The following is a rough transcript which has not been revised by The Jim Rutt Show or Samantha Sweetwater. Please check with us before using any quotations from this transcript. Thank you.
Jim Rutt: Today’s guest is Samantha Sweetwater. Samantha is a master facilitator, executive coach, author, and founder of One Life Circle, a ministry she describes as one of remembering. She works at the intersection of personal transformation, ecological regeneration, systems thinking, and spirituality. She is the author of the recent book, Reimagining Ourselves at the End of Our World. It is a work that blends sense making, spiritual practice, trauma healing, and civilizational design. Welcome, Samantha.
Samantha Sweetwater: So good to be here, Jim. Thanks for having me. I think this will be a fun conversation.
Jim Rutt: So let me start where I always start with these worldview podcasts. This morning, somebody woke up, and they are a thing that seems to be Samantha Sweetwater. What is that?
Samantha Sweetwater: I have a couple of orientations that I meet that in. I love Bucky’s invitation that I seem to be a verb, though I seem to be many verbs simultaneously. I seem to be not one verb, but many verbs simultaneously. I am the listening to Jim Rutt and the speaking out of this mouth. I am the eyes that see and the ears that hear and the strange aggregate of continuity of perceptual apparatus and behavioral response that moves through me.
I think of myself as a location both in time space, in both the physical universe and in consciousness, that has a texture, a flavor, a set of patterns that expresses itself uniquely as this one, this person, Samantha Sweetwater. I’m not good at the more kind of noun-based identity narratives that a lot of Western brains and bodies are good at. Like, I’m not good at saying I’m a teacher. I’m pretty comfortable with the teacher because I observe myself in the verb of teaching a lot. I’m pretty comfortable with the noun of speaker because I observe myself in the process of speaking a lot, but that’s how my self-identity works.
Something like executive coach is weird because I talk to people, I help them, I support their self-attunement. There’s a lot of things I do, but I’m much more—when I wake up, I’m a space where perception and sensation and response are occurring. And that’s very real for me. Right now I have a backache, and I can attend to it or not attend to it. That’s part of my space. It’s part of the who and what this one is right now.
And then if I shift frames, like if I pull out not just to see myself, but to see myself in the bigger context of this world, this time, this planet—I think of myself as an organism, a human, an earthling, an American who cannot have the continuity of experience of being born in this country, a white-bodied person. Those are nouns, but they’re pointing to the contextual framings of who I am. So I think about that question very trans-contextually. The farther I pull out, or the wider the context, the wider the lens, the broader those contextual framings might be.
Jim Rutt: Yeah. So that’s great. So there’s this thing that it is to be Samantha in the world. Then there’s also this body. Right? It’s a body that eats, goes to the bathroom, pays taxes, and can be grabbed by the police and thrown in jail. But it’s also the body with which you could make love and can enjoy a wonderful sunset, etcetera. What in your mind is the relationship between the conscious Samantha and the body Samantha?
Samantha Sweetwater: I imagine you’ve talked about construction theory, Lisa Feldman Barrett’s work as a neuroscientist. Just read her book recently.
Jim Rutt: Yeah. I love her work.
Samantha Sweetwater: So I think her work, for me, is the most useful description of the way I think about that relationship. I think of body, brain, mind, and relationship as the four things that are happening to answer that question. In relational neurobiology, we talk about body, brain, and mind, but what we’re forgetting is that the concept of Samantha is also related to the chair that I’m on that’s defining my sense of my body, for example, or my answering of your question, which is really inseparable from what this mind is doing in relationship to this body. My brain is processing affect as my mind is interpreting that affect. So my relationship with my body, mind, brain, and the relationships I’m in is one of attending to that as a fabric of relationships.
Jim Rutt: Yeah. That’s a good shot at it. Lisa Feldman Barrett makes the additional point that even things like what we think of as ethics and what we think of as color are socially constructed based on our interactions and relationships with others, and that humans more than any other large mammal are inherently deeply social, and so is our most important invention, which is culture.
Samantha Sweetwater: Yeah. And to give a little more granularity on construction theory—on the very basics of construction theory, my brain is interpreting the pain in my body, my mind is creating a story about it. I have a story about it. In this moment, I could say, oh, it’s ubiquitous and annoying. Or I could also just say, I have more sensation in my sacrum and lower back than normal. And I could even continue that story and say, I’m going to put a low level of focus on it while I allow it to ground me. And it’s all kind of a matter of complex construction in terms of my relationship between my mind, brain, and body.
Jim Rutt: Let’s pull way out now. You’ve talked a fair bit in your work about being a Gaian. Right? That we are in our bodies, we are in our consciousnesses, we are in relationship with other people, we’re part of culture, and all that is a little eddy on the surface of life on this third rock from the sun. Tell us a little bit about your thoughts about that.
