Why this, and why now

Most of us were taught that personal growth is private and social change is public. Therapy, journaling, and self-help sit on one side; activism and policy sit on the other. The split has costs. Self-improvement can turn inward until it forgets the people around it, and people who work for change often burn out.

This project starts from a different premise, drawn from the psychology of Carl Jung, the evolutionary science of cooperation, and Elinor Ostrom's research on how communities govern what they share. Part of every inner life is inherited and held in common. How each of us spends attention and effort either tends that common inheritance or pollutes it. Becoming whole, it turns out, is something we do partly for each other.

A practice of Commoning Consciousness

GAIA in ten minutes

GAIA stands for Gratitude, Affirmation, Intention, and Action. The name also recalls Gaia, the Earth imagined as one living system whose parts depend on one another. The practice keeps that interdependence in view, one short entry at a time.

Each day

1. 

   Gratitude

   Name something that supports you that you did not produce. Look beyond gifts of nature to the often invisible work of other people (someone's care, someone's maintenance) and to things held in common, like a language, a library, or a story that helped.

2. 

   Affirmation

   Receiving goes wrong in two opposite ways. Some of us feel undeserving and guilty about what we did not earn; others slide into entitlement. Affirm that you are worthy to receive and use what you received, as others are, without claiming to own it. A useful form is: I am worthy of receiving this, as others are.

3. 

   Intention

   Name a direction rather than a destination: a value to move toward, whatever happens. An intention held too tightly becomes one more thing to prove.

4. 

   Action

   Name one or more concrete steps in that direction, and let at least one reach beyond you, into a relationship, a group, or a place. Inner work belongs alongside action in the world, never in place of it.

Once a week: the Coherence Ledger

Before an important action, take two minutes to forecast where its benefits and costs will fall, at four levels:

Mark each level +, 0, or −. There is no score. Watch instead for an export flag: a benefit at one level paired with a cost at another. That is what passing a cost to someone else looks like from the inside. Afterward, review what actually happened, and ask at least one person who felt the effects how it looked from their side.

Every thirteen weeks: a season

A season is long enough to see patterns. At its end, look back over your entries and ledger: which actions raised export flags, which parts of you asked for too much attention, and how your forecasts compared with what happened. Then begin again.

What GAIA is not

It is not a productivity system, and it keeps no streaks, scores, or badges, on purpose; those would feed the very drive to prove oneself that the practice is meant to calm. It is a reflective practice, not therapy or treatment. If you are struggling, please talk with someone you trust or a qualified professional.

Commoning consciousness, in six short pieces

Commoning is the ongoing work by which a community cares for, uses, and governs something it shares: a fishery, a forest, a neighborhood. This series makes the case that part of the inner life is shared in this way too, and that tending it is work we do together.

1. The fundamental problem, turned inwardWhat relieves one part can harm the whole, inside a person as in a group.
2. Part mine, part oursWhy every complex is partly personal history and partly an inheritance we share.
3. Attention and effortThe two currencies we spend every day, and why nothing withdrawn simply vanishes.
4. Inflation as pollutionHow overinvesting in one drive sends its costs downstream, and why neglect fails too.
5. The two-way mirrorWe see our intentions; others see our impact.
6. The living middleWhy the goal is balance and resilience, not perfect order.

These pieces draw on the argument of a book in progress. Deeper and more speculative questions about what consciousness ultimately is get their own treatment elsewhere; nothing here depends on them.

The idea, part 1 of 6

The fundamental problem, turned inward

Evolutionary biologists describe what they call the fundamental problem of social life: behavior that benefits an individual can undermine the group that individual belongs to. A shirker in a hunting party, a free rider on a shared pasture. Groups that find ways to keep this tension in check tend to do better than groups that don't.

The same pattern shows up in neighborhoods. Each household makes a reasonable choice about how much to spend on upkeep, and yet, added together, those choices can slowly degrade the block that gives every home its value. No one intends it. The harm lives in the gap between what is good for the part and what is good for the whole.

This project proposes that the gap runs through the inner life as well. A drive that relieves your own tension, such as the push to achieve, to be right, or to be seen, can be locally rational and still wear down the wider life you share: your own other needs, the people closest to you, and the culture around you. The achievement that quiets your anxiety tonight may be paid for by someone else's evening.

