In Conversation with Daniel Christian Wahl – Part 1: A New Way of Seeing, Living, and Being Together

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Daniel closes Designing Regenerative Cultures with a line from Drew Dellinger’s poem, the future turning round to ask what we did once we knew. So I asked him where his own knowing began, whether it arrived as a sudden event or came on slowly, whether it was already there in the boy walking to school.

His answer refused the tidy origin story. Knowing, he said, is there from the start, undifferentiated and participatory, until we are taught the powerful technology of words and with it the categories that cut the world into pieces. He grew up in Munich in the Cold War, ill at ease with a culture still being re-educated into its own history, and he sat with his older brother on the roof of the house looking towards a communications headquarters two kilometres away that both of them knew was a first target in the game of mutual assured destruction. A sports teacher noticed he was not the boy for competitive ball games and put the Daodejing and the Bhagavad Gita into his hands at eleven. That was where perspective first came loose.

I told him I knew the ground he was standing on. I too grew up in Germany, near Dortmund and then in Heidelberg before I came to the UK in 2003, my father born just after the war and given no answers by his family, the education system bearing down on my generation with the sins of the fathers. For both of us that confrontation had been fertile ground. And for each of us an elder had quietly done a service without naming it as one: for him a teacher who opened a door to yoga, for me a man who put books into my hands well beyond my reading age and started a reflective process I only understood for what it was much later.

From there the conversation widened. Daniel’s claim is that the cultures that came before us were place-sourced, understanding themselves as guardians and expressions of the bioregions they lived in, and that holism is only the attempt to remember what we knew before all the talk: that this is a participatory universe. I raised Peter Kingsley and the suspicion that the wound runs deeper than the Enlightenment, back to Plato, though Daniel would not blame any single hinge. He reached instead for Owen Barfield, for an original participation we have lost and a final participation we might still earn, having gone the long way through separation to reach it.

When I pressed him on a new story and the natural patterns of health, he reached for Aaron Antonovsky and salutogenesis: health as something a living system grows, an emergent property at every scale from the cell to the family to the bioregion to the planet, and not a fixed state you fall out of and climb back into. That was his quarrel with some of his own colleagues in the regenerative field. We are, he said, undergoing a species-level rite of passage, uninitiated and genuinely uncertain whether we will come through it, and only that uncertainty cooks us down to the humility the moment asks for. His hope is quieter than it was when he wrote his book in 2016.

Part one of three. Continue to Part 2: Hope or Despair, or the Extra on Plato and the left hemisphere.

Transcript

This transcript has been edited for readability from the recording. Any passage that could not be made out is marked [unclear].

I’m just really glad to be invited to this conversation, because it’s something that has interested me for twenty-five years now, at least, probably longer. But I’ve tried to give language to it, and learned about the trappings of language on the way.

So, yeah, we’re looking forward to this. Daniel started as a biologist, did a degree in Holistic Science, did a PhD in design, design for human and planetary health, and wrote a book in 2016 called Designing Regenerative Cultures. And that’s about the potted history.

Okay, thank you so much for this. So, we’re going to do this in a couple of episodes, and the first episode is around the topic of new ways of seeing, living and being together. And I’ve got the honour to ask the first question. I’ll give it a short introduction, that question. It’s about your moment of knowing, and I will explain a little bit what we mean with that. What is a moment of knowing? A sudden event, or a gradual process? I think you know where it comes from, right? You conclude your book Designing Regenerative Cultures with an excerpt from Hieroglyphic Stairway, which is a poem by Drew Dellinger, and the excerpt is titled “what did you do once you knew”, and comments with “surely you did something”. Well, we can all see your ongoing great work, Daniel, but how did this journey start for you, actually? What was your moment of knowing? Was it already present in little Daniel going to school? Has it been triggered by specific events? Can you take us with you in how this evolved for you?