Samantha Sweetwater: Sure. So I think of Gaia as a principle in the universe of a planet where a local sun has collaborated with matter and water to boot up complex life. And so in that process of the evolution of life on a Gaian planet, we are a certain category of organisms that I think of as a creator-destroyer, preserver-destroyer category of organisms. So if you imagine that our planet is not the only Gaia in the universe, but it is a very particular one, and we’re a very particular kind of organism on this planet—we’re a category of organism that can attempt to separate itself from the biophysical processes that made us. And in that way, we are creators of worlds, and we can also become destroyers of worlds.
So the identification of our place within biospheric process is why I identify as a Gaian. We have created a global civilization that is not at all coordinated in terms of its function relative to the biosphere. So the kind of opportunity that the metacrisis and polycrisis presents is also an opportunity to interrogate: well, what identity structure might cause us to realign the superorganism with the planetary superorganism, with the more fundamental biophysical process that we depend upon and are interdependent with and are currently on the verge of collapsing?
Jim Rutt: Let me ask you two questions that go in opposite directions. First, you mentioned that we’re not the only Gaia out there. It’s funny—I used to, of course, as a 14-year-old nerd, believe, oh, the galaxy’s got to be full of cool civilizations and various weird life forms. That’d be great to go out there and explore. I would say in my older age, as I’ve studied more the Fermi paradox—which was the question that Fermi asked some young physicists having lunch at Los Alamos, talking about alien life in the universe or at least in the galaxy—Fermi said, well, where are they? And it is kind of curious that we haven’t seen any sign of them despite our relatively powerful probes.
So I have retreated to an agnosticism on that question, which loads us up, I believe, with a huge moral freight, which is: until we know if we’re the only one, we have a gigantic potential role in the universe that we could squander. We probably can’t destroy all life on earth, but we could knock the complexity level way back, so it would take a very long time for it to recover to where it’s at. And if we’re the only general intelligence in the universe that could bring the universe to life, then that would be an even more astounding loss than if we’re one of 10,000 technological societies in the galaxy. Yes, we would be losing the story—the equivalent of losing the story in the language of one of the tribes in Amazonia. But of course, that happens all the time. So it’s at a different level than if we were to lose the only general intelligence that has the possibility to transform the universe into a thing of life. Because I think we both agree that life is a qualitatively different thing than non-life.
Samantha Sweetwater: Yeah. And I think that the frame that I offered around thinking of ourselves as a unique class of organisms is certainly relevant whether we’re the only earth or whether there are multiple Gaias in the universe. I’ll be transparent in sharing with your audience that I sit with the inquiry about whether there are other Gaias both in the seat that you just articulated—we certainly haven’t seen them—and one can only hold that question with extreme epistemic humility and the possibility that we’re the only one. I think that’s really critical.
And then I will say simultaneously that I’ve had very deep visionary experience, kind of agnostic experience of contacting the intelligence of other Gaias in my dreams, and the book speaks about that. And to me, it does not matter whether you hold that as an actuality or as a really interesting thought experiment. I almost think it’s equally interesting and maybe even more so just as a thought experiment about what might an organism with the level of complexity and capacity as ourselves do if we had the cultural mechanisms to organize our creativity in a way that was net additive to the vitality, diversity, and well-being of the planet as a whole—as opposed to organizing ourselves as we have, as extractive, colonizing, deeply violent creatures who seem to continuously replicate this pattern of greed and consumption that is net degenerative to ecosystems and less violent cultures. So that’s the thought experiment. It’s a thought experiment that’s deeply embedded in my work.
Jim Rutt: Yeah. There’s a hilarious Internet meme that has some aliens flying by the earth in, like, a Jetson car or something—a couple, it looks like, with alien faces, etcetera. The wife turns to the husband as it flies by the earth and says, “You’ve got to lock your door in this neighborhood.”
Samantha Sweetwater: It’s a good one. Yeah.
Jim Rutt: Yeah. And of course, I look at it from a slightly different perspective—I think it’s a very compatible perspective—which is if we don’t change our ways, we’re not going to exist long enough to find out what our place is in the galaxy or in the universe. I mean, we actually are on the termination road at this point. And there are some of us who know it, and there’s a growing number who sense it without knowing it propositionally. I was having a discussion Monday with a dear friend of mine, and we were pondering the topic of what is the cause of the massive birth decline everywhere in the world, you know, from the most advanced technological societies to Nepal or Bangladesh. One of our hypotheses—we don’t know the answer for sure—is the sense of doom. Right? It’s hard to bring a child into the world and invest years into it and to cherish it and see it have 80 years of flowering if you think that there isn’t going to be 80 years of flowering. Don’t know if that’s the case, but it could be. And unless we can change our ways in a major fashion, we’re not going to find out the answer to the galactic question.
Samantha Sweetwater: Right. Yeah. I completely agree.
Jim Rutt: Yeah. And it’s a very complementary perspective. Your mention of the encounter with the aliens in the dreams and pondering whether it matters whether they’re real or not actually takes me—it’s a perfect setup for my next question. You use the word sacred in many different ways: sacred reciprocity, sacred hope, sacred fabric of life. I used to hate the word sacred, but I’ve come to have my own operational definition of it. But I would love to hear your definition of sacred. I’d love to hear yours as well. I will give you mine after I hear yours.