This is a parallel, not a claim that minds are neighborhoods. But it is a useful parallel, because we know a great deal about how communities care for what they share, the ongoing work researchers call commoning. The rest of this series asks what that knowledge means for the inner life.

The idea, part 2 of 6

Part mine, part ours

Carl Jung used the word complex for a cluster of feeling, memory, and reaction organized around an emotional core. Most of us know our complexes by their effects: the reaction that arrives faster than thought, the pattern that repeats no matter the setting.

Jung's own definition has two parts. The core of a complex combines what he called a factor determined by experience with a factor innate in the person's character. The first is your history. The second is older than you: a shared pattern, which Jung called an archetype, that many people form their complexes around. The mother, the hero, the trickster, the stranger.

The mother archetype forms the foundation of the so-called mother-complex. C. G. Jung

So a complex is partly yours and partly held in common. Your drive to prove yourself through achievement was shaped by your own story of praise, competition, or scarcity. But the pattern it is built on, the hero who earns worth through struggle, belongs to no one in particular. Using it does not use it up, and countless others carry their own versions.

That is the hinge of this whole project. If part of what moves us is shared, then how we live with it is not only our own business.

The idea, part 3 of 6

Attention and effort

Every day we spend two currencies. Attention is where the mind goes: what we notice, rehearse, worry over, care about. Effort is what the body spends: time, energy, the physical cost of acting. They are connected but not the same. You can pour attention into a worry while your effort goes elsewhere, and you can labor all day at something your attention has long since left.

Jung treated the intensity of attention as the visible sign of where psychic energy was going, and he refused to reduce mind to body or body to mind. He also proposed a principle that is easy to test in ordinary life: energy withdrawn from one thing does not disappear. It reappears somewhere else.

Push a worry down, and it tends to come back as irritability, a restless night, a dream. That is why simply deciding not to care about something rarely works. The attention has to go somewhere, and where it goes matters, both to you and to the people who meet it on the other end.

The idea, part 4 of 6

Inflation as pollution

Jung called it inflation when the ego takes on more than belongs to it: claiming, in his words, what belongs to someone else, or to everyone, or to no one. In plain terms, inflation is when one part of you, or one role you play, takes more than its share.

There are roughly three ways to spend attention and effort. You can integrate: work with what is stirring in you so that it settles, without burdening anyone else. You can contribute: spend effort in ways that leave something shared in better shape. Or you can export: get relief for yourself by sending the cost somewhere else.

Exporting works the way pollution does. A factory can lower its own costs by sending waste downstream; the waste doesn't vanish, it lands on people who didn't choose it. Inflation's costs land in three places: on the other parts of your own life that get starved of attention; on the people around you, who absorb the late nights and the short temper; and on the culture, which learns from all of us what success looks like and what it costs.

The opposite failure matters too. A drive that gets no attention at all doesn't go away. Jung observed that neglected parts of the psyche tend to split off and act on their own, running a life from the shadows. The goal is not to starve a complex but to live with it consciously: somewhere between too much and too little.

The idea, part 5 of 6

The two-way mirror

From the inside, we see our intentions: our reasons, our effort, what we meant. From the outside, other people see our impact: what actually landed on them. Our intentions are nearly invisible to them, and our impact is often nearly invisible to us.

This asymmetry is why the costs we export are so hard to notice. By definition they fall on others. The view from the other side of the glass is how we come to see them, and you cannot take responsibility for a cost you cannot see.

The mirror does not flatter, it faithfully shows whatever looks into it. C. G. Jung

But the glass is also a screen. Everyone projects their own material onto others, so no single reflection is simply true. The remedy is not to find one perfect mirror but to keep many, including the ones that disagree with us. Choosing only flattering mirrors is its own kind of inflation: comfortable, and closed to learning.

This is also the idea behind the GAIA Commons: letting several people forecast the same planned action, independently, so that the view from outside can be set beside the view from within.

The idea, part 6 of 6

The living middle

What should all this tending aim at? A common intuition says more order is always better: calmer, tidier, less conflicted. Research on living systems points somewhere else.