Well, these new ways of seeing we’re trying to speak about are, at the very same time, ancient ways of being that are being rediscovered. We’re only speaking about something in new language, from the perspective of a culture that has lived separation to the point of believing it, and has created technologies that, as Arthur C. Clarke I think said, are indistinguishable from magic.

And so, on that journey personally, I think, and now that I’m a father of a five-year-old, I’m being reminded that the knowing is there from the start, but it’s undifferentiated. It’s simply participatory, and that is a very different way of being in the world than once we even start with the powerful technology of being taught words, and with that, the categories of the world.

And I think I quite early on felt a little bit ill at ease with my culture, coming from Germany. In the decades that I grew up, education about the German history was pretty much a re-education of a people, to a point that it was really sticking young faces into a past that wasn’t really theirs, but, of course, in a kind of intergenerational trauma and responsibility. And so I think that made me reflect quite early on.

And also the luck that a sports teacher realised that I wasn’t that kid in all the competitive, ball-based games, and invited me into yoga when I was eleven, as an alternative, at the school that I was going to. And then, very early on, introduced me to the Daodejing and the Bhagavad Gita, and just some writing that made me question perspective.

Along with living in Munich, in the middle of the Cold War, that meant understanding that we had cruise missiles and SS-20s pointing at us, and that we were part of the battlefield of World War Three at that point. Where we were talking about crisis, some of us remember that, for others it’s in history books, but it was imminent, it was real. I remember sitting with my three-and-a-half-year-older brother on the roof of our house, looking towards what was maybe two kilometres away, which was the government communications headquarters at [unclear] in Munich. So we knew that one of the direct targets in this game of mutual assured destruction was two miles away from us. And so, I’m getting all emotional remembering that, but, yeah, we’ve been a threat to ourselves and to life on Earth for a long time.

But where we started, with the ancient ancestry of us, we need to remember that we wouldn’t be here if we hadn’t been regenerative, place-sourced cultures. Place-like cultures that understood themselves as guardians and expressions of the bioregions they inhabited. That’s a different way of being in the world, that is in its very nature holistic. And in many ways our conversation about holism is in the power and the misunderstandings that language can produce. We eventually needed a way back to an understanding that, before all that talk, we already had. And for me that’s what holism is trying to do: it’s trying to remind us that this is a deeply participatory universe.

So, yeah, now I’ve come off topic from my story, where did it start. And it’s a double question, just briefly. It’s like knowing how we know, and how that in and of itself is already part of the root causes of the crisis we’re currently experiencing. And then knowing the crisis, knowing how deep the messed-up things have gotten at this point, and how it is actually twenty past one, not five to twelve. And that’s another knowing that is still growing, deepening every day, and maturing me every day, beyond taking permanence too seriously.

Yes, we will come to the topic of hope or despair in one of the next episodes. And I see Marcus’s hand is raised, so I’ll ask you to bring in whatever you want to say.

Yes, I wanted to acknowledge that you just helped me understand something about myself, Daniel, that I had not quite so consciously reflected upon, although I was very aware of the theme. And that is, I too grew up in Germany. I grew up near Dortmund, and then lived in Heidelberg for a while as well, before I moved to the UK in 2003. But this theme of the very conscious education into the past, and the intergenerational split. My father, born just after the war, not getting any answers from his family, and the pressure that was on the education system in order to confront the next generation with the sins of the fathers, was extraordinary, and a very fertile ground for my own development. So I appreciate the reflections you’ve given of it.

And you’ve touched on a theme with that. Like you, I also recognise that others had a hand in my development early on. My recognition was not a PE teacher who allowed me to experience yoga, but I had an individual who gave me books. He recognised something, and he gave me books of a particular thing that were well beyond my reading age, and it started something, a reflective process. And I am very aware that in this kind of thing there is, despite our world of separation, for me a theme of connectedness that was set up through this recognition of elders, who somehow didn’t see themselves as elders, but they did a service unto me, very much so, by giving me books that helped me become who I am today. It took me a long time to see it like that.

