Reconnecting Business Leaders with Earth

Eduardo: [00:01:14] In today’s episode, we have Ra James, he’s the founder of (re)Biz, a 31-day online workshop and emergent creation lab for leaders who are ready to build a regenerative post growth world. He also has created Future Elders, an online un-school, focussing on healing the future through remembering the original wisdom of global culture elders, realizing that wisdom is far more powerful than knowledge, and he is the true catalyst for transformational and innovative global change. 

Ra is also the founder of Pueo Regeneration, one of the world’s first regenerative consulting firms that advises businesses worldwide on how to activate their purpose, [00:02:00] create adaptive leadership strategies based on biomimicry and implement kincentric worldview shifts into organizational operations and culture. He speaks globally on this topic. Welcome to the show, Ra. 

Ra: Thank you. Good to be here. 

Eduardo: So you travel the world and immerse yourself in many original peoples and cultures. What inspired you to do such traveling? Perhaps searching for meaning and purpose? Tell us about that journey. 

Ra: Yeah, it kind of just started as an intuition. It wasn’t something that I was exposed to very young. As a family, we had gone to maybe Ireland once or Canada. We didn’t really travel that much, but there was this intuition that I really wanted to travel. I was always drawn to different foods. I was always drawn to different music, but my life led me in the direction of playing sports.

[00:03:00] So up until the point I was 20, I was basically slotted to be a professional athlete. And I realized at that point in my life that I had the opportunity to make a decision whether to continue on that route, which I actually didn’t really want to do. But social pressures and all these other emotions were swirling about, or I could drop that and travel. And I chose the latter. And then when I was 20, I moved to Hong Kong to study Chinese philosophy and that really was my first inspiration. Just taking the initial decision of uncomfortability, of following an intuition that was against what most of the people in my life were doing. 

So I think that that’s a really important point, as often times we view resistance as something to retreat from when actually, as Joseph Campbell says, the cave that you’re afraid to enter holds the treasure that you seek.

[00:04:00] So to look at resistance as a way to actually follow what was to be birthed in the same way that a seed needs to push through resistance to come out of the soil. So when I first went to Hong Kong that like just blew my mind open to the fact that there are a lot of realities, there are a lot of ways to live in the world. And the chunk of north of Boston where I’d spent the majority of my upbringing was only one very small reality. And that essentially catalyzed me into then traveling around the world for the next 12 years, all of which then synchronistically kind of wove from there. But the initial guiding force was just this intuition, this like internal bubbling, sort of effervescent voice that was like, there’s things to explore here.

And I don’t know where it came from. I think it’s really in all of our genetics, you know, I mean, [00:05:00] human beings were hunter gatherers for a very, very long time. It’s not according to our history as a species. It’s not common to just sit in one place for an extremely long period of time. Maybe we moved back and forth between places, between seasons and things like that.

But there’s an innate desire to explore within our genetics. So I think I was really just beginning to tune in and listen to things within me. And then that kind of just opened up in Hong Kong and continued. And I basically traveled to around 50 countries on five continents in the next 12 years. And yeah, my whole life changed.

Eduardo: It’s amazing. And I wonder what is that initial push that gets you over and see, it’s time to go explore? Because a lot of us have felt that. This is a very special episode because I’m actually speaking from the place where I grew up. [00:06:00] I mean, I studied here in this room all through middle school and all the way to college.

Ra: Wow.

Eduardo: So I come here about every year and it’s like connecting back. But there’s always this thing that pushes you, right? And you can decide to stay where you are or you can decide to really break through and go explore. 

Ra: Yeah. Oftentimes when we go to step off of a cliff, let’s say, into the unknown, we think we’re just going to fall, you know? But that’s a lack of trust. And it’s one of the main things that I’ve learned actually in, as I’ve shifted my worldview, is like, how much do I actually trust? Whatever we can call it, the universe, we can call it God, we can call it consciousness, we can call it the world. You call whatever you want, [00:07:00] but how much do you actually trust the benevolence and beauty of life itself? And if you trust it, that when you step off, there’s going to be something to catch you? Or do you trust yourself enough that when you step off, you will be able to figure it out? Then you’ll naturally be able to start trusting more and more. And as you start trusting more and more, then more and more blocks kind of emerge, I view it as like this, this unfolding path, yeah?

