When I told Elisabet Sahtouris that we were having a retreat program called Butterfly Connection in her native Greece in 2009, she wrote back saying “it is interesting that your message downloaded right after I wrote two emails on butterfly metamorphosis.” Good timing!

She shared a version of the Butterfly Story which we then obviously explored in our program:

My favorite metaphor for the current world transition, first pointed out to me by Norie Huddle (Butterfly, 1990), is that of a butterfly in metamorphosis.

It goes like this: A caterpillar crunches its way through its ecosystem, cutting a swath of destruction by eating as much as hundreds of times its weight in a day, until it is too bloated to continue and hangs itself up, its skin then hardening  into a chrysalis.

Inside this chrysalis, deep in the caterpillar’s body, tiny things biologists call ‘imaginal disks’ begin to form. Not recognizing the newcomers, the caterpillar’s immune system snuffs them as they arise. But they keep coming faster and faster, then linking up with each other.

Eventually the caterpillar’s immune system fails from the stress and the disks become imaginal cells that build the butterfly by feeding on the soupy meltdown of the caterpillar’s body.

It took a long time for biologists to understand the reason for the  immune system attack on the incipient butterfly cells, but eventually they discovered that the butterfly has its own unique genome, carried by the caterpillar, inherited from long ago in evolution, yet not part of it as such (Margulis & Sagan, Acquiring Genomes 2002).

If we see ourselves as imaginal discs working to build the butterfly of a better world, we will understand that we are launching a new ‘genome’ of values and practices to replace that of the current unsustainable system. We will also see how important it is to link with each other in the effort, to recognize how many different kinds of imaginal cells it will take to build a butterfly with all its capabilities and colors.

– Elisabet Sahtouris, Ph.D., evolution biologist, lecturer and author of EarthDance: Living Systems in Evolution

The conversations around the role we are playing in this world and how we are playing this role are central themes of our dialogues. Although we do not focus on exploring theories, we obviously are alert of the patterns and insights that come out of our time together. There is a couple of patterns that we have been exploring with participants of these retreats.

It’s the caterpillar’s job to resist the butterfly and the butterfly’s job to become stronger because of the opposition to its advance.

It is the job of the system in place to resist the emergence of a new system – this resistance supports the strength and validity of the new system for the time when the shift happens. During this transformation, one is constantly challenged by the old system - acknowledging that this is at service of the new invites to a place of understanding rather than a place of opposition or duality.

The system emerging will, at its own turn, be build to last and to resist following emergences. We are stepping into this flow that will continue beyond us in the future. We are at the same time aware of our vital importance at this time and our transient influence at the no-time.

Acknowledge the job of the old system in resisting the new invites us to look at this transition as what it really is, a transition, and not a fight. This acknowledgment goes beyond focusing on actions to intervene in the old or the new, it rather looks at the service performed by our choices and actions.

One of the questions we explore in a Butterfly Connection retreat is: what actions am I doing to be at service at this time?

In the case of the caterpillar, its immune system kicks in because it does not recognize the second genome [of the butterfly]. Before the discovery of the second genome, this was a major puzzle.

It is completely normal to be puzzled by a time of major transformation. The old system clearly cannot sustain the current situation and the system emerging is yet not clear to us, difficult to be named using today’s words.

Co-create the language of this new system requires a space of exploration both of the self and while relating in community. To be supportive of local conversations emerging, Butterfly Connection aims to create and inspire spaces for this inquiry, understanding the critical role of the chrysalis, the silent space in between the two worlds, a space where although there is apparent stillness, it is where the real transformation is happening.

This story was told as part of the Butterfly ConnectionD programme.

Read more:

• A more recent version of that story can be found at Elisabet’s websiteD. Click on the Butterfly to read it.
• The collective intelligence of the imaginal cellsD

I was really pleased to see a video presentation of my favourite approach to sustainability¹ talking more openly about building trust as a necessity for social sustainable societies.
[～4min]

Even though I remember trust being mentioned within the community, I’ve always had a sense that they could be entertaining the idea that we should find universal social principles for too long.

Why I think generic social principles are an illusion

I was really impressed when I read the work of the Chilean economist Manfred Max-Neef² and what is behind his list of basic human needs.

His work makes interesting points on Self-reliance at the Center of Development and the economic use of satisfiers. He claims that we can identify a taxonomy of fundamental human needs. For some people those fundamental human needs could be a starting point for setting up universal needs and generic social principles.

Although a research on human needs might bring a great set of topics to inform the dimensions of being human for group conversation, basic human needs in bullet points do not work as principles of social sustainability in the same way natural principles do³. I argue that the way we relate to the natural world and our social world is different when we are talking about design and intervention.

Universal human needs might provide a framework for conversations but are not a strong base for systematic decision-making. This is because social principles need to be explored in community conversation (and in some cases, agreed upon by the community) for the sake of both process and content:

• For the sake of content because, different from natural principles, it is by re-interpretation that we re-create them in our context. Social principles are interpretations on how to be-in-the-world and cannot be set independently of human interaction. Without conversation and spaces of participation, principles that impact us socially are meaningless⁴.

• For the sake of process because what feeds social fabric is trust. Without a process that open space for trust to be co-created among the community, principles are useless for collective decision-making.

For social sustainability our social systems should be designed in participatory ways³.