Samantha Sweetwater: Centrally, what I think about sacredness—this goes back to the description of us as a unique class of organism. So sacred is something only humans do. Like, we created the word. We’ve constructed it, and different lineages and traditions and religious frames frame it differently. Sacred in its Latin meaning—I don’t mean it quite in the Latin sense, and there isn’t another synonym for it. So I’ve sort of redefined sacred in a way. But in the Latin context, it means to set apart.
I’ve spent a lot of time working with and studying with and practicing with various indigenous traditions. And so the way I inhabit the word is—I will be very clear that it’s not a specific indigenous frame, it’s a generalized indigenous frame where people are using the Latin-origin word in a different way. And what they’re speaking to is the quality of recognition when we recognize something as sacred. The way John Vervaeke said it very elegantly is: sacred is how the world is to us when we see it through the eyes of love. It’s a beautiful way to say it. He said that in an interview with Ian McGilchrist and Daniel Schmachtenberger. And I felt like that was one of the best encapsulations of what I mean when I say sacred.
So if I bring deep appreciation to the relatively complex miracle of us having this conversation and all of the things that went into that, I could meet this as an instantiation of sacredness. I could meet it in a sacred way. That’s not, for me, complicated, and there are gradients of greater or lesser sacralization. But centrally, it’s about the way I—or anyone, or a group of people—meets a thing or a process with the eyes of love.
Jim Rutt: I like that. That’s interesting. Now my view of sacred may be sort of compatible with that—I just have to think about it—which is the appropriate stance with respect to things that are important but too complex to be subject to reductionist analysis. It’s kind of a nerdy answer. But like, for instance, I live on a farm. I have some beautiful woods around me. When I go to the woods and go for a walk, that relationship I have with the woods is really high-dimensional. That’s not something I can sit and break down to, okay, it’s this plus this plus this. It’s a gigantic, complex, high-dimensional experience. And to me, that feels sacred.
And when we have a dinner party—let’s say a great free-flowing conversation with eight people, which I believe to be the optimal size for a dinner party—that thing that emerges in that conversation, unplanned, unscripted, crazy sometimes, is sacred. That we’re able to do that, to bring into being a new thing amongst us in a joyous, convivial sense. And it’s, again, not really subject to reductionist analysis. And so the stance toward these high-dimensional complex things that are important—I call sacred.
Samantha Sweetwater: I love that. I feel like for me, those would be exalted textures of sacredness. And then I would bring the definition—for me, I enjoy bringing that sense down into even explicable things as a lens for seeing how amazing they are. Just because I can explain something on a scientific or materialist level doesn’t mean that it’s not sacred. I have the opportunity to observe the operation of the soil or the exchange between the tree and me as a reciprocity of breath—we could map all the details of that. But to me, that makes it no less sacred. So that’s how I would expand the definition in my own experience. I just love, though, that the way you connect it to the greater than measurable. I think that’s also really important.
Jim Rutt: Yeah. For me, as a sort of hard-nosed kind of dude, it took me a while to find that. Years of chatting with people—what the hell do you mean by sacred?—I finally came up with that definition that seems to work for me at least.
Samantha Sweetwater: Right. And then the thing I would offer to listeners is to explore how the language of science can actually be a poetry if you approach it as a sacred language. I love the science of planetary boundaries. I think of it as poetry. I think of it simultaneously as science and as poetry.
Jim Rutt: Say more about that, because obviously planetary boundaries are a huge issue for a lot of the work that we both do.
Samantha Sweetwater: I love hearing and feeling when you say “the hard-nosed,” and I just adore that. There’s a part of me that was trained from a very young age both as an artist and as a scientist. I was trained in the scientific method when I was five and was dissecting fetal pigs when I was five. And I was making a lot of art. So something in me was trained at a very early age to hold an aesthetic lens and a kind of rigorous scientific lens simultaneously.
I’m also trained as a permaculturalist, and to hold beauty as a design principle in everything we do—the eyes of sacredness can often give you a doorway to the right brain, which then helps us to meet things more trans-contextually, more complexly. When you see something just in the left-brain way, your brain doesn’t then naturally see its more symphonic and orchestral dimensions, its more complex dimensions. So in a way, it’s a little bit of a hack to better systems seeing—to think of those very left-brain things also in some ways as a poetry or as a symphony, particularly when we’re looking at science that involves complexity, like the planetary boundary science, or like trying to understand where we can meet the problem of measuring biodiversity with measures that are also sufficiently broad-boundaried to not create the same pathologies that keep replicating.