If you take one step, a journey of a thousand steps can open. But if you never take the first step, that journey never opens. So there’s this thing of infinite potentiality that requires us to take a first step. But if we don’t ever take that step, then the journey just remains potential energy and it doesn’t open.

So trust for me is a really, really important one to beginning any of these journeys, because you can always go back to where you never were going to leave from anywhere, Y¡you know? So.

Eduardo: [00:08:00] And we’re speaking about this in first person, right? I mean, it’s us. It’s one individual. But if you look at a society as a whole, there’s businesses and there’s whole economies that have come about following that path that has been kind of chartered to the path of growth. And now we’re victims of the circumstances of following that path and not jumping off to venture and do the right thing in a lot of ways. And then we have, as a result, climate change. And the result of this is mechanistic. We’re all looking for growth. Industrial systems that look for everything is secondary except for growth, right? And economics. So talk to us about how your worldview and cosmo vision has changed and how do you see the challenges we’re facing?

Ra: In that last sentence, I heard you say the word victim.

That word really has a powerful emotional charge. [00:09:00] What I am witnessing is not that we’re victim to something, but that we’ve forgotten the ability to question the direction that things are moving. Language is really, really important. Like the word growth is an ideological term that a lot of us believe means flourishing or thriving. It’s the thing that we all want, right? I want to grow more. I want to mature. I want to learn. Plants and trees grow. Everything continues to grow. It’s an ideological term. But the way that it’s been packaged and then manipulated, meaning reshaped into a way for a production and exchange system to extract more and more labor and nature for less price is where the word growth has just stopped being thought about. Like we’ve dropped our curiosity about what growth actually means. So essentially now growth [00:10:00] is creating harm.

Because we’re growing without a threshold, we’re growing without a specific goal in sight. You know, right now there’s really no identifiable endpoint to our growth and our economy is built upon the continuation of exponential growth of return. So the way that growth is even structured now, first of all, it’s isolated from the life cycle, the life cycle being different points of how all natural law functions.

There’s birth, there’s growth, there’s death, there’s decomposition. So we’ve isolated growth in that. So we’ve pulled it out of natural loss and right now it’s unnatural. You could just say that outside of that, we’re now growing with no identifiable goal in sight towards increasing the human thriving experience outside of specific groups of people thriving, which we could call the global north.

[00:11:00] As the majority of the economy has now been shaped with resource extraction and labor extraction from the global South to funnel into the capital accumulation and hedonistic comforts of the global north. So the way that everything is growing and it’s been manipulated, this term of growth has been used to funnel resources and accumulation into specific parts of the globe.

We’ve viewed growth as something going up, right? Like the GDP graph goes up, up, up, up, up, up. It’s just supposed to keep going forever, which is impossible because the earth is a being that needs to live in homeostasis and has learned how to live in homeostasis over the 4.8 billion years or longer that it’s been an organism. And cancer, for example, is something that continually grows [00:12:00] and grows and grows and ends up cannibalizing the host that it grows upon because it views itself as separate from the host.

So human beings right now as a dominant hegemonic worldview view themselves separate from the earth. So in the same way that a cancer views itself separate from the host, human beings are viewing themselves separate from the earth, and they’re now growing exponentially without understanding that they’re cannibalizing their own home, which is what the cancer does, which results in death.

And Ayurveda talks about this, too. And I’ve studied Ayurveda in India, the first stage of disease in Ayurveda is accumulation. That’s like literally how disease kicks off. Your doshas get out of balance and there starts to be an accumulation of the certain elemental nature which then creates a ripple effect that eventually kills the host.

And there’s just a lot of things in here around growth and how we kind of package it and utilize it for our own personal development. [00:13:00]  And this is why personal growth and development is one of the biggest industries out there right now, you know?

