Where Do I End? Systems Science, Ecology and Contemplative Wisdom

A meditative discussion on what systems science might teach us about emptiness, land spirits, and the more-than-human world we're part of.

In some shamanic traditions you ask the spirit of a river for permission before fishing in it. For a long time that sounded like pure metaphor to me. Then, after a PhD in physics and complex systems, I started seeing it a bit differently - a watershed is a self-organizing system, with its own rhythms and ways of responding to what we do, that no single creature in it controls. Whether we call that a "spirit" may be more of a language question than I had assumed. Something similar happened with emptiness in Buddhism: the science kept suggesting that where "I" end and my ecology begins is more a choice of how we look than a fact.

So I've been wondering whether systems science could help translate contemplative insight into a language our culture takes seriously - and whether that could be as big a shift as the scientific revolution was. I don't know yet.

We'll start with a few core ideas from complex systems science - emergence, self-organization, antifragility. Then we'll move into a relational meditative space to share our curiosities, confusions, fears and hopes around all this, and just be with it together.

No science background needed.

You can check out more of our work at: https://complexitycontemplation.org