Jim Rutt: Yeah. For those who are interested in the left brain, right brain, and how it influences culture, I did a worldview podcast with Ian McGilchrist two weeks ago, and we got into a lot of those topics. He has some amazing insights into just exactly this question—how can the left brain and the right brain work together as a symphony essentially to make a better world than ours, which in his language has been hijacked by the left brain. Let’s go on to the next topic, and I think this is a deep one. We could talk about this for a while, so don’t be shy about digging. And that is that you often say that the metacrisis is fundamentally a crisis of separation. Let’s dig into what we mean by separation.
Samantha Sweetwater: Yes. Good question. The simple frame is that separation is the view that anything exists separate from anything else. It’s the illusion of the absence of entanglement and the epistemic frameworks that are built upon that. So in True Human, I talk about the generator functions of separation, which you could also think of as generator functions of the metacrisis.
The first one being our immature developmental arc where we needed to differentiate and self-define ourselves as other than ecology—or that we are at the top of the evolutionary pyramid—is an example of an epochal narrative about separation. You could take us off the pyramid and put us in the web as a very particular process within the ecology, a very particular ecological function. No other organism exists separate from its ecology. That’s not possible. But we’ve created these definitions that allow us to have this illusion of separability that’s being confronted by the collapsing crucible of planetary systems and of human systems too—of the epistemic commons, of the geopolitical situations that we’re in right now. This is like a collapse of separability that we’re actually in in a very acute way.
I want to say again that you could think of this as synonymous with what are the generator functions of the metacrisis. The first is morally neutral. It’s just our need to self-differentiate and grow and evolve. And my hypothesis for years has been that we’d hit these limits—limits to planetary boundaries, but also limits to our capacity to coordinate within the existing narrative structures and identity structures that we’re inhabiting—and have to kind of come back down into the circle of life, more into the feminine, more into the body, more into relationality, more into context. And, you know, as Gaians who are bound to the Gaian song, otherwise we’ll extinct ourselves.
This thought process arose for me originally in the context of the integral community, where the integral map just goes up endlessly. It’s honestly like a cock pointing into the sky. And I saw that in my twenties, and I was like, there’s something wrong with this map. Living systems function in a circle. The ouroboros is the ouroboros for a reason. It has to recirculate itself. We have often lacked that understanding in our way of thinking about ourselves. So that’s the first generator function. And the antidote to that is relational maturity—putting ourselves back in context in meaningful ways to restitch the fabric of relational coherence both in the human world, in the technocultural and technological world, and in the ecological world, and in the relationships between them.
Jim Rutt: Now one of the things I’ve found as a useful pedagogical tool for talking about our relationship with nature—and this is a thing that unfortunately, not just the West, but much of human thinking going back thousands of years, at least to the axial age, seems to have missed—is that every single existing species today is of equal distance from our last universal common ancestor. The cockroach is the same evolutionary distance away from the origin of Earth’s life as you and I are. And this horrific idea of the chain of being, which goes back to Aristotle and before—until extremely recently, humans didn’t even believe they were animals. There were people who were persecuted for making the statement that, no, humans are animals too. And once you realize that we’re all closely related, I have found that people’s attitudes about the natural world actually do begin to change.
Samantha Sweetwater: I think you’re right. I mean, the cosmic wink is our scientific narratives—not just our science, but the narratives that our science is revealing, like that we are all genetically so closely related, all as deep in time—and our technological capacities for coordination and sense making potentially at scale. There’s such a wink that we may be able to find our way back into coherence.
Jim Rutt: Let’s go on to your other parsed separation story.
Samantha Sweetwater: Sure. These get kind of increasingly morally problematic. The second, which is not so problematic, is structures of separability. The first is stories of separability—like putting ourselves on top of the pyramid, or the story that we’re not animals, or taking the sense of divinity and sacredness out of the world and putting it only into a sky god. These are all stories of separability.
That is followed by structures of separability, which includes language. Noun-dominant languages are more oriented towards separability. Most indigenous languages are more predominantly process-based, verb-based—not just verbs, but also process and relationship based. And so that’s a very deep structure, of course. But structures also include buildings with closed windows and doors and controlled climate systems, and communicating with each other on screens rather than in person. Those are all structural instantiations of separation that reify and increase our sense of separability from each other and the natural world.
The next is game-theoretic dynamics of win-lose game theoretics. And I’m sure your listeners know all about that. But really, are we playing zero-sum games predominantly, or are we playing infinite games predominantly? Are we participating in something closer to the way nature does gaming, which includes both finite and infinite games, but ultimately balances towards an infinite game where the game itself persists? That includes the growth imperative and profit as incentive and the multipolar traps that are involved in geopolitical situations.
And the next is dominator ideologies. So racism, patriarchy, all the other isms. It’s the collapse of plurality and the justification of dominance hierarchies ideologically and psychobiologically. And then what I don’t write about in the book—which Luke Kemp has written about in exquisite detail in Goliath’s Curse—is that all of that is kind of potentiated by the engine of dark tetrad personality types that create dominance hierarchies to persist in zero-sum gaming, and that has a generally deleterious effect on diversity and many people and many ecologies. So those are the systems and structures of separation that we get to meet and evolve in this lifetime.