No one wants to hang out with a personal degrowth and decomposition consultant, you know? We all want to grow and develop when we don’t understand that the death and the decomposition or the degrowth creates the environment for the growth to actually happen in an organic way. Because if a tree falls in the forest and then mycelium and other microorganisms don’t come in and begin to decompose that to free up space and enrich the soil and the life for more trees to grow, then there would just be fallen trees everywhere.

Death and decomposition are really, really important in growth and as a deathophobic, the dominant hegemonic worldview is very deathophobic.

Eduardo: Tell me about what you have found about the wisdom of the elders. And this concept of the elders.  [00:14:00] And what are some of the most striking things that you have found out when immersing yourself in original people’s cultures?

I first had to even understand what an elder was, because in a society that, and I’m talking about the Western Anthropocene, which is, I’ve been using dominant hegemonic worldview, but really what this is, it’s a phenomenological result of our separation from nature that’s created an economic movement of neoliberalism. And a lot of Western psychology is based on this, right?

We can witness it with technology. I didn’t even understand what an elder was. All I know is that I didn’t really have any growing up. As I’ve begun to unpack this, it’s like, Well, why didn’t I actually have any elders? Why were there a lot of old people? But no elders? 

There’s a difference here. First of all, someone being old and someone being an elder, those are not the same thing. An elder for me is someone who has not lived as a pseudo cultural drone to the economic system where they have pushed away their experiences and uniqueness [00:15:00] for trying to function within a system where they need to earn their living to survive. An elder is someone who has been able to siphon and transmute their knowledge into an experience that relates to deepening relation and kincentrism with all of life.

So for me, an elder is someone who is holding that tincture of wisdom that is applicable for community and applicable for people to actually have them heal. And the word heal meaning reclaiming wholeness.

So the way that technology works now, I mean, we’re all in it, right? We all have our iPhones, you know, we all have our computers, we all have these OS updates, We have all this stuff, right? And it’s continuing going faster and faster and faster and faster, like I have the iPhone 13, like that’s old news now. Like, I don’t know what they’re up to now, but if you position yourself for growth specifically, if you position yourself for productivity, specifically, if you position yourself for quicker and quicker [00:16:00] adaptation to the technologies themselves, you’re highlighting the youth, right? You’re highlighting that energy of newness. 

So an elder is someone who at this point in this technological view of planned obsolescence and of newness, their productivity and their worth does not match with the pseudo cultural desires and definitions of success or usefulness or productivity. So someone who’s 65 is not going to be as productive as someone who is 20 with all of these new apps and things that technology is doing. So elders, in the same way that we’re deathophobic, are being pushed away just like old products are being pushed away to landfills, older people are being pushed away into senior homes, Right. Because they’re not productive. 

So in the same way that deathophobia is creating this desire to continually grow [00:17:00] the wisdom and ability for elders to be respected in a society that functions on technological progress and continuous growth is being pushed away for the desire of productivity because we only view productivity in output. We don’t view productivity in depth. 

This is a whole thing with growth is like, why do we view growth as this? Why do we view growth as this? There’s a depth, there’s a maturation, there’s a ripeness, a fruit is growing, but the fruit doesn’t necessarily grow and go bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger in size, but it can grow deeper and deeper and deeper and deeper and flavor and in ripeness, everything relates to the fact of why I didn’t understand what an elder was. So it took me a while to even get to the point of realizing how all of these things are interconnected and why the wisdom of elders is so important is because the wisdom of elders thrive within limits. Earth has ecological ceilings. We can say this, right? 

[00:18:00] Doughnut economics highlights this in the way that it actually looks at systems. But Earth has ecological limits in the same way that humans have limits, like our body is a limit. It also can enter us into limitlessness. But we have to understand a limit before we can create into something that’s beyond the limit. When we don’t understand the limit itself, which for me is one of the highlighting characteristics of an elder, is they exist within limits.