A system that has to cope with a changing world needs enough variety to meet what the world throws at it. Researchers who study cities and ecosystems distinguish stability, which means returning to one fixed state, from resilience, which means continuing to function through change, and from sustainability, the ongoing capacity to keep adapting. Crystals are perfectly ordered, and brittle. They cannot adapt or grow.

Minds are no different. A life squeezed into perfect order has lost the variety it would need to meet a genuine surprise. The healthy condition is a living middle: enough order to hold together, enough openness to keep learning. Jung thought wholeness was never finished; in his words, always we shall have to begin again from the beginning.

That is why GAIA runs in seasons and keeps no score. The aim is not to perfect yourself but to keep growing in ways that leave the shared world, inside and around you, a little more able to keep growing too.

The GAIA Journal

A free, private journal for the daily practice. Open it, write for ten minutes, and close it. Nothing leaves your device.

What's inside

A daily page for the four steps, with rotating prompts and a ring that fills as you write. A quick check-in on attention and effort. The Coherence Ledger, for forecasting where an action's effects will fall and reviewing what happened. Thirteen-week seasons with a season review. Backups you can download at any time.

Privacy, plainly

Your journal is yours alone. Entries are stored only in the browser you write them in. They are never sent to anyone, including the people who run this site. That also means clearing your browser's data erases them, so download a backup from time to time. The journal has no streaks, scores, or tracking.

The print companion

A printed journal is in development alongside the book, with one volume for each thirteen-week season. These are working cover designs.

The GAIA Commons

A small pilot community for practicing together, built on one rule: journals stay private, and only planned actions are shared.

How it works

1. Share an action

   Describe something you plan to do and the intention behind it, with names and identifying details removed.

2. Others forecast it, blind

   Members rate it with the same Coherence Ledger you use in your journal, before they see anyone else's view.

3. A profile appears

   Once five members have weighed in, the action gets a profile the circle can search, with your own forecast shown beside theirs.

4. Say what happened

   After you act, add a short note, so the circle learns which forecasts held up.

Privacy by design

Shared records carry no names or account identifiers. Your own list of what you shared and reviewed sits in a private space that no one else, including the organizer, can read. The circle governs itself: its review expectations and even the ledger's categories are proposals for members to revise.

Joining

The Commons is a pilot, open by invitation while we learn how it works best. Circle members receive a link from the organizer.

For now, the newsletter doubles as the waitlist: invitations to join a circle go out there first.

Your address goes only to Buttondown, the service that sends these letters. Every letter has an unsubscribe link.

Already invited? Open the Commons (pilot members only).

The podcast

A weekly show that unpacks the practice of commoning consciousness one idea at a time, in episodes of about twenty minutes.

The format

Seasons run thirteen weeks, the same length as a GAIA season. Each episode opens with a story, works through one idea, shows what it looks like in practice, and ends with a prompt of the week you can take straight into your journal.

Where to listen

Episodes

Season one is in development. Each episode will have its own page here with notes and references.

Glossary

Key terms used across the site, the book, and the podcast, grouped by theme. Terms marked exploratory come from the book's Part Two, which is kept separate from its scientific claims.

The shared mind

Archetype

In Jung's psychology, an inherited, shared pattern of meaning and behavior, such as the mother or the hero, that many people's complexes build around. We know archetypes only through the images they take in each life and culture. Read: Part mine, part ours

Collective unconscious

Jung's term for the layer of the psyche that is shared across people rather than acquired through one life, the home of the archetypes.

Complex

A cluster of feelings, memories, and reactions organized around one emotional theme, which can act with a will of its own. Every complex joins a personal history to a shared pattern. Read: Part mine, part ours

Consciousness-first viewsExploratory

Theories that treat consciousness, rather than matter, as the most basic feature of reality. The book gives one of them, Tom Campbell's My Big TOE, a careful and sympathetic critique in its exploratory Part Two.

Gaia

The idea, developed by James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis, that living things and their surroundings form one self-regulating system. The project borrows it as a parallel for consciousness, not as a claim that there is one planetary mind.

Individuation

Jung's word for becoming whole: integrating the parts of oneself rather than being run by one of them. The project argues it is also a collective project, since becoming whole includes seeing what our choices cost others.