Jim Rutt: Yeah. Let me respond on the dominator—something I’ve become very interested in over the last couple of years. One of my collaborators turned me on to the notion, and it turns out it explains a lot. We often talk—at least I often talk—about the forager operating system that was able to defeat our probable evolutionary heritage to respond relatively positively to hierarchy. The forager developed the means to not succumb to hierarchy. You know, the Chris Boehm story of when the big man shows up—and maybe it’s the dark tetrad type, I sort of eyeball it at one or two percent of the population of males at least—who just get off on being the big man. They like to put their foot on somebody’s neck. But in the forager operating system, it wasn’t tolerated. First, they would ignore them, then they’d laugh at them, then they would counsel them and hopefully have their family counsel them. And if that didn’t work, they’d exile them. And if they came back, they killed them. So for 95% of what we know of human life as homo sapiens, we were not subject to the dominator. The dominator was always there, but we had to have an operating system to defeat that one or two percent who wanted to be dominators. Most people don’t want to be dominators, but a few people do, and that’s enough to ruin it for everybody.
And then in my version of the story, the transition to agriculture allowed surpluses to be built up. I should go back—Chris Boehm makes the good point that one of the things that allowed humans not to go down the chimpanzee road, or even the bonobo road, which is different but nonetheless a hierarchical system of oppression, was the development of weapons so that two betas could kill the alpha relatively easily. So we had a balance of terror that allowed the egalitarian society to be the basis for the human operating system for hundreds of thousands of years.
But once you got to agriculture, you could build up surpluses. So if the big man gets a bit ahead of everybody else in their hoarding, etcetera, they can now hire henchmen. And so the idea of henchmen, I think, is the hinge that allowed the whole dominator ethos to take over everything post-agricultural. There are a few examples, but not many, of egalitarian societies post the invention of agriculture—maybe very early in the Middle East, but it doesn’t seem to be a lot of it. It seems very quickly you get chiefs and sub-chiefs, nobles, commoners, slaves. The lack of attention to stopping the dominator syndrome has then lived with us ever since. And even at the Enlightenment, which was where we started to add more collective sense making to how our society worked, we kept the dominator ethos and the dominator template. And so in some sense, we just upregulated the cognitive capacity of the dominator system.
Samantha Sweetwater: Exactly. What I love about Goliath’s Curse—Luke Kemp’s new book—is the detail with which he explores where there have been instances of what he calls fluid civilizations. So he makes a distinction between Goliaths, which are dominance hierarchies that are run by the sociopaths with henchmen, with weapons, who hoard lootable resources, all of the things you’ve just said. And then there are shatter zones and zones where people leave, because it’s also predictable historically.
Goliath’s Curse is incredible in terms of the rigor and breadth of the historical data—both the depth and breadth of the data that he collated to write it. So it turns out that those Goliaths also often lost a lot of their population because we don’t like being dominated. In the 200,000 years of our evolution before there was Goliath food, before agriculture, we predominantly thrived in egalitarian, pluralistic societies where we traveled to trade and develop mutual aid relationships across fairly large geographic spreads—predictably somewhere between 100 and 200 kilometers—where there was intermarrying and there were strong relationships that were tended, that were also a network of mutual aid.
We have very much forgotten that wisdom. As you said, we transferred the persistence of the dominators. And I think it’s useful to study those evolutionary tendencies with great rigor right now. We can’t go back to ancient history, be with the people, understand their language, understand their rituals, understand their praxis, but we can observe through archaeological records some of the things we knew were true and learn from existing indigenous peoples in some cases. It’s an interesting moment. We’re sort of hovering out at the edge of our own worst evolutionary tendencies and wondering, can we transition to the more robust and resilient ones?
Jim Rutt: Yeah. And I’ve said relatively recently, focused on this dominator one, but I believe if we don’t solve that one, we can’t solve the other ones. For instance, could we manage the equivalent of a business without there being a boss? The way the indigenous people did it, the forager people did it, was there was role-based leadership. The 15-year-old kid who was the expert at hunting rabbits led the rabbit hunt. The woman who was the expert at finding tubers led the tubering expeditions to dig up the root crops to get you through the periods when you couldn’t find game. The person who had the intuitive spark to engage with the sacred easily became the shaman. And those things were not boxes on a chart. They were role-based leadership that came and went. When a new 16-year-old kid came up and he was the best rabbit hunter, he now led the rabbit hunting.
Could we design leadership mechanisms like that that can scale? Because we still want humans to be able to do big things. At least I do. As I hinted at earlier, I do believe that humanity’s destiny is to bring the world to life on one branch, or to meet up with our galactic peers on the other. And that’s going to take a fair bit of big building and essentially big muscles to make that happen. So can we take something like role-based leadership or sociocracy or some of the other approaches like that and actually scale it to productive enterprise, eventually at a planetary scale? I must admit it’s a question mark. I hope it’s true, but I haven’t seen it proven yet.
