MINIATURES OF EVOLUTION

Drawings from Focusing processes (3rd cohort, first webinar)

I am happy to announce that there will be a 4th cohort, free of charge, of my series of 5 webinars. Most likely, we shall begin on Tuesday April 22nd, at 18,30 CET, although I wait for more registrations of interest before setting the exact date and time.

Re-imagining our evolutionary past to access the future

Empowerment and resilience in times of ecological crisis

5 webinars, 2 hours long each.

The theoretical foundations of the course and some examples are displayed in the paper downloadable here.

INTRODUCTION The ecological crisis and climate change are undoubtedly crises of a development model that aims at infinite growth on a finite planet. But they are also crises of a broader scope, which affects our being in the world as humans and our trust in our cognitive abilities, which until now would have allowed us to solve - directly or indirectly - the problems that we ourselves create, very often artfully, to sell the technology suitable for solving them better than we ever could.

The proposal of this course takes a substantial step back with respect to the human capacity to solve problems, since climate change is rightly considered a wicked problem. In the course we use the technology invented by a child, language, to formulate theoretical premises, hypotheses on what evolution is. These hypotheses, brought into action in real life, can serve as guides and, hopefully, protect us as talismans of wisdom in the face of the evolutionary challenges that lie ahead. Learning to write in LTL, the language of the tree of life is an evolutionary task of universal scope, since evolution, before being mistakenly confused with progress, concerned our more-than-human ancestors who survived before us to generate us.

This course is meant for you if

1) You resonate with the fragment of Empedocles, a Greek philosopher of the 5th century BC, [FR. 142]

"For once I was a boy and a girl and a shrub and a bird and a mute fish that darts out of the sea",

2) You are willing to walk the talk of regeneration and sustainability by going deeper into their implications, that all point to "degrowth" as a necessary means to control growth and re-genarate new forms of life.

The course provides a compact and creative version of Eugene T. Gendlin's Focusing and Thinking at the Edge, both considered as practices of re-understanding the past, personal (Focusing) and collective (TAE). It aims to develop:

· A pivotal meaning for the phrase “sustainable development” (at the personal level),

· Shift from “outer" development goals to evolutionary steps (for society and culture),

· Attention to and recognition of the occurrence of meaning (truth),

· Organismic (bodily) wisdom and appreciation of more-than-human life forms,

· An understanding of how projecting on nature human-only activities and constructs can lead to anthropocentrism disguised by science,

· A crossing of first-person experiencing and third-person science, evidenced by the skill to enter and exit metaphorical language,

· Cross-contextual sense making, non-binary critical thinking, applied to the construction of “mini-theories of evolution”, a process that merges four of the five dimensions of the Inner Development Goals framework, namely Being, Thinking, Relating and Action,

· Opportunity to team up with others during the course to co-create and possibly develop communal projects at the end of the course, e.g. by joining the now forming "narrative writers" group (thus adding the 5^th dimension of Collaborating to the previous four dimensions),

· Curiosity, courage and congruence to exit the metaphors about a “regenerative culture” and take action to materially regenerate the soil, run permaculture projects, preserve biodiversity.

COURSE DESCRIPTION

FIRST WEBINAR

1. Panoramic view of the course: “sustainable development” as an Aristotelian concept,

2. Feeling of the interconnected crises,

3. Very simple focusing steps to get a map of felt sense, an emerging deep need, and a gesture of care for the deep need,

4. From the gesture, an action step can develop!

Homework for the first four webinars: Readings from Darwin, Margulis and other texts on evolution (shared in the folder).

SECOND WEBINAR

1. Introduction to LTL (Language of Tree of Life) and discussion on the non-binary axiom “Evolution is not progress and not non-progress”,

2. Shaping your first premise as an incomplete gesture responding to a deep need

3. Increase of entropy in isolated systems and arrow of time,

4. Collective reading of a poem by W. Szymborska.

Homework: Read the short web article on “How the first plant came to be” and think about a possible script for the encounter.

THIRD WEBINAR

1. A critique of both Darwin and Margulis: projecting cultural practices (Darwin) or dramatic versions of “mating” (Margulis) onto nature does not change culture (Darwin) or does not change science (Margulis),

2. A third approach from Gendlin’s A Process Model: projecting onto nature something that humans do, but also plants and animals do (symbolic proto-behavior), so that “one of them could be us,”

3. Videos and readings on extraordinary facts in nature (to help with forming the theoretical premises for the Tree of Life).

4. Mimesis exercise 1: Definition of the word “endosymbiosis” after acting in a script as cyanobacteria and eucaryotic cells.

Homework: Watch the YouTube video “Walk the talk of sustainability”.

FOURTH WEBINAR

1. Putting together theoretical premises (from scientific facts or evolutionary theories) and experiential ones,

2. Derivation of your first new term from the “abductive” process (called so by Bateson and Peirce, not by Gendlin),

3. Final touches to the communal Tree of Life in Zoom WhiteBoard.

Homework: 1) write at least two sentences to recite in our performance as salmon in the 5^th webinar), 2) Go through the Interactive Focusing Format for the role modeling in the next webinar.

FIFTH WEBINAR

1. Discussion on the concept “good-enough ancestors”. What do they do? What do they leave behind? Literal and metaphorical “composting”.

2. Is reducing the carbon footprint for everyone? The model from the “Low Carbon Lifestyles Wheel” (to be released in shared folder),

3. Interactive Focusing Format for dyadic, empathic storytelling.

4. Closing exercise, Mimesis exercise 2, with us performing as young and old salmon having to swim upstream and delivering ancestors' messages before the journey.

YOUR HOST FOR THE 5 WEBINARS

Maria Emanuela Galanti, MA, is a Focusing Teacher based in Rome, Italy. She is a Counselor (Person-centered approach) with a MA in Philosophy from SUNY/Buffalo, as well as a Laurea Vecchio Ordinamento in Philosophy from Sapienza, Rome. She has also studied Developmental Psychology. She is an ecologist and member of WWF, Italy. In order to tackle the ecological crisis, she has devised “Miniatures of evolution” to bring inspiration to the necessary behavioral change. To register your interest for the course or other inquiries, you can contact her at rigenerazioni.meg@gmail.com

The course is offered free of charge, online, to volunteers who are willing to fill out two surveys in order to research its effectiveness.

To attend the course in the next prototyping version of it, please fill out this form.

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