Everyone is a mystic poet: the secret trippiness at the heart of systems change
How much space do you allow for yourself to feel deeply how mysterious it is to be alive? What would happen if you would bring this experience of mystery to work? Would that feel like taking something strange and esoteric into ‘normal’ life? And what would happen if you would reverse this view — seeing ‘normal life’ as strange and esoteric, and direct contact with mystery as normal?
By Joost Vervoort
Some time ago I was having tea with DRIFT researcher Tessa de Geus who is publishing some fantastic work on the role of power in sustainability transitions. At one moment, we discussed a recent blog I wrote about ‘infrastructures of mystery’. In this blog, I discuss the notion that experiences of the deep mystery of life, familiar to many people in many different shapes and contexts, are essential to a flourishing society. So what happens if we safeguard and create the infrastructure needed for a more explicitly recognized and central role for mystery in our society? What would be needed? And what benefits would this have in terms of mental health, social connections, possibilities for imagining better futures, and more? We talked about what it means to talk about such an ‘esoteric’ subject in our normal setting where rather academic, technical and rationalistic accounts of systems change and transformation dominate.
This got me thinking. Perhaps it is true that in our weird corner of sustainability work — both in academia and in practice — reflections of the mystery of life are more esoteric. But to the wider world, perhaps writing about ‘systems change’, ‘transformations’, ‘social innovation’ and ‘niches’ is the more obscure thing. And perhaps speaking directly to the profound strangeness, tragedy and beauty of being alive in every moment, of being in relationships to other humans and to the world is a lot more relatable than all of this sustainability discourse.
There is a very interesting model by sustainability scientist and educator Donella Meadows that has to be one of the most seminal texts when it comes to talking about systems change. Meadows’ essay ‘Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System’ outlines a number of leverage points for change in any complex system. These go from rather superficial leverage points that affect things like momentarily available resources like providing some emergency funds in a financial crisis to deeper leverage points like changing the very goals of a system, such as the political goals of a national government. Meadows argues that more superficial leverage points are easier to change but less impactful, while deeper leverage points are harder to change, but more impactful. Note that she uses ‘higher’ leverage points but that the convention has shifted to describing these as ‘deeper’, which I feel does a lot of good work.
Where it gets really interesting is all the way at the bottom, or at the top, however you see it. Meadows argues that one of the deepest leverage points has to do with the fundamental paradigms and perspectives people hold when engaging with the world. But then she describes an even deeper leverage point, and she gets kind of wild here:
“There is yet one leverage point that is even higher than changing a paradigm. That is to keep oneself unattached in the arena of paradigms, to stay flexible, to realize that NO paradigm is “true,” that every one, including the one that sweetly shapes your own worldview, is a tremendously limited understanding of an immense and amazing universe that is far beyond human comprehension. It is to “get” at a gut level the paradigm that there are paradigms, and to see that that itself is a paradigm, and to regard that whole realization as devastatingly funny. It is to let go into Not Knowing, into what the Buddhists call enlightenment.
People who cling to paradigms (which means just about all of us) take one look at the spacious possibility that everything they think is guaranteed to be nonsense and pedal rapidly in the opposite direction. Surely there is no power, no control, no understanding, not even a reason for being, much less acting, in the notion or experience that there is no certainty in any worldview. But, in fact, everyone who has managed to entertain that idea, for a moment or for a lifetime, has found it to be the basis for radical empowerment. If no paradigm is right, you can choose whatever one will help to achieve your purpose. If you have no idea where to get a purpose, you can listen to the universe (or put in the name of your favorite deity here) and do his, her, its will, which is probably a lot better informed than your will.
It is in this space of mastery over paradigms that people throw off addictions, live in constant joy, bring down empires, get locked up or burned at the stake or crucified or shot, and have impacts that last for millennia.”
Hello. Hi. This is trippy as hell. I’m not sure people spend enough time really reading what she says here. She is saying that being in the great mystery at the heart of existence is the deepest leverage point. Meadows, one of the seminal thinkers in systems change and sustainability, is encouraging us to be mystics.
I have a few thoughts about this. First of all, I think that the emphasis here could be even more on the ‘amazing universe far beyond human comprehension’, because there is a risk that it otherwise slips into a kind of disembodied, unemotional meta-cognition about the flexibility of paradigms and perspectives. I know this is not necessarily implied here, but just to be clear: we are not just disembodied blank slate consciousnesses that get to play with paradigms in the void. Engaging deeply with the mystery of life can open up a kind of autonomy, but the other side of the coin can be a deep realization of ‘being lived’ by the mystery as well.