Personal, shared, and open

The project's way of describing how consciousness is held: some content is personal, some is shared within particular communities, and much is open to all. No single kind of ownership covers it, which is why tending it calls for commoning.

Projection

Jung's term for perceiving in others qualities that belong to ourselves. It makes every outside view, including our own view of others, partly a screen. Read: The two-way mirror

Shadow

Jung's term for the parts of ourselves we do not acknowledge. Left unseen, they tend to be projected onto other people.

Shared inner world

The images, stories, archetypes, and patterns of meaning that no one owns and everyone draws on. Each inner life draws on it and returns something to it.

Unus mundusExploratory

Latin for “one world”: Jung's late idea, developed in conversation with the physicist Wolfgang Pauli, that mind and matter may be two aspects of a single reality. The book treats it only in its exploratory Part Two.

Attention, energy, and their paths

Attention

Where the mind goes: what we notice, rehearse, worry over, and care about. One of the two currencies every choice spends. Read: Attention and effort

Contribute

Spending effort in ways that leave something shared in better shape.

Effort

What the body spends: time, energy, and the physical cost of acting. The second of the two currencies. Read: Attention and effort

Equivalence, principle of

Jung's idea that psychic energy withdrawn from one place does not vanish but reappears somewhere else, often in another form. Tension we do not work through goes somewhere.

Export

Getting relief by sending a cost somewhere else: onto the rest of your life, the people around you, or the culture. It often feels like success from the inside, because the relief is real and the cost lands out of sight.

Inflation

Pouring so much energy into one complex or role that it overruns its bounds and pushes its unresolved tension outward. The project compares it to pollution sent downstream. Read: Inflation as pollution

Integrate

Working with what is stirring in you until it settles, so that no one else has to carry it.

Neglect

The opposite failure to inflation: a complex that gets too little attention and runs a life unacknowledged.

Tending and wear

The two ways attention and effort return to the shared inner world: care that tends it, or costs that wear it down.

Systems and change

Capacity to adapt

The ability of a person, group, or system to keep functioning, learning, and changing as conditions change.

Coherence

Parts working together in ways that let the whole function and keep adapting. Not the same as rigid order. In the practice, benefits at one level that are not bought with costs at another.

Entropy-tolerant

A standard of health that accepts some disorder as the price of staying able to learn and adapt, rather than treating minimal disorder as the goal. In the practice it becomes “good enough for now.”

Fundamental problem of social life

The tension between what is good for the parts of a system and what is good for the whole: behavior that pays off for an individual can wear down the group it depends on. The project turns this problem inward, to the parts of a single psyche. Read: The fundamental problem, turned inward

Living middle

The range between too much order and too little: enough structure to hold together, enough openness to keep learning. Capacity to adapt peaks here. Read: The living middle

Multilevel selection

The evolutionary view that selection acts at more than one level at once. Within groups, selfish behavior tends to win; between groups, groups whose members cooperate tend to win.

Order

How much structure, regularity, and constraint a system has. Too little leaves it scattered; too much leaves it brittle, like a crystal.

Stability, resilience, sustainability

Three different aims: returning to a fixed state; continuing to function through change; and the ongoing capacity to keep adapting. The project aims at the third.

Stock and flow

A systems-thinking picture in which a stock, an accumulation, changes only through what flows in and out. The project treats the shared inner world as a stock fed by tending and drained by wear.

Commons and commoning

Commoning

The ongoing work by which a community cares for, uses, and governs what it shares. Following David Bollier and Silke Helfrich, the project treats the verb as more precise than the noun: a commons lives only as long as people keep commoning it.

Commons

A shared resource, the community that uses it, and the rules that community makes for it.

Core design principles

Features Elinor Ostrom found in communities that govern shared resources well over long periods, such as clear membership, a fair match between costs and benefits, and rules the users help make. David Sloan Wilson and colleagues argue they apply to groups of many kinds.

Polycentric governance

Governance with many centers of decision-making at different scales, each with some independence, that interact and adjust to each other. Elinor Ostrom's alternative to choosing between markets and states.