Because if I could just go to a river and continually harvest all of the water from the river and the river had no limit, then it wouldn’t matter how I’d treated the river because it’s just infinite. So elders hold knowledge of how to live within limit, how to live within place, how to learn from the wisdom of place, how to learn from the wisdom of non-human and earth beings. How to live in harmony, you know? So this for me is what elders are. If I can focus it down into one point which we can carry forward, is that elders exist in community. Elders don’t exist on their own. There’s not like self-proclaimed elders walking down the streets of Brooklyn, you know? [00:19:00] They’re not like, Oh, I’m an elder. Like, Oh, well, why are you an elder? Well, I just call myself an elder. That’s not how it works. 

An elder is someone who a community has supported in a way, a community has needs for that wisdom and that lighthouse, that pinnacle, that guiding force that an elder provides. So without a community, there are no elders, which is another thing that we’re encountering now, right?

Where are all the communities? I didn’t grow up in any communities, but when I went back to these different places around the world that still had thriving communities. Well, there are elders because they’re naturally connected. So if I can group this into something, it’s that the wisdom itself is rooted in how you function in the “we” and not the “I”.

And there’s something that I’ve said recently that I’ve learned throughout my own evolution and decomposition or whatever I want to call it, it’s that [00:20:00] the healing of our individual traumas is actually the healing of the trauma of individualism. So one of the biggest things that’s happening in the world now is that we all think that we’re individuals. We all want our own identities, we all want customization. 

There’s this whole thing around the individualism of identification. People say this all the time, right? They’re like, I’m a self-made entrepreneur. It’s like, Oh, really? Well, who birthed you? How are you self-made? You know, the word automaton means self mothered, right? But that’s not possible unless you had an immaculate conception. But still you came from a mother and we came from the mother. What, you’re self-made? Like who built your flesh your whole life? All the food you ate. Would you have been self-made without the water? No. Who helped to teach you in whatever language you speak? Who helped to teach you the skills to get to the point of having the business, right? 

But there’s this narcissism. There’s this individualized. I’m self-made, I am this thing and that individualism is a disease [00:21:00] because it isolates you and it naturally creates the conditions around accumulation because you accumulate things to try to buffer yourself into safety. So only within this individualized construct can you even have an economic system that functions on accumulation. So to actually bring it back to understand how true civilizations functioned, you have to re enter into community. You have to re enter into the communal understanding of “we” that a civilization does not exist if there isn’t clean water, if everyone’s needs aren’t taken care of, and that they’re well-fed. One of our teachers, he says, people ask him all the time about what they think of Western civilization. He says, Oh, I think it’s a really good idea. 

Because it doesn’t exist, because our waters are dirty, we’re harming the earth and people are starving all over the world. What sort of civilization is that? So I’ve think these are really good points for contemplation, and I just want to wrap it up by saying the transference over from the “I” to the “we”  [00:22:00] or the individualization or the small “s” self, as they say in yoga, into the larger self that includes the earth and all other beings. 

The wisdom is rooted in this. This is what kincentrism is about. This is what decomposition is about, because you decompose your own barriers and boundaries of yourself into becoming and realizing that there are no surroundings. The human nature binary is new. The definition, if you look up nature, it’s like anywhere that humans are not. That’s basically what the definition is. That’s kind of strange, no?

Eduardo: It is. Few thoughts crossing my mind. I mean, Western philosophy, which has inspired a lot of the current Western civilization idea, I think of the concept of the Overman that inspired it all Nazi movement. And it was a misinterpretation in itself, however. But the essence of the Overman from Nietzsche [00:23:00] is like, Yeah, you have all these developmental stages, the entire thing is a continuum and the Overman is an ideal that we should strive for.

And I think that has permeated the society in such a deep way, right, that it has become I mean, we see it everywhere. That’s the infinite growth idea in itself and it’s so attractive, it’s almost an unreachable state. This Overman idea is like if you chart the path between ape and Overman, we are in the middle and walking towards development. And we believe it’s a matter of IQ and intelligence and connectedness, but not in the natural way.

More in a computing way, accessing huge amounts of data and increasing processing capabilities. Futurists talk about we’re the path that we’re going to actually decide our own future genetics,  [00:24:00] and they relate this to the concept of infinite growth. Just like the universe. It’s expanding at an ever increasing speed even. And so we should do the same. 