Then you spoke about how these ways of seeing today are really ways of being of an ancient kind. And there is an aspect here, with a very fine edge, that I have a need to explore. I just wondered what your contribution to that might be. Which is that it’s very easy to dismiss Western culture and its approach to science and so forth as the reason for the difficulties we experience globally, now, the meta-crisis, which we will come to later, especially its notion of progress: that any problem will always be sorted in the future. But through a writer called Peter Kingsley, who you might be familiar with, I discovered for myself that the problem of the West might lie much further back than we so readily assume. He puts his finger very firmly on Plato as the beginning of a disconnection, in Iain McGilchrist’s words, a focus on the left brain, advanced very much by Aristotle, where we were cut off from our mystical past. Plato did an enormous deed of essentially moving all our right-brain, religious, interconnected experience of life. He moved it, and very skilfully rewrote history, as it were: didn’t acknowledge his sources, created sources in order to place himself very favourably in a particular light. And that has lived since then in a way that we believed him, but we didn’t see the damage he actually did. And so when Whitehead says all of philosophy is a footnote to Plato, that is, for me, the origin. It’s something that I’ve explored deeply, and I’ve been trying to look beyond Plato into the past in order to understand: what might the mission of the West actually be? And could it be that this issue with Plato is actually part of what we need to redeem? This is a big, interconnected rabbit warren, but I just wanted to offer that into this space, and we can skip it.

No, no, no. Right, let’s stay there briefly, because we’re mentioning Whitehead. I mean, why would Whitehead say this? Because Whitehead was pointing towards process philosophy, in one way of speaking. It’s just, as you were sharing how important books have been in your life. Of course, as you know, if you’re familiar with my work, the same in my life. And I remember many mentors, particularly Seaton Baxter, who I did my PhD with, who was just genius in feeding me the right book at the right time, in a way that magically allowed me to come up with new ideas that I would then excitedly tell him. And then, after telling him in the evening, realising, wait a minute, he planted the seeds. I only had that insight because of that conversation that I had with him two weeks ago.

So I hear all that, but at the same time I had this interesting email today from somebody who [unclear]: literate people learn words, illiterate people learn worlds. Boom, boom. That’s big, and to the point of what we were going to talk about. So, nothing is a coincidence. This person writes to me today, and it addresses Plato’s need to objectify the world in order to frame it in ways that can create structures of power over rather than power with, structures of separation rather than structures of inter-being, and [unclear] framing.

And more than that, the word is the beginning of this kind of philosophy, explaining the world through the intellect, through the rational mind, through logic. That something is either A, or it’s B, it can never be A and B at the same time. This exclusionary logic, this binary system, that even I, I love McGilchrist’s work, but I find the left-hemisphere, right-hemisphere thing is polarising and difficult in and of itself. And if you actually understand neuroplasticity and brain science, you can see that the brain is entirely capable of switching the areas that it’s using, to a certain degree, in its own healing after accidents and so on. But anyway, that’s me going into a rabbit hole.

But what I’m trying to speak to is this: how important it is whether we see the world through a language that is focused on nouns and on objectifying, versus seeing the world in a more verb-based way. And as we’re beginning to see the world that way, we’re going to be seeing ourselves that way. So we become more and more an object, more and more something separate from the world, that is standing in the world, rather than a node of consciousness that, in the kind of Francisco perspective, is actually bringing forth the world. In the way of knowing, the very act of the world knowing itself through us is the act of the first distinction, that then brings forth what the Buddhists call samsara. And we might as well live into it, with it, because you cannot take a perspective without creating a blind spot. But if we are aware of it, and we honour the present.