Possession and property

Bollier and Helfrich's distinction between something held through use by the person who uses it, and something owned, which can be sold or traded. The GAIA Journal is a possession: it belongs to its writer and is never pooled.

Sociocracy

A way for groups to govern themselves in linked circles, making decisions by consent: a proposal goes ahead when no one has a reasoned objection the group cannot resolve.

The practice

Action

The fourth GAIA step: concrete steps toward your intention, at least one reaching beyond you into a relationship, a group, or a place.

Affirmation

The second GAIA step: affirming that you are worthy of receiving and using what you received, as others are, without claiming to own it. The middle path between guilt and entitlement.

Blind forecast

In the GAIA Commons, peers forecast a planned action's effects independently, before seeing one another's forecasts, so that each view stays its own.

Coherence Ledger

A weekly tool for forecasting where a planned action's benefits and costs will fall, at four levels, then reviewing what happened.

Export flag

A benefit at one level paired with a cost at another: the sign that a cost is being passed along. A prompt for reflection, not a verdict.

GAIA

A ten-minute daily practice of Gratitude, Affirmation, Intention, and Action. The name also recalls Gaia, the Earth imagined as one living system whose parts depend on one another. Read: The method

Gratitude

The first GAIA step: naming something that supports you that you did not produce, such as gifts of the living world, other people's often invisible work, or things held in common.

Intention

The third GAIA step: a direction, a value to move toward, rather than a destination. Held too tightly, an intention becomes one more thing to prove.

Levels

The four places the Coherence Ledger looks for effects: self; close others, such as family and friends; groups you belong to; and the wider commons, the shared world an action touches.

Many mirrors

Seeking several outside views of your actions, including ones that disagree, to narrow the gap between intention and impact.

Season

Thirteen weeks of practice ending in a review. The journal, the podcast, and the print companion all run in seasons.

Two-way mirror

We see our own intentions; others see our impact. Each side sees what the other cannot, which is why the practice compares forecasts with what actually happened. Read: The two-way mirror

Sources for these terms are listed on the References page.

References

An abridged, annotated list of the main works behind the project, grouped by strand. The book's full reference list follows APA style.

Depth psychology

Carl Jung's Collected Works, in the Princeton University Press (Bollingen) editions, and a guide for readers new to Jung.

• Jung, C. G. (1966). Two essays on analytical psychology (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.; 2nd ed., Collected Works, Vol. 7). Princeton University Press.

  Jung's account of the personal and collective layers of the unconscious, of inflation, and of individuation. The main source for the project's treatment of inflation as a kind of pollution.

• Jung, C. G. (1968). The archetypes and the collective unconscious (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.; 2nd ed., Collected Works, Vol. 9, Pt. 1). Princeton University Press.

  Jung's central statement on archetypes and the collective unconscious. The foundation for the idea that every complex is part mine, part ours.

• Jung, C. G. (1969). The structure and dynamics of the psyche (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.; 2nd ed., Collected Works, Vol. 8). Princeton University Press.

  Includes “On Psychic Energy,” with the principle of equivalence behind the project's treatment of attention and effort; Jung's review of complex theory; and the essay on synchronicity that frames the exploratory Part Two.

• Jung, C. G. (1970). Mysterium coniunctionis (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.; 2nd ed., Collected Works, Vol. 14). Princeton University Press.

  Jung's late work on the union of opposites, including the unus mundus, one reality beneath mind and matter. Discussed only in Part Two.

• Stein, M. (1998). Jung's map of the soul: An introduction. Open Court.

  A clear, compact introduction to Jung's model of the psyche, and the best place for general readers to start before the Collected Works.

Evolution and cooperation

David Sloan Wilson and colleagues on how cooperation evolves, and how groups can make it last.

• Wilson, D. S., & Wilson, E. O. (2007). Rethinking the theoretical foundation of sociobiology. Quarterly Review of Biology, 82(4), 327–348. https://doi.org/10.1086/522809

  The case for multilevel selection: selfishness wins within groups, while groups of cooperators outcompete groups of defectors. It frames the fundamental problem at the heart of Part One.

