Relationships matter

Our relationship to concepts and ideas such as self, other, and nature has been influenced by a classical worldview and its assumption of separateness. Quantum social science challenges this assumption by recognizing that entangled quantum systems are never fully separable. When we are aware of this entangled relationship, we can both respond to the risks we are creating and realize our shared potential to generate alternatives.

 Values are woven into the patterns that structure our relationships with each other and the environment and so it is the quality of our relationships that creates new patterns and possibilities. This includes relationships with biodiversity and other sentient and non-sentient beings.

If we address the relationships underlying the climate crisis, we are at the same time likely to address those that have contributed to numerous other global crises. In a quantum world, small changes can make a big difference. In doing so, we need to keep in mind what the late cultural historian and religious scholar Thomas Berry said: “The universe is a communion of subjects, not a collection of objects.”

Relationships with nature

Many indigenous peoples around the world have managed to maintain a close relationship and connection with their local environments, resulting in generations of “lived” experience and knowledge about how to manage these environments in a truly sustainable way.

In the short film below, seven Native individuals from communities in North America talk about their thoughts, beliefs, and feelings on sustenance, water, place, and identity. As they say: “We understood every kind of water there was in our universe, whether it flowed on the ground or it came from the sky and we always had a way to deal with that as a life process. We understood every molecule as it came from the sky and we knew how to live in it.”

https://www.confluenceproject.org/library-post/stories-from-the-river-lifeways/

The musical track “Back To Nature” from Nightmares on Wax charts the shifting balance in humanity’s relationship with nature and how it could be transformed into one of harmony and thriving. It features a voiceover from the indigenous Mexican spiritual leader Kuauhtli Vasquez and chanting from a member of the Mexican Wixarika tribe. As it says, “When you exhale, I breath the air you breathe – we’re all together. This is the way Nature designed it”.

Easkey Britton is an Irish surfer and marine social scientist whose research explores the relationship between people and nature, especially the benefits of water environments for health and social wellbeing. As a surfer, she has experienced how “the fluid movement of the sea and surf can create a coming together…and the shared immersive experience of surfing can overcome assumptions of separateness that persist in our culture and politics.”

The short film below of Easkey surfing gives a little taste of the intimacy of this immersive connection: “This is a place beyond borders, beyond you and me to us. We are held in sway, as a merging unfolds, the illusion of separation crumbling…”

Relationships with each other

Deeyah Kahn is a Norwegian British documentary maker and human rights activist who works to foster intercultural dialogue and understanding. In the video below, she talks about her approach of “radical compassion”, at the heart of which is finding a way to create connections and relationships with others. As she says, “All the work that I do is about recognizing ourselves in each other, to try and locate the humanity in someone else… Once we recognise that, it becomes harder for me to harm you, to hurt you. The more we can get underneath all the ‘noise’…the closer we get to solutions.”

More information on Deeyah’s work is available on her website at https://deeyah.com/

The Collective Psychology Project was founded in 2018 by Alex Evans to bring psychology and politics together. Its focus is on “deepening our empathy with each other, building our sense of common purpose, and identifying with a ‘Larger Us’ – one that includes all 7 billion of the world’s people, plus other species and future generations – rather than a them-and-us, or an atomised ‘I’.” (www.collectivepsychology.org). Its report A Larger Us brings together findings on why we need collective psychology, what it might look like, and how we start developing it in practice: https://www.collectivepsychology.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/A-Larger-Us.pdf

Relationships in science

Albert Einstein on the delusion of separation

An appreciation for the non-dual relationships that permeate the living world can be seen in a letter of consolation that the physicist Albert Einstein sent to a grieving father in 1950:

“A human being is part of a whole, called by us the ‘Universe’, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest — a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.” (quoted in Ricard & Thuan, The Quantum and the Lotus).

Barbara McClintock’s relational approach

One striking example of the previously unimaginable insights that can emerge from taking a relationship approach to science can be seen in the work of the late plant geneticist Barbara McClintock. Her approach was to enter into a state of close connectedness with the plants she studied, to the point where she felt the boundary between object and observer dissolve. As she described it: “the more I worked with them, the bigger and bigger [the chromosomes] got. And when I was really working with them, I wasn't outside, I was down there. I was part of the system…I was even able to see the internal parts of the chromosomes - actually everything was there. It surprized me because I actually felt as if I was right down there and these were my friends…As you look at these things, they become part of you.” (quoted in Fox Keller, 2000, A Feeling for the Organism: The life and work of Barbara McClintock).

Despite being marginalised by her colleagues, McClintock persisted with her approach and was awarded a Nobel Prize in 1983. The author and educator Parker Palmer talks about McClintock’s approach in the short video clip below, pointing out that “At the heart of great science, we are constantly reminded that knowing is about being in community with the world itself”.

Key Relationships Matter image: Mark Harpur, Unsplash