My friend and meditation teacher the always amazing Rosa Lewis and I talk about this a lot. The meditation teacher Rob Burbea who sadly died a few years ago has done some fantastic work at the level that Meadows talks about. In his book in emptiness, ‘Seeing that Frees’, Burbea emphasizes that perhaps the deepest level of ‘awakening’ or whatever you want to call it is this deep sense that everything is a ‘way of seeing’. But Rosa and I believe that this de-emphasizes how interdependent life is. In many ways, we are expressions of reality, of lots of very specific eventualities. We are the ways of seeing and being. We are emergent, mystic poems.
This touches on the need to understand that being in the depths of mystery is very much an embodied process. MSc student Alexis Beaudoin and I are working on how psychedelic experiences shape people’s relationships to the natural world and to sustainability. In this work, we are proposing that below the level of changing ‘perspectives and paradigms’ we have to look at changes to the very organism that you are, bodily. Psychedelics have demonstrated effects on people’s neurology — they produce different human beings, not just perspectives. This experience of mystery is also often relational — it happens in connection with others and with non-human life. Meaning itself is relational, it is about resonance between different people and entities, to use the words of the German sociologist Hartmut Rosa (another Rosa!). Sociologist Erika Summers-Effler writers about the transformative potential of mystics in society — a transformation that is often small scale and interpersonal and spreads through networks in a stealthy way.
Yet another way that we’ve found useful is to understand the deepest level of changes as actual changes to the nature of the world. When you change, the world actually changes, and vice versa. Professor of sustainability John Robinson has recently published a wonderful article that describes shifts to the ontological nature of the world over time, what has been lost about the world in modernity, and how an alchemical change to the nature of the world might be possible and important for a sustainable future.
Another reflection I would have is that we can embody a sense of mystery not only when we engage with ‘the ability to transcend paradigms’. All the other levels of systems change are suffused with mystery as well. I can imagine a kind of mystery-infused approach to working on any of these leverage points. Seeing ostensibly ‘normal’, every day change work as a deep expression of mystery. It gets even more interesting when we bring in ideas like the Daoist notion of Wu Wei — or ‘effortless doing’. Karen O’Brien discusses this in the context of quantum social science and the changing of fundamental paradigms about how change may be acausal in the first place.
There’s another way to look at ‘normal’ work in systems change as mystical practice — and that is to understand work on reality through the lens of mystic poetry and alchemy. What happens if we see our daily work, and especially work in strategy, planning, policy and so on, more as co-writing the universe’s poetry?
In the EU Horizon project CreaTures we interviewed lots of funders and policy makers who support the cultural and creative sectors. A key insight from these interviews that has become relevant again recently is that it’s possible for funders and policy makers to see themselves as creatives as well. There is much creative power in the setting of conditions for artistic practice. You create a vision for the future, and help establish imagination infrastructures. But of course this goes for all strategizing, agenda setting and policy making. It’s all co-creating reality and possibilities. If we take the idea seriously that mystery is at the heart of systems change, what would happen if those involved in systems change recognize their work as mystic poetry?
I think that in the world of activism, this connection between a sense of mystery and poetry on the one hand and action on the other is a lot more commonly recognized, and it reflects much of the transformative potential of activist movements. MSc students Shreeya Patangay and Louis van Haasbergen are each diving into the deeper poetry of how activists understand systems change. I was just listening to rapper Macklemore, who I would normally find a bit cringy to be honest, drop a song about the student protests for Palestine that is impressive in its straightforward addressing of the importance of those protests and the horrifying injustices happening in Gaza when so many artists are afraid to compromise their success by tying their work to this injustice. The song is very straightforward, but its courage and directness gives it a mystic poetry of its own. This link between mystic poetry and activism is also at the heart of the development of our very trippy game about climate activism, All Rise.
It is one thing to see systems change as intimately connected to mystery and to a sense of mystic poetry as if this is a useful paradigm shift to make, a choice.
But what about this: all of reality IS mystery, and you ARE, always, inescapably, a mystic poet simply by participating in life. What does this mean for your work, your practices, your way of being in the world?
Dr. Joost Vervoort is an Associate Professor of Transformative Imagination at Utrecht University. His work focuses on connecting games and creative practices, mystery, politics and action to create better futures. He leads the NWO Vidi project Anticiplay and is a leading researcher on the Horizon Europe project STRATEGIES which focuses on the transformation of the European game industry. He sings about the global crisis in Terzij de Horde and paints weirdly dark album covers for other bands.