And you also, because there was a lot in your question, or comment. Of course, it’s dangerous to vilify Western science or the Western perspective, and there are lots of examples of people in the West. I mean, just a wonderful book, The Passion of the Western Mind, where he actually takes you through how this story evolved in the West. And he also, towards the end, highlights the counter-current: the faith that comes through to Hegel, [unclear], to some extent Rudolf Steiner, and so on, the other way of participatory knowing the world. So, for me, yeah, I’m agreeing with you that with Plato a lot of things started, but I wouldn’t necessarily blame Plato for it, in the sense that I think all these steps are there.

There’s a wonderful book, talking about the intellectual anthroposophist Owen Barfield. He wrote a book called Saving the Appearances, a study in idolatry, or something, there’s a small little book, if I’m remembering the title at the moment correctly. But in it, he speaks of original participation, which is the participation of the indigenous, where everything is significant. I am part of this web of life, all my relations. The dewdrop that is hit by the sun as I walk past is not a coincidence, not a physical phenomenon that breaks light into a certain visual stimulus. No, it’s meaningful, it communicates to me, it says something. That is one way of knowing the world, through participation. But I think we needed the story of separation, the Enlightenment, in order to now come to what Owen Barfield calls final participation.

And that’s going to take us, I mean, because we left it so long, I think we’re going to get a bit of a pasting that will humble us. But we might just find higher ground, rather than go into some kind of endgame, which is the other option, which wouldn’t be so nice. And I think what we are all about is trying to find different ways of connecting people, so we can find that higher ground. And at the moment we’re still using this technology, and may it be with us, but it also comes with a big rat’s tail, and it takes us away from the physical communities each and every one of us are living in every day. And I’m living that in my body a lot at the moment, because it’s taking me away from my child, from my relationship, from my neighbours and my community, to be in conversations with people all over the globe, which is magic. But I am realising it’s dangerous as well. And at the moment I can’t do very much more than name it, and try to redesign my life in a way that I come back into balance with that. And sorry for a long answer.

Now, one of the questions that I’m interested in is this issue of a new story: how does your aspiration of connecting with underlying natural patterns of health, and creating regenerative cultures, fit with that trajectory?

I’ve had a really interesting, when I started sharing my writing initially, giving away the chapters of my book through Medium, then it was partially out of realising, wait a minute, if I post a chapter every week, or a sub-chapter, then I’m going to be out of chapters soon. And I started posting some of my older writings from my PhD in 2006, Design for Human and Planetary Health. And I realised suddenly that, had I actually bothered to read these chapters, I probably would have felt I needed to edit them, and there were spelling mistakes and all sorts of things in there that I already felt embarrassed about. But then I realised how people were responding to it, and suddenly saw that there were, in this kind of spirit of, we’ll all keep learning, and what was useful to us on a piece of the journey will be useful to somebody else on their piece of the journey, when they pick it up, just in the serendipity of coming across it, just when it somehow served them.

And the reason I bring that up is because in that work I developed this notion of salutogenic design, together with my PhD supervisor. And that’s actually, as I now think deeper into how we would develop the current canon of what is regenerative, I see a very strong link between health and what, in Regenesis and Carol Sanford language, is called participation in nested wholeness. And one of the blocks that my friends in Regenesis, I’ve talked to them for four years about it, so many times, that I’m quite happy to talk about it to anybody now. What we don’t seem to see eye to eye about, which I find so important in the evolution of this work, is that there are two different ways of understanding health.

Which was the other bit that is also in this PhD work from back then, the notion of meta-design: that before we even go into new ways of being, seeing and living together, we need the narrative bit. The, how do we actually, who are we, what is our relationship to this world, and how do we bring forth the world together? Because otherwise we repeat the same pattern, and we try to introduce something in a context that is very resilient, as you were saying, where the narrative is still very strong.