Ra: Yeah. But it’s taking the power out of the hands of life. Because if life and the universe are doing these things anyway, then why do we have to act like we’re separate from it to come up with our own ways to do it? This is what I often say. The word superhuman, right? The word superhuman conjures up this like superhero type of thing, when really it’s just to become superhuman you have to become superhuman. Like, if you want to access all of this wisdom and knowledge, it’s all right here. All technology is doing is aggregating it in a place where we can search it all the time. Didn’t like come out of nowhere and end up on Google like it’s already here already. If you really learn how to listen to what we call nature, everything is already there for you.

[00:25:00] There’s this interesting thing that we think that we need to outsmart or improve upon the process of consciousness and life that has created us in the first place. Why do we need to continually improve upon that? There is a pretty good engineer who ever drew up the earth. I mean, they’re pretty good. How arrogant of us to think that we’re going to draw up more innovative processes to create thriving life and creativity and abundance and biodiversity.

Like, look how many species there are on the planet, how much diversity and innovation and creativity and abundance is already here. And we’re trying to create new mechanisms for that. I met this Sufi guy once, we were having dinner, and afterwards he’s like, You don’t need to create anything. You just need to reveal it and remember it. It’s already here.

And there’s this obsession with creation. Oh, we’re made in God’s image. So now we have to make things in our image. We’re naturally going to create. But the way that we’re creating, and this is one of the core aspects of the amnesia right now, is that the way that we’re creating is how we were created.

[00:26:00] And the way that we were created has separated itself from the natural culture of natural law. Right now we’re viewing things and another really deep point is, like you said, a continuum. A continuum is a lot different than a polarized duality. 

And the way that we’re creating right now, if we’re separate from nature, the way that we’re viewing ourselves, if I view that tree is not me, if I view you as not me, if I view the Earth as not me, something that I can exploit, and that’s an “it” that’s inanimate, well then naturally I’m going to create things that treat the environment in that way because the technology reflects me. Because I’m creating the technology. But if I actually have healed or reclaimed wholeness in my worldview, then the technologies that I birth are going to reflect me. [00:27:00] So actually, without changing the way that we view the world and then live into that view, embodying that view, the technologies cannot change. We have to align in that space to create things in that space. And it’s not like we have to change. We don’t have to become the übermensch like you’re saying. We’re already that thing. We just have to remember that we don’t have to do anything to become human. I’m already a human. So are you.

And the word human comes from the word humus, which means ground or soil.

But how many people plant seeds? This is like a really deep thing that I even reflect off into people who do sustainability. I’m like, Have you ever grown your own food? -Heads of sustainability. No. How can you be a head of sustainability if you don’t understand life?

Eduardo: This whole concept of decomposition comes to mind right now. And I think in your journey, it strikes me as a series of contrasts [00:28:00] that you have been able to realize. The runaway culture has its cultural means that are universally accepted and people just take them as granted. These are truths basically. And the problem is that in those truths, there’s duality all over the place, right?

When we’re thinking about infinite growth, the world is going to collapse, therefore, we should go to Mars and become an interplanetary species. Which of the two sides of the duality are we feeding? Are we feeding the ultimate spiritual truth, or the egotistical truth? And the truth of reason is this lack of connectedness with the spiritual truth, that, unless you realize that actually exists, the only wolf you are feeding is the egotistical “truth”, the little truth.

Ra: [00:29:00] Yeah. 

Eduardo: And it’s blinding. How do you even get out of that? How do you even realize it’s a sickness?

Ra: You look outside. We witnessed that we’re not living in community. We witnessed that the Earth is experiencing ecological collapse. We witnessed that depression and anxiety and mental health issues are on the rise. To understand the mirror, you have to understand that what you’re looking at is the psyche, right? And Carl Jung says, We don’t have a psyche. We’re in the psyche. So what we’re witnessing is the collective psyche that we’re in.