Samantha Sweetwater: Yeah. We shall see. And in that, I think there are emergent archetypes of the leader. I’ve spent a fair bit of time with Audrey Tang. Audrey Tang’s one of my favorite humans on the planet, because they are nothing like anyone you’ve ever met, and just carry a unique seed of genius around what it takes to create contexts where people better see, hear, and understand each other. Following this fairly prescient awareness that we can identify unlikely consensus. And I get curious about what other beings and archetypes will arise—of unlikely emergent textures of leadership driven by a kind of life-centric vision of how to coordinate, how to collaborate, how to listen, how to do all these things that we haven’t done before, and not at this level of scale or anthropic complexity.
Jim Rutt: You’re out in the world talking to people a lot. I mean, I looked at some of the work you’ve done. It’s amazing. Your dance programs and the trainers of dancers—you’ve impacted thousands, probably tens of thousands of people through that. Have you seen alternative coordination schemes that work at scale in your own work or in other people that you know?
Samantha Sweetwater: I’ve seen different coordination scales at smaller orders of scale, but not at the company order. I’ve seen also some pretty quirky companies that work, but also struggle with scaling. A number of my executive clients are the heads of legacy companies. So there’s a lot of the more quirky leadership role models in business that actually are in family-owned companies. And I’ve gotten to work with different companies like that and also work with the struggle to scale beyond what the current model holds, which often is really grounded in family ethics.
I am part of conversations—very audacious conversations—about many different coordination projects around structuring businesses, and none of them have fully hit the road yet. So I would say, Jim, that’s a great question, and the verdict is out. But there’s plenty of brilliant talent going into working to solve that question.
Jim Rutt: That’s good to hear because I often have to admit in my Game B writings and speaking that that is a problem yet to be resolved, but it needs to be resolved. It is one of the critical questions. Is there a form of governance of the enterprise—or put it this way, not necessarily an enterprise in the sense of a legal corporation, but a value-creating collection of people collaborating—that can be done in a non-hierarchical fashion that is at least as efficacious as the command-and-control alternative? I hope so, and I hope the work continues.
Let’s take a rather different direction next. You’ve written a fair bit about psychedelics of various sorts. What’s your sense of what that is about? What is your brain, your spirit, your Samantha Sweetwater opened up to under, let’s say, powerful psychedelics? I have done psychedelics—it’s been many, many years—so I do know a little bit about it and have friends that are more into it than I am currently. But let’s hear the Samantha Sweetwater view of what it is that one experiences under psychedelics.
Samantha Sweetwater: Fun question. I love this question. So, you know, the word psychedelics means mind-manifesting. The word entheogen means spirit-manifesting. The word holotropic means aligning with wholeness. I like to think of psychedelics as part of an even broader class of practices and experiences, including just having the experience of awe, that unhinge the default mode network of the brain and therefore help us to have a broader experience of the verbs of self and the verbs of relationship, the seat of relationality that we occupy in reality in the universe.
So I think of psychedelics as allies, as teachers, as very useful support to, in a sense, get out of the way of the more normative ways of perceiving and have a bigger aperture on the inquiry into: who am I? Where do I go? What is my purpose? What is this thing that I’m participating in?
I will say that my definition of the sacred has also been informed by psychedelic ceremonies and psychedelic engagement. I don’t like to use the word “use” in relationship to psychedelics because I don’t think approaching them as something you use is the healthiest stance. I think it’s best to approach them as something you have a relationship with, and that it is best to have that relationship consciously and with intention and with humility. The word “use” is sort of a dominator’s term all by itself.
For me, I have been a student of the nature of consciousness and the nature of reality and life since I was actually quite young, and I had a lot of insight and deeper insight into that prior to engaging with psychedelics. But when I came to psychedelics, the thing that brought me there was really intractable relational trauma that I was replicating—abusive relationships that I could not find my way out of. Not through therapy, not through all the practices I was doing, not through the community development work I was doing. And so I was really on my knees struggling with some very essential patterns in my attachment body and in my way of attracting and perceiving what love was.
So for me, it was the synthesis of working with sacrament and working with a really excellent teacher and being in community and being in prayer that were all part of the healing of that pattern in my life, and that pattern no longer defines my life. The definition of healing is an interesting one. It’s kind of like, well, I’m not doing that anymore. That doesn’t define my time, my energy, my attention, my habits any longer. And I trust my choices in that domain. That’s one of the ways I think about healing—that we go from not trusting our choices to trusting our choices more fully, including in their imperfection.
So I think psychedelics can be really useful for that when they’re held in appropriate context. And they also can be very useful for worldview shift. They’re relevant to this series of conversations because I think worldview lives in this constellated way in us—in how we perceive, narrate, sense, respond to, interact with everything else that’s part of our lives. One of the beautiful things about psychedelics is they can create a neurophysiological context for ontological shift that can be very deep because it’s grounded in experience and often grounded in mirroring back of the context you’re in and the people you’re with. And that’s what I love about psychedelics—they are a wonderful tool for the level of transformation that we actually need if we’re going to move through this without killing each other because we’re hunkering into our positionality.