• Wilson, D. S., Van Vugt, M., & O'Gorman, R. (2008). Multilevel selection theory and major evolutionary transitions: Implications for psychological science. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 17(1), 6–9. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8721.2008.00538.x

  Brings multilevel selection into psychology, supporting the project's reading of a single psyche as a system shaped at several levels at once.

• Wilson, D. S., Ostrom, E., & Cox, M. E. (2013). Generalizing the core design principles for the efficacy of groups. Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 90(Suppl.), S21–S32. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jebo.2012.12.010

  Shows how Ostrom's design principles follow from evolutionary theory and apply to groups of many kinds. The bridge between the project's evolutionary and commons strands.

• Atkins, P. W. B., Wilson, D. S., & Hayes, S. C. (2019). Prosocial: Using evolutionary science to build productive, equitable, and collaborative groups. Context Press.

  A practical method for groups that joins the core design principles with acceptance and commitment therapy. A model for how GAIA practice circles can work.

• Wilson, D. S. (2019). This view of life: Completing the Darwinian revolution. Pantheon Books.

  An accessible tour of evolutionary thinking applied to everyday life and policy. A good first book for readers new to this strand.

• Okasha, S. (2006). Evolution and the levels of selection. Oxford University Press.

  The standard philosophical treatment of how selection can act at several levels, used to keep the project's evolutionary claims precise.

Commons and commoning

Elinor Ostrom, David Bollier, and the study of how communities govern what they share.

• Ostrom, E. (1990). Governing the commons: The evolution of institutions for collective action. Cambridge University Press.

  Ostrom's landmark study showing that communities can govern shared resources well without either private ownership or central control, and the source of her design principles.

• Ostrom, E. (2010). Beyond markets and states: Polycentric governance of complex economic systems. American Economic Review, 100(3), 641–672. https://doi.org/10.1257/aer.100.3.641

  Ostrom's Nobel lecture on polycentric governance, which informs the project's picture of commoning at several scales at once.

• Hess, C., & Ostrom, E. (Eds.). (2007). Understanding knowledge as a commons: From theory to practice. MIT Press.

  Applies Ostrom's framework to knowledge, information, and other intangible resources. The closest scholarly precedent for treating shared meaning as something people hold and govern in common.

• Bollier, D., & Helfrich, S. (2019). Free, fair, and alive: The insurgent power of the commons. New Society Publishers.

  The project's source for commoning as a verb, and for the distinction between possession and property that keeps the GAIA Journal private.

• Linebaugh, P. (2008). The Magna Carta manifesto: Liberties and commons for all. University of California Press.

  A history of the commons that treats commoning as an activity rather than a thing, a usage later commons writers have taken up. Background for the project's choice of the verb.

• Frischmann, B. M., Madison, M. J., & Strandburg, K. J. (Eds.). (2014). Governing knowledge commons. Oxford University Press.

  Extends commons research to knowledge and other intangible resources, the nearest scholarly precedent for treating shared meaning as something communities govern.

• Rau, T. J., & Koch-Gonzalez, J. (2018). Many voices one song: Shared power with sociocracy. Sociocracy For All.

  A practical guide to sociocracy and consent-based decisions, and a model for how practice circles can govern themselves.

Systems and living systems

Stocks and flows, resilience, coherence, and Gaia.

• Meadows, D. H. (2008). Thinking in systems: A primer. Chelsea Green.

  A clear introduction to stocks, flows, and feedback, and the source of the project's stock-and-flow picture of attention and effort.

• Holling, C. S. (2001). Understanding the complexity of economic, ecological, and social systems. Ecosystems, 4(5), 390–405. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10021-001-0101-5

  Holling's account of adaptive cycles and resilience across nested systems, background for the living middle.

• Juarrero, A. (2023). Context changes everything: How constraints create coherence. MIT Press.

  How constraints make coherence possible in complex systems. It informs the project's use of coherence as parts working together without rigid order.

• Schrödinger, E. (1944). What is life? The physical aspect of the living cell. Cambridge University Press.

  The physicist's short classic on how living things keep their order by drawing it from their surroundings. Background for the book's discussion of entropy and an entropy-tolerant consciousness.

• Lovelock, J. E. (1979). Gaia: A new look at life on Earth. Oxford University Press.