So, for me, this salutogenic understanding of health, that Aaron Antonovsky, the Israeli health scientist, developed, actually based on the research to say, how can this generation of my parents and grandparents have lived through the Holocaust, and now laugh with their grandchildren, and set up functional new enterprises in Israel, and be perfectly functional human beings again? Where is that resilience coming from? What kind of health is possible? And he wrote this book called Health, Stress and Coping, which is from the 1960s, the title of which could be written yesterday or today, and people would pick it up. It certainly seems something that I could pick up again. In that book he highlights that a sense of belonging and a narrative of meaning were one of the magic ingredients in being able to continue, to live with all that.

And he then also distinguishes that we’ve got it wrong in our current understanding of health, where health is understood as some kind of perfect state that we then fall out of, to show symptoms of disease, and then we should treat those symptoms, and then we go back into health. And he said, no, no, no, health is something much more complex than that. Health is an ongoing learning, a journey. And you could go even further, bringing in complexity theory: health is an emergent property of a complex dynamic system, at all levels of wholeness. It manifests in a cell, in an organ, in an individual, in a family, in a community, in a bioregion, in an ecosystem, and in the planet. And it’s all interrelated, and it isn’t separable, because it’s a field phenomenon of the whole, and of how the whole relates to itself.

And in that context, then, this notion of salutogenesis, because, to finish that little thing about my disagreement with the other great people who have really given depth to the regenerative field for the last twenty-five years, people like Carol Sanford and Pamela Mang, and all of them, they see health as maintenance-level work. They see it in the way that culture sees it: you fall out of health and then you go back into it. So it’s maintaining something. And so the whole metaphor of, we are systems nurturers, resistance healers, we’re working towards healing where the system is blocked and the information doesn’t flow, that can be fitted into their wonderful frameworks, that are extremely, deeply developmental.

But the minute you make that mental switch, and you say health is a dynamic process, health is evolutionary, health is a story of learning, you integrate your experience of whatever ill health you had, and you make the best of it. Sometimes it means you’re limping for the rest of your life. At other times it means that you are actually, ultimately, in a better state in the future to weather a disruption, because you’ve been unhealthy.

So, yeah, we talked about the seeing, which is both dynamic and understanding that in this participation in nested wholeness, we don’t have a choice: we are affecting everything, every second, with our attention, with what we think, what we say, with how we act. And our conversation here is not theory. Let’s stop being theoretical and start getting practical. This is highly practical. This is restoring and transforming something, we don’t know what, and we can’t control and predict what it transforms, but conversations have agency, thoughts have agency, in this entire wholeness. And if we take responsibility, we can choose to ignore that for another few centuries, or for another few years, or maybe decades, but ultimately it’s part of the nature of existence, in a relational universe, what the Buddhists call karma, what is so deeply in the Vedanta, in so many wisdom traditions: that things come back to you, because you are actually everything you’re looking at. The seen and the seer are one.

And how do we, from that new way of seeing, find the ground to be differently?

Well, I think, because we left it so late, we are now confronted with what I would call a species-level rite of passage. We have had cultures that had rites of passage for millennia. For our long regenerative history as a species, we used rites of passage to grow into maturity as members in the community of life, at the age of ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, something like that. And now we have uninitiated seventy-year-old teenagers leading world economies, or leading businesses like Tesla. And it’s ripping us apart.

And now, what’s happening, because we’ve pushed the world so far to the edge of the abyss through our current actions, and we’re not the pest on the planet, and we’re not evil at all, we have the potential to be the opposite, that’s really important to say. But we are undergoing a moment which all rites of passage hold in common: that you have to be uncertain of whether you’re going to make it, because only in that moment do you get cooked to the level of humility that you can let go. And in that moment, I think, if we as human beings get to that level of maturity, that we are life, and therefore all is fine, and the story will continue without us if we’re too stupid to learn. But we have the potential to be so much more, and we could potentially become healers of the systems we’ve so greatly impoverished. And whether we’re going to make it, I think it’s going to be a little bit of both. We’re going to see the horror, and we’re going to see the beauty, as we have done for centuries. But my own positivity about it is not as strong as when I wrote my book in 2016.