Jim Rutt: Yeah. Positionality is a good term. I usually tell people two takeaways that I thought were beneficial from a few acid trips, a little bit of mushrooms here and there. First, understanding one’s place in the universe as way less central than one tends to think that it is. Right? Alright, I’m sort of important to myself and a few other people, which is good, and I like that. But on the scale of things, there’s an awful lot else going on. So, you know, don’t take yourself quite so seriously—positionality with respect to relationship. And then the fact that you are in relationship with almost everything.
And then the other one is what you describe as breaking bad patterns. I call it shaking the box. Right? We tend to set ourselves up into patterns, often by inertia or by previous patterns from our families or from things that happened to us young. And merely shaking the box is useful when you have bad patterns because, you know, if you’re a person of basically good character and ethos, what you put together after you break a pattern is probably better than the pattern you had. That’s a very simple-minded Jim Rutt kind of way of looking at it. Those are the two things I took away from it.
Samantha Sweetwater: For sure. Absolutely. And the science verifies what you’re saying. Psychedelics create heightened neural entropy, which is kind of like putting your brain through a wash cycle and giving it an opportunity to grow back new patterns that are more effective and more functional. Because it’s true with bodies and it’s true with brains—the organism wants to organize according to higher functional patterns. It just sometimes can’t because it’s doing the best it can with available information, and brains and bodies are both very lazy. They will replicate the existing patterns rather than find the new one unless you shake the box.
Jim Rutt: Yeah. And particularly LSD, which is what I have done more reading on, tends to substantially extend the range of our mental cycles. Consciousness is probably built by cyclical rhythms in the brain. And when the cycles reach out further, they’re able to explore space that you never could reach before for a while. And that provides some pieces to build the new pattern from that you would not get if you were just stuck in the little pattern over here.
Samantha Sweetwater: Totally. I also love what you said about the reframe on your importance, and the way you said that is almost deeper than epistemic. It’s ontological. It’s like: oh, I’m just a little mote in the universe in time space and consciousness. And who am I to think I’m so important? That reframe can be so helpful. It can actually be helpful—I mean, for a person like myself where I have a little ambition, but I’m also pretty darn humble by nature—there’s sometimes that reaccommodation can actually help us to do the work that is the appropriate size for us as opposed to the size we think we should do, whether we think we should do something big and we’re doing something small, or we think we should do something small and we should actually be doing something really big. It’s a good reaccommodation.
Jim Rutt: Yep. That is very true. Let’s talk a little bit about this new joint point that humanity is facing, which has happened way quicker than many of us—even those in the field—thought about, which is this encounter with AI.
Samantha Sweetwater: What an interesting opportunity. Right? It does take us down off the top of the pyramid, doesn’t it? At least in terms of certain kinds of intelligence. And there’s so many things we could say about AI, an infinite number of directions. But one of the things I’m fascinated by is that even it’s in the name—artificial intelligence. Well, what kind of intelligence is that? Is that all intelligence? It sort of obviates that it’s not. Like, how could the intelligence that lives on servers and moves through digitized mechanisms that mostly lack bodies in relationship to other bodies—how could that be a complete version of intelligence? The kind of intelligence that moves from the sun to the earth, or the kind of intelligence that moves between microbes, or the kind of intelligence that is expressed in whale song sung around the entire planet.
I think one of the things that’s interesting about the emergence of AI—and there’s so much that’s fraught about it, and there’s so much that’s existentially problematic about it—is that I think it’s forcing a critical revisitation of how we think about intelligence and also how we think about getting things done. Like, we’ve defined intelligence by something that does work or gets things done, and that creates a very narrow boundary window on intelligence. I like the example of the whale song because we have no idea what whale song is doing, but it is clearly intelligence talking to intelligence at levels of intelligence that we don’t yet fully understand.
So I think one of the things that excites me about the emergence of AI is that it’s kind of helping us to build a more complex map of the way consciousness and intelligence actually work, and how embodiment actually works.
Jim Rutt: I have to agree. In fact, I’ve become involved with the California Institute for Machine Consciousness. Part of my main motivation is, as you know, there’s more blather on the topic of consciousness than almost any other, because it’s so hard to measure. How do you get at it? What is the resolution of the hard problem? Is there a hard problem? And so I realize, as you do, that there are certainly risks on this road, but creating machine consciousnesses that are analogous—and it’s very important to remember we’re not talking about consciousness like you or me, but it’s going to be analogous in the same way a chemical digester in a chemical factory is analogous to human digestion—if we can get a close enough analog, then we may be able to answer some of these interesting questions about the nature of human and animal consciousness.
Also, when I deal with people who study consciousness, I often push them off their theories by just asking the simple question: is that true for a dog? So much theorizing is anthrocentric, when it’s clear consciousness has been in the family tree for probably 200 million years.