And when you can recognize the symptomatic expression of illness, like Krishnamurti says, it is no expression of health to be well-adjusted to a sick society. Just because you’re thriving and you’re making money and you’re successful, and whatever these cultural mechanisms are that we have defined as success does not mean that you are healthy. [00:30:00] It doesn’t mean that you’re well, doesn’t mean that you’re successful. When the actual metric is based upon an illness. So for me to be able to, like you’re saying, to pop out of this continual feeding of the separation of ego, meaning that I am separate from you. I am better than you, right? This is why it’s a dominant hegemonic worldview, because it’s a dominator. It’s a hierarchy. To be able to get yourself out of that I think if you look around and you have the eyes to see and the ears to hear, you would recognize that there’s a lot happening in the world and it’s not normal.

You know, there’s this thing where it’s like, there’s a shifting baseline. In the 1920s, the world was something. In the 1960s, the world was something. In the 2020s, the world is something. There aren’t a lot of people who are around from the twenties until now. But if you ask them, they’re like, This is not normal. [00:31:00] This is not how I lived. Then even span it back to the year whatever. I mean, even the way that I talk about years now, I’m not even sure how to talk about the year because the church has established what our time is on this planet with the birth of Christ as year zero. So I don’t even want to say in the year 3000 before Christ, because that’s not where time existed like that. Or the church is like, Oh, time starts now. Jesus at the year zero. Like what? No, it’s not one time started, but if you look back in time, people were living and thriving in community. They were living and thriving with technologies that are more advanced than ours now, and there’s no way to scientifically prove that.

But from what I’ve learned, the technologies that we have now are nothing compared to the ages that we’ve had on this planet. Just think about the evolution of this area. The last Ice Age was what, 12, 15, 20,000 years, somewhere in this span, right? Earth. It’s been here for 4.8 billion years. The United States has been around for 300 years. [00:32:00] The Industrial Revolution started, what, 1840 something. So to think that the technology that we’ve been able to create in 2 to 300 years is going to be superior to civilizations that have existed for tens of thousands, if not more years, It’s pretty arrogant.

So there’s this really interesting thing that I experience that really helps me is zooming out. So, okay, here we are now, what have I inherited? I’m not self-made. I’ve inherited all of these beautiful things of life, you know? So how do I begin to understand that I am nothing without life, that really will humble the ego a lot to realize that you don’t exist without life. I could lose my leg, my arm or my eye. And I would survive. [00:33:00] But if I lose the air, water or food, I die. Which one’s more important than my body? Which one’s my actual body? So who am I? All high and mighty? Someone pulls water from me for three days, I die. And we’re not honoring the water. We’re not honoring the farmers. We’re giving them $2 an hour or less, exploiting them and exploiting the land and bleaching the soil. And it’s like, we don’t exist without any of this. So that’s the way to humble yourself right there, which is why renunciation is such a powerful path. And that’s why they do this in yoga. They do this in a lot of spiritual practices.

Eduardo: This whole concept of personal development, right? But there’s a whole industry about it, and you speak about a different concept. It’s not development, but decomposition. Talk to us a little bit about that. Let’s go more in depth there.

Ra: [00:34:00] Decomposition is a natural process. There are various different beings that live in that way. Vultures are one of them, like scavengers, right? They sit on the precipice of life and death. That’s essentially decomposition. Right? Something dies and then it’s decomposed. So vultures eat things that have died and they turn it into more life. Hence the vulture.

Mushrooms do the same thing, right? Something falls, they eat them, turn into compost soil, communicate, send out information, and now there’s more soil for more growth. So why we think we’re so small is because we haven’t decomposed our own stories about who we are. We haven’t decomposed boundaries that I think that separate you from me or that separate me from the earth.

So the decomposition process is actually freeing up space for deeper [00:35:00] growth in the sense of who we are, actually, because most people think that they’re this little entity, you know? Just bumping around other atoms in the universe. That’s a really limited worldview. 

So if you actually want to grow outside of your own construct of who you think that you are, you should probably work on decomposing the stories and the limiting beliefs that prevent you from actually seeing what you truly are. And then you’re going to be able to grow, you know, and you’re going to grow not inside your little container like this, but you’re going to be able to grow and affect ecosystems in a beautiful way because you’re going to be able to now cultivate the natural gifts and genius that exists within you as you decompose the conditioning that society has placed upon you and you de-condition all of these other things. Deconditioning and decomposition, right? They both have “de”. It’s this process of recycling back into to free open space.

