil contends that educating people to become diversity and equity literate is the first essential step, and the 360-hour program he has designed to this end has proven very effective. Once people see the data, they cannot help understanding the drivers of racial and social injustice more clearly, which leads to the place where real transformation can happen. Shakil’s extraordinarily insightful and illuminating approach is fueled by many years of contemplative practice, and he leaves us with a vision of what we are fighting for—not just what we are fighting against—based on Dr. Martin Luther King’s dream of Beloved Community. Small groups of dedicated people have managed to successfully nudge societal norms in the direction of justice in the past, and this conversation and Shakil’s book, Deep Diversity, most certainly contribute a compassionate nudge in the right direction. Bit by bit, recognizing that this is a journey, Shakil conveys both the means and the hope that justice will prevail. Recorded April 26, 2023.

“Can we hold the tension between our common humanity and our differences simultaneously?”

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Antonio Damasio | From Feelings to Socio-Cultural Homeostasis

The Strange Order of Things is a pathbreaking investigation into homeostasis, the condition that regulates human physiology within the range that makes possible not only survival but also the flourishing of life. Antonio Damasio makes clear that we descend biologically, psychologically, and even socially from a long lineage that begins with single living cells; that our minds and cultures are linked by an invisible thread to the ways and means of ancient unicellular existence and other primitive life-forms; and that inherent in our very chemistry is a powerful force, a striving toward life maintenance that governs life in all its guises, including the development of genes that help regulate and transmit life. The Strange Order of Things is a landmark reflection that spans the biological and social sciences, offering a new way of understanding the origins of life, feeling, and culture.

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