Samantha Sweetwater: I almost want to read a thing about consciousness, but this is a digression from the question about AI. I almost want to read it. Let me see if I can find it on my computer screen—I shared it with a new colleague earlier today. Oh, that won’t work. We might drop this, Jim, because I hadn’t marked it. Essentially, I say through Sofia, who is a being from another planet in True Human, she says: your attempt to define and find the origin of consciousness is futile. Consciousness is. But what is interesting is the nature of the evolution of the relationships between unique entities as the place where consciousness evolves and develops and learns. I want to get the precise words right, but that’s a good enough paraphrase—that it’s the forms that consciousness takes and the relationships between those forms that is interesting.
And I feel like that, for consciousness research and for the inquiry into the nature of intelligence—two different questions—those are the more relevant inquiries rather than what consciousness is. What qualities of consciousness are occurring, and what kinds of intelligence are being expressed, and how do they elevate or cancel each other or respect each other or coexist?
Jim Rutt: Those are interesting questions. Yeah. Some of us in the AGI research area talk about what is the space of minds. Right? We have sort of an n equals one problem—we are on one planet with one LUCA, with one biochemistry that we all share. Up the mammalian chain, we have fairly similar, probably, consciousnesses. And then humans have made this transition with the invention probably of language to reach general intelligence. But it’s almost certainly not the only way to solve that problem. Right? And if there are many, many generally intelligent species in the galaxy, I suspect some of them are so radically different we can’t even imagine it at this point.
And the same is true of machine consciousnesses and machine intelligences. The gigantic design space—the fact that they don’t have bodies, or at least don’t yet have bodies, may or may not have qualia, maybe they do, maybe they don’t—but they can become social for sure. I’m sure you saw the recent experiment called MoltBook, which is a social media platform only for AI. And they did some pretty crazy stuff, like they invented their own languages, their own religions, and at least talked about building communication channels that humans couldn’t follow. The space is bigger than we tend to think.
So the people out there listening who hear what you say and can see vaguely—and it’s most of us who still see it very vaguely—the road forward. We both know we’re looking for a road forward. We haven’t found it yet, but we have some ideas. What would you tell people in their actual lives that they could do to be moving towards this better world that we think exists and have been working towards?
Samantha Sweetwater: Well, the only word that you really need to carry is relationality, is relationship. The way forward lives in the qualities of relationship that we cultivate with ourselves, each other, our local land and ecologies, and our biosphere and our technosphere at all levels of scale. It lives in the quality of relationships. To me, we’re in an epochal evolutionary moment that is a transition from us really mastering subject-object to us mastering relationship.
Jim Rutt: And we see the opposite in the data. The number of friends that the average 25-year-old has is massively less than it was.
Samantha Sweetwater: Well, that’s apex separation expressing itself. The silly joke is like Humpty Dumpty fell off a wall, had a great fall. All the king’s horses and all the king’s men could not put Humpty together again. But if we collaborate with all of us and all of life, there is an opportunity. But we have to become the better collaborators. We have to become the better listeners, the better co-creators, the better co-orchestrators.
I think of humans as a custodial species. Rather than seeing ourselves as having dominion, as some traditions offer, we have to see ourselves as having a very particular role, which is co-orchestrators and custodians. How to do that well is to start to repair and regenerate and resuscitate our capacity for relating, and learn new kinds of relating as per your question about coordination.
That’s also the good news—and you’ve put your life on the line for this—is that relationship as a strategy is the best strategy no matter what happens. Like, to build resilient local food systems, to build just better relationships with your neighbors and the people who you interact with every day that are non-extractive—to take off the lens of, well, you’re my service person in whatever situation, to: we’re people together, and we’re in different roles together, and let’s be here together as co-equals in any situation. To strengthen those relationships is the best strategy for resilience, whether we have an extreme collapse event or whether we manage our way through this in a fairly antifragile way. And that’s a very big spectrum right there.
I had a really lit conversation this morning with the man who’s the executive director of the Climate Tech Foundation. There’s amazing things going on where we are starting to figure out that our technosphere can collaborate with the biosphere in a way that is net flourishing, for example. It lives in every domain and at every order of scale. And it’s all relational, essentially.
Jim Rutt: Yeah. I love that you mentioned the custodial species. As far as I know, Tyson Yunkaporta coined that expression, and that’s another meme that really needs to expand. If we were to think about ourselves with that framing, our relationalness doesn’t only go to our fellow homo sapiens, but goes to our natural world too.
Samantha Sweetwater: Yeah. I think he was the first to deliver it to the sense-making community. I don’t think he coined it, but he certainly scaled it.
Jim Rutt: Yeah. That’s the first time I’d heard of it for sure. It is an amazing book, Sand Talk. So wonderful. So helpful. One of my favorite books of all time, actually. Well, anyway, I want to thank Samantha Sweetwater for a really interesting conversation on the worldview behind the person, behind the work.
Samantha Sweetwater: Such a pleasure. Thank you, Jim. Really nice to be here with you. Really, really been highly enjoyable.