Design social systems by participation and trust

As a species we have never designed a natural system. The most we have done was try to manage natural systems, although without success as a broad perspective have been showing. Nothing that we have ever designed shows, for instance,  intelligence and adaptation like a living organism does.

It is understandable that we use living-organism metaphors to inform systems that we can design. By doing that we can emulate resilience and adaptation shown in natural systems, but also these metaphor can be misleading in taking us to believe we design living systems.

As an example, people really want to connect concepts like autopoiesis to the organisational context. While autopoiesis can support us to create another narrative of how we would like to organise ourselves, no system designed by humans is autopoietic, even though their creators, people, are autopoietic systems⁵.

A social system can be a purposeful agreement made for people or between people to live and act together.

We can design social systems to be supportive of our collective needs and ask natural system to inspire us, but there is no ‘self-creation’ of human-made systems, only replication of a story that we have previously created. Participation in creating this story is key in designing social systems.

It is important to notice that the word design can also be misleading. Design is commonly understood as creation, but social systems require recursive participation, a system that contains space for re-design.

Re-design is key to check both context and purpose of a system over time. Spaces of design and re-design build trust among people and between people and their systems. Many institutions and organisations are examples of social systems that have lost track of its end purpose or are trapped into a now out-of-context initial design/story. Some that are made to be at service and support people end up becoming means of authority over people.

If we feel coerced or alienated from a system we are part of, we obviously do not trust it. Trust is what makes social systems work and realise their potential as instruments of collective human aspiration. Trust can only be created and sustained if we have spaces of participation.

More about this?

¹ Learn more about The Natural Step FrameworkD.

² Read about Human Needs in the works of Manfred Max-Neef et al.A and other social psychology studiesD.

³ Read Participatory Backcasting from PrinciplesA.

⁴ What’s the meaning of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights? Watch [～30min] Escaping the Universal Declaration of Human RightsM.

⁵ My claims seem to be against what Niklas LuhmannD understood from social systems theory and more towards the work of Jürgen HabermasD. I am reading more to learn about their work.

Monologues don’t exist.

But sometimes we speak to ourselves, don’t we? And thinking? Isn’t it a kind of monologue? Some other times we apparently speak out in what seems to be a one-way communication. Even if we can argue that monologues do exist, this perceived one-way communication clearly don’t.

That’s because our ability to speak and write are not disconnected to the interactions we have had with the World and other people, other eyes to the World.

The act of communication never starts (in the sense of being born) but rather is an interaction of influences from past and present getting together in an understandable unit at a certain moment. The act of communicating feeds a network of ongoing communication, never starting anew but also never completely repeating itself.

The act of speaking is a contribution for generating the World.

We not only speak to describe, but also to become

‘Speak to become’ means that by communicating we are refining our own understanding of the World, relating with/through/about it, but also we refine what we are in the process.

The act of speech is always a two-way. It changes or maintains the World around us as much as it changes or maintains ourselves.

When we look at the World, we are looking at a mirror

Monologues are not a one-way communication act, but can be a mono-consciousness act. That reinforces the importance of dialogue. Dialogue as a meeting of consciousnesses imply in bringing together multiple, connected but still possibly autonomous views of the world.

Communicating the/our World we can find Ourselves

So we arrived at this: the process of communicating the World tells as much about you than the World you are communicating. When we look at the World, we are also looking at our own Self.

I am reading the book Deleuze, Education and Becoming and came across the quote below, by Laurel Richardson, that explores writing as a way of self-discovery, something I feel represent my process of writing to you now.

Writing is a method of discovery, a way of finding out about yourself and your world. When we view writing as a method, we experience ‘language-in-use,’ how we ‘word the world’ into existence… And then we ‘reword’ the world, erase the computer screen, check the thesaurus, move a paragraph, again and again. This ‘worded world’ never accurately, precisely, completely captures the studied world, yet we persist in trying. Writing as a method of inquiry honors and encourages the trying, recognizing it as emblematic of the significance of language.

Tribute to Václav Havel

The story was told and retold and I remember sharing it with the delegates of the World Spirit Forum in Switzerland when we were talking about peaceful activism some years ago. Here it is, not sure how faithful, but definitely a great story:

There was a time during the Soviet influence on Czechoslovakia, in the land now split into the Czech Republic and Slovakia, that dissidents of the regime existed but could only meet in the dungeons of the city where they would host their talks and publish their manifestos. Mr. Václav Havel was one of them.

The control of the regime was absolute, so Mr. Havel had no hope that it could be overthrown or that anything could possibly be changed by a group of unhappy citizens. Nevertheless, not seeking revolution but searching for what was truth for the time, great conversations happened and impressive written material was produced and published by underground presses.

As more people would get in contact with the words from the dissidents, more would join the conversations and read the publications.

One day somethings extraordinary happened. Someone working for the regime got in contact with the material and got puzzled and interested by its content. He managed to join some of the conversations and read some of the texts while still working for the same regime that was being criticised.

Personally, the man was comfortable working for the regime, but yet there was something calling him to explore what the dissidents were talking about. His motivation was not revolution, but the search for the truth at that time.

After this first man others came – they did not start a revolution themselves, but they did anonymously feed the new story emerging, the one that was closer to the reality of the time, the one that triggered the Charter 77 movement and the Velvet Revolution.

Read and Listen:

• Listen to Václav Havel addressing the European Commission
• Visit Václav Havel’s official website