Eduardo: [00:36:00] One of the ultimate things that come to mind is this concept of true. Okay, personal development, personal growth. Personal betterment can be interpreted two ways. It’s either a result of effort, and the effort is usually driven by ego. I mean, that’s one thing to realize, and there is the absence of effort and actually letting go of all effort and then just flowing. And you mentioned this component of decomposition. It’s like, okay, let’s get rid of all this bullshit, actually. And actually flow through. Personal development doesn’t require a lot of effort. The only effort is to get rid of the notion that your true personal growth has anything to do with with you. That’s your ego, you know?

Ra: [00:37:00] Think about the zen…, and I don’t think it’s a proverb, it might be a proverb, but someone has a cup, right? And the cup is full.

Eduardo: Oh, yes.

Ra: Try to put some more stuff in the cup. You can’t. The cup will just…

So if the stuff that you’re having in the cup is preventing you from growing, you have to recognize that first of all, you have to recognize that what you’re doing on your personal growth and development journey is actually not growing in the same way than if you were to empty the cup and fill it with something that you actually want to grow with. So do you have to be able to differentiate there in the first place, which takes a long time potentially. It can be instantaneous, but sometimes it takes a long time. It took me many years to even realize that everything that I was doing was conditioned from a specific worldview and way of viewing.

[00:38:00] It took me a long time to understand that, but that’s why a lot of us do it is then hopefully other people can hear it and then it doesn’t have to take them as long. That’s actual, that’s actually work, right? Like work is doing something so that other people don’t have to do it in the same effortful nature or else you’re just toiling, you’re just running around on a hamster wheel and then you’re living into the name the human race, because we’re all racing about trying to do something when we just have to sit in one place and understand what’s happening.

So when you’ll actually be able to empty that cup and fill it with things that you really want, the emptying is the decomposition, right? The emptying is the releasing of constraints or density or beliefs or anything that is preventing you from filling your life with life until the point where you connect back with life and then it’s no longer your life. This is what yoga is about, right? It’s not just doing different asana positions. 

[00:39:00] The word yoga comes from the word yuj in Sanskrit, which means union or to yoke. And what’s yoking? So why does yoga exist? Well, why would you need a process for union? Well, we’re not unified, right? Why is the world disintegrating? Well, I think we’re disintegrated. So the process for yoga is to reconnect back with life, to unionize with life. So if I think I’m me, and I think that’s life, that’s a separation. So the process of yoga is to merge back with life. So this is really what decomposition allows.

It’ll happen with us anyway, right? Naturally, if we don’t preserve ourself and put all of our ashes in an urn and put it somewhere in a glass box where it never decays, our body naturally would decompose back into the earth from which we’ve taken our life. It’s already built in to the system. [00:40:00] We’re just preventing it because we’re afraid of decomposing our individuality back into a larger self.

And this is why a lot of plant medicines help, right? Think about mushrooms. Mushrooms are a really beautiful, sacred medicine, an ally. And a mushroom as a decomposition agent, what does it do? It decomposes your own egoic structures when you eat the mushrooms. This is why you have moments of self-transcendence. When you’re eating mushrooms, it’s because you’re decomposing your own limitations of yourself. 

The archetypal energy of the mushroom is decomposition. So it decomposes your own egoic structures simultaneously when you eat the medicine. These are energies that are active on the planet, right? You have to understand what’s happening with them to understand the route that we’re going. And if we continually orient the route towards individualism and growth, that route is going to create disease because it’s not natural, because individualism does not exist in nature.

[00:41:00] So aligning with natural law like this is the depth of what’s happening here. And when you don’t align with natural law, the planet is far more powerful and way more intelligent than us, right? The Hopi say this is the fourth world. The planet has already reset itself three times and we’re in the fourth one now.