  The first book-length statement of Earth as a self-regulating living system, and the source of the project's central analogy.

• Doolittle, W. F., & Inkpen, S. A. (2018). Processes and patterns of interaction as units of selection: An introduction to ITSNTS thinking. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 115(16), 4006–4014. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1722232115

  Argues that recurring processes, not only the things that carry them out, can be what selection acts on. A key text in current debates over whether Gaia can evolve, which the book draws on in weighing its central analogy.

Consciousness and social change

The exploratory questions of Part Two.

• Campbell, T. (2003). My big TOE (Vols. 1–3). Lightning Strike Books.

  A consciousness-first account of reality as an evolving information system. The book gives it a careful, sympathetic critique, adopting some of its ideas while holding them to scientific standards.

• Kastrup, B. (2019). The idea of the world: A multi-disciplinary argument for the mental nature of reality. iff Books.

  A contemporary argument for analytic idealism, the view that reality is fundamentally mental. A useful counterpoint to Campbell in the exploratory Part Two.

• Bookchin, M. (1982). The ecology of freedom: The emergence and dissolution of hierarchy. Cheshire Books.

  Social ecology's case that domination among people and domination of nature share roots. The book uses Bookchin's critique to test the claim that change can ever be only personal.

The practice

Sources behind attention and effort, the GAIA steps, and the Coherence Ledger.

• Wu, T. (2016). The attention merchants: The epic scramble to get inside our heads. Alfred A. Knopf.

  A history of how attention came to be captured and sold. The backdrop for the project's case that where we spend attention is not only a private matter.

• Hayes, S. C., Strosahl, K. D., & Wilson, K. G. (2012). Acceptance and commitment therapy: The process and practice of mindful change (2nd ed.). Guilford Press.

  Acceptance and commitment therapy treats values as chosen directions rather than goals to finish, the idea behind GAIA's intention step.

• Cohen, G. L., & Sherman, D. K. (2014). The psychology of change: Self-affirmation and social psychological intervention. Annual Review of Psychology, 65, 333–371.

  A review of research on self-affirmation, in which reflecting on core values eases defensiveness under threat and can support lasting change. Research grounding for GAIA's affirmation step.

• Elfers, J., & Hlava, P. (2016). The spectrum of gratitude experience. Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-41030-2

  A study of the range of ways people experience gratitude, and background for GAIA's gratitude step.

Related Work

Research that the project's framework grows out of.

• Weaver, R., & Knight, J. (2014). Evolutionary mismatch as a general framework for land use policy and politics. Land, 3(2), 504–523. https://doi.org/10.3390/land3020504

  Applies evolutionary mismatch to how institutions lock in, an early step toward the project's evolutionary reading of social life.

• Weaver, R., Bagchi-Sen, S., Knight, J., & Frazier, A. E. (2017). Shrinking cities: Understanding urban decline in the United States. Routledge.

  A systems account of urban decline, and the source of the shrinking-cities case the book uses to ask whether order is the same as quality.

Key terms from these works are defined in the Glossary.

About the project

Why “commoning”

David Bollier and his colleagues point out that it is often more precise to speak of commoning, the ongoing work of caring for and governing something together, than of a commons as a fixed thing. This project takes that view of the inner life. Consciousness here is less a single shared resource than a living system, something like a planet, with many kinds of access, use, and responsibility running through it: some of it personal, some held in common. Keeping the shared part able to function and adapt is not a state to reach but work to keep doing, together.

The name also points back to the project's roots in Carl Jung, who held that the mind has a collective dimension deserving far more attention than it gets. If that shared dimension needs stewardship, then individuation, Jung's word for becoming whole, becomes a collective project as well as a personal one.

Key terms are defined in the Glossary, and the main sources are listed with notes on the References page.

The author

The author is a PhD social scientist who studies how places, institutions, and shared resources shape people's lives. He directs research at the Cornell University ILR School's Buffalo Co-Lab and was previously a tenured professor of geography at Texas State University. He is lead author of Shrinking Cities: Understanding Urban Decline in the United States. He has kept a GAIA journal of his own for more than a year and a half.

Artwork for the project is being created by a collaborating artist and will appear across the site, the journal, and the book.