And each time what happens is that greed comes up and humans start living unnaturally and exploiting the planet. And the planet is a living organism, just like us, when we get a virus or something, we have a fever, our body institutes these natural mechanisms to boot whatever’s harming us. So the planet as it achieves homeostasis is doing the same thing. So we really have a choice now about to recognize what’s happening. 

This is really what (re)Biz is about, right? I mean, these are the depths that we go into.

[00:42:00] It’s not just about creating a plastic of seaweed. That’s not the depth that this is about. There are far deeper things to understand about what’s happening here, and they’re all interconnected. And when we view them as compartmentalized, that’s part of the issue. That’s separation, right? 

Eduardo: Well, this is a good segway into this concept of growth versus this “new concept” that we see coming out of degrowth and post growth. Can you contrast these three concepts?

Ra: I’d say there’s four main ones. There’s green growth, there’s post growth, there’s degrowth, and there’s steady state economics. Those are like the four main things, right? So green growth is what we see with like ESG and sustainability and all these things, which is really the idea that GDP can still grow infinitely while we decrease ecological impacts back into a state of equilibrium on the planet.

[00:43:00] But the issue here is that despite a lot of research, scientists have still not proven that we can decouple growth from resource extraction. So even if we’re continuing to grow in a green way, we’re still extracting massive amounts of resources to do that, mostly from the global South to fuel the global North. So we’re kind of outsourcing the suffering and the ecological destruction onto the global South as the global North, as everyone, I mean, everyone around me in Texas, there’s so many Teslas, right? Teslas everywhere and simultaneously, where’s all the lithium, Where’s all the cobalt? Where’s all these metals come from? Congo, Chile. Different places, right? 

So green growth is this and it’s kind of been co-opted, which is why I think 68% of companies say that they’re greenwashing, which is just out of control. And this feeds into a whole other thing that we going to (re)Biz, which is grief. [00:44:00] Essentially that’s just complete lying and bargaining, which is one of the stages of grief, is that humans still seem to not understand that you can’t bargain with your own home that provides you life. You can’t be like, Oh, this is organic, this is sustainable. If it’s not, you’re just lying. Like, who are you trying to bargain with? You’re trying to bargain with the planet? So green growth is kind of like this. 

So post growth essentially is critiquing and criticizing this ideological view of growth as an imperative. And instead it’s prioritizing human well-being and ecological well-being as opposed to continuation of capital accumulation in the optimization or cheapening of labor and nature. Because capitalism essentially thrives based on that continual cheapening of labor and nature, which is why there’s all these outsourcing and globalization. [00:45:00] That’s how that functions. So you go to a place where the labor is cheaper and then they get exploited in that place and you steal the land. I mean, this is imperialism at its finest, right? You steal the land for no money, you’re very cheap, and then you mark it up and sell all the resources. That’s how it works.

So post growth essentially is criticizing this and saying that there are better ways to function that optimize human needs. So human well-being and ecological well-being. So post growth is a state of functioning. Degrowth is a mechanism for high income nations to reenter into an ecological ceiling by scaling down unnecessary production. Production is the causation of massive amounts of resource and energy use. So degrowth is essentially bringing us back into the ecological ceiling because right now we’re just shooting upward. So degrowth is bringing us back in. [00:46:00] And it doesn’t mean that you have to suffer. It just means you need to scale back unnecessary industries that are creating massive amounts of resource and energy extraction that aren’t really benefiting human well-being and ecological well-being, that’s essentially what regrowth means.

Steady state is essentially this ideological understanding from ecological economics that states that the economy should never extract more than ecosystems can regenerate and the economy should never pollute more than ecosystems can absorb. Those are the four main things. 

So green growth is really what’s happening now. Degrowth is a mechanism for the global North mostly, to reenter into an ecological ceiling by decomposing industries and production that is extracting resources and energy that are not contributing to ecological well-being or human thriving. And then there’s post growth which is optimizing that state of equilibrium through functioning on needs instead of wants.

[00:47:00] And then steady state is essentially just understanding that the economy should not be extracting more than it’s regenerating and that it should not be polluting more than it’s absorbing. I would say we shouldn’t be polluting at all, you know? But ultimately, I mean, these are what